One Year of President Trump

President Trump has just completed his first year in office. On January 30 he’ll be giving his State of the Union Address. If you’ve been watching ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, you would think that this country is  coming  to an end by Feb. 15 and that Trump will be going to jail for dealing with Russians. Proof doesn’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter. If it did, Hillary would not have been able to run for President (inmates are not permitted to hold office in most states), let alone take her excuse laden losers tour of the world last year.

Those so called news networks listed above have spent over 90% of the last year guessing about who in Trumps campaign or administration plotted with the Russians and ignored when evidence started showing Hillary might be involved.

Rather than look strictly at the negative, let’s look at some of the positive things.

Think back to election day. Nobody gave Trump a chance. The only question in the media was what time the election would be called. All the polls had Hillary winning the election. Around 9:00 that night, the southeast was coming in. Florida, the Carolinas, went for Trump. Georgia came in later, also for Trump. Hillary was expected to take Virginia but it remained too close to call for a very long time.

The talk became about how Hillary had her wall built up. It was expected she’d take the Northeast (although New Hampshire surprised by being so close) and she’d have her wall of protection with Pennsylvania, probably Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. The only one Trump didn’t get was Minnesota.

If you look at the completed map, everything was blue in the Northeast and the west. The exceptions were one half of Maine and Alaska. Between the two coasts, everything is red. There are four exceptions to this. Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, and New Mexico. A total of 44 Electoral votes. The bulk of the population is in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their suburbs. New York has 29 Electoral votes. California has 55. Florida has 29 but their population is spread throughout the state and Texas has 38 votes. So, Hillary getting more votes than Trump means nothing under our system. It only means that those on the coasts where the bulk of the population is crammed together in tight areas she has their support but the rest of the country doesn’t and didn’t trust nor support her.

If you look up the interactive maps online, you can place your mouse over a state and it will show you a breakdown by county. The big cities in the states are pretty much owned by the liberals but each state in the heart of the country supports trump outside the big cities.

Just a bit after 2:00 it was only a matter of them calling one more state for Trump. They had the stock futures (since the market was closed at 2:00 am). It was up about 150 points. Then it was announced Trump had won. The market took an immediate dive and by 2:30 the market was down 600 points. Then President-Elect Trump and VP Elect Pence came out. By 2:45 am the market was back up over 200 points and still climbing. On election day the dow was at 18,332.74. Today it’s at 26,071.72. That’s 8,000 in just over a year! A week or so ago it grew by 1,000 in one week! Now we’re starting to hear questions about whether it’s sustainable or if a correction or crash is coming.

The economy has not reached 2% growth in any of the last eight years of Obama. In the first year of Trump, it’s already grown by more than 3.2%!

So what caused the markets to increase? Trump is very positive when talking about Americans going back to work. Companies started changing their plans about leaving the country and those that had left are making plans for a return. Trump also scaled back on unnecessary and/or redundant regulations. He made the work environment in this country more palatable for companies to hire. This makes businesses want to do more in this country. To invest more. To hire more. That makes Wall Street happy because they will make money as well. All make the economy grow.

There are some things that I believe President Trump has made a few mistakes, but the press and the Congress have been mistaken about Trump, in my opinion.

Trump has always been a businessman and took that to DC with him. But the way the Senate and House work with their traditions, it’s hard to break some of those traditions. The most obvious being the 60 votes for cloture.

Congress and the press don’t like change. They want Trump to be a clone of Bush (both father and son) and Reagan. They don’t want someone making waves. Congress has learned to say the right things when they are campaigning but once elected, they go back to the same old ways. Trump hasn’t figured out how to get those changes using the traditions against the Congress.

After failing at repealing health care, Trump learned what Congress hasn’t. There is more than one way to get things done. They could make changes to their bill and try to pass those. When Congress couldn’t get those done, Trump began working on putting out his tax plan. The tax plan ran through the Congress quickly. Very quickly for them. Included in the tax cut was a repeal of the mandate (elimination of the requirement to pay a penalty if you don’t buy Obamacare) and also included in the tax bill was  the opening of ANWAR for oil drilling.

They’ve been trying to get ANWAR opened since Reagan was President. He hasn’t been President since 1988. 30 years ago!

Those tax cuts are going to start being noticed in pay checks in the next week or two. You will have more money in your hands. More to spend on food, clothes or savings. Or a little towards all three. Oh, and by the way, TAX CUTS DO NOT NEED TO BE PAID FOR!!!!  The government will have more revenue due to the tax cuts and they should decrease their spending and paying down the debt and deficits. However,if the Democrats takebac the House this year, they won’t be paying down the debt.

Notice what the Democrats said. “It’s a giveaway to the rich”, “the corporations”.”Businesses won’t give it to the people.” But guess what actually happened. Before even seeing one dime from the tax cuts, several companies gave out $1,000 bonuses to their employees.

The business tax has been reduced from 35% to 21%. This has the effect of more businesses that left here in recent years, now wanting to come home. The rich getting a tax cut. If you make $1,000,000 and you pay 10% tax, you’ll pay $100,000. If you make $50,000 and pay 10% you’ll pay $5,000. Who pays more? Both are paying 10% so while the dollar amounts are different the percentage paid is the same. The only difference is that the rich will pay a higher percentage (meaning higher dollar amount as well) than the middle class man/woman.

The people complaining about the rich getting tax cuts never seem to answer the question “when have you ever gotten a job from a poor person?”

Tonight is President Trumps first State of the Union speech. I anticipate an upbeat speech with a look back at his successes this past year and his positive vision for the next year. The press will be negative once the speech is over.

You’re welcome to comment,

Brett