The billionaire business boys in politics didn’t have a good week.
President Donald Trump lamented that he “didn’t think the job of President of the United States would be so difficult”. The world laughs! Governing the biggest economy, largest military, trillion-dollar budgets, the most influential country in the world and he didn’t think the job would be so difficult!
Well, to be fair, he didn’t know executive orders were generally powerless or that the Congress and the courts were so powerful.
You almost feel sorry for the guy who campaigned so hard for one of the toughest jobs in the world and didn’t know what the job entailed. Quite frankly, a politician’s job at any level comes with more crap than accolades. For the politician and their families, a tough skin is mandatory.
Back in Canada, Kevin O’Leary dropped out of the Conservative Party leadership race the day before voting began. Seems the billionaire businessman who was going to make Canada great again would likely win the leadership of the Party, but probably not the next election. Or maybe having looked south of the border decided becoming Prime Minister wasn’t such a great job.
O’Leary would have had to start living in Canada full time and give up on his American reality TV show. He probably also realized that unlike the States where Trump could fly in and out of cities in his private jet to speak in front of huge rallies, O’Leary would need to go town to town across vast regions (often by car) to personally shake hands with thousands of everyday Canadians.
Most people who go into politics have a sincere desire to make a real difference. To survive at politics they also need a strong ego.
Billionaire businessmen who think they can jump into politics and make countries great again have the ego, but they don’t have the all-important civic agenda. Without an agenda they flip and flop based on who talked to them last.
Billionaire businessmen have one agenda—personal profit. This profit agenda was so obvious when the tariffs on softwood lumber were announced by President Trump to favour Canada’s third richest billionaire family, the Irving’s of New Brunswick.
Supposedly the tariffs were to punish lumber taken from Crown land as Americans deem it government subsidized.
Since the Irving family own the vast majority of privately harvested forests in Canada only a three per cent tariff was placed on their lumber versus up to 24 per cent on other companies.
But those smaller mom-and-pop timber and sawmill owners using exclusively private timber were not included in the three per cent tariff!
State-side these tariffs will enrich a very few industry biggies who own the forests and lumber mills. The losers are the millions of end users—home builders and home purchasers—whose prices will skyrocket.
Kevin O’Leary got out before he made the big Trump mistake. While down south poor Mr. Trump lives alone with his twitter feed while his wife and young son hide out in their Manhattan penthouse. And instead of governing, continues to organize campaign rallies to boost his ego.
Billionaires don’t become billionaires or multi-billionaires by taking care of others, billionaires take care of billionaires. For ordinary, working people to elect them into government leadership is nonsense of the highest order.