This Will Be My Last Post (*see the end)

Click on the link below for confirmation of how bad the situation is for the USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjS7-ibQ2E 

THE USA IS A DICTATORSHIP

The FIRST way out of it is for every person and organization that is asked to perform unconstitutional/illegal/unethical acts

to refuse to do so.

The SECOND is to vote all of them out.

Click on this link to understand Hitler's effect on the German people
 and the comparison with Trump

MAGA is just another anti-science, cruel, and dishonest attempt by USA conservatives during the last 100 years or so to gain power and wealth at the expense of  "We, the People."

Republicans Are On The Wrong Side Of History - And Everything Else!

If MAGA Wins, Christianity Once Again Will Bring A Dark Age

They Don't Want Smaller Government, They Want Social Darwinism

Dystopia is here

The Plot To Militarize America

The Science-Based Way To Restore A Democracy?

Democrats Have To Get Back to Economic Populism

MAGA ideology Is Bad, But It Can Be Overcome

Joe Kennedy III Has An Answer For The Democrats

So Does Robert Reich

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Free Speech Vs Hate Speech

This topic is one of the most misunderstood and controversial in the culture of the USA. One reason is that the US Constitution does not explicitly mention Hate Speech. Click here to understand it better.

Regarding Charlie Kirk, objectively, he was a vile, bigoted, ignorant, and hateful person. He was about as extreme in his unsupported conservative/religious ideas as you will find. His ilk needs to be strongly and publicly debated/challenged. If you think that Kirk was rare within conservative Christianity, check THIS out. This monster appeals to the likes of Kirk.

Violence in the USA

Recent research reveals that liberals are less violent than conservatives (link) (link). Also, conservatives are lying about the increase in crime in the USA (link), and even the definition of it is not universal (link). 

Just in case you still think that liberals are the enemy after all of the above. (link)

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*For over a decade, I have promoted the pinnacle of brain function (critical/science-based thinking) on this blog. For various reasons, I no longer wish to add new content on this blog in the form of a new Post. However, occasionally, I will add links within existing Pages above and Posts below, as well as on this page: 

To anyone still interested in this blog in the future, please continue to explore it. I will leave it active indefinitely for that purpose.

Peace to you all. 

The Horror of The US House Budget Bill

House budget bill would add $3.1T to deficit and debt over the coming decade

SECRET Provisions of Bill TO HIDE Trump Crimes EXPOSED

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What is the answer to improving economics and well-being in the USA and the rest of the world? How about investing in true needs with the surplus funds of the wealthy individuals and countries through significant increases in taxes on rich individuals and countries (link)?

US Debt: An Existential Threat?

Click on the link below for what I think will be the first step in the process of the failure of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and a possible return to the gold standard:

Why the US Treasury Market is on the Brink of Total Collapse 

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More on the subject here, here, here, here, and here.

"Mickey Mouse Is Smarter That Trump"

Click on the link below for a detailed examination of the idiocy of Trump's trade and economic policies and DOGE. If this doesn't scare the Hell out of you, you are not educable:

Jeffrey Sachs Goes Off, Roasts Donald Trump’s Trade Talk

Bill Maher: Gullible Or Groveling

Bill Maher has the skill to sell nonsense to the gullible. He plays the "Centrist" card open-faced and ignores reality, as all such media personalities do. Reality/truth is not close to being represented by the center of the US political conversation.

Click here to learn what he had to say about his meeting with Donald Trump a few days ago.

The Person Who Knows It All Knows Nothing

The saying "the person who knows it all knows nothing" highlights a paradox: someone who believes they know everything is likely unaware of their limitations and the vastness of unknown knowledge. It suggests that true wisdom lies in acknowledging the limits of one's knowledge and remaining open to learning. This idea is often associated with Socrates' famous statement, "I know that I know nothing".

-AI Overview

Click on the link below for the best expose (in his own words!) about the present POTUS you will ever see:

Wall Street Just WENT OFF ON TRUMP With Alarming Warnings!

The Wisdom Of Scott Galloway

"Scott Galloway is an entrepreneur, author, professor of marketing at NYU, and host of the Vox Media podcasts 'The Prof G Pod' and 'Pivot' with Kara Swisher. Scott joins Preet to discuss gutting the government, undermining alliances with Europe, masculinity, and togetherness, and why Democrats need to be the party of ideas."

Click on this link for the podcast.

Tariffs: A Science-Based Look At It

"Will tariffs really wreck your savings & the stock market? Or just raise prices by 1 to 2%? Plus, why shouldn't you be scared of Trump's tariffs (yet)? It doesn't have to end with a full-blown trade war."

Click on the links below for more:

Will New Tariffs Really DESTROY Your Savings in 2025?

The Economist presents its expert, fact-checked, opinion here

The "Expert" Who Persuaded Trump On Tarrifs

"MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow walked her viewers on Friday through the origin story of how President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, joined the MAGA team during his first presidential run – and brought a phantom source with him to Washington, D.C.

"'You’d think it would take like a grand plan and some big brains to figure out how to destroy the economy of the richest nation on Earth, but that's not how it's working out,' the primetime host told viewers during her show’s opening monologue. 'Turns out, it doesn't take a big idea or a lot of big brains working together.'

"Maddow noted that Trump tasked son-in-law Jared Kushner with finding him an economic adviser, a search that led Kushner to Amazon, where he landed on one of Navarro’s books. That’s when Maddow noted that Trump tasked son-in-law Jared Kushner with finding him an economic adviser, a search that led Kushner to Amazon, where he landed on one of Navarro’s books. That’s when things took a turn for Maddow, who said Friday that Navarro wasn’t the only figure who helped craft Trump’s tariff policy.

“In all of his books, Peter Navarro has cited an economics expert to justify his views, and the economics expert he cites is somebody named Ron Vara, who, Maddow added, sent out a memo around Washington at the start of Trump’s first administration touting the benefits of a tariff policy.

“'The problem is, Ron Vara doesn't exist, he never has,' Maddow said. 'The economics expert that Peter Navarro has long cited to explain why he's so gung-ho on tariffs, this person, Ron Vara, is a made-up person. He is a fictional person. Peter Navarro invented Ron Vara as his expert source, so he could quote this expert source over and over and over again in his crackpot books.'”

(link)

The Key To Personal Wealth

It's not working hard or getting a higher education: it's business ownership (sole proprietorship or stocks).

Click on the link below for an informative video on the above. And, NO, it is NOT a sales pitch:

The System Is Designed To Keep You Poor

Eisenhower Had It Right, Reagan Had It Wrong

"President Dwight David Eisenhower, perhaps the last real Republican, had a 90 percent tax rate for the super rich during his administration.

"Eisenhower explained it this way: The super rich could avoid the high taxes by investing their money in things that make America stronger. If they wanted to avoid high taxes, he said they could invest in business expansions and higher employee wages. They could give a million or two to tax-exempt non-profits that feed, house, and clothe poor people of America, among other things.

"They did some of that, but the Eisenhower years generated enough taxes to launch and complete the labyrinth of interstate highways, the largest road project America had ever seen, and is needed again.

"President Trump said that the recent tax cuts would cause big business to generate more jobs. Federal sources said this week that the tax cuts didn’t bring about more employment. Businesses took the tax break money and squirreled it away or bought back their company’s stock. Greed won. America lost.

"It’s time Congress took control of this country’s economy and do what must be done to take the power away from the greedy rich guys who will never let middle class America bloom the way it did before Ronald Reagan handed the economy to the millionaires and billionaires."

(link, from 2019)

Just Another Republican Lie: The Deficit

 

The Truth About Trump Tax Plan

 

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Click here to learn about the effects of Trump's initial taxes from 2017.

The Southern States In The USA: Why They Are A Problem

Click on the link below for an 11-minute video to better understand why residents of the southern USA are so different than the rest of the country:

Why The US South Is Insanely Poor

Why Monopolies Are Bad

"Late last week, a little-known Chinese artificial intelligence start-up called DeepSeek revealed that it had come up with more advanced Artificial Intelligence than America’s Big Tech companies, and at a tiny fraction of the cost — even without access to America’s advanced chip technology.

"To add insult to injury, DeepSeek has made its technology 'open source' — that is, available to everyone.

"The lesson here is that Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google became too big, fat, and musclebound to remain sufficiently innovative. Instead of out-of-the-box invention, they specialized in marginal improvements.

"By contrast, Chinese tech corporations compete fiercely with each other. This has put them on the cutting edge — and why China has been able to come up with startling innovations (not only in AI but in electric vehicles, batteries, even TikTok and much more).

"China’s secret sauce hasn’t been big subsidies from the Chinese government creating giant 'national champions.' It’s been intense competition."

Click on the link below for more:

American Capitalism just got a black eye

Biden Reminded Us What We Have Lost

"In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that 'an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.'

"It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the 'Great Compression,' for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

"That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the 'Great Divergence.' Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

"Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

"But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic 'elite' that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign."

Click on the link below for :

A Summary of the History and Danger Ahead Regarding the USA

Tariffs, Populism, And Economic Nationalism

"Skeptoid's wheelhouse is science vs. pseudoscience, so some of you might be asking why are we talking about an issue of political policy? We're not. We're talking about a question rooted in science: economics. Economics is very much a science, though there's always debate on whether it's a hard science or a soft science. It's generally considered a soft science, because it studies human behavior and societal interactions, which are harder to quantify and control compared to, for example, chemistry. Some argue that economics should still be considered a hard science due to its heavy dependence on mathematics, including calculus, statistics, probability, game theory, differential equations, and so on. However, these remain difficult to apply; you can mathematically develop all the predictive theories you want, but they're really hard to test by observing human behavior. And so today we are going to look at some hard examples of economic nationalism having been tried in three famous recent cases. Was it a bounty for their economies, or a bust?"

Click on the link below for the details:

Economic Nationalism: Bounty or Bust?

Can Taxing The Rich Balance The Budget In The USA?

This question does have an answer if one is open-minded and is fact-based in thinking. Below are representative opinions. I have mine:

Progressive:

Why neoclassical economics has failed

Bipartisan:

Could tax increases alone close the long-run fiscal gap? Yes.

Taxing the rich could raise trillions but that alone won't fix our fiscal crisis

Conservative:

Biden’s Math of Just Taxing the Rich Doesn’t Add Up

The Limits of Taxing the Rich

Unconditional Cash Transfers: An Efficient Way To Help The Poor

"You’d probably guess that a major factor contributing to homelessness is a lack of money. Yet, very few programs provide unconditional and lump sum cash to unhoused individuals as a solution. There are a number of barriers that have impeded the broad implementation of this type of assistance, which include the lack of policymaker support and public mistrust in homeless people’s ability to manage money. Our guest this week found that direct cash transfers actually result in net societal savings over time. Jiaying Zhao is an associate professor, Canada research chair and a Sauder distinguished scholar at the University of British Columbia. She co-authored “Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness,” which was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Zhao, who has personally experienced housing insecurity in the past, joins WITHpod to discuss the cognitive taxes of poverty, rethinking the homogenous narrative about who homeless people are, the most surprising findings from the study, intended policy changes and more."

Click on this link for a classic episode of "Why Is This Happening: The Chris Hayes Podcast"

Economic Myths Debunked

Click on the link below for the 10 biggest myths about the economy presented by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor for Bill Clinton:

https://youtu.be/HZ3j4hHMO5E