Kind reader;
I’d like to share some straight up reality that might influence your thinking about the upcoming election. Thanks for riding along – I appreciate your readership (and comments!)
Facts:
Slapping tariffs on US trading partners for trading with us won’t encourage future trade.
Telling you those tariffs will offset all the promised tax cuts is nonsensical. Tariffs will only make those products more expensive for the consumer, and encourage US trade partners to develop alternate markets..
Living with Dobbs rather than Roe is already demonstrating an increased U.S. neonatal death rate.
Telling you politicians are the proper judges of a woman’s reproductive health is nonsensical. Outlawing abortion only increases more dangerous abortions, like in the old days, and full term pregnancies even in situations where the mother’s life is in jeopardy.
When support of Ukraine is abandoned, what does China do with Taiwan? And then what? Does the global order become global chaos as countries do “whatever the hell they want?”
Telling you foreign wars will be fixed fast is nonsensical. Friction between groups is constant and shifting. There are unforeseen consequences to leaving solutions to the combatants. Nature abhors a vacuum. Isolationism will result in more conflict, not less.
US gross national income per capita has surged since 2020, an average of 7.5% per year, compared with almost every other developed economy. Wages are up, unemployment is at 4.1%, the S&P500, Dow Jones and NASDAQ averages are at all-time highs. Wage growth has outpaced price growth (inflation, if you like) over the past year by an average of 2%.
Telling you we’re a failing nation is nonsensical. The most frequent argument for administration change in Washington is the ‘terrible economy’ we currently have. Not so.
A president cannot control market prices in a free enterprise system. Those are primarily based on supply and demand, not presidential fiat.
Telling you high prices result from some kind of political malfeasance is nonsensical.
Immigrants do your landscaping, pick and process your food, staff your restaurants and hotels and constitute new taxpayers and workers. This is a long term advantage in a time of near zero population growth across nearly all industrialized countries.
Telling you they’re rapists, pet eaters, drug mules and murderers is nonsensical. It’s the last yawp of an aged generation clinging to power, desperate to maintain dominance in a fast changing cultural and economic landscape.
Indeed, telling you anything, especially in the absence of listening, should make you check that person’s track record.
He promised us a better health care plan, only to admit eight years later that he still doesn’t have one. He promised to finish the border wall, and then completed 52 miles of new wall in four years. He promised a $500 billion infrastructure program which never materialized.
This is a 78 year old man with zero empathy, who has invested zero dollars in his campaign while enriching his businesses on campaign donations. This business genius has filed for bankruptcy six times. He incited a riot the last time he lost an election, and continues to dispute that election after losing court challenges over sixty times. He is a convicted felon 34 times over, and faces prison if he loses this election. He’s totally motivated to tell you anything, to sell out to any donor, influencer or criminal racket that improves his electoral position.
And people still say they don’t know enough about Kamala Harris. Ask yourself; do you know anything about J.D. Vance, who would stand a single failed heartbeat from the presidency? Harris has been California state prosecutor and attorney general, U.S. senator, and now vice president for the past four years. Vance has served as the junior senator from Ohio for a single year. That’s it.
I’m an aging boomer. My big decisions are now made with a view toward the safety and prosperity of my kids, and their kids. To base my vote on my own taxes, or the price of my next loaf of bread, or the supremacy of my religion over my civic life strikes me as a great tragedy of short-sightedness.
There have been significant and positive strides in our economy, our standing in the world and our commitment to social equity, climate and infrastructure under Biden/Harris. Four years with them sounds like a proposition beneficial to a wide majority of Americans, Not perfect, but with an administration more willing to listen, empathize, and act in the nation’s best interests than the alternative.
Please consider this a full voiced endorsement of Harris/Walz. I value you as readers and have attempted to tread lightly here. Your consideration of these words is deeply appreciated, regardless of your acceptance of them.
Please vote!
Mike
Notes:
There is no formal Trump/Vance platform; only twenty bullet points. You can find the GOP platform here. It’s sixteen pages and also woefully short on detail.
It doesn’t mean there isn’t a strategy for a new Trump/Vance administration – only that it’s been formulated by the Heritage Foundation as Project 2025. It’s almost 900 pages. For a clear, condensed look at the impact of the most likely agenda of a new regime, I recommend this summary from the non-partisan League of Women Voters.
All assertions made here have been verified through PolitiFact.
Graph from Statista – September, 2024
By the way, our water pressure has never been better…