Adam, this is the best, most rational political article that I’ve ever seen on Medium. You discuss facts, not emotions, every other word is not an obscenity, and you have tons of links and references which I promise to go back and read.
I was a Ted Cruz supporter until he dropped out. After what Cruz said at the Republican convention, I acknowledge my mistake and wonder how I was duped so easily. While I was supporting Cruz, I was collecting anti-Trump memes to post on Facebook. Looking back at them now, I can see that every one of them is based on emotions, not facts. Americans need to look at facts before they vote.
My eyes glaze over when people start talking about economics. I’m not proud to be a dummy about money, it’s just that it doesn’t interest me. But one reason Donald Trump interests me is that he has a strong economic background. He talks about making deals, that he’s good at making deals, that he will make individual deals. And I realized that this is a lot more important than it sounds. For example, in Brazil, “imports by post valued up to US$3,000 are subject to a flat Import Tax of 60% on the CIF value of the import” (CIF being the assessed value of the item after adding the cost, insurance, and freight). So a Brazilian who wants to buy a computer made in America will have to pay more than twice its normal cost. Basically we are unable to sell them anything unless the buyer is rich. So imagine what would happen if President Trump said “Okay, Brazil, whatever import duty and tax you charge on American products, we will apply the same duty and tax to Brazilian products being imported to the US.” They would have to lower their import duty or lose the US market. I remember hearing that someone (GW Bush?) wanted to increase taxes on imported goods from Brazil, and Brazil raised a stink about it until the US backed off. I doubt that President Trump will back off, so watching world markets open up to us could be very entertaining. China, especially, would need to change its evil ways.
The Second Amendment is a very important issue to me, so I was happy to see Trump’s positions. After January 8, 2011, Jared Lee Loughner killed 6 people and wounded 13 others during a constituent meeting held for U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, I was talking to a retired police psychiatrist. His opinion was that quite a few people must have dropped the ball for that guy to have been running around free. And even before then, it was easy to see how the mass shooters had been displaying their violent mental illness for all to see, and yet were still allowed to roam among us. Basically, our broken mental health system did not allow us to take them off the streets until they killed a bunch of people. So I was excited to see that Donald Trump is addressing the 900 pound gorilla in the room on his campaign website:
Fix Our Broken Mental Health System
Let’s be clear about this. Our mental health system is broken. It needs to be fixed. Too many politicians have ignored this problem for too long.
All of the tragic mass murders that occurred in the past several years have something in common — there were red flags that were ignored. We can’t allow that to continue. We need to expand treatment programs, because most people with mental health problems aren’t violent, they just need help. But for those who are violent, a danger to themselves or others, we need to get them off the street before they can terrorize our communities. This is just common sense.
And why does this matter to law-abiding gun owners? Once again, because they get blamed by anti-gun politicians, gun control groups and the media for the acts of deranged madmen. When one of these tragedies occurs, we can count on two things: one, that opponents of gun rights will immediately exploit it to push their political agenda; and two, that none of their so-called “solutions” would have prevented the tragedy in the first place. They’ve even admitted it.
We need real solutions to address real problems. Not grandstanding or political agendas.
Donald Trump received a record number of votes in the primary elections and he is pulling ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls .Barring any major vote fraud, he will be our next President. That is a very good thing!