"Donald Trump’s approach to economics was downright primitive. He essentially held that America was falling from greatness due to trade policy stupidity and corruption in Washington and especially owing to a penchant for bad deals by past presidents. The undeniable economic decline of Flyover America, therefore, amounted to a kind of Global Grand Theft from [America by everybody with whom Americans traded. This was bollocks. Destructive bollocks. Destructive to rust-belt Americans in those places already hollowed out by tax burdens, meddling bureaucracy, and high-wage pro-union legislation, and also to those with whom Americans were still trying to trade. People like us down here. The cost of his antediluvian protectionism is still being paid both financially and in the world's growing security threats. (Remember the old warning: when goods don't cross borders, armies will.)]...
"[The Donald's ongoing Border Wars were both anti-trade and anti-immigrant. And both campaigns were ultimately Anti-American.] The ... false argument for the Donald’s Border Wars [for example] —that immigrants take American jobs– is utter nonsense. For crying out loud, immigrants are filling, not stealing, lower paying domestic jobs because for reasons of culture and welfare inducements the native-born simply won’t take them. [And the increase in productivity from the expansion of local markets and multiplication of the division of labour makes immigration almost always a productivity boon -- one that The Donald did his best to bury.]
"[The effect of Trump-o-Nomics was almost wholly negative.] Donald Trump inherited an economy that was tepidly coasting forward on the momentum of the post-crisis cyclical recovery, but he then hammered it into a violent tailspin [especially] during his last year in office... [His protectionism helped destroy whatever recovery was beginning to occur. His propensity for borrow-and-spend, the unthinking resort off the short-termist politician trying to conjure up growth in a maladjusted mess of an economic system, left it more maladjusted and misaligned than ever before.]...
"[The Donald used debt and bankruptcy to build his property empire. As president this propensity for reckless borrow-and-spend exploded, overseeing the third-biggest deficit increase of any president ever.] This was nowhere more evident than in his endless promotion of a large-scale national infrastructure programme, costing at least $1 trillion in new infrastructure spending over 10 years—all of it paid for by borrowing -- a theme that the Trump White House resurrected multiple times during the Donald’s tenure....
"The American economy is [now] a debt-entombed, speculation-ridden stagflationary mess, and you can fairly blame a goodly share of its perpetuation and its latest metastasis on Joe Biden. But the shaky foundation on which it rests has been long in the making—with the coup de grâce coming during the misbegotten era of Trump-O-Nomics. ...
"As we have documented extensively, Donald Trump is not an economic conservative in any way, shape or form. On everything that matters for prosperity and liberty—fiscal rectitude, sound money, free markets and small government—he’s on the wrong side of the policy fence. So to repeat: The Donald is simply an opportunistic, self-promoting demagogue [who helped ride America into the ground seemingly either to preen his overweening narcissism, or simply to stave off his many creditors] ..."~ summary and interpolation of several posts by David Stockman (former Reagan White House budget director) on the topic of 'The Trouble With Trump-O-Nomics' and 'The Trumpian Myth Of Global Grand Theft'
UPDATE, from Stockman:
"Between them, Trump and Biden have raised the national debt by nearly $13 trillion. That’s 40% of all the money that’s ever been borrowed by presidents since George Washington....
"When it comes to the core matter of fiscal discipline, the Donald was no disrupter at all. He was actually the worst of the lot among Washington spenders, and by a long shot, too. … All of the hideous excesses of the COVID bailouts were launched on his watch, signed into law with his pen and/or legitimized with the imprimatur of an ostensible Republican president …
“When you compare the constant dollar growth rate of total Federal spending during his four years in the Oval Office with that of his recent predecessors it is evident that the Donald was in a big spenders' league all of his own … the Donald’s record stands first among no equals on the wall of shame.”
"[He is truly] the King of Debt.... Ultimately, excessive, relentless public borrowing is the poison that will kill capitalist prosperity and displace limited constitutional government with unchained statist encroachment on the liberties of the people. So for that reason alone, the Donald needs to be locked-out of the nomination and out of the Oval Office.”
3 comments:
The fact Trump believes in nothing other than attracting adulation is itself a damning indictment of the bankruptcy of those who give him succour because he "opposes" the Democrats - but he has spent his entire life bending to the wind according to what benefits him. It's particularly deluded for Christian conservatives to think that a man with his record and background is their "saviour", but he is equally only taking on the culture wars because it gets him adulation, not in any way that actually secures "wins" for those who back him.
All quite true. Unfortunately, as has been the case with Libertarian goals for the last century, you've managed to a few forms of economic purity - lower tariffs, free trade agreements, lower taxes for a while (Reagan, Thatcher, Douglas) - but without apparently having any effect on those internal things like regulations and social welfare, which is why we're now facing this:
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs.
“Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.”
That's a now famous (well in the blogosphere anyway) comment from NR's Kevein Williamson.
Now here's this from arch NZ blogosphere Lefty, "Sanctuary":
Wah wah wah, cry me a river. I am heartily sick and tired of the whining exceptionalism of coasters and farmers. Plenty of people work hard for sweet f**k all, try being an all night cleaner in Tamaki’s industrial sprawl.
The world is changing. Coasters seem to think they have a right to do what they want because, reasons. Nobody forces them to live in that rainy and dreary place. Yes, their way of life is out of date. So stop whinging that the rest of us have some sort of obligation to support a dying way of life, like some sort of giant outdoor paean to the 20th century and accept it.
I see on another Trump thread here that somebody said I used a lot of words to explain this appeal and that we can't always accept The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend. Fair enough, so here's the above summarised concisely:
You’d be grateful for it, too, if everyone else hated you.
One more thing, from somebody who also loathes Trump but was trying to explain his appeal in 2015 in Bloomberg, Donald Trump: Class Warrior:
I'm a British immigrant, and grew up in a northern English working-class town. Taking my regional accent to Oxford University and then the British civil service, I learned a certain amount about my own class consciousness and other people's snobbery. But in London or Oxford from the 1970s onwards I never witnessed the naked disdain for the working class that much of America's metropolitan elite finds permissible in 2016.
When you consider what it would have been like for an Oop North boy hitting Oxford in the 1970's, that's a damning comment on modern day America. He continues:
My neighbors in West Virginia are good people too. Hard to believe, since some work outside and not all have degrees, but trust me on this. They're aware of how they're seen by the upper orders. They understand the prevailing view that they're bigots, too stupid to know what's good for them, and they see that this contempt is reserved especially for them. The ones I know don't seem all that angry or bitter -- they find it funny more than infuriating -- but they sure don't like being looked down on.
Many of them are Trump supporters.
...
Yet, contrary to reports, the Trump supporters I'm talking about aren't fools. They aren't racists either. They don't think much would change one way or the other if Trump were elected. The political system has failed them so badly that they think it can't be repaired and little's at stake. The election therefore reduces to an opportunity to express disgust. And that's where Trump's defects come in: They're what make him such an effective messenger.
You also might enjoy this from more people who don't like Trump or his "ideas" at blog Why Evolution is True, Why Trump voters weren’t irrational
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