letter to the editor

Business experience is more valuable for governing

Posted 10/8/24

Thirty-four percent of the members of the US Congress are lawyers, and 51 percent of senators are lawyers. 

Only 30 percent of House members and 25 percent of senators are business owners, …

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letter to the editor

Business experience is more valuable for governing

Posted

Thirty-four percent of the members of the US Congress are lawyers, and 51 percent of senators are lawyers. 

Only 30 percent of House members and 25 percent of senators are business owners, business founders or business executives.

This is also true at the local level. For instance, the Democratic candidate for the NY Assembly, Paula Kay of Rock Hill, NY is a lawyer. Her only experience in life consists of jobs in public service and as an aide to political candidates.

Even at the most local level, issues are turned over to lawyers, presumably because they know how to write a contract and because “they know the ropes.” Frequently, their ideas have to be shot down based on technical issues. The Forestburgh Solar Law vs. the U.S. Navy Engineering Report serves as a good example.

Notwithstanding that some would feel otherwise, lawyers by virtue of their education and experience are not the most suitable candidates to run this country in elected positions. 

Likewise, spending 20, 40 or 50 years in the Congress of the United States does not develop business instincts necessary for running this country. 

It is symptomatic that the last three Democratic presidents—as well as the current Democratic presidential candidate—are lawyers, whereas the last three Republican presidents had degrees in economics and business with business experience. 

I remember that President Bush the Elder said, “I am watching people working and meeting the payroll, and I am moved.” 

The fact remains that their Democratic opponents were never in a position where they would have to meet the payroll or pay the suppliers.

This is why I think that President Trump, because of his business education and business experience, was the best president of the modern era—mostly on an economy with the lowest black unemployment in history, the lowest overall unemployment rate since 1959, etc. I say this in spite of President Trump’s many failings and his largely unfounded persecution, all of which I detailed elsewhere, such as his wrong insistence on a “stolen election.”

This is also why I feel that Paula Kay is a less suitable candidate for District 100 of the NY Assembly than her opponent Lou Ingrassia, who has business experience.

“After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world” said President Calvin Coolidge, himself a lawyer, in his speech on January 17, 1925.

He was followed by Herbert Hoover, a humanitarian, a Secretary of Commerce and the head of Truman’s 1947 Hoover Commission, charged with restructuring the U.S. government. But importantly, Hoover was a mining engineer who made his money as a successful mining entrepreneur. Thus, Hoover refused to accept his presidential salary, as did President Trump, who donated his quarterly paychecks to charity.

And I would like to tell those who would claim that the Republican President Hoover, so beloved by the “progressives” for his humanitarian efforts, did not do enough during the Great Depression, what Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau—the only Jewish person in FDR’s administration—said: “We have done everything but nothing worked. The national economy revived from its deep depression only at the beginning of WW II after we started the massive industrial effort to defeat the Nazis.”

Ivan Orisek
Forestburgh, NY

democratic, candidate, NY, assembly, paula kay,

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