Monitoring Your Credit Score
and Credit Report

Original Post
http://guides.wsj.com/personal-finance/credit/how-to-monitor-your-credit-score-and-credit-report/

• Tips

  • You're entitled to one free credit report, once a year, from each of the three credit reporting agencies -- Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
  • Higher FICO scores mean lower interest rates and can save you thousands of dollars. Try to boost your score before you apply for a loan.
  • Order your free credit report at ANNUALcreditreport.com. Avoid sites like freecreditreport.com. 
  
  Set up a calendar alert and run one of the three report every 4 months.
  
  Bad credit can result in unfavorable interest rates that cost you thousands when you take out a mortgage, a car loan or a student loan. It could block you from leasing that apartment you’ve been pining for. And it can be a black mark on your record that even prevents you from landing your dream job.
  So it pays to know the essentials of your credit report and related score, the behaviors that can make your score rise or plummet, and the services that help you monitor your credit.
  Your credit report is a summary of your borrowing and repayment history—any new accounts, closed accounts, unpaid bills, late bills, and other activity. If you have a loan, mortgage or credit card, it will show up here. Your credit report provides the basis for your credit score.
  
  Your credit score (also called your Fair Isaac Corp. (FICO) score) is a three-digit number between 300 and 850 calculated from a formula that’s designed to gauge your creditworthiness. The three main credit-reporting agencies (Equifax Inc., Experian PLC, and TransUnion) buy the formula from Fair Isaac. The bureaus use your personal data and crunch the numbers differently, so your score will vary slightly at each agency. When a lender considers your application for credit, they turn to one (or all) of the credit agencies for your score, which indicates your reliability as a borrower.
  
  Here are a few ingredients of a credit score:
  • Payment History: Whether you pay your bills on time, including credit cards, student loans, utility bills, or any other lender or service provider that reports to the big three agencies. Getting this right is easy: don’t blow the due date.
  • Amounts owed: The breakdown of your credit balances, and how they compare to the limits of what you’re allowed to take out. If you’re maxed out, it can hurt.
  • Years of credit: The age on your accounts. The longer your credit history, the better lenders can gauge your ability to repay. Unfortunately, the formula knocks young borrowers who don’t have an established, detailed history.
  • New credit: How many accounts have you opened recently, and how many lenders have inquired about your credit? The more activity, the more it appears you’re about to go on a debt binge.
  • Types of credit: The mix of accounts you hold, such as auto loans, credit cards, student loans, or mortgages.
  
  In general, higher credit scores equate to lower interest rates, meaning less cash you’ll have to fork over during the life of a loan. Recently, credit experts think any score above 720 will get you the optimum interest rate. In 2007, the national average FICO score is 723, and 58% of Americans have a score higher than 700, according to Fair Isaac.
  Remember that your credit score is important, but it’s not the sole factor in whether you get approved for a loan, credit card, or other forms of credit. Most lenders also look at your annual income, employment history, and other factors.
  
  With many consumers worried about shaky credit—especially with the threat of identity theft and credit card fraud—many financial institutions, companies, and the credit bureaus themselves are pitching products that guard your credit. Their credit monitoring services watch for new accounts, a surge in balances, or other changes to your accounts. Some will produce detailed reports about your credit score and suggest ways to make it more attractive to lenders.
  Don’t confuse credit monitoring with identity theft protection. Credit card fraud is just a piece of the larger problem of identity theft. Paying someone to monitor your credit will not halt identity theft or unauthorized uses of your Social Security number or other personal data, although it can help you detect problems before they escalate.
  
  Do You Need Credit Monitoring?
  The thought of a thief running up huge credit-card debts in your name is frightening. But credit-monitoring firms are banking on that fear, especially if you’re already a victim of a data breach. Before you shell out $100 (or more) per year for a credit watchdog, make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Maybe you know that you won’t keep adequate watch yourself. Perhaps you’re applying for a mortgage and want to make sure your credit remains pristine. Or you could just be obsessed with the idea of credit fraud. If so, credit monitoring might be worth the peace of mind.
  
  If you’re on the fence about whether you need credit monitoring, consider these self-serve approaches for protecting your credit:
  
  Watch your bank and credit card statements for fishy transactions — Make a habit of scanning your financial accounts daily, or at least weekly. Some creditors will even allow you to set up your own free alerts to notify you when online transactions are made on your account or when a purchase exceeds a specified amount.
  
  Keep an eye on your credit report — By law, you’re entitled to a free report every year from each of the three bureaus, so you might as well order a different one every four months. Scan it for abnormal activity, such as accounts or credit cards you didn’t open. You can order the report through each agency, or at annualcreditreport.com. Don’t fall for the add-ons; you just want the score.
  
  If you’re curious about your credit score, you might be able to access it for free. Many banks don’t offer this perk—instead they’ll package your score with inflated charts and graphs and make you pay for it. But it doesn’t hurt to ask for it. Another tack is to ask an inquirer (car salesman, credit card company, or landlord) for a peek at your score. They’ll pull your score before doing business with you, and might share it if you ask nicely.
  
  You can also take other common-sense measures, such as protecting your credit accounts online and shredding sensitive documents, to help prevent fraud. It’s good to know that you have the power to control your credit without paying someone else to do it. Remember, annualcreditreport.com is where to order your free credit report.
  
  How to Picking the Right Service and Boosting Your Credit Score
  You should base your buying decision on how comprehensive you want the monitoring to be and what you’re willing to pay for it. If you’re conscientious about your credit, there are many common-sense steps you can take yourself to keep your credit healthy. In that case, credit monitoring may not be worth the extra money.
  
  The big three credit agencies all offer products that will try to detect fraud and generate your credit score. Each provides a variety of packages depending on how vigilant you want them to be. Many banks offer similar services — look around, you might be able to get a better offer through your financial institution. And the identity-theft players, like LifeLock and TrustedID, also pitch credit monitoring as part of their ID theft protection services.
  
  Make sure you consider the cost before signing on. Some services charge as much as $50 monthly to keep tabs on your credit, which can total $600 annually. Weigh that expense against your odds of suffering credit card fraud. By one estimate, identity theft touches 3 percent of Americans each year—with credit card fraud just a fraction of that number.
  Finally, watch out for the bureaus promoting fancy scores that purport to measure your credit risk by some reconfigured formula. You only want the FICO score, the same one lenders request. The other so-called FAKO scores—like Experian’s PLUS score, TransUnion’s TransRisk score or Experian’s Credit ScoreTracker—are money drains. They’ll just confuse you about where you really stand. If you just want your score, you can order it through Fair Isaac.
  
  If you’re merely looking to keep your credit in good health, it’s not too tricky. Limit your credit cards, set up automated payments to pay your bills on time, space out when you apply for loans and accounts, avoid maxing out your credit cards and carrying unpaid balances. And keep it up for years and years. In short, don’t go nuts with credit, and you should be fine.
  If you’re paying for credit monitoring or just doing it on your own, be sure to report any errors you spot in your report. Contact the agency that sent you the report—each of them has a process for reporting errors. Incorrect info can be damaging to your credit.
  

Dear Millennials: Your Love of Socialism Could be America’s Downfall…

Original Tag
http://louderwithcrowder.com/dear-millennials-your-love-of-socialism-will-be-americas-downfall/

Dear Millennials: Your Love of Socialism Could be America’s Downfall…
Courtney Kirchoff Thursday March 31 2016

millennialssocialism

Dear young adults in figurative diapers,

Being an adult can be a major drag. We have to get jobs. Pay bills. Pay taxes. Make our own appointments. Go to bed early so we can get up early and shuffle on to work the next morning so we can pay for all the stuff we need to continue working. Also the refrigerator doesn’t magically fill itself. Someone should tell Whirlpool about that. Have you noticed that in order for food to be prepared… you have to prepare it? Ridiculous. I’m calling my mom.

http://louderwithcrowder.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WillFerrellMeatloaf.gif


Adulthood isn’t what we thought it would be. No, the economy these past several years hasn’t exactly been stellar, either. Okay? Okay.

My fellow millennials, for sure we have our challenges. Many of you were raised in broken homes. Many of you were exposed to divorce. It’s possible a lot of you didn’t live with your father or may not have known him at all. Combine home life with the rise of political correctness in school, taking its dangerous form of “self-esteem above all,” and no wonder you think life is unfair but you should have it all.

Look, I’m sorry life screwed you over in the early years. I’m sorry if you were shuffled to daycare day in and day out. I’m sorry if you don’t have memories of playing with your parents. But most of all, I’m sorry you were not instilled with the grand idea of personal responsibility. I’m sorry you were not empowered with the notion that YOU are the commander of your own life. If you take nothing else from this post, believe that no matter who you are, you can succeed. Without government.

Because guess what, my friends? Your abject loyalty to socialism is going to tank our country. Your insistence on getting what you want and making other people pay for it, all under the guise of “fairness,” will lead to ruin. For everyone. Including you.

You were likely taught in school of the virtues of socialism. How a government looking after its people via taking over businesses would promote equality. To each according to his need. Sharing, you were told, is caring. Awww! It’s a better world where everyone has the same things. It’s a better world when we’re all equal! No one is rich, no one is poor. Utopia.

http://louderwithcrowder.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/MindBlown.gif

Well, the education system kind of screwed fooled you. They told some white lies here and there. Why shouldn’t they? A public school is just a state school. A government school. Why wouldn’t those schools promote the same system which would ensure they continue on regardless of their quality? Regardless of the outcome? Follow the money. Public schools are funded by governments. It doesn’t seem to matter how poorly performing a school is, does it? Why is that? Because it doesn’t matter. FAIRNESS. EQUALITY. SCHOOL IS A RIGHT. HEATHER HAS TWO MOMMIES, YOU BIGOT!

The truth about socialism is much different. While you may think the tenets are lofty, fair, reasonable, and give you the feels, the reality is darker (read WW2 Survivor’s Account Draws Chilling Similarities between Nazism and Liberalism…). See, socialism removes human ambition from the equation. Actually it does more than that. Socialism punishes human ambition. Those who strive to be their best, to do their best, only highlight the masses of humans who do not strive. Who fail. And that’s just. Not. Fair. It’s not fair for a few people to succeed while others don’t.

Voila, socialism. The idea that people who suck at life get to take from people who don’t suck at life, because it’s not fair that a few people who are either brilliant, hard-working, both brilliant and hardworking, should succeed more than people who are not brilliant or hard-working. BOO! Socialism promotes human mediocrity.


http://louderwithcrowder.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SpaceBallsWhatReaction.gif

Question for you: Who are these angels in government who are going to make things fair? After you’ve answered that question, answer me this: why do you put more trust in these elected strangers, who address you while reading from a teleprompter, with YOUR LIFE than you trust your own self? Read Dear Liberals: Your Cult-like Faith in Government is Disturbing… Why do you put so much faith in Bernie Sanders’s plan to save you than you trust yourself to save you? Reminder, it took Bernie Sanders 40 years to earn a paycheck.

Why do you want to change the economy because you just cannot hack it?

Socialism is for losers. Socialism is for bums (see WATCH: Debunking the Myth of ‘Democratic’ Socialism)
http://louderwithcrowder.com/watch-debunking-the-myth-of-democratic-socialism/
. Socialism is for people who think life is unfair and therefore everyone else, who does work, must take care of you. Or even if you are taking care of yourself, you still think everyone else should help those losers who can’t care for themselves. Seeing a theme here? Socialism is for people who see the worst in others. Socialism assumes humans are weak. Pathetic. Read Dear ‘Men’ Who Vote Bernie Sanders: You’re Not Men at All…

America was founded on the idea that human beings should be free to live their own lives. To be masters of their own destiny. That, by the way, is the definition of American Exceptionalism. People, not government, should be in charge of their own lives. They should be free. Free to succeed. Free to fail.

Which is why the blind embrace of socialism would systematically unwind what America is. Why? Because a lot of you just plain suck. Sorry for the tough love, but come on.

Interestingly, and I’m not using that word sarcastically, when you socialist millennials decide to pull on your big boy and big girl pants, go out into the world and fight for yourself, you leave socialism behind. After learning you can take care of yourself, it just requires a crap ton of work and less whining, your imaginary friend socialism loses its appeal.

From The Washington Post:

    The expanded social welfare state Sanders thinks the United States should adopt requires everyday people to pay considerably more in taxes. Yet millennials become averse to social welfare spending if they foot the bill. As they reach the threshold of earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year, the majority of millennials come to oppose income redistribution, including raising taxes to increase financial assistance to the poor.

Lemme translate that for you: you’re totally cool with socialism…until you’re the one paying for it.

Attack on the GOP Ascendancy

From Commentary Magazine just after the election. I thought that this was an excellent review of where we are now and will be until Trump either succeeds or fails as a president.

John Podhoretz / Nov. 12, 2016

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The Republican Party is in the ascendancy. Who could have predicted it? No one. The response of Democrats and liberals since the election has been screaming, crying, and telling tall tales about racist incidents on social media while providing no evidence that they’ve taken place—and, on the activist Left, rioting. That, alas, maybe anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear could have predicted.

First, the ascendancy. Among the many things everybody got wrong about this election, including me, was what we were seeing happening on the Right side of the political divide. We looked at the heated primary, the rise of Donald Trump, the right-of-center politicians who refused to support him and criticized him, and the conservative media that attacked him, and we concluded that the Republican Party was in crisis and in danger of breaking up. Up until the moment it became clear Trump was winning Florida, the major discussion point about the Right was the “civil war” that was about to break out and whether for the first time in 160 years the United States would see the rise of a serious third party.

Oops. Crow eaten, very much including by me.

After election night, the Republican Party is just fine. More than fine. The Republican Party is arguably in the strongest position it has held in the modern era—holding the Presidency, House, Senate, 33 governorships, 69 of 99 state legislatures, total control of offices in 25 states.

It turns out the crisis is not within Republicanism, but within conservatism. This isn’t a complete surprise, of course; fissures have been evident for years on various aspects of foreign and domestic policy. But if Trump does 20 percent of what he has said he’ll do when it comes to his policy agenda, he will create crises on the Right in relation to trade, the size of government, American commitments abroad, and the projection of American power. He will be a Republican president pushing an agenda that unsettles and upends many (largely) settled questions.

Will conservatives abandon their principles because the team with which they are aligned now has extraordinary political power? Will conservatives decide honestly they were wrong about certain fundamentals if Trump implements new approaches and those approaches work? If the changes Trump does make do not work, of course, his heresies will be blamed. What’s even more important, if they don’t work, the Republican ascendancy will end as quickly and decisively as it began.

The question for Democrats, liberals, and Leftists is this: After eight years in which perhaps their key talking point was that the problem with American governance was the GOP’s utter refusal to work with Democrats, can they now turn on a dime and simply do the same to the Trump Republicans? As the Magic 8-Ball says, signs point to yes. How else to interpret the behavior over the past five days, the riots and public nervous breakdowns by Leftists and liberals who cannot believe that what has happened has happened?

There is no real way to claim Trump’s electoral college majority of 304 is illegitimate–a charge that has been the favored tactic of the more paranoiac and conspiratorially-minded Right and Left over the past 16 years. George W. Bush was deemed illegitimate because he supposedly stole Florida; Barack Obama was deemed illegitimate because of the ridiculous charge he wasn’t actually born in America. Both of these absurdities seized the emotions and darkest ids of those whose true problem was that they couldn’t bear the policies being enacted and felt impotent in their efforts to block them.

So the claim instead is that Trump is, in his person, illegitimate. He’s racist and sexist and a demagogue and terrible. And this, I believe, has begun an interior process within the Democratic Left that opposing him by any means necessary is not only vital but a mark of moral superiority. And this grants people license to do illegitimate things in pursuit of delegitimizing the results of the election.

Many of the stories being retailed on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere about watermelons being smashed on cars and swastikas being etched into cars and water fountains suddenly featuring signs that say “Whites Only” are so patently invented it’s staggering how easily people are falling for them. (Case in point: How many arrests have been made in these cases? How many actual news stories verifying these supposed incidents have you read?) The ones that are lies are being told by those who are telling them because, I expect, they believe they are revealing a deeper truth: They may be inventing these hate crimes but, since Trump is himself a walking hate crime, it is in service to a higher cause.

So, too, the rioting, which is nonsensical since the places in which the riots are taking place were Hillary Clinton strongholds. It happened to set a marker and make it clear that the Republican ascendancy will be opposed at every turn by every possible means.

I feel entirely free to make this argument precisely because I myself viewed Trump’s rise during the Republican primaries as a frightening event that was lowering American discourse. Perhaps had, say, the GOP candidates going up against him chose to aim their fire and hundreds of millions at Trump rather than at each other in the fall and winter, and had the horrified media of the past two months not been devoted to giving him $2 billion worth of air time and attention, Trump might have been stopped before he was given the inestimable gift of facing the worst presidential candidate since Walter Mondale. (At least Mondale was an upstanding and morally unimpeachable person, as opposed to the egregiously amoral and crooked Hillary Clinton.)

Instead, there was a certain glee as liberals watched what they believed was a Republican dumpster fire from which they would benefit immeasurably. When Les Moonves of CBS said he didn’t like Trump but thought he was good for the bottom line, he was saying two things at once: I’m making money off the other guy and it’s a double delight because the team I oppose is going to be punished! No, they didn’t like Trump, but they believed he had risen up from the bubbling depths and would destroy conservatism and the GOP for them.

My views on Trump’s fitness haven’t changed. But I do not question his legitimacy. Instead, I question the legitimacy of the lies being told to discredit him and the riots being staged to set a marker for worse civil unrest to come. Every serious person should.

Three common arguments against Trump still being made

Three common arguments against Trump still being made

http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/im-a-coastal-elite-from-the-midwest-the-real-bubble-is-rural-america#sthash.fqVO5KUr.gbpl

 

This article prompted me to write this argument against three common charges against Donald Trump. These are dated arguments, but still make the rounds. They are being clung to by Democrats still reeling from the election of Donald J. Trump.

It is not the fault of the COastal Elite, rather the people from the Midwest

"To pin this election on the coastal elite is a cop-out. " Not the elite per se, The Clinton campaign was ignoring the issues and people of the Midwest. Bill Clinton apparently pointed this out but was over ridden. Obama recently said that Hillary did not get to this area enough.

The article repeats the standard false and outdated talking points regarding Donald J. Trump. Here I try to knock them down.

He makes three claims saying that these rubes from the Midwest voted for a man who...

 

CLAIMS

(1) violating the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent apartments to black people. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called

(2) Mexicans rapists, drug dealers and criminals. If we pin this election on coastal elites, we are excusing white working-class and rural Americans for voting for a man who called for a

(3) complete ban on Muslim immigration."

RESPONSES

(1) The government sued Trump. Trump sued the government. "Trump vehemently denied the claims, which he called "absolutely ridiculous," according to a 1973 New York Times article. Trump and his company filed a counter-suit the following December, claiming the government made baseless charges and asking for $100 million in damages. The court dismissed the counter-suit."

Trump agreed to stipulations but did not admit guilt. Hardly "violated."

Source: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/27/hillary-clinton/true-hillary-clinton-says-federal-government-sued-/

1973 was different time and place. This was two years before the TV show The Jeffersons came on the air to explore this issue. The Jeffersons went off the air in 1985 when the show was no longer provocative.(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072519/) This is very old news.

(2) Liberals always eliminate this crucial sentence/ "And some, I assume, are good people."

Source 6/16/2015: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/16/trump_mexico_not_sending_us_their_best_criminals_drug_dealers_and_rapists_are_crossing_border.html

Current position: Strengthen border security and reform immigration. The people illegally here in our country who are guilty of a crime will be deported or incarcerated. No different than Obama's position.

(3) Liberals ALWAYS stop the quoted sentence BEFORE this "until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on."

Source 12/7/2015: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration

Current position is "Extreme vetting." and probably country based.

We are in a race with the radical Islamic terrorists and cannot lose. It will only take one to destroy a city.

So in conclusion, it does not help to make the same old tired arguments. Let's see how he does and go about our business until there is something NEW to talk about.

"Donald Trump is going to be our president, We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” Hillary Rodham Clinton 11/09/2016

Is Bannon as bad as they say?

Is Stephen K. Bannon as bad as they say?

I did my own research so you can just click on the links

The links are exposed so, if you want, you can click with some confidence

Since the Election and the character assassination started

Main Stream media at it again saying Bannon is an anti-semite and a racist
Mostly based on a story written on Breitbart by, wait for it, a jew. Article here
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/05/15/bill-kristol-republican-spoiler-renegade-jew/
Refuted by these posts on Breitbart, with sources

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/11/14/stephen-k-bannon-friend-jewish-people-defender-israel/

and a live interview with the writer, Joel Pollack, on CNN
15:00 - 16:00 Challenge to these guys from Pollack
https://youtu.be/TMViDn_XKOk

And a link to an article mentioned in the interview
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

Wikipedia definition of Alt Right
The alt-right has no formal ideology, with the Associated Press stating that there is "no one way to define its ideology."
Curious that the left has no problem defining the Alt Right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/11/14/ben-carsons-former-press-secretary-bannon-allegations-no-patience/

Megan Kelly asking Newt Gingrich about Bannon on Fox News
https://youtu.be/BbQhbG_AFYU

Another CNN interview
1:00 Randy Evans of the RNC "Not surprised that Democrats would be overly critical of the chief strategist that beat them in the election" and neither should you be.
https://youtu.be/OIFPdpggXF0

 Zionist Organization of America defending Steve Bannon
http://zoa.org/2016/11/10342353-zoa-criticizes-adl-for-falsely-alleging-trump-advisor-bannon-is-anti-semitic/

Letter in the Hill by Boteach against the ADL By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, contributor - 11/15/16 09:48 AM EST
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/306035-letter-to-anti-defamation-leagues-jonathan

Historical Posts

Bannon appearing on Bill Mahers Show August 5, 2011 with a great panel including
Anthony Bourdain and Neil deGrasse Tyson
https://youtu.be/2HWGihz0UGg

• Highlights (for the time constrained) at 1:20
• 3:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson calls for a Businessman to help the US out of it's troubles. Be careful what you wish for.
• 5:50 Anthony Bourdain

Bannon in 2011 at the Tea Party Conference in South Carolina January 2016
https://youtu.be/-36PDP-2Fyw

Stephen K. Bannon at The Liberty Restoration Foundation in 2011 - explaining Financial Situation and trade deficit and how to fight and organize
We had then, 200 trillion in liabilities and 50 trillion in assets.

"Barrack Obama is not the problem, he is a symptom of a problem."
9:54 "Guys I respect tremendously, William Crystal, Dr. Krauthammer..."
19:00 Historical perspective
20:00 Listen to Occupy Wall Street
22:00 "We are not nativist, homophobic racists"

 https://youtu.be/0BSrJv0IpH

Bannon Interview on Hannity discussing the Movie he made called Undefeated in 2011
4:20 - Is where he defines the 2016 race
https://youtu.be/o3aa9D1Ar2Q


Bannon and Dinesh D'Souza on Patriot radio
https://youtu.be/EhaZn5sN4is

Quote from Politico on his radio show starting
“We’re particularly interested in Sanders since we think at least some of the issues driving [his surge] are very relevant to our audience,” Bannon said to Politico.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/10/26/siriusxm-announces-daily-breitbart-news-radio/

August 2016 after he was brought into the Trump campaign. He appears with the president of Citizens United.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KueRI3T7Pis

October 2016 interview with Mark Cuban before the MSNBC debate
2:50 Steve Bannon is a lot smarter than Donal Trump
https://youtu.be/_FSM7KhlBjc

Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily (11/9/2016) 
https://youtu.be/57n2KFc_350

Trump, Clinton and the Culture of Deference

Political correctness functions like a despotic regime. We resent it but we tolerate it.

 

Photo: Getty Images

By

Shelby Steele

Nov. 7, 2016 7:23 p.m. ET 

 

The current election—regardless of its outcome—reveals something tragic in the way modern conservatism sits in American life. As an ideology—and certainly as a political identity—conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for. There is a presumption in the culture that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality—this despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome.
In the broader American culture—the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education—conservatism suffers a decided ill repute. Why?
The answer begins in a certain fact of American life. As the late writer William Styron once put it, slavery was “the great transforming circumstance of American history.” Slavery, and also the diminishment of women and all minorities, was especially tragic because America was otherwise the most enlightened nation in the world. Here, in this instance of profound hypocrisy, began the idea of America as a victimizing nation. And then came the inevitable corollary: the nation’s moral indebtedness to its former victims: blacks especially but all other put-upon peoples as well.
This indebtedness became a cultural imperative, what Styron might call a “transforming circumstance.” Today America must honor this indebtedness or lose much of its moral authority and legitimacy as a democracy. America must show itself redeemed of its oppressive past.
How to do this? In a word: deference. Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies. Since then deference has become an almost universal marker of simple human decency that asserts one’s innocence of the American past. Deference is, above all else, an apology.
One thing this means is that deference toward victimization has evolved into a means to power. As deference acknowledges America’s indebtedness, it seems to redeem the nation and to validate its exceptional status in the world. This brings real power—the kind of power that puts people into office and that gives a special shine to commercial ventures it attaches to.
Since the ’60s the Democratic Party, and liberalism generally, have thrived on the power of deference. When Hillary Clinton speaks of a “basket of deplorables,“ she follows with a basket of isms and phobias—racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and Islamaphobia. Each ism and phobia is an opportunity for her to show deference toward a victimized group and to cast herself as America’s redeemer. And, by implication, conservatism is bereft of deference. Donald Trump supporters are cast as small grudging people, as haters who blindly love America and long for its exclusionary past. Against this she is the very archetype of American redemption. The term “progressive” is code for redemption from a hate-driven America.
So deference is a power to muscle with. And it works by stigmatization, by threatening to label people as regressive bigots. Mrs. Clinton, Democrats and liberals generally practice combat by stigma. And they have been fairly successful in this so that many conservatives are at least a little embarrassed to “come out” as it were. Conservatism is an insurgent point of view, while liberalism is mainstream. And this is oppressive for conservatives because it puts them in the position of being a bit embarrassed by who they really are and what they really believe.
Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life. We resent it, yet for the most part we at least tolerate its demands. But it means that we live in a society that is ever willing to cast judgment on us, to shame us in the name of a politics we don’t really believe in. It means our decency requires a degree of self-betrayal.
And into all this steps Mr. Trump, a fundamentally limited man but a man with overwhelming charisma, a man impossible to ignore. The moment he entered the presidential contest America’s long simmering culture war rose to full boil. Mr. Trump was a non-deferential candidate. He seemed at odds with every code of decency. He invoked every possible stigma, and screechingly argued against them all. He did much of the dirty work that millions of Americans wanted to do but lacked the platform to do.
Thus Mr. Trump’s extraordinary charisma has been far more about what he represents than what he might actually do as the president. He stands to alter the culture of deference itself. After all, the problem with deference is that it is never more than superficial. We are polite. We don’t offend. But we don’t ever transform people either. Out of deference we refuse to ask those we seek to help to be primarily responsible for their own advancement. Yet only this level of responsibility transforms people, no matter past or even present injustice. Some 3,000 shootings in Chicago this year alone is the result of deference camouflaging a lapse of personal responsibility with empty claims of systemic racism.
As a society we are so captive to our historical shame that we thoughtlessly rush to deference simply to relieve the pressure. And yet every deferential gesture—the war on poverty, affirmative action, ObamaCare, every kind of “diversity” scheme—only weakens those who still suffer the legacy of our shameful history. Deference is now the great enemy of those toward whom it gushes compassion.
Societies, like individuals, have intuitions. Donald Trump is an intuition. At least on the level of symbol, maybe he would push back against the hegemony of deference—if not as a liberator then possibly as a reformer. Possibly he could lift the word responsibility out of its somnambulant stigmatization as a judgmental and bigoted request to make of people. This, added to a fundamental respect for the capacity of people to lift themselves up, could go a long way toward a fairer and better America.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is the author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

The Costs of Clinton

Her policies are further left than Obama’s, and you know her ethics.

 Original Article here

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-costs-of-clinton-1478213912?emailToken=JRr8fvp4YnSSgNEwZ8wg1FBtZa4TF/TMQV2SJ3TLPFTLsjmM/b3xnfxu1oLt

Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.

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Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.
She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.
The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.
But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.
Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.
Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.
Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.
Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.
Lurking behind all this, as we’ve seen these past two weeks, is the familiar pattern of scandal fed by her penchant for secrecy and political paranoia. As journalist Carl Bernstein has noted, she shares Richard Nixon’s “obsession with enemies.” She surrounds herself with henchmen like Sidney Blumenthal and David Brock, who feed her instinct to stonewall and attack.
The most astonishing revelation of the 2016 campaign has been that neither she nor her husband learned anything from the ethical traumas of the 1990s. You would have thought they’d want to shed the legacy of the Lippo Group and the Lincoln-Bedroom-for-rent, but instead they built the same pay-to-play structure via the Clinton Foundation.
Mrs. Clinton made the astounding decision to use a private email server for official business so she could duck federal records laws. But when that was discovered, rather than admit the mistake and release everything, she and her retinue continued to resist and deflect and deceive. By her behavior in the past year, Mrs. Clinton has ratified the worst things her critics say about her.
Some of our friends argue that Mrs. Clinton’s corruption is tolerable because it is merely about gaining and maintaining political power. This understates how much the Clinton blending of public office with private gain erodes confidence in honest government. It feeds the leftist narrative that business is merely another arm of the state and thus reduces support for free markets.

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All of which means that if she does win on Tuesday, the manner of her victory would damage her ability to govern. Rather than win a policy mandate, she has chosen to destroy Mr. Trump personally. She would face a Congress that wants to investigate her from the first day and an electorate that is polarized and doesn’t trust her. Her instinct would be to lean even more on the left for political support, making compromise with Republicans in Congress even more difficult.
We’re as optimistic as anyone about the resilience of American democracy, but four more years of aggressive progressive rule would more deeply entrench the federal Leviathan across ever more of the economy and civic life. The space for private business and nonpolitical mediating social institutions would shrink.
The case for Mrs. Clinton over Donald Trump is that she is a familiar member of the elite and thus less of a jump into the unknown, especially on foreign policy. The case against her is everything we know about her political history.

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Credited to the WSJ

The Gamble of Trump

The hope of better policies comes with his manifest personal flaws.

Wall Street Journal 11/6/2016 - original link below

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gamble-of-trump-1478299393?emailToken=JRr8fvp4Yn6Vi9Izb8wg1FBtYaANAeuEA1TZaWzQJ03U8SWJ/rL7lvRu1oA%3D

 

The case for Donald Trump is political disruption. A broken Washington needs to be shaken up and refocused on the public good, and who better to do it than an outsider beholden to neither political party? If only that reform possibility didn’t arrive as a flawed personality who has few convictions and knows little about the world.

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The best hope for a Trump Presidency is that he has aligned himself with enough sound policy impulses that he could liberate the U.S. economy to grow faster again. He would stop the crush of new regulation, restore a freer market for health insurance, unleash U.S. energy production, and reform the tax code. His default priority would be growth, which the U.S. desperately needs after a decade of progressive focus on income redistribution and the worst economic recovery in 70 years.
Assuming Republicans hold Congress, the House GOP has already put many of these reforms in legislative language. Mr. Trump could adopt them as his own reform agenda and get a fast start on governing. With a GOP Senate he could fill Antonin Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court with someone from the fine list of candidates he has publicly released. For many voters, the future of the Court is by itself enough reason to support Mr. Trump.
Yet while this could be a 1980-like moment of economic renewal, Mr. Trump is no Ronald Reagan. The Gipper came to office with a coherent and firmly held world view formed by decades of reading and experience as a Governor. It isn’t obvious that Mr. Trump reads anything at all. He absorbs what he knows through conversation and watching TV, and he has no consistent philosophy.
This makes it hard to predict how he would respond to the shocks and surprises that buffet any President. His firmest policy conviction seems to be that trade is a zero-sum game and that America is losing from global commerce. But if he follows through on his vow to withdraw from trade pacts, impose tariffs on imports and punish U.S. companies that invest abroad, he could cause a recession. The main economic battle in a Trump Administration would be between his pro-growth domestic reforms and his anti-growth trade policy.

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The strongest argument against Mr. Trump, as Hillary Clinton has recognized, concerns his temperament and political character. His politics is almost entirely personal, not ideological. He overreacts to criticism and luxuriates in personal feuds.
President Obama’s greatest failure has been to govern in a deliberately polarizing fashion, and Mr. Trump’s response has been to campaign the same way. If the businessman loses a race that Republicans should win this year, one reason will be that his often harsh rhetoric has repelled women, minorities and younger voters. He ignores or twists inconvenient facts, and even when he has a good point his exaggerations make it harder to persuade the public. Yet a President needs the power to persuade.
The least convincing Never Trump argument is that he would rampage through government as an authoritarian. That ignores the checks and balances in Washington that constrain GOP Presidents in particular. If Mr. Trump wins, the media would awaken from their Obama-era slumbers and dog his Administration with a vengeance. The permanent bureaucracy would resist his political appointees, working with the media to build public opposition.
The more realistic concern, especially for conservatives, is that Mr. Trump would be as haphazard in office as he has been as a candidate and thus fail to change Washington as he has promised. Mr. Trump would start out with more than half the country disliking him, and most of his advisers lack government experience. Too many blunders or an early recession could cause voters to sweep out the GOP Congress in 2018, setting up a return to an all-progressive government in 2020.
Another risk comes from the negative impulses on the political right that Mr. Trump’s meanest rhetoric has awakened. Populism has its uses, and the media stereotypes of Mr. Trump’s supporters don’t capture their variety and general goodwill. But populism becomes dangerous when it is rooted too much in ethnicity or class.
Mr. Trump’s Breitbart posse has a vendetta against Republicans on Capitol Hill and is motivated by brooding resentments that too often veer into white-identity politics. If Mr. Trump indulged these sentiments as President, he would further polarize the country and alienate non-whites for a generation.
Then there is the biggest Trump gamble of all—foreign and security policy. The good news is that Mr. Trump wants to rebuild U.S. defenses that have eroded on Mr. Obama’s watch. He would be more candid about, and more aggressive against, the Islamist terror threat.
Yet the irony is that Mr. Trump shares Mr. Obama’s desire to have America retreat from world leadership. Beyond “bombing the hell out of ISIS” and “taking the oil,” it isn’t clear the Republican has any idea what to do in the Middle East. As a rookie in world affairs, he would be unusually dependent on his advisers—if he listened to them.
His seeming bromance with Vladimir Putin is especially troubling given the Russian’s aggression in the Middle East, Europe and cyberspace. Presidents Bush and Obama also underestimated Mr. Putin’s revanchism, but Mr. Trump has been all too nonchalant as Russia presses ahead. His instincts to retreat to a Fortress America could invite more aggression from Russia, China and Iran.

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The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate since 1928, and if we didn’t endorse Ronald Reagan we aren’t about to revive the practice for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump. Yet one of them will be the next President. The choice comes down to the very high if relatively predictable costs of four more years of brute progressive government under Hillary Clinton versus a gamble on the political unknown of Donald Trump.

Copyright ©2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. - Accredited to the WSJ