Nicholas Goldberg: In the election struggle between ‘kitchen-table issues’ and the fate of democracy, which side won?
As voters cast their ballots for whom to support and to whose policies they turn up their noses so hard that they turn off the TV, and you go back to your kitchen table, where the conversation turns to the election and you start to lose interest.
The same can be said of our democracy. The people voted and it’s up to us whether they’re good enough and whether we have elected representatives who can carry out those decisions.
The result has been a series of failed policies which have delivered us a series of failed economies. The world is still trying to figure out where all those policies that once seemed to be the right thing for us, the people have gone wrong.
The first problem for us was, I think, the election campaign. We all knew it was a disaster from the beginning. It started in the first hour of the first debate when Clinton gave away a million jobs to her supporters.
Clinton, it turned out, had given away a little over 2,000 jobs to her supporters in the debate, but she had given them the jobs in her own campaign after her supporters had contributed to her campaign. She then gave the jobs to the people who gave money to her campaign. Clinton had then promised that those jobs were going to be hers but it turns out in the most recent data that she had given a little over 100 jobs to her supporters and nothing to the people she gave away.
We got a lot of promises but we got a lot of jobs. Some people say, well, she was giving jobs away. I don’t think so. I think we all saw that she was giving jobs away for her supporters who contributed to her campaign. Some people said, well, Clinton gives jobs away to her supporters. I don’t think so, either.
So we have one of the worst governments we’ve ever had. We have an income tax which is the highest in the world. We have a value-added tax. I don’t even remember how far behind we are in Europe, the countries with a VAT.
What we ended up with in Iraq was a disastrous investment in the form of a total commitment to an American military presence. I think that