Posted on by mikecronin2013

The Battle Begins. How Will you Fare?

trump-clinton

By Mike Cronin

Barring a “black swan” event, the race for president is down to Trump vs. Clinton.  Who will you vote for, and why?  Will you even vote?  Will your vote matter?

There are so many marginal factors that can shape an election, but there are some basic election fundamentals that seldom get explained.

First: From 1932 to 2012, the average voter turnout has never been higher than 63% or less than 49%.  That means on average only a little over half of the eligible population votes in any given presidential election.  Of the half that votes, roughly 32% are dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrats and will always vote for the Democrat candidate.  Roughly another 22% of the half that votes is comprised of hard-core conservative Republicans who will always vote for the Republican candidate.  These groups are the “base” for a given candidate/party.  Once you exclude the 54% of voters that are going to automatically vote D or R in any given election, the real battle takes place over the remaining half of the half of Americans who are going to vote. Expressed another way: Presidential elections hinge on the lever pulls of slightly less than 25% of the adult population!

It gets better.  Where those 25% reside is crucial.  If a majority of them reside in states that are overwhelmingly likely to vote a certain way, their votes aren’t going to mean very much.  Conversely, if the bulk of those independent voters reside in states that could go either way (the so-called battleground states), their votes could wield enormous influence!

Are you one of the independents or third party members who vote but don’t blindly punch holes for any party’s candidate (or against the other party’s!)?  Where do you live?  Will your vote count?

If you are, how will you make your decision? Party loyalty isn’t your thing, so what does it for you?  Unfortunately, some will waste their votes on frivolous criteria such as the looks, race, or gender of the candidate, or on candidate’s oratorical prowess.

To do justice to our system and not waste my vote, I’ve developed a small list of criteria that I can rate each candidate against using a survey technique called a Likert scale.  Here it is:

Rate each candidate on how you believe they would:

Honor the Oath of Office and abide by the Constitution & the laws of the land Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Appoint Supreme Court Justices that will uphold the Constitution Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Command the armed forces and employ military force only to counter serious threats to the United States Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Act with integrity & honesty, and demonstrate character Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Govern transparently Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Reduce dysfunction and corruption in the Executive Branch Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Work to reign in government spending, promote capitalism and demonize socialism Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Work to audit, and possibly end, the Federal Reserve Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Work to end, or at least lessen and simplify, the income tax Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary
Overhaul the immigration system to allow maximum freedom to enter and remain in the country  consistent with preventing criminals, terrorists, and other bad actors in and without yielding an automatic electoral advantage to any party Fail Marginal Mediocre Good Exemplary

Obviously, you might prefer different criteria than what I’ve settled on, but whatever thoughtful criteria you select can still work.  Once you establish your criteria and rate each candidate, score them thus: 1 point for each Fail, 2 points for each Marginal, 3 points for each Mediocre, 4 points for each Good, and 5 points for each Exemplary. Total up the scores and vote for the candidate that earns the highest marks.

Still, there is at least one other major contextual factor that is seldom examined during presidential elections: Congress.  We can elect a president based on the most cogent criteria, but if he or she must deal with a Congress skewed to the opposing party, it is likely they will face high resistance to carrying out their plans or their mandate.  Even if he or she gets to work with a same-party Congress, your candidate could still find it hard to make headway if, like Donald Trump, they come from outside the beltway political establishment.

There is a simple (not easy!) fix to that: Help your presidential candidate get a sympathetic, same-party Congress to work with!

 

Posted on by mikecronin2013

The Minefield of Abortion

Prolife-Prochoice1

By Mike Cronin

My 12 year old daughter told me Donald Trump hates women.  I asked her why she thought so, and she replied that he was against abortion.  Indeed, Mr. Trump expressed several positions on abortion during a recent GOP debate.

Abortion has probably energized more of American politics than any other single issue since the argument over slavery led to the Civil War over states’ rights.  I’m not going to resolve it here, or even take sides, but perhaps we can do a little to clarify the issue to enable some rational decision making.

If you believe that a soul is created at the moment of conception, i.e. if you accept the premise that a growing embryo is a human being, then abortion is killing.  There are grey areas in life, and there are absolutes.  One of the absolutes is that if a fetus is human, then willfully aborting said fetus is murder. One of the most eloquent arguments for taking this position takes the form of a question:  If an embryo is NOT a human being, then what else is it?

On the other hand, in order to accept, or tolerate, or condone abortion, you have to either accept the premise that a zygote/embryo/fetus is not a human being, or you somehow have to rationalize that killing an unborn human is, at least in some cases, permissible. One of the most eloquent answers to the question posed in the previous paragraph takes the following form:  A fetus is a POTENTIAL human being.  It does not acquire the status and rights of a “human being” until it is a separate individual, i.e. until it has been born (or delivered).

Those are the basic parameters of the abortion debate – but the panoply of interests that engage in the debate muddy the waters so much that it is almost hopeless to try and evaluate them all. Consider these few:

The “pro-life” movement has never proven that a soul exists, much less that it is created or first manifest at the point of conception.

On the other hand, neither the “pro –choice” faction, nor medical science, has ever proven that there is no such thing as a soul.

Or how about these positions:

Since a woman has to carry a fetus in her body, it is her right to decide what to do with it.  Until birth/delivery, the fetus is no more a human being with rights than is an appendix, and it may be disposed of in the same manner.

Yet a woman cannot become a mother without at least the provision of some genetic material from a man (excepting the novel cases now anticipated by scientists) – doesn’t that give the father some say in the disposition of the growing embryo?

And two more:

It is monstrous to force a woman who has been impregnated by a rapist to carry the fetus to term and deliver the baby.  That not only subjects her to the physical torture of unwanted pregnancy and child birth, it also enslaves her to the torturous memory of her violation.

But if the embryo is human, then aborting it would be murder.  Murdering the child for the sins of his or her father would be even more monstrous than enslaving the woman to her pregnancy and her purgatory.

Perhaps my daughter was right and those who are against abortion hate women. No doubt there are some people for whom that is accurate, but there is more complexity here.

Some issues are far simpler than politicians, clerics, and the media would have us believe, and some are far more complex.  Abortion certainly falls into the later.   My advice to my daughters will fall along these lines: Abortion is generally legal. That doesn’t mean it is benign.  Even if you believe that aborting a fetus is not murder, the various procedures can still be more brutal and gruesome than mere surgical organ removal.  Even if you believe that it is a woman’s absolute right to decide what to do with her body, and that a growing fetus is part of her and not a separate human being, the best time to exercise that right is before conceiving a baby.

That may be less than fully satisfying dad advice, but it is all I’ve got at the moment. Like my daughters, you will have to navigate the minefield, make up your own mind, and live with the consequences.

Posted on by mikecronin2013

Issues, Symptoms, and Oreos

By Mike Cronin

Most of the issues in the presidential debates are not issues at all but symptoms. How so? Let’s take an example: illegal immigration.

The real problem isn’t that the United States is racist and doesn’t want so many people coming into our country. It’s that the flood of people coming into this country illegally is a signal that other things are broken.  The mass of immigrants perceive the United States to be a better place to live and work than wherever they are from. In other words, their incentives to come here are greater than their incentives to stay home. That has always been the case with immigration to the United States. What has changed is the nature of the incentives.

Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the incentive to immigrate to United States was the opportunity to be free to work hard, own property, and succeed.  From the latter part of the 20th century to the present, that incentive has been morphing. There is still an incentive to come here to be free and succeed, but another incentive has been steadily taking the place of that original one.

The new incentive is to come to the United States and take part in the bounty of government benefits and handouts that we bestow on a significant portion of our population. Free K-12 education. Subsidized housing.  Free or subsidized medical care. Relatively high paying jobs (even jobs that pay immigrants less than minimum wage under the table may be paying them more than they could get in their own country.) Low risk of being deported.   Even the possibility of voting. Why stay at home and live in absolute poverty, when you can come to America and upgrade to relative poverty and dependence on Uncle Sam?

A related symptom is corporate off-shoring and outsourcing. Even as immigrants are poring in to find a better life here, companies that send jobs or work outside the United States are vilified as unpatriotic. But why do they send these jobs outside the United States? Does it have anything to do with patriotism?

Could it instead be because government interference and manipulation have incentivized them to outsource, just as it has incentivized illegal immigration?

Image result for oreo to Mexico

Consider the Oreo case.  Donald Trump vowed last year not to eat Oreos ever again because of reports that Nabisco’s parent company moved 600 jobs from Chicago to Mexico in order to lower labor costs.  What the reports left out of the equation is that the marginal tax rate and a key product ingredient (sugar) are also cheaper in Mexico than in the US.  Think about that.  A company moved 600 jobs to Mexico because operating conditions are more conducive to profitability there than they are here, the original business-friendly nation!

So what is the disease?  Government interference in the market, namely via ham-handed manipulation of incentives.

Government tells companies who to hire (Affirmative Action), how much to pay them (minimum wage), charges payroll taxes, Social Security taxes, and corporate income taxes. Government requires businesses, and many professionals, to have licenses, and it regulates everything. It makes raw materials, parts, and other materials more expensive by applying the same kinds of interference to suppliers and other business partners.  The costs of all of this are either absorbed out of company profits, or passed on to the consumer, and it drives companies to go elsewhere to do business, which kills jobs here.

In effect, our own politicians  drive unskilled and low-skilled jobs out even as they lure unskilled  and low-skilled laborers in! This drives companies to move entire production lines out, or to hire illegal immigrants and pay them under the table.  It puts drag on the entire economy with excessive regulation, excessive taxes, and excessive interference – then the politicians call the companies unpatriotic for wanting to escape.

Might the politicians be a few cookies short of an Oreo?