Welcome to “Upside-Down Trump-World,” a land where our government does exactly the opposite of what’s best for the American people.

It’s a land where deficit-hawk Republicans pass legislation that adds $2.6 trillion to our deficit — a land where free-trade Republicans stand quietly by while our president starts trade wars.

It’s also a land where the GOP, the “party of business,” provides companies with handouts in the form of tax cuts while killing them with tariffs that harm their ability to sell their products overseas.

We must talk about health care, a need of every American. The Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) was far from perfect but light-years better than what we had. To begin with, just as with auto insurance, everyone was required to buy coverage which spread the risk.

People with pre-existing conditions could no longer be rejected or charged more than others and it went a long way toward protecting people from bankruptcy just because they got sick.

While Greg Walden and Republicans in Congress were unable to repeal the ACA, they did enough to it to render it useless. This, while its popularity among Americans was actually growing.

Let’s move to the environment. Whether you recognize the science that has firmly established that human-caused climate change is a reality, the direction of the GOP to save the coal industry is nonsensical and bad for our economy, today and in the future.

Renewable energy is going to win the competition with coal and oil, not because of climate issues but because it makes economic sense.

To put it simply, the wind and the sun are free while coal and oil are not. While we back coal and pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, countries around the world (especially China) are investing heavily in renewable energy technologies.

We are already buying solar and wind technologies from China; just check out the new solar farm in Madras. This is exactly what causes trade deficits; others make products that we need while we don’t reply in kind.

What do Republican leaders like Walden have to say about this? Nothing.

The GOP has always advocated for balanced budgets. Then in December, Walden and his pals in Congress passed a tax cut which Forbes magazine called “the end of all economic sanity in Washington.” Their theory was that this would drive up hiring and wages. It hasn’t done either one. Instead, corporations used this windfall to support stock-buybacks and higher dividends.

As a result, the stock market is doing great but workers are not. In late July, Forbes published another article on all this, focusing largely on wage stagnation. There is an additional side-effect to the tax cut combined with the budget which was passed in February; the deficit is projected to increase by $2.6 trillion over the next ten years.

So much for the GOP position on fiscal responsibility. What do Republican leaders like Walden have to say about this? Nothing.

Last week at a rally, Trump stated that the current U.S. economy is the best in history. If he believes this, why gamble by instituting trade wars with China, the EU, Canada and Mexico.

The risk that tariffs, especially on Chinese goods, will cause price inflation at 20 percent to 25 percent levels and kill this wonderful economy is high.

What do we have to gain? What do free-trade Republicans like Walden have to say about this? Nothing.

A good friend of mine says that this is politics as usual, the left versus the right. If that were true, we wouldn’t have leading conservative columnists like David Brooks and George Will opposed to virtually everything the GOP is doing in Washington.

Will actually wrote an editorial suggesting that all voters support Democrats in the midterms.

He believes that we need to send a message to Republicans who say nothing while Trump executes his upside-down policies. He’s right.

— Rich Belzer lives in Bend.