Happy New Year! At the beginning of 2018, I wrote down a few common sense predictions about what would not happen in the world in the following twelve months. Did I get any right? Of course, spoiler alert, all of my predictions came true! Here are the predictions and what ended up happening:

Everyone likes to make New Year’s predictions. Just to be a little different, here is a list of things that are exceedingly unlikely to happen in 2018. Although there are scores of pundits, celebrities and other talking heads who will try and convince you otherwise, here are seven things that logic and clear thinking suggest won’t occur in calendar year 2018…

So, what actually happened:

1.Global Warming. Have you been outside lately? The polar bears will be quite safe in 2018.

The polar bears were quite safe, and they will be again this year. The French people apparently feel pretty optimistic about their future too, not so much about their own economically after carbon taxes were slapped on them briefly until they rose up in revolt.

2. Nuclear War. No, WWIII won’t start over a tweet, despite what the pundits from MSNBC and CNN want you to believe. (Gotta hedge a little because we’re talking about Kim Jong Un here after all. ) If it does happen it will be because N. Korea does something tragically stupid, and God-forbid maybe even gets in a single blow before they cease to exist. It won’t happen, however, because President Trump calls Kim Jong Un fat or “Rocket Man”.

We’re still here and Li’l Kim and Trump are trading love letters. Better than bullets.

3. The Taxpocolypse. Lower Taxes won’t destroy the country. On the contrary, expect more economic growth. The promise of lower taxes has already helped the economy and should continue to do so in FY18.

According to the CBO: “In 2018, real GDP is projected to grow by 3.1 percent.” It was as high as 4.1% On January 1st, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect, Vice President Pence noted that within a few weeks after the bill’s passage, companies began to offer their employees thousand dollar bonuses and that in his own family when his kids were little, there was a word for such a year-end windfall, “Christmas”. You don’t hear the term “Taxpocolypse” much around Capitol Hill anymore.

4. Immigration Stormtroopers. Democrat scare tactics are just that, scare tactics. There will be no squadrons of ICE rounding up foreigners and people of color for mass deportation. There will be no liquidation of East L.A., or South central Chicago.  Yes, plenty of illegal immigrants will be deported, after due process and according to existing law, but if you seriously believe they’re coming for you, and you’re a legal alien- well, you’re a just a little bit gullible.

Still no boxcars full of illegal immigrants being shipped to concentration camps. There was a caravan of prospective immigrants headed here from Central America. Funny thing, after storming Mexico’s southern border, causing riots, and sweeping like as a horde through the interior bringing crime and sickness with them, an amazing thing happened, Mexican officials and citizens started to sound a lot like Trump and his supporters with regards to an unsustainable increase in illegal aliens crossing their border and using up public resources. Tragically, there have been a couple of children among those who crossed into the US who died of sickness. Obviously, if the caravaners had their way, they would be pouring into the country with nary a medical screening. It kinda reminds one of the logic of controlled, legal immigration of screened and vetted individuals. Meanwhile, there are incidents of preventable crime by illegal immigrants who could have been deported except for asinine sanctuary city laws. In an incident of horrible irony, a legal immigrant policeman was killed by an illegal immigrant felon in the sanctuary state of California.

5. Venezuela: “A socialist success story”. There’s an outside chance of them becoming a capitalist success story sometime in the future, but will take some doing and would probably take years. On a related note, the Che Guevara-T-shirt wearing-die-hard-leftists in this country (still) won’t acknowledge that socialism destroyed that country.

Venezuela is still socialist, its people still lack basic necessities, so much so that thousands have fled to neighboring Columbia causing a bit of a refugee crisis for that country. Representative (elect) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her fellow Democratic Socialists in this county have yet to connect socialism with Venezuela’s economic and human-rights catastrophe.

6. A “wave election” for the Democrats. Conventional wisdom says the party that holds the White House loses Congress during the mid-terms. The Democrats have little to offer except anti-Trump sentiment. If the stock market continues to go up, and GDP growth stays where it is or increases, the public won’t have much incentive to change course. Only if the economy goes south or a major crisis arises and is bungled by the White House will the Democrats have any chance of retaking either branch of Congress. That having been said, Capitol Hill is the Republicans’ to lose.

Though the Democrats did win back the House, it was not the wave that they had counted on. They lost ground in the Senate, thanks in large part to their ridiculous antics in the Senate during the Justice Kavanaugh hearings that saw several Democrat senators tripping over each other to grandstand during the proceedings. Those particular senators may not have lost their bids for reelection, but may have cost some of their peers in red states theirs.

7. Impeachment proceedings. Since the Republicans hold Congress and probably will after 2018, Trump would have to have committed an actual high-crime or misdemeanor, not an imagined one to get himself impeached. Sorry, left-leaning news media– not gonna happen, not in 2018 and probably not ever.

With control of the House flipping over to the Democrats, impeachment proceedings are almost a guarantee, certainly some of them have been chomping at the bit since January of 2017. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that there will be myriad Congressional investigations into the President and his associates. The presumed Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi will probably be able to hold off on an impeachment vote until after Robert Mueller’s report, which may merely serve as the DOJ passing the impeachment baton off to the various House committees that will run with it, regardless of what it actually says.

Well, 2018 is now in the books and surprise, we’re all still here and doing OK. Trump is still President and it won’t be a nuclear winter. There are no concentration camps filled with non-white slave laborers waiting to die at the hands of MAGA hatted stormtroopers. There may even be a surplus of polar bears this coming year and Miami and New York are still not under water. It wasn’t exactly a wave, but the Democrats did win back the House but lost ground in the Senate. Nancy Pelosi will be telling her party to curb their enthusiasm over impeachment, at least in the beginning. Democrats don’t not overplay their hand when given a chance, so of course, they will. Their efforts will be to no avail, as Republicans still control the Senate. In 2019, count on many of these things continuing not to happen, especially, hopefully, the bit about not having a nuclear war, that would really suck. Happy 2019!

-J.P. Mac.