By Calvin Hill
October 27, 2016
Decades of technology, insane tax policies, abominable, unnecessary military spending and the wars without end has led to an angst in America that is real and/or perceived.
How is it possible that in the past 7 and a half years that a five point decrease in the unemployment rate, a tripling of the stock market, a booming auto industry rescued from life support, a recovering housing market rescued from corruption, and an income gap that has seen middle class gains for the first time in over 30 years can be exploited by a narcissistic demagogue as America “going in the wrong direction,” whatever that means? Unfortunately, the media is always eager to point out, without clearly defined parameters, that almost two-thirds of the public believes that America is going in the wrong direction, borders on absurdity. One person’s right direction may be another person’s wrong depending on their present circumstances.
It is highly likely that the lives depending on the kerosene lamp industry believed the country was going in the wrong direction once Thomas Edison’s 10,000 failures to light the incandescent lamp were behind him. Our love of the smartphone interrupts dinner conversation, movies, peaceful days, quiet nights and pleasant walks, although our overall appreciation made half the shelves of thousands of Radio Shacks obsolete. And unless your small business requires a brick and mortar establishment, your need for a telephone company representative to come in and hardwire a desktop touchtone phone to your home is no longer necessary.
Donald Trump has given millions of Americans the false and misguided hope that he can renegotiate trade deals that his party has championed for decades and thinks that the Republican donor class will merely capitulate, all while planning to institute massive trickle up tax cuts that puts more middle class tax dollars into the bulging pockets of multimillionaires and billionaires with no guarantee that they must, or will, reinvest those gains into jobs and expansions. Trump’s tax cuts on steroids is change you should not believe in.
With the exception of his tax cuts, his desire to repeal Obamacare and the rollback of regulations, the Republican Party virtually eschews almost everything that Trump is selling to the Trumpniks. The GOP is horrified at Trump’s love for Vladimir Putin, his anti-NATO rhetoric, his nonchalant attitude concerning nuclear weapons and his misogynist condemnation of women in the workplace. His cavalier Tweet suggesting rape and sexual assaults in the military was based on a politically correct notion of allowing women to serve their country along with men and thus, was inevitable. He has yet to opine, in a Tweet or otherwise, why men serving with men are also raped – and not by women.
The carefree notion that regulations destroy small businesses and needs to be severely rolled back is another careless GOP talking point that Trump has latched on to. This is false. Most small businesses understand and look to comply with the regulations and take them into account when formulating a business plan. What destroys small businesses and they don’t take into account is when unscrupulous persons like Donald J. Trump routinely refuse to pay them for their products and services as a modus operandi for doing business. In their desire to roll back regulations, Trump and the GOP needs to inform the public exactly how many Flint, Michigan water crises and East Chicago, Indiana toxic soil developments are acceptable and how much healthcare dollars they are willing to budget to treat the lead and arsenic laden residents of those communities, mostly black, without Obamacare.
Understandably, the lifetime difference in earning power without a college degree is a major motivator for young Americans to seek a post high school education. And the cost of debt-ridden degrees seems absolutely insurmountable when a college graduate is unable to find a job commensurate with their education and a salary large enough to escape the confines of Mom and Dad’s basement.
Despite Donald Trump’s campaign entourage, who repeatedly reiterate that when their candidate “talks issues, he wins” – Trump has laid out very little workable, coherent policy that will remove those college educated and technology displaced Americans from their frustrating situation. Deporting tens of millions of undocumented immigrants would only open the door for those college educated millennials for opportunities to pick fruit, clean buildings, bus restaurant tables seek day work and provide a small stipend to their parents to show that they are making an effort to help out. In addition, Trump, along with the Congressional Republicans not only eschew raising the minimum wage, they want to abolish it. Trump’s past discriminatory actions and present rhetoric regarding people of color has marshaled unwavering support from skinheads, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. His overt lack of respect for women has led to front page stories of Trump parading his mistress around New York, to the embarrassment of his first wife and her children. His so-called “locker room talk” often escapes to national radio discussions about the condition of his present wife’s breasts and his daughter’s rear end. His civic imbecility has led less educated Americans to believe that the Supreme Court of the United States has the power to abolish the 2nd Amendment. And Trump’s latest hypocritical “outreach” to the black community is to posit that jobs are being taken from them by “illegal immigrants,” though his history is that undocumented immigrants are Trump’s go-to hires in place of African Americans.
In the 7 plus years of the Obama presidency, we have gone from losing over 600,000 thousand jobs a month under Bush 43 to monthly job growth. Gas prices are less than half of what they were when Obama took office. Banks have come under the watchful eye of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the rape and pillaging of America’s homes and savings has, for the most part, been successfully reigned in.
Donald Trump’s reckless policy proposals will reverse all of that progress. There is a reason that no major American newspaper or publication has endorsed Donald Trump to be President of the United States. Not even the ones that have always endorsed the Republican presidential candidate. Some have even endorsed Hillary Clinton. And for all of his talk that the election is rigged by media favoritism, the #NEVERTRUMP movement was started by conservative talk show hosts and pundits. However, there is one thing that Trump is selling to millennials that will likely come to fruition. Under a Trump administration they will be able to move out of their parent’s basement. What Trump is not telling them is that their parents will no longer own the basement.
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