Trump fan got it wrong

Regarding the recent letter headlined, “Trump gets it on automakers,” I think the value of this piece is that its point of view is representative of a Donald Trump fan. He writes “Trump clearly understands economics and finances better than any prior president.”

Wow. Better than the Harvard guy who turned General Motors around by directing them like a trustee would? He returned them to profitability and recovered all the money we loaned GM with interest. So does Trump know what the rest of us know?

Foreign car manufacturers who produce their cars on American soil are students of arithmetic at the level where they can create and solve a word problem. Here is what they learned: Labor, material and overhead at home plus freight plus days in inventory transit equals a lot more money than building the cars up the road from the customers. When foreign car manufacturers make more millions of dollars in profit, where does it go? It leaves the country for good.

Here is another one: Building a factory at home with the millions they took out of our country (profits) is more expensive than building a factory in Midwest and southeastern America after they receive the hundreds of millions of dollars from state and federal sources, along with tax and hiring incentives, from us.

Fun fact: Buick and Chrysler products are extremely popular in China. They sell like popcorn. These companies actually have manufacturing facilities there, but the production demand requires them to import cars. According to The New York Times’ Business Day section, China charges 25 percent on every car imported by these companies — and we charge everyone a whopping 2.5 percent. You think Trump understands this? See if you can get him to give you a straight answer on this: Why do we not equalize our trade balance by extracting the exact same amount of tariff money on imports that we pay on our exports? Have him tell you about the lobbyists, the rich people who profit from foreign goods sales — everyone who has their snout in this trough.

Hope this “uneducated regurgitation” puts the conversation back on its rails before election time. The bar for presidential candidates has never been set lower than it is right now.

Henderson

The Trump administration’s denial of climate change and climate science has taken many forms beyond just the obvious. We know that the repeal of the Clean Power Plan is predicted to result in 90,000 more asthma attacks, 300,000 more missed days of school and work, and 3,600 more premature deaths annually by 2030. And that the proposed 31 percent cut to the EPA budget is aimed directly at rolling back the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. What we do not often consider is how many endangered species will go extinct under this administration.

Recently, 25 highly imperiled species were denied protection under the Endangered Species Act. These species range from the Pacific walrus, losing habitat to due a warmer climate in the Arctic, to the Florida Keys mole skink, losing habitat to rising sea levels. To list them as endangered would have been an admission that climate change is having a myriad of negative consequences. The Endangered Species Act was created to protect biodiversity not only for its intrinsic value, but for future discoveries that will benefit mankind. In addition to the animals and plants we eat, 50 percent of medicines currently available derive from natural products. Wildlife specifically disrupted by climate change and other human activities to the point of extinction needs to be protected. Las Vegas