Interview and economy commentary

The other night "60 Minutes" had a fascinating interview with a Chinese woman. She is a self-made billionaire who started with little but eventually earned enough to go to London. There, she learned about investments and returned to China where she and her husband made their billions in designing and constructing office buildings.

The program also showed unbelievable vacancies of overbuilt private apartments. Others built them but the people didn't come. It was almost unbelievable.

During the interview, Leslie Stahl asked the interviewee what the Chinese people want. Her surprising answer: "Democracy."

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I regularly receive a fiscal newsletter from a friend, and in his last letter he made the following comments:

China's economic power and geopolitical presence continues to grow.

"Let us not forget that China is a brutal communist dictatorship, melding communist doctrine with an array of free enterprise principles practiced every day by hundreds of millions of Chinese people. China is an enemy of our USA. It has thwarted us in the United Nations Security Council again, and China is taking very large oil production daily from Iran and paying Iran through financial intermediaries of China, for all practical purposes totally circumventing the USA embargo strategies against Iran. China steals trade secrets and proprietary information on a grand scale, including increasing cyber penetrations of our government and our major corporations.

China is active all over the globe, acquiring energy and mineral resources needed to be a great geopolitical power. NCOOC, the Chinese state-owned oil company, recently paid $15.1 billion to purchase Nexen in the largest-ever foreign acquisition of Canadian energy resources. Nexen owns vast tracts of real estate in Canada having oil sands and tar sands, is the second largest oil producer in the North Sea and one of the largest leaseholders in the Gulf of Mexico. If the current administration does not reverse its active prejudice against fossil fuel energy, allowing the Keystone XL pipeline to deliver 700,000 barrels of crude oil to the USA daily, a pipeline will be built in Canada by China, delivering this precious energy to our competitor, from the port of Vancouver. China is growing its military might at an extraordinarily rapid rate as our current administration continues to degut our military, the finest in the world."

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In the above mentioned 40-plus page newsletter, the writer reviewed the finances of Europe and Africa, among other countries, and how their socialistic policies were destroying their economies, currency and future.

In a brief reference to the United States he observed how, "welfare and other so-called entitlements continue to expand dramatically."

Food stamp recipients have increased from 32 million to 47 million households, an increase of 46.8 percent over just the last four years with the program often abused.

Disability income recipients have expanded to 10.8 million for a program costing tens of billions of dollars a year with false claims and fraudulent payments.

Medicare and Medicaid programs for years have been thought to have a 30 percent fraud factor.

Obamacare will cover 40 million people, most of whom will make no health insurance premium payments and may add in years ahead $1.1 trillion to the deficit. The Obamacare cost is now calculated to be $1.97 per hour per worker in the private sector, or about $4,000 additional cost per year per worker, a number that cannot be afforded by many, if not most, small businesses. Since first introduced, analysis of Obamacare ranked it high as being the program the most likely to bankrupt sovereign USA.

Social Security is now funded only with chits in the drawer because the federal government has spent the Social Security reserves to pay for current non Social Security government operating expenses, and 10,000 people a day are retiring expecting Social Security benefits.

Those wishing to see hard statistics about entitlement programs may want to read ‘A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic' by Nicholas Eberstadt, which was highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article on Jan. 25 entitled, ‘Yes, Mr. President, We are a Nation of Takers.'

Hard left policies are expanding government payments to voters dramatically. On Feb. 14, the current administration, with our tax dollars, began promoting a 100-city tour staffed by senior government officials to explain in these meetings in each city how individual citizens can extract more money from government programs."

You can crawl into a roach hotel or possum trap but rarely can you get back out.

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From a friend:

"This is a quiz for people who know everything. These are not trick questions. They are straight questions with straight answers.

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.

2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?

3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?

4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?

5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn't been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?

6. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters ‘dw' and they are all common words. Name two of them.

7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?

8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked or in any other form except fresh.

9. Name six or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter ‘S.'

Answers to quiz:

1. The one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends: Boxing.

2. North American landmark constantly moving backward: Niagara Falls. The rim is worn down about two and a half feet each year because of the millions of gallons of water that rush over it every minute.

3. Only two vegetables that can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons: Asparagus and rhubarb.

4. The fruit with its seeds on the outside: Strawberry.

5. How did the pear get inside the brandy bottle? It grew inside the bottle. The bottles are placed over pear buds when they are small, and are wired in place for the entire growing season. When the pears are ripe, they are snipped off at the stems.

6. Three English words beginning with dw: Dwarf, dwell and dwindle ...

7. Fourteen punctuation marks in English grammar: Period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, quotation mark, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.

8. The only vegetable or fruit never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked or in any other form but fresh: Lettuce.

9. Six or more things you can wear on your feet beginning with ‘S': Shoes, socks, sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes, stockings, stilts."

Gary Rust is chairman of the board of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian, as well as a member of the editorial board.