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Wolf touts Pittston plant’s partnership with Luzerne County Community College

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Hazleton real estate fraud suspect Ignacio Beato hit with federal charge

<p>President Donald Trump&#8217;s plan to drop corporate taxes from 35 percent to 15 percent could make the United States more competitive in the world marketplace. It could lead to business expansion. It could create jobs. Along with other sweeping tax measures, it could help institute greater economic growth, helping to solve a wide swathe of social issues.</p><p>And what&#8217;s the leftist alternative?</p><p>It&#8217;s higher corporate taxes. That, at least, is what Hillary Clinton stood for during the presidential campaign, and the consequence would likely be even more anemic growth, fewer jobs and lower wages. The main benefit would be to put wide grins on the faces of progressives who think any move possibly benefiting the rich as well as the poor is condemnatory and should be replaced by more central planning of a kind that stifles the economic exuberance resulting from free people making free choices in a free market.</p><p>The contrast is interesting at this particular juncture because so many commentators are busily assessing Trump&#8217;s first 100 days in an office he won less because of enthusiasm for what he stood for than disgust at the alternative. So how about a quickie glance at what signals the anti-Trump crowd has given during this first 100 days of what it would give us if in charge.</p><p>We would be less a home of the free, that&#8217;s for sure. The Democrats have been cursing about Trump rolling back regulations encapsulating liberty and we have had Democratic senators wanting to rewrite the First Amendment to give politicians more power over free speech. Some have sought to investigate those disagreeing with them on global warming and, meanwhile, on college campuses, groups of anti-Trump, anti-conservative, narcissistic, spoiled students have been doing their best to shut up conservative intellectuals offering views different from their own.</p><p>Some mob episodes have been truly scary, especially when you looked at the anti-fascist fascists wearing masks and dressed in black as they pushed others around and destroyed property. Signs and shouts were less on the order of discourse than vulgarity spilling from leaky brains, much like Madonna when she stood up during the women&#8217;s march on Washington, practiced the F-word and said she would like to burn down the White House. Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez himself seems to think it cute these days to go about giving speeches using a four-letter word that stands for feces.</p><p>More civil but far more frightening were too many Democratic senators showing in their interrogation of Neil Gorsuch as a nominee to the Supreme Court that they do not believe in judicial decisions based strictly on law and the facts. They simply want outcomes favoring the down and out, which would be an abandonment of rule of law. Without it, our republic folds and everyone is down and out, and that apparently is what mayors and other officials of sanctuary cities want, too. Obeying federal immigration laws is anathema to them. They are above all of that.</p><p>Other first-hundred-days things to consider include media bias that cheats the public and dishonors blessed standards. There have been the-sky-is-falling attacks on Trump for his own attacks on climate-change plans that accomplish nothing at major expense. Environmentalists have been outraged that he is going ahead with the Keystone XL pipeline shown to be safe by thousands of pages of scientific work backed up by varied federal agencies. Scientists in a recent pro-science demonstration in Washington seem to have ignored leftist anti-science positions, which are rampant.</p><p>None of this is by way of shrugging shoulders at Trump&#8217;s inattentiveness to a crisis-seeking federal debt that could be worsened by the tax cuts. None should like it that he is playing around with new tariffs that would raise prices and cost jobs or that he wants a southern-border wall that would accomplish no more than other methods billions of dollars cheaper. In fact, one of his victories has been to reduce illegal crossings to the lowest in 17 years simply by rhetoric and improved surveillance.</p><p>Let&#8217;s now focus on the days ahead, not letting Trump off the hook but getting it that not a few of his opponents have a lesser America in mind.</p><style>
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<div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at <a href="mailto:speaktojay@aol.com">speaktojay@aol.com</a>.</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Their view: First 100 days of the anti-Trump crowd