We are consistently hearing two phrases during the 2016 campaign: “Take America Back” and “Make America Great Again.” But just what do these two phrases mean?
I’ve had many of my radio listeners assert that these phrases mean giving the power back to the elite, the rich or even white people. I find such charges outrageous and small-minded.
In exploring these phrases, I’ve discovered that most Americans fail to understand the greatness and opportunity - for each person - that lays just beneath the surface of our nation. It’s become popular to attack big business, denigrate successful (rich) people and fight for the poor. But in the process, we’ve damaged the very core of what helps the poor rise out of poverty and achieve the potential that only American citizens can find.
What you focus on expands. We have turned the focus off of success and onto the failures. In doing so, we have generations of Americans that see businesses in America as the enemy. Having operated my own company for years, I found it striking how all of these “save the poor” policies and regulations actually caused me to hire fewer people, offer fewer benefits and ultimately merge my company with a larger one (in which more jobs were lost). As we grew, we needed a lawyer on retainer just to help us navigate employment regulation by the federal and state government. Building a new facility took a team of experts to navigate the federal and municipalities’ overarching government regulations. Even putting my logo on the building sign was not allowed in some places, because it wasn’t esthetically pleasing enough. It seems America has lost sight of the fact that branding and bravado is critical to success. Due to the costs resulting from these regulations and burdens, we couldn’t cover our employees for health insurance. I spent hundreds of hours trying to solve this problem to no avail.
So when I hear “take America back” or “make America great again,” I hear: remove the chains that bind us to failure and free our entrepreneurs, businesses and people to explore, create and grow unfettered again.
These phrases mean creating a foundation so that any American who wants to go to work every day, acquire a unique skill and behave with discipline can assuredly win in life. Take America back – back from those businesses that ship jobs overseas and hurt progress – by lowering the corporate tax rate to be competitive and fair. Many people believe this conservative idea of reduced corporate taxes (currently the highest in the World) is just another handout to big-business. Wrong! It’s removing a barrier to job creation and adding restrictions on companies who don’t pay any taxes at all. It rewards ethical corporate citizens and is balanced by forcing businesses avoiding taxes to start paying. The alternative? We remain stuck where are now, slowly losing our jobs to China and India.
It means bring America back to a place where all people have the same opportunity because there is abundance of growth in our own country. Take America back from politicians like Obama, who are more worried about appeasing the rest of the world with their policies than they are about their own citizens. Take America away from Washington politicians, like Bush, Clinton and McConnell whose very nature reduces freedom and nets excessive regulation that harms job-creating businesses. Take America back from liars and scam artists who win by cheating. Stop punishing entire industries for the actions of an immoral few.
If we are living up to our potential, everyone should have an opportunity to build a life, own a house, buy their own health insurance and rise out of poverty. These things aren’t “rights” as Bernie Sanders describes them, they are rewards for hard work and perseverance in a society that’s not rigged in favor of establishment politicians and their unethical Wall-Street donors.
The politicians have created so much regulation and tax burden on employers that we’ve developed an ‘every man for himself’ mentality. We've punished all of them for the wrongs of a few and are harming everyone’s job prospects in the process. Those getting harmed the most are in poverty, inner-city communities and the college students who are failing to find the kind of jobs they expected. Liberals in this campaign season want to punish all of us for this failed policy – by increasing taxes on job creators in order to pay for free college, and by fettering businesses through even more regulation and taxes in order to cure poverty. The student loan debt wouldn’t be a problem, if college graduates were finding jobs commensurate in pay with their degree. Taxes, regulations and social programs will not cure that ill.
These conditions are a direct result of liberal policy from the last two decades. This includes people like Bush and McConnell, Obama, Reed and Pelosi, who have failed the very tasks they were elected to perform. They are unqualified to understand the effect of government policy on behavior. For example, with the massive new regulations on banks as a result of the financial crisis of 2009, smaller banks are struggling. This happens in every industry when regulations are so burdensome it becomes insurmountable to keep up with compliance. The small and medium businesses get crunched out in mergers or closures and the big banks (some with crooked VP's and teams of lawyers) end up prevailing. This happens in spite of the fact that the very laws these political-fools put in place were to stop those very institutions from being able to create another crisis.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what these incompetent losers (yes, I like it when someone calls them what they are ...like Trump does) are doing to destroy the very unity and resolve that made this country great. Let's take that back from those losers and return it to the people. They’ve failed.