Now that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the presumptive major party nominees, Americans have a clear choice between more prosperous and safer America and the risk their children will live in poverty and fear.
President Obama has crusaded to replace pragmatic thinking about the economy with the Left’s obsessions about global governance, race and gender and income redistribution.
The results are depressing.
Obama has managed 1.7 percent GDP growth, falling family incomes and nearly 7 million men between 25 and 54 that don’t even try to find a job. Reagan’s recovery featured 3.6 economic growth and broadening opportunities for all Americans.
The $500 billion trade deficit is killing growth and Clinton recently promised to address it head on. Yet, her Ivy-League advisor on trade ridiculed Trump in a Wall Street Journal op-ed for suggesting we get tough with China. It appears just as Bill Clinton opposed NAFTA while running for office and then flipped once elected, Mrs. Clinton’s “expert advisors” will provide a ladder for her climb down on trade after she is elected.
Clinton promises a growth-slowing national version of the costly California Fair Pay Act “break down barriers” that are long gone. Already, young women earn more than young men, and universities shamelessly discriminate against men by granting 60 percent of all degrees to women.
Academia’s damage hardly stops there.
The standard curriculum is heavily steeped with requirements in the humanities and the social sciences explicitly designed to indoctrinate young voters with a terrible sense of guilt if they are white and an indignant sense of entitlement if they are not.
Most students leave college without the tools needed to make a living in the rapidly evolving digital economy. Most lack basic skills in critical thinking, technology and entrepreneurship needed to find and keep jobs as computers and dexterous robots—powered by artificial intelligence rivaling or exceeding human IQ—could replace or radically alter most occupations as we know them today.
Clinton’s answer is to raise taxes on the wealthy to further subsidize a decadent higher education system by making tuition, room and board essentially free to students at state colleges. Why not give out drug paraphernalia to combat substance abuse.
Clinton reminds us over and over again she has a track record on foreign policy, and Barack Obama lauds her successes. I guess it was the plan all along for radical Islam to establish a terrorist state in Iraq and Syria, ISIS to be in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa, the Russians to seize the Crimea and slice off a piece of the Ukraine, China to militarize the South China Sea and bully neighbors who no longer see America as a reliable ally, and ISIS-inspired terrorists armed with automatic weapons to gun down innocent Americans in San Bernardino.
Trump’s language may be crude, but he is quite right to assert what Clinton won’t admit. America can’t stabilize the Middle East with nation building or by making obtuse and costly judgements about regimes we don’t like. And if Germany and other western European powers won’t spend or fight to defend their liberty, we have to deal with Russia and Putin and stop pretending NATO—and Europe’s parade ground armies—are any deterrent.
Trump may alarm and even arouse fear among allies and foes alike. Looking at the world Obama and Clinton helped create—it’s about time!
America’s problems are best solved when Americans are inspired to action by realistic assessment of the challenges they face and offered opportunities to address them—not nostrums, platitudes, half-truths, and handouts that encourage indifference, indolence and indignity to the accomplished.
Americans are safest when they are growing, can afford adequate armed forces and can rely on genuine commitments from our allies, not practicing appeasement masquerading as toughness and pretending the world is something different than it really is.
Get the recap of top opinion commentary and original content throughout the week.