Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have upset the political insiders vying to be our country’s next President. Suddenly Americans have real choices to consider during the primary season. Trump strikes me as a self-aggrandizing nutcase. He is also obviously very prejudiced and poorly informed on many topics.
Bernie Sanders is hardly perfect but he offers a breath of fresh air from the Democratic party because he is willing to stick his neck out and tell Americans what he really thinks. It’s too bad that people don’t understand what it means to be a socialist, because the United States is already a socialist country. We’re just not as deeply rooted in socialist policies as many European nations.
This election should not be about socialism and fascism (what the Tea Party pretty much stands for). It should be about finding a way to solve some of the immense problems facing our nation today:
- Defense and external threats from terrorists
- Creating meaningful jobs, not the empty jobs that Obama’s administration created
- Ending hi-tech immigration policies that put Americans out of work
- Reducing the costs of education
- Re-educating older workers who need updated skills
- Providing better health-care coverage for all Americans
- Shifting the burden of paying taxes away from the middle class
To hear them talk you would think that the Republicans and their Tea Party ultra-conservatives care about creating jobs and improving everyone’s lives, but the meaningless political talk coming from the Republican Party and from the Tea Party movement tells a different story. For example, the Tea Party wants to eliminate the “lender of last resort”, the US Import Export Bank, from our economy because they feel that large companies like General Electric and Boeing don’t need “corporate welfare” and should be able to get their loans from commercial banks.
Of course, if the commercial banks were issuing the kinds of loans that manufacturers who export to foreign markets need, there would never have been a “lender of last resort” to begin with. The US Import-Export Bank has existed for 80 years and it is a very profitable institution. That means the companies who borrow money from the ExIm Bank pay it back with interest, interest that pays the bank’s expenses and allows it to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars to the US Treasury every year.
Without the ExIm Bank major exporters will move jobs to other countries because they cannot get the funding they need here. So how is the Tea Party’s position on the ExIm Bank helping to make America great, create jobs, or eliminate corporate welfare? The last time I checked, welfare did not come with interest and a repayment schedule.
And we don’t really have a problem creating good jobs in this country. It’s just that we don’t create good jobs for American citizens. There are several million unfilled jobs right now. Companies complain that they cannot find enough qualified candidates. The large tech giants like Microsoft and Google want to bring in cheap foreign labor to fill those positions rather than invest in employees who are already here. There are now several well-documented incidents where highly profitable companies layoff employees but require them to train their lower-cost immigrant replacements.
Tea Party activists complain loudly about a largely non-existent “illegal immigrant problem” (most of them are productive workers who just need a path to legalization so they can pay taxes) but they do virtually nothing about the legal immigrant problem. An estimated 40% of today’s illegal immigrants in fact entered the country legally, via the airports, using visas that have expired. What is the Tea Party proposing to do about this growing pool of cheap labor that is constantly putting American citizens (and other legal immigrants) out of work? We don’t need more H1B visas. We need to train more people who are already here to do the jobs we need to fill.
I think there is a real chance that the Republican nominee will be Donald Trump and the Democratic nominee will be Bernie Sanders. Both men talk a good game but neither looks like he will have the support in Congress he needs to pass programs that will actually help Americans.
And the Tea Party’s insistence on lowering taxes while maintaining defense spending is just insane. Where is that money supposed to come from, because they are already killing over $600 million a year in guaranteed interest from the ExIm Bank’s loans? We need more government programs like the ExIm Bank if we seriously want to lower everyone’s taxes.
The complaints about “big government” make no sense. Tea Party activists pretend that reducing Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Veterans benefits will somehow force people to stop sponging off the government and go get jobs; but those jobs don’t exist, and just how long should we force our retirees to work anyway? Aren’t they supposed to be retired?
When push comes to shove I think Bernie Sanders is the man to go for. He may not be strong on defense but he may choose a great Secretary of Defense who will oversea important changes to the ongoing wars with Al Qaeda and Islamic State. As long as President Sanders does not continue the Obama administration’s fantasy of “having ended two wars” (that are still going on and in which we are still involved) he’ll have every opportunity to change our defensive posture with broad support. I think most Americans are unhappy with President Obama’s pursuit of legacy at the expense of acknowledging that the two wars are still going on.
And we do need health care reform. I don’t want to see the people who are finally getting health care under the Affordable Care Act lose their benefits, but I do want to see the millions of Americans who were cut out of their insurance or left with none brought up to par with everyone else. We should not lack a national health care system that can provide for everyone just because the Tea Party thinks that is an evil thing.
Since when is caring for your neighbors a bad idea? Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to throw people out of this country (Trump does). He wants to integrate them into the system so they pay taxes and at the same time he wants to bring manufacturing jobs back to our country. Trump seems to be vague and shadowy with his plans.
So the question for all of us comes down to this: will we let Bernie take a shot at doing what so obviously needs to be done, or will we elect someone else who is not interested in doing the right thing and hope that somehow the Tea Party will galvanize the system into doing what Bernie would do anyway?