Off The Editor’s Desk – 5-6-2020
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What’s the difference?
Could you have ever imagined that you would see the day when the price for a roll of toilet paper was greater than a barrel of oil?
As I get older, I am realizing that the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is growing and there is no common ground between them.
I looked up a site about the differences in party platforms for the 2016 election which listed ten items that each party had a different outlook including; Abortion, Same Sex Marriages, Immigration, Climate Change, Medicare, Wall Street, Iran, Israel, Money in Politics and Voters Rights.
But I think they missed the most important one and that is about government control of our lives.
If my memory serves me right and if I go back to the early days of the Clinton administration up through Bush, and Obama I saw an increase in government regulation. First we had NAFTA, the free trade agreement between the Canada, Mexico and the United States, government regulations against coal and fuels. This on top of sending manufacturing companies overseas, buying foreign goods and with more government regulations put the United States in a tailspin. Shame on me, as all I did was sat at home and watched our manufacturing output drop into the tank as China and other foreign countries made the goods we bought and then we lost out and our unemployment rate skyrocketed. I too, purchased items “Made in China.”
Then came Trump with his “Made in the United States” policy, less government control, jobs opened up and the employment rate jumped. Then, the brakes were applied by COVID-19 and doors were closed, people out of work.
All those manufacturing jobs that had left, had not yet all returned to our great shores and this came to our attention quickly as we found out that a lot of the personal protection equipment (PPE) and respirators needed by health care workers to do their jobs were made in China and they were hoarding the world’s supply and increasing the cost.
What happened? The American spirit jumped into action and manufacturing firms quickly converted to making those needed PPEs and I hope that China is stuck with those items that they kept from the world.
The Daily Editorialist put it this way: “President Donald Trump appears impervious to bad news. At least that’s what one might discern from the April 21 Hill/HarrisX poll, where 56 percent approve of his performance on the economy despite 26 million jobs lost and counting amid the government-directed closures in response to the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic. Overall, 50 percent approve of the job the President is doing. Perhaps that is because of Trump’s Herculean efforts to do whatever it takes to prevent society itself from collapsing while everything is still shuttered up.
“Trump’s considered yet robust approach to the pandemic to save as many lives and jobs as possible has inoculated the President against apparently any political fallout from the economic crash. He took the approach favored by most Americans, who, in turn, are giving him a pass on the economy that would otherwise realign American politics for a generation for any other incumbent.
“Can Trump be beat? By now, internally, Democrats must be in a full panic mode.”
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton