March 28, 2020

As an aspiring Financial Consultant (stock broker) trainee in New York City many years ago for a major wirehouse, I was taught that the two most important things in any investors life are his health and his wealth, and health came first. Now we have a President who has made the cynical calculation that wealth comes first. He is desperately trying to figure out how many casualties his base can tolerate in exchange for getting the economy going again. As Gov. Andrew Cuomo puts it, he is talking about sacrificing your mother or father for the wallets of his friends and campaign donors.

The other concept they teach you in training school is that most people are influenced by two basic emotions, fear and greed. Trump is preying on the fears of the American public to satisfy his own greed. Anyone who ever lived in New York as I did knows that Donald Trump is a con man and a grifter. The rest of the country will eventually figure it out, but it may be too late.

March 26, 2020

BULLETIN: Donald Trump has just announced that he will donate all of his hotel properties and resorts in the fight against coronavirus. All beds will be converted for the use of patients suffering from the disease. Doctors, nurses, and other workers will be offered safe lodging on premises so that they won’t risk contaminating their families. “This will come at great cost to Trump, Inc.,” the President said, “but lives must come before money.”

I jest. The President has no interest in sacrificing anything except the lives of older people. He wants everyone to return to work on Easter for some inexplicable reason. Actually, it is totally explicable. He is more interested in the Dow Jones than Mr. and Mrs. Jones. For some reason, he thinks that Dow Jones votes, and Mr. and Mrs. Jones don’t.

March 25, 2020

Donald Trump is saying that it would be a beautiful thing if he could announce the end to the coronavirus by Easter, and send everyone back to work. He said the coronavirus will go away miraculously, and now he is picking Easter as the date for the miracle. It’s not the second coming or the rapture. Let’s call it the Premature Resurrection. And on the third week, Donald Trump rose up and declared that the coronavirus hoax was over. Hallelujah! The son of a real estate developer will lead us to the Healthy Land. Hopefully, the coronavirus won’t be there when we get there, or else we’ll all be ghosts.

The United States at one time had the capacity to sacrifice for the greater good, and maybe we still do. We have dealt with wars, depressions, slavery, and earlier pandemics. We need to come together once again to fight the coronavirus, and not at Mardi Gras or Florida’s beaches. However, we have a willfully blind “war President,” who has lost patience and interest already. He is not willing to sacrifice anything himself, but he is willing to sacrifice a huge number of Americans. Life is cheap, and older life is cheaper. It’s the kind of cost-benefit analysis he must have learned at the Wharton School.

Rather than calling the end to the coronavirus by Easter, I would like the voters to call the end of this presidency on Election Day. Then we could all give thanks for the greatest present of all, and scream “Happy New Year.”

March 22, 2020

There is a saying that goes “Just because you are in the kitchen doesn’t mean you are cooking.” We now have a President who thinks that being in the Oval Office is the same thing as being a President. Trump thinks that doing daily press briefings on the coronavirus is demonstrating leadership. Normally, it would, but he is only in the kitchen. He is just making a personal appearances. If he were cooking, he would have taken the time to be familiar with the facts, and take pains to communicate the truth to Americans. If Trump were cooking, he would be leading the federal effort to coordinate medical supplies and testing. Unfortunately, he is just in the kitchen letting the nation’s governors fight amongst themselves for needed supplies. Trump calls himself a war time President, but he is only in the kitchen. If he were cooking, he would be taking responsibility for what is happening, and would not be blaming others. If Trump was cooking and not just in the kitchen, we would not be the new epicenter of the coronavirus. Trump needs to go into the other room, and let the real experts cook.

March 20, 2020

The Trump administration and Donald Trump himself have waged a war on science since day one. Trump’s motto is “Make America Great Again.” It should be “Don’t Confuse Me With the Facts.” It started with the denial of climate change. While California and Australia burned, Trump denied what his own scientists and Defense Department were saying. He dismissed the scientists, and weaponized the EPA to roll back environmental regulations. Budgets and personnel at the NIH and NASA have been cut. Then he cut the department responsible for planning for and managing a pandemic. Studies showed we were ill-prepared, and they were accurate.

Now we have a President, who ignored what his experts were saying about the pandemic that was coming. Scientists didn’t say that the pandemic would go away miraculously in April. Doctors didn’t say that the number of cases would go to zero. Trump wants to overrule his experts, and send Americans back to work and in harms way. He is making the cynical calculation about how much a life is worth. Marco Rubio infamously claimed that the earth was only 6,000 years old. Trump might as well say that the earth is flat.

March 19, 2020

“I guess you could call me a war time President,” Trump said. In the same breath, he said the coronavirus was not his fault, and he doesn’t take responsibility.” He said the federal government wasn’t a shipping clerk. Then he said he knew it was a pandemic before anyone else. Can you imagine Winston Churchill, standing up before Parliament, and saying about World War II, “It’s not my fault or responsibility.” I am currently reading Erik Larson’s latest book, “The Splendid and the Vile.” It is essentially about how Churchill conducted the fight against the Nazis before the United States entered the war.

Churchill had prepared his entire life for his moment. He served in the military, and held various positions in the defense department. He saw the Nazi threat before anyone else. He prepared the British people and the British military for what was to come. He inspired all with his great oratory. He worked and wrote tirelessly. He did not delegate responsibility for the war. The British people knew that “Winnie” was in charge. He gave them hope when things looked hopeless. He was visible. He walked through the rubble of London and other cities, interacting with citizens and victims. He owned the war. He made himself knowledgeable on all aspects of strategy, tactics, and armaments. He staked his place in history on how he promulgated the war. He didn’t eschew responsibility, he welcomed it. Here is a quote from the book. “What we know is that the Prime Minister provided leadership of such outstanding quality that people almost reveled in the dangers of the situation and gloried in standing alone.” “Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.”

We don’t have a leader. We have a Dear Leader.

March 18, 2020

Pandemics are random and unpredictable. They are no one’s fault. Deficits are not. Deficits are manmade. You don’t give the people and companies who need it the least a massive tax cut toward the end of a decade-long economic recovery, and balloon the deficit. When the economy is healthy, you strengthen your balance sheet, not weaken it. You try to give yourself some financial flexibility to deal with whatever might come next, and something always does. Black Friday, the Dot Com crash, the Great Recession, 9/11, and so on. Now we have a pandemic that requires massive financial resources from the federal government. Unfortunately, Trump has run the country like one of his casinos. He has leveraged us to the hilt, and brow beaten The Fed to keep interest rates artificially low. Congress and The Fed realistically have no prudent fiscal options. Just a lot of bad ones. Trump will walk away, and we will have to declare bankruptcy.

March 16, 2020

Stand-up comedian, John Mulaney, does a hilarious routine, comparing Donald Trump to a horse loose in a hospital. You can look it up on YouTube. The horse has never been in a hospital before, and no one knows what the horse is going to do, not even the horse.

Trump is actually a circus elephant. The elephant, the symbol of the Republican party, is a large and slow-moving animal. Like the lumbering circus elephant, Trump has a bunch of clowns following him around wherever he goes to clean up his shit, and his shit is everywhere. After a recent news conference meant to calm the frayed nerves of the American public, his clowns had to pick up the giant turd that he laid about insurance companies waiving co-payments for treatment of coronavirus. The waivers are for tests, not treatment. Then he made a mess about blocking goods and cargo coming into the country. That was not true. Finally, he created the biggest shit storm of all by saying that all travel from Europe would be blocked. Americans overseas panicked, which created disastrous and dangerous conditions at many US airports as they all tried to return before the deadline.

The circus elephant can be very entertaining unless you have to deal with its shit. When will Republicans get tired of being Trump’s clowns?

March 15, 2020

“If the shoe fits, buy another pair.”