Cookies?

This site uses cookies, because it is at Blogger. The European Union requires that every web site in the world that is seen in the EU post a warning and, in some cases, a request for permission if using cookies. Google tells me they provide such a notice on this, my blog. But I am responsible to make sure it is seen. But, but since I am outside the EU I cannot see it. So I can't make sure it works, even though I am responsible.

I almost appreciate Google helping me comply with this. But, but, but I can't know whether or not I am complying.

Giving thanks

Today is the day we stop to give thanks. To think of what we have received and who it came from. Then we are supposed to say so - "the giving" -  but I don't do very well on the action part.

I thank God for my wife, my family, our church and our community of Lake Forest Park, WA.

Church: New Hope International Church in Bellevue, WA

Family: I attended the retirement party for my brother Rick yesterday. He worked for Seattle Pacific University for 18 years.

Growth

Growth of our economy brings more jobs, higher paying jobs and challenging jobs. We need it badly.

This year Hillary Clinton offers more Obama stagnation. The 2008 recession ended in 2009, but we have little growth since. Obama's drop in the unemployment rate is NOT due to more people working but to people giving up on the job search and sitting on the side line.

Donald Trump is far from perfect, but he is far, far better than Mrs. Clinton on jobs and the economy.

Temper tantrum in Congress

My congressman was in the group that threw a temper tantrum and shut down the House of Representative. The Democrats already got the vote they are demanding. The Senate voted on the same bill and they lost. Adults would have said "OK. We lost this time." But they ...

Speaker Ryan ends Demo sit-in with Zika vote

An honorable Marine and a Secretary of State

When a young Marine committed a single security violation he followed the Marine honor code and turned himself in - with consequences.

A Secretary of State violated Department policies  -- set up an email server with minimal security to avoid the disclosure required by law. Then stored classified material where foreign governments could get access. (Did they access it?) She expects her violations to be excused and to be rewarded with the highest trusted position in the US.

Phillip Jennings in USA Today.

When will Bezos pay to locate an Amazon facility in space?

No. He doesn't plan to risk his business by putting it in space, but yours! He expects Boeing to!! In order to "Save the Earth" of course.

His comments at the Code Conference on May 31 via Recode.net:

Bezos says tasks that require lots of energy shouldn't be handled on Earth. Instead, we should perform them in space, and that will happen within the next few hundred years."Energy is limited here. In at least a few hundred years ... all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet," Bezos added. "Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial. 

You shouldn't be doing heavy energy on earth. We can build gigantic chip factories in space." Solar energy, for instance, is more practical for factories in space, he said. 

"We don't have to actually build them here," he said. "The Earth shades itself, [whereas] in space you can get solar power 24/7. ... The problem with other planets ... people will visit Mars, and we will settle Mars, and people should because it's cool, but for heavy industry, I would actually put it in space."

The reporter adds:

No word yet, however, on when Bezos plans to move Amazon fulfillment warehouses beyond the surly bonds of Earth.

Still slow posting

I still haven't solved the tie-in between my blogging SW (both on Mac and IPhone). And I have other problems now! The SSD in my Mac froze. I have replaced it but am only part-way restored from my back up. My situation is not straight-forward for Apple's Time Machine. And I am being very, very careful not to mess up my only back up.

A family member asked me which I would vote for: The Donald or Hillary Clinton.

Response: My only vote for Hillary is "Guilty." She violated State Department rules and stored Secret and Top Secret information on her own private server. That made that classified info available to foreign governments - friends and foes. If I had done inadvertently a fraction of what she did  I would be behind bars. She did it intentionally and expects you and me to elect her president.

Does Bernie Sanders want GE to remove 1,500 jobs from Vermont?

Bernie Sanders of Vermont complains constantly about immoral corpoerations. Generally without any examples. But recently he cited giant GE. Does Sanders want GE to close two plants and remove its 1,500 employees from Vermont? And stop buying $40 million of parts and services per year in Vermont?

GE's CEO Immelt responded  in Washington  Post:

The senator has never bothered to stop by our aviation plant in Rutland, Vt. We’ve been investing heavily (some $100 million in recent years), hiring and turning out some of the world’s finest jet-engine components in Vermont since the 1950s. The plant employs more than 1,000 people who are very good at what they do. It’s a picture of first-rate jobs with high wages, advanced manufacturing in a vital industry — how things look when American workers are competing and winning — and Vermont’s junior senator is always welcome to come by for a tour. 

Elsewhere in Vermont, GE Healthcare employs more than 340 men and women in South Burlington. Yearly, GE does about $40 million worth of business with dozens of suppliers of parts and services across Vermont. Nationwide, we have 200 GE plants, including 15 that were built in the past five years — all with the aim of making GE the world’s premier industrial company.

And Immelt defends GE's global business.

Would Vermont be better if GE took those jobs to another state? Via Powerline Blog.

Swedes leaving their country

Swedes are leaving their wonderful, perfect country. Don’t we wish the US  could be like Sweden? Where are the Swedes choosing to go? The United States is the top destination!!

SPEISA

… emigration reaches record levels. Last year, 51,237 Swedes left the country. It is more than the peak reached in the late 1800s when there was an agriculture crisis in Sweden.

And there might be “unregistered residents” also departing, making the number larger.

Yale University is closing its climate institute

Yale University is closing its climate institute - Yale Climate and Energy Institute. It only opened in 2009. Looks like the priorities of the elite changed rather quickly. Everyone told us the Paris climate summit in December, 2015 was going to solve everything. If it did we can stop spending money on “settled science." This should be just the beginning. 

American Thinker

Yale Students respond. Maybe alumni were not donating to it.

Three things Congress got right last year

Congress got three things right this year. 

1. End oil export ban.

It was a good-faith effort to reduce dependency on imports after the 1973-74 Arab oil em cargo. But market forces have overwhelmed this simplistic approach. The goal has been attained by increased US production(!) due to fracking. Furthermore US refineries are not set up to handle the characteristics of US crude. It can be processed in many places overseas. Let the marketplace decide where.

2. Make permanent removing marriage penalty from EITC - Earned Income Tax Credit. 

An income subsidy for families with children, it penalized families where both parents were working. A correction was put in place in 2009, but was temporary.

3. Improved military retirement. 

Broadening the “serve for 20 years, so you can retire” rule. Under the existing policy only those who completed 20 years got anything toward retirement. Now all those serving will be able to establish 401(k)-type accounts with employer matching.

Charles Lane puts his best left slant on this meager good news at Washington Post.

Did they get anyting else right? Can't think of anything. Making Paul Ryan Speaker was worse than a disappointment.

The middle-income moved up

The middle-income group in the US has gotten smaller. We have all heard this. The assumption is always that the families no longer in the middle dropped to lower-income.

Wrong. They moved up. While the middle group got smaller the top group got larger; even the lower group got smaller. Data for 1967 to 2014.

 The change is not due to more women working. The number of workers per household is unchanged from 1960 to 2000 at 1.22. Source: US DOT (I don’t use “class” terminology, but “income.”)

Graphics and data from Prof Mark Perry’s Carpe Diem blog at AEI - American Enterprise Institute. Click to enlarge.

Sanders can't afford his socialist dreams

Bernie Sanders’ socialists goals are so expensive that he can’t raise taxes enough to pay for half their cost. Megan McArdle at Bloomberg.

… And Democratic priorities, particularly Sanders' plans, would cost a great deal of money. He says he favors single-payer health care, which would involve funneling through government coffers most of the $3 trillion a year that Americans currently spend on health care; $1 trillion of new spending on infrastructure; expanded Social Security benefits; and free tuition at public colleges. Enacting his agenda would require something on the order of $1.5 trillion a year in new revenue. 

That’s a lot of money. That’s not “whack up taxes on the rich” money: His Social Security plan to modestly increase benefits, for example, appears to consume all of the revenue from lifting the cap on Social Security earnings above $250,000 a year. Maybe that sounds like a little itty bitty change to you, but in fact it is a 12.4 percent tax hike on all wage and salary income for high earners, who already have a marginal tax rate of about 40 percent, not including state and local taxes. That’s just to pay for one proposal. Covering the estimated $1 trillion a year in private health insurance expenditures would need something many times larger than that. 

That means taking money from the middle class, because while the middle class does not have oodles of the stuff lying around, there are so many more of them that in aggregate, taxing them raises more revenue than taxing the rich. (That’s why extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class cost three times as much as extending the tax cuts for the wealthy would have, even though investment bankers got a much bigger individual benefit from the tax cuts than a bus driver making $45,000 a year.) Just paying for Sanders’ single-payer plan would, for example, conservatively require between 25-35 percent more tax revenue than we currently collect. Other plans require expenditure from other parties -- employers, state and local governments -- that are likely to end up being collected from the paychecks of workers, one way or the other.
...

She also goes into an obstacle I hadn’t thought/heard of: His tax-raising ideas would have to get past the chattering class - policy wonks and journalists - who will realize that they will have to pay big; some will take a bullet for the cause, but most will hesitate when they realize the tax increases will hurt them.