How Markets Work, and a Truth Bomb

Look, I'm getting sick and tired of hearing the White House spewing forth bovine excrement about how reversing the decision to halt the Keystone XL pipeline - a decision that Joe Biden made unilaterally on his first day in office, with a boastful flourish - wouldn't affect gas prices at the pump for years, because it would take a long time for Keystone XL to become operational and start delivering oil. Such bovine excrement ignores how markets work. So let me explain how they work, and in so doing, illustrate why Joe Biden and Jen Psaki are idiots.

Wait a minute - let's not over-complicate things. Actually, Joe Biden and Jen Psaki are idiots because their mommas each raised an idiot. Alright, that's not fair. Joe Biden is an idiot, but Jen Psaki is actually probably very bright. She just either doesn't have an earthly clue how markets work, or she's a pathological liar. Probably both.

There, now we've got that out of the way. Let's turn to how markets work. If you lean left, you'll want to pay close attention, because you've probably been spreading this bovine excrement, and you need to stop it, because you're wrong, and it makes you look like an idiot, too. And if you don't lean left, please share this with your friends who do, because friends don't let friends look like idiots.

Markets trade on future expectations. Take stocks for example. Stocks don't trade on the underlying companies' past performance. Consider Kumquat, a hypothetical tech company that makes widgets, ubiquitous products that everyone uses. There are even people who love Kumquat's products so much, they're called "Kumquat fanboys" (which is probably a sexist term). They have Kumquat stores where everyone goes to buy those widgets. People line up at the Kumquat store to buy the latest Kumquat widget when it comes out: everybody has to upgrade their Kumquat 10 to a Kumquat 11, etc.

Now, Kumquat's stock doesn't trade on how many widgets Kumquat sold last quarter. No, it trades on how many widgets Kumquat expects to sell next quarter, or next year. Kumquat's CEO will have a call with a bunch of Wall Street analysts, and he'll say the company is going to open X new Kumquat stores, and they're going to release the new Kumquat 12, which will do twice as many cool things as the Kumquat 11 did, and they expect to sell Y units of the Kumquat 12 at ZZZ dollars a unit, while still selling a bunch of units of the Kumquat 11 at a now-discounted price, blah, blah, blah.

It's all based on the future outlook. And based on that outlook, if it's rosier than last quarter's actual performance, Kumquat's stock price will go up. Even though - and this is important - even though Kumquat hasn't opened one of the promised new stores yet, or produced one new unit of the Kumquat 12.

Now, when the actual results come in, if Kumquat's projected earnings are below what they forecast for the quarter - known as an "earnings miss" - the stock might go down. Or, if the earnings are higher than forecast - an "earnings beat" - the price may go up. So it does respond to actual performance. But it's driven by future expectations, first and foremost, and adjusted after the fact based on results versus those expectations. In other words, the results are judged relative to the expectations. It's like beating the point spread vs. winning or losing the game.

Oil isn't a stock, but it trades the same way. If oil traders think something's going to happen that could lead to the future price of oil increasing, they'll bid up oil futures - derivatives contracts for forward delivery of "spot," or physical barrels of, oil. If they think the outlook for oil prices is negative, they'll bid oil futures prices down. Projected supply and demand are the primary factors oil futures traders look at. And spot oil prices, as well as gasoline prices, are influenced by oil futures prices.

Okay. So let's look at what happened to oil prices when Joe Biden was elected President in November 2020. Now, if you lean left, you're crying, "Foul! Joe Biden may have been elected in November 2020, but he didn't take office until January 2021, so he couldn't have influenced oil prices yet, because he wasn't yet in a position to make any decisions!"

To which I say, "Aha!" Because remember? Markets trade on expectations. Now that the election was over and we knew that Joe Biden was going to be President, the outlook for oil became negative. Joe Biden campaigned against domestic fossil fuel production. He said he wanted to put oil producers out of business. He was for the Green New Deal. He promised to kill the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office (and he did). So the oil traders said, "Ruh-roh. Domestic supply is going down. Keystone XL - even though it isn't even complete yet - isn't going to deliver the increased supply we expected it to when Donald Trump gave it the green light. Oil prices are going up, because OPEC is going to start gouging us." And they started bidding up the price of oil.

The graph below shows the price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, the benchmark for domestic oil prices, from the day before Biden was elected through March 7, 2022. Note that immediately after the election, oil prices started to rise. The Friday before the election, WTI was $36.97/barrel (bbl). By March 5, 2021 - about six weeks after Joe Biden was inaugurated, and signed the Executive Order killing Keystone XL - WTI was $66.08/bbl, an increase of 79%. By mid-July, crude had more than doubled from the pre-election day level (some of that had to do with normal summer demand). By late October, it was over $85/bbl. This was all before Putin even began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border.

Now, you could note that there was something else going on during this time: recovery from the COVID pandemic. And you'd be right, to some degree. The shutdowns were finally over, including the renewed California and New York shutdowns of December 2020. The vaccines were being rolled out. People were going on vacations again. So there's certainly a demand component involved.

However, the economy re-opened in May 2020 after the initial COVID shutdowns in March of that year. I took driving vacations in the summers of 2020 and 2021, and I went from Kansas City to Taos, New Mexico both years, so that's a pretty good frame of reference: same trip, same route. There was certainly more traffic in 2021 than in 2020. But there was lots of large truck traffic in 2020, and plenty of local traffic. Certainly demand was higher in 2021 than in 2020, but the price increase shown in the graph above could not have resulted from increased demand alone.

Let's look at oil prices in 2020, from the time the economy re-opened until the election, as seen in the graph below. The increase from the re-opening, around the beginning of June, to the peak of summer in late August, was less than $8/bbl - about 22%, but from a starting point of only $35/bbl or so. By the election, the price was back down below $37/bbl, and that was before California and New York shut down again. So even though demand went from virtually nil to a pretty healthy increase, we saw only a modest increase in oil prices. Why? Because the policies of the Administration in office at the time were decidedly friendly toward domestic oil production. From that, we can infer that increased demand due to COVID recovery (and summer travel) might account for a 20-25% increase in prices - admittedly, a crude guesstimate (pun intended). That leaves about a 50%-plus increase in 2021 that's attributable to Joe Biden's anti-fossil fuel policies.

Bottom line? Joe Biden owns the run-up in oil prices from the day he was elected until the day Vladimir Putin began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border. And he owns a piece of it since, because he has stubbornly refused to relent in his assault on domestic oil production. Let's face it: he was proud of those policies. He was bragging about the actions he took, at least until inflation started soaring, and he started getting pummeled in the polls. So why hide behind it now? Why point the finger at Putin now? Look, if this is "Putin's price hike," why are Biden's poll numbers falling further?

Markets trade on expectations. And since Biden was elected, oil prices have risen. They didn't rise under Trump, because oil traders expected oil-friendly policy, and thus that the future trajectory of oil prices would be lower, or at least stable. From Election Day 2020 forward, the expected trajectory has been up, up, up, because the effect of Biden's policies on supply was expected to be down, down, down. Putin's actions have exacerbated that. So has Biden's response (or lack thereof) to it. Going hat-in-hand to Iran, Venezuela, or Saudi Arabia will only drive prices even higher.

So that's why, if Biden announced a reversal of his Keystone XL decision, oil prices - and gas prices, which are based on oil prices - would drop immediately, even though the pipeline wouldn't deliver a drop of oil for about a year. (And no, Jen, you couldn't replace all the gas-powered cars with EVs before then.) Because markets trade on expectations.

A final word. Today, Jen said, in response to a reporter's question, that since Putin began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border in January, the price of a gallon of gas is up $0.75.

Well, what she didn't say is this: from the time Joe Biden was elected until the time Putin began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border, the price of a gallon of gas went up $1.18.

So whose price hike is worse?

An Open Letter to Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Dear President Zelenskyy,

America offers its prayers to you and the Ukrainian people. Regrettably, tragically, heart-breakingly, we can offer you little else.

Because, you see, unlike you, our own President is a coward.

You have seen this. While you stand in proud defiance against the naked aggression of Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden cowers in the face of it. Putin makes the obvious sabre-rattle of placing his nuclear forces on alert, and Joe Biden cancels a long-planned ICBM test, out of deference to what the world has now seen is an adversary far inferior to America's military might.

Biden's reaction should not be a surprise. You, and the rest of the world, watched as Joe Biden surrendered in shame to the Taliban last summer, sacrificing American lives and abandoning Americans and Afghan allies alike behind enemy lines, in spite of solemn promises to the contrary. And would that your brave countrymen had the materiel that we left in the hands of the Taliban!

Putin watched this unfold, too, and it no doubt emboldened him to take the action he is taking today. For this, Joe Biden bears no small responsibility for your current plight.

We Americans would rather pay more to fuel our cars and heat our homes than to continue to buy Russian oil that is tainted with the blood of your people. We realize, after all, how blessed we are to still have our cars and our homes.

But paying more is not even necessary: America's energy resources are abundant, and we have more than enough to not only supply our own needs, but to share with our European allies, thereby cutting off Putin's ability to fund his war machine, and thus completing the decimation of his economy and making him a pariah even among his own people.

However, Joe Biden cares more about appeasing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than he cares about the horrors that might be visited upon the women of your country at the hands of Russian soldiers. So he continues to buy blood-tainted and ecologically "dirty" Russian oil rather than producing relatively "clean" oil here at home. And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez isn't intelligent enough to recognize the difference in the environmental impact about which she claims to care so much. (And, no matter what she may say about equality, she doesn't care about the fate of your women, either. She's too busy attending charity galas wearing expensive, donated designer gowns emblazoned with catchy slogans, and - ironically - making profits selling goods labeled with phrases condemning capitalism.)

Unlike you, Mr. President, Joe Biden is a career politician. He has spent his entire life in Washington, D.C., and it has corrupted him to the core. He cares only about his own political calculus, and how it can enrich him and his family. Unfortunately, whether you personally survive this war does not factor into his calculations. You cannot trust him, any more than you can trust Vladimir Putin.

But your survival matters to Americans. It matters because we long for a President like you, one that we can be proud of. One that will stand against aggression. One to whom the sovereignty of his country's borders matters. One who cares about his people, and stands with them. One who is a symbol of his nation, and not a mockery of it.

Unfortunately, Joe Biden can offer you little more than words, and in his present state, he doesn't even do a very good job of that. More than 74 million Americans wish we had a president that could offer you more, and I daresay that, today, a good many more than that have joined their number. Sadly, we can "only" offer our prayers now. But take heart, because prayer is a powerful thing. God is on your side, and that is a force that Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden together cannot overcome.

So we, the American people, will continue to pray. We pray for your continued strength, and for the deliverance of your great nation.

And, while we're on our knees, may God have mercy on Joe Biden's soul.

More Lies About Jobs Data

Today - March 4, 2022 - we got what looked like a very strong jobs report. Nonfarm payroll growth of 678,000 in February, with January's gain revised up to 481,000, December's at 588,000, and November's at 647,000. The unemployment rate at 3.8%. Average hourly earnings up 5.3%. That all sounds pretty darn good, right? No wonder the Biden Administration is crowing about their economic track record, how they've added 7.7 million jobs since they took office.

Not so fast.

As The Curmudgeon has noted before, politicians do precious little to "add" jobs, unless they hire interns and aides. (Bill Clinton was particularly good at that.) The private sector adds the jobs. The best politicians can do is to get the hell out of the way, cut regulations and not add new ones, and let businesses do their thing. And that's not the Biden Administration's style. They like to regulate.

Now - and this is a digression, so stay with me - the ultimate government interference in a business' operation would be to shut it down. Of course, legally, the government can't do that, unless the business is itself violating a law or regulation. The government has no Constitutional authority to shut down businesses.

Yet, in March 2020, that's exactly what the U.S. government did, en masse. It shut down a lot of businesses, and those businesses just stood by and let it happen. Here's where the digression ends.

How did that affect jobs? Well, in March 2020, nonfarm payrolls fell by nearly 1.7 million, the biggest drop on record, more than double the worst month of the Great Recession in 2008-09. And that was just a partial month's result; the government shutdown didn't hit until well into the month.

Then April came along, and said, "Hold my beer."

The April nonfarm payroll loss was a staggering, dumbfounding, jaw-dropping 20.7 million jobs. More than in all of the Great Recession.

(For reference, the economy had been humming along very nicely before that. Unemployment was at record lows, and payroll gains were averaging about 236k/mo. in the six months before the shutdown. And let's state right now, for the record, that not only was the shutdown wrong, and illegal, and unconstitutional, it was unnecessary, and did nothing to change the trajectory of the pandemic, or to save lives. That's been proven. If you believe otherwise, you need bandages on your knuckles.)

Now, two of the biggest states in terms of employment, New York and California, shut down again in December 2020 (what's the definition of insanity, again?), and as a result, nonfarm payrolls for the nation as a whole shed 306,000 jobs, because those states' job losses dwarfed all other states' combined job gains.

So, taking those three months of shutdowns together, the U.S. economy lost 22,668,000 jobs. Due to stupid, unnecessary, illegal, government-mandated business closures in response to a pandemic. Let that sink in.

Now, in all the months since April 2020, excluding December 2020, when California and New York decided to repeat the failed shutdown experiment, nonfarm payrolls have gained, in the aggregate -

20,544,000 jobs.

In other words, we haven't added one. damn. job. We're still more than two million jobs behind.

No wonder there are still help wanted signs everywhere. We've nowhere near caught up to where we were two years ago, much less accounted for the normal growth that should have occurred since then, plus inflationary growth spurred by excessive government spending over those two years. That should add up to at least the current 11 million job openings.

Moreover, since Joe likes to tout his big numbers (which are nothing more than replacements of jobs lost during the shutdown), let's look at some of the numbers replaced under Trump:

May 2020: 2.8 million jobs, June: 4.8 million, July: 1.7 million, August: 1.6 million, September: 716k, October: 680k.

As MC Hammer sang, "You Can't Touch This."

As for that 3.8% unemployment rate - it was 3.5% in February 2020, before the shutdown, under Trump. So we're still not fully recovered there yet, either.

Finally, that 5.3% payroll growth rate is great - except that the inflation rate is 7.5%. So real wage growth - adjusted for inflation - is negative, by more than two percentage points. That's why we're all feeling squeezed.

A final note. I was listening to a business news anchor interviewing one of President Biden's economic advisors, and the advisor kept touting all that the administration is doing to bolster up the supply side. Wait a minute - supply side economics? That's "trickle-down" economics, right? Didn't Joe just tell us in the SOTU the other night that trickle-down economics doesn't work? And yet his advisors are pushing it?

Glad to see the liberals abandoning the dark side, and coming to the light. Of course, they're not actually embracing supply-side economics, or we'd be drilling oil like mad. But it's nice to hear a liberal economist acknowledging that it's the right approach.

We're All In This Together

Remember that sentiment of solidarity? Early in the covid pandemic (back when it was a pandemic, and not an endemic, which is what it is today), many people uttered those words to express that we were all equally affected by the threat of disease, the potential loss of loved ones, the restrictions, the government shutdowns.

We weren't, of course. Some of us were more vulnerable to disease than others. Some were more susceptible to serious illness or death, especially since very few people actually died from covid; most died from pre-existing morbidities that covid exploited. Some of us continued to go about our lives in relative freedom. Of course, we couldn't dine out or go to the movie theater or fly on an airplane in those initial "two weeks to slow the spread" (wink, wink), but we got take-out from restaurants, went to the park or on driving vacations (even though we were told to stay home), and generally lived our lives without fear. And some of us were fortunate enough to not see our jobs or our incomes affected by government fiat that arbitrarily picked winners and losers, with ramifications that are still being felt today in labor market and supply chain dislocations.

As The Curmudgeon said at the time, "We're not all in this together. We're in the same ocean, but we're all in different boats."

Well, now we're truly all in this together. And it really seems to be bothering some people. Allow me to explain.

For many months now, government leaders and health care officials have wielded vaccination like a bludgeon, using it to drive a wedge between the populace. And those who are vaccinated have been all too willing to play along, viewing themselves as somehow morally and even intellectually (I know; it's laughable) superior to those who are unvaccinated.

Have you ever read the Dr. Suess story, "The Sneetches?" It's very appropriate to the current situation. Here's a synopsis from Wikipedia:

"The ... story ... tells of a group of yellow bird-like creatures called the Sneetches, some of whom have a green star on their bellies. At the beginning of the story, Sneetches with stars discriminate against and shun those without. An entrepreneur named Sylvester McMonkey McBean (calling himself the Fix-It-Up Chappie) appears and offers the Sneetches without stars the chance to get them with his Star-On machine, for three dollars ..." The Sneetches who originally had stars, seeing that they're no longer unique, now look to have their stars removed to once again differentiate themselves, so McBean develops a machine to remove the stars, and they pay for the privilege. But then so, of course, do the newly-starred Sneetches. And so it goes, round and round, until pretty soon none of the Sneetches know who are the original superior breed, all of them are flat-broke, and McBean has all their money.

There are several morals and key themes to this story. One, of course, is that McBean is none other than Anthony Fauci. And in the end, he's going to be the only one who gets rich off this whole thing.

But the over-arching theme is that the star-bellied Sneetches - the vaccinated - consider themselves superior to those without stars. Why? Merely because they have a star on their bellies. There is nothing else special about them, but they preened over those stars as though they actually meant something. (The bitter irony is that they come to mean less and less with each passing week.)

In their efforts to discriminate against and shun the unvaccinated, the vaccinated claimed that they were now immune from infection. From serious illness, hospitalization, and death. That they were shrouded in an invisible shield, and could not spread infection to others, and were therefore morally superior to others in the great war against covid. They accused the unvaccinated of propagating the spread of the disease, prolonging the pandemic (even after the evidence clearly showed that it had become an endemic), threatening the lives of others, and overwhelming the health care system (which never really happened).

Of course, they were wrong. On all counts. (And the irony of their presumed intellectual superiority is how easily duped they were by "McBean," just like in Suess' story.)

They were apparently math-ignorant, for even the manufacturers of their majik potions stressed that the efficacy rate of their vaccines was only about 95%. That means that, of every 100 people who get the full vaccine, five of them may still get infected, if exposed. In other words, the vaccine only works in 95% of people. And indeed, breakthrough cases happened, though they were rare. (Five percent qualifies as "rare.") But for whatever reason, the vaccinated felt justified in maintaining their smugness, and that apparently led them to ignore math and claim that 95% = 100%.

Enter delta.

Delta was more transmissible than previous variants. And it proved more resistant to the vaccines. The breakthrough cases increased, and started to get press. "Gee, I guess our efficacy rate is only about 90-95%," said the vaccine manufacturers. Effectively, that's saying the vaccines are 90% efficacious, as you can really only claim the low end of the range. In other words, if you get vaccinated, you still have a 10% chance of getting infected. Those odds are important; we'll come back to them in a bit.

Moreover, vaccinated people were getting really sick. Being hospitalized. Dying. Not in huge numbers, mind you, and the vast majority of deaths - vaccinated or not - remain among those with serious co-morbidities and/or the very elderly. But it was happening, in sufficient numbers to get reported. And, since Delta hit about six months after the first people were getting vaccinated, it had to be acknowledged that the vaccines' efficacy wanes after about that period of time. So booster doses are required to maintain efficacy, much like flu vaccines, which require an annual dose. At first the necessity for boosters was denied by the vaccine zealots; then, it was grudgingly acknowledged; now, the vaccine zealots have become eager booster zealots. Hey, if you can't beat 'em ...

(To be fair, natural immunity wanes, too. I know at least two people who had covid in 2020, and got it again in 2021. And, they were sicker in 2021 than they were in 2020, presumably because in 2021 they had the Delta variant - I'm just guessing there; I don't know what variant they had. I do know that these are very healthy people with no apparent co-morbidities and strong immune systems. To that end, covid is like other coronaviruses, including the common cold: you can catch cold multiple times over the course of your life, too, but if you catch cold today, you probably won't catch cold again in a month. All this proves is that covid is just another coronavirus.)

Still, the vaccinated kept at it. They maintained the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" theme. They ridiculed those who chose not to get vaccinated, insinuating that they're uneducated Neanderthals who don't understand science. (In truth, not only do they likely understand science as well as, if not better than, their vaccinated counterparts, they clearly, in most cases, have superior math skills. I'd argue that many of the vaccinated couldn't pass a basic statistics course, from the evidence I've seen.)

Joe Biden pushed his mandate for employers, invoking an emergency OSHA order intended to apply to situations of such dire urgent threat to workplace safety that no alternative is available other than granting broad, authoritative powers to OSHA.

Never mind that businesses have succeeded in keeping workplaces safe for nearly two years now, as the immediate threat of the pandemic has ebbed into an endemic. Never mind that this "emergency" was so dire that Biden announced the mandate in September (just after the disastrous Afghanistan surrender - "hey, look over here!"), but wouldn't put it into effect for four months. Or that it was so urgent that, the day the Sixth District lifted the stay imposed by the Fifth District, OSHA announced that it would delay enforcement by yet another month.

Some "emergency."

Yes, the star-bellied Sneetches continued to point proudly at their stars - even though the stars had to be boosted in order to keep them from fading; the boosts themselves became a new virtue signal - and looked down their beaks at their star-less brethren. So much for, "we're all in this together," right?

Enter omicron.

There is no statistical infection-rate difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated with omicron. In fact, the director of the CDC recently reported that, of omicron cases in the U.S., 80% are among the vaccinated, and a third have received a booster dose. In other words ...

The vaccines are ineffective against preventing infection from omicron.

Now, the "experts" will tell you that the vaccines will keep you from getting very sick with omicron. Well, guess what?

You're probably not going to get very sick with omicron anyway.

In South Africa, where omicron first reared its ugly head, symptoms are mild and hospitalization rates are low. And the vaccination rate in South Africa is much lower than in the U.S. In the Kansas City metro, cases are near the Delta peak (which is about 80% of the November 2020 record level); the positivity rate is a whopping 38% vs. 34% at the Delta peak and 31% last January; yet deaths are at very low levels, in line with some of the lowest levels since covid first emerged.

The most common symptoms of omicron appear to be very similar to those of the common cold, or a mild flu. Forty percent of positive cases are completely asymptomatic.

Now, that could be, in part, thanks to vaccinated people getting infected, right? Well, that leads us to the point of this post:

A recent news report focused on vaccinated people who were infected with the omicron variant. They expressed surprise at how guilty they felt. Why? Because, previously, they'd felt so judgmental toward anyone who was unvaccinated, and got infected. They felt that those people deserved to get infected.

That it served them right.

Nice, huh? Yet we've seen it all across social media. An outspoken vaccine critic gets covid and dies, and the comments on their social media page are shockingly hateful. Laughing at them. Making fun of them. Referencing karma and the like.

Well, funny thing about karma - be really careful with it, because, as John Lennon sang, it's gonna get you - gonna knock you right on the head.

In this news report, the vaccinated people who got infected were saying that they realized that anyone can get covid, and that they shouldn't have been so judgmental.

In other words, they were coming to realize that we're all in this together. That the stars on their bellies don't mean a whole lot, in the grand scheme of things. Those stars are no more a differentiator than whether one is vaccinated against the flu, and you don't see people virtue-signaling over the flu vaccine, or attempting to brow-beat or ostracize others over their flu vaccination status.

And, now that omicron is the dominant covid variant, we can truly say that the flu is more severe than covid. (It probably always has been, for the vast, vast majority of us, who are under the age of 65 and don't have significant co-morbidities.)

Okay, now for those odds I promised we'd talk about. Anyone who's ever read The Curmudgeon knows he loves math. So here's some math, and it's pretty easy stuff.

If you run the numbers in terms of how many people have had covid in the U.S., and divide it by the population, then adjust it for the number of months that covid has been present in the U.S. and annualize that, your odds in any given year of getting covid are a bit less than 10%. That's with no vaccine. It's simple math, and the data is readily available: ((Total Cases / Population) / Months Since First Case ) x 12 = Annual Rate. (It actually works out to 8.4%, currently.)

Now, I would argue that there have been a lot of completely asymptomatic people running around who were never tested who had covid, which would influence the numbers higher. At the same time, in 2020, for political reasons, the testing protocols were manipulated to overstate cases, as The Curmudgeon has previously addressed, so those things may cancel each other out. (There are other complicating data, such as people getting it twice, but the incidence of that data would be statistically insignificant.)

In addition, as we've also previously discussed, other factors influence one's odds of getting covid. Population density is a biggie. Age, race, and gender all play a role. So, using The Curmudgeon as an example, a white male under 65 living in suburban Johnson County, Kansas probably has somewhat lower odds than the national average - maybe, I don't know, around 7-8%?

But, for arguments' sake, let's peg it at 10%, a nice, round, conservative number. Now, remember that post-Delta efficacy rate of 90-95%? For all practical purposes, with the vaccine, I have maybe a 10% chance of getting infected.

Same odds as if I'm unvaccinated.

And that's with delta. With omicron, by all appearances, my odds are higher. Even if I'm boosted. So ...

We truly are all in this together. Vaccinated or unvaccinated, boosted or unboosted. Stars on our bellies or no stars. We're all in this together. So there's no shame in getting sick. Just like it was before the vaccines - before covid, really. There was no shame in catching a cold, or getting the flu, or a sinus infection. It was just part of life. If someone got the flu, nobody said, "Stupid bastard should have gotten the flu shot." If your neighbor caught cold, you didn't say, "Serves her right for not wearing a mask to the store."

So if you're vaccinated, maybe it's time to get off your high horse - because maybe you've come to realize that your "high horse" was never that high. Maybe you've come to see that, at best, it's one of those mechanical horses outside the supermarket that you insert a quarter into to make it go. And at worst, it's a stick horse that you straddle, and gallop around the yard on while you scream, "Yee-haw!" If not - well, take a closer look at that horse.

Because if you insist on continuing to hang your virtue on the fact that you made the choice to get a vaccine - which, by the way, is your choice, and good for you if you made it; that's your business - you may soon find yourself having tested positive for covid, and realizing that, if the vaccine was the source of all your virtue, you have no virtue at all.

And if that happens, for the unvaccinated, let me admonish you not to succumb to the temptation to point to your star-less belly and say, "I told you so." Don't be guilty of the same sin you've complained about for lo these many months. Yeah, I get it; "they" were wrong to act the way "they" did. But two wrongs don't make a right. So be better than that.

Let the lesson for all of us be that we truly are in this together. Covid is now a common, seasonal coronavirus, like the common cold, and it's going to be with us forever. (Yet another gift from China that we're stuck with forever, like shrimp toast.) It'll continue to come and go. Some years will be worse than others. Nearly all of us will eventually have to deal with it. It'll be worse for some of us than others.

Fortunately, we now have treatments, which are even better than vaccines. Why? Because if I'm vaccinated, I can still get covid. But if I get it, vaccinated or not, I need to be able to overcome it with a treatment. Just like I can get the flu vaccine, but I can still get the flu, and if I do, I want to be able to take Tamiflu so I can get over it faster. (In fact, insert the word "flu" in the place of "covid" throughout this paragraph, and you'll see just how common covid is now.)

Only once we adopt this mindset will we truly put covid behind us - at least the fear part of it. To hell with Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the news media, the politicians, and everybody else who's trying to capitalize on that fear. Let's put Fauci back where he belongs - in the dustbin of bureaucratic obscurity. It's a false premise to say that we'll be past covid when we reach X% vaccination, because the vaccinated can very easily get covid. We'll be past covid when we figure out that covid is here, it's seasonal, it's treatable, and if we're really worried about it because we're in a particularly vulnerable population, or we're just worried about it for our own reasons, we have vaccines for it, that may help. But the bottom line?

We'll be past covid when we've figured out that it doesn't matter what X is, and when we've accepted that we're all the same, irrespective of which side of X we're on.

An Open Letter to AOC

Dear AOC,

We’ll give you a pass for your ridiculous claim that you represent “as many people, if not more, than Joe Manchin.” After all, ridiculous claims are your stock-in-trade, and you’ve demonstrated time and again that you suck at math.

(But for the record, Sen. Manchin represents more than twice as many people as you do.)

However, we would ask that you return to middle school and take a Civics class (as in government, not Honda cars), and don’t leave the classroom until you pass this time, because you clearly don’t understand how this whole thing works.

See, it matters not how many people one represents; it’s what those people want. Your constituents are probably all on welfare, and so the prospect of all the false promises of the Build Broke Better legislation sound good to them.

Sen. Manchin’s constituents, being hard-working folks, know better. They’ve been polled, and 75% of them oppose Build Broke Better. (Here’s some remedial math for you, sweetie: if he represents more than twice as many people as you do, and 75% of his constituents oppose Build Broke Better, that means that he represents more people who oppose Build Broke Better than the total number of people you represent.)

So you see, Sen. Manchin is doing what the people of West Virginia elected him to do: representing their interests. You claimed that he was guilty of “an egregious breach of the President’s trust.” Well, see, the President didn’t appoint him. He was elected by the people of his state. So it’s their trust that matters, not the President’s. This is one of the things you need to make sure you learn in that Civics class before you head back to D.C.

Another thing you need to learn is that, in a democratic Republic, you’re not always going to get your way. (Once you learn that, go back to Washington and explain it to your Squad Sisters – and Bernie, while you’re at it.) You say that the system needs to change, because one man shouldn’t be able to block a bill.

Well, that’s not what happened here.

Fifty Republican Senators firmly oppose Build Broke Better. And so does Joe Manchin, the lone voice of reason in the Democrat party (unless Kyrsten Sinema still opposes it; she’s kinda been lost in the shuffle since Sunday’s bombshell announcement by Manchin).

Here’s a little more remedial math – and I’ll go slow, because I know that I need to with you: there are 100 Senators. Fifty Republicans, plus one Joe Manchin, equals 51. Fifty-one is more than half of 100, so that’s a majority. And if a majority of the Senate opposes a piece of legislation, that piece of legislation fails, and “the system” is working exactly as the framers intended for it to work. One man didn’t block it; 51 people did.

I hope you do well in your Civics class. Try not to get too discouraged if it’s graded on the curve. Just do your best, and remember: those other kids may be smarter than you, but you’re a whole lot more entertaining.

Sincerely yours,

The Economic Curmudgeon

The Madness of Mad Money

You may have tuned in to the CNBC show, "Mad Money," starring Jim Cramer. Cramer has always been a highly entertaining guy - loud, bombastic, talks a mile a minute, and very opinionated. Sometimes to his own detriment.

Now, I used to kind of like Cramer. He's actually made me some money over the years with his stock picks. Based on his research, I bought Ulta and Ambarella, and did quite well in the former and pretty good in the latter. But he's also made some real dud calls - like urging people to buy Bear Stearns in early 2008. (Bear Stearns failed in March of that year.)

Cramer is a very smart guy, and generally a great stock-picker. His record, and his portfolio, speak for themselves (although he's undoubtedly made more money as a TV celebrity and off his personal brand than he ever did, or could have, in the markets; otherwise he'd still be working in the markets am I right?).

However, I have long been aware that Cramer either doesn't know jack about macroeconomics, or he simply doesn't care about the greater good where macroeconomic policy is concerned. We can now extend that to public health policy, and public policy in general, and in a frankly alarming way. But first, let's focus on the macroeconomic piece.

In 2007, Cramer went on an epic, on-air rant on CNBC, screaming that then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke should open the Fed's discount window - the borrowing till for banks - and cut the borrowing rate for banks to zero in order to save firms like Bear Stearns from failing. He predicted that, if the Fed didn't do that, those firms would indeed fail.

Well, Bear Stearns did. So, six months later, did Lehman Brothers. The rest of Wall Street, and much of the rest of the banking system, eventually had to be bailed out. So Cramer was right, yes? Yes, but ... so what? The Fed knew all that would happen, too. So Cramer wasn't omniscient; he didn't know anything that Bernanke didn't know. (Don't get me wrong; Bernanke didn't see the housing bubble forming, or the bust coming. Neither did Cramer, for that matter. I did. So I'm not defending Bernanke. I think he's an idiot. I'm just saying he knew what Cramer knew. So did anyone who was paying attention back then, because we were in the middle of a shyte-storm.)

So why didn't the Fed open the discount window, like Cramer wanted them to do, and cut the borrowing rate for banks to zero? Because ...

Saving those banks from failing isn't the Fed's job.

There's this thing called moral hazard. And it comes from letting huge companies take huge risks, then bailing them out instead of letting them fail when the risks go against them. It creates an incentive for them to keep taking huge risks, and it puts the taxpayer on the hook for it. (That's a gross over-simplification, but I don't want to take the time to expound on it.)

Why, then, did Cramer want the Fed to save those firms, if it isn't the Fed's job? Two reasons: one, he had a lot of buddies that worked there, from the corner offices to the trading floors. And they were all calling him, crying that they were going to lose their seven-figure-a-year jobs - never mind that it was because they made a bunch of risky trades that they probably didn't really understand when they made them. But they were afraid they'd lose their houses in the Hamptons, so they called their buddy Jim, who's on TV all the time, hoping he could persuade somebody, anybody, to listen, and help them out.

And the second reason?

Cramer makes money when the stock market goes up. So he wants it to always go up.

That's key. Cramer will say anything, advocate for anything, to try to prop up the stock market. Even if it's bad policy. Bad economic policy, bad fiscal policy, and now bad public health policy. Or just bad public policy.

(The Curmudgeon, on the other hand, has figured out that you can make money when the market goes up OR down. Seeing the market crash coming in 2008, he shorted the market, and made money while it was tanking.)

After the Great Recession was over, the Fed kept rates too low, too long, which is how the housing bubble got inflated to begin with; they did the same thing after the dot-com recession in 2000. So when Bernanke and Co. decided to start raising rates, Cramer went on another rant, screaming that they shouldn't do it, they should keep rates low - even though the economy was ready to stand on its own two feet, and continuing to keep rates that low would probably fuel another bubble.

Why would Cramer do that? Why would he advocate for bad - actually, dangerous - monetary policy?

Because he was afraid that, if the Fed began to raise rates, the stock market rally would end, and stock prices would stop going up.

In other words, Jim Cramer is nothing more than a prostitute, and his pimp is a rising stock market.

Now, recently, Cramer went even further off the deep end. He actually said that the government needed to just mandate covid vaccines for every man, woman and child - not just workers at companies with more than 100,000 employees. Not just government employees and contractors. EVERYBODY. And, get this - how would Cramer make sure that everyone complied?

He would have the military enforce this new mandate.

That's right, boys and girls. Jim Cramer would have armed American soldiers stand guard over you while someone sticks a needle in your arm. And I guess, if you tried to cut and run, he'd have the soldier shoot you.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Now, why would Cramer make that quantum leap into the realm of totalitarianism?

Simple: he made that statement the day the news of the omicron variant dropped, which sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 900 points on the day.

Never mind that we've since learned that omicron is much milder than delta (4700 cases in the UK; 10 hospitalizations; 1 death). Never mind that the Dow since recovered (in just ten trading days) to more than the level where it was prior to the omicron news.

Never mind that, of the 43 US cases as of a couple of days ago, 79% of them were among vaccinated people, and 41% of those vaccinated people had gotten a booster. So much for your vaccine mandate, Cramer, you stupid sack of ...

But I digress. See, Cramer is tired of seeing covid news cause big market drops. So he thinks if we just vaccinate everybody, covid will go away, and the market will go up forever. Well, I've got a few hard life lessons for ya, Jimmy-boy:

1. Covid ain't going away. Don't like it? Blame Fauci and his Chinese buddies; they created it. The vaccines aren't working - witness the data points listed above, and there's plenty more where that came from. Plus, they wear off. Your plan would keep the army pretty busy, I guess, because we'd be vaccinating every couple of months. And people would still get infected. And there would still be new variants.
2. As long as we have a media in this country, we'll have those market reactions, because the media is selling fear, and the market is buying. Maybe if your buddies on the trading floor were a mite bit smarter, they wouldn't freak out every time the media hypes something like omicron. The rest of us seem to have figured out that all of this fearmongering from the media (and hacks like Fauci) is much ado about nothing. Why does the market have to poop its collective diaper every time CNN projectile-vomits up some new covid crisis?
3. If you were a little smarter with your (and your viewers') money, you could profit from those dips. I bought stocks after the omicron dip, and I'm looking pretty good today. I jump in and out of the market on covid news, buying when these freak-out headlines send the market reeling, and taking my profits when it recovers, so that I have some cash on hand to jump back in.

Now, Cramer has taken it even one step further, if you can believe it: he just tweeted that "the government has a right to force you to obey."

Think about that for a minute. If you've read the same Constitution and Bill of Rights that I read, do you recall seeing anything about the government having rights? Doesn't the government exist to protect and defend our rights? Are governments endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights?

No. Because you know who their Creator is?

WE ARE, Cramer, you blathering, mindless, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, hopeless, heartless, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey poop!!!

(Yeah, I borrowed heavily there from Chevy Chase's rant in "Christmas Vacation," edited for decency. 'Tis the season, ho ho ho, and all that.)

So yeah, I can only assume that Cramer has gone finally and fully MAD; so hell-bent on arguing for any policy that will put a jack under stock prices that he'd advocate for his children to be sent to the gulag, if he thought it would result in a 10% pop in the FANGs.

Hey Jim, if you haven't figured out by now that markets go down as well as up; and if you can't figure out how to advise your audience what to do when that happens; maybe it's time to admit that you're over your head. It was a good ride, you milked it for all you could, but you've exposed yourself. You're clearly out of your depth. Hand the reins over to somebody who gets the big picture, the whole picture, and retire.

Before it's too late, and the grey matter goes so soft, you have trouble remembering what you were talking about. We've seen that happen quite a bit lately, and it's rather sad.

Not Who, But What

By now, you're probably aware that this year, we've seen about two million immigrants cross our southern border illegally - more than in 2018, 2019 and 2020 combined. Our southern border is completely open. Some illegal immigrants are met by border agents and released; many are "gotaways," who cross and run, not wanting to be confronted by agents (which should be of no small concern - what do they have to hide?).

These immigrants aren't just from Mexico and Central America, they're from the Middle East and Eastern Europe. I'm not prejudiced against people from those countries. But we have had people on terrorist watch lists that have crossed the border, along with people that have serious criminal records, some of whom have committed heinous crimes once in the U.S. And I have a problem with that. We also don't test anyone who crosses the border for covid - not a huge concern of mine, except that we treat our own unvaccinated and untested citizens like criminals.

Along with the people have come record amounts of drugs, including fentanyl. Through mid-May, more fentanyl was seized than in all of 2020, and that's just what was seized. Both the flow of people and the flow of drugs into the U.S. are controlled by Mexican cartels, which are making vast sums of money from this trafficking. (And some of it is truly human trafficking; women and children are being trafficked into the U.S. for slavery, including the sex trade, and along the journey they're being raped by the cartels that are trafficking them.) Yes, the cartels now control our southern border, and they're openly firing automatic weapons - real automatic weapons, not the AR-15s that the Left mistakenly refer to as automatic weapons - across the Rio Grande at our border agents, openly mocking the fecklessness of our leadership in combating them.

You may also be aware of the disastrous pull-out from Afghanistan that left 13 U.S. service men and women dead outside the Kabul airport, killed seven innocent Afghan children and an Afghan "friendly" in a drone strike that we were initially proudly told killed an ISIS suicide bomber, and left hundreds of U.S. citizens and Afghan friendlies stranded in-country after we were promised that we'd stay until they all got out. The State Department and military leadership don't really know how many are stranded, but it appears to be more than they're admitting.

And you undoubtedly know that, having just passed a trillion-dollar infrastructure spending bill through both houses of Congress, the Democrats are now pushing Joe Biden's massive $1.75 trillion (down from the original $6 trillion pushed by Bernie Sanders) "Build Back Better" plan, that would include a number of Socialist spending measures funded by the biggest tax increase since FDR, accompanied by the biggest expansion of IRS powers in history. The measure would weaponize the IRS the way the DOJ has weaponized the FBI against parents of schoolchildren, opening up audits to those earning less than $75,000 a year in an effort to squeeze every last dime out of American workers in order to feed the Washington bear (no wasted symbolism that the hungry animal I use in this simile is the California state animal, or the symbol of the Soviet Union).

On to more local trends. If you've watched the news lately, you've seen the images - they should be shocking to us, but I'm afraid they're not anymore - of a bunch of organized looters armed with guns, hammers and crowbars running out of a Nordstrom's in Walnut Creek, California and jumping into waiting getaway cars, then speeding off to safety, knowing that they wouldn't be prosecuted under that state's non-existent shoplifting laws. Similar crimes happened at Louis Vuitton and Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. This isn't the ghetto, folks. Walnut Creek is well outside of San Francisco. I was just through there a couple of months ago. It's as suburban as my hometown of Overland Park, Kansas.

In downtown San Francisco, Walgreen's, CVS and Target are closing stores right and left due to the shoplifting epidemic. The mayor, ever in denial, claims that the chains are closing those stores simply because they're unprofitable. I realize that she doesn't understand how business works, but it's hard to turn a profit when your shrinkage rate is skyrocketing. Who loses as a result of these closures? The elderly urban dweller who now has to walk many blocks to get her prescriptions in an ever more dangerous city, because her neighborhood pharmacy had to close.

In Los Angeles, "follow-home robberies" have become commonplace. In these crimes, thieves wait outside high-end retail stores until shoppers take their wares to their cars, then follow them home, and either block them into their driveways or follow them into their houses and steal the goods, along with other valuables. The thieves are armed, and threaten to kill the victims and their families, which have included children sleeping inside the home. At least one recent incident resulted in a shooting death.

The response of city officials? Don't attempt to evade or defend yourself or your property. Instead, be a "good witness." In other words, be a compliant victim. We'll eventually get around to prosecuting these criminals, most of whom are gang members. Yeah, LA has a great track record in combating gang violence. The gangs control LA like the cartels control the southern border.

Then, of course, there was the tragic story of the man who drove his SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, killing and injuring a number of people. We later learned that he had a long rap sheet and several outstanding warrants, and was only free to do what he did - apparently intentionally - because of lax bail laws.

And also in Wisconsin, we have the entire Kyle Rittenhouse affair. One of the things we learned from his trial is that he was asked by a business owner in Kenosha to come and help protect his car dealership from rioters, because the night before, another dealership had been burned to the ground while police stood by, helpless to do anything, outnumbered by rioters. The Governor had refused offers from the President to send in National Guard troops to help protect Kenosha's citizens and property in the riots that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Why? A stubborn partisan pissing match.

So a Kenosha business owner was so desperate, having lost one of his businesses to arsonist, rioting thugs, that he asked a 17-year-old kid to help protect another of his businesses. And the ultimate outcome was that two men who attacked that kid, and threatened his life, died. If anything, their deaths are on the Governor's head.

***************

There's an excellent, and probably underrated, song by Living Colour called "Cult of Personality." It was released in 1988. Check out some of the lyrics:

Look in my eyes, what do you see?

The cult of personality

I know your anger, I know your dreams

I've been everything you want to be

I'm the cult of personality

Like Mussolini and Kennedy ...

Neon lights, a Nobel Prize

Then a mirror speaks, the reflection lies

You don't have to follow me

Only you can set me free

I sell the things you need to be

I'm the smiling face on your TV

I'm the cult of personality

I exploit you, still you love me

I tell you one and one makes three

I'm the cult of personality

Like Joseph Stalin and Gandhi ...

Neon lights, a Nobel Prize

A leader speaks, that leader dies

You don't have to follow me

Only you can set you free ...

The song is about celebrity, but on a political level. It mentions Mussolini and Kennedy, Stalin and Gandhi, in the same couplets, to illustrate that while one is seen as good and one bad, they were equally followed by the masses because of their larger-than-life personalities. They may exploit their followers, but still they're loved by them.

There are lyrical references to why we're drawn to these political figures: "I know your anger, I know your dreams ...", "I've been everything you want to be ..." (or appear to have been), "I sell the things you need to be ...". The song also speaks to the message delivered by politicians: "A mirror speaks, the reflection lies ...", "I'm the smiling face on your TV ...", "I tell you one and one makes three ...". And the reference to "a Nobel Prize" is most curious, as the song pre-dates Nobel Prize-winner Barack Obama's Presidency by years, yet he may be the ultimate example of the Cult of Personality among U.S. politicians.

The song issues a final warning in subtly shifting the line, "only you can set me free" to "only you can set you free." And that's the point of this post.

***************

So what does the song have to do with all the current events listed at the beginning of the post, and with the title?

Everything.

See, when we vote, we tend to vote for the person. It's been that way for a very long time. Remember "I Like Ike"? It wasn't, "I Like the Eisenhower Doctrine," or "I Like Modern Republicanism." It was about Ike the man, and it shouldn't go unnoticed that he was the first widely televised President. Known for his big grin, he was the first "smiling face on your TV."

It's gotten worse in the age of television. Viable candidates like Paul Simon of Illinois and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut were strong on policy, but never gained a lot of traction with voters, in part, I believe, due to the fact that they weren't all that telegenic. On the flip side, JFK was an enormously popular President, in spite of very limited experience coming into office (similar to Obama), and a scant track record during his short time as POTUS before he was assassinated - and a track record marred by some pretty spectacular blunders. But he was a really good-looking guy, with a fashion model wife, and there was all the mystique of "Camelot."

The point is that we vote for people, not policies, but policies are what we get. So maybe we should flip the script and think about what we're voting for, not who. (Forgive me, fellow grammar-Nazis.)

Now, easier said than done, right? Because after all, "the mirror speaks, the reflection lies." Nobody's going to say, "If elected, I'm going to let two million illegal immigrants across the border in my first ten months," or "A vote for me is a vote for unfettered crime!", or "You want riots in the streets? I'm your guy!"

But we're smart people. And we ought to be able to test the winds of change, read the writing on the wall, and get an idea of what might be coming. We also ought to be able to figure out the implications of one-party rule. We're seeing the damage it can do in just a very short time. I shudder to think how much worse it can get by January 2023. Thank God much of that time will be spent campaigning.

Now, at the same time, we have to set aside party-line partisanship. It may drive you nuts to think of having an R or a D in any office, depending on which side of the fence you've got your heels dug into. But think about it: did the fact that the last mayor of your city was from the party you despise really screw up your life? No? Then stop grousing about the outcome of that race and get on with your life, and focus on the stuff that really matters. I'll give you a hint, as a head start: blind partisanship for its own sake isn't among that stuff. Policy, that which affects you and your fellow citizens, IS that stuff.

So here's what it comes down to. Remember when Californians went to the polls to decide whether to retain Gavin Newsom as their Governor? Now, Newsom is a telegenic guy if ever there was one. He was running against Larry Elder, not the best-looking guy in the world, and Caitlyn Jenner, who ... well, I won't even go there.

Ultimately, California voted to keep Newsom. (That makes it sound like a decision to keep a pit bull that won't stop biting the neighbors, which is actually a pretty good analogy.) Or, as one of my friends rather bluntly put it, California said, "Govern me harder."

But is that the message Californians really sent at the ballot box? I'd argue that it's not.

Instead, Californians said, "I want looters to be able to run into the Nordstrom's in Walnut Creek with crowbars and guns, and steal as much stuff as they can carry out. I don't really care if it terrorizes the store clerks to the point that they decide to quit their jobs, or if it means that retailers have to raise prices so that I have to pay more for the stuff I buy. And the same goes for the high-end stores in Beverly Hills."

"I'd like to see the suburban shopping malls ringed with concertina wire." That's another recent development in the "Golden" State.

"I want CVS and Walgreen's to pull out of downtown San Francisco, even if it means little old ladies have to risk getting mugged because they now have to walk twenty blocks to get their arthritis scripts refilled. Better that than enforce shoplifting laws." The San Francisco DA is also facing a recall election. It'll be interesting to see how he fares.

"I like the idea of playing 'chase' with the gang-bangers in LA, having them follow me home from the store and try to break into my house and steal my stuff. It'll be like a video game. Don't worry, I'll be a good little witness. I'll even show 'em where I keep the good silver. They probably won't shoot my kids in their sleep." The actor Seth Rogen recently said - publicly - that this is just life in a big city, and people should get over it.

"I don't want to be able to mow my lawn with a gas mower anymore." That was a unilateral decision made by Newsom not long after he was retained in the recall vote: a ban on gas mowers in California, effective in a couple of years. But I'll bet they use gas machinery in his Napa Valley vineyard.

When voters in Wisconsin pulled the lever for Gov. Tony Evers, they said, "Why should Minneapolis get all the attention? We want riots in Kenosha, too! And we want Tony to stand up to the Bad Orange Man and refuse the National Guard, even if it means that teenage kids with AR-15s have to defend local businesses. We'll just count on the mainstream media to label those kids as white supremacists, and surely they'll be found guilty of murder, especially if the media leans on the jurors a little."

And, "We don't want restrictive bail laws. We're a progressive state. So what if a guy has a long history of breaking the law, including violent crime and even trying run someone over with his car? What's he gonna do, drive through a downtown Christmas parade or something. Ha! Ya, hey dere!"

Finally, when people marked their ballot for Biden and Harris, they weren't voting for those two. (Actually, most of them were voting against Trump more than for Biden. Biden couldn't even beat Bernie Sanders in the primaries without a lot of help from the Party Machine. And Harris was the ultimate identity politics pick, who had to bail on the 2020 Presidential campaign before the primaries even began, so unpopular was she among her own party's voters.) But no, they were actually saying this:

"I want a couple million immigrants a year to cross our borders illegally - I don't care from where - and I want them to bring all the fentanyl they can carry. Never mind whether they have a criminal record, are on a terror watch list, or have covid."

"I want to pay $3.40 a gallon for gas, not $2.15 a gallon. And while I'm at it, my Thanksgiving dinners have been way too cheap. I want to show how thankful I really am, by paying more for Thanksgiving dinner (and everything else) than I ever have."

"I want to have to wait to get the things I order for my kids for Christmas, or for that treadmill I bought. And I want to not be able to find what I need at the store. The Soviet Union shouldn't be the only nation in history that had bread lines."

"I want 13 of our finest to be killed due to incompetent military leadership, and I'm okay with innocent kids being killed in an errant drone strike."

"I want us to keep spending money until there's nothing left to spend, and if that means I get audited by the IRS, that's okay - I'm fine paying more in taxes, even though I only make $55,000 a year."

Now, you could argue, of course, that someone who voted for Trump voted for an insurrection. I'm okay with that, if you want to define an "insurrection" as a bunch of unorganized yahoos traipsing through the Capitol, taking selfies, all the while escorted by Capitol police, like so many docents guiding a rowdy tour group.

Or that they voted for more mean tweets. God, how I miss the mean tweets.

But they also voted for a strong economy. Cheap gas and energy independence. Low inflation. Secure borders. A President unafraid to answer questions, and who doesn't need note cards to do it, and will take them from any reporter. Who isn't told by his handlers what to do and say, and who to answer to, and when to turn his back on reporters and walk off stage. A President who has the respect of our allies and our enemies alike. Who has respect for our military, and for law enforcement.

A Vice President who doesn't cackle at the most inappropriate times. Who actually has a grasp of the issues such that he can intelligently answer a question. That doesn't embarrass us on the world stage. That, when tasked with handling a problem, doesn't avoid it instead. That doesn't need staged photo-ops with paid child actors to appear approachable and relatable.

So in 2022 and 2024, remember that you're not voting for the whom, but for the what. Don't focus on "the smiling face on your TV," because one and one does not make three. The mirror may speak, but the reflection too often lies.

Toward the end of the song, the lyrics speak this truth: "You gave me power in your own God's name." Don't forget that; they have no power but what you give them, and what you give, you can take back. Above all else, especially don't forget these words:

"You don't have to follow me,

Only you can set you free."