Why People Support Donald Trump ?

As you read the negative comments about Donald Trump, most of the focus is on his personality and irreverent behavior. There is a lack of real substantive rebuttals to his policies on the issues. Many of his critics dismiss him prematurely never researching his positions ready to believe negative media portrayals. For this reason, they cannot understand why Trump is rising in the polls - and they never will. For working Americans of all stripes, there is a real concern with jobs, wages and the economy as well as the things that impact these issues such as taxes, immigration, foreign trade and Obamacare regulation. Add to this the fact the a majority of Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction with national security, foreign policy and energy independence and you begin to see why Trump’s message is resonating.Donald Trump has a revitalization plan for our economy. This includes lowering corporate and personal tax rates and reducing government regulation on business. Repatriation of off-shore dollars held by multi-national corporations alone, once rates are lowered, is estimated to bring two to three trillion dollars back into our economy. Let me go into some detail on these topics that you may not have seen before:

Taxes - Trump has developed a tax policy that would reduce the top tax rate from 39.6 to 25 percent at the same time increasing the standard deduction to $25K for single and $50K for married filers. He would drop the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent with a 10 percent rate for repatriation of funds. See the plan here.

Immigration - Trump has received his most fervent criticisms for his statements on immigration, but few have reviewed his policy proposals which you can see here. These are common sense policies that simply enforce laws that are already on the books. It does not involve mass deportation as the media has suggested. If you enforce the laws as they were intended, the system will work properly. In a fifteen year period starting with 1998, we’ve had 25 million people immigrate to America and a full third of these, about 8.5 million, have come illegally according to the census bureau. And this figure is based just on what has been documented. The actual number is likely to be much higher as those coming illegally generally avoid revealing their status.

Foreign Trade Deals - As with all of our foreign trade deals, the promise was more jobs for Americans as well as cheaper consumer products. Instead, we lost jobs. NAFTA resulted in a net loss of one million jobs. When China entered the WTO, another three million jobs were lost. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that is taking place now, the projections are that we will experience two to three times more job losses than what we have had to date from our existing trade deals. Many of Trump’s critics, conservative and democratic alike, have warned his positions will invoke a trade war with competing tariffs on imports and exports. What many do not realize is that China, and many other trade partners, already apply defacto tariffs with a 25% VAT tax on any imported goods. China also artificially lowers the value of it’s currency as compared to the U.S. dollar and gives Chinese corporations large state subsidies to insure that they remain competitive against foreign counterparts. To compete, a host of other Southeast Asian countries are forced to do the same thing and this is why most of the focus of Trump’s plan is on China. The damage is already done and China relies heavily on trade with the U.S. to support it’s growing economy; an economy that has been built on the backs of U.S. workers. See Trump’s plan here.

Healthcare Reform - Trump would propose reforms to healthcare through Congress that would restore economic freedom and free market principles. More than 60% of the Obamacare co-op insurers that offer Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage have failed so far and more are on the way. The key reason is that what ACA provides is not insurance; It’s welfare paid with taxpayer dollars. And a critical component of the ACA law was not addressed in the rush to enforce ACA involving the taxpayers subsidy of insurance company profits. A bill was later proposed to provide these subsidies but that bill was killed. This did not stop the Obama Administration from funding these subsidies anyway and that has now been deemed illegal by the Federal Courts. As more private insurers fail, we will eventually end up with a bloated, bureaucratic single-payer Medicare system by default that will cause trillions in deficit spending. It’s clear we have not fixed the problem yet as more people lose their healthcare as well as not covering a majority of those uninsured persons that were targeted in the first place. Trump’s reform plan is here.

Military and Foreign Policy - The U.S. Army has been reduced to Pre-World War II levels. Our Navy is smaller than it's been since 1917. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947. The Iran Nuclear Deal does nothing to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear arsenal in 10 years and gives them $150 billion with which to build it. ISIS has been steadily increasing it’s size and territory causing a mass refugee crisis in Europe. China is building military island outposts next to international trade routes, Iran is capturing and humiliating our military personnel and Russia and China are buzzing our military planes and ships. We appear to be a country in retreat. Many of Trump’s foreign policy statements are here.

Energy Independence - Trump understands that energy independence is crucial to long-term economic vitality and national security. Fracking is responsible for turning the U.S. from a net importer to exporter of oil for the first time in our history. Yet, the Obama Administration has not allowed fracking on government land nor off-shore exploration and drilling, The coal industry has been destroyed through regulation and the XL pipeline remains unapproved; a measure that would reduce delivery costs from 50 cents to 5 cents per barrel. His policies are here.

I’m not endorsing all of Mr. Trump’s statements. However, many of his plans for energizing our economy make sense to me. Economic growth lifts people out of poverty, shrinks our deficit and provides funds needed to make Social Security and Medicare solvent again. It’s remarkable how little the Democratic platform even discusses the economy and the deficit. Their focus is on higher taxes and more spending. In effect, they are for jobs but not employers. This is obviously an unworkable contradiction.

It’s clear that there is a large amount of dissatisfaction with our government and the state of the economy. We’re growing on a 10 year average of less than 2 percent when the average for the 20th century was 3.5 percent. The prime lending rate is at zero and the labor participation rate is 62 percent similar to the economic malaise in the Carter era. Consumer spending is down and personal savings are up in the 5 percent range indicating there is a lack of confidence in the future. This is bringing unprecedented numbers of voters to the polls and they are not looking to establishment candidates like Hillary or Bush. I think we’ll see a large number of blue-collar Democrats, Independents and Republicans coming out to vote for Trump and I think he will win.

(Written before election)