I had a back and forth exchange with my realtor about 10 years ago about taxes.  He was trying to make the point that democrats don’t work hard enough at limiting spending.  That taxes were/are out of control.  Jeff was an educated guy, super sharp and personable so the exchange was pleasant.  It was one of those rare debates where I’m engaging with a conservative and he literally had an answer / good comeback for every single point I made.

He’s right.  Taxes are too high.  As a general rule, our government officials waste an awful lot of money.  Jeff brought forth example after example and it became hard to counter. In the end, after thinking about it I came to agree with a lot of what he was saying.

But it didn’t turn me into a Republican or a conservative and here’s why:

The Republicans are full of shit when it comes to their economic strategy.  

They want the label of ‘deficit hawks’ but they are in fact worse at bringing down the debt than democrats are.

They want the label of ‘job creators’ but in fact job growth has been slower while Republicans have held the Oval Office.

They want us to believe that they are the party of smaller government but in fact they have grown the government more than the democrats have.

It’s a pattern of say one thing, do another.

And the thing that ticks me off the most is that the notion that the economy will somehow grow faster under Republican leadership goes pretty much unchallenged by the media.  Here are a few charts to help debunk this myth.

What other conclusion can you draw from this chart?  Democrats are job creators, Republicans, not so much.

What’s interesting about this next chart is when you observe the trend starting with the Reagan tax cuts, or the start of ‘trickle down.’  My takeaway is that there’s a significant slope up on the Federal Debt starting with Reagan.  Clinton helped curb it for a little bit, then GW Bush added more tax cuts and the slope continued up. Meanwhile the banks were deregulated and we got hit with The Great Recession which Obama inherited in his first month of office.  The debt increase under Obama was 90% due to the bank failures of 2008 and the subsequent bailout.

The funny thing is, I still recall the outright screaming from some conservative friends on Facebook for Obama to do something as they watched the 401k balances dwindle daily.  They were begging for him to print money.  It was actually entertaining to watch.  And print money they  did.  The banks got bailed out at Tax payer expense.

Democrats went about adding regulations on banks so this couldn’t happen again.  These are the same regulations that Trump just rolled back.  So if the banks get in a world of hurt again, it’s clearly on Trump and the Republicans.

This last chart once again debunks the idea that Republicans are job creators.  Reagan had decent numbers but there’s more to the story.  Bush 41 and 43’s numbers stink.

I worked in aerospace for the entire decade of the 1980’s at Boeing up in the Seattle area, so I remember this well.  During Reagan’s first term, there was continued escalation of the arms race with the former Soviet Union.  I saw it every day at work.  Boeing is like most aerospace companies in that it has a commercial side and a military side.  During Reagan’s first term, the commercial side of the business was sucking wind.  Demand for the new fleet of 757’s and 767’s wasn’t matching expectations.  The job economy was terrible.  Interest rates with double digits.  My first home loan was at 12.5%.

The military side of the Boeing however, was picking up the slack for the slumping commercial side.  That probably saved my bacon in retrospect.  At least there was a place to go for a lot of people in Boeing commercial who they needed to cut.

Then something extraordinary happened that would affect the economy in ways that people forget.  The Soviet Union collapsed and that brought about the end of the Cold War.  I give Reagan credit for this.  It was a huge gamble to out-spend the Soviets into submission in the arms race.  But his gamble worked. Ironically the Soviets were dirt poor due to engaging in a fruitless 10 year war with Afghanistan.

For the economy this meant that we as a country, no longer needed to invest billions of dollars into making bombs each year.  At work, the military side of the company started to scale back and suddenly the commercial side picked up.

It’s amazing what happens when you start to invest in products and services that actually have some sellable value.  But the savings to the US economy for not having to compete in the arms race was HUGE.  And it wasn’t just Boeing. Enginneering talent across the country got put to work for better purpose, designing iPods and iPhones instead if ICBMs. Exports increased dramatically. This more than anything explains why jobs started picking up and continued to flourish under Clinton and the dot com boom.

But because of the timing of it, and the fact that Reagan’s infamous trickle down strategy started around the same time, people confuse the ensuing economic prosperity with the tax cuts when in fact they had nothing to do with the tax cuts and everything to do with the end of the Cold War.

So here we are 30 years later with Republicans that same trickle down canard. People are not informed enough to understand that contributing to inequality is not how you grow the middle class.  FDR proved that beyond any reasonable doubt.  But every election cycle the Republicans roll that turd out as the answer to all of our prayers.

So yes, taxes are too high.  I AGREE WITH YOU.  Let’s fix the exorbitant amount of waste in government spending by all means.

What should we do about it?  How about learning from our own past history and using what worked?

In my opinion, everything is ripe for review.  Every nickel of spending.  What I am NOT in favor of is blanket cuts which is what Republicans propose.  Blanket cuts are a cop-out because they say “We are spending too much on medicare so we’re going to cut it by 25% and then let the chips fall where they may.”  Well, grandma gets screwed in that scenario and that’s not right.

If you want to cut waste, lets find some waste and cut it.  But don’t propose blanket cuts that screw the poor.  That contributes to inequality.

I’m going to assert that there’s more low hanging fruit in white-collar banking fraud, money laundering and tax cheats (see Trump, Donald J.) than there is in entitlements.  But republicans don’t seem to want to talk about that for some strange reason.  Oh, right.  The donors.

I hate to spoil the party, but I do think this is worth considering because I’ve been reading cautionary warnings from Paul Krugman and Robert Reich lately.  We haven’t seen this steep of a slope on the S & P 500 since the last 2 times we felt painful crashes in 2000, and 2009.

Having gone through a few of these and felt the pain, it got me to thinking about the new tax legislation just passed by the GOP.  Stock prices are in large part a function of earnings, and expected earnings.  When the markets have crashed in previous years, there have been signals from price/earnings ratios getting too far above the average.  Note that in the chart below, the 10 year average P/E for the S & P is 16.4.  We are currently at 20.5 before the tax cuts have taken full effect.

Additionally we’re at what is considered peak employment (around 4%) so it’s a fairly tight labor market.  The tax reform plan was sold as a ‘jobs creation’ package.  But who pray-tell, will be filling all these new jobs?  Certainly not immigrants.

What concerns me the most is the well-known practice of CEO’s boosting their own annual compensation by employing stock buy-back programs of their own company’s stock.  This temporarily boosts the prices of the stock, but the problem is, it can’t hold because stock prices are fundamentally based on earnings.

So does this mean that salaries will finally be boosted because of the tight labor market?  Could be.  But I’m being extra cautious about the fantasy that the S&P will continue to rise at this pace.  Historically there’s always been a correction.  All it takes is one world event to trigger it and the next thing you know, your 401k is down 30%.  Boom.

The current run started during the initial stages of the recovery from The Great Recession of 2009.  We’re on a 9 year run.  Obama gets credit for 8 of those years, Trump one year.  We are due for a correction.  In my mind it’s just a question of when.  My vote would be about 6 months before the 2018 mid-terms to ensure justice is served to the architects of this massive giveaway to corporations — who do not need it, and are there’s no incentive tied to getting the tax break.  They just get it whether they create jobs here, ship jobs overseas, or use it to buy back stock.  One of the most idiotic schemes ever legislated.

Hold on to your shirt-tails.

The stuffed white shirts have nothing to do with the movement. Per @MJGerson:

“The strong, moral commitment to the dignity of women and children recently asserting itself in our common life has mainly come from feminism, not the ‘family values’ movement. In this case, religious conservatives have largely been bystanders or obstacles.”

See: Falwell, Jerry Jr.

By now we’ve experienced enough slight of hand by the Republican Congress to know that every proposal needs to be seriously questioned.  Since going 0-fer-2 on ACA Repeal, Republicans are now keen on rolling out their fantastical new Tax Reform package that’s reportedly going to make everyone rich!  Tax cuts around the horn!  But the devil is in the details.  Just because a party would like to see 4% GDP growth doesn’t make it possible.  Leading experts say that tax cuts do in fact spurn growth, but what gets returned to the economy is about 1/3 of what was lost in revenue. That leads to the concern that the tax cuts around the horn strategy is going to lead us down the path of insolvency sooner rather than later, but it’s worse than that.

Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman goes into pretty good detail in a New York Times article Trump’s Rosy Scenario breaks it down pretty well – detailing why Trump’s 4% goal is a lot of wishful thinking.  Below are the highlights.

Krugman:

Real GDP grew 3-4% annually under Reagan;  it grew 3.7% annually under Clinton.  But there are fundamental reasons to believe that such growth is unlikely to happen now.

First, demography: Reagan took office with baby boomers — and women – still entering the workforce; these days baby boomers are leaving.   Here’s the UN data on a 5-year growth rate of the population aged 20-64, a rough proxy for those likely to seek work:

Just on demography alone then, you’d expect growth to be around a percentage point lower than it was under Reagan.

Furthermore, while Trump did not in fact, inherit a mess, both Reagan and Clinton did — in the narrow sense that both came into office amid depressed economies, with unemployment above 7 percent.

So even if you (wrongly) give Reagan policies credit for the business cycle recovery after 1982, and believe (wrongly) that Trumponomics is going to do wonderful things for incentives a la Reagan, you should still be expecting growth of 2 percent or under.

Cut taxes, grow the economy!  Sounds good but the data doesn’t support it.  As George Bush #41 aptly stated, this is “voodoo economics” at its best.

Conservatives like to point out that when liberals look down their noses at them as imbeciles, this is exactly the reason Republicans won the 2016 election. It was perceived snobby elites vs. the lunch bucket crowd and this time around, the lunch bucket crowd bought the Make America Great Again sales pitch, such as it is.

I’m no literary genius as most of you are keenly aware, so full disclosure up front. I’m a life-long 3.1 student who underachieved in the interest of being a well rounded person with other things to do besides just read books.

I say this because the main theme of this post has to do with just how dumb average Joe Republican has become, but I don’t want to sound like an elitist, because I’m average IQ at best. I just think I’ve given these issues more serious mind-share than most Republicans have and am sharing some observations from my own personal experiences.

The best example of mindless followers are the evangelicals. These people give the pastor full reign over their brains to the point where he can stand at the pulpit and literally say “And the Egyptians used the pyramids for grain silos” while the faithful shake their heads in unison with agreement. There are some highly educated people in this crowd too, so go figure. But when it comes to once they get inside the chapel doors, all critical thinking goes out the window and they morph into sheep.

Fox News is a master exploiter of this level of blind faith / ignorance that exists in the evangelical community. They cater their message in the same way the paster’s do and the sheep get in line.

In the 2016 election, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity should have been credited with an assist for the election victory. Hannity just spews vitriol for 60 minutes and is not a serious journalist but he does have a following and they eat it up. O’Reilly would literally try to use his on-air time to ‘coach’ Trump into managing his campaign in ways that would benefit him. He was not interested in a deep policy probe, it was all about helping frame a strategy that would beat Hillary Clinton. To his credit – and our detriment – he was successful. After today’s news of his unexpected departure from Fox, it’s too little too late. The damage is done.

But my main point is that there is a lack of critical thinking that goes on, especially in the Republican party. I know some pretty smart Republicans and they vote GOP for their own reasons, but they are in the minority. The vast majority are people who are easily fooled into voting against their own self interests. Things like tax cuts for the rich / trick down economics. The American Health Care Act ( Paul Ryan’s baby ). Climate change. Military spending. Women’s health issues. Even though all of these things have been debunked by the experts and will hurt them personally, the Duck Dynasty crowd likes to back the candidate with the GOP moniker. I haven’t been able to figure out other than to resign myself to the dumbing down of America. I ain’t no Robert Reich with a PhD, but I listen to him as well as Dr. Krugman to try to learn from truly smart people. That’s why I can’t get into debating the Duck Dynasty crowd. Colossal waste of time.

The Tualatin Times afforded readers the opportunity to chime in with a Soapbox article — up to 800 words if you were so inclined.  It was basically a format for those who wanted to address a hot topic that warranted more than a “Letter to the Editor”, of which I had written many.  I’ve written a dozen or so Soapbox articles for The Times, but this is one of my better efforts and I would date it back to about 1996 or so.   At the time it was in response to a Letter to the Editor by a frequent conservative member of the community who often wrote bitter, close-minded opinions and I let her have it with both barrels.  I believe there was a reply the next week but I don’t recall it being very convincing.

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A wise man once said “Be careful about what you wish for, it could come true.” A recent letter to the editor “God needed in school more than a survey” suggests that our kids would be better off if only we could revert to the days when God was ever present in our classrooms.

Of course the first question is, which God? God as in the Jewish God of Abraham? God as in the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? God as described by the prophet Joseph Smith? The “Jehovah” I’ve read about in The WatchTower? Allah as experienced by the prophet Mohammed?

In her best selling book A History of God, respected historian and former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong talks about how man’s idea of God has evolved from a pluralistic form to the modern day monotheistic God at the time of Abraham and Jacob. Jacob, ever a pragmatist, cut a deal with the God “El”. In exchange for much needed protection, Jacob agreed to worship El as the one and only God that mattered. Is this the God we’re talking about?

We have a cross section of all of these belief systems right here in Tualatin. Surely someone who would suggest God be re-instated back into the classroom would want to be inclusive of their neighbor’s belief system.   How do we do this? About the closest I’ve seen to a common denominator is the term Higher Power, but I suspect few would be satisfied with this watered down description of God.

Since the very definition of God it is a hard question, I’m in favor of using a little class time to explore what each of us means when we say the word God. In fact, while we’re at it let’s expose our kids to the concepts behind a variety of belief systems so they can make an informed choice.

There would be many benefits to a comparative religion study in public classrooms. Jews, Muslims and Christians might gain an appreciation for each other’s point of view and stop killing each other.

Kids would get the opportunity to do some critical thinking as they form their own belief system. As a parent of 3 kids, above all else I value giving my kids honest answers to their questions. They’ve come up with some whoppers over the years that are tough for me to deal with because I have more questions than answers myself. If God set up the universe as an experiment, and then gave us free will so he could then reward the faithful, couldn’t he have chosen an experiment that didn’t include so much human suffering?   If God is all powerful and all knowing, then he has both the knowledge that there will be suffering and the power to prevent it but chooses not to. Why is this? Eve takes a bite of the forbidden fruit and the price imposed by God is a human sacrifice? Sounds like sort of a vindictive God to me. Are you sure this whole thing isn’t just a cruel joke to get me to behave the way you want?

Talking serpents, plural marriage, child sacrifices, Jonah inside the belly of a whale for 3 days and living to tell about it? Virgin births, rising from the dead, purgatory, life beyond the grave, cannibalistic themes like “eat his body, drink his blood”? The salacious story of Sodom and Gamorrah. I’m having a hard time telling the difference between the Old Testament, a Stephen King novel, and Greek mythology.

Should the knowledge of the 1^st century be considered the infallible truth of the 21^st? Didn’t Nicolas Copernicus teach us anything about questioning the puerile beliefs of our time?

I see it as a dangerous practice to ascribe literal truth to a compendium of writings drafted over many centuries by scores of different authors with vastly different agendas and perspectives. I find it ironic that those who hold that God belongs in the classroom are usually the same people trying to keep Harry Potter out of the school library.

It’s clear a lot of good has occurred in this world due by people who have a strong faith in God. Unfortunately, history also has recorded the atrocities of The Crusades, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, the IRA in Northern Ireland, and Al Qaeda to name a few, all in the name of God.

When kids ask hard questions about God, instead of giving the usual hand wave answers (my favorite eye roller is “God didn’t want us to be robots so he gave us free will”), sometimes I find the best answer I can come up with is “That’s a great question but a tough question, so I won’t pretend to have the answer for you at this time.”   Being a parent does not somehow make me an authority figure on God. But I do get to decide if my approach will be rationalism, which seeks to reach the heart through the head, or theology, which seeks to reach the head through the heart.

Whether we like to admit it or not, most of us inherited our belief system from our families. We did no study of belief systems followed by the process of making an objective choice. Someone we trusted made that choice, and in many cases, at infancy. Growing up we were allowed to ask a few questions, but as the questions got harder to answer, instead of admitting they don’t really know, the people responsible for our faith development fell back on that age old tactic that gets ‘em every time: Fear of eternal damnation.

When you’re an impressionable grade schooler, the idea of eternity in a place like hell is a tough thing to get past. Perhaps this is why many children just adopt the belief system that’s been brow beaten into their psyche and move on.

I admire many people who have a strong faith in God, especially those who walk the talk. But it’s been my observation that those in favor of re-instating God back in public schools are the same ones who would be marching down to the principal’s office if teachers were to engage kids in a conversation about God and find out the teacher’s definition of God doesn’t match theirs precisely. Perhaps this is why public schools avoid the issue altogether. They can’t win no matter what they do.

In any case, spending classroom time on the subject of God is fine by me.

Bill Toner

The vast majority of company training I’ve taken over my 36 year career has been a pretty big waste of time.  However, every once in a while you run across a teacher you connect with and the take-aways really stick.

One such class was a an all day management class required by Tektronix by Dr. Ralph Katz.  It’s been so many years ago, I don’t recall what the name of the class, but he basically took us through the main points of his book The Human Side of Managing Technical Innovation.

Dr. Katz’s main points were all centered around managing uncertainty where;

uncertainty == bad

This point resonated with me personally, especially as it related to my years in the High Tech Industry prior to management.  High Tech is cyclical.  Today’s Google is tomorrow’s AOL.  You are never ‘set’ because change is happening so fast.  Combine this general trend with being in aerospace and printers while trying to provide stability for a family of 5, and  what you get is a fairly stressful situation because you’re always looking over your shoulder for the next round of cuts – wondering if you should’ve signed up for that 30 year mortgage or not.   Sleepless nights and overtime are a way of life.

I was a new manager at the time I took this class.  I was eager to try to be a good one in the sense of understanding the human side of the job and getting the most out of people because they were motivated as a team, not because of fear tactics.

When people are worried about their jobs on a daily basis and uncertainty is a way of life, some powers that be seem to think this is a good thing as far as squeezing more productivity out of people.  So what if they are scared, we got more done and met our goals.  What I’ve experienced is the opposite.

For 12 years at Xerox from 2000-20012, we were under constant pressure of cuts.  This is not the fault of management.  It had more to do with industry trends and decline of the printed page, but it was the hand we were dealt.  Senior management did make some horrendous mistakes along the way, but in general, it was just being in the wrong industry at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, Xerox is a big company.  They are spread over multiple continents and management chose a ‘distributed’ model for software development, which brings its own set of challenges.  In my role I had to collaborate with teams in Rochester, NY as well as Welwyn Garden City, UK, as well as 2 sites in India.  Apart of the time-zone challenges, the biggest challenges was, as Dr. Katz so adeptly pointed out in his book, managing uncertainty across these sites.

What management failed to recognize was that ‘team’ collaboration across sites in different organization was a recipe for territorial battles.  And we had them in spades.  Because of the back-drop of uncertainty in the workplace, peoples’ actions aligned first with protecting their site, and second towards team.  Oftentimes this was hidden in very subtle ways, but nevertheless, it explained a lot of behaviors I saw.

Here’s where Dr. Katz’s message could have been employed for much better results, but it was not.  Management failed to recognize the very existence of the territorial battles because they were worried about them themselves.  I often wondered what different results would have been possible had a Sr. Manager sent one email , genuine in nature, that set peoples’ minds at ease on the uncertainty question, and motivated everyone to work as a true team without the worry of territorial loss.

I do not think this was asking management to promise people that their jobs were certain.  Everyone knew they were not.  But a simple e-mail to let everyone know that hey, we need you to get these 3 things done as soon as possible, and nobody is going anywhere for the next 6 months for sure.  Let’s work hard together and get it done.  It’s not a message of relaxation, or promising things not possible.

Instead the rumor mill was always in full force, often at times when there was nothing to worry about.  This is not when people able to be their most productive selves.

I remember one time in particular when a rumor mill was hot for 3 months about an upcoming layoff.  The rumor was true, but at the end of the day they only laid off 10 people from our site of 1500 people.  That’s less than 1%.  There didn’t need to be that much fear and loathing over a < 1% cut.  I’m actually of the belief that most companies should go through and trim out the bottom 5% of performers as a matter of course, just to get rid of the dead weight.  Addition by subtraction and it’s good for business and morale.  But because they chose to be poor communicators and run a major clandestine operation of much-ado-about-nothing, a bunch of people ran scared who didn’t need to.

Another of Dr. Katz’s messages had to do with ‘what goes around comes around’.  For the better part of the last 2 decades, a poor economy has given corporations the upper hand when it comes to employee retention.  It’s not like we had a ton of options to move around for higher salaries, so attrition has remained relatively low.  That’s how it is right now, but it’s not always that way.

I remember in the 1990’s having an extremely difficult time getting the right people hired. They simply had too many offers on the table.  In my 36 years at this, I’ve only was one time in the late 1990’s where the management team had to huddle up with HR and have a serious discussion about retention.  People were leaving for startups and the impact was large.  Schedules were being missed. But it can happen and the tides may be shifting.  I’m starting to see more movement now than in previous years and funny enough, it’s not always about money.  A big factor is work environment and indirectly, level of certainty.

I exited management about 3 1/2 years ago and I do not miss it.  My favorite aspect of it for the 15 years I was in it was college recruiting, and there’s so little hiring that even that is not much of an attraction to get back in.  But I can’t help but remember Dr. Katz’s message as I see managers attempt to rule by intimidation and employ fear tactics.

At the end of the day, high tech workers don’t like to be treated like employees of U.S. Steele.  Often times when we do, what management gets is clock-punchers who aren’t motivated to care about their project beyond work hours.

There really isn’t much point spending a lot of energy debating whether Donald Trump is qualified or deserving of the GOP nomination.  Of course he won’t be the nominee.  Any sane person can see this.

What I know about the media tells me that they love to build people up and then watch them come crashing down.  Let’s face it, the media has never seen a candidate with an ego this big.  Never.  It’s a once in a lifetime event.

So far this primary has been about giving Trump ample opportunity to put his enormous ego on display so that when he gets beaten in the primaries, the networks will win the ratings game again by being able to air Trump pounding sand at his loss.  Looking forward to an entertaining show.