Keep it in the family

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.

America’s metro areas, most of which vote Democratic and many of which are very prosperous, subsidize the nation’s rural areas, which vote Republican and tend to have more poverty (except for some in such heavily government-subsidizedsectors as agribusiness) and health and social pathologies. Of course there’s massive hypocrisy in GOP attacks on “big government,’’ whose anti-poverty programs disproportionately favor Red States, not the “welfare queens’’ and illegal immigrants in such Blue State cities  as New York and Los Angeles.

As the Trump administration, in its relentless efforts to further enrich its mostly very affluent senior members by cutting income and other taxes for the rich, tries to shrink locally popular programs to help the poor, concentrated in the Red States, it will be interesting to see what Trump’s fanatical fans in those states do.

Meanwhile, you have to be impressed by the confident brazenness of the Trump family and administration in seeking ways to make money off the fact that their leader, an outrageous crook, is in the White House. The administration is rife with egregious conflicts of interest, many connected with the Trump Organization. The taxpayers are now paying big money to help the Trump family and its associates make a killing off the fact that their leader is in the Oval Office.

Near the center are Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner, who learned the joys of  self-dealing and nepotism from their fathers.  Mr. Kushner’s father, like Donald Trump, is real estate man. But Charles Kushner is also a convicted felon. In 2005, he was convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering, and served time in federal prison. After his release he resumed his career in real estate. 

But the elder Mr. Kushner has been a devoted father. Consider his $2.5 million donation to Harvard before his son was admitted, despite a not very impressive secondary-school record. Now young Jared is being asked by his father-in-law to, among other minor chores, “reinvent ‘’ government to make it more businesslike. (Whose business is the model?) For some sense of how this might work out, read Elizabeth Spiers’s piece about how Jared ran the New York Observer:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/30/i-worked-with-jared-kushner-hes-the-wrong-businessman-to-reinvent-government/?utm_term=.6322cc1d9211

Such families know how to get things done!