A FEW RANTS FOR THE END OF 2018

What if they had a government shutdown and nobody knew? I understand that many who work for our government do important work, but I also believe many more are just paper stackers. And when the stacks get high enough, they take them down and stack them again.

I watch with amazement as supposed-intelligent people, Members of Congress, rant on about the border wall. I heard Senator Schumer sounding like a schoolyard bully, stating that President Trump will never get his border wall. People of New York. Are you proud to know that Chuckie Schumer represents you in the US Senate?

Here’s some information for you Senator Schumer. The border wall is not President Trump’s wall. It will belong to the American people and it will be built and it will be effective keeping illegal people and drugs out of this country. Your actions are not now and never has been about a border wall. This defiance of our President is about you and your Democrat cohorts refusing to allow him to have any success. You and your Democrat associates will pay a huge price for your continuing resistance to the will of the American people.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for goodness sakes. Retire. You are eighty-five years old and you have fought cancer many times. You have earned an easy chair. Ultimately none of us can stop the march of time. You will eventually be replaced and by a justice who both can read and understand the Constitution of the United States. The sooner the better.

To the Federal Reserve. Thanks for nothing. By your actions you have successfully destroyed the wealth of millions of people as well as made a serious dent in the economy of this country. I hope you are proud.

I don’t know about you, but I am growing very tired of experts who think they know all. I remember Alan Greenspan. He, almost single handed, destroyed this country for years. In his zeal to be relevant, he and his cohorts raised interest until their choke-hold brought the stock market to its knees. It took many years to recover from that bit of stupidity. Who knows how long it will take to recover from this latest attack on our economy. Leave the markets alone. Leave interest rates alone. Let the market decide.

I wasn’t going to write a column this week. I am celebrating the Christmas season and I hope you are too. So, I’ll leave you with this thought. This country and its people are stronger than a few punk politicians. 2019 is going to be a great year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,

Ron Scarbro

OBAMACARE HAS TO BE REPLACED

OBAMACARE HAS TO BE REPLACED

A federal judge in Texas has found Obamacare unconstitutional. He ruled that since the individual mandate, that being a required participation or a fine if you choose not to participate, was eliminated by the Trump tax cut of 2017, the entire law was now illegal.

Of course the response has been predictable. The left is up in arms screaming that this is all Trump’s fault. They will immediately appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most liberal court in the land, who will doubtlessly overturn the Texas Judge’s opinion. It is easy for the Ninth Circuit to rule the way they do because they either don’t read the Constitution or they do not understand it.

The next step is also quite predictable. The whole matter will be appealed to the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit will again be overturned. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned court in this country. Obamacare as we know it is finished.

The fact is it should have been finished before it even started. The only reason the “Affordable Care Act” became law was because the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, changed the language in the law and made the individual mandate a tax. Congress clearly stated it was never intended to be a tax but Roberts decided to write law rather than just do his job of interpreting law. By renaming this mandate a tax, it passed Constitutional muster. With the subsequent elimination of that particular tax by the tax cut, Obamacare immediately became unconstitutional.

Now the Congress is going to have to enact a new law to cover up for the disaster of the past.

The number one problem is pre-existing conditions. Now remember, we are not talking about health care. No, we are talking about health care insurance. The only way any insurance can work is if the vast majority of participants pay for the coverage but never use it. Imagine if you decided to never buy health care insurance but found one day that you were diagnosed with a catastrophic disease. Do you think it would be right to then go out and buy insurance? No insurer could survive if this were the situation. With no individual mandate, only the government would be able to subsidize such insurance.

This then is the problem facing the Congress. Had Obama stayed out of this in the first place, private business would have found a way of dealing with the situation. But he didn’t and now we must clean up the mess that has caused.

Here is a little fact that is going to upset some liberals. Medical care is not a right. It is a commodity and just like all commodities, it is for sale. Here is another fact. The high cost of medical care has been caused in large part by the availability of health care insurance. Imagine what care would cost if there was no insurance and the medical industry was left to competition just like all other commodities.

The other side of that coin is that we have some of the best care available and that is due in large part to the vast amount of money flowing to that industry.

This is just some of the reality that Congress is going to have to deal with as they consider new legislation. Here is another fact. A large number of our citizens will never have enough money to pay for medical care, nor will they willingly buy and pay for medical insurance. Couple that with the knowledge that government run health care doesn’t work anywhere in the world and it won’t work here.

The Congress has a big job ahead of them. They need to concentrate on that and leave partisan politics aside.

Ron Scarbro

I HAVE A QUESTION

In October the stock market started a roller coaster ride that continues today. The talking heads who claim to be the experts said it was just a “correction.” What is a correction? I did some research. It would appear that when the market experiences “irrational exuberance,” according to some mystical group of traders, it must correct itself. That usually means a 10% change in value. So, people sell their stocks until the market reaches some unknown number that satisfies this same group of traders.

I have a question. When the market regains the losses from the correction, is that a correction also? Is it a correction of a correction? If any of this is truly a correction, what should the market value be? Who gets to decide what the stock market level should be? I have been involved in the stock market on a very limited basis for many years and since 1995 it has grown in value from a Dow Jones average of approximately 4,000 to over 25,000 now. Wow, how many “corrections” do you suppose have occurred in the last twenty-five years? I’ll leave that to the much smarter analysts. They seem to know best.

This brings me to this question of climate change. The global warming crowd is heating up again. Did I say that? Yes, I guess I did. The earth is getting too hot. The sea levels are rising. The ice is melting. We’re all going to die. In the next few hundred years the sea level is going to rise a few inches. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I am sure you’ve heard it all.

I have a question. What should the temperature of the earth be? What should the level of the sea be? Who, among these brilliant scientists, gets to decide the answer to those questions? This whole global warming, climate change conversation is actually just a Godless religion. A religion which puts humans in charge of nature instead of the other way around. The next time you see one of these brilliant scientists, ask him how to stop a hurricane or a tornado. How about creating rainfall for dry areas of the world. I’m pretty sure he won’t have an intelligent answer.

Consider this. When the earth started warming after the last ice age, do you suppose the cavemen sat around their campfires looking for someone or something to blame? After all, there were no automobiles. There were no factories burning coal and belching out poisonous smoke. There were the occasional volcanoes erupting though.

What they did see was a gradual receding of the ice on the earth. What they saw was a gradual warming of the atmosphere. Do you think they were happy or were they sad about this? I think they were overjoyed. It was easier to stay warm. Food probably became more abundant. Grasses grew where ice once had dominated and that probably brought prey animals closer. For humankind, global warming was a blessing. I’m pretty sure nobody at that time thought that the earth was getting too warm or the sea was rising too high.

Fast forward to today. We have a lot of experts. Just ask them. Most will tell you they are the preeminent source of all things concerning the climate.

I have a question. What if this climate change we are experiencing is nothing more than a continuation of the warming that melted away the ice age? Humans have a tendency of measuring time in weeks, or months. Climate changes are measured in thousands of years, not weeks or months or even years.

As you can see, I don’t have any answers. I only have questions. But until one of these brilliant experts can answer my questions, I will just continue to think what I think and believe what I believe.

Ron Scarbro

SHUT UP AND SING

Did you hear Barack Obama the other day? He said that if you watched Fox News you had a completely different worldview than if you read the New York Times. Well, duh. These were some of the most truthful words I ever heard from this individual who seems at times to have a problem with the truth.

I confess. I watch Fox News, but I also have in the past read the New York Times. Basically I do that to see how the other side lives. I also obtain news from many other sources. In my mind, to depend on only one source is asking for and receiving a one-sided coverage and propaganda. That being said, I am convinced that the New York Times has long ago ceased to be a news organization and has become instead a propaganda arm of the leftist movement in this country. And as I have said before, I wouldn’t wrap my dead, rotting fish in the New York Times for fear my fish would be contaminated by the experience.

This is what I know. What you believe and what you know is largely dependent on your source of information. The only way one can know without a doubt the veracity of anything is to have experienced it. If you go through life using the New York Times as your only news source, you would be a disciple for the left. By the same token, if your only source is Fox News, you become their puppet. I have friends and relatives who think they know the truth of situations but, because they often get their information from left wing news outlets, they couldn’t be further from the truth. Sadly, in my view, Fox News has moved so far to the right that their content is sometimes suspect also. Their motto, “We report, you decide,” is cute but the facts are that they decide what they report just like all news organizations.

When a newspaper publishes one of my columns, it is printed on the “Op-Ed” page. That’s where it belongs. It’s not news, it’s opinion. Unfortunately, much of what passes as news in our publications is really nothing more than opinion driven by the agenda of either the writer or of the organization for whom he works. When readers mistake opinion for news, they become believers. Sometimes that is good, sometimes that is bad. Wouldn’t it be great if news organizations just reported the facts of situations, and let the readers decide what they choose to believe? I am afraid that ship has sailed though. Even local news anchors seem to find it necessary to both report the news and then tell you what to think about it. That is not their job.

An interesting experiment is to find a news story of interest then follow that story through all of the major networks. If it is a positive story about Donald Trump, Fox will give it a favorable reporting. The rest of the networks probably either won’t give it favorable reporting or they will ignore it all together. If a story doesn’t fit a network’s narrative, it will usually not find the light of day. That particular type of malfeasance will not be well received by the consuming public either.

Newspapers are having much more difficulty staying afloat. The more they try to be the news instead of just reporting the news, the more difficulty they are going to have.

It’s a lot like when Barbra Streisand tries to offer me her opinion on politics. I say, just shut up and sing. When you are not entertaining me, you are just boring me. When news outlets stop reporting the news in favor of giving opinion on the news, I say just shut up and report. Otherwise you are just a bore.

Like the late, great John Wayne once said, “Life is tough. It’s even tougher if you’re stupid.”

Ron Scarbro