Person of Faith

Why do we put so much emphasis on whether someone who runs for office is a "person of faith"? The obvious answer is that a significant percentage of the electorate thinks that there is something wrong with people who don't have some kind of religious faith. There is a lingering belief, for instance, that atheists are without morals. For a subset of religious people, the belief is that those who are persons of other faiths are somehow suspect. What we end up with is the sideshow that we have in 2020 where a demonstrably irreligious candidate who panders to fundamentalists deriding another candidate who is a practicing member of a Christian denomination as being "against God". I would have more respect for a candidate who declared that he would not discuss his faith than one who uses it as a campaigning tactic. I would have had no problem with Trump saying that he wasn't religious and didn't attend church than the spectacle of him trying to talk like a fundamentalist without any inkling of what that meant. 

One politician whose religious stance I do respect is Mitt Romney. He's obviously devoted to his Mormon faith and his active in his church. However, he refused to make it an issue in his presidential campaign. I had problems with some of his political positions, but his decision to keep private matters private was a point in his favor. 

As far as the 2020 presidential campaigns go, I am not impressed with Trump's pandering to the Evangelicals, or his painting of Biden as "against God", nor am I moved by Biden's religious values. 

It is for me, and should be for everyone, a non-issue. 

Trump Has To Go

 Here I am once again preaching to the choir, or talking to myself, or shouting into the wind, but despite everything else that's going on, I have to say it again, Trump has to go. 

I'm am sick and tired of the one issue voters. "Vote for Trump! He's Against Abortion! - Democrats want to kill babies!" I understand that abortion is the number one issue for some people. I understand that nothing is more important than outlawing abortion for those people. What I don't understand is why these "pro-life" people are willing to burn the country to the ground with an incompetent narcissist in the White House in order to hold on to the hope that a supposedly conservative Supreme Court majority will overturn Roe vs. Wade. 

I'm sick and tired of the one per-centers who rationalize that his regulatory cuts have made their businesses more profitable and increased stock prices. Yes, there is such a thing as burdensome regulations. Some regulations just generate extra paperwork and do nothing to solve the problems that they are supposed to solve. But it shouldn't always be about the cost. The purpose of most government regulations is to implement legislation. I work for a state government agency. In the last legislative session, a statute was passed instituting a deadline for review of certain incentive programs. A group of people within my agency has been at work coming up with guidelines for taxpayers so that we can meet the new deadline and still comply with existing statutes. There are some requirements that taxpayers may look upon as burdensome or unnecessary, but are needed to make sure that we are following the law while conforming to the new timeline. Trump has prioritized cost above safety, above environmental quality, above consumer protection. Federal agencies that exist to protect worker's safety, environmental quality and consumers have been gutted with regulations designed to carry out the agencies' missions going unenforced.

I'm sick and tired of the ignorant people who parrot Trump's claim that he has accomplished more than any president in history. Sometimes the claim is "more for African-Americans or more for Hispanics". These claims, when looked at objectively, are nonsense. His signature claim, that he would build a "big, beautiful" wall that Mexico would pay for (and that they'd "like it") is a bust. The last time I checked there were exactly 3 miles of new construction, plus around 200 miles of repairs and upgrades, some of those have actually fallen down in high winds or toppled over due to the foundation being undermined. He has not repealed "Obamacare", the PPACA, although he has tried continually throughout his term to do so. He claims to have eliminated the ISIS caliphate. While it is true that ISIS no longer holds any territory, they are alive and well and still operating. Their territorial holdouts were largely defeated by Kurdish militias (who we subsequently abandoned to the Turks) and the Iraqi army with US air support. Spend some time looking up his long list of executive orders and you'll find that they are largely toothless proclamations; most of the legislation that he signed while the Republicans still held the majority in the House of Representatives was similarly fluff. His one legislative achievement, the 2017 tax changes, was far short of historic, resulting in large cuts for the wealthiest Americans and for corporations, while delivering a barely noticeable cut for most Americans. 

I'm sick and tired of those who justify supporting Trump because they think that the Democrats are all socialists, or hate God, or want to dismantle the military. Shit...none of that even justifies discussion. 

Trump was counting on an economy that, by some measures, was booming to justify his re-election, and hoping that enough people wouldn't notice that the trends were merely a continuation of what started during his predecessor's administration. The onset of Covid-19 showed just how fragile our economy really was. Now he has to distract us from his poor handling of the crisis and the subsequent economic recession by blaming China, the Democrats, the media and even epidemiologists for the mess we're in. He has been pushing hard to sow distrust in our election infrastructure and to hobble the Post Office's ability to handle mail-in ballots at a time when voting by mail is becoming more common. He is not suggesting, but saying plainly that if he loses it will be prima facie evidence that the election was rigged. He has refused to say, as he he refused in 2016, that he would respect the results if he lost. 

Are Vice President Biden and Senator Harris perfect? Of course not, no matter what your definition of perfect is. Like it or not, the way things are is that there are two major parties and the president will come from one of them. Biden may not be who you think is best for the country, but he is certainly the sane choice. 

A Dangerous Man

I was once accused of thinking that I was smarter than everyone else. Or maybe it was better than everyone else. I'm neither, but I have to say that I usually keep my mouth shut until I have my facts straight. A lot of positions in the political world are a matter of opinion. Should our military be involved in a conflict? What is a proper marginal tax rate? Should the government be involved in health care or insurance? Reasonable people can disagree on any number of issues. But one thing is not a matter of opinion: we have a dangerous man occupying the office of president.

Trump is dangerous for three main reasons: his incompetence, his narcissism,  and his authoritarian tendencies. All three combine to make him dangerous to our democracy. 

He is incompetent. Somehow we in this country have latched on to the idea that a successful businessman can translate business acumen into political skill. The problem with that viewpoint is that they are entirely different skill sets. A business owner or CEO has one job: to maximize profits. This is not the job of a mayor or governor or president. Government agencies have missions that have nothing to do with the amount of revenue that they generate. But we have seen Trump equate the mission of our military to how much other countries pay us for the presence of our troops. International alliances are scrapped because of the price tag, the Post Office is currently being crippled because Trump doesn't understand its mission. Combine this with the fact that Trump really isn't a successful businessman. He leaves behind him a trail of failed endeavors, unpaid bills and bankruptcies. People believe he is a business genius because he played one on television. 

He is a narcissist. Everything is about him. He has sidelined anyone with any expertise in government who did not display unquestioning loyalty to him personally. International relations come down to how nice he perceives foreign leaders are to him. Governors who do not publicly praise him are retaliated against. He is convinced that career civil servants are out to get him, part of a "Deep State" conspiracy. His paranoia and distrust of "experts" results in an abysmal ignorance of the basics of economics and governance. He continues to misstate and misunderstand how tariffs work as well as how NATO financing works. 

He is an authoritarian at heart. Part of this goes back to being the head of a privately owned company. CEOs of family businesses are virtual dictators within the confines of their business. Their word is law. There's no board of directors and no investors. As President, you can't do whatever you want, although he has repeatedly said that he can. He has expanded the use of executive orders to get his way, and promised to use them more. He has declared a national emergency in order to fulfill an ill-considered campaign promise that was never more than an applause line. He has unilaterally withdrawn from international agreements. He has ignored the wishes of state and local governments and sent in federal agents dressed up as military to pose as a tough guy. He has suggested that the election be delayed. He regularly attempts to undermine the integrity of our elections, the courts, the free press and Congress. He was impeached, but a spineless Republican majority in the Senate refused to convict and remove him. 

All of this, incompetence, narcissism and authoritarianism, have combined to give us 150,000 deaths and an economy that has shrunk by a third in less than half a year. The country is teetering on the brink of a depression, with millions out of work and he does nothing, while bragging about nonexistent accomplishments and whining about how unfairly he is treated. 

He has to go.  

Not Everything You Disagree With Is Socialism

If you believe everything that the Trumpublicans are saying, everything that the Democrats are proposing is socialism, which according to them is the same as communism, which of course is un-American and bad. This approach depends on the assumption that voters will not do the hard work of critical thinking and will accept the party's slogans without question, and their assumption would be correct. What voters  should be doing is asking not whether or not a particular program or policy is socialist or not, but whether that program is or isn't good for the country. 

It isn't very difficult to demonize socialism. Most of the nations that are apologetically socialist are either repressive dictatorships, or have failed economies, or both. Socialist (or Marxist or Communist) theory envisions a utopia where there are no class differences and no gaps between the rich and the poor. The "workers" own the means of production and there is no economic exploitation. The problem with this theory is that it neglects nearly every aspect of human nature. Since there is no possibility of amassing wealth, there is no incentive to take risks. The countries that have attempted to model their economies on socialism could only do so by instituting a dictatorship to force it on the population. Authoritarianism coupled with a command economy usually resulted in poverty, as well as a robust black market. Countries who have seen their economies flourish, despite a socialist structure, have done so by allowing some measure of capitalism. Politicians who throw around the accusation of socialism point to extreme examples like Venezuela and Cuba, and even the former Soviet Union to make their point. These are indeed glaring instances of failed socialist economies. 

But are the policies of left-leaning politicians the same as the policies of these failed economies? In order to make that case, Trumpublicans have to ignore three basic things:

1. The policies that liberal politicians are offering are nowhere as extreme as what was happening in the failed socialist nations
2. There are successful socialist nations, e.g. The Nordic nations
3. There are aspects of our own economy that could be considered socialist

#1 is pretty obvious. No one in the Democratic Party is suggesting that we turn the United States into a socialist dictatorship. No one is in favor of a command economy, no one wants to eliminate private ownership. 

#2 is arguable. The Scandinavian countries are smaller are more homogeneous than the United States. But these are not strictly Socialist nations, but Socialist Democracies. Democratic Socialism is a better term for what even the farthest left politicians want to institute. 

#3 is something that the hard core capitalists hate to admit. We already have programs in place where income is redistributed. The Social Security system, despite people's mistaken belief that they "pay into it" is a social safety net program. Most states have incentive programs where businesses can gain tax credits for meeting goals that the government thinks are worthy. 

Most things that are pejoratively labelled "socialist" are only a bad thing if you view them through the lens of "something for nothing". But anything that anyone receives from "the government" is getting a handout if you look at it a certain way. But any government expenditure is merely a result of a consensus on how taxes collected from the citizenry is spent. Few would argue that spending tax dollars on the military, or roads, or the fire department is socialism. While it can be argued that we all benefit from the protection that the  military offers, some people never need the fire department for example. Programs such as Medicaid for All, Free College Tuition or even universal basic income, should be looked at, not as a giveaway, but as use of our tax dollars that has wide-ranging benefits to society. Universally available health care wouldn't be free, it would be a program that recognizes that it is beneficial to the nation as a whole, and a wise use of our tax dollars. 

If by "we will never be a socialist nation" the Trumpublicans mean that we will never be a failed dictatorship plagued by poverty and hyper-inflation, I agree wholeheartedly. But if they mean that we will never use our tax dollars to benefit all Americans, then I vehemently disagree.