Jan 10^th

If you haven’t been following the news lately let me bring you up to date. We now have a lottery set to pay out over a billion dollars if anyone manages to win it when the critical numbers are announced on Wednesday. Of course you can still win something even if you don’t win the big kahuna because there are several lesser prizes to be had if you match slightly fewer of the correct numbers. I understand that the odds against winning the top prize are 292 million to one; even so, if you can win a billion dollars it’s probably a bet you should take.

On a different tack we have that top journalist Sean Penn interviewing the Mexican drug lord el Chapo who was captured shortly after the interview. Indeed the information floating about is that the Mexican marines had el Chapo dead to rights but they waited to arrest him until the famous American movie star interviewer could finish his interview lest he be inconvenienced by some misdirected gunfire. The perks of the rich and famous are wondrous to behold. (All the more reason to buy a lottery ticket!)

We have a one-time famous economist emerging from obscurity to make an interesting prediction about the coming Presidential election. Arthur Laffer tells us that the Republican nominee, whoever he/she may be, will carry at least 46 states, and maybe as many as 49. I’m not able to find how accurate Laffer’s predictions have been in past elections but this prediction sends him far out on a very thin and brittle limb. Mr. Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve. This curve purports to show the relationship between the rate of taxation and the amount of income the state realizes from this taxation. Basically, Laffer claims that if taxes are raised too high the revenue from taxes begins to decline. If people are “overtaxed” they will work less and tax revenues will fall. The sticking point is that nothing Laffer has asserted shows us just where this optimum taxation point occurs. Oh well; it’s an interesting theory.

Trump has weighed in on current football rules; he doesn’t like them because they’re too restrictive. He believes old time football when players could use their helmets as weapons made for a better game. Never mind the long term effects of concussions on players which have been well documented. Why should Trump care about that; he has never played a contact sport of any kind. Concussions can have effects on the brain for years after the injury. Macho Donald got multiple student deferments during the Vet Nam war and then after graduation developed those nasty heel spurs that gave him a medical deferment so he never got into the military. Now he wants to jump over everybody and become Commander-in-Chief. As he says in “The Art of the Deal,” “Think Big.” I guess the heel spurs are OK now, but then he’ll only have to march around the Oval Office.