Federal Budget: Well, What Do You Expect?

After updating my usgovernmentspending.com with the new Trump budget, I am looking around me to see what other people think.

Here, for instance, is Donald Lambro complaining about "wasteful spending," such as Scott Pruitt flying first class, and the stupidity of $13 billion to fight opioid addiction and $18 billion for the wall, and the fantasy of imagining that we can cut $250 billion from Medicaid and $200 billion from Medicare.

Then there is Angelo Codevilla complaining that the extra $81 billion for defense isn't going to fix anything, not the waste in Afghanistan or the waste on the F-35 fighter. And we still don't have a decent anti-missile defense.

I'm sure that our Democratic friends are squawking like stuck pigs about little children going hungry in "our communities" and how this means the end of "our democracy."

But here is the big picture on the federal budget spending, with pensions (i.e., Social Security) in red, health care in green, defense in gray, and welfare in yellow. All other spending is at the bottom in blue:



Here's the link to usgovernmentspending.com if you would like to muck around with this chart.

What you see in the chart is that basically nothing has changed, overall, in the last 25 years. Nor is it likely to change. Oh sure, there is a significant cut in defense spending in the 1990s. You see a steady increase in health care, starting in 2000. But the size of federal government spending started at 20 percent of GDP, swelled up to nearly 25 percent of GDP in the Great Recession, and has now declined down to about 20 percent of GDP again. So nothing has changed over the last 25 years.

We are going to continue with Social Security instead of letting Americans plan and save for their own retirement. We are going to continue with Medicare instead of letting Americans decide for themselves how much of a drug cocktail they want to spend their life savings on at the end of life. And we are going to continue the great and glorious Pentagon establishment and its flashy procurements despite the nagging suspicion that it is all going to flush down the toilet if we ever get into a real shooting war.

And everything else in the federal budget is chump change, even the dreaded yellow line of welfare (exclusive of Medicaid, CHIP etc.) at the top of my chart.

Here's what I think about all this. First of all, one fine day the whole federal budget will go south. Maybe it won't happen on our watch, maybe it will. But one thing is certain. If you or I have been relying on that government free stuff to keep coming, we are going to be in a world of hurt when the balloon goes up. For senior citizens like me it means "eating the paint off the walls" as they said after the end of the Soviet Union. And notice how they aren't saying anything about how senior Venezuelans are doing in the current meltdown. I wonder how the old folks are doing there, what with food scarce and health care non-existent?

Then there is the other problem. All these government programs are incredibly rigid and non-responsive. They go on forever without changing, without adapting to changing conditions. Until it's too late. The market system adapts every day to changing conditions, and we each have to adapt too, in our jobs, in our homes, in our families. Yet we have mewed up some of the most important social functions in government programs that cannot be changed.

How should we prepare for the financial challenges of life, from losing a job to educating the kids to saving for retirement? Who knows, because today we pay for most of it through inflexible government programs. And yet it is through meeting the challenges of life that we develop our humanity.

Yes, but what about the people that can't take care of themselves through no fault of their own? Surely we need government programs to take care of them.

But does government really take care of people unable to take care of themselves? Does it really help people to allow them to live for years without work? What about the crazy mass-shooters? What about the white working class dying of despair and opioid addiction? What about the miseries of people that lost their homes in the real-estate crash? What about the teenagers that can't get jobs because of the minimum wage? What about the huge cost of health care, courtesy of government regulation and credentialism? What about the abysmal educational achievements of African American kids after half a century of affirmative action and diversity programs?

See, I think that the point of humans as social animals is that social cooperation is about reducing the incidence of force. It is about people coming together and helping each other without someone saying: do this or else. Right now we have a federal government spending about 20 percent of GDP on the principle of force, because government is force, and state and local spending another 15 percent of GDP. Then we have the regulatory state that regulates everything that moves.

In my view, if you want to understand our problems then you have to start by thinking through what happens to a society when 35 percent of its interaction is under the knout of force, when little children are forced to go to government schools, when workers are forced to send 20 percent of their wages to government, when the relationship between worker and employer is fouled by an incomprehensible tangle of regulation.

Our lefty friends make a big deal about "militarism" and wasteful military spending. They are completely blind to the militarizing of everything else in this so-called "welfare" state.

People look at the federal budget and complain that nothing has changed. Then they look at school shootings and demand that the government "do something." Right now the US Senate is busy voting down all the possible immigration reform bills, so it looks like nothing will happen on that front.

People talk a lot about problems: sexual harassment in the workplace, marginalization of minorities, you name it. And each item on the agenda requires an increment of force.

I think that the problem is the opposite of what the activists say. I think the challenge is to find ways of dismantling the vast edifice of force that we have constructed over the last century, of which the federal budget is Exhibit A. I think the challenge is to implement new paths of social cooperation -- without resorting to the hammer of force.

Can Men and Women Recover Their Lives from Leftism?

The last few months have seen the remarkable emergence of psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, whose bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos has found a particular audience in young men. Peterson is, of course, recalling young pajama boys to responsibility from their parents' basements.

The other puzzling phenomenon is the rise of special snowflake girls at our nation's universities during the Obama years. They seem to be insisting on safety: from sexual harassment and from unwelcome ideas. This is not surprising to me. What Women Want is protection. All the rubbish about women being superheroes and rough tough corporate execs is just that: left-wing rubbish. The point is, I think, that a woman cannot go about being a woman unless her safety is provided for.

There is no mystery about this. The central activity of women in the world is the birthing and the raising of children. To do this, a woman needs a quiet, safe place to care for her little ones. That is why, for instance, recent opinion polls report that a clear majority of mothers want to stay home with their kids. No kidding! The fact is that women don't like the free-for-all of the sexual revolution; they don't like ultra competition; they don't like business startups; they don't like the open outcry of the battle of ideas; they don't like being separated from their young children.

This is not to say that women should be forced to stay home, forced to stay out of trouble, forced to live modest lives. Not at all: the essence of freedom is the right to make a complete mess of your life and go against all sensible cultural memes without being put in the stocks. But I think that it is a cruel injustice to teach girls that they ought to be adventurous and career oriented and live life just like a man.

Of course, the cultural force that teaches women to be "independent women" and to live against the wisdom of the ages is the modern phenomenon of the left. I do not know exactly why it is that the left teaches, nay, bullies women to be unwomanly, and men to be unmanly. I suspect it has something to do with the blind leftist hatred of everything bourgeois and middle class.

I suspect that we are approaching a crisis in the cultural authority of the left. This was highlighted for me in a piece on the cultural divide between left and right. It shows that since 1994 the right has moved a little to the right, but the left has moved a lot towards the left.

In my view the movement to the left is getting beyond folly to real social damage, and is creating such emotional stress for individual leftists that it will soon reach a breaking point.

The point of the left has always been the idea of liberation from the iron cage of existence. Why should people have to suffer when the means of their liberation is available? In the Marxist utopia we should be able "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner." In the early 21st century, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exults over the wonders of Obamacare:

"As you hear from these stories, this is a liberation...  This is what our founders had in mind--ever expanding opportunity for people.

"You want to be a photographer or a writer or a musician, whatever --  an artist, you want to be self-employed, if you want to start a business, you want to change jobs, you no longer are prohibited from doing that because you can’t have access to health care..."

See, I think this has things exactly backward. I think it is a wonderful thing for people to take risks and attempt to live the creative life. But I strongly believe that such risk-takers should do it on their own dime, and not force ordinary people to subsidize or pay for their risk-taking. The fact is that universal healthcare enslaves everyone in a mandatory government program so that some people can be liberated from the responsibility of managing their own risks.

Let us analyze this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. In my theory the People of the Subordinate Self are liberated from exploitation and oppression when they come to learn and practice the virtues of individual responsibility. It is a hard thing to do, and many people prefer to live as virtual serfs, as government program beneficiaries or as government bureaucrats with lifetime tenure, rather than accept the burdens of responsibility. Likewise, in my theory the People of the Responsible Self rise up into a life of creativity from a base of a responsibility. They do not imagine themselves being liberated from responsibility if they decide to become "a photographer or a writer or a musician."

But in the crazy-cakes world of the left the artist or the feminist or the gay is endeavoring to liberate herself from the shackles of responsibility; indeed she is really a victim for being forced by society to observe its bourgeois norms. This kind of thinking is an almost irresistible temptation for someone on the left because the default program of the left is the liberation of helpless victims from exploitation and oppression. It is only a small step from advocating for ex-slaves or victims of the patriarchy to imagining oneself, who so longs to escape the coils of responsibility into the ethereal heights of creative art, to be just as much a victim as the real victims of society.

I think it is best to regard all liberation, except in the strict sense of liberation from actual slavery or serfdom, as a fantasy. We are humans, social animals, members of society, and that means that we should endeavor first of all to contribute to society and build up a credit balance in the bank of cooperation before we draw it down in a risky creative venture. For any well-born would-be creative to regard themselves as a victim, because the government has cut grants to the arts, or because they can't afford health insurance, is laughable.

Indeed, if there is real privilege is these times it is the privilege we create that allows people to do experimental things, in art or in business, at all. In most societies down the ages experimentation was regarded as a very present danger and was stopped in its tracks. Because when an experiment goes wrong it often causes real hardship to others in society.

In my view both the alt-right and the safe-spaces left are experiencing the same thing. Something is wrong, so we must return to the old ways to find safety and reconnect with responsibility.

David Brooks Does Not Get It

Back in the good old days when he worked for the Wall Street Journal in Europe, writes David Brooks, there was nothing but good news. German unification, fall of the Soviet Union, etc. But now we see

the return of ethnic separatism, the rise of authoritarian populism, the retreat of liberal democracy, the elevation of a warrior ethos that reduces politics to friend/enemy, zero-sum conflicts.

Back in the good old days we had the Wall Street Journal celebrating "dynamic entrepreneurs and America’s heroic missions." Now we have FoxNews "with its daily gospel of resentments" and President Trump's "warrior mentality" and "constant race baiting." We have descended into clan warfare.

Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors.

OK. So what is David Brooks missing? He writes as if the agenda of the left doesn't exist; he writes as though conservatives have no warrant for resentment and warriordom. But, enquiring minds want to know, how come conservatives got all mad and warriorly?

So let's tell the story of the last half century in another way. Back in the 1980s we conservatives felt that the Reagan revolution had established the idea that the market system ought to prevail because theory and because practice. Theory said that socialism and the administrative state could not work and the record of the Reagan years proved it in practice. But then came Bill Clinton saying he was a New Democrat but then immediately setting his wife to legislate a total administrative state solution to health care. Then came left-wing race and gender politics -- after the Civil Rights Acts supposedly solved the problem of government discrimination -- that encouraged Americans to think of themselves as clan members rather than Americans. Well, voters taught Clinton a lesson in 1994, and then elected George W. Bush who promised a "compassionate conservatism" that would square the circle between conservatism and liberalism. Wonderful! Everybody would live happily ever after. Except that liberals hated George W. Bush and everything he stood for.

Then came Barack Obama and a determination to fundamentally transform America with good old administrative state solutions to health care in Obamacare and to finance with Dodd-Frank. Plus left-wing race and gender politics and climate change politics.

Conservatives realized that we were chumps. If we behaved like good guys then what Margaret Thatcher called the "ratchet" would continue to inch America to the left, with bigger and bigger government and more powerful regulators and race-and-gender liberalism bullying us and stigmatizing us as racists, sexists, homophobes, and wave upon wave of immigrants to swamp our inheritance of Anglo-American law and democracy. We realized that conservatism wasn't working. We realized we had to fight back.

Now let us make clear what we mean by conservatism and liberalism. Today, conservatism means the nation state as the imaginary clan of all the people living in a nation state, understanding that we are all Americans first, fellow citizens of a city on a hill, the last best hope of mankind on Earth. But today liberalism means a global elite organizing its supporters into sub-national clans: the clan of African Americans, the clan of feminists, the clan of gays. And these clans are represented as helpless victims of the dominant white male hegemony.

Now I would say that the conservative notion is a good one. It builds upon the most successful script for organizing people into a political community, the completely fanciful and confused notion of a national people with a glorious history and language and culture that goes back into the dawn of history. And conservatism holds high the astonishing Great Enrichment of the market system, allowing economic relations to develop into astonishing prosperity without too much bullying and economic repression from the government.

I would also say that the liberal notion is a bad one. It starts with the notion of a global elite of educated, evolved people that know best, and uses identity politics to stir up and exploit the race and gender resentments of its supporters to make war upon the ordinary people that identify with the nation. There is, of course, an evil genius in this strategy that comes down to us straight from Philip of Macedonia and Julius Caesar: divide and conquer.

There is an honorable reason for the global elite/identity politics model. After World War II the global elite decided that it had to step in and excise the cancer that produced the poisonous nationalism of Adolf Hitler. The solution was to combine the nations in supra-national organizations that would be controlled by the global elite. So far so good. But politics didn't just go away. If nationalism and the nation state was to go away, something would need to replace it. And what replaced it was identity politics. Political leaders would not advance the cause of the nation; instead they would cater to the cause of the minority.

In other words, the educated and evolved elite encouraged what David Brooks now calls "clan warriors" because in politics you have to appeal to some common denominator, and if you are not going to play to patriotism, the clan of the nation, then you play to other clan: race or gender or class.

Now, ideally, we humans would all rally to the notion of humanity, the notion of humans as one global clan. But that time is not yet, primarily because of the fact that humans speak different languages. So politicians are going to rally us to some lesser group, to a nation or to a lesser tribe.

In my view the nation is still the best way to rally people into some kind of unity.

So here we were in the election campaign of 2016, and the top two Republican candidates were Ted Cruz, that proposed to rally conservatives against liberals, and Donald Trump, that proposed to rally all Americans to Make America Great Again, with walls and less immigration that would put America First.

Do you see the brilliance of the Trump notion? He does not set American against American. He puts Americans against non-Americans. And he fights for ordinary Americans and celebrates them as he did in his State of the Union speech.

In a way it is encouraging that David Brooks doesn't get this. One assumes that none of his liberal friends get it either.

You see the really dirty secret of what President Trump is doing is that he is speaking to the folks that liberals want to hive off into resentful identity politics silos. He is encouraging them to think of themselves first of all as Americans, as in E Pluribus Unum, in a glorious effort to Make America Great Again. Imagine if he succeeds!

Now, in my view, the global elite agenda is utter folly. Just because you stop rallying people to their nations, it doesn't alter the fact that in politics you always rally the people towards something. Since you cannot rally ordinary people to the idea of global humanity, not yet, you have a choice. You can rally them to the nation or rally them to something smaller.

And when you rally people to something smaller you are likely to break up the nation states of the world into something smaller and meaner. As in a Scotland independent of Britain, or Catalonia independent of Span, or California independent of the US.

But hey, as long as David Brooks does not get it, then Donald Trump gets to celebrate the notion of America with all of us normals while the liberal globalists wander around scratching their heads wondering what went wrong.

Trump Budget: Two Years of Trillion Dollar Deficits

Now that I've got usgovernmentspending.com updated with the Trump FY19 budget, here are the takeaways.

First, the tax cut is going to increase deficits, big time. Here are the deficits predicted by the FY18 budget:



And here are the deficits predicted by the FY19 budget.



Yikes! Back to trillion dollar deficits! Most of the increase in the deficit comes from the Trump tax cut. For instance, the budgeted FY18 federal revenue in the FY18 budget last year was $3.81 trillion, whereas in the FY 19 budget it is $3.42 trillion. That's a decrease of $391 billion.

But I wonder how accurate the forecast can be. See, here are the projections of income tax revenue, first in the FY18 budget.



Now here is the income tax revenue from the FY19 budget after the Trump tax cut.



So the Feds are expecting the Corporate Income Tax take to drop by $100 billion in FY18. Really? I'd expect a one year bump as corporations like Apple bring home billions in profits parked offshore and pay tax on their ill-gotten gains. But the Feds expect a bump in Individual Income Tax in FY18, the first year of the tax cut.

What about the spending side? Here is Defense in the FY18 budget.



And here is Defense in the FY19 budget.



So you can see that Trump is putting about an extra $100 billion a year into defense that puts it above the trillion-a-year mark by FY22.

But the basic math on the federal budget is this, for FY18.

Federal Pensions	$1.0 trillion
Federal Health Care	$1.2 trillion
Federal Education	$0.1 trillion
National Defense	$0.9 trillion
Federal Welfare	$0.4 trillion
All Other Spending	$0.6 trillion
Total Federal Spending	$4.2 trillion

It is interesting, is it not, that all the arguments about federal spending are usually about the All Other Spending part of the budget. Which is a mere $600 billion a year. Meanwhile the big money, year after year, is in Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense.

And remember, Donald Trump says he is not going to touch Social Security and Medicare.

Now, if I had my druthers, we'd privatize Social Security and Medicare so that the workers spent their lives saving for retirement and end-of-life health care rather than lending it to politicians in the hope that they would get it back in their retirement years. And most probably the workers would pass a ton of that money on to their children.

But imagine what would happen if we suddenly saved a couple trillion in the federal budget. According to, I think, Milton Friedman, the reality of governments is that they tax and spend up to the limit allowed by the bond market and the voters. What would happen to that $2 trillion a year in savings from people taking over responsibility for their golden years? Would it be returned to the voters in tax cuts? Or would our ruling class find other ways to bribe the voters?

I am not sure that I want to know the answer to that question.

No, Democrats Are Not Just Americans With Different Ideas

Today as I was updating usgovernmentspending.com with the new numbers -- and Trump is proposing a couple of years with $1 trillion deficits! -- I heard Michael Medved telling his audience that the partisan divide is rather overblown, and that Democrats are really good guys at heart with different ideas for America.

Well, not quite, Michael. First of all, the differences in ideas make a big difference. And second, there is a very large stream in the Democratic side that regards politics and political power as a saving religion, and that to oppose them in any way is a damning sin, of racism, sexism, and homophobia, and that the power of the state should be used to shut the opponents up.

In my view, that is a big deal.

First of all, the basic differences in ideas.

Democrats believe in the administrative state. They believe that numerous things that we do together should be done under the supervision of experts and administrators and paid for with taxes. There's a trillion in government-administered pensions, more than a trillion in government administered health care, and more than a trillion ind education.

If we conservatives had our druthers, we would get these importance social protections out of the hands of government, because government does things very badly.

But the truth is that the Democrats own the inside track on this. Most people have enough of the serf in them that they feel safer with the local liberal in charge of their protection: guaranteeing pensions, health care, and education for the kids. People like me would like to persuade the American people to change their minds about this, but we recognize that we have a long way to go. So, for me, there is a quiet resignation that things are not going to get better; we are going to have big government and the administrative state around for a long time, even if, with President Trump, we are taking a whack at out-of-control regulations.

But the big thing, and the thing that is really non-negotiable, is that most Democrats, and certainly all the little kiddies going through elite finishing school, have a saving faith in the power of politics to change peoples' lives and fight injustice. In other words, they believe that political power is the means to bend the arc of history towards justice. I call this the "activism culture."

In my view the activism culture is built on the truth that, at the beginning of the 19th century as the industrial revolution was getting into full swing, the vast majority of people in the industrializing regions were "outside the system." The whole governing thing was reserved for the absolute monarchs with help from the land-holding aristocracy. In the first half of the century the issue was to include the rising middle class into the system, and after the middle-class got the vote then the issue became the franchising of the working class. The activists assumed that revolution would be needed to get the unfranchised into the system.

The assumption of revolutionaries like Marx and Engels was that the rising power of the bourgeoisie, the captains of the new industry, would become the equivalent of the old aristocracy and grab power, using the wealth of the new industrial system. Just as the old aristocracy kept the jealously kept the wealth of the land for them and their descendants, so the captains of industry would rule over the world tightly holding on to their industrial gains. The workers of the world would be "immiserated."

Obviously, the only way the unfranchised could get the attention of the rulers was by marches and demonstrations and demands, and so the modern activism culture was born. And it makes sense. If you are inside the system with a vote then the powers-that-be will pay attention to you, because they need your vote. But folks outside the system need a more direct way of influencing the government.

But there is a problem. Once a group has been franchised with the vote, and admitted into the system, what is left for the activists to do? This was the problem faced by the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School after World War I when the Social Democratic Party of the German workers became the government of Germany. The answer for them was to realize that there were others in the world not yet franchised and admitted into the system: women and racial and sexual minorities. The activists that once championed the workers could now advocate for the victims of the patriarchy and of slavery and of colonialism.

This has been tremendous fun for the activist community, right down to the present moment, giving meaning to the lives of countless well-born scions. But it is based upon a lie.

The lie is the notion that the captains of industry and the middle class is a ruling class intent upon its own power project and determined to keep down the people outside the system. In fact the captains of industry are not that interested in power, and the middle class is not that interested in power. It is a monstrous injustice to act as if men have been keeping women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time and enslaving and colonializing brown people since the days of Columbus.

In fact the capitalists and the bourgeoisie got out of slavery in the 19th century and colonialism in the 20th century because, frankly, they did not pay.

Moreover, the record of the last century is that mobilizing whole peoples to fight injustice is counterproductive. The lesson of the Soviet Union and China and other countries that followed the activist agenda is that when you decide to organize a country in a crusade against injustice you create killing fields and miseries and injustice unimaginable under the old regime.

So the position of conservatives in respect of the left and its #Resistance and AntiFa and SJWs and the gender and race studies kiddies at the university is that these are budding totalitarians and must be stopped at all costs. Their ideas are wrong, their methods are wrong, and they must be stopped.

The left's ideas are wrong, because the market system does not require detailed top-down supervision; on the contrary, it stagnates when subordinated under administrative control. Indeed the science shows that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and the same applies to the administrative state that tries to administer prices: it is called the economic calculation problem. Then the administrative regulators of  regulated industry tend to become "captured" by the industry they regulator: regulatory capture. And then legislation on economic matters tends to buy the votes of people indifferent to a project and burden the defeated minority with costs but no benefits. This is the finding of Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent. This is why I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. It is one thing to remove an injustice. But once you start to implement a program of justice you will immediately create injustice.

The left's methods are wrong because people inside the system do not need to threaten each other with "peaceful protest." We have had two hundred years of the Great Enrichment since the dawn of the industrial era, and the overwhelming fact is that the market system accommodates and enriches all comers. Force is not needed except to punish people that rob and steal and cheat.

My hope is that the #Resistance will harm the Democrats in the next two election cycles so much that the Democrats will be forced to curb the activists and hide them away. And that will deal with the problem until next time.

The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Suppose that Gentry Liberals are Democrats' Biggest Problem

Let us consider the latest Michael Barone piece, that "Gentry Liberals Own the Democratic Party." He means that:

In our three largest cities -- New York, Los Angeles and Chicago -- gentry liberals have become the dominant political demographic.

But, of course, Donald Trump is president. Then,

Gentry liberals have produced the metropolitan areas with the highest income inequality in the nation. They decry gentrification -- and the accompanying movement of low-income blacks and Hispanics out of their neighborhoods -- even as they cause it. They sing hymns to diversity even as they revel in the pleasures of communities where almost everybody believes and consumes exactly the same things -- and votes Democratic.

In other words, gentry liberals pursue politics that is very nice for gentry liberals, cities with expensive streetcars and bike lanes and yeasty cultural resources, and sky-high prices that keep the deplorables out of town. And every gentry liberal can enjoy the comfortable reassurance of #WeBelieve yard signs on every corner. President Obama is the poster boy for gentry liberals; he "has lived all his adult life in gentrified neighborhoods."

But there is a problem.

Dominating the party is one thing; producing candidates and issues with appeal to the broader national electorate is another. Gentry liberals have the microphone and the money to dominate the Democratic Party. Whether they can overcome their snobbish disdain and bitter contempt for those beyond their comfortable enclaves and come up with a winning national strategy is unclear.

Well, yeah. I hope that the dominance of the gentry liberals, the folk I call the People of the Creative Self, increasingly marginalizes the Democratic Party from the American mainstream. Hopefully this gentry-liberal dominance already is doing it.

For instance, one can only guess that Nancy Pelosi's eight-hour filibuster from the floor of the House of Representatives was an attempt to deflect the rage of the gentry liberals that the orange clown had run the table on the Democrats with the tax cut plan, the SOTU speech and the government shutdown. Not to mention the fact that, more and more, it seems clear that the Obama administration was spying on the Trump campaign on the excuse of trumped-up fake dossiers.

But will the Trump-led Republican Party actually take it to the Democrats and marginalize the preening educated-class liberals, gentry liberals, People of the Creative Self? Here's a piece that might influence you. J.B.White calls Donald Trump "The OODA Loop President."

What's that, you say? Well, the OODA Loop is the brainchild of a true American character, John Boyd, a fighter pilot that also lived to create the transformative F-15 and F-16 fighter jets from a desk at the Pentagon.

OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act. It encapsulates what any warrior -- or market warrior -- does in a fight. But it takes time to go through the cycle, from one action to to the next. Thus speed is of the essence. The idea is to get inside your opponent's OODA Loop, disrupt his plans, and act faster than he can respond.

Which Trump seems to be able to do.

But there is another aspect of Trump, that came out in his SOTU speech: his apparent mastery of the "cares about people like me" metric. White writes that Trump prominently acknowledged

haunting, memorable, and heartbreaking trials and tribulations made extremely personal by a range of attendees who suffered great loss.

You know, of course, which voters would be most affected by this kind of rhetoric. Ordinary middle-class women, who would like respond to Trump's acknowledgement of the trials and tribulations of ordinary Americans as "caring about people like me."

The mainstream media has made a big deal about the notion that women vote for Democrats. And so they do, unless you subtract gentry liberal women, the #MeToo Pussyhat brigade, and black women. Then you find that ordinary middle-class women are not overwhelmingly Democrat at all.

But suppose that Trump starts successfully appealing more and more to ordinary middle-class women that are not gentry liberals, what then?

Well, we are going to find out pretty soon, as we swing into the mid-term election season.

You see, my judgement is that the whole liberal agenda is a gentry liberal conceit from entitlements to labor law to economic regulation to environmentalism and climate change. On my view, the diversity and inclusion movement seems to be all about getting gentry-liberal women jobs in universities and Silicon Valley. But the gentry-liberal agenda is not much fun for ordinary middle-class Americans.

What ordinary Americans want is a decent job, an affordable house in a decent area, decent schools for the kids, decent roads, and decent health care. Gentry liberals make that more difficult.

And Donald Trump seems to be the Great Communicator that can help ordinary Americans see that.

FISAGate: Don't Forget That These People are Idiots

So here we are, reaching the "what did the President know and when did he know it?" in the FISAGate scandal.

For you young-uns, the "what did the president know" meme was made famous by then Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN) during the hearings of the Watergate committee headed up by dear old (actually very canny) Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC).

Of course, the FISAGate thing will never get as big as Watergate, partly because Democratic scandals are never as big as Republican scandals. The mainstream media make sure of that. And besides, FISAGate cannot be a big thing, because that would mean that President Obama was involved and that would be racist.

Yesterday, texts between FBI love-birds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page revealed that "potus wants to know everything we're doing."

Well, well, well. And here I thought that President Obama never knew anything unless he'd read about it in the newspaper.

As this self-inflicted scandal starts to knife into Democrats, it is important to get one thing clear.

High government officials are not what you are taught to believe: dedicated public servants, highly qualified experts, keen analysts, men of the people, and all that stuff.

They are idiots. They are fools, knaves, and weaklings stumbling around trying the clean up the latest fine mess their fools, knaves, and weaklings of bosses have got them into.

By bosses, I am thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Knowing that these two were supposed to be the one-two First Black President and First Woman President is bound to tell you something about their personal intellectual qualities.

Now I don't know if the whole FISA court shenanigans was a four-stage deep state plot to influence the 2016 election, as Conservative Tree House seems to think, or whether it was just a Keystone Kops affair of idiots tripping over themselves. It really doesn't matter now.

But I will tell you what. The "brilliant" idea of the Trump-Russia collusion thing will go down as the biggest mistake in recent American history. What if the Obama administration had been using the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign? The Republicans would never have raised it after winning the election, because it would be too hard to give it traction without the help of the mainstream media. The only way to be sure that Republicans would investigate it would be to back them into a corner with a Trump-Russia special prosecutor investigation, because it just makes it a bit easier to make sense of the foolish Trump-Russia conspiracy meme.

However, I do think that the Republican investigators do seem to know what they are doing, and they have been quietly working away for the last year building a trap for the Obama administration Heffalumps to fall into. Why do I think this? Because things seem to be falling into place with curious regularity on the FISAGate front.

One thing that is curious to me is the choice of Carter Page as the reason for the FISA court application. As information comes out it appears that Carter Page was an FBI informant and seems to have been used in counterintelligence against the Russians. This is a man that Ann Coulter calls Agent 000. (Er, is that Agent Double-Oh Zero or Agent Triple Zero?). I suppose that Carter Page was just the convenient name that happened to be around. I mean, you wouldn't want to compromise real intelligence investigations with a dead herring like Carter Page. Plus, the only reason he was associated with the Trump campaign was apparently, according to Coulter, that nobody in the foreign policy community would have anything to do with Trump, dahling. So the Trumpists were stuck with a fellow not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

All this is to say that regimes and dynasties all have their sell-by date. That's because the scions of the revolution aren't quite as sharp as the original revolutionaries. Stalin was not as smart as Lenin, although certainly just as brutal, and Gorbachev was totally lacking in the brutal ruthlessness that a true tyrant needs.

Our present progressive elite has been around more or less since the end of the US Civil War, and the world we see around us is the result of their political agenda to create a wise and compassionate administrative state. But today's progressive scions really don't know what they are doing or why. They are just Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls from good families that learned their lessons well.

If you listen to their propaganda, you will hear that they have heroically tamed the capitalist (and now racist sexist homophobic) beast and saved capitalism (and the white patriarchy) from its own worst instincts.

But I think that our progressive elite has merely looted the modern economy, like any conqueror, to reward its supporters. Eventually they will run out of other peoples' money and then the fun will begin.

In the old days the political elite was confined to its necessary role as protector against existential perils like the Mongols. That was merely because the pre-industrial state could not support a government sector that extended much beyond defense; it just did not have the money.

But today's elite has looted the economy to pay pensions to grandpa, health care to grandma, free education to Johnny, and a welfare bureaucracy to keep the poor out of the way. And now they are having a problem coming up with an encore. Meanwhile their government-employee supporters are looting government services like police and fire and education to pay for their well-deserved retirements.

The elite's self image of educated and evolved experts wisely helping the oppressed and the marginalized has had an amazing run. But now it is challenged by Trump, who is offering an alternative narrative.

Whereas the progressives have done a great job splitting off the working class and now minorities and women from the mainstream of American life, Trump is proposing to unify the whole country around the narrative of celebrating America, good ordinary America and Americans, and anyone can join.

It is going to be really interesting to see if he can pull it off. There is one thing that is going for him. Lefties like Stalin and Hitler resorted to the nationalist meme because they realized that in the modern era it was the only way to unify people to their standard. You can say that Stalin  and Hitler were monsters, but they surely knew how to play the game. People belong to nations now, and nothing else works as well.