"America will never be a socialist country," President Trump proclaimed in his State of the Union address in supposed stinging rebuke of the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are pressing the pricey proposition that American must move beyond (socialist) Medicare and Medicaid and Veterans Affairs health-care to provide health insurance to all Americans.
The President's throwing down of the ideological gauntlet is fairly standard stuff from the leader of a political party that once stood for limited government and a free market.
But Trump is not just the head of the Republican Party. He's a President who, contrary to those same free-market principles, has bent over backward trying to make coal, which was dying under its own weight in the free market, an electricity-generation winner again.
He has celebrated if not outright engineered costly tax deals to keep companies in or lure them to the U.S., including at a Carrier plant in Indiana and a Foxconn facility in Wisconsin. These are not pay-as-you-create-jobs deals like Amazon's here in New York; they're hand-over-fist giveaways. Google to see the results.
He has launched trade wars that U.S. consumers are paying for through higher prices. And when China and others have imposed retaliatory tariffs that have hurt American agriculture, Trump has paid out billions in tax dollars to farmers.
Friday came the latest total: $7.7 billion from public coffers, ordered up by the President himself to offset the damage done by the tariffs he has effectively invited.
As long as he's the one doing it, our so-called capitalist President loves using government money to prop up private business.
