Sacred cows taste better.


Wednesday, May 29, 2019

How To Guarantee Trump's Downfall


Every so often, I have a true stroke of brilliance. Yes, it's arrogant of me to say so, but I think it's warranted. I'll share my stroke of brilliance with you, and you can judge for yourself if you agree with me.

A man who has recently made the news again is a historian named Allan Lichtman. He pops up before every election, claiming to have successfully predicted the previous 8 or 9 elections or so. A closer look at his methods reveals that he's not quite so successful as he claims. He predicted Al Gore would win in 2000, and was wrong. He also called Donald Trump as the winner for 2016, but got cold feet and backpedaled right before the actual election. So he's not quite so confident in his methods as he advertises. Still, he's a media darling, and in these uncertain times, many love to hear bold predictions from a prophet. Even a bad one.

Lichtman's method is to measure 13 factors, and if the presidential candidate is favored in 8 of them, that candidate will win. Some of them are subjective, but some are clearly not. Two of the ones which are not subjective are short-term and long-term economic stability. It is those I wish to focus upon.

Those of us who know anything about economics recognize that Trump is ruining a perfectly good economic boom. He's taking the good momentum left to him from the Obama era and ruining it. Of course, it takes years for such ruining to be felt by the public, so we're not quite feeling all of it yet. In fact, any capitalist system is quite capable of continuously running well, and can take quite a beating before a real downturn happens. In 2008, it took an unexpected and massive housing-value collapse to bring the economy down, and even then, it bounced back after only three years. This has allowed Trump to falsely claim that he's been doing a good job with the economy. But, of course, his mismanagement will be felt sooner or later. Economists of all stripes are predicting a recession, but many of them are divided as to whether it will hit by 2020, or 2021.

If the downturn hits in 2020, Trump is out. If it hits in 2021, he might just win re-election.

And here is my stroke of brilliance. You see, the unspoken X-factor of an economy comes in the form of uncertainty. Economic uncertainty makes for a troubled market. Stocks are more jittery. Prices don't come down as readily. People cling to their wallets more tightly. Uncertainty is really the thing which drives an economy down. In the 1970's, economic uncertainty, caused mainly by OPEC driving gasoline prices up, made many people nervous, and inflation went way up. But today, Trump has let the unemployment rate slip below 4%, and inflation has not taken place. Why? Because markets feel certain. They are confident that the markets will remain predictable.

And here's where we all can topple Trump in a subtle, beautiful way.

We create more economic uncertainty!

How, you ask? By expressing worry about the economic future. By pointing out, quite correctly, that farmers are suffering; that Wisconsin is no longer the dairy state because dairy farms are selling out at the alarming rate of 2 farms per day; that one-fourth of last year's entire cranberry crop had to be simply dumped because farmers couldn't sell it; that Harley Davidson will soon be a European motorcycle company; that steel tariffs will drive the prices up for everything with steel as part of their manufacture.

It's really not lying. We have the above reasons and many more when it comes to worrying about the economy! But the more we talk about it, the more we express ourselves in worrying, the more we generate buzz about the coming downturn, the more it will happen. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy!

And the inevitable economic downturn will happen in 2020, not 2021, and Trump will be out in one of the biggest losses in American history!

After all, Trump has been pinning his entire re-election campaign on the economy. If it falters by November of 2020, he's got nothing.

So chat it up on social media, everybody! Express your worry about the economy on Facebook, for so you should! Tweet doom and gloom, an end to the economic boom! Generate word of mouth that the economy's going South! There's an economic storm coming, and it's name is Hurricane Donald! Be paranoid! Be LOUD about it! Worry, worry WORRY!

Hell, you're going to worry anyway. You might as well make it count.


Eric

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Friday, May 17, 2019

My Cartoons

Lately, I've taken up doing little cartoons to express myself. I hope you enjoy.