it was more than just selfish interest of the rich. Personal household income across the spectrum increased more under Trump than it had in years. Unemployment rates among all groups, but particularly among minorities fell to their lowest levels ever. Much of this was the impact of cutting corporate taxes significantly. The US had among the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Companies had started moving manufacturing back to the US because the penalty of doing business here was decreasing.
But he was no diplomat. I said to my wife often during his presidency, I would never invite the guy over to dinner. He’s not someone I’d want to be around. But I can’t deny the impact on our personal financial situation that was the result of his personal and corporate policies.
Remember that many of the folks who claimed to hate him and called him a racist also attended his wedding years prior as his friend. Watch his appearance on The View before he was a candidate. The hosts on that show are having fun with him and exchanging friendly banter. The whole narrative changed when the media and Hollywood decided to brand him. Then no matter what he said could and was used against him.
Compare this to Biden who was chased out of the primaries in the 1980’s for his history of plagiarism. Then in the 2008 primaries for some of his racist talk. This round it has all been swept under the rug and ignored because anything to defeat Trump.
As far as personal ethics and personal character, both 2016 and 2020 have been among the worst choices of individuals to hold that office that I can recall. And neither side even pretends to care one wit about fiscal responsibility anymore so we can’t vote in that anymore. Now they just promise to print larger checks to buy votes. I have no idea how that’s legal.
Anyway.
There is no correlation to the corporate tax cuts and reduction of unemployment. Most corporations did NOT invest in people they invested in stock buy-backs. Trump road the fed polices that were put in place after the 2008 financial crises. If Trump were truly out for his voters, why was the middle class tax cut temporary and the corporate cut permanent? Biden was not my first choice but was a safe choice for normalcy.
The voters are part of the problem, they hear sound bites, social media and FoxNews/NewMax and pretend to be informed. I will not pretend that there is not some left leaning news shows, but people are too superficial in general and not engaged. The extremes of each party are engaged and the moderates are mostly on the sidelines.
Until there are term limits across the board and the money (lobbies) are out of politics it is stacked deck against us.
A major step toward fixing this would be;
- 2 term limit on Senators (12 years), 4 terms on Congress (8 years)
- neither can run for another office for at least 5 years after the higher of the numbers (12 years) was reached
- Once you leave office you can have no ties with a lobby group for at least 5 years.
- Severely limit lobbying contributions (no trips, cash, tickets, etc.) campaign contributions.
- Supreme Court should be limited to 18 years with each position opening at 2 year intervals. If a Justice dies or retires the replacement fills out the remaining portion of the 18 years and they is it.
- And lastly get rid of simple majority in both houses and force compromise with 2/3 votes needed to pass.
This would take work no-one currently in office would ever sign up for and once implemented would create some bumps for a few years, but I would be willing to be you would then have people in office that truly cared and wanted to do the right thing, versus the current members that are there as careers and keeping themselves in office and padded with kickbacks.
People like to quote "the founding fathers intent" which to me is BS. I am no scholar in American Constitutional history, but I doubt highly the current systems is what the envisioned. Also like all people they ware human and fallible and you can't take what made sense in 1776 and always extrapolate it to 200 year sin the future.
