If You Think

 If you think immigrants are coming for your job, perhaps your dream career of picking cotton, lemons, potatoes, oranges, or peas in the hot sun fourteen hours a day or working on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse was a poor life choice.

If you think immigrants are the primary source of fentanyl being smuggled into the United States, perhaps you should ask a DEA agent. They will tell you that China is the primary source and the vast majority of it comes through the international mail, the express consignment operations environment, and across our southern border through official Ports of Entry (POEs). Most importantly remember that Donald Trump promised on his first day in office to free Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road dark website responsible for much of the fentanyl entering this country before he was jailed.

If you think the president has direct control of oil prices and those prices are not largely determined by global market prices for crude oil and the fact that a small group of oil companies made billions in windfall profits recently, perhaps you have been asleep for the last few decades.

If you think that food prices are set by politicians, you are only partly right. A group of politicians removed restrictions on big business and, in the name of a free market economy, allowed four firms to control over 40% of the market share for 85% of your groceries. In fact, ten companies (Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez) control almost everything we eat. The group of politicians advocating for bigger business with fewer regulations, especially any that would restrict corporate profits, has a pachyderm for their mascot.

If you think the Affordable Care Act is an abomination and should be repealed and the 45 million people served through subsidies, insurance mandates, and Medicaid expansion should be abandoned to find their own way in Emergency Rooms, you already know who your candidate should be. But, you should also know that his opponent is working to expand provisions that he championed in the Inflation Reduction Act that allowed Medicare to negotiate lower prices for ten of the more popular prescription drugs. The guy in the orange spray tan and combover claims to have a secret plan, one he kept secret during his four years as president, and he might consider telling us what those plans are, but only if he is reelected.

If you think the 2017 series of tax cuts that mostly benefited big business and the very wealthy and shifted the tax burden to future generations with a growing national debt was a good idea, ask yourself how that has worked out for you and yours. If you also think tax cuts for the wealthy should be expanded, your guy can be found wearing a red hat, and a red tie, and hanging around golf courses. If, however, you think that the very wealthy and big corporations should be paying more of the costs and that the promised “trickle down” never even moistened your lips, perhaps the guy wearing Ray-Bans deserves your support.

If you think a proposed ten percent across-the-board tariff on all imports instead of boosting domestic manufacturing with major federal investments in semiconductors and other technology is a good idea, maybe you should dust off your old degree in Economics and rethink your position. Tariffs get paid, not by exporters, but by consumers when exporters raise prices to cover those tariffs. Only one candidate has promised an across-the-board tariff of ten percent. That candidate's last name rhymes with dump.

If you think a nationwide abortion ban would be a good thing and that politicians should be able to use their religious beliefs to take away the rights of all women, you also know who got us headed down this path in the first place. Who better to make complicated medical decisions than a politician. So far the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed individual states to set a patchwork of restrictive laws has also brought the predicted horror stories in its wake. Add to that the potential for a national abortion ban and the continuing efforts to abolish all manner of contraception, and you have a formula to expand the chaos now seen at the state level.

If you think climate change is a liberal hoax perhaps you can explain why the death rate from rising temperatures in Phoenix, AZ has gone up 100% every year for the past ten years. Phoenix had previously relied on the charity of churches to provide relief for the homeless and poor but that obviously hasn’t worked. Now they have turned to pandemic relief dollars to help with the problem. So, if you think fossil fuels are still the answer to all of our energy needs you know which party to vote for. You may remember that it was Jimmy Carter who installed solar panels on the White House in 1979, and it was Ronald Reagan who promptly removed them a few years later.

If you think we should abandon NATO and the years of our alliances fostered since the Second World War perhaps you should revisit how that war was fought and won. Know your history and the struggles since that war to maintain peace in Europe because conflicts in this region have cost America thousands of lives. China and Russia would love us to abandon NATO almost as much as they would love to rule the rest of the world. If you look down to where you are standing what lies beneath your feet is that world.

If you think that Donald Trump represents your moral values as a human being, you might want to pause for a little self-reflection.

Vote this November but know what is at stake.