About Me

In writing the "About Me" portion of this blog I thought about the purpose of the blog - namely, preventing the growth of Socialism & stopping the Death Of Democracy in the American Republic & returning her to the "liberty to abundance" stage of our history. One word descriptions of people's philosophies or purposes are quite often inadequate. I feel that I am "liberal" meaning that I am broad minded, independent, generous, hospitable, & magnanimous. Under these terms "liberal" is a perfectly good word that has been corrupted over the years to mean the person is a left-winger or as Mark Levin more accurately wrote in his book "Liberty & Tyranny" a "statist" - someone looking for government or state control of society. I am certainly not that & have dedicated the blog to fighting this. I believe that I find what I am when I consider whether or not I am a "conservative" & specifically when I ask what is it that I am trying to conserve? It is the libertarian principles that America was founded upon & originally followed. That is the Return To Excellence that this blog is named for & is all about.

Sunday, October 30, 2016

An Analysis - Trump Versus Clinton - Issue By Issue

Shortly after the third presidential debate Donald Trump released what he calls Contract With The American Voter – an eighteen point program that starts Trump's first day in office & will dominate the agenda the first hundred days, if he is elected. 
 
Highlights of Trump's contract include: 1) cancelling all of BO's unconstitutional executive actions that bypassed Congress on immigration law & bestowed work authorization benefits on illegal immigrants including providing cash in the form of tax refunds even for years when no income tax return had been filed, 2) pursuing a constitutional amendment to place term limits on members of Congress, 3) placing a hiring freeze on all non-military employees – except for public safety & health needs, 4) requiring that each new federal regulation eliminates two existing ones, 5) picking Supreme Court justices "who will uphold & defend the Constitution" based on a list of twenty prospective justices previously presented, 6) cancelling all federal funding to sanctuary cities, 7) suspending immigration from terror prone regions like the Middle East, 8) removing two million dangerous undocumented immigrants & cancelling visas from countries that won't take them back, 9) repealing & replacing ObamaCare with Health Savings Accounts where healthcare insurance can be purchased across state lines & Medicaid is managed by the states following block grants of funding, 10) cutting red tape @ the FDA where there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, 11) supporting Kate's Law (HR 3011) that calls for a mandatory five-year prison sentence for those who illegally reenter the country with a felony conviction on their record – the law is named for Kate Steinle who was murdered by a homeless man who was an illegal alien who had previously been deported five times, & 12) authorizing the Keystone XL Pipeline Project.
 
In addition Trump has an economic growth plan that lowers taxes on the middle class & businesses, has vowed to eliminate the fallacious destructive anchor baby claim to birthright citizenship, & will restore the enforcement of immigration laws.
 
If you are not one of the 17 million people who have already voted please compare Trump's contract vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton's positions before you vote.
 
Hillary Clinton's positions include raising taxes & increasing regulations on businesses, expanding Social Security benefits, reintroducing the public option to the ObamaCare legislation, enacting a $15 per hour federal minimum wage law, providing free college to people making less than $125,000 per year, mandating overtime pay for salaried personnel, enacting paid family leave legislation, & increasing the proposed 65,000 poorly vetted Syrian refugees by hundreds of percentage points in her quest for simultaneous open borders & a welfare state & all the government-dependent problems that follow such an arrangement.
 
Let's take them one by one:
 
1) raising taxes & increasing regulations on businesses - Name one job that you create when you tax income?  Name one small business that actually expands when you increase taxes or regulations?  Name the economic freedom principle that is enhanced when you raise taxes?
 
2) expanding Social Security benefits - Social Security & Medicare along with Medicaid & ObamaCare (see below) form the cornerstone of the American welfare state.  To illustrate just how dependent many Americans are on these programs please consider that two thirds of our seniors depend on Social Security as the main source of their income & for one in five it is the only source of income.  Without Social Security half of all seniors would be living in poverty so naturally seniors love Social Security.  If possible seniors love Medicare even more.  Today's retiring baby boomers are the only people who have paid into Medicare their entire working lives.  Medicare Part A is primarily paid for by the 2.9% payroll tax plus co-pays & deductibles paid for by the recipient while Medicare Part B is primarily paid for from funds taken out of the general tax revenues taken from the U.S. Treasury plus monthly premiums & shared co-pays & deductibles  paid for by the recipients.  The portion of Medicare Part B paid by seniors amounts to only 25% of the program's cost.  Medicare Part D is under a similar arrangement as Part B & is 75% funded by the U.S. Treasury meaning that the drug plan constitutes a public subsidy of 75% of the cost of the program.

 

So what's not for seniors to like – except that these programs are not financially sustainable? How unkind is it for our elected reps to let this continue until total collapse of the programs?  It is the elderly & people over 55 who are dependent on these programs who will be hurt the most when the programs collapse.  Just what will these people do then? 

 

See graphic below for couples, both one earner & two earner, that shows the projected lifetime Social Security benefits compared to the lifetime taxes paid in.  The lower the annual income the higher the projected lifetime benefits ratio.  Two earner couples start to pay more in lifetime taxes than they receive in benefits around the $130,000 annual income level while the same is true for single people around the $65,000 annual income level (not shown on graphic).

 

 click on graphic to enlarge

 
3) reintroducing the public option to the ObamaCare legislation – This is the next step toward single payer universal healthcare but ObamaCare has its own problems in the meantime.  Average premium hikes for 2017 are 25% across the 39 states served by the federally run online market (22% increases are the average hike for all insurance marketplaces, both federal and state-based exchanges), before subsidies, with increases ranging all the way up to 116% in Arizona.  With United Health, Humana, & Aetna dropping out of some state exchanges many consumers have far fewer plans to choose from.  Some consumers have lost coverage because smaller insurers have shut down.  And of course many consumers cannot see the doctor of their choice.
 
The welfare part comes in because 85% of customers on the exchanges qualify for subsidies which reduce the monthly premiums.  And more than half the people who receive subsidies to help pay their premiums also qualify for additional assistance that reduces their deductibles in a feature of ObamaCare known as cost sharing reduction subsidies. 
 
But the deductibles are still too high for many people to pay their hospital bills meaning hospitals are still suffering from bad debt. "It feels like a sucker punch.  When someone has a really high deductible, effectively they're still uninsured, and most people in Childress don't have $5,000 lying around to pay their bills" says John Henderson, chief executive of Childress Regional Medical Center in Texas.
 
So taxpayers keep paying their fair share & everyone else's for that matter.
 
4) enacting a $15 per hour federal minimum wage law – Just debunk this Democrat idea by asking how can a politician declare a worker is suddenly worth more to an employer than they were the day before – that is what a raise in the minimum wage really is, a government decree.
 
The people most hurt by raising the federal minimum wage are the most unskilled workers – people who do not add more to a businesses' revenue than to costs when making a higher wage.  Women are twice as likely to fall into this category than men.  Teenagers are especially priced out of the labor market by increases in the minimum wage more than any other group - with the biggest cost being their lost opportunity to gain experience & training that they will need later in life.  In essence the people who carry their weight @ a wage rate agreed to by their employer & themselves, but not @ a higher rate, will be the ones who lose their jobs.
 
Democrats love to automatically assume the high moral ground by saying Republicans & Tea Partiers abandon the morality issue in not caring about low income people who do not make a living wage – but every bit of evidence I am aware of makes me not trust Democrats & government with morality.
 
5) providing free college to people making less than $125,000 per year, mandating overtime pay for salaried personnel, enacting paid family leave legislation, & increasing the proposed 65,000 poorly vetted Syrian refugees by hundreds of percentage points in her quest for simultaneous open borders & a welfare state & all the government-dependent problems that follow such an arrangement - These points only further cripple what's left of America's free enterprise system by continuing the last sixteen years of two-party government-dependent socialism. 
 

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Hillary's Doublespeak

Thanks to a new 2016 subscriber to RTE for sending this collection of Hillary Clinton's changing positions & deceptions – the video is only 4 minutes long so please let me know of any double-dealings, frauds, trickeries, lies, or false pretenses you would like to add to help make the list more complete.
 
click on photo to enlarge
 

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Answer To "Who Said It?" Quiz Reveals Election Choice

No one has had more quotes misattributed to him than Thomas Jefferson – click here for a list of misattributions compiled by the historians @ Monticello.  Makes me wonder if TJ ever said anything @ all other than what he spoke directly to a young Ronald Reagan about age being unimportant.  Early in his administration Reagan said, speaking of Jefferson – "We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.  And ever since Jefferson told me that, I stopped worrying."
 
I have also seen one of my favorites -  "I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace; that two are called a law firm; and that three or more become a Congress!" – attributed to Ben Franklin or John Adams.  Actually it was neither – it was the character John Adams in the Broadway play 1776 that said it as the opening line of the play.
 
But we probably never will know whether Lenin or Lord Keynes was the originator of the famous saying that Keynes (Essays In Persuasion, p 78 – 1931) attributed to Lenin, although later researchers attributed to Keynes, – "Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of Society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."
 
Ever since first reading Lenin's thought decades ago I took inspiration from it & have tried to live my life with the people I thought could diagnose those hidden forces of destruction.  I always told Carol we want to spend our time with the one tenth of one percent who could figure out what Lenin was talking about.  No, its not that I got the arithmetic wrong, it is that I always remembered it as one man in a thousand, not million.
 
No matter the author the sentiment is certainly true – just look @ America today where it takes a husband & wife going into the workplace to bring home two paychecks of debased currency so that ends can @ least see each other if not totally meet.  The purchasing power of the middle class has not increased in over 40 years.  The median earnings for men working full time year round were stagnate @ $50,000 per year in constant 2014 dollars from 1972 to the present.
 
There are 94 million Americans who do not have jobs & are not looking for one – see graph below for breakdown of U-6 unemployment/underemployment rate as of July 2015.  U-6 was still 9.7% in September (up from 9.6% in June).  Some of the 94 million people are too young to work & some are too old but it still is a record number & these people need a growing economy to sustain them in their youth & their old age.
 
The U.S. GDP inflation-adjusted (real) annual growth rate of 2% under BO's first seven years in office is the weakest expansion since World War II - with a slowing in the first half of 2016 to a 1% annual growth rate & projections of 1.8% for all of 2016.  At 2% growth it takes 35 years for the economy to double & @ 1% growth it takes 70 years to double so people favoring Democrat party government-dependent policies are asking for little to no increases in their standard of living during their entire lifetimes.
 
The Census Bureau reports that fewer people own their own home than in any time in the last 50 years. 
 
None of the above is the stuff that prosperity & wealth creation are made of & Hillary Clinton will not only continue but will expand BO's policies that brought us the deliberate continuous unrelenting underemployment, stagnate standard of living, & misery that is turning into the new normal for America.
 
 click on graph to enlarge

All of this means that people are increasingly living by spending down the wealth accumulated over their lifetimes &/or their parents lifetimes – exactly what Lenin had in mind whether he said it or not.
 
With the above background I submit below a six question quiz that requires you to identify "who said it"? 
 
Following the questions I present the answers – unlike the above three examples all of these six quotations have been positively identified as to speaker, date, place, & context with which they were said.
 
Please don't peek – answer all of the questions before looking @ the answers. 
 
I am interested to know how you make out – so please let me know.
      
1) "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
 
A. Karl Marx       B. Adolph Hitler       C. Joseph Stalin       D. Barack Obama       E. None of the above
 
2) "It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, & for the few . . . & to replace it with shared responsibility, for shared prosperity."
 
A. Lenin             B. Mussolini             C. Idi Amin             D. Barack Obama        E. None of the above
 
3) "(We) . . . can't just let business as usual go on, & that means something has to be taken away from some people."
 
A. Nikita  Khrushchev        B.  Joseph Goebbels          C. Boris Yeltsin       D. Barack Obama         E. None of the above
 
4) "We have to build a political consensus & that requires people to give up a little bit of their own . . . in order to create this common ground."
 
A. Mao Zedong              B. Hugo Chavez                C. Kim Jong II         D. Barack Obama          E. None of the above
 
5) "I certainly think the free-market has failed."
 
A.  Karl Marx                    B. Lenin                            C. Molotov              D. Barack Obama          E. None of the above
 
6) "I think it's time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched."
 
A. Pinochet                       B. Milosevic                      C. Saddam Hussein       D. Barack Obama      E. None of the above
 
No peeking!
 
Scroll down for answers . . . 
 
(1)  E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/29/2004
 
(2)  E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 5/29/2007
 
(3)  E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
 
(4)  E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
 
(5)  E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007
 
(6)  E. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 9/2/2005
 
Click here & here to see the statist context with which each of the six quotations was made.  But whatever the context the point is they were Hillary's words.
 
America is off the rails as Trump falls further & further behind Hillary Clinton in the polls, who along with her husband are the most corrupt, crooked, & scripted-to-say-anything people imaginable; whereas Trump is a multi-billionaire who told Oprah many decades ago that he would run for president only if he thought "it got so bad" that his leadership was needed. 
 
For voters to abandon Trump for his alleged, & highly possible if not probable, misdeeds in favor of the Clintons misses the entire point of where the country is headed.  Over their years in Arkansas & then in the White House we know for sure that both Clintons were involved with the actual deeds described by the same sort of allegations being made against Trump.  Why should we side with the Clintons to our continued statist government-dependent detriment when we have a chance with Trump to undo the politically correct things that are destroying our country?  It is many of the same people who feign offense @ Trump's alleged racist & sexist statements who go to the raunchiest movies they can find for entertainment, could only hope to be in charge of beauty contests, listen to the Howard Stern radio program where Trump has been a guest, & engage in locker room talk that makes me wonder what example they are themselves for their daughters & granddaughters.
 
Trump has surrounded himself with advisers representing all sides especially on the economy – from protectionist professor Peter Navarro of the University of California, Irvine, to Larry Kudlow & Steve Moore, both advocates of free market policies & supply side economics, to Judy Shelton, an advocate for sound money & return to the gold standard.  This mixture of policies certainly has a better chance of improving America than the Clintons' socialist plan of higher taxes on the job creators if for no other reason than Trump really wants to help & the Clintons don't.
 
We had better be very sure that Trump's transgressions warrant electing Hillary & continuing the path that two thirds of Americans think is the wrong one.  It is best to look past the titillating talk of the women claiming sexual harassment by Trump & look @ the more substantive list of WikiLeaks news dumps that show the Clintons for what they are – connivers who will do or say anything to return to the White House.
 
Democrats show that they are politically playing the rest of us for fools when they say that Trump should be disqualified from becoming president for his words but did not think that Bill Clinton should have been removed from office for his actions after the proven Lewinski affair of oral sex in the White House with a 22 year old intern. 
 
To fall for the Democrats' political strategy is to surrender the presidency to Hillary Clinton who has calculatingly stood by her man, to a fault, attacking Bill Clinton's accusers even as she now supports Trump's accusers.  Where would Hillary be if not for Bill?  Certainly not the Democrat nominee & that is what she has focused on & worked for all of these years.
 
If Hillary wins Trump will return to the luxurious life he left 16 months ago while an ever increasing percentage of Americans will continue to become dependent on government for larger portions of their incomes – the Death Of Democracy spiral that ends liberty in America as we have known it all of our lives.  Hillary will continue, or worse yet expand, both BO's government-dependent policies that will ensure slow or no economic or job growth & the federal regulations that result in more than $2 trillion in annual compliance costs that ensure poor productivity increases & lackluster job growth.
 
But getting back to the quotes: Jerry Falwell Jr. summed the election up nicely – "concentrate on America's future – not Trump's past."
 
And even more basic & to the point Dr. Franklin replied when asked what members of the Constitutional Convention had brought - "A Republic, madam – if you can keep it."
 

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Some Common Sense Needed

Thanks to a long time subscriber of RTE who sent the below list of points that obviously need some common sense like: Why do people order double cheeseburgers, large fries, & a diet coke? or Why don't you ever see the headline "Psychic Wins Lottery"? 
 
After enjoying the rest of the points on the list I thought of a few more myself (please add any yourself):
 
When you call a bank, insurance company, water company, Veterans' Administration, Social Security office, or any government office, before you are connected to a live person, the recording tells you that your call will be recorded; when Hillary Clinton was interrogated by the FBI regarding her mishandling of top secret classified information the questioning was not recorded.
 
You have to show proper ID to rent a car, rent a hotel room, apply for a fishing license, rent an apartment, open a bank account, renew your driver's license, open your safe deposit box, apply for a job, or get married – but you don't need any ID to vote.
 
Following a shooting death of an unarmed black man by white police officers TV pundits strain to say that most, or even some, police officers are good, dedicated, well intentioned people; but never mention the same traits about the rioters & looters being shown on camera while the pundits speak – leaving it unsaid or @ least implied that the rioters & looters are all good, dedicated, well intentioned people who are just assembling to redress their grievances.
 
People can walk around drug stores or grocery stores talking into cell phones in a loud voice so that every word they speak is heard; & then leave the store being more than happy to sign a petition protecting their constitutional right to privacy.  (BTW - Students of the Constitution know there is no constitutional right to privacy.)
 
Sharing selfies of marked election ballots were banned by a New Hampshire law - but a federal appeals court struck down the law.  NH is considering taking the case to the Supreme Court where no photos are allowed.
 
Hillary says her use of a single e-mail account was clearly a mistake & she has taken responsibility for it – when people make mistakes they get grounded or sit in a corner with a dunce cap on.  How did Hillary take responsibility?
 
Congress took off for five weeks vacation this summer – back for four weeks to work on the budget before the end of the fiscal year, September 30 – & then they take off four more weeks to campaign for reelection.  Compare this to the original Constitution that called for citizen government – "The Congress shall assemble @ least once in every Year, & such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December" – changed by the 20th Amendment, ratified on January 23, 1933, that called for Congress to assemble @ noon on January 3 every year.  (This change is one of the root causes of all of our problems.)
 
Hillary tells a crowd that includes Warren Buffet that her plan is to raise taxes on the middle class – they are so giddy that they applaud wildly – including Buffet who in truth wants this.
 
Hillary tells an adoring crowd that her plan is to have the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes – the crowd applauds approvingly as if all of them pay their fair share of taxes.  (In 2012, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.2 percent of all income taxes while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.8 percent).
 
One very timely point – why do Democrats think Donald Trump should be disqualified from becoming president but did not think that Bill Clinton should have been removed from office:
 
click on photo to enlarge
 
*** 
Only in this world:
 
do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes @ the front check out counter.
 
do banks leave vault doors open & then chain the pens to the counters.
 
do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway & put our useless junk in a locked garage.
 
do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten & buns in packages of eight.
 
do they have drive-up ATMs with braille lettering.
 
Ever wonder:
 
Why the sun lightens our hair but darkens our skin?
 
Why is "abbreviated" such a long word?
 
Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor & dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?
 
Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
 
Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?
 
Why isn't there mouse-flavored cat food?
 
Why didn't Noah swat those two mosquitoes?
 
Why do they sterilize the needle for the lethal injection?
 
You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes?  Why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?
 
Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
 
Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?
 
If flying is so safe why do they call the airport the terminal?
 

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Why Lovers Of America Should Vote For Trump

The polls are tightening is the desired report from a media that is clamoring for ratings during the next five weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign.  These tightening polls are of the popular vote, for the most part, & are a much more interesting headline than just reporting the status of the Florida race – if Trump loses Florida it is game over, followed in importance closely by Pennsylvania & Iowa. 
 
If those above three states turn in Trump's favor we have a race, if not an outright Trump win. 
 
The trifecta is harder than you may think with Pennsylvania being the hard nut to crack.  PA is not really a swing state having gone for the Democrat the last six presidential elections.  There are about 1 million more registered Democrats in PA than registered Republicans so quite often the Republican pulls close only to fall back @ the end.
 
But the media focuses on the popular vote polls because it is much easier for people to grasp – although misleading because it is only the result of the electoral college that counts.  Just tell Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden (1876), Grover Cleveland (1888), or Al Gore (2000) that the popular vote polls showed them winning the presidency – Gore won the popular vote by 543,816 votes & as we all know lost the election.
 
The great Duquesne economics professor Antony Davies & James R. Harrigan have issued a report entitled Government Debt and Spending in 4 Graphs that shows clearly what Trump (or really any Republican) is facing.  Please review the following table from the report that shows that @ least the bottom 60% of income earners, on average, receive more in the form of tax credits and transfers from the federal government than they pay in taxes to the federal government.
 
  click on table to enlarge
 
As indicated in the above table even those in the fourth quintile pay only a modest 8% net or effective tax rate, on average, meaning that taken all together 80% of the income earners in the country are not personally interested in tax reform because they don't pay any or much tax @ all but are interested in maintaining the government programs that they benefit from.  I have pointed out for years that this is the prime reason the FairTax cannot catch on & for that matter neither can any of the various versions of the flat income tax.
 
Yes, those in the middle class receive $3,600, on average, more in benefits than they pay in federal taxes each year.  In fact people in the top two quintiles currently pay $1.5 trillion in taxes that go to those in the bottom three quintiles.  This means that a majority of Americans – almost a supermajority – have a personal interest in expanded government.  The more government spends, the more they stand to receive.
 
Scott Hodge, President of the Tax Foundation, answered Hillary Clinton's implied question – "What is the fair share of taxes that the wealthy should be paying" – when he calculated that in order to bring every family in America to average would require the people in the top two quintiles to pay higher taxes than they currently do with people in the top quintile paying the vast majority of an additional $2.4 trillion per year in federal taxes or 74% of their income. 
 
I refer to this phenomenon as the Death Of Democracy principle that has been the undoing of all the world's great civilizations once the majority of voters realize they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.
 
One of Trump's appeals to me is that he offers a chance to @ least slow down this destructive slide into government dependence – a slide that Hillary Clinton only accelerates.
 
***
 
Polls showing the division of the popular vote of Hispanics has been a good indicator of the general election winner the past several cycles (see graphs below) – possibly because there is such a large margin between the candidates since 2008.  In 2012 the biggest expert I know of regarding the importance of immigration & demographics blurted out several weeks before that election that "Romney could not win" when the polls showed Mitt only receiving 27% of the Hispanic vote.  Trump is currently polling @ 17% among Hispanics meaning he will need a much larger percentage than the already large percentage of whites that Romney received in 2012 in order to break even on this losing position.
 
It is estimated that a Republican will need @ least 40% of the Hispanic vote in order to have a chance because lower percentages are a major problem for candidates in states with a large Hispanic population.
 
click on graphs to enlarge
 
In this same regard only 26% of Asian-Americans voted for Romney in 2012.  Only 21% of Asian-Americans support Trump according to Morning Consult.
 
***
 
Early voting is a more subtle influence on the determination of the presidency than the two influences described above – if only because both Hillary & Trump talk about November 8 being Election Day.  The percentage of early votes cast nationally has more than doubled since 2000 – see table below.  A few days before the 2012 Presidential Election Day Romney was campaigning in Florida, after early voting had started, talking about Election Day being November 6, 2012 – in fact over half the ballots cast in Florida that year were before November 6.
 
  click on table to enlarge
 
In the last two presidential races the Democrats have been more effective in getting their supporters to vote early.  For example, although Romney won the Election Day vote BO won the early voting & the electoral votes in Iowa – see table below.
 
click on table to enlarge
 
click on table from AP to enlarge
 
In 2012 seventy-four percent of Blacks voted before Election Day in the battleground state of North Carolina – this is a crucial state for Trump who is making outreaches to the Black community – but is it too late?
 
The following states began early voting in September, 2016 including Iowa & Minnesota – it is not unreasonable to project current margins in the polls, following the first debate last Monday, favoring Mrs. Clinton will stand up during @ least some of the early voting process:
 

9/23/16  Idaho, Minnesota, South Dakota, Vermont

9/24/16  Maine, Maryland, New Jersey

9/29/16  Illinois, Iowa, North Dakota, Wyoming

The beginning of early voting for the rest of the states who allow early voting is as follow:

10/10/16 California, Nebraska

10/11/16 Montana, New Mexico, Utah

10/12/16 Arizona, Indiana, Ohio

10/17/16 Georgia

10/19/16 Kansas, Tennessee

10/20/16 North Carolina

10/21/16 Washington

10/22/16 Nevada

10/24/16 Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Texas, Wisconsin

10/25/16 Hawaii, Louisiana

10/26/16 West Virginia

10/28/16 Massachusetts

10/29/16 Florida

10/30/16 District of Columbia

11/3/16 Oklahoma

The early voting advantage logically would go to the campaign with the best ground game (& the candidate in the lead when early voting starts as indicated above) – i.e., the Democrats who have never left offices established in 2008 in some of these states.  For instance Hillary has over 300 staffers in 57 offices in Ohio & 55 field offices & hundreds of organizers in PA while Trump is relying on the RNC who has 112 staffers in Ohio & 31 field offices.

***

The biggest point that favors Trump is his projected single digit loss in the millenials category.  BO won millenials with 66% in 2008 & 60% in 2012.  Hillary leads 38% to Trump's 33% with Gary Johnson & Jill Stein combining for 24%.  If Trump can keep the millennial loss in single digits & pick up a higher percentage of Whites than Romney won it should make a big difference in closing the gap & could be the key to winning.

***

Although there have been many polls over recent years showing the propensity of Americans, especially young Americans, to prefer socialism over capitalism the best indication of this preference is Socialist Bernie Sanders winning primaries/caucuses in 22 states with a total of 43.2% of the popular vote or 12,029,699 votes.  Sanders also drove Hillary Clinton to the socialist left during the primaries.  See graph below – green states were won by Sanders.

click on graphic to enlarge

Higher taxes & more regulation is all that can be seen if Hillary wins the White House with promises like expanding Social Security benefits, reintroducing the public option to the ObamaCare legislation, enacting a $15 per hour federal minimum wage law, providing free college to people making less than $125,000 per year, mandating overtime pay for salaried personnel, & enacting paid family leave legislation.  These policies continue the type of BO's policies that deliberately produced the current stagnate economy & do not make for a good investment climate – but there are strong indications, like the above Sanders' electoral results, that people want this.

But who could blame the young adults, for their anxiety & dissatisfaction, who can't find jobs & never will in their chosen college educated fields under the mixed economic & political system (way more than 50% socialism with traces of capitalism) we have today.  The problem is the youth of America has been brainwashed into thinking what they are experiencing is pure capitalism & that they are due all the socialist freebies being promised.  These people are so poorly informed that they do not know what they are losing
or why they are losing it.
 

The U.S. GDP inflation-adjusted (real) annual growth rate of 2% under BO's first seven years in office is the weakest expansion since World War II - with a slowing in the first half of 2016 to a 1% annual growth rate & projections of 1.8% for all of 2016.  In fact there is a cruel record of ten straight years where the real GDP has not reached 3% in any year.  See graph below – horizontal red line represents 3% real annual GDP growth.

click on graph to enlarge

At 2% growth it takes 35 years for the economy to double & @ 1% growth it takes 70 years to double so people favoring Democrat party government dependent policies are asking for little to no increases in their standard of living during their entire lifetimes.

Both men & women in their prime working years (aged 25 to 54) have not recovered to the jobs levels when the Great Recession began in December 2007. See graphs below.

  click on graphs to enlarge
 
Now as important as all of the above described misery is that Hillary will surely inflict on humanity if she wins the presidency, Trump offers something even greater than an alternative economic plan, energy plan, or superior foreign affairs policy.
 
In a Trump presidency we have the chance for a start of a change to the political correctness mindset that is ruining America unless it is reversed – & quickly.  Items like eliminating the fallacious destructive anchor baby claim to birthright citizenship, settling the incompatible relationship of Muslims who follow Sharia law taking a U.S. citizenship oath, banning people from Muslim countries from entering America until we know that immigrants & refugees from these countries are not terrorists, ending sanctuary cities, & restoring the enforcement of immigration laws – are all bedrock matters that must be settled before issues like tax reform, healthcare, climate change, the national debt, the budget deficit, or even adequate national defense can be addressed. 
 
Without Trump none of the politically incorrect issues listed above would have ever been brought up @ all by any other person running for office & for this every lover of America should thank Trump whether or not they hate him for any or every other reason – & should vote for him instead of Hillary Clinton.