Oil Drilling Off Of Our Shallow Continental Shelves

The safest place for ocean drilling for oil and natural gas is in our shallow, Continental Shelves off our East and West Coasts because they are shallow (100 to 400 feet deep). There is much less water pressure at the well heads on the ocean floor of the Continental Shelves as there is in the Gulf of Mexico where wells can be in water a mile deep and thus under intense pressure. That makes leaks much less likely to happen off the Continental shelves, and much easier and faster to contain and fix if they do happen.

Black Reparations for Slavery

Simple question - does this help or hurt Blacks. Obvious answer - this hurts Blacks by giving them something that they never personally earned, thus reducing their motivation to succeed. There is no secret to success in America. You study hard in school and you work hard at your job. Those that do in this day and age are usually successful no matter what their color; those that don't are usually failures. Black performance in our public schools is dismal compared to other races despite the fact that many of those schools get as much as $20,000 a year per student or double the national average. So just throwing money at the problem hasn't worked. So let's address the real problem for people of any color - single parent households. Single parent households on average are much poorer than married parent households and are the engine of poverty and crime. This should not be a surprise. Married households have the potential for twice the number of working parents and baby sitters. What has happened since the introduction of the 1960s Great Society welfare programs? Back then 3 out of 4 Black babies were born to married households. Now, 3 out of Black babies (and 1 out of 4 White babies) are born to single parent households. What should we do about that and the cycle of failure it has been producing? First, without preaching morality “sermons”, add Economics courses to public schools which include income demographics facts about single and married households. Second, for by design single parent households, name the father before collecting welfare benefits and seek support from that father (require DNA proof to make sure the right person has been identified as the father). Third, only promote students to the next grade if they actually passed. No more "social promotions" for failed students so as not to embarrass them. Give them summer school and also after school programs to help them pass, but if that fails, let them repeat the grade. Finally, if a student fails a grade level for a second time in that or any other grade, bring the parents to Family Court to determine if the child is in a hostile of otherwise failed household and needs to be removed for their own good. Again, never ever an automatic child removal from the household, - let the judge review and decide what is really happening and what needs to be done.

Business Cycles – How They Work and Why

Why do we swing from good times to bad times to good times again? Why can't the economy just go straight up without ever falling? The economic swings up and down are largely caused by business cycles. Let's take an economy that is emerging from weak to strong slowly. When the economy was weak, many people were out of work thus dampening consumer spending – the main driver of the economy. With consumer demand down, the laws of supply and demand kick in. Less demand for products and services, in addition to causing layoffs and even bankruptcies, also leads to cheaper prices for goods and service as it is better for businesses to at least get something for their products and services. Often their own costs for products and labor have gone down, enabling them to mostly survive the bad times. Over time the cheaper prices for goods and services causes demand to rise for them as they have now become more affordable. The higher demand eventually causes business to increase production and hire more employees. This result has a multiplier effect, especially as the people who have been hired were either unemployed or making less money in the job they quit. So now they can afford more goods and service and there is pent up demand for these goods and services. The improving economy will cause some of these employees to start their own business, hiring more employees to meet the growing demand for goods and services both large (such as homes, cars) and small. So why doesn't this process go up forever?

At some point, the increased production of goods and services will have fulfilled the pent up demand from the previous economic low point. Purchases will decline. Layoffs and/or reduced working hours will increase, and some bankruptcies will occur. This too has a multiplier effect to the negative. Once enough damage has been done to the economy, prices for many goods and services will fall again, and the process of trending toward better times as described previously will begin again.

What about government – can't they help? Yes sometimes they can, but they may not do it right and multiply the problem. For example, after the 1929 stock market crash and the resultant Recession, with less people working, government revenues went down. So to balance the budget, government raised taxes during a Recession. Consumers, with less disposable income/take home pay due to the increased taxes, bought less goods and services, resulting in further layoffs, less taxes collected due to less people working, and the 10 year long Great Depression that took a World War to get out of.

The government has two major tools to speed up or slow down the economy. The most often utilized is the control of the money supply and interest rates through the Federal Reserve. This is called Monetary Policy. In a down economy, lowering interest rates makes borrowing cheaper. That enables more people to afford buying homes, cars, etc.. That drives up demand for goods and services and starts an economic uptrend. Raising interest rates in an over heated economy can likewise slow an economic boom down hopefully before severe inflation topples the economy. However, people don't rush out and buy new cars and homes in big quantites just because interest rates have been lowered. This is a slow process. Thus Monetary policy is the weakest tool that the government has, but can be very useful when the business cycle is not very volatile.

The more powerful tool in the government's economic arsenal is called Fiscal Policy. Fiscal policy is the lowering and/or raising of taxes. These type of changes are felt immediately by consumers as their take home pay increases or falls.When it increases, since most people typically spend all or nearly all of what they earn, demand for consumer goods and services rises much faster than under Monetary Policy. Thus the impact on the economy is much faster.

Also, raising taxes in an over heated economy has a much quicker impact on cooling off the economy than monetary policy. However, it is also easy for such dampening fiscal policy to be too dangerous because too many people, including much of the middle class, live paycheck to paycheck with little or no savings. Cutting their take home pay could easily make them unable to pay their rent, mortgage, car payment, or other important bills. Therefore, it is normally better to utilize more slowly acting monetary policy to dampen over heated economies.

There's nothing stopping government from utilizing both fiscal and monetary policies at the same time, though control rests “independently” with Congress and the federal Reserve. Sometimes they can help each other; but sometimes they actually fight each other.

It needs to be pointed out that even in strong economies, when businesses and jobs are growing nicely, there will be some businesses and jobs lost due to inefficiencies compared to competitors and/or obsolescence of such goods and services. For an easy to understand example – the making of horse drawn wagons was once the largest industry in the U.S.. However, this industry went out of business when the car was invented and caught on as the preferred transportation means. That's a good thing and something that Capitalism does best – rooting out “waste” (it would have been a waste of both human and material resources to continue to build horse drawn wagons in large quantities since no one would have been buying them). By more efficiently rooting out “waste” than any other economic system, Capitalism has become the most successful economic system ever, and the only economic system that has raised billions of people throughout the world out of poverty. The reason that Communism never worked and was the most failed economic system ever is that it has no mechanism to efficiently root out waste in a non-market driven economy. You met the production goal and you were a success despite the fact that much of it became surplus that no one bought, thus not raising the standard of living of anyone. Also, Communism gives no incentive for people to take risks and develop new products, services, and very importantly, new technology. My hope for the future is for American schools to offer and require more Economic classes so that future voters are wiser on Economics - normally the most important issues for voters in any government besides freedom.

Major Reasons for High US Health Care Costs

The US, compared to the major, wealthy nations in Europe and Canada, have, by far, the highest obesity rates, the highest drug overdose deaths, and the highest rates of teenage births. All of these “self inflicted” factors explode heath care costs for all Americans and have absolutely nothing to do with what kind of health care plans each nations offers. See links:

https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/the-world-is-fat/ - US is much higher than Europe and Canada which explains some of our higher health costs and worse health results

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190221083419.htm - American drug overdose death rates the highest among wealthy nations.

https://www.unicef.org/pon96/inbirth.htm – US has much higher rates of teenage births

Another reason for high health care costs is the fact that medical fraud on government health care programs range, depending on which newspaper article you read, between 10 to 25%. That equates to tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars wasted each year. Private insurance companies average less than 1% fraud. We can sve a ton of money by firing the federal workers who handle health care and hiring insurance companies as third party providers to design and administer our government health care programs. Health Care Fraud – Private versus public - https://www.quora.com/In-the-United-States-which-has-a-greater-percentage-of-fraud-committed-Medicare-Medicaid-or-private-insurance and also http://www.cato.org/publications/congressional-testimony/waste-fraud-abuse-government-health-care

The final component of high health costs is complex and has no simple solutions. About 25 to 30% of Medicare costs occur in people's last year of life. It is difficult to predict which terminal patients are receiving operations that only worsen their suffering and doesn't stop their soon to be deaths. Some of these patients may be better off with hospice care to relieve their end of life suffering and allow them to die peacefully at home instead of painfully in a hospital. Living medical wills, that cannot be over ridden by relatives, may be one humane way to reduce this problem. See link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/how-we-spend-3400000000000/530355/

All Governments Have No Money

All Americans very much need to understand this critically important basic principle - all governments have NO MONEY. They get all of their money from taxpayers and by borrowing which eventually we taxpayers must pay back too. So governments cannot give us anything for "free". Anything governments "give us" is paid for by all of us through taxes so that nothing we get from government is free. Even if your income is so low that you are not actually paying taxes, you still are paying for those "free" government benefits through lower wages, less available jobs, less job promotional opportunities, higher borrowing and credit costs, etc. due to the lower disposable income of consumers who are now paying higher taxes.