Friday, March 3, 2017

Trump, who do you owe money to?

While I think Trump is a narcissist, a conman and is uniquely unfit to be our president, I honestly want him to find his way and not
be utterly terrible.  I say that because ultimately, he'll ride off into the sunset and we'll be left holding the bag.

In the many conversations I've had about Trump I finally decided to crystallize my thoughts.

The main question that many of my friends ask is, "What's the thing that Trump could do that would make you happy?"

What I would like Trump to do is fully disclose his fiduciary obligations both foreign and domestic.

We know for a fact that he has a $600 million dollar mortgage with the Chinese central bank.
While he's claimed he doesn't have any holdings in Russia, his son in law has contradicted this statement.
Without this information every action he takes gets to be an exercise in asking "Is he doing that because it's good for America or is his doing that because it's good for Trump?"

Next I'd like to see him fully personally divest and have his personal financies put into a blind trust like every president has done for the last 30 years.

Finally, I'd like to see him fully transfer control of Trump Enterprises to a private management company not connected with the Trump family.

I'm not confident this would solve the fiduciary problems, but it would bring them out into the light.

As for his 54 billion increase in spending for the military, it's absurd.
Firstly, we don't need more nuclear weapons, that's just craziness.

The bigger issue than even the 54 billion is the long term costs that go along with that.
So you spend 54 billion now to build ships, etc. You still need to pay to maintain that equipment.
When you grow the military from a personal point of view, all those people end up eventually with huge entitlements.
I noticed there wasn't much said about the VA... consider that with our existing military personal size the VA is a complete disaster... Let's compound that with more people.

When it comes to the conversation about nuclear weapons, at this point we've either scrapped or mothballed all the facilities needed to take spent uranium and extract the plutonium out of it.

What's the environmental and monetary costs to get those programs up and running again?
Next, it's one thing to have a bomb... you need some way to deliver that bomb.  At last check our Ohio class subs are aging. While there's been talk of building Virginia class boomers... has that happened?  Are there even plans on a drawing table? What about the ICBM's that'll be in those subs?  Mind you he's not talking about retiring the existing systems, he's talking about expanding.  So we're going to have to continue to spend billions maintaining and updating what we've already got on top of new systems.

As for his Trillion dollar infrastructure bill... how's he going to pay for this?  He's also talking about tax cuts.
The math simply doesn't add up. While I agree our infrastructure needs some serious updating, nobody seems willing to actually pay for it.  We're perfectly willing to subsidize he shit out of gas and oil though.

No comments: