1. We cannot spend money we do not have on things we cannot afford and do not need.
• We are $34 trillion in debt, or roughly $100,000 for every American.
  
• People who never went to college, or chose community college and/or Penn State or Bloomsburg over Ivy League, have no obligation to pay off the student loans of those who went to expensive schools and studied subjects in which employers have no interest.
• The Federal government spends roughly $175 billion (2021) on higher education which, as shown by the events of October and November 2023, appears to support the "study" of violent ideologies that are incompatible with the values of the United States. Future support for college studies should be limited to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), business, accounting, health care, and other fields that directly support useful employment.
  
• The Federal government also squandered $12.5 billion (2021) on the United Nations which cannot see its way clear to unequivocal condemnation of Russian and Hamas terrorism, Communist China's violation of the UN Charter by threatening to use violence against Taiwan, and even appoints human rights offenders like Iran to human rights committees.
2. Manufacturing, Wages, and Employment
• Manufacturing is the foundation of American affluence and military power. It is what made America great and enabled us to win the Second World War.
  
• The absence or decline of manufacturing is a universal leading indicator of national decline. Spain's and Portugal's discovery of gold and silver in the New World ruined them because it allowed them to buy manufactured goods from their rivals, England and Holland, instead of making them. The British eventually used money spent by the Portuguese to buy the vineyards of Oporto (the source of Port Wine) the same way Mainland China is using money spent by Americans to buy up properties in the United States.
• If the government mandates a $15 an hour minimum wage for jobs that do not generate enough value to support that wage, the jobs will either not be created or they will be shipped offshore to Mainland China and other low-wage countries. Henry Ford and his contemporaries proved, however, that removal of all forms of waste from jobs--as but one example, brick laying as practiced through most of human history wasted 64% of the mason's labor on bending over to pick up each brick--can enable almost unlimited high wages side by side with lower prices and higher profits.
• We must grow our way out of the Federal debt. This would require an 8 percent or more annual growth rate in the gross domestic product (GDP) which Henry Ford proved to be achievable with tenfold and even greater productivity improvements in the first part of the twenthieth century.
  
3. Inflation
• The Federal Reserve should be a last resort for dealing with inflation; consumer education should come first. Inflation results from a higher MV (money supply times velocity of money, i.e. the number of times per year a particular dollar changes hands) in the absence of commensurate value and utility. When consumers pay more than they should, they shortchange themselves and drive inflation as well.
• When Americans pay made-in-America prices for Mainland Chinese-made goods with fancy brand names on them, they overpay and also give the seller money for which the seller has not returned value. The seller then has money it has not earned with which it can bid up the prices of goods and services. A celebrity endorsement, or a fancy brand name, is an almost sure symptom you are being overcharged.
  
• Extended warranties are almost universally wastes of money because they cover the period of product life in which failure is least likely; the manufacturer's warranty covers the period in which defects will make themselves known.
  
• When a fancy brand name ice cream maker forces you to buy its product in uneconomical $4.99 a pint quantities, when the store brand sells for $2.50 to $3.50 for three pints, that tells you the former seller wants to sell you packaging and labeling rather than product. You are being overcharged, and the seller again receives money without delivering value.
• Refuse to pay junk fees; these also represent money for which the seller has not given any value.
  
4. Immigrants, Yes, Illegal Migrants, No
• We are a nation of immigrants that welcomes refugees and legal immigrants who want to Americanize and assimilate, but not illegal migrants or those whose values and behavior are incompatible with our values (as demonstrated recently by the behavior of some "international" students at our universities as well as immigrants who vandalized missing person posters in our cities).
  
• Theodore Roosevelt's essay on Americanism says that, if you assimilate and Americanize, you are one of us regardless of what you look like, where you came from, how or even if you pray, or when you or your ancestors arrived. If you do not assimilate and Americanize, you do not belong here even if your ancestors came here on the Mayflower.
  
• New York City has cut vital services, including a meals for seniors program, to squander $300 a night on hotel rooms for illegal migrants. The city is now asking for Federal tax money, i.e. your money and mine, to cover the difference. I would equate this to a head of household who squanders his paycheck at the bar, track, and casino, and then tries to tap his extended family for money so he can pay the rent or mortgage, pay utility bills, and buy food for his family.
5. Climate Change
• Climate change is a fact of geological history, and greenhouse gases contribute to it.
  
• The attendees at the annual UN Climate Conferences (UCOP) do not however believe it is urgent to reduce carbon emissions as shown by their use of private jets to attend. If they believed it was urgent, they would use commercial transportation or, even better, hold the meeting online to eliminate all travel costs and associated carbon emissions.
  
• The proposition that lining the pockets of special interests with cap and trade mandates, carbon taxes, and the like is however a fraud on the working American with no purpose other than to enrich climate profiteers. Senator Kirstin Gillibrand, D-NY, named Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the New York Stock exchange of beneficiaries of cap and trade. If I am elected, any legislation to add junk carbon fees to electric bills, or force use of unproven and/or uneconomical renewable energy sources, will be dead on arrival on my desk. Proven and economical renewable energy sources will displace fossil fuel sources on their own and I encourage their development.
  
• Good engineering and business practices that seek to eliminate all forms of waste from supply chains, as practiced by Henry Ford long before anybody heard of the Environmental Protection Agency, deliver higher wages, lower prices, and higher profits simultaneously. They also have the incidental effect of reducing carbon emissions if energy comes from fossil fuels, but we would not squander renewable energy either. The ISO 50001:2018 standard for energy management systems is very useful in this context.
  
6. Fake News
   
• A free society relies on accurate news to make informed decisions. Fake news, whether from the mainstream media on the Left or QAnon on the extreme Right, is a menace to society and citizens must be educated to fact-check everything they see, hear, or read. Fake news can and has literally killed countless people (e.g. Spanish-American War and First World War). The media enjoys enormous power and, while it cannot be regulated by the government, citizens can and must hold purveyors of fake news accountable by discrediting them to the point where nobody will believe them.
• The world got The International Jew when a Tsarist anti-Semite, Boris Brasol, gave Henry Ford a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ford failed to fact-check this material and published it. Please remember this before pressing "send to all" or "share" on social media regarding questionable stories.
  
• We now see similar material circulating on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms including but not limited to:
• Statements that the United States perpetrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks (9/11 conspiracy theories)
• Statements that Israel attacked itself on October 7 2023 to give it an excuse to attack Gaza, even though the Hamas terrorists published videos of themselves murdering civilians
• Osama bin Laden's "Letter to America" now has admirers among younger Americans even though Bin Laden murdered 3000 of us in 2001
• False and misleading information about Covid-19
• George Orwell's 1984, in which the Ministry of Truth publishes whatever the government wants people to believe, is highly instructive.
7.  Health Care
   
•  Health care is expensive because health care systems, like most other industries, have enormous amounts of waste built into them. In addition, deficient quality management systems make possible hospital acquired infections and what is usually called malpractice, but is really the fault of the deficient system in which the doctors have to work. Highly authoritative solutions have been proposed (e.g. by the Automotive Industry Action Group) to deploy the same kind of quality systems that are used in car factories, but the health care system has been less than receptive.
• In the mean time, there are things you can do to hold down your health care costs if your insurance does not offer first-dollar coverage. Do not use a hospital's imaging (X-ray, ultrasound, MRI, and so on) or laboratory if there is a facility fee added to the service. I have had very good experiences, in terms of both cost and service, with area clinics that specialize in imaging and diagnostic blood testing.
8.  The Second Amendment 
• The Second Amendment is not, as President Biden (D-DE) and ex-Govenor Cuomo (D-NY) would have us believe, a right to own firearms suitable for hunting purposes. There is no Second Amendment right to hunt anything and Biden and Cuomo, both of whom are attorneys, know this which means they are lying to the American people. The Second Amendment is a right to own weapons suitable for defense of one's self, one's home, one's family, and one's country from human aggressors.
  
• I was personally among the Second Amendment activists who broke the back of the Million Mom March (2000) by exposing its use of 501(c)(3) tax exempt resources to promote House candidates. This may have cost Al Gore the 2000 election because, by the time November came around, the Million Mom March had been so badly discredited as to be unable to get out the few hundred votes he needed to win Florida. I am also an NRA Life Member but I was disappointed with the NRA's failure to exploit this opportunity to discredit the anti-Second Amendment movement in the United States for good.
• Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D-PA) is a dangerous gun quack who knows nothing about lawful armed self-defense but wants to dictate to Pennsylvanians what kind of firearms he thinks they need for this purpose.
• Use the laws we have. Federal law has mandatory minimum consecutive sentences for people who use guns to commit violent felonies, but this law is rarely enforced. Prison is 100 percent effective in keeping violent criminals and firearms away from each other.
• 5 years for possession of a gun during a violent felony or while dealing drugs
• 7 years if the gun is brandished (e.g. pointed at the convenience store clerk during a robbery)
• 10 years if the gun is fired, even if nobody is hit.  For example, Khalif Tuggle murdered Thomas Petersen during a carjacking but was allowed by Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) to plead to third-degree murder and 13 1/2 to 27 years, eligible for parole in 10. US Attorney William McSwain added the Federal charge of firing a gun during a violent felony which will, if Tuggle is convicted, add no less than 10 years to what he got from Krasner.
• The above reference adds that a criminal who shot a man with an AK-47, what the Democrat Left calls an "assault rifle," got 3 1/2 to 10 years but he also was charged with firing a gun during a violent felony which could add no less than 10 years consecutive to this.
  
• Three strikes and you're out!
• When the UK, which had "common sense gun laws," was threatened with invasion after the Dunkirk evacuation, it had to beg for Americans to "send a gun to defend a British home."
• When Ukraine was invaded in 2022, President Zelenskyy urged Ukrainians to arm themselves. My first question was "with what?"
• When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, it got an almost entirely free ride against disarmed citizens thanks to Israel's "common sense gun laws."
• Strike one (UK, Second World War), strike two (Ukraine), strike three (Israel), you're out.
  
• Second Amendment talking points
9. Veterans:
   
• We need to meet our obligations to the men and women who defend our country before we squander money on the United Nations, university programs that consist of indoctrination rather than education for meaningful work, or illegal migrants.
• Task and Purpose reports, "US artillery troops 'plagued by nightmares,' other psychological troubles after fighting ISIS" "The report, released in 2019, said that the Marines were being hurt by the shockwaves from their howitzers. More than half of the battery was diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injuries." While I cannot give medical or engineering advice on this issue, it stands to reason that the shock waves propagated through the Marines' heads and/or bodies (via the bloodstream) with effects similar to those on boxers who get their bells rung too many times, or shell shock. One of the cited effects (New York Times) was demyelination which is the same problem as multiple sclerosis.
  
• I also read that some Marines were given other-than-honorable (OTH) discharges due to behavior problems caused by this, as opposed to getting the help they needed. This is absolutelyu unacceptable.
  
10.  Foreign policy: 
• We learned the hard way in 1939 that it is a lot cheaper, in terms of lives as well as money, to deal with aggression and terrorism as soon as they make themselves known rather than letting them run out of control. This is no different than the principle that it is cheaper to put out a small fire than a large one, and to treat cancer in Stage I rather than Stage IV.

Henry Ford Made America Great

"Substituting the engineer for the politician is a very natural step forward. The engineer can do that which the politician can never do under any circumstances. The engineer creates and harmonizes while the politician can at best only rearrange what he has in hand "  --Henry Ford, Moving Forward (1930)

"Ford's success has startled the country, almost the world, financially, industrially, mechanically. It exhibits in higher degree than most persons would have thought possible the seemingly contradictory requirements of true efficiency, which are: constant increase of quality, great increase of pay to the workers, repeated reduction in cost to the consumer. And with these appears, as at once cause and effect, an absolutely incredible enlargement of output reaching something like one hundred fold in less than ten years, and an enormous profit to the manufacturer." Arnold, Horace Lucien, and Faurote, Fay Leone. 1915. Ford Methods and the Ford Shops. New York: The Engineering Magazine.

I (Bill Levinson) am not a politician; my education is in the physical sciences, engineering,* and business. I am also the country's apparent foremost authority on Henry Ford's business system; the same system that made the United States the wealthiest and most poweful nation on earth, and also created the American middle class and the 40 hour work week. I was able to buy a copy of Ford's My Life and Work (1922) on the Advanced Book Exchange some time in 1999 or 2000; it is now available for free online. The first few pages told me immediately that I had found the heart and soul of American manufacturing supremacy. The book described purportedly "Japanese" quality and productivity secrets including just-in-time manufacturing, design for manufacturing, motion efficiency, and a lot more, and in language understandable by anybody with a high school education.

Ford's results spoke for themselves, nothing has happened to change the value of his principles, but these principles are not taught in political science classes or law school. This means that many if not most Members of Congress (who are attorneys and/or hold political science degrees) know only how to redistribute wealth created by others; they have little idea of how the wealth is created in the first place. Henry Ford and his contemporaries not only told us how to create wealth, they delivered it in unprecedented amounts.

My position is as centrist or center-right Democrat as it is Republican which means I can gain buy-in from the swing voters who actually decide the election. Our candidates don't win simply because, even though they enjoy the support of Republicans, there are still fewer Rs than Ds in Northeast Pennsylvania and they have not addressed sufficiently the needs of the centrist voters who decide the elections. Wagesare among a major issue and I have the background to address this.

The state and local Democrats in our region, in fact, come across as traditional pro-worker and pro-middle class centrists which is why they keep getting elected in an increasingly Republican region. This is why it was a waste of time for any Republican to run against John Yudichak (when he was still a D) and also against Paul Kanjorski before Kanjorski forgot that his boss was not Barack Obama but the people who elected him. It is therefore important to say "Democratic Left" or DemLeft for short, as opposed to "the Democrats" when criticizing the extremists who have hijacked the party at the national level.

The national Democratic Party has however, as currently led by Nancy Pelosi, forgotten to "dance with the one that brought you," in this case the working and middle class American. It is instead dancing with "The Squad" and other elements of the extreme Left that want us to believe, among other things, that the United States is an evil and systematically racist country as opposed to the nation that saved the entire world from Nazism. This, dear "woke" Leftists, is what our parents and grandparents did from 1941 through 1945 to destroy the most racist evil in the world's history. "Rosie the Riveter" played a central role in making our country the Arsenal of Democracy (and the UK's Queen Elizabeth II also was in it).

 The United States is the greatest nation on this planet, the things that happened to make it that way were invented here, and nothing stops us from using the same principles again.

Contact 

Bill "at" levinson4nepa.com

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