Thursday, October 27, 2016

Scott Adams endorses Trump!

In a recent post (here) Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert comic strip) announced that he has decided to support Trump. He is not allowing comments on his post, but his rationale is so misguided that I feel compelled to respond, so I'm putting it here.

I guess I should stop reading Dilbert now. Too bad comments are disallowed on that post.

His main beef about Hillary seems to be the estate tax. Big deal. Yes it's double taxation, but so what. Lots of things are double taxed. Corporate dividends are double taxed (the corporation pays tax on its profit, and then you pay tax on the dividends, which come out of profits). Second, who is harmed? People who didn't earn the money in the first place. Third, it doesn't matter because nobody actually pays estate tax anyway. Rich people all have their money in trusts, if they care.

Furthermore, there is no surprise that the platform uses weasel words about taxes. It would be nice if it could be open and transparent, but since nobody wants more taxes, you are never going to see a nice list. The fact that you can find it at all is the best you can expect.

The more important point is that he doesn't seem to realize that Trump is certifiably insane. He is not qualified to "lead" or "persuade" or anything else. Just because Scott Adams doesn't know how to solve ISIS doesn't mean that it's an even call between Hillary and Trump. Hillary probably doesn't know either, so there's some chance she'll screw it up, but not without giving it careful consideration. We know for sure that Trump doesn't know, and it is almost 100% certain that he'll screw it up, because most likely he will do something completely idiotic. He is just a spoiled, narcissistic, overgrown child after all. And keep in mind that congress offers almost no restraint these days on the president's use of the military.

Finally, if Hillary wins it's true that many of us won't exactly be celebrating, but we will all breath a sigh of relief that at least we'll still be able to vote again in four years. But if Trump somehow wins, we will definitely be crying and thinking about going to Canada.