Alfonse D'Amato

Our next president must fix a broken economy

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John Crudele, a columnist for the New York Post whom I have tremendous respect for, wrote a recent column titled, “Here’s how we can fix this broken economy.” Last week, in a debate hosted by CNBC, the Republican marching band of presidential candidates tried to tackle that same problem.

Let’s face it. The U.S. economy is truly broken. Any presidential candidates who imply otherwise are delusional.

Congress has overspent to the tune of about $17 trillion. The Federal Reserve is intent on raising interest rates, but the weak economy has prevented it from doing so. We are setting ourselves up for another collapse, and Congress can’t do a thing (except pass a bloated budget).

Economists who were once optimistic are now embarrassed. Last week we also learned that the economy barely moved in the third quarter. This poor performance means that for the entire year, gross domestic product will increase by the extremely disappointing rate of 1.8 percent.

I have endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich for president because he has a proven record, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, of balancing the federal budget. This hasn’t been done again since he left the committee.

While I’m not campaigning for Donald Trump, he’s right when he talks about the need to lower the corporate tax rate to avoid corporate inversion, a.k.a. tax inversion, the practice used by corporations to move all or parts of their companies overseas to avoid paying high taxes. We can add so many more high-paying jobs here if we discourage tax inversion and keep businesses here.

Overall, the rest of the GOP candidates fared well when discussing the economy. Marco Rubio, the young senator from Florida, finally took his gloves off and began to fight, even taking on fellow Floridian Jeb Bush. Rubio focused on reducing the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, an initiative he believes would allow America to compete again worldwide, and stopping new online sales taxes to protect the technology sector.

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