Good Luck America

For a blog so personal and forthright as this I’m not adding any pictures or links. This is just how I feel.

I feel that it is fitting that one of my last civic posts will be about this election. Obviously, Donald Trump will be our new president and that is a scary thought to many people. Yet I’m here to tell you the truth. My biases before doing this are that I’m a Mexican-American agnostic.

America will still be here 4 years from now. The world is not ending, but the cubs have won the world series.

What a Donald Trump presidency means for the country is a lot of different things. First of is that a new type of foreign policy centered on isolationism and almost mercantilist trade policy will see us take a more reclusive role in world politics. Much like Britain chose to isolate itself from the EU, we will begin to isolate ourselves from NATO. However, as the Brexit vote showed, the rise of the far right is not limited to just the US. This is a worldwide movement and it wouldn’t surprise me if more countries started going down this path. Because of this the wheels of global economics will slow down as less free trade and less commerce flow from one country to another so it wouldn’t surprise me is prices begin to rise from previously imported goods here in the US.

The other major development is Trump’s emphasis on bringing back industrial jobs to the rustbelt. This in my opinion is going to go along the lines of most of Trump’s other policies. It will look great in the short term but terrible in the long run. As the world becomes more and more mechanized most people in this country still fail to realize that within 20 years their manual labor jobs will become obsolete. I don’t care how much of a tax incentive you give major companies, once it becomes clear that paying for a robot once becomes cheaper than paying for a person’s salary consistently, companies will make the switch.

It’s with that in mind that I think the people who are going to be left behind in this new world are the very ones Trump is trying to save, white lower to middle class blue collar workers. Instead of trying to transition this demographic into more specialized job fields or encouraging more people to work in the service industry (which has risen substantially in recent years) they will be once again left behind as technology exceeds their cost of labor.

We have a president who doesn’t believe in climate change. So, like everything else he will push for more jobs in the domestic oil and coal industry while deregulating other industries known for making pollution. Renewable energy will continue to grow but not at the pace we once expected it too. Likewise, if the health of the climate worsens than expect more refugees to wash up on US shores after hurricanes and flooding devastate more of the poorer regions of the Caribbean and South Pacific oceans.

The stock market will hold up for a few years but i suspect that once the Chinese housing bubble bursts our economy will be hurt ( this would be true regardless of who was president).

Expect unemployment to go down and GDP to rise under Trump’s tax cuts and incentives but also don’t be surprised to see the national debt go up if he makes good on his promise to increase military spending.

Expect one of three major supreme court decisions to be overturned by what will now become a conservatively dominated court for the next few decades. Roe v. Wade, Gay Marriage Equality, and Affirmative Action are all at risk and it wouldn’t surprise me if one of these is overturned, though I would be surprised if all 3 are overturned.

In closing I want to say that it is always impossible to predict the future, but by using history, economics, and incentives it’s not too hard to get a realistic idea of what to expect. So, expect the income gap between the middle class and the upper class to rise. Expect skilled laborers to seek jobs in Asia and Western Europe instead of the US. Expect cheap foreign labor to leave the US in favor of domestic citizens taking over their work.

And lastly expect us to be better off in 4 years than we are today, but worse off in 8 than we are right now.

Am I upset? Somewhat. But I know that I, as a college educated male seeking jobs that will not be affected by an increased in mechanized labor, will be fine in the long run. It’s those who don’t have a college degree and those who work in manual labor that will suffer the most. Ironically enough those are the people who voted for Trump.

Good luck America, my future looks alright, yours…. not so much.