Day 102 – May Day! May Day! Warning! Warning!

Thursday, May 1, 2025

If there is anything you get from China, buy it now. That includes paper products, toys, and Christmas decorations. In a few months, maybe weeks, they won’t be on the shelves. Our President summed it up by saying, maybe a little girl won’t get three dolls for Christmas and will have to settle for only two. This prompted Lawrence O’Donnell to speculate on Donald’s name if he was in The Sopranos to be “Donny Two Doll.”

Me, I only want one doll. A voodoo doll. And I don’t have to tell you who the doll would look like.

It would come with a box of pins. Each pin would be tagged with names like: The Economy, Foreign Policy, Immigrants, Tariffs etc.

Moving on. Apparently, Elon Musk is moving on. Having to start smelling like bad fish in the Oval Office he says he’ll only come back one or two days a week to stink up the place. But he and his DOGE team took a few souvenirs. No he didn’t take the silverware. Remember, Mitt Romney saying he had “Binders full of women”? Yeah, well the Doge boys took “Laptops full of data.” Your data. Data from Social Security, the IRS, Immigration … and it is reportedly going to be put into a master database so he can track anyone in the country. Just like China! Hoo Rah.

This will make Cambridge Analytica look like child’s play. 

Was this the whole point of Doge? It certainly wasn’t to save money, or make the government more efficient.

I can’t quite figure it out – yet, but I can say this. There was this set of ideas on the right and with the tech bros that government was inefficient, and filled with layabouts. That government needed to be run more like a business, that the fat needed to be cut. But that is not what they did. They went in and indiscriminately fired people, made ridiculous demands, and left. The result may be the biggest mass murder in history, the ruining of our national research, the weakening of our soft power and influence and that’s just what I can think of as I write. It’s worse than that, of course.

I had the honor of working for one of the greatest companies in the world back in the 80s. The CEO left and went into government to help them become more efficient. He quickly realized that government was a different beast and that how it operated was different than how a company worked. As the CEO of a company he could give an order and expect it to be carried out. He learned that in government that didn’t work so well. You had constituencies, that you had to cater to and convince. The goals of government are much different than that of a company. A company wants to make a profit, in government they are most often doing something because no one else will do it exactly because it isn’t profitable. 

Take health insurance. A private insurance company wants to make a profit, the bigger the better. In a private insurance company paying out money to people is an expense. Keeping expenses low is a goal, hence people don’t necessarily get all the financial help they need. In government run insurance the goal is not to make a profit but to make everyone healthier. 

If we had government run health insurance it has been estimated that not only would everyone be covered, but no one would go bankrupt trying to pay for health care. Would it be cheaper? You bet. Current estimates run to $468 Billion cheaper. Yeah, but what about quality? Well, I dunno, the estimate is that 68,000 lives would be saved every year, and that overall health as measured in life expectancy would increase. You can measure U.S. life expectancy against other countries and see we rank at the bottom. So, if I were to pick: live longer, be healthier and spend less money doing it I’d let the government handle it.

Yeah, but then you don’t get to choose. Yeah, you don’t get to choose between one crappy program or another. Ask yourself this, “Why do people pick Medicare over private health insurance?”

Here’s another thing to look at – the minimum wage. I dare say that if you are making minimum wage you can’t survive. You have to cut somewhere – be it rent (live in your car?), food (eat the food in the burger joint you work at when no one is looking), health care (free clinics or don’t go) etc. 

But what if we (as in “we the people”, as in “the government”)took every Metropolitan Statistical Area (Defined as “ Metropolitan statistical area (MSA) A geographic entity based on a county or a group of counties with at least one urbanized area with a population of at least 50,000 and adjacent counties with economic ties to the central area.” – Thanks Google.)

What if we took each one and said, “How much does it cost to live there?” Then divide that into hours per week (40? 37.5?) to determine what a person would need to make to live there, and make that the minimum wage for that area. I know. I know. Walmart managers heads would explode. But think about it.

Ya see. If you believe the purpose of government is to serve “the people” then the decision is easy. If you believe in something else, like scamming as much money as you can but dress it up as patriotism or immigrants are coming to take your jobs. Well? What can I say?

Jon Stuart pointed out that Mrs. Trump got paid $40 million for a documentary about her life. This would be enough money to pay for all of Ken Burns’ documentaries for decades. or for the current special on the planet with 30 mill left over – something like that. I hope she’s ordered her Christmas decorations because otherwise the White House may look really barren in December.

Update: The port of Seattle has business. In fact, it is slightly up. However, they believe this is a rush to get stuff here before the tariffs and the future does not look good.