Jared Kushner doesn’t get it. Here‘s an obscure (to me) news source that echoes what I’ve seen elsewhere, including the Toronto Star. I’ll give a few quotes, emphasis mine.

This assumption is widespread in American politics: that competence in business translates to competence in politics. In 2012, during his presidential campaign, Mitt Romney said he’d like a provision in in the Constitution to “say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.” But is there any evidence for this belief? Historians haven’t found any.

Sean Illing Let me start by reading you a recent quote from Jared Kushner: “We should have excellence in government. … The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”I’m not sure the axiom that business and politics are equivalent can be expressed more clearly than this. What’s your response?

Gautam MukundaThe government should be run as well as a great American company, but that’s profoundly different from saying it should be run like a great American company — those are two completely different things.The first and most obvious problem with that is that American citizens are not customers. Someone has to tell Jared Kushner that citizens are his boss, not his customers. When you’ve inherited your job, that might be difficult to understand, but it’s an important idea.

Gautam Mukunda It’s not that there are no skills in common. If you asked me, would the CEO of a randomly selected, highly successful company do a better job as president than a person you selected at random off the street, I’d say yes. But we don’t, the most recent election excepted, select our presidents at random off the street. We select them from a pool of people who have been governors or senators or congresspeople. So that’s your comparison set.Now let’s talk about the differences between running a democracy and a company, which are profound. First, there are differences in ends. Companies are supposed to run at a profit. If your government is running at a profit, you have a problem; it’s not an indicator of success. More broadly, almost all companies have a level of authority that flows upward that much more resembles a dictatorship than a democracy.

Kushner is a number of interesting ‘things.’ He’s the husband of Ivanka Trump, whose nude photos came out during the campaign. (I’d hate to have a beautiful wife whose erogenous zones are on public display.)
He’s an unpaid white house occupant who has not distanced himself from his businesses, much like his father-in-law.

He’s today’s person of interest.

At one point, Ronald Regan was used to claim that Canadian health care was, er, crap. This is, of course, totally untrue.

At one point, the infant mortality rate in the USA was equal to that in Cuba. I think Cuba has done better since.

Now for a comparison between Canadian and American health care. Ready? Emphasis mine.

Canadians living with cystic fibrosis lived on average 10 years longer than Americans with the same disease, in part because of the very different healthcare systems in the two countries, the study found.

When severity of disease, age and other variables were taken into account, Canadians had a 34% lower death rate than American patients overall.

Ms Brotherwood spent three years working in a cystic fibrosis clinic in Los Angeles, after working at Dr Stephenson’s clinic in Toronto. The differences, she says, were striking. “In Canada, I make clinical decisions. I look at their case and I decide whether or not they would benefit from meeting with me. There, the decision is driven by their insurance,” she says. Ms Brotherwood says she had to forgo seeing patients who were in real need, just because they did not have the coverage.

Even when they were insured, high co-pays meant that some families had to reduce the amount of medication they used, or avoid going to the hospital, she says. Many researchers have suggested that this profit motive, and the strain it puts on families, may be to blame for the average lower life expectancy in the US.

Now go listen to The Donald and how he’s going to ‘fix’ health care in the USA.

Donald Trump is pro business. Pro in the British, not American, sense of the word.

I’ll be brief here.

• Tangerine (formerly ING Direct) just informed me that their foreign exchange rate charge is moving from 2% to 2.5%. I didn’t know it was best in class; now it isn’t. Please don’t tell me that.
• Panasonic. Apparently they are going to reduce their digital camera efforts. I have several Panasonic digital cameras. I like them very much. The latest improvement was exactly what I wished-to-God they would do: a better, faster, longer zoom than the FZ18 with a much better EVF and weatherproofing. They did it. Now they may stop innovating.
  Please don’t tell me that.
• Scarborough subway and John Tory. Apparently he’s got better numbers talking to ‘lots of people’ than real studies. The one-stop subway is imho an enormous boondoggle Tory hasn’t the guts to stop. His numbers are imho nonsense.
  Please don’t try to tell me that.
• Vaughan Go station and John Tory. This comes out of the Smart Track budget. It will actually increase driver traffic. This is because the delay caused by an unnecessary stop will cause some 3% of current Go users to revert to their cars. So, we’re paying (out of a limited, almost non-existent traffic budget) for a stop that makes Tory Smart Track look like it’s on track. Which will increase vehicle traffic.
  Please don’t tell me that.

Person of Interest: John Tory, two out of four.

Here you will find that Donald Trump’s Secretary of State thinks military action against North Korea is worth threatening. This because of North Korea’s missile and nuclear development programs.

The US is hoping that China will help rein in North Korea. In fact, China has recently stopped buying coal from the North, which is a major source of revenue for the country.

However, the US has continued to annoy China, in particular by deploying a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) system in South Korea. China views this as spying on it.

So, here we have another potential ‘finger on the trigger’ of ‘conflict.’

This is the same Rex Tillerson who used a second, alias, eMail to comment on climate change while at EXXON. (Tillerson is the former head of EXXON Mobile, and spent some 40 years working there.) I’ll give you a pointer and a quote.

Eric Schneiderman says Mr Tillerson used an account named “Wayne Tracker” for at least seven years. Wayne is Mr Tillerson’s middle name. Mr Schneiderman is investigating whether Exxon misled investors and the public about climate change.

Given the Trump trumpeting about Hilary Clinton’s private eMail server, this looks just as self-serving.

No dumb questions today. Just ask yourself,

Do I trust this administration?