PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FIRST TERM ACCOMPLISHMENTS

President Trump in he Oval Office

Whether you agree or disagree with what President Trump did, there is little disagreement that he did a lot as President.  If you disagree, you probably have either did not pay attention or only watched CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, or MSNBC, since those T.V. stations generally did not and do not report the positive actions the President took or downplayed/twisted his accomplishments.  To help remedy this situation, I’ve  compiled a list of a few of the  President’s accomplishments.

1. Created the largest reduction in Federal income tax rates that the U.S. has ever had for both people and businesses, leading to the largest economic boom the U.S. has ever seen.  This has resulted in the lowest unemployment rates ever for African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Asian-Americans, and an overall unemployment rate of 3.5%.  It also has meant about 10% increase in wages to the lowest-paid workers and a total increase to average American families of about $10,000 and larger revenues from Federal taxes because of the vastly-increased economic activity.

2. Revised as much of Obamacare that was legally possible and replaced it with much better and less expensive healthcare insurance.

3. Ordered and signed hundreds of Executive Orders largely directing various Federal agencies to eliminate job-killing regulations.

4. Withdrew the United States from the do-nothing “Paris Climate Accords,”  preventing billions of taxpayer dollars being transferred to other countries.

5. Appointed three “originalist”  judges to the Supreme Court and about 200 Federal judges.

6. Coerced NATO members to add $140 billion to their previous donations to NATO.

7. Decreased illegal immigrant border crossings by 73%, thus improving the lives of legal immigrants as well as the poor since illegal aliens will work for “starvation wages” and thereby drastically lower the wages employers offer to unskilled workers.

8. Dow Jones Industrial Average increased in value by over 40% from when he was elected on November 8, 2016 to when he left office on January 20, 2021 as  result of his economic policies.

9. Enabled the U.S. to become “energy-independent” by significantly increasing oil, gas, and coal production, thus freeing it from mid-east oil, as well as keeping Russia much poorer and therefore less able to militarily threaten other countries.

10. Created the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to normalize relations to help bring peace to the Middle East.

11. Re-established the United States as the world leader by bombing a Syrian airfield when Syria used chemical weapons against its citizens.

12. Destroyed the ISIS caliphate by delegating authority to the Secretary of Defense and removing Obama’s  “Rules of Engagement.”

13. Significantly increased military spending in FY ’18, ’19, and ’20, thus vastly improving the military’s  combat-readiness.

14. Re-negotiated trade agreements (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada to make it fairer to the United States.

15. Approved the completion of both the Keystone and Dakota Access oil pipelines, thereby preventing the more dangerous train and trucking of the oil.

16. Cancelled U.S. participation in the very flawed and harmful-to-the-U.S. Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

17. Withdrew the U.S. from the Iranian nuclear deal and imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign on it that has forced Iran to curtail its funding of its terrorist proxies.

18. Negotiated a trade deal with China to curtail Chinese tariffs, add American tariffs, and stop Chinese theft of American intellectual property.

19. Built about 500 miles of 30-ft. high wall on our southern border to curb illegal immigration, narcotics, and human trafficking.

20. Withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia so as to compete with China, who has heavily invested in these weapons.

I’ve only listed a small sampling of the Trump Administration’s achievements. Last I looked, there’s a few hundred things that improved the lives of Americans and the United States.  Since I have been following politics starting in 1960, beginning with the Kennedy-Nixon debates, I’ve never seen any President do more or work so hard in his first term than President Trump.  He became a genuine “Jobs President,”  which enabled it to quickly snap back after the economy was shut down to thwart off Covid.  His policy positions were superb for the United States and his “in-your-face” and negative campaigning style I believe were partly responsible in his being elected President. If he continues to improve in being more prudent in selecting the words he uses in his tweets and comments, I believe he will change many hearts and minds of Independents and Moderate Democrats and will be elected  once again in 2024…and perhaps become one of the greatest President in U.S. history.

 

WILL PRESIDENT TRUMP BE RE-ELECTED AND BECOME OUR GREATEST PRESIDENT?

Will President Trump be re-elected on November 12, 2024?  I believe that, given his accomplishments when he was President, he should be.  Further, I believe that he will become our greatest President. Let’s take a look…

George Washington was our greatest President…without him there would be no United States of America.  Abraham Lincoln was our second greatest for ending slavery and preventing the South from seceding from the Union and therefore keeping the United States as one country.  Ronald Reagan was our third greatest because America was in a huge mess after Jimmy Carter’s presidency and Reagan turned it around by cutting taxes and Federal regulations which grew the economy, and by rebuilding our military to the extent that the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Gross Domestic Product (which is the measure of the size of the economy) almost doubled in the ten-year period from the time Reagan’s cuts in tax rates went into effect (1983).

I believe that Donald Trump will become our greatest President: he already knows the best policies to pursue for the U.S. to prosper…in addition to knowing how to handle sticky international problems and strengthening our military, but now he needs to improve his dealing with the Democrats and the media and be more careful in his choice of words to protect himself from the “Deep State” and the likes of Dick Durbin, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, etc.

A few of the President’s major accomplishments include his initiating  and signing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which stimulated the U.S. economy, big time.  This came as  President Trump terminated thousands job-killing useless regulations, initiating a huge increase (10 trillion dollars) in the Stock Market, creation of 7 million new jobs, low unemployment rate (3.5 %), increases in the Civilian Labor-Force Participation Rate, and growth in the Gross Domestic Product.  Moreover, by giving the military more flexibility in fighting ISIS, areas formerly held by ISIS have been recaptured.  President Trump built an illegal-immigration-stopping wall on our southern border, and attempting to end to chain migration and  VISA-lottery immigration.  He also made huge increases in the military budgets for both FY 2018, ’19 and ’20, which significantly improved the military’s strength and readiness.  He also negotiated great trade deals with China, Mexico, Canada, Japan, South Korea, etc. and cracked down on China’s intellectual theft from America.  He created 9,000 economic opportunity zones in inner cities and other poor areas and passed prisoner reform legislation to help prisoners be treated more fairly.  Despite massive resistance, President Trump also temporarily stopped travel from China to the United States on January 31, 2020, in order to slow down the spread of the Coronavirus from China to America. Finally, he appointed three excellent Supreme Court justices and creatively using financial incentives, had Covid-19 vaccines developed in record time.

Now that President Trump has been out of power for almost four years and the U.S. has done very poorly thanks to Biden’s far-left policies, what does President Trump need to do if he is re-elected to become the greatest President in U.S. history?  I believe that how Trump made America great again despite everything the mainstream media and the Democrat Party did to stop him, like four ridiculous indictments, will determine, in part, how great President Trump becomes.  Put more simply, Trump’s political enemies will be somewhat responsible for the degree that he becomes great.  There is a simple Arab saying that makes it clearer, “the greater your enemy, the greater the victory over that enemy.”  President Trump has many powerful enemies.

After seeing what President Trump has accomplished in his first term, what else does he need to do to be re-elected and become our greatest?  This is what I believe he needs to do:

  1. Eventually win all four of the lawsuits against him and be re-elected in 2024.
  2. Eliminate ineffective government programs and agencies and reduce the size of the Federal workforce, especially the IRS.
  3. Eliminate annual budget deficits and make a plan to pay down the National Debt.
  4. Continue rebuilding the military to be stronger than it ever has been to counter China and stop its intellectual theft from America.
  5. Significantly reduce the opioid crisis,
  6. Expose and end election and voter fraud,
  7. Revitalize and make safe depressed inner cities,
  8. Clean up corruption in government and political parties,
  9. Continue appointing more conservative judges,
  10. Be more congenial, criticize in private, praise in public.
  11. Add more Middle Eastern countries to the Israel-Arab Abraham Accords, especially Saudi Arabia.
  12. End the massive illegal immigration that President Biden created.

In today’s partisan political climate, it’s difficult to get much accomplished without great effort, but President Trump has gotten many things done despite his many enemies. We’ll know on November 12 or perhaps much later if he’s re-elected and in a few years just how great a president President Trump was.  He has significant headwinds from Mainstream Media which has become completely corrupt, and election fraud which has become massive and pervasive.  Since Mainstream Media won’t change, I believe the outcome of the election will depend mostly on how much of the election fraud we can prevent.  If it can be kept under 3% (to overcome the usual  amount of Democrat cheating), Trump should win.

OBAMACARE EQUALS NO HEALTH INSURANCE (unless it’s subsidized)

A very useful guide though a little outdated

When Joe Biden became our next president on November 3, 2020, Obamacare continued to be America’s healthcare system.  In June of 2023 it remains in effect.  As of 2022, approximately 35 million Americans were coved by Obamacare-supported medical insurance coverage.  Therefore, Americans need to know something about it.

Without subsidies, Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is unaffordable for most people.  Because it is so bad, many looked to President Trump to repeal and replace it with something much better and much less expensive.  Because employers were not required to provide heath insurance for part-time workers, most new jobs employers created  in the U.S. under Obamacare were part-time.

I’ve been a supporter of universal healthcare since the year 2000 and, although I did not vote for President Obama in 2008 and 2012, I was hopeful that he would make good-healthcare-for-all a reality.  It did not cross my mind that Obama would promulgate legislation that would destroy healthcare for many more Americans than it might help.  It also did not occur to me that healthcare premiums for the unsubsidized would double, triple, or even quadruple because of Obamacare…and that deductibles would be as expensive as four to twelve thousand dollars/year and co-pays double for the unsubsidized what they had been pre-Obamacare…and that all of these consequences combined would have the cumulative effect of destroying healthcare for tens of millions Americans.

Let’s give the creators of Obamacare the benefit of the doubt and assume that their hearts were in the right place, and that the passage of the ACA was not simply an attempt of government takeover of 1/6 of the U.S. economy (with healthcare).  The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that it was not affordable and was pitiful health insurance…it was poorly and incompetently designed and executed.  It reminds me of  the homily that “an elephant is a mouse designed by committee,” but in the case of the ACA, it was designed by one political party in Congress.

But wasn’t Obamacare  designed to be like Romney-care, which was passed by Mitt Romney when he was a Republican governor of Massachusetts?  That’s what politicians said to justify Obamacare, but that’s not true.  Romney-care only affected about  8% of the Massachusetts population.  Obamacare affected everyone except those exempted by the President. Romney-care did not have penalties or mandates that Obamacare did until it was repealed by President Trump in his tax-rate-cuts law. The very few good aspects of Obamacare, pre-existing conditions and coverage by parents’ insurance until age 26, could  have been simply added in new health insurance Federal legislation.

Although Obamacare  is clearly very bad and expensive health insurance, except for those receiving significant subsidies or exemptions,  the U.S. may be stuck with it. The reason is totally political.  One sixth of the economy is healthcare.  The ACA or “Obamacare” is a politician’s dream come true but the average American’s nightmare.  With thousands of dollars required for deductibles before reimbursement by insurance companies kicks in, Obamacare for most ends up basically being only catastrophic health-care insurance, which is important and necessary, but not something one should pay a lot of money for.

An opportunity for Obamacare to be either repealed and replaced came with the 2016 Presidential election.  Only if Republicans controlled the Presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives could Obamacare be replaced with healthcare that was affordable and truly cared about people.  Legislation failed in 2017 because of Senator John McCain, who promised to vote for a Bill in the Senate to overturn it and then, last minute without informing anyone in advance, did not vote to overturn it.

CONSEQUENCES to the U.S. from PRESIDENT OBAMA’S ECONOMIC POLICIES

President Obama meant well.  He sounded sincere and touted “fairness” as his primary concern in his governance of the nation.  However, it’s true that “the road to hell is paved with people with good intentions.”  In plain English, it almost doesn’t matter if the President was sincere  and meant well if the results of his policies were to cause great  harm to hundreds of millions of people.  Until the Obama Presidency the percentage of Americans with full-time jobs (“Civilian Labor-force Participation Rate”) had not been as low as then (62% of civilian labor force) since the late seventies and if unemployment statistics were calculated the way they were in the year 2000, unemployment would be about 10%.  If they were calculated the way they were during the Great Depression, unemployment would be over 20%.  Below is my analysis of those major policies of President Obama that destroyed the American dream for many Americans and which President Trump, who came after President Obama, and the Congress had to reform:

A. OBAMACARE/AFFORDABLE CARE ACT: This  law was a wet blanket on the economy. While everyone is for good healthcare, and for insuring people with pre-existing conditions, as well as kids up to the age of 26 years-of-age on their parents insurance, Obamacare is a bureaucratic nightmare with much more expensive premiums for most people, and unbelievably-high deductibles and co-pays.  This turns most Obamacare policies into catastrophic care only because most people will never meet their deductibles and will therefore be paying out-of-pocket for most of their healthcare.  This turkey needed to go and hopefully replaced with something much better.

B. IMPEDING ENERGY PRODUCTION:  A decision on the Keystone pipeline was made for political reasons.  Oil production on government land was significantly down, however, basically because the environmental lobby was against all fossil fuels.  Meanwhile, America has more gas, oil, coal, and shale oil than all of the countries in the Middle East combined but government regulations prevented most of it from being developed.  The wealth created by all of this energy could pay off the National debt, the trillions in unfunded liabilities, and produce an economic boom the likes of which no country has ever seen.  And as thoroughly, scientifically, and irrefutably proven in David Archibald’s, Twilight of Abundance, the warming trend of the earth over the last century and up until recently,  is due mostly to Sun Spots and Solar Flares, not to the burning of fossil fuels.  

C. DEFICITS/NATIONAL DEBT: President Obama doubled the National Debt (from $9 trillion to $20).  The Federal government is still borrowing billions/month from the Federal Reserve so the annual budget deficits grew to over 1/2 trillion dollars/year.  Each year the Annual Budget Deficit is added to the total National debt and when Obama left office was about $20 trillion.  This amount of deficit spending and National Debt is unsustainable. The Federal Reserve  has the authority to print money and by doing so has been able to get away with this huge deficit spending,  but doing so without the backing of gold and/or legitimate loans from other countries, simply inflates our currency.  The U.S. dollar is currently the world’s “reserve currency,”  but our borrowing and spending may eventually change that.  When it occurs, the dollar will immediately decrease in value by about 30%, our credit rating dramatically reduced and interest rates on our borrowing dramatically increased, and our ability to borrow severely curtailed.

D. REGULATIONS:  Regulations are necessary in our society but government needs to be very careful in not over-regulating since this can and does add significant costs to the economy, negatively impacts business creation, and reduces freedoms.  The regulations written pursuant to Dodd-Frank, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the Affordable Care Act  (“Obamacare”), among many others, are excessively burdensome to people and the economy.  ESA, for example, had caused the destruction of many crops in California’s Central Valley due to the Delta Smelt, a small fish on the Endangered Species list. Dodd-Frank is a financial nightmare that does nothing to prevent future bank problems.  Obamacare has and is destroying jobs.

E.  HIGH TAXES:  Money taken from the economy in taxes should be limited because it hurts the economy.  Tax money should be used only for legitimate purposes.  Higher taxes is a drag and drain on the economy so  government needs to be careful to spend it wisely.  Lowering tax rates on everyone who pays taxes in order to stimulate the economy is the preferred way of increasing tax revenues and growing the economy to pay for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, etc.

F. CORPORATE TAXES:  A significant Obama policy  that had unintentionally done  harm to many people was the retention of the 35% corporate tax (reduced under Trump to 21%), which was higher than any other country in the world except for Japan.  This has led to the flight  of many U.S. corporations and businesses to other countries, and with this flight, the jobs and taxes that go with them.

G. PROLONGED UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS:  Extension of the duration of unemployment benefits for more than  12 months is very harmful to the unemployed as evidenced by studies showing  the unemployed usually do not even look for jobs until a few weeks prior to their unemployment benefits expiring.  At one point, Obama, in conjunction with a Democrat Congress, extended unemployment benefits to 24 months. “Compassion” was the stated reason, but “buying votes” I believe was the real reason.

H., I., J.,K., L., M., N., etc.

In closing, most Americans were proud that the U.S. elected an African-American President 151 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed  American slaves, even if they personally did not vote for Barack Obama.  The United States inherited slavery from England when it took over the country in 1776 but had to temporarily retain slavery  in order to form the Union to include Southern States (the “Great Compromise”).  At the first opportunity, the U.S. rid itself of slavery (in 1863).

The first African-American President unfortunately had no experience in managing anything or in guiding an economy and therefore the U.S. consequently  hurt  badly economically.  While I believe President Obama meant well, he also still believed that failed liberal/”progressive” economic policies (“Keynesian economics”) were the way to stimulate the economy and therefore turned a blind eye to workable economic policies.

President Reagan demonstrated how to get an economy working and the proof is the fact that the Gross Domestic Product (which measures the size of the economy) of the United States almost doubled 1n the 10 years following Reagan’s implementation of his large reduction in tax rates (1983-1993) and curtailing Federal regulations.  President Kennedy also stimulated the economy during a recession in the 60’s by cutting tax rates.