No, I was merely saying that Bush 43 was a bad president - but no one called him mentally unsound (despite initiating a bunch of wars,lying about Iraq and costing the taxpayer trillions).
Well, what I'm trying to say is that policies are not an indication of emotional health. How Trump handles himself, the things he says, the way he acts, etc. are an indication. Also, I'm not implying that he should be hospitalized. Just that he does not have the temperament to be President (unlike George W. Bush).
I don't understand how you pass judgment that Trump is a terrible businessman.
Because so many of his businesses have failed. Please look through the whole list.
"Of course, everyone is familiar with Trump’s real estate failings (more generally known as Atlantic City), but it’s the business ventures where his recklessness really shines. The man licensed his name to hundreds of trademarks (like the game show below that lasted but a year) and incorporated countless businesses-to-be, but only a select few (dozen) were actually led by the hand of the Donald himself."
http://gawker.com/a-complete-list-of-donald-trump-s-business-disasters-1764151188
Since you reside in the US you would know that commercial deals are enforced quite strictly here and foreclosure is common. Unlike India or Pakistan defaulters in the US don't have it easy nor is evading recovery process simple. I believe that if Trump really was legally obligated to banks or investors he'd be finished long ago.
The tax returns would simply show his massive use of carrying forward past losses which might be optically bad but its the law (ironically the tax evasion would then consist of false losses - showing a healthier business than declared).
As I have stated before, the very fact that Trump accumulated those huge losses (amounts so large that he may have avoided paying federal taxes altogether for nearly 20 years) is precisely why he is not good at running businesses (other than real estate which his father started, trained him in, and is mostly dependent on property values anyway---which almost always rise over time, particularly in Manhattan). Legality has nothing to do with the issue.
I'm not sure how someone who ran up massive losses in a variety of different companies (they were not making money) that eventually went under can be considered a very successful businessman. I'm not sure if anyone would agree with your definition. Again, enriching one's self (while your companies are losing money) should not confused with business acumen.
The origin of the electoral college is not a matter of conjecture, it was put in place for a single well-documented reason - the fear of less populous states of being made irrelevant by a direct aggregated election- a matter of great concern in what was then a federation.
This is simply incorrect. The Electoral College was established to prevent people from directly voting for President. In those days, the people could not even vote for their Senators directly. The Electors were seen as a buffer between the common people, and could potentially not follow what the people voted for.
The second biggest reason it was established was due to slavery---arguably the biggest reason. For example, slaves could not vote, but the Electoral College would count them as 3/5 of a citizen (this was known as the "Three-Fifths Compromise"), and would therefore more power to states with more slaves:
"At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves"
http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
I don't know about Pakistan but in India something similar happens when parties campaign excessively in U.P., Bengal, Bihar Maharashtra (the populous states) and ignore the smaller states like Goa, Chhatisgarh, Uttarkhand, the NE states, etc.
We can debate whether this is good or bad but that's the system. If the founding fathers wanted a positive correlation between electoral college victory and popular vote the college would have been redundant.
The Electoral College does not protect small states (it is directly tied to the population of each state, after all). This is a fact:
^ In this scenario, a candidate could win just
11 states, out of a total of 50 states & D.C. (less than a quarter of them), and still become President.
You are confusing the compromise over the allocation of Senate seats (which are allocated equally among the states) with the Electoral College. I repeat, the Electoral College does
not protect small states. Not at all.
My limited point was simply this - NYC has always had plenty of successful, rich people. Trump's dad's estate was valued at $300 mn in 1999 (indexed to $450 mn today). While that's big by S Asian standards it's not an extraordinary sum then (Bill Gates was valued at $90 bn in 1999). More importantly his family did not wield influence in US policy / government circles.
You don't get from a kid with a 33% share in a $300 mn estate to being valued at a $4 bn by Forbes without a good degree of success. Granted that success may be by exploiting legal loopholes, being unscrupulous and immoral - (no worse than, say, the way the Saudis became billionaires many times over by creating OOEC to manipulate the oil market) - but it's not something a mentally unbalanced person would be able to do.
Well, as I stated above, I don't find it impressive it all. It has been shown many times that rich people (whatever the exact amount of their wealth) can grow their wealth much more easily than middle class Americans (even on a percentage basis).
Secondly, success in the real estate market is perhaps the worst example of showing business acumen. Property values almost always rise over time---particularly in NYC (particularly in Manhattan). His failures in other business speak for themselves. In any case, my point was only that his business record cannot be used to deflect his poor temperament and erratic behavior as President.
Most of these people had Obama for 8 years who was witty, charming, excellent orator, highly intelligent, ticked off the most stringent merit-based qualification criteria and yet did not see their lives improve.
Not exactly. By a 50-42% Americans said that they were better off than they were eight years ago in 2016, according to Gallup:
Same goes for how they felt about jobs:
Also, keep in mind that Obama left office with a 60% approval rating---one of the highest marks for any President:
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