10/22/2019
My dear Friend and President, DJT,
Help me to understand the purpose of your cabinet meetings. I thought it was to coordinate the efforts of the administration so you could all be moving in the same direction, but maybe it's supposed to be an opportunity to advertise what the administration has been up to. Yesterday's meeting seemed to be latter.
I was surprised to see Larry Kudlow (LAK) citing Mark Zandi (MMZ) of Moody Analytics when talking about how great the economy is doing. LAK was talking about 180,000 new jobs as if that was a great accomplishment, but MMZ talks about it as a slowing in hiring as the "trade war takes a toll on the economy."
I find it hard to believe that the average American family is making $66,000 a year now. When I tried to find where that number came from, I got a bit overwhelmed because there are so many ways to compute it. You could look at how much one employee is making on any given day, or you can look at how much a "household" brings home in year. When computing the average, do you include the people who aren't making any money at all? Do you use the mean or the median? LAK did not explain all of that. He did talk about a "household survey" that was at 400,000 per month. Can you explain that to me?
Other folks had some interesting news about their activities but I'm afraid there's not any reporting about that because you spent so much time talking about all of your personal problems at the beginning of the meeting. The best news was Kelly Conway's report about Drug Take Back Day which is happening on Saturday when folks who have opioids in their medicine cabinet can take them back to CVS. Who knew it would be so hard to dispose of pills properly? I encourage you to take my "less is more" advice and refrain from talking so much at your next cabinet meeting.
