That march for science.

I wonder how many of the marchers had a minimum of scientific education.  I strongly feel that all high school students should take chemistry, physics, and biology.  In the 21th century when so many policies and issues have science (or claim to have science) at their base, all citizens ought to have some science at the high school level in order to understand the arguments pro and con.  Simple concepts, conservation of energy, the difference between compounds and elements, conservation of mass-energy, the difference between acid and alkali, specific heat and the heat of fusion, invariance of the speed of light, and more, are essential to real understanding.  This isn't happening right now.  Kids can coast thru high school with no science what so ever.  A lot of 'em come out of high school unable to read an ordinary ruler. 

Tax Cuts bring prosperity? Heard on Fox News this morning.

They cited the prosperity that followed the Kennedy tax cuts (early 1960's) and the Reagan tax cuts (1980's)  However back in those days the Feds mostly paid their bills with tax receipts, rather than by selling T-bills.  Now a days taxes are not paying for the Feds, they are selling nearly $1 trillion worth of T-bills to keep those US treasury checks from bouncing.  That's a scary amount of money.  GNP is about $17 trillion, so the $1 trillion yearly deficit is about  6% of GNP.  That's a bunch more than the deficit back in the Kennedy or Reagan years.  It's one of the reasons GNP growth was 1% under Obama. 
   If we just cut taxes, we will have to run a bigger deficit.  Sooner or later, people will stop buying T-bills and then things get dicey.  Do we stop paying social security and medicare?  Do we stop paying the troops?  Do we just let the checks bounce?  I don't want to go there. 
   Plus, selling T-bills is very close to just printing fresh dollar bills to meet our expenses.  Look at it from the T-bill buyer's point of view.  He gives Uncle cash, Uncle gives him a nicely printed bond, green ink and everything, just like a dollar bill.  There is a market for T-bills, runs 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and should our bondholder need cash, he picks up his phone, orders his broker to sell, and he will have cash in his account in a day or so.  Does our bondholder feel any poorer after buying that T-bill?  No, he figures the money is still his, he just put it into a T-bill which does pay a small amount of interest.  As opposed to bank accounts which pay no interest at all these days.  
   And we all know that just printing more money causes inflation, the price of goods goes up, and we all agree that is not good. 
   So before tax cuts can bring prosperity, we will have to cut some spending.  There are a lot of things that could be cut right down to zero.
   Start with farm subsidies.  There aren't that many farmers any more.  I worked in industry for fifty years and we never got a penny of federal subsidies.  Why should farmers get free money?
   Then we could eliminate block grants to the states.  If the states want to spend money they ought to have to raise it themselves.  When you have to raise the money you will be more frugal in spending it.  When you get free money from Uncle, it will be spent, every penny of it, whether the project is worthwhile or not. 
   Then we could shut down the federal dept of education.  Education is controlled and funded at the city, town, and state level.  We ought to leave it that way.  The federal funds the ed dept hands out are really bribes to get the staties to do things Washington's way.  We would be better off dropping the bribes and letting the locals do things their way. 
   And there are other things which will come to me as I think things other. 

Dodd-Frank. Welfare for big banks

The Dodd-Frank bill, passed in the depths of Great Depression 2.0,  essentially promises US taxpayer support for big US bank, should they screw up and go broke.  It makes a list of "systemically important" banks, adds unwilling banks to the list now and then.  These favored banks are required to file a ton of paperwork, including a financial last will and testament,  supposedly to guide the Feds in a bailout, should they go over the cliff.
  Bad idea all around.  The bank managers are encouraged to make stupid loans, because they know the feds will bail them out should the stupid loans go bad.  The rest of the world is reassured that US banks will live up to their commitments,no matter how stupid, using money from us long suffering taxpayers.
  Better idea.  Use the ancient Sherman Anti Trust act to break up any bank so big as to pose a threat to the financial system should it go broke.  The justice department still has an entire office full of anti-trust lawyers, who haven't done squat in the last 20 years, other than draw their pay.  They ought to be out earning their pay by breaking up banks "too big to fail".   

Budget of only $609 Million.

That's the 2016 budget for the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That's a lot of money.  Figure you can hire a bean counter for $100K, that budget will hire 6000 bean counters.  Erica Groshen, former BLS commissioner, writing an op-ed in today's Wall St Journal, thinks BLS needs more money to fulfill it's duties.
  These duties include publishing the monthly jobs report.  Crucial work that is, especially as ADP, the big payroll agency, publishes it's own jobs report, a week ahead of the BLS report, based on very credible data. Funding for BLS got so tight last year that they dropped the "International Labor Comparisons" program, and the "Mass Layoff Statistics" program.  Awful that is.  Of course I have never heard of either program before, and from the titles I gotta wonder if they were worth a plugged nickel. 
   The most important thing BLS can do, is compute the numbers the same way, every month, every year, so that changes in the number indicates changes in the real economy and not merely changes in book keeping.  Only if you forbid book keeping changes can you tell if things are actually getting better or worse.  Which is why we care about the numbers.
   Today, they ought to get the jobs report out by putting the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.  Use the same spread sheet every year.  I don't see why we need a staff of 6000 bean counters to get this done.  I'd think 60 would be plenty.
  $609 million isn't "real money" in Everett Dirksen's phrase (A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money).  But it is getting close to a billion, when I think it ought to be $6 million.

Farewell Bill O'Reilly

Fox News announced Bill's "retirement" on air last night.   Too bad.  I'm not a super great O'Reilly fan, I watched him when there was nothing better on (often) and I had nothing better to do (not so often).  He had an attitude, and expressed it on the air, frequently.  Mostly his attitude was OK by me, sometimes I found him a bit simplistic and jingoistic, but never as bad as lefties like Rachel Maddow.  Most of the time Bill seemed to have his head screwed on, nose to the front. 
  Tucker Carlson gets O'Reilly's 8 o'clock time slot, "The Five" moves from 5 o'clock to 9 o'clock.  Tucker is pretty good, The Five is merely OK. 
  Message to everyone.  Keep it zipped. 

Dominating the news cycle

Mother of all Bombs soaked up fantastic amounts of TV coverage for days on end.  Some video showing the Mother getting dropped.  Not so much bomb damage assessment (BDA) video.  But as a publicity stunt, this one ranks right up there with things like the Doolittle raid. 
   Not quite sure why it got so much press coverage.  It was 21000 pounds, big, but the British had a 20000 pound bomb (Grand Slam) in service back in WWII.  So a ten ton bomb in 1944, a 10.5 ton bomb in 2017, this is  astounding progress? 
   Lets assume this one bomb hit did our side some good.  But you don't win guerrilla wars with air power.  You gotta sap the guerrilla's morale with effective propaganda, and astute political moves.  And you have to have ground troops to provide security to your civilians and kill the guerillas.  More MOAB strikes might get us more good press, but it isn't gonna win a guerilla war for us. 

Republicans gotta get something done.

First they have to deal with Obamacare.  Nobody has ever figured out just what Obamacare is doing and what it is gonna cost.  The health insurers are dropping Obamacare as fast as the can after loosing barrels of money.  Right now it looks like Obamacare promises taxpayer funded health insurance for everyone who doesn't have health insurance from their employer or is 65 years old and hence eligible for Medicare.  Nobody has ever published an estimate of what Obamacare is gonna cost.  A reasonable guess is it will cost as much as Medicare.  There are more people without employer health insurance than there are people over 65.  Since they are younger than 65 they ought to be in better health.   Any way you slice it, Obamacare is a black hole down which we toss money.  A lot of money.
  To do tax reform, we have to get a handle on Obamacare costs.  Unless we at least know what the taxpayers have to fund, you cannot do any tax cutting.  And every one agrees that taxes are too damn complicated, too damn high,  and too unfair.  If tax reform doesn't happen, there will be a LOT of unhappy campers for the 2018 by election.  Might be enough for the Republicans to loose control of the house or the Senate, or both.
   It's do or die time for the Republicans.  They have to reform Obamacare.  They have to do tax reform.  If they don't,  they are gonna get clobbered in 2018.