Decades of farmer legislative success have made producers in many agricultural segments into lieges of the state. While farmers have no problem getting a fill suckling on the teat of government subsidies, these same farmers think it is un-American for poor people (especially Black ones) to get similar government help.

I won’t waste space calling for an end to farmer welfare programs. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, the two most popular presidents in the last 70 years, (measured by end of term Gallup job approval ratings) both  put a great deal of effort into reining in these programs. They failed miserably.

Farm subsidy payments ballooned under Donald Trump. Between 2019 and 2020, total direct government payments to farmers increased  over 107 percent. In 2020, direct government payments to farmers set a new record $51.2 billion, or 43.8% of net farm income (also a new record). The subsidy payments are just the tip of the support farmers get from the government.

Note: To be fair, part of the reason for the 2020 record is because of the impact Trump’s disastrous trade war had on farm income. Trump’s trade war was just one of the avoidable and continual disasters that marked  Trump’s presidency. Fairness or un-fairness of trade agreements have absolutely no impact on trade balances. The difference between a country’s exports and imports always equals that country’s net national savings. https://www.frugalron.com/the-curse-of-liberalism/

Trump gave us real world proof of the futility of a trade war by having the second largest trade deficits in US history (second only to  Republican President George W. Bush).  Many other industries suffered because of Trump’s trade war fiasco, but they didn’t get huge subsidies to bail them out like farmers did.

Slogans like “Don’t complain on a full stomach” are just fine on a pickup bumper, but don’t stand up to real scrutiny when talking about farmer welfare payments. Somehow, products like meat, potatoes and eggs miraculously make it from farm to market without government help (with the exception of grading and health inspections). Highly perishable products like fruits and vegetables also rely on market forces to set prices and get them to the grocery store with little or no government interference.

Many countries around the world manage to get farm products to market by relying on good old fashioned capitalism. These countries do this in spite of the international market distortions caused by US farm programs. The reason the US has an abundance of food is because we have terrific soil , climate, infrastructure and technology – not because of farmer welfare payments.

Let’s look at the gravy train…

The core of US farm programs are support for corn, soybeans, wheat, rice and  cotton. The Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) loan programs guarantee farmers loans for all the covered grains they produce. The per bushel price may be higher than the market price. The interest rate is subsidized. Next, the Price Loss Coverage Program guarantees farmers a “Target price” for their grain or cotton. If the average market price over the year is below the target price, farmer’s get a check for the difference. Livestock producers that market all their grain through their livestock also collect this subsidy.

As any conservative capitalist will tell you, “The best cure for low prices is low prices.”  The market distorting government programs provide price floors for farmers protecting them from the full impact of supply and demand driven price drops.  No other industry in our capitalistic economy gets these protections. 

If the above sounds like a “Minimum Wage” program, you are catching on. The only differences are target prices are updated every four years and are much more generous than minimum wages.

Besides eliminating a good chunk of price risk for farmers, the government also subsidizes crop insurance for them in case of poor yields. Depending on the level of coverage, this insurance is subsidized from 38-80 percent of actual cost.

To Republicans, when farmers get highly subsidized price insurance, that is part of the “Farm Safety Net”.  If a low income Black person gets government subsidized health insurance, that is socialism.

Ethanol

The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates gasoline and diesel producers  blend renewable biofuels into their supply. In 2022, the law mandates blending 36 billion gallons of ethanol. This represents an amazing 40 percent of the corn grown in the US. Biofuel producers also receive tax credits to subsidize production.

For a group of people that are absolutely opposed to government mandates, farmers conveniently look the other way when government mandates the gasoline industry use 36 billion gallons of ethanol annually. Consumers certainly don’t seem to want the stuff, based on huge billboards advertising “ethanol free gas”.

Farmers claim accurately that ethanol helps the US maintain energy independence while creating less greenhouse gasses than gasoline. Yet, when farmers and Republicans are confronted with President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” act that will make a far bigger impact on energy independence and lowering greenhouse gas emissions than ethanol, all  the concern about energy independence and climate change disappears.

It is interesting that Biden’s plan includes$320 billion for clean energy tax credits, $105 billion for resilience investments, $110 billion for clean energy technology, manufacturing, and supply chain investments and incentives, $20 billion for clean energy procurement and $960million to retrofit fuel storage to handle bio-fuels. Biden’s bill does not include any mandates.

By 2035, auto makers claim they will no longer produce gasoline powered cars. Bet the farm on this. Republican farmers, who regularly complain that government can’t do anything right, will be demanding that government come up with a solution for what to do with all the millions of bushels of corn now used for ethanol.

The ethanol mandate highlights even more hypocrisy. The federal government often requires its suppliers hire a workforce that is representative of the population where the company is located. Government might also mandate their employees get vaccinated  to protect themselves and other employees from dangerous diseases.

To most farmers, forcing private companies to hire more Black people or women is extreme government over-reach, socialism or for sure – communism! As well, most farmers agree that mandating protections from disease are infringements on basic liberties.  However, if government mandates 36 billion gallons of ethanol on a public that doesn’t want it, well, that of course, is completely different.

In fact, it isn’t at all different. It is hypocrisy to embrace one government mandate that gets rid of 40 percent of the corn grown in the US while criticizing other government mandates that improve and protect lives.

Milk

Socialism has many faces. One of them is certainly Federal Milk Marketing Orders (FMMOs). Only a few people claim to actually understand these voluminous tomes to bureaucracy – and most of them are lying.

About 75 percent of milk produced in the US is marketed through FMMOs. They are designed to get dairy farmers a “fair” value for their milk. For capitalists, and most non-agricultural producers, a fair value is a market clearing value and doesn’t have any government involvement.  These rules involve the federal government in farm milk price discovery and the FMMOs also stifle competition. But wait, isn’t that socialism?

If the “fair” value of milk established by the FMMOs isn’t enough, dairy farmers can also use the Dairy Revenue Price Protection Program to buy price insurance. The federal government subsidizes the insurance from 44 to 55 percent based on the level of coverage.  So, one might ask, “If dairy farmers are for government subsidized price insurance, what is so different for working poor people getting government subsidized health insurance?”

So, taxpayers are funding FMMOs to keep consumer milk prices higher than they would otherwise be. At the same time, taxpayers are heavily subsidizing price insurance for a group of people who are vehemently against tax payer subsidized health insurance for poor working people.

Unfortunately for dairy farmers, FMMOs and the army of bureaucrats that administer them can’t completely isolate farmers from market forces. Consumers have discovered they can drink almonds. The dairy alternatives market was valued at $22.6 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $40.6 billion by 2026.

For some struggling dairy producers, the solution is more government in the form of federal government mandated milk prices and production quotas. The late Soviet dictator,Joseph Stalin,   would be so proud.

Sugar

While corn, soybean, rice, cotton and dairy farmers make a mockery of free market capitalism, they are in the minor leagues compared to sugar producers.

Most US sugar comes from sugar beets produced in the Red River Valley in northwest Minnesota and eastern North and South Dakota.  Sugar beets are the most inefficient way to produce sugar and can’t compete with imported cane sugar. Having worked in the Red River Valley, I can tell you there is no money in farming like sugar beet farming.

Sugar producers use government enforced import quotas to stifle foreign competition. Then, they formed a cartel and use market quotas to further stifle competition. Rather than letting government set prices and quotas like dairy farmers propose, the sugar producers get away with doing this themselves.  Analysts at the American Enterprise Institute estimate these policies inflate U.S. sugar prices by 69 percent above the global sugar price and provide $1.2 billion worth of annual support to sugar growers and processors. This makes sugar the fourth most subsidized crop in absolute terms.  americanactionforum.org/…/primer-agriculture-subsidies-and-their-influence-on-the-composition-of-u-s-food-supply-and-consumption

According to the CATO Institute, “The U.S. sugar program is a prime example of discredited economic central planning in action.” https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/candy-coated-cartel-time-kill-us-sugar-program

This is just another example of the hypocrisy among the same farmers that decry policies that help poor people as socialist.

What do these subsidies and anti-capitalistic programs accomplish?

Economists say  excess profits are capitalized into the factors of production. In other words, farm subsidies and protections from market forces jack up land prices. These excess profits are not distributed evenly. With or without the farm welfare programs, there is a bell shaped distribution of profits among farmers. Lots of producers are in the middle range with some very profitable and some very unprofitable operators on each side.

The subsidies and market distortions contribute to the concentration of larger farms. These programs supercharge the earnings of the most profitable operators. Profitable operators will expand to maximize profits. At the same time, these programs have raised land prices far above where they would otherwise be. This is a powerful incentive for less profitable operators to sell out. Who wants to work 16 hour days, seven days a week when you can sell the farm and be an instant millionaire?

Also, these programs are self perpetrating. A farm bill is passed and raises land prices. Four years later a new farm bill will be passed by – you guessed it – congressmen from districts heavily populated by farmers. The lobbyists will tell the legislators that land prices and rents have risen dramatically since the last bill was passed. The only solution is to raise loan rates, target prices and all the rest to higher levels. And, the cycle repeats again.

I should admit that during Frugal Ron’s 12 plus year farming career, I maximized every farm program available. However, I always looked at them as glorified welfare programs and never looked down at government programs for poor people that needed more help than I did. Again, that is what this article is really about. Farm programs are here to stay. The point I’m trying to make is farmers should not be against government programs that help poor people achieve basic human needs while gobbling up every farm welfare dollar available themselves.

White privilege

It is worthwhile to try and understand the impact of White privilege in agriculture and how this relates to the dichotomy of the money and special protections White farmers get.

There are very few first or second generation US farmers. Frugal Ron can attest to how difficult it is to make it as a farmer when paying market rates for land, machinery and cattle without substantial off-farm income. Most farms are multi-generational enterprises, and there is good reason for that.

One of President Franklin  Roosevelt’s New Deal creations was the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) loan program in the 1930’s. FmHA gave aspiring farmers low interest, long term loans to buy foreclosed or abandoned farms, usually with no money down. Men with families that got one of these loans usually got a draft deferment and didn’t have to fight in WWII.  Commodity prices were very high during the war and shortly thereafter, enabling many of these farmers to pay their loans off early.

If you Google “fmha discrimination lawsuits”, there is a long list. I can relate to the discrimination. My father was the most blatantly racist and anti-Semitic person I’ve ever known. And, he was an FmHA loan officer for over 30 years.  While I don’t expect he ever got to turn down a Black farmer’s loan application in west-central Wisconsin, his being able to hold his position in FmHA for as long as he did speaks volumes about the culture of the organization from the 1930’s into the 60’s. The kinds of opportunities FmHA provided, or more importantly, didn’t provide, shaped the agriculture we see today in the US. FMHA discrimination is a major reason there are so few Black farmers.

These opportunities are important. In my lifetime in agriculture, I never met a US Jewish farmer. Yet, in Israel, they are the world’s most productive and efficient producers.

The net result of this is that almost all of today’s multi-generational farmers have never have had to fill out a job application. They never had to worry about getting laid off. Or, if their car didn’t start in the morning, getting fired for being late to work.

If they are good at what they do, farmers make phenomenal amounts of money. If they aren’t good managers, unless they really screw-up, they can sell out and be very wealthy. This is an example of White privilege that most Black people can only dream about.

This helps to explain why a Farm Journal poll in January 2019 found that Donald Trump had an 83 percent approval rating among those in the agricultural business. This wasn’t just due to the massive subsidies Trump bestowed on farmers. During the height of Trump’s disastrous trade war, when dairy farmers were dropping like overweight old people in a hot yoga class, Trump’s farmer approval rating was still over 80 percent. These numbers are double what Trump’s overall job approval rating  averaged through his term.

I use Trump’s approval rating or vote percentage as a proxy measure for racism. This is an accurate measure. Because of Trump’s unique level of stupidity, he is the only president in US history that mucked up everything he touched. His presidency is remembered for hundreds of thousands of un-necessary COVD deaths, record setting job and GDP destruction, record setting deficits and percentage spending increases, over 16,000 lies and attempting to overthrow our electoral democracy. Details and data sources are at  https://www.frugalron.com/the-trump-disaster/

While Trump is a fake conservative, a fake billionaire and a fake Christian, there is no denying he is a genuine racist. Looking at the results of Trump’s presidency,  the only reason anyone would ever want him back is that they share his racism. Hence, I find Trump’s popularity rating as an excellent measure of that group’s racism.

Racism and White privilege’s impact

Nothing gets farmers more defensive than talking about their subsidies. Typically, farmers will justify these government handouts by saying that farmers work really hard and that they need them. No argument here on either point.

However, when Obamacare, housing subsidies or food stamps are brought up, these are totally different. Pollsters won’t get this response, but someone very involved with agriculture will get an unvarnished answer along the line of “Niggers just sit on their asses all day and never do any work. They just sit around doing drugs and collecting welfare.” Ask one of these farmers if they’ve ever known a Black person and you’ll get an answer like, “I know all about them.”

Republicans also are sure that safety net programs for poor people are just a waste of money. On this point also, they are very wrong.

According to David L. Kirp, a professor of public policy, “Half a century ago, 123 three- and four-year-olds, all of them African American and all from low-income families who lived on the wrong side of the tracks in Ypsilanti, Mich., participated in an experiment. About half attended a pioneering early education program called Perry Preschool, while the control group did not have the same opportunity. Remarkably, researchers have been able to track the lives of most of these children ever since. The fact that lifelong benefits — including greater academic success, higher earnings and better health — began with two years of high-quality preschool has commanded widespread attention.”

“A study published this summer by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman and his colleagues takes the implications of Perry a giant step further. This research demonstrates that the children of the Perry preschoolers are also better off because of their parents’ experience.”

“As the Perry preschoolers grew up, they became better educated and developed greater socio-emotional skills than the control group. They became better parents — their children grew up in more stable two-parent families that earned, on average, about $10,000 more a year — enough to lift many of them out of poverty.”

This healthy upbringing has had a prolonged impact on the children of the Perry preschoolers. Compared to the offspring of the control group, they were substantially less likely to have been suspended or assigned to special education, and more likely to have graduated from high school. Now in their 20s, they’re more likely to have jobs and be in good health and less likely to be divorced.

The bottom line: Good early education accelerates upward social mobility across generations.

Another point, “expanding Medicaid eligibility for low-income families. In a recent American Economic Review article, Andrew Goodman-Bacon, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank, concludes that, as much as a half-century later, early childhood Medicaid eligibility reduces mortality and disability, increases employment and improves health. Since its inception in the 1960s, “Medicaid has saved the government more than its original cost and saved more than 10 million quality adjusted life years.”

“Another study has found that when the children who grew up in Medicaid-eligible households were in their 20s, they were more likely to have gone to college than those whose families, despite their similar economic circumstances, had the misfortune of living in a state where their families were not eligible for Medicaid. Now they are earning more and paying more taxes.”

“Critics have used the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) as a punching bag, the nanny state exemplified, ever since the passage of the Food Stamp Act in 1964. This critique is flat-out wrong. A 2018 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that SNAP has helped to dramatically reduce child poverty and that twice as many children would live in deep poverty without the program.”

“Recent research shows that the food stamp program has had a decades-long effect on the health, economic self-sufficiency and the overall well-being of children who came of age in those families. These children are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college, earn more and stay out of prison.”

Summing up…

The image of all farmers being rugged individualists that are the American dream of entrepreneurial independence is a myth. Crop, dairy and sugar farmers are essentially wards of the federal government. They owe their existence to federal handouts, mandates and federal protections from capitalism, competition, weather and market forces. This isn’t opinion, this is fact.

It is ridiculous to ask that these farmers just be more responsible and work a little harder and  that they will miraculously break away from their government dependence. Yet, these same farmers need to recognize that the same advice is equally ridiculous for most low income Black people that weren’t born with the same opportunities multi-generational farmers were born with.

 

The United States Supreme Court will soon decide if they will overturn Roe versus Wade, the landmark 1973 Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States. Because of the current make-up of the Court, it is likely Roe versus Wade will be overturned.  Yet, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, by a more than 2-1 margin, US citizens favor keeping abortion legal. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/16/post-abc-poll-abortion-supreme-court/  These results are consistent with other polls measuring overwhelming support for legal abortion.

So, how can a law that only has the support of 30 percent of US citizens get rammed down our throats?  This shouldn’t happen in a democracy where citizens theoretically dictate policies. But, here we are, with a radicalized right wing fringe controlling the Supreme Court.

What went wrong?

In a true democracy, every citizen’s vote is equal. For a number of reasons, this doesn’t happen in the US. We can only say that we have, “kind of a democracy”.

The US Supreme Court is where to start looking at what has gone wrong. Justices are nominated by the president. Unfortunately, voters don’t elect the president, the Electoral College does that. Since the 1992 election , Republicans have lost the popular vote in all but one election. However, because of the Electoral College, Republicans have held the presidency for twelve of those years and appointed five of  the nine sitting justices.

In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won the popular vote by over 7 million votes. He won the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232 votes. Yet, if Donald Trump had gotten roughly 45,000 more votes in three states, Trump would have been re-elected. In this nightmare scenario, Biden would have gotten a mandate from the voters with over 51 percent of the vote to Trump’s 46 percent and still would have lost. That would have been a disaster on many levels.

Since our nation’s founding, over 160 countries have copied parts of our electoral and legislative system. Not one has copied our Electoral College. The Electoral College gives outsized advantage to low population states and distorts the electoral process. The Electoral College was a last minute Constitutional compromise to appease representatives of slave owning states that were worried more populous states would someday outlaw slavery.

While every  citizen’s vote is equal in a true democracy, the Electoral College makes voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada much more valuable. At the same time,  the 2.6 million registered Republican voters in New York are inconsequential because of the large Democratic majority there. Likewise, Democrats in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and other Republican dominated states might just as well stay home and not vote in presidential races. Their votes simply won’t matter.

The Electoral College causes a disconnect and apathy between many voters and their democracy. It is at least partially responsible for a right wing Supreme Court that is not even closely representative of the US population. The other reason for the disconnect between the Supreme Court and the US population is the United States Senate.

The dysfunctional Senate

Supreme Court Justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. In the case of Republicans, the president nominating Supreme Court justices may have never received a majority of popular votes. Likewise, the Republican senators that approved the justices, certainly don’t represent the majority of voters.

Again, as a result of a compromise with slave owning states while writing the Constitution, each state, regardless of their population, gets to elect two senators.

In 2018, Brett Kavanaugh, was nominated to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump,  who lost the 2016 presidential election by over 3 million votes. Republicans controlled the  Senate and rammed Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination through the confirmation process while ignoring testimonials about Kavanaugh’s sexual assaults and perjury. Republican senators (who come mostly from small, rural states) did this while representing 42 million less voters than the Democratic minority in the Senate. Between the Electoral College elected president and a Senate majority that doesn’t represent the majority of voters, you start to understand  the dysfunction between voters and today’s right wing and out-of-touch Supreme Court.

More Senate dysfunction

After Texas passed a law basically making all abortions illegal and in anticipation of a draconian Supreme Court ruling, the US House of Representatives did just what they should do, they passed a bill that would guarantee women’s right to legal abortion. This was an exercise in futility.

The House bill then went to the Senate where it died. Senate rules require a bill that doesn’t involve spending to get at least 60 votes to stop a filibuster. Consequently, a 41 vote minority of senators can kill any bill they don’t like.

The Senate filibuster is not part of the Constitution. Nor is the all-powerful, unelected Senate Parliamentarian who makes a bill’s life or death decision if it can be filibustered.

Polls show US voters want legal abortions, campaign funding reform, universal health care, real taxation of the rich and some level of gun control. But, none of this happens. There is a reason. In a real democracy, the majority rules. In the US Senate, the minority rules.

Elected officials picking their voters

The House of Representatives is supposed to be “The People’s House”. Not hardly.

Each Congressional representative represents about 700,000 people (based on the latest Census). Seven states have only one representative, meaning their representatives may represent significantly more or less than 700,000 people.

This is all well and good, but both parties practice gerrymandering. This is a process where state legislatures draw congressional districts that give the party in power the ability to make more safe seats for their party. Democracy be damned. This is all about political power.

Fewer and fewer House seats are competitive. Most elections are decided before a challenger is picked. The gerrymandered districts mean elected officials don’t have to worry about general elections, they only need to pander to their party’s fringe voters so they aren’t challenged in primaries. Since their seats are safe, lobbyists and special interests will bestow humungous campaign donations on them, further insulating them from voters. The Washington Post article below lays out the process of gerrymandering very well. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/23/gerrymandering-redistricting-competitive-house-districts/

Many Democrats look at the last four years and assume that President Joe Biden can spend and borrow unlimited government money, keep interest rates near zero while stifling international trade with tariffs and not lose a minute of sleep worrying about inflation. These Democrats argue that President Barack Obama left Donald Trump with an extremely strong and growing economy and the socialist Trump increased federal government spending by an unbelievable 65 percent in his four years in office while increasing the deficit by an unfathomable $6 trillion. (These figures do not include the $1.9 trillion rescue package Biden passed in his first month in office to try and right the economic catastrophe caused by the disastrous mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic by Donald Trump.) So, if Trump can borrow and spend money like a drunken sailor with a pocket full of credit cards and not budge inflation, why can’t Biden? To understand this, we need to look back at what we learned from the Trump fiasco.

Before going further, it is important to remember that Biden’s plans are just that. Like any president, Biden’s first year in office is essentially an extension of his predecessor’s policies. The tax and spending policies in effect today are those that were passed during the Trump term. All that Biden has accomplished economically so far is the passage of the aforementioned $1.9 trillion rescue package with most of the money going for vaccinations and bailing out state and local governments. When we look at the Biden economic packages, I am writing about hypotheticals since we really don’t know what will be passed.

We are definitely seeing inflation today. These price increases are caused by supply disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the lumber industry shut down last Spring. The last thing homeowners wanted was non-family members in their homes when COVID was raging; consequently home remodeling came to a standstill. This year, you have two years of pent-up demand for home remodeling in a scaled back industry of suppliers. It takes roughly a year of drying time for every inch thick of green lumber before it can be used for building. Consequently, lumber prices are astronomical. The only way to blame Joe Biden for this is because he pulled us out of the COVID nightmare and brought us back to some sense of normalcy.

What did we learn from the liberal Trump?

In 2017, I predicted Donald Trump’s presidency would be an absolute disaster and those who survived would consider themselves lucky. I certainly nailed that prediction! However, I also predicted Trump’s runaway spending and borrowing would trigger high inflation and the highest trade deficits in history. I was wrong big-time on the inflation call. While Trump’s trade deficits were consistently the second biggest of any president, they were still $190 billion less than Republican President George W. Bush’s.

What happened and why I screwed up helps us understand the risks President Biden’s plans present. First, why didn’t inflation explode with all of Trump’s deficit spending? At the end of Obama’s term in 2016, the federal “Net lending or borrowing” balance was -$717 billion. At the end of 2019 (pre-pandemic), Trump’s net lending or borrowing balance was -$1.137 trillion. During this period, Trump grew the deficit by $420 billion.

What is really unprecedented is that over the same period, “Net private savings” increased $389 billion. Trump and the Republicans tax cuts were geared to benefit the rich and corporations. Obviously, these individuals and corporations didn’t have anything better to do with this money than to put it into savings. So, almost 93 percent of Trump’s increased deficit didn’t get spent. It went into what I call “Dead money”. It is pretty near impossible for money that is sitting in savings to cause any kind of inflation.

So, while Trump was breaking every non-recession deficit spending record in history, corporations used their windfall to puff-up their balance sheets and rich people invested their tax cuts in stocks and bonds and other savings instruments. This didn’t do anything to help the economy but it also didn’t trigger any inflation.

The second question, why didn’t our trade deficit explode because of Trump’s borrowing and spending? A country’s trade balance equals the country’s total exports minus total imports. The trade balance also equals private savings plus government savings. (Fairness of trade agreements have no impact whatsoever.) I assumed that Trump’s massive increase in debt on the government side of the equation would send our trade balance to unheard of negatives.

What happened was that Trump’s government savings deficits were almost balanced off with a 93 percent increase in private savings on the other side of the equation. Trump’ trade deficits were always larger than Obama’s (or any other president), but never approached George W. Bush’s.

So what about 2020?

While the above narrative explains why inflation stayed under control in 2018 and 2019, what explains the low inflation in 2020 when Trump’s borrowing and spending moved from liberal to socialist levels?

In 2020, Trump broke every spending increase and deficit record in our history. Trump increased federal spending just in 2020 by an unbelievable 43 percent. He added $3.3 trillion to our national debt in one year. Trump’s out of control borrowing pushed the US’s total debt to a value larger than our annual GDP. This use to be considered as a trigger point where an economy would crash into some type of Venezuela style chaos with out of control inflation that finally ended in an economic collapse.

The reason all of Trump’s 2020 spending didn’t lead to runaway inflation was that all this federal spending went into the economic black hole caused my Trump’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. While hundreds of thousands of US citizens were dying from a silent killer and the response of the person occupying the White House was calling the disease a hoax and denying science, the economy went into a tailspin. Trump’s spending was like a Band-Aid trying to stop the bleeding from an economic artery being cut. What Trump called stimulus programs were actually rescue programs that kept the economy from collapsing. With the economy in this bad of shape, even a 43 percent spending increase and $3.3 trillion of new debt couldn’t spur inflation. At the end of Trump’s term, he was the only president since Herbert Hoover to have negative job and GDP growth during his time in office.

Monetary policy

One of the other keys to keeping inflation at bay is maintaining consistent monetary policy. In an ideal scenario, this means the Federal Reserve sits back and lets the market set interest rates. The Fed broke this rule in late 2018 when Trump’s borrow and spend bubble economy was falling apart and the Fed started lowering interest rates. In 2020, when markets realized Trump was incapable of dealing with the pandemic and started collapsing, the Fed aggressively lowered interest rates to zero. Because the Fed was lowering interest rates while the jobs market and the economy was collapsing, this didn’t contribute to inflation.

What this should mean to Biden

Hopefully, the preceding gives some more depth to the Trump fiasco and we can understand the dangers of thinking that inflation is dead. In his first months in office, Biden has worked to restore our nation’s physical health. His success is reflected in our country’s economic resurgence. This is important.

Biden proposes cutting out the huge tax cut handouts to corporations and some modest cutbacks to the welfare to the rich we have had in the US over the past forty years. Biden’s spending includes things like a subsidy to parents with children. You can bet your last dollar that 93 percent of this money is not going into private savings or become dead money. If Biden were to simply keep Trump’s 2020 spending and borrowing, the impact on inflation would be much more volatile just because the people that are winners in Biden’s budget proposals will spend the money they get.

Trump spent his presidency ignoring the advice of real experts. In contrast, Biden’s spending proposals are classic, textbook economics. Spending government money on infrastructure, education, health care and basic research are proven ways to increase a nation’s productivity. Productivity increases typically transfer to wage increases. Notice the word “typically”.

Over the past forty years in the US, most wage gains from productivity gains have gone disproportionately to high wage earners. We’ll cover fixing this momentarily; however the important thing about Biden’s spending is that the money is going middle and lower income people who will spend it. This presents more risk of inflation.

International trade

What is also important is getting rid of Trump’s ridiculous tariffs on selected imports and getting rid of the reciprocal tariffs other countries slapped on our exports.

Inflation happens when too many dollars are chasing too few goods. Open international trade acts like a pressure valve release to an overheated economy. During the Bill Clinton Administration, he actually had federal budget surpluses in his last three years in office. However, the US still had negative trade balances each of those years with the 2000 trade balance at -$398.9 billion. The too many dollars in the US economy were spent on foreign goods and inflation stayed at very low levels. Without the trade agreements Clinton signed, we would most likely have had runaway inflation by the end of his term.

China

Trump foolishly thought he could cause serious economic damage to China with his ridiculous trade war. This didn’t work very well. In the 2020 election, Trump took the worst beating by an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover and Xi Jinping is still the undisputed leader of China.

In contrast, Biden looks to regain the US’s competitive edge with China by making ourselves more productive with his targeted spending.

Inflation?

No matter how wonderful Biden’s spending proposals are, if Biden keeps spending at Trump’s level, there is a high risk of inflation because the people earning this money will spend it. All things being equal, also expect our trade deficit to reach new heights.

Make no mistake; inflation is a very bad thing. It does not impact everyone at the same rate. Typically, wages rise much slower than the things we buy during inflationary periods. Worse, inflation leads to higher interest rates. With the level of debt the US government has, if we had to start paying six percent interest rates on federal debt, that would be catastrophic.

How to fix this? End the 40-year welfare for the rich and corporations and reorient our spending priorities. In other words, balance spending with tax increases and balance the federal budget.

Tax increases, solve two problems at once!

In 1945 the US’s highest tax rate was 94 percent on income over $200,000. After WWII, the US ruled the world. Income over $200,000 was taxed at 91 percent. In 1965, the highest tax rate was lowered to 70 percent on income over $200,000. The high tax rate stayed at this level until 1982 when Reagan lowered the rate to 50 percent (on income over $86,500).

By 1988, Reagan flattened the tax curve and all income over $29,750 was taxed at 28 percent. Since then, the top tax rate has floated in the 30-39.5 percent range. https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal.pdf  Biden’s tax plan would raise the highest tax rate from 37 to 39.6 percent. He is actually just fast-tracking a change already planned to take place in 2025. This is a pathetically small tax increase.

According to The Pew Research Center, “The wealthiest families are also the only ones to have experienced gains in wealth in the years after the start of the Great Recession in 2007. From 2007 to 2016, the median net worth of the richest 20% increased 13%, to $1.2 million. For the top 5%, it increased by 4%, to $4.8 million. In contrast, the net worth of families in lower tiers of wealth decreased by at least 20% from 2007 to 2016. The greatest loss – 39% – was experienced by the families in the second quintile of wealth, whose wealth fell from $32,100 in 2007 to $19,500 in 2016.”

“As a result, the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016. In 1989, the richest 5% of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second quintile, $2.3 million compared with $20,300. By 2016, this ratio had increased to 248, a much sharper rise than the widening gap in income.” https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/

The point here is simple, the US used to be an egalitarian or classless country. No more. The way to fix this is to go back to a tax system like we had when the US was the world’s most powerful country and the US middle class grew because of high marginal tax rates and aggressive estate taxes. By raising US taxes back to traditional levels, we can raise enough money to pay for desperately needed infrastructure, education, health care and basic research.

Corporate/business tax rates

One of the fantasies Republicans try and sell is that if governments just give corporations and rich people tax cuts, they will in turn create jobs. Donald Trump proved just how silly this is.

As noted above, Trump gave rich people and corporations $multi-trillion tax cuts and they used the money to pad their balance sheets and invest in the stock and bond markets. This was good for stock markets, not so good for those wanting jobs. The reality is that more jobs were created in the last three years of the Obama Administration than during the first three of the Trump Administration. The low pre-pandemic unemployment levels Republicans brag about didn’t happen because of Donald Trump, they happened in spite of him.

In the real world, job creators expand their businesses and hire more people when they think they can make money doing it. This is going to happen if the tax rate is 10 percent or 60 percent. The only things tax cuts for corporations and rich people accomplish is to make rich people richer.

Summing this up…

When we look at our history over the past 40 years, fiscal conservatism has meant prosperity. Republican President Ronald Reagan came into office with the first federal government-spending deficit greater than $100 billion. He doubled that by his last year in office to -$212 billion. While raising government spending by 82 percent during the Reagan term, we had a number of recessions.

Republican President George H.W. Bush took over the borrow and spend mantle from Reagan. He maintained Reagan’s rate of annual spending increases and almost doubled the budget deficit to -$359 billion in his last year in office. A nasty recession spelled the end of the Bush I presidency.

Democratic President Bill Clinton put the brakes on the out-of-control Republican spending and only increased total federal government spending by 27 percent over his two terms. He left office with a $153 billion budget surplus while bringing the US arguably the strongest peacetime economic boom in our history.

President George W. Bush returned a frenzy of Republican borrowing and spending. Over his two terms, he raised federal government spending by 86 percent and left office with a -$774 government spending deficit. He also left the US with the worst economic crash since the Great Depression.

Democratic President Barack Obama had the misfortune of taking office while the economy was unraveling from the Bush II disaster. Tax receipts plunged 26 percent in his first weeks and Obama had to deal with the US’s first $trillion deficit (-$1.5 trillion). Federal government spending rose only 24 percent during the conservative Obama’s two terms in office. He managed to whittle the annual spending deficit down to -$717 billion by his last year in office. During the Obama term, he launched one of the longest economic recoveries in history.

The Socialist Republican Donald Trump took over the strong Obama economy and showed the US a level of borrowing and spending never before imagined. His 42 percent one year spending increase of $2.1 trillion is bigger than the entire federal budget was up until 2002. Electing Trump cost us almost $6 trillion in additional debt. What did all this borrowing and spending get us? Donald Trump left office with the lowest Annual G.D.P. Growth Rate of any president since these records were first kept in 1937. Trump is the only president to have a negative Annual Growth rate of Non-Farm Jobs during his term since the Great Depression.

Over the past forty years, Democrats brought us conservatism, frugality and prosperity. Republicans have brought us liberalism, socialism, massive debt, progressively worse economic disasters and excuses.

It doesn’t take much for Frugal Ron to look back at this and be alarmed by the size of Joe Biden’s spending plans and the possibility of more deficits. Yet, at the same time, Biden is spending money on the things that can bring us long-term prosperity. He also addresses essential spending to try and mitigate future climate changes. In addition, he is addressing the needs of long marginalized people of color.

There are a number of things to take away from all this:

• The Biden spending plans (if passed) have the potential to create wealth for a wide range of the population for years to come. They also have the potential to improve the lives of a wide range of the population.
• The most effective way to make sure inflation does not return if the above spending happens is to balance the federal budget with tax increases on those most able to pay. This requires returning to the type of tax structure the US had during its glory days.
• The second most important anti-inflationary step for Biden to take is to end Trump’s trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace with his selective trade tariffs. Get the government out of the markets and remove Trump’s tariffs.

So, what is going to happen if Biden gets his spending plans enacted into law? If taxes are raised to balance the budget and trade is opened back up, we could have one of the longest, broad based and prosperous periods in US history. If a Republican style plan with lots of spending, no tax increases and keeping trade restrictions in place is passed, we are probably looking at another Republican style economic debacle, made worse by high inflation.

We have just finished the most catastrophic presidency in our country’s history. Donald Trump led a cast of incompetent misfits whose stupidity and ineptitude caused hundreds of thousands of needless deaths, devastated our economy and turned around almost three decades of falling abortion numbers in the US.

This article documents some of the disaster perpetrated on the United States by Donald Trump. Then, in a second article, we’ll try and understand why 74 million voters would want four more years of the death, economic destruction, moral decay, increased abortions, desecration of our laws and attacks on our democracy that Trump brought us.

Documenting the disaster

Donald Trump’s incompetence caused more needless deaths than all presidents in US history combined

One of every 597 people in the US has died of COVID-19 while one of 11 people has been infected. The map below of COVID deaths per capita illustrates the disaster. The darkest countries have the highest death rates.

Source: New York Times

There is no need to date the above map. Donald Trump has mismanaged the US’s response to the pandemic from the start. Consequently, the US death rate has continually been among the world’s highest and the US has the highest number of total COVID deaths.

How could this happen to a nation with more Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine, (113 and 38 of them are immigrants) than any other country? How could a country with the world’s most prestigious hospitals and premier medical research institutions lead the world in deaths from a virus? Add in that the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) was once considered the world’s gold standard for integrity and professionalism.

All of this expertise is negated when a country has an imbecilic leader like Donald Trump who somehow thinks he is more qualified to handle a pandemic than all these experts. Trump blatantly ignored our own and the world’s most respected medical experts and relied on his gut feelings. Over 556,000 US citizens paid the ultimate price for this incompetence.

It is difficult to imagine how anyone could blunder worse than Trump. Trump started his administration by ignoring studies by both his and the Obama Administration highlighting the lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), hospital beds, ventilators and other supplies that were in desperately short supply throughout the pandemic. Before COVID-19 was discovered, he dismantled the pandemic response apparatus that was painstakingly developed during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama Administrations.

Experts called for 10-30 million COVID tests daily with contact tracing of positive cases. Experts called for a national strategy of quarantines, shutdowns and enforced mask mandates. Trump ignored them all while the US death toll soared. The only concern Trump had for the people dying from COVID was what impact their deaths would have on stock markets. The political hacks Trump installed at his CDC even advised hospitals to put their overflow COVID patients in nursing homes.

While Donald Trump called COVID a hoax and continually downplayed how serious it was, leaders in most other nations stepped up and embraced the science Trump mocked. Australia had some of the earliest and highly publicized cases (Tom Hanks and his wife). They still require travelers from other countries to do a two-week quarantine when arriving. If the traveller thinks their rights are being infringed, they can take it up with the armed guard in front of their hotel. Australia has had one COVID-19 death in every 27,494 people, Japan one death in 13,677people, China has one death in 300,416 people and South Korea has one death in every 29,405 people.

Great leadership has allowed these countries to restore their lives and economies to a level of normalcy unimaginable in the US. Even Canada, which has the misfortune of having to share a border with the US (which they eventually closed to all non-essential travel) has only one COVID death per 1,601 people, or 37 percent of the US per capita rate.

Donald Trump’s stupidity will forever be the defining characteristic of his presidency. However, Trump’s stupidity is unique. He is simply incapable of changing course regardless of how bad things are.

Most any businessperson who fell on hard times will tell you they learned from it and move on. The next time, when cash flow and profits turn negative, they make major changes in their management. If that fails, they divest assets as fast as they can, knowing they will get more money from them than a lender after foreclosure or bankruptcy. Unfortunately, these lessons were lost on Donald Trump. Not only did he have one bankruptcy or two bankruptcies or three bankruptcies, he had an unbelievable six bankruptcies while squandering his family’s fortune and that of anyone foolish enough to provide him funding. And, he is making the same mistakes as he heads to bankruptcy Number Seven. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

One sees the same ineptitude in Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic. Any reasonably intelligent person would notice the success other countries were having while following World Health Organization and US expert recommendations. They would compare that to the disaster taking place in the US and make a course change. Trump’s pandemic response was exactly the same as what bankrupted his businesses. He simply cannot admit that he mucked up and needs to make changes. Before the Christmas holiday, he urged Americans to travel and spend the Holidays with family and friends, helping fuel the last surge of over 100,000 US COVID deaths.

And, what happened to Trump’s precious Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) that he cared about more than the lives of US citizens? It started rallying when polls showed Joe Biden had an insurmountable lead in the presidential race.  Since Biden’s victory, the DJIA has gone up almost 5,000 points or over 17 percent.

Trump – the most prolific liberal borrow and spender in US history

“I alone can fix it!” Donald Trump pledged as a candidate at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Things haven’t quite worked out that way for Trump’s economy.

Table 1. Spending by President
	Annual Federal Govt. Spending (billions)
President	Year before taking office	Last year in office	Percent Change	Annual percent change*
Ronald Reagan – Rep. 1981-1988	$645.0	$1,171.1	82%	8%
George H.W. Bush – Rep. 1989-1992	$1,171.1	$1,524.8	30%	7%
Bill Clinton – Dem. 1993-2000	$1,524.8	$1,943.6	27%	3%
George W. Bush – Rep. 2001-2008	$1,943.6	$3,383.1	86%	7%
Barack Obama – Dem. 2009-2016	$3,383.1	$4,200.4	24%	3%
Donald Trump – Rep. 2017-2020	$4,200.4	$6,932.9	65%	14%
* Calculated by averaging percent spending change of each year in office. Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis; Table 3.2 Federal Govt. Current Receipts and Expenditures; Line 43.

 

Trump has been the anti-Christ of economic conservatism. Over the last 40 years, Republican federal government spending increases were more than double those run up by Democrats. Trump set new standards for out-of-control government spending with his 14 percent average annual spending increase that is almost double of any of his free spending Republican predecessors of the past 40 years.

Likewise, the deficit-loving Trump set new records for deficit spending in non-recession years with $1 trillion in 2018 and $1.1 trillion in 2019. The 2019 deficit was 69 percent higher than Obama’s last year in office. In 2020, Trump set a new record for fiscal incompetence with an all time record $3.25 trillion deficit.

As with the pandemic, Trump’s aversion to listening to experts proved disastrous to the economy. It doesn’t take PhD in economics to figure out that if a country cuts receipts with a huge tax cut combined with out-of-control spending increases, we are going to have record government spending deficits.

Table 2. Net Savings by President
	Net Savings (billions)
President	First Year in Office	Last year In Office	Average
Ronald Reagan – Rep. 1981-1988	-$104.3	-$201.0	-$210.5
George H.W. Bush – Rep. 1989-1992	-$194.3	-$359.2	-$269.5
Bill Clinton – Dem. 1993-2000	-$328.7	+$152.9	-$108.3
George W. Bush – Rep. 2001-2008	+$1.50	-$774.2	-$382.3
Barack Obama – Dem. 2009-2016	-$1,475.3	-$717.0	-$1,026.8
Donald Trump – Rep. 2017-2020	-$540.0	-$3,251.6	-$1,482.4
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 3.2 Federal Government Current Receipts and Expenditures; Line 49.

One of Trump’s most memorable lies is that he had to spend huge amounts to rebuild the US military after years of neglect under Obama. The reality is that Obama’s annual defense expenditures were greater than the six countries with the world’s biggest defense budgets combined.

Donald Trump leaves office with the lowest Annual G.D.P. Growth Rate of any president since these records were first kept in 1937. Trump is the only president to have a negative Annual Growth rate of Non-Farm Jobs during his term since the Great Depression. Trump inherited a growing economy with an Unemployment Rate of 4.7 percent from President Barack Obama. In contrast, Trump left President Joe Biden an Unemployment Rate of 6.7 percent. This, of course, is after Trump signed two huge economic stimulus bills, one for $2 trillion and one for $900 billion. Thanks to the Federal Reserve, interest rates have been close to zero for well over a year.

This is familiar territory for Republicans. According to a New York Times analysis, “Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6 percent under Democratic presidents and 2.4 percent under Republicans. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/opinion/sunday/democrats-economy.html

Republicans love to blame Trump’s economic failures on the pandemic. However, during the first three years of Trump’s borrow and spend presidency, less jobs were created than during the last three years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Further, the economy was weakening in December of 2018. Trump’s borrow and spend economy would have collapsed if the Federal Reserve hadn’t come to the rescue by dramatically lowering interest rates. Trump’s liberal attempt to buy prosperity with out of control spending increases combined with outlandish tax cuts for the rich and corporations (both financed by government borrowing) eventually collapsed at the first sign of market’s comprehending that Trump was incapable of dealing with COVID-19.

Trump – the second biggest exporter of US jobs in US history

Trump started a trade war in a failed effort to bring jobs back from other countries. Obviously, it didn’t work.

Table 3. Trade Balance by President
	Trade Balance (billions)
President	Average Annual
Ronald Reagan – Rep. 1981-1988	-$81.6
George H.W. Bush – Rep. 1989-1992	-$54.2
Bill Clinton – Dem. 1993-2000	-$179.8
George W. Bush – Rep. 2001-2008	-$611.5
Barack Obama – Dem. 2009-2016	-$414.0
Donald Trump – Rep. 2017-2020	-$502.4
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 4.1, National Income and Product Accounts; Line 34.

Any economist of merit knows that a country’s Trade Balance has nothing to do with the fairness of trade agreements. It has everything to do with a country’s Net Savings, or the sum of Government net saving plus private net saving.

Capital outflows must always equal Capital inflows. In other words, Exports – Imports = Government net saving + Private net saving. Government spending deficits of the size Trump incurred will outpace any net private savings and we will always cause huge negative trade balances in these circumstances. We could drop all trade restrictions and allow unlimited imports and if the sum of private and government savings didn’t change, our Trade Balance would be exactly as it is today.

The flip side of the Capital outflows = Capital inflows equation is that Trump’s -$503 billion 2019 trade balance outflow of capital results in an equal $503 billion inflow of foreign capital buying US brick and mortar companies and financing our debt.

Yes, for sure, Donald Trump is the only one who could fix our economy.

Donald Trump, the most pro-abortion president in 30 years

Following the 28 percent drop in annual abortions attained during the Obama/Biden presidency, Donald Trump was actually able to turn the tide of annual abortions going down in the US. According to CDC data, abortions in the US actually increased one percent in 2018 (last year data is available). This is the first increase in three decades.

Republicans, the Real Pro-Abortion Political Party

How did Trump manage this feat? The answer is very obvious. Trump defunded Planned Parenthood and did everything he could to limit the number of people accessing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) health insurance with its free birth control provision.

Annual abortions dropped 14 percent during the Clinton Administration as Democrats provided free birth control to all federal government employees. Obama’s (ACA) extended health insurance and free birth control to 20 million previously uninsured Americans. Also, in 29 states and the District of Columbia ACA packages required employers to provide free prescription birth control to employees. During the Obama years, more women used the almost fool proof Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives that they could often obtain for free thanks to the ACA.

Only a fool would expect that restricting free birth control wouldn’t result in more abortions. That fool is Donald Trump. By defunding Planned Parenthood, Trump restricted that organization’s ability to provide free birth control and education to vulnerable women. That and restricting ACA and free birth control had predictable results as far as raising the number of US abortions.

If the Supreme Court that Trump packed with right wing zealots is foolish enough to outlaw abortion, we will find that medical abortions via the internet and for profit abortion clinics in Canada will make abortion easier and cheaper in the US than it is now.

Abortion, Sex and Republicans

Republicans have complained for decades that Planned Parenthood was the major driver of the “abortion industry”. Obviously, defunding the organization didn’t bring about the dramatic drop in abortions they promised.

Morality, Christian values, lying, law breaking and Donald Trump

Nothing much new here. The Washington Post tally of 30,573 false or misleading claims (lies) in Donald Trump’s four-year term occupying the White House is a record that will hopefully never be broken.

Trump’s record of whoring, siring an illegitimate daughter, making a mockery of marriage with his divorces and innumerable extra marital affairs along with at least two dozen women accusing him of sexual assault is also an inexcusable assault on Judeo-Christian morality.

The War On Christianity

Donald Trump will go down in history as the only serial rapist dumb enough to brag about his assaults on tape. To Trump’s Christian In Name Only (CINO) followers, holding up a Bible in front of a church somehow off-balances his immorality, even though Trump claims to have never asked forgiveness for anything he’s done. Even Trump’s preacher, Jerry Falwell Jr., is a pervert that paid a man to have sex with his wife while Falwell watched.

Trump continually violated the very core of Christianity with his policies of taking health cars, food and housing from the poor while giving tax breaks to the rich. No religion in the world condones the separation of brown skinned children from their parents who were legally seeking asylum in the US.

Trump broke more laws while president than all the 44 presidents before him combined. Yet, his attempt to have his followers mount an insurrection to overturn the election he lost in a landslide is really an embodiment of Donald Trump’s life. Trump’s insurrection had no thinking behind it and no planning. Organization and coordination was nowhere to be found. Execution was total chaos, in this case resulting in five deaths. The end result was complete failure. Vice-president Mike Pence certified Joe Biden as president just a few hours later than planned.

Is Donald Trump mentally retarded?

Other writers soften their descriptions by saying Trump did not have the qualifications or skills to be a successful president, Frugal Ron is much more direct. If someone continually does, writes and says really stupid things, the obvious deduction is that person is really stupid. The question is, just how stupid is Donald Trump?

When Donald Trump moved into the White House, he came with some high-powered advisors. His initial group included chairmen of some of the world’s most powerful corporations, the former chairman of the National Republican Party and a host of former generals.

This did not work well. These people were not used to working with someone as stupid as Donald Trump. One remarked that Trump had the mental aptitude of a fifth-grader and another said Trump had the attention span of a five year old. One told Trump that he is a “f_ _ king idiot”, another told Trump that he is a “f_ _ _ king moron”.

After the 2018 mid-term elections, Trump cleared out the last of his advisors with above average intelligence and replaced them with yes men and a couple female press secretaries that were as intelligent as he is himself.

Throughout Trump’s presidency, I estimated Trump’s IQ was in the 75-80 range. I based this on his ignoring experts in dealing with COVID-19, his idiotic trade war that he thought was going to end the US’s balance of trade deficits, his foolishness in believing that if he cut taxes (revenue) dramatically and made huge spending increases he could balance the federal budget and how he managed to turn around the three decade drop in annual abortions. Sure, there was Sharpie-gate, the cognitive test he passed that Trump thought qualified him as a genius and of course, the idea to drink disinfectant along with a host of daily idiocy that gave late night TV comedians a plethora of material.

My view of Trump’s intelligence changed after the recent presidential election. One might think it couldn’t get weirder than the President of the United States ordering poll workers to stop counting ballots while Trump was still ahead. But, it certainly did get weirder.

Trump’s lawyers argued in front of more than 30 courts that the election was rife with fraud, yet never produced a single shred of evidence. And yet, Trump still argues the election was stolen from him. Trump’s ridiculous conspiracy theories clearly show that he doesn’t recognize reality – a sure marker of extremely low intelligence.

Whether my current estimate of Trump’s IQ, 65-70, is a few points too high or too low is really an academic argument. What we do know is that Donald Trump is stupid and the consequences of his stupidity on our lives have been catastrophic.

For decades, Republicans have marketed themselves as the anti-abortion party. Actual data doesn’t match their hype.

You don’t need a PhD in statistics to see trends in the above table. While US abortion numbers have trended downward since 1990, they drop much faster when Democrats are presidents. There are some very good reasons.

Study after study of international data shows a strong relationship between low cost contraceptive availability and decreased numbers of abortions. Put simply, countries with widely available and cheap contraceptives have lower abortion rates. 

The above table shows the impact of varying levels of contraceptive availability and cost in the US when presidents of different parties are in power. Republicans believe abortion restrictions, virginity pledges and abstinence-based teaching will lower the number of abortions. Democrats take a much more realistic view that making contraceptives more available will result in fewer unwanted pregnancies and thereby fewer abortions.

The US abortion rate in 2018 was 13 abortions per 1,000 women, aged 15-44. For comparison, Switzerland has the world’s lowest abortion rate with five abortions per 1,000 women of reproductive age. We still have a lot of room for improvement.

The Clinton years…

During the eight year Clinton Administration, Title X family planning funding was dramatically increased for five million families. Clinton also signed legislation requiring federal employees’ heath insurance plans to cover contraceptives for 1.2 million women of childbearing age.

In 1999, the Morning After pill (also known as Emergency Contraception or EC) was cleared for sale as a prescription only product. Republicans fought tooth and nail to prevent the sale of Emergency Contraceptives.

The Bush II years…

During the two-term George W. Bush Administration starting in 2001, Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” kept him from cutting Title X family planning services. However, he didn’t implement any policies making contraceptives easier to obtain at a lower cost. The only factor that lowered abortion numbers during the Bush II years were that the Morning After pill could be sold over the counter (instead of as prescription only) to women 18 years old and older.

Consequently, the momentum of decreases in abortions dropped by almost half from the Clinton years. Yet, it should be noted, Bush didn’t do anything to stop the downward trend in annual abortions.

Bush implemented faith based, abstinence only sex education programs in schools. Many church groups also started virginity pledges where young people signed pledges that they would refrain from having sex prior to marriage.

Unfortunately, these abstinence policies were and still are ineffective. One study, Abstinence-only Education and Teen Pregnancy Rates: Why We Need Comprehensive Sex Education in the U.S found, “Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates. This trend remains significant after accounting for socioeconomic status, teen educational attainment, ethnic composition of the teen population, and availability of Medicaid waivers for family planning services in each state. These data show clearly that abstinence-only education, as a state policy, is ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.”

The Obama years…

President Barack Obama became the most effective anti-abortion president in US history during his two terms. A number of events caused the 338,000 plunge in annual abortions during the Obama term. After a long fight with Republicans, in June, 2013, Emergency Contraceptive sales were allowed over the counter to girls of all ages.

However, the most important reason for the huge drop in abortions was the Affordable Care Act (ACA) also known as Obamacare. The ACA required more employers to offer health insurance and in 29 states and the District of Columbia, those insurance packages require coverage of prescription contraception. During the Obama Administration, more than 20 million people gained health insurance thanks to Obamacare. Those 20 million people also gained access to free birth control and contraceptives.

Also lowering abortion numbers during Obama’s term, more women started using Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARCs). These implants, though more expensive, are 20 times more effective at preventing pregnancies than birth control pills.

Other factors?

During Obama’s term in office, a number of Republican controlled states passed various bills restricting access to abortion. By the end of 2016, Obama’s last year in office, these bills were deemed unconstitutional or were stayed pending further proceedings.

Republicans argue they have lowered abortion access in various states and thereby this is why the number of abortions has dropped. It is true fewer clinics are performing abortions now than in 1992, the last year before Clinton took office. However, this is more likely because of the 666,610 fewer annual abortions (44 percent drop) since 1992 than any state actions.

Does lower availability of abortion clinics limit the number of abortions annually?  Twenty-first Century women are willing to travel. For example, in 2015, 49 percent of the abortions performed in Kansas were on women from outside the state. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/ss/ss6713a1.htm

So, if clinic access doesn’t have a substantial impact on the number of abortions performed annually, do state laws making getting abortions more difficult have any impact? In Wisconsin, Republicans passed laws requiring women to meet with a counselor and physician a minimum of 24 hours before getting an abortion. The woman is required to have a separate appointment for the abortion. Women under 18 must have an adult relative over 25 years old with them.

It is doubtful these requirements reduced the number of women getting abortions. Wisconsin abortion numbers increased 3.7 percent in 2017 and another 7 percent in 2018 while most states had fewer abortions.

The natural question to ask Republicans who claim abortion restrictions are causing the number of abortions to drop is, “Where are the babies?”

The US lowered the number of abortions by 666,600 annually since 1992. If this occurred because of clinic closures and abortion restrictions, there should have been 666,600 more babies born in 2017 than in 1992. However, the 3,853,472 live births in the US was the lowest number in 30 years.

The Trump years…

Since taking office in 2017, Donald Trump has done everything possible to reverse the steep decline in annual abortions that took place over the past 30 years. Trump cut Planned Parenthood Title X funding by $60 million. This reduced Planned Parenthood’s funding for education and free contraceptive distribution and did not impact their abortion funding, which is financed by donations.

Trump has repeatedly tried to eliminate the Affordable Care Act. Failing that, he has chipped away at the edges and reduced the number of people able to qualify and getting no-cost contraceptives. Trump has also backed efforts to end the requirement for employer financed health plans to include free contraceptives. And, he is trying to have the Supreme Court rule the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional.

In Trump’s first year in office, abortion numbers dropped by 11,780, the smallest drop in 19 years. It seems like Trump is doing everything in his power to get annual abortions back up to the pre-Obama levels of 1.2 million per year.

Summing-up

Annual abortions don’t drop just because a president has a (D) or (R) after his name. The 44 percent drop in annual US abortions since 1992 has taken place in a dynamic environment.

Abortion numbers drop after new technologies such as Emergency Contraception and Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives come on the market.  Incremental drops in abortion numbers happen as Emergency Contraception moves from being a prescription only product for women over 18 to being an over-the-counter contraceptive for women of all ages.

The largest drops in annual abortions occur when birth control is more available and is covered in health insurance plans. It is no coincidence these things happen while Democrats occupy the presidency.

Throughout the period covered in this article, it seems Republicans are more interested in waging war on birth control than on abortion. To any reasonable person, it should be obvious that this is counterproductive.

If we are serious about dramatically reducing the number of future abortions, we need to shed foolish ideas like attempting to outlaw them. “Abortion rates are similar in countries where abortion is highly restricted and where it is broadly legal. The abortion rate is 37 per 1,000 women in countries that prohibit abortion altogether or allow it only to save a woman’s life, and 34 per 1,000 in countries that allow abortion without restriction as to reason—a difference that is not significant. Highly restrictive laws do not eliminate the practice of abortion, but make those that do occur more likely to be unsafe.” Source: Guttmacher Institute

For more information on why laws outlawing abortion in the US will be ineffective, visit https://www.frugalron.com/abortion-sex-and-republicans/

If we want to continue reducing abortion numbers, we need to expand on what works. That means taking advantage of relatively new technologies like the almost fail proof Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives. Most important, make LARCs more available at lower cost.

According to a study, Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC): a practical solution to reduce unintended pregnancy, “In a US study of nearly 10000 women aged 14-45 years, when the three barriers (education, access and cost) were removed 75% of study participants chose a LARC method. As a result, the study reported an 80% reduction in teen births and 75% reduction in abortions among women in the cohort compared to national statistics. If we are serious about reducing unintended pregnancy, we need to be serious about increasing the use of methods that we know work. Greater LARC use and continuation has been proven to effectively reduce unintended pregnancy, including abortion and teen pregnancy” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23689169/

California has the least restrictive abortion laws in the US . Yet, they have dramatically reduced the numbers of teen pregnancies, abortions and the percent of 18 year old girls that have had sex since instituting state wide, science based sex education starting in middle school. This should be a model for the rest of the United States.

While this article has dealt almost exclusively with numbers and statistics, the real cost of abortion is the long lasting angst and stress that abortion decisions place on women and their families. This is the real reason we should continue and accelerate the progress of the last three decades to dramatically further reduce the number of abortions in the US.

This website is dedicated to promoting conservative government. The recent stock market crash of the liberal Donald Trump’s bubble economy provides Frugal Ron and other conservatives an example to point out what happens when liberalism is allowed to go unchecked. Or, how not to run a government. Past columns on this website predicted the collapse of the Trump economy. This gives Frugal Ron the opportunity to say, “Frugal Ron got it right again!”

The reality is, Frugal Ron is no genius. It didn’t take much intelligence to predict the liberal Donald Trump’s attempt to buy prosperity with massive government spending increases using borrowed money would end badly. Economic growth rates were slowing even as the liberal Trump was pumping ever-larger spending increases financed by borrowed money into the economy. All that was needed to pop Trump’s bubble economy was a pinprick. Instead, we got a sledgehammer.

Every Republican president from Ronald Reagan forward has failed in trying to turn a government financed false prosperity into the real thing. It is no coincidence that conservative Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both came into office after Republican recessions and each launched record setting long growth markets in the US with consistently conservative spending increases.

What true conservatism is…

Perhaps this is a good place to remind our selves what real conservatism is. Certainly, since Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, borrow and spend Republicans have shown us a whole new level of liberal government. Donald Trump has expanded liberalism into socialism. The results are easily predictable.

The litmus test for conservatives is how a president controls spending. While Congress technically is in charge of spending, in reality a strong president uses veto power to get the budget he wants.

A conservative also balances the federal budget and keeps government spending deficits from interfering with the market. While presidents have a great deal of power to shape the budget, they have less power to control spending deficits during recessions when tax revenues drop. True conservatives appoint conservative and qualified governors to the Federal Reserve Board, and then respect the Fed’s independence.

Conservatives stay out of the marketplace as much as possible. For conservatives, government has no place picking winners and losers, either industries or individual companies. Conservatives believe in capitalism’s “creative destruction”.  If an industry or segment of the economy is dying, true conservative leaders get out of the way. As an industry dies, new industries we never dreamed of years ago evolve and replace the dying ones. They take over the dying industry’s human and capital resources and put them to better use. Conservatives call this progress. Countries that try and get in the way of progress and subsidize dying industries and protect inefficient industries from foreign competition lower the standard of living for all their citizens for the benefit of a few.

While real conservatives believe in staying out of the marketplace and disrupting people’s lives, this doesn’t mean we are against regulations. When our country and the world’s future are threatened by climate change, it is the absolute responsibility of government to mitigate the problem either by carbon regulation or taxation. Equally important, when air and water pollution by the few threatens the well being of the many, it is government’s responsibility to step in and force change.

Conservatives also recognize that government can do a plethora of things better than private industry. Some of these are protecting us from foreign attacks, maintaining an impartial judicial system, educating our children, keeping our food and drugs safe and on and on.

Conservatives recognize that voters need to make choices. For example, while 90 years ago it may have been wise for government to get involved in agricultural commodity pricing, no involvement is needed now. As conservatives know all too well, once an industry is subsidized, it is almost impossible to wean them.

Spend, Baby, Spend!

So how did we get into the current mess? The liberal Donald Trump’s 2018 to 2019 Current Expenditures increased by a whopping 6.5 percent. Even before the Corona virus outbreak, Trump’s spending increase was going to be much larger in 2020 due to spending bills approved by Trump. As Republican Senate Majority Leader told Trump, no one ever lost a presidential election for spending too much.  Now, this spending is being put on steroids.

The pre-Corona numbers put the liberal Trump’s spending increases right in line with other Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan’s average annual spending increase was 7.7 percent, George H.W. Bush’s annual increase was 7.3 percent and George W. Bush’s increase was 6.7 percent. By comparison, Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had annual spending increases of 3.2 percent and 3.3 percent respectively. While the difference from a 7.7 and 3.2 percent annual spending increase may seem small, with compounding over eight years, they add up. Reagan increased federal government spending over 80.3 percent in his eight years in office compared to Clinton’s 28.5 percent increase in his eight years.

The last great Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who served from 1953 to 1960, is the only Republican who comes close to Clinton and Obama’s small annual spending increases. Eisenhower’s annual average increase in federal spending was 5.5 percent. (Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 3.2 Federal Government Current Receipts and Expenditures, Line 24. www.bea.gov)

Borrow, Baby, Borrow!

The only thing Republicans are better at than spending money is borrowing money. (Note: All the following figures are pre-Corona virus.) While at this writing, final government balances for 2019 are not calculated, the liberal Trump’s 3rd Quarter2019 annualized balance is -$1.225 trillion. When Obama left office, the 2016 federal government balance was -$677 billion. The ultra-liberal Trump increased the annual federal budget deficit by 81 percent since taking office!

Considering the huge spending increases currently proposed to try and prop up the economy and the expected drop in tax revenues resulting from the Trump Recession, Frugal Ron expects the 2020 deficit will surpass $5 trillion.

Obama also had budget deficits over $1 trillion. While the free spending Trump got to take over a robust economy with growing tax revenues, Obama had to clean up the mess from the George W. Bush Recession. In the final quarter of Bush’s tenure, GDP plummeted at an 8.4% annual rate. Unemployment began rising rapidly. The S&P 500 plummeted 38% in 2008, its worst year since the Great Depression.

In Bush’s last year in office, tax revenues dropped 7.4 percent. In Obama’s first year in office, tax receipts dropped another 24.6 percent. It wasn’t until 2013 that tax revenues exceeded 2006’s levels. Credit the 2012 Budget Reconciliation Bill’s tax increase for the increased revenue that slashed the budget deficits and started yielding the increases in employment and economic growth that continued into the Trump Administration.  (Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 3.2 Federal Government Current Receipts and Expenditures, Line 2. www.bea.gov)

While the liberal Trump’s current budget deficit is the largest non-recession deficit in our country’s history, (and soon will be the biggest deficit ever) his borrowing is not unique. The year before Republican Ronald Reagan became president, our budget deficit was -$88.8 billion. By the time he left office, it was -$160.0 billion. George H.W. Bush showed he could out-borrow even Reagan and pushed the annual budget deficit to -$334 billion. Democrat Bill Clinton erased the deficit in six years and left office with a budget SURPLUS of +$155.5 billion. In two years, Republican George W. Bush turned that back into a typical Republican budget deficit of -$271.5 billion. Bush II left office with a budget deficit of -$604.3 billion. (Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 3.2 Federal Government Current Receipts and Expenditures, Line 37. www.bea.gov)

The increased budget deficits occurring while Obama was in office were not caused by excessive spending. In fact, no Republican in history has come within two percentage points of Obama’s annual spending increases of 3.3 percent. They were caused by dramatically reduced tax revenues caused by the Bush Recession. In contrast, Trump inherited a growing economy and created the 81 percent increase in the size of his deficit with annual spending increases twice the size of Obama’s and out of control tax cuts to the rich, all leading to a bubble economy. DAMN THOSE LIBERALS!

What is really ridiculous out of all this is that Republicans are trying to create a Constitutional Convention that would pass amendments to the Constitution outlawing federal budget deficits and requiring annual spending increases lower than any Republican Administration has ever achieved. How much simpler it would be to simply elect another powerful, frugal Democrat like Bill Clinton as president who can whip Republicans in line and control their spending.

Open up the printing presses!

People often accuse big government politicians of printing more money to prop up the economy. It doesn’t actually work this way. Very little of the money used today is actual paper money. The way government grows the money supply is through banks and the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve currently requires banks to have a 10 percent cash reserve for all the loans in their portfolio. (This is not paper cash, it is a cash balance.) If Frugal Ron goes to a bank and asks for and gets a $10 million loan, the bank can make that loan if they have $1 million sitting in reserves. They put $10 million in Frugal Ron’s account using their $1 million and $9 million they just borrowed from the Federal Reserve. The $9 million from the Federal Reserve never existed until the bank asked for it. The net result is that Frugal Ron gets $10 million to spend and the US economy just created $9 million.

As long as the demand for money is market driven, this system actually works really well. Market driven means the market sets the interest rate. In this wonderful environment, the government isn’t borrowing money and driving up the interest rate. And, the Fed isn’t trying to counterbalance the rise in interest rates by lowering the interest rate.

Frugal Ron is not going to borrow $10 million unless he is reasonably sure he is going to make an adequate return on the loan. Likewise, the bank is averse to risk and is not going to lend the money unless they are very sure they can get it back. Like every business, banks want to grow. The faster they get Frugal Ron’s $10 million back, the faster they can turn their initial $1 million in reserves into $100 million in new loans.

For the system to work, everything is dependent on the independence of the Federal Reserve Bank. Government controls fiscal policy (taxes and spending) while the Federal Reserve controls the monetary policy described above.

An independent Fed used to be the case. For example, when Ronald Reagan was president, he spent government money like a drunken sailor and pumped $hundred’s of millions of borrowed money into the economy. At the same time, the Federal Reserve kept the economy in check with record high interest rates. This depressed borrowing and dramatically lowered the growth of the money supply. Yes, Reagan had a horrific 82 percent stock crash, but the system held together and inflation took a terrible beating.

In the Donald Trump borrow and spend era, this independence is gone. Trump replaced the highly respected and independent Chair of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen with the much more pliable Jerome Powell. Why Powell won’t stand-up to Trump isn’t clear. Maybe he hasn’t get the backbone to withstand Trump’s bullying, or maybe he is reacting to Trump’s attempts to stack the Federal Reserve Board with wildly incompetent and unqualified candidates? But the liberal Trump had the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates in 2019 and 2020 to make up for his incompetence managing fiscal and trade policy. The yields on Treasury bonds dropped below 0.5 percent before the Corona virus collapse.

What has happened is that in the liberal Trump era, the demand for money is no longer demand driven. By “demand driven”, interest rates are set by the market. When the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates three times in 2019 to prop up Trump’s economy, that made interest rates to borrowers lower and made borrowing that was otherwise unprofitable now worthwhile. Consequently, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply and made the stock market and economy grow. All enhancing a bubble economy that was due to burst.

With the latest Federal Reserve interest rate decrease, long-term Treasury bonds are yielding 0.0 percent annual interest. This is the first time in history this has happened.

While this liberal scenario sounds like beautiful classic music to Republicans, it has a downside. There was a time not so long ago when frugal retired folks could put their savings into safe Certificates of Deposits and get a nice 3 percent annual return to supplement their pensions and Social Security. Now, in the era of zero interest rates, they will be forced to put their money in much riskier investments to get a return. Making this even worse, bonds used to be safe investments. Now, in the zero interest rate era, bond yields have only one direction to go. As bond yields go up, bond values drop and suddenly, another safe investment for retirees is gone.

For every loser, there is a winner. Big spending Donald Trump was always known as the “King of Debt”. Now his over leveraged, failing businesses have a lifeline.

Trump’s trade policies – A study in futility and stupidity

As a presidential candidate, the liberal Trump vowed to eliminate our job destroying trade deficit. Trump said he would renegotiate the unfair trade agreements other countries were using to take advantage of us. Trump was going to accomplish all this by launching “an easy to win trade war”. He would call upon his legendary negotiating skills to “put America first”.

Unfortunately, after three plus years, the most recent data available for the 3rd quarter of 2019 shows Trump’s trade deficit sits at an annualized -$506.9 billion. Comparing apples to apples, the “totally unacceptable Obama trade deficit” in the 3rd quarter of 2016 was -$436.4 billion. So, while Trump campaigned about Obama destroying the US economy with his huge trade deficit, Trump’s current trade deficit is actually 16.1 percent higher than Obama’s.

So why has Trump failed so miserably? Trade balances have nothing to do whatsoever with trade treaties!! Trade balances equal national savings. Simplified, Government net savings + Private net savings = Exports – Imports. Using the most recent Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data:

Government net savings = -$1,597.6 billion or $1.5976 trillion (includes local and state governments)

Private net savings = $1,090.2 billion or $1.0902 trillion

Exports of goods and services = $3,806.1 billion or $3.8061 trillion

Imports of goods and services = $4,313.0 billion or $4.3130 trillion

Doing the math…

Govt. savings + Private savings = -$1,597.6 billion + $1,090.2 billion = -$507.4 billion

Exports – Imports = $3,806.1 billion – $4,313.0 billion = -$506.9 billion

BEA calls the $0.5 billion difference the “Net Capital account transactions”, which translates roughly into something like, “the check is in the mail”. (Source of Export & Import data: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 4.1 Foreign Transactions in the National Income and Product Accounts, Lines 1, 18 and 36. Savings data: Table 5.1 Savings and Investment by Sector, Lines 36 and 39, www.bea.gov)

The net savings is called the Capital Account. The difference between Exports and Imports is called the Current Account. For any country, those two accounts must always be equal.

All this is, of course, far out of Trump’s ability to comprehend. Even the most basic parts of trade are out of Trump’s depth. Trump continually claims the import tariffs he put on Chinese goods are paid by China. This is false. The US companies importing the goods pay these tariffs to the US government. Those costs are passed onto US consumers as higher prices. As of June 30, 2019 the US government collected over $63 billion in tariffs over the previous 12 months. This leads to at least $63 billion in increased costs to consumers.

When the liberal Trump started a trade war by putting a 25 percent tariffs on steel imports because of what he called unfair trade practices by steel exporting countries, other countries countered by putting tariffs on our agricultural exports. Since agricultural commodities are heavily dependent on exports, these tariffs and other trade restrictions put on our exports devastated our farm economy.

The sad part is this trade war obviously accomplished nothing. Our trade deficit grew by over 16 percent during Trump’s “easy to win” trade war. The liberal Trump’s trade war attempt to lower the US trade deficit was doomed to failure because even if he had gotten the trade concessions he wanted from other countries, they would have had no impact on our national savings rate.

Worse, Trump’s “America First” trade agenda increasingly focused on harming other countries, especially China. This goes beyond stupidity. For farmers, the US domestic economy is maxed out. There isn’t much room for further growth. The export dependent farm economy’s growth is contingent on increasing incomes in China, Mexico and other such countries. Only an imbecile would do anything to hinder China’s growth.

While farm bankruptcies and suicide rates are increasing at record rate, a Farm Journal poll released in January 2020 found Trump’s approval rating by farmers is at a record 83 percent.  We’ll leave this phenomenon for another column.

Savings

Frugal Ron got it right again when he predicted Trump’s foolish trade war would not improve our country’s trade balance. That was a no-brainer. However, Frugal Ron missed big time in predicting the trade deficit would explode because of Trump’s huge federal budget deficit.

Using the equation again: Government net savings + Private net savings = Exports – Imports. One would have expected that the -$558 billion in Government Net Savings  (because of the huge increase in Trump’s spending and tax cut) would have gone to the other side of the equation and been reflected in an equally huge increase in our trade deficit.

While Trump’s current balance of trade deficit grew 16.1 percent, that doesn’t qualify as an explosion. What happened over the past three years is unprecedented.  The decrease in government savings almost entirely went into private savings.

Private savings was at $590.4 billion in the 4th Quarter of 2016 when Obama left office. As noted above, the latest numbers show private savings are at $1,090.2 billion (or $1.092 trillion).  This is a difference of $499.8 billion.  (BEA Table 5.1)

The difference from Obama’s 2016 Federal budget deficit and Trump’s 3rd Quarter 2019 deficit is $558 billion. Looking at it this way, $0.90 of every dollar increase in our deficit has gone into private savings.

According to the Consumer Expenditure Survey, people in the top 10 percent of income saved almost a third of their income after taxes. People in the middle of the income distribution spent 100 percent of their income. It appears high income individuals and companies are running out of places to spend the money they got from Trump’s tax cuts and spending increases. The only place to go with it is savings.

The Socialist president

While Ronald Reagan was a wild-eyed liberal, deficit loving, big government spender, no one ever accused him of being a socialist. At Reagan’s core, he believed individuals could make better spending choices than government. One of the tenets of conservatism is that decisions should, whenever possible, be shifted to the lowest level of government. The lowest levels of government are individuals.

This is clearly not the case with Donald Trump. His “managed economy” is the closest thing to socialism the United States has experienced. And, it has failed miserably.

The liberal Trump vowed to protect the steel industry.  He put a 25 percent tariff on steel imports. Then Trump set-up a bureaucracy in the Commerce Department.  Steel users must apply to this agency if they can’t find a certain type of steel in the US before they can import it. There is a long backlog of steel users in this government morass waiting for tariff exemptions. Without the exemptions, manufacturers are at a disadvantage to foreign manufacturers who don’t have to deal with tariffs and a bureaucracy.

According to a PBS study, “The results? “For the first few months after Trump’s tariffs took effect, steel prices did rise. The price of a metric ton of hot rolled band steel hit $1,006 in July 2018, according to the SteelBenchmarker website, which tracks steel prices. Since then, it has plunged to $557 — lower than before the tariffs.”

“Steel-consuming companies have sought alternatives. Some have moved production overseas, where steel imports aren’t subject to Trump’s tariffs. Or they’ve reduced their steel purchases or substituted alternatives from plastic or composite materials.”

“President George W. Bush also sought to protect the steel industry by imposing tariffs in 2002. Rebuked by the World Trade Organization, Bush withdrew the tariffs the next year. While Bush’s tariffs were in place, the industry actually lost 14,000 jobs.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-trump-tariffs-havent-revitalized-american-steelmakers

Conservatives recognize that for every winner that some government program creates, there will also be some losers. The steel industry protections from imports Trump put in place provided some short-term winners in the steel industry. However, the losers far outnumbered the winners.  All consumers were losers because they wound up paying more for anything made from steel. US manufacturers that use steel were also losers because cars, machinery and everything else they produced were less competitive in international and US markets where competitors didn’t have to pay tariffs. Foreign countries that don’t have steel tariffs are winners because they picked up jobs from US manufacturers when they moved jobs overseas to avoid the tariffs. Foreign manufacturers are winners as they picked up business from US companies that couldn’t move production overseas.

The biggest losers in this real life scenario are US farmers. Mexico, China, Europeans and everyone else affected by Trump’s tariffs put countervailing tariffs on US agricultural products. Trump, the true socialist, tried to make up for farm producer losses with a massive subsidy program. As always with government subsidies, the right amounts never go to the right people.

In the end, the US steel industry was a loser for the protections. As noted above, some steel users switched to substitutes, demand for steel end products dropped because of higher prices, and manufacturers using steel moved overseas.

The liberal Trump’s recent trade deal with Canada and Mexico shows all that is wrong with socialist trade protectionism. Trump’s agreement requires 75 percent of a vehicle’s content be produced in North America and 70 percent of a vehicle’s steel and aluminum to originate in North America to be tariff free. The way to get around all this is simply to produce the whole automobile overseas and pay a tariff to bring it here.

This trade agreement may well be as devastating to the US auto industry as Trump’s tariffs were to the steel and farm economies. This is just the kind of legislation the conservative President Obama fought. What should tell us something is that Trump’s U.S.M.C.A. was approved in the Senate with the help of some of our most left wing, liberal senators, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren.

Besides protecting chosen industries like manufacturing from foreign competition, socialists also believe in subsidizing businesses. Trump personally lobbied with former Wisconsin Governor (R) Scott Walker to hand out close to $4 billion in subsidies to a Taiwanese company, Foxconn, to build a manufacturing plant in southern Wisconsin. The “Seventh Wonder of the World” as Trump characterized the huge plant, has yet to materialize.

Conservatives hate government subsidies of chosen companies since it hands out taxes paid by long-time established companies and gives the subsidized organization an unfair advantage in competing for labor and resources against the companies who funded the subsidy. Also, subsidies rarely go to small companies (who create most of our jobs). They are usually reserved for large, politically connected organizations.

Wrapping-up

There are two major summary points in this article. First, Donald Trump is not a conservative. He is an ultra-liberal, borrow and spender who follows the socialist agenda of a government managed economy.  While socialists are generally associated with policies that help poor and middle class people (Bernie Sanders), Trump’s socialism is geared to helping the rich.

Sadly, today’s Republicans think they are conservatives if they take money away from the neediest people in our country (who typically happen to be people of color). This isn’t conservatism, this is racism.

Trump succeeded in cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other safety net programs while letting spending run amok in the other 98 percent of government. Hence, Trump’s current (pre COVID-19) annual spending increase is double Obama’s average increase in Obama’s eight years in office. In a true sign of the victory of liberalism, all of the gyrations in today’s financial marketplace are the result of whatever Trump and his Fed are proposing. Market economics is dead.

What is an example of conservatism? Bill Clinton had the lowest annual percentage increase of federal government spending in Bureau of Economic Analysis history (they started keeping records in 1929).  His federal budget surplus of $155 billion was the biggest in history. (The only other president in the last 60 years to have a budget surplus was Eisenhower.) 

Clinton got government out of the way of consumer buying decisions by signing two major trade agreements and giving China Most Favored Nation trading status. His tariff slashing was tantamount to having the biggest tax cut in history.

Since Clinton had a budget surplus, government wasn’t in the credit market.  Interest rates were set by market demand with the Federal Reserve sitting on the sidelines. No wonder he had a record long period of economic growth. Another aspect of the power of conservatism, Clinton’s economic growth was spread across all segments of society.

The second major point of this article is that the current economic free-fall is the result of a perfect financial storm. We had a classic bubble economy fueled by a combination of three years of out-of-control, liberal borrow and spend policies and a loose monetary policy. Throw in a major crisis like COVID-19 and a ridiculously incompetent Donald Trump who ignored all warnings of our being unprepared for a pandemic. All of a sudden, you have a disaster that turns into a financial free fall.

That is the past, so where is this going? Financial markets thrive on stability and confidence. Donald Trump provides neither.

To the movers and shakers of the financial world, the liberal Trump is a pathetically incompetent figure. He inherited over $500 million from his father. He proceeded to lose more money than any American from 1985 to 1994 ($1.15 billion). After six bankruptcies, no bank in the world will lend money to him or his businesses.

What about Trump’s economic advisors? Typically, when a presidential campaign gets going, they recruit high-powered economists from Wall Street and academia as campaign advisors. When a candidate wins, these economists follow the former candidate to the White House. In Trump’s case, this didn’t happen. No real economist was going to have anything to do with an administration that was clueless about the value of trade and didn’t understand the basic economics that trade agreements have nothing to do with a country’s trade balance.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was charged with locating an economic advisor. So, like the rest of us, when we need something hard to find, Kushner turned to Amazon.

He did a search on Amazon for someone matching Trump’s views on trade. Kushner found a book co-written by Peter Navarro and was struck by its title, “Death by China.” Kushner cold-called Navarro and invited him to be an adviser to the Trump campaign. Navarro now directs the White House National Trade Council and serves as the Assistant to the President. Not surprisingly, Wall Street has little confidence or regard for Trump or his team.

Epilogue

The liberal Donald Trump is the most disastrous president in US history on many levels. Even before the corona virus, his current 6.5 percent annual spending increase is double Obama’s average over his two terms. The liberal Trump’s most recent (pre-corona virus) federal budget deficit is 81 percent higher than when he took office. The unbelievably stupid Trump, who can’t understand trade deals have no impact on our trade balance, has a 16 percent bigger trade deficit than Obama. What is so funny about these disasters is how Trump claimed during his presidential campaign that the budget and trade deficits were destroying our country and he was the only one who could fix them.

Going on, with the liberal Trump, for the first time in our history, we have Treasury bonds yielding 0 percent interest. We have an economy in free fall because of the corona virus and Trump’s ignoring all warning signs of our being unprepared for a pandemic. We still don’t know how many deaths his ineptitude will cost.

When Obama left office, we had a treaty with Iran (that they obeyed) that halted their nuclear weapons program for ten years and was integrating them into the global economy. Today, their nuclear weapons program is going ahead full throttle. When Obama left office, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs were only a danger to themselves since all their tests blew up on them. After Trump’s “fire and fury” threat, the North Koreans suddenly got their act together and had a successful H-bomb test. Today, they are doing regular missile testing to get their nuclear weapons to the US.

The pathological liar Trump has zero credibility with the majority of voters due to the 16,000+ lies he told in his first three years in office. He is far and away the most immoral president in our country’s history. https://www.frugalron.com/mr-man-trump/

Trump is the laughing stock of world leaders. While Obama was president, other leaders wanted to get meetings with him to find out how he was turning around the US economy faster than their countries were able to do. In contrast, Trump left the last NATO meeting in a huff after leaders of Canada, England, Italy and France were caught on video imitating him. They weren’t laughing with Trump, they were laughing at him.

Trump’s backstabbing of our Kurd allies who sacrificed 11,000 of their lives to do the dirty work of beating ISIS for us, Trump’s embrace of authoritarian dictators and his breaking of international treaties have destroyed our world standing. Our separating of children from their parents who came here legally seeking asylum and then warehousing the children far away from their parents breaks all Judeo-Christian values we used to hold dear.

Trump flaunts our laws and if he left office today, he would be indicted for at least 16 felonies. He would likely join a plethora of his friends who are already in jail. Even Richard Nixon had more respect for our laws than Trump.

The only light at the end of this pathetic tunnel is in November. Voters have a chance to elect another honest, conservative Democrat who can again pull us out of this Republican economic debacle. God help us if we miss that chance.

Rush Limbaugh recently stated, “OK, how’s this gonna look, a 37-year-old gay guy (Pete Buttigieg) kissing his husband onstage next to Mr. Man Donald Trump? We’ll leave Pete Buttigieg for later. But, excuse me, Mr. Man Trump??

Perhaps a Mr. Man in Limbaugh’s eyes is someone who like Limbaugh has a trophy wife, multiple divorces, lies with abandon and is a racist? Anyway, Limbaugh and Trump are a modern day reincarnation of two long ago Saturday Night Live characters, Hans and Franz.

Hans and Franz were two body builders (in their eyes) who constantly derided “Girly Men”. The comedy part of this was that, like Trump and Limbaugh, despite all their machismo, Hans and Franz were the ultimate Girly Men.

So, just for Hans and Franz, we’ll look at Mr. Man Trump and see how someone that was born with a platinum spoon in his mouth and probably has never done a physical day’s work in his life fits as either a Mr. Man or as a Girly Man.

For Trump supporters…

Since Trump supporters have a totally different sense of morality than the rest of us, I’ve divided this into two sections to make it more relevant for all. First for Trump supporters, in terminology they’ll understand:

• Real men keep their wives satisfied.
  • Mr. Man Trump fired his bodyguard in 1996 after a police officer found Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples, and their bodyguard naked under a lifeguard stand on a deserted beach at 4:00 AM. 
  • Mr. Man Trump’s third wife, Melania, resides in the East Wing of the White House while Donald resides in the West Wing. When traveling, they have separate hotel rooms. From all appearances, Melania seems to prefer celibacy to anything Girly Man Donald has to offer.
• Real men don’t go whoring. At the same celebrity golf tournament Girly Man Trump hooked up with Stormy Daniels, Mr. Man Trump also offered Jessica Drake, another porn star attending the same golf outing, $10,000 and the use of his private jet to have sex with him.
• Real men don’t do comb-overs. Nobody has a comb-over like Girly Man Trump to cover his bald spot. Also, real men don’t fear high winds. For those of us Real Men who are lucky enough to be bald, it may have taken a little getting use to, but we regard baldness as the ultimate sign of masculinity.
• Real men don’t wear more make-up than their wives.
• Real men don’t wear girdles. Look at pictures of Girly Man Trump on the golf course and compare to him wearing a suit and make your own call on this.
• Real men don’t do tanning beds or tanning creams. The ultimate example of vanity and overdosing is Girly Man Trump’s orange skin.
• Real men don’t use profanity or take their Lord’s name in vain. Girly Man Trump curses regularly, even at his campaign rallies.
• Real men have the respect of their peers. Girly Man Trump is the laughing stock of the world. While other world leaders are not being a class act for laughing at someone like Trump who is truly intellectually challenged, it is hard to blame them for mocking an arrogant, blathering windbag. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/04/world-is-laughing-donald-trump

For the rest of us…

The following don’t mean anything to Trump and Limbaugh supporters, but they mean a lot to the rest of us in defining real machismo:

• Real me don’t sexually assault women. Twenty-five women have courageously come forward and described the details of Girly Man Trump’s assaults. Some reported Mr. Man Trump pulling up their dresses and grabbing at their vaginas. For today’s Republicans, sexual assault by a white male Republican is just fine as long as they lie about it afterwards.
• Real men don’t brag about sexually assaulting women. In the “Access Hollywood” tape Girly Man Trump enthusiastically brags about grabbing women by their pusseys. Mr. Man Trump denies ever saying these things. It takes a particularly idiotic Girly Man to lie about what is on a recording.
• Real men don’t have numerous extra-marital affairs like Girly Man Trump.
• Men who get caught having affairs own up to it. In contrast, a pathetic Girly Man will arrange six figure payouts to try and buy his sex partners’ silence while having his lawyer (Michael Cohen) lie to his wife for him.
• Married men with any sense of concern for their wife’s health use condoms when having extra-marital sex with porn stars. In an interview on “60 Minutes”, porn star Stormy Daniels related how Mr. Man Trump had unprotected sex with her.
• Real men know that the best sex happens when both parties are into it. Girly Man Trump’s first wife, Ivana, charged him with marital rape (along with “cruel and inhuman treatment”).
• Real men don’t sire illegitimate children. Girly Man Trump’s daughter Tiffany was born out of wedlock on October 23, 1993.
• Real men make their wives happy.  In virtually every photo where Girly Man Trump is standing near Melania, she looks like she just swallowed a moldy tomato. In pictures where she is half way across the US or in another country without Girly Man Trump, she has a beautiful smile that melts hearts. One can only imagine the humiliation a supermodel like Melania must have felt as reports of her husbands infidelity were published.
• Real men are willing to give women freedom. We have no idea what kind of agreement the Trumps have to keep their marriage going, probably at least through the election. However if Girly Man Trump has any human sensitivity and manhood, he’d give his wife her freedom so she could start over and find a real Mr. Man that could show her faithfulness and be capable of love.
• Real men tell the truth. Girly Man Trump has lied over 16,000 times in his first three years in office to the American people he is supposed to be serving.
• Real men take responsibility. Girly Man Trump regularly says, does or tweets something incredibly stupid. Then, the press does their job and dutifully reports it. Of course, Mr. Man Trump deservedly looks like an idiot. He then blames the press for reporting his stupidity. Girly Man Trump’s enemy isn’t the media, it is the truth.  Expect when the Trump’s announce their divorce, Girly Man will blame the press.
• Real men aren’t bullies. Making a fool of your wife who is campaigning against cyber-bullying while he is the world’s biggest bully doesn’t make Girly Man Trump look more masculine.
• Real men aren’t racists. Only a Girly Man would call Nazis very fine people and refer to Mexicans who come to the US as murderers, drug dealers and rapists.
• Real men are loyal to those who have their backs. Girly Man Trump abandoned our Kurd allies who had 11,000 deaths doing the dirty work of destroying ISIS for us. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-kurds-gave-their-lives-to-defeat-the-islamic-state-trump-just-pissed-it-all-away
• Real men don’t break laws. Girly Man Trump broke two campaign finance laws trying to buy the silence of his sex partners. The Mueller Report identified ten more obstruction of justice laws that he broke. He also broke four US extortion laws in his attempt to get Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation of Joe Biden.
• Real men don’t campaign for pedophiles. Girly Man Trump campaigned aggressively for pedophile Alabama US Senate candidate Roy Moore.
• Real men don’t order the separation of parents who came to the US legally seeking asylum from their children and lock the children in cages hundreds of miles away.
• Real men don’t disparage the physical appearance of a rival candidate’s wife like Girly Man Trump did with Heidi Cruz. Especially, if like Mr. Man Trump, you are obscenely fat, have a ridiculous comb-over and orange skin.
• Real men don’t mock a reporter with a disability. Mr. Man Trump imitated New York Times reporter Serge F. Kovaleski jerking his arms in front of his body. A real man with any semblance of intelligence would never deny doing this knowing it was on video. That certainly didn’t stop Girly Man Trump.
• Real men have consideration for other people. Mr. Man Trump called a grieving widow (Myeshia Johnson), whose Army husband had recently been killed in action and told her and others listening on speakerphone that her husband, “Knew what he signed up for.” Pure Girly Man Trump.
• Real men don’t have their rich dad get them a 4F Draft Deferment for a phony bone spur like Mr. Man Trump did to avoid going to Vietnam.
• Real men have compassion and are willing to help others in need. Girly Man Trump’s charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, was shut down by the New York Attorney General’s Office due to, “A shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more.”
• Real men are confident enough of their own sexuality that they can accept gays for who they are as people.

Repulsiveness ≠ Masculinity

It is incomprehensible that anyone with Donald Trump’s behavior would be referred to as “Mr. Man”.  But, these are incomprehensible times.

The important thing for rational people is to not be overwhelmed by Donald Trump’s repugnant behavior and to start accepting it. Even more important is to make sure we teach and reinforce in our children and grandchildren the values of human decency.

Pete Buttigieg as President?

Back to Pete Buttigieg. He has an impeccable military record. He is Harvard and Oxford educated, is articulate and intellectually in the same league with Presidents Clinton and Obama. He clearly lays out progressive goals of what he wants to accomplish and how to get it done. No one questions his sincerity, integrity and honesty. He is the complete opposite of Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, Buttigieg is overly idealistic and flat out naive in believing he can get Republicans to work with him and that he can unite our country. Perhaps, the attacks on his sexuality by Republicans will be the reality slap in the face Buttigieg needs to understand the bigotry the great majority of Republicans stand for. Hopefully, he will come back older and wiser in a few years. 

Any Democratic presidential candidate needs to recognize that initiatives to slow global warming and improve the well being of the majority of US citizens will rise and fall on party lines votes. Roughly 37% of US voters are hard-core racists, so no one is going to unite this country. https://www.frugalron.com/racism-and-donald-trump/

If Jesus Christ came down to earth in heavenly glory and ran for president on a platform of peace, love, acceptance of strangers, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, healing the poor and criticizing the greed of the rich, Republicans would question His citizenship and then marginalize Him as an Obama Democrat.

Summing-up

So, what has Trump done for the good of others that might balance off the repugnant behavior detailed above?

Does Trump show any humanity by giving to charity out of the goodness of his heart without any expectation of personal gain? A 2016 Washington Post article, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/26/donald-trump-has-now-given-more-to-charity-in-the-last-four-months-than-in-the-previous-10-years-combined/

found Trump donated more money in the four months after getting the Republican presidential nomination than in the previous ten years. Some donations were made on high profile campaign visits. The totals include contributions to his Trump Foundation, which as noted above was later shut down because of fraud.

Some will claim Trump’s handling of the economy has benefitted the poor by providing them with jobs. However, we have a classic bubble economy. Like every Republican president from Reagan forward, Trump is trying to buy prosperity with massive government spending increases financed by huge deficits.

For comparison, President Obama’s average annual federal government spending increase was 2.8% over his eight-year term. Trump’s most recent annual spending increase is 6.6%. Obama’s last Net federal government saving was -$677 billion.  Trump’s most recent Net federal government savings is – $1.212 trillion. (Source: Bureau Economic Analysis, www.bea.gov; Table 3.2, lines 43 and 37).

Unfortunately, every other Republican attempt to buy prosperity with huge government debt financed expenditures has resulted in disastrous recessions. If anyone can provide a reason this bubble will end differently, please give me a reason in the comments section. I’m always open to learning new things.

Republicans will argue that Trump has appointed anti abortion judges to the Supreme Court and this outweighs his repulsive behavior. Unfortunately, between the internet, new technology and cheap air travel, any law outlawing abortion will be unenforceable for women with money. More detail is in the attached article. https://www.frugalron.com/abortion-sex-and-republicans/

One last point, my apologies to all the past winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I am sorry for those that earned this award for their efforts to improve the lives of others and saw the prestige of the award diminished by Trump’s giving it to Rush Limbaugh.

With the exception of racism, nothing unites Trump supporters like their drive to outlaw abortion in the United States. Republican efforts to stack the Supreme Court may achieve their goal. Unfortunately for them, cheap international air travel, the Internet and technology will make this an empty victory. It is one thing to pass a law. It is another thing to actually enforce that law.

Republicans have a difficult time understanding that the world has changed since 1973; the year abortion became legal in the US. They think they can force women to resort to the horrific back room abortions prevalent before Roe versus Wade. It is a different world and women have options they never dreamed of before 1973.

The reality is that every time government passes over-reaching, unpopular laws, a demand driven crime machine is created giving citizens what they want. This happened with prohibition, it happened with the War on Drugs and it will happen with abortion. I expect if the US outlaws abortion, medical abortions online will become the predominant way women with money will get around the law for abortions in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Later abortions will happen outside US borders.

Looking at the big picture, the reality is abortion laws don’t reduce the number of abortions. In fact, studies have found that countries that outlawed abortion have the highest abortion rates. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide

Medical abortions

The primary method US women will use to circumvent a US abortion ban is with medical abortions. A medical abortion uses two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, taken one day apart at home. Within 24 hours, the woman will have a miscarriage. The process is 97 percent effective.

Misoprostol is also used alone. This drug is also used to treat ulcers and is easier to obtain than mifepristone. It is effective in terminating pregnancies over 90 percent of the time. If it doesn’t work, a woman can wait 12 hours and repeat taking the drug.

There is no surgery and no vacuum procedure. In Sweden, 92 percent of abortions are medically induced. It is rapidly becoming the predominant form of abortion in the US. Medical abortions are used in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Using these drugs in the US without a prescription is illegal, just like opioids. However, today, mifepristone and misoprostol can be ordered from a website https://www.womenonweb.org/en/page/3074/buy-abortion-pills-mifepristone-online-misoprostol-online

The above website is run by a non-profit group wanting to give women the option of safe abortions. That isn’t the future though.

When the War On Drugs was launched, few people dreamed of the sophisticated distribution system drug cartels would put in place. If you missed seeing what was going to happen in illegal narcotics distribution, you are now forewarned that mifepristone and misoprostol will be easily accessible for almost all women. With a US market of 940,000 abortions annually, there will be plenty of incentive to deliver customer-focused solutions to women with unwanted pregnancies.

It is impossible to predict how mifepristone and misoprostol will be distributed if abortion is outlawed in the U.S. Frugal Ron’s expectation is women will buy a prescription for misoprostol over the Internet. The doctor, physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner providing the prescription will be licensed in the US and located in a country with no extradition agreement with the US. The credit card charge will go to an offshore bank. The woman ordering the prescription can fill it at her local drug store. Her health insurance will most likely cover the cost of the drug.

Both drugs are patented. This doesn’t mean much to people selling it illegally, but it does mean the formulations are publicly available. Mifepristone and misoprostol can be used as liquids or pills and mixed in anything from sugar bags to cookies. Shipping the small amounts needed to women should also be relatively simple as an alternative distribution method. Current providers of illicit drugs may also be involved in the distribution of medical abortions.

Travel

A second option for women wanting an abortion is traveling to Canada. This will be the preferred method for later term abortions.

Traveling for abortions is already happening. There are no abortion clinics in either North or South Dakota. This certainly doesn’t mean women in those states aren’t getting abortions. Ten percent of the abortions performed in neighboring Minnesota are done on out of state women.

International air travel is cheap. And, airports are jammed everyday with women who are very comfortable traveling.

A recent price check finds that for $222, anyone can book a round-trip flight Monday, returning Tuesday from Chicago to Toronto. The same schedule will cost $352 from Los Angeles to Vancouver and $222 from New York City to Ottawa. US citizens need a passport to travel to Canada. But, a woman can get an expedited passport in 24 hours. Appointments at abortion clinics can be made online. If abortion is outlawed in the US, expect a large expansion of safe abortion clinics on the other side of the Canadian border.

Abortion is legal in Canada for all stages of pregnancy. It is one of the few countries in the world with no legal restrictions on abortions.

As an aside, Canada’s experience with abortion laws should give U.S. abortion opponents even more cause for concern. In 1969, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed in Canada. This law legalized abortion as long as a committee of doctors signed off that it was necessary for the physical or mental well being of the mother.

Dr. Henry Morgentaler started performing abortions without committee approval. In 1973, he claimed he had done over 5,000 illegal abortions. To make sure there was no doubt, he had one of these abortions videotaped.

The Quebec government took Morgentaler to court twice. Both times juries refused to convict him even though he admitted to doing thousands of abortions. The government appealed one acquittal and the appellant court overturned the jury’s verdict. Morgentaler was sentenced to 18 months in jail. Public outcry over the appeal court’s decision caused the federal government to pass a law (commonly known as the Morgentaler Amendment) preventing appeal courts from overturning a jury’s not-guilty verdict. Morgentaler was again acquitted at a third trial, causing the Quebec government to declare the law unenforceable. Eventually, Canada passed its current law granting women abortion rights at any stage of gestation.

If the Supreme Court outlawed abortions, it is quite likely many urban counties would elect district attorneys who refused to prosecute abortion cases. If U.S. attorneys attempted to prosecute these cases in federal courts in urban areas, it is very likely juries (like those in Quebec) would refuse to convict, making the laws unenforceable.

This is the problem with abortion laws that are passed legislatively and judicially by straight party line votes. In this case, the majority of US citizens will have no ownership or buy in to any law outlawing abortion.

What a CF!

Republicans and their evangelical supporters may well get their holy grail of an abortion ban in the US in the next year. While they are celebrating, they probably won’t notice abortions are more accessible and easier to get for women with money than ever before. No more “cooling off periods”, no more being forced to watch ultrasound presentations, no more required parental involvement and no more doctor appointments for medical abortions. More than likely, abortions will be cheaper than they are now.

The point is, for women with a credit card, a responsible boyfriend with a credit card or a caring parent with a credit card, a US abortion ban will simply be a hassle, not an impediment. The only losers out of this whole mess will be the poorest; least educated and most isolated women. This will result in more brown and black skinned babies, the worst possible outcome for Trump and his racist supporters’ efforts to, “Make America White Again”.

A real solution

Ironically, while big-government, liberal Republicans seek to use the jack-boot of unenforceable laws and the threat of locking people up in jail with lifetime sentences to reduce abortions, they are ignoring technology that can virtually eliminate abortions in the US.

Eliminating abortions means preventing unwanted pregnancies. In a 2011 survey, about 45 percent of pregnancies in the U.S. were unintended, of which 42 percent ended in abortion. The solution should seem fairly straightforward to most rational people. Let’s eliminate unwanted pregnancies and thereby make abortions obsolete. This solution requires a two-pronged strategy:

• Universal and free access to contraceptives, including Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARC).
• Universal access to sex education and information on reproduction and pregnancy prevention.

LARCs

Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives are implants that a woman can use that provides extremely effective birth control. Studies find they are 20 times more effective than birth control pills, the patch, or the vaginal ring. One important reason why is the LARC removes the “user error” factor that can make other methods less effective. No need to remember to take a pill daily, or have a diaphragm on hand, ready to go.

Once a LARC is in place, it does its job for years with no input from the user, acting as a “set it and forget it” method. Also, if a woman decides she wants to have a baby, the LARC can be easily removed, hence the “reversible” in the name.

How effective are LARCs at reducing abortions? The Contraceptive CHOICE Project was launched in St. Louis, Missouri in 2007 at George Washington University Medical College with the goal of studying how to reduce unintended pregnancies and hence abortions.

The CHOICE project enrolled over 9,000 women between 2007 and 2011 to receive free contraceptive counseling and the contraception of their choice for two to three years. The researchers found that from 2006 to 2010, teen study participants had an average annual abortion rate of 9.7 per 1,000 teens — significantly lower than the 41.5 abortions per 1,000 sexually active teens nationwide in 2008.

In the contraceptive CHOICE project, teen participants learned about all methods of contraception, including LARCs. Seventy-two percent of the teens then chose to use an IUD or an implant as their own form of birth control. Among the general population, only 7.2 percent of women use LARCs. This shows that women who receive a comprehensive education about birth control methods are more likely to choose the most effective and long-lasting kind.

Among the CHOICE participants who opted not to use LARCs as their birth control method, there were 4.55 unintended pregnancies per 100 women every year. There were only 0.27 unintended pregnancies per 100 women per year for the CHOICE participants who chose the LARCs. This is what Frugal Ron calls the almost complete elimination of the need for abortion. This is a real world study involving real people.

In another real-world application, The State of Colorado found similar results. After handing out free IUDs and implants to teens and poor women over six years, the statewide teen birthrate dropped 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while the abortion rate dropped 42 percent. The results were especially dramatic in the state’s poorest regions.

Cost

LARCs are highly effective and cheaper over the long term, but they can be expensive up front for uninsured or underinsured women. Out-of-pocket costs can range from $500 to $1,000, putting them out of reach for teens and poor women — those most at risk of an unintended pregnancy.

“The idea that women can access preventive methods and preventive health care at low cost or no cost is essential,” states Dr. Jeffrey Peipert, chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Indiana University School of Medicine. “Every dollar invested in contraception can save between four and 17 dollars down the road in health care costs.”

Republicans complain about the high cost of Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives. Yet, what is the gain of eliminating abortion as one of the most divisive issues our country deals with? On an individual level, individuals and families that have to decide whether or not to have an abortion have to make wrenching decisions. If government can eliminate this kind of pain, it has truly made the world a better place. This is not some abstract academic argument. One in four US women over 44 had an abortion.

The Republican Christian alternative

(Note, Frugal Ron recognizes Republican Christians are totally different from real Christians. The two groups are not to be confused or generalized together.)

Republicans and their Christian followers propose required abstinence only education as a faith based solution. Making this even more ludicrous, they have “Raw Dog” Trump as their point person promoting abstinence.

A review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2017/abstinence-only-until-marriage-programs-are-ineffective-and-harmful-young-people

found, “In theory, abstinence is 100% effective at preventing pregnancy and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). However, many adolescents who intend to practice abstinence fail to actually do so, and they often fail to use condoms or other forms of contraception when they do have intercourse. Considerable scientific evidence accumulated over the past 20 years has found that Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) programs are not effective at preventing pregnancy or STIs, nor do they have a positive impact on age at first sexual intercourse, number of sexual partners or other behaviors.”

Another study, “Abstinence-only education and teen pregnancy rates: why we need comprehensive sex education in the U.S.“ found similar results.

The author’s reported, “Using the most recent national data (2005) from all U.S. states with information on sex education laws or policies (N = 48), we show that increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth rates. This trend remains significant after accounting for socioeconomic status, teen educational attainment, ethnic composition of the teen population, and availability of Medicaid waivers for family planning services in each state. These data show clearly that abstinence-only education, as a state policy, is ineffective in preventing teenage pregnancy and may actually be contributing to the high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.”

States that emphasize abstinence-only programs have the highest rates of teen pregnancies and teen births. However, it should also be noted these states are also the ones making it most difficult for teenagers to get contraceptives by limiting Planned Parenthood’s efforts. Over and over, the same points keep slapping us in the face and say, “Wake-up, if you want more abortions, restrict access to contraceptives and implement faith based abstinence only education. If you want to make mega progress in eliminating abortions, make LARCs universally available for free and provide fact and science based sex education.”

Real sex education is key to preventing abortions

California is an example of how states adjusted when it became clear that abstinence-only education isn’t working. In 1992, the state’s teen pregnancy rate was 157 per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19 — the highest rate in the nation. To combat the problem, the state launched a three-year abstinence-only sex education effort. After finding the program had absolutely no impact on teens’ decisions to start having sex, the program was scrapped in 1995. In 2003, lawmakers passed the California Comprehensive Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS Prevention Education Act.

The law, forbade classes from promoting religious doctrine or bias against people, and required all sex education programs be medically accurate, age-appropriate and comprehensive. From the inception of the program in 2003 to 2013, California’s teen abortion rate dropped 55 percent ^1. compared to the national teen abortion rate drop of 46 percent ^1. in the same period. While these numbers are impressive, they understate the results of California’s comprehensive sex education.

California does not keep separate records for women from other states getting abortions in the state. Also, California does not require parental authorization for teen abortions and has no waiting period. Consequently, many teens from neighboring states that did not get California’s sex education come to the state for abortions. We can assume that these women would have close to the national average abortion rates and would thereby raise California’s teen abortion rate compared to if only California teens were counted.

Critics complain that sex education promotes promiscuity. However, a 15 year old California boy intent on having sex with as many similarly aged girls as possible would jump for joy if he found out his family was moving to Texas. While 28 percent ^1. of California girls reported having sex in high school, 38 percent ^2. of Texas girls had sex during their high school years. Texas schools have either no sex education or abstinence only education.

California’s success in preventing teen-age abortions is no accident. It also had nothing to do with restricting access to abortions.

• California state law requires that comprehensive sex education is taught in grades 7 to 12. A school can choose to offer sex education earlier than grade 7 as well.
• Sex education must include information about the effectiveness and safety of all U.S. Food and Administration (FDA)-approved contraceptive methods, including emergency contraception.
• California requires that instruction and materials are appropriate for students with disabilities and students of all races, genders, sexual orientations and ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
• California law also requires instruction about gender, gender expression, gender identity and gender stereotypes.
• California requires that students in grades 9 to 12 learn about sexual harassment and violence, consent and prevention and reporting of sexual harassment.
• Parents or guardians can remove their children from sex education classes. This is known as an “opt-out” policy.
• In California, teens can get a prescription for birth control without a parent’s permission.
• Clinics called “Title X clinics” provide sexual and reproductive health care to both teens and adults. Title X clinics offer many services, including prescriptions for the Pill, pregnancy option counseling, and testing for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and infections, including HIV.
• Title X clinic appointments are completely confidential.

Abortion prevention is more than just preventing teenage pregnancies. Planned Parenthood has 115 clinics in California. Planned Parenthood is able to offer more education and free contraceptives, to people of all ages.

Republicans are especially indignant that California’s comprehensive sex education classes include fact based and science backed information about how sexual orientation is caused by biological factors that start before birth. It is difficult to maintain Republican hate-based homophobia in an environment where ignorance doesn’t reign supreme.

It is obvious that outlawing abortions in the US will only impact the poorest and least educated women. If policymaker’s goal is to reduce abortions, the logical plan combines California’s sex education with free distribution of Long Acting Reversible Contraceptives. There are problems with a logical solution.

The politics of stupid

Frugal Ron observes that almost all people wanting to outlaw abortion are very much against using more effective and wider distribution of contraceptives and comprehensive sex education. This makes no sense whatsoever. Why would someone who wants to end abortions be against practices that do just that? Could it be that these folks are far more dedicated to stopping people from having recreational sex than stopping the killing of unborn babies?

This brings us to Christian superstitions and mythology. Right wing preachers exhort their flocks that we are having more floods, more devastating hurricanes and wildfires because it is God’s punishment on America for our tolerance of abortion, homosexuality and promiscuity.

These preachers forget to mention that the first half of the 20th Century is recognized as the epoch of church membership and attendance in the US. In addition, during this period, abortion was illegal everywhere, every state had anti-sodomy laws, and divorce was virtually non-existent.

Yet, the period from 1900 to 1950 brought us World War I, the Dust Bowl, locusts, boll weevils, the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust. Sadly, many Republicans are gullible enough to believe these Bible thumpers and their myths.

The most outrageous example of top-down theocracy concerning birth control is the Catholic Church. While the hierarchy of the church condemns using any kind of contraceptive, according to Pew Research, 98 percent of Catholic women have used some form of birth control during their lives. This is probably about the same percentage of Catholics that were eating meat on Wednesdays and Fridays before the church hierarchy decided they wouldn’t go to hell for this indiscretion.

One might think that if the Catholic Church is promoting abstinence to the rest of us, they ought to be successful in promoting it to their own employees. This is not the case. The Boston Globe published a series Children of Catholic priests live with secrets and sorrow. The reporters identify and interview many Catholic priests’ children.

Paul Sullins, a priest and sociologist at The Catholic University of America, said his belief that priests with children may be more numerous than priests who abuse children is based on common sense: “It’s a much less common impulse for an adult male to want to have sex with a child than it is to have sex with a woman.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops estimates there are more than 18,500 victims of Catholic sex abuse.

This isn’t a new problem. At least four Renaissance era popes had children during their reigns.

The last impediment to implementing an effective plan to dramatically lower the number of US abortions is present day Republican inability to think logically. Republicans ignore research, knowledge and arithmetic in eliminating the federal budget deficit, eliminating our trade deficit and saving our planet from the impacts of climate change. Why is anyone surprised when Republicans ignore real world data and research showing comprehensive sex education and LARCs reduce abortions?

Summing-up

It is impossible to predict how the nine member Supreme Court will handle upcoming abortion cases. If lower courts follow precedent and rule against individual state laws outlawing abortion, the Court might let the lower court rulings stand, keeping Roe versus Wade intact. Or, the Court might hear the cases and allow individual states to keep their laws; creating a hodge-podge of differing rules for each state. Or, the Court might invalidate abortion protections for the entire country. This article anticipates the latter scenario.

While Frugal Ron points out how outlawing abortions will be ineffective in decreasing abortions, the frugal one also shows how abortion numbers can be dramatically reduced through comprehensive sex education and making state of the art birth control universally available and free.

The real work of making changes in reproductive rights belongs to women impacted by these laws. In the 2016 presidential election, only 46 percent of women 18-24 years old voted. This needs to change. Young women have the power to destroy the Republican party as it exists today.

Protest marches after an election just give Republicans something to joke about. When women vote, their laughing stops. Additionally, if Roe versus Wade is overturned, women serving on juries can make sure no one is ever convicted for providing abortion services.

Women will circumvent any abortion law that is passed. They’ve been doing this for many years. While this is sad, what is really sad is that we have the technology and the means to all but eliminate abortion in the US and we aren’t doing it.

Additional Sources

1.https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/facts-and-stats/national-and-state-data-sheets/adolescent-reproductive-health/california/index.html

2. https://www.hhs.gov/ash/oah/facts-and-stats/national-and-state-data-sheets/adolescent-reproductive-health/texas/index.html