Frank's Musings

Biden’s liberal-democratic policies lower the cost of living, increase national security, and improve our general well-being not just theoretically, but also in at least eight practical ways:

1.      Well-funded and controlled open borders bring in laborers with needed skills allowing businesses to expand.
2.          NATO and other honored alliances maintain world order and promote the exchanges of ideas and people that improve living conditions.
3.       International peace enables leisure, ancestral-heritage, and business travel.
4.       Free trade and capital transfers facilitate inexpensive imported manufactures.
5.       Unobstructed trading routes reduce transportation costs and inflation.
6.       Reciprocal world environmental accords ultimately benefit all global inhabitants.
7.       Similarly, making domestic technologies available worldwide ultimately benefits   us, too, by increasing IT sales income and reducing the price of imports.
8.       Fulfilling treaty commitments is a two-way street, e.g., we owe support of Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression as fair compensation to Europe for their support when the U.S. suppressed the Taliban's sheltering of terrorists in Afghanistan.

Campaign slogans should also include concrete examples of the harm that MAGA policies and blunders caused during Trump’s prior administration, including:

1.      Withdrawal from Paris climate accord—global warming gets worse when any country, even alone and particularly when exceedingly more intensively, refuses to collaborate.
2.       Admiration of foreign authoritarian leaders only encouraged their aggressive behavior, viz. the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Chinese obstruction of sea lanes.
3.      Appointment of conservative Supreme Court Justices led to the robbing of a woman’s right to choose.
4.       It also led to further loosening of gun ownership control at the increased risk that deadly weapons will be handled threateningly and recklessly.
5.        Trump’s legal debts are making him vulnerable to influence by deep-pocket special interests (cfAll-In with Chris Hayes on X: ".@chrislhayes: Part of Trump's appeal in 2016 was the lie that his personal wealth would allow him to self-fund his campaign and make him immune to outside influence. That's even less true today. Trump is strapped for cash, and his political positions are up for sale. https://t.co/N9ZXnvgNoD" / X (twitter.com)).
6.        According to David French in the NYT, “The murder rate skyrocketed on [Trump’s] watch. Between 2019 and 2020, America experienced the largest single year increase in the murder rate in more than a century, and that was under Donald Trump.”  The rate dropped to its lowest level in fifty years under Biden.