What If Trump Wins?

Some people I know are a little worried that Donald Trump will be re-elected in November.

Now, I don’t think it will happen. I can give you a lot of reasons why. But, nothing is certain in politics. So, just for fun, let’s explore some of the things that are likely to happen if he is returned to the White House by the voters on Election Day.

I am sure that some big changes will happen, and some little ones too.  Some people will find that life will get easier for them - fame or fortune or both will come their way - and more will find life getting harder.

There will be outrage on the part of a lot of people, and mocking laughter on the part of others. Over and over again, until we all get tired of it.

And, in the end, there will be the death of one of America’s major political parties. RIP - GOP. I’ll give you the reason later.

But, first things first. What will a Trump victory bring? Some of my predictions might seem like I’m giving the President some advice. But, a lowly blogger like me would’t dare assume that.

For starters, the White House will become a catering hall.  You know, that building in Washington where there was a fireworks show and people on the lawn saw it end with the word TRUMP emblazoned in bright red letters.

Well, if you can hold a rally for your supporters on the lawn, why can’t you hold a victory party for your supporters inside. Not the 1,500 people who were crammed into a small space on the lawn, but to the supporters who paid big bucks for the honor of being a Trump insider - a man or woman of influence.

Now nothing lasts forever, and Trump has no gratitude, but a donor today is a financial backer tomorrow. Throwing a big party for wealthy donors is a pretty good investment. Besides, you could have a shell company cater the whole thing, and pay the expenses to yourself - washed properly through one or two different corporations, of course. Bill Barr could tell you how to do it.

The next thing to happen will be a housecleaning. Not the White House, that other house. The one under the Capitol Dome.

For Donald Trump, no victory will be enough. No matter how many Republicans get re-elected, there should have been more. You can’t blame the lazy Socialist Democrats - after all, if the election was a fraud, your getting re-elected might be seen as a fraud - so you have to blame Republicans for not working harder.

It might take more than a few tweets to get rid of the Republicans you blame, but some will come back and worship you - Little Marco Rubio comes to mind. He is, after all, a Senator from Florida, which is your home state, and which didn’t give you a big enough margin.

Your daughter is too young to put into the Senate seat to replace him, but there are some attractive candidates you might decide to favor.

Well, that’s the small stuff. Let’s look at the bigger picture.

Our nation is in a terrible crisis. In several, actually. As the death toll continues to mount, it may be hard to find workers for a lot of industries. Well, a change of policy is needed.

You could direct every woman to have four or five children, but that would take too long. Child labor doesn’t work too well in a lot of 21st century jobs.

So, you will have to open the borders and allow foreigners to come it. Besides, you could turn the job of finishing that border wall to Mexico. After all, they’re the ones paying for it. And, you could close all those customs posts on our side of the border. They could do that, too.

The virus will just go away by itself. Maybe in winter it will be too cold to spread around. After all, everything ends sometime.

But, there is one nasty problem you will have to deal with. Some of those old conservative Republicans, and certainly all of those treacherous Democrat legislators, will have noticed it. Our nation is in debt. Big debt. And growing every year.

So, you will have to cut spending or raise taxes. Or, cut some spending, and raise taxes on some people.

Well, you have already suspended the Payroll Tax and promised to make that a permanent if you were re-elected. So, that means big cuts already have to be made in Social Security, since those payroll taxes bring in the money that goes out to seniors every month.

But that’s OK. Some of your advisors believe that taking money from workers to pay old people who decide not to keep working is just a Socialist plot anyway.

So, you can end Social Security. Privatize the whole thing. Might be a lot of people that would offer you a good deal to take it over, and your are nothing if not a deal maker.

Now you might have some problems in the Middle East. That peace agreement you took credit for might run into some problems. So you have to find someone to take over that deal. I have several suggestions, which I won’t make here. They are just too obvious.

There is one way to handle the problem of less money coming in and more money going out. It’s called inflation. Just print more money. You are the President, and you can just order it. It’s right there in the secret powers you have in the Constitution.

Now inflation is a sure winner for some people. You have a fixed mortgage, for example, you can pay it off with cheaper dollars. You have a gas station, you just up the price at the pump. Money markets have opportunities galore.

And the value of fixed assets goes way up. Hotels, golf courses, more golf courses. The list could be endless. It might cost more to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, but the cash value of those licenses that your daughter got from China should go up by more than enough to cover that expense.

For the people working for a living, it won’t be so good. Any pay raise they get probably won’t keep up with inflation. It never does. But, they didn’t vote for you anyway. They probably deserve it.

Now you may have some problems with inflation on the higher end, particularly in those suburbs you needed so badly. Towns and counties can’t really run at a deficit. Their budgets have to balance, within reason.

So, with costs going up, services that people notice will have to go down. It will be even worse for schools. That could turn into a real drag. And, the people who live in million dollar houses who voted for you - not unusual in a lot of wealthy suburbs - will find their tax increase a lot steeper than people who live in a house selling for $250,000.

And they might not get away with telling their local tax assessor their house with a $700,00 mortgage is really worth only $350,000. State officials might catch on.

Well, you can probably live with those problems for a couple of years. There are more than enough ambitious people willing to work for you who you could blame. Just ask your new Attorney General, Rudy Giuliani, how to do it.

But, after two years there will be another election. And, typically, the party in power loses seats in Congress. You could be facing a Democrat House and a Democrat Senate. Heck, they might even insist you call it a Democratic House and Senate.

Not only that, the Republicans who are still in office in two years will start thinking about who the next president will be. There aren’t enough states to ratify a change to the Constitution to give you another term, you know.

Now those new candidates might want to change the direction of the Republican Party, which could be a problem. But, it became a certainty when the party decided not to adopt a platform this year. The old one will be eight years old when the next election comes around, and things will be different.

More problems to blame on you, since you ran the country for eight years. Different voters, too. More black and brown, fewer whites. It has something to do with the nation’s birth rate, and your plan to allow unlimited immigration from Scandinavia didn’t work too well.

Now, whatever happens, the new party leadership will have to decide on what they want to do when they get elected. Since all the Republicans in Congress say their goal is to support you - all the Republican governors, too - they will probably fight over a new direction.

And that could lead to chaos. Maybe even tear the party apart. After all, what is important in the Midwest might not be important in the South or places like Wisconsin.

So, what to do? No party structure. No clear leadership. No shared values. Fewer voters, changing demographics, and maybe even different election districts where you will have problems getting local people re-elected.

 Well, time for just one final suggestion. Before you get rid of the Attorney General, have him research one question for you. I know it’s audacious, but that never stopped a man of your wisdom and courage before.

Can a sitting President pardon himself? After all, Hillary might have done it. But, I don’t think she will return your call and tell you how.

It Ain't Over Till It's Over

The remarkable Yogi Berra - an 18-time all-star who hit 358 career home runs when baseball had fewer games each year - is known for many remarkable sayings, things like “it’s deja-vu all over again.”

He had another saying that I’ve been thinking about lately, especially when people claim that Coronavirus will somehow go away when a vaccine is developed and things will go back to normal.

Yogi said “it ain’t over till it’s over.”

There is a shared assumption in this country that once the virus problem is solved, things will instantly return to the way they were.

President Trump promises that once the virus goes away, restaurants will open, businesses will hire the people they laid off, customers will come flooding back and Broadway theaters, baseball stadiums and colleges will all be filled.

Not quite.

We know, of course, that more than 170,000 people won’t be here any more - a drop in the bucket for a nation of 330 million, but a tragedy for everyone who knew one of the victims.

We can only guess how many restaurants won’t re-open.  Earlier this month, industry experts estimated that one in three restaurants won’t be coming back. In one pessimistic poll, 80 percent of restaurant and bar owners questioned said they were uncertain if they will open again.

Now we aren’t quite certain what will be happening with public schools. And I have read stories that some college students are talking about deferring their studies - they would just come back to class next year.

How many? Your guess is as good as mine. But, let’s pretend for a minute that you are a high school senior who doesn’t know what the 2020-21 year will bring.

You want to go to college when you graduate. And, by the fall of next year, it should be safe. But, colleges only admit so many people - they can’t build a lot of classrooms and libraries and dormitories overnight - and lots of the students who were admitted to the freshman class this year plan to come back.

Say there were 3,000 freshmen admitted this year, and a third of them decided not to come. Maybe they wanted to wait for real classes, and didn’t want to pay all that tuition to see home videos. 

That means when the current crop of high school seniors tries to get into that college next year, a thousand of those 3,000 seats will already be filled. 

Is that number too high or too low? Well, lately I have been reading about colleges that open and then quickly close again.

Even before the virus entered the picture, it was hard for many people to get into a good college. Some rich and famous people have gone to jail for trying to get their kids into college by cheating and got caught.

You mean they claimed their daughter was on their high school school rowing team when there was no rowing team? Yep, things like that.

Or let’s say you are a landlord. Make it a modest landlord, who owns two or three commercial buildings. And the dry cleaners and restaurant and snack bar have closed, or have strict limits on occupancy. Even better, they are not paying rent.

Do you know that some hedge funds that loaned money to the bank that holds your mortgage have been filing legal claims, trying to force small landlords into bankruptcy. Why? Well, sooner or later someone is going to come up short when the county and state don’t get their taxes, and if the owner is bankrupt and you hold the judgement, you stand a good chance of recovering most of the money you lent out. At least you are ahead of all the other creditors.

That, sadly, is the law. And, we all believe in law and order, don’t we?

For homeowners, there is a real question about defaulting on their mortgages. No one has a good number, but estimates are ranging from two or three per-cent of homes to 10 per-cent or more.

That would create millions of tragedies, of course. Just imagine what would happen to the value of your house if there was a house in foreclosure on every block in the neighborhood.

Now the wonderful thing about capitalism is that every crisis creates a new opportunity, One business closes, another opens to replace it. Some people win, others lose.

But if you want to open a restaurant and you can’t get the containers to pack your food in - the manufacturer in another state couldn’t get the raw materials or their workers left town because they had no savings and had to find work elsewhere - well, you have a problem.

Sometimes, our dreams get in the way of reality. I heard a sportscaster on the radio the other day, complaining that we should open baseball stadiums because nothing is better than being out in the fresh air and sunshine. He was mumbling something about political correctness.

Well, he probably goes to the game through that wonderful gate that says press - you know, the one to the elevator up to the press booth.

He probably forgot what it was like when 20,000 or 30,000 people try to get into a stadium at the same time. Heck, he probably forgot what it is like sitting in the stands when there is no strong wind blowing. Ever smell that bowl of chili from four seats away?

I love the idea of getting back to normal. I think the experts know what they are doing, and lots of politicians are smart enough to follow them. Except for the ones who don’t, and the growing list of hospitalizations show who they are.

Then, if you really want to worry, think about this. We don’t know the long-term effects of Coronavirus. There are stories about athletes getting sick, recovering, and finding out months or years later they just can’t compete any more. But, no hard evidence either way - just another reason for caution.

Or, if you want to think big, just ask what the social and political implications are in Saudi Arabia, where last year 2.5 million Muslims came from all over the world to perform Hajj - the religious pilgrimage to Mecca. This year, the number was cut to about just 1,000 people, all from within the kingdom.

Religion is taken seriously in the Middle East.

So, when we think about the Spring and how soon everything will be getting back to normal, just remember Yogi.

It ain’t over till it’s over.

FOOTNOTE - While Yogi Berra is credited with saying “it ain’t over till it’s over,” there are lots of claims to who said it first, or whether it came before or after other similar sayings, like “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” or “it ain’t over till the fat man sings,” sexist and body-shaming comments that go back to the days when opera was more important to popular culture than it is today.

When Luciano Pavarotti failed to perform at the Met in New York City in 2007,  for example, the New York Post ran a headline - “Fat Man Won’t Sing.” 

Sports writer Dan Cook used the phrase in the San Antonio News-Express around 1975 or so to boost interest in a terrible local basketball team, the San Antonio Spurs. “It ain’t over till it’s over,” he told the fans. As expected, the team didn’t make the playoffs. It was over.

Of course, Lenny Kravitz — who came to the party late - could claim that he really popularized the saying. “It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over” was a song on his second album, Mama Said, and later released as a single in June, 1991. Kravitz (who wrote and produced it) said he was inspired by Motown, soul and Earth, Wind and Fire.

That’s another thing about Yogi Berra and his sayings - still waters run deep.

A Normal Day

It took me a long time to realize it.

I have been watching the President and I listening to him for more than three years, just like everybody else. And, yet I missed it.

I missed the forest for the trees. That’s amazingly easy to do.

Donald Trump has never had a normal day.

It’s worth repeating. Donald Trump has never had a normal day.

How do I know? Well, I am sure that sometime in his youth he got up, ate breakfast, went out and played. Listened to his father. Listened to the radio. Had dinner.

But I am talking about Donald Trump the adult. The President. The one who came down the escalator in Trump Tower and said we were all in trouble and that he was the only one who could fix things.

He’s never done anything incremental. Add three per-cent to a budget, send federal aid to a disaster area, even appoint people to his cabinet. He always picks from the best people, the smartest people. The ones who have everyone’s respect - even if you never heard of them.

He sends a hospital ship to New York to help deal with an overwhelming epidemic, and it is not put into use right away. Hundreds of beds, and only a handful of patients.

Were arrangements made ahead of time to bring it in? Did local officials coordinate with the Navy, which was concerned about contamination on their ship which could turn into a huge problem?

It’s a problem, of course, since he knows more than anyone he appoints. “I have the greatest brain,” he says. “I’m smarter than the generals.” Smarter than doctors, too, since he gives out medical advice.

But, he can’t do everything. Got to have time to tweet and play golf.

So, if things don’t work out, then of course it is someone else’s fault. Someone he appointed? Then they are a rat, a traitor, the worst betrayal ever.

Couldn’t he ever just do something normal. After all, not everything is the best - that’s the argument dedicated football fans make before the season starts. Hey, everyone has the same chance to win.

And, to be honest the score of every game starts at 0 - 0.

Now if this sounds like an exaggeration - since we are talking about Trump it would be the worst exaggeration in the world - let me give you a couple of examples.

- The cake. That famous chocolate cake he gave to China’s President, Xi Jinping, which was so good - he said he never tased one so good -  that it cemented their relationship and the relationship between our two countries. That was back in 2017. It probably would have lasted if Trump himself had baked it, but you get busy running the free world.

- The deal. The worst deal ever. The North American Free Trade Agreement, if you remember it. Trump made its a lot better - he changed the name.

• Our military. Trump says he has invested $2.5 trillion dollars in new equipment to make the U.S. armed forces the best-equipped in the world. Not quite. The entire defense department budget this year is $738 billion, and it’s the biggest ever. And only about a quarter of that is for new equipment, a lot of which is the same as the worn-out equipment it will replace. Things wear out in the Army and the Navy, something he learned in military school, no doubt.

Anyway, that’s enough to make my point. Donald Trump has never had a single normal-sized thing happen since he has been in the White House. Everything he does, everyone he meets, every plan he proposes or rejects is always the best or the worst.

I don’t know how he does it. 

It would drive me crazy if I had to get up in the morning and take the best milk ever sold and pour it into the best cup of coffee I ever drank, then took a couple of the best pills medicine can create which were prescribed for me by the best doctor ever to deal with a problem with my….no, I have no problems. I am in the best of health ever. My personal doctor told me that, don’t you remember.

My medical records? I won’t show them to you. It would only make you jealous.

Want to make an issue of it? It’s your fault. Stop being nasty. I call that Fake News.

Which, of course, brings me to the upcoming election. I suspect that if he loses the election, it will probably be someone else’s fault. The voters, surely. But who will get the real blame?

Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party - at least the few people left in the GOP who are not true Trump loyalists.

I think our President will look at the political landscape and realize that the best thing to do is simply pull out of disloyal, creaky, old and mostly white Republican Party and start his own political party - the Trump Party has a nice ring to it.

Then he will just wait for his wealthy supporters to fund the new Trump Party, maybe take a seat on the board of directors. They won’t have to do much - he will lay it all out for them.

Besides, the Trump Network will already be starting up, and all the loyal advertisers will leave Fox News. My Pillow, just wait for the sales to start going through the roof.

As for the wreckage that is left, well it has to be someone else’s fault, and someone else will have to clean it up.

While there is no clear candidate, we know that if Trump loses, Mike Pence won’t be doing anything.

A

How Rich Are You?

 

So, Joe Biden has chosen Kamala Harris to be his Vice President.

Now the world will start looking at who she is. Republicans will try to paint her as an out-of-control radical liberal without offering any proof, while her supporters will declare the election is all-but-won, then remind people not to be overconfident.

But, before we spend the next three months going where the political winds blow us, maybe it’s time to take a few minutes to look at the place she came from - the United States Senate.

That’s a legislative body in Washington, and many of them are millionaires or multi-millionaires.

Nearly half of the Senate’s Republicans recently stopped the extension of unemployment benefits, claiming $600 a week was way too much, and that out-of-work people could easily get by on $400.

Giving them more money, they argued, would only keep people from looking for work. Then President Trump explained he only wanted to pay $300 - individual states could make up the rest - even though most states haven’t budgeted the money to do it.

Before we start going into some details, let me ask a question. How rich are you? I’ll ask it again later, in a slightly different way.

(Just write the answer on a piece of paper, or dictate it to your secretary. How you answer might be interesting.)

Now, let’s look at the Senate, that exclusive club for millionaires who occasionally let poorer folks join. Of course, we have to take their word for it. They report their own wealth.

We know the annual salary for every member of Congress is more than $174,000 a year. Many Senators get extra pay for heading committees and other things. And, they get expenses - something called an Official Personnel and Office Expense Account.

Most Senators get more than $3 million a year, for things like office space in their home state, mobile office space and furniture.  Heck, some Senators used to claim some of that money for an office in their home. You see why it’s a little difficult figuring out how much they actually earn.

Calculating a Senator’s net worth - that’s everything they own, less everything they owe - is also hard. If you’re married and your spouse owns half of the house, how do you figure out the worth? What’s a stock option worth if you haven’t exercised it yet? What about the money you have in a blind trust? See why the numbers are soft?

There are, of course, lists. Many lists. Mostly, they have similar figures, based on public records.

Surprisingly, the wealthiest Senators are all Democrats and all had thriving law practices before going into politics.

Mark Warner of Virginia is considered the wealthiest Senator, with a net worth estimated at more than $90 million.

Richard Blumenthal - a former Connecticut Attorney General - comes in second at $70 million, then Dianne Feinstein at nearly $60 million.   Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican, a prominent businessman, is  worth about $23 million.

All of which makes me wonder a bit about Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, a lawyer who has been in the Senate since 2015, and whose net worth is listed as between $100,000 and $1 million.

 But, whether they have $5 million or $10 million or more than $50 million, there is something a little odd about watching wealthy Senators unable to pass an extension of unemployment benefits.

Admittedly, the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted for one more than two months ago, and all the Democratic Senators support it.

So, just what are those reluctant Republicans thinking about? It seems a little tacky to create so much misery for a lousy $200 a week, when you get a big pay check and only work in Washington an average of 165 days a year.

Can’t they imagine what it’s like not having enough money to pay the rent and buy food because their business closed down? That’s why people are unemployed. 

Maybe they believe that, some day soon, all the businesses will re-open, all the customers will magically come back, and all the banks will make a fortune on new loans to the people who are offered new jobs, even if they will be making less than they used to. After all, they get deeper in debt every week, and that debt doesn’t away.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said he wants to cap the benefit so people don't collect any more in unemployment than they were making while working. 

The point here is that it’s embarrassing to see millionaire Republicans argue about giving people $600 a week, which - if they saved every single dollar - would net a remarkable $1 million in just about 30 years. If they don’t waste it on food or rent or clothes. Or taxes.

Now, at the risk of sounding like an old-fashioned Communist - and Communism has a lot more problems than America’s economic system - there is one problem inherent in wide-open Capitalism. It concentrates capital. 

Every year, money flows from the poor to the rich, stopping briefly at the well-off before going up and up and up to the one per-cent. That’s the very idea behind Capitalism - concentrate the wealth, invest it, and everyone is better off. At least, the shareholders are.

To go back to Adam Smith, if a thousand people chip in a couple of dollars each, you can buy a machine that will make things faster and cheaper. All the investors get the profits, and we are in the Industrial Age.

But, right now, nearly 25 per-cent of our nation’s wealth is owned by less than one per-cent of our population. They don’t shop in our local stores, they don’t pay taxes in our cities and towns. It is truly a wonder.

Look at it another way. The Federal Reserve estimated that the one per-centers controlled more than 38 per-cent of the nation’s wealth. (they get to vote on corporate boards).

So where does it leave us? Well, if you divided all the wealth equally among all the people, the average net worth of American families would be $692,000. But average doesn’t work. The median - the point where half the families have more and half have less - is only $97,300.

Crunch the numbers a little more, and you will see that 70 per-cent of us collectively own a bit less less than 10 percent of the nation’s total wealth. No matter how much overtime you work, you won’t really get ahead. In fact, the 40 per-cent of families at the bottom of the economic heap falls further and further behind every year - and that’s not counting the impact of the virus.

So, back to my question. How wealthy are you?

I asked because people tend to exaggerate a bit when asked about money. But, they are also more modest at the edges. Rich people often say they are well off. Poor people say they are in good shape, which often translates as “I can pay my bills this month.”

If you want to be middle class nowadays, you have to own a house that is worth around $300,000 or so, since a home is the single most expensive purchase most families ever make.

Which, by the way, is a good yardstick. If you want to call yourself truly rich, you have to own something that is worth more than your house. Maybe a company. Maybe a private island. Maybe some real estate that is 40 stories tall.

Now, here’s a funny thing. In many places, where real estate prices are sky high, lots of people own homes worth $250,000 to $350,000. But a lot of them are house rich and cash poor.

Taxes are sky high, too. And some of them are now out of work, or have closed their business. And, they really need that $2,400 a month to cover their bills.

But, giving them $600 a week will probably mean they will stop looking for work. Goodness knows, they might otherwise find something paying $7.50 an hour, even if they are 50 or 60 years old.

At least a lot of Republicans in the Senate could sleep well if they did.