Make America Great Again?
Let’s think
about that much-shouted slogan, using hard facts that anybody can easily verify.
The stock
market is at an all-time high. That would not be so if investors were horrified
at the current state of economic affairs, as the Right would have us believe. Wall
Street realizes the economy is healthy and strong. In fact, under the
Biden/Harris administration, the economy grew a robust 3% between April and
June of 2024 alone and remains prosperous.
America leads
the world in oil and natural gas production, an industry that supports more
than ten million jobs.
Between
January 2021 and June 2024, 13.4 million jobs were added to our economy, 7.9
million of those to U.S.-born workers. (From the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) More
Americans are working than ever before, and jobless claims are at an historic
low. The Biden/Harris administration has saved factories along with their local
economies.
Semiconductors
power the modern world. They’re essential in cellphones, new cars, and medical
tech, for just a few examples. Thanks to the Biden/Harris Investing in America
Agenda and the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, semiconductor manufacturing
has come back to America, along with $30 billion in new private
investments and still more thousands of well-paying jobs. (From the Commerce
Department.)
Inflation has
been a global problem for some time, yet the Biden/Harris administration has brought
it down to under 3% for us. We’ve all seen gas prices falling recently.
Despite what the Right is Trumpeting,
violent crime is at a 50-year low across our nation.
This is only
a partial list of Biden/Harris accomplishments. The point is, to any real
patriots, to any real believers in the promise of our American democracy, to
anybody working hard to realize their own version of the Dream, to anybody
paying attention to the facts, America is Already Great.
Meanwhile,
Donald Trump, a convicted felon who owes more than half a billion dollars in tax-evasion
penalties and jury-trial defamation settlements, is spending much of his campaign
time on grifting, touting everything from $60 Bibles (“The Bible is my favorite
book,” he said. “I have many.”), to a Bitcoin scheme, to golden sneakers, to
$99 digital trading cards featuring himself in various glamorized poses, to
golden $100,000 wristwatches. (Only $500 for an economy silver version for the
masses.) Is the MAGA leader trying to Make Trump Rich Again? At
his followers’ expense? Are you joining the MTRA movement?
Yes, we obviously
need to curb gun violence. The Biden/Harris administration wants to ban assault
rifles, which have no legitimate use in self-defense (a shotgun is a much
better weapon for that) or game hunting. But the Right refuses, and their hand-picked
wing of the Supreme Court legitimizing the bump stock, which turns an AR-15
into a supremely lethal machine gun, is certainly not helping.
Yes, our
border policies obviously need attention. That’s why the Biden/Harris
administration put together a bipartisan border reform and strengthening act
that would have given the Right most of what they said they wanted. And what
happened? Trump urged his congressional cronies to reject it and they dutifully
did. Why? Simply so Trump could use the issue as a cudgel against the Left in
his campaign.
Those Haitian
Immigrants, by the way, are in Ohio and elsewhere legally under the TPS
(Temporary Protected Status) program, which allows sanctuary for people fleeing
dire circumstances from severely degraded or lethal regimes like Haiti, which
has been devastated by catastrophic weather. The people of Springfield have
embraced them as decent, hard-working people who have benefited their
community. Claims from Trump and Vance of them eating pets and otherwise destroying
Springfield life have been thoroughly debunked, yet Trumpers have terrorized
the community with bomb threats that have disrupted Springfield life, locked
down schools, and overloaded law enforcement.
As I’ve said,
the only people who had original claim to the entire Western Hemisphere were
Mayans, Aztecs, or other native tribes. Every single other person in the
whole Western Hemisphere is either an immigrant or descended from immigrants. Ironically,
the wives of both Trump and Vance are from recent immigrant families.
Einstein was
an immigrant, as have been thousands upon thousands of famous, productive,
contributing, valued members of our nation. That’s what the Statue of Liberty
is all about. Look up the inscription on it. Should we tear down that statue? (Immigrants
should, of course be vetted before the granting of citizenship.)
In fact, you
might say immigrants were the first to begin making America the greatest nation
on the planet.
Phil
