Local opinion: Tariffs, health insurance, Commies: Thoughts on Election 2024

The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

As an Arizona very small business owner for the past 43 years I am familiar with the price of things over time. Sheets of plywood, for instance. The sitting president in 2017 ordered his first tariff, on Canadian lumber. Plywood went from under $20 to over $60. 8-foot 2x4s, from around two bucks up to $15. And all the American and Canadian lumber that could be cut sold for greatly inflated prices, it all sold to the point that guys in boom-town Idaho were buying semi-loads from Lowes before it got unloaded.

That tariff money went briefly into the U.S. Treasury, and then, via the sitting president's 2017 tax break, what do they say, 90% of that money ended up in the accounts of the top 1% richest?

If you want to know that every time you go to Home Depot, you'll be part of a great American trickle-down, where the better part of the money you pay for lumber, steel, basically most building materials, tools, appliances etc. gets siphoned off to the richest of the rich without even a giant sucking sound, well — that's the Republican deal. Hard to understand guys driving off with a pickup load of project lumber at twice the price of a year before thinking "Take that, you stinking Canadians!"

The highest price that I ever paid for gas was $4.54, Salina Kansas, July 2008. George Bush the younger was president. Today it's around $3. Oh right, that's before inflation. I used to think that the lesson is that whenever a Republican from Texas is in the White House the price of gas goes high. Really, it's any Republican.

My Az Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance for my family of 5 in 2010 was up to $2,400 a month. Then came Obamacare. My monthly bill came down to $760.

We got refunds every year because of not using as much as we paid for. Blue Cross would have wanted an extra $250,000 plus over the 11 years that we were paying for Obamacare prior to my getting on Medicare. More than my house is worth.

That might have helped pay Blue Cross' anti-trust $2.7 billion fine of 2020. That's the Republican way. Except for Senator John McCain, that is, whose "thumbs down" on the Republicans' Obamacare repeal saved the day for many millions of us. (That was the good "thumbs down," not to be confused with the "let-them-eat-cake thumbs down" from a very different Arizona pol that killed the federal minimum wage.)

As for foreign policy: Commie Pinko used to be a bad thing. Now I've seen hats with the slogan "Better Red Than Dem." Now a good chunk of the voters in this country want to dump Europe Canada Mexico etcetera and join forces with communist Russia? This one I really don't get. Even writing that makes it sound like I'm having a weird dream. Many Republicans want to switch sides "Over There"?

Unlike the weenies running the Washington Post and L A Times, Harris is my public choice. The other candidate, to say the least, is disreputable. Wait, in the spirit of the times, I can't say the least: Not just disreputable, but the most disreputable person in all the land, heck, of all American history, heck, of the whole world and of all time the grandest beyond compare most disreputable one since Lucy walked the Olduvai Gorge.