Georgia on my mind
The great state of Georgia is the subject of several great tunes over the years, mostly from blues artists with southern roots crooning about coming home to enjoy the peaches and great weather. Tunes like “Georgia” by Ray Charles and “Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight and the Pips, evoke the importance of getting home when you’ve been away for a while. Today, Georgia is the subject of one of the most important Senate elections in American history. Because of their peculiar election rules, which requires winners to get at least 50.1% of the vote, we now have a runoff for the two seats currently held by Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Both are Republicans and they are challenged by Rafael Warnock, the Pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church (same church as MLK) and Josh Ossoff, a former congressional staffer. If at least one of the Republicans win, the GOP will maintain a slim majority in the Senate. If the Democrat challengers sweep, the Senate will be equally split 50-50 with Democrat Vice President-elect Harris becoming the tying vote, meaning that the Democrats will effectively gain control of the Senate. More importantly, the Democrats will control two branches of government.
The last time Democrats controlled the legislative and executive branches of government was during the first term of Barrack Obama in 2008. Back then, their first order of business was to make best efforts to realize their long-dream of full single-payer government control of healthcare. They were able to get a good way towards that goal with the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), something the GOP continues to try to overturn as an unconstitutional expansion of federal government power. Although this overreach by the Democrats cost them both the house and the senate in the 2010 mid-term elections, Obama remained in the Whitehouse for the next 6 years and there was little the GOP could do except grouse and make some unsuccessful attempts to water-down the law by passing legislation that Obama would never sign. Even when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and the GOP controlled the legislature, they couldn’t muster the votes to overturn Obamacare. We can argue about whether Obamacare was an overreach or the best thing to happen in healthcare since antibiotics, however one thing that cannot be argued is the difficulty of unwinding massive legislation once it becomes law. Especially when you are giving away more goodies to the American voters.
If the Democrats sweep both Senate seats, I can assure you they will waste no time in making even more massive changes to our country at lightning speed. Kamala Harris will be sprinting back and forth from Blair House and the Senate to break tie votes. And what will be the legislation she will be voting on? Well, it might be instructive to read the 110-page “BIDEN-SANDERS UNITY TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATIONS” released in July by the President-elect and his socialist primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. It’s a manifesto of radical leftist policies more akin to Venezuela and Cuba than of our country - from a job-killing $2 trillion climate agenda to eliminating cash bail and dismantling border protection. It betrays the working-class voters Biden claims to represent and destroys any notion that he is a “moderate.”
Under Biden’s manifesto, “Climate change is a global emergency” which requires “decarbonizing” American industries and eliminating carbon dioxide emissions to “net zero.” It promises to eliminate fossil fuel power by 2035 and replacing that with installing “500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines.” Of course, there’s no mention of “made-in-America” solar panels because the only way to install 500 million solar panels in five years is to buy them from China. In other countries, like Australia and Germany, which have gone down this path, the result is cheap, shoddy solar systems that fall apart within five years. Of course, we will have to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement, and pay the Green Climate Fund, the United Nations slush fund which gives grants to China, even though China doesn’t contribute a cent. This is a straight transfer of American taxpayer funds to the Chinese Communist Party. Hilariously, the document claims this will all result in lower electricity bills.
It’s a laughable fantasy. Where will baseload power come from when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow? Almost two-thirds of our electricity comes from fossil fuels and the experience of countries such as Australia and Germany is that switching to wind and solar drives up the cost of electricity. Take California, which has mandated zero emissions by 2045. Electricity prices in California are 60% more, on average, than in the rest of the United States and rose five times faster between 2011 and 2017, according to a study by Environmental Progress. The Biden plan would have more credibility on climate if it put nuclear power in the middle of it since it is the only zero-carbon solution that actually scales to meet our needs. Sound like a pipe dream? France safely generates 75% of its power needs from nuclear.
The word “union” appears 49 times in the document and “working families” 17 times, as Biden pretends that high-paying fossil fuel jobs and pensions in places such as Pennsylvania and Ohio will be magically transformed into new climate jobs, building wind turbines and electric cars and climate-retrofitting 4 million homes.
To pay for all this, Biden promises to hike the top income-tax rate by two points and the corporate tax rate by seven points, undoing the engine that kickstarted the economy in 2017-2019. In other words, he plans to punish the wealth creators and redistribute their money to an ever-expanding class of people on the government dole. Not that it will be enough.
There is a lot more to be afraid of in the 50,000-word manifesto. Biden will abandon school choice and eliminate or hobble charter schools. He will also “eliminate standardized tests that unfairly label students.” Crime, too, will follow the NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio model which has been so successful in driving up crime rates in New York. “Eliminating the use of cash bail” heads the list, along with decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level. Biden’s campaign vehemently denies that he supports defunding the police. But in an interview with activist Ady Barkan on digital media site NowThis News he said, “Yes, absolutely,” when asked if “we can redirect some of the [police] funding?” Redirecting “some” funding away from police is a euphemism for defunding police, at least partially.
Biden speaks out of both sides of his mouth on fracking, too. He said during a debate in April that he would ban oil and gas fracking, which accounts for 10 million jobs and has catapulted America to the top world producer. Just what we need in a pandemic-crippled economy.
The biggest clue to the destructive ideology that drives the Biden-Sanders manifesto is the word “equity,” which appears 34 times. Equity means equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. It is the very DNA of Marxism and everything bad flows from it, as we saw in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. The name of this podcast and blog is “United We Stand” and the mission is to find middle ground in America. However, there is no finding middle ground with this agenda which is all about complete control of the political system, the economy, our schools and your personal behavior. It tolerates no dissent. We cannot afford to compromise with this. These policies need to be resisted anyway possible by the majority of citizens who now see the true aims of the American left.
By the time some of you read this, the Georgia run-off election will be over and we presumably we will know whether a GOP-controlled Senate will prevent the Democrats from their worst impulses, or whether 2021 will be remembered as the year “the music died.” Bye, bye Miss American Pie. Ok, maybe I’m getting carried away. I really hope President Biden can hold the barbarians of his own party at the gate. A GOP Senate could be a secret weapon for him if he is really the moderate negotiator he proclaims to be.
Ok. Enough complaining about the state of our country. If you are part of my growing audience, you know that I am a libertarian small government guy on a mission to help fortify our middle class and support middle ground politics. I am suspicious of centralized power in all it’s forms because I study history and read the data. For the past year of this blog and podcast, I have spent a lot of time talking about the problems our country faces. In 2021, I will pivot to talking about and taking action to implement some of the grassroots solutions I discuss in my book, “Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government.”
You will hear a lot more about how we reform public education starting with diminishing the power of teachers unions and returning power back to parents to choose how and what their children are taught. My guests will include teachers, administrators, parents and politicians who share the belief that reforming public education is the most important challenge of our time. This issue is truly bi-partisan and cuts across all income, racial and cultural demographics.
You will hear from a former insurance company executive who was my favorite client at Enservio, the company I founded in 2004. He is a brilliant and interesting dude who is a master problem solver. He and I have been trading emails on ways to reduce income inequality and he has an incredible insight into why poor folks pay more for financial services which effectively limits their ability to create wealth. The root cause is a real surprise and might be the beginning of a solution to lower the cost of insurance for this demographic.
In a couple weeks, my guest will be Lyn Alden, a whip smart investment strategist that possesses one of my favorite superpowers; simplifying complicated topics. Her interview represents a continuation of efforts to help you make money in these crazy markets that began with my guest and legendary investment manager Whitney Tilson in 2020. Lyn sees the world as it is, and cuts through the Wall Street hype to explain complicated economic topics in language that everyone can understand. Lyn understands the difficult box our Federal Reserve has created for our economy and will explain some investment strategies we can all use to profit from the game that is being played by global government and their central banks.
In 2021, I will talk lots about how Bitcoin and other crypto currencies can be an incredible hedge against the endless money printing of our Federal Reserve and other world central banks. I know some of you are very skeptical of Bitcoin and that is mostly because you don’t really understand it. That’s OK. I will help you and here’s a quick primer. Fiat money, such as the U.S. dollar, is a currency whose value is based on the stability of the issuing government. It has no intrinsic value because it is not backed by a physical commodity like gold. For further context, the Great Recession of 2009 marked the beginning of central banks expansive monetary policy. The Covid-19 pandemic, meanwhile, has seen worldwide central bank balance sheets balloon past $25 trillion. Excessive money printing results in currency debasement and an erosion of your purchasing power. Five decades of “loose” monetary policy have led to an increase in frequency, and severity, of boom-and-bust cycles.
Bitcoin is a digital currency that was created in 2009 by an anonymous group of technologists as a solution to endless money printing. It immediately addresses the key weakness of our fiat currency world by limiting the quantity of Bitcoin to 21 million. Bitcoin is a store of value outside the government currency system. With this digital currency, consumers can transport hundreds of millions of dollars in value right in their pocket—on a USB ledger no larger than a stick of gum. According to Bloomberg, Bitcoin has outperformed every other asset class, with a 9 million percent rise in the past ten years. I hope this is enough to whet your whistle and encourage you to stay tuned in 2021.
You will also notice that I have changed my branding a bit from Jim Fini to Locally Grown. After a year of publishing my blog and podcast, I realized that the mission was more important than my name. Jim Fini doesn’t fix what ails our country, Locally Grown bottom-up government does this. The website URL remains the same at www.jimfini.com but you will see a different logo on the site and in the emails you receive.
You will also notice on the footer of my website, a link to my Patreon site. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Patreon is a service that allows you to provide monthly financial support to your favorite content creators. In exchange, supporters, or “patrons,” receive certain perks, such as exclusive uploads, early access to new work, ad-free content, and the ability to give suggestions. Many creators on YouTube also include the names of their patrons at the end of their videos. So, if you like what I’m doing, I encourage you to make a monthly commitment at my Patreon site. A contribution of as little as $3 per month gets you a signed copy of my book and access to bonus podcast episodes. Thankfully, I am blessed with not having to make a living as writer because I now realize how much work it takes to create professional content every ten days or so. Actually, your contributions will go to hiring an assistant that can help with the many editing and back office functions that helps this platform scale. I’m a start-up guy and the goal is making this more than just a labor of love. I want to create jobs and make this a self-sustaining business that delivers great value to its customers. After all, that is the American way.
I’m grateful to all of you who have been listening and reading my stuff and I encourage you to tell all your friends. In my opinion, things are gonna start getting unruly in America over the next couple years. Hopefully, I can help you make sense of this. Keep your great comments coming and if you have any suggestions for topics or guests, I’d love to hear them. Just pop me an email at jim@jimfini.com. And remember, United We Stand, Divided We Fall, Each One for the Other, and All for All.