I was glued to the TV set at age 12 in 1960 to watch the Kennedy-Nixon debates.
President John F. Kennedy inspired me to the point that I was going to be a Democrat, learn the skills of public speaking and study political science in college. At the age of 15, I was the president of the Young Democrats of Hamilton Township, N.J. At the age of 16, I received observer credentials to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where I saw President Lyndon Johnson receive the Democratic Party nomination for president.
I spoke with a relative of Medgar Evers of Mississippi, a civil rights activist, at the convention. I, too, became concerned about the average Joe. I watched the liberal wing of the Democratic Party thinking that it could help the working people of America prosper by redistributing income from the most productive members of our society. Today the average working person is earning less in our little-growth economy, brought to us by President Barack Obama, than they did under Presidents Kennedy and Reagan.
In 1980, I became a Republican because I viewed the Reagan economic and foreign policy programs as mirroring the programs of President Kennedy. President Kennedy stood up to Premier Nikita Khrushchev and made him take down the missiles in Cuba. That strong foreign policy leadership by President Kennedy was parallel to President Reagan when he went to the Berlin Wall and shouted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” As a result, President Reagan won the Cold War with the Soviet Union without firing a shot. That strong leadership is compared to President Obama drawing a line in the sand when he demanded that Syria not use chemical weapons on its own people. President Bashar al-Assad crossed that line, and President Obama did nothing about it. That is when the United States became a paper tiger. That world view made the world a much more dangerous place because our allies could not count on us and our enemies did not respect us.
Not so with the Kennedy and Reagan foreign policy leadership. President Kennedy cut our personal taxes on the most productive members of our economy, as did President Reagan, and now President Donald Trump is taking a page out of their economic playbook.
President Trump is doing this because he read history and understands that if you want to grow our economy to keep jobs in America and have rising wages, we need a corporate tax system that makes our corporations competitive with the rest of the world. His policy will stop the inversion of our major corporations leaving our country for foreign headquarters. Inversion is a situation that allows our corporations to move their headquarters to a lower-tax nation and receive the benefits of lower taxation.
The mistake that President Jimmy Carter made was to elevate our Department of Education to a Cabinet-level position in 1978. The theory was that by doing this, the federal government would know better how to educate our children than state and local school boards. At that time, the United States was No. 1 in the world in K-12 education. Today we are No. 25. So much for big government having the answer to providing us with a free and prosperous middle class of which education is the foundation.
In my macroeconomics course, I was taught the multiplier effect also. I also saw that President Dwight Eisenhower spurred the construction of the Interstate Highway System, which he believed was a way to defend our country after seeing the Autobahn in Germany. Instead, it was the catalyst for making America the strongest economy in the world. Compare that to the infrastructure program proposed by President Obama.
In the 200-plus years from President Washington to President George W. Bush, these presidents accumulated $9 trillion in national debt. In just eight years, President Obama doubled the national debt that took over 200 years to create, to over $18 trillion. And what infrastructure program did he provide for the working people of this country? It was about $30 billion of over $10 trillion in national debt. Where did all that money go while the working people endured a less than 2 percent growth in our economy and stagnant wages for the last eight years?
When it comes to income inequality, the socialistic polices of the big-government Democratic Party has been the greatest contributor to allowing the rich to become richer while the average Joe or Jane cannot receive a decent safe rate for their savings to provide for the education of their children or save for retirement. This is an issue I, as an investment real estate broker, have witnessed firsthand. Because President Obama catered to the environmental extremists (not environmentally concerned people) and the wing of the Democratic Party that believes our free enterprise system is our problem and needs to punished, he abandoned a pro-growth economic policy and let the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve run our economy.
If we do not have a fiscal policy that grows our economy, we do not use more fossil fuels. No fossil fuels are favored by environmental extremists. If we over-regulate our free enterprise system and tax it so that it is uncompetitive in the world, corporations do not invest in their businesses and cannot increase the wages of their employees. Because President Obama produced a no-pro-growth fiscal policy, America got very little infrastructure expenditures and his policies forced the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates artificially low. These low rates allowed people with large sums of investment money to make large returns on their investments.
Meanwhile, the average working person who is trying to increase his or her family savings of $5,000 and $10,000-plus get to save safely at less than 1 percent. So if the Republican Party is the mouthpiece for the wealthy then the Obama administration was the enabler of widening the gap in income inequality for the workers in America. Hillary Clinton did not understand the problems of working people and President Trump did.
(Joe Mendola lives in Warner.)