Reply To: Donald Trump & What Is Immaturity?

[Juan E. Sandoval]

The Facts

• Objectively speaking, terrorism in the USA has a yearly death toll (~95)  smaller than that of babies suffocating from plastic bags (~1100)
• Objectively speaking, pollution has a yearly death toll ~(135,000) a thousand times larger than that of terrorism.
• Objectively speaking, human driving error has a yearly death toll (~35,000)  hundreds of times larger than that of terrorism.

Therefore, objectively speaking, pollution, gas powered cars and something as innocuous as plastic bags (to use one random example) kill thousands of times more American citizens per year than terror attacks.
Hypothesis
If the political goal of electees was to protect America, efforts would be directed towards -- turning to a renewable source of energy to stop the pollution of our cities, to electrification and automation of transport, to prevent unnecessary fatalities, and so forth.
What happens: Myopic focus is directed towards a few allegedly hostile international groups and they are provoked, giving us a reason to go to war. But not just any groups; groups that we have some political advantage in attacking --while framing it under the pretense of stopping a deadly global threat ("War On Terror").
Speculation about True Aims:
The sensible conclusion to come to is that the political electees are not really interested in the American people's wellbeing, but are motivated by power and economic directives. Why? Because the behavior of the USA is perfectly in line with such an outcome, and utterly out of line with a strategy that would be in favor of the American people. The wars overseas don't benefit the American people, and they aren't the real threats.
More Facts:

• Objectively speaking, climate change is real, human caused, and on the road to disaster --and is one of the largest consensus ever from the scientific body --across dozens of disciplines converging in data. The consensus says we need to urgently move away from fossil fuel reliance.
• Objectively speaking, the oil industry is a multi-trillion (trillion--as in $1,000,000,000,000) dollar industry with lobby groups in government and an agenda to continue selling oil, and a history of suppressing information on climate change.
• Objectively speaking, the USA government alone subsidizes gas at $4.6 billion ($4,600,000,000) a year.
• Objectively speaking, the gap between the rich and poor in the USA has greatly increased over the past 20 years --and is only getting worse as laws are overturned that have been in place to prevent multi-billion dollar corporations from gaining too much power.

Hypothesis:
Therefore, the oil industry is invested in lobbying for bills and laws to pass that benefit their continued success, and have close ties with governments due to their immense concentration of wealth. The automotive industry is also closely allied.

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Facts on Immigration:
On GDP: https://ir.citi.com/FBbeXUKehK94DM2ktog5Yjj4Eh9MKmlJH34Poe7ZhEFhORbQvjK8I1BVlhg%2BCNS4WRzN1yW9UoM%3D

Our overriding conclusion is that migration is conducive to native and aggregate prosperity, especially over longer time frames. Throughout this report, we explore much of the recent literature on migration and present new estimates of some of the recent growth effects of migration. We find that migration is likely to generate greater prosperity on an aggregate, per capita and per worker basis, though the associated distributional effects of this may be uneven.

On Job Displacement:

https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/125271
Politicians, the media, and the public express concern that immigrants depress wages by competing with native workers, but 30 years of empirical research provide little supporting evidence to this claim. Most studies for industrialized countries have found no effect on wages, on average, and only modest effects on wage differentials between more and less educated immigrant and native workers. Native workers’ wages have been insulated by differences in skills, adjustments in local demand and technology, production expansion, and specialization of native workers as immigration rises.

More: http://www.aei.org/publication/how-immigration-boosts-american-economic-growth-and-innovation/

One wonders to what extent anti-immigration sentiment is driven by a warped understanding of reality. Right off the bat, a new economic research review by Citi and Oxford-Martin points out that Americans think nearly 40 percent of the country are migrants. The reality is 13 percent, a misperception gap also found across advanced economies.
But the lack of understanding probably doesn’t stop there. The study, “Migration and the Economy,” goes to great length in explaining the unappreciated beneficial impact from the global movement of our fellow humans. The headline stat is that without migration, US economic growth would have been roughly 15 percentage points lower than it actually has been. Or to put it another way: “While not quite putting the US in recession, this is enough to cancel out the majority of post crisis gains.”

Conclusion:
Immigration is a net positive to the financial growth of a nation. It is a boost to the GDP. Immigrants contribute to the supply/demand of goods, and to the economy. There is no strong evidence for job displacement over a 30 year research period.
My take:
Donald Trump was elected not by reason but by appeal to emotion. His platform was based on lies that "felt" right to an American group who, while meaning well, were severely misinformed about the actual state of the world and reality. His platform included things such as:

• Immigration as responsible for our economic declines - objectively false
• Invasion from islamic/mexican/etc groups, as one of our biggest threats to security - objectively false. way false.
• Denial of climate change as a threat to humanity - objectively false
• A promise to "drain the swamp" of political corruption - objectively false. he did the opposite.

I could go on but it suffices to say that I believe the American people were swoon over by words that resounded with their felt grievances and what they felt were the "culprits" -- but this was all misdirection.
And instead, Trump's election represents yet another billionaire corporatist lobbying for his friends, as they collaborate to increase the wealth of oil companies -- further harming the planet, continuing to slowdown the transition to renewable energy, hampering the progress towards electrification of vehicles (because that would mean less gas cars and less oil industry), etc.
These corporations started off as a necessary part of the economy, but have now become too big to fail, and are no longer subservient to the population -- but are acting to overwrite the democratic process and run away with the coins. And meanwhile the American people are blaming immigrants and terrorism, because that's a clever diversion and story they've written.
That is what is objectively happening, insofar as I can tell. You can facts check me if you'd like.
This, as far as I can tell, is a bipartisan issue. The temperamental difference between republicans/conservatives and democrats/liberals is a necessary one. But neither party is truly in favor of undermining the democratic process -- and the primary issue should be to fix this runaway corruption. Donald Trump is NOT on board with this solution, despite some lip service, but is perhaps one of the most explicit demonstrations of that very same corruption to date.