President Trump's showmanship and brashness was fully on display last night.
From the honoring of the US Hockey team to the the well-deserved publicly made awards for valor and gallantry to heroes assembled in the visitors' galley, it hit all the right notes, with a little over the top boasting that we have come to expect from President Trump.
The energy he had giving a very long speech certainly gives an indication of his continued fitness as President, and gives lie to the idea that he is tired or incapable of holding office as was his predecessor at this stage,the SOTU showed a very clear divide between Democrats and the rest of the country.
The State of The Union address yet again publicly and firmly put the Democrats on the 20% side of 80/20 issues.
The Democrats simply could not support the idea that they should represent the interests if Americans over illegal immigrants - and everyone watching saw that quite clearly.
That the Democrats could not stand and honor those who lost their lives to illegal alien criminals, and to criminals released on no-cash-bail and Democrat soft-on-crime policies was also clearly seen.
From Rashida Tlaib's F___k ICE! badge, which was very classy; to Ilhan Omar getting all out of sorts when the $18 billion in Somali Fraud in Minnesota was pointed out, to Al Green's acting out and getting ejected yet again, the Democrat's performative outbursts for their base likely made their base happy, and turned everyone else off about them if they were watching.
Not all Democrats showed up in white as had been previously announced as a form of protest, but some did. Democrats have a habit of dressing in all white for protesting major political events. Perhaps someone pointed out the optics of doing so this time would be less than optimal. No pointy hats on the Dems this time, thankfully.
In short Trump, while being bombastic firmly fixed the Dems on multiple issues as being out of step with ordinary Americans - and got coverage for many issues the Dems would rather be swept under the rug.
The speech was overall very good, albeit overly long, with an energetic and optimistic look ahead for the country -- and it properly honored numerous American heroes.
Mr. B. looked with some dread at the question: How much of the US economy is fake?
If you consider US state and federal government going to waste and fraud, the answer is a heckuva lot.
US Government Accountability Office puts annual fraud in US government programs at 233 Billion to 521 billion per year.
Elon Musk had an estimate of annual fraud in US federal government spending at 1.5 trillion – equivalent to slightly over half of all the 2.5 trillion dollars in taxes collected from American individual taxpayers per year.
In other words, if we got rid of the fraud at the federal level, we could pay half the federal income taxes we pay now with the exact same results.
This isn't even touching wasteful government spending at the Federal and State level.
At the State level, there's quite a lot going on as we saw in Minnesota and California which ranges into the billions of dollars.