"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in message
...
Per Vic Smith:
IMHO, the vast majority of Trump supporters are deplorable.
Simple as that. Being a rube is no excuse.

The pundits I've been listening to (David Brooks, for example) would
disagree.

Certainly Trump has a lock on the Racist/White Supremacist vote,

And there's a large enough segment of his base that are like that supporting
him unfortunately amounts to tacit support of his most rabid base.

but the guys I've been listening to say that many (or maybe most) Trump
supporters are good, decent people who have simply been ignored by both
parties for years and years.

I don't know how you assign a figure to how many supporters are closet
KKK'ers and how many are good, decent people. I do know one metric: It
seems a lot easier to find Trump supporters willing to go straight to
impeachment, overthrow and rebellion remarks because they're on the news on
most every channel almost every night. I don't have to go looking for them
and there are people in different cities all saying similar things at Trump
rallies.

For instance the Repubs, in an act of amazing leadership, have convinced
a large block of people living paycheck-to-paycheck that voting for them
is patriotic, tax cuts for people earning over $250,000 per year are in
their interest, and a bunch of other things..... and they have been
harvesting those votes for years and years without doing anything for
those people.

It's been done with oceans of paid propaganda. The truth is that people do
better under Democratic presidents:

http://www.marke****ch.com/story/luc...ats-2015-10-27

Since 1945, American voters have swung back and forth between both
parties: seven Democratic presidents and nine Republican ones. Economic
growth in real terms (in other words adjusted for inflation) averaged 2.54%
per year under Republican presidents, but 4.35% per year under Democratic
ones. That annual difference of 181 basis points, say Alan Blinder and Mark
Watson, the two economics professors at Princeton who conducted the study,
really adds up over time. It means that real GDP expanded 18.6% during a
"typical Democratic four-year term, but only by 10.6% during a typical
Republican term." Adding more fuel to the argument, The Economist notes that
better job creation and stock market performance also coincide more with
Democratic presidents than Republican ones.

And I believe that the death of the trickle-down tomfoolery is yclept.
Trickle-down will lumber along for a little while longer at the hands of the
old school Republicans, but the economic data strongly suggest that tax cuts
to the rich increase speculation and not jobs. Look at all the work on
self-driving vehicles and think about all the people that drive for a
living. They're heading off a cliff but we keep hearing from the R's that
they have a solution: give the wealthy more money to kill, not create, new
jobs. At least that's the real result of their policies.

Worse still, the speculation that springs from lower taxation on the
ultra-rich tends to wreak havoc with younger people. The housing bubble
made it almost impossible for first home buyers in many markets.

The Dems have been no better. Once the party of union and working
people, they have become the party of the educated suburbanite upper
middle class....and have taken the brunt of the responsibility for
implementing NAFTA with no measures to soften the impact on all those
people who would lose their jobs.

I am not sure who to blame for NAFTA and even if there IS any blame.

http://www.factcheck.org/2010/05/naftacafta-blame-game/

SEIU-COPE points to a report authored by economist Robert E. Scott for the
Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that is partly funded by labor
unions and has union presidents on its board. Scott estimated in 2003 that
NAFTA, enacted 10 years earlier, was responsible for the net loss of 879,280
jobs. But other studies have found the net impact on jobs was minor.

I wouldn't back Trump on a bet... but I can easily see how decent
hard-working people who have not had their ears to the ground
politics-wise could be strongly attracted to somebody, *anybody*,
besides the status quo.

The gridlock is really in Congress, not the Presidency. Look at the
difference in approval ratings. IIRC, Congress is heading towards negative
approval numbers at 13%. Until the problems in Congress are fixed, the game
will pretty much continue on the same track.

--
Bobby G.