John T. Reed’s news blog

We have a $58 billion trade deficit with Mexico. Trump as president would have the emergency power to stop imports from Mexico. Let’s say the Wall costs $10.4 billion. $10.4 B ÷ $58 B = 17.9%So Trump shuts down U.S.-Mexican trade for 17.9% of the year (17.9% x 365 days = 65 days.) At the end of it, the President of Mexico would deny he paid for the Wall, but he and his countrymen would have lost $10.4 billion of net trade with the U.S. Trump would claim he thus made Mexico pay for the Wall. So Trump truly would...

He is weighing which will hurt him more: releasing or not releasing. It’s sort of how bad do you think they are? If the average answer is not as bad as they actually are, don’t release.If I were him, I would say, “I release them to Obama’s IRS every year. They have no great problem with them. If they have no great problem, what more do you need to know?”The tradition is just that, not a binding requirement.His tax returns are probably aggressive. I wrote the book on that, literally: Aggressive Tax Avoidance for Real Estate Investors, now in its...

Hillary claims mistakes were made. True mistakes go both ways. About half help you and half hurt you..When all the mistakes helped you, which appears to be the case with Hillary, they were at least half NOT mistakes, but deliberate misbehaviors, not inadvertent..This is a crude cousin of Benford’s Law which tells you whether financial and other types of numbers have been falsified by comparing the incidence of certain digits in certain positions in random sets to those in faked sets. .Benford’s Law: the principle that in any large, randomly produced set of natural numbers, such as tables of logarithms...

Nearly everyone in the U.S. got measles before there was a vaccine, and hundreds died from it each year. Today, most doctors have never seen a case of measles. [I got measles in the 1950s.] More than 15,000 Americans died from diphtheria in 1921, before there was a vaccine. Only one case of diphtheria has been reported to CDC since 2004. An epidemic of rubella (German measles) in 1964-65 infected 12½ million Americans, killed 2,000 babies, and caused 11,000 miscarriages. In 2012, 9 cases of rubella were reported to CDC.Approximately 24,000 people die a year from the flu. If 100%...

Here is a judge’s explanation of why he rejected a challenge to CA’s vaccination law from today’s San Francisco Chronicle.“Society has a compelling interest in fighting the spread of contagious diseases through mandatory vaccination of school-age children. [The right to practice one’s religion] does not outweigh the state’s interest in public health and safety. [The California State Supreme Court upheld mandatory vaccination since 1890. religious freedom] does not include liberty to expose the community or the child to communicable disease. [The right to an education, strongly protected by California law, must give way to the public interest in protecting children’s...