It must be understood up front that I really like Donald Trump (or perhaps I’ve just grown to appreciate him). What he’s done to the Republican party is nothing short of imperative. He woke up the party, forced conversations that were being tiptoed around, and paved the way for a candidate other than Jeb Bush to get the Republican nomination. He is not, however, the answer to the country’s problems.
Many of things that he’s said over the last four months have clearly resonated. His standing in the polls proves that he’s reaching people on the surface and waking them up to the needs this country has when it comes to immigration, national security, and the economy. The problem is that it’s all on the surface. Digging even a little deeper into his proposed policies around immigration, national security, and the economy reveal a combination of impracticality and utter impossibility.
On immigration, you can’t build a strong and beautiful wall while still being cheap, yet he intends to attempt to combine those three attributes. Not possible. To do what he wants to do is going to be extremely expensive and it definitely must be done, but to say that it will be cheap is either misleading or ignorant.
On national security, he’s been all over the board. He wants the Russians to do exactly what they’re doing which can only yield two possible endings for America. Either they’re successful in securing Bashar al-Assad’s regime by pushing ISIS out of Syria and eliminating the American-backed resistance or they’ll fail and put America in the catch-22 of needing to help him achieve a goal that in part goes contrary to our goals. Either way, the Trump/Obama solution is weak at best and dangerous at worst.
Then, there’s the idea of improving the military, again something that must be done. However, he’s still claiming that he can do this while staying revenue neutral after cutting taxes and renegotiating trade deals to force companies to build American factories and hire American workers. On the surface, this seems like a viable plan. The unfortunate reality is that the things he can affect with “fair trade” will take many years to realize while his tax cuts are planned to go in effect very quickly. The three things don’t jive together. You can’t drastically increase spending, cut taxes, and try to make up for it with trade deals that will have zero effect until his second term at the very earliest (assuming he can renegotiate them at all).
Donald Trump has some good ideas. In the right hands, these ideas can be turned into practical fixes. His heart’s in the right place but he’s not the right person to make these things happen. He opened up the conversations. Now it’s time to let someone make real changes that can actually work.
Here’s a video we did on our new sister channel that goes into a little more detail.
via Soshable http://ift.tt/1GrJHES
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