Can Donald Trump Really Win This November?

So the conventions are now over and we are finally starting the general election with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump having both officially secured their respective party’s nominations. Now is an interesting time to take a look at this race to try and evaluate where things stand.

Looking at the conventions, most all observers feel that the Democratic Convention's smoothly orchestrated lineup of high impact speakers from Bernie Sanders to Michelle Obama to President Obama, Bill Clinton and finally climaxing with Hillary herself made a much better presentation to the electorate than the Republican Convention which was without many of their stars who opted to stay home rather than be forced to do an endorsement speech for The Donald. In fact, the major anticipated endorsement speech from Ted Cruz surprisingly turned out to be an embarrassing non-endorsement speech. And Clinton has indeed benefited from a post-convention bounce in her poll numbers to open a lead over Trump.

Most political observers are still amazed that Trump has gotten this far in the presidential race considering that his arsenal seems to consist of little more than attracting attention by saying and doing outrageous things. Substance on issues just isn’t his thing.

Although this behavior has led even many Republican politicians and conservative pundits to abandon him, the more outrageous his behavior, the more his followers seem to be inspired. And the media just can’t take its eyes off of him, providing seemingly non stop free coverage of his campaign, wondering what he is going to say or do next.

But being outrageous to attract attention is inherently self-limiting. What used to be shocking loses its punch as we become numb to it all. The only option is to up the ante by being even more outrageous and risk alienating more voters. Indeed, one of his most recent incidents had him publicly inviting the Russians to dig up some of Hillary’s still missing E-mails (although he belatedly claimed this was meant to be sarcasm, this argument doesn't hold water).

Most recently, he belittled the Muslim parents who told their heartbreaking story during the Democratic Convention of their sacrifice in losing their son fighting for America. This exchange between Trump and the parents has been universally condemned and may be inflicting major damage on the campaign. Has he finally gone too far this time? If not this time, will it maybe be next time?

And then there is that ticking time bomb in his tax returns he has so far refused to release despite repeated requests. Does he have something to hide?

While Trump's lack of substance on issues didn’t hurt much in debating his fellow Republicans, Hillary Clinton is a very skilled and experienced debater who not only has a strong command of the issues but may be able to get under The Donald's skin and throw him off his game. The debates start in late September. This will definitely be must see TV!

But finally, and most importantly, his path to obtaining enough electoral votes to secure victory is an increasingly narrow one.

Even as Mr. Trump has ticked up in national polls in recent weeks, senior Republicans say his path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed for election has remained narrow — and may have grown even more precarious. It now looks exceedingly difficult for him to assemble even the barest Electoral College majority without beating Hillary Clinton in a trifecta of the biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

This once again demonstrates that because of changing demographics, especially an increasing Latino population, Republicans may be all but shut out of winning any national elections. And this trend will worsen for them in future national elections as more red states become purple on their way to blue.

Can Trump capture the trifecta of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida previously won by Obama? It’s not impossible but pretty unlikely.

Ohio is Trump's best chance to flip a state to his column but Hillary still holds a small edge there. And he will get no help from Republican Governor John Kasich who has refused to endorse him.

Pennsylvania has been designated a swing state in the last several presidential elections only to settle in with a persistent Democratic advantage as Election Day approaches. A good turnout in the Philadelphia area may well seal the deal there for Hillary.

As for Florida, the Latinos know that a Trump loss there will be a back breaker so you can be sure they will be turn out in force come Election Day.

So does Trump have a chance to win this November? Assuming his campaign doesn’t flame out before then, the Electoral College math is not in his favor. This is not to say that he has no chance. It just means that to have any real hope of winning, he will have to flip several states that voted for Obama into his column. Trump seems to believe this can be done but party strategists have their serious doubts.

Even if Trump has a relatively small chance of winning, the fact that he has any chance at all is of great concern to many who feel that Trump is perhaps the most unqualified and even dangerous presidential nominee of a major party in our history. But no matter how favorable Hillary’s chances may eventually look by Election Day, complacency is not an option! Trump has shown incredible resilience in keeping his campaign alive during controversies that would have done in just about any other candidate. We underestimate him at our peril!

Will the UK Really Leave the EU?

The British Exit from the European Union (EU), widely known as Brexit is perhaps the most compelling story to come out of Europe since the falling of the Berlin Wall. It is like a soap opera with its unpredictable twists and turns. It is a story about an impending divorce where one partner announces to the other that they have 'just grown apart'. One where the rejected partner angrily says in effect 'Go ahead and leave – but I’ll make you pay!!’

The idea and purposes behind the EU are certainly solid ones. There is strength in numbers. A small country in Europe wouldn’t have much power to negotiate favorable trade deals with the rest of the world, especially the giant players. But with the combined EU being the world’s largest economy, its influence on the world’s stage is undeniable.

And avoiding the unwieldiness of each country having its own currency, customs and immigration regulations is certainly desirable. Traveling, working, and living throughout Europe is seamless between its member nations.

But alas, there are some downsides to such an arrangement. Instead of individual countries having a free hand to run their economies as they see fit, there are requirements to administer their economies within certain agreed to guidelines. And with the common currency in the form of the euro, countries lose access to the printing press to expand their money supply during recessions to try and reduce unemployment. The extreme difficulties Greece recently had to go through was a result of this. While normal fiscal management would suggest an expansion in the money supply to help pull them out of a badly depressed economy, orders from headquarters (the EU) were for austerity measures in the form of cutting government spending to try and balance the budget – which only made matters worse and may eventually lead Greece to abandon the EU and the euro.

So why does the EU favor these austerity measures when they seem clearly at odds with countries struggling through recessions? Although EU decisions are made by a consensus of their members, Germany exerts a lot of influence on its economic policies being one the dominant countries on the continent. And Germany has much more of a fear of inflation than anything else having lived through the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic between World Wars I and II with its vivid images of money in wheelbarrows.

For whatever its motivations, the one size fits all economic policies are to many EU observers a very serious and perhaps an even fatal flaw. This has led to even strong supporters of the Remain movement to have mixed feelings about the EU.

But the UK was able to sidestep the currency issues by being able to join the EU but keep the pound instead of the euro. To supporters of the Remain side, such an agreement made leaving the EU even harder to justify.

With the far right in the UK grumbling for some time about leaving the EU, Prime Minister David Cameron thought he could finally settle this issue by putting the question to a vote in a national referendum. Big mistake. While this form of pure democracy may sound appealing, the economic ramifications of leaving the EU are far too complicated for the average citizen to make an informed decision. And what’s more, it presented an opportunity for a charismatic politician in the form of Boris Johnson, a former mayor of London, to demagogue the issue. Although a number of UK politicians supported the Leave movement, Johnson was its most prominent spokesperson. In the style of Donald Trump, he convinced enough mostly older people disgruntled with issues like immigration and globalization that he could lead the UK away from the EU and to the promised land, presumably as the next prime minister.

The polls said the vote would be close but predicted until the very end that the Remain side would likely win. Johnson probably thought so too!

Then the upset happened. The Leave side won. The financial markets around the world went into a tailspin, as did the value of the pound. When Johnson declared victory with all of the anxious UK watching, he seemed strangely subdued. Perhaps after this unexpected victory, it dawned on him that the actual disengagement from the EU would be a most formidable task. And with Prime Minister Cameron immediately announcing his upcoming resignation to leave this to his successor, Johnson was asked about his plan to actually execute the separation process. He had to admit that he hadn’t thought of one. He looked like the dog who had frantically chased a car and then upon unexpectedly catching it didn’t know what to do next.

Then some of the Leave politicians were forced to admit that some of the claims they made to persuade voters were either exaggerated or simply not true. And to top things off, Johnson then made a surprise announcement that he was no longer in the running to become the next prime minister. Many of the voters were livid. He broke it and wasn’t going to stay around to fix it. There was clearly a lot of buyer’s remorse.  And Johnson’s colorful and controversial political career may well have come to an end.

So what now? The Leave side says they won fair and square. But did they? And unlike an election this was a non-binding referendum. But is there any going back? It is fair to say that if many had to do it over again knowing what they know now, they may well have voted differently.

But going forward isn’t going to be a walk in the park either. There are a number of political obstacles that must be dealt with. Does Parliament have to provide the final approval to start the Leave process? What about Scotland and Northern Ireland? They voted solidly to Remain and may well leave the UK to stay in the EU.

And then there is the actual negotiation over the ‘divorce’. Essentially, all of the terms that are part of being in the EU are now subject to renegotiation. The actual procedure has a designated legal name – article 50. Once the intention is officially announced to the EU to leave, the clock starts on a 2 year deadline to get all of the terms negotiated. The fact that some of the Leave contingent wants to wait awhile before starting the clock may be a sign of some cold feet about going through with all of this. Please check out this informative link and video to learn more.

How this will all turn out is anybody’s guess. In the most optimistic scenario, the EU may decide it’s in their interest to make some concessions to the UK in exchange for a reconciliation. But if or when this finally gets to the negotiation stage, it may turn into a nasty tug of war. Divorces are often like that. But in addition, there may be an incentive by members of the EU to drive a hard bargain to make an example of the UK. After all, there are far right parties in a number of other European nations which if they come to power will be itching to also leave the EU with its own unforeseen worldwide consequences. This is truly a lighted powder keg that the world will be watching!

The Democratic Party's Identity Crisis

Especially after this recent presidential primary season, it is safe to say that most observers would agree that the Republican Party has swung so far to the right that their icon, Ronald Reagan would not be conservative enough  to be nominated if he were alive today. But what about the Democratic Party? An argument can be made that it too has moved to the right over the last few decades. If so, what effect has this had on a number of its traditional liberal constituents?

Thomas Frank in his latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? argues that the party has abandoned the working man, long considered the backbone of the party, in favor of a more elite professional class.

Frank is best known for a previous book, What's the Matter with Kansas? where he skewers Republicans for conniving to get conservatives to vote against their own economic self-interest. This time, he’s back to accuse some of the Democrats of doing the same to its liberal supporters.

Back in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council was formed as a reaction to the crushing defeats of strongly liberal presidential candidates George McGovern and Walter Mondale. In order to effectively compete in future elections, it was believed that the party needed to move more to the right, especially on economic issues. This meant a closer relationship with the corporate and financial sectors. But it also meant that the era of the New Deal and strong labor unions was fading away.

And as Frank notes on Page 57 of Listen, Liberal:

As the DLC saw it, whenever Democrats lost an election, it was because their leaders were too weak on crime, too soft on communism, and too sympathetic to minorities.

When its leader in Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, the ideas of the DLC could be put into action.

Clinton’s time in office has been praised for a number of successes. Among them was a booming economy and a balanced budget to pass on to his successor. But Frank had some sharp criticism for a lot of what happened on Clinton’s watch which he details in his book which the reader is invited to check out. But for now, here is a summation from a recent article by Frank in Salon.com:

Evaluating Clinton’s presidency as heroic is no longer a given, however. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the corporate scandals of the Enron period, and the collapse of the real estate racket, our view of the prosperous Nineties has changed quite a bit. Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton’s administration that deregulated derivatives, that deregulated telecom, and that put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave. He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him. If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious.

Whew! While Clinton is generally seen as a centrist, he certainly comes off as governing from decidedly right of center.

As for another centrist, Barack Obama, Frank’s criticism is more oblique. While he rightly praises him for Obamacare, he criticizes him for being just too chummy with Wall Street. With his Wall Street advisors leading the way, the perpetrators of the Crash of 2008 were allowed a soft landing with bailouts and no prosecutions to inconvenience them. Unlike so many other areas that were under control of a Republican obstructionist Congress, Frank argues that this was largely under his control.

Hillary Clinton, the almost certain Democratic presidential nominee is much more difficult to fairly evaluate. She was an important part of her husband Bill Clinton’s administration. So can we also blame her for Bill’s policy failures? Not fair, say Hillary’s supporters; she is her own person and would govern in her own way. But then Hillary did announce that Bill would serve as her economic adviser if elected.

Then there is the nagging question of where Hillary truly is on the political spectrum. This Wikipedia article attempts to sort this out. At one time, she was a prominent member of the above mentioned center right DLC (which by the way, also supported the invasion of Iraq). But she has also identified as being a moderate along with being a progressive which has led those especially on the left to question her authenticity as a candidate.

But a little perspective is in order here. While the Clintons and President Obama have been found wanting by liberals on occasion, they are not to be confused in any way with the present day Republicans who occupy the far right of the political spectrum. For whatever gripes liberals have had with Presidents Clinton and Obama, they have appointed reliably liberal Supreme Court Justices during their time in office and we can obviously expect Hillary to do the same if she is elected. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan gave us Antonin Scalia. George H.W. Bush gave us Clarence Thomas. And George W. Bush gave us John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Nuff said?

So we close here by trying to answer the question of what is the true identity of the Democratic Party – both now and in the future. Frank concludes his book in a deeply pessimistic tone having little hope that the party that seemingly abandoned many of its core liberal constituents will ever change back.

But apparently after Frank finished his manuscript, Bernie Sanders (not mentioned in the book) came out of nowhere to single-handedly try and drag the Democratic Party (kicking and screaming) back to its glory days of the New Deal and true concern for the working man. And although he is going to fall short of getting the nomination, he has awakened a passion in a lot of those in the liberal wing of the party who thought they had been forgotten.

Most notably, the strongest support for Sanders has been from the youngest voters. They represent the party's future. As a (not young) passionate Bernie Sanders loving liberal, to borrow from Mark Twain, I’m here to tell you that the death of the liberal branch of the Democratic Party has been greatly exaggerated!

Will Automation Take Our Jobs Away?

One of the big issues in this year’s presidential election is the loss of American jobs to foreign competition. And while especially Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have stressed this as an issue, there is perhaps an even greater threat to jobs the world over in the way of automation that nobody seems to be talking about.

This is for good reason. It is easy to demonize the Mexicans or the Chinese or the various trade pacts and advocate solutions to the voters. But automation defies any simple political solutions to rally the electorate behind.

About a year ago, Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur came out with Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future which provides both a fascinating and a somewhat disturbing reading experience. Think about it. What would happen to the world economy if a significant part of our population simply had no way of earning a livelihood? What do these people do to be able to eat and keep a roof over their heads?

Of course, it must be mentioned that the fear of automation permanently putting people out of work has been around for many decades if not centuries. But these fears have been always been shown to be unfounded. In perhaps the most noted example, agricultural jobs were mostly automated out of existence. But then came along manufacturing jobs to fall back on that needed to be filled.

Indeed, there are jobs in this Internet age that didn’t even exist a few decades ago. It has always been mainstream economic thought that the so-called Luddite Fallacy overlooks all of the new jobs that are created by new technology as old ones become obsolete.

But Ford argues (convincingly in my opinion) that with the exponential rise in computing power and artificial intelligence, mankind is in a race to stay ahead of technology that it simply cannot win. And we must come up with solutions sooner rather than later on how we are going to deal with all of this. The reader is invited to view this video link to hear Ford summarize the ideas presented in his book.

Because of the exponential advances in computer technology, algorithms can already be devised to do tasks that were thought to only be doable by humans. For example, there are programs that can effectively grade test essays along with programs that can generate articles for publication in magazines or on the Web. As another example, it was unclear whether a chess program would ever be able to compete against the world’s best human players. Thanks to their increased (and just about flawless) raw computational power, it is now the world’s best humans who cannot compete any more with the best programs. And then there is IBM's Watson who defeated Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. There are countless other amazing computer automation skills that are detailed in the book for the interested reader.

While less educated workers will obviously be affected by automation, even the more skilled workers are losing their jobs to what is known as offshoring. This is from Rise of the Robots - Page 115:

Highly educated and skilled professionals such as lawyers, radiologists, and especially computer programmers and information technology workers have already felt a significant impact. In India, for example, there are armies of call center workers and IT professionals, as well as tax preparers versed in the US tax code and attorneys specifically trained not in their own country’s legal system but in American law, and standing ready to perform low-cost legal research for US firms engaged in domestic litigation.

The plight of unemployment for many recent law school graduates along with their crushing amount of student debt has been written about a lot lately. These students have traditionally started their careers doing legal research grunt work in preparation for moving up the career ladder. Now less research work needed domestically means that fewer graduates are needed.

So it appears that jobs that are susceptible to automation tend to naturally go to lower wage countries until they too become either partially or fully automated. Ford quotes a 2013 University of Oxford study that estimates that close to half of all US jobs are susceptible to automation within the next two decades. Here's the link to that study.

And as Ford explains...

…advances in artificial intelligence make it even easier to offshore jobs that can’t yet be fully automated.

But some jobs in manufacturing are actually returning to America – but with much less pay and much more automation.

So if the job prospects for the less educated are grim and with prospects for more educated workers starting to deteriorate, the usual suggested solutions are looking pretty inadequate.

The all-purpose standbys, retraining and education, will not be effective if indeed automation does clean us out of too many jobs. Retrain for what job? Education to move up the skills ladder makes sense at first blush. It is safe to say that there will always be jobs that require a high enough skill level to resist automation. But how many of these jobs exist and how many people have the aptitude to do these jobs? It is for these reasons that Ford says the skills ladder is more accurately described as a skills pyramid.

“Oh if only everyone could go to and afford college” is the refrain. Indeed, Bernie Sanders proposes offering free public college education to all Americans like as in other countries. But we already have too many people attending college who aren’t suited to college level learning. This is from Rise of the Robots - Page 251:

Overall, about 20 percent of US college graduates are considered overeducated for their current occupation…In Europe where many countries provide students with college educations that are free nearly so, roughly 30 percent of graduates are overqualified for their jobs. In Canada, the number is about 27 percent. In China, a remarkable 43 percent of the workforce is overeducated.

So what would work? Ford advocates a Basic Income Guarantee for all Americans as a safety net program, an idea that surprisingly, Friedrich Hayek, an icon for the right has strongly supported.

But it is safe to say in today’s political climate, the idea of paying someone for doing nothing is a non-starter. So how about paying our unemployed to help rebuild our severely crumbling infrastructure? The government can borrow the money at record low interest rates. While this may not solve the long term problem posed by technological unemployment it will at least buy us some time to come to an agreement on how to address this very serious issue.

For a country as wealthy as ours, there is far too much poverty. It has been said that the best antidote to poverty is a job that pays a living wage. The push for $15 an hour is meeting with success in different parts of the country. The basic principle is simple. Someone who is willing and able to work full time should not have to live in poverty.

Of course, there is the argument that raising wages will lead to more of those jobs becoming automated. But at Foxconn in China which is infamous for its low pay and toxic working conditions that have actually led to some suicides, they are still planning to bring automation in to replace most of these workers. The takeaway here is that being willing to work for slave wages isn’t going to prevent that job from being automated if that is the employer's intention all along. (In many cases, the lure of automation for employers isn't necessarily about saving money - it is more about control.  Robots don't get tired or sick or complain about how they are being treated.) So for the workers that are left, we might as well ensure that at least they won’t have to live in poverty.

So what is the endgame here if automation explodes as is feared? Those who want to eliminate as much human labor as possible from the workplace need to be careful what they wish for. Machines are not consumers! The never-ending push to produce products as cheaply as possible by eliminating human labor eventually runs into a destructive dead end when the supply of consumers dries up! Much of the retail sector (except the high end retailers catering to the affluent) is already struggling with many having to close stores.

Despite the Republican blather about our corporations being the ‘job creators', most of us realize that the real job (and profit) creators are consumers like us who buy their products. So while technological progress is inexorable, wise men will know that killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is not the answer. And from this, maybe we can hopefully find some solutions for the future!

What's Behind the Rise of Trump?

This is from the introduction to What’s the Matter with Kansas? – How Conservatives Won the Heart of America  

The poorest county in America isn’t in Appalachia or the Deep South. It is on the Great Plains, a region of struggling ranchers and dying farm towns, and in the election of 2000 the Republican candidate for president, George W. Bush, carried it by a majority of greater than 80%.

The county in Kansas that author Thomas Frank referred to back in 2004 no longer holds the dubious distinction of being the poorest county in America. But to be sure, this is not because of any improving economics there but is instead because so many other poor rural counties across America are suffering through their own economic misery.

The premise of Frank’s book is that Kansans (and by extension others in rural America) have tended to vote based on their conservative social values while at the same time voting against their own economic self-interest. While Republicans promote their pro-life, pro-gun, anti-gay social agenda, their economic agenda typically benefits the interests of big money and big business to the detriment of the working man. For example, tax cuts for the rich – good! Unions to bargain for better wages and working conditions – bad!

Frank observes time after time that even with economic conditions progressively deteriorating – no problem! Vote Republican! It’s those conservative moral values they hold so dear that are really the most important.

But as poverty spreads and persists in rural America, the natives are getting ever more restless.

There are a number of reasons for the increasing hard times in rural America. For example, in Appalachia, working in a coal mine was just about the only way to earn a decent (albeit a dangerous) living. But the demand for coal is decreasing and the fewer mines remaining are becoming more automated.

And elsewhere, more and more manufacturing is leaving America for Mexico and other countries with lower wage economies. The most recent example is the announcement of Carrier planning to move its manufacturing in Indiana to Mexico.

There is anger and resentment of what is a largely white population towards others that they blame for their plight. Maybe it’s the immigrants from Mexico whom they feel are taking away their jobs. Maybe it’s the blacks and Hispanics whom they feel are "screwing over whites". Maybe it’s the Muslims they feel may be invading America and need to be kept out.

If only someone understood what they were feeling. If only someone would come along and ‘tell it like it is'. That someone turned out to be Donald Trump.

And while all politicians are there to tell their target audience what they want to hear, it is a demagogue like Trump who widens the area of acceptable political discourse beyond all recognition. Mexicans “sending their rapists”, building a "big, beautiful wall" to keep out the Mexicans, rounding up and shipping out the 11 million undocumented who are already here along with a border policy that would keep out all Muslims “until we figure out what the hell to do” are now acceptable subjects for discussion for not only some voters but also in the media.

And while the media, especially those on the right are singled out for blame here, it overlooks the even greater effectiveness of social media sites like Twitter. Outrageous beliefs masquerading as facts can be easily be re-tweeted by both Trump himself or his like-minded supporters and spread like wildfire. Hate groups who want to spread their venom and endorse somebody like Trump can more easily stay under the radar of scrutiny.

So what we have is a Republican Party which through its endless catering to the rich has neglected the needs of its working class voters while selling them a bill of goods around preserving moral values. Can Trump do better for his supporters – or is he just selling his own bill of goods to dupe his voters?

Logic strongly argues for the latter. Some of crises he conjures up to stir up his followers are at the least overblown if not downright untrue. For example, it is easy to paint a picture of swarms of Mexicans invading us over the border like this video of a border crossing from Morocco. But the reality is that immigration from Mexico has been declining to the point now that net immigration from Mexico is now into negative figures. That’s right, more Mexicans are now leaving America than are coming here!   But that is hardly something to fire up your supporters over. This makes the talk of the giant wall supposedly to be paid for by Mexico even more absurd.

And what about the Muslims? Do we keep tabs on the Muslim citizens here to know where they are? And do we ban a group from entering our country based on their religion? Both are creepy, not to mention unconstitutional. And unless Trump can devise a ‘Muslim detector’ how do we even positively identify these people?

Other issues like the loss of jobs to countries with low wages are very real fears. But how much of this would truly be under Trump’s control if he were to become the President? The story on the Carrier closing discusses not only the human costs but also the decisions behind the announced move. Large investors in companies like Carrier often exert relentless pressure on CEOs to squeeze every last nickel of profits from their businesses. 

United Technologies [Carrier's parent corporation] faces pressure from investors hungry for earnings growth in an economy that’s only modestly growing at home, and falling in important overseas markets like China and the Middle East. Although the company’s stock has vastly outperformed benchmarks in the last few decades, the shares have badly trailed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index over the most recent five years.

Wall Street is looking for United Technologies to post a 17 percent increase in earnings per share over the next two years, even though sales are expected to rise only 8 percent. Bridging that gap means cutting costs wherever savings can be found…

Since it is a given that corporations exist to maximize their profits, how much control can Trump truly expect to exert on where a company makes its product? Tariffs as Trump has suggested may be an option (if Congress approves) but runs the risk of a dangerous and possibly catastrophic trade war that could kill millions of US jobs. In addition, many of our jobs are also being lost to automation. Does he propose to also make automation illegal? This is not to say there are no solutions to this problem. But this is to say that the issue is a very complex one that defies the simplistic solutions his followers can rally behind.

When all is said and done, will a man who was born wealthy and has devoted his life to increasing (along with bragging about) his wealth really look out for the interests of those who are less wealthy? Here are a couple of clues. Like just about all Republicans, he is proposing a tax cut that will disproportionately benefit the very wealthy in addition to exploding the deficit. And this would then presumably require massive spending cuts in either social programs or the military to try and balance the budget – and for Trump who promises to “make the military great again" it is safe to say that it won’t be the military!

And secondly, does Trump favor any raise in the minimum wage to provide at least some relief for those at the bottom of the economic food chain? The short answer to this question is No! 

Nuff said?