Hello…
Though I see President-Elect Donald Trump’s tariff policies as somewhat of an impulsive “rush to judgement”, I can understand why he would promote such an economic policy in that he wants to see a return to American manufacturing prowess.
However, tariffs only can work successfully when a nation has a legitimate manufacturing capability, which the United States lost under both Democratic and Republican administrations in the past 35 years. Their rush to outsource every aspect of real-value American capabilities has cost our country dearly where we are now at a point where we no longer even have enough talent to rebuild a credible manufacturing base.
This lack of talent was recently demonstrated when Taiwan halted production on a new chip-manufacturing facility due to an inability to hire enough local talent to run the operation let alone build it.
As a result, to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity successfully, one must start from the ground up.
This is why I agree with President-Elect Donald Trump’s interest in abolishing the Department of Education, which has been one major factor in the rapid decline of US public education.
That being said I would prefer that the existing Department of Education not be completely abolished but instead severely scaled back and reformed so that its primary responsibility would be merely to advise and assist state educational systems to reform their own programs by returning them to the original foundations of public education. This would mean eliminating the use of technologies until students reach high school while returning studies back to the way they were taught in the 1960s when students were expected to work hard at their studies instead of spending a good deal of their time on external activities.
Actual learning is and always has always been a difficult process to undertake. Making it increasingly easier for students to literally skate through programs is not doing anything to prepare them for the future.
In concert with this, our university educational systems need massive reforms as well.
This idea where free expression is defined by what the donors and the administrators of our university systems want it to be is not what such schools of higher education are supposed to be.
We need qualified teachers and professors running our educational institutions at all levels and not the ideologically bent fools that now populate a large portion of such institutions.
And we need a return to hard-core standards in our universities along with tough entrance requirements just like we had back in the 1960s before they were slowly redefined to satisfy the demands of the intelligently vacant and vapid ideologues who inhabit them currently.
Once our nation starts producing good graduates in the technologies and the sciences we will then have a good basis to rebuild our manufacturing capabilities where good people will find employment in new and growing research and development areas as companies begin to reinvest in real-value investments instead of financial mirages.
Of course, one cannot wait for a redevelopment of an educational base to support a new manufacturing capability. As a result, the US will have to attract new investment in such a field while we also bring in qualified educational instructors who concentrate mostly on the hard-core fundamentals of education to give a boost to educational reform.
Once we have developed a new and strong manufacturing base again, then tariffs on foreign imports makes sense in that it encourages Americans to buy American goods and products creating a feedback-loop into our own industries.
That is how America created not only a powerful manufacturing sector but a vibrant middle-class with good jobs as well…
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer / Military Historian-Analyst