No wonder this administration can’t get anything done. It specializes in wishful thinking.
This conveys the impression that the administration cares a lot about cutting taxes for very wealthy people and corporations, and considers the other elements of the plan to be filler, to be sketched in brief if at all.
.. Tell hundreds of thousands of government employees that they need to make a more business-friendly environment, and you’ll rapidly discover the terrifyingly myriad ways in which such a directive can be interpreted by individual minds. No, what you actually have to do is create rules to follow, all of them spelled out in mind-numbing minutiae.
Detail makes enemies.
Let’s revisit the personal deduction eliminations, for example. Going to get rid of the deduction for people with high medical expenses? Enjoy the frantic phone calls from patient groups. How about educational savings accounts? Are they going away? Stand by for the firestorm of indignation from middle-class parents. If the Trump administration actually tries to enact its plans, one by one, many of its ideas, so pleasing in vague summation, will become flesh, encounter political resistance, and die an early and gruesome death.
In West Virginia coal country, voters are ‘thrilled’ about Donald Trump
Before the price of coal collapsed, before the number of working miners in the state fell to a 100-year low of 15,000, miners could make $60,000, even $75,000 a year, without a high school education. Walmart money doesn’t come close.
.. Winans, 85, lost one son in the mine and another on a gas drilling rig. Her husband died of black lung disease after a life in the mines. Eighteen years later, Winans still hasn’t remarried because marriage would end her black lung benefits.
“The government makes you live in sin,” she said. She’s lived with a man for years, always feeling a bit guilty about it, “but I’m not giving up that money for a piece of paper that says ‘I do.’ ”.. Despite the tragedies that have marked her life, Winans prays for the return of coal, and she says Trump will make it happen.“I like the way he talks — straight,” she said, “not like that Hillary [Clinton], the way she got up there and shook her finger and said she’d shut every mine down. What would that do to West Virginia?”.. Trump’s appeal here is stylistic as well as policy-driven ..
It’s about coal, but also about being ornery and oppositional.
“Trump was just what people here have always been — skeptical of government, almost libertarian,” He’s going to undo the damage to the coal industry and bring back the jobs, and all of our kids down there in North Carolina are going to come home.”
.. “The whole history of West Virginia is exploitation by outside influences,” he said. “Now the guy 80 percent of us voted for turns around and nominates one of the least favorite names in Upshur County. If he brings in more billionaires and Mitt Romney is secretary of state, people will say, ‘Well, wait a minute now.’
.. he wonders if the selection of Ross means Trump might not really be a friend to miners.
.. “It’s your parents’ and your grandparents’ and your life,” he said. “You just accept the risk, just like driving an automobile or playing football. You have to live. And my uncle, like me, loved it more than anything. If you have a curious mind or any interest in geology
.. “I guess I really want to believe it’s really going to be different,”