The Spelling Bee and Other Worthless Championships

 No kid should ever spend a minute watching the Spelling Bee contest, leave alone bother to spend days, months and years of valuable time practicing for it.

There are more foolish contests in this world, but I am hard pressed to name one.

But why, Sanjiv?

The Spelling Bee teaches you all the wrong skills, namely memorizing meaningless strings of letters that form words. Nobody needs this skill. As I type this essay about this infernal contest, I make spelling errors galore. And yet, the editor fixes them on its own – for the most part. There is nothing to fix the words or the (lack of!) thought that went into them.

Spelling is a worthless skill. You may as well teach your kids the fine art of stenography or how to become a telephone operator.

There is a good reason why kids with Indian origins have won the last 11 Spelling Bee contests. Their parents went to school in India and learnt the art of learning worthless skills. One of these is rote memorization of strings of letters that form meaningless words like “marocain” that they, nor anyone else shall ever use.

Indian schools are notorious for creating a curriculum that is completely devoid of independent thought, problem solving, or imparting even the most basic skills. Just remember some rubbish, like how to spell the word marocain, and you get to pass the final exam. Yay! Now go a job and become someone else’s problem.

Perhaps India should have contests about memorizing random numbers. The first one to recite 1200 digits wins!

The kids in these contests COULD have been taught more useful skills, like constructing useful sentences and thoughtful paragraphs. That skill that seems to be a lost art. I can’t seem to find a decent writer to save my life. Perhaps, we should have a writing contest, but then it could not be packaged into nice TV prime time segment, complete with cute children with glasses regurgitating dictionaries.

The kids COULD have participated in hackathon where the smart kids are writing useful code that will be used in billion dollar products and websites. Then they get hired, by the next big startup to be the head of department that writes the core of next hot IPO.

Do your kids a favor. Let them take those soccer lessons or teach them useful things like gardening or fixing cars, carpentry or making websites. They will learn useful things, like solving problems and working with people.

Or, you could teach your nerdy kid how to rot in front of a dictionary all day.

Your choice.

Confidence is Everything

If I was running or was in any way responsible for a large economy, the first thing I would worry about is how secure people and institutions felt about their lives and their money.

Capital expenditures are a very important part of a large economy like this one. These expenditures are essentially multi-year investments that institutions and people make in order to earn money or somehow improve their lives. That washing machine you just bought for your new house? Two large investments, both made for multi-year periods.

You will not make these investments if you think your life may be upended tomorrow but some kind of an economic or other storm – such as deportation.

Similarly a business will not make such an investment (like a $500 million new plant), if there is a chance that they will suddenly not be able to sell product from that plant to all their markets.

When you contemplate a 20% border adjustment loudly, as the government, you are sending a signal to everyone contemplating such an investment. DON’T BOTHER - unless your consumer is entirely domestic. When you impose a 20% tax on your side of the border, you know the other side of the border will retaliate with a 20% tax on their side of the border. And suddenly, you have poorer consumers on both sides.

Aside from poorer consumers, you will have poorer producers on both sides of the border, who will start going bust in droves because now they cannot sell product where they were selling product a year ago. Suddenly, they are laying off their employees and then you have economic chaos in every direction.

The system will eventually re-converge in a few years, with domestic producers picking up the slack at higher price points. But even they will be affected by the confidence problem. If I invest now, will this tax be eliminated in 2 years and then I go bust?

Meanwhile, back on the farm you have a bunch of immigrants wondering if they should apply that coat of paint and replace that dying washing machine, or maybe even buy a new house. Suddenly, they are panicked consumers hoarding cash and not even going to the movie theater. If I get deported, how much cash will I need?

The problem is much bigger when you realize that it’s not just the undocumented immigrants who are wondering if they should hang around. Meanwhile, as they dribble out the United States loses skills it desperately needs – across the economic and skill spectrum.

Let’s not forget tourists who decide not to bother showing up because they just might not be welcome here. Who wants to buy expensive tickets and book non-refundable rooms and then be turned away at the border? Let’s go to Paris instead.

Creating uncertainty reduces consumer and business confidence. The University of Michigan has a survey that attempts to measure this confidence. It’s far from perfect but is a reasonably good leading indicator of where things are headed. It’s not exactly rising – and not without good reason.

When you affect confidence, you affect capital expenditures, operating expenditures and hiring and suddenly you have lower growth – even (and especially) if you never impose those border taxes. This is no way to accelerate growth in an economy. You can douse short term fuel on the fire – like a tax cut. That will only cause a few big flames that will lead to a lot of smoldering in just a few seconds.

Why Democrats lose Elections - And What They Should Do About It

The Democrats are great at marketing to their own people. The problem is that if you want to win an election, you actually have to reach out the other side and frame the message in a way the other side can understand.

The one line from the Hillary Clinton clown parade that I remember was “look at the website. It’s all there”. Now, I am sure there was a website and have no doubt that “it” was all there. However, I never bothered to look. Neither did most Americans.

On the other side was a boisterous chant “lock her up! Lock her up!”. Never mind that there was no reason to lock her up, or a website that explained the reasons to lock her up. It was just a brilliant slogan based upon a sliver of non-fact.

If you want to win the war of words about the “Endangered Species” Act, rename it to the Noah’s Ark Act or Saving God’s Creatures Act. The rural world cares not one lick about “Endangered” and has no knowledge of “Species”. You want to win a war of words that involves them, use the terminology they use in Church, because that is where they go – a lot.

The Democrats like to use the phrase “conflict of interest” to describe Trump’s obvious conflicts. Does this resonate with the masses? What is a Conflict of Interest anyway? The man is set about making America Great Again. If you want to win a war of words, you have to weaponize your phrases, not use some educated Ivy League economic club terminology.

Then, you have to keep using that weapon until everyone else is using your weapon to describe the problem.

If you want to describe Trump’s Russia problem, you need to call him a Russian Stoogie. Name him Vladimir Trump. Call him Traitor Trump in your speeches, Democratic Congressmen and Senators – because he Sold Out. Don’t hold back on the caviar and vodka jokes. Make cartoons with Trump sitting meekly in Putin’s kangaroo pocket drinking from a baby bottle.

If you want to keep the “Estate Tax”, don’t let Republicans rename it to the “Death Tax”. Call it the “Aristocrat’s Tax” and talk about how it was designed to make sure future generations actually work for a living instead of passing on wealth to their children.

If you want to pass a “Carbon Tax”, quit calling it a “Carbon Tax”. For heavens, sake what is Carbon? And I am being taxed enough already! Call it “Saving God’s Green Earth Act”. It’s the Law that prevents Florida and California going under water. Who cares if Antarctica is melting? Let it melt!

And if you want to make Conservative into a bad word, quit calling Republicans Conservatives. Call them the Primitives. They want to bring back Primitive ideas and take the world back to an Ancient place. Make Conservative into Primitive and make the whole thing into a bad word like “Liberal”.

Repeat these terms repeatedly (again and again!) even if there is not a sliver of fact to them. Your opposition has no interest in facts. Your job is to make other people repeat your slogans.

You want the country to kvetch about the health care mess, tell them to “kiss your health care goodbye” and how your cancer stricken children will die on the streets like they used you while people go bankrupt. Make jokes about how the Republicans are planning on a Million Dollar Deductible on your health care plan. Don’t talk about Obamacare repeals. The GOP made sure that the word “Obamacare” is toxic.

And if you really want to win, couch your health care desires in pro-life terms. You are the Pro Life party. You want to make sure all Children don’t die because they lose their health care. You want to make sure people don’t have heart attacks and diabetes. You want HUMAN LIFE to live! Who is going to be opposed to that anyway?

Never mind the facts. They do not matter. What matters is how you phrase what you want. Your job is to come up with slogans that will make your positions appealing to the vast majority of this country – not just the liberal elites living in big cities.