I have heard a lot about the policies of the former president making up for a lot of downside. With all due respect, setting aside all of the former president's illicit, untruthful and immoral actions, I am not too keen on his policies or results.
-focusing first on gutting people's healthcare with a horribly designed replacement was unwise. Senator John McCain actually saved the Republican party and 20 million Americans by voting it down.
-the tax law which increased debt by $1.6 trillion by lowering corporate and wealthy folks' taxes gave a brief sugar rush to the economy before it fell back to previous levels. A key reason is too many companies bought stock back rather than investing it in their businesses which actually surprised the White House.
-the travel ban rolled out on a Friday was so poorly communicated it was pulled in two days; apparently communicating change to the people executing it was an afterthought and he failed to brief Congress beforehand. This was a failure of epic proportions.
-several studies have shown tariffs are not successful as they punish customers and upset supply and sales chains. The former president has said China pays for the tariffs about twenty times and each time economists have corrected him - importers pay for them and pass along to consumers. It saddens me that Biden continued several of them.
-weakening NATO and our allied relationships through tariffs and by pulling out of the TPP has reduced our influence. Global commerce makes the world more secure. In my view, the best thing any leader can do is open up avenues for trade as Nixon and Clinton showed. Trump actually called Jimmy Carter to see how to compete better against China - the TPP which went on without us was a tool to do just that.
-slackening our efforts in combatting climate change and environmental degradation have hurt not just Americans. Pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Change accord at the same time The Breakthrough Energy Coalition of major investors was being created is telling. California, if measured as a country, is the 4th largest solar energy country in the world and oil rich Texas leads the country in wind energy.
-what has gotten so little press is the former president canning a planned requirement to make all investment advisors fiduciaries, meaning they must consider the interests of their clients above their own. This favors investment brokers, not investors.
-finally, his poor handling of the pandemic was harmful to Americans. As two examples, the unlearned lesson from earlier pandemics is keeping kids out of school pays dividends as they sit so close to each other and more readily pass the germs taking them to/ from home. And, we were not testing travelers when they made it home. One expert said by the time we banned travel from China, COVID was already here.
Biden has not been perfect with his policies, continuing the tariffs being one example, but he has done much more to help Americans than his predecessor and the economy and job growth has been more and he kept us in the Paris Climate Change which Trump threatens to take us out again.
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