By Rick Manning

I proudly voted for Trump and am tired of the losers in the election trying to discredit me and my vote.

Here is the deal. Our nation has not had more than 4 percent economic growth since China got permanent normal trade relations and joined the World Trade Organization in 2000. According to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis in the 47 years from 1953 and 2000 the U.S. economy experienced 4 percent or higher growth in almost half of those years. Since 2005, our nation has not even achieved a modest 3 percent GDP growth, experiencing the slowest ten-year period of growth since the Great Depression. If 2016 continues on its current poor trajectory of 1.7 percent annualized growth, the period between 2007 and 2016 will be the worst ten-years since record keeping began, including the terrible 1930s.

But the new normal Obama-Bush economy isn’t just about numbers. It is about the millions of people aged 16-64 who have dropped out of the workforce over the past decade. A quick fact, if labor participation of people 16-64 had remained the same as in 1997, the September unemployment rate would have been 9.8 percent instead of the reported 5 percent. This jump represents seven million Americans who are now out of the workforce compared to twenty years ago demonstrating the hidden despair behind the topline unemployment numbers.

I supported Trump because he challenges the new normal resulting from the past thirty years that has caused stagnant wages, lowered expectations and the destruction of formerly thriving industrial America on the altar of bad trade deals, too much regulation and uncompetitive labor conditions.

I support Trump because he will work to make America economically competitive through lowering our nation’s highest corporate tax rate in the world and repatriating stranded corporate profits to be reinvested in the U.S., He will also end the deliberate subversion of the U.S. economy by environmental regulations designed to drive up the prices for electricity driving the green cost of manufacturing domestically up so high that it is cheaper to ship products here from distant lands than to make them in places like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I support Trump because he will break the stranglehold of the politically connected and the establishment that does their bidding for a price on the government. A stranglehold that results in domestically produced, inexpensive lightbulbs being temporarily outlawed while more expensive, profitable bulbs produced in China were forced into the marketplace, ending hundreds of jobs by the time Congress got around to defunding it.

I support Trump because he will reinforce our nation’s relations with friends like Great Britain and Israel, while holding governments like those in Iran and China honestly accountable. He will build the already authorized wall and fence along the U.S.-Mexican border and seek to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, a welcome change from the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil approach to our southern border.

I support Trump because all lives matter, and the foundation of the United States is built around the ideal that justice is blind must be restored in order for our legal system to have any legitimacy.

I support Trump because terrorism is a real threat and the almost passive acceptance of acts of terrorism by followers of Islam reveals a dangerous national blind spot that must be eliminated.

And I support Trump because the U.S. Navy is down to the fewest number of ships since World War I, and he will build it back up to 350 ships using American steel and highly skilled American workers. America’s economic and national security depend upon a robust Navy, and a President Trump understands that basic fact and will remedy the poor decisions of the past.

I am not ashamed of standing up for constitutional, limited government principles and I am proud to have voted for Donald Trump for President, and the crybaby losers of the left cannot change that with all of their false narratives about what this presidency means.

A Trump presidency may just be our nation’s last chance for the 21st century to be the next American century. And the extension of freedom that results when America is strong, benefits the entire world.

I am proud to have stood for freedom through my vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States and so should everyone else who voted for him.

The author is president of Americans for Limited Government.