Little he's done "positively?" People can disagree about his choice of Supreme Court nominees or what his trade or immigration policies are. Those are politic and ideological disagreements. But my point is that all these actions have been carried out. They have happened. There is no chaos in the White House. There is no madman acting irrationally.
I remember in 1993 "60 Minutes" had a segment about the "chaos" within the Clinton Administration. Scores of people in his Administration were leaking to the media their dismay that there was no coherent organization of anything. They complained that working there was like attending a graduate seminar in policy analysis where everyone spend countless hours studying an issue and thereafter the President would just smile and say thank you and never act on anything.
As for fitness the most clearly unfit and dangerous President was George W. Bush. He clearly did not have the experience, intelligence or even temperament to be President. He launched a war in Afghanistan that FAILED. We never got a surrender agreement from them and they were never defeated. The same for Iraq. No "mission accomplished" there either. There was no surrender from the government there and America's stupid stated goal was to kill the top fifty members of their government so they went to ground and continued fighting forever. Bush was an idiot, failed in every business or enterprise he ever had anything to do except baseball. Did you hear anyone pointing that out at the time? Hell no. And he mismanaged every other aspect of the economy as well.
As for the tariffs, during the eight years of Obama we lost over 50,000 manufacturing jobs. In the last eighteen months we've regained 200,000 manufacturing jobs. Look at the business press and you'll see US companies are leaving China in droves. Much of this has to do with the venal nature of the Chinese themselves, and rising wages there. But much of it is the tariffs.
Have farmers been hurt by the tariffs? Yes, but who gives a shit. We don't want to be a country which sells corn and soybeans and imports our manufactures. We want to be a country which exports manufactures and not imports them. We want to be an industrial power again. Agriculture is not a priority. We are not a banana republic.
Originally Posted by pussycat
I didn't, and I won't, comment on chaos in the White House. Or Trump's temperament. I'm discussing Trump's accomplishments, or lack of accomplishments, since he has been POTUS.
Your statement about manufacturing jobs is VERY misleading. You might want to read the following article.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/01/ma...-roaring-back/
"The employment figures released on Jan. 5 showed an increase of 25,000 manufacturing jobs in December. That resulted, as we said, in a net gain for the year of 196,000 jobs. That was much better than in 2016, when the economy lost 16,000 manufacturing jobs. But it was not as good as 2011 or 2014, when the economy added a little more than 200,000 manufacturing jobs in each of those years.
Atkinson, co-author of a 2015 report called “The Myth of America’s Manufacturing Renaissance: The Real State of U.S. Manufacturing,” said that being 1.2 million short of the pre-recession jobs level is just one indication that manufacturing is not back.
“Even more telling,” Atkinson told us, “the U.S. is producing less manufacturing output in the second quarter of 2017 than it did in the last quarter of 2007,” when the recession started.
“Almost 10 years and NO growth in real output. This is not roaring back, or even back,” Atkinson, citing Bureau of Economic Analysis data, told us in an email."
You are correct when you say some manufacturing jobs are moving from China to the U.S. but I can find nothing to support you saying "in droves". And it has nothing to do with Trump's tariffs. The tariffs haven't been in place long enough to impact loss of manufacturing jobs. China seems to have altered their preferential policies because they are no longer so dependent on foreign firms in their country.
Once considered Beijing's most-welcomed guests, bringing with them the money, management skills, and technical knowledge that the country so badly needed, foreign companies now appear to have fallen out of favor.
"China doesn't need foreign companies so badly now in terms of acquiring advanced technology and capital as in previous years," said Professor Chong Tai-Leung from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, "so of course, the government is likely to gradually phase out more of these preferential policies for foreign firms."
Echoing Chong's comments, Shen Danyang, a spokesperson for China's Ministry of Commerce accused some foreign corporates last September of only wanting to make "quick money", had become too dependent on preferential government policies in China, and were starting to feel the pain of what he called a "deteriorating environment for business" in the country.
I'd love to have Trump tell farmers that he doesn't care about them. U.S. agricultural exports hit $140.5 billion in 2017. That's a nice chunk of change that you don't call a "priority".
