Computation Of The Zone Tax Credit For The: Fill & Download for Free

Here you go, here’s why I’m excited about Trump:1. Trump is the Opposite of Racist, a Nationalist. Nationalism was conceived as a means of overcoming tribal racism, of uniting diverse peoples with a mutually supportive, overarching national identity. Does dividing us by races, ethnicities, and identities and prevent us from being united as Americans? E Pluribus Unum – from the many, one people.And yes, he has denounced white supremacists: Trump condemns 'racism, bigotry and white supremacy' in speech after mass shootings kill 31 and 'Racism Is Evil': Trump Denounces The KKK, Neo-Nazis And White Supremacists and Frank Macera's answer to Has Trump denounced white supremacy? and President Trump Releases The Platinum Plan for Black Americans: Opportunity, Security, Prosperity, and Fairness)The Chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, is both black and Hispanic.Trump receiving the Ellis Island Award along with Rosa Parks:Lowest black and Hispanic unemployment in our history.Support for historically black colleges. “Provided long-term funding for historically black colleges and universities in his three years in office, and has helped redirect resources to opportunity zones, or low-income areas where new investments may be eligible for tax breaks.Criminal Justice Reform with the First Step Act has released 1,000’s of non-violent offenders.First Step Act, landmark criminal justice reform legislation enacted by an 87-12 vote in the Senate on December 18 and a 356-36 vote in the House on December 20. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law on December 21.”First Step Act Was This Past Year's Second Example Of Federalism At Its FinestEven Obama adviser Van Jones says Trump doesn't get credit for the good things he has done for the black community.Lowest black and Hispanic unemployment in our history.Support for historically black colleges. “Provided long-term funding for historically black colleges and universities in his three years in office, and has helped redirect resources to opportunity zones, or low-income areas where new investments may be eligible for tax breaks.Criminal Justice Reform with the First Step Act has released 1,000’s of non-violent offenders.First Step Act, landmark criminal justice reform legislation enacted by an 87-12 vote in the Senate on December 18 and a 356-36 vote in the House on December 20. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law on December 21.”First Step Act Was This Past Year's Second Example Of Federalism At Its FinestEven Obama adviser Van Jones says Trump doesn't get credit for the good things he has done for the black community.Van Jones says Trump 'doesn't get credit' for helping black people2. Covid-19:Jan. 31. Trump restricts travel by anyone who had been to China within 2 weeks to returning citizens and authorizes screening and quarantine as needed:“The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of all aliens who were physically present within the People’s Republic of China, excluding the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, during the 14-day period preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States is hereby suspended and limited subject to section 2 of this proclamation. I have also determined that the United States should take all necessary and appropriate measures to facilitate orderly medical screening and, where appropriate, quarantine of persons allowed to enter the United States who may have been exposed to this virus.”Feb. 1 Biden calls Trump a xenophobe and fear-monger and offers no plan of his own. Apparently, it would have been a lot worse if Biden were president. “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.” – Joe Biden @JoeBiden 4:01 PM · Feb 1, 2020·TweetDeck?Biden was a United States Senator with 47 years in politics and a national platform. What new anti-virus policies is he endorsing? Is criticizing Trump enough to end the virus?De Blasio’s actions in New York were responsible for the majority of the spread in the United States:Feb. 9 De Blasio urged the 500,000 person Chinese New Year celebration to go forward with tourists from all over the country and the world, especially Europe. This resulted in nearly half of all the early cases, and all those tourists going home and initiating the spread in a number of places around the country.New York Chinese New Year Feb. 20203. Apprenticeship training - Apprenticeship.gov4. School Choice. Why shouldn’t hard working poor kids be able to join others of like mind and get a good education? Public school isn’t always the best choice: Ted Kord's answer to Shouldn’t well-behaved students have a right to a peaceful and safe environment in which to learn? Restorative justice in my kids’ schools is making my kids miserable and inhibiting their learning.5. Block education grants allow local districts to spend money the way it makes sense in their district instead of the current “knowledge isn’t important” and “no discipline” philosophy coming out of Washington. Our spending has risen dramatically in the last decades, yet test scores haven’t gone up and teachers complain about their salaries. Shouldn’t we try another way?6. Lowest black and Hispanic unemployment in our history.7. Lower foreign student enrollment to make room for our own children.8. Tax code that stopped subsidizing the rich with $10,000 maximum local tax deduction. I paid more myself, but I think it’s fair. Individual tax receipts were higher in 2018 than 2017. Middle and lower incomes paid less, with childcare credit doubled to $2,000, standard deduction raised to $12,000, and tax brackets lowered, so where did the money come from to pay for these cuts? People with expensive houses paid for it.9. Big companies like Apple and Goldman no longer allowed to transfer income overseas to avoid taxes. This cost Goldman $5 billion in 2018.Goldman Sachs Is Taking a $5 Billion Hit From the Republican Tax Bill10. Equalized corporate taxes between the US and the developed world. Britain is 19%, China 20%, Sweden 21%, and now the US is 21%. How can we keep our jobs if we don’t at least avoid adding higher taxes to the incentives to leave? Apple announced building their first computer plant in America Jan. 1, 2018, the same day Trump allowed them to bring their billions home from China at 15% tax instead of 40%. They had been planning since 2013, and were just waiting for the tax to be lowered. Apple expands in Austin11. Fighting to prevent Chinese technology theft. Tariffs have already caused movement away from China to countries without state-sponsored technology theft. Blocking Huawei will spur more US component manufacture and send other business to Nokia and Ericsson who respect our laws.12. Net neutrality. Remember when charging based on data usage was going to censor the internet? Now everything is running better than ever, as promised.13. Ended Obamacare tax on poor who cannot afford health insurance even with subsidies.14. Drug pricing – Companies like GoodRx have shown us disclosing and comparing pricing caused drug prices to drop so much I’ve been able to drop my drug insurance. The pharmacy benefit manager middle men and drug stores had large markups, and now we’re reaping the benefits of competitive capitalism with lower prices. Epi pens were up to $600 under the previous administration, now the price is down to $110 at CVS and Target. Unlike single payer or insurance, you can get any drug cash pay with no hassles. Adrenaclick Prices, Coupons & Savings Tips - GoodRx15. Competitive, efficient hospital pricing. Actual hospital pricing will be disclosed starting Jan 1, 2020. This will rationalize and lower healthcare cost in the US. All the paid hours that go into our labyrinth of hidden pricing and negotiation, and multitudinous paperwork is expensive, and it prevents people from making informed decisions. Administration is about 1/4 of every healthcare dollar. All that paperwork and process costs a lot, there are separate contracts for every insurance company and fees are individually negotiated for each patient, all hidden and protected from competition. Straight forward healthcare pricing will save a bundle on administrative cost.My recent X-rays were billed at $1736. The insurance discount $1528, insurance payment $168, my payment $42. Obviously, I have to have insurance for the discount. But what if the X-rays were just billed at $210 cash pay? I wouldn’t need $1500/month insurance for ordinary care, I could have low cost catastrophic insurance, and pay cash for everything else. This would save a lot of administrative expense, and the more healthcare delivered per dollar, the more we’ll all have. The only way we can afford to provide healthcare for everyone is get that cost down. Total healthcare spending in 2018 was $3.65 trillion.Hospitals Sued to Keep Prices Secret. They Lost.Trump scores court win on hospital price transparencyU.S. Health Care Costs Skyrocketed to $3.65 Trillion in 2018 - A new analysis from U.S. federal government actuaries, the U.K., Mexico, Spain, and Canada.16. Defeated the ISIS Caliphate in short order by empowering military leaders to “seize the initiative and win,” reducing the need for a White House sign off on every mission. Trump has refused to get involved in any new wars, which is lovely.17. Criminal Justice Reform bill, “First Step Act” eliminated required minimum sentences. “More than 3,000 inmates have been released and another roughly 1,700 people convicted of crack cocaine offenses have seen their sentences reduced thanks to the First Step Act, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Sentencing Commission.” The First Step Act promised widespread reform. What has the criminal justice overhaul achieved so far?18. Recognized Jerusalem. Israel wasn’t going to give up their ancestral home, so it was a necessary condition for peace in the Middle East. Trump was right, the fears of violence were unfounded, and putting the recognition behind us paved the way for the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan to recognize Israel for the first recognitions since Jordan in 1994. Egypt was first in the region in 1979.19. Improved the quality of VA care with the Veterans Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act to allow senior officials in the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire failing employees and established safeguards for whistleblowers.Trump’s VA MISSION Act:• Strengthens VA’s ability to recruit and retain clinicians.• Authorizes “Anywhere to Anywhere” telehealth across state lines.• Empowers Veterans with increased access to community care.20. Did something about the 185,000 pages of conflicting overregulation. It isn’t even possible to meet all the regulations because different regulations call for different things. Here’s How Much Red Tape Trump Has Cut21. Rational EPA regulations. It doesn’t help the environment to let stock ponds turn black and stink and make the cattle drink it. You really do need to treat for invasive weeds and bacteria. I couldn’t treat the water in my tank to drinking water standard so the bacteria broke my skin out every time I ran my pump. Then, to add insult to injury, they said that water’s nasty so you have to spend $10,000 to have it disposed as hazardous material. Drinking water is hazardous to the environment?He plowed his field; now he faces a $2.8 million fine22. Great American Outdoors Act. “The fund must be used for priority deferred maintenance projects in specified systems that are administered by• the National Park Service,• the Forest Service,• the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,• the Bureau of Land Management, and• the Bureau of Indian Education.22. Brought stranded citizens back home:Here Are The 17 Prisoners Trump Has Freed Since He Took Office23. Expensive illegal immigration and the associated crime is being reduced. The cost of additional schools, healthcare, housing, and food benefits is substantial, especially when we’re spending over a $trillion/yr we don’t have. And there’s the gangs with their associated theft, murder, drugs, and sex slaves. Trump’s border wall construction:Trump Wall Construction - Track the Status of Trump's Border Wall!400th mile of border wall celebratedhttps://www.wfmz.com/news/livestream/watch-live-400th-mile-of-border-wall-celebrated/video_3c242b8a-19f7-11eb-91d9-1bdc61296a5c.htmlThen it turns out the major objections to Trump just aren’t true:1. Covid Mismanagement was Trump’s fault?List: 74 actions taken by Trump to fight virus and bolster economy.List: 74 actions taken by Trump to fight virus and bolster economy (List: 74 actions taken by Trump to fight virus and bolster economy)Jan. 31 Trump restricts travel to and from China, and those who had been to China:“The entry into the United States, as immigrants or nonimmigrants, of all aliens who were physically present within the People’s Republic of China, excluding the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, during the 14-day period preceding their entry or attempted entry into the United States is hereby suspended and limited subject to section 2 of this proclamation. I have also determined that the United States should take all necessary and appropriate measures to facilitate orderly medical screening and, where appropriate, quarantine of persons allowed to enter the United States who may have been exposed to this virus.”https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-suspension-entry-immigrants-nonimmigrants-persons-pose-risk-transmitting-2019-novel-coronavirus/Feb. 1 Biden calls Trump a xenophobe and fear-monger and offers no plan of his own. Apparently, it would have been a lot worse if Biden were president. “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.” – Joe Biden @JoeBiden 4:01 PM · Feb 1, 2020·TweetDeckDe Blasio’s actions in New York spread Covid in the United States:Feb. 9 De Blasio urged the 500,000 person Chinese New Year celebration to go forward with tourists from all over the country and the world, especially Europe. This resulted in nearly half of all the early cases, and all those tourists going home and initiating the spread in a number of places around the country.New York Chinese New Year Feb. 2020“NYC health officials were on high alert, on Jan. 23, as deadly Coronavirus spreads around globe. Yet they did not stop Chinese’s New Year parades, Feb. 9, in all 5 boroughs, that typically draw 500,000 people. “https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2020/01/23/nyc-health-officials-on-high-alert-as-deadly-coronavirus-spreads-around-globe/Feb. 13: "There are ZERO confirmed cases of coronavirus in New York City, and hundreds of Chinese restaurants that need your business!" the New York City mayor's office tweets. "There is nothing to fear. Stop by any Chinatown for lunch or dinner!"Feb. 24 Pelosi does her own spreading: “Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco's Chinatown Monday to send a message. She said there's no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns.https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-san-franciscos-chinatown/2240247/‘That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here,’ Pelosi said. "Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation."March 13, 2020And then, even worse, they refuse to shut the schools until mid-MARCH. 1.2 Million kids spreading the virus and infecting parents and grandparents.“Cuomo, De Blasio Resist Calls to Close New York Schools”“New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said he does not see a need to close schools statewide and would leave such decisions to the localities.His statement comes as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio faces pressure from the leaders of the teacher’s union and the City Council to close schools as cases of the new coronavirus surge.”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/de-blasio-says-nyc-schools-mass-transit-will-stay-openThis took place in 20 places across NYC in February.https://images.rove.me/w_1920,q_85/naujawgeoqdga3iored6/new-york-chinese-new-year.jpgAnd then, after we know that rest homes are vulnerable, Cuomo allows this:“Coronavirus spreads in a New York nursing home forced to take recovering patients” “It’s reckless and careless,” said the granddaughter of a 96-year-old man whose family withdrew him from a Long Island nursing home. “Over 1,700 more coronavirus deaths reported in New York nursing homes”https://nypost.com/2020/05/05/over-1700-more-deaths-reported-in-new-york-nursing-homes/https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/coronavirus-spreads-new-york-nursing-home-forced-take-recovering-patients-n1191811“New York refused to send nursing home’s COVID-19 patients to nearly empty USNS Comfort”https://nypost.com/2020/04/24/new-york-nursing-home-denied-requests-to-send-covid-19-patients-to-usns-comfort/“An NYC nursing home forced to take coronavirus patients was also sent a supply of body bags for when they died”https://www.businessinsider.com/nursing-home-given-body-bags-when-they-accepted-coronavirus-patients-2020-4And of course, Nancy Pelosi wants to investigate how the response was handled after she did the same thing as NYC in February.- Ted A. Brewster and Cal Stowe2. Trump was not responsible for “ripping babies from their mother’s arms”, in fact it was a Democrat policy ended by Trump. It was the propaganda coup of the century to turn a noble fight to get illegal children treated the same way as citizens into something evil and hang it on Trump.In September 2018, the Trump Administration proposed regulations that sought to end the practice of forcing children to be “ripped from their mother’s arms” by the Flores Agreement won by liberal lawsuits. Democrats voted it down, saying “ripping children from their mother’s arms” is actually “legal safeguards for children”, in order to keep the practice and blame it on Trump. Trump officially ended the practice with an executive order in June 2018 - https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/20/full-text-trump-executive-order-family-separations-transcript-658639 .Citizen children are always separated from parents in childcare centers, jail not being considered a suitable environment for children, but historically illegals were considered a special case, and children stayed with their parents. There was a problem with unaccompanied minors, and a suit was filed on the behalf of JENNY LISETTE FLORES. Negotiations and court proceedings dragged on for nine years, spanning three presidencies. This resulted in the Flores Settlement in 1997. In short, unaccompanied illegal children were to be detained in the same facilities and subject to the same rules as citizen children.In 2016, liberal activists got the 9th U.S. Circus of Appeals to extend the 1997 Flores Settlement from unaccompanied illegal minors to children detained with their parents. Children were ordered to be separated from the parents detained under immigration law. Trump put the children in childcare centers as the law requires, and Democrats claimed he was “ripping them from their mother’s arms” and “throwing children in cages”. This was widely believed, a testament to the propaganda power of the media. Pelosi, to her credit, backed a bipartisan bill to avoid all this, but the other Democrats would not have it.2016 Ruling, see page 13 I. The Settlement Applies to Accompanied Minors. “We agree with the district court that “[t]he plain language of the Agreement clearly encompasses accompanied minors.”https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/07/06/15-56434.pdfFlores Agreement – Janet Reno under Clinton 1997https://cliniclegal.org/sites/default/files/attachments/flores_v._reno_settlement_agreement_1.pdfThe Flores settlement, the court order Trump blames for family separation, explainedU.S. must release child migrants held in family detention, court says - :~:text=S. must release child migrants held in family,the Rio Grande into Texas. %28John MooreCourt: Illegal immigrant parents can be detained, children must be released - :~:text=Court%3A Illegal immigrant parents can be detained, children,on June 25, 2014. %28Associated Press%29 more >3. Tax Cuts for the Rich? No, the new tax code stopped subsidizing the rich with $10,000 maximum local tax deduction. I paid more myself, but I think it’s fair. Let’s and look at the results:a) Individual tax receipts were higher in 2018 than 2017. Middle and lower incomes paid less, with childcare credit doubled to $2,000, standard deduction raised to $12,000, and tax brackets lowered, so where did the money come from to pay for these cuts? People with expensive houses paid for it.b) State and local tax deductions permanently limited to $10,000. Ordinary tax payers have been subsidizing the wealthy for a long time, by letting them deduct their local tax from income for federal tax. This accounted for the majority of the tax increase on the wealthy, and spurred migration out of New York and California. Not to mention the slump in high end real estate prices.“The SALT-tax [cap] was incredibly damaging to the market, and the additional mansion and transfer taxes have also caused people to pause,” said Pam Liebman, president and CEO of the Corcoran Group brokerage.”Manhattan home prices in ‘near free fall’ as median dips below $1M“changes to the tax law that have hit high-tax states hardest and sellers who are still clinging to 2014 prices.”Real estate in the Hamptons had its worst spring quarter in 8 yearsc) On average, the top 6% paid more tax in most states, and the top 9% paid more in California, New York, and New Jersey.d) Maximum deductible mortgage size was lowered from $1 million to $750,000.e) Truly wealthy hedge fund managers like Goldman and international companies like, Apple, Big Pharma, etc. avoid tax by shifting income overseas to low tax countries. Now they have to pay 15% even on overseas income from foreign subsidiaries. This cost Goldman $5 billion in 2018.Tax overhaul costs Goldman Sachs $5 billion

1 Introduction The broad Answer to this question - whether “China’s population being 4 times* that of the United States and high economic growth will allow China to become the world’s sole superpower” is “Yes.” But it is not just high population plus Chinese economic growth that has and is producing that result, because several other factors are involved.*It should perhaps be noted that the question is not quite accurate. According to the CIA World Factbook, the July 2018 population of China in 2018 was about 1,384.7m, about 4.2 times the July 2018 US population of 329.3m.2 Why has China become, and is still becoming, the world’s greatest economic power ?There are perhaps five major comparative factors:The superior Chinese understanding and practice of Shimomuran-Wernerian macroeconomics (the macroeconomics of the Tokyo Consensus Zone Economies) compared with the inferior American practice and promulgation of Washington Consensus macroeconomicsThe highly effective meritocracy of China vs the less effective “democratic” US GovernmentThe Chinese Government understanding of, and application of the “Mandate of Heaven” vs the American adoption of the “rule by the rich”The Chinese understanding, development and application of the leading economic computer-modelling assembly-line-control technology in the form of MadeInChina2025 which is the Chinese version of Germany’s Industrie04 which the German Federal Minister has described as “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the American lack of any such programmeThe willingness of the Chinese Government to learn from best practice elsewhere in the world compared with the American lack of such learning and the American assumption that US economic decline is the “fault of other countries” when it is largely home-grownLet’s examine these aspects of each of these issue in turn in sections 3.1 to 3.5.3.1 The superior Chinese understanding of Shimomuran-Wernerian macroeconomics compared with the inferior American practice and promulgation of Washington Consensus macroeconomics. SeeThe Rough Guide To Shimomuran Economics – George Tait Edwards – MediumAnd for a Committee-produced and not well informed view of the significance of Dr Osamu Shimomura see one of the the Springer BriefsThis book tells you a lot of background information about Dr Osamu Shimomura(1910–1989) the economist but it does not mention how Shimomuran economics works, and I think that’s a enormous and major omission. There is now a recent but not very well informed Wikipedia entry about Dr Osamu Shimomura at Osamu Shimomura (economist) - Wikipedia. That entry manages to get many of the facts about Shimomura’s career wrong and is based upon an article in the Tokyo Shimbum. Perhaps a lot may have been lost in translation. I note with interest that two of the referenced articles are mine. For a more comprehensive Answer about Dr Osamu Shimomura (1910–1989) the economist Shimomura seeGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to Why is there so few information about the Japanese economist Osamu Shimomura in the English speaking internet, even though the Japanese government has created a fellowship named after him? Even Wikipedia listed him as a chemist and not an economist.Of course the questions should ask not “why is there so few” but “why is there so little” and should recognise that Dr Osamu Shimomura the investigator of green bio-luminesce is a different person from Dr Osamu Shimomura (1910–1989) the economist. My reply above discriminates between these two very different different Shimomuras.AndShimomuran Economics is the Most Significant Advance Ever Made in Economic Understanding and the West Still Doesn’t Get It and noteGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to Why do Western economists ignore the writings of Dr Osamu Shimomura who is called "Japan's most influential post war economist"?Shimomuran Macroeconomics produces the goods. The average economic GDP PPP growth rate of China has been about four times (c10% pa) the American growth rate (c2.5% pa) from 1975 to 2014 and over three times (or 6.7% pa) the US growth rate (c2.2% pa) from 2015 to 2017. See George Tait Edwards's answer to What's Wrong With Washington Consensus Macroeconomics? (WCM)WCM fails to produce the goods either domestically or internationally. Three economists at the IMF have recognised that. See the June 2016 article by three IMF economists at Neoliberalism: Oversold? which has the frontspieceThere is as yet no sign as yet (January 2019) of any change in US policy. The idea that an “evolution” of that policy is possible and interesting, but completely unfounded and undefined. Nobody so far has ever managed to fit retrospective realistic foundations under a castle in the air. I wish Maurice Obstfeld and the IMF good luck with that attempt.3.2 The highly effective meritocracy of China vs the less effective US GovernmentThe required qualification for membership the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a university degree, which all 80m+ of Party members have. The required Chinese qualification for higher political office is membership of the CCP plus a performance record of success in running one of the local city or provincial economies. One result of that process is that senior Chinese politicians have a track record of success and possess a realistic competence in running a sub-unit of the Chinese economy. That capability maps over to the running of the whole economy, with the result that the Chinese meritocracy is the most intelligent, the most highly qualified, and the most effective government in the world.A major problem with most governments is succession planning. Even when a western government is brilliantly led for a few years, there is a lack of succession planning due to the political or democratic process. The excellent and highly competent and subtle FDR was “succeeded” (but actually failed) by President Harry Truman who did not continue Roosevelt’s policies because he did not understand them, and to the extent he did, he disagreed with them. There is an automatic capability of excellent succession planning built into the Chinese higher political system. No such capability exists in in the upper reaches of western governments.The technocratic government of China plans the country’s future. The US has no such plans. Note the key points of “China’s New Five Year Plan” covering the 2015–2020 period:The American economic system is more democratic than meritocratic. It was once claimed with pride that anyone could become an American President. That does seem to be true if that person possesses or can attract sufficient funding. But it is no guarantee of even minimal economic competence, and even when America succeeds in some measures (eg Obamacare) the next President (eg Trump) can partially reverse any popular gains made.3.3 The Chinese Government understanding of, and application of the “Mandate of Heaven” vs the British and American adoption of the “rule by the rich”3.3.1 The “Mandate of Heaven” The concept of the “Mandate of Heaven” was introduced into Chinese history over three millennia ago in 1045 BCE by the Shang dynasty. See Mandate of Heaven - WikipediaThe Mandate of Heaven is summarised by Mencius as“The people are of supreme importance; the altars of the gods of earth and grain come next; last comes the ruler. That is why he who gains the confidence of the multitudinous people will be Emperor... When a feudal lord endangers the altars of the gods of earth and grain, he should be replaced.”Chinese economic policy acts to ensure the highest possible increase in the incomes of the people, so is in accordance with the Mandate of Heaven.11th century China under the brilliant Prime Ministership of Wang Anshi (1021–1086), the first investment credit economist, became the first industrial economy and was then the largest economy in the world. See Wang Anshi - Wikipedia and my own view of the historical greatness that individual at Part 2 (The Invention of Credit Creation For Productive Investments in the Northern Song Empire (960-1126) by Wang Anshi (1021–1086) ofGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to What are major Chinese innovations?3.3.2 The Forecasts Of Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)What has happened to nearly all western and westernised economies was forecast by Oswald Spengler, in his first bookIn this ground-breaking book, (the Decline of the West is two volumes) Oswald Spengler accurately predicted thatThe natural evolution of all Western “democratic” economies was to become plutocratic economies, captured by monied interests, and mainly and usually almost entirely serving the interests of the richThe western media would also be captured by monied interests and the people and their education would become uninformed and their understanding would be defective against the “we decide what is and isn’t news” agenda focus of western mediaDemocratic societies would see the emergence of “Caesars” - inadequate usually rich individuals who would lead major economies into decline - without possessing the competence to do otherwiseSee The Decline of the West - Wikipedia andGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to What are the biggest reasons for why wage growth in the US has been so terrible for decades?George Tait Edwards's answer to How long has China's government been an oligarchy? which refers to the Spenglerian propheciesAll of these predictions have come to pass for all the major western economies. These changes in the focus of western governance (from advantaging the people to advantaging the rich) are the major reason for the current and the continuing decline of the British and American hegemonies.Because real consumption is the largest expenditure factor in the western Keynesian equation of the economy (NY=C+I+G), the most important aspect of economic policy is focusing on how best to increase the rate of real average and median living standards. Chinese economic policy does that, western Austerity does the opposite.The last thousand years of history demonstrates that if an economy operates for the benefit of all its people, it becomes a world-leading economy, and if it just operates to place its monied class above the people, then that's the rapid route to economic decline.Spengler’s observations appear to be consistent as the mirror image of the “Mandate of Heaven”. The Spenglerian rule of the rich produces economic decline, the Mandate of Heaven rule for the people produces great growth and widespread prosperity and potential success as a major world economy.3.4 The Chinese understanding, development and application of the leading economic technology in the form of MadeInChina2025 which is the Chinese version of Germany’s Industrie04 which the German Federal Minister has described as “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” versus the American lack of any such programmeChina has proposed and implementing the “next industrial revolution” based on the wholesale introduction in all of its manufacturing and services economy the fast-reacting, integrated G5/Internet of things/Credit-creation-economy. SeeGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to What is the comparison between the German industrial policy "Germany04" and "Made In China 2025"? andGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to China had 6.6% GDP growth in 2018, is that good or bad? andGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to At what point will we know if Trump is winning his tariff battle with China? and seeGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to What are the major differences between the American economic system and the Chinese economic system?By opposing MadeInChina2025 Donald Trump has lost much of America’s future. SeeGeorge Tait Edwards's answer to Why is “made in China 2025” so concerning to Trump that he demanded China must abandon that plan in order to stop the trade war?3.5 The willingness of the Chinese Government to learn from best economic practice elsewhere in the world, compared with the American lack of such learning, and the American assumption that US economic decline is the “fault of other countries” when it is largely home-grownChina has learned high-growth macroeconomics from the Japanese master growth economist Dr Osamu Shimomura (1910–1989).See George Tait Edwards's answer to What did China get right in its economic and social development which the US got wrong?China is following (by about 70%, higher than any other nation) the recommendations set out at The Most Successful Economic Policy Of All Time - The German Historical Economics Development of Shimomuran-Wernerian MacroeconomicsThe leading nations of the west are now firmly on the Spenglerian trajectory of economic decline via the WCM invention-suppressing and the Austerity-following people-impoverishing “rule by the rich” and no change to the economic prospects of these economies seems likely soon.The United Kingdom and the USA have suffered economically through the leadership activities of the five modern “Caesars” in the persons of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Ronald Reagan, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prime Minister David Cameron and President Donald Trump. All five of these leaders claimed they possessed a superior economic programme when they did not. Each of them accelerated the economic decline of their nation by ruling and running their economy in the interests of the rich, and were supported in that objective by a subservient media.Margaret Thatcher’s major programme (commonly known as TINA because she said “there is no alternative) was the destruction of large part of the “Post-war Consensus” which had placed Britain in the forefront of nations as a progressive welfare-state economy serving its people. The positive inheritance of the Clement Attlee post-war administration (comprising the five pillars of the welfare state) and the John Maynard Keynes insights about the reduction of unemployment were two situations she reversed. Some British newspapers hailed Mrs Thatcher as a mere housewife who proposed housewife cost-cutting economics as a solution to Britain’s economic decline but it rapidly became clear that her knowledge of real economics was minimal while her policies were industrially disastrous. I enjoyed meeting Mrs Thatcher and her team in 10 Downing Street when I was a member of the Grylls Group, but the report of that group (which I had written) to assist SME financing, was turned down by Geoffrey Howe in his March 1982 Budget Speech.The use of the vast additional government revenues of North Sea (largely Scotland’s) Oil was to reduce the top rates of income tax to the great benefit of very rich incomes. That policy was introduced by Nigel Lawson who, from my brief discussions with him, understood even less economics than Thatcher did. Lawson described the future of Britain as not just a low-tech but a no-tech economy, a nation with a high dependence on tourism, a nation of hamburger-friers but minimal technology. The pound was allowed to zoom upwards which destroyed about 20% of the British manufacturing industry, a result which several economists at the time described as a greater industrial damage than that done during WWII by the Germans. Thatcher reduced the living standards of working people (and their ability to finance the Labour Party) through the sale of nationalised industries into private hands, and through her preference for finance and the City of London rather than manufacturing industry. The keys to the industrial future of Britain - the machine tool manufacturers like Stone-Platt (see Platts Textile Machinery Makers by R H Eastham) and Alfred Herbert (see Alfred Herbert (company) - Wikipedia which says “it was one of the world's largest machine tool manufacturing businesses. It was at one time the largest British machine tool builder”) both went into bankruptcy without any supportive action from the government. The British banks shut both companies down after they had increased their new equipment investment but reduced their liquidity by doing so. The shutdown of much of British manufacturing industry reduced the incomes of the working class who Thatcher saw as “the internal enemy” because they largely did not vote Conservative.The climax of Thatcherism was the Poll Tax which system has historically been used (especially the USA) to deny poorer people the right to vote. It succeeded in its major objective by chasing so many voters off the electoral rolls that the John Major Government was elected despite all the opinion polls indicating a Labour victory. That was Thatcher’s last achievement although it was preceded by her downfall.Ronald Reagan destroyed the manufacturing pre-eminence of the United States through a deliberate policy of relocating what he saw as major “smokestack” industries abroad. See REAGAN'S HIDDEN 'INDUSTRIAL POLICY' which notes“The Reagan plan to shrink America's basic industries has been enormously successful. Since 1981, when the value of the dollar began climbing to unprecedented levels as the budget deficit ballooned, some 2 million jobs have been lost in old-line manufacturing businesses. Steel, autos and others have been forced to reduce domestic capacity, set up operations abroad (or enter into joint ventures with foreign producers) and diversify into specialized niches.”As I have noted elsewhere, the multiplier effect between the loss of manufacturing jobs and total job losses in the USA is somewhere between three and five, probably three for the effect within five years and five within a decade. The loss of future smokestack industries is quasi-permanent and the future loss of their likely developments is crippling to job prospects in these affected states. In 1982 I observed that decline in US industries first-hand by driving on holiday from New York to Buffalo through some roads often lined by shut-down factories and discussing that situation with my wife’s American relatives.Here’s a map illustrating the “American rustbelt” consequences of Reagan’s policies:Source: Copyright B Jennings, 2010 and reproduced by permission.Tony Blair pretended to be a socialist with a “new Labour” policy but once in office continued and adopted the policies of Thatcher, who had accurately described him as “her greatest achievement.” His political achievements were minimal and his self-admiration almost boundless, the two major tracer marks of a Caesar. While Blair did reduce some child poverty he (along with the late Mo Mowlem) in the “cocktail offensive” had promised the money speculators in the City of London that if elected he would continue to treat them favourably, continuing Thatcher’s major policy of financial preference with industrial decline. (The major ex-industrial areas in the UK become the British rustbelt, around Glasgow, Newcastle, Sheffield, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and South Wales, but I can find no relevant map illustrating that reality.) The great contrast between the very high hopes the people of Britain had after the election of a Labour Government led by Blair in 1998 compared with the subsequent minuscule achievements of the Blair Governments caused a major collapse in Labour voters. Blair admitted he was a Thatcherist after he left office, an admittance that would have placed him into the position of the historical obscurity he deserved, if he had stated that reality before he gained office rather than afterwards. He is probably the most disappointing Labour leader of all time.David Cameron destroyed the democratic foundation of the UK for partisan advantage resulting in his downfall and the disastrous Brexit vote which was not a valid democratic result. See George Tait Edwards's answer to Does it matter if British are in favour of the Brexit today?Donald Trump is just another very disappointing Republican President favouring tax cuts for the rich without any more productive American industrial policy. SeePresident Trump wrongly blames the decline of US industry on foreign countries when the main real culprit is his political predecessor President Ronald Reagan.4 ConclusionsThe rise of China and the economic decline of the USA is not simply a matter of population and economic growth (which viewpoint can be seen as broadly “right” but it’s too limited an explanation) but it is also more solidly based uponA much better and more realistic Chinese economic understanding and practice than that available in the USAA more competent and realistic Chinese Government serving the people rather than the US Government focus on serving the richThe practice by the Chinese Government of the “Mandate of Heaven” while the USA is trapped in a system of rule “of, by and for the rich”The Chinese adoption of the MadeInChina2025 best available transformative economic technology while the USA lacks any such industrial policyThe Chinese Government as a institution practising “lifelong learning” and high investment in the best available technology, while the USA neither learns from others nor invests for itself, but instead POTUS Trump blames the rest of the world for its home-grown economic decline.6 Over-arching Conclusion This did not need to happen. If the USA had continued with FDR’s economic miracle 1938–44 based upon FDR’s foundation ideals of “rule for the people and invest in US manufacturing industry” then the USA might have grown by about 7% a year from 1945 and the USA might have had a 2015 economy about 2 to the seven times larger (because 7% produces a doubling of real economic size every decade) of about $256tr. in $2005 PPP prices. This compares with a world GDP today of about $134tr. If FDR policies had prevailed, something like that might have happened. Of course that growth rate might have lessened after the first forty to fifty years of high growth due to the limitation of input resources and an America04 upgraded US system might have then been required. The USA could have kept its position as a world-leading economy if it had taken the trouble to study and practice how best to do that.But it did not. And that opportunity is now lost forever.Perhaps the world has had a lucky escape. The American culture after 1980 turned pathological and into the win-lose-legal-system money-dominated education-for-the-rich health-services-for-the-rich tax-cuts-for-the-rich Austerity-for-the-workers gun-toting rustbelt system we see in America today. The Chinese culture is focused on the domestic delivery of higher living standards within a comprehensive welfare state and is an internationally constructive and more bilateral approach as reflected in all the project funding of B&RI/OBOR/&Other investments.In my considered opinion, the Chinese way is much better.

This is where I get frustrated. There was a moment. It was a real moment where everyone in the country agreed. Right and Left; black and white; we all agreed. There was something that needed to be done about these bad cops. It was clear that there were bad cops. No one was arguing about that.Then the craziest people say the craziest things, like, “abolish all police” because of the actions of a few. All I can say then is that the people who lead these sorts of protests do not think black lives actually matter.I say that not because of the hatred I am always accused of any time I take a stance that is not the absolute most hysterical one proposed. I say that because I actually read black authors. Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, Larry Elders, and the honorable Justice Clarence Thomas.They will point to the specific places and times where there are the fewest police are the same settings of the most blacks killed. This isn’t because the number police are hunting down black men; it is due to crime. The places where police involvement is the strongest, i.e. where “tough on crime” policies are implemented the most is where we see the greatest reduction in the number of violent deaths of young black men.Let’s compare statistics. The two graphs below are from the CDC and depict the leading causes of death for males in the United States. I’ve highlighted this portion pertaining to homicides, where homicide accounted for 5.2% of the deaths of white boys aged 1–19.[1]For blacks, it was a very different picture. Homicide was by far the number one killers of black boys and men aged 1–44.[2]Only about 100 out of ever 100,000 black people will die from an interaction with a cop. It is the sixth most likely cause of death for young black men and boys, according to a University of Michigan study. The same study, which was trying to demonstrate the problem of police for blacks, however, showed the number three killer of blacks of the age group were those slain due to criminal homicide. Number three pretty fairly explains number six from a statistical standpoint. The odds that they will die due to crime near their homes is far, far higher. Only in those places where policing was made greater did the rate of black deaths go down.But now we’re having a conversation about police brutality, which somehow morphed into a discussion about abolishing all police everywhere. In some areas, the police, flawed as they may be, are the only thing keeping back a much worse killer of young black men. I’m just going to say, it’s probably not going to work.I want to try to do justice to the other side, and at least give credit to where this idea comes from. To many of us, the idea comes off as simply vengeance against the police. In part, it absolutely is, and anyone pretending otherwise is lying to themselves. But the other part is a sincere belief that through investments into social services, people won’t need the police.The idea behind abolishing the police is that the funds for the police don’t actually do anything to solve the systemic problems in crime ridden areas and people who commit crimes. Instead, those funds should go towards schools, welfare, housing, job programs, education, and such. It echoes the frustrations communicated by the Dallas Chief of Police David Brown when, in 2016, five of his officers were ambushed and assassinated while protecting civilian protesters during a Black Lives Matter protest.“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Brown said at a briefing Monday. “We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. … Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”[3]It’s true. Whenever something is wrong, cops are simultaneously blamed and called to fix the problem. This extends to being the people who have to break up families where the father is a criminal, to being the “big brother” to local kids, or saving the day when anyone has a problem with anything from animal control to needing help with directions.It also follows a particular differing world view between ideological conservatives and liberals. In an answer I wrote last month, I talked about how conservatives generally view humanity’s nature as flawed where liberals view people as generally good. Practically speaking, that’s saying that the basic conservative belief is that all people are like Lord of the Flies — devoid of a strong fabric of social institutions and traditions, people would devolve in brutal monsters and society would be unlivable. The opposite is the belief that the world is what corrupts us and that the institutions themselves are what make otherwise good people do badly. Slowly get rid of these corrupting influences and the world becomes a manifestation of the beauty within all people.People who hold the view that people are fundamentally flawed, believe that those who commit crimes are not better or worse than the rest of us, but they did fail where we did not. Crimes must be punished, to create a negative incentive against doing more crimes, both for the criminal and for everyone watching. People who hold the latter belief, that mankind’s nature is fundamentally good, believe that people who commit crimes aren’t themselves wrong, but made wrong by a society who failed them. Inequality, broken communities, poor education, a lack of opportunity, those were why people committed crimes… not their own personal actions. Where the flawed vision seeks punishment, the more optimistic vision views crime as a symptom that is fixed through a better network of aide and reformation of the whole person “back” to the good.For one, crime is a personal choice and for the other crime is a symptom of injustice.With that framework, one vision views the police and prison system as necessary to protect the rest of us from ourselves by creating disincentives to committing crimes. But the other views the prisons as rehabilitation centers and the police as a painful, inefficient, and abusive way to get people there.You can see how people who are predominately viewing the world through the vision that people are good would want to “defund police”. The theory isn’t to punish the police (although it is that, too). It is to reinvest that public funding towards ways to prevent crimes from happening. Remember, in that vision of human nature, people don’t commit crimes because of personal character flaws, but because society is responsible for making them that way. To revisit a previous image, the money should instead go to things like education, job creation, and welfare.It’s a nice idea, but will it work?Not reasonably.Let’s look at a few of the proposed solutions to crime instead of the police.HungerThe one with the most immediate effect would probably be food. The suggestion is that people are committing crimes because they are poor, or even starving. This is a false narrative. America has a very bad problem when it comes to relating the actual effects of hunger. This is because, for many years, government statistics have inflated the term “hunger” with many other things. A good example of that comes from the 2015 report from the Agriculture Department saying that “48 million Americans were living in hunger”. That is how the report’s findings were communicated, however the actual language was “food scarcity”. The USDA defined food insecurity as “uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.” Furthermore, it doesn’t define that as a chronic condition, but at any time in the last 12 months. It’s a lot more broad and less abysmal then imagining one in six Americans starving. James Bovard of the Foundation for Economic Education criticized the finding:The definition of “food insecure” includes anyone who frets about not being able to purchase food at any point. If someone states that they feared running out of food for a single day (but didn’t run out), that is an indicator of being “food insecure” for the entire year — regardless of whether they ever missed a single meal. If someone wants organic kale but can afford only conventional kale, that is another “food insecure” indicator.[4]This same statistic, however, from the almost unchanged 2016 data, is what Nancy , Pelosi based her statements on that “1 in 5 children in America goes to sleep hungry at night because they are so poor.”[5]No. 1 in 5 children starving in the United States is a ridiculous exaggeration.In the past, a similar error in reporting happened the poverty statistics from the US census are conflated with our understanding of hunger. It is to say that anyone who falls below the poverty line was also starving, as if the two are the same. The two aren’t the same. In fact, for many poor, it is cheaper to get too many calories than it is to get the right amount leading more cases of obesity and heart problems among the poor than the chronic affects of starvation. For Americans as people beneath the poverty line in the US still can afford a stable home, a car, TV, cable internet and a cell phone.In fact, Robert Rector, one of the key architects of successful welfare reform in the 1990s, communicates a far different picture of what it means to be part of the American poor. [6]Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning.Nearly three-quarters have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television.Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and a quarter have two or more.Half have a personal computer; one in seven has two or more computers.More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as an Xbox or PlayStation.Forty percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.Ninety-two percent of poor households have a microwave.Forty-two percent of all poor households actually own their own homes.The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.Ninety-six percent of poor parents stated that their children were never hungry at any time during the year because they could not afford food.The average consumption of protein, vitamins, and minerals is virtually the same for poor and middle-class children and in most cases is well above recommended norms.Most poor children are, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier than the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II.[7]That the majority of these people who are poor by the measure of the US census cannot afford food is… misleading.In truth, we have no idea how many people are actually hungry, or more to the point, starving from a chronic lack of food. What we can say, however, is that it is not one of the largest problems in the United States, today. While decreasing food insecurity among the rest of America should be goal, weighed against all other problems America faces, there is no clear evidence that reducing that statistic will reduce the much larger problem of black-on-black homicide. David Dorn, the 77 year old black retired police captain wasn’t killed because someone was hungry. He was killed while defending his store from a looter stealing a TV.Let’s look at the next most immediate problem that advocates of defending the police are pushing.HousingI’ve written on this elsewhere.In the case of housing, we actually have a good case of the systemic effects of racism, even if they no longer exist, carrying forth into today. New Deal programs such as the Federal Housing Administration, created in the National Housing Act of 1934, eventually worked to create a system of renters among the poor where rents became much more common than mortgages. Mortgages are a means of actual wealth creation through the purchase of real estate that usually appreciates over time and which can be passed on or sold to fund retirement. Rent doesn’t do that. Rent is a liability that buys only one period’s living and nothing else. This matters because the policies of the National Housing Agency and later the Federal Housing Agency which grew out of it created one of the most systematically devastating programs in the history of blacks in America since Jim Crow.Beginning in the 1960s, the US government began heavily subsidizing new home development, however, they didn’t do this equally. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development was created by the Johnson administration as part of the War on Poverty. It was intended to help the urban poor to resettle into home ownership. Remember owning homes was a path to wealth creation for the middle class and seen as the greatest predictor for wealth later on. However, what the program actually did was channel whites out of the cities into rural areas surrounding the cities. With the rise of cars and highways, these tracts of land grew into the modern suburbs. Blacks, on the other hand, were given “opportunities” to live in densely packed high rise buildings near the inner cities. These became known as the Projects.The Projects concentrated a population of poor people into an extremely small geography. Anyone studying demographics at the time could have pointed out that this would be a recipe for crime, declining education, and would over saturate the local job market with too many mouths to feed and not enough job creation. This is not to mention the fact that as crime rises, education falls, and wealth diminishes, investment into new business drops creating a downward feedback loop. Add to it the fact that people have literally been piled sky high and you create a powder keg of everything necessary to see inner cities become war zones. Again, any demographic statistician could have predicted this regardless of whether they were talking about the American blacks or not because the same effects happen anywhere in the world where this kind of experiment under these conditions is tried.Was this clear systemic racism? I think so. I think there was an intentional element of racism in at least some of the planners of this scheme under the Johnson Administration that pushed whites to the unsettled suburbs, leading to the largest rise in wealth in human history, and the nightmare scenario that became the Projects for black people.But even then, maybe there is an argument that it wasn’t quite as racist as even I am suspicious of. One could argue that at a time when America was still a manufacturing powerhouse, or to be more precise, when factories benefited from being massive places where thousands of people with no real need of higher education could work and have a meaningful and happy life while providing for a healthy and happy family. Many factories in the same area benefited from one another, sharing talent and a culture of expertise not unlike modern Silicon Valley. It made sense to stack people up as many as could fit near them, from an urban planning perspective, perhaps. More factories were good for America and at the time, it was also good for blacks and other urban poor working them. They were working their way out of poverty.But then Free Trade happened. As the rest of world recovered from WWII, it became profitable for the continued wealth of the nation to start looking to external means of production, such as creating incentives to move manufacturing to Mexico or China. This wasn’t racially motivated at all, championed by both the Democrats and Republicans and in fact, encouraged by a progressive ideology of globalism. So it was great for certain already wealthy parts of America and greater yet for the rest of the world, but an absolute economic disaster if you have already created entire cities dependent on the idea that there will be tens of thousands of low skill, high paying jobs a few blocks away… as in, the Projects. So in a very real and tangible way, while much of the country became very rich from international free trade, blacks were devastated and mostly because they believed in an idea that would raise them out of poverty lasting perpetually.If we really, honestly look at what has been happening to the black communities since the 1960s, during a period where racism has played less, and less, and less of a factor every single year, but where the problems of black poverty seem even more overwhelming for blacks to overcome and consider the problems not just as a problem of racist whites, but as a consequence of many bad policy decisions that came together to create a perfect storm of terribleness for blacks in America, you start to realize that there is an incredibly high likelihood that the policies intended to help are more to blame than the sinister machinations of evil whites.So housing is another area where blacks should be concerned. Rent can be expensive, but generational poverty is more expensive. All the plans to “help” the poor blacks where, at best, convoluted and required the American economy to remain unchanged indefinitely while paradoxically growing forever. This is if we ignore the very real suspicions that they very policies were racist themselves by design in how they divided the poor whites from the poor blacks. Either way, the collapse of American manufacturing led to many of the problems we saw beginning in the 1980s and 1990s with exploding crime rates among the inner cities.That leads us to jobs.JobsThe government can’t create jobs out of thin air. They can, but only for government jobs. These jobs, however, are risky at best because they are tax-payer supported, and all tax payer supported jobs are at risk of being viewed as parasitical by taking money away from other programs or even, just artificially, taking too much in taxes for sake of saying jobs were produced. Case in point — the police, right here, in this question. If one argues that we should defund the police, you’re arguing that the jobs of many police officers aren’t really needed. All government jobs are weighed against the value they put into the community. If they can, however, be automated, or the same result gained through other means, then those jobs don’t last long.So the government doesn’t create jobs. The only thing the government can do is help nurture the environment for opportunity. Opportunity creates work and work creates jobs. By this, the US government does more for American jobs by implementing some program like building up new means of transportation like the US interstate system (which lowered the cost of transportation within the US and thereby raising opportunity for manufacturers) than it does with most jobs programs, providing tax payer subsidies to hire for businesses that couldn’t or shouldn’t otherwise afford the extra labor.The other way that government can influence jobs is by creating policies that create the environments where job creators leave. A good example of that came from the last few weeks.A Minneapolis manufacturing company has decided to leave the city, with the company’s owner saying he can’t trust public officials who allowed his plant to burn during the recent riots. The move will cost the city about 50 jobs.“They don’t care about my business,” said Kris Wyrobek, president and owner of 7-Sigma Inc., which has operated since 1987 at 2843 26th Av. in south Minneapolis. “They didn’t protect our people. We were all on our own.”That’s one company of about 50 jobs that will no longer be in the city. There will be more who will take what work opportunities exist, and they will leave, too. These companies will make major investments in places where they feel they will find long term success. That will not be in places where entrepreneurs and investors fear things like high crime. Beyond the obvious risk to the business of robbery or vandalism, high crime areas also erode property values, and drive out talent who might make a business prosper and grow. Over the course of years, it also reduces the investment pool for further new businesses.So focusing on job creation instead of ensuring that crimes are dealt with fails in that it:Reduces business investmentReduces the number of jobsReduces wealth creationReduces property valuesWhat is the link in all these? Those are where we get our taxes. If, for some reason, crime isn’t reduced after defunding the police, the pool of money used to fund all these other programs is itself going to be shrink. If “increased investment in community initiatives” doesn’t have a major impact, then one by one, these initiatives will fall. At that point, without policing or community initiatives, the only possible word for such a system is anarchy.EducationThe last major call is to defund the police to fund more in education. I’ve worked as a public school teacher and my wife is a currently a teacher. I’m sympathetic to this one. It’s clear that better education can put someone on the track to a better life. This is true — of individuals. As a community planning policy, education can’t happen if the lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs aren’t met. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a theory in psychology that states that a person can’t achieve the important processes of development, if their lower needs aren’t met. Below educational needs are things like safety and security. Simply, if a person doesn’t first feel safe, he isn’t going to get much from education.Second, while some politicians have defended the call to defund police by saying “we’ve defunded education for decades and look where that got us,” not only is that a misdirection, but it’s also demonstrably false.The US has not defunded education. In reality, it spends more per student than any other country.Furthermore, while education spending continued to increase, there is no clear indication that education itself it has. That is to say that in America, more funding doesn’t clearly show better education. The fact that so many call for more funding doesn’t mean the problems revolve around not enough money, but how it’s spent.The education system is fraught with other problems, so many that it doesn’t help to go into it here. But simply pouring more money into a leaky bucket doesn’t actually improve failing schools. Evidence shows us that schools aren’t failing from a lack of funding as much as other systemic failures that will exist just the same with 10 times the funding they currently have. If we want to fix education, robbing from the police departments to fund more of it will not solve the problem anywhere in the United States. Education itself must be reformed.The last problem is also obvious.If we take away from policing to support education… even if it would work… it would take about 20 years to show fruits of that labor. That’s about the time it would take a child raised in a rough neighborhood to grow up and graduate, becoming a productive member of the community. During that 20 years, he will have to endure a policeless environment where crime will not be stopped and where the criminals may, in fact, be the source of order, as we saw with gang warfare in the 1980s and 90s. The temptation, or even, to sell drugs or take part in other illicit activities to support a family in need will be great. Or maybe that’s just the best job they can find and don’t care enough about the consequences. If he survives that life unscathed, he will also be choosing between two very different realities — should he take up one of the jobs in his neighborhood, or should he seek work elsewhere? Most, will move on, leaving the old neighborhood behind them. This disgenic cycle is another reason why other things need to happen first for education to truly have an impact, and part of that is an immediate reduction in crime, something which can only happen through strong policing.BureaucracyThe final reason I think these programs will fail is that someone has to be in charge of them, and not just them, but many other programs. The reason that we’re attempting this complex network of new social programs is to have an indirect response — reducing crime. It’s not altogether obvious why any one investiture will reduce crimes, and as I’ve shown, the chances that any will in fact improve much is low. But we need all of them to maybe work.That’s dangerous.It’s like what happens when traditions go away. There are things we do just because we’ve always done them, with no real idea of why. Stop doing them. Suddenly, new problems no one expected start popping up to ruin our beautiful schemes of efficiency and planning. That’s because, often traditional methods are formed to solve a problem, and the tradition lives on protecting us from that problem long after we forgot about the problem in the first place. If you want an example, read through the Bible’s book of Leviticus. It reads like a list of the senseless draconian laws of a bronze age era nomadic culture, but read it closer and realize how many of the laws protected them from diseases no one would understand the cause of for another 4,000 years.This idea of investing into numerous social programs is like that, too. Say it works. Great, crime is reduced. But how do you convince a future bean counter that you need to keep investing in all of these programs, when it is unclear how exactly any one of them contributes to the real problem of crime? You won’t. Instead, they will look at education and rank it according to education, housing according to housing, food according to food, and so on. “We don’t have this problem,” they’ll say, and a program will get cut. At some point, there will be a crisis and a call for austerity, and people will start slowly defunding one or two more of these “antiquated” programs.Then what?Some pencil pusher makes a huge bonus by saving the state and municipality ten million dollars by cutting “excess funding” from programs that no longer serve their “original function.” Then, a few years later, crime starts creeping back in. Look, call it cynical, but also call it realistic. This idea, this hope, is too complex with far too few proofs that it will work. Instead, what will probably happen is that we may spend a great deal to achieve marginal gains, but those gains will soon be lost through the natural and unrelenting push of bureaucratic incompetence, as all good social programs eventually succumb to.Better WaysIt’s obvious that defunding the police is an idealistic approach to urban planning policy, like so many others. It’s also not without the palpable vein of vengeance. It is, however, being pushed in large part by non-urban idealistic white liberals who will not suffer the long term effects of their policies, also like so many others. This has been the criticism of many black conservatives, and is the central focus of the book “Please Stop Helping US: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed” by Jason L. Riley. I recommend everyone, conservative or liberal, legitimately concerned with the plight of blacks in America and not simply engaging in the outrage issue du jour, should start by reading his book. It is a clear look from economic and historical perspectives of the other side of the argument.I don’t like to complain when I have no better solution to the problem. Here, I think that defunding the police is a suicidal plan for the long term success of black neighborhoods. Abolishing it is even more obvious, but something so extreme as to lend credibility to the less absurd defunding.Instead, some other things should have been tried first.In an answer I wrote last week, I talked about a method that is far more practical and has better chances of bringing real reforms, based on how the military solves problems. Hold the chain of command responsible. When something goes wrong, it is up the supervisor to issue discipline, but when something goes seriously wrong, it is up to the supervisor to be held accountable for his oversight. In this case, with Derek Chauvin, the police officer with his knee over George Floyd’s throat, it seemed to all of us that there was criminal negligence leading to the death of someone placed under the arrest, and care, of the Minneapolis police department. That should be a call to investigate not only Derek Chauvin, but who ever leads, trains, and ultimately ensures he stays on the force. There should be an investigation of his supervisor, as well… and his, all the way up the chain up to Police Chief Medaria Arradondo. Even if the death of George Floyd were to be all there was, the chief should be investigated. Seeing the chaos and numerous abuses of the entire force with the riots that followed, I don’t know why more people aren’t calling for his removal.Mind you, he’s just the lowest ranking member I can name. I’m saying every supervisor directly between Derek Chauvin and him needs to be removed from leadership positions one way or another.No, not only am I saying that the immediate supervisors need to be investigated, probably fired, and perhaps even charged, and that the higher ranking supervisors need to be charged, but the elected officials need to also be investigated and impeached for the sheer incompetence leading up to right now, such as Mayor Jacob Frey.Oh, no, but I’m not done. I also think that Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota should be impeached. People should be asking questions about if he failed in this, what should be done.Mind you, “impeached” has lost a lot of its meaning in recent years. Where many politicians openly called for the impeachment of Donald Trump before he even took office, and the following three year spectacle that was, impeachment isn’t supposed to be about firing people. It was intended to happen far more often for investigating failures in the public view and determining if something more could have reasonably been done by the leaders in charge. If the investigation proves that these leaders either did the best they could, or that they simply don’t have the power to act, then changes can be made to the process empowering them and their successors to better do their jobs in the future. If, however, they had the opportunity and botched the responsibility, then the impeachments need to lead to their removal from office.I’ve heard absolutely nothing in any of this about holding the leaders responsible. There’s be numerous calls to charge all four of the officers responsible of murder. I’ve seen that explode into blind hatred towards all police officers, including abolishing and defunding them altogether. But I have yet to hear a serious conversation about investigating either Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, Mayor Jacob Frey, or Governor Tim Walz. None. To me, that would have been the first option.Leaders are the people who write the rules. Leaders select people they expect to follow the rules. Leaders enforce the rules. Most importantly, leaders demonstrate how to do their jobs within the rules.If you want to radically correct the culture of an organization, then you don’t make a big show of holding the lowest of level of people responsible. Worse, you don’t just brand all people who wear a badge as hopelessly corrupt murderers who need to be defunded You change out the entire leadership of everyone responsible for them. That’s the fastest and most effective means of changing a broken culture of incompetence and corruption. More discussion needs to center on holding that department in that city and that state accountable, as well as any others where failure is demonstrated, rather than demanding we punish all cops everywhere or even worse, defund and abolish an institution vital to the protection of the very people most vulnerable.But there is one more solution that has been tried successfully worth bringing up, the example of Camden, New Jersey.In 2013, the city of Camden, NJ was suffering some of the worst effects of the prolonged recession starting in 2008. It had some the highest violent crime and murder rates in the nation. That year, the city dissolved the old Camden Police Department and reconstituted it as the Camden County Metro Police. Led by then governor Chris Cristi and other local officials, they created a public-safety department within the Camden county government dedicated to the city of Camden before disbanding the police department.From there, they were able to reform their practices. This included enacting an entirely new union contract which removed wasteful practices and rules that may have been good for creating jobs for cops, but kept those cops in offices and off the streets where they were needed.Immediately after, officials invited all of the former Camden police officers to reapply for their jobs and rehired most, but being selective in not hiring known bad apples into the new force. [8]The overall quality of the force was improved as since then, violent crimes per 1,000 people have dropped from 79 to 44.[9]The new department is more involved in the community, more efficient, and has less barriers to doing the jobs of police officers.Disbanding a whole police department sounds extreme. It is. It is far more extreme then my suggestion to hold the chain of command responsible, but nowhere near as radical as defunding the police or abolishing them altogether. At no point did the citizens of Camden not have a police department. One day, they had a bad police department; the next day, they had a reformed police department made up of mostly the same good cops, but now more empowered to do their jobs.For this plan to work it took a lot of people realizing a few things. It’s possible to have a structure that works against itself. It’s possible for years of practices, policies, and routines to pile up, or for inefficient positions to be created which can’t legally be removed. It might also be impossible to remove some bad people, who deserve to be fired or whose position just shouldn’t exist, thanks to unions that overreached their mandate. All of these things could be true, and a police department still be filled with good cops who want the best for their communities. What’s more, the process actually saved a lot of money from the old way of policing, so Camden could use that money either to invest in their new police department, or attempt some of these community minded experiments being lauded about today.Defunding the police department, with no other Camden-like reforms, does none of this. In fact, it’s worse. It tells the police that they are now expected to do the same job with less funding. This might mean that the same inefficient organizational structures, same bad policies, and many of the same bad people stay in place because legally there is nothing that can be done about them. Think, if Camden had been told, “We’re punishing you by taking away tens of millions from your budget, but you still have to do the same job”, they probably would have been forced to let go of a lot of their officers and as past models show, they probably would have asked many to voluntarily leave and seek other jobs. What normally happens in those cases is that those who can move and are great, jump ship and get jobs at better departments, leaving only the people who absolutely must stay with the community and those cops who are terrible at their jobs. Think about that. You cut funding and leave only the worst cops.This is a death spiral.You know how we know? Look at Minneapolis. Piggy backing off of Anthony Galli’ excellent answer is this quote from the Minneapolis mayor:“We know that when officers are doing more overtime and they're overworked, they're more fatigued. When they're more fatigued, they're more likely to use force.” He was concerned seeing a report note that 30% of overtime in 2018 was due to staff shortages and another 6% was due to "possible" staff shortages. Mayor Frey continued, “The best way to combat staff shortages is to hire more staff, yes. I think that's one important element to both public safety and police community relations.” [2]As well as this, from the police chief over a year ago.Minneapolis is what a city looks like with a defunded police department. So if more cities want to go that route, they’re playing an experiment in which we already know the results.I’m just a little dumbfounded at some of the people making statements calling for defunding the police, or abolishing them outright, when better options are not only available, but obvious. It comes off not just as needlessly virtue signalling, ignorant of better, and less suicidal methods to improve their communities. It might serve some, like the Mayor of Los Angeles, to say these things for national attention from people who ultimately will not suffer or gain from it. Some people want this to work so bad, but that doesn’t mean there is any reason to believe it will other then blind ideology. Some are simply embracing a vengeful attitude towards the cops, which serves absolutely no one. Given the costs, the real costs, I fear that what we’re going to see in some of these areas a return to the violence and chaos of the 1990s. And, so that no one forgets, that hurt blacks and the poor most of all.Relaxed. Researched. Respectful. - War ElephantFootnotes[1] From the CDC-Leading Causes of Death-Males Non-Hispanic white 2017[2] From the CDC-Leading Causes of Death-Non-Hispanic Black Males 2017[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/grief-and-anger-continue-after-dallas-attacks-and-police-shootings-as-debate-rages-over-policing/[4] No, 48 Million Americans Are Not Going Hungry | James Bovard[5] Pelosi Misrepresents Childhood 'Hunger' Data[6] The War on Poverty After 50 Years[7] 40 Million Americans Are Living in Poverty? FALSE[8] Camden, NJ, did police reform right — not that radicals will pay attention[9] Ex police chief says crime went down when they disbanded the force