Trump's Economy

James Carville, a strategist for Bill Clinton's successful presidential campaign versus George HW Bush, coined the phrase "It's the economy, stupid". And indeed, the state of the economy, for better or for worse, is usually credited to, or blamed on, the sitting president. A tanking economy can doom an otherwise successful president to one-term status, and a booming economy can boost an otherwise unpopular president to re-election. So, what's good about our economy and what did Trump do, if anything to contribute to it?


Before I get into that, let's agree that Trump doesn't know anything about economics. He doesn't know anything about trade, trade deficits or how tariffs work. Much was made about what a successful businessman he was during the 2016 campaign. What Trump is good at is self-promotion. As a real-estate developer he was good at squeezing cash out of money-losing businesses by having his lawyers arrange things so that he got paid even if no one else did; he was good at saving money by not fully paying his contractors; he was good at convincing the world (partly due to The Apprentice) that he was genius; he was good at convincing banks to keep loaning him money. As good as he was at all these things, it's obvious he didn't understand the underlying economics, nor did he care to understand, as long as he got paid. Unfortunately, when your the president of the United States, the goal isn't to enrich yourself, but to make decisions so that everybody prospers.

One of the economic indicators that Trump likes to talk about is the stock market. In particular he cites the Dow Jones Industrial average. The following link takes you to a few posts that I wrote about how the stock market works and how it might not be an unambiguously good thing: Stock Market Posts

Another statistic that Trump points to is the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is unusually low, and in some months records have been set. It's funny how, during the 2016 campaign, Trump derided unemployment numbers as "fake" and suggested that they might be as high as 40%, but once he was elected, the numbers were as good as gold. One thing that unemployment numbers don't take into account is the number of people who are underemployed, that is, they have a full-time job, but still can't make ends meet and often have to take a second job to pay the bills. This is tied into an increase in manufacturing jobs, which on average pay well, but the manufacturing sector is a relatively small percentage of total jobs and it's far from the future of employment in America.

Speaking of manufacturing, much is made every time a company decides to expand a plant or expand or do some additional hiring, but we're not hearing about it as much lately, and the incidents of closings and of companies moving overseas is downplayed, and when made public, Trump blames it on lack of patriotism or some such.

There are reasons to credit Trump for some of the good that is occurring in the economy. He ran (as most Republicans do) on an anti-regulation platform, and he has followed through, by appointing cabinet heads whose pre-government careers involved fighting against the departments that they now head. Unfortunately, the lack of consistency, including the ill-informed use of tariffs as a bludgeon to get his way, has undermined whatever confidence business may have had in him and his "policies". The big corporate tax giveaway of last year, while it resulted in a flurry of bonuses (that looked better than they actually were) has largely resulted in nothing more than a more gigantic deficit & national debt.

What we have is an economy that:

• May or may not be doing well, depending what indicators you look at
• Any positive results are not distributed equally
• The trends, good and bad, are merely continuations of trends from the previous administration
• Actions taken have had an extreme negative effect on our deficit & debt

So, for all of you Trumpists who cite the "great" economy as a reason to support Trump, your support is resting on extremely shaky ground. 

Deflection

Another day, another hateful statement by the current occupant of the White House. I'll leave it to others to discuss whether some of his more recent outbursts were racist in nature, but will look at how these pronouncements deflect from other issues.

A common tactic used by children when caught doing something that they shouldn't be doing is to point the finger at a sibling or classmate. A co-worker from several years back, who had experience as a school principal, told me that the way that he handled these distractions was to calmly say: "That may well be, but we're not talking about them, we're talking about you." Any objective observer of Donald Trump will recognize this childish strategy.

The most recent rage tweets by Trump concerned Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Cummings has been holding Trump's feet to the fire since the 2018 midterm elections put the Democrats in the majority, and most recently, grilled the head of the Department of Homeland Security regarding conditions at the border. What then, precipitated the attacks of the last few days against Rep. Cummings and the apocalyptic descriptions of parts of his district? Why, our old friends Fox News. https://www.theroot.com/the-president-was-up-early-rage-tweeting-about-rep-eli-1836754360

The picture then, combines deflection with the disturbing tendency of the President of The United States to set his priorities based on what he sees on Fox News. But let's get back to deflection.

While I would never ascribe logic to anything that Trump does, deflection, in the manner that he employs it, is an egregious logical fallacy. Primarily, it's what's called a red herring, which is trying to redirect the argument to another issue which the re-director can more easily address. His methods also have elements of ad hominem, where the character of the opponent is attacked as a method of undermining his argument. But despite the illogic of Trump's approach, he continues to do it because, in a sense, it works. While we were talking about the horrific conditions in which we are confining people, including citizens, at the southern border, now we're arguing about the conditions in inner-city Baltimore, whether a member of Congress is responsible for it, and whether Trump is a racist.

This isn't the only instance of deflection. A particularly relevant example was (and still is) the obstruction of the Mueller investigation. Trump's deflections in that case involved recurring and almost constant attacks on Mueller's character, the integrity of his team, and suggestions of deep state conspiracy theories. Trump achieves his goal, his idiot supporters believe it all while his detractors spin their wheels debunking the ridiculous.

Don't get distracted!