The Mandate

MONEY UPDATE

Tom Martel:  “The past couple months we have been bombarded with political rhetoric, EVERYWHERE.  I think you should give your faithful readers a break and throttle back to Finance for a week or two.  Let’s hear about your new investment followings.  What about Corning, how about the bankruptcy of SIGA, our long love of WheelTug, and the company on the water at the Great Lakes?”

☞ That’s fair.  WheelTug seems to be tugging along, as best I can tell — hang on to your BOREF with money you can truly afford to lose.  Silt continues to accumulate and GLDD shares seemed pleasantly strong in the face of the most recent earnings release, even though it missed expectations.  It’s boring, but I just figure that someday the various stars will align and I may be able to sell for $12 or $15 or something.  SIGA remains the disappointment I think I’ve written about before, but I’m sure not selling it at this price.  Not all bankruptcies are created equal.  And Corning?  I am so not qualified to opine; I just think that at 15X earnings, and with the possibility that one day all our roads and parking lots will be made of glass.

George Mokray:  “Look at this solar freaking bikeway!  Isn’t it great that the election voted climate change doesn’t exist?  Now we can all relax.”

Which brings us back to politics.

THE “MANDATE”

I checked Politico’s tally of each Senate race and, using all my fingers and toes, came up with just under 23 million Republican votes.  So just over 7% of every living American voted for Republican policies (anti-Ebola, anti-Obamacare-yet-pro-KYnext-which-is-the-same-thing, etc.).

You might think that’s a mandate from which our future course should be set; yet just over 20 million voted for Democrats.*  So just over 6% voted for Democratic policies (pro- the Administration’s handling of Ebola,** pro-Obamacare, etc.).

My own feeling is that each issue should be considered on its merits.  If virtually the entire scientific community holds one view but 7% versus 6% of Americans disagree, should we trust the electoral “mandate” or go with the science?

And of course the 7%/6% thing was skewed by the fact that populous Democratic states like New York and California had no Senate races this year.  If their views were counted in the tally, the mandate might well have been Democratic, as it was in 2012 and may again be in 2016.

It’s a little bizarre, no?  The notion that this was a mandate against the President’s policies . . . when the public at large favors most of them, such as hiking the minimum wage or requiring universal background checks or rebuilding our infrastructure or allowing grads to refinance their federal student loans?

Hello?

*I included votes for Greg Orman, as he was running to unseat Kansas Republican Pat Roberts.

**The American death toll has now risen to . . . still zero.  Here is a map of Africa showing how the continent — or at least a tiny chip of it — is infected.  And, while we’re at it, here is another, showing how immense Africa is.