I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the 2016 presidential election

Since it’s clear to me that Bernie Sanders is likely not winning the Iowa caucuses barring higher turnout than what the final Ann Seltzer poll has predicted, I’ll predict a few things, all of which are shocking to most people on here:

1. Bernie probably will drop out of the presidential race late Monday night or early Tuesday morning, and he’ll stay completely out of the presidential race from that point forward.
2. Bernie will not endorse a presidential candidate once he’s no longer running, and he won’t seek anyone’s vice-presidential nomination.
3. Bernie will not seek re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2018, although he’ll continue to serve the people of Vermont until his current term in the Senate is over.
4. Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee, and she will lose the general election to Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Will I vote for Hillary in the general election if she’s the Democratic presidential nominee? Barring an indictment of Hillary before the general election (extremely unlikely, and it’s not been confirmed as to whether or not Hillary is actually under criminal investigation), yes. However, indictment or no indictment, Donald Trump is going to be the 45th President of the United States. That’s because Bernie doesn’t appear to have a realistic path to the Democratic nomination if he loses the Iowa caucuses, and, since Hillary lacks any kind of appeal to working-class voters, Trump, who does have appeal to working-class voters willing to vote for a ultra-wealthy racist, can take advantage of that by running a downright nasty campaign that would make Richard Nixon’s political campaigns of the 1960’s and the 1970’s look tame by comparison. Although I would not join them, I would predict that about 15% of Bernie supporters would go to Trump if it’s a Hillary vs. Trump race.

While I still think that there’s a slight chance that Bernie wins the Iowa caucuses (he’d need significant support among late Democratic registrants, however), If this is how the decades-long political career of Bernie Sandes comes to an end, it would be just an awful way for it to end.

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Bloomberg News gives Scott Walker a lump of coal for Christmas

All right, Bloomberg News didn’t literally give Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a lump of coal for Christmas, but they did figuratively give Walker a lump of coal for Christmas in the form of this article about how Walker, who is a likely Republican presidential nomination candidate in 2016, and his Republican allies in the Wisconsin State Legislature have wrecked Wisconsin’s economy:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has his eye on the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, and as he tries to boost his national poll numbers, there are numbers at home that also bear watching — his state’s finances.

Tax cuts and Medicaid spending are contributing to a projected budget deficit that may reach $2.2 billion in the two-year period starting in July 2015, according to his administration’s analysts. While Walker aides call the projections premature, Democrats say the figures prove the governor’s policies — especially income and property-tax reductions — turned a $517 million surplus at the end of June into a shortfall.

Tax collections and decisions by Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature will determine the size of the deficit. Yet the swing to a shortfall limits Wisconsin’s financial choices as the governor prepares his February budget presentation. Last week, he called for more property-tax cuts.

“What they’ve opted to do is a policy choice of cutting taxes,” said Gabriel Petek, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s in San Francisco. “They’ve changed the fiscal trajectory of the state that had been on course for higher reserves.”

(emphasis mine)

Obviously, Scott Walker deserves at least a figurative lump of coal for Christmas. That’s because his policies of cutting taxes for the wealthy, implementing a statewide school voucher program in Wisconsin, and handing out corporate welfare to his campaign donors have completely wrecked Wisconsin’s economy, finances, and business climate. Despite the fact that Walker’s policies of cutting taxes and spending money on bad policy that only benefits the politically connected have clearly wrecked Wisconsin’s reputation, Walker wants to hand out even more tax cuts to the wealthy. That’s absurd, since cutting taxes does absolutely nothing to reduce or eliminate a budget deficit, in fact, cutting taxes makes budget deficits even worse.