Are Things as Bad as Trump Says?
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
Again, this is my political rant channel, Steve's Café. If you're more interested in language learning, then tune in to my Lingo Steve channel. People have asked me there to make more videos in different languages, so I'm going to do so. I'll probably follow this one with a Japanese language video over there. And, if you are a learner of English, you can find the audio and text of this at LingQ, where you can study it to improve your English. Today, I want to talk about Donald Trump because it's topical to talk about him.
I haven't got all my thoughts organized, but I'll just sort of give you my perspective on this whole phenomenon. I think Donald Trump is a thoroughly disagreeable person.
Someone said you should read his book The Art of the Deal. I didn't read it, but I looked up some surveys, reviews and summaries of the book. Apparently, it talks most about him, but there is some advice there on how to do a deal and one of the bits of advice is ‘under promise and over deliver.' Well, Trump has been promising all kinds of stuff that he hasn't got a chance of delivering on, so he's certainly not living up to his bit of advice. That's only one of the things that I find disagreeable, for example, when he implies or says that he's going to create all those jobs in the U.S., he's going to bring jobs back and he's going to do so by sticking it to China and by sticking it to Mexico.
I think we need to be a little bit more realistic. First of all, things in the U.S. are not that bad. The level of unemployment might be a little higher than it was 10 years ago, but that's the case everywhere. So let's just look at an example of a country and an industrial sector that has lost a lot of employment in Canada and it has nothing to do with China or Mexico. Let's look at the forest industry.
I remember when I worked in the forest industry. For example, the Town of Port Alberni on Vancouver Island, a simple little town which had a pulp mill, a paper mill, a saw mill and loggers, was the richest town in Canada because everyone had people working. Maybe a husband and wife worked in the mill and the son worked logging, everybody had a good income. Well, employment in the forest industry in Canada has gone from 300,000 to 100,000, a third of the previous level.
Why? Because we don't need as much paper anymore, because we have the internet and because of a market that I'm very much involved with, Japan. We're facing more and more competition from second-growth forests in Scandinavia, Germany, Romania and New Zealand. There's competition out there. The saw mills and, I presume, the pulp mills, while I'm not as close to that as I am to saw mills, are so much more automated. There's far less employment, therefore, it's gone from 300,000 jobs to 100,000 jobs. That is very difficult on certain communities and those people who were employed in that sector, but it's not about scapegoating China or Mexico. Yes, to some extent, we have cheap product coming in from China that might be manufactured in the U.S., but I suspect a lot of that was already manufactured overseas 20 or 30 years ago; maybe not in China, but in some other low-wage country.
I'm talking about textiles, shoes and things of that nature. Perhaps there would be a little more employment, but sticking it to China is not going to bring back manufacturing jobs in the United States to any significant extent. So he's promising that he's going to bring the U.S. more employment, it ain't gonna happen. On the other side, he is thoroughly unpleasant.
How can you be involved in a political competition with say Hillary Clinton or any of his opposition and spend so much time calling them disgusting. Kasich is disgusting in the way he eats and Hillary Clinton would only get five percent of the vote if she were a male, which is absolute nonsense and it's based on nothing. He talks so much garbage and yet people support him, so I ask people why. Well, you know, people are so mad. They're mad at the system. What are they mad about? For example, the United States spends something like $8 or $9,000 per capita on public health care, let alone private health care.
That's about the highest in the world, only Norway and Denmark are close to that. So the government spends a lot of money on public health care. They may do it inefficiently, but money goes to health care. The United States spends more money than most countries on education. Again, it may not be very efficient, but it is spending the money. Yet, I saw a statistic and 45% of the population pay no taxes federally whatsoever. So they're getting health care, they're getting schooling, the quality of which is a problem, and other benefits that they don't even pay for. Yes, we're going through a period of adjustment, a period of automation and, yes, there's international competition.
To me, that's a good thing. I like international competition in many different ways. I like listening to music that I buy, but I don't only buy music played by Canadian artists. I want to hear Spanish guitar music; it might be by a Uruguayan for all I care. We live in a connected world. I want to buy fruit from Mexico, the Philippines. That's the benefit of living in this connected world. I'm not going to cut it all off in the hope that somehow it's going to raise standards of living, it won't. And so Trump…I just don't understand.
Things aren't that bad, they are worse in most other countries in the world. They might have been somewhat better for the majority of Americans in terms of their access to education, access to health care, the ability to buy things, but if people would only get out of their car they'd be healthier. Everywhere you go it's drive-in pharmacy, drive-in this, drive-in that, when people get out of their car they don't look like they could walk very far. That's an exaggeration, of course, but that's in the style of Trump. There are so many things that people could do in the United States, educate themselves, read more, take advantage of this wonderful world like the iPad or the iPhone.
I learn all my languages on my iPad and iPhone and none of that existed 10 years ago, 20 years ago at any rate. We have so many good things now that it's just for us to take advantage of. So all this business from people about, well, they know what Trump is saying is stupid, but they are just really annoyed at the system and stuff like that. I don't buy that at all.
I think they support that exists for Trump is a reflection, unfortunately, and I'm going to get a lot of negative comments on this, of the education system in the United States. Either people are poorly educated or they're taught to believe that they're entitled to a bunch of stuff when, in fact, nobody owes Americans a living. People aren't entitled to anything. I'm reading a history book about 1848 and there was a movement ‘the right to work'. We don't have a right to work. There are entrepreneurs who create jobs, the government doesn't create jobs. Whatever we want we're going to have to create it ourselves and the system isn't rigged. That's my view on it.
I think there is so much hype about how things are rigged, unfair, all this and all that and so people are going to vote for a guy whose wife buys $100,000 dress for one dinner and that's good, that's what we want to follow? I don't get it. Bye for now.
