Subject: LTEs for signoff
From: "Walker, Eric" <[email-masked]>
To: "Miranda, Luis" <[email-masked]>, "Paustenbach, Mark" <[email-masked]>, "Walsh, Tom" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2016 15:33:09 -0700

LTE 1:

The Republican Establishment is struggling to come to terms with Donald Trump as their standard-bearer, claiming that he doesn't truly represent their values. But from the Donald's opposition to raising the minimum wage to his plan to cut taxes for the rich, Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are cut from the same cloth.

In addition to proposing Bush-like tax cuts for the rich, Trump's claims that the U.S. can never default on its debt because the treasury can always print more money demonstrates a dangerous cluelessness about how the economy works. His views that we can negotiate partial debt payments with foreign creditors is as reckless as it is inaccurate.

In Trump's world, that's business as usual. Trump's businesses have repeatedly gone bankrupt, leaving investors, contractors and small businesses on the hook for his bad business decisions. We shouldn't subject the country's economy to Donald Trump's bankrupt business practices. The only deal to be had with Donald Trump is a bad one.

LTE 2:

The more I read about Donald Trump's tax proposals, the more I am terrified of another Republican presidency. These policies would hurt hard-working Americans like me, the way they did under Bush. Trump's tax plan would cost $9.5 trillion by slashing taxes for billionaires, while standing staunchly against a minimum wage increase. Trump even made the outrageous claim that wages were too high. His plans are an even more reckless version of the same, trickle-down tax plans that Speaker Paul Ryan has tried and failed to advance in Congress, in which the rich get richer at the middle-class's expense.

We shouldn't be surprised by the con that Trump and the GOP are running. The last Republican administration left our country in a recession, and this one would be no different.

Voters should not be fooled by Donald Trump's faux-populism. He has built his fortune by taking advantage of working people, and his tax plan would mean a big windfall for himself, once again giving middle-class families the short end of the stick.

LTE 3:

Don't be misled into thinking Trump is a friend of working people. First, he said in the debate that wages are "too high" in this country. Then, he rolled out a tax plan that would give the top 0.1% of income earners like himself an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million. We can't know exactly how much Trump would benefit from his own plan to cut taxes for the rich, since he has refused to release his tax returns.

But Republicans in Congress have been riding the Trump train for years - trying to enact Bush-style tax cuts for the rich and trying to cut things like healthcare, education, and infrastructure spending to pay for it.

Donald Trump is nothing new - he's just another Republican politician trying to give your hard-earned tax money to the rich and cut services your family depends on to pay for it. Let's reject him and his Republican friends at the ballot box this November.

LTE 4:

I don't understand why Donald Trump and Paul Ryan don't get along. They both support the same trickle-down economic policies that preceded the economic downturn in 2008. They both want to more Bush-style tax breaks for the rich. They both oppose raising the minimum wage. They both oppose equal pay for women. They are both content to threaten the country's full faith and credit by playing games with the debt limit. They both want to undo the progress we've made under President Obama - 14 million new jobs and cutting the unemployment rate in half.

Trickle-down economics simply doesn't work. The last two times Republicans implemented this agenda, our country was left mired in recession and facing massive deficits. The fact that Donald Trump and Paul Ryan are still pushing this failed economic theory shows they just don't understand what regular Americans are going through.

Eric Walker
[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>
732-991-1489
@ericmwalker<https://twitter.com/ericmwalker>