Grumpa Joe's Place

I have often said that the USA needs to be run like a business, and lawyer-politicians are the wrong people to become Administrators and Commanders-in-Chief. Now that we have a businessman running for office, and my vision has been achieved I am beginning to run scared. The problem stems from the fact that We the People have been conditioned over many years to listen to the rhetoric of polished lawyers who are honed in wordmanship, and debate. Donald Trump the current Republican front runner has none of these qualities, but instead he is a street fighter. He has no problem attacking his opponent without regard  to the etiquette of debate. A smash at an opponents character or his standing in the polls takes precedence over logical argument of the issues. The end result is a debate that resembles a street brawl rather than polite argument of ideas.

Our media does not help the matter  because they love the brawling. It gives them fodder for sound bites and analysis that keeps people listening and customers paying for commercial air time. The First Amendment of the Constitution allows freedom of speech for the purpose of giving the press the ability to ask tough questions of candidates and to dig for answers and the truth. Modern day media outlets avoid spending money on digging for answers. Instead many of them create answers or avoid answers by sticking to analyzing the brawls and poll numbers.

People ask me If I will vote for Trump. My answer is that I like Trump because he has upset the established organization of politicians and is redefining the rules of running for office. He continues to poke his finger into the eyes of the establishment and We the People are loving it. Why? We the People are sick and tired of the elected establishment ignoring our voices. They pander and say what they have to say to get our votes, then forget about us until the next election. They become the elites who don’t work very hard, have eons of time off, and plenty of money to spend when they are vacationing. In the meantime our country suffers from massive numbers of people unemployed or under-employed without a single ounce of effort being expended to change things.

What scares me about Trump is his fix for leveling the playing field with China. He continues to spew rhetoric about installing tariffs to make China pay. A friend reminded me of a former business man president who did much the same thing. He installed tariffs on countries getting the benefit of our market and they in turn installed tariffs on our products coming into their country. The resulting trade war only exacerbated the Great Depression. The president’s name is Herbert Hoover. It frightens me to hear a businessman spewing such nonsensical rhetoric about tariffs. I agree that China should be more grateful for the gift we gave them beginning in the seventies when Richard Nixon visited and opened the doors of trade. Ever since the USA has rushed to send all of its manufacturing jobs and machines to them. The Chinese should be kissing our butt for opening that door for them. Instead, they celebrate having more billionaires than the USA.

Capitalism survives by making profit. Without profit companies die. In order to make profit, companies must continuously cut their costs. Cost cutting is necessary to compete in a world market. China can out compete with US companies because they play low wages. Their starving people are very happy to make a dollar a day or hour because it is more money than they have ever seen in their wretched lives. Suddenly these dirt poor farmers have cash to live on. They can afford to go to the market to buy a cat for Sunday dinner rather than have to search the neighborhood for strays.

Cheap labor comes from poor people who are starving and will do anything for money. They don’t care about minimum wages, they care about having a few dollars to spend on food for their kids. They are willing to work for those few dollars and avoid protesting for more. They just work. Where do these poor people come from? They are immigrants. That is why the governments across the world are now competing for immigrants. The US economy needs immigrants willing to do the work our native born people won’t do. Why won’t our natives do the work? Most of them are too highly educated to get their hands dirty. We have brain washed our kids to go to school and get smart so they don’t have to work hard. The end result is we have bred generations of kids who don’t know what physical work is, nor do they know the value of physical work.

I taught my kids that they should be willing to work at  many jobs. That way they will understand the value of going to school. They will understand what kind of education they need to earn a living. All of my kids have done that. They all began working when they were fifteen. My oldest son worked on a maintenance crew for a manufacturing pant. His summers consisted of painting a cyclone fence with a brush; he is now an engineer. My daughter found work in a nursing home changing diapers and feeding patients, she became a nurse, my youngest son worked in a video store as a clerk then promoted himself to become burger flipper at the Golden Arches, He is now a computer scientist. My grand children are being taught similar values. Work be it physical, or mundane repetitive tasks is good experience for life.

So why does Donald Trump scare me? He isn’t talking about making America competitive with the world market. He wants to make America Great again, but he hasn’t showed me how he is going to do it. Perhaps it is his campaigning technique to not show his hand sooner than needed, but right now his brawling ways are his strongest suite. He needs to show us how he is going to stimulate the economy to resurrect the 93,000,000 jobs that disappeared from our country.

Filed under: Conservative, Election, family, Government, Manufacturing | Tagged: Brawl, China, Debate, Election, Immigrants, Trump | Leave a comment »