Letter: Trump Delivers on Promises

Via The Roanoke Times:

Between 2011 and the close of 2016, more than 62,000 U.S. coal miners — nearly half of the coal mining workforce — lost their jobs. This wasn’t just the product of a challenging marketplace. The coal industry was the target of a series of purposeful and carefully-orchestrated regulatory punches from a federal government that wanted to make it more difficult and more expensive to both produce and use coal.

The pain felt in coal country was the same shared in too many American cities and towns that have been on the wrong side of public policy that has crushed community-supporting industries.

While an editorial on Aug. 21, “Why Forbes says Trump is conning coal country,” accused the Trump administration of misleading coal country, the administration has delivered on its promise to take the federal government’s foot off the industry’s throat. Not only has the administration staunched the loss of coal jobs, but last year the mining industry put more than 1,000 miners back to work. The Trump administration is giving the industry, and the hundreds of thousands of Americans who depend on it, a chance to compete again. Coal still provides 30 percent of the nation’s electricity and coal plants time and again prove themselves to be our most reliable and resilient sources of power. While the industry still faces challenges, a federal government intent on its destruction is no longer one of them.
See the article here. 
  • On September 4, 2018