27
votes
Just how bad is Trump's 2020 pitch?
Not submitting a link. Last thing that scumbag needs is web traffic.
But...let's suppose every one of this items actually came to pass in a reasonable form. There is some stuff there even I would legitimately want. So let's see the good/bad of Trump's lies, and discuss.
I'm bolding things that are (IMHO) obviously very, very bad. Italicizing ones that might be good, but are likely just lies. Striking out anything that is blatant pandering that the president has 0 ability to act on.
The purpose of this mental exercise is to see how people who don't keep up with politics might fall for the rhetoric. Know your enemy and all of that.
JOBS
Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 MonthsCreate 1 Million New Small Businesses- Cut Taxes to Boost Take-Home Pay and Keep Jobs in America
- Enact Fair Trade Deals that Protect American Jobs
- "Made in America" Tax Credits
- I like the idea of trying to locally source stuff. Tax Credits are not how to do it.
- Expand Opportunity Zones
- Eh, sounds good on paper...but will likely just be another loophole.
- Continue Deregulatory Agenda for Energy Independence
ERADICATE COVID-19
Develop a Vaccine by The End Of 2020Return to Normal in 2021- Maybe if we actually did what we needed to do. I don't have my hopes up.
- Make All Critical Medicines and Supplies for Healthcare Workers in The United States
- Refill Stockpiles and Prepare for Future Pandemics
- Yay for fixing your fuck-up way too late?
END OUR RELIANCE ON CHINA
Bring Back 1 Million Manufacturing Jobs from China- Tax Credits for Companies that Bring Back Jobs from China
- Allow 100% Expensing Deductions for Essential Industries like Pharmaceuticals and Robotics who Bring Back their Manufacturing to the United States
- No Federal Contracts for Companies who Outsource to China
- Outsourcing bad. But China isn't the only place.
- Hold China Fully Accountable for Allowing the Virus to Spread around the World
- God. Damn. It. I have no words.
HEALTHCARE
- Cut Prescription Drug Prices
- Put Patients and Doctors Back in Charge of our Healthcare System
- Lower Healthcare Insurance Premiums
- End Surprise Billing
- Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions
- Wait, didn't ACA do that?
- Protect Social Security and Medicare
- They obviously mean by increasing age to collect, privatizing, and actually trying to dismantle it. But you know...would be good if they did the opposite of what they've tried to do the last 2+ decades.
- Protect Our Veterans and Provide World-Class Healthcare and Services
- How about for everybody else too?
EDUCATION
- Provide School Choice to Every Child in America
- Yea, let's do away with church/state separation and also enable crippling debt from kindergarten. /s
- Teach American Exceptionalism
- I have no words. This is basically the worst thing ever.
DRAIN THE SWAMP
- Pass Congressional Term Limits
- End Bureaucratic Government Bullying of U.S. Citizens and Small Businesses
- Nice soundbite...but 'End Bureaucratic Government' is code for "Let's stop regulating to prevent discrimination and other things that are generally good ideas"
- Expose Washington’s Money Trail and Delegate Powers Back to People and States
- Drain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organizations That Hurt American Citizens
- Yea...cause the USA is the bastion of all that is good and does no wrong /s
DEFEND OUR POLICE
- Fully Fund and Hire More Police and Law Enforcement Officers
- Increase Criminal Penalties for Assaults on Law Enforcement Officers
- Prosecute Drive-By Shootings as Acts of Domestic Terrorism
- Bring Violent Extremist Groups Like ANTIFA to Justice
- Somehow I think the actual Nazis won't be targeted by this.
- End Cashless Bail and Keep Dangerous Criminals Locked Up until Trial
- End monetary Bail. Anything else: bad.
END ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS
- Block Illegal Immigrants from Becoming Eligible for Taxpayer-Funded Welfare, Healthcare, and Free College Tuition
- Mandatory Deportation for Non-Citizen Gang Members
- Dismantle Human Trafficking Networks
- End Sanctuary Cities to Restore our Neighborhoods and Protect our Families
- I can't bold this one hard enough
- Prohibit American Companies from Replacing United States Citizens with Lower-Cost Foreign Workers
- Nice soundbite, but give Unions power again and those kinds of problems will resolve themselves.
- Require New Immigrants to Be Able to Support Themselves Financially
INNOVATE FOR THE FUTURE
- Launch Space Force, Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon and Send the First Manned Mission to Mars
- Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure System
- Win the Race to 5G and Establish a National High-Speed Wireless Internet Network
- Not sure who you're 'winning' against, but whatever.
- Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest Air
- Um....yea.... how about everybody gets those things?
- Partner with Other Nations to Clean Up our Planet’s Oceans
AMERICA FIRST FOREIGN POLICY
- Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home
- Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share
- Maintain and Expand America’s Unrivaled Military Strength
- Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans
- That sounds a lot like 'Continue with Endless Wars'
- Build a Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System
- Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped bombing everybody else this wouldn't be needed.
Sorry, couldn't resist adding my additional commentary. So yea, looking over it again...very, very bad. But enough gems in there that the uninformed that only hears about those might fall for it.
He literally said this a few days ago:
Apparently, 2020 is the American Dream and all the credit goes to Trump himself!
Trump's entire M.O. is RIFE with hypocrisy like that. China is to blame for not containing COVID, but there was nothing at all he could've done to stop the USA from facing the worst infection on the planet. He's Mr. LAW & ORDER!! but all of the white collar criminals he's surrounded by are victims of overly aggressive law enforcement.
I'll have one total anarchy please*.
*Total anarchy being dependent on non-violence. Violent actors will be exiled and/or dispatched if they won't go willingly.
Agree with most everything OP had laid out, but confused by this one:
Personally I've been of the opinion that this is a good thing, though I understand there are some downsides to it. @vord what's your reasoning for this particular point?
I think at the very least congressional term limits are not "obviously very, very bad" as this post claims.
My stance is based on what @grahamiam laid out. My thoughts are that term limits don't actually solve the election cycle problem, but does eliminate the stability and increases corruption opportunities.
I think a better solution would be to up all term lengths to 4 years or more, but also permit recall voting to happen every 6 months. Having a longer term means less time campaigning, and being able to be ousted at a moment's notice means actually having to listen to your constituents...which is kind of the intent behind a representative democracy.
That said, yes I was being a touch hyperbolic. I also was trying to kick off a discussion around it, which seems to have (at least somewhat) worked.
Edit: @Omnicrola, pinging you to answer your question.
I've heard this repeated endlessly on the internet, the idea that term limits are a lobbyists wet dream. Insofar as lobbyists vote with their wallets however, this appears to be very, very untrue. As a case study, please see the data from the 2012 California prop 28 to reduce term limits from 14 to 12 years. The vast majority of financial support for term limit reduction came from labor organizations and unions. The vast majority of opposition came from private businesses (mostly finance sector) and/or high net worth individuals who also provide substantial donations to California Republicans.
https://www.followthemoney.org/entity-details?eid=10247017&default=ballot
I can find similar data from state limits w.r.t. my State of Ohio.
The argument that lobbyists love term limits just doesn't seem to hold water if you follow the money. One has to wonder if publications like Slate and Vox, who have made this point in the face of evidence to the contrary, aren't being financially incentivized to help push a narrative that ultimately helps lobbying rather than harming it.
I agree it's not likely as bad as (even I) am concerned it might be. But dropping an existing term limit by 2 years is a very different animal from introducing them where there were none prior.
Heck, I think with properly-functioning elections there shouldn't be any term limits for presidents either.
Key word being properly-functioning, and we're nowhere close at the moment.
Yup. Our iron chancellor Merkel has been around since 2005. I was a kid the last time we had a left-of-center government. Am I happy with her track record? No. Am I content with her, given expectations of a conservative? Absolutely. She is a way better chancellor in terms of uniting the country and making reasonable compromises than any other politician I know. And that's why she hasn't been replaced yet. If she didn't have the support she does, she'd be out. Term limits wouldn't help.
With her on the way out, I hope I won't miss her because the left finally gets an opportunity to shine. But I fear I will miss her, because she will just be replaced by a less reasonable conservative.
This is how a political system is supposed to work. It assumes, however, reasonable voters with good information. That’s a hard problem to fix that cannot be solved with term limits.
The bottom line is that legislating is a learned skill, and often in a lack of experience legislators will lean more on others (lobbyists) and give more power to other branches, like the executive.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/01/18/five-reasons-to-oppose-congressional-term-limits/
Here's the link, in case anyone wanted to go through the bullet points sans commentary: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/trump-campaign-announces-president-trumps-2nd-term-agenda-fighting-for-you
Some of the list is a laugh and a half, both in their entirety, or just because of how the phrase is penned, like missile defense and cybersecurity sharing a bullet point. A permanent moon base + manned mars mission is also the loftiest 4 year space goal I think we've ever seen. It's always weird to me how much new stuff he wants to build, or relief he wants to fund, while also wanting tax cuts to maintain the mil budget + SS + medicare, because the budget just isn't there.
School choice furthers divide the haves and the have nots as you've noted, and it also particularly hurts his rural base. If rural districts in the country are generally like they are in Wisconsin, they don't have a lot of money and the state funding they get from every single student matters.
It certainly widens the cultural divide among those without economic means to choose their school by segregating those with a parochial bent from those without.
In progressive, affluent localities charter schools are filled with well-meaning folks and provide high qualityneducation, and can serve to elevate disadvantaged families if entrance is truly random and transportation is provided.
I speak from experience on the rural school part, I'm not even talking about the cultural divide. My entire life the school hasn't had enough money. The two alumni who gave money only gave it for sports, one of which we were mediocre at best at and the other we were almost good sometimes, but never really successful. In the meantime the science teacher had a materials budget of $200 for the entire year, split between seven classes. The last I heard, the state funds school districts to the tune of about $7,000 per student, and somewhere between 10 and 20% of the kids in the district are choosing to go elsewhere. If all those students stayed in the district, the teachers wouldn't be as terribly paid as they are.
It creates a cycle of instability and low morale. Teachers don't stay as long and don't have the time to know their community and reach them better, and by paying them worse you're losing the best teachers. I don't make much by tech standards, but I make twice what the starting salary is at the district I went to and I'm not even thirty.
I went to college and got to know some people from one of the richest public school districts in the state. They have a tax base full of rich people who spend lots and lots of money and it shows. These kids came into college with tons of AP credits and sophomore or junior status and for the first time in my life I felt underprivileged. I came in with three credits, because my school had no AP classes or anything similar to that. I got those credits from taking a class at the local UW college while I was still in high school, and I was only allowed to because the school had nothing left for me. If my parents hadn't been able to spare a car for me to drive to that class I would have come into college with nothing.
Of course my school's issues also came from other issues like the culture of the area, the incompetence and corruption of the administration, and its small size. A small school will never have as many resources as a big one, but we can and should make them as equal as we can.
I don't disagree with your second paragraph at all. But school choice is sucking the lifeblood out of rural communities faster than it's already draining. I have no love lost for the school I went to for thirteen years for a number of reasons, but if it (and perhaps the town with it) is going to die, we shouldn't accelerate that death and we should ease the pain of everyone affected. By allowing school choice in these places, we're suffocating the people who stay behind, willing or not. We're depriving the kids in those districts of the resources they need that will make them smarter, happier, and healthier.
We know how powerful having an education is in someone's life and school choice is always going to leave people behind. We need to have everyone in the public school system for it to work - no private schools, no religious schools, no homeschooling. We need to truly, honestly make the terrible public schools across the country better by spending more resources on them, by investing in their communities, by not throwing their kids and young adults in prison and destroying their chance at a fulfilling life. We need to ease rural schools' pain or death by helping them consolidate as needed, and make sure their teachers are being well-paid in the meantime. We need to help people in those rural towns cut their losses and leave for somewhere with more resources when the time comes.
It wouldn't be easy to do even if there weren't powerful interests standing in the way. I'm not going to claim to have a specific plan that will help everyone transition to a new system as painlessly as possible. It's going to take a generation of honest investment and commitment, and probably a culture shift in a big portion of the country. But we've seen how rewarding our education system can be in wealthy districts, and we have the ability and resources to give that quality of education to everyone. School choice does not solve the problem of the haves and have-nots, it only allows some of the have-nots to escape their situation and leaves the rest of the have-nots even worse off.
Wait, you don't require quitters to fund the system regardless? I can get out of paying for public schools by sending my kids elsewhere? WTAF? Just use taxpayer money from everyone, as much as needed to provide what is required, and whoever doesn't get on the ride loses their ticket money. It's not hard.
Also, if some communities are struggling to pay for schools, next higher level has to step in, federal funding if needed.
Currently quitters can't opt out of paying. That's what the school choice platform boils down to: being able to redirect those funds to the private schools away from public.
Regarding funding, the answer is to do away with property tax funding, and give equal funding per student across state/nation.
I should have been more clear about that, but @vord is right. Our schools are funded with mix of property taxes and state and federal funding. For the small schools that I'm describing, a majority of their money comes from state funding. That isn't the case in bigger districts with larger and wealthier tax bases though, and vord describes what a lot of school choice advocates (not all of them, but certainly the conservative ones) are trying to do. I'm not sure how that state/federal funding is distributed, but I would hope it mostly goes toward supplies and teacher salaries.
Would this not be better than the status quo? Of course in an ideal world every student is generously resourced. But that’s not likely achievable in the foreseeable future. Why not start here?
I'm really not sure if it'd be better than how things are now. Maybe a complete reorganization of bad schools is due, mixing the kids in smaller amounts into better schools similar to desegregation efforts in the 70s. That certainly wouldn't solve everything but it wouldn't leave people behind I think.
It's important to note that it's possible for charter schools to be good, but it's definitely not a certainty. The experience for students in any given school is highly dependent on state laws and school leadership. I worked for several years at a charter school and have visited and interviewed at several others, as well as having plenty of experience working in districts that share the community with charter schools. There are some that are good, but there are also many that are not.
Also, I encourage anyone examining charters to take any disclosure from/about them with huge grains of salt. The charter school I worked in had a full-time two-person PR department. Why would a school need marketing staff? Because the school leadership's primary focus was looking good first, and doing good second. We looked amazing on paper and online, but that didn't match the lived reality of the students or teachers in the school.
I live in the US and every city budget I've seen the police get a 20-30% chunk of it. I found it a bit eyebrow raising that every single city and suburban town police force somehow has infinite amount of "crowd control" equipment once BLM protests started. My city somehow has facial recognition equipment and military-grade LRAD weapons just sitting around waiting to aim at those they are sworn to protect.
It would take a lot to convince me that problems our police forces are facing are actually due to underfunding.
I think it's not a lack of education, but rather the wrong education.
Many (most?) cops are ex-military. Their training is in combat and executing orders without question.
A lot of policing problems would go away if that wasn't the case.
For reference, Jacobin and crosscut cite a fifth of the Seattle PD being ex-military.
Either way, articles like this and this from military related sites definitely show there's a relationship between the 2 roles.
What's your issue with the military to police transition? In my personal experience, ex-mil folks seem a lot more well prepared for the job than your average criminal justice grads. In general I've had overwhelmingly positive experiences working with ex-mil folks, in business, in the nonprofit world, pretty much everywhere. The idea of giving a gun and a badge to a 22 year old with 10 weeks of specialized training whose college degree is mostly high level psych and soc is far more concerning to me then giving a gun and badge to a 26 year old who deployed for two tours.
Ancedotal evidence: Every person in my high school who ended up in the police force was also in the military. These people are not the ones who should have guns around
civiliansanybody.That said, I also think no general police officers should have guns. Maybe they'd work harder at de-escalation. Also would give a hint of truth to the 'most dangerous profession' lie.
It's kind of funny, I have the exact opposite anecdote. People I went to school with that made me cringe when I found out were now law enforcement, all went through the college criminal justice pipeline. You do get some real crayon eaters among the grunts though, so I'm not shocked that those folks land cop jobs. Part of the problem is that due to the nature of police hiring, and the huge friction that comes with changing employers, a small percentage of departments pretty much buy the entire nation's best and brightest (and have 130 candidates per opening), while others basically have a help wanted sign hanging in perpetuity and will take pretty much anyone without a record and visible tattoos.
I've heard elsewhere ( I think when the national guard showed up to protests) that they are so much more disciplined and used to rules of engagement and de-escalation that military would make better cops than cops. But that would of course depend on the person.
It really depends on training, background, and selection criteria. Good military experience by otherwise well qualified veterans with the right temperament is probably a boon.
Fair, edited the comment to be neutral. Thoughts on this, @vord?
See sibling post, but also:
It's easier to teach someone to shoot a gun than to teach them to de-escalate.
I'm firmly against the idea that the problems with Police are a lack of training. I believe the problems are cultural, and that unless we take action against bad officers we will continue to have widespread police brutality in America
Not terrible at face value. But I'm generally not in favor of "mandatory sentencing" or anything like that because it deprives the legal system of making nuanced choices when it matters.
Love this movie. Sadly too many people take satire at face value.
Edit: Wait...did our actual president say that in the comments? Whelp. That's all folks.
It's hard to say anymore...I've heard far more ridiculous things come out of the POTUS since 2016.
Considering that the official 2020 RNC platform is the 2016 one with a "Trump is Great" cover letter, I guess it's very good if you are a fan of the president and just words on a page if you're not.
Space Force is dumb, but seems to have been diverted into mostly being a reorganization of existing defense projects.
But what's wrong with "Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon and Send the First Manned Mission to Mars"? I know people have mixed opinions on the value of space exploration (both manned and unmanned), but I'm shocked that anyone would characterize either of these goals as "obviously very, very bad".
I am definitely in favor of non-profit space exploration. It's important work that needs done.
But.
Sending a person to Mars is, at this point in time, a collosal waste of money.
I'm not saying we should defund NASA. They should get a larger budget. But not to waste on 'American Exceptionalism Theater.' NASA has hundreds of other projects which need the funding more.
We haven't sent people to the moon in my lifetime because almost anything a person could do, a machine can do better at lower cost. Why should we create Biodome in space when we haven't even gotten it working on Earth?
See, you're exactly the kind of person that I very much disagree with, but I've long since given up on pursuing this debate. What I do take issue with is the idea that anything you said makes it either "obviously" or "very, very" bad. Even if I concede your point, sending people to the Moon or Mars is at worst, a highly nuanced debate that doesn't make financial sense right now.
I'm sorry, but could someone provide a source? The last I checked (2 days ago), the GOP said they aren't creating a new platform, and I expect some the 2016 stuff is out of date... I'm over here waiting for Mexico to pay for the conspicuously absent wall.
Straight from the source:
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/trump-campaign-announces-president-trumps-2nd-term-agenda-fighting-for-you