Having failed after eight years as president to have accomplished anything whatsoever to the betterment of the USA, Barack Obama is apparently not done trying to continue his incessant damage to the nation.
Yes, while Obama wants people to think he is going to continue to live in Washington so his kids can stay in the same schools, that's not exactly in the same area code as the truth. No, he is apparently setting up the equivalent of an alternative government, to try to provide continual opposition to the Trump Administration, although exactly how they plan to operate, and what they will do on a daily basis is a bit of a TBD.
What isn't at issue is how it is going to be paid for, since leftist moneybags like Tom Steyer have committed nine figures worth to pay for it (Steyer has pledged $100 million himself just for commercials). So Obama will still have plenty of income to support both his golf habit and this subversive activity, in whatever form it might take.
So ... if we assume this to be true, and we assume that he is doing this "shadow government" thing, then what is the best course for the actual, real government, the one voted in by the people?
I have that answer, thanks.
Donald Trump did not run a wonky campaign. I know that may be the single most superfluous sentence in the history of the written English language, but it is actually the point. During Trump's campaign, he said he wanted, or would do, the following things and little else:
- An "America First" foreign policy
- Securing the border with Mexico to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking across it
- Deporting criminal aliens
- Repealing and replacing Obamacare
- Returning jobs, particularly in manufacturing, to the USA and deterring their leaving
- Lowering corporate and personal tax rates
- Beginning to clean up destroyed inner cities.
That was the core of it, plus another item or two here or there. As I said, this was not a wonky platform, it was a set of goals for which either legislature or executive action (or, in the case of deportation, simple enforcement of the law) would implement the goal.
And that's the point. Barack Obama can set up a whole alternative government complete with his own putting-green on the bizarro White House he is going to inhabit. But it will all be for naught if Donald Trump does the things that he said he was going to do, and doing them has the effects he said they would.
And that was the point of the simplicity of Trump's campaign platform. The economic metrics are pretty easy to predict; in about a year, the unemployment rate will sneak up (it is a fairly useless figure as currently computed) but the labor force and job count will rise, as people who had left the job market and stopped being counted, flood back into the market faster than the economy can produce jobs for them.
Economic growth, let loose by huge reversals of regulations, will be a hiring engine. Tax revenues will drop at first, but within 24 months revenues will flood into the government, as the economic upsurge from lower tax rates generates more in taxes than ever before, despite lower rates. Specific companies will start hiring here in the USA, and others will cancel outsourcing and remain here.
Obamacare will be replaced, slashing big chunks from the Federal budget and, before long, cutting individual insurance costs. There will be a wall on our southern border.
And finally, but not least, something -- I don't know what -- will be done to try to address inner-city crime and high murder rates. It may or may not work, but it will be more than Barack Obama did in eight years if Trump even lifts a finger.
That is my point here. If Donald Trump does what he said he wanted to do, which in concept is fairly straightforward, and gets most or all of the above done, the result will be so dramatic -- a roaring economy, lower crime rates, something improving in the cities -- then eventually we will forget Barack Obama and his shadow government entirely.
There is nothing more effective at defusing your enemy than making him completely unnecessary. And it will be impossible to try to hide a dramatically successful economy and way-higher employment counts from the people. If he does all that -- and Ronald Reagan did it in a comparable amount of time -- there will be no need for Obama, and he will wither into a pathetic little troll, loved by Hollywood but shown by Trump's successes to be the failure we all know he was.
And I will end this by saying that even a revived economy will be an incomplete result if he can't make at least a little headway in the inner cities. He very much needs to be visible early on in that specific area. It will show him to care about the cities more than Obama ever was.
Trust me, all of that will be seen by the voters -- of all colors.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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