Let's Make American Cars Great Again, While Remembering That Some American Cars Are Already Great

A recession is inevitable no matter which candidate is selected. http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2015/02/when-will-the-u-s-have-its-next-recession/

@28-Cars-Later Of course. There's always going to be a next recession. The difference is that if Clinton is elected it will be part of the normal business cycle and if Trump is elected it will happen immediately, as business largely gets put on hold until it becomes clearer what is going to happen with him in office. Businesspeople really, really, really don't like uncertainty and unknowns. Trump is literally the biggest unknown in the history of American presidential politics, because of his combination of unpredictability and a complete lack of relevant knowledge or experience. (If he took office, he'd be the only president in American history without high-level government or military experience.)

@dal20402 I agree business prefers predictability but I disagree on the exact timing. Personally I see it more likely in 2017-18. I also don't think Trump is unknown as some think, he's already started back-peddling on some things much to my chagrin. We also must remember the current President had no real qualifications to assume the post to which many rightists criticized, yet we are still here. Unless President Trump truly went batsh*t crazy, things wouldn't change as radically as some think. Deport some illegals? Wow enforcing existing statutes, shocker. Tariffs? Wow attempting to fight cheap foreign goods and maybe create jobs. I don't think he'd get a wall because its not realistic. I can't think of too much else he's demanded of the top of my head. Here's another tidbit from my own experience. In 2012 my then g/f, who was an IT contractor for Thermo Fisher, was cut along with all other contractors on her project the Friday after the election. I don't recall the stated BS reason, however it was implied to her "We lost the election and needed to cut back" (which I realize is hearsay but was probably true). I expect the same this time around no matter who is selected because there will be no real winners. I only hope my company isn't suddenly sold between now and November as rumors here suggest, as then I'll be set to ride through the turmoil through to next year and possibly start looking.

@28-Cars-Later The whole problem is that what he proposes changes from one day to the next, and there's no way to predict which scenario happens, or even if he stays within the system. "Deport some illegals?" Depends on whether it's the same record number of "some illegals" that the current administration has been deporting, or 3% of the US population. Deport 3% of the population, unequally distributed, and a whole lot of businesses will need to defer investment (if they can stay alive at all). Tariffs? Now we're talking. Depending on what tariffs were imposed, that could cause substantial bits of our export economy to disappear overnight. For example, impose a tariff on Chinese consumer goods and watch the Chinese government cancel all of our aerospace business there and hand it to Europe. In my area, that alone would cause a substantial loss of well-paying union blue-collar jobs and a real hit to the local economy. And then there's his incoherent and wildly self-contradictory talk on finance. If I were a banker, I'd be petrified of his election. With Clinton, you know what you're getting: most likely no change, but with a Democratic congress maybe higher capital requirements and a few more regulations governing risky trades. With Trump, you wouldn't have any idea. There would be no way to make a coherent business plan, and the most likely response would be to curtail all but the bluest-chip lending until the picture was a little clearer.

@28-Cars-Later 28CL, business people I know are already in the process of adapting or adjusting to whichever candidate gets elected in Nov, although most anticipate Hillary to be the one. The same happened when O got elected. Before he was sworn in, many had already made major adjustments to their business, finances, and lifestyle to offset the disastrous effects his "spreading America's wealth around" would have on their assets.

@28-Cars-Later I see what you're saying, but I seem to recall Obamacare changing somewhat frequently in the run up to its passing. Now perhaps it wasn't a near daily change, but the ideas of it were not the original ones discussed. Flip flopping is nothing new, but perhaps in Trump's case it is too frequent. I am not an attorney as you are, but my basic understanding is if Federal statute called for a deportation of 10% of the entire US population should they be illegal aliens, then not doing so would be a violation of the law, correct? The fact X% of the population is already illegal has already demonstrated the failure of branches of state and federal government to comply with the written law. Complying with already written law is not rocket science. Now if this was actually achieved and Trump went further, I see the concern. The trade deficit stood at $531.5 billion in 2015. This number will continue to grow until the cart is tipped over unless something is done about it. I do not doubt it will require a wholesale approach as opposed to just something as simple as a few tariffs, but I do know the GATT treaty (later WTO) has eviscerated the US economy. From a consumer products standpoint, US buyers may be better off with more expensive but better made goods than cheap Chinese throwaways. I assume you're referring to Boeing vs Airbus, I don't know enough about the situation to effectively comment. I do wonder however those few thousand existing jobs fare against the hundreds of thousands of US jobs not being created as the result of globalism. I also have no doubt the Pentagon or some other "ally" would automagically place an order for military aircraft should Boeing legitimately fall into dire straits. Here's where we may diverge, bankers are a big part of the problems we face as a society. They should be afraid, and many of them should already be in jail for actions in 2008. They own HRC, and with respect to them nothing will change. We the peons need something to change for the better which the Obama administration has not wrought. We need the necessary evil of banking to scale things back a bit. We need to get out of ZIRP. We need jobs beyond server-level. We need a Justice department to enforce the law. We also need our government to level off its spending problems and scale back the psychopathy a tad. I don't know if any of those things could occur with Trump, but I do know none of them will occur with a career criminal such as HRC.

@28-Cars-Later When a statute as written cannot practically be put into practice 100 percent of the time, the law has ways of adapting. That is a pretty common situation with regulatory statutes, which include the immigration statutes and lots of others from food safety to traffic rules to consumer protection. One common way the law adapts is to acknowledge that the executive branch has to pick and choose where to focus its enforcement resources, and recognize as valid those types of executive decisions. Just think as an analogy about what it would take to enforce every traffic law, every time. You'd need a video camera covering every foot of roadway, a software system that could detect every little misstep shown on the camera, and the manpower to review each thing the camera flagged and handle the monumental volume of violations. Signal 98 feet in advance instead of 100? Get a ticket. Drift over the double yellow slightly to safely pass a bicyclist rather than staying behind him for miles? Get a ticket. Turn into the far lane? Get a ticket. Stop two feet over the stop line? Get a ticket. Obviously that's never going to happen. You'd be wasting monumental amounts of public money and employing huge numbers of people for fairly minimal public benefit. Deporting every person who entered the country illegally would require an effort of similar intrusiveness, for a similar lack of benefit. There is literally no way to find them all except to conduct a simultaneous, nationwide house to house search while enforcing checkpoints on the street. The logistics and cost of that are obviously impossible to handle. And beyond the logistics, just imagine how that would make American citizens feel about their country, and how badly it would betray American ideals. All this so that otherwise law-abiding people who mostly pay taxes and contribute to the economy can be kicked out (we already do a decent job of kicking out the non-law-abiding ones). So instead we have court decisions that say the executive has the discretion to forbear deportation in individual cases. Whether he can do so for entire classes of immigrants is the question at issue in the litigation over Obama's executive orders, but no one disputes he can do it in individual cases. And, practically, that means he chooses to ignore millions of cases completely. Not doing so anymore would be a seismic policy shift and create overnight the largest project the United States government has ever undertaken.

@28-Cars-Later Also, "career criminal" is an awfully strange way to describe someone who has never been charged with a crime despite being the subject of one government investigation or another for pretty much her entire adult life, mostly by investigators who had strong political or career incentives to find some way to charge her.

@28-Cars-Later Deport 10 million, and you've got a vacuum for 10 million others. Never mind the logistical nightmare, but won't we have to stop hiring them, somewhere along the line? Why not start there in the first place? They'd deport themselves, like millions did when the economy and housing boom, hit the skids.

@28-Cars-Later If we stop hiring migrant workers, and no citizens are willing to fill the gap, then our food will rot on the vine, our houses will be a mess, and diapers will go unchanged. Yuk. Also, you're assuming that undocumented workers come to the US for the jobs. Maybe they just like raping.