09:20 – We got enough chemical bags made up yesterday to build another 15 or 18 each of the biology kits and chemistry kits. With what we have in stock, that takes us to a comfortable finished goods inventory level for this time of year. Sales will be slow for the rest of this month, and then pick up again through December and for the first half of January. Then they’ll slow down again through about tax day.
Anti-Trump rioting continued for a fifth night in many large cities and a few smaller ones, although it seems relatively restrained compared to what it might have been. It almost seems like the only people rioting are those paid by Soros to do so, and they’re having a hard time getting unpaid people to help them riot.
As expected, Trump is already backing off from many of his campaign promises, notably his plan to expel illegal aliens. He now says he’ll focus on expelling only the worst two or three million of them and worry about the rest later. He’s also said he has no problem with same-sex marriage, considering it settled by the Supreme Court decision. No doubt that’ll upset a lot of social conservatives. My advice to Trump on this issue is to repeat what I’ve said before. Trump needs to get the federal government completely out of the marriage issue. He can do that by directing the IRS to eliminate any reference to marriage in tax regulations. Everyone should file their federal income taxes as either single or married filing separately. And the tax rates for the latter should be the same as for the former. A married couple with $40,000 of taxable income should pay the same amount each as a single person does on $20,000. Marriage status should become a personal and contract issue, not a tax issue.
My main concern about Trump at this point is that he’s being disturbingly conciliatory towards the progressives, the GOPe, and so on. Perhaps that will change once he’s actually in office. I hope so. I think Trump’s main priority should be to complete the destruction of the Progressive/Democrat/Republican establishment, leaving them nowhere to run.
This week, we’ll build more science kits, wash and dry a bunch of 2-liter bottles, and fill 20 of them with pinto beans and oxygen absorbers. We also have a bunch of pasta to be repackaged, and more on order. That’s not time-critical, as even in their original plastic bags their best-by dates are 18 months to two years out.