The United States is approximately 18.5% Hispanic while America is 13.4% black.
The Hispanic vote has typically been much heavier on the Democrat side than the Republicans, but this is changing.
Here, dear reader, is how it is changing:
1. In the 2016 Presidential election, Hispanics voted 66% for Hillary Clinton and 28% for Donald Trump.
It is very easy to understand gasoline pricing — you drive up to the pump, study the price of different grades of gasoline, insert your card, and pump your gas.
[The price of gas taken together with the price of groceries makes one as intimately knowledgeable of the state of inflation in America as a Nobel Laureate economist.]
Today, when you fill up it costs about twice what it did when Joe Biden was elected President.
Glendale, California — I have a 24-gallon tank. Do the bloody math. Ouch!
But, what really controls the price of gasoline? Is it crude oil prices? Continue reading
Leadership is a difficult, broad subject — a constantly evolving, context-dependent, nuanced, and complex issue while being supremely personal and driven by individual style.
We have spoken before about leadership style, authentic leadership voice, but today I want to speak about leadership tone.
By “tone” I mean the emphasis or coloration of how the leader’s voice resonates, its intonation, timbre, or temperament, of how the leader speaks and approaches the solving of problems or meeting challenges. Continue reading
When a politician needs to counter some terrible narrative as it relates to behavior or policy what does he/she do?
They find some EXPERTS to pimp out to support their outrageous behavior or policy.
You will recall during the last days of the 2020 election, candidate Joe Biden was confronted by the allegation that a laptop owned by his son — in the possession of the FBI for a year and supposedly being “investigated” — was filled with damaging information.
Joe had famously asserted that he had had nothing to do with his nefarious son’s business dealings with amongst others, the sovereign nation of China. The information on the laptop showed this was a lie of gargantuan proportions and that not only was he actively involved, but he was the beneficiary of “10% for the Big Guy.”
The information on the laptop began to leak out and showed a drug crazed Hunter Biden engaged in various sorts of churlish and illegal behavior.
What did candidate Joe Biden do? He pimped some EXPERTS. You can read the contemporaneous article here:
Now, in a move that has been proven a lie and incredibly cynical candidate Joe Biden rounded up “50 former intelligence officials” who warned the naive, gullible, and callow American public that the laptop, the information on the laptop, and Joe’s balding forehead were “signs of a Russian disinformation operation.” Continue reading
The US government, the Biden admin, has already passed one huge Pandemic-related bill earlier this year and is in the death throes of passing two more:
1. The American Recovery Plan Act was passed by the Dems to the tune of $1,900,000,000,000.
2. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is waiting passage to the tune of $1,200,000,000,000.
3. The Build Back Better Bill (The Bernie Sanders, “Damn Right I’m A Socialist” Bill) is awaiting passage to the tune of $3,500,000,000,000, but has been sent to the gym and whittled down to $1,900,000,000,000.
This is a “nominal” total of $5,000,000,000,000 ($1.9T + $1.2T + $1.9T = $5,000,000,000,000), but it will actually be far more — at least 2X — than that nominal amount because of the bogus way Congress prices such bills.
See:
for an explanation of how Congressional arithmetic really works. Continue reading
We are inundated with media, pundits, and bloggers telling America what its opinion should be.
We are similarly flooded with pollsters — who seem to get Presidential elections and politics in general abysmally wrong — telling us what we think.
There are three long term, reliable measures of consumer/business confidence upon which I have historically relied to provide an accurate picture of the state of affairs in the country:
The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index
The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index
The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index
I particularly like to be able to see the trend as I am a firm believer that the trend is your friend. It shows you things that a discrete number cannot.
If you are a CEO, a manager, a leader you will of necessity order persons who are your subordinates to do things that need to be done. It is the nature of a senior-subordinate relationship, an employer-employee relationship. It is an every day action in the workplace.
How can you ensure that these things you require to be done are, in fact, done?
There are essentially three ways:
1. You can mandate that they be done under pain of punishment. Discipline in the work place is always lurking just below the surface.
Taken to an extreme, if you fail to follow the mandate, you will be fired.
In 33 years as a CEO and 5 years an Army officer, I never had anyone defy my orders or found it necessary to discipline anybody for willfully not following my direction.
I had plenty of times when someone did not do something I had ordered to be done well, but that is not what we are talking of today.
2. You can reward persons for the accomplishment of the task.
Whatever behaviors you reward will be observed by others and duplicated.
Feed the good angels; starve the bad angels. Get more good angels. Money talks.
3. You can persuade them of the necessity and wisdom that the thing be done.
Persuasion requires education, communication, salesmanship, a bit of cajolery, and the willingness to engage in calm debate wherein the titular power of the CEO is put aside for a second as he/she deploys the power of logic. Continue reading
When one reads anything these days one is confronted by headline grabbing numbers as to the “cost” of various pieces of legislation — right now this falls under the headings of “infrastructure” and “social infrastructure.”
There are two bills at play now in the US Congress.
1. Bill No 1 — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (10 Aug 2021), priced at $1,200,000,000,000.
2. Bill No 2 — the “social infrastructure” bill, known as the Build Back Better Bill informally, is intended to be passed by reconciliation, a legislative trick that requires a simple majority in both the House and Senate. This bill is priced at $3,500,000,000,000.
These two bills are in addition to the American Recovery Plan Act already enacted by POTUS Biden and the US Congress (the Dems) for $1,900,000,000,000.
We are talking nominal spending of more than $6,600,000,000,000 — which I believe understates the total expenditures by more than $3-4,000,000,000,000 because of Congressional Black Magic Arithmetic.
That is a total of approximately $10,000,000,000,000 which will ultimately add about $7,000,000,000,000 to the National Debt.
Hello, America! Are y’all paying attention to this?
“Who are you going to believe? Me, your Truthful Aunt Nancy, or that rusty bag of bolts, Big Red Car? I’m going to squeeze his headlights but good. Look into my eyes.”
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