While the media does seem to enjoy focusing on the “lack” of bipartisanship, there is more bipartisanship than most Americans realize.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/report-cards/2018/senate/cosponsored-other-party

Trump is not a “conservative” Republican, he is a deal making populist. So while McConnell has refused to bring up many Democratic sponsored legislative bills, he has brought up many of the bipartisan bills passed by the House. So the real question is whether the House Democrats are prepared to deal or are they largely passing bills designed to “force” votes on Senators? McConnell has killed the latter as did Harry Reid his predecessor in the past, when Republicans tried the same tactic.

Trump has proven that blue collar jobs were not dead. Manufacturing jobs are not booming, but thanks to Trump’s policies manufacturing jobs are increasing.

“The manufacturing industry posted net job gains of 284,000 over 2018, capping its best calendar year since 1997.” (Source: CNBC 1/4/2019 by Thomas Franck).

In fairness to Democrats, some Democrats including Chuck Schumer have supported many of Trump’s trade policies designed to help manufacturing, but to date, Democrats have not made it part of their platform to defend manufacturing in this country.

The issues of automation, robots, and AI are real, but so is the fact that unemployment is at levels so low, that particularly minorities are at historic low levels and white men are at nearly historic low levels. I understand your tax proposal but it is the wrong answer. I agree we should eliminate the income tax on most Americans. Set it at say 50% on all income over $1 million and not income taxes on income below that.

Why? Income taxes on workers are taxes on “production”. We don’t want to tax production in a globalized world. Why higher taxes on income over $1 million, people earning more than $1 million a year are unlikely to move since they won’t earn that in other countries.

The tax base needs to move to consumption, a national sales tax. No matter what country produces an item, if it wants to sell that item in this country they will pay the same amount in taxes as an item produced here. Now it will never be that “pure”, but that is the direction we should be heading. And for those that believe a national sales tax is regressive, well I am proposing a 50% income tax on high incomes, so it really is not regressive when taken as a whole.

But your tax on unearned income is dangerous. While it is hard for citizens to move around the globe easily, money moves at the speed of light (or at least electricity. Pressing “send” on a money mangers’ computers can move money from here to Europe, China, Japan, or Australia in less than a second.

We need plenty of capital and a competitive tax structure, then business will migrate to our country to get close to American consumers (we do love to consume).

What will those jobs be to replace those lost to automation, robots, and AI… hard to say… but while those technologies will be quite disruptive, economic theory and history have shown new jobs emerge to replace lost ones.

I do not support the pouring of money into education (we simply do not have a lot more money to spend given the ever increasing demands of an aging population). We do need an expanded life long view of education, where access to education at the community college or vocational school level is affordable and available to adults for their whole lives as retraining will become an important element of the new economy.

I spent a career in health care, the real problem is the power of the health care lobby and I say that as someone that was an executive for several health care provider organizations, Medicare program administrators, private health insurance companies, etc. I do understand health care and one of the big problems is while health care itself is not a “monopoly” many products and services within health care are effective monopolies and so should be price regulated.

As a conservative, the purpose of a free market is “price discovery”. It serves to identify a price at which both consumers and producers are satisfied. But there is almost no “price discovery” in health care, besides all the legal and regulatory factors that limit competition, most of health care is paid by “third parties” and so normal consumer behavior does not operate well in health care to regulate prices.

Price ceilings and taxes on patented drugs would not put an end to new drug development or cause pharmaceutical companies to abandon the US market. Pharma companies like to say that, but its a lie. First of all in almost every country patented drugs products do have price controls on them and yet every major pharma product is sold in those countries. Secondly, drugs are sold worldwide regardless of where they are produced (my earlier proposals were designed to make it cheaper to manufacture in the US).

But the real question is would pharma companies continue to innovate. Actually, they rarely do anymore. Very few new drugs are developed by major pharma companies today. Most are developed by small start-ups. This minimizes the R&D risk to a large pharma company. Instead they purchase the patents of new drugs in various stages of the FDA approval process from these innovative smaller drug development companies. Why do we care where those small companies are located?

These small companies do tend to locate in the US because of our “talent” housed in and around our major universities, but if they did not… so what? It is true that with my proposals the amount of money a pharma company would offer to acquire exclusive rights to a drug would decline. But the profit margins are so huge, that it is unlikely to seriously impact the development of new drugs if you drove down prices as much as 40–50%.

But it is not just pharma. Let me give you another example. I built a women’s health organization by acquiring many OB/GYN practices. Soon my company had 30% market share in our market, that market share allowed my company to raise our prices 50% above market without adding any value simply because no health insurance company could afford not to have us in their network. Insurance companies simply passed the higher cost on to employers through higher premiums. The most innovative thing I did was realize how powerful market consolidation is to health care pricing. We need to end that source of “pricing power” if we want health care to be affordable.

But getting back to Pelosi and Trump. Pelosi is a very talented politician even though I do not agree with much of her policy. Her real problem was her weak hold on power due to the rising power of the “far left” in her party. So perhaps she was between a rock and hard place.

Since, it was her desire to stay in power that cause her to cater to the far left and not to do what was in the best interest of the country and even the Democratic party long term. In the long term the Democratic party has to retain its moderates in the party and attract the votes of the independents not in the party.

But with so much pressure from the left wing of her party sitting in “protected” districts, the moderates are being let out to dry and it might cause the Democrats to loses their hold on the House in 2020. Had Pelosi pursued a far more moderate agenda and focused on bipartisanship, she would have solidified the grip of her “freshman” moderate members on their seats and potentially flipped even more.

Instead, my sense is the House will be up for grabs again and unless someone rises to the top soon among Democratic Presidential candidates, it could be another term like Trump’s first two years in office.