Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Highlights of the call:

The complete call:

For an absurdist view of how bizarre the Trump administration has been, listen to the first 25 minutes of this podcast, up to the break. The payoff is worth it, I promise.

This is something I posted on the Facebook alumni page of my high school class.

Senior year, I had Mr. Beauregard for a Psychology elective. He said something about us being the peak of the Baby Boom that really stayed with me.

Mr. Beauregard’s point was, “There are so many of you! Right now you’re competing with each other to get into college. You’ll be competing for jobs, and houses, and everything else.” His insight was one reason why, when taking an Introduction to Economics course in my freshman year of college, I decided to make the subject my major.

While I studied Economics, inflation surged, and we talked about the causes in class. They included the OPEC oil embargo, but its effect was accelerated by our generation coming of age. Before turning 30, even a small house suddenly topped a hundred grand.

This year I’ll start collecting Social Security. It’s no coincidence that 2021 is the first year that the Social Security reserves are starting to decline, as I have highlighted on the graph with a blue arrow.

Addendum: I neglected to mention Nixon ending the gold standard for currency exchange. Letting the dollar lose value as a result is often cited by conservative economists as the single reason why inflation took off. Perhaps it was a trigger, but inflation and unemployment were already rising. Going off the gold standard by itself couldn’t have sustained the rise in inflation over the next ten years. The fact that exchange rates still float, and inflation has been relatively low to very low for many years since then, is proof.

For almost 15 years I traveled to hospitals and installed clinical computer systems. Some of the hospitals were large medical centers like Walter Reed, while others were small rural facilities. The government classifies the smallest of them as Critical Access Hospitals.

Trump’s influence has been so toxic that he threatens the already shaky standing of CAHs. The line has been crossed from rugged individualism into willful ignorance.

Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture
Issued on: December 21, 2020

In the 1950s, the Federal Government largely replaced traditional designs for new construction with modernist ones.

Rand Paul should explain Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead to Trump.