Trump Trade Policy Angers Allies, Plus Whose Economy Is This Anyways?….There was confusion & hard feelings galore coming from the Trump trade policy games Trump played at the G-7 Summit. As seen in Economy-job-trends-year-to-yea
It’s questionable how much a current president even affects the economy one way or the other. What is normally the case, a president gets undue credit for a good economy, & unjustifiable criticism for a bad economy. For example, take the ongoing problems in our current economy of stagnant wages, income inequality & high deficits. Who gets the blame for that? It’s been trending that way for a long time. Liberals have a valid argument in blaming Reagan, that although his actions of weakening labor unions & antitrust laws may have helped unleash animal spirits for boosting the renowned American free-market economic engine, it also set the stage for growing corporate dominance by mammoth multinational conglomerates, providing them the power & leverage to suppress employee wages in favor of the corporate bottom line. Conservatives have a strong case by pointing to LBJ, that even though initiating his Medicare/Medicaid programs did help provide needed healthcare coverage for the sick & elderly, those programs over the past half-century have grown so unwieldy expensive & far beyond our ability to pay, from which our mounting debt/deficits have stifled our ability to finance discretionary spending/fiscal initiatives, that could otherwise better prop up/sustain our economic growth while fixing the many glaring problems. So placing the blame may be more an ideological opinion.
Trump Tax Plan
These excerpts below from a billionaire go along with what I’ve been saying for years, but few other billionaires are willing to fess up to. With widening wealth inequality, it makes the trickle-down approach pure bunk. Sparking shared economic growth these days would require a bottoms-up strategy, not top-down, but Trump & his economic advisers are still operating in the previous century with an obsolete dogma, as seen from unfiltered-raising-wages-doesn
Today, Hanauer is a self-made billionaire. He made his money as a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist and has also created a broad array of companies ranging from e-commerce software to biotechnology. Hanauer’s business acumen has allowed him to become one of the wealthiest Americans — the so-called 1 percent — but it has also made him an unlikely champion of the poor and a passionate advocate for the advancement of economic equality in the U.S. “If you’re a middle-class person and feel like the country has left you behind, that is an objective truth. That didn’t happen by accident.” Hanauer is aware that some form of economic inequality is an essential part of a healthy economy. “That’s not in dispute,” he says. The question, however, is how much of it should exist. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of Americans shared only about 8 percent of the national income. By 2007, however, that number had grown to almost 23 percent, while the income share of the bottom 50 percent had fallen from about 20 percent to about 12 percent in 2015.
“It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to see that if that trend continues, we will no longer have really a capitalist economy or a democracy,” notes Hanauer. He believes there are multiple factors contributing to the probleme: trickle-down tax policies, dwindling overtime pay and decreasing wages. “There is no excuse for any company in America to pay their workers so little that they need food stamps, and Medicaid and rent assistance,” explains Hanauer. “This is bulls***.” “That’s not capitalism. That’s socialism for the rich.” According to Hanauer, all businesses share the same “econo-erotic fantasy”: “My customers will all be rich and be paid a lot by their employers. My workers, sadly, will not be paid a lot, so my margins are very high. I’ll exist in this world where my workers need food stamps, sadly, but my customers are wealthy enough to both buy my stuff and pay the taxes that will fund the food stamps.” Hanauer appreciates the appeal of the fantasy, but there is one problem: “If everybody gets that deal, then you have no economy anymore.” However, Hanauer believes this crisis is a direct result of “policies enacted by governments from both the right and left.”
When President Trump signed the GOP tax bill on December 20, 2017, he touted it as the coming of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” And while Republicans have said that the bill will benefit the middle class and spark job growth by giving corporations permanent tax cuts, Hanauer says that those claims are far from the truth. “Rich people no more create jobs than farmers create tomatoes. The economy generates jobs, not rich people,” he explains. “The more money consumers have, the more jobs that are created, because people buy things and people like me are required to hire people in order to meet that demand.” Ultimately, Hanauer believes people should call their elected representatives and demand policies that create wage-and-overtime increases and reject cutting taxes for wealthy corporations, “[Don’t] get conned by this trickle-down nonsense that raising wages kills jobs — It doesn’t. It’s just a thing rich people say to poor people to keep rich people rich and poor people poor.” “It’s a lie. Don’t believe it.”
Other indications of a poorly thought-out tax plan comes in excerpts from economists in this article corporate-tax-cut:
The new corporate tax cuts are unlikely to stimulate the level of job creation and wage growth that the Trump administration has promised, a trio of prominent economists has concluded, because high tax rates were not pushing much investment out of the United States in the first place. Instead, the researchers conclude, multinational corporations based in the United States and other advanced economies have sheltered nearly 40 percent of their profits in tax havens like Bermuda, depriving their domestic governments of tax revenues and enriching wealthy shareholders. That number suggests a jarringly large amount of what appears, to policymakers, to be investment pushed abroad by high tax rates is instead an accounting trick — so-called paper profits — which tax cuts will not reverse. “This idea that if you cut taxes, you’ll attract a lot of physical capital, a lot of investment to the United States, I don’t think is supported by the evidence,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors. “Paper profits — that doesn’t boost wages for workers. What boosts wages is actual factories.”
The research by Mr. Zucman and Thomas Torslov and Ludvig Wier of the University of Copenhagen does not imply that corporate tax cuts will not help companies or lead to at least some new investment. But it challenges the magnitude of the increase that President Trump and congressional Republicans promised would result from cutting the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent as part of the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul. Throughout the debate over the tax bill, Republicans cast the country’s corporate tax rate as uncompetitive when compared with nations such as Ireland and Canada, and said the rate was pushing American multinationals to park their profits in other countries where their tax bills would be lower. The new research concludes that assumption is wrong. “Machines don’t move to low-tax places,” the economists write, “paper profits do.”
Various Issues
This story cries out for more affordable college & a commitment to more advanced training/apprenticeship programs: low-skill-workers-will-be-the-
Health Care
Inside the-trump-administrations-terr
Our healthcare insurance system overall is a dysfunctional hodgepodge of patchwork bureaucratic confusion, so I wish our leadership would really seek to fix the system rather than using the issue as a political football. We’ve been haggling & locked into our positions over this for years without progress, so it’s way past time to figure out something better. And our healthcare costs are way higher than other countries without any corresponding advantage in health outcomes or longevity, so we’d be far further ahead to take the best ideas from what’s really working, copying insurance coverage plans used by other countries that are proven superior to ours.
Strangling Debt
The dire situation America finds itself in with funding entitlement obligations are found in these excerpts below from medicare-will-be-dead-in-
Never mind that these young adults born between 1981 and 1996 are struggling with crippling student loan debt, less access to workplace benefits and collective bargaining agreements, increasing job insecurity and a Great Recession that erased millions of jobs. It’s not those issues that have knocked out prosperity and economic mobility for young Americans; it’s the avocado toast! There’s only so much of this browbeating before there’s an inevitable backlash, and a popular target by fed-up Millennials is that they’re paying into a social benefits system to prop up Baby Boomers that might not be as generous for them when they retire. These concerns are not without merit. On Tuesday, the Social Security Administration issued its annual Trustees Report, saying Medicare and Social Security will become insolvent in 2026 and 2034, respectively, under current trajectories. Currently, about 62 million retirees, spouses, surviving children and disabled workers receive Social Security benefits, while about 60 million people, most of them over the age of 64, receive health insurance from Medicare, according to the Associated Press. Those numbers will grow as more Boomers enter their sunset years, and right now Social Security and Medicare are set for them; what happen after that is uncertain. It has not gone unnoticed by younger Americans that these older Americans have enjoyed access to more workplace benefits, better job security, greater collective bargaining power, and even a higher real federal minimum wage. To young adults twho don’t enjoy these benefits, it can seem like what’s going on is nothing less than generational theft.
Rising income inequality has increased the amount of income that’s above the Social Security contribution cap of $128,400 (any income earned over that amount isn’t subject to Social Security and Medicare contributions), while the Great Recession and wage stagnation have hit lower- and middle-class Americans, in many cases lowering the amount of their contributions and how much they can save to offset what they won’t receive from the system after they retire. The U.S. pays the world’s highest prices for many healthcare services, especially for brand-name pharmaceuticals. High healthcare prices not only hit retirees’ budgets, but also place unnecessary burdens on both Medicare and Medicaid. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, drug companies, hospitals, health insurers and health professionals associations have forked out nearly $2.3 billion lobbying Congress to serve their interests.Meanwhile, the cost inflation of hospital and other medical care services are among the highest of any product or services category. In America, tennis shoes and mobile services are getting cheaper, but healthcare, child care and higher education costs are soaring. The inability for lawmakers to fix the long-term viability of Social Security and Medicare is one of the main reasons why so many young Americans are angry about picking up the tab to support retired Boomers. As Millennials struggle with over a trillion dollars’ worth of student loan debt in an economy offering fewer benefits, less job security, and lackluster wage growth, young working-age Americans may be right to wonder if the legacy of the New Deal that helped their parents will be around as they enter their sunset years.
Here is a rather in-depth intellectual read: how-the-greek-debt-crisis-expo
Trump Trade Policy & G-7
I do have some empathy for the nationalistic attitudes, since I’ve always believed every nation has the right to take reasonable steps in protecting their domestic industries. Having seen firsthand how the manufacturing economy here in northeast Ohio has been in decline for decades, our political leaders failed us by not addressing or barely acknowledging the outsourcing that was shuttering our factories, to the point leadership with their corporate backers readily embraced unfettered free trade. More than a quarter century later I still regret enjoying & somewhat believing Rush Limbaugh’s demeaning satire against Ross Perot, since that giant sucking sound Perot talked about during his presidential run became all too real with the loss of millions of good-paying factory jobs. A more nationalist approach can be a healthy thing compared to total surrender to unfettered free trade where mega-corporations win, as long as the goal is a level playing field where protectionist policies are basically in line with equivalent measures our trading partners are using.
But the conflated logic on display by the Trump trade policy at the G-7 Summit, it offered up a toxic stew of picking on the wrong targets while abandoning our leadership role in the world: in-trump-some-fear-the-end-of-
Plus here is the one Trump caters to the most: Day-by-Day-Donald-Trump-
Click on this next link where the discussion is on Trump in Canada looking like a rambling wreck: cnbcs-john-harwood-concerned-a
An impulsive spiteful president also is known for changing his mind, especially when those he might strike a deal with won’t stoop to shower him with praise: trump-g7-allies-clashes-trade-
After President Trump’s atrocious and irrational behavior leading up to and at the Group of Seven summit, the disintegration of the liberal world order in place since the end of World War II and the potential for a serious international crisis no longer seem hard to imagine. The president, unmoved by history, ignorant of facts and guided by sycophants, has not been forced to grapple with the real world nor to hear views that don’t coincide with his twisted worldview, in which allies are ripping us off and aggressive strongmen are to be admired and accommodated. Trump — after departing the G-7 meeting early — reversed his earlier decision to sign on to the joint statement with other member nations. He no doubt was reacting to the public tongue-lashing from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who told the press, “I highlighted directly to the president that Canadians did not take it lightly that the United States has moved forward with significant tariffs on our steel and aluminum industry.” Trudeau continued by declaring that the Trump administration’s decision to invoke “national security” to justify tariffs was “insulting” given Canada’s alliance with the United States in multiple wars. As Trudeau put it, “Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.” Trump can never tolerate criticism, let alone such public and direct criticism, so he accused Trudeau of making “false statements” and reneged on the decision to sign the joint communique.
Trump demonstrated once again that he is erratic and untrustworthy — with his own allies! The contrast between his antagonistic relationship with democratic allies and his never saying a bad word about Russia defies explanation, unless one is to buy into the theory that he is indebted in some fashion to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose campaign to interfere in the U.S. elections helped land Trump in the White House. I have no idea what he is talking about. Our allies are not stealing anything. It is far from clear what, if anything, would satisfy him. If — and it is a big if — Trump is serious about erecting barriers to U.S. markets, we are looking at a full-blown trade war with our closest allies and trading partners, along with the trade wars with China and Mexico. All this would redound to the benefit of exactly one country, Russia. A worldwide recession would not be hard to imagine. Trump becomes irrational and unhinged when contradicted, and given the degree of contradiction permitted within his inner circle (none), it must be unnerving indeed to discover that our allies view him with disdain if not contempt. Arriving late and leaving early from the G-7 gathering, Trump played the petulant child, trying so very hard to say that he didn’t want to be part of their group anyway — so there! Worse still, is disturbing invitation for Russia, the United States’ most worrisome foe, to join the G-7 suggests he really cannot tell who is a friend and who is an enemy.
In the case of the Singapore summit, we really do see a zero-sum equation. Trump, for fear of failing, seems to have defined “success” down to a photo op, thereby giving a massive victory to Kim, who obtains legitimacy and reduces, if not eliminates, any real risk of military action against his regime. Kim will do what North Korea has done again and again: speak nice words, pull the United States into fruitless discussions and give up nothing of consequence. The empty gesture of formally ending a war that has been over for 65 years achieves nothing for the United States but will burnish Kim’s image. The notion that real denucelarization is even possible needs to be rethought. How could an entirely closed regime, replete with secret labor camps and a substantial military, ever allow inspectors to rove the entire country to determine what it has and what, if anything, it is giving up? How could Kim give up the jewel of his regime, the very thing that got him a summit with the world’s only superpower? Getting “investment” or economic aid from the West likely sounds like colonialism redux to the North Korean regime. Taking “help” from the West would be inviting the fox into the henhouse from their perspective. Surely someone in the Trump administration understands this, right? (Where is national security adviser John Bolton when you need him?) Trump is now so desperate to show he’s “right” — a master negotiator who breaks every precedent — that it is becoming more and more likely the summit will deliver plenty of glad-handing but no concrete moves toward denuclearization. In that respect, Trump is exactly like every other American president who got pulled into a process whose end result is North Korea’s continuing status as a nuclear power. The main difference is that none of Trump’s predecessors were dim-witted enough to give the ghoulish dictator of North Korea a public-relations triumph. Oh, and they managed not to get into fights with Canada.
Must Sees from last week
Here is a good interview steven-brill-trump-d
Only Time Will Tell
The talks were in Singapore (Asia) & the subject are the nukes in North Korea (Asia), & only time will tell whether they’re successful. These lyrics may sum up the Singapore talks as two egotistical, self-absorbed, chronic liars looked to game each other:
You’re leaving now
It’s in your eyes
There’s no disguising it
It really comes as no surprise
To find that you planned it all along
I see it now
Becomes so clear
Your insincerity
And me all starry-eyed
You’d think that I would have known by now
Now, sure as the sun will cross the sky
This lie is over
Lost, like the tears that used to tide me over
(Only time will tell)
One thing is sure
That time will tell
(Only time will tell)
If you were wrong
The brightest ring around the moon
Will darken when I die
Now, sure as the sun will cross the sky
This lie is over
Lost, like the tears that used to tide me over
You’re leaving now
It’s in your eyes
There’s no disguising it
It really comes as no surprise
To find that you planned it all along
I see it now
Becomes so clear
Your insincerity
And me all starry-eyed
You’d think that I would have known by now
Now, sure as the sun will cross the sky
This lie is over
Lost, like the tears that used to tide me over
(Only time will tell)
You’re on your own
Inside your room
(Only time will tell)
You’re claiming victory
You were just using me
And there is no one you can use now
(Only time will tell)
One thing is sure
That time will tell
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