I had expected to outline the basic policy priorities I think would be a good campaign platform and then use that as a reference to evaluate the actions and proposals of parties, candidates, and elected officials. I’m finding that I may not have time to outline my baseline platform before responding to the actual policy positions being articulated by our incoming president (at least if I want to do it in a timely manner).
I’ve decided to use Trump’s declared Day 1 priorities to give an initial example of how I will evaluate policies and priorities as they come up.
One of my teenagers brought up the fact that Trump has indicated his Day 1 priorities are ending the criminal cases against him, pardoning the January 6th convicts, and beginning his promised mass deportations. Normally I would link to the original article but I don’t have one in this case. I am willing to respond to this because those things are in line with things Trump has said repeatedly on the campaign trail. The other unusual things I will do here is let my teenager respond to the idea instead of responding directly myself.
When we got talking about these Day 1 priorities my teenager said “mass deportations are going to wreak havoc on our economy.”
Knowing that it is possible to arrive at a true conclusion based on daily information or faulty logic I decided to quiz my kid on this subject (which we have not talked about before). I asked, “why would that be bad for the economy?”
The immediate response was “lots of immigrants do low paying jobs that Americans don’t want to do, if we remove them from the country that work will get a lot more expensive.”
I would have focused specifically on the risks to our food prices but all I can really say is, my teenager has a better understanding of our economy and the role immigrants play in it than our president-elect.
