Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Dad Saves America" channel.

America is suffering from misgovernment, disgovernment, and malgovernment. We need to get more active in politics, from local to national, to save the country.
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My parents (and grandparents) found a perfectly viable solution. My dad and my grandfather worked full time. They were frugal when they had kids, and my mom and my grandmother stayed home full-time until the kids were in school. Then, they worked part-time so they could be home when the kids were. To avoid "bored housewife" syndrome, they got into church activities with other moms. It helped that they were college-educated, and it also helped that my grandparents were in a position to help my parents pay off their house sooner than most. It also helped that they didn't live in a place with a huge scarcity premium on real estate or insane commute times. This is not hard to replicate, and it avoids pitfalls like income-inversion friction (like when women make more than men).
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"Trade balances don't matter" Trade balances used to matter more, before we went entirely to fiat currency. When another country could drain your entire previous metals reserve (what you used as a war chest, for example) then a huge trade deficit with them could cook you as a country. SIMILARLY though, if we are to allow countries to use their trade surplus with us to buy our capital goods -- say, our LAND, or passive rental income such as HOUSING -- trade balances start to matter again. If there were no such thing a capital goods or investments, and their holding more dollars just meant that those dollars could only be used to buy what our economy made, then I'd agree -- trade balances wouldn't matter. But that isn't the case by a long shot.
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The problem with this public / private demarcation, is that short of declaring everything a state, county, or city matter, there is no way to determine "public interest". The Great Barrington Declaration did not emerge from the "public" sphere, it emerged from Civil Society -- some private actors coming together to get the right answer in the right way -- which turns out to be in the "public interest". Individuals need to be able to be made aware of these answers, and decide for ourselves.
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Public sector unions should be banned from making political donations, as they are funded from money taken from employee paychecks. If you are a contractor for the government and give money to the people who sign your paychecks, that's called a kickback and it's very illegal.
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"Significant change is always going to cause significant uncertainty." NAILED IT! Our budget deficit is such that we need significant change. Our manufacturing base is such that we need significant change. Our place in the world -- which was originally designed when we were the only country that wasn't rubble -- is such that we need significant change. I'm old enough to remember when people would complain about politicians not being courageous enough to change what needed to be changed. Well, we need to back that courage when it shows up.
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"Hannah trusted the church with little Samuel maybe a little too much" Especially considering how the sons of Eli, the high priest, turned out. Eli seems like he was an awful father.
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@durin3415 Single women who've realized they will NEVER have children, do everything they can to wreck their friends' marriages. We need to start presenting cautionary tales about this type of woman, and keep doing it despite all the whining about "demonizing" people.
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"This is an emergency" Yes, our budget deficit is a national emergency. $500B per year from tariffs would go a long way to solving it.
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"More saloons than churches" I'm curious what the story is with the political power of the bordello-keepers. They were absolutely huge in the city during the Gold Rush. Did their power wane, or simply evolve? If you had Silicon Valley billionaires in thrall to such people, it would explain a lot about our current culture wars.
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Walz is a toad. Give him a furry hat, and he would fit right in, in the old Soviet Communist Party.
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"The stakes feel so high because they are so high, because the decisions are so centralized" Yeah, the only way to resolve the toxicity of our political debate is to DEcentralize.
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"Our nature is to be more concerned about a hangnail, than thousands perishing overseas" Well no one else is going to pay attention to that hangnail, and if no one paid attention to hangnails when others were perishing we would ignore those hangnails until they were so badly infected as to threaten our own lives. This is a silly way to prioritize things. Everyone in life has a duty to look after themselves, and will have a variety of experiences (some of them extremely dire) to deal with. If we only attend to those, no one will ever have the sort of transcendent experiences that are also possible in God's creation. Allocating according perfectly according to a hierarchy of suffering, even if our ignorance allowed it, would end human life as we know it. The thought experiment reduces to absurdity almost immediately.
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One serious problem with relative economic advantage is that it pushes overspecialization. When this hits resource-rich countries, this is called "the resource curse" or "Dutch disease", and is recognized as a problem that squeezes other (desirable) productive industries out, as the foreign exchange it brings in puts other forms of local export out of business. When this hits countries who specialize in something like Finance, you get Britain: "A very rich city [London] attached to a rapidly declining country." The fortunes of the city -- which are not enough to support the country's massive welfare state, by the way -- suppress the fortunes of the hinterlands. America is seeing the same thing, with financial services in New York and information technology in Silicon Valley (and increasingly, government contracts in Washington) overshadowing other ways of making money.
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We have a country where there is enough free speech and free inquiry, that we can tell early on that Jay Bhattacharya was right and Anthony Fauci was wrong. This is good, but not enough. What we need is a country where we are free to implement the Great Barrington Declaration, and ignore the NIH when the NIH is full of s**t.
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@ Without tariffs, American industries can't afford to produce the things Americans want and need.
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"No one is lining up to do manufacturing jobs" No one this guy thinks matters, is lining up to do those jobs. This is snobbery, American style, and it's how Trump got elected.
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"How are you going to make food producers more competitive?" Deregulation, maybe?
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"We can't return to the patterns of ancient wisdom, because we don't live in their world" Please stop asserting this without evidence, particularly because it's far enough from truth to be false. Trivially speaking, we do not live in the world of 2000 years ago, but human beings are similar enough -- and insofar as we have a different point of view, it is largely one transformed by Christianity, per Tom Holland's book Dominion -- that we can, we should, and we must have yet another revival of "ancient" Christian beliefs as we have had century after century.
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"Work brings human dignity" If we gave as much human dignity credit to mothers as they deserved (and if we didn't have the government incentivized to monetize every human interaction and every moment of every human life), we'd solve the inter-generational labor imbalances that threaten our civilization's survival. We'd probably also solve the mental illness epidemic, the autism epidemic, the problem with anti-social uses of social media....
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"Your $80k costs the rest us $100k" No, it's more like "We could either keep $100k local by paying you, or ship $80k overseas." Keep shipping enough of those $80ks, and you just keep getting poorer, and poorer, and poorer.
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Do spies and covert ops exist? It's interesting to consider "principalities and powers" in terms of a Cold War. They have completely opaque systems of travel and communication, and enough sense to dodge our sabotage our scientific processes to keep us confused (or convinced they don't exist.
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"The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs caused massive bankruptcies among American farmers" I thought that they were going bankrupt because they borrowed money for capital enhancements during WW1 when Europe's farms were offline, and when Europe's farms came back after the war, a massive agricultural oversupply followed.
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"The reason we have so many different car models is because we have so many overseas trading partners" What? No. Overseas, our car companies have totally different product lines.
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"Always forward!" Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
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"We all have to figure out how to leave each other alone" Except in that obliviousness, the Woke mind virus grew and spread. "You do you" got us here. Some things can't be tolerated, and it was a mistake ever to do so. We need to go back to a more traditional education and value system, the sooner the better.
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Religion isn't settled land anymore, with its sheriffs and soldiers and magistrates -- it's frontier again, with its explorers and archaeologists and majestic vistas.
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"Rebuttable presumption" is another way of saying "guilty until proven innocent". Family Court generally is a travesty of justice.
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@jeanburk9539 Rice paddies in a desert are a questionable choice, though.
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Are tariffs a tax on relative economic advantage?
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@x1k790 If sensible people were more active, we wouldn't need any kind of revolt. If there were enough active people to win a revolt, that would be enough to win without a revolt too.
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@osiris7208 Unfortunately, the people talking most about psychopaths, sociopaths, and malignant narcissists are... the psychopaths, sociopaths, and malignant narcissists.
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"The Fed pumps money into the economy by buying Treasury bills" -- In other words, they pay off the national debt. Seriously, what's the difference here? I mean, Treasury bills ARE the national debt. When the Treasury needs money not covered by revenues, the Treasury gets it by selling these bills. (Many of which are bought by the Fed already, by the way.) Has the Fed ever simply forgiven the Treasury of those debts? Presumably, the bearer of the bond has the right not to collect if it so chooses. Similarly, when the other holders of these bills are paid on time (we haven't defaulted) would they necessarily care if the Fed forgives the debts it holds?
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"Barack Obama - polished, sounded centrist but really pretty far-left guy, then Trump" who is more hilarious than polished, accused of being far-right but really pretty centrist. Oh, for an America that could elect a real Conservative again. Trump will help getting the most rotten fruits of the insanity out, but he won't get at the roots. That's for Vance, I think. And it's going to take the freedom that Elon has gotten for us to convince the rising generation (the boys especially are ready to accept it) that social conservatism has been right all along. Just wait until those boys start sharing stories about how the rainbow types in positions of authority (doctors, educators) got handsy with them. Mii2 will have NOTHING on how that upends our powerbrokers.
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"If course we're all fat" As opposed to the Chinese, a significant percentage of whom are still starving.
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To some degree MMT is true - fiat money is imaginary, and our system of taxation and spending is just confiscation of money (to combat inflation) from people who are "undeserving", and government spending is just redistribution of money to people who are "deserving". However, MMT backers ignore the fact that the taxation rate (the rate at which you take money out of the system) and the money-printing rate (the rate at which you put money in) HAS TO BE THE SAME or you're going to get inflation. Also, if you take money away from people who produce goods and services, and hand it to people who don't produce goods and services, you will get less goods and services. More money and less goods and services, also means INFLATION.
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"What does American civil conflict even look like?" Well-armed small groups of Conservatives put up toll gates on all major freeways, preventing urban areas from getting fed, until all Blue cities surrender. In particularly intransigent cities, they cut off the water supply. The war is over in less than two weeks.
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"This is not really about gender" Er, yes it is. Men express leadership one way, women express it another. Both have gotten broken in the modern era. Men express leadership directly. Giving orders. Speaking freely. Running the idea up the flagpole, seeing who salutes. Women express leadership more communally. They put social pressure on other women to do the right thing, and withhold support form those who don't. We've got shy men, and a climate of social pressure amongst women that puts the pressure in EXACTLY the wrong direction. Men need to ignore social pressure from women and SPEAK OUT, and women need to get their heads straight about what is good and what is evil. That's the way we get out of the death spiral we're in.
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"Not everyone can be successful and have status" I know this may come as a surprise to someone in a high-visibility profession, but there is such a thing as "successful enough". Even more significantly, rather than being the most important person to crowds and crowds of people, the cultural practice of monogamy means you just have to be the most important person to one other person (and your kids).
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"I don't care what you do in your personal life, but I do care what you're pushing on kids" Yeah... how has that worked out for you? I'm starting to be convinced that any public expression (or even evidence) of these p**verse ideologies needs to be criminalized, or they're going to come for the kids.
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"That $1T trade deficit comes back to America as capital investment" And since these are good capitalists doing this, they are CHARGING for the privilege of using their money -- this is known as rent collecting, and it solely benefits THEM, not US. Our trade deficit hands other countries the ability to bleed us dry.
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If Kamala Whorish wants to be unburdened by the guilt of the behavior that gave her a political career, she is free to repent and be forgiven. The pride that keeps her from repentance is the same pride that makes her think herself qualified for high political office, though.
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"Our elected representatives haul tech CEOs in front of them and scream at them for the cameras" Yes, and the tech CEOs nod politely, ignore what the senators say, then go back to their companies and obey whatever any Deep State apparatchik tells them to do.
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This lady would rather hang out with New Husband rather than be a mom. This is what feminism gives us -- instead of holding men to a higher standard (be a dad instead of hanging out with New Wife) they just want women to be as awful as men.
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