Now that Kamala Harris is officially the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, both the Republicans and the media are hounding her to provide specific detailed policy proposals. My advice to Harris and her campaign is simple.

DON’T DO IT!!!

First, despite all their claims to the contrary, neither Trump nor his campaign have come up with much in detail. Saying that you’ll Make America Great Again, deport illegal immigrants, stand up to Putin, and stop taxing income from tips are hardly a policy framework. They’re campaign slogans, and that’s about all anyone will get from Trump. More slogans, if that.

Now, there was a detailed Republican plan – Project 2025 – and, once leaked, Trump immediately claimed he never heard of it, and that should tell anyone that you shouldn’t believe any policy suggestion from Trump. As for deporting all illegal immigrants… anyone who does will destroy the American economy, because those illegal immigrants comprise an estimated 20% of the U.S. construction industry, doing dirty jobs that most Americans won’t or can’t do, at a time when we’re already short of housing that costs too much.

Second, the media only wants those detailed policy plans so that they can nitpick and criticize them to death, finding fault in every phrase. Such plans are just red meat to the media wolverines, no matter how much they claim they’re only seeking the truth. The truth is in fourth place behind audience support, advertising revenue, and newscasters’ egos.

Third, no detailed campaign policy proposal ever survives intact after contact with reality and economics. No economist can predict accurately what the economy—or the world political situation – will be five months plus from now. It’s fine to say that the U.S. needs to restructure homebuilding and home-buying to deal with high prices and inadequate supplies of shelter, or to restore bodily legal rights removed by state laws, but leave the details to the time when the new president actually has the power to do something. Because, if you don’t, the media – and the other side – will trash all too many good proposals in their attack to gain a few more percentage points of audience approval.

Being detailed in a campaign is one of those ideas that sounds wonderful… and can only lead to disaster, in all too many ways.

While all political figures have a tendency to overstate their “case” and to take liberties with facts, I find that J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are the greatest misstaters/liars of any major party presidential candidates I’ve seen in the fifty years I’ve been in and followed U.S. politics.

Unlike Trump, who’s an outright liar, Vance is a cunning misstater, often using actual and largely accurate facts to paint a seemingly convincing picture that’s primarily inaccurate, and he and a number of other very articulate right-wing Republicans are succeeding in convincing people in large part because of the ignorance of the American people.

For example, take the “comparison” between how people feel about their economic position in the Trump years to their economic position now. Of course, many people are unhappy at present. Prices and interest rates are much higher. But very few people ask why or look into the reasons. They just blame the incumbent – and they’ve been suckers that way for years.

Economic policies and laws are like a ship. It takes a long time to implement policies and laws. It takes months if not years to get legislation reforming or creating programs. After passing such legislation, it usually takes well over a year to write and even begin to implement the regulations and procedures to put a law into effect (and those procedures are required by law!). Even Executive Orders of the President can take months or longer, depending on what’s involved. The full impact of Biden’s medical and drug price reforms won’t begin to take effect until next year and later. The chip and microchip factories created by Biden’s initiative are barely under construction.

This applies to Trump as well. All the “good times” in the first years of Trump’s administration were created by the policies of previous administrations. The greatest impetus for inflation began with the reaction of the Trump administration’s massive spending on Covid and Trump’s enormous tax cuts, but the full impact didn’t occur until Biden was in office.

So, Trump and Vance are taking credit for the policies of their predecessors and blaming the inflation and economic problems that Trump caused on Biden. Just as Bill Clinton took advantage of the stable economic conditions and balanced budget handed to him by the unpopular tax increases of the first President Bush, which contributed to Bush’s defeat.

And, by the way, more than a few economic studies have pointed out that the massive increases in corporate profits were a significant factor in creating higher inflation, yet very few politicians bring this up, and fewer news media sources report on it.

So… it might be wise to look at the assumptions of who’s really to blame and who’s really the one to praise before jumping to conclusions. Not that many people will because it upsets their preconceived views.

Over the past several years, but especially over the past few months, I’ve noticed a growing trend in advertising, one which amounts to “insuring” everything.

The most obvious example is that of CarShield, which bills itself as the answer to unexpected car repair bills. But there are other examples, from pet insurance to appliance insurance (in addition to warranty coverage). A month or so I was asked if I wanted insurance for a replacement coffeemaker that I was buying.

Now… some forms of additional insurance are likely worth the price, such as a homeowners’ policy or supplemental health insurance, because most people can’t afford major structural repairs from weather or fire damage and because most health insurance doesn’t cover everything by a longshot.

But replacement insurance for a $35 coffeemaker?

What troubles me most about this is the idea that people need insurance for everything. Perhaps I’m old school, but when I was a child and a young adult, my parents emphasized that life was uncertain and that everyone needed to set aside money for expected events or the so-called “rainy day.”

While most Americans offer lip service to the need for a rainy day fund or emergency savings, according to a July 2024 survey by Empower research, some 37% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected expense over $400, and almost a quarter (21%) have no emergency savings at all. And one in four Americans dipped into emergency savings last year, not for emergencies, but to cover basic living expenses, while sixty percent of Millennials are stressed about a financial emergency striking.

Part of me wonders about whether this is really all about economic deprivation, but when I look at the student parking lot at the local high school or the local state university and see that most of the cars are newer than my 15 year old SUV, I have certain doubts. These doubts are bolstered when I see brand-new twenty-foot powerboats in the driveways of the most modest homes in town, or when students who protest that they can’t afford textbooks drive late model cars, presumably without CarShield insurance.

The guiding principle of the Founding Fathers was to maximize freedom within a framework of ordered secular laws and to keep religion out of the Constitution except to allow people to believe as they wished within that framework of secular laws.

That’s why the Constitution plainly states: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Unfortunately, too many Americans don’t seem to understand that. Nor do they understand or want to understand what the word “secular” means, which is “having to do with attitudes, activities, or other matters that have no religious or spiritual basis.”

Secular laws are a system of rules that a government or society creates to address issues such as business agreements, crime, and social relationships. Secular laws are created by non-religious institutions, such as popular assemblies or governments, and the purpose of secular law is to create a framework that allows people to live peaceful and orderly lives.

Now, if one looks around the world, it seems that a great number of conflicts, including here in the United States, center on groups wanting to impose their religious or faith-based beliefs on others.

Most of the conflict over abortion lies in belief, whether “life” begins with separate sperm and egg, at conception, at the time a fetus can survive outside the womb, or at actual birth. There’s also the basic conceptual question of whose rights are paramount and when, those of the mother or those of the fetus. People with different faiths/beliefs have different – and strong – opinions about each of those points.

They will never agree. Yet the right-to-life group insists on legally codifying its beliefs and imposing it on others, even when that imposition will kill other women, all too often totally needlessly, as recent events throughout the United States have shown.

Allowing women to choose when and if they have children does not preclude the right-to-lifers from following their beliefs as those beliefs affect their own lives. That removes religion and belief from the law, but the right-to-lifers want their religious beliefs imposed on others.

This only creates more conflict.

Look at the internal conflict in Iran, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where male religious zealots insist on imposing all manner of religious requirements by law and force, not by personal choice. Or Sudan. Or in all too many other Middle Eastern countries. In the past, wars over religion decimated nation after nation. The Thirty Years War in northern Europe killed roughly eight million people and fifty percent of the population in some parts of Germany.

Yet… for some insane reason, all too many human beings feel that they have to mandate religious beliefs on others by force of law, because only they have the “right” beliefs.

The Founding Fathers understood this all too well, unlike far too many Americans today.

J.D. Vance’s has attacked Tim Walz’s military record as misrepresentative, but, like most political attacks by the Trumpists, Vance’s charges do have a few grains of truth in them.

Vance charged Walz with resigning from the National Guard when Walz learned that his unit would be deployed to Iraq.

The actual facts tell a somewhat different story. By early 2005, Walz had served twenty-four years in the Minnesota National Guard, including a disaster deployment in the U.S. and an Iraq support deployment to Italy in 2003, and he could have retired at any time. In February 2005, Walz filed the paperwork to run for Congress. A month later, Walz’s battalion was informed that it might be deployed to Iraq at some time within the next two years. After considerable self-debate, Walz put in his retirement papers. The actual orders for the battalion to deploy were not issued until August, and the battalion did not leave on that deployment until March of 2006. Basically, Walz chose to try to serve Minnesota as a congressman, rather than continue in the Minnesota National Guard, since he couldn’t do both.

J.D. Vance enlisted in the Marines and did four years of active duty. He also recently made the statement that when his country asked him to go to Iraq, he did it, but that Walz “dropped out.” What Vance conveniently ignores is that he was on active duty with the Marine Corps, and it wasn’t a choice – unless Vance went, he’d face desertion charges, and his time in Iraq was as non-combat press specialist with a Marine air wing.

After his time in the Marines, Vance completed college and Yale law school, followed by two clerkships and a brief stint in corporate law. Then he began working in venture capital, including Mithril Capital, a firm backed by Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Along the way, he married a law school classmate who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and who remains a well-paid corporate attorney. Yet, as a product of “the establishment,” and someone who was once a “never Trumper,” Vance brands himself as “anti-establishment” and trades on his Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of his Appalachian younger years and tends to forget his entire post-graduate corporate law/Wall Street/Silicon Valley career .

Just who is doing the misrepresenting?