I recently ask a question here on IST of just what are Trump’s stands on issues…..a kind reader sent me a link but I was not thrilled about the answer I got there so I started some more research and I went to Trump’s website in search of the answers I sought……
Even his website was not real helpful….most of it was the slogans from his rallies….slogans are fine but they do not answer the question…..it does not help me understand his positions or his solutions….
So back to the drawing board…..it took awhile…I was hoping to find some sort of analysis of his economic plan and after some nail biting and cursing I found an analysis on a blog by Ian Welsh……
It is a good piece on the proposals of Donald J. Trump…..please no one have a stroke…..I want to be fair to this person…if his plan has merit then it should be reported……
Ok folks, let’s say what people keep refusing to say.
Trump’s economic plan makes sense and will work.
Okay?
What Trump wants to do is to use tariffs to return production to the United States. He has mentioned a 35% tariff on cars produced in Mexico, for example.
This is not crazy, this is not insane, this is how economies were largely run for most capitalist history.
If a country is running a trade deficit it has more demand than it is filling domestically. If it has unused capacity and less than full employment (both are true in the US, I would want to see the US running under 2% unemployment consistently for years before I was sure it was at full employment) then the stuff it is making overseas, which can be made at home, should be made at home.
Source: Trumponomics – How the Trump Economic Plan Will Work | Ian Welsh
Do not take this post as an endorsement for Trump’s plan…….I just want to be fair and give my readers all the info I can find on the candidates…..with the hope that they will make an informed choice when voting……we have had enough knee-jerk voting…..it has given us the circus we have now…..we are so much better than that….infantile name calling will not help in our search for a leader……
If the TPP gets passed by Congress, and accepted around the world, it will mean an end to any such thing as tariffs. Tariffs are the enemy of the international corporate hegemony, as it limits their ability to create world-wide markets without having to pay for it. They want NO national boundaries acknowledged in the business world….
The last person in American politics who wanted to create tariffs to protect the American economy was Richard Nixon….and look what they did to him…. His name is equivalent to ‘pariah’…..
Oligarchs HATE tariffs. If that is his plan, he is a dead man….
gigoid, the dubious
A lot of his “ideas” are dead on arrival if he is elected….chuq
Never fear; we’ll have a woman president next. There are more than 125 million voters in this country who are about as manipulable as any putty, and will go with whatever is reported on TV…. Who really knows what actually happens? It could all be done in a studio….
SIGH…. People are so gullible….
gigoid
Their gullibility comes from ignorance….my fave quote….”Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance”…….the Holy chuq
Aye, I’ll accept that one as basic….
g
If that’s Trump’s economic policy….then I’m moving to America and voting for Trump! 🙂
But seriously, lowering/eliminating tariffs has absolutely murdered the Real Economy…the one in which actual people inhabit. It’s been great for Oligarchs, GDP fetishists and…people with serious shopping addictions (aka 95% of the population) But it has moved generations of folks from decent paying factory jobs to shitty minimum wage jobs….or outright employment. It’s hard not to consider Free Trade the driving force behind most of our economic woes. Manufacturing underpinned everything else.
NAFTA was supposed to give Canuckistan goods “easier access to the US market”. However, if I recall, a study deemed NAFTA directly responsible for the loss of 80-100,000 manufacturing jobs. And since 2000, we’ve had a net loss of 350,000 manufacturing jobs. Some of those job losses are directly/indirectly related to NAFTA. But the reminder are due to America’s importation of cheap Chinese shit supplanting US & Canadian made products. Not only is that job loss a proportionately bigger hit to Canuckistan than America has suffered, our factory jobs tended to be more unionized and have better pay & benefits. “This has been a HUUUUUGE loss!” as Trump would say.
The most industrialized province, Ontario, went from (far & away!) the richest province to a “have-not” province within 20 years. And there’s NO sign of a comeback. All Canuckistan has going for it now is oil…and hockey players returning home after their multi-million-dollar-a-year careers in the US. We can’t even afford to make pennies anymore!
And there’s also a great environmental argument to be made from more locally based economies. Just think of all those transportation emissions to & from (as Trump says) “those Chinese motherfuckers” as they import our raw materials, do our former jobs turning them into products, and then shipping them back to us.
I am not sure that the plan will be as successful as this guy thinks….the middle class will still be paying all the bills….chuq
A middle…class? Huh? Wat dat? Never heard of it. Was that a typo? Middle glass? Little class?
Yes, it’s a lot harder to get those jobs back than it is to lose them. It’s like turning an ocean liner around. It’ll take at least a decade before any positive results start showing. However, it would stop the bleeding. It would keep what’s left alive.
But it would be the first example of “returning fire” after decades of very one sided carpet bombing.
In America 90% of all voting is “Knee Jerk” voting or is driven by media hypnosis and Trumponomics will be no better or worse than Bushonomics or Obamanomics or any other nomics have ever been.
And there is way why everybody is upset…..their voting created this problem and now they want to blame everyone but the culprit….
I have to agree with Mr. Gigoid on the economic question but the fact is that whatever a president’s economic policies might be and whoever the president might be no economic policy is going to get off the ground without the input of Congress.
Something everybody should keep in mind no matter who you vote for….
Domestically, Presidents are the new “Vice-President”. They’re mostly just decorative. Tits on a mule. Congress controls domestic policy and no President controls Congress anymore.
But without question, Trump has one thing going for him that none of the other candidates have. Balls. He just doesn’t give a fuck what anybody thinks. He says his thing, even if he has to yell over the top of a room full of booing people….aka Congress
Unlike Obama McBendover, Trump would continously berate disobedient members of Congress and call them “pussies” and “motherfuckers” in his daily press conferences. As the linked article suggests, he would use the dirt spy agencies already have in their files on people. He would sick his Goldshirts (trademarked) on them. Trump just don’t give a fuck!
So, maybe he gets caught. Maybe he gets impeached. Big whup! He hops in his own limo, goes back to Trump Towers, shits in his gold toilet and then starts running his multi-billion dollar empire again.
I just cannot imagine Donald going without cash and influence for 4 years….chuq