Job-killing tariffs, ballooning debt, blessed peacemakers

Tariff tax on consumers

Toyota Motor North America is holding its 29th Opportunity Exchange this week, continuing a long-term commitment to diversity and inclusion. Last year, Toyota spent $3.3 billion with diverse suppliers employing 136,000.

As president of Georgetown Metal Processing, I am part of Toyota’s diverse supplier community. My 25 team members manage aluminum and steel supply for Toyota’s Camry, Avalon and Lexus ES.

Toyota’s 10 plants and 137,000 team members in the United States export vehicles to 31 countries. Toyota’s U.S. investment of $25 billion is being overshadowed by the government’s threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles and parts because they potentially are a “national security threat.”

The proposed tariff on automotive imports, a tax on consumers, would increase the cost of every vehicle sold here, not just Toyotas. No vehicle in the U.S. is sourced exclusively in the U.S. This tariff would raise the cost of a U.S.-built Camry by $1,800.

Free, fair trade is the best way to create sustained growth for the auto industry. Tariffs on vehicles and components will lead to declines in sales, auto production, jobs and vehicle exports.

Thank you to Kentucky’s delegation for its support on this issue. But we can’t sit and wait for another announcement. We must continue to ask Congress to oppose further tariffs on the industry.

GOP the walking dead

Today’s Republican Party has dwindled to a submissive arm of the executive branch, and its only goals are to blindly support a president of its own party and blindly attack a president of the opposing party. I see no evidence that Republicans have honored, or even want to honor, their oath of office to protect the Constitution and serve the American public. They have become a zombie party.

In our history, political parties have been born, died and new parties formed. Republicans with any sense of patriotism should dissolve the remnants of their party and build a new one, conservative, but faithful to the Constitution and aware of its mission with regard to all Americans. It will need new leadership chosen from experienced candidates with some real policies, respect for Democrats and openness to ideas.

Term limits should be adopted. Corporate donations shouldn’t carry the expectation that a politician is being bought.

Let’s put back into place what the founders envisioned, a government with three independent branches. We must act now to restore it or face a future in which the hateful chasm between “tribes” of Americans gets so wide that we all fall into the abyss.

Trump’s ballooning debt

I am writing in response to a letter extolling the virtues of the federal tax cut. It’s true that the current president is good at taking credit for the continuation of President Barack Obama’s having saved us from the Great Recession after President George W. Bush left us in peril of descending into the second Great Depression. But those of us who love this country are worried and ashamed of the way he gave us this sugar high.

We should only increase the national debt during times of emergency, such as world wars and great recessions, and pay it down when the economy is good. The president brags about how good the economy is, but rather than being fiscally prudent by reducing the deficit and paying down the national debt, he jacked up the deficit to almost a trillion dollars a year and the national debt by a trillion-and-a-half dollars. This, after he promised to entirely eliminate the national debt in eight years.

The other way he improves corporate profits is to destroy the health, safety, environmental, financial and other regulations that make our lives so much better than those of people who live in third-world countries, another one of his campaign promises.

Inter-cultural parenting

Transracial adoption and parenting are common in America today. Parents who are successful in parenting their child of a different race or culture have a few things in common. They study and find ways to honor the race and culture of their child’s birth family and engage in the community of that culture through cultural events, art, etc. Some live in a community where the parents are the minority rather than the child, or pick schools and communities with a broad diversity of people. They surround their adopted child with role models who look like them.

They understand the institutional racism their child will face. They teach their African-American son that he will get pulled over more than his white family. They tell their Hispanic daughter there may be times when she must prove her citizenship because others will assume her to be an illegal immigrant.

These parents are fighters, advocates and realists, but above all parents who will worry just like every other parent they know.

Full circle on guns

It’s unfortunate that Sen. Rand Paul’s wife Kelley feels she has to sleep with a gun handy. Congresswoman Gabby Giffords knows what it is like not feeling safe just going to the mall. Sarah Palin’s pronouncement “Don’t retreat. Reload.” and bull’s-eyes on political opponents seem to be making a full circuit.

Blessed peacemakers

Gladiators, gallows and gore. We delude ourselves thinking we’ve left all that behind; think video games, ultimate combat, “The Walking Dead,” the chant “lock her up.”

We are at a crisis of mistrust, hate and polarization. Calls for respectful dialogue seem hopeless. If there is a way out it must be through our churches. The silence, if not complicity, rings mute. Some argue that faith is an individual matter apart from worldly affairs. Some, it would seem, leave that faith behind at noon on Sunday. All who quietly abide our worldly ills need to revisit the Ten Commandments. Which of them do you tolerate in exchange for job, food on the table and gas in your car? Are uncertain comforts worth abdication of moral imperatives?

As the Ten Commandments admonish, so do the Beatitudes bless “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, pure in heart, those who are peacemakers.” As you settle in your pew, join your Bible study group or speak from the pulpit, think upon these things.

Twice taxed?

I retired in 2013 after working the same job for 51 years. During that time, I paid from my wages into my Social Security two times a month and also paid federal income tax on those wages before Social Security was deducted. It makes no sense to me why my Social Security benefits are taxed after that money had already been taxed. Whatever the reason for this double taxation, it is wrong. I believe that every person who receives Social Security retirement benefits no matter what other retirement benefits they receive should get the full amount of Social Security without further taxation.

I am not sure if my efforts to get this changed would be successful, but I am contacting my representative and senator urging them to start the process of removing taxation of Social Security benefits.

This story was originally published November 13, 2018 at 5:37 PM.