Joe Brown's 5 Step Plan to Fix America

Joe Brown has an incredible working knowledge of the current economic world that comes through in his videos.  While I would have to see more details to totally back this plan, it's a great place to start the conversation.  I totally agree with the underlying themes of his plan, which is to cut out bloated parts of the goverment, and force people, businesses, institutions, and local/state governments, to be more responsible economically.  

Coming from, me, a guy who has spent a long time homeless, I know that sounds totally hypocritial.  But his plan would defund many of the douchebags of the current system, who live off organizations doing mediocre work for huge government contracts or subsidies.  That would free up trillions of dollars to actually flow through the real world, everyday economy.  That would help myself and all kinds of other people who have run into corruption, red tape, and other bullshit currently alive and thriving in the system, things that have made it harder to make a decent living.  

It would also siphon trillions of dollars away from busniesses, cities, and towns that are highly dependent on government contracts, that are not in the best interest of the country as a whole.  This plan would wind up with a huge part of both businesses and local governments in rural, small town, and small city America going bankrupt.  But those areas would be a bargain then, and attract and embolden the creative and hardworking people in those regions that have new ideas, to rebuild their town, city or area in today's fast changing world.  I firmly believe that the people needed to rebuild every struggling town or city are already in those towns and cities.  In most cases they are simply held back by whatever local, entrenched network runs the show now.  

I've spent 28 of my 56 years in small towns and small to mid-sized cities, in five states, spread across the U.S..  Most of those places are currently run by people working with outdated ideas.  They may or may not be very corrupt, and most are probably reasonably decent people.  But they're running on the ideas and with the small cliques of people that worked 30-40 years ago, and haven't fully adopted to today's technological and social realities.  

And while we're at it, what if the U.S. Senate actually represented the U.S. population, and not arbitrary boundaries from 100-300 years ago.  There are nearly 330 million people in the U.S., so each senator should represent about 3.3 million people.  Here in California, we have 39 million people, a huge state, a huge economy, and two senators.  Across the country, dinky Rhode Island has a tiny area of land, a much smaller economy, and 1.1 million people.  We have multiple counties in California that are larger than Rhode Island in area, some which also have more people.  

San Bernadino County is 8 or 9 times the size of Rhode Island, AND has twice as many people.  Nothing against Rhode Island, they just happen to be the smallest state to use for comparison.  The point is, redstricting the U.S. Senate, as fair as possible, would even out the representation to actual people, and much more accurately represent the U.S. population, which would have enormous positive effects on this country going forward.  

If you watch this video, let me know your thoughts on Facebook or Twitter.  This plan isn't perfect but it's a great place to start the conversation on jumpstarting America as a functional democratic republic again.  

The two best videos to understand rising prices, inflation in general, and the economy right now

This is Joe Brown, of Heresy Financial channel, picking apart President Joe Biden's inflation plan.

If you drive a car or ride a bus, you use gasoline, or natural gas, to create electricity for electric cars, or to power many buses.  Both gasoline and natural gas have gone up a lot in pricein the last two years.  Traveling on the streets is more expensive now, and so are most other things, and this blog is about not only my life on the streets, but also how to survive and thrive in the crazy decade of the 2020's.  Joe Brown, with his Heresy Financial channel (above), gives some of the best overall analysis of today's economy that I've seen.  If you want to understand today's rising prices, the video above is a great place to start.

OK, I'm sick of hearing numbskulls blaming President Biden for the current rising prices.  The president, any U.S. president, by themselves, has very little to do with the economy.  Working with Congress, they can pass laws and programs that affect the economy to some degree.  But the federal Reserve (aka The Fed), really controls our money supply, and influences interest rates, which ripple through the rest of the economy. 

You can blame Biden, if you want, for keeping Jay Powell as the head of The Fed (the Federal Reserve), who caused our current price inflation.  The federal deficit (gap between money coming in from taxes and money spent by U.S. federal government), has gone up since the federal budget was balanced during the Bill Clinton presidency in 1999-2000.  Democrat and Republican administrations have both spent more money than brought they brought in, over the 20 years since.  The Covid-19 pandemic response caused the deficit to soar, first in 2020 under Trump, and now under Biden.  

Nomi Prins was a quant, which means a super math geek, at Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers in the 1980's and 1990's, and has been a financial journalist/author since about 2001.  She is one of the smartest people around to explain the financial markets and the how economy works.  This recent interview gives her the chance to explain what she sees happening in today's world with high inflation, falling stock markets, slowing real estate markets, and everything else going on.  

These two videos are a heck of of lot of information to digest, particularly if you don't pay much attention to economic issues in general.  But these are the best to current videos I've seen to understand what's going on, why prices are so high, and why we may need another huge bailout (which will cause more inflation in 2-3 years) at some time.  

Everybody complains about rising gas prices, food prices, and other high prices.  But very few people really want to learn the basics of how the economy actually works, and where things may go from here.  If you're one of those few people, check out these videos.  If not, keep whining as prices keep going up, loans get harder to get and more expensive, and real estate starts going down in the coming months.