Thin Skin

            Hillary Clinton has just the right strategy to beat Donald Trump: get under his skin.  We saw how well it worked last week. Her foreign policy speech was all about Trump’s unsuitability for the presidency, and Trump reacted predictably with a personal attack on Hillary’s character. In the process he missed a golden opportunity to talk about what ails this country on the home front, the economy.

            Last week presented Trump with a big fat target, the worst economic news of President Obama’s presidency. The month of May produced only 38,000 new jobs, when 250,000 are needed just to keep up with the growing population. Worse still was the news that the labor force declined by 458,000, reducing the labor participation rate to 62.6%. The last time we had numbers this scary was during Jimmy Carter’s malaise. Unfortunately, we don’t have Ronald Reagan waiting in the wings to come to the rescue. What we have is Donald Trump going after the media and Crooked Hillary.

            Republicans have no choice but to rally around Trump. But how long will they have to wait for him to address serious issues like the economy? Instead of railing against China and Mexico and what he sees as unfair trade, he should be focusing on what is really killing jobs in this country. He should be asking why under Obama new businesses have grown at the anemic rate of only 2.3%. He should be asking why real incomes for the middle class have fallen steadily and why people working part time jobs can’t find full time work. Instead of attacking everybody who gets under his skin, he should be waging a verbal war against crushing taxation, suffocating federal regulations, and state licensing laws that make it almost impossible for enterprising people to start a new business.

            Growth is the answer to what ails the economy. Growth is the only way we’ll ever be able to reduce our debt. Growth is what idle Americans need desperately. What they don’t need is promises of more free stuff from another progressive administration or churlish personal attacks that distract from serious policy proposals.