Not to worry little snowflakes – sticks and stones may break your bones -but words will never harm you. We know the coming fight over policy will be really terrifying for you to watch – but, no matter what the outcome of Trump’s actual policies (not his words!!), America will be better for it
Will Start To Lighten
As Democrats Grapple
With Changes in Policy
The preliminaries of the
Trump presidency are ending, and difficult though it is to appreciate, the
atmosphere is lightening somewhat. It is a little early to opine on the Trump
foreign policy, but his first three visits from other government leaders have gone
well. He did brilliantly saying publicly to the British leader, Theresa May,
that “a strong and independent Britain is a blessing to the world” — a stirring
contrast to Obama’s threat, delivered in London, to put Britain “at the back of
the queue” if it left the European Union.
President
Trump’s conversations with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, seemed to
go well also, as have conversations with the Chinese president. Comparisons
between the Trump references to “America First” and the pre-war isolationist
movement led by Colonel Charles Lindbergh have died away, as has most of the
alarmist nonsense about Donald Trump. It is no longer possible to frighten the
children of America with suggestions that Trump is a reckless warmonger.
The
exchange with Canada’s Justin Trudeau was virtually a love-in, as was the
remarkably cheerful joint press conference of Mr. Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu.
It remains to be seen what will come of the “notice” that departed national
security adviser General Michael Flynn gave the Iranians, but the president
will pick his time and send a starkly different message to the groveling to
Tehran of his predecessor.
Ah
absurd overreaction to the executive order on admission of people from seven
terrorist-wracked or terror-sponsoring states, which have been identified as
such by President Obama, is subsiding. The administration will practice
enhanced screening at point of processing, and may issue a new order; and
presumably, when the vacancy is filled and cant and emotionalism have subsided,
will ask the Supreme Court for a reference on the constitutional point of the
president’s prerogatives in immigration matters. The partisan publicity-seeking
mischief of the Washington State government and a Seattle federal judge cannot
be allowed to stand, even on a moot point (if the present order is superseded).
Allegations
of racism have died in all but psychotic political environs; the bunk about
misogyny finally vanished altogether with the joint meeting on Monday with
Canada’s Trudeau to promote women executives. The succeeding fatuity about
Trump’s being an autocrat has wobbled away as he has indulgently abided by the
antics of the Seattle district judge and the flaky Ninth Circuit in San
Francisco (a court that has seen 86 percent of recent appeals from it to the
Supreme Court meet with success).
His
cabinet is inching through the confirmation process, protracted by mindless Democratic
obstructionism. The Democrats must have scraped the bottom of the barrel with
Senatory Schumer’s sniveling over the entry ban, Elizabeth Warren’s threats of
individual vengeance on all 52 senators who approved Senator Sessions as
attorney general, and Representative Maxine Waters’s attack on Trump for
tolerating the Russian “invasion of Korea.” The Democrats have almost run
through the Saul Alinsky playbook of demonization and harassment, and the
president’s children and a grandchild are the latest targets, but no
significant part of public opinion will support such sleaze. (It seems like
only yesterday that Hillary was saying “When they go low, we go high.”)
The
reality that Mr. Trump is president, is not going to be impeachable, and is
substantially unstoppable, is seeping into the Democratic mind. There is now a
health-and-human-services secretary (Tom Price) sworn to remake Obamacare and
extend it; an education secretary (Betsy DeVos) who opposes the teachers’
unions and supports private alternatives to the state school system they have
desecrated; and a Treasury secretary (Steven Mnuchin) who will present a
comprehensive reform of taxes. A director of the Environmental Protection
Agency who is skeptical about climate change (Scott Pruitt) appears safe enough
for confirmation, though Mr. Trump’s nominee for labor secretary (Andrew
Puzder, who is critical of much of the union leadership, while being supportive
of working people) withdrew Wednesday afternoon over a variety of issues.
But
the great political battle is about to shift to the attempted enactment of
Donald Trump’s long-promised legislative assault on what he considered the
rottenness of the entire political governing class and system. Health-care
reform and tax reform are the first priorities, and comprehensive bills, if
adopted, would erase what little there is of a domestic Obama legacy and
improve upon it, and would incentivize the return of trillions of dollars of
retained profit of American companies overseas, sharply reduce corporate-income
taxes, and reduce taxes on modest incomes.
American
corporate-income taxes are the highest of any advanced country, and it is a
testament to the leftist dogmatism or simple complacency of the mainstream
American media that there was so little agitation over the last 20 years for
revisions to the tax code that would promote reinvestment of earnings in the
United States. Historians of the future will wonder how the United States
managed to be both overtaxed and chronically debt-ridden. There has been no
shortage of advice from intelligent economic commentators, such as Martin
Feldstein and Larry Kudlow, about how to structure tax reform, and the
consensus of Republican economists seems to be that it is so complicated that
it should be divided in two — with a stimulation of some cuts, fiscal
enticement of patriation of foreign profits, and an infrastructure fund now;
and more-comprehensive reform later.
With
great trepidation, I think that the momentum of the election victory and the
installation of such a radically reformist Cabinet must be exploited while the
Democrats are still reeling, and torn between impressing their base in
Hollywood, the media, academia, the militant feminists, and minorities (an
awkward coalition of rich and poor with only patches among the working and
middle classes) and bridge-building with the moderate-conservative majority.
While
the extreme acrimony of the late campaign and the antagonism between Mr. Trump
and the conventional media have ensured that there has been no honeymoon, there
is still novelty and the expectations of the Trump supporters. The president is
running well ahead of the Democrats in the polls, has twice the approval rating
of the Congress, which has risen since the end of gridlock, and three times the
approval rating of the media. If he can produce a tax system that enriches the
lower-income families while spurring business reinvestment, he can generate
between 3% and 4% percent economic growth, which would itself reduce the
deficit by $400 to 500 billion a year.
Some
taxes on elective spending and transactions would eliminate the rest of the
deficit. This appeared to be the carrot he held out to a group of visiting
bankers a few days ago — some higher taxes on Wall Street but sharply reduced
regulation. Most of Dodd-Frank and much of Sarbanes-Oxley, and a great deal of
additional superfluous regulation, should go.
The
Obama war on business and the (Hillary) Clinton ambition to flatline the
economy by making the voting majority of Americans members of some category of
benefit recipient would go with it. It will be a mighty accomplishment if
Donald Trump can bring the country back from President Obama’s plan to “spread
the wealth around” by increasing the size of the public sector and forcing more
people into forms of welfare, and refocus it on the entitlement of people to
their incomes, as surely as they are entitled to enjoyment of their property —
tempered only by the need to provide what the government must have to function,
as opposed to buying votes with public money and inciting class warfare.
If
at the same time, or right on the heels of it, he can produce a health-care
plan that is universal, but based on tax credits for those with adequate
incomes, and assistance for those who do not, he will have ended 20 years of
stagnant, mainly gridlocked government. He will also coopt the entire center of
the political ground. At the same time, he will have assisted the moderate
Democrats to regain control of their party and make it again a centrist reform
party capable of governing without reducing the country to shambles, as it did
under LBJ, President Carter, and Mr. Obama. At that point, the popularity of
the administration will cow even the more overwrought sectors of the media.
The
confected hysteria is subsiding, and Democrats must now face the fact that many
of their cherished mistaken policies are about to be torched and the ashes
dispersed over the country. Mr. Schumer, Minority Leader Pelosi, and the rest
will soon have to decide whether to make a course correction, and show some
tactical maturity, or hurl themselves like grieving widows in colonial India on
the funeral pyre of the fools’ socialist paradise they have been promoting for
15 years.
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