#500: What's REALLY Important?

We survived.  Seven people here in North Carolina did not, and that is particularly important (and tragic).  Hurricane Matthew was a dramatic storm, with high winds ripping through the eastern part of the state, far bigger a chunk of the state than had been expected.  Floods are rampant in areas that had been at fairly high water levels previously.

It's still pretty breezy here, and as I write this, there are ongoing rescue efforts to find and remove people put in some precarious positions by the storm.  Coastal Georgia, Florida and South Carolina are cleaning up as we speak, and some coastal areas are simply not going to be the same.  Some dams are at treacherous heights.

If you've never had the eye-wall of a hurricane go over top of you, it's a pretty scary experience.  Nowhere better to go, nothing you can do.  Mother Nature can be a mean mother.

That's really important.

ISIS is here.  Born of an ideology that was allowed to take root and gain funding when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama refused to allow American projected strength to stay in Iraq, radical Islamist terrorism is here.  Islamist terrorists are killing innocents in great numbers in the Middle East, and they're already killing innocent Americans here in our workplaces and social settings.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton support bringing unvetted or under-vetted people from those regions here, although no one thinks it a good idea, save for them.  There are thousands of square miles of territory in their home regions where they can practice their own culture and their own faith, with their own language.  They would probably prefer that.  But no, political beasts like Obama and Hillary value votes ahead of the lives of innocent Americans; they will try to bring them here, and will shrug when the next phony refugee commits crimes here.

That's really important.

We are, as a nation, $20 trillion in debt.  We owe that incredible amount to many other countries, including China, who wants to destroy us.  Our economy has soured so badly that entrepreneurs are not able to raise capital to start or sustain businesses.  We laugh when banks advertise that they want to lend to small businesses, because they certainly don't want to, and they don't do it.  Accordingly, the USA is not creating jobs.  Few new good jobs, and tax revenues lag.  As a result, we can't pay the principal on our national debt, and the interest cost we do pay keeps rising.

Businesses that would provide those jobs are not creating them here, because it's too expensive.  Minimum-wage laws, excessive regulations, slow Federal agency responses, all make it easier to ship jobs overseas or simply hire fewer, better people -- or automate.  You can't tell businesses to hire more; wages reflect the value added by the employee's efforts, not what the employee actually needs.  So job growth is slow, wage growth is non-existent, and it's not clear who cares in the White House.

That's really important.

And this, friends, is the 500th column on this site.  That might only be important to me, but I'd like to think that occasionally something I wrote made a difference, even to one person, even once.

Shall I tell you what's not important?  Sophomoric comments that are made in any locker room in the USA on any given day, like the ones that occupied 30% of the presidential debate last night.  If you, my friend, are not looking first at the things I point out as being important, and plan to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton, despite the proven incompetence of the Democrats' candidate at solving anything important to the life of the USA, then I don't know what I can tell you.

I think I'll look out at the wind again.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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