Donald Trump thinks you need to show a photo ID to buy groceries, which, par for the course there.
I’m not going to pick on Trump specifically here, because he’s not the only person there in D.C. in charge of running the country who has no idea how the other 99 percent of us go through our day-to-day lives.
Think of, pull a name out of a hat, Chuck Schumer. When’s the last time he mowed his lawn? I think about this of any of those folks every time I roll my mower around mine, an hour each week.
Don’t have a guy do that for me. Nope. Sweat that one out myself.
What about, another name out of the hat, Paul Ryan: think he ever sweeps and mops his kitchen? Sweeping, mopping and vacuuming are on me in my household’s division of labor.
No cleaning lady. The floors, the toilets, the trash getting out to the curb, all on us.
Back to Trump, then, to pick on him for growing up the son of a millionaire: think he ever worked a minimum-wage job, had to buy a jalopy, pay for car insurance, go to a grocery store with a budget, have to look for the reduced-price items in the meat freezer?
If you’ve never done any of these things, or haven’t for years, how would you have any concept of the value of a dollar?
Seventy-eight percent of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck, according to a CareerBuilder survey, and 44 percent can’t afford even a minor $400 unexpected emergency expense, according to a report from the Federal Reserve.
Which, yikes, right?
And the response from our fearless leaders is to debate more tax cuts for the super-wealthy, the idea being that doing that will somehow trickle down to the rest of us, as if we don’t have data on how that didn’t work when Ronald Reagan first sold us on the notion back in the 1980s.
We’re told, naturally, that the economy is going great, because if you live in the D.C. bubble, where the poors around you earn low six figures and live in half-million-dollar homes, you judge how the economy is going by how the stock market is going.
Half the country has exactly $0 invested in the stock market – no individual stocks, no money in pension funds, no 401(k)s, no IRAs, no mutual funds, no ETFs.
This, also, according to the Federal Reserve, so, no, not fake news.
The least of our concerns is that our president doesn’t know that you don’t need a photo ID to buy groceries.
Up there at the top is that neither of the political parties has a clue what we face.
Republicans want tax cuts for themselves and their rich buddies. Democrats want … honestly, who really knows what they want? They’re just as buddy-buddy with the corporate elites as the other side.
The word complicit comes to mind to describe how little they accomplished for the middle and working classes in eight years of Barack Obama.
So, yeah, pile on Donald Trump. He’s a buffoon, so, easy target.
He at least diagnosed the problem, that there’s a swamp that needs to be drained, even if he has no idea as to the extent of it.
None of them do, which is an even bigger problem, to mull over next time you have to show your ID to buy groceries.
Column by Chris Graham
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