A year of accomplishment under President Trump

As we hit the 11-month mark in the first presidency of Donald J. Trump, let's be clear about one central truth. MAGA was never going to happen overnight. It will take years to undo the damage done by previous administrations, particularly that of President 0, and realize the hopes and dreams that inspired Americans to elect Mr Trump POTUS. That said, even the lamestream media must admit (although they probably won't) that President Trump has done a tremendous amount of good in the first year of his first term. In Walt's opinion, he fully deserves two thumbs up!

His many detractors, like CBC's Neil Macdonald, want President Trump to fail, even if America goes down with him. They can't bring themselves to admit or even talk about the many good things he's accomplished in less than a year: the small ones (like making it OK to say "MERRY CHRISTMAS!" again) or the big ones, like pushing through a much-needed tax reform in spite of the opposition of Democrats and the Republican establishment. The fact is that Mr Trump has, in less than a year, done more than his predecessor did in eight years and more than the Republican Establishment did in a decade of controlling Congress!

The aforementioned tax cut and simplification bill will excuse a majority of Americans from personal income tax altogether. 80% of taxpayers will be able to file their returns on a post card. The top personal rate goes down to 37% the corporate rate to 21%. Americans will be able to keep more of the money they earn and put that money back into the economy.

The Democrats keep saying the tax reform will drive the budgetary deficit out of sight. Walt calls BS on that. According to the Federal Reserve, the annual deficit will be eliminated in less than three years and the national debt (as a percentage of GDP) will start to shrink. GDP growth should be close to 4% -- roughly double that of Canada -- generating nearly a trillion dollars of additional production and transactions in 2018 with only minimal inflation.

The result will be the revival of the spirit of entrepreneurship and capitalism, and the end of the Prez's defeatist warnings that the USA must learn to live with a mere 1% annual growth rate and ever-rising numbers of Americans surviving by sucking on the government tit. And, even better, the gap between the USA and China will finally stop narrowing, as America increases its lead as the world's largest economy.

In the first year of President Trump's term, 2,500,000 jobs have been created -- 228,000 jobs last month alone. The jobless rate is at a 17-year low. In 2017, 171,000 manufacturing jobs were created, compared with 16,000 lost in 2016.The unemployment rate is at its lowest this century! And that's not just for whities like Walt, but for Latinos too. Their unemployment rate is down to 4.7%, the lowest since recording started 45 years ago.

And how about the stock market? Since Mr Trump was elected, the Dow has risen by some 5000 points -- almost 30%. New highs have been hit over 15 times, and Walt predicts the Dow will hit 25,000 by New Year's Eve. (Lifetime pct .988.) Energy production has been drastically deregulated and imports of petroleum reduced to a third of the country's needs and falling steadily. And just this week, the bunkum of "climate change" -- the "global warming" that was -- has been taken off the list of threats to America.

Getting the costs of America's so-called health care "system" under control has presented a challenge, sure enough. President Trump said he would sign any health care bill Congress could pass. They tried twice to come up with a replacement for Obamacare, and failed twice. That's not the President's fault, but that of the Republicans in Congress, some of whom (Hello! Mitch McConnell) are working against the President's agenda, for reasons which we can only guess.

In his draft report card on the first year of POTUS' administration, Scott Adams writes that the only way to get a good health care bill is by letting the Republican Congress fail a few times so they become flexible (more bipartisan) later. He predicts that President Trump's potential influence over health care will grow over time as both sides look at a failing Obamacare system and don't want to explain their failure to voters next year.

And finally -- this is just a partial list of achievements -- there's immigration. Prototypes for the components of the Wall have been built and displayed. It will be built! The Department of Homeland Security reports border patrol arrests have dropped to a 45-year low, down 25 percent from this time last year. The millions of aliens who are in the USA illegally or on sufferance are getting nervous and are starting to go home or, like the Haitian "refugees" who've been in America for a decade, heading for Canada, where they'll be welcomed by the Trudeau government, if not the Canadian people.

Neil Macdonald and the other bleeding hearts in the media should realize that American voters didn't elect Donald Trump to be nice. They elected him to get things done. And that's exactly what he's doing.

Footnote from Ed.: The source of most of the statistics presented in this post is this week's (16/12/17) issue of The Economist. Even they, guardians of the liberal progressive ideal, are forced to admit that the outlook for the USA in 2018 is, errr, positive.

Book review: "A Better World for All"

"A Better World for All" -- great title for the Christmas season, even better as a resolution for the New Year. But how to achieve a better world for all? Is the power of prayer our only hope? NO! says Ron McPherson, the author of a new book (or booklet -- just 64 pages) bearing the aforementioned title.

A Better World for All is the "Reader's Digest version" of Mr. McPherson's first opus, Freedom's Dawning, reviewed by Walt way back in 2010. See "'Facilitism': a better answer?"

What Mr. McPherson articulates in these books is a modern version of the Utopian ideal propounded nearly five centuries ago by St. Thomas More. Mr. McPherson argues that his system, Facilitism, can deliver to us a world without poverty, with far less stress, free healthcare, free education and... wait for it... no taxes! It will be, he tells us, a healthier world, a friendlier world, a happier world.

Skeptical? Sure. But we've tried everything else -- capitalism, socialism, communism and every combination and variant of those "isms" -- and nothing has worked. But, you may say, isn't capitalism working? Even in one of the few remaining Communist countries, China, they're now practising "capitalism with Chinese characteristics". Whereas in the United States it's socialism with Democratic characteristics. How's that working out?

The root of the problem, Mr. McPherson argues -- indeed, the root of all evil -- is money! [Haven't we seen this movie before? Ed.] Yes, others have said that if there were only more money, everyone would be fat and happy. Major C.H. Douglas, the pioneer of the British "Social Credit" economic reform movement, proposed a "National Dividend" to distribute more money (in the form of debt-free credit) equally to all citizens, to help bridge the gap between purchasing power and prices. This would be coupled with a price adjustment mechanism, which he called the "Just Price", which would forestall any possibility of inflation.

Printing more money turned out to be the wrong answer. In 1936, the Social Credit government of the Canadian province of Alberta, printed "prosperity certificates" in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the Great Depression. The federal government took umbrage, saying only it had the right to print (and thus create) money. Canada's Supreme Court agreed and that was that.

But printing money is not Mr. McPherson proposes in A Better World for All. Think about it. Who uses cash money nowadays? The world runs on credit, which is to say, bookkeeping entries made by the banks. The "dollars" created by the Fed, for instance, don't really exist in the form of cash. Can you imagine how many dollar bills it would take to stand for the trillions of dollars in the USA's national debt?

Nor are US dollars back by anything. Once upon a time you could exchange a paper dollar for a silver dollar, or even a (very small) piece of gold. Not any more. It's all credit -- more accurately, debits and credits on bank computers all over the world.

So, Mr. McPherson asks, why don't we just do away with money? It's the kind of question that might provoke a certain amount of skepticism, not to say laughter, but the author thoughtfully provides a methodology for doing just that.

When I say "thoughtfully", I mean that literally. Facilitism is a system that Mr. McPherson has been thinking about and writing about for years. It deserves consideration. Walt recommends that you get A Better World for All -- click here to explore the Facilitism website -- and give it yours.