Category Archives: Politics

Article 4: Trump’s Margin of Victory

Yet one more Facebook post I’m copying here to follow up on later. This person seemed to be suggested “we” voted for Trump, so we should just let him “do his thing”. “We are missing the opportunity”. Hmm…

Susan, I still need to reply to your previous post but it takes a lot of research, something I’m not convinced you do. I’m not exactly sure what your main point is here but it seems to stem from the fact that “we”, whoever we are, voted for Trump and should just let him do whatever he wants. I’d like to remind you that “we”, as in the majority of the American public, did NOT vote for Trump.

  1. Trump lost the popular vote by the 3rd biggest margin in history (2,864,974 votes or 2.1%)!!!
  2. Trump won the Electoral College by 77,744 votes spread over 3 states (MI, PA, WI) in an election that saw over 136 million votes cast. That is a crazy small number of votes. There are only 10 Electoral College wins that were closer than Trump’s!

These numbers are easy to confirm on any major news organization’s website, here is a link to CNN’s. And to NY Magazine. And to the National Public Vote Tracker. It’s also interesting to note that Trump’s narcissism is so unbounded that he continues to lie about the election results. Given the numbers, I would respectfully suggest you rethink your position about who Trump really represents.

Article 3: Trump Impeachment

Also a copy of a Facebook post I made. Posting here for later update to content structure.

There are at least 3 (highly?) viable areas under which Congress could start impeachment hearings against Trump. They are:

  1. Breach of the Emoluments Clause (and other conflicts of interest), particularly in relation to his ownership of hotels and office buildings, most notably the Old Post Office (see these articles: Trump Is Still In Direct Violation Of Emoluments Clause. WHY Are We IGNORING An Impeachable Offense? and Why Hasn’t the Government Gone After Trump for His $180 Million Breach of Contract? ).
  2. The sharing of top secret information with his children, specifically Invanka, who has been present at high level meetings but has no formal role within the WH (think David Petraeus).
  3. The entire Russian connection. The most clear case is Michael Flynn’s violation of the Logan Act. Regardless of you view of this Act, Trump was complicit in Russia’s interference in the election and an active participant in Flynn’s arguably criminal communications with the Russians. There is more than enough here to write a credible Article of Impeachment. And if this is not enough, other possible breaches would be lying under Oath, defying a Court Order, or you know, sexual assault charges, to name three others. While there doesn’t seem to be any willingness to explore the sexual harassment charges, it’s not hard to foresee a situation when either of the others might happen, given Trump’s predilection for lying and abuse of the judiciary.

Article 2: Comparing the Effects of Trickle-Down Economics on Employment

Update (Feb 27, 2017): Here’s another article updating the situation in Kansas. Brownback vetoed the tax increase law. The house overrode his veto but the state senate fell 3 votes short, so the tax increase will not happen. Kansas education, among many other services, will pay dearly.

I want to write more about this but here is a copy of a Facebook post as a temporary placeholder for now. I’ll update it to follow the same structure as the other posts as soon as possible.

An interesting update on something I’ve written about before. Kansas under Governor Brownback went all in on (conservative) trickle-down economics with big tax cuts across the board. Revenues plunged and the state has been in severe fiscal crisis since, nothing ever “trickled down”! So this happened over the weekend.

Just in case you were wondering how conservative economic policies have stacked up against liberal (“out of control” 😉 ) economic policies enacted in California, here’s the most recent employment data for CA vs KS over the relevant timeframe.

Article 1: Comparing Government Employment Under Bush and Obama

Objective: Dispel The Myth That Government Employment Grew Significantly Under Obama

Discussion:

This is the first post in a series of “articles” relating to political facts, or perhaps more pointedly, to dispelling “alternative facts” that are quoted so readily. I originally created this graph as part of a response to a post on Facebook, which I have also shared there. I’m adding it as a post here, perhaps with a bit more context. This post compares All Government Employment (seasonally adjusted) under Bush and Obama by months in office (Hint: Obama’s government employment numbers end up lower). The data for the graph below can be found at FRED. I’ve also put a copy of my Excel SS used to create this graph on Dropbox.

I was asked on FB to post these numbers extracting military personnel. My guess at the logic of the question is the belief a bigger military is better and that the military was much larger under Bush, which is why his numbers are higher. Here’s my response:

Sadly, FRED does not track military personnel, you have to get those numbers from the DoD. Having said that, there are many ways to slice military personnel data but if you look just at Active Duty personnel (because those numbers are easiest to find and compare), the deltas are very small (a good graph can be found here). AD numbers from Sept 2000 to Sept 2016 are all between 1.13M (lowest) and 1.43M (highest – which was Sept 2010 under Obama!). This is a difference of 300,000 and would only change any of the numbers in this graph by +/- 300. Even if you subtracted 300 from Bush’s final number it would be a little larger than Obama’s. The point of this graph is to clearly dispel the myth that government employment grew significantly under Obama, which it didn’t (other than the 1 time spike of part-time workers for the production of the Census, which is required by the Article 1, Section 2 of the United States Constitution).

Data: