Today on Point of View we hear from speaker, writer, and researcher for Answers in Genesis, Bodie Hodge. He tells us more about his book, World Religions and Cults, Volume 2: Moralistic, Mythical and Mysticism Religions.
Merrill Matthews joins Kerby in-studio in the second hour and he discusses the president who Donald Trump most resembles, he also does some fact checking on Trumps speech on trade policy.
During his years at SIUC, Bodie continued his personal study of biblical apologetics and began teaching this topic to a junior high Sunday school class. While at SIUC, he was the president of one of the few Christian student organizations, Christians Unlimited, and was also an officer in the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
After earning his master’s degree, Bodie worked as a mechanical engineer for Grain Systems Incorporated, was a visiting instructor in mechanical engineering at SIUC, and worked as a test engineer through Aerotek Engineering for Caterpillar, Inc., in Peoria, Illinois at the Peoria Proving Ground.
Dr. Matthews is a past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists. Dr. Matthews also served for 10 years as the medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation, and has contributed chapters to several books, including Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate and The 21st Century Health Care Leader and, in 2009, Stop Paying the Crooks (on Medicare fraud).
He has been published in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Barron’s, USA Today, Forbes magazine and the Washington Times. He was an award-winning political analyst for the USA Radio Network.
Dr. Matthews received his Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas
Trump recently delivered a speech intended to demonstrate his grasp of trade policy and outline what he would do as president. So it’s worth fact-checking some of his comments.
“Today, we import nearly $800 billion more in goods than we export.”
The driving concept behind Trump’s economic policy is the belief that other countries are beating us on trade, which for him is proven by the existence of a trade deficit. Many, and perhaps most, economists argue that trade deficits have little bearing on a country’s economy, but even so, Trump’s not telling the whole story.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2015 trade deficit in “goods” was $763 billion. What Trump failed to mention is that U.S. companies sell more “services” to other countries than those countries sell to us, creating a services surplus of $266 billion.
The former Republican president who Trump most resembles isn’t Reagan, but Herbert Hoover, who served from March 1929 to March 1933, when his reelection bid was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Let me outline some of the similarities between the two men.
Like Trump, Hoover had never held elective office. A near prerequisite for winning the presidency of the United States is to have been elected to some previous office or a war hero. Hoover was neither, and the same applies to Trump. Unlike Trump, however, Hoover had been appointed to several government positions, which helped indicate the kind of president he would be.