Mike Lipper’s Monday Morning Musings
Some
Past Errors Create Future Problems
Editors: Frank
Harrison 1997-2018, Hylton Phillips-Page 2018
Employers can't find
suitable candidates to hire due to both faulty education and attitudes toward
work. This is one of the reasons the US is losing the productivity of labor
battle. In at least 16 states a large percentage of students are failing third
grade reading tests e.g., 60% failed in Tennessee. (In our machine era, if you
can't read instructions, you can't operate various machines.) I suspect that teachers
are taught to teach to the test, test scores are used for hiring, and schools are
retaining teachers in union jobs.
Teachers should be teaching
students how to use information to gain knowledge. This is not what is
happening today. (A classic example is a problem I had with my late daughter. She
drove me crazy with her disability, which caused her to have problems adding a
simple column of numbers correctly. So, I changed focus and concentrated
instead on how she kept track of spending money. She always had money in the
bank and her bills were always paid. In explaining it to me, she said that was
easy. She said she was conserving the money by keeping it intact at the bank,
while we paid her credit card bill. Thus, she was the best money manager in the
family. The key was that she figured out what none of her teachers or aids did.
The teachers need to learn to teach life lessons.)
The biggest problem with
what is being taught is the integrity of our history, which pivots on one word:
Tariffs. People don't like paying taxes. Politicians throughout
history have given popular reasons why people should make these payments,
without focusing on the real reasons. Three examples in US history still hurt
us today.
The “Boston Tea Party”,
staged by American Colonists dressed as Indians, threw the first shipment of
taxed British tea into Boston Harbor. The Colonists were protesting the payment
of a tax without being represented in the British government. The truth of the
matter was that Lord North, an unpopular British Prime Minister, needed to pay for
a six-year war with the French to protect the American colonies during “The
French-American War”. Lord North and many in England thought that America was
costing too much. It was being totally financed by revenues derived from goods
purchased from “The Mother Country”. The Tea Party thus became one of the
initial political events leading to the American Revolution.
The second
misappropriation embedded in our history is the Civil War. In this weekend’s
Wall Street Journal there is an opinion piece by Jim Webb, a US Marine Officer
who served in Vietnam and a Secretary of the Navy. He was also an independent
director of a respected Mutual Fund. In the article he commented that there
were very few confederates who owned slaves. He also noted that more slave
owners fought for the North than the South. Yet it remains a popular belief today
that the war was about slavery. In truth, the war was about tariffs. The North
wanted high tariffs to protect its manufacturing, while the South wanted low
tariffs to aid the British who were major buyers of their’ cotton and were
suppliers of cash to the Confederacy.
Post Civil War through
the Wilson administration, Americans were fed a political diet about slavery. For
about the fifty years this was happening, the German General Staff made many
trips to study American war battles, particularly battles in the Shenandoah
Valley with Stonewall Jackson. The study of these battles played a critical
role in both WWI and WWII, particularly in their attacks of the ”low countries”.
I also believe the German
underground political movements in the US led to delays in the US entering both
world wars, despite British efforts. (The US recognized the importance of the
war and placed its War College in Pennsylvania, hoping to understand both battles
and the infrastructure challenges.)
The third
misappropriation is still taking place today, with the last two administrations
selectively using tariffs for domestic political purposes. These tariffs caused
inflation that was importantly paid by low-income people. The current
administration is attempting to hurt Republicans by damaging corporate earnings
through the restriction of sales, while at the same time trying to raise labor union
wages and their contributions.
With All This Good
News-How to Invest?
Like Ronald Regan, “I
won't exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience”. Neither party is serving up a long-term leader
or a set of policies. Most people can see through their own accounts that there
is no great future for them. Around the world young people have lost confidence
in the "system".
With most equities around
the world declining in real terms, one should consider a careful plan to dollar
cost average into the markets. The more China suffers, the more attractive long-term
investment in China becomes. Foreign car companies will benefit compared to ‘the
big 3”, as the UAW forces prices higher.
Recognizing my COVID
Brain does any of this makes sense.
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you miss my blog last week? Click here to read.
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