Message on Political Reform and Political Reality, by old friend Bill V.

While I find Bill's rhetoric a bit overstated and rather curmudgeonly, there is a lot of truth to it...By the way, I don't agree with him that all Sanders' supporters want is " more free loot"-- but if they want totally free college educations for EVERYONE, they are delusional in that regard...

GOP voters may wish for an end to the income tax. That is delusional to--LK

I subscribe to Richard Maybury's Early Warning Report. While I certainly don't recommend it for you, I thought you might find a few quips from his May-June 2016 issue interesting:

What a candidate says in the election campaigns has no connection with what he or she will do in office. But the empty rhetoric does reveal what the millions who vote for these lies are hoping for, and that is very important. 

The rhetoric of two of the three top candidates, Sanders and Trump, is strongly anti-government. [Footnote 2: The rhetoric, not the man. Sanders’ fans believe the government is terribly corrupt because it isn’t giving them all the free loot they deserve.] This means we can safely say at this point that the majority of the voters feel they want an anti-government president. They’ve solidly embraced Reagan’s remark, “Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.” This majority will be disappointed. No such anti-government animal is allowed to live in the Oval Office. He or she will be transmogrified, as Reagan was. The president is just one man. The bureaucracy is millions. If the president wants to do something and the bureaucracy doesn’t, it won’t happen. I remember John Kennedy complaining that no matter what he tried to get done, by the time it worked its way through the uncountable layers of officialdom, the final product bore little resemblance to what he’d planned. The new president may want peace, prosperity and security, but the bureaucracy wants more bureaucracy. That’s where their promotions and pay raises come from.

Elections are always built around the fundamental hallucination that there are humans with so much moral fiber they will not be corrupted by political power. In the present election, the two groups of professional hallucinators are the leaders of the Democratic Party, who will not wake up till they run out of marijuana, and the leaders of the Republican Party, who won’t until they run out of beer.

As I’ve said so often, political power corrupts the morals and the judgment. History teaches no clearer lesson. All politics is crooked, often catastrophically; I’ve never heard of an exception.

People in upper levels of government rarely speak to inform. They speak to achieve an effect. In the period between the elections and the Jan. 20th inauguration, when trying to detect where the new president is headed, and what he is likely to try to do to your finances, listen to his public statements. Do it not because you believe him but to ask yourself, what effect is he trying to achieve? If you can come up with the answer, you will know his true intended direction