Trump voters: what do you expect and want to happen in the next four years?

Politics & Elections
61

This is a message that Democrats were supremely shitty about getting across.

62

The man is completely and totally about self promotion. If he doesn’t get what he wants in that area, he is not going to make much of an effort for ‘the people.’

63

(double post)

64

If we go by a total border-wall price tag of $30 billion, spread out over eight years, and assume annual federal budgets of $4-5 trillion per year, isn’t that less than** 0.1 percent** of the federal budget, per year?

65

It’s more a political responsibility, and the ICE union which endorsed Trump will explain to him that while they would welcome a wall in some areas, others just don’t need one. The desert itself is a “wall” that few can cross successfully.

66

Which is to say, they die.

67

[QUOTE=Aceplace]
Rebuild America’s decaying infrastructure. Many bridges, roads, and dams are all old and unsafe. Trump’s construction background makes him ideal for this task. This will put many people back to work.
[/QUOTE]

Well, no, probably not.

Infrastructure is not built by people who are easily unemployed. It’s built by skilled labor. You need machinists, welders, carpenters, engineers, draftsmen, millwrights. People like that tend to already HAVE jobs, and if they don’t it is disproportionately likely that

  1. There is something wrong with them as an employee, or
  2. They are not physically located where the jobs are, can’t or won’t move, and may not be conveniently local to your next infrastructure project.

Unemployment in the United States is very low. I know Donald Trump told you everything is a disaster. I know people think the Mexicans are “stealing” jobs. The indisputable fact is this: unemployment is low. It doesn’t actually get much lower than it is now; the absolute low point of my lifetime of more than four decades on this planet was 3.8% in the last year of the Clinton administration. If the government engages in a massive infrastructure project, what will largely happen is they will be taking skilled workers away from existing work.

I know this will sound weird, but at times like this, what causes unemployment is not a lack of jobs. Yeah, yeah, it seems counterintuitive, and it’s not always true; if Trump gets his wish about NAFTA and it cascades into a global trade arrest, there will be way too few jobs. But the reason people are out of work right now is because there is a disconnect between the pool of labor and available jobs. People who wish to work but have no job (discounting frictional unemployment) are generally out of work because:

  1. They have no skills or education,
  2. They do have skills but not ones an employer seeks, e.g. a political science major,
  3. They live distant from jobs they could do, or
  4. They’re black. Black people are still much likelier to be denied jobs they are in fact skilled enough to do.