Thoughts About The Political Scene

I'll try and make this brief, because I honestly do not know as much about national politics as much as many of my readers undoubtedly do.  Furthermore, I'm going to write about other subjects, some of which I have talked about before, but which I want to bring up again, which have little to do with politics.

We're currently observing the progress of an Impeachment in the House of Representatives.  It has its seeds in Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President, Joe Biden, sitting on the board of a Ukrainian company, which was under suspicion of corruption.  Some folks believe that corruption is terrible all over Ukraine, which is very plausible.  Corruption in former Soviet Union countries is sort of endemic, because once the Communist Party got really large and powerful, and its bosses began casting envious eyes on the ruling classes of the world, some of the sorts of abuses that George Orwell outlined in his book Animal Farm actually happened.

Republicans, and lots of people in and out of politics, can't believe that the President is being condemned for asking the Ukrainians to investigate both the DNC*--and by extension, Hillary Clinton--and the Bidens, father and son.

This is a shakedown, from the point of view of the Democrats.  The Democrats think of what Trump and the new Ukrainian president were discussing as a personal request from Trump.  On the other hand, Trump and his supporters view the discussion as Trump bravely investigating wrongdoing by the Bidens and the DNC, on behalf of the American People, who hate corruption.

It is certainly foolish of Hunter Biden to have joined the board of Burisma, but Hunter Biden has done several foolish things, and ambitious younger sons of people in the public eye, who have had a taste of wealth and fame, notoriously tend to be attracted to dangerous and high-profile actions.  Trump's bafflement at having this incident elevated to the level of treason, or high crimes and misdemeanors, is understandable, if not exactly excusable.

Why are Republicans as a whole refusing to condemn Trump?  Many reasons.  For one thing, the only matter on which Republicans agree--or rather, the two matters on which they agree--are that (1) They hate the Democrats, and (2) The Democrats are out to get them.  For the rest of it, each Republican has his or her own little agenda, and the single recurring theme in all these agendas is that of trying to get re-elected.  This is no surprise.

There are many reasons why the Republicans completely disagree with what the Democrats want to do, is that the Republicans have as a main principle: We can't do everything for everybody.  If you ask any conservative, this is something they will agree on.  Now, the Democrats say: we're not asking to help every citizen with everything.  But we certainly must help them as follows:

(1) Help the poorest with basic needs.  Food stamps, cheap lodgings, etc.
(2) Help disaster victims after a hurricane or a flood, or fire, etc.
(3) Help partially with education.  We need this, because we need an educated electorate.
(4) Help the recently unemployed, the disabled, and the elderly, with money and health services.

To this list, the Democrats are adding:

(5) Help everyone (or at least the poor) with Healthcare.  Ideally, everyone.
(6) Help everyone get a college education.
(7) Help the country move to clean energy immediately.
(8) Help everyone with free family planning, and abortion, as needed.

A few years ago, I would have supported Health Care for All, except that I'm seeing how crazy the Health Care business is.  The prices are insane.  In fact, the costs for anything in the US is wildly different from anywhere else.  For example, the other day I got a blood test done from the local hospital, and I was charged on the order of $400. **  These blood tests are ordered by doctors as a defensive measure, to protect themselves from being accused of performing unnecessary procedures.  Well, I guess we've got to swallow that situation, because frivolous litigation does have consequences.  The fact is, a simple blood test only costs around $80, unless the lab technicians want to wear $5000 gloves, to prevent litigation on sterility failure, and want to perform only 5 tests a day, to prevent being accused of being fatigued in the workplace, and so on.  Mind you, I'm not exactly saying that these things happen.  But our culture certainly encourages cost inflation.

College Education for all is a sad thing.  Having got one myself, I would be a hypocrite if I were to say that other young people do not deserve one.  But the fact is: students do not learn very much in school--again, a cultural matter; all of US society pressures students to not pay attention in school--so that all the material they ought to have learned in school gets postponed to college, where it has the potential for being taught well, but in fact only a workmanlike job is done of teaching this remedial material.

We've talked about the Environment and Clean Energy already at length, and need not address it here.

As I have pointed out before, Business has been elevated to the status of the greatest occupation that anyone can have, in the USA.  People are mistakenly identifying American Business as what makes the USA great.  In actual fact, the US has had a large share of people who are thoughtful, and who write well.  The great wealth that the American Middle Class has enjoyed in the 20th Century meant that we could support more writers than many other countries.  Arguably, Business supports this wealth, which makes other things possible.  But it seems silly to point to Business as the genius of the USA, because it makes these other things possible.

As a result of this deification of Business, people assume that a business tycoon could run the country better than a lawyer, or a former Governor, or an Actor, or a Professor.  Trump was the first experiment in handing the reins of government to a business executive.  And what happened?  He surrounded himself with yes-men and lobbyists, and went off to golf.

Knowing that Trump had no government administrative experience, his circle of supporters indulged his eccentric whims, and in exchange, he pushed through a few pieces of legislation, highly damaging to the country, and to people of little wealth or income.  Most importantly, Trump finds it impossible to view himself with a critical eye.  Since a shakedown in business is considered perfectly fine, and since Trump considers that the USA is helping countries around the world with very little to show for it, he must have thought that doing a deal with Ukraine was a reasonable thing, and nothing to do with the election, really.  It seems to that this thing cannot be resolved until and unless Joe Biden drops out of the presidential nomination race.

To come back to Congressional Republicans: they're probably thinking, we must give the impression of fighting this impeachment all the way.  Of course, even if it passes, the Senate will (probably) not convict Trump, but Trump probably doesn't realize that.  Anyway, these sorts of gestures are important with Trump: if we sit out these Impeachment votes, thinking that the Impeachment will fail in the Senate anyway, Trump will still be mad at us.  Furthermore, making a show of opposition will stiffen the backs of Senate Republicans, who might otherwise cave, and vote for Trump's removal.

If and when the Impeachment fails, Trump will have a screaming victory at the polls, and a grateful Trump will help all the Republicans get re-elected.  (Trump isn't sure he has the energy to actually campaign on behalf of all his Republicans; instead, he's promised to help them from his campaign money chest.  He's going to buy the election for his party!)

Elizabeth Warren's quite reasonable suggestion that she is going to tax wealthy families at 2% of their wealth every year, is in my mind a minor step in offsetting the huge windfalls Trump obtained for very wealthy families and corporations.  For a family whose holdings are around a billion dollars (which is not rare these days), that is an annual tax of $20,000,000 per family.

On the other hand, after Trump's enormous tax-cut of 2017, our national debt is on the order of $23,000,000,000,000 (that's twenty-three trillion dollars).  This extra Elizabeth Warren tax will pay off this debt only after a thousand years (assuming there is a thousand families who will pay this tax).

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*DNC: Democratic National Committee, the steering committee of the Democratic Party of the USA.

**Startling as this is, in some places, the costs are higher.  Crazy.