Voting Logically
Do you vote emotionally or logically? Are you sure?
There is a book – “The Political Brain” by Drew Westen, which is subtitled “The role of emotion in deciding the fate of the nation.” We all like to believe we are logical voters, but as this book lays out, the reality is we are mostly emotional voters. Very few sit down and work their way through the issues, doing research and checking facts to arrive at who we are going to vote for.
If you would like to be a logical voter, then please read on. We are going to go through the major issues in a calm rational manner to figure out which candidate we need to vote for. We will be scoring the issues as we go for Trump and Harris, with the objective being which gives us the better country and what does a better country mean.
So, let’s start with the Economy and it’s various aspects. It’s what Americans think is the biggest issue.
Economy – Energy
I’ll start with energy as having spent over thirty years in the field, it is an area I am familiar with. So, what have the candidates promised on this issue?
Trump – Promises to “drill, baby, drill” and halve energy costs in 12 months, but how would that work? Trump proclaims that Biden has restricted drilling access, but the reality is that US domestic oil and natural gas productions are at all time high. (see above) And there are two hard facts that his promise ignores.
1 – Oil prices are low, in the $70/barrel range and natural gas is at $2.40 per million BTUs. Those prices are low compared with the last few years and to get energy prices down, you would need to lower prices even more. The problem is those prices are what energy companies need to drill new wells. In fact, natural gas prices were too low only a few months ago and some natural gas producers had stopped drilling wells waiting for prices to get above $3.00 because they can’t make money drilling wells at $2/MMBTU. So how is Trump going to lower energy prices, but keep production up? He is either lying and has no intention to do this (see below for Trump’s truthfulness) or he will have to give taxpayer money to producers to supplement and lower oil and natural gas prices. As a nation we are $35 trillion in debt, so giving tax dollars to oil companies is a bad idea. Key takeaway – Trump will not lower energy prices without putting us even deeper in debt.
2 – The other thing to understand is that energy prices are a global thing. When in mid-2022 energy prices shot up to $8/MMBTU of natural gas and over $100/barrel for oil, that had nothing to do with the United States, it was Russia invading Ukraine. At the moment energy prices are unsteady because of fears of what will happen between Iran and Israel. Iran produces about 3.2 million barrels a day oil. The US produces about 13 million barrels and Saudi Arabia about 9 million barrels a day. So, while Iranian production is smaller, it still makes up about 3% of world oil production. And why that is important is because there isn’t a lot of extra production available. If Israel attacks Iran’s oil infrastructure expect oil prices to shoot up as a result. So, while Trump wants to lower energy prices, he has no ability to control world events, no matter how much he will proclaim he does.
Harris was going to ban fracking in 2019, and now says she won’t, but “…my values haven’t changed…”. Well what does that mean? I looked at the consequences for a fracking ban in an earlier substack post <here> – and basically laid out that a fracking ban in the US would cause high prices and a man-made energy shortage. Hopefully, people in the Department of Energy have explained this to Vice-president Harris. The reality is that while I have concerns about the availability of oil/natural gas in twenty years, it will be the majority of the US energy mix for the next four. – Harris is right to not ban fracking.
While their is concern about fewer sales of offshore leases and leases on Federal land, the Biden administration has also approved a number of projects including the Willow development in Alaska and a natural gas pipeline in West Virginia. And anyone who complains about the Keystone pipeline needs to realize that the Keystone pipeline didn’t get built when Trump was president for one simple reason, the economics had changed and the pipeline no longer made sense.
Worried about the LNG export ban? We have eight operational LNG export terminals, seven under construction, and another 12 approved to be built. The ban impacts 6 facilities, 4 that had submitted for approval and two that are in planning. Total LNG export capacity is 14.43 billion cubic feet per day (BCFD) of natural gas with another 16.9 BCFD in construction. The amount approved but not under construction is 17.2 BCFD. So, do those additional 6 projects need to be approved, no. We are likely over building export terminals and the existing construction will cause a tight natural gas market and drive up prices in the next five years.
Renewables – One of the big Biden policy victories that the Democrats are touting is the Inflation Reduction Act, which is really a green energy bill more than anything. It offers tax credits towards solar, wind and energy storage. Personally, I don’t like this. While I firmly believe we need more wind, solar, hydroelectric, nuclear, and long duration energy storage. Paying for it by giving away future tax dollars when we are $35 trillion in debt, seem likes bad fiscal policy.
My view is put a small tax on oil, natural gas, and coal that slowly ratchets up over the next twenty years and use the tax dollars to pay down the national debt and build things that are not immediately economic, but that we know we will need in twenty years. This would be transmission lines, long duration energy storage, and high-speed rails. Things that are hard to justify with economics right now, but that everyone agrees pays big dividends in the long term. Don’t believe me, look at what China is building, lots of energy storage, transmission lines for renewables, and high-speed rails, far more than the coal plants people focus on.
Energy & Inflation – We will talk more about inflation next, but for right now you need to understand that there is a strong correlation between inflation and energy prices. Realize that forty years ago we had much easier oil fields to drill and develop and as result oil prices where in $12 to $20 per barrel price range. Now we are in the $70 to $80 range and even adjusting for inflation we are still seeing an increase in oil prices far in excess of inflation. If the cost of energy increases, that raises the cost of raw materials, transportation of materials, manufacturing, and transportation of final goods to consumers. That is the very definition of inflation.
When I started in the oil patch, my first offshore project was a platform for Exxon called Alabaster located in less than 500 ft of water depth. Alabaster was designed for 115 million cubic feet of natural gas a day and 2,500 barrels per day of condensate, which is what oil people call 22,825 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Alabaster needed about 7,000 tons of steel to do it, which works out to 3.2 barrels of oil equivalent per ton of steel.
One of the newest platforms in the Gulf of Mexico is Shell’s Appomattox in over 7,000 feet of water depth and with a production capacity of 175,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. The entire development requires 120,000 tons of steel. That works out to 1.4 barrels equivalent per ton of steel. That is less than half the amount we were producing per ton of steel thirty years ago. The oil and natural gas that the world depends on is getting harder to get and that means it requires more material and more effort and causes prices to go up. As much as you want to blame politicians and big corporations, and I do think they should get some of the blame, the reality is that as hydrocarbon energy gets harder to produce, prices will go up.
And yes, in the previous section I did propose a tax on hydrocarbons to fund long term infrastructure and to pay down the debt. The only way to control inflation driven by energy is to establish alternate sources that are not hydrocarbon dependent, and that is nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar, and other renewables. And because most of these sources are not in sync with consumer demand, you need transmission lines and energy storage to make renewables more reliable.
Trump may proclaim “drill baby drill” to the delight of many in the oil patch, but that is a hollow promise because he is also talking about cutting energy prices which isn’t going to go anywhere. Harris is right to not ban fracking and to encourage development in renewables, but we need a better tool than the tax credits when we are so far in debt as a nation. A hydrocarbon tax would cause us a short term rise in costs to fund the long term construction of the infrastructure that our grandchildren would need. Energy will be scored as one point to Harris, zero to Trump.
Economy – Inflation
Trump is loudly proclaiming that Biden is to blame for inflation and as a result so is Kamala Harris. The problem is that all the countries of the world saw a massive jump in inflation after the COVID pandemic. The US is doing a lot better than most of them in keeping inflation in check and is right in line with the average for Europe. The disruption to supply chains, higher energy prices due to Russia invading Ukraine, and the impact of extreme weather events has been a worldwide thing. To blame it on a US president doesn’t make sense.
There is a reality that I explore in my book, “Fixing America”, that there are three basics aspects of America, the society, the economy, and the government. While one can affect others, none of the aspects controls the others. So, while an American president can pass laws and change taxes which can affect the economy, there are underlying market forces that control the economy that a president is helpless to change.
If you want a president to improve the economy, that would require a massive increase in presidential powers to allow him to control production and employment. We haven’t seen that level of power since the price controls of World War II. Having read books on how Harry S. Truman struggled to unwind the price controls after WWII and how disastorous those same price controls were in the Soviet Union, I think that is something we need to avoid.
Economy – Candidate Proposals
Trump – Trump’s tax cuts that passed in 2017 are expiring for individuals. But, the corporate tax cuts he passed in 2017 were permanent. Which shows you where his and the Republican priorities lay. He now promises to renew the individual tax cuts and add to them, pushing corporate tax rates down to 15%, providing more tax cuts to individuals, eliminating taxes on Social Security payments, and eliminating taxes on tips.
Trump imposed tariffs on solar panels, foreign steel, and a number of other products which was intended to protect US businesses and encourage them to produce more. Biden kept those tariffs for one simple reason, because they made sense.
Trump is now promising massive tariffs on all goods coming into the US and at the same time he implies that those tariffs would be paid by foreign countries. That is not true. Tariffs are paid by the US importing company and they then turn around and add that tariff to the cost they paid for the goods and that means they pass the tariff to consumers, you and me and everyone else here in the US that buys the goods. It is a tax on us, with the objective of making US made goods more cost competitive with foreign goods. There is just one problem, we don’t make as much as we used to and, in some categories, we don’t make any. While higher tariffs on everything could generate more federal revenue, they are far more likely to burden middle America and set off a recession.
Harris - Harris would renew the 2017 tax cuts for households making less than $400,000 per year and expand benefits for low- and middle-income households in the tax code and create new subsidies to support homeownership. The cost of these benefit expansions would be partially offset by raising the corporate tax rate.
Harris has also proposed giving people $50,000 tax credit to help start small businesses. I am not in favor of this. Starting a business is hard and an extra $50,000 tax break would be a big help, but it would not change the underlying economics of the business. Most small businesses fail due to cash flow problems, poor locations, poor business plans, and lots of other issues that have nothing to do with a tax credit. That tax break might encourage businesses to start, who have no hope to overcome other fundamental issues.
The primary problem with American small business is that big business often pays less tax and has more resources. As a result big corporations tend to crush small business and take the market share. This was an idea that we explored in the chapter on Small Town America that was published <here>. The reality is if you want to help small business, then create a corporate tax where big business pays a higher percentage than small businesses that are owned by individuals and not trust funds and bigger corporations.
The elephant in the room is the $35 trillion national debt and the fact we haven’t run a balanced budget in over twenty years. While the Harris plan appears to run a smaller deficit than the Trump plan, neither one of them improves the economic stability of the country and both candidates promise to continue our slide into further debt.
But if you are hoping for some economic sense from any of the third-party candidates, don’t hold your breath. None of them provide a plan to really address the economic issues of deficit spending by the federal government and none of them address paying down the national debt.
Zero points for any candidate.
Immigration – the other big issue.
Harris – Been a lot of talk about Harris’s role in the Biden administration. She did go down to Central America to try and convince people to not migrate. That didn’t do a lot. The reality is that the Biden administration focused on infrastructure and other core Democrat issues and ignored the border for the first two years. It was only when they realized that the border could sink their re-election that the border became a priority. Biden’s approach was to try and get a bipartisan solution. Republican Oklahoma Senator Lankford and others worked to put forward a border bill that actually addressed a number of important issues. The bill never made it out of the Senate. Once Trump called on Republican politicians to reject the bill, the bill was dead. Don’t think Democrats are innocent in this. A number of the Democratic senators who were willing to support it, quickly turned into no votes to appease liberal groups once it was clear the bill would fail in the Republican controlled House.
And that is a core reality. The present immigration laws allow people crossing the border illegally to claim asylum. The number of asylum cases pending before the US Court system has skyrocketed because people are using our system of laws to get into the asylum process. We may focus on the emotional pictures of poor migrants attempting to cross the southern border, but it is the asylum process as laid down in US law that is the problem. The Biden administration finally recognized how bad of an issue this was and is trying to force people to use a phone app to schedule the asylum process while they remain in Mexico. But the reality is we need Congress to revise the laws and get us to a better solution. This isn’t a presidential issue, it is a Congressional issue. Harris is indicating she would support a bill much like the Lankford proposal which would be a step in the right direction.
Trump – Meanwhile the man who promised a “…big beautiful wall that Mexico would pay for...” is now promising a mass deportation. The promise of a wall in 2016 ignored the harsh terrain in areas of the US and Mexico border and the resulting high cost of building a wall, never mind the impossible idea that Mexico would pay for it. Trump’s chosen design was also a wall that immigrants could cut through with a simple Sawzall available from Mexican hardware stores. During Trump’s four years, he made no effort to address the changes in law that would actually stop illegals claiming asylum. He separated children from families in a hairbrained idea that resulted in the government having an almost impossible time reuniting the children with the families.
In every rally Trump brings up migrants and blames them for everything. When a Springfield Ohio woman lost her cat and blamed it on Haitian migrants living next door, Trump and his vice-presidential candidate JD Vance were quick to jump on the issue and proclaim migrants were “eating the cats”. The missing cat was found safe in the woman’s basement and she apologized to her neighbors.
It should be no surprise that Trump’s latest proposal of mass deportations is even more unworkable. The cost impact and the logistics of the effort haven’t been thought out. Rounding up millions of undocumented will require an expensive effort by law enforcement and cost billions before you even begin the process of deporting them. It also has a very Nazi feel to it with the idea of deportation camps. There is a very sizeable impact to the US economy as many undocumented people who have been here for more than five years are working in low-paying jobs that the majority of Americans would never do.
My chapter on Immigration has been published as a substack article <here>. There are a lot of things we need to do, as the Harris proposal of adopting a Senator Lankford style bill would address some of them, she gets a point. Trump’s unworkable deportation scheme and the fact that Trump advisor Steven Miller is talking about a denaturalization program to take citizenship away from people shows that neither Trump nor Miller are realists. But the point to Harris is grudgingly given due to the delay in the Biden administration recognizing and getting a border deal, which should have been done in 2021.
Abortion
The chapter on Abortion from the book “Fixing America” has been published as a substack article <here>. The core message of the chapter is we need to address poverty to reduce the volume of abortions and that banning abortions doesn’t get us the result that we want. Any ban results in complicated medical decisions and has the potential to increase the number of births amongst poor single women where the burden is the highest.
Trump and the Republicans have finally gotten Roe vs Wade repealed and found that they have no idea what to do next and have been backpedaling since then. The reality is that the majority of Americans want legal abortion access and having now realized it, Trump is trying to maneuver to the middle to avoid losing.
But I can’t quite give a point to Harris. The Democratic slogan “Abortion is Healthcare” ignores the responsibility towards the fetus once it becomes viable. Some Democrats argue with me that no woman would abort a healthy fetus in the third trimester. The fact that they won’t consider returning to a Roe vs Wade language as part of a permanent law or better still a constitutional amendment that guaranteed all of us bodily autonomy for making our medical decisions (abortions and vaccines) is disappointing.
LGBTQ+
Trans people have become the latest minority to be used for election politics. That is unfortunate as estimates are they are at most one percent of the population. And like every minority before them, they really only want to live out their lives without controversy. The chapter on LGBTQ+ from the book “Fixing America” will be published as a substack article later this week. Follow my substack if you would like it sent to your inbox. The gist of the chapter is reasonable rules that doesn’t allow minors to implement gender changing surgeries, but otherwise keeps the government out of the private medical decisions of adults.
The continuing push from Republicans on harsh anti-Trans legislation and Trump’s insane claims about children getting surgeries in school, shows that Trump is just trying to stir up anti-trans fervor to get votes. Like any demagogue running for office, he will promise and threaten anything at this point. Trump loses a point here.
Heathcare
Trump did not cap insulin prices at $35 per month, Biden did. But the reality is that, Biden only capped $35 out of the insured person’s pocket. The pharmaceutical companies are still charging more than that, it is just taxpayers and insurance companies that are making up the difference.
Trump and the Republicans have been trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) without having a viable alternative in place. So, until Trump actually provides a plan, there is simply no way he can get a point on healthcare.
But Harris is no better. While Biden has allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, something that was specifically blocked in the ACA due to backroom negotiations, American healthcare is more expensive and has worse results than the developed countries that are our peers. The ACA made a lot of progress in improving medical healthcare, but it failed to address the core issues that we have limited competition, monopolies in some areas, horribly unhealthy eating habits (60% of American diet in ultra-processed food), and these items and others are causing us to have worse outcomes. Obesity and diabetes are at all time highs in some states.
Hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies have some of the highest profits and spend the most money on lobbying and campaign donations. For personal bankruptcies, high medical costs are citied in over 60% of all fillings.
Character Matters
While this has been a rational discussion of issues, we do need to touch on the subject of truthfulness. The Constitution was written with a system of checks and balances, but it is a system that depends on honorable people acting in the best interest of the country and not in the blind pursuit of power.
I personally haven’t met any of the candidates, so I can only judge them on what they say and more importantly what they do. And in doing that review, I find Donald Trump lacking far more than Kamala Harris.
Trump has lied repeatedly. Promised things and failed to do them, and this pattern was long before he thought of running. When he purchased the Bonwit Teller department store building in 1979 to build Trump Tower in Manhattan he promised to donate the architectural art works that decorated the building to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He reneged on the promise and workmen jack hammered the art into dust to as they demolished the old 1929 building to make way for Trump Tower.
Trump has repeatedly hired small mom-and-pop contractors to perform work, and after the work had been done, stiffed them. If they were lucky he payed them pennies on the dollars, rather than the promised price. A lot of them he refused to pay. Over the years Trump has been involved in 3,500 lawsuits, many of them from ordinary Americans looking to collect what Trump owed them.
The failed Trump businesses that have gone bankrupt and taken investors for losses is a long list. Trump Airlines, Trump University, Trump Steaks are just a few. Please remember, Trump is the person that managed to bankrupt Atlantic City casinos that he owned.
A replacement to the Affordable Care Act was always going to be rolled out in two weeks. The same two-week delay for when infrastructure week was going to be delivered. Promises were made and never kept. Even the tax cuts that he touts were maneuvered through Congress by Paul Ryan as part of Ryan’s long sought goal to lower corporate taxes, Trump merely got to put his name on it. Just like the shoes, trading cards, and bibles printed in China that Trump is hawking right now.
The idea that Trump was a successful president except for COVID flies in the face of the fact that he disbanded the pandemic response plan in 2018. Lacking that plan and the people to execute it, the COVID response was delayed and lacked coordination. His cabinet was chaotic mess as he fired people by tweet, took credit for anything positive, and mercilessly threw people under the bus for any perceived failures. No failure would he accept blame for, even when it was clearly his fault.
Mike Pence, Trump’s previous vice-president won’t endorse him. Former Trump officials have endorsed Harris or remain silent on the issue. Former and present Republicans have endorsed Harris. The only prominent Republicans siding with Trump are those that need his support to continue to hold their elected positions or have expectation of getting jobs in a second Trump administration. That is a key point, we need to understand that Pence, Mattis, Tillerson, Kelley, and a number of other Republican officials acted like guardrails during the first Trump Administration. They won’t be there during a second term. Instead we will have the hard core loyalists that will not hesitate to tell Trump yes and execute whatever mad scheme he wants.
In 2016, my dad, a lifelong Republican and at one time part of the committee that ran the Republican party in Louisiana was dying of cancer. He asked my sister to get him an absentee ballot as he was in hospice. He voted for a Democrat for president for the first time in his life, choosing Hilary Clinton over Donald Trump. His logic was simple, Trump was a charlatan, a liar, morally bankrupt, and unfit to be president. At his funeral his friends called me a liar, they felt it was impossible my father would have voted for Clinton, but he did.
I don’t think that logic has changed. I’ve watched some Trump rallies, not the clips, but the raw unfiltered video and everything I’ve seen has shown that my father was right. Trump was on Epstein’s Island. He cheated on every wife. His failed businesses and the small mom and pop contractors he stiffed is a clear testament to the lack of character.
Protecting Democracy
It is amazing that both sides are proclaiming that they protect democracy. Trump proclaims that the 2020 election was stolen and that Kamala Harris will use immigrants to establish an American socialist state. The only problem is those two statements make no sense.
In 2020, we saw a massive turnout, but we also saw a shift. Trump’s margins of victory declined by an average of 2.6% in Republican states from the victory in 2016. Texas declined from 9% victory margin in 2016 to 5.6% in 2020. The vote in Texas increased by 2.3 million voters in 2020, but over half of that increase was for Biden, lowering Trump’s margin of victory. Take that 2.6% shift from the Republican states and apply it to the battleground states and Trump’s defeat becomes obvious. The reality is Republicans haven’t won a national popular vote since 2004 and the changing demographics in America won’t reverse that, only make it even more impossible. As a nation we are becoming more diverse, more inclusive, and less likely to support a return to the 1960s or any other time in our past.
Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 results and his calls for a protest at the Capital on January 6th 2021 when the elections results were to be certified showed that the transfer of power was not peaceful or smooth. The attempts to block the certification by the mob and by Republican senators and representatives was fueled by Trump with phone calls, tweets, and speeches. And like a cagey mob boss, he may have but a reference to “peacefully” in his speech to the January 6th protestors, but he put the word “fight” in a lot more.
As for this idea Democrats will bring in immigrants to win, if you believe that, then getting the bill the Oklahoma Senator Lankford has put forward into law is the quickest way to resolve the issue. And the only thing blocking that is Donald Trump.
Further the idea that Biden or Harris are closet communists or socialists is ridiculous. What they are, is members of a Democrat party that is locked with the Republicans in a duopoly that actively blocks the formation of third parties. A duopoly that has become a multi-billion dollar business of political consultants, analysts, and fundraisers that will receive and spend billions of dollars this year, to produce nothing that will enrich the economy or society. Both sides will proclaim that the race is tight, and that they absolutely need your donation to defeat the other side. Sending out tweets, emails, and text messages begging you to send them the few dollars in your pocket.
When either party embraces ranked choice voting, removing dark money from our elections, and changing election laws to permit more third party candidates on the ballots, then I will believe they are protecting democracy.
Final Words
I won’t tally up the count, you can do that on your own, you can adjust the points if you feel I have unfairly scored something for Harris when you feel it should be Trump. But I ask you to write down a point-by-point analysis on why you are scoring something for either Trump or Harris.
Want to deport immigrants? Then sit down and figure out how much money we will need to spend per immigrant to catch them, house them in deportation camps, and then deport them. Then add in the loss to the economy of those people that have cleaned our houses, mowed our lawns, picked our crops, and built new houses. My calculations are coming up with trillions of dollars.
Like the ideas of tariffs on everything coming into America? Figure out where you are going to get your vegetables in the dead of winter, cause those are all imported. Want to buy some new clothes, 98% of all new clothing in America is imported.
I am not enthusiastic about any candidate in this race. I was raised Republican and until 2004 voted Republican. I had doubts about the Iraq invasion and people saying we would get Iraqi oil to pay for it. So I stopped being a Republican and listed myself as independent, a moderate. That rare creature that we seem to have thoroughly driven from the halls of Congress in place of people more interested in sound bites than governing.
As politicians and pundits demonize their opponents, we lose the ability to discuss issues and to have meaningful conversations with others. You can have a conversation with someone you disagree with, but not someone that others have convinced you is delusional or evil. The rhetoric of hatred supplied by many of the pundits and politicians is to keep us divided and part of a “loyal” base of voters that they can depend on. Because if you talked with the other side, you might just find common ground to work from.
I wrote “Fixing America” when I left my job with a mid-sized oil company. It started as just an effort to research questions and issues for my own benefit, but as I got farther into it, I realized that it needed to be a book. A book that gave you the history, the facts, and some analysis to allow you to decide what is going on, rather than have people spoon feed you with how you should vote or feel. The book doesn’t approach things from a Republican or Democrat perspective, but rather goes to the fundamental data and history and works from there to show us what the real problems are. The book looks at the structural issues that have given us a $35 trillion national debt, a healthcare system more expensive than any other in the world with worse results than most countries, and an electoral system that has become gerrymandered and dominated by dark money.
We live in an information age where people can make videos, send out tweets and make the most outrageous claims with nothing to support their claims. If you decide to, you can live in a media bubble surrounded by people telling you things that resonate with your beliefs, without ever subjecting those beliefs to the rigorous testing that needs to happen. Because the reality is that both the left and right are pouring out propaganda.
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.
— Carl Sagan
I would add to what Carl Sagan said, it is not just science that must use those methods, it is also all of us to determine what is true and what is false. It is an age where someone can produce polished videos on YouTube to convince people that the earth is flat. And where you can also watch a live feed from the International Space Station.