Trump is Playing Musical Chairs With the Democrats, and He's Already Lost

Say what you like about Elon Musk; he's right about the Big, Beautiful Bill. This legislation, which was approved by Congress on a party-line vote, will increase the national debt and lead to recession.

Ignoring the nation's mountainous national debt that grows larger by the day, Trump and the Republicans approved a 1000-page bill that does nothing to balance the national budget.

Democrats unanimously opposed the bill, putting them in a position to say "We told you so" when the American economy collapses. Nevertheless, they shrilly denounced the bill's modest cuts to Medicare and the food stamp program. Senator Elizabeth Warren, growing more deranged as she ages,  repeatedly yelled "People will die" as a result of the bill's passage. 

The United States, like Ernest Hemingway, is going bankrupt, slowly at first, "then suddenly." We're in the slow stage now, and no one knows when our economy will suddenly collapse under unmanageable debt. 

However, that day is coming when no one wants to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. We don't know when our house of cards will implode, but I predict it will be during Donald Trump's presidency. 

The Democrats will smugly explain that our coming Great Depression is due entirely to Trump's economic policies, and he will be left holding the bag. Trump will take the blame for our coming economic meltdown, even though this catastrophe was decades in the making. 

Put another way, Trump and the Democrats are playing musical chairs with the economy, but Trump doesn't know that's the game he's playing. The Democrats plan to have a seat when the music stops, leaving Trump outside the circle of inside players.

That being said, I'm glad Congress passed the Big, Beautiful Bill. It does nothing to get the nation's fiscal house in order, but at least it gives some tax relief to the people who need it most--older Americans and the struggling middle class. 

In other words, people like me.

 

"Hangin' on to What I Got": Buck Owens' Advice for Hard Times

 Well, if a dollar bill is not worth a dime

And if the whole world goes to pot, 

Well, I'm a tellin' you that I'm a happy man

And I'm a hangin' on to what I got.

Hangin' on to What I Got

Buck Owens

Elon Musk dislikes President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill," arguing that it will contribute to the growing federal deficit and the nation's $36 trillion national debt. 

Musk is probably right, but whatcha gonna do? The Democrats oppose the BBB, but they won't consent to any budget cuts that would harm their shrinking and perpetually unhappy political base.

Meanwhile, hard-pressed Americans need a tax break, and I favor helping 'em out.

Let's face it: It's too late for the politicians to balance the federal budget or reduce our $36 trillion national debt. Nor will the Trump administration be able to halt inflation or curb interest rates. As Merle Haggard put it, our country is "rolling down hill like a snowball headed for hell," and the average American has no power to change the trajectory of our impending economic meltdown.

Hard times are coming to Flyover Country. Most of us will become poorer in the coming years, especially older Americans living on fixed incomes.

Perhaps all the little folk can do is take Buck Owens' advice and try to hang on to what we've got--our families, our jobs, and our homes.

This is a good time for Americans to get introduced to the music of hard times, a subgenre of country music dubbed the Bakersfield Sound. The leading lights of the Bakersfield Sound--Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Woody Guthrie, Wynne Stewart, Tommy Collins, and Wanda Jackson--all saw hard times during the Great Depression, and they expressed their arduous life journeys in their heartfelt songs. 

You can hear that music today by listening to Dwight Yoakam's Bakersfield Beat on Sirius radio. I predict that the audience for the Bakersfield Sound will expand as our national economy collapses.  The Bakersfield Sound is the music of hard times, and hard times are just around the corner.

The Grapes of Wrath: Hangin' On to What I Got

"Social Security is beaking down," claims the Washington Post: Ain't necessarily so

 "Social Security is breaking down," the Washington Post cried out yesterday, and the Democratic National Committee joined in the alarm. "Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes," reads the WaPo subheading. Chaos reigns is the implicit message, all inflicted by Elon Musk.

The WaPo article was an exercise in fear-mongering, intended, I believe, to undermine public support for Elon Musk's efforts to make the federal government more efficient. As one of the millions of older Americans who rely partly on Social Security, I can attest that Social Security is not breaking down.

My wife and I receive our Social Security checks on time every month, and we can easily check our account status on the government's website. What's the problem?

Earlier this month, the Social Security Administration demonstrated its efficiency by the speed with which it implemented the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA), which Congress passed last December. 

My wife and I are among the 3.2 million retired Americans who contributed to state-sponsored pension plans that did not participate in the Social Security program. Consequently, we were both unfairly penalized when we started drawing our Social Security benefits. 

The Social Security Fairness Act canceled those penalties, and the Social Security Administration distributed our refund checks earlier this month, depositing them directly into our checking accounts. Next month, my wife and I will be receiving our enhanced benefits. 

I was pleasantly surprised by the SSA's alacrity in implementing the SSFA, which was apparently accomplished with a reduced staff.

Some Americans have occasionally been irritated when dealing with the SSA's bureaucracy. Still, I doubt that their frustration was any greater than that of many Americans who stand in line at the Post Office during the Christmas season. All in all, the Social Security Administration probably functions as well or better than other federal agencies.

That is not to say that the Social Security program is without problems. As many commentators have pointed out, the SSA faces a massive funding shortfall in the coming years because Americans are living longer than they did when the Roosevelt administration created the program in 1935.  Sooner or later, Congress will need to find new sources of revenue to support the program.

Nevertheless, the Social Security program is not breaking down, and it was irresponsible for Washington Post reporters to suggest otherwise. 

Image credit: Right at Home

Take this job and shove it! Elon Musk tries to prune the federal bureaucracy

 Take this job and shove it

I ain't working here no more.

Sung by Johnny Paycheck

America's budget deficit is on track to hit $1.9 trillion, which will be added to the nation's accumulated national debt of $36 trillion. 

Elon Musk, chief of President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is moving savagely to prune the federal workforce, which he urgently needs to do.  

He began by offering buyouts to entice federal employees to resign--a classic corporate tactic to trim payroll costs. So far, roughly 75,000 people have accepted the offer, a tiny percentage of the nation's 2.3 million federal workers.

Unfortunately, the employees who accepted the offer include some of the nation's most efficient bureaucrats. That's because the people who left federal service have job skills that can transfer to the private sector.

Most civil servants are hanging on to their federal jobs despite a pointed invitation to leave.  These include those who don't have the skills or experience to find employment outside the DC swamp. They will dig in at least long enough to reach retirement age.

DOGE will be forced to fire thousands of government workers to trim the workforce. Many will file lawsuits challenging DOGE's authority to make the government more efficient. They'll also avail themselves of the elaborate civil service regulations that protect their constitutional right to due process.

In short, it will be months or even years before the federal workforce shrinks. Meanwhile, the primary beneficiaries of the DOGE initiative will be lawyers--lots and lots of lawyers.

In the near future, we are likely to see the passive-aggressive nature of the federal civil service rear its ugly head as the apparatchiks of the DC swamp begin a work slowdown. We can't fulfill our duties, the bureaucrats will moan, because the workforce has been slashed by a "Nazi nepo baby."

Indeed, we are already seeing worksite sabotage in the Social Security Administration. Senior SSA administrators say it will be more than a year before they implement the directives of the Social Security Fairness Act, which is intended to benefit retirees who have been unfairly penalized. 

Why? They're understaffed.

Take number. A federal bureaucrat will assist you sometime in the next century.

USAID funded transgender opera in Columbia: The Deep State Hates Flyover Country

 Elon Musk, newly selected as the Deep State's chief villain, has discovered shocking cases of waste and abuse at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Among the agency's insane expenditures was money spent to fund a "transgender opera" in Columbia and a "transgender comic book" in Peru. 

Who approved these projects and disbursed the money? Who got the loot? Most importantly, why was taxpayers' money spent on such lunacy?

The answer to the last question is obvious: The Deep State hates the Heartland, which Deepstaters sneeringly refer to as Flyover Country. Our DC-based federal workers despise the patriotism, work ethic, and religious values of patriotic Americans, and they display their contempt by endorsing transgender opera in Columbia and transgender sports in the Heartland's school gymnasiums. 

Now, the Trump-launched Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) has pried up the rock under which the nation's salaried culture destroyers have hidden. The Deep State is fighting back, using the nefarious tactics it has perfected: specious litigation, hysterical rhetoric, and mass-circulated misinformation by the Deep State's sycophantic media.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who represents Harvard University and the Cherokee Nation in the Senate, accused Elon Musk of buying the presidential election. Warren apparently forgot that Kamala Haris, the Dem's genetically clueless candidate, spent far more campaign money than Trump and still went down to ignominious defeat.

Some Deep State politicians have even issued veiled hints of violence, calling for supporters to fight "in the streets." Perhaps they can rally the arsonists who burned down Minneapolis to make good on their threat.

We will soon see whether Trump's legion of decency or the Deep State will win the battle for our nation's soul. The leftist breastbeaters should remember, however, that Flyover Country is on Trump's side and that the people living in the Heartland will never consent to be governed again by the wingnuts of the DC swamp who want to allow hairy males in girls' bathrooms.

"Losing their minds"  Photo credit: Yahoo News

Elon Musk says MBA degrees are overrated: Does it make sense to go to graduate school?

 Elon Musk says MBA degrees are overrated, and he should know.  Musk doesn't have an MBA, and he's worth $166 billion.

Here is what Musk said in a recent interview:

The path to leadership should not be through an MBA business school situation. It should be kind of work your way up and do useful things. There's a bit too much of the somebody goes to a high-profile MBA school land then kind of parachutes in as the leader but they don't actually know how things work. They could be good at, say PowerPoint presentations or something like that, and they can present well, but they don't actually know how things work. They parachute in instead of working their way up. 

Not surprisingly, many MBA teachers disagree with Musk. Robert Siegel, who teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said Musk is "completely off base talking about M.B.A.s." Siegel challenges Musk's charge that MBA  courses don't teach people how to be entrepreneurs. 

But a Canadian professor of management studies admitted that "[t]he MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences." And Jessica Stillman, writing for Inc., suggests that people could save a lot of money simply by reading ten well-known books about business. 

Musk's skepticism about MBA degrees falls within a larger debate about the value of graduate degrees in general. Speaking as a person who is embarrassed to have two graduate degrees from Harvard, here is my take on this topic.

First, don't go to graduate school unless you believe a graduate degree will improve your job prospects.  Public-school educators in some school systems get an automatic raise if they have a master's degree in education, so it may make economic sense for a teacher to pursue an advanced degree in education regardless of whether there is any substance to the program.

Second, don't pay too much money to get a graduate degree--especially a degree from a non-elite institution. Many colleges introduced expensive MBA programs after Congress introduced the Grad PLUS program that lifted the cap on how much people could borrow for graduate school.

Northeastern University, for example, offers an online MBA program costing $78,000, which Northeastern claims is "an affordable option" compared to other programs, which charge as much as $200,000. 

Maybe that is so, but ask your friends who have MBAs if they think the experience was worth the cost.  You may be surprised by some of the responses you will get.

Third, don't get a graduate degree that might actually hurt your job prospects.  For example, many law schools offer master's degrees, which require an additional year of study beyond the basic J.D. degree. Some law schools offer graduate degrees in law for people who do not intend to practice law. 

I've known people who pursued a graduate degree in law because they didn't excel in law school and didn't get a good law job after graduating.  An extra law degree, they think, will enhance their job prospects.

But employers can sniff out the motivation for that strategy. If the job applicant had a brilliant career in law school, that person would probably be pulling down a six-figure salary in a prestigious law firm instead of hanging around a law school for an additional year.

And an online graduate degree from a for-profit school may be absolutely worthless in the job market. I've sat on many faculty hiring committees and heard committee members reject any job candidate who obtained a doctoral degree from a for-profit school.

Finally, weigh the opportunity costs of going to graduate school. Are you gaining experience in your present job that will likely pay off later in salary increases and promotions?  If so, why leave the job market and take out student loans to go to graduate school?

This is the bottom line. Don't take out student loans to go to graduate school unless there is absolutely no other way to achieve your professional goals. Millions of Americans have had successful careers without graduate degrees, and millions more have graduate degrees and don't know nuthin'.