Trump Derangement Syndrome Persists

Platform or personality? When deciding for whom to vote, how much weight does each carry in voters’ minds? Is it more important to agree with candidates than to like them? What if you like them but you don’t concur on the issues? As I’ve listened to people in the four years since Donald Trump first announced his candidacy for president it has become evident among his detractors that hatred for him as a man far outweighs whatever his performance has been as president. Trump’s supporters, however, care more about what he does than about what he says or tweets.

Trump supporters cringed when he said he got the most electoral votes since Ronald Reagan because a quick search reveals that he didn’t. His egotism is so enormous that the presidency with its all its ego-stroking perks cannot satisfy it, but his favorability ratings climb nonetheless. Trump’s base is satisfied because he’s doing what he said he would do, like appointing conservative judges to the courts, cracking down on illegal immigration, and reining in China’s illegal trade practices.

That drives the left and the media — which Trump supporters see as conjoined twins — absolutely bonkers because they not only hate Trump, they also disagree with him on the issues. Rather than criticize his policy positions though, they fire ad hominem salvos — continuously. Trump is racist, sexist, xenophobic, they insist, and so are those who voted for him. Leftist politicians and media have done little else throughout Trump’s presidency, but the effect has been the opposite of what they intend. Rather than drive them apart, relentless criticism of both the president and his base drives them closer together.

Some Trump supporters wish he would consult with staff before talking or tweeting. If he didn’t trip over his own tongue so much he could have implemented more of his agenda by now, they believe, and who could argue? Others say they held their nose voting for him in 2016 but have since grown to like him in spite of the dumb things he says. As Senator and former opponent, Lindsay Graham said last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC): “We have a lot in common; I like him and he likes him.”

The Mueller report is due any time now but many are beginning to realize that it will have no evidence of Trump collusion with Russia in the 2016 election. However, Democrats won a majority in the US House last November and with that comes control of key committees, so Democrat chairmen are using subpoena power to scrutinize Trump on many fronts. Will they find anything with which to impeach the president?

It’s hard to believe they will considering that media coverage of Trump has been more than 90% negative and they’ve been looking everywhere for negative things to report. The two-year Mueller investigation has probed so many areas far afield from its original charge of investigating Russian collusion that we have to wonder what’s left to investigate. It seems clear now that removing Trump from office is the goal for Democrats and if there’s no Russian collusion, they’ll look for something else.

Meanwhile, Democrats who want to run against him are voluminous and more announce almost every day. They’re promising the moon: free tuition, free medical care, government jobs for everyone, money for those unwilling to work, reparations for descendants of slaves and Indians, and rebuilding every single structure in the whole country. When asked how to pay for all that, they say they’ll tax the rich and print money.

Meanwhile, the national debt has reached $22 trillion, eclipsing annual GDP — Gross Domestic Product — the sum total of all economic activity in the country. Some of us remember that twenty years ago President Clinton and a Republican Congress worked together to balance the federal budget and even talked about spending the surplus to actually pay down the national debt rather than keep adding to it every year.

Trump’s tax cuts have stimulated the economy and government revenues are rising, but government is expanding even faster and so is the annual deficit. It’s growing at about $1 trillion a year again. This used to used to be a big issue for Republicans though doesn’t seem to be anymore ever since Trump took office. Americans paid $523 billion interest on the debt in 2018 and that will keep rising. How long can this go on?

All of us know how much we make and how much we spend — what happens when we spend more than we make. There’s a limit to how much debt we can sustain before it seriously cramps our lifestyle. We don’t need degrees in political science or economics to understand the same is true for our country no matter what part of the political spectrum we occupy.

Not A Party Pooper

Happy Birthday Lila

“I like birthdays,” said my granddaughter last year. “You get presents. You turn another number.” She had just turned five. “Next year, I’ll be six,” she added matter-of-factly and that day comes Saturday. She’s a New-Year’s-Eve baby who arrived just in time to give her parents a tax deduction for 2010. I’ll be in attendance, bringing her a present — the Calico Critters Hazelnut Chipmunk Family Playset. It’s a box of four tiny anthropomorphic chipmunk figurines for $25. If I were shopping blindly for a present to give her and saw this on a shelf somewhere, I would never have purchased it. It looks overpriced, but that’s what she wants according to her mother. It’s not the $25 because that’s not a big number for us; it’s the objective value — but then I’m not objective when it comes to my grandchildren. She loves those little critters.

It so happens that I turn another number soon myself: 66. I’ll be entering my late sixties, one could say, and I’m going to start collecting Social Security. I’ll only be getting 30% of what I would have otherwise been entitled to because of a law signed by President Reagan thirty years ago to prevent double dipping by teachers in states like Maine. As a career public school teacher in this state, neither I nor my school district paid into Social Security for my teacher salary over 34 years. We both paid instead into the Maine State Retirement System. Because I worked other jobs all during that time, I paid into Social Security for those salaries, and I still do in the form of self-employment tax because I still work part time. If I’m only going to get 30% of my SS benefit, I should only pay in 30%, right? But no, I have to kick in the entire amount. Will I get back what I paid in? Well, that depends on how long I live, and who knows how long that will be? I don’t want to know.

Will the checks continue if I make it past 80? Probably not unless serious changes are made. There are simply too many people collecting and not enough paying in. Any dummy knows that can’t go on forever but neither President Obama nor President-elect Trump have any announced plans to address that. There’s nothing but IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund. More than 90 million Americans are out of the workforce and obviously not contributing.

Meanwhile, there’s more than $12 billion in the Maine Public Employees Retirement Fund. It’s over 80% funded and Governor LePage has made provisions to steadily increase that percentage. Compared to retired teachers in other states like California and Illinois, my pension is meager and I can’t survive on it alone. Teachers and other public employees there get defined benefits that are two, three, and in some cases ten times what mine are, but those states are close to bankruptcy because of it. According to Forbes Magazine, Illinois has a $111 billion pension shortfall in 2016. Chicago’s alone is $9.5 billion. California had an unfunded pension liability of over $500 billion in 2014. It’s worse now despite Governor Moonbeam’s rosy reports on California fiscal situation.

Democrats have been running those states for generations. They’ve made commitments to public employee unions they knew couldn’t be kept. They also knew they’d be gone when the bills came due and they didn’t care. It’s called “kicking the can down the road.” They’re still kicking, but the end of the road is approaching fast. Should the federal government bail them out? Over my dead body.

I’m at that stage of life during which many of my contemporaries are dying or becoming debilitated with various aliments. I’m not what I used to be, but I’m doing well compared to most, and so is my wife. We both hate to exercise, but we do it anyway and it’s paying off. She also nags me about eating vegetables. Life is good, for now. I’ve been on Medicare since my last birthday and she goes on it in 2017when she turns 65. But Medicare is another kind of Ponzi scheme like Social Security. More and more are collecting it but the number paying in isn’t nearly keeping pace. Are our “leaders” in Washington addressing that? You know the answer.

President Obama has been patting himself on the back as his administration is about to end. When it does, he will have more than doubled our national debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. All I can do about that issue and the others outlined above above is write about them. I’ll keep on pointing it all out to people, most of whom don’t want to hear it. When I attend my granddaughter’s birthday next Saturday where all my other grandchildren will be, I’ll think about it but I won’t say anything. Why ruin a good party?