Bringing Our Troops Home

The United States has approximately 800 military bases spread out across the world in 70 countries which cost somewhere between $85 and $100 Billion dollars per year to operate and even more in a war zone. Some are quite large and others are merely just outposts but the cost is substantial and in many cases, no longer necessary.

Take the recent report that President Trump plans to withdraw 9,500 U.S. troops from Germany. They're upset about it because to the German government and the businesses located near the U.S. bases there, it's not about the loss of military protection, it's the loss of their consumer dollars.

When all those men and women in foreign bases get paid, they're gonna spend it in where they're stationed. That also includes the families of the service people living with them so the economic impact is greater than just the 9,500 troops.

Ultimately, we do not need a military base in Germany any longer. We don't need military bases in Italy, France, Afghanistan or Iraq either. If they speak ill of us, or want us out, we should leave and take our dough with us. Germany does not have a right or any claim to U.S. Taxpayer money. That money comes from the sweat of the brows of the U.S. citizenry and therefore should be spent with better discretion than keeps some other country's economy afloat.

Germany disparages President Trump while they kissed Barack Obama's ass and he was a waste product who did nothing, delivered nothing and with one exception, everything he's done has been reversed. Now we have someone in office with some backbone and they don't want to deal. So we don't have to deal either. See ya later, bye!

Stagnant Leadership

It is obvious that Angela Merkel has been around too long. Her tenure in office is approaching that of many Socialist Dictators. She has overseen a systemic stagnation where the only way she sees to solve a problem is to do more of the same. Instead of solving Germany's economic woes, she opens the borders. Instead of energy solutions, she doubles-down on more of the same; import, import, import. Both roads lead to a dead end.

Nothing is going to get any better over there until she is out of office. I thought letting in one million unmixable Muslims into the country would have been enough for someone to step to the fore to oust her but nope, they all just took it. That's when you know something is wrong. Perhaps they're just too trusting. Perhaps they've all swallowed that "my brother's keeper" bullshit.

Who knows? But it's not our fault and it's not our problem. If they don't like us, let's take our money and find something better to do with it than to keep Germany's drinking establishments afloat.

Germany's Need for Energy

Germany isn't nearly as Green as they make out to be. They need more oil. Germany's demand is the highest in the EU. They need more natural gas too. Germany is the world's 7th largest consumer of natural gas. I guess the solar panels and the wind turbines ain't cutting it.

So they make a deal with Russia. You remember Russia? The big Red Menace of Europe that our troops are in Germany to protect them from? Yes, THAT Russia. So now they are doing the Libertarian thing of turning a potential combatant into an economic ally. Nothing wrong with that. That is what we like to see.

But you don't need a foreign army to protect you from an economic ally. It's just that simple.

Hard Working Americans

Two weeks vacation. That says plenty. That's what most of us get. If you stay at a company for 5 years, you could get another week. After 10 years you may get 4 weeks off. A rare few places will offer 5 weeks after 15 years on the job. but that's the top end of it. For many small businesses, time off isn't even an option. We also have Over-Time. We all have worked over-time. That's extra. We get Time and a Half for each hour of overtime. For many, that's where the money for buying all our stupid stuff to make the world go around gets made. And have I mentioned all the taxes we pay?

Ultimately, we bust our BALLS for that money. We work longer hours than any industrialized nation. That includes Japan where the average Japanese worker will cram 8 hours of work into a 12 hour day such is the state of their economic incentive these days. The U.S. is the biggest economy because the people in the U.S. put in the most productive hours. There's no shortcut.

Bring Them All Home

It's time we empty out. Bring our troops home. Leave them in the tough spots like Taiwan and Japan but if there's no inherent danger like Germany, France and Italy, empty the place out. Out of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Time to draw down our forces and stop fighting everyone's battles for them AND being their gravy train. It's more than just wasteful.

These deals we make aren't forever. We have been told that we are not the world's police and we should take that to heart. We certainly shouldn't be. Perhaps these countries would appreciate us a little bit more if we weren't there.

After all, they can't miss us if we won't go away.

Obama Flaunts His Pessimism

Former President Barak Obama truly cannot figure it out.

A man who never met an economy he could understand just cannot figure out how current President Donald Trump could turn around the U.S. economy so quickly.

He just has no idea. He is baffled by the whole thing. So much so, he is compelled to broadcast his incredulity across the globe in a speech meant to denigrate the sitting president but only served to bring into sharp contrast the glaring differences between the two men.

President Obama believes that only Government can grow an economy. That the only time the economy LOOKED to be growing was when his administration injected $ 832 Billion into the U.S. economy. This he did by sending U.S. Taxpayer money to the states in order to prop up their public sector workforce since, with all these people being out of work in the country, the tax revenues were falling and the states were looking to cut their public employee ranks.

So the government spent a lot of money. A lot of money they had to pull out of the pockets of the people who earned it first. In essence, it's robbing Peter to pay Paul and we would never know how far that $ 832 Billion dollars would have gone to stimulate the economy had it been left in the peoples pockets to spend as they see fit.

Then President Obama did not trust the American people with their money. He and only he could know how better to distribute these funds to GROW the economy.

And for a little while it did, of course, because the states spent that money and kept their public sector employed. They got paychecks and money was put into circulation. But it was just a band aid, a short term solution to a long range issue. And it eventually showed.

Once that money was spent, after the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2014 looked like things were taking off, the economy fell right back to below expectations and at one point, between the 3rd quarter of 2015 to the 1st quarter of 2017, tripped along at 1%, 0.4%, 1.5%, 2.3%, 1.9%, 1.8% and 1.8%.

And that is the Obama Ecomony we all remember, the one Mr. Obama thinks we do not.

That is because there was no return on that money put into the economy. When it was spent, it was gone and the economy got nothing back. There were no businesses that grew because of it and no additional wealth created by it. Money taken out of the economy and then put back into it isn't an Investment. There's no net gain. It's just a wash but for the many extra hands it passes through. The middleman, in this case The Government, takes it's cut too. Where is the growth in this process?

President Trump, on the other hand, put the money back into peoples pockets so they can go out and spend it. Not just because of the tax cut but also ending excessive regulations and other business taxes that restricted small business growth. People think that big corporations are the largest employers of American workers but it's really small business, companies that employ 100 people or less, who have always been the backbone of U.S. industry.

Under the Obama administration small businesses were just another stream of revenue and his administrations policies restricted them but under the Trump administration, these restrictions are being eased and they are coming back and coming back for everybody. All boats are being lifted in the new tide.

The man who once told union employees in the manufacturing sector that their jobs were NEVER coming back and that this was the NEW NORMAL can never understand what it takes to foster real growth.

This is why Mr. Obama is back out on the campaign trail. He's trying to buy a CLUE!

No Mr. Obama, you may think it takes a magic wand to do what President Trump has done but it doesn't. It takes an OPTIMIST. A person who believes that great achievements can be accomplished by a nation that he thinks is GREAT.

You aught to have tried it but you didn't believe it could happen.

Big difference. 

McCain Stops Criticizing President Trump

He never met a war he didn't like.

He was complacent and entitled.

He was gripped by ego, jealously and spite.

And more than all that, he was angry and bitter. Especially at the end.

The Buddhists would say that anger and bitterness are not emotions one wants to carry into the next life. John McCain is carrying a heavy heavy load into the Summerlands for sure.

I will forever remember John McCain as a man who put his own sense of importance above those of the American people. He didn't care who would be hurt, it was all about him and his pain. He could never put his own interests aside for the good of the country. 

When he lost his bid for president, he blamed his vice presidential nominee and when it came time to cast the deciding vote to abolish the monstrously misguided Affordable Care Act, he voted to keep it. Not because he believed it was good but because the President and the people who voted him into office, an office he could not attain, knew it was bad.

All because he HATED them.

Let us hope that he finds in his next life the peace that eluded him in this one.

The Left Continues to Hound President Trump 

The Leftist Media with their Progressive enablers have continued their offensive of manufacture and outrage at his every sentence and pronouncement regardless of the outward hypocrisy.

But it's not going to work.

Everybody knows its bullshit.

All this will succeed in doing is destabilizing the country. But the Left does not care. The ends justify the means. Facts don't matter, evidence does not matter, what the public feels does not matter. Russian collusion was never the real focus. It was all a Red Herring.

This whole thing was always about "Get Trump" and if they couldn't, let this display serve as a warning to anyone else who even THINKS they want to run for president as a Republican because you better have Big Balls in order to put up with the unheard of onslaught of hate and vitriol spewed from every orifice of the outraged entitled political Leftists in this country because this is what will happen to you too!

What matters is what THEY feel. THEY will show YOU why you were wrong in electing Donald Trump president of the United States. THEY will take over and SHOW you how THEY could have done it all better.

But they really don't know how.

I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

And who doesn't really? She is just another Know-Nothing Socialist who will promise you, the American "Down-trodden", the equality and "rights" you seek but has no working knowledge of how to actually reach this objective. She doesn't understand economics but she knows she doesn't have to. She is an ambitious revolutionary and all revolutionaries have to know is how to seize power. After that, the rest is gravy.

She may succeed in grabbing power but once in her hands, she will totally blow up and everyone around her will too. And she knows how weak the substance of her ideas are, hence she won't debate anybody who questions them. She can't be bothered since it's not what she's come for. She's in it for the power and she will say anything, promise everything, for a chance at it.

This is why she's already been caught out by claiming to support New York cab drivers but who uses Uber to get around NYC instead. Now that's support you can trust!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is just another in a long line of tin-pot socialist hypocrite dictators-in-waiting from a socialist borough in socialist New York City, a city that spends so much on entitlements that people literally move there from all over the country just to get on public assistance.

Good luck to her, lets see how far she gets.

Elizabeth Warren's New Plan

Siding with illegal aliens in the wake of the Mollie Tibbetts murder was probably not the best career move for the clueless Massachusetts Senator but it's her nationalization of all businesses that make $1 Billion annually that is a real non-starter. Once a business breaks the proposed threshold, the US Federal Government would then dictate who sits on their Board of Directors! Can you believe this?

But is she really proposing such an absurd piece of legislation in order to move to the political Left of Bernie Sanders in order to make a presidential run of her own in 2020?

We'll see how her act plays on the national stage. It is my guess that the only thing anyone will be asking the Massachusetts Senator during a mythical campaign would be: "Are you really an American Indian?".

Blaming Capitalism

Capitalism is not a government. It is not an Army. Capitalism is not a Decree or Invention.

It is a Force of Nature.

It cannot be stopped, ultimately, by any government. All Socialist nations return to a market economy eventually and the only delay is that Socialist and Communist countries have to deploy people with guns to keep people from practicing what comes natural to every human being at birth; "Working to better themselves.".

No matter who you are or where in the world you live, we all want the same things: we want food and shelter, we want meaningful work so we can gain food and shelter, we want to keep our families protected and our children warm. We want to be free from harm and free to pursue a direction in life we can choose for ourselves.

Capitalism, that force of nature that people, millions of people, making personal decisions about what to do with the money they earn, makes the world go around. You stop this and the world stops.

South Africa Decides to Kill Their Economy

Another wise choice by the people of Africa who have no idea what a Democracy actually is. And this latest move will put them closer to finding out just how far from a Democracy they are.

Nobody wants to invest in a murderous Dictator. South Africa's government has fostered violence against the white farmers and seeks a "Blame Whitey" agenda for their lack of policy and wanton graft in the 24 years since they've held the reins of the government.

Here's a wild guess. If you are a poor black subsistence farmer in South Africa now, you will be a poor black subsistence farmer five years from now after the land grab. I'll bet money.

The American Leftist Press seems to be totally ok about South Africa's land grab since they helped the South African government defend their land "appropriation without compensation' against a tweet by President Trump. The irony here is that Cuba did the same thing back in 1956 to American businesses there and we've had an economic embargo on that country ever since.

Let's hope that time will not stop for South Africa like it has for Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, and Mexico. All countries caught in a time-warp of lack of advancement.

And enlightenment.

China Goeth Before a Fall

China does not own Taiwan.

They never did.

They aren’t even the same people.

The children of Mao Zedong and the children of Chiang Kai-shek, although both born of murderous totalitarian cloth, have gone in glaringly different directions since the final banishment of 1949. 

Taiwan did not become Chinese, the Chinese who went there became Taiwanese. And while the Taiwanese are a reflective people now delving into the examination of atrocities of the past, mainland China has no such reflective spirit. Their past suppression and killings of their own people go unresolved in favor of pointing fingers at Japan. Mao Zedong remains a close third on the list of top totalitarian murderers behind Stalin and Hitler. Should history make more revelations, Mao could yet reach number 2.

Today the people of Taiwan are facing their bloody history at the hands of Chaing Kai-shek, even building a memorial museum to victims of the 228 Incident and the White Terror but on mainland China, although they may have abandoned the “Communist” ideology a bit for the sake of making some real money, haven’t given up on the suppression of their history, new ideas and thoughts of freedom that still lie within the people.

And Taiwan is a Democracy whereby they have regular and free elections to see who will exercise government power and where victory at the polls confers real power to the winner.

China…not so much.

I have met many people from China who now live in the U.S. and the first thing they tell me when I ask them “So, what brings you to this part of the world?” is that they now get to live the life they wish to lead. “We do not have much freedom in China” one woman who my company hired part-time and who is also a graduate student at Harvard University said to me, “To achieve the things I want in life, I had to leave.” I’m sure there are many more who remain less fortunate.

To say that China and Taiwan are one is absurd. There is only one China and there is only one Taiwan. There is far more than 110 miles separating the two nations. 

China's Shaky Pins

China may be flexing its muscles in the South Seas but it is a precarious perch for the new bully on the block. One does not have to worry about getting into an arms race to change the balance of power however. All the United States has to do is withdraw China’s Most Favored Nation trading status and impose tariffs on Chinese imports and things will change rapidly.

China’s out there blowing a lot of dough on armaments, building island military bases and planning trips to the moon. It would be a shame if the money ran out before they can finish all that, wouldn’t it. It wouldn’t take long.

We’ve been kissing China’s ass since 1972 screwing Taiwan and ourselves in the process. We have had to put up with a lot of China's nationalistic economic bullshit since then. The dumping of cheap Chinese steel into the United States helped kill our steel production and turned a once iconic steel mill in Easton Pennsylvania into a Sands gambling casino.

Then there is the matter of China’s currency manipulation. See China's government declare their economic independence and might while reaching for the oxygen masks!

But this is very easy to unravel. The action will cause prices to rise here at home but with the coming economic changes on the horizon, the income of working Americans will rise to meet this challenge. Once domestic product kicks into gear, there will be no shortage of goods. They’ll just be made better and last longer.

Despite the last 16 years of spendthrift egomaniac presidents trying to give away the U.S. economy, it’s about time we had a fiscally conservative egomaniac president looking to bring it roaring back.

I can’t wait to see what happens next!