When I was a little kid I became obsessed with the idea that if I had really strong suspenders I could jump really high and maybe even fly. Well that didn’t work. And that is the real reason health care plan fixes and Obamacare modifications wouldn’t work either.

We are in a pickle with health care, and President Trump is another galaxy  away from understanding that.

For as long as memory serves me, health insurance premiums have been in an upward spiral, regularly leading every component of the cost of living index. No mystery here, these premiums were simply keeping up with the incessant cost uptrend in primarily treating chronic illnesses and with end of life care. It was simple to predict, even twenty years ago, that there was an unsustainability to future health care spending.

Perhaps it was futile for Obama to attempt to fix healthcare, or some part of it.. The law attempted to bridge two central issues, one, the plight of the uninsured and uninsurable, and two, to redirect people to be healthier by incentivizing preventative care, which is why that kind of care is not subject to a deductible..

There were also provisions, which Trump and republicans don’t  talk about, capping insurance company profits to 15% of the plans’ premium cost.  This included administration, sales and marketing costs, etc. Thus, whatever premium increases we see in Obamacare pretty much reflect the claims experience of the insurers and the insureds. We did note that the new, though withdrawn (really failed), Trumpcare proposal, increased insurer’s profit to 20% (an enormous 33% increase). We also wondered how many Trumpster insiders recently purchased health insurer companies, such as Aetna, in there non-blinded or affiliated investment accounts.

Any program requiring insurance companies to accept all comers had to address the issue of adverse selection against them if pre-existing conditions are waived.. Thus, Obamacare can only work if adverse selection is mitigated by the requirement for everyone who doesn’t elect to have health insurance, or doesn’t get it through employers, Medicare, or Medicaid,  pay a tax  penalty.  But what if they can’t afford to enroll? Presto,, tax credits to help them pay the premium.

Indeed, one could say that Obamacare’s premium increases are not due to anything but that people are sick and becoming sicker,  because even people who did not have pre-existing conditions are quite often not in thriving health,. and modern medicine is expensive.

Our healthcare system, alas,  is not broken, as some say. Rather, our healthcare system is based on the oft reinforced false premise that major chronic illnesses are not primarily self caused and can be effectively addressed by pharmaceuticals and other extraordinary (and costly) treatments..The heck with good diet, exercise, and healthful lifestyles.

http://earthjustice.org/features/holding-the-president-accountable-to-the-law?curation=newsletter

from the above:

Check out the down lines just between the eyebrows, called liver lines in Chinese medicine. The liver is the organ that controls the emotion of anger. And look at the bags under the eyes, which reflect the condition of the kidneys. The kidneys control the emotion of fear. And the puffiness running on each side of the nose down to where the nostrils begin. You can see it clearly on the well lit side of the face, directly below the inside corner of the right eye,  indicating heart issues, and the heart controls anxiety.

But quite frankly, you don’t have to go that far. I am sure the Donald loves this photo as it seems to present him as really serious, tough, austere, and dominant. If a child looked at this photo, he would never want to play with the Donald. Would you?

Seriously, considered with the finesteride abuse mentioned in this blog, it is inconceivable that this man should have control over the  nuclear football.

And he also said, at his recent news conference: “I am the least racist person you have ever seen”

And I am sure that Trump believes this. What does it mean to be just the least bit racist or the least bit anti-Semitic? And not only that, but the least bit racist that anyone has ever seen? While that is the level of grandiosity we have come to expect, aside from not being believable, isn’t the statement an unconscious contradiction, like a Freudian slip?

If saying that you are the least bit racist, aren’t you saying “yes, I do harbor a bit of racism, but it is very tiny so it doesn’t count.” Couldn’t that have been closer to the truth and that is the one that fits with the words Trump spoke.

We always thought that one was either a racist or not. And if you are a bit racist, that behavior might hopefully be modulated by one’s culture, prevalent laws, immediate environment, social nexus, etc. It might be a racism that doesn’t threaten anyone because it resides in a culture that is otherwise magnanimous.

That is until the culture, laws, social nexus shifts under, for example, a Trumpean totalitarian regime (enabled partly by the scapegoating of gays, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims),

Indeed, racism can grow like cancer in a culture that feeds it. It would be like a cancer cell in the body (if now just starting in the brain of Trump), a bitty piece of tumor. A molehill bit of racism that can turn into a mountain.

Moreover, aren’t the words in a class of self delusion all by themselves. Trump could have just as easily been saying:  “I am the least dishonest person you have ever seen”. Uh Oh!

For clarity, one can put it another way too: “Everyone is dishonest really, but I am only a little bit dishonest””

Grandiosity aside, you are either honest, always striving to be honest,  and if not, honesty is just a word. It is not a matter of degrees. Would you hand over your life savings for safekeeping to someone who said: “you can trust me, I am the least dishonest person you have ever seen”? And I have a bridge to sell too.

Humpty Trumpty built a great wall. Humpty Trumpty had a great fall (off his wall?).  All the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

1/12/17: Stephen Miller stated today that there was massive (3-5 million) illegal immigrant votes. The statement was unaccompanied by any evidence. CNN’s John King  said: that Voter Fraud Claims “Ludicrous,” White House “Spewing Garbage.” But at the end of the piece he said “Why, somebody tell me why?”… Why are they saying these things”.

Maybe we should start calling some of these Trump folks “collaborators,” along with the rest of the signed on team, some of who are likely just coattail riders looking for prestige and power.

Let’s look at what exactly Miller said. I doubt that the president is going to restate exactly (word for word) what Miller said. He will, of course, just reference it. What Miller said was that he was prepared to go on any show anywhere anytime and repeat it and say the president of the United States is correct, 100%. If he does say that on any show, what he said today will be 100% true because he told us today that he was prepared to go on any show and say that the president was correct, that he had that belief about voter fraud, and no one can disprove that you have or don’t have a belief. Beliefs are personal.

Everyone knows a selfish person who rationalizes himself to be generous, and a mean person that believes he is kind, .Anyone can fake a belief, people even lie or fake to themselves.

If you told me that you had a belief, who am I  to  dispute you and prove that you didn’t have that belief? The point is that if they could say that they  believe this, with their remedy being the awful economically and socially destabilizing deportation, or even jailing, of  3-5 million people, we have a big problem.

Just consider the families, businesses, social and religious groups that these folks attach to. How will they vote next time?

On the other hand, If they don’t really believe that 3-5 million people voted illegally, is Steve Miller lying? Well no, because he didn’t really say that. He can say that he only was referring to what he was “prepared to say”, and what the president’s belief was, and not whether the facts of what he said were true or untrue.

So let’s assume that they don’t really really believe that 3-5 million people voted illegally, but they want everyone to think that they do believe it. Why? One presumes to build a grounds justification for deporting  millions more people, (and even jailing some)  probably accompanied with additional lies.

However, it is not hard to see that the extreme disruption following “illegal voting” remedies would affect the results of the next two year election and surely the presidential one four years hence. . The republicans and Trump would undoubtedly lose millions and millions of future votes of folks sympathetic, connected or related to the unfortunate deportees. ..

On the other hand,  the false claim regarding voter fraud may be the rationale for extremely onerous  rules aiming to control voter participation, which could more than offset the losses mentioned above.

Indeed, what might be the final effect on voting outcomes on state and local levels, let alone in the next presidential election?

If this is part of a long term plan, we all need to see Trump’s “whole hand” And while we reported that Trump is not a great strategist, we do think that he does indeed have an undisclosed hand.

Can it be that Trump and his collaborators and coat tail riders are all dumb? We can now only wonder if the bets on their hand considers the laws of chance?. Could the bets be terrible bets with horrible odds?,  (as they would be absent future connected plans for extreme voter suppression). Indeed bets that smart people would never make .

What worries us  most is that these people are likely not dumb. If so,  you can only make a few assumptions, neither reassuring:.

1. We are on the verge of a totalitarian state, or
2. Finisteride side effects (and/or other unrelated  severe mental defects)  are having there most devastating effects on the President, and his collaborators and coattailers are just following Trump’s mentally unbalanced leads, crazy though they are. Maybe just to keep their jobs? or maybe….., who knows?

We should always keep in mind what Lord Acton said many years ago: : “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In other words, our situation will likely get worse.

Not very comforting.. .

We can only wonder why it has almost become a forgotten issue. But here is the rub. The President didn’t really lose his money. It was never all his own money. Most of the money came from investors and lenders. Now if you, our dear reader, or me, have a mortgage foreclosure, that forgiven debt becomes a tax liability. It is as if you earned the amount of money that represents your unpaid mortgage balance. So your terrible misfortune will be compounded by a devastating tax bill. But if you took out a business loan or issued bonds through the right kind of business structure,  such as a Limited Liability Company, and defaulted, no problem. You are not tasked to pay the taxes on the debt you will never pay.

But it goes further. You can be assumed to have personally lost those funds, if your business entity was what is called a “pass through entity”. Even though those funds that were lost were never really yours. Thus it was possible to deduct the losses of money that other people provided and lost. Yes it was a brilliant tax strategy, and perhaps we are simplifying it a bit.

Mr. Trump’s accountant took credit for this strategy, but the president was smart enough to adopt a suggested tax strategy, so cunning and original, but potentially harmful to the United States,  that it has since been discredited and blocked. . So credit is due. Mr. Trump was smart enough to massively benefit from numerous people’s hardships (creditors, investors, employees, vendors), which he, due to poor judgement and timing, largely caused.

Is it really any wonder that Trump refuses to release his tax returns, which will reveal all this (not to mention charitable contributions, or the lack thereof, while identifying  where conflicts of interest yet reside).

For those financial folks reading (it’s too arcane for most readers), here is how that was done. His casino business in New Jersey was set up as a pass-through entity and it offered public shares as such. Pass-through entities are enabled to pass through profits and losses directly to their investors and/or owners. Trump was able to retain the largest portion of those shares, even without making anything like the substantial investment in money that the public investors made. . Typically owners of pass-through entities are able to offer a limited amount of existing shares in the offering, while retaining most of them, thus the public investors wind up capitalizing most of the respective business entity that the shares represent, while the promoter (Trump) actually retained substantial ownership of shares.. Investment professionals call this practice, inherent in almost all new equity (or stock) offerings, “dilution”. Losses from the business accrue to all the entities’ owners, based on the number of shares they have, not on what they paid for them.. So while Trump paid next to nothing for his shares, he had a great deal of them. Thus he was able to take the large losses on those shares, for the failed businesses. The losses were so large they more than offset one year of his income, but he was able to “carry them forward.” Folks carry forward losses because they generally exceed income for some number of years; wiping out one years’ income entirely, and than carried forward to “reduce” future taxable income . And that is the reason he wouldn’t show his tax returns, because he has paid very little in taxes off the backs of all the losers in his various failed businesses. 

A recent article (5/15/19) just reconfirms the above article regarding Trumps’ tax loss is worth a read:https://finance.yahoo.com/news/did-trump-live-large-while-102136839.html

There are certain mind control techniques (many of them are language tricks) that President Trump uses which had, in the past, been quite successful for him. The problem is that once they are noticed and publicized, they entirely lose their efficacy. And now, he being so much in the public spotlight, that is guaranteed to happen. As it does, the world catches on that the emperor has no clothes.

Examples:

Making a statement/accusation/insult absent taking personal responsibility for it:

Recently said by subject (regarding a judge’s recent immigration ruling):: “I don’t ever want to call a court biased, so I wouldn’t call it biased”.

Or this: “I won’t talk about Jeb Bush. I will not say he’s low energy. I will not say it”.

How about this one of repetitive rhetoric (filed by Mark Liberman) demonstrated in an interview with Trump:

“Q. Let me ask you about women voters-why should they vote for you?
A. Because I’m very much into the whole thing of helping people and helping women. Women’s health uh issues are such a big thing to me and so important and you know I have many woman that work for me I was one of the first persons uh people in the construction industry in New York to put women in charge of projects, I mean I have it even today, and I have many women at high positions. I know I’ve gotten a lot of credit for that, I mean I have so many woman working for me and so many women in high positions working for me and I’ve gotten great credit for it”

What is this repetitive rhetoric about? I mean is that a symptom of a mental deficiency? Or is it a way of hammering in his point? Or both? It obviously works on people’s brains. He got a lot of votes. I would venture to call it a listener brain exploitation technique. Beware and notice how little Trump actually says or explains to win his ways!

What about the nicknaming game he played during the campaign. We use to do that with each other in grade school. We all can remember how well it worked.
“Pocahantas”, for Elizabeth Warren, “crooked Hillary” “lyin’ Ted Cruz”, etc. It was devastating because everyone imaged the nickname, it became a descriptor, as ridiculous and elementary as it was, it stuck in our minds.

And yet another,  attributing his made up, non-evidenced ideas to other sources, in order to attain credibility. Statements like: “the smartest people I know are saying…….” and following that with a statement he wants you to believe (because you want to be one of the smart ones). It is fun to detect this trick, even as it is so insulting to the listener’s intelligence once they catch on.

What about Donald’s hand shaking technique https://youtu.be/H5G2vR9YOdc, most obviously aimed at achieving dominance over a potential opponent. See it here: It’s the oldest story. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. It is really not going to work longer term.

Donald Trump is an idiot savant. Perfecting all those devastating techniques to get his way, sort of like a baby crying to get its’ bottle. He is a master tactician. It is easy to memorize and practice tactics. Even a mentally defective  person can do that. Where he will fail is in strategy, because strategy requires longer term, disciplined, multi-focus forethought and careful consideration of probable and improbable (though potentially highly disruptive) outcomes.

Let us challenge our readers to find and identify previous and future examples. It’s fun! And we would love to hear about your successful efforts.

It was at one of those huge rallies last year , the raucous crowd hanging and cheering on their new leaders’ every word,. that Mr.Trump said, almost word for word, that he was going to help all the “working men” there by finally getting rid of the “death tax” (which is the perjorative term for estate tax). There was a deafening cheer from the crowd.

One wonders if the cheering working folks knew that the “death tax” had virtually no application to them. The current exemption is five million dollars, and married couples really don’t pay estate taxes unless their combined estate exceeds ten million dollars. Of course Mr. Trump had to know that. And he had to know that the cheering crowd didn’t know that. But he reveled in the cheering while the crowd members were making fools of themselves.

Actually, this was the disqualifier for me. I was always looking to give him the benefit of the doubt, trying to attribute good will to him in spite of his often outrageous statements and behavior, trying to rationalize him as a potential force for moving our country forward during challenging times. And I am sure everyone cheering there was already persuaded that his heart was in the right place. But Mr. Trump had to know that estate taxes had virtually no effect on the crowd’s financial situation. After all, he claimed many times that he was an expert on our tax code. So no, his heart was not in the right place. His words were intended to deceive.

In algebra, one can multiply 1000 positive numbers together, and one arrives at a positive number. But if only one number (out of the 1000)  in the string is negative, the result will always be negative. In any due diligence, it really is critical to pay attention to that one negative number often hiding in plain sight. It is alas more and more apparent, now that he is president, that there were a lot more negative numbers that we voters failed to catch.

Yes, there seems to be something amiss in the water supply. Are we not losing our sense as a people?