COMMENTARY: A Las Vegas entrepreneur offers Trump advice on how to jump-start the U.S. economy
I’m just returning today from my Washington, D.C., trip to the inauguration of President Donald Trump. I’m betting our new president got right to work on Friday afternoon, minutes after being sworn in, to delete as many of the executive actions and reverse as much of the damage done by President Obama as possible.
But tomorrow will be our new president’s first full working day on the job. So, for today’s column I turned to a brilliant Las Vegas CEO for advice on how our new president can turn around this horrible Obama economy. I interviewed Wayne Gorsek, the founder of the world’s largest online vitamin company. He has created more than 1,000 quality jobs. He is in the Inc. 500 Hall of Fame. Today, Wayne is CEO of Vegas-based vitamin company DrVita.com.
Here is his advice to the new president:
The amount of debt President Trump is inheriting is beyond comprehension, close to $20 trillion on the books at the federal level, plus more than $123 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Now add on local and state debt. We are headed for collapse, decline and Armageddon. There are two options to save the United States from financial disaster.
Option one is to balance budgets, reform out-of-control spending and dramatically reform government pension plans.
Option two is to grow the economy and create tens of millions of new high-quality jobs.
For the first option to work we must drastically reduce health-care costs that now exceed $3 trillion per year. Health-care spending has soared out of control from 5 percent of GDP in 1960 to almost 20 percent now, a 400 percent increase. Reversing this disaster will require dramatic health-care reforms.
Creating more quality jobs and GDP growth requires massive reductions in taxes, regulations and bureaucracy. Mr. Trump is proposing just that, but he also must inspire reversing taxes and spending at the local and state levels. For instance, just this week Clark County is proposing changes that would increase our property taxes. A better idea would be to reduce excess spending and eliminate non-essential government employees.
Our public education system is a disaster. We must start qualifying children prior to freshman year in high school for two tracks, one is a career vocational with no college required. The shortage of skilled labor is causing massive lost growth opportunities for the workforce and U.S. manufacturing.
Government currently favors big business, even though small business creates two-thirds of jobs. Because only the very large companies such as Tesla are getting incentives, we are now losing thousands of small businesses per year.
We must require the 108 million Americans getting entitlement checks — at a cost of $1 trillion a year — to get a job or lose their check. Call it “Workfare.”
Finally, all of your Review-Journal readers must look at labels and buy only American.
Thank you, Wayne Gorsek, for a dose of common sense.
Wayne Allyn Root (Wayne@ROOTforAmerica.com) is a best-selling author and host of “WAR Now: The Wayne Allyn Root Show” from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now. His R-J columns run Thursday and Sunday.