Donald Trump has been leading in all of the polls, particularly on the Republican side of the house; but I am afraid that this may be a phenomenon of people finding a suitable conduit through which to channel their anger. I appreciate the anger that people feel, because I have been preaching this anger for many months now and sacrificed my job to it as well. The government is broken. Integrity and honesty, the foundational pillars of honorable politics, are dead in the public sphere. Few people care for keeping their word in this age of transient technological apathy. The amount of information available to us has anesthetized us to the thread of absolute truth winds quietly beneath all of this reality, and the resulting moral decay is a natural, if improper response to it.
Donald Trump fills a role as a manifestation of anger, but this is a dangerous role for we the people to cling to. Rarely are good decisions made in anger; at least in my own life, this is unequivocally true. When this legitimate anger permeates the culture, it makes us prone to making rash decisions simply to effect a powerful change. This is the same type of anger that borne Communism and Nazis to power in the past. We the people must exercise extreme caution when reacting out of base anger. We must remained focused on what is critically important in any political figure.
Politics is based on policy, which is founded on honesty. If you do not have an honest politician than nothing they say in the policy realm matters because you cannot rely on them to fulfill their policy promises. Sadly, honesty cannot normally be measured objectively or quantitatively in most circumstances. So honesty, as best that we can perceive it, is a necessary precondition for a qualitatively good politician. Without honesty, there is no good politician.
So, how does one go about determining the honesty of a politician ahead of time? For myself, I measure what they say against what I know is realistically possible. One hallmark sign of a bad politician is unrealistic or inherently dishonest policy. If they cannot ever fulfill wild promises, then you know immediately that they are playing your emotions, which should immediately trigger guards in yourself.
The first step in doing this is finding legitimate information regarding policy positions of Donald Trump. My first stop is his official website, in order to get it from the horse's mouth. To my shock and horror, he has only one official position: Immigration reform.
So, let's address immigration reform first. For people who follow me on Facebook, I have been largely silent on this topic, with the exception of vocal opposition to violent illegal immigrants who need to be imprisoned or shot on sight without mercy and without trial.
Trump's position on illegal immigration has three primary philosophical points:
1. A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.
2. A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.
3. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages and security for all Americans.
His first two points are fairly solid. Nations are defined by borders. However, he fails to address the first half of the definition of 'nation.' Nations are united by common descent, history, culture, or language. There is a certain level of cultural assimilation that must occur, and does normally in order for us to be considered a 'nation.' This implies that a national language should be enforced, or at the very least highly encouraged, since language is one of the most fundamental levels of understanding and communication of precise meaning. People who fail to assimilate culturally, linguistically, are not truly part of our nation. The natural question that follows is how we define citizenship. People must culturally assimilate before we grant them citizenship. They must speak English if they are to be given citizenship and I would argue that they be forced to learn the fundamentals of our government system, that power is derived from the people and that all laws are derived from the Constitution.
Which brings us to Trump's second point. A nation without enforced and enforceable laws is not a nation. While I could argue semantics, this statement is mostly in line with reality. Without laws derived from and congruent with the Constitution which are easily and fairly enforced any kind of order breaks down and you breed contempt and despair for the unity of a nation. So this is mostly in line with reality, but could be more nuanced.
Trump's third point is much more questionable, not in principle but in implementation and connotations. A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Technically there is nothing in the definition of nation that requires service to the people, but in the case of the United States this is true because of the way our Constitution was authored.
So let's look at his proposed implementation.
Make Mexico Pay for the Wall.
There are a number of practical issues with this, but let's address the fundamental incentivization scheme that he is proposing. He refers to the Mexican balance of trade with the U.S. implying that he will hold U.S.-Mexican free trade hostage until they pay for a wall. In 2014, the U.S.-Mexico trade balance was 53 billion USD in Mexico's favor out of a total 294 billion USD in total imports from Mexico. So, I have no doubt they would build a wall if he asked them to backed up by tariff threats, however the damage done to the U.S. economy would limit the practicality of this approach.
The bulk of the trade was in automobile vehicle parts and accessories, at 13.2% of the trade, crude oil (really?!) at 9.4%, trucks, buses and special purpose vehicles at 9.2%, and new passenger automobiles at 7.2%. The chief ways to attack this is to either build an intellectual property wall around the U.S. to prevent U.S.-developed technology from being used in manufacturing processes abroad, build tariff regimes, or pull U.S. labor costs down to be globally competitive. Pulling U.S. labor costs down can be done one of two ways, either lower U.S. wages, which is not a legitimate option, or lower costs on businesses to hire people, which means lowering taxes on businesses. This will allow businesses to cut expenses on personnel and accordingly sell their products for less on the global market. There are likely other methods to lower the U.S. cost of labor that I am missing, but we will stop on this topic for now. The second way to pull the balance of trade down is to build tariff walls around the U.S. by taxing imports. This involves taxing goods coming across the U.S. border, which will drive the price of goods in the U.S. up accordingly making it more expensive to do business in the U.S. I am not sure that tariffs (except in the oil industry) are a good idea, at least not until technology advances enough to offset the increased costs. The final and, in my opinion, the most effective, is to outlaw advanced technology transfer across U.S. borders such that companies cannot take advanced product designs and manufacturing processes out of the U.S. This would involve incredibly stiff penalties (40% tariffs on their product) against any company exporting technology out of the U.S. and should discourage companies from exporting manufacturing processes abroad to exploit cheap labor abroad. This will still cause the price of goods in the U.S. to rise, but hopefully not as much as a straight tariff.
Trump doesn't seem to see this though, which is troubling. He is more interested in channeling voters' anger than actually presenting legitimate or effective solutions to our problems.
The idea of building a physical wall is absurd. A physical wall will only address one of about six different means of accessing the U.S. and thus is inherently flawed. It would be much more effective to build a psychological wall around the U.S. by implementing extremely merciless policies around immigration, particularly proven criminal immigrants with felony records. If we start by eliminating the anchor baby policy, executing violent felony criminal immigrants, and deporting non-criminal immigrants on a regular basis, the flow of immigrants across the border will cease as people with criminal intent will stop coming here and forcing legitimate immigrants to follow legal means for becoming citizens. However, we need a flow of immigrants to make up for our declining population, so legal immigration needs to be streamlined according to the philosophical principles listed above (cultural and linguistic assimilation and political education) and the overall quota adjusted annually with the demographics chiefly in mind. If the U.S. demographics situation improves than we lower the quota to slow the flow of immigrants into the U.S.
Trump seems to not want to look that deeply into the immigration situation though.
The final piece of immigration oddities with Trump is his insistence that he "likes" Mexico and is happy to hire Mexican immigrants. This is fundamentally at odds with his protectionist stance, which is aggressive against Mexico and Mexican people and culture, which is another hallmark of a dishonest man.
This article is getting excessively long, so let me address only one more policy stance of Donald Trump, Chinese trade and economic policy.
He said recently, "They keep devaluing their currency until they get it right. They're doing a big cut in the yuan, and that's going to be devastating for us." This is not wholly true or honest. Yes, lowering the value of their currency will affect our trade balance with them in their favor, but it also has deleterious effects on the Chinese economy that will hurt them in the longer term. The immediate effects of lowering your currency versus implementing tariffs are similar, but the longer term effects are considerably different. Devaluing causes additional long term effects that distort the use of capital in the market causing money to flow into non-productive asset classes. Just look at the U.S. economy. After attempting to devalue our currency consistently from 2008-2015, the U.S. stock market, which is not as productive as infrastructure or research investments or increasing consumer spending, was correspondingly driven to new highs. When you make capital gains possible in the less productive asset classes, you encourage capital to move from longer term productive investments into short-term speculative assets that offer suitable returns pumping asset prices above historic or rational levels, producing bubbles in U.S. stock assets. When the monetary policy stimulation ends, you get the deflation of the U.S. market bubble recently experienced restoring the stock market to a more sensible level. These same kinds of domestic effects will occur in China, which will harm them in the longer term, despite the fact that they will receive the immediate benefits of such a move.
So, saying that China is "destroying us" by devaluing is taking a very short-sighted view of the laws of economics and constitutes a blatant failure to consider unintended consequences, both of which are dangerous for someone seeking the office of President of the United States of America who needs not only to consider the laws of economics intimately in all of his policy positions but also needs to make every effort to foresee unintended consequences of his policies.
Based on this analysis above, Trump is clearly not an honest candidate and clearly cannot be trusted to actually implement anything that he states now. If you vote for Donald Trump, you are voting on a wisp that may or may not materialize and will more than likely result in a whole host of unintended consequences.
If you want a more honest candidate who also still embodies the anger against blatant corruption in Washington, Ben Carson is your man. He clearly lays out all of his positions and all of his policies that I have looked over and taken time to think about seem plausible and consistent with the rest of his narrative.
