America has become greater through science and education.
Trump’s appointments of science deniers to the cabinet and other posts, and Trump’s and Pence’s own anti-science and anti-medical outlooks, will literally take us back to the 50’s. Sh-boom, sh-boom! His nomination of religious oriented and totally unqualified Betsy DeVos to become Secretary of Education cannot bear fruit for K-12 or higher education. Trump’s and Ben Carson’s unfounded doubts about vaccines, the denial of government funding for Planned Parenthood, and the forthcoming cancellation or diminution of health insurance for 30 million, will set back the extent and advances in medicine in this country.
While Trump has focused on bringing back manual manufacturing jobs from the 50’s, America has developed into highly educated, scientifically based innovative industries and educated service vocations. The tedious manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to countries with less educated and innovative work forces. A lot of the tedious manufacturing jobs have been replaced by robotics. Our youngsters are being trained in robotics. But Trump got his victory by squeaking by in rust belt states, which liked his message of traveling back in time, so Trump will pursue that in his quest to get reelected.
Erecting trade barriers will only hurt our own creative industries and salaries, that depend on competing worldwide with outside manufacturers. Costs of all products will rise to our entire population, since it is our consumers that will have to pay for the products containing some foreign manufacturing, not the foreign governments or industries that Trump thinks he is “punishing”. The foreign manufacturing will only switch to foreign businesses who will take over the competing US businesses with the now more expensive products. Think of Samsung versus Apple smart phones.
Erecting barriers in trade pact deals other than free trade, is directly and severely interfering with the free market ideal that has been the basis of the Republican Party philosophy.
We had the most economically advanced and rewarding business model. There will always be dislocations in jobs, and the only solution is retraining and education, and continued scientific research and development advances.
You can’t expect a 65 year old worker to still use only the skills that they graduated high school with at 18, or college at 22. We didn’t even have hand calculators back then, but used slide rules. The young people that read this have no idea what a slide rule is. I was an early computer user in college, and was privileged to get one run in a day with my stack of punched cards that I had to carry to the computer center and back.
In Trump’s White House Energy page, he vows to drop the Clean Power Plan which has created hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs, much more than the number of lost coal mining jobs. Trump’s action will hamper these modern jobs providing clean burning and lower cost fracked natural gas, wind power, solar power, and increased energy efficiency. He will bring back polluting, unwanted, and more expensive coal plants. His so called clean carbon capturing coal plants have been sought for two decades, and are still impractical and much more expensive than anyone wants to pay for.
