As I have stated over and over again on this blog, It Does Not Add Up, my greatest concern for our country is the lack of fiscal responsibility amongst our national leaders. The public debt (on which we pay interest) is $13 trillion, which is 74% of GDP. This is way too high for peacetime and, furthermore, it is very likely to just keep getting worse until serious steps are taken to shrink it (as a percentage of GDP).
It is my opinion that the Republicans are more serious than the Democrats about fixing this problem. Therefore I want the Republicans to nominate a presidential candidate who has a good chance of being elected in November. I don’t know if Donald Trump is that candidate but he is attracting a whole new group of people to the Republican cause. They are working class whites who have fallen away from the Democratic Party.
Republicans can reach these voters, as Trump is doing, with suitable policies such as:
- Immigration. Rather than “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” which would put most of our current illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, we should adopt the principle, “All the immigrants we need but only the immigrants we need.” A tightly constrained Guest Worker program, enforced with border control and eVerify, would accomplish this.
- Free Trade. Trade agreements are still possible but need to include provisions like Trade Adjustment Assistance or other programs to help retrain laid-off workers for the millions of well paying, high skill jobs in the U.S. which are hard to fill.
- Tax Policy. Rather than skewing tax cuts mainly for the wealthy, as most of the Republican candidates propose, they should be applied equally to all income levels, and fully paid for by shrinking deductions which mostly benefit the wealthy. This would put more money in the pockets of all middle income workers and create more and better jobs at the same time by speeding up economic growth.
Conclusion. Donald Trump has lots of negatives as a presidential candidate but Republicans can, and hopefully will, learn a lot from his very successful campaign so far.
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