The Guardian article posted below - "Donald Trump's ignorance is becoming more evident with each passing day" - makes it clear that Donald Trump is a train wreck waiting to happen. His common man style of not playing by the rules says more about his inability to understand the world we live in, and about his incredible ignorance of basic facts, than it does to his imagined swag. It might play well to the mafia of mediocrity that voted for him, but it's going to get us all in trouble one day.
The article by David Cay Johnston helps explain why.
********************
Donald Trump's ignorance is becoming more evident with each passing day
Let’s connect the dots between Donald Trump’s “tax plan”, his invitation to the murderous leader in Manila and saying he would be “honored” to meet with the dictator of North Korea. And let’s throw in his claim that Trumpcare will be better than Obamacare and that his skeletal tax plan would make him pay more.
While these facts might seem unrelated, each points to a fundamental truth about Trump that I have been trying to get people to understand since he announced his latest presidential campaign in June 2015: Trump doesn’t know anything.
And Trump’s ignorance should scare you because the White House says he plans to fulfill all of his campaign promises – and among them is starting wars and using nuclear weapons.
Human beings have thousands of years of experience with taxes and diplomacy and yet Trump lives unaware of the basic principles of government finance and international relations.
Don’t take my word for it, even as someone who knows the man and has studied him closely for 29 years. Just listen to Trump’s own words. They show he acts like a classic con artist, all bluster and vagaries. He lives blissfully unaware of his ignorance of basic facts that anyone who paid attention in high school, much less college, should know.
Trump declared recently that Andrew Jackson was furious about the civil war even though he died 16 years before it began. Trump seems unaware Jackson was a slave-owning white supremacist.
Meeting with black leaders in February, Trump said that Frederick Douglass was “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more”.
That’s a neat trick for someone who was buried 122 years ago, not that Trump has a clue that Douglass was an abolitionist newspaper publisher, pastor and orator.
Trump is even ignorant about his tax plan, all 100 words of it, or that it violates principles of taxation articulated by Plato, Adam Smith and many other philosophers.
Trump said under his tax plan, he would pay more. Nope. He’d pay 86% less, based on his 2005 federal income tax filing, which I revealed in March at DCReport.org, the nonprofit news service I founded to track what Trump does, rather than tweets.
His tax wishlist would eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, a 1986 law signed by President Ronald Reagan. That law cost Trump nearly $31.3m of his $36.6m federal income tax bill in 2005.
Had Trump’s tax wishlist been in effect in 2005, he would have paid just $5.3m in federal income tax on an income of $152.7m.
That works out to slightly less than 3.5% of his income, which is lower than the effective income tax rate paid by the poorest half of American taxpayers that year. They paid slightly more than 3.5%. The difference is that Trump’s income was almost $3m a week while the poorer half got by on a tad more than $300 per week.
Then there’s geopolitics. Not only does Trump not know a Shia from a Sunni or the reasons it matters, he also came into office knowing nothing of the thousands of years of relations between China and Korea. Trump said Xi Jinping, the supreme leader in Communist China, schooled him during a recent telephone conversation ...
********************
You can read the rest of the article by clicking here. But know one thing. President Trump, our national embarrassment, just might become a stain on humanity.
- Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment