Massengill Advisory LLC
+1 (855) 414-3968
  • Home

Jared Kushner: Fifteen Lessons I Learned From Criminal-Justice Reform

4/29/2019

 
Picture

BY JARED KUSHNER 
APRIL 24, 2019
​
IDEAS: Kushner is Assistant and Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump.Jared Kushner was interviewed at The TIME 100 Summit on criminal justice reform, the Mueller report findings, Middle East peace, and more. To watch the interview and read about his comments, click here.

One of the proudest moments of my life was standing beside President Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office to witness him sign the First Step Act, a historic criminal-justice reform bill that would make American communities safer, improve hundreds of thousands of lives and change the way we think about prisons. As I listened to the many advocates who had tirelessly worked to make this day possible I couldn’t help but appreciate the genius of our Founding Fathers. America’s democracy is the greatest governing system in the world. It was designed to be stubborn and slow, yet open to change when enough citizens agree on needed progress. I was later told by the first man who was released from prison early because of the First Step Act that while the speeches at the signing ceremony were beautiful, he and his friends were watching it live from prison, screaming at the television, “Sign the damn bill already!” For them, it was a miraculous moment.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

China's Xi Signals Approval for Trump's Trade War Demands

4/26/2019

 
Picture
Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed some 40 world leaders at the Belt and Road forum in Beijing, but his speech may have been aimed at a head of state not in the audience: U.S. President Donald Trump.

Xi spent a large portion of his speech Friday addressing Chinese domestic reforms, pledging to address state subsidies, protect intellectual property rights, allow foreign investment in more sectors and avoid competitive devaluation of the yuan. All four are issues the U.S. is addressing in trade talks with Beijing.
​
To read the rest of this article, click here.

When the Productive Class has been pushed hard enough, they will opt out

4/26/2019

 
Picture
People love their big paychecks, but they also value their sanity.

One of the most astonishing manifestations of disconnected-from-reality hubris is public authorities' sublime confidence that employers and entrepreneurs will continue starting and operating enterprises no matter how difficult and costly it becomes to keep the doors open, much less net a profit.

The average employee / state dependent reckons that the small business owner / entrepreneur is killing it financially, banking a small fortune in pure profit every month, and that they're doing what they love so they'll continue doing it no matter what. In other words, they're all wealthy Tax Donkeys who can easily afford higher taxes and fees and will tolerate paying more to keep doing what they love.

Wrong on both counts--dead wrong. A far more typical response is the one a house painter emailed me last year: every day, he reported, he wanted to dump his spray rig and power washer in a dumpster and leave the U.S.

The number of small businesses and entrepreneurs hanging on by a thread financially and emotionally is legion. Rather than killing it, they're getting killed by rising rents, wages, labor overhead, taxes, fees, licensing, inspection fees, insurance and so on.
The long hours, financial risks and open-ended responsibilities are ideal conditions for burn-out and bankruptcy.

​To read the rest of this article, click here.

CHINA HOLDS THE GOLD AND WILL MAKE THE RULES

4/25/2019

 
Picture
by Egon von Greyerz

​
Gold is the ultimate insurance against a bankrupt financial system, a corrupt political system and a rotten monetary system. But official propaganda, combined with people’s greed, mean that virtually nobody understands the necessity of insuring against these risks. Also, investors are convinced that stocks always go up and therefore that the 147x growth in the Dow since the end of WWII will continue unabated. Few understand that exponential growth in stocks is totally dependent on an equally exponential expansion of money printing and credit, including share buybacks.


But it isn’t enough to acquire insurance in the form of gold, it is also critical to insure the insurance. Most people who hold insurance in the form of cash, jewelry or gold, will hold it in a safe at home, in a bank safe or alternatively hide it.

For the rest of this article, click here.


The Feedback Loop of Doom: When Mobile Creatives and Capital Abandon Unaffordable, Dysfunctional Cities

4/25/2019

 
Picture
When the 4% who generate the jobs and tax revenues have had enough and leave, the effects quickly impact the 64%.

At the end of any trend, everyone's a true believer: this trend is so enduring, so broad-based, so based on unchanging fundamentals that it will never ever reverse.

One such trend is the white-hot growth of housing, employment, tax revenues, etc. in major urban magnets for global capital and talent: you know the usual suspects: Dallas, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland OR, Denver, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and so on.

What these urban regions offer are strong job markets, a very desirable dynamic.

For example, over 400,000 jobs have been added to the San Francisco Bay Area in the past few years, basically an entire new city of workers. Very few states have added 400,000 jobs in the past few years, and fewer still have added so many high-wage jobs.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

The Dark History of the Minimum Wage

4/20/2019

 
Picture
Given the demonstrable harm to the poor caused by minimum wage laws, I have always assumed that proponents were at best, innumerates who were not bright enough to understand the impact of these policies or at worst, cynics who didn’t care about the harm to the poor as long as their virtue signaling won them power.

While that may still be the case today, the origins of the minimum wage laws actually have a darker history. The harm to the poor was not incidental; it was its declared purpose. 

Part of a package of “progressive” eugenics policies just over 100 years ago, alongside abortion and forced sterilization, proponents of minimum wage laws like Henry Rogers Seager, a Columbia economist and president of the American Association for Labor Legislation, published a key paper on minimum wage laws in 1913, “If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization of the congenitally defective."

Reading the published policy proposals by the “progressive" Democrat leaders of the time is chilling. I recommend James Corbett's short documentary, "The Dark History of the Minimum Wage."

Every Time Democrats Talk, I Want To Vote For Trump Twice

4/8/2019

 
Picture
I am a highly motivated Trump voter because the Democrats have motivated me up to my eyeballs. I have never been more motivated in my life, because the Democrats are terrifying me.
​
Essay by George S. Bardmesser

It’s a damn shame I have to wait another 20 months to vote for President Trump. I wish I could do it now. Twice. Or better yet, in as many jurisdictions as I can. Preferably in every swing district and every swing state.

Yeah, yeah, I know — sadly, I can’t. It’s been a hell of a ride these past couple of years, and I sure hope it doesn’t end next November.
I am a middle-of-the-road Republican who voted for Trump with the utmost reluctance in 2016. He sure wasn’t perfect. He was no Cicero, either––though he can give a decent speech when the chips are down. He had a few extra skeletons rattling in his closet, especially compared to colorless non-entities like Jeb. So yeah, I was queasy about voting for an ex-registered-Democrat-from-New-York-and-possible-liberal-now-turned-Republican.

Was I worried? Hell, yeah! Was I depressed? You bet. But, really, what options were there? Hillary? Jill Stein? Seriously? 

​Read the rest of this article here.

Sam Vaknin: The True Toxicity of Social Media

4/7/2019

 
Thomas Wictor has highlighted a fascinating interview of an Israeli genius whose analysis of social media is amazing.

The Israeli psychologist Sam Vaknin was was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), Vaknin made it his mission to learn how to cure this allegedly incurable affliction. He has one of the highest IQs ever measured, but as a child, his mother subjected him to mind-boggling physical and psychological abuse. Vaknin was also sent to college at the age of nine, which finished the job of ruining him.

This video is well worth the time required to watch it. Wictor summarizes Vaknin’s most important point.

Social media was built to create an addiction to it. Addiction is a feature, not a bug. Every single person who created social-media platforms is pathological in that he is not socialized. He is angry and childish, determined to impose his will on everyone as a form of revenge. The technology of social media itself transforms the users into becoming more like the people who created it.

And that’s why the users of social media can’t think. They choose to be “fooled” by non-stories over and over and over. When I was on social media, my attempt to explain things was ultimately futile. Users of social media want hysteria–anger, fear, aggression, and uncertainty. They want to feel that everything is horrible.

Click here for the full interview: https://youtu.be/dmXcjvL9VSc

Byron York: From former Trump lawyer, candid talk about Mueller, Manafort, Sessions, Rosenstein, collusion, tweets, privilege, and the press

4/5/2019

 
Picture
What was President Trump up to when he publicly attacked the work of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller? What was going on behind the scenes between the White House and Mueller's office? Was there cooperation? A fight over privilege? And just how mad was Trump at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Rod Rosenstein when the special counsel was appointed?
​
Veteran attorney John Dowd was President Trump's lawyer for a critical period of the Trump-Russia investigation, from June 2017 until March 2018. In a new podcast, Dowd offered an unusually frank inside look at what was going on between the president and the prosecutor. 
​
You can find the entire article here.

Democrats in 2020: Unelectable Nonentities

4/5/2019

 
Picture
It is uproariously entertaining to see the scurryings of the innumerable host of Democratic presidential candidates in what is already more of a lottery than a quest for the nomination of a great party to the world’s greatest office.

The Gadarene stampede to (and over) the edge of the abyss of all who advocate open borders, 70 percent income taxes, the green terror, socialized medicine, legalized infanticide, reparations to native and African-Americans, packing the Supreme Court, and vacation of the Electoral College, has finally elicited, in a Churchillian expression, a tiny mouse of dissent. The charge to oblivion reminds me of 1972. 

For the rest of this article, click here.

<<Previous
    Picture

    Author

    Kevin Massengill is an entrepreneur, investor, and award winning Fortune 500 senior executive with a track record of massive business growth.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    Archives

    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    January 2017
    September 2016
    August 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.