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People who know me well know that I have a passionate appreciation for music [not to be confused with much out there these days that is called “music” but is something else]. Interestingly, some recent bipartisan action by our legislators to address some archaic music licensing practices gave me an idea — maybe there is something we can learn from music that can help us get our polarized, deadlocked government off dead center and actually producing meaningful results for our country. A piece of bipartisan legislation that recently advanced unanimously from the House Judiciary Committee proves that there are at least some things that don’t immediately shoo both Republicans and Democrats into their corners ready to come into the ring swinging when the bell rings to start Round 1.

Yes, Bipartisan

You read that correctly — I did, in fact, say “bipartisan”. I know that’s a concept that seems to have been completely lost, but it actually happened. This bill — the Music Modernization Act — is on a fast track to becoming law after the House Judiciary Committee, which has been very bitterlydivided by partisan politics, unanimously recommended the legislation. I honestly don’t remember the last time I heard remarks from legislators like these. …

“Let no one say that we cannot in a bipartisan manner musically fix a very important and crucial part of the American economy,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee [D – Texas] said. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries [D-New York] said the bipartisan success shows the nation that “when you bring a coalition of unusual suspects — a conservative [Republican] from rural Georgia and a progressive Democrat from … Brooklyn — things get done.”

And Bart Herbison, executive director of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, called the unanimous vote a “historic moment.” “The fact it was unanimous makes me very optimistic it gets through the rest of the procedures,” Herbison said. “We still have a way to go in terms of a full House vote and the Senate. But, look, it’s a great day.”

The legislation aims to improve the ease of licensing a song for streaming services by creating a new nonprofit organization, run by publishers and songwriters, that will now be in charge of identifying rights holders and paying digital royalties.

Compromise Not Just Within The Government

In addition to the bipartisan support the bill gained from lawmakers, it also came together after a series of compromises by music industry stakeholders. Virtually every corner of the music industry supports the bill. Key parts of it are: 1) In exchange for the new licensing system, songwriters and publishers will forfeit some of the ability to sue streaming companies like Spotify and Apple Music for not properly licensing their songs; 2) The standard that the federal rate court uses to set the digital royalty rates for songwriters and publishers is changed to a free market standard; 3) It closes a loophole in federal copyright law that caused artists whose songs were recorded prior to 1972 not to be paid royalties when their music is played over internet radio; and 4) It codifies the existing practice of paying music producers compensation stemming from digital royalties earned by artists.

First Music, Then …

I’d be willing to bet that of the dozens of key bills that would be great for this country if they could become law, most actually could become law if Representatives and Senators would just approach them the way they approached the Music Modernization Act — i.e., first, just look at a bill on its merits [ignoring the party affiliation of its sponsor]; second, find points within it on which there might likely be immediate consensus [surely, there are alwayssome]; third, don’t assume that there is no way consensus can be reached on other points [i.e., focus on finding conceptual approaches to addressing differences rather than immediately jumping into half-hearted efforts to hash out details under pre-programmed party-driven “principles”]; and finally, quit hiding behind procedural rules that always seem to win out [e.g., the filibuster in the Senate, and absolute authoritarian control of the House Speaker and Senate Majority Leader over what even gets to floor votes].

Music is a creative activity. It would be great if some of the creativity that crept into the House Judiciary Committee in the Music Modernization Act deliberations could find its way into all of our legislative chambers.

A Quick Side Note. … The image I chose for this post is the score to Polanaise in A Flat Major, by Frederic Chopin — one of my very favorite pieces of music. It’s hard for me to grasp the sheer genius of a person who could sit down at a piano with a blank sheet of paper and a pen and come up with something like that.

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Charles M. Jones

Note: Much of the content in this post was extracted from two articles in the 4/12/18 edition of the Nashville Tennessean, some paraphrasing and some directly quoting those articles.

Since my target audience is national rather than state or local, I tend to avoid writing in this Blog about topics that are clearly of interest mainly to people in the state and city where I live. However, one highly visible and controversial Nashville-specific topic right now presents to me an opportunity to “kill two birds with one stone.”  For the benefit of people in the Nashville metro area, I will indicate my rationale for clearly identifying with one side of the current controversy. For the benefit of those people and everyone else in this country, I’ll describe the situation from the perspective of how the Current Paradigm, hanging on by it’s fingernails while the New Paradigm continues rushing in at a rapidly accelerating pace, is still not totally dead.

The Local Aspect [Prerequisite To The Paradigm Shift Perspective]

The topic, from a local perspective, is a May 1 referendum that will be a “Go / No-Go” decision on a proposed $8.95 billion [note the “b”] mass transit system anchored around a hub-and-spoke light rail network that includes a 1.8-mile underground tunnel through downtown to the hub, 26 miles of track to form the spokes, a rapid bus network on four other roads, improvements to the city’s current bus system, and 19 transit centers that would include park-and-ride and other transit options. Funding, in addition to revenue from fares when the system is fully operational [15 years from now], would be from increases for 50 years to four taxes: local sales tax [1% increase, raising the overall sales tax rate from 9.25% to 10.25%]; hotel/motel tax [0.625% increase], business and excise tax [20%]; and rental car tax [1.2% increase].

I can wrap up this Local Aspect section by quickly summarizing my Letter To The [Tennessean] Editor that was published in the 4/3/18 edition. …  This mass transit plan could easily have been pulled from dusty archives in Chicago or New York or Boston — where it may have been “innovative” in the first half of the last century. If it is approved, we are “betting the farm” on the philosophy that citizens will design their lives around a fixed transit infrastructure. There was absolutely no “Point A to Point B” thinking in the design. “Innovative” thinking in 2018 would start with observing traffic and commercial/residential development patterns to develop a matrix of specific points of origin [Point A] to specific destinations [Point B], then using sophisticated mathematical modeling to determine a route matrix, and finally factoring in options like bike-sharing, autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing services, etc. $8.95 billion over 15 years is $597 million per year. On that budget, I’d be willing to bet that a much better and more flexible and adaptable plan could have been devised that we could have begun actually using this year.

The Bigger Picture: Paradigm Shift Perspective

Elements of Current Paradigm thinking run throughout the two-year process of developing and gaining approval of this plan. As I mentioned in my letter referenced above [no Point A to Point B thinking], all the people involved did was gather statistics from other cities with rail-based hub-and-spoke systems [“ridership” as a percent of population; fares; operating costs; whether operating below, at or above cost; etc.], translate those statistics to Nashville’s demographics, get estimates of construction costs [little more than educated guesses at this point], develop a budget, and begin the marketing and sales effort. All of that is Current Paradigm thinking. Only the people who are the opponents of this plan are exhibiting New Paradigm thinking by at least mentioning alternative conceptual approaches seriously.  Proponents only mention them in rebuttal mode: “That won’t work because …”, “That’s pie in the sky thinking; we need something more doable now” [apparently forgetting that “now” for their plan is 2034], etc.

Twenty Days From Now …

We’ll know the outcome in twenty days [May 1], probably shortly after or possibly several hours after the polls close. My guess is that the proponents will win if for no other reasons than 1) the fact that they have more money for media ads [and so far seem to be successfully creating an atmosphere of “the sky is falling”, “this is our chance”, “it’s now or never”, etc., to make voters feel like they will be dooming Nashville’s future if they vote “No”], 2) the entire description of this massive proposal on the ballot is only 244 words, and 3) a very small percentage of voters will have actually read even that short synopsis, and the vast majority will be swayed more by the media coverage than by the facts.  If they do, I can predict three things with almost certainty: 1) the project will not be finished on schedule in 2034; 2) the total costs to date in 2034 will be at least $13-15 billion [a 50% overrun], probably more; and 3) traffic in Nashville will be at least as bad as it is now, possibly worse.

If it passes, and if I’m still around in 15 years, somebody please remind me of how accurately I predicted this in 2018.

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Thanks for reading this Charles M. Jones, and if you regularly follow my Blog, for that, too. Please consider sharing this or other posts with your friends, colleagues and associates.

 

Charles M. Jones

A local news article in a recent issue of the [Nashville] Tennessean initially caught my attention not because of the subject matter, but because of the way it was titled — NASHVILLE GENERAL Poll: Residents support more funding for struggling hospital. The question that immediately came to mind as I read that title was whether the wording of the question pollsters asked might have influenced the results, resulting in this headline. As I read the article, I was drawn more to what it revealed about polling than to the actual content related to the hospital.

The Role Of Polls

Polls, if taken following strict rules of statistical math to ensure the proper size and stratification of the pool of respondents, can be very useful. However, the slightest bend or twist from these rules can produce bias in the results. That why you’ll see certain polls emphasized in one set of media outlets and other polls emphasized in another set of media outlets. Bias can be introduced into a poll in at least two ways I can think of even if rules that ensure randomness [e.g., sample size] are followed.

First,, the polling medium [“land line” phones, cell phones, snail-mail mail-outs, email mail-outs, door-to-door, etc.] can introduce bias because different strata in the population are more apt to have access to — or to be responsive to pollsters using — various polling media [strata in this context meaning segments by race, age, sex, education, marital status, etc.].

Second, different ways of wording questions can cause people to feel “obligated” to pick a particular  answer from a list of choices even if that answer is not fully consistent with what they would write as a free-form answer if given that opportunity. Surveys sent out by political parties [the main purpose of which is to solicit contributions, not to determine what voters think about issues] are the “poster children” of this source of bias — “__Yes __No: Do you support our strong position on a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her reproductive health and our support of Planned Parenthood as a key partner in helping them navigate through difficult personal decisions regarding unwanted pregnancies?” or “__Yes __No: Do you support our strong position that securing our borders is an absolute prerequisite to development of a successful Immigration Reform plan, and that building a wall on our sudden border is a necessary component of securing our borders?” Any Democrat would feel pressured to answer “Yes” on the first question, and any Republican would feel pressured to answer “Yes” to the second.

Many Democrats, if given the opportunity to write a free-form answer to the question to which “Yes” clearly means “I’m pro-abortion,” might write an answer that would not be so easily characterized that way. Many Republicans, if given the opportunity to write a free-form answer to the question to which “Yes” clearly means “Yes, I fully support the Republican stance on Immigration,” might write an answer that would not be so easily characterized that way.

The Toll Of Polls

Toll, in the context in which I’m using it here, refers not to the costs of conducting polls, but to the impact on public perception. As I’ve pointed out above, bias can — and I believe often does — play a significant role in interpretation and reporting of the results — and the results, particularly when presented through the biases of the media outlets through which they become public, have a tremendous impact on how the public’s view of the issues covered by polls is formed.

So What Conclusion(s) Can Actually Be Drawn?

I’ll conclude by getting back to the article that brought this concept to the forefront of my attention this week — the article that led with the headline “Residents support more funding for struggling hospital.” Well of course they do! Who is going to answer “No” to that question if the hospital is characterized as a “safety net facility for the poor and uninsured?” 

The only conclusion that can actually be drawn from this particular poll is that people like the idea of government support for the underprivileged. It made no connection between the touchy/feely aspect and the more practical aspect that would likely have affected the answer of many of the people who were polled — i,e., the cost to taxpayers of this particular ongoing and constantly-increasing expenditure vis-a-vis the tradeoffs, like what other costs might ultimately have to be cut if we continue this funding. And I doubt if even a tenth of one percent of the people polled have any idea whether the $35 million current support level is adequate or not — or whether the “emergency” increase is a true need or one generated by less than optimal management over the years of funding support already received.

In closing, I should emphasize that the point I’m making here has nothing to do with this hospital or whether or not they need the increased governmental support they seek. The point is that polls need to be interpreted in light of the considerations I’ve brought out here.

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Charles M. Jones

A March 26 article I read in USA Today amplified an impression I’ve had for several years — that regulation of technology presents challenges I honestly don’t see our current law-making process [and certainly not the average profile of person currently in office] capable of handling effectively.

The new law about which the article was written has been dubbed the CLOUD act. It was one of the many “earmarks” inserted into the massive $1.3 trillion spending package passed last week. Its purpose seems innocuous enough, and on the surface, logical — to simplify the process for the U.S. government and its allies to get evidence of serious crimes and terrorist threats when that evidence is stored on a server in another country.

I’m happy to see efforts to replace laws that technology has long-since made obsolete. The CLOUD Act is an attempt to update a 32-year-old law that was passed before the World Wide Web existed. That obsolete law, the Stored Communications Act, is the subject of a case before the U.S. Supreme Court — a case that is now moot because of Congress’ approval of this new law.

However, detractors of this particular law make some interesting points that suggest we are probably in store for many unforeseen consequences that will stem from it. Consider, for example, these observations:

• • The law could make it easier for nations with human rights abuses to spy on dissidents and collect data on Americans who communicate with foreign nationals.
  • The law allows foreign governments to wiretap on American soil, using standards that don’t comply with U.S. law, and gives the executive branch the power to enter into agreements with other nations without congressional approval [from a joint letter to Congress from several civil liberties groups].
  • Twenty-four groups said the law permits foreign police agencies to obtain information about people in the United States without having to follow the search-and-seizure rules imposed by the U.S. Constitution, and that it could give foreign governments access to information they could use to torture their opponents.

I’m sure there are or will be arguments about these observations, but my point in listing them here isn’t to endorse these specific assertions. My purpose in listing them is that whether they are 100% accurate or not, they bring visibility to the concept of unintended consequences in the context of regulation in general, and specifically [and I believe, peculiarly] regulation of technology.

If I tie my impressions as I read this article with similar items in media coverage over the past several years [at what feels to me to be a rapidly-increasing frequency], my general disdain for the competency of our current elected leaders to effectively deal with regulatory challenges in technology is potentially becoming greater than that for their competency to effectively deal with our unsustainable fiscal path. Consider these technological challenges:

• • Drones. Getting a grip on licensing needs, and knowledge that should be required of those seeking licenses, is progressing much less quickly than the technology itself.
  • The problems FaceBook is facing, as evidenced by its recent stock slide and two items in the media just this week … Facebook ads apologize for Cambridge Analytica scandal [3/26/18] and Facebook falls on the ropes, stunned by heavy backlash: FTC to probe potential misuse of personal data [3/27/18], both in USA Today.
  • Technical restraints that attempts at Gun Control and Immigration Reform legislation have exposed. Observing media coverage of arguments on both sides of these issues makes it clear that our capacity to implement something as simple as better background checks is limited to a considerable extent by antiquated and disjointed systems controlled by many different agencies at various levels of government.
  • Cyber warfare that is clearly going on. It’s difficult to access any media coverage in any medium on any given day without being keenly aware that we do not have a handle on this issue — and that we are by no means leaders either in capitalizing on the underlying technologies or in defending ourselves against those who have done so more effectively.
  • Robocalls. Anybody who has ever registered with the FTC’s Do Not Call registry knows that this feeble attempt at regulation was nothing more than a way for politicians to say they “did something about this issue.” An article just this week revealed just how massive a problem this is and how far behind regulators are in dealing with it [FCC approves plan to cut down on millions of pesky robocalls, USA Today, 3/27/18].
  • Autonomous vehicles. Read/listen/watch any media source on any given day to see this as yet another example of regulation trailing technology.

So be on the look out for many unintended consequences and after-bad-things-happen / didn’t-see-that-coming adjustments! Or as the title of this post suggests, Civi, Caveo! [Citizen, Beware!].

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Charles M. Jones

This week, we have clearly seen that the label “Tax and Spend” no longer belongs just to Democrats. The way I see it, the phrase should become “Tax and Spend Politicians”, because as I pointed out in a previous blog, they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same. I’ll call the massive $1.3 trillion spending bill the RINO-DINO “bi-partisan” spending bill [not to be confused with budget bill, which we haven’t seen for many years].

RINO, of course, is the long-used acronym for Republican In Name Only. You don’t see DINO in the media, I assume because neither Democrats nor their liberal media allies like the potential connotation of “DINOsaur.” The truth is that there is very little if any difference between the two from the perspective of how they think about specific pieces of legislation.

Let’s couple that fact with two other pieces of the legislative process these days: 1) how the two dominant political parties actually operate on a day-to-day basis; and 2) the declining influence of ideological positions.

On the first of these pieces, both parties operate under a seniority system that rewards long-standing membership in the two chambers of the legislature. That, by definition, means the Current Paradigm [which I’ve said in previous posts to this blog is already dead but still hanging on by its claws] is still hanging on. More junior legislators — who were elected to “drain the swamp” and get our government back to some level of sensibility — simply don’t yet have the muscle to change the status quo. Comments from those legislators, and even from some RINOs, indicate that this spending bill was “bi-partisan” only because both RINOs and DINOs in the leadership of both parties developed it in a vacuum and had the power to pressure them into holding their noses and voting for it.

On the second piece, ideological positions seem to matter less and less anymore, and all discussions about priorities end up being about money — how much money do we need to put into this great new initiative [or how much more money do we need to put into this existing initiative]?

Why Am I Keeping The Term “Tax” in “Tax And Spend?”

So since we just passed one of the biggest if not the biggest tax cut packages in our history, why am I keeping the term “Tax” in “Tax And Spend?” You don’t have to be an accountant or a mathematician to figure that one out. I’ve written about this almost ad nauseam in my blogs, and the fact that we are on an unsustainable fiscal path was one of the original pages of this web site [and although I haven’t updated the numbers, what I said on that page is just as valid today as it was a year and a half ago].

In the long term, Government cannot spend more unless it does one or some combination of three things: 1) spend less in some programs to offset the increased spending necessary to initiate new programs or grow existing ones; 2) increase taxes; or 3) grow the economy [increase GDP] rapidly enough to generate revenue sufficient to offset the increased spending [many, but not all, economists say #3 has never worked — i.e.. it is not possible to “expand our way to prosperity” on a sustainable basis].

So if we continue to increase the level of deficit spending and essentially ignore the national debt, a day of reckoning is out there — and the longer we continue on this path, the closer and more painful that day of reckoning will be [see my recent post The Mother Of All Balloon Notes]. Ergo, “Tax” stays in “Tax and Spend”.

Stay Tuned

Despite all the criticism of President Trump’s tax cut initiative, there are some good elements to it, particularly if they are viewed in context with cutbacks in business-choking regulations piled on in recent years. However, I’m inclined to agree at least to some extent with the economists who say that Government can’t “expand its way to prosperity”. I honestly hope that at least some of the success we experienced under President Reagan’s administration from actions of his that were similar in many ways to President Trump’s. If we do, the day of reckoning could be farther out, but it won’t go away.  It will come.

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Charles M. Jones

Not surprisingly, the tragic shooting in a Florida high school on February 14 brought out the usual political atmosphere — each party rolling out its bandwagon to rally their faithful around “what to do”, with their respective media adherents being the first to jump on. As usual after tragedies like this, the “do something” options put before us after this one were painted by politicians as binary — i.e., get on our bandwagon or theirs.

The Democrat bandwagon is always tighter gun control laws. The Republican bandwagon is better processes for dealing with mental health issues. Both sides stress why their approach is best, and both sides quote those parts of statistics and research that support their mantra and discredit that of the other side. This goes on until the media outlets sense that coverage of the most recent tragedy is no longer attracting readers / listeners / viewers, coverage fades, and that tragedy just moves into the statistics bank.

I am encouraged that this latest event seems to show some evidence of being “the straw that broke the camels back,” but I expect the end result will be passage of relatively minimal legislation if any. And because of the “bandwagon effect” and the factors that drive how Legislators make decisions, whatever is passed now or in the future will be a less than optimal solution.

Why Just Two Bandwagons?

It alarms me that nobody seems to be broadening their view to include other potential root causes of this problem in our culture today.

At least one such potential cause I’ve thought of often over the past few years as the frequency of these attacks has increased dramatically [see Mass Murders Accelerating] is depicted quite well in the cartoon I picked as the lead graphic for this post. This cartoon appeared recently in one of the news feeds I follow. It shows a Mom and Dad watching a news report on TV while their son is right behind them playing a violent video game. The caption over the parents reads “Guns cause all this trouble.” The caption over the son reads “Kill them! Kill them all!”

A Prime Candidate?

So what potential culprits are there that nobody ever brings up in these flurries of activity after another attack because they already have their canned bandwagon rhetoric ready to pull out and set in motion? At least one depicted in the cartoon I’ve mentioned here should be a prime candidate — the “dark side” of technology.

Although technology has many upsides that make our lives easier and better, there are many caveats we should be keeping in mind more than we have been so far. One is video games, or at least many of them.

I have never played a video game, so I’m sure there are many experts out there who could present some very good arguments to what I’m saying here. My perception of video games comes from indirect exposure — TV ads attempting to entice new buyers, observation of others [particularly children] playing them, etc. The vast majority seem to involve “battles”, often in military settings but also in what appear to me to be “street fighting” situations. The bottom line is that regardless of whether or not I have a distorted view of the percentage of video games that include violent situations like that depicted in the cartoon, millions of kids have access to them and many of those become what could arguably be described as “addicted” to them — consumed with competing, “winning” battles, etc.

If you pair what I described in the preceding paragraph with the unquestionably more lax parental oversight that prevails these days, it’s not much of a stretch to envision at least tens of thousands of children in their early teens who have been influenced by these games throughout their formative adolescent years. Now, in their high school years and beyond, they may still be playing the games, but even if not the influence on their thought processes is there.

Continuing this train of thought and just doing the statistical math, if even ten percent of these young people in their teens and twenties have led disappointing lives … and if even ten percent of those blame “somebody else” for their problems and foster burning desires to “get even” or “make a statement” about their frustrations … well, you get the point: which is that at any point in time you may chose nowadays, this backdrop could easily have created at least a few potential perpetrators out there ready to be the instigator of another Sandy Hook Elementary School or Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School or Pulse Nightclub or … attack.

A key part of the role that violence-ridden video games might play in forming this mindset in a person is a general desensitization to killing. In a game, “it’s just a game,” and when you turn it off there are no bloody bodies around. Expanding on that concept, not a day goes by that evidence of total disregard for human life in the world today is everywhere — Bashar al-Assad literally killing his own dissident citizens with poison gas, Christians being killed just because they are Christians in some parts of the world, Kim Jong Un literally starving his own people so he can funnel practically all of his regime’s financial resources into his nuclear weapons program [the end result of which could trigger instantaneous death to millions of people], etc.

I’m not trying to build a case that violence in video games is the real culprit behind the mass killing problem. My point is that I’m surprised that there’s never even any mention of it and probably several other potential culprits by politicians in the flurry of media coverage after each event. The reason, of course, is that their interest is in media coverage, not in actually trying to fully diagnose the problem and find the best overall approach to solving it — and their bandwagons are so well refined that jumping on them is simply the path of least resistance. That’s a whole different issue, so I’ll just stop here and write about that another day.

Thanks for reading this post, and if you regularly follow my Blog, for that, too. Please consider sharing this or other posts with your friends, colleagues and associates.

 

Charles M. Jones

It’s interesting to me that this article didn’t even make it to headline status in the 3/5/18 edition of USA Today … Report: Spending, tax cuts soaring to records; Debt is reaching levels not seen since World War II. It was in the Business section, and not even on the front page of that section. A better title for the article might have been The Mother Of All Balloon Notes.

Let’s Make A Deal

Using the title of a well-known TV game show, I have a proposal for a hypothetical person [I’ll call him Sam] making $197,000 a year who has a wish list of things he is convinced he needs to buy right now. Unfortunately, the things on his list add up to $200,000. With no savings at the moment and current regular living expenses eating up his entire salary and already causing him to spend a considerable amount of time managing cash flow, he is extremely frustrated.

Fortuitously, at a cocktail party he attended to get visibility among influential people in circles related to his profession, he met a guy [I’ll call him George] who made him a deal that seemed too good to be true. Here’s the essence of it:

• • Sam gets a $200,000 loan, with the full principal to be deposited in his bank account immediately. No security is required. George says the fact that Sam has a good job and earns almost the same amount annually that he is borrowing now is sufficient security.
  • For the next nine years, Sam will pay only interest each month, at a variable rate of 2.3% that is tied proportionately to the Federal Funds Rate [which is currently only 1.5%]. That means his first monthly interest payment will only amount to about $383.
  • In the tenth year, Sam will pay interest at the then-current rate as usual, plus the entire principal of $200,000.

Sam knew that coming up with an extra $383 each month would add further complications to his already-annoying cash flow management problems, but he was confidently expecting a raise fairly soon that would make up that amount with cash to spare. He realized the variable interest rate could increase his monthly payment over the next ten years, but reasoned that future raises would probably more than offset any such increases. He was also very confident in his ability to succeed in his profession, and expected promotions over the next ten years that would enable him to accumulate money to pay the principal — banking as a fallback on his confidence that absent sufficient cash to pay the principal in full at that time, his good payment record and substantially higher income would enable him to successfully negotiate a new loan for the shortfall. And of course, during all this time, he would have been enjoying the things he needs now rather than ten years from now.

Sam didn’t know that in some states, these “balloon notes” are illegal, and many states require notices of the coming “balloon payment” to begin at least several months, maybe more, before the due date. Anyway, he signed on the dotted line and began spending his $200,000.

Back To The Article I Referenced …

I’m sure you’ve figured it out already, but Sam is Uncle Sam, aka the United States. I’m sorry, but I couldn’t come up with an American-sounding name for Sam’s creditor that would draw a parallel that easily recognizable — somehow Jinping just didn’t flow off the tongue as well as George. To relate Sam’s loan to the article I referenced at the beginning of this post, just multiply the numbers by a hundred thousand — i.e., add eight zeros. Sam’s “salary” [Gross Domestic Product] becomes $19.7 trillion , with a “t” — $19,700,000,000,000. The $200,000 loan becomes $20 trillion — $20,000,000,000,000.

Most people don’t realize this, but $20 trillion is nowhere near the total future financial obligations of this country — it doesn’t include state and local debt, so-called “agency debt” [debt issued by federal agencies such as FHLB and GNMA and government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.] … or the biggies: unfunded liabilities of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. If that isn’t enough grease on this fire, a probably even bigger amount than entitlement programs not included in this debt figure is the unfunded liability of future pension obligations of federal employees, elected officials, etc. For several decades now, corporations and many not-for-profit organizations have had to compute and “book” this latter amount in order to be compliant with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles [GAAP that external auditors use], but GAAP does not apply to governmental entities.

The Moral To This Story

In closing, I’ll just get back to my relatively simple story about Sam. I was unsuccessful in an admittedly hasty attempt to look up correct source attribution for the old adage “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” So, I’ll just leave it at “an old adage.” Hopefully, the wisdom of the adage will prove to be questionable and Sam’s view of the wisdom of his loan will prove to be correct. 😊

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Charles M. Jones

Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union during my junior high and high school years. Technically, his title was First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — at that time, the equivalent of Vladimir Putin in today’s Russia. I remember vividly his general demeanor, and more specifically his propensity to express in public forums his firm belief that Communism was superior to Capitalism. Consider these quotes [emphasis mine]:

• • I once said, “We will bury you,” and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.
  • The United States will eventually fly the Communist red flag. … The American people will hoist it themselves.
  • We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within.
  • You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you. We’ll so weaken your economy until you’ll fall like overripe fruit into our hands.
  • The press is our chief ideological weapon.

Fast forward to today. The Russians are clearly meddling in our elections and many other facets of our society, but not in the ways Democrats were hoping would offer a more palatable explanation of Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election [i.e., more palatable than the simpler explanation that she was an unimpressive candidate with no clear message who was surrounded by people running a campaign very poorly]. It is clear they have come around to realizing that the “collusion dog won’t hunt,” so they’re focusing on obstruction or whatever else will keep some kind of anti-Trump narrative alive and capturing a decent share of each day’s media coverage. To me, the main value so far in the Moeller investigation is that it is now more publicly known that Russia and other countries are actively involved in cyber warfare — and although it doesn’t get anywhere near the media coverage, so are we.

Back To Khrushchev’s Predictions

Let’s look at some current “goings on” and relate what we see to Khrushchev’s statements. It’s a known fact that many anti this / anti that / for this / for that rallies and demonstrations are fueled by intentional campaigns with one and only one goal — to sow seeds of discontent, create animosity between “factions”, etc. … With Twitter hashtags, Social Media “bots”, etc., even the recent Florida school shooting was used as a springboard for this kind of activity, capitalizing on what the perpetrators knew would be controversy over gun control. Consider this article about a week after the incident [CNBC Article 2/22/18]:

The headline itself is quite revealing. … Florida shooting shows how hard it will be for Facebook to fight its fake news problem. It’s followed by these sub-headings: “What people see on Facebook about the tragedy depends on what they search for, who their friends are and what they’ve viewed before”; and “When everyone’s news is their own personalized version, it can be impossible to find any ‘truth.’”

What you see on Facebook about the tragedy depends on what you search for. Different searches done by CNBC Thursday morning for “Florida high school shooting,” “Florida school shooting” and “Florida shooting,” for example, turned up three distinct sets of videos at the top of the resulting Facebook pages. The sources of the videos ranged from national networks such as NBC, CBS and Fox to local news channels, individual video bloggers and foreign sources like China’s Xinhua news agency. From there the content fragments still further into at least five different types of content: videos, public posts, articles, posts from groups, and another section called “what people are saying.” That last category surfaced some posts from [the writer’s] Facebook friends, suggesting that content was also chosen for [him] based on [his] network. Among the posts were some still claiming that students speaking out against the shootings were paid actors, and others refuting that cynical conspiracy theory. Similarly, there were competing posts on another issue: Some said one shooting survivor claimed that CNN handed him a scripted question to read at its Wednesday town hall broadcast, while another, from CNN, said that charge was untrue.

Even as I was writing this post off and on over the past day or two, I ran across this article …

Report: Russian group hacked Germany’s government network. A Russian-backed hacker group known for many high-level cyber attacks infiltrated the German government’s secure computer networks, the Deutsche Presse-Agentur [DPA, the German Press Agency] reported Wednesday. DPA cited unidentified sources saying the group APT28 hacked into Germany’s Foreign and Defense Ministries and stole data. The attack was noticed in December and may have lasted a year, DPA reported.

The message there, of course, is that Russia is doing what they do everywhere — not just in America.

The truth is that any entity — a person, a company, a government … — can generate this kind of activity if it has two things: 1) the technical knowhow, particularly the ability to make an item appear as though it came from an entity [person, company, or government] within the United States; and 2) possibly, but not necessarily in all cases, the financial resources needed to do #1.

Technology Gap

For most of my lifetime, technology has been advancing at a pace far faster than the ability of government to adapt to it — and more worrisome, to effectively utilize it. Deployment of technology has been very decentralized at multiple levels of government — so coordinated thinking about potential needs like national databases to support gun control has been minimal at best, non-existent at worst. Also, no disrespect toward many dedicated and highly capable government employees in this country intended, government generally does not attract and retain the best and brightest of the workforce — for a number of reasons to be sure, but the easiest to relate to is that the best and brightest can make much more money and be more free to “be all they can be” in the private sector.

Until we can narrow this gap and become less polarized politically, I’m afraid we will continue to lag behind several major powers who appear to be light years ahead of us in this critical area — Russia and China for sure, and probably other counties as well. Unfortunately, the former is more doable than the latter, but even more unfortunately, the former is also dependent to some extent than the latter.

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Thanks for reading this post, and if you regularly follow my Blog, for that, too. Please consider sharing this or other posts with your friends, colleagues and associates.

 

Charles M. Jones

Whatever world or national issue I was considering as subject matter for this week’s blog post is mere trivia in comparison with the news this morning that Reverend Billy Graham has died. I consider myself fortunate that most of my adult life paralleled Reverend Graham’s ministry from its early years to indisputable recognition as far and away the most dominant Christian leader of the twentieth century — a recognition that carried well into this century.

The best-known part of his ministry was the Crusades he led for six decades. I was only nine years old when he led a 12-week Crusade in London in 1954.  His 16-week revival event in New York in 1957 drew tens of thousands to Madison Square Garden. His last Crusade in June 2005 in Queens, New York, drew a total of 230,000 people. I watched his televised Crusades throughout my adult life, and attended one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1970.

“America’s Pastor”, “Protestant Pope”

Reverend Graham’s influence, historians say, was monumental. Some called him “America’s pastor.” Others referred to him as the “Protestant pope.” He is reported to have led more than 3 million people to commit their lives to Christ, and his preaching was heard in 185 of the world’s 195 countries. “No more than one or two popes, perhaps one or two other people, could come close to what he achieved,” said William Martin, a former historian at Rice University and the author of A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story.

The image of a televised Billy Graham Crusade is probably an indelible part of the recollections of millions of people my age and younger, and two other members of the four-man leadership team that made those Crusades what they were — Cliff Barrows and George Beverly Shae — would be a part of that image. The other member of the team, behind the scenes but no less important, was Grady Wilson, who was essentially [whether so titled or not] the “Chief Operating Officer” — the man who managed the massive operational and logistical side that is so necessary in a ministry of that magnitude.

For a man of his stature, Reverend Graham was a humble man who would always point people heaping accolades on him to Jesus Christ as the One toward Whom any recognition should be focused. Some accounts of the unveiling of a 9-foot bronze statue of him in Nashville indicate that he was uneasy about that event. In 2016, after sale of LifeWay Christian Resources’ property where it stood, the statue was moved to LifeWay’s Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center near Asheville, NC, just a few miles from the home where Reverend Graham lived most of his life. “It will welcome nearly 70,000 men and women who come to Ridgecrest every year for spiritual training and retreat,” said Thomas Rainer, LifeWay president and CEO at that time.

Well Done, Thou Good And Faithful Servant

When asked what he’d like people to say about him when he died, Reverend Graham said, “I want to hear one person say something nice about me and that’s the Lord, when I face him. I want him to say to me, ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant’” [see Matthew 25:21].

My feeble attempt in this post to pay tribute to a man who was one of the most positive influences on my life will be just a small drop in a very large bucket of writings about him today. But to him, nothing in that large bucket can compare to the one thing I am certain he heard this morning: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

 

Charles M. Jones

I found something Tennessee’s extremely popular Governor Bill Haslam said in a recent interview quite interesting — and eye-opening in some ways. Probably because he is term-limited and not running for re-election this year, several profile-type pieces about him have appeared in the media lately. Before using his remark to bring out what was eye-opening about it for me, let me just share the remark itself with you [emphasis mine]:

“Gov. Bill Haslam said on … that 2018 is ‘really important political year’ but that he worries how the business challenges facing the news media will impact coverage of the race to succeed him.  [Expanding on] what irks him about their business’s current state of affairs, he said, ‘This is going to be a really important political year. This is a real governor’s race. We have a [U. S.] Senate race that’s really important, not just for the state but the country, and a number of congressional seats in play. My fear is that all of these won’t be covered in the detail they traditionally have.’ “Furthermore, Haslam said when he asks most people where they get their news, many name dubious sources without editors.

What caught my attention when I read that was his apparent perception that “traditional media” is what it used to be “back in the day …” — subject to considerably more “editing” by real “journalists” than is actually the case today. And interestingly, although “traditional media” are a long way from being totally dead, the percentage of people [particularly those in the 18-36 age range] who get most if not all of their “news” [and of course, “fake news”] from internet-based sources and social media is increasing by leaps and bounds.

“Fake News” Is Real, But What About “Semi-Fake News”?

The term “fake news” has become commonplace these days, particularly outside the “mainstream” media [which folks in the “non-mainstream” media describe as the purveyors of fake news]. I’ve written about this before [e.g., see Fake News or Just Meaningless News? and News [Or NNTN?] Circa 2017], but the eye-opener in Governor Haslam’s remark made me realize that there is also quite a bit of what I’ll call semi-fake news out there. My point here is that both fake news and semi-fake news are causing problems that are getting worse by the day.  Other than tampering with our election machinery itself [vote gathering and counting processes] — of which there is absolutely no evidence — those problems are much worse than any meddling by Russians [or anybody else] into our election campaigns. Before developing that point, let me first define the two terms:

Fake News. Segments reported in the media that are clearly false. These segments often show up as lead stories on TV and major front-page headlines in papers, quoting “undisclosed sources.” Retractions [if any] come days if not weeks later, as brief mentions on TV just before going to commercials, and short paragraphs on page 14E of newspapers. Just one of thousands of examples: “ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.” [The report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr. Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.]

Semi-Fake News. Flashy attention-grabbing headlines designed to attract readers/listeners/viewers rather than just accurately and factually communicate the underlying story.  A classic example of semi-fake news is what was arguably the dominant item in media coverage during the week of February 5-9 — the long-predicted “correction” in financial markets. I’ll get into why I call most of that coverage semi-fake news in the next section. …

A Recent Classic Example Of Semi-Fake News

An appropriate headline for a story the night of 2/5/18 about the “correction” in financial markets would have been something like “Dow drops 4.6%, possibly signaling long-anticipated correction in financial markets” [I should mention here that the percentage drop that day was nowhere near the largest ever (22.6% on 10/19/87) — in fact, it ranked as only 25th largest since 1960]. Yet look at this sampling of headlines:

• CNN … ”A stock market lesson for Trump — the hard way.”
• USA Today … ”Trump Has Often Taken Credit For The Stock Market’s Climb. Will He Own The Drops Too?”
• USA Today … “Politicians Who Crow About Stock Market Gains Face Hazard When Market Drops.”
• New York Times … “Has Trumphoria Finally Hit A Wall?”

Interesting backdrop on this one … Paul Krugman, this article’s author, doesn’t exactly blame Trump for the market drop, but suggests gullible market investors are guilty of falling for Trump’s childish idea that the economy can grow 3% a year, not the 1.5% pace that he believes is the speed limit. And people forget that not only were prognosticators predicting that the stock market would plunge if Trump were elected president, but they seemed at times to actually be hoping for it to happen. Krugman’s famous comment along that line, published the day after Trump’s election, is instructive: “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover? … If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” [For the record, since those words were published, the S&P 500 Index has risen 26%. And that’s after the recent big market drop.] On election night, Nov. 8, 2016, as Investor’s Business Daily wrote a week and a half later, “fear consumed traders. At one point futures on the Dow Jones industrials index plunged 800 points.” Democrats were everywhere in the media, gloating. [Oops. “By Friday, the index finished the week up 959 points, more than 5%,” IBD wrote back then, making the case for a Trump bull market that later became reality.]

There are two takeaways from calling these attention-grabbing headlines what they are — semi-fake news. First, they are misleading at best, and insidiously furthering an anti-Trump narrative at worst [the former because they unnecessarily overdramatized the actual story; the latter because the more liberal (which is most) media outlets were gleefully reporting this in an anti-Trump context]. Second, it’s not just fake news we need to be on the lookout for — semi-fake news can be just as bad from the perspective of having adverse affects on our already disappointing political climate.

A Very Short Math Refresher …

Here’s a very short math refresher for anybody not getting my point about coverage of this “correction” being semi-fake news. If the Dow Jones Industrial Average [DJIA] is at 2,246.74 [its value on 10/16/87, the Friday before the largest percentage drop in history — 22.6% on Monday 10/19/87] and “drops” by 1,175.21 points, that’s a drop of 52.3 percent — and if the 2/5/18 “drop” had been 52 percent, the entire world would probably be in a state of financial chaos right now. But if the DJIA equals 25,520.96 [its value on Friday 2/2/18] and “drops” by 1,175.21 points [as it did on Monday 2/5/18], that’s a “drop” of only 4.6 percent. Although 4.6% is certainly not a trivial “drop”, it ranks as only the 25th highest since 1960.

No Extra Charge

I won’t charge extra for the extremely useful information I’ve shared with you in this post 😀.  My reward will be in any use you derive from it in filtering through whatever “news”, “fake news”, and semi-fake news” you access every day.

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And by the way, this post has not been about the stock market. I have followed the markets for many decades, and the bulk of my income is from investments. But the main thing I’ve learned is that markets go up, and markets go down. Generally, they have gone up by about 4% more than inflation when viewed over decades and not months or even years. So if anybody thinks I’m implying with the post that we’re not in for any more “corrections,” go find some experts. You’ll find many “doomsday” predictors and you’ll find many “sky’s the limit” predictors — so the bottom line is, just as with filtering out fake news and semi-fake news, you’ll have to read / listen to / watch all of those “experts” and make your own decision about where you think the markets are headed from here.

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Thanks for reading this post, and if you regularly follow my Blog, for that, too. Please consider sharing this or other posts with your friends, colleagues and associates.

 

Charles M. Jones