Even as a candidate still working out her position on health care, she is already light years ahead of Trump who has no idea what policy even is, much less how to implement it other than “Whatever Obama did, I will undo” (which is biting him in the butt wrt immigration policy).

The GOP replacement package would have been a significant improvement over the ACA, except for the not so insignificant detail that the GOP got cold feet at the end and didn’t fund it adequately; ergo, McCain’s no vote, which was given out of spite, was in fact defensible.

Every “crisis” he thinks he is addressing is one of his own making.

I don’t think we really HAVE any crises, compared to 9/11, Al Queda, the financial meltdown, or Hurricane Katrina. We only have minor dustups compared to those. So……I can’t really see eye to eye with tha tpoint.

Trump STILL believes being president should be like being a CEO, where he should be able to implement anything he wants on a whim.

Agreed.

If we didn’t know before, we should know now, being PoTUS is not anything like being the CEO of a company.

Hmmmm. Many of the same principles and rules still apply. Certainly not all, but I’d have to disagree with the phraseology of “not anything like”.

IDK, most of your points are still pretty SOP for any presidential campaign I’ve ever experienced since 1980 (my first).

Hmmm. My first was 1976, and I’ve never seen anything close to this level of planned giveaways. I’d concur that my points are not unique, but there is a matter of scale and scope here that’s unique in the post Vietnam world, I’d argue.

Really, with a $4+ trillion budget much of this is doable.

Actually, all the free stuff they want to give away costs ANOTHER 4T. So, we suddenly would have an 8 trillion dollar budget with maybe a 1T of offsets. The rest goes to debt.

But it does mean something else has to be cut, which is really the debate.

Sure. What would you cut, keeping mind that the projected cost of all the new free stuff is about 100% of what you’re already taking in?

As such I am still a huge fan of an adversarial government, whether it is the variations within a party or party vs party.

Adversarial government is the only thing keeping us afloat right now.

I wish the broader electorate were actually interested in the math.

Me too.

But the math is such that both sides can and will spin the math to their favor.

Eh….you can spin a couple hundred billion here and there. You can’t spin three to four trillion.

There is nothing transparent with government funding (as someone who continues to try to understand government funding for the arts). The only math most Americans understand is who gets checks cut for whom. I have no doubt the obfuscation to get to that point is deliberate.

Completely agree.