William Thien

In my opinion there are two or three, perhaps four issues that disqualify Democrats from the Presidency.

1. The border needs to be secured. It’s a no-brainer. Illegals are arriving in massive throngs and pouring across the southern border. All of the pandering by the Democrats to non-citizens and their citizen kindred simply to get their votes in future elections while disregarding the costs to the tax payer indicate a disregard for the tax load the US citizen must carry, not to mention the lost jobs to illegals working for cash under the table and the corresponding lost income tax revenues which must be assumed by the current US working classes.
2. The assault on the 2nd Amendment. Most of the mass shootings were perpetrated by people who purchased their firearms legally, even with strict background checks and strict laws governing usage. Enough said aside from the fact that owning firearms is a constitutional amendment and isn’t about what a hunter might need to hunt for a deer.
3. The desire to create even more protected classes and foist any related tax burdens upon a nation of people already carrying a heavy load in that regard.
4. A fundamental desire to raise taxes instead of cut programs back or remove them altogether…goes to a belief that government can solve all social and human issues. It cannot.

What qualifies Democrats?

1. An understanding that the country cannot police the world and expect to keep a balanced budget. Military activity is expensive and it is the source of much of the country’s debt.
2. A grasp of issues that affect the country’s health such as a need to address proper health care regulation and health insurance regulation to control prices in the same way health care was regulated prior to The Reagan Administration when you could afford to buy health insurance yourself if you had to without a subsidy from your employer if they didn’t offer it, or a subsidy from the government.
3. A good sense of law addressing adult consensual behaviors. The Republicans totally disqualify themselves by restricting or attempting to restrict certain types of adult activity, including abortion and birth control. Without abortion, a horrible choice to have to make, crime would skyrocket and government would mushroom to pay for all of the children that the mother couldn’t support on her own, something already done massively.
4. An excellent idea about what needs to be done regarding environmental issues.
5. Positions on marijuana usage and incarceration for usage.
6. Position on education.

More to follow…

Copyright © William Thien 2019

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Of all the candidates that appeared during both debates, I’d have to say that the top three candidates in my opinion were John Hickenlooper, John Delaney, and a third place tie between four candidates, and they are in no particular order Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Andrew Yang.

Only Hickenlooper and Delaney seemed to be experienced enough to hold the job, had the correct attitude, and didn’t seem to be out to settle a score or get even with anyone. They seemed to have left the baggage behind.

The candidates tying for third place missed points on either talking to me first in a foreign language, had baggage and indicated they were looking to settle scores for things I or people like me haven’t been involved in, or had some pie in the sky ideas. But they were all pretty convincing on other points and likable.

I think the panel asking questions in the future shouldn’t be media personnel. They are too in tune with the mainstream media, the tool by which much of the country’s condition is maintained when change in many respects is necessary. Instead of asking necessary questions, many of the questions were merely designed to increase ratings or cause instability.

I would vote for Hickenlooper and or then Delaney today were Trump not in the race, and Trump, though a good candidate has some work to do, some things to restore which he undid or reversed such as regulations on clean air and water and the unfettered corporate accumulation and trading of consumer internet activity.

Copyright © William Thien 2019

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Recently I asked the question, “Are there valid reasons for socialized medicine in America?” and concluded that, ‘yes, there are.’

But if you ask me, socialized medicine in an economy like ours seems a bit drastic. Besides, we have two socialized systems already, Medicare and Medicaid. I also asked the question, “who is going to pay for it?” We don’t really have an answer to that yet in The United States.

In my opinion we might be better off as a country if we simply went back to a state of properly regulating medicine prior to Reagan’s deregulation of it, back to a time when medical advertisement was regulated to control costs to the consumer and to prevent misrepresentation of benefits to the patient by unscrupulous advertisers, when hospitals and health organizations were not allowed to limit treatments, and the media wasn’t flooded to the gills with specialty drug ads where everyone is either a rock star after taking a particular drug or going to a party where they are the center of attention. Really?

Prior to the deregulation of medicine in America anyone could purchase health insurance and it wasn’t a completely outrageous expenditure that unlike today didn’t really cover anything normal. I’m talking about deductibles and co-pays. Insurance didn’t steal your discretionary income for the month so you could take a vacation every now and then or buy a new piece of furniture.

Since the deregulation of medicine, an industry that in anyone’s right mind should be properly regulated, medical costs have skyrocketed.

Medical costs skyrocketed because the costs of advertising and other expenditures entirely unrelated to health care have been incorporated into the costs of treatment. But prior to deregulation treatment and drug costs were still handled by private industry. They were not socialized.

Many of medicine’s component costs such as the cost of advertising and excessive insurance costs were eliminated by proper regulation. Socialized medicine didn’t really become a major issue for the entire population until medicine was deregulated.

In other words, it is advertisers and the media and a new business model for medicine following deregulation that have driven costs up making medicine impossible to pay for without some form of subsidy.

It happened during the Reagan era so many in America are either too old to remember it or so young they’ve never known, but Reagan and Nixon deregulated medicine. Prior to that, medicine was affordable.

I think if we returned to a period in the country’s history where medicine were once again properly regulated, costs would return to normal and socialized medicine wouldn’t be necessary.

The question remains, are our elected capable of accomplishing proper regulation of medicine in America or have they surrendered their values for good? Do we even have candidates willing to make it happen? With a media profiting thoroughly from the lucrative advertisements for drugs and medical care, they will surely be working against regulation.

Nobody wants to properly regulate anything anymore. You constantly here that there are too many regulations and just about every candidate says this and that need to be deregulated for this and that reason and there is some industry association or some large conglomerate behind them. That might be true for many industries but when it comes to the country’s health, clearly deregulation hasn’t been a good idea.

I haven’t heard one candidate mention regulation of medicine over socialization. They either are oblivious of the history of the regulation of medicine in America or simply socialists with an agenda. Or they have their hand in it and when it comes to politics in America, I’d say the latter seems the most likely.

Copyright © William Thien 2019

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You know, I have to wonder why our government doesn’t start purchasing Tesla autos to use as staff cars? It really makes you wonder. Our government and our elected keep getting us involved in wars primarily over oil at a huge cost to the tax payer, not to mention the wounded veterans such wars produce and the casualties. The costs are beyond enormous and contribute to insurmountable debt.

Why not start using electric vehicles? Why not start supplying Teslas or some other type of electric vehicle?

Just think of the daily usage of gasoline by our massive government. Think of all those feds driving around all day. Think of the Post Office!

That would definitely place downward pressure on the price of oil for everyone if our government started using electric vehicles.

If the government wants to fight a war over oil, replace it with something else. It’d be good for the environment and the tax payer, too.

Copyright © William Thien 2019

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Personally I am glad to see The President has refrained from hammering Iran militarily following the shootdown of one of our surveillance drones. In my opinion whether or not the drone was in international or Iranian airspace is irrelevant. It was unmanned. No loss of life. A measured response is the right response.

When I first heard the story about the shootdown another question arose entirely because I was in almost complete and utter “taxpayer shock,” you know, that form of shock when you hear how much the defense department pays for a relatively common item such as a hammer or a toilet seat, and in today’s arsenal I would have to say that a drone, no matter how sophisticated, is in fact a relatively common item.

After hearing about the cost of the drone and that it apparently has no more defensive capabilities than a “target drone,” or one that is used to test missiles and other defensive mechanisms, a flying test target for our own anti-aircraft missiles and other anti-aircraft batteries, I had to ask why is the damn thing so f’ing expensive if it can’t protect itself?

For that kind of money, the thing (a Global Hawk) should at least be able to enter in to some sort of defensive posture whereby it can return fire or maneuver out of the way of a semi-sophisticated anti-aircraft battery. But apparently not. The drone apparently just flies along until some country with a missile battery decides, hey, let’s see if these things actually work!

Now, I would agree it may not be as simple as that.

But $100,000,000?! WTF! That is more than $2,000,000 per state of the fifty US States and then some. No wonder the country can’t balance its budget and many of the states don’t have any cash. No wonder the roads are full of six-inch deep holes and there is no money to pay teachers and our elected can’t sit down to agree on an infrastructure plan! Where is the congressional oversight? Who the flux is writing a check for the damn things?! And why is it such an easy target when it costs so damn much? by the way, somebody has corrected me and said, “Bill the “damned things cost $110,000,000, not $100,000,000.” For the sake of argument, I’ll just round it down to $100,000,000. No need to make Congress out to look like a bunch of kids at the mall with daddy’s credit card you know.

If it seems like I’m using a lot of exclamation points, there’s a reason.

Sometimes it helps to say the dollar amount out loud to get a real idea of how much something costs. When you put those sums merely in to numbers, the real amount often doesn’t seem to set in. Let’s all say it out loud, slowly, so we can get a real idea of the cost of the thing: One……..hundred……..million……..dollars!

Again.      One…….hundred……..million…….f’ing…….dollars!

For $100,000,000 our drone should have taken out the anti-aircraft missile battery used to shoot it down, disabled or destroyed all of the others in the vicinity (of which the media reports there are many), disabled or destroyed a good portion of the other military assets in the vicinity, relayed all of its intelligence back to point of origin, returned to its point of origin, and then gotten back in to the air after being re-armed and then done it all over again. $100,000,000 is a lot of cash for a target drone! Because that’s what it is, an f’ing target drone.

That was the promise of such sophisticated drones anyway, wasn’t it? That was how such drones were portrayed by the country’s massive propaganda and entertainment machine in Hollywood with movies like Stealth, Drones, Drone, Battle Drones and countless others. They were supposed to be a solution to the current military needs.

Yes, it is true that many of the larger media companies are also heavily invested in the military industrial complex so no wonder the media is frothing at the mouth hoping for a conflict with Iran on a larger scale. They will be making money both ways, with increased viewer response and by selling more $100,000,000 dollar flying toilet seats and hammers.

Iran must know even a small scale war with The United States will have disastrous financial consequences for the tax payer if we are going to continually lose such expensive assets so easily.

I don’t even know why we are over there in the first place policing the place up once again? Weren’t we just there? Aren’t we in the process of withdrawing in the vicinity? One of my most popular essays on such matters, Should the United States be The World’s Police Force?, asks a similar question. Military activity is expensive, extremely expensive. Just look at the cost of the damned drone!

If we are there as the media says to protect the shipping lanes, well I have to say that $100,000,000 can buy an awful lot of our own oil right here in The United States from our own oil producers. Or buy a Tesla. Maybe our government should be manning its police forces and government officials right here in The US with autos made by Tesla. This country needs to stop sacrificing its sons and daughters and its way of life so people can drive a V-8 that gets 10 miles per gallon.

My applause to The President for showing some restraint in the matter. Because I’m not so sure the war is with Iran.

Copyright © William Thien 2019

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