The current tendency to judge and label each other is regrettable. Labeling others often says more about the labeler than the labeled.…

The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE for short, has one highly visible and vitally important set of Key Result Measures, federal government revenue, spending, and…

In Peggy Noonan’s “A Certain Idea of America,” a sentence in an essay on the American Dream caught my attention: “The original sin of America,…

We owe a lot to our billionaires! I know there is a lot of disrespect and accusations that they aren’t paying their fair share to…

A fundamental problem facing the United States of America is that our federal government is irresponsibly spending about ten trillion dollars per year…

I wonder what percent of USA citizens would agree that these are sixteen primary reasons Donald J. Trump won a second term as POTUS. Maybe…

The fundamental issue that divides “conservatives” from “liberals” in the United States is size of the federal government. The pure conservative believes that it should…

Two years ago I posted what I considered Vital Signs for the long term economic health of the US. It focused on total outgo vs.…

Having been facing some medical issues for the past couple of years, I am very familiar with the declaration, “I’m going to check your vitals.”…

I have clear memories of having my tonsils removed at age 5 or 6 in the 1940’s. It was standard procedure for children at…

This post is a revision and updating of one originally done March 7, 2012, on a former blog. June 28, 2010, I had done a…

This post is based largely on A Thinking Person’s Candidate published by me in an earlier blog on 1/24/2016, seven years ago. The…

I remember seeing an Apple Macintosh computer on display somewhere in Columbia, SC, in 1984 or 1985 and being amazed at the point and click…

Below are a couple of charts, thanks to this website, that make a strong case for ignoring long term market trends while investing, constantly and…

I enjoy newsletter, Thoughts from the Frontline, by John Mauldin. For December 5th, he wrote about our widening wealth gap and the discontent of “elites”…

I don’t have any evidence that Roger Williams ever had influenza, and, as far as I know, the only connection between the virus and Pastor…

Calls to “defund” police departments sound unreasonable, but I understand some are saying that they don’t really want to remove all funding and shut down…

A common current lament is about young men growing up without a strong and virtuous male presence in their lives. That certainly…

Now we know why decades of deficit spending and debt accumulation, even through times of fake prosperity, storing our national wealth in ridiculously inflated stock…

In the 110 years since the Sixteenth Amendment authorized the personal income tax, we have created an expensive and burdensome monster with tentacles in our…

I am a little puzzled that so many seem to be excited about and making voting decisions based on the current economy. Yes, unemployment is…

Here is a laughable headline on a Philip Bump October 6 Washington Post opinion piece: Senators representing less than half the U.S. are about to…

Judge K’s reaction to the interrogation is understandable given the irrational attacks on his personal character, but I wish he had been more rational, less…

If I were Judge Brett Kavanaugh, I would be wondering why I didn’t issue this statement and take this action when Mrs. Ford’s accusation first…

Published first a few years ago in an earlier blog. Dwight David (Ike) Eisenhower was the president of my youth, age 10 to 18 approximately,…

Posted a few years back on an earlier website. Dr. Ralph Stanley (1927-2016) was, for several years, an annual visitor at Bill’s Pickin’ Parlor just…

(First published 4/29/2012) US Ambassador to Germany was not exactly a plum position in 1933, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to get to his…

Originally published 4/8/2013. Even though I disagree with almost everything Paul Krugman writes, I normally read his columns just to see what points he is…

This was originally posted May 20, 2013 under a different title in response to the worshipful attitude many citizens seemed to have toward President Obama.…

Originally published 9/20/2013 as “Apple, Elegant Design, and the Affordable Care Act” There is an inspiring and exciting, at least to folks like me, Marco…

Originally Posted 11/09/2013 Paul Allen, according to Forbes Magazine, had $15.8B and was the 26th richest US citizen as of April 2013.  Concern about the…

If you are of my general age, you are going to love “Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure” by Matthew Algeo.  If you are a lot younger…

Following now abandoned discussion about removing his image from the ten-dollar bill, Alexander Hamilton, thanks to the eponymous hit musical, is vying for focus of…

First Published in 2010 in Earlier Permanent Fixes Blog on Blogger. In the fall of 1963, Sigma Chapter of Sigma Nu Fraternity at Vanderbilt University…

My source for data on federal, state, and local government spending is  almost always the Bureau of Economic Affairs National Income and Product Accounts. I…

Originally Published in May, 2010 – Still loving the townhouse and city living I grew up in Maryville, TN, always living within easy walking or…

The post below was published in 2010. The examples are a bit out of date, and the links don’t work, and I was wrong about…

Originally Posted November, 2009. Examples outdated, links may not work, but system unchanged. When I was growing up in Maryville, TN, I spent a lot…

Imagine a simple rural farming community in which the people provide for their own and each other’s needs, trading among themselves and helping each other,…

This is just an experiment, posting screen shots of a post in my abandoned Google Permanentfixes Blog. I have been slowly deleting or updating and…

In my previous Permanent Fixes Blog I posted a couple of times during the financial crisis about this family relic, using it as an example…

In the 1800’s, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, with little government oversight or involvement, spent his life building transportation and financial infrastructure that made him possibly the…

Media typically reported enthusiastically about “creation” of 228,000 new jobs in November of 2017. For Example: Could we have a little context? I checked the…

I found the quote below at a US Government Health and Human Services website about Medicare payments. Believe me, I didn’t make this up. “This…

Earl Blumenauer, D – Oregon, explains in an op-ed today where all the “Death Panel” uproar was born. He says that in his years in…

About ten days ago I was feeling really bad and started having chills. By the next morning I had a fever and obvious symptoms of…

When I was an irresponsible teenager, a couple of friends and I went fishing for native brook trout in the Smoky Mountains National Park. We…

David Brooks is spending a lot of time thinking lately and coming up with some good points such as in the attached column. We are…

There are at least five good reasons government should not meddle in the affairs of private free enterprise.

I remember in my young adult years a common subject of discussion was the “cost of building” a new home in a particular location. I…

Now that “health care,” a euphemism for insurance, is back on the table, I thought I transfer some more stuff from the old blog to…

This was first posted on my old blog in September, 2014. I was reminded of it by this news item of a non-fatal shooting at…

The announcement a few days ago of real % increase in GDP for the first quarter of only 0.7% suggested it might be time to…

This is an interesting hot news item of the day, just one example of the coverage in the clip above, about President Trump’s musings on…

I see there are very few new posts on this blog since the November election of Donald Trump. And this in spite of the fact…

(With apologies to blog post subscribers because I mistakenly “Published” a work in progress that had some old data.) It is very difficult to get…

It can make a person feel really old to find that a common word of his youth is now classified as archaic. That is what…

I didn’t vote for Donald Trump for POTUS (or for Hillary Clinton), but I understand exactly why so many did and why he won the…

The December 4th Charleston SC Post and Courier included a rather lengthy story, by David Slade (Facebook), describing mismanagement of state employee pension funds over…

The news from Aleppo makes me wonder how different our own history might have been if Lincoln had just said to the six deep south…

I seldom agree with Leonard Pitts, but today he has a good suggestion. He is very upset about the election of Donald Trump and lists…

The “Repeal and Replace” mantra has become a joke since we have not seen any reasonable, easily understood, proposal for the replacement, let alone any…

Reading all the doomsday rhetoric on the web today about our president elect gives me hope that we all can unite now in demanding that…

The currently trendy demonization of capitalism and profits and the misperception that “non-profits” are somehow better or more virtuous than for-profit enterprises are unfortunate. Greed…

Here are three simple true/false questions about employment in the USA.

There is an interesting article in The State newspaper today about lobbying activity in and around the SC State House. I know the sizes of the…

Digging through some records in my home town this week I learned that, in 1957, my parents bought four cemetery lots at Grandview Cemetery for…

Both sides of the political fence like to pick and choose data points to prove either that the jobs recovery during the Obama administration is…

A NYT lead editorial, The Myth of Job Creation, published during the 2012 presidential campaigns, tried to make the case that both Governor Romney and President Obama erred…

If you are a Facebook user, please check out the Permanent Fixes Facebook Page.

Originally published 11/24/2009 – Figures updated to 2015 Now I get it. I couldn’t figure out why so many seem to favor government health insurance…

The post below was originally published November 16, 2013. Given the number of insurance companies currently ceasing to participate in the ACA, it is interesting…

Since the founding of the nation, the fundamental political issue has always been size and influence of the Federal Government and the extent to which…

The post below was written during the negotiations leading up to the March, 2010, passage of the Affordable Care Act. Passage of the proposed legislation,…

Here begins some introduction to the original post, updated now because it looks like higher marginal income tax rates are once again on the federal…

In April this year the US Commerce Department reported that before-tax corporate profits in 2013 totaled $2.1T and that corporate tax revenues totaled $419B. That…

One of the things I remember about grammar school days (1950’s) was how good a slice of white bread smeared with butter tasted in the…

Note: This is an update of an older post from my Blog. The thing that reminded me of it was Mrs. Clintons “nouning” of the…

In December 2015 The State editor Cindi Ross Scoppe published an editorial boosting the idea of a significant increase in the South Carolina tax on…

I’m thinking of the libertarian political philosophy in connection with Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s failure to respond quickly and appropriately to a question about…

I am enjoying America’s Forgotten History, Part II, by Mark David Ledbetter. It is self published and available on Amazon Kindle for $1.50. Of course…

A news item about Switzerland denying citizenship to two Muslim girls who refused to take school-required swimming lessons because there would be boys in the…

When I started reading The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, I did a quick search on “Dust Bowl” for a little background information on the subject…

Once we get past the major peripheral presidential campaign issues currently dominating social and left and right wing media, there are three subjects that deserve…

My memory is not what it used to be and never was that good, so, when a FB friend asked if I have read Babbitt…

If you trace your ancestry to Ireland, Scotland, England, or France or if you came from the Vikings or if you are Catholic or Episcopalian…

  “The attractive nuisance doctrine applies to the law of torts in the United States. It states that a landowner may be held liable for injuries to…

I have clear memories of economics lectures from my paternal grandfather in the 1950’s and 1960’s about what would be the result of what he…

In my early days at Eastman Chemical, in the late 1960’s, I learned a lot of practical stuff about chemical plant construction, and a little…

Originally posted 3/28/2012. Updated 7/28/2018 to include comments by the Montserrat Guide which were previously in a separate post. We just got back from a…

I was a senior at Vanderbilt on November 22, 1963, the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. JFK had visited Nashville and spoken at Vanderbilt’s Dudley…

I wrote a couple of days ago about some changes in education over the past fifty years, but I also have one first-hand account of…

Dillard L. Williams is one of my ancestors, my paternal grandfather’s great grandfather. He was born in 1821 and, according to Granddaddy, was murdered in 1864. If…

Over almost 52 years of marriage, my wife and I have rented eight and purchased eight residences. So we have considerable experience with both renting…

I thought of the Rolling Stones song in connection with my probably developing reputation as a permanent malcontent, never happy with the way things are,…

“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” – G. K. Chesterton What made me think of…

Gun regulation has crowded fiscal and economic difficulties out of the news, at least for a while, and has prompted a look at the data…

The classic “guns or butter” dilemma concerning use of federal tax revenues (and borrowed money) suggests a choice between spending on national defense or welfare.…

Originally Posted 8/25/2012 – Additional Introduction Added 8/7/2016) Below is a post I did during the last presidential campaign explaining why I supported Mr. Romney…

It seems to me that if estates are to be taxed, there should be some consideration for the number of heirs involved. A parent should…

Worrying about how we fund federal spending, I noticed that in 1960, federal excise tax revenue funded 11.6% of federal spending, but, in 2015, it…

I’m so far out of touch that I didn’t even realize sociologists had abandoned the idea of The United States as a “melting pot,” most…

(The difficulties have not improved since I wrote this six years ago.) I recall a conversation with my Japanese assistant during my early 1990’s Tokyo…

Admittedly, we have become extremely materialistic, focused almost entirely on MONEY and the things it can buy, but given the expanding population and the tendency…

I was just thinking about the “simple bare necessities of life” which traditionally included food, shelter, and clothing. Now “health care,” however the government decides…

The item below is from the August 1, 2016, Time Magazine. Search “universal Income” and you will find recent much longer articles from The New…

USA Student Loan data are not as easy to pin down as our total National Debt (~$19.3T) or the amount we owe the Social Security…

The Federal Income Tax was established in 1913 by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, but it was not until 1930 that the Supreme Court…

Reference to “bucket lists,” lists of things a person wants to do before dying, seem to be trending these days, especially for any of us…

My maternal grandfather, Oscar Shelley, a rural mail carrier for 33 years, 1927 to 1960, wore out a new Chevrolet every two years on Route…

My paternal grandfather, Richard Hobart Williams, was a hard-working staunch conservative, a Hoover Republican who traveled around East Tennessee during the Great Depression trading horses…

A new biography, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square by Randy Boyagoda, does quadruple duty. It provides a well-researched and documented critical look at…

Channel surfing while on the elliptical machine in the gym yesterday I ran across a panel discussion from David Axelrod’s University of Chicago Institute of…

It is frustrating to hear people argue that the United States needs to do health care, education, social spending, etc., like Finland or other small…

(First posted in 2010 when the PC movement was more of a curiosity than a religion.) A few months ago I attended a funeral at…

Sunday afternoon about four o’clock I took a pretty bad crash when the front wheel of my recumbent bike went into the open space under…

In an ongoing controversy, the City of Columbia, SC, is being sued for misappropriation of water and sewer revenues. The accusation is that diversion of…

Be careful with the following sentence about the original intent of our founders. It is the longest I have ever written. I’m dividing it up…

I think we should ban the word, “affordable,” because it is subjective and meaningless without context. What is affordable to one person is not affordable…

I have a feeling that trade policy is going to be a major topic of discussion between now and November 2016. This is a reposting,…

I’ve been a little worried about what a second term for President Obama might look like but feel better now that I know that Jerry Springer…

A much higher degree of socialism than we have in The United States works well under certain circumstances. It seems to have worked among at…

Here is a key point to keep in mind: Labor supply and labor demand are separate and independent variables. When the demand exceeds the supply,…

Two or three weeks ago I saw on Facebook one of those irritating little “Quotes in a Box” attributed to USA President Calvin Coolidge. I…

The simple truth expressed in the title equation is lost in the shuffle of the posturing under way in Washington DC, in particular President Obama’s…

Dr. Oscar Livingstone Simpson, contemporary of my parents, practiced medicine in East Tennessee, mostly Maryville, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s, and he wrote a book…

An updated 5/21/2011 post. In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be any need for government spending on either national defense or social benefits. Nations would…

There is plenty of evidence that the rich are getting richer but not as much that the poor are getting poorer. The annual Forbes Magazine…

I have clear memories of economics lectures from my paternal grandfather in the 1950’s and 1960’s about what would be the result of what he…

Sometimes it helps to provide some historical context for currently observed phenomena. The chart below shows total federal, state, and local social benefit spending for…

When I began employment at Eastman Chemical Company in 1965, the Social Security wage cap was $4,800, the rate was 3.625% for employee and employer,…

My grandparents, Oscar and Ezalee, Hobart and Bessie, were born in 1895, 1895, 1897, and 1898 respectively. Their children, three sisters in the first case…

In famously Red South Carolina, voting only 44% for President Obama in 2012, I live in Richland County, home of the University of South Carolina…

It is reported this morning  that one of every eight babies born in the USA in 2008 was born to an illegal or undocumented or…

This week (Daily Mail 7/3/2016) there is a report of the beheading of four teenage Christians in Iraq because of their refusal to convert to…

Yesterday morning, I went to the CVS Minute Clinic to get a flu shot (not H1N1, just regular flu). It’s pretty convenient so you might…

Physicians and hospitals in the USA offer excellent medical care, in quality, quantity, and timeliness, to rich and poor alike. Of course there are exceptions,…

I’m about to get in trouble here, but let me try to minimize the trouble by emphasizing that this posting has nothing to do with…

We are heavily entangled with, both supporting and depending on, two very large entities that we hope and pray are too large to fail. Unfortunately,…

Encouragement of designated giving can be an effective fundraising tool but, except in the case of major capital campaigns for specific projects, has little or…

Facebook is an excellent tool for, among other things, propagation of preposterous propositions. Just a few days ago I saw one of those little memes…

I was disturbed by the enthusiastic applause, at the Reagan Library Republican debate, of the Texas death penalty and executions resulting from it. It was…

It is frustrating to hear simplistic comparisons such as, “Norway spends less on health care than we do and it’s all free there and they…

(Originally Posted 2/13/2014) TQM, Total Quality Management, was a 1980’s, 1990’s buzzword that, as all buzzwords eventually do, has pretty much vanished from the language…

(First Published 8/17/2011) I have enjoyed a number of history, theology, Bible, literature, music, and economics courses offered by The Teaching Company over the past…

(Originally published 12/2/2012) We are in serious need of another hurricane threat or sex scandal or other news-dominating event to get the media folks to…

(Originally Published 9/16/2009) Thank God for global warming! Without it, we would be still locked in an ice age and the famous “finger lakes” of…

First Published August 16, 2009 – Well, we now know this recommendation was not adopted and that same-sex marriage was legalized. But this is what…

(Originally Published 9/27/2012) In a September 19, 2012, WSJ article, Geoffrey A. Fowler reported that more billionaires are signing on to the idea, promoted by Bill Gates and…

Paying for Marriage, A Welfare Idea (Originally Published 9/25/2009) The phrase, “You get what you pay for,” is usually used to justify a seemingly high…

Shrunken (Now Vanished) Kodak and its Southern Offspring (Originally Published 8/21/2010) In 1972 I was employed (since 1965) by the third largest company in the…

Sevier County Tennessee “Taliban” (Originally Posted 9/14/2010) Sevier County, nestled in the foothills of The Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee is best known as…

Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the USA (Originally Posted 2/22/2011) Living in Japan in the early 1990’s, we often read and heard that Japan is a…

(Originally posted December 11, 2012) I have been thinking about the income inequality issues, both gender income differences and class warfare issues, and scouting around…

(Based on an 8/21/2011 post – Edited and data updated to 2015 in this post) August 21, 2011, I wrote a post making some fun…

GDP, the total value of goods and services produced within the country in a given time interval and the key measure of national economic health,…

Some folks like the idea of a smaller and less intrusive government, lots of dynamic and competitive private business activity, and individual citizens making choices…

Poverty is a problem in America. I’ve seen it in volunteer work and in the faces of people on the streets. With Home Works of…

If you have experience posting photos on some websites, you know that the photos have to be a certain size and shape and have received…

A person vaguely familiar with Scripture may mistakenly remember Jesus advising against building a house on sand and in favor of starting with a good…

I am reading History of the American People by Paul Johnson, a British citizen who has written a fascinating outsiders view of America after several books in…

Even though Cornelius Vanderbilt funded the establishment of Vanderbilt University, my alma mater, it would be difficult to argue that he was a philanthropist or…