George Rebane
First and foremost, Jo Ann and I wish all of our family, friends, and RR readers a healthy and productive 2019 – hopefully, ‘happy’ can also be fit in there somewhere 😉
As things stand now, US economic growth will continue at a brisk rate in 2019 with low unemployment, especially for the historically unemployed minorities. This is major consternation for the anti-American Left as it prepares for the 2020 elections. Look for progressive policies aggressively promoted to stop this growth.
In the growing assault on the Trump presidency, if the calls from leftwing media outlets like truthout.org and vox.com to take to the streets is answered by the tens of thousands of alt-Left, then there is a good chance for some serious violence. As most recently being demonstrated by the Democrat leadership, the search for middle-ground is long past. Now it’s simply a destruction derby going on at the federal level. The Left has already won several of such derbies at the states level.
Several pollsters tell us that more than half of millennials believe that capitalism is bad and socialism should be given a chance. Very few of them know the definition of either means of organizing the economy and society.
This may be the year where businesses big and small realize the constructive and disruptive power of AI-based business systems. No longer do we see all the hopeful arguments that AI will create more jobs. Instead we (techies) notice a lot of quasi-tutorial pieces (e.g. 'What Exactly Is Artificial Intelligence?') in the world’s leading news media. Most of them are written by journalists who haven’t quite cracked the code themselves on the topic. Therefore, some are quite humorous.
Both sides of the climate change war (yes, it’s now a war) claim that 2018 was not a bad year for their respective perspectives. For the global warmists, the latest IPCC report was their capstone for the unassailable edifice of ‘scientific proof’ that ‘preventable man-made global warming’ is happening and can be stopped without bad economic impacts. The skeptics saw the report as a final admission that there is still no supporting science behind the whole matter.
California will be the state to watch in 2019 as all the brakes to slow down the long-promised Leftward Leap toward socialism have now been removed. Keep your eye on the stats for one-way rentals of U-Haul trailers heading east.
RR will be meticulously read and denigrated by our local lefties, both in the blogosphere and in the more established media – we apparently live in their heads. My wish for 2019 is that our commenters should continue to minimize their ad hominems, and put a churchillian polish on those that must be posted. Remember, the internet is forever, even if you are a sackhead.
[2jan19 update] This is actually an addendum to my 650am in the 28dec18 sandbox. American autocracy, if it comes, will arrive through the ballot box. This was also anticipated by Jefferson in his ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’ Numerous examples of the Left counting on such ignorance arrive daily – today’s is from Gov Cuomo of NY speaking on Ellis Island. There he vilifies President Trump and his secure borders initiatives by reminding Americans that both Cuomo’s and Trump’s grandfathers were immigrants who came through Ellis Island. And then with his loony leftwing logic argues that legal immigration by foreign supplicants to these shores is equivalent to aliens violating our laws by illegally crossing our border and demanding their ‘right’ to residency. Cuomo and Democrat leaders really believe we Americans are stupid enough to swallow that argument. If they are right, then Jefferson’s dictum will surely come to pass.
[5jan19 update] The country’s progressives are giving high fives to the 70% marginal tax policy suggested by the newest proto-communist in Congress. Congresswoman AOC is lauded as being spot on with her new tax policy on earned income. Some leftwing worthies point out that in bygone days such high tax rates made the rich keep their money in investments and, therefore, that helped the economy and will do so again. Their blindspot seems to be in what people do with all their excess disposable income. The socialists seem to think that such people take that income in cash, and then stow it away under their mattresses – i.e. the money leaves the economy. That, of course, is not the case at all. The well-to-do spend that money in maintaining and expanding their expensive lifestyles, which means that it winds up in the revenues of merchants, manufacturers, and purveyors of recreational products/services. The commerce and jobs that result from such spending constitute a tremendous boost to our entrepreneurial and innovative small and mid-size companies who are the nation’s leading employers. None of this thinking is accessible to our collectivists and corporatists.
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