The Heritage Insider: Trump and working class men, why the electoral college, priorities for a new administation, Iran deal can be revoked, why are college students so sensitive?

November 12, 2016

 

 

Trump won because he talked about the challenges facing working class men. Why do we have an electoral college, again? There are lots of issues for President Trump to tackle; here are a few. Since the Iran deal isn’t a treaty, President Trump can revoke it at his own discretion. Colleges have been teaching students to see themselves as victims; so now they are behaving like victims.

 

 

What did Trump just do? Donald Trump won the election, writes Arthur Brooks, because his campaign unearthed “the hunger for dignity in communities where it is most absent.” Brooks continues: “Who falls on the wrong side of this dignity gap? These days it is working-class men. In his new book ‘Men Without Work,’ my colleague Nick Eberstadt shows that between 1965 and 2015 the percentage of working-aged men outside the workforce increased to 22% from 10%. Many millions more are underemployed. The employment-to-population ratio for men aged 25-54 is 6.8% lower today than it was in 1930, in the teeth of the Great Depression. These secular trends were amplified by the nonrecovery that most Americans experienced after the Great Recession. Only about the top fifth of the economy saw positive income growth for most of the Obama presidency, Census Bureau data show, while most others averaged no growth at all.” [The Wall Street Journal]

 

There is a reason we have an electoral college. In winning the presidential election, Donald Trump has received fewer overall votes than Hillary Clinton according to current vote tallies. That fact has revived talk on the Left that the electoral college needs to be “fixed”—as if the possibility that a candidate could win election with fewer overall votes was something the Founders failed to anticipate. In particular, the National Popular Vote plan calls for states to pledge their electors to vote for the candidate who receives the most votes nationally instead of the most votes in their state. As Tara Ross explains, not only is the National Popular Vote plan an end-run around the Constitution and its federalist design, it would also incentivize and nationalize voter fraud. [Prager University]

 

A few priorities for President Trump: These come from “Blueprint for a New Administration: Priorities for the President,” by The Heritage Foundation: End corporate welfare. Modernize the military. End federal funding for Common Core. Stop trying to pick winners and losers in the energy sector. Repeal ObamaCare and enact patient-centered health care reform. Stop funding Planned Parenthood and fund women’s health programs that are not connected to the abortion industry. Reverse the policies of deferred action on immigration. Give states responsibility for all leasing and permitting on federal lands within their states. Eliminate the Department of Justice’s equitable sharing program, which encourages police departments around the country to abuse civil asset forfeiture. Appoint a new commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service who will not delay or deny the approval of tax exempt statuses in order to punish political opponents. [The Heritage Foundation]

 

President Trump isn’t bound by non-treaty agreements. Last year, the Obama administration made a bad deal over Iran’s nuclear program and decided that the deal would be in the form of an executive agreement rather than a treaty. The administration chose this path because it was worried that a treaty would not be ratified by the Republican-controlled Senate. That means a different president (i.e., Donald Trump) can now revoke the agreement at his choosing. James Phillips writes that such a choice would be a good idea: “Iran’s dictators have had an easy time out-negotiating and out-maneuvering the Obama administration, which eagerly sought to clinch a deal. The administration made huge concessions that allowed Iran to dismantle international sanctions without dismantling key elements of its nuclear program, which continues to advance. It looks like the Trump administration will take a much harder line on the Iran nuclear issue, which will be one of the earliest foreign policy issues it must address.” [The Daily Signal]

 

Colleges are reaping the sensitivity they sown. What’s the deal with all the college student snowflakes on who think they need grief counseling in order to deal with Donald Trump’s election? Part of the answer is that, as Clay Routledge writes, the universities themselves have been teaching students to see themselves as victims. “More and more colleges are creating ‘bias response teams’ that students can contact if they feel they have been victimized by microaggressions. There is an increasing demand for safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect students not from physical danger, but from ideas, course material, and viewpoints they may find offensive. Conservative speakers are being banned from campus because students claim to find them threatening. Professors are being investigated for not being sufficiently politically correct in class, failing to predict what material might trigger students, or refusing to use gender neutral pronouns that are not even part of the English language. Even more concerning perhaps are recent moves to create racially segregated student retreats, student unions, and campus housing in the service of offering marginalized groups places of refuge and healing. […] Ironically, the victim protection campaigns many colleges are engaged in not only underestimate human resilience, they may actually cause the problems they are designed to solve because they suggest to students who wouldn’t otherwise feel like victims that they are, in fact, victims.” [John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy]

 

 

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