As the country turns the page on Joe Biden’s presidency and prepares for the second coming of Donald Trump, there is plenty to ponder about the year ahead in American politics, spanning Trump and his party to the Democrats to the hot election takes of a couple months ago.
I remain disappointed that none of the writers for this substack will touch the big C word.
Covid. You can't understand what happened in terms of the loss of trust for institutions and the big media without looking at the pandemic narrative. Remember when the lab leak was a racist conspiracy theory? I do. What about the wonderful warp speed vaccine that turned out not to work - but is still being forced on people.
Covid was not the only thing that undermined trust. The HunterBiden laptop, the Russian interference story, these also were dramas which made many Americans, like me, stop trusting the big media outlets. You need to talk about this. Propaganda. Censorship.
I agree that Democrat suppression of the "lab leak theory" is a relevant bad example of "woke" politics. But I also think that the development of the anti-COVID vaccines was beneficial in reducing the severity of infections, especially in older adults like me who appreciate the benefits of the vaccines that I have taken over the course of my life. I took the COVID vaccines and had some mild cases of it similar to colds, but might very well have had much more severe cases without the vaccines (along with those for smallpox, tetanus, influenza, polio, shingles, etc.).
Thank you for your comment and I appreciate that it is polite and well reasoned... Personally, I am not sure whether the vaccine is helpful. But if you feel it is helpful for you thats great and I would never say that the covid vaccine shouldnt be available. I objected strongly to the democrats wanting to mandate it, including for pregnant women , and children. Since it did not prevent infection or transmission there was absolutely no justification to mandate it. We were the party of " my body, my choice." Vaccines are designed to modify the immune system over a long period of time, as such they carry some risks as well as possibly benefits. Due to the uncertainty around the risk/benefit, such interventions should not be mandated. The democrats mandated this vaccine in the states where they had control and that pushed me into voting republican, probably for the foreseeable future.
Well said, and there were many C19 red flags, while to me, the origin was the least of them (though potentially the most sinister). VAERS data off the charts (this was voluntary reporting no less) re: the vaccine, no long-term testing (a given prior to this vaccine, hence the emergency designation), natural immunity, never heard of it, the mask folly (I'm sad for all those still under the spell, does not common sense say a virus can enter through your ears or eyes, or that walking into a restaurant, DANGER, DANGER, sit down at a table, whew, all clear, remove mask!, or that breathing in your exhale all day could be a problem, see navy sub studies), was never a threat to healthy children yet. . , emergency vaccine process immunity for pharma companies (seriously?), why one size fits all instead of focusing on the most vulnerable. . . I pray when the next thing happens, a more critical eye will be forthcoming, and our previous knowledge won't be so quickly disregarded.
Yet, I'm very hopeful for the future, not just because of a new administration seemingly wiser from it's first go around, but because I'm sensing many more people realizing there is a Creator, despite almost every part of our society being ruled by the prince of this world. God bless.
The economy, at the turn of the year, is in good shape only in media narrative and flawed government statistics. Here on the ground, it is in bad shape. People will vote their own lived experience not media narrative. We are all about 20% underwater on inflation even by understated government numbers. Those numbers will probably never go down again but stopping the War on Energy will also help to stop the bleeding. New jobs are either in government or government adjacent industries or low paid service jobs. Neither are especially useful to the working class. And lockdown induced shortages have never really gone away, at least where I live. They just skip randomly from product to product. And there are new ones like the bird flu induced egg problem. The supermarket has stopped posting prices. If you have to ask, it's too much.
Your claim that "the supermarket has stopped posting prices" is as ridiculous about mainstream supermarkets as the claim that "we are all about 20% underwater on inflation." Part of the reason why most people have lost some purchasing power is the result of lingering disruptions to supply chains from the COVID shutdowns, and the Biden administration's excessive restrictions on fossil fuel production have not helped. But part of the inflation has been caused by increases in wages, which are great for people as "workers" but not so great for them as "consumers," and especially not so great for people as consumers and prospective workers who are frozen out of the job market by the excessive minimum wage mandates so beloved by "progressive" Democrats. The most important thing about the state of the economy, however, is that overall unemployment is reasonably low, and is likely to remain that way if the Federal Reserve continues its policy of gradually reducing short term interest rates, and Trump and his MAGA supporters don't impose excessive tariffs too soon and on allies like Canada and Japan rather than adversaries like China.
I would instead suggest much, much different MAJOR issues for the next few years:
*The civil war among Democrats, which they cannot win, over techhies vs. greens. The AI/Crypto revolution is absolutely unacknowledged by the left. ONLY Trump and Republicans have (indirectly to a large degree) addressed the grid needs of real gas, oil, coal, and nukes. You will not "wind power" your way to AI or crypto. These are cutting edge issues which is why Bezos, Cook, and above all Musk---who sees this more clearly than anyone---have been trekking to Mar-a-Lago. Major loss for Ds (maybe 10% total of their voters in one way or another). Cryto is going to be increasingly huge. Advantage: Republicans
Big cities are still going to be in the hands of Democrats, setting up a second civil war, as the inner city residents will continue to be punished by having large numbers of illegals. Trump will deport, deport, deport, but aside from Adams, ALL the big city mayors are going to resist. Advantage: Republicans.
Education realities: non-college jobs are going to growing at a very high rate, especially with illegal immigration being stopped. College enrollments will further decline, and so called "blue collar" jobs increase. The wave of the future is homeschooling and private/charter schooling eating further into Democrat advantages. Advantage: Republicans
War vs. Anti-War. Only Trump and the majority of the GOP (a few war mongers left) are in favor of strengthening America without war. This is a big advantage among Youts.
Jewish/Israel vs. Hamas/Hexbollah pro Palestinian lobbies: Advantage R. Jews won't vote R, but peace works in favor of Republicans. Peace will break out all over the Middle East, driving Muslims more from Ds as we saw in 2024.
Last, if you recall in JUNE 2024 I predicted Trump would win with 312 electoral votes, win the popular vote and that the GOP would win the Senate (in October I said pop vote by 1.5% and senate by 3, so I was low by 1 senator). So here is my call:
J.D. Vance, after four years of declining inflation, massive energy buildup, peace, and general prosperity, will be the easy GOP nominee. New Jersey will swing R. (Rs added ANOTHER NET 27,000 voters last month. It's a big hill to climb, but by 2028 PA will be tied and NJ will look % wise like PA in 2024). Vance will win by 320-340 EVs and hold the popular vote.
I think you're undercounting the chance for a recession.
Yields on 30-year treasuries are already higher than the Fed's primary discount rate; this suggests long-run monetary tightening, and nearly all instances of monetary tightening that have occurred after so-called 'soft landings' have resulted in recessionary conditions. (the Fed rate is actually itself a lagging indicator of monetary conditions)
I'd also say you're wrong about the blue collar/white collar balance. The AI revolution will primarily accelerate growth in white collar jobs (those working in IT/data) and slowly automate away many blue collar jobs. In the technological revolutions of the industrial era, these jobs would normally be replaced by new forms of blue-collar work; however, that was a result of the wage system, and the continuous recycling of a portion of the value labor created back to laborers. This system is now being phased out, because the form of labor used by capital is changing from the industrial era's 'number of hours spent on a machine task' to the digital era's 'amount of useful data produced', and our institutions have not caught up yet. They will need to invent a way to recycle the value produced by people's data back to them to make the AI revolution compatible with broad-based job growth across economic classes. They probably will, barring the extinction of human civilization--but not in the next 8 years, and not before the problem gets bad enough to become more obvious to the masses. Thus more blue collar jobs will have to vanish before people take notice.
AI is getting diagnosis at a much better rate than doctors. AI can and will report news. AI can think and come up with solutions in a way that thinks through consequences. It can work faster, more efficiently, and without as many mistakes. Who needs a professor who may or may not be correct, who may or may not have cheated or committed plagiarism when an AI can teach and correct individually. It can make movies, take and edit photos. Honestly, if I were to ame a bet, I'd bet AI takes out the higher paid thinking jobs before it takes out car and truck mechanics.
You'll need network and data engineers to train them and upgrade the design of the neural nets, to ensure networks can handle the traffic for them; you'll need people to man the data centers, people to implement proper cybersecurity measures, etc.
Those are not blue-collar jobs.
There are very few blue-collar jobs that an AI, properly trained and interacting with robotics, cannot do. It is certainly capable of taking out truck mechanics, all the more so once the trucks drive themselves.
But the secret that Big Data is trying to obscure, and the issue that needs to be addressed, is that AI is in reality nothing but a bunch of algorithms processing massive amounts of data. And that data didn't come into being ex nihilo; it was produced by the work and creative exertions of people. Those people need to be paid for that work to have a sustainable AI-driven economy.
But that will first require that people in general, and their governments, come to understand that data is in fact the new form of labor--and it may take some time for them to get the message. Until then, Big Data will continue to obtain free labor, by getting our data for free, monetizing it into great fortunes, and returning none of it back to the originators of the data that creates the basis for those fortunes.
I agree with the thought process here. What happens when data security can be performed by an AI? I guess what I’m really asking is what happens when AI can replace all jobs? What are humans going to do? Because Covid was an experiment in what happens when people have money and idle hands.
The ideal outcome would be for AI to increase productivity so much that more people would have the option of working fewer hours per week while maintaining an acceptable or better quality of life, based not so much on higher nominal incomes, but on lower prices for goods and services.
A centrist/moderate liberal Democrat would have an excellent chance at being elected President in 2028, but the dominant faction in the party will likely make such a nominee impossible. Hardcore, ultra-woke Leftists control the media and the activist base. They will deflect all concerns about transgender radicalism, DEI, unlimited abortion rights, etc. If Trump screws up - very possible - even a hard Left Democrat could win in 2028, especially if the economy is perceived to be doing badly
I wonder if we could do anything to make sure these public opinion polls are accurate. Very obviously, Trump voters aren't well represented. They've been underrepresented for almost 10 years. That alone makes me suspicious of all other polls. I struggle to believe people didn't mean they wanted deportation when it was made so abundantly clear Trump was hammering it. People can't really say they are surprised because he made it very clear his plan was deportation and drilling day 1.
I remain disappointed that none of the writers for this substack will touch the big C word.
Covid. You can't understand what happened in terms of the loss of trust for institutions and the big media without looking at the pandemic narrative. Remember when the lab leak was a racist conspiracy theory? I do. What about the wonderful warp speed vaccine that turned out not to work - but is still being forced on people.
Covid was not the only thing that undermined trust. The HunterBiden laptop, the Russian interference story, these also were dramas which made many Americans, like me, stop trusting the big media outlets. You need to talk about this. Propaganda. Censorship.
I agree that Democrat suppression of the "lab leak theory" is a relevant bad example of "woke" politics. But I also think that the development of the anti-COVID vaccines was beneficial in reducing the severity of infections, especially in older adults like me who appreciate the benefits of the vaccines that I have taken over the course of my life. I took the COVID vaccines and had some mild cases of it similar to colds, but might very well have had much more severe cases without the vaccines (along with those for smallpox, tetanus, influenza, polio, shingles, etc.).
Thank you for your comment and I appreciate that it is polite and well reasoned... Personally, I am not sure whether the vaccine is helpful. But if you feel it is helpful for you thats great and I would never say that the covid vaccine shouldnt be available. I objected strongly to the democrats wanting to mandate it, including for pregnant women , and children. Since it did not prevent infection or transmission there was absolutely no justification to mandate it. We were the party of " my body, my choice." Vaccines are designed to modify the immune system over a long period of time, as such they carry some risks as well as possibly benefits. Due to the uncertainty around the risk/benefit, such interventions should not be mandated. The democrats mandated this vaccine in the states where they had control and that pushed me into voting republican, probably for the foreseeable future.
Well said, and there were many C19 red flags, while to me, the origin was the least of them (though potentially the most sinister). VAERS data off the charts (this was voluntary reporting no less) re: the vaccine, no long-term testing (a given prior to this vaccine, hence the emergency designation), natural immunity, never heard of it, the mask folly (I'm sad for all those still under the spell, does not common sense say a virus can enter through your ears or eyes, or that walking into a restaurant, DANGER, DANGER, sit down at a table, whew, all clear, remove mask!, or that breathing in your exhale all day could be a problem, see navy sub studies), was never a threat to healthy children yet. . , emergency vaccine process immunity for pharma companies (seriously?), why one size fits all instead of focusing on the most vulnerable. . . I pray when the next thing happens, a more critical eye will be forthcoming, and our previous knowledge won't be so quickly disregarded.
Yet, I'm very hopeful for the future, not just because of a new administration seemingly wiser from it's first go around, but because I'm sensing many more people realizing there is a Creator, despite almost every part of our society being ruled by the prince of this world. God bless.
The economy, at the turn of the year, is in good shape only in media narrative and flawed government statistics. Here on the ground, it is in bad shape. People will vote their own lived experience not media narrative. We are all about 20% underwater on inflation even by understated government numbers. Those numbers will probably never go down again but stopping the War on Energy will also help to stop the bleeding. New jobs are either in government or government adjacent industries or low paid service jobs. Neither are especially useful to the working class. And lockdown induced shortages have never really gone away, at least where I live. They just skip randomly from product to product. And there are new ones like the bird flu induced egg problem. The supermarket has stopped posting prices. If you have to ask, it's too much.
Your claim that "the supermarket has stopped posting prices" is as ridiculous about mainstream supermarkets as the claim that "we are all about 20% underwater on inflation." Part of the reason why most people have lost some purchasing power is the result of lingering disruptions to supply chains from the COVID shutdowns, and the Biden administration's excessive restrictions on fossil fuel production have not helped. But part of the inflation has been caused by increases in wages, which are great for people as "workers" but not so great for them as "consumers," and especially not so great for people as consumers and prospective workers who are frozen out of the job market by the excessive minimum wage mandates so beloved by "progressive" Democrats. The most important thing about the state of the economy, however, is that overall unemployment is reasonably low, and is likely to remain that way if the Federal Reserve continues its policy of gradually reducing short term interest rates, and Trump and his MAGA supporters don't impose excessive tariffs too soon and on allies like Canada and Japan rather than adversaries like China.
I would instead suggest much, much different MAJOR issues for the next few years:
*The civil war among Democrats, which they cannot win, over techhies vs. greens. The AI/Crypto revolution is absolutely unacknowledged by the left. ONLY Trump and Republicans have (indirectly to a large degree) addressed the grid needs of real gas, oil, coal, and nukes. You will not "wind power" your way to AI or crypto. These are cutting edge issues which is why Bezos, Cook, and above all Musk---who sees this more clearly than anyone---have been trekking to Mar-a-Lago. Major loss for Ds (maybe 10% total of their voters in one way or another). Cryto is going to be increasingly huge. Advantage: Republicans
Big cities are still going to be in the hands of Democrats, setting up a second civil war, as the inner city residents will continue to be punished by having large numbers of illegals. Trump will deport, deport, deport, but aside from Adams, ALL the big city mayors are going to resist. Advantage: Republicans.
Education realities: non-college jobs are going to growing at a very high rate, especially with illegal immigration being stopped. College enrollments will further decline, and so called "blue collar" jobs increase. The wave of the future is homeschooling and private/charter schooling eating further into Democrat advantages. Advantage: Republicans
War vs. Anti-War. Only Trump and the majority of the GOP (a few war mongers left) are in favor of strengthening America without war. This is a big advantage among Youts.
Jewish/Israel vs. Hamas/Hexbollah pro Palestinian lobbies: Advantage R. Jews won't vote R, but peace works in favor of Republicans. Peace will break out all over the Middle East, driving Muslims more from Ds as we saw in 2024.
Last, if you recall in JUNE 2024 I predicted Trump would win with 312 electoral votes, win the popular vote and that the GOP would win the Senate (in October I said pop vote by 1.5% and senate by 3, so I was low by 1 senator). So here is my call:
J.D. Vance, after four years of declining inflation, massive energy buildup, peace, and general prosperity, will be the easy GOP nominee. New Jersey will swing R. (Rs added ANOTHER NET 27,000 voters last month. It's a big hill to climb, but by 2028 PA will be tied and NJ will look % wise like PA in 2024). Vance will win by 320-340 EVs and hold the popular vote.
I think you're undercounting the chance for a recession.
Yields on 30-year treasuries are already higher than the Fed's primary discount rate; this suggests long-run monetary tightening, and nearly all instances of monetary tightening that have occurred after so-called 'soft landings' have resulted in recessionary conditions. (the Fed rate is actually itself a lagging indicator of monetary conditions)
I'd also say you're wrong about the blue collar/white collar balance. The AI revolution will primarily accelerate growth in white collar jobs (those working in IT/data) and slowly automate away many blue collar jobs. In the technological revolutions of the industrial era, these jobs would normally be replaced by new forms of blue-collar work; however, that was a result of the wage system, and the continuous recycling of a portion of the value labor created back to laborers. This system is now being phased out, because the form of labor used by capital is changing from the industrial era's 'number of hours spent on a machine task' to the digital era's 'amount of useful data produced', and our institutions have not caught up yet. They will need to invent a way to recycle the value produced by people's data back to them to make the AI revolution compatible with broad-based job growth across economic classes. They probably will, barring the extinction of human civilization--but not in the next 8 years, and not before the problem gets bad enough to become more obvious to the masses. Thus more blue collar jobs will have to vanish before people take notice.
We shall see.
AI is getting diagnosis at a much better rate than doctors. AI can and will report news. AI can think and come up with solutions in a way that thinks through consequences. It can work faster, more efficiently, and without as many mistakes. Who needs a professor who may or may not be correct, who may or may not have cheated or committed plagiarism when an AI can teach and correct individually. It can make movies, take and edit photos. Honestly, if I were to ame a bet, I'd bet AI takes out the higher paid thinking jobs before it takes out car and truck mechanics.
You'll need network and data engineers to train them and upgrade the design of the neural nets, to ensure networks can handle the traffic for them; you'll need people to man the data centers, people to implement proper cybersecurity measures, etc.
Those are not blue-collar jobs.
There are very few blue-collar jobs that an AI, properly trained and interacting with robotics, cannot do. It is certainly capable of taking out truck mechanics, all the more so once the trucks drive themselves.
But the secret that Big Data is trying to obscure, and the issue that needs to be addressed, is that AI is in reality nothing but a bunch of algorithms processing massive amounts of data. And that data didn't come into being ex nihilo; it was produced by the work and creative exertions of people. Those people need to be paid for that work to have a sustainable AI-driven economy.
But that will first require that people in general, and their governments, come to understand that data is in fact the new form of labor--and it may take some time for them to get the message. Until then, Big Data will continue to obtain free labor, by getting our data for free, monetizing it into great fortunes, and returning none of it back to the originators of the data that creates the basis for those fortunes.
I agree with the thought process here. What happens when data security can be performed by an AI? I guess what I’m really asking is what happens when AI can replace all jobs? What are humans going to do? Because Covid was an experiment in what happens when people have money and idle hands.
The ideal outcome would be for AI to increase productivity so much that more people would have the option of working fewer hours per week while maintaining an acceptable or better quality of life, based not so much on higher nominal incomes, but on lower prices for goods and services.
A centrist/moderate liberal Democrat would have an excellent chance at being elected President in 2028, but the dominant faction in the party will likely make such a nominee impossible. Hardcore, ultra-woke Leftists control the media and the activist base. They will deflect all concerns about transgender radicalism, DEI, unlimited abortion rights, etc. If Trump screws up - very possible - even a hard Left Democrat could win in 2028, especially if the economy is perceived to be doing badly
Please list any centrist/moderate Democrats, much less those who that would have an excellent chance at being elected?
I wonder if we could do anything to make sure these public opinion polls are accurate. Very obviously, Trump voters aren't well represented. They've been underrepresented for almost 10 years. That alone makes me suspicious of all other polls. I struggle to believe people didn't mean they wanted deportation when it was made so abundantly clear Trump was hammering it. People can't really say they are surprised because he made it very clear his plan was deportation and drilling day 1.