Excerpt from the Columbus Dispatch
By Rudy Fichtenbaum
It would be really nice to believe that working and middle class people in Ohio have prospered under President Donald Trump’s administration, but unfortunately the facts tell a different story.
The undeniable truth is that Ohio has lagged the rest of the nation in just about every category that matters to people who get up and go to work every day, trying to pursue the American Dream.
Working people in Ohio continue to live lives fraught with financial insecurity. The real day-to-day issues that families talk about around the kitchen table — good-paying jobs, living wages, affordable health care and medications, college tuition, keeping the lights on and the water running — are not being addressed.
We know that President Trump inherited a strong economy from his predecessor in office, President Barack Obama, and for a few years that strong economy continued to hum. We are now starting to see signs that Trump’s policies are slowing the economic growth.
There is no greater symbol of Trump’s ineffectiveness than the Mahoning Valley, where General Motors shut down the GM Lordstown plant in which workers had been making vehicles since 1966.
Trump visited workers during the 2016 campaign to reassure them that their jobs would be safe. “Don’t move. Don’t sell your house,” Trump said. At the time, General Motors Lordstown was the largest private sector employer in the area with three shifts totaling more than 4,000 workers churning out GM Chevrolet products.
Fast-forward to 2019 and the GM Lordstown automobile manufacturing plant sits empty.
