Author: haroldblackphd

The Summer 2023 edition of “Georgia” – the magazine of the University of Georgia has as its cover story the university’s Redcoat marching band. The article brought back a rush of memories that had long been forgotten – or suppressed. The article evoked bittersweet memories for me. When I was growing up in Atlanta, we had five year high schools and I was one of only three eight graders in the varsity band. My junior and senior years, I was first chair clarinet – equivalent to concert master. I was really very good and although I could not improvise, I could play anything placed before me.

When I graduated from Booker T Washington High School in 1962 I was awarded five college band scholarships. Four were to HBCUs and one was to Ohio State. All wanted me to major in music and so I turned them down. Instead I enrolled at Georgia. Naturally, I tried out for the band despite their being the “Dixie” Red Coat band and playing Dixie after the National Anthem at football games (which looked like a Ku Klux Klan rally with all the confederate flags). My Dad said “Are you sure you can play Dixie?” I told him yes since I wanted to be in the band. However, the director, Roger Dancz told me after I auditioned that despite the fact that I was probably the best clarinetist on campus that I could not be in his band. The reason? He said we would not be able to travel in the segregated south. So instead I played in the Air Force ROTC band and always resented not being allowed to be a Red Coat. During my four years at Georgia no black athlete played on the Athens campus. However, my senior year NC State played us and there were blacks in their band. They were housed in the basketball arena with cots on the floor and fed in the cafeteria. I visited them and they said that they were the first blacks in the band at their school. When they showed up the band director said that they were welcome to be in the band that that “We will make this work.” I envied them and my resentment of Roger Dancz grew. I love the university but there were four faculty or administrators that I will never forgive. Roger Dancz is one of them.

To this day, when I see black students wearing the Red and Black, I wonder what might have been.

When I was growing up, my parents made me and my brother work. In elementary school, they decided to put in a basement by digging out the dirt under the house. My brother and I had to take out so many wheelbarrows of dirt before we could go out to play. In high school, we were made to work during the summers doing menial work for minimum wages. We washed dishes and bussed tables. We didn’t complain we now had money of our own. I bought books and records. We never thought of those jobs as menial. We knew that we were not going to earn that low wage as adults. We were living at home so any monies earned were disposable and not used for rent or food or utilities. We knew we were going to college. Although my parents went to HBCUs, my brother wanted to be an engineer but was barred from going to Georgia Tech so he went to Purdue. I wanted to follow him to Purdue but was forced to go to the University of Georgia when that university was ordered to desegregate. The state was paying my brother’s out of state tuition when Tech was segregated and took away that funding when Georgia was ordered to admit its first black students. Dad could not afford to send us both out of state and told me to find an alternative. I found the University of Georgia. While at Georgia, unbeknownst to my parents I worked to supplement the money they sent me monthly. One of my closest friends was head waiter at a local restaurant and I waited tables for a couple of years making enough money to buy a motor scooter and later my first car. I never told my parents any of this for they insisted that I devote all of my time to school. When they found out about 20 years later my mother said that she felt like “giving me a whipping.”

Working at low paying jobs proved invaluable. They taught me to be responsible, to get to work on time (Dad used to say that “on time was five minutes late”) and to be disciplined. Today, much of the issues facing our youth, especially our black youth can be traced to the existence of minimum wage laws which limit their employment opportunities. When the first minimum wage law was passed, black youth employment was actually higher than that of white youth. Indeed, the first minimum wages were enacted because black youth were being hired at wages lower than white youth much like illegals will work for lower wages today. The legislation was a success making black youth less competitive with whites at the higher wage. Now for black kids, the unemployment numbers are depression-like. The youth have been rendered unemployable. They have no skills and little prospect for gaining useful skills that are legal. While they would be able to find work at lower wages, the current minimum wage keeps them unemployed. Every now and then a proposal is made to enact a subminimum wage for teenagers. It is always a non-starter. It is argued that this would exploit the youth and would benefit big business. They know better and simply want to maintain the poor as wards of the state. Now Bernie Sanders is pushing an increase in the minimum wage to $17 per hour even though virtually all studies show that raising the minimum wage increases unemployment. Fewer youth will have the skills necessary to merit the higher wage. Although Sanders argues as if heads of households are working at the current minimum, the truth is that only two percent of heads of households earn the minimum wage. The increases in unemployment will be mostly among young people who reside with their parents (or parent). 

But Sanders and his ilk do not care about the consequences of their actions. The minimum wage is anti-poor and racist. It was enacted to lessen the competition by blacks for low paying jobs and to create welfare dependency. It worked. Some states have recently increased their minimum to $15 an hour. The early results show that businesses that employ these workers are forced to automate and replace people with technology. Obviously sanity is missing in the minimum wage argument. 

You can tell who the left fears by the hit pieces that suddenly appear in their newspapers, on their networks and their sycophants like Black Lives Matter, Move on and the NAACP. Make no doubt about it, the object of their scorn (and fear) is the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. How else do you explain their labelling his wife as Lady MacBeth while they put Hillary Clinton and Gisele Fetterman on a pedestal? Moreover, Fetterman’s husband, who somehow was elected to the US Senate by voters in Pennsylvania, is doted on and given loving praise by the left’s media outlets. Fetterman, who is speech impaired, wears hoodies and shorts to the senate has actually been mentioned as a presidential candidate! His clownish attire has been called “stylish” by those on the left. If Fetterman were a republican, he would be ridiculed and satirized by Saturday Night Live and late night comics. 

But Fetterman is the type of politician that the left loves. It can control him which explains why they fear DeSantis. They cannot control him and he revels in that knowledge. The left desperately wants Donald Trump to be the nominee of the republican party because Trump is the only republican they think they can beat. While the left occasionally makes snide remarks at Nikki Haley, Tim Scott and Mike Pence, they look upon the Florida governor as the largest danger to their power. Thus, they sicced the NAACP on him issuing a “travel advisory” cautioning blacks to not travel to Florida which the NAACP says is hostile to people of color (and LGPTQ+). When I first saw the travel advisory, I wondered why the NAACP would do something this stupid. Are they saying that the 3 million black and 6 million Latino residents are in danger living in such a hostile environment? That is probably news to those Floridians of color. Are black tourists being attacked when they cross the state line? I go to Florida three or four times a year and have yet to be attacked by anything other than mosquitoes, black flies and love bugs. I have not been denied service, cursed at or been treated with anything but respect. Maybe I should get the chairman of the NAACP who lives in Tampa show me where he has suffered from living in such a hostile state.

Is Florida more dangerous to blacks than Chicago, New York or Los Angeles? Do blacks in Florida suffer more discrimination than in democrat controlled states? Florida’s blacks have lower unemployment rates than in California and higher median incomes than blacks in Illinois. Are there more hate crimes against people of color in Florida? The data say otherwise. The advisory also said that DeSantis has tried to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools. I’ve written on this before. What DeSantis did was to have the courage to not allow the AP course on black history to be part of the Florida curricula. That course was less about history than it was about Critical Race Theory, “queer” black history and the distortions of the 1619 Project. Florida does teach black history. DeSantis gives an award for the best essays on black history by public school students. The state’s education department says that “Students shall develop an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” Indeed, the 1920 Ocoee massacre, in which blacks were killed by a mob is a part of the state’s curriculum. No, DeSantis is not trying to erase black history.  He is also has willingly incurred the ire of the left by taking over Florida’s leftist New College and ending funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs which tout segregation and pit races against each other.

DeSantis called the travel advisory a stunt. It is not a stunt. It is worse than that. It is the NAACP being made a fool of by its bosses on the left. The NAACP has long since ceased to be a civil rights organization and has become another organ of the left. It claims to want to enhance black education, yet it strongly condemns school choice which has been able improve the educational achievement of minorities. Not surprisingly, one of the major contributors to the organization is the teachers’ unions. If the NAACP were serious about black progress, it would favor right to work laws, oppose increases in minimum wages and support school choice. But then, the NAACP is more interested in pleasing its funding sources than in advancing the well being of black folks.

The fact that there is only one charter school in Knoxville is not surprising because the system is set up to minimize the number of charters. The applications must be voted on by the local board of education which is akin to asking them to acknowledge their own failure in providing for a quality education. The new charter is patterned after Chattanooga Prep, a successful all boys school. What is interesting about the vote of the Knoxville school board is that all four representatives of the inner city districts voted against the charter while representatives of the five districts outside the city core voted for the charter. Given that the poorest performing schools are within the city’s core, one would have thought that those representatives would have been the most keen on providing promising kids a chance to escape being trapped in terrible schools. Such was not the case.

When the application for the new charter was filed, the local NAACP and black state representative predictably came out against the new school. Their letters were embarrassing and indicated that they had not sat down with the applicants and discussed the school. Virtually every point made in opposition to the school was addressed in the rejoinder by the applicants. Apparently, those in opposition would have opposed the application regardless. Because it has been shown that parents in poorly performing school districts favor educational choice, charter schools and/or vouchers, I would hope that those who live in Districts 1, 2, 3 and 4 will elect representatives that have their children’s best education at heart rather than interested in preserving the status quo. It is time for a change,

I have personally tutored reading to students at one of the poorer performing schools in an afterschool program. We tried unsuccessfully to convince the school system to adopt a reading program called Funnix and demonstrated that kids thought to be poor learners could read if only the method of instruction were changed. By the end of the school year, all our children could read. As a result, the superintendent did not invite us back nor did he change how the students were being taught not to read. I met with several prominent members of the black community and with three different representatives from District 1 where some of the most embarrassingly bad schools reside. None were particularly interested in “rocking the boat” seemingly content to let the status quo continue. Its truly sad. There is no reason why any child should not be a proficient reader by grade 3 unless severely impaired. Even in the “best” performing elementary school in Knoxville there are around 20 percent who do not read at grade level. But at the 4 poorest performing schools less than 10 percent are proficient at the third grade level. This is outrageous. Why does the board of “education” allow this travesty to continue? In the city with the state’s premiere public university, Knoxville’s schools should be models of excellence. Instead they are a pitiful excuse mimicking education. The school board, if it were truly interested in education, would demand from the superintendent that every school should have a proficiency of at least 50 percent or else there will be consequences such a no pay increases and subsequent firing. Only if the administrators have skin in the game will proficiency levels improve. Until then the board of education is simply bored of education.

The old line black establishment has come out against charter schools and choice in education even though their constituents favor charter schools. There are 1 million kids on waiting lists for charters nationwide. Many parents want better education for their kids and with the overall performance of charters contrasting with that of the public schools, its no wonder. However, the establishment favors throwing money at the failed schools affirming the old definition of insanity. Perhaps this is because one of the primary funders of the NAACP is the teachers’ unions which vehemently opposes charters. Ironically, the teachers’ union in New York has its own charter with the president of the American Federation of Teachers sitting on its board! Simply amazing. I guess the education establishment which includes the Knoxville Board of Education is more interested in not educating children than in teaching kids to read.

The fashion police are out for democrat house leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for wearing tennis shoes with a suit to a budget meeting at the White House. Of course it is now common to see men wearing tennis shoes with suits. Just look at ESPN. Little known is the fact that I started the trend. In January 2017, the University of Georgia honored me and two others who entered the university in 1962 as its first black freshman. The morning of the event I realized that I had left my “dress” shoes and only had my running shoes with me. It was too early to go out and buy another pair of shoes so I was forced to wear “tennis” shoes to the event. It felt strange. Little did I know that was was setting a fashion trend. So its all my fault.

There are those who simply on reflex yell for the Federal government to balance the budget. They say that households have to balance budgets (they don’t really) so the government should balance its budget. Ok. Then you ask them “how” and they don’t have a clue because very few people have the intellectual curiosity to learn about how to do it. In reality, there is no reason why the Federal government should balance its budget. Just like households and corporations, the budget can be in a deficit so long as the outstanding debt can be serviced without an adverse effect on the borrowing entity. That is, if the household, corporation or government can increase its income sufficient enough to maintain or increase its well being while servicing its debt then it can run a deficit forever, paying off old debts while incurring new ones.

Yet let’s insist that the Federal government try to balance its budget. That is practically impossible. The two parts of the Federal budget are nondiscretionary and discretionary spending. The nondiscretionary (mandatory) spending is because Congress has made it so and includes the entitlements medicare and social security. The discretionary spending is everything else. Suppose that the Congress decided to balance the budget in 2023 given the spending and revenue levels of 2022. Revenues were $4.9 trillion while nondiscretionary spending was $4.1 trillion and discretionary spending was $1.7 trillion. Thus, if the budget were to be balanced then amount allocated to the mandatory component would be $4.1 trillion of the $4.9 trillion collected leaving only $0.8 trillion. This would mean a 50 percent cut across the board in everything else that the government spends its money on. You can imagine all the yelling and screaming when defense, air controllers, law enforcement, corporate subsidies and social welfare programs are cut in half. 

Of course, nondiscretionary spending is nondiscretionary because the government says it is. Everyone knows that in order to control federal spending then the spending on social security and medicare must be corralled. So I offer a few real solutions of my own that will work. 1. Eliminate duplication in government programs and spending 2. Eliminate automatic escalators in all government programs including social security. 3. Raise the full benefit age of social security to 70. 4. Privatize medicare and medicaid. 5. Privatize social security with a benefit floor guaranteed by the federal government. 6. Institute a flat income tax with no exemptions and requiring a two thirds vote in congress to raise it. 7. Limit the growth in the number of pages in the federal register (this would limit the number of regulations that could be enacted). 8. Institute an aggressive review of all regulations by all federal agencies. 9. Mandate that regulatory burdens must be reduced by at least 5 percent per year. 10. Limit federal pay (including perks) to no more than 10 percent over the average pay for the same position in the private sector. 11. And cap the federal budget to 18 percent of the previous year’s GDP.

Of course, there is virtually no chance that any of this will ever come about because the congress has no interest in curtailing spending and no interest in fiscal discipline. The federal budget is a giant cookie jar to keep constituents and donors happy. Doing so gets politicians reelected and the administrative state in power doling out billions like manna from heaven. There are hardly any positive consequences to either politicians or federal employees for being frugal but severe ones if they try. Politicians would not be reelected and replaced by ones who would promise to restore the largesse of yore while federal employees would be fired and would have to find real jobs. Bummer.

Excellence in higher education is hard to define.  How can you tell if a professor is doing a good job?  I’ve always said that so long as my students didn’t run from the room with their hands over their mouths, I guess that I was doing ok.  Or better still, I guess that I did ok when I get feedback in later years. I heard from a student who had my class 10 years ago and said how much he hated me and hated the class. But now he wanted to thank me for making him work hard for that C. I just heard from a student who had my first class taught at the University of Florida in 1972 who had retired and said that my class was what motivated him to be successful.

I retired ten years ago and even then standards were being lessened by the universities. There were no longer term papers. Exams had become true/false multiple choice. There were no more reading lists and books on reserve at the library. Those professors who refused to dumb down their courses found themselves with bad teaching evaluations, complaints from students and pressure from administrators. The hassle wasn’t worth it for most and they caved. At the undergraduate level I taught seniors. Many were functionally illiterate. They could not spell, write or do basic math. They did not know literature, history, geographic or politics. Many students had no idea how many senators were in Washington or even how many senators did the states have. I said “what have you been taught all these years?” If I had the power I would flunk all of you – not because of what you know in finance but what you don’t know about anything else.” I would not want you to be a graduate of my university. I actually had a student who asked me, “Why should I know anything?” Why should I know math when I have a calculator on my iphone? Why should I know geography when I have mapquest? Why should I know English when I have a word processor with grammar and spell check? Students were not intellectually curious. And these are our best and brightest?

I used to say that the world is made up of three types: the 3 percent that make things happen, the 7 percent that know what’s happening and the 90 percent who haven’t a clue as to what’s happening. I was naïve in thinking that the easy access to information would change the percentages and more people would know what’s happening as people availed themselves to information that was virtually costless. I was wrong. The youth today is no better informed than the youth of my day. I find their ignorance appalling. If these are our college students then what about the masses?

The universities are not helping the situation. In fact they are making things worse with lessened requirements, lower standards and providing less rigorous education. Students today may not know history, English, civics or math but they do know climate change, diversity, equity and inclusion and Critical Race theory. They can’t even define what is a woman! The universities now turn out graduates who do not read, lack writing and communication skills, are short sighted, do not believe in the American dream, have been taught to hate capitalism and are not patriotic. We should not be shocked when our leaders turn out to be ignorant ideologues. 

When I retired I felt I was at the height of my powers. Changes in technology made it easier to research and produce academic articles. Technology also made my teaching more interactive and more fun. My consulting business was thriving. I had been an editor of a first rate academic journal and the president of a major finance association. I had won awards for teaching, research and civic involvement. As much as I love what I did, my undergraduate students were driving me to distraction. Teaching Phd students was not enough to keep me at the university so I let the younger professors deal with the mess. The world is run by those between 50 and 65. Fortunately by the time this bunch gets into power, I should be dead.

We have again reached another so-called budgetary crisis where the Federal debt ceiling must rise or else risk the possibility of the government defaulting on its debt payments. The ceiling currently sits at $31.4 trillion and must rise because the government continuously spends more than it receives in tax revenue. Failing to raise the ceiling means that the government could not pay all of its obligations and would have to delay or renege on some of its debts. Currently, the House in Republican hands is threatening not to raise the ceiling unless Biden agrees to some spending cuts and shifts in spending. Biden of course refuses. We have seen this Kabuki theatre before with its elaborate preening and false displays prior to raising the ceiling. The Republicans want their voters to think that they are actually trying to curtail spending while the Democrats want their voters to think that no cuts will be forthcoming – unless they are to the military. Both obviously are not being forthcoming because neither party is serious about cutting Federal spending. They want to grow spending on their priorities and not on the priorities of their adversaries while ever growing overall Federal spending.

The debt ceiling has been around since World War I and has always been raised when it has been reached. It doesn’t matter who sits in the White House, the ceiling gets raised. The only difference is that when the Republicans are the president, the Democrats object to raising the ceiling and when the Democrats are in office, the Republicans object. Its all a game. Who said “My vote against the debt limit increase cannot change the fact that we have incurred this debt already, and will no doubt incur more”? The answer is Senator Joe Biden who voted against raising the ceiling in 2006. Biden also voted against raising the ceiling two times before. Now of course the same Biden is accusing the Republicans of playing partisan games by holding the debt ceiling hostage – just like he did on three different occasions when he was senator. Of course, he is right. Both parties avail themselves to the opportunity of playing before the cameras while not being in the least bit serious about controlling government spending overall.

The government always threatens a “shutdown” in case the ceiling is not raised. I think the last so-called shutdown was in 2019. Then the government picked those items to shut down affected the public directly, like closing the national parks and furloughing “non essential personnel”.  Entitlements continued to be paid, the military and the congress got paid, air controllers, law enforcement got paid and the mail got delivered. The shutdowns was brief, lest the public realized that they really don’t missed most of the non-essential government. Also, the non-essential workers got paid vacations since they were given back all back pay.

Much of the doom and gloom that comes out of Washington during times of a threatened shutdown is simply theatre. Instead of the Treasury trying to inflict the most pain on the public in order to pressure the Congress to raising the ceiling – which it will do anyway – there are other options. The first concerns the paying of interest on the debt. Government agencies hold about $7 trillion of the debt and the Federal Reserve holds another $6 trillion. The government could just defer paying interest on this debt while paying the interest on the debt to all other holders. Even in a worst case scenario, the US Treasury can always rely on the Federal Reserve to supply the funds necessary to fund its spending.  Therefore, the US government can be thought of as a contingent currency issuer who can issue the funds to spend.  

So in the end, the debt ceiling will be raised and the main driver of the debt, entitlement spending, will continue to grow unconstrained. I can guarantee that any agreement on the budget will not address entitlement spending and until it does, both Democrats and Republicans will continue to play this silly game of chicken as each successive debt ceiling is reached.

Remember the joke about the guy tasting Bud Lite for the first time thought it tasted funny and sent to a lab. The report said “I am afraid your horse has diabetes.” Well now Bud Lite – the fake beer – has a new spokesperson who is a fake woman. So a drink impersonating beer has a man impersonating a woman.

The news reported a man whose job offer was withdrawn because he sent an email to two women with “ladies” as a greeting. One woman said calling her a “lady” was a “microaggression.” 

I think the left has conspired to get Donald Trump the republican nomination because the only way that the democrats can get re-elected is if Trump is the republican nominee. Hence the indictment.

I don’t understand how anyone can advocate gender surgery for kids and

why gender issues should be part of the curricula for K-12.

The national debt is over 100% of GNP. The democrats want it to be higher and the republicans aren’t much better. On the opposite spectrum, Finland just voted out its leader because its national debt had surged to only 40% of its GDP.

It used to be that the Federal Reserve was the only adult in the room. Remember when it was said that the Fed removed the punch bowl after the party had just gotten good? Now the Fed is spiking the bowl.

Sadly, the Fed is saddled with the same incompetence that runs through the Biden Administration. Its regional presidents are ill-equipped to do their basic job of overseeing the banks in their region. Rather some of the regional banks such as Atlanta, Minneapolis and San Francisco seem to be spending more resources on DEI than on bank regulation. Mary Daly at the San Francisco Fed is the embodiment of incompetence.

The Fed Board’s seven members lack the foundation of monetary economics. Only two of them even have a modicum of training in the field. Jay Powell is a lawyer, not an economist. Its like the Supreme Court having a bunch of economists as justices.

The Knoxville NAACP has “demanded” that the application for a boys only charter school be withdrawn. This is in sync with the national organization’s opposition to charter schools. Guess all the hundreds of thousands of dollars given to the NAACP by the teachers’ unions is paying off.

I loved the Babylon Bee’s story of a Chinese army training video showing how to attack the American army by using the wrong pronouns.

Is transgenderism just part of a national mental health crisis?

I bet most kids questioning their gender reside in liberal states.

I just finished reading Siddarth Kara’s Colbalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives. It is a sobering and frightening account of the appalling conditions in mining cobalt in the Congo. That such conditions are allowed to continue is almost unimaginable. Everyone should read this book. Kara tells the story of the people of the Congo who have been dealt perhaps the planet’s worse poker hand. From slavery to the genocide by the Belgians to exploitation by the Europeans and now by the Chinese, the Congolese have never profited from the rich minerals in their soil. More personally, one of my 13 DNA strains is Congo, so these are stories about my relatives.

We now have in power a government that seems to conspire with the Chinese. It lets a spy balloon sail across the country unimpeded until after it finishes its mission. It denies domestic mining permits of minerals used in smartphones and EVs that are currently dominated by the Chinese. It is trying to destroy fossil fuels and replace them with more expensive and less reliable sources of energy while the Chinese are building more coal fired plants. Why should we make China better off while we make ourselves worse off and more dependent upon our main adversary? 

The Biden Administration is coming after your gas ovens, your small appliances, your light bulbs, your internal combustion engines, banning natural gas buildings, diesel and gas heavy trucks – everything it seems other than John Kerry’s private jet.

All of the above points to a country in decline. I think it is a product of all the propaganda spewed by the left that has taken over media, “culture”, education and politics. Its no wonder that most Americans think that their children will be less prosperous. It is also no wonder that fewer Americans are patriotic, love the country, are religious and believe in the American dream. Its truly sad because this malaise is of our own making.