Dennis Prager | Oct 04, 2016

The overwhelming media consensus regarding the first presidential debate -- Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton and Lester Holt -- is that Clinton won.

If she did win it was because Trump, after a strong opening 30 minutes, allowed himself to get baited into emotional and tendentious self-defense.

And because the media have decided to focus on the tendentious, such as the utterly moronic issue of whether, in 1996, Trump called then-Miss Universe Alicia Machado "Miss Piggy," almost all the debate analyses ignored many of the most important things each candidate said.

On those grounds, Clinton did not win. On many truly significant subjects, she said things that were actually frightening, and he said things that were actually important.

Here are some examples.

Clinton explained how she would expand government control over American life: "We also have to make the economy fairer. That starts with raising the national minimum wage and also (guaranteeing), finally, equal pay for women's work. I also want to see more companies do profit-sharing. If you help create the profits, you should be able to share in them, not just the executives at the top."

It's astonishing how little attention this proposal of forcing companies to give a specified share of their earnings to employees received in the post-debate coverage. It's socialism, bordering on communism.

What she will have the government provide for free is "affordable child care and debt-free college."

She will have it paid for "by raising taxes on the wealthy. "I think," she said, "it's time that the wealthy and corporations paid their fair share to support this country."

According to Clinton, a "fair share" is not constituted by a 50 percent-plus individual income tax rate (including state income taxes and property taxes) and the top 1 percent of wage earners paying nearly half of all individual income taxes, while earning 20 percent of total income. Nor is it constituted by the 35 percent corporate tax rate, the highest among major Western countries.

Trump described his tax proposal: "Under my plan, I'll be reducing taxes tremendously from 35 percent to 15 percent for companies (and) small and big businesses. That's going to be a job creator like we haven't seen since Ronald Reagan. ... Companies will come. They will build. They will expand. New companies will start."

Is that not important and substantive?

Clinton believes that reducing taxes "is not how we grow the economy." Isn't her economy-crushing view worthy of more attention than "Miss Piggy?"

Trump, on the other hand, knows what virtually every economist knows: Tax cuts and regulatory reductions produce jobs. He said to Clinton: "You are going to approve one of the biggest tax increases in history. You are going to drive business out. ... You are going to regulate these businesses out of existence. ... New companies cannot form, and old companies are going out of business. And you want to increase the regulation and make them even worse. I'm going to cut regulations. I'm going to cut taxes big league, and you're going to raise taxes big league. End of story."

End of story is correct. Could Trump have been clearer on how to revive the American economy? Could Clinton have been clearer on how she would suppress growth and vastly expand the size and power of the government?

snip

Perhaps my favorite moment of the evening -- also completely ignored -- was Trump's quick reaction to Clinton saying that nuclear weapons "is the No. 1 threat we face in the world." He said: "I agree with her on one thing: The single greatest problem the world has is nuclear armament. ... Not global warming, like you think and your president thinks."

She never responded to this devastating point about left-wing hysteria over global warming. But she did have a lot to say about Miss Piggy, birtherism and Trump's tax returns. And so do her allies: the American media.

http://townhall.com/columnists/dennispra...prager-n2227350
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FWIW Lester Holt really dug into that NYT "bombshell" on Donald Trump not paying any taxes. He presented the story from every way but true. What a partisan hack he is. TM