Facts are stubborn things, no matter who’s president

As the old saw goes, “It doesn’t matter whether you agree with science or not, it remains true.”

That’s also what I like about facts. They remain facts in the face of denials, distortions, lies, perversions and attempts to ignore them.

For example, Donald Trump says that he will place a 45 percent tariff on goods from China. With 2.2 million workers, America’s biggest private employer is Walmart. Roughly 70 percent of its shelves are stocked with goods manufactured in China. Nearly half a trillion dollars’ worth of goods are sold at Walmart each year. The result of his tariff would be to add 45 cents to each dollar collected. Could Walmart stay in business if it upped its prices by 45 percent? If not, what are Trump’s plans to re-employ the 2.2 million (or some significant subset) of people he puts on the streets?

It’s unnerving that a man who fashions himself a business genius would ignore that aspect of his proposal.

But that is only the beginning of the beginning. What happens to the countless businesses whose customer base is made up in part by (soon to be unemployed) Walmart employees?

How about the thousands of workers who are in various ways associated with getting those (now unaffordable) products to market? Since 60 percent of U.S. imports from China are the products of American businesses, where should workers in those companies look for employment when Mr. Trump puts their employers out of work?

Previously, he has shown only callousness to those he drove into bankruptcy.

But that is not the end of the illusions on which Mr. Trump’s policies will be based. Although he pontificates about bringing off-shored jobs home to America, he seems not to have read that 88 percent of America’s manufacturing job losses since 1986 have resulted from automation, an accelerating phenomenon. Unless he can make clocks run backwards, those jobs have disappeared forever.

Instead of addressing the daunting challenges of how to deal with an economy that is decimating its workforce through wrenching transitions, he wastes valuable time on irrelevancies and misinformation. He is capitalizing on hopeless and leading us to despair.

The fact that facts are facts does not, in fact, give me any joy in the face of the blighted lives being led by so many middle and lower class citizens who must work more than one job just to survive. What kind of life is that?

Pursuit of illogical, fact-free policies and plans will not lead these families to better lives. Populism is effective for winning elections, but is bereft of workable ideas for solving problems. Its illusions don’t trump facts.

The writer lives in Pawleys Island.

This story was originally published December 3, 2016 at 4:34 PM with the headline "Facts are stubborn things, no matter who’s president."