Category Archives: economy

Is He Just Joshing Us?  

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“Joshing,” as in “teasing,” or “joking with” others.

Senator Josh Hawley recently proposed the federal government issue $600 tariff rebate checks per person—a family of four getting $2,400.

Such a deal he has for us!

What makes no sense is that in true Trumpian fashion, he is blaming President Biden for the perceived necessity for the checks. “Americans deserve a tax rebate after four years of Biden policies that have devastated families’ savings and livelihoods,” Hawley said as he announced his plan, and suggested, “My legislation would allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country.”

Now, hold on a minute. He’s spouting totally misleading statements that rely on public ignorance of how tariffs work.

We are going to un-ignorance any of you who think other countries are paying the United States big taxes, the tariffs of which President Trump is so proud. They are not.  WE are the ones taking it in the billfold. Britannica.com makes it easy to understand:

Let’s review how tariffs work.  First, neither a foreign company nor its home country pays any additional tax when it brings products here. United States companies buying the products are the ones paying a tax (the tariff) to Customs and Border Protection at the port of entry. They pay the foreign manufacturer the price of the goods and then they pay an additional amount to CBP before the products are released to them.

And how do those companies recover that extra fee, including the tariffs President Trump seems to arbitrarily set?  As the illustration shows, they make you and me pay more for our Korean refrigerator, our Canadian steel, our Chinese fireworks, Indonesian shirts, etc. We already are seeing some stores post signs telling customers how much more items cost because of the President’s tariffs. He’s intimidates some companies into not doing that. But he can’t scare all of them.

Therefore, Hawley’s proposal would have the federal government give us a rebate check to offset some of the extra money that we are paying for foreign-made products because of the Trump tariffs and we will use that money to buy more products with inflated costs because of the tariffs.

This is an economic program based on the Menard’s rebate system.

So, when Hawley says, ““My legislation would allow hard-working Americans to benefit from the wealth that Trump’s tariffs are returning to this country,” he is indulging in nothing short of verbal sleight of hand. There is no money “returning to this country.” It is here already and WE will pay it. In effect, he proposes putting some money in our right-hand pocket after the Trump tariffs take money out of our left-hand pocket.

Six hundred dollars might not come close to reimbursing us for our tariff-increased out-of-pocket expenses in the purchase of a new car, or the accumulated costs of less costly things we buy throughout the year.

And how much will this gracious gesture cost our debt-ridden federal government? How much of the tariff-raised money that could go toward reducing the Trumpian increase in our national debt will instead be sent back to us as a fake bonus?

A few days ago the census bureau put our national population at 342,201,496.

In our calculations, we probably are over-simplifying the math and the subtleties of who would be eligible for a rebate. We don’t know, for example how many of those 342.2 million people are criminals, mental patients, gang members, and drug-sellers from south of the border who wouldn’t be eligible to receive anything and, if the administration has its way, won’t be here to collect a check anyway. But just by multiplying the population number by 600, we could up with a total expenditure of $205,320,897,600. That’s $205.3 BILLION of our own money that will be returned to us.

Missourians (our population of 6,282,690) would receive $3,769,614,000 of their own money back.  The best thing that can be said for the deal is that it’s better than the Menard’s rebates that you only get if you buy something else later.

HOWEVER all of us might not get one of these checks if Congress falls for this scheme—your vigilant observer for example.

Hawley has told listeners to Steve Bannon’s podcast that  Trump’s tariffs are “on track to raise over $150 billion this calendar year alone,” well short of the calculated total above. But that shortfall can be adjusted because Hawley says it won’t go to those who supported Trump’s favorite punching bag, Joe Biden. “You’d give it to our people,” he said. “The rich people don’t need it…All those Democrat donors of Wall Street, all these fund guys, who all hate the tariffs…We ought to give a portion back to our working class blue-collar voters who powered the Trump revolution, who got this president into office multiple times, and who are the backbone of this nation.” Multiple times meaning “two.”

Get out the hip boots, folks. It’s awfully deep in here.

I’m not saying I supported Joe Biden in 2024, thus becoming disqualified under this  Hawley/Trump frequent flyer program. It’s just that you will never find my lip prints on the presidential ring.

Pro-Trump blue collar folks will be rewarded for their loyalty but anti-Trump blue collar workers won’t be rewarded? We suppose he knows how to separate a red blue-collar worker from a blue blue-collar worker.  Perhaps he’ll use the people from ICE who are widely respected for their skills of discerning who gets hauled off to God knows where, largely based on physical appearance, to determine awardees.

This pinpointing of disloyal blue collar workers and keeping the Washington bureaucracy (what’s left of it, anyway) from sending checks to undeserving garbage men, grave diggers, and gas station operators should keep the total outlay below the amount we just computed.

And remember, this scheme just gives us back our own money that otherwise would be used for such things as building more wall in the Southwest where we are still waiting for the first check from Mexico that Trump promised would pay those costs, reimbursing this country for all those miles of fence.

This country is more than $30 TRILLION in debt. Where will it find the money for Hawley’s warm and fuzzy give-back plan? You and I will provide it by paying for Trump’s tariffs, as we have provided the money for the wall Mexico will pay for.

So far he hasn’t tied tariffs on Mexican products to the recovery of fence costs.

While thousands of his constituents have to deal with cutbacks in the food stamp program, the school meal programs, safety net reductions, cuts in disaster aid, attacks on disease prevention and control, and friends and relatives hauled away by masked hooligans in ICE outfits, he’s going to load up on a souvenir airplane, build a ballroom where even more of his friends can pay a lot of money to be in the same room with him, and gather as many other shiny tchotchkes that catch his eye. And he and Hawley hope to take our minds off of his meat-cleavering of programs that serve the people at large by giving us back a few hundred of the bucks it’s costing us to buy any of the myriad of things made somewhere else that they are making us pay more to buy.

Blaming President Biden for all of the broken promises or created problems of this administration as well as giant increases in the federal debt has become a misleading Republican whine that is beyond tiresome. Liars might figure, but figures don’t lie. And the figures show Trump stands balding head and shoulders above Biden and Obama when it comes to running up the national debt.

A study by consumeraffairs.com shows the Biden administration increased the national debt by $6.17 trillion while the first Trump administration drove it up by $8.18 trillion. (The Obama administration, ran it up by $8.34 trillion, but it took him eight years.) The calculations show Biden increased the national debt by 21.7 percent. Trump hiked it by 40.43% and some analysts say his Big Ugly Bill will add $2.5-3.8 trillion more.

Last we heard, Hawley hadn’t attracted any supporters, particularly others in his party, many of whom think the tariff revenues should be used to reduce the national debt or at least to retard its growth.

Next thing you know, Trump will be demanding the Nobel Prize for Economics—as he also wants it for Peace achieved through international bombing and national cruelty.

Let’s wait and see how Hawley figures out a way to get this dead bird to fly. Just remember, it’s our money that you and I might someday get back, not dollars paid by any foreign government or foreign manufacturer.

Six hundred dollars that we can use to pay tariff-inflated prices on other goods..

Maybe it’s not so different from Menard’s rebate system after all.

Liars Figure

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—especially when they don’t like the truth that figures tell.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported job growth figures well under those our president had been bragging about or boasting did not, in fact, materialize, he killed the messenger, another indication that he cannot tolerate people who tell the truth.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 73,000 jobs had been created nationally in July, a third month that the numbers came up short of what had been promoted or predicted.  The department, as it has done at times in the past, adjusted previously-announced figures for May and June substantially lower than originally reported. And our President—with no evidence the bureau was not being accurate with the adjustment—fired the director.

Trump hasn’t liked Director Erika McEntarfer anyway and has accused her of faking employment numbers last year to make Kamala Harris look good. He claims the July job figures are the latest thing “rigged in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”  He says he will hire someone “much more competent and qualified” to take McEntarfer’s place.

We wonder which “more competent and qualified” FOX news anchor he will pick to replace McEntarfer, who has a doctorate in economics from Virginia Tech and was an economist in the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies during Trump’s first term. Before that, she worked in the Treasury Department Office of Tax Policy. During the Biden presidency she was with the Council of Economic Advisors as a senior economist. The Republican-controlled Senate showed its confidence in her with a confirmation vote of 86-8 for  directorship in early 2024.

What seemed to pull Trump’s cork was that  revision downward of numbers from May and June and a paltry 73,000 new jobs reported in July. The original report for May calculated only 19,000 new jobs were created. The original report for June calculated 144,000 new jobs but was revised downward by ninety percent to only 14,000.  The new three-month total is 106,000, well below the original report just for June.

The outlook for much improvement is gloomy.  Coresight Research forecasts 15,000 stores will close this year. That’s added to the 7,325 closed last year.

From various sources we have put together a list of store chains shutting down big parts of their holdings:

Walgreens 500 this year, 1200 by end of 2027.

Advanced auto Parts 727 by mid-year.

Macy’s 150 stores through 2026.

Family Dollar  370 this year (600 last year)

CVS  300 stores already closed.

Big Lots  500-700

Joann Fabrics  all stores

Forever 21 all locations

Rite Aid  200 in fourteen states

Denny’s Restaurants 100 this year; 50 last year

Red Robin  70

Foot Locker  More than 400 by 2026

Dollar Tree  30

7-11  440 (out of more than 13,000 locations)

And none of those figures look at the jobs that are lost because workers are shipped off to some mysterious location and there hasn’t been time for Medicaid recipients to replace them in the face of threats to take away their benefits if they don’t work.

Political cowards do not accept bad news and often have a tendency to look for scapegoats rather than flaws in their own policies.  Leaders look for ways to turn bad news around. Cowards kill messengers. Leaders do not fear truth to power; they welcome its challenges to be better.

Trump claims the national economy is booming because of his policies. The numbers say otherwise. His solution is to fire someone who looks at the numbers and tells us truths he doesn’t want us to hear—.

—as is the case with Federal Reserve Chief Jerome Powell, who won’t embrace the rosy picture Trump paints of the economy. He lies awake at night—-maybe we should put some punctuation in there so it more accurately reads, “He lies, awake at night”—because he lives in his own world where truth is kept under mental lock and key, and he cooks up new insults and threats to throw at those who have the courage to stand up to him.

When will this country, particularly those who have so easily shrunk from their responsibilities to the people at large, reach a tipping point with him?

 

Here We Go Again

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We’ve seen this scenario played out before. Republicans cut some taxes and the economy goes into the toilet soon after with the state having reduced its ability to fund programs that people rely on during economic downturns, especially lower-income Missourians.

The national economy isn’t in the toilet (yet, perhaps), but Congress has approved President Trump’s budget that will harm thousands of Missourians.  At the same time, Governor Kehoe is thinking about signing the bill eliminating some taxes that will produce revenues.

He already has vetoed hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget approved by the legislature, citing concerns about state finances in the fiscal year that is  newly underway.

We must be missing something. This doesn’t seem to add up to us. On one hand, there is concern that the state can afford the things the legislature approved and on the other hand there’s—

Wait a minute.

Aren’t we on the same hand?

Finger one: Cut the budget because of uncertainty of state finances, much of it caused by federal cuts in some important programs.

Finger two: Cut Missouri taxes to reduce total revenues even more?

One estimate is that the tax cuts reduce program funding by about a half-billion dollars at a time when not-so-beautiful bill in Washington eliminates a lot of federal money coming here.

To be sure, there are some good things in the bill he plans to sign.  A capital gains tax reduction will be welcomed by many who have capital gains but that’s one reason the liberal-leaning Missouri Budget Project isn’t a fan of the bill.   The MBP says five percent of Missouri taxpayers will get eighty percent of the benefits.

But it’s not all for the high-rollers. The Circuit Breaker property tax program will increase the income levels of people eligible for it, a change that will affect almost 200,000 households. The state sales tax is being lifted for diapers and women’s hygiene products. And there are some other things the MBP admits are badly-needed.

The conventional Republican wisdom is that if you reduce taxes, the infusion of those moneys into the general economy will generate more revenues to offset the taxes. We can’t say that we have noticed significant improvements in the economy when the legislature reduces Missourians’ taxes.

We are in sympathy with the stated reasons for lowering these taxes but we wonder if freezes are more protective of the overall well-being of state services than cuts at this time.

For more than fifty years we have listened to all kinds of people complain about the lack of money for schools, health and mental health, prisons, law enforcement, housing, nutrition and a host of other issues.  This scenario is kind of like the old saying, “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” except the talk about taxes also includes doing something about them.

Sometimes though, it is best to heed the phrase-altered advice, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

To be honest, we admit having no grasp of the subtlety of economics that one probably needs to understand the rationale for these cuts.  We only took one economics course in college. Everything else we know about the economy is reflected in our utility bills and grocery prices. And in our taxes.

Jim Mathewson, who served in the legislature from Sedalia and was the President Pro Tem of the Senate for eight years, a record that will never be broken in this unfortunate era of term limits, said several times, “People don’t remember that you cut their taxes. But they sure remember when you raise them.”

It’s a nice bill today but the people who remember it are the ones who won’t benefit, especially those hit with the federal cuts.  One thing we’ll watch is to see whether there’s a political fallout in state politics that will be anywhere the fallout being predicted at the national level.

 

Cartoon Man/Man as Cartoon

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Editorial cartoonists occupy a unique position in American journalism.  They can comfort. They can interpret. They can inform. They can provoke.

They can capture a moment in our national existence in a way that is memorable. They can show in their work things we mortals grasp for words to express.  Steve Burns, a Pulitzer-Prize winning children’s book author, works for the San Diego Union Tribune.

A few days ago, he captured an image of the American economy that is not what our president promised in his campaign it would be. “Stocks Down,” he called it.

It’s the most creative illustration I have seen of our president and the times he has brought down upon us.

Burns’ cartoons are syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate.

We hope he can do another portrait someday of our president that reverses the lines, not because we want him to succeed but because we want our nation to prosper no matter what he eventually does to it.

Hats off to Steve Burns who uniquely captures this moment for our nation.

(Image credit: Creators Syndicate March 14, 2025)

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Notes from a Quiet Street

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(Comments on affairs of our world that do not reach the umbrage level necessary to result in a full blog).

This is sooooo bureaucratic—from someone who wants to reduce the bureaucracy.

President Trump has set up a Department of Government Efficiency.  DOGE to those who speak Bureaucratic.

Think about that for a minute.  Trump’s first step in making major cuts to the federal bureaucracy is to establish a new bureaucracy.  We’ll be watching to see how many employees it takes to be efficient.

It’s not really a “department” that is part of the cabinet. So far it’s just two rich guys who’ve never been inside government, hired by a third billionaire.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are the two guys.

We will watch to see if adjusting the tax code for themselves is as important as axing programs for those farther down the economic ladder.

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Many of us are surprised to learn that Canada is such an evil country, right up there with Mexico.  One of the reasons the incoming president has given for big tariffs being put on products from those two countries is that they facilitate the entrance of Fentanyl into this country.

It’s always easy to do tariffs.  Let’s see what the administration’s plan is to reduce consumption of the drug in this country. Money follows the consumption of a product, whether it’s fentanyl, superhero trading cards, gold tennis shoes, allegedly fancy watches, or even red caps.  Right?

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And, of course, making Canada our 51st state—-hear that, Texas and Alaska, who will be dwarfed by this new state—will solve all that problem.

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How about making Panama our 52nd state?

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And maybe we can revive talks about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland, or just buying Greenland, too, and keeping Puerto Rico!!

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How much will the Billionaire Boys have to cut out of the budget to pay for that little shopping spree by someone who is unlikely to have ever bought a ten-dollar shirt at Sam’s club?

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Lt. Governor-elect Dave Wasinger has hired Katie Ashcroft as his Chief of Staff.  She needed the job as she looks toward being the sole breadwinner for the family when her spouse gets laid off   in January.

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Wasinger is the first person who to preside over the Missouri Senate as the Senate President (one of the roles of the Lt. Governor) with no experience in elective office at any level since Kansas City lawyer and Democratic Party activist Hillary Busch, who served from 1961-65 under Governor John Dalton.

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It is such a relief to open our mail at this time of year and hearing from people who have a personal relationship with us to donate more than $19 a month—or to dispense with parts of my children’s inheritance.

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But then again, we’re not getting automated phone calls from people wanting to counsel us about Medicare enrollment.

In the space of 24 hours our caller-ID told us we had gotten calls from Elgin, Missouri; Laddonia, Benton, Lewistown, and Jefferson City. Most left no messages but a few times when we answered and a human was on the other end, we asked, “Where are you located?”  One person would only say, ”I’m calling from a remote location.”

I thought we were on the Attorney General’s no-call list.  I would call him to ask, but he’s too busy working on national issues, probably, to talk about why it doesn’t seem to work very well.

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One day last year, our caller ID said the call was coming from our number.

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It oughta be illegal.

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It’s been so nice not wrapping a bunch of presents and not digging out all of the Christmas decorations and planning a big meal for the extended family.  Instead of wrapping things, we’re packing things.  We’ve given ourselves a great big present—a new mailing address.

But the blog is not moving.  It’s going to stay right here.

(image credit: Executioner—Reddit)

 

Let the Ethnic Cleansing Begin—Part Two

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We painted a rather pessimistic view in our last entry of our retread President’s plans for the largest deportation effort in our history. We looked at a Mother Jones article from a few months back that tried to gauge what the difficulties would be if he carries through with his plan.

The article displayed concerns about grave economic consequences of deporting 11-million people. Most of the adults in the group would be forced to leave their jobs behind, producing a crisis in the chicken plucking, roofing, and agricultural industries.

Here’s how to deal with this:

During his campaign, the incoming President asserted that these brown people from the south and the (probably) predominantly white people form the north—all of those thieves, killers, rapists, robbers, insane people, and major drug carriers, you know—were taking jobs away from Americans. Late in the campaign, speaking to a special group, he emphasized that these jobs were “Black jobs.”

You might remember from his June debate: “They’re taking Black jobs, and they’re taking Hispanic jobs, and you haven’t seen it yet, but you’re going to see something that’s going to be the worst in our history.”

Hispanics taking Hispanic jobs?   We’ll let him try to make that logical some other time, which might be one of the few times he has done that.  But what about “Black jobs?”

If I were an African-American, I might take great offense at his assumption that there are certain jobs set aside for Black people. I thought our civilized America had pretty well gotten beyond that, but maybe he was too busy bankrupting his latest business venture to notice.

Incidentally, did he ever check the citizenship status of the cleaning staff at his hotels, clubs, and other properties? And what color were those jobs?

Well, not to get toooooo snarky—

The Hispanic people that he seems to have a hate/love relationship with do the farming, roofing, hotel cleaning, and healthcare jobs that include, as one source put it in our last entry, “emptying bedpans.” But if we export the Hispanics despite them having “Hispanic jobs,” then Black people seem to be the correct substitute, especially since those folks took black jobs to begin with.

But before we jettison all of these brown rapists, drug smugglers, etc., we can make them build the wall on our southern border that Mexico was supposed to pay us for building. We’re still waiting to hear that the check has cleared.

NBC had a story this summer reporting that Black workers often are overrepresented in government and health care work. There are eight Fortune 500 companies already headed by black executives, and Black people cause a problem for this scheme elsewhere. Under the first Trump administration, black unemployment dropped to 5.3%–in September 2019.  Under Joe Biden, it dropped to 4.8% in April 2023.

But that’s good news because the Army and the National Guard won’t have to round up a real big bunch of people to fill vacancies in Black people’s Black jobs. That’s good news because he won’t have enough federal military or state national guard units to round up all of the Black people who will be told to fill in for the rounded-up Hispanics.  Federal law tends to oppose that sort of thing anyway—-although the Trump Supreme Court might refine that provision.

Oh, wait! We DO have enough troops to do all of this. We just bring home soldiers helping protect our NATO allies and our sailors whose ships are protecting Israel from Iranian rocket attacks, and sailors from the ships protecting Taiwan, and troops keeping peace or holding enemies at bay in other places.  He doesn’t seem to think many of them belong out there anyway, so that’s not an employment gap he needs to worry about filling.

But then, who will replace all the Black people who are going to replace the Brown people thrown out of the country?

The solution is too easy.

Round up all the homeless people and make them fill in for all the Black folks who will regain all the jobs the brown people took away from the black people who will get their jobs back when we get rid of the Hispanic people who risked everything to come to this country to get jobs, many of whom sent some of their earnings back to other people in their home countries .

Now, all of those people who sent money home from America will be no longer sending money back home that helps their national economies. Instead, they will become a burden to those counties that we consider our allies.

Getting back to the homeless—

There are studies that show many of the homeless have mental problems but they can’t be treated because Ronald Reagan killed President Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act that continued funding federal community mental health centers. In a matter of weeks after he took office, Reagan changed things to give states block grants which haven’t made up for the loss of the Carter program. So we have a lot of mentally-ill homeless people among us and it’s easier to complain about them than do something about their problems.

But if we can take these folks, even those with mental health issues, round them up, get them off the streets and then distribute them out for mental health care duties now handled by Hispanic and Black people, everything’s fine.

Elon Musk wants to slash government spending by billions of dollars so don’t look for any mental health help for the homeless folks that will be rounded up to complete this restructuring of our economy.  The buck has to stop somewhere.

But who is going to help those who have taken the remaining job openings that have trickled down after the Hispanic deportations?

Simple.

Our retread President tells all those countries for which he wants to inflict tariffs that if the armies in those other countries round up enough of their people and make them emigrate to the United States, we won’t have a problem.  Unfortunately, our immigration people might be so busy getting people out of the country that they won’t have time to check the legality of those coming in.

But there it is.  All the bases are covered.  America will be great again.

No charge.  No awards expected.

A lingering issue remains, though.  Will the Army and the National Guard be committed equally to rounding up Canadians, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, and Swedes—among others—who probably are in this country illegally, too?

And then once we’ve got all of immigrants out of the country, who’s going to protect the rest of us from the Wampanoags, whose lands were taken by the Pilgrims who came here seeking religious liberty for themselves but not for Baptists and other unacceptable people who they considered the equivalents of our rapists, drug smugglers, criminals and crazy people, when the Wampanoags and other nations demand the interlopers get out of places such as Mar-a-Lago?

Let the Ethnic  Cleansing Begin—Part One 

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Our retread President has promised that deportation of 11-millon undocumented aliens will be started on his first day in office. A number of economists or economy-watchers say the consequences could be severe. But that is immaterial to the incoming Commander/Demander in Chief of our country.  Others have raised serious humanitarian questions about the policy. But nobody has ever accused our incoming President of having any humanitarian interests except for his own, which are closely tied to his personal wealth.

Today we are going to start describing a plan that will mitigate any economic or diplomatic damage resulting from this deportation efforts. We expect no recognition from the incoming administration for these helpful ideas. However, if an invitation were extended to attend the State of the Union speech during which it would be announced that our necks soon will be decorated with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, we would not object.  Much. We are offering this advice at no cost, something that will please Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world who seems to have a plan to reduce government spending no matter what the cost.

Some might find this plan slightly off-the-wall. Or entirely so. But somebody has to provide some insight into how to deal with this issue and your faithful scribe will jump into the breach.

Mother Jones magazine, which some people dismiss as a liberal rag, took a hard look at Trump’s proposal a few months ago.  The incoming president has blamed foreign drug cartels and gangs have “invaded” the United States and have established a foothold at an apartment complex in Colorado, a claim contested and/or debunked by the town mayor and residents of the apartment complex in much the same way that leaders of a town in Ohio deny there’s any cat-eating going on there. Regardless, the “invasion” deserves a forceful response from this country.

The incoming President also has asserted that brown people from Venezuela and other countries that have emptied their prisons and lunatic asylums are killers, rapists, fentanyl importers, and probably don’t wear clean underwear every day.

Mother Jones describes a lot of problems with 47’s plan (actually he’s the 45th person to be President. He’s the second one to have two different administrations):

The magazine  says it’s going to take 95,994 chartered flights to get the 11-million people out of the country and going to wherever they will be  unloaded.  Projected costs, spread through 20 years because you can’t do this in two weeks would be $300-Billion.

Who would profit?  Private prison companies such as CoreCivic and the GEO Group were paid $1.5 billion by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to run immigration detention centers in 2022. They’ll improve our economy by building new facilities and hiring a lot of people to guard the women and children—and men—at new lockups.  A GEO Group subsidiary, BI Incorporated, got a five-year deal to produce ankle monitors and phone tracking apps worth $2.2 billion to ICE and will do quite well making 11-million more of these shackles. CSI Aviation has a $128.3 million contract for daily transport flights that they’ll have to increase, again pumping more money back into economy.

And this business expansion will offset the loss of jobs elsewhere in our economy.

There probably will be inconsiderate and ungrateful lawyers who will sue the government if the 1798 Alien Enemies Act is used to justify the deportations.

This might be the time to invest in a critical industry: hardware and home improvement companies. All of those detention camps will require a lot of posts and poles and wire and plywood buildings for the large facilities for undesirable Canadians, Mexicans, etc. A spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Association likens such camps to Soviet Gulags.

If there aren’t enough people in our regular military services who are guarding Taiwan, and South Korea and other pressure points in the globe and a decision is made not to lessen those protections, then nationalizing the National Guard is a possibility, he says. Fine and dandy but the Posse Comitatus Law forbids the National Guard from doing civilian law enforcement jobs.

Let’s face it, establishing military guard posts at every road in and out of all of our states is going to take a lot of people making sure no undocumented aliens can seek safety in a different state from their illegal homes here.

The article suggested we brace ourselves for big increases in food costs, decreases in important segments of the workforce, cuts in housing development, and cuts in some health programs.

The magazine quotes an agriculture and economics professor at the University of California-Davis who estimates food prices for hand-picked products will go up 21% because the deportations will eliminate half of the hands doing the picking. The survey also estimates 25% of the people who process our chicken, turkeys, pork, and fish are undocumented aliens. And it says we can look for a doubling of the price of milk if the people doing the milking are shipped out.

Illegal migrants are not eligible to collect Social Security. But they pay about $13-Billion a year into it. Undocumented immigrant households paid $35.1 Billion in state and federal taxes in 2022. That’s a pretty big economic hole. We’re waiting to see the plan for dealing with that.

It’s estimated about 350,000 undocumented immigrants work in health care, two-thirds of them in providers or in supporting positions. Rebecca Shi, who heads the American Business Immigration Coalition says, “They are the people that pick our crops, prepare our foods, clean our hotel rooms and empty our bedpans.”

This roundup also could affect the roofs over our heads. A study indicates one third of the crews that are whizzes at installing new roofs on our homes and businesses are potential deportees.  The construction industry already is short an estimated half-million workers.

But don’t worry.  The incoming President knows who will replace all of these workers.  If he doesn’t, we’re going to tell him in our next installment.

It might seem bizarre and crazy.  It isn’t.  It’s just the new normal.

The Ones Most Interested  

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—and the places most damaged.

We’ve had three weeks or so to digest the results of the November 5 election.  We are going to offer some insights in the next few entries.

One of the amendments we voted this month proposed something that we’ve seen before—a statewide vote to force a city or an area to allow something the people there did not want.

That was Amendment 5, which would have forced the people living and working at the Lake of the Ozarks to accept a commercial casino in their midst.  Two areas of Missouri were involved: the area where a casino is proposed and an area fearful that it would be the next place forced to accept one.

We’re talking about the Lake of the Ozarks and Branson.

It might be instructive to see their thoughts about the sports wagering amendment and the casino-placement amendment. We looked at the votes in five lake counties and in five Branson-area counties.

Both groups wanted nothing to do with either proposal, sports wagering or a casino.

The five lake counties were 57% against sports wagering, Amendment 2, that barely passed statewide with only 50.074% of the votes (as of last night), a margin so small a recount can be justified if the losers want to pay for it.  The five Branson-area counties opposed it to the tune of 60%.

Amendment 5 was the issue that was most stark in its possibilities for these two areas and the message sent by these ten counties was more than no. It pretty much amounted to a “Hell, No.” Camden County rejected the proposal 10,621-14,375. Taney County swamped it 9,875-16,071.  Sixty percent of the voters in the five lake counties rejected the casino. In the Branson area, the rejection was even greater, 61.4%.

End result: People in those ten counties don’t like sports wagering but their people can do it if they want, but they’re sure don’t want them ever to do it in a local casino.

Both of these counties have promoted their areas as family-friendly tourism destinations.  Branson was worried that a Lake of the Ozarks casino would be the precedent-setter for a casino campaign in Branson. Amendment 5 would have forced one area to accept something the voters clearly did not want, and exposed the other area to a similarly unwelcome intrusion later.

Branson had a taste of this issue twenty years ago when voters defeated a proposal to put a casino next to the White River at Rockaway Beach.

How about counties that have casinos?  Amendment 3 failed in three of them—Cape Girardeau (46.4%), Lewis (Mark Twain Casino in LaGrange—46/7%), and Cooper (Boonville 48.5%).

This time, the casino industry spent ten-million dollars on a petition effort and an election campaign for Amendment 5.  Their efforts netted them less than 48% of the statewide vote.

In St. Charles County, the home of Missouri’s most lucrative casino, Amendment 3 got only 53.4%.

The spending on the Lake of the Ozarks proposal was pocket change compared to the huge amount invested in the sports wagering amendment. It took $41 million from the two biggest internet bookies to overcome the $14 million dollar opposition campaign financed by another bookie. The victory margin was only (as of last night) 4,360 votes out of almost three million votes cast.  The certified final results will be posted after the Missouri Board of Canvassers meets on December 10.  Presidential electors meet a week later. Congress is to certify the federal results on January 6.

The casinos will get their money back pretty fast.  The host cities of the casinos will lose millions because of the support their voters game to Amendment Two.

How much will they lose?  There are two factors.  The state tax rate on gambling (table games and slot machines is 21%.  Host cities get ten percent of that amount. In the last fiscal year, ten percent of the state gaming taxes collected provided $39,711,780 to the host cities.

But sports wagering will provide ZERO money from the state gaming tax, which will be only ten percent to begin with.  The State Auditor estimates casino revenues in the first five years will be $1,044,684,612.  The states ten percent will amount to $104,467,878, all of it earmarked for higher and lower education. None of it goes to the home cities. None.

If Amendment 2 followed current law, the casinos’ own home dock cities would split an additional $10,446,788.

But it’s worse than that.  If the tax rate on sports wagering were the same as it is on other forms of gambling—and the industry has never given a consistent answer why is should not be—the home dock cities would have split an additional $21,938,377 in those first five years.

The casino industry will recover more than one-half of the money it spent on the campaign by giving their own host cities the shaft. Permanently.

I can show you the math; the casinos wouldn’t.

The manifest shortcomings in taxes can only be remedied by adoption of another amendment. A campaign that focuses on those shortcomings and either corrects or overturns Amendment 2 might be considered, given the paper-thin margin of victory for sports wagering. It would be interesting to know the reactions of city councils in the thirteen host cities if they are ever shown these numbers. I doubt the industry, its leaders, or its supporting organizations have ever given these figures to the cities

The casino industry has never been put on the defensive at the Capitol or at the ballot box.

And maybe it should be, as we will discuss in our next commentary because what could be coming will be only worse.

What Next? 

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The casino industry spent a record $41 million dollars to convince few more Missourians to vote in favor of sports wagering than voted against it—very few—out of about three million votes cast.

It will be a mistake to think the industry is satisfied with the sweetheart arrangement voters approved. The casino industry is changing rapidly, and the legislature and the voters need to be preparing for the next change in law that will benefit casinos and disadvantage the state, our schools, and their own host cities.

We don’t profess to be an expert or some kind of Casino Nostradamus, but we have been studying this industry and its proposals for several years now. It is not hard to find industry and scholarly articles pointing to a much different industry materializing in the next ten years or less. The casino industry is being altered by demographic changes. But rapidly changing technology will let the industry respond to those demographic changes.

Amendment 2 was just the first step. The policy set by Amendment 2 is likely to be the template for state policy as casinos move increasingly to remote betting on ALL gambling offerings.

We know from experience that technology often moves faster than the development of reasonable and fair regulation of it, making this a time for correction of shortcomings of the past coupled with anticipation of problems in the future. The state will be well-served by a adopting a policy of correction and anticipation, although there is considerable doubt that such a policy will be enacted a Missouri Legislature that is heavily influenced by industry pressure and largesse. Whether voters who can be wooed by absurd amounts of money spent on advertising that is low on the honesty scale would approve a policy unfriendly to the casinos is problematic.

A couple of years ago, Joey Richardson wrote for Gamblingsites.org, “(Casinos) are going to need to change what they offer and how they offer it if they want to continue to attract new customers.”

Millennials who have grown up on video games and who learned during the pandemic how to live their lives without leaving their homes already are having a major impact on the future of businesses of all kinds. Past discussions of internet sales taxes as a meager protection for brick and mortar businesses were one of the beginnings of this trend that gained momentum in the pandemic era when working from home became viable.

Hoosier Park Racing & Casino in Indiana became one of the first casinos to have a Pac-Man video slot machine, in September of 2017. Blackjack revenue for casinos is about half what it was in 1985 when it was responsible for 85% of table game revenues. Richardson noted in his article that casinos already had brought in new games to fill the gap—Caribbean stud, Three Card Poker, and Casino Holdem among them. All can be played remotely—if laws are changed to allow it.

Although Richardson doubts brick and mortar casinos will die out, Mehul Boricha, at Techrival.com has suggested virtual reality casinos could be on the way. He wrote, “Rules and regulations will always continue to influence future casinos. Various regulatory bodies come up with new and stricter policies that online casinos and games have to adopt without losing their grip on their innovation and creativity.” The new world of casino gambling that is being born in front of us will be a challenge not only to tomorrow’s legislature but to the gaming and lottery commissions that will have to regulate it. The gambling industry prefers not to make or be forced to make an investment that will allow regulatory bodies to prepare for the changes they must make to balance public responsibility with private profit.

Marketing Manager Emily Rodgers with driveresearch.com reported on August 2, 2023 that the growing preference for online or mobile app betting among three-quarters of sports bettors indicates a significant shift in the gambling industry towards digital platforms, offering convenience, accessibility, and potentially contributing to the overall increase in sports betting activity worldwide. She says convenience (78%) and easy deposits (75%) are the top reasons people prefer online/mobile sports betting. She argues that these top factors highlight the importance of user-friendly and seamless platforms in the gambling industry, factors that not only attract more bettors but also contribute to increased customer retention and engagement. She says digital channels are in the future for casino gambling, beginning with sports wagering..

Online sports betting revenue is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate (CAGR) of 10% during the next 5 years.

The introduction of AI (artificial intelligence) in sports betting will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the industry. One example is the way systems record information in digitized ledgers  known as blockchain, which is being adopted globally. Blockchain applications will help automate real-time data, expedite payments and wagers, and provide in-the-moment security and monitoring – including cryptocurrency transactions that are not allowed in Missouri, yet.

The sports betting marketplace grew ten-fold from 2019 to 2021 while netting nearly  $7B in revenue from $83B in total bets placed on sports in 2022.

Another report by marketdecipher.com revealed similar findings. In fact, its estimated $85B in bets placed in 2023 is forecast to balloon to $288B total by the end of 2032.

Virtual reality sports betting took a step forward with the launch of the VR22 sports betting  platform last October. The service allows users to take in a 360-degree live gaming experience as if they were there in person. Users can interact with the game or match in real time including the ability to place wagers down to a specific play – and even purchase merchandise or NFTs.

Missouri already has remote betting although it has been on a small scale.  In the past several years, a few of our casinos have had what they call “hybrid” wagering.  If a table is too crowded to allow additional players, gamblers are referred to a computer terminal that lets them place bets at the table as if they were physically there. It has been done on a small scale and has generated generally small profits. But it’s an experiment and it works.  Whether the terminal is fifty feet from the table or 50 miles and at someone else’s table, it is still sports wagering. And it is part of gambling’s future.

Another reason present casinos need to reach the public where it is, instead of waiting for the public to come back, is the threat of widespread competition. It is a very real threat and the first part of it could be in business in a few years.  We’ll talk about that in our next edition.

The Choice

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We will decide the future of our state and nation tomorrow.

Some argue we will decide the FATE of our nation tomorrow.

We harken back to the story of an English stable owner in the 16th and 17th Centuries who had forty horses, leading customers to think they could choose one from among the forty.  But the stable owner allowed only the horse in the first stall to be rented, believing that he was keeping the best horses from always being chosen.

Customers believing they had many choices actually had only one. Take it or leave it, even if neither was desirable.

The stable owner was named Thomas Hobson, whose name is preserved in the phrase “Hobson’s Choice,” meaning only one thing is really offered while it appears there are other choices and it isn’t particularly desirable.

Many believe that is what we are facing tomorrow, a Hobson’s Choice.

We’ve all survived the weeks of rhetoric, weeks of misstatements and lies, or misinformation from insiders and outsiders on our social media, weeks of efforts to denigrate competing candidates and competing issues.

We have listened to the two sides paint the picture of the other side. And after listening to all of that noise we have concluded that we have these choices at the top of the ticket:

—A candidate who claims to be middle-class child of immigrants whose party has been branded as Marxist and Socialist and a threat to our democracy by the other party.

—A felon, a congenital liar and narcissist whose party is backing him despite complaints that he wants to emulate Hitler and other dictators and is a threat to our democracy.

Thomas Hobson would be greatly entertained.  Take it or leave it when neither choice seems to be desirable.

The political process seems to have given us horses in the first of two stalls in a stable full of better mounts that we can’t have.

This might not be any help to you at all, but let’s skim the surface of the two possibilities.

Both Karl Marx and Adolph Hitler wrote books: Marx’s Das Kapital, and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Marx is described as “a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.”  The description is from Wikipedia, which serious researchers caution should not be considered original research. It is an amalgam of the evaluations done by others presumably well-acquainted with a subject.  So, We are going to rely on one of Wikipedia’s sources, English historian Gareth Stedman Jones, whose work focuses on working class history and Marxist theory and who wrote in 2017 in the journal Nature:

“What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. It firmly embedded concepts such as commodity and capital in the lexicon. And it highlights some of the vulnerabilities of capitalism, including its unsettling disruption of states and political systems… it [connects] critical analysis of the economy of his time with its historical roots. In doing so, he inaugurated a debate about how best to reform or transform politics and social relations, which has gone on ever since.”

The same resource describes Hitler as “an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator” of Germany under the Nazi Party that “controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship.”  He wrote his book in prison while serving four years for treason after a failed coup in 1923. The book outlined his plans for Germany’s future, the main thesis being that Germany was in danger from “the Jewish peril,” a conspiracy of Jews to gain world control. It is considered a book on political theory. “For example, Hitler announces his hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils: communism and Judaism…Hitler blamed Germany’s chief woes on the parliament…Jews, and Social Democrats, as well as Marxists, though he believed that Marxists, Social Democrats, and the parliament were all working for Jewish interests. He announced that he wanted to destroy the parliamentary system, believing it to be corrupt in principle…”

So there you have it. A choice between an economic theorist whose theories challenge our capitalistic society and a political theorist who used every means necessary to be an all-powerful manipulator of a political system, including mass incarceration and murder of undesirables.

You might have a different evaluation for these two whose partisans have stereotyped each other throughout this campaign.

We had a coworker who once observed, “Stereotypes are so useful because they save a lot of time.”

In American politics, stereotyping saves the voters a lot of thinking.

And that’s too bad.

From our lofty position, we offer this thought;

Economic theories are abstract offerings that do not imprison or murder those who differ from them.  Political theories can create tangible results that, taken to extremes, can produce (in order) division, disrespect, control through, if necessary, mass incarceration and—-at the very worst—murder.

We have two politicians to think about tomorrow.  It’s too bad none of the others in the stable are available.  It’s take it or leave it time.

Which Hobson’s Choice are you going to make?

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