THE FORGOTTEN MAN
Like Roosevelt, Trump referred many times during his campaign to “the forgotten men and women.” Trump was talking about those millions of hardworking Americans who have lost their jobs and can’t find a new one thanks to the wrecked economy, compliments of the sellout Republicans and Marxist Democrats.
You may be familiar with Roosevelt’s speeches about the “forgotten man,” but I’ll bet you don’t know where he got that idea. Roosevelt was actually borrowing from a famous writer of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries named William Graham Sumner. Only, Roosevelt got it wrong, perhaps intentionally. Roosevelt’s forgotten man was anyone unemployed or in need, for any reason. He engaged in the usual liberal class warfare and made the forgotten man anyone who was poor, while blaming it all on those evil rich people who employ everyone.
Roosevelt evoked his forgotten man to win support not only for tax-funded infrastructure programs, but for all sorts of welfare programs as well. As I said, Roosevelt was a socialist. But Sumner wasn’t referring to the needy in his essay. For Sumner, the forgotten man was the taxpayer, the man who pays for all the politicians’ programs. He wrote about how, when X is suffering, A & B always get together to pass laws forcing C to help X. C was Sumner’s forgotten man. He called him “the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist.”23
The problem with Republicans and Democrats is they are so bought and sold by special interests they are compelled to take one side or the other. They are either on the side of Roosevelt’s forgotten man or Sumner’s, the poor and middle class or the rich. It is beyond their comprehension—and against their interests—to consider taking both sides.
Donald Trump’s infrastructure does just that. It sides with the forgotten men and women who are out of work and the taxpayer. Unlike Roosevelt’s infrastructure spending, Trump’s plan will be, for the most part, privately funded and built. Only $167 billion of the $1 trillion over ten years will be guaranteed by the government, in what his plan calls an “equity cushion.” To incentivize the rest, he plans on granting tax breaks to investors in infrastructure equaling 82 percent of the equity amount.
In other words, Trump’s plan will benefit forgotten men, the unemployed man or woman, and the taxpayer. You can do that when specials interests for one side or the other don’t own you body and soul. In fact, taxpayers won’t be harmed at all by Trump’s plan because the income taxes from new jobs and profits for the contractors will cover the government portion of the investment, with private investors taking the risk on the rest.
It’s a win-win for both forgotten groups, but it is already under attack by jackals from the left and right. Of course, you know what the liberals are going to say. Bernie Sanders says it’s just a “corporate giveaway.”24 What a surprise. That academic crank Paul Krugman at the New York Times says it’s just another scam because the government isn’t doing the spending.25
What could we expect from either of these avowed socialists? Krugman won a Nobel Prize in economics from the same people who gave Obama a peace prize. He’s called for going back to a 91 percent top income tax rate and basically supported everything Obama has done to lay waste to our economy and everything Hillary Clinton wanted to do to make it worse.
It always galls me when liberals talk about “tax cuts for the rich.” Who do they think pays most of the taxes? You can’t cut taxes for people who don’t pay taxes. How do you cut zero?
You can expect more of the same from all the usual suspects on the left. Anything with a private component is off the table for the Marxists, no matter how much it might help those middle-class working people they claim to care so much about. Republicans want to privatize everything and Democrats want to socialize everything. The Democrats won’t even listen to a suggestion to give the private sector a crack at this. Neither will a lot of Republicans. This despite everyone acknowledging the government has failed!
TURNPIKES
Long forgotten down the memory hole is America’s former, private road system. I’ll bet you didn’t know that for the first eighty or so years after the Constitution was ratified, most roads and infrastructure were built just as Donald Trump is suggesting they be built now: by private companies investing their own funds and running them for profit.26
Anyone who has driven in the Northeast has traveled on a “turnpike.” But I’ll bet not one in a thousand knows what the word turnpike means. Pike is another word for pole and the roads are called turnpikes because, when they were first built, they were all toll roads run by private companies. They’d have a long pole, a pike, across the road and when you paid the toll, they’d turn the pike to open the road and let you pass. It’s similar to the turnstiles at modern subway systems. You pay the fee and the turnstile rotates to let you through.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about today’s system where the money for the road is collected in taxes and the government hires and pays a contractor to complete the road in the longest time and at the greatest expense possible. I’m talking about private investors funding the road themselves and taking the risk that the revenue generated will provide a return on their investment. That’s what Trump is suggesting. That’s how roads were built in this country until the Republicans first gained power after the Civil War.27
Government infrastructure was originally a basic plank of the Republican Party. They had wanted the government to take over roads and infrastructure for generations, when many of the founders of the party were Whigs. Nobody remembers any of this because all they know about the Republicans in the nineteenth century is that they ended slavery. That they fundamentally changed the role of government in infrastructure is largely forgotten.
It seemed to work for many generations. Eisenhower is remembered for building the Interstate Highway System. FDR’s New Deal infrastructure program very much borrowed pages out of the Republican Party playbook. But was it really better than the original, more American idea Trump is revisiting now? Maybe it’s worth a try to find out. We know that what we’re doing now isn’t working.
It’s not like this would be some radical, fundamental change. We already have privately owned roads, bridges, and other infrastructure in this country now. We’ve even allowed foreign companies to own and operate our ports.28 They’re all making profits and providing excellent service while the government infrastructure loses money and is falling apart. What could we possibly have to lose by letting American companies take a crack at this?
The Democrats will fight this tooth and nail. They don’t even want health care sold in the private market. They’re certainly not going to entertain the idea infrastructure can be, too. Thank goodness Trump’s fellow Republicans will come to his defense, right?
Wrong. We know Turkey Gobbler McConnell said the Senate wasn’t going to cooperate with Trump on anything, except “maybe” repealing Obamacare.29 Paul “Obama’s Beard” Ryan found the suggestion knee-slapping funny.30 They are the gatekeepers for the sellouts in Congress. It’s almost as important to get them out of the way as it was to defeat Hillary Clinton. What good is having a nationalist executive if Congress won’t give him anything but liberal-globalist policies to execute?
Half the problem is that many Republicans don’t even seem to know what Trump is suggesting. They haven’t read his policy paper, so they’re talking about his infrastructure plan as if it’s the same old Roosevelt-style tax-and-spend plan Hillary Clinton was proposing. Democratic congressmen are trained like parrots to yell “racist!” no matter what a Republican says and Republicans are trained to yell “Deficit spending!” no matter what a Democrat proposes.
So, here we have a Republican who is not like any Republican or Democrat we’ve elected in generations and he’s thinking of the country first and his party second. But without even reading his revenue-neutral plan, Republican congressmen just yell “Deficits!” when they hear the word infrastructure. They are a lot of mindless vermin dwelling in the slime of the swamp.
Anyone who has listened to my show, The Savage Nation, or read any of my previous books knows I am not just a Republican parrot, squawking “Privatize it!” with the rest of the flock whenever the Republicans want to hook up one of their corporate donors. Privatization certainly can have a downside in some situations.
Just ask the townspeople of St. George, off the Bering Sea near Alaska. The experiment with privatizing the ocean has cut them out of their birthright to fish their own waters.31 And it hasn’t necessarily solved the problem of extinctions due to overfishing, even if the pedantic think tankers who dreamed it up thought it looked good on paper. There may be a private solution to overfishing; there may need to be a government solution. Granting property rights to the ocean is unexplored territory and true conservatives should proceed with caution, respecting the long-established local rights that should be the starting point for any new policy.
Private roads and infrastructure, on the other hand, is not unexplored territory. It is the original, American approach. It was very successful. We’ve also had successful government infrastructure programs, just not under Comrade Barry. He managed to spend almost a trillion dollars and build virtually nothing. His projects were “shovel ready,” all right, but not the way he meant it.
Thanks to that—sixteen years wasting trillions in the Middle East and eight years under a food stamp president who doubled America’s debt—we’re not in the same position to undertake a large government spending project as we were in previous generations.
Despite the Great Depression, even Roosevelt didn’t have the kind of debt crisis looming over him that we face today. Eisenhower was in an even better position when he built the Interstate Highway System Trump has been dealt a country with crumbling infrastructure and a debt time bomb he must consider before borrowing a trillion dollars to build anything. His largely private approach may be the only way to get the job done. And unlike private oceans, we have long precedent for private infrastructure.
AN AMERICA-FIRST ECONOMY
For eight long years, we’ve heard nothing from Emperor Barry and the Democrats but Marxist rhetoric on the economy. We’ve heard that America’s most successful businesses “didn’t build that.” We’ve heard opposing Obama’s socialist health care law is racist and health care prices are high only because of greedy capitalists.
We’ve heard that the only way to create new jobs is to completely socialize higher education, as if making everyone but the consumers pay for college is somehow going to bestow more marketable skills on a generation of whiny losers who can’t get a job because they haven’t learned anything but global warming and women’s studies.
Despite sending Republicans to Congress in 2012 and 2014 and giving them a majority in both houses, we saw no improvement. Republicans either went along with Obama on issues that benefited their donors or did nothing. Had it not been for Trump’s victory and the clear message it sent—that the people were reaching for their pitchforks—they would have approved TPP in the lame duck session. Republicans wanted that crony deal for international, socialist central planning even more than the Democrats.
Trump’s war for an America-first economy faces opposition in both parties. Prepare for a propaganda war from the left about how he’s a greedy capitalist trying to enrich himself and his friends and a propaganda war from the right on how he’s a populist, protectionist demagogue standing in the way of free trade and economic growth.
As with everything else, don’t forget to follow the money. Every time you see some “expert” coming on television to opine on why Trump’s economic plan is bad, do a search of his or her name and see who’s funding him or her. Virtually always, you’ll find some special interest that doesn’t have your best interests in mind.
What we’re fighting for is true capitalism, where new competitors aren’t blocked from entering the market, where Wall Street suffers losses when it makes bad investments and foreign workers aren’t given artificial advantages over American workers by their own government. Expect privileged elites from both parties to fight it to the end.
SAVAGE SOLUTIONS
Recognize the health care system was broken before Obamacare and why.
Fix the crony capitalist FDA.
Mandate insurance availability for individuals across state lines.
Raise the eligibility age of Medicare.
Mandate copays for Medicare and Medicaid.
CHAPTER THREE
TRUMP’S WAR TO REPEAL OBAMACARE
Republicans in the House of Representatives have been repealing Obamacare for six years, when it didn’t matter. Knowing it was merely a symbolic vote, since Obama was still in the White House and Democrats held a majority in the Senate, even the RINOs took the opportunity to show what tough conservatives they were for their long-suffering constituents. They voted six times to repeal the law in its entirety, with almost fifty other votes to repeal or delay parts of its provisions.1
But now that the vote is no longer symbolic, repealing this monstrosity seems to have become a lot more complicated. The first proposal the RINOs came up with was a budget bill that included repealing Obamacare and… $9 trillion in new debt over the next ten years.2 Right out of George W. Bush’s playbook, the Republicans were ready to add as much to the national debt as Obama has over his eight-year term. And it only took them three days.
A few congressmen did push back. Senator Rand Paul actually voted against the Senate bill to repeal, saying, “There is no reason we cannot repeal Obamacare and pass a balanced budget at the same time.”3 Paul may be more libertarian than conservative, but at least he’s doing what he believes is right. He came up with a plan to replace Obamacare that he said had Trump’s support at the time.4
Paul’s plan is what you would expect from a very libertarian Republican. It depends solely on letting the market work, including letting people buy insurance across state lines, eliminating mandates forcing people to buy coverage they don’t need, taking limits off health savings accounts (HSAs), and allowing small businesses and individuals to join together to form larger groups.5 These are all good ideas. The question is, are they enough to satisfy the electorate so they don’t elect another socialist to do something worse in the future?
A few days later, Trump told the Washington Post he had a plan to replace Obamacare that would cover everybody. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us,” he said.6 As of this writing, we had not heard details of Trump’s plan, but you can see that it sounds a lot more like Obamacare than Paul’s.
Clearly, the Republicans are all over the map on how to replace Obama’s socialist program. You have very market-oriented, libertarian proposals on one hand and Trump sounding very much like the Trump who told Larry King in 1999, “I’m very liberal when it comes to health care.”7 What are the Republicans going to propose and what should those who elected Trump support?
I think you know where I’m going on this issue. As I said in the first chapter, the otherwise good conservatives in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, have to fight their own progressive biases. Let’s face it, Trump has always had an instinct that led him to support government health care.
I believe the worldview that says, “This is really important, so the government has to pay for it,” is wrong. I believe exactly the opposite. The more important something is, the less you want government involved. Imagine if the government were the “single payer” for food. We’d all starve. Like anything else, the free market does a better job delivering health care than the government.
That’s a theory I agree with, but you know how much stock I put in theories when it comes to solving problems in the real world. We don’t live in an Ayn Rand novel. We must recognize there were problems with health care even before Comrade Barry foisted his socialist plan on us. It was dissatisfaction with the system before 2009 that allowed the socialists to get supp
ort for their disastrous program.
So, any replacement plan the Republicans come up with must address the problems that led to Obamacare. That’s number one. They can’t just repeal the law and let those problems return or the Democrats will be back and the next time they attain power it will be single-payer. The plan must create the conditions where everyone has a reasonable opportunity to purchase coverage that will keep an unavoidable serious injury or medical condition from bankrupting them.
Just as important, the replacement must not raise the national debt, which is a crisis in and of itself. Only the RINOs would believe it’s okay to add $10 trillion more in debt while repealing a program written and passed solely by tax-and-spend Democrats. What use is getting rid of an entitlement that threatens to bankrupt us and replacing it with bankruptcy itself? Even Trump’s statement about “covering everybody” has me worried.
WHY IS HEALTH CARE SO EXPENSIVE?
To solve any problem, you must understand what caused it. We have to understand what caused the problems with health care costs before Obamacare. The punditry tries to make this a lot more complicated than it is. There is some nuance to the health care costs, but only in the fine details. We’re concerned here with only one question: Why do health care prices behave so much differently than the prices of most other products or services? Why do they rise so sharply, even adjusted for inflation, when the prices of most other goods fall?
Trump's War Page 4
