Trump

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Back From a Break

And what do I find?

Precisely what I left.

It is a remarkable fact that the current election here in America is likely to produce as its protagonists the two least liked candidates. It is far less remarkable how they would have been selected: both Trump and Clinton started the race – if you can recall that far back – with the greatest name recognition. America apparently takes a while to see through the acts of well known players.

Yet their routes to dominance have been equally remarkable in their difference. Trump has mounted an insurgency that has toppled the Republican establishment. By the time November rolls around I think we will be in the midst of a complete and very open break-up of the Republicans. This is simply the end point, or the logical conclusion, of the steady re-apraisal of what it means to be a Republican. The origins of which are coterminous with the rise of the hard right Californian faction with Reagan as its figurehead.

Reagan was an ideologue, his personal views on things like Social Security – which he argued was a communist method for undermining good old American self-reliance – set him out of step with the American middle class, and were it not for the 1970’s and its economic turmoil, stagflation, and oil crises, his extremism – nor his racism –  would never have been acceptable. His skin deep Hollywood style demeanor and solutions were simply an overlay beneath which sat the manifestly anti-democratic machinations of a rising corporately funded and manned effort to subvert government and place it in the hands of big business.

I wish I could say that the Democrats fought back and called out that big business attack on democracy, but I cannot. Instead, scared by the immense popularity of Reagan’s charisma, which people still seem to conflate with the popularity of his policies, the Democrats cut their long time allies adrift, abandoned economic progressivism, and, under Clinton, became a milder version of Republicanism.

Neoliberal political economy has since run as a common thread between the two parties. Free trade, pro-business deregulation, anti-unionism, anti-government austerity policies, and the like became in various ways the platform of both parties, with the ugly stand-off in Congress we now witness entirely due to differences on social issues.

Trump’s ascendancy is simply a recognition that the post-Reagan GOP has never really been committed to its own propaganda. It advocated that its policies would provide a prosperous future with opportunity for all. In actuality those policies were designed to benefit the wealthy few and big business alone. This contradiction has been laid bare by the stagnation of wages and the prospect of a further decline in fortunes for the very people who provided its most loyal voter base. Those voters, not unsurprisingly, are rejecting the establishment as a consequence. Hence the turmoil and the likelihood of a re-alignment on the right in our politics.

In contrast Clinton is the candidate of the establishment. She is steeped in neoliberal ideology. An ideology that produced welfare reform and threw millions into the working poor, which deregulated the banks leading to the recent crisis, which passed NAFTA, a device to ship manufacturing jobs abroad, which was the origin of our bloated prison population because of its attitudes towards crime, and which was committed to a fiscal conservatism that failed to undo the rising tide of inequality unleashed by Reagan.

Clinton is a more reliable friend of business that Trump could ever be. Her pro-business credentials are worthy of a candidate of the right in most any other western nation. She is an avid supporter of the current round of pro-business trade agreements, and her affiliation with Wall Street is a legendary example of the interbreeding between big finance and Washington policy makers. As a leader of the left she is a fraud. As a conduit for corporate control she is perfect.

I find all this ironic.

The party associated with conservatism is in chaos and likely to reinvent itself in some updated way. The party associated with the progressive agenda is stolidly in the grip of an establishment which owes its soul to its corporate money backers.

The one offers us chaos and a neo-fascist policy suite. The other offers us a bland attachment to all that is worst in our recent past. The conservatives are radical and the radicals conservative.

It’s all very confusing and not a little disconcerting. The one thing I can say is that big business will manage to retain its grip on power. After all, the extent of lobbying means that our elections no longer matter: the minute the politicians return to Washington after November they will be reminded who owns them.

Hint: it’s not you or me.

 

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The Republican Dilemma

If my mailbox is anything to go by Donald Trump is about to cause the Republican party a nervous breakdown. Get the couch ready.

Scarcely a day goes by without someone on the political punditry writing at length about the intricacies of a brokered convention. I am not going to regale you with the arcane nature of the procedures and rulebooks of the Republican party. I don’t care enough to steep myself in them. One thing I will comment on, however, is the democratic mess the Grand Old Party finds itself in.

It is now clear that of all the current and still standing candidates in the GOP primary process, only Trump has the possibility of acquiring sufficient delegates to win the party’s nomination. If he does reasonably well in tomorrow’s primaries, he will only have to win between 40% and 45% the rest of the way to wrap things up. No one else is anywhere near close enough to win outright. So anyone hoping that the Republican nominee isn’t Trump has to focus on stopping him from achieving an outright win, and then throw their hopes onto the uncertainties of a brokered convention.

A rising theme amidst the panic within the GOP is that the party elders and betters have to stop Trump ‘for the good of the country’.

Think about this for a moment. There are a few problems with it. Here are two:

First: let’s all be honest, stopping Trump isn’t for the good of the country. It is for the good of the party. A Trump nomination would split the GOP apart. Whatever is left of its old centrist tendency would be sorely pressed to support someone as extreme in his rhetoric as Trump. The more dominant hard core conservative wing loathes Trump’s soft and middling opinions of social policies. And the plutocratic wing just can’t stand Trump’s anti-free trade attitude nor his apparent liking for higher taxes on the rich. No, a Trump candidacy isn’t just bad for the country, it’s a lot worse for the Republicans themselves.

Second: and ought not the voice of the party’s voters have some say in the election of the party’s candidate? To prevent that voice from its democratic expression in the name of some ‘higher’ principle, as if the voters are clueless as to what that principle might be, smacks of old world smoke filled autocratic rule. It’s hardly the kind of smack down of democracy that sends a good message about the understanding the GOP leaders have of the wishes of their own people. It calls into question the entire primary process: why have one if you ignore a result you don’t like?

My own view is that the GOP leadership ought to allow Trump to win the nomination, if that’s what the voters want, and then campaign against him in the election in November. That way they validate their democratic worthiness by acceding to the voter’s wishes, and then they protect the interest of the country by preventing someone they think unfit for office from winning election.

Of course they won’t do this. They’ll opt to protect the party above all else.

I have a view on that too: what kind of party is it that allows a demagogue to get this far in its own internal selection process? It seems to me that the GOP is so saddled with rotten policy objectives, stuck with poor alternative candidates, and a tangled contradictory set of factions, that it has ceased to exist as a coherent party at all. The GOP is already lost. A whole swathe of its own supporters apparently don’t like it. So what’s to save?

Except face?

 

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Trumped?

My head hurts this morning. I don’t know why I would be so disoriented by Trump’s continued rise to power, it was, after all very predictable once he entered the race, but it still hurts.

And, yes, it was predictable.

The Republican party has steadily vanished into a haze of obstreperous religious business driven drivel from which only a far right populist could ever emerge with any coherence. One of the great laughs anyone can have in this current peculiar electoral season is to listen to a Republican claim that Trump doesn’t belong in the party of Lincoln.

That’s true. He doesn’t. But the Republicans are not the party of Lincoln. They co-opted the name and perverted it. In most ways they are now the exact opposite. Especially when you take the scarcely veiled racism of their state level activists into account. We only have to look at the many local efforts to limit access to the polls – all in the pure name of being opposed to voter fraud – that disproportionately affect African-American voters. Guess which states those efforts are most advanced. I’ll give you a one word clue: Confederacy.

Th rise of Trump and his inchoate  platform should not be a shock to anyone who has paid attention to the American economy: it sucks for most folk. It sucks, in particular, for the older white blue collar male cohort that used to be the backbone of the Democrats. This guys have seen the consequences of thirty years of neoliberalism up close. They don’t like what they saw. They are in a surly mood.

If history is anything to go by, this surly mood will only get worse if it isn’t countered by policies that actually deal with its root cause.

Which brings me to Clinton and the Democrats.

The left, I use the word broadly, in America is just as culpable as the right. For decades now the Democrats have acquiesced to and accommodated swathes of neoliberal economic policies that have summed up into a massive attack on the majority of voters. Unfettered free trade, business deregulation, especially of the banks, endless pro-business initiatives in the name of encouraging job creation, a blind eye to the ravages of outsourcing and offshoring, and decidedly limp-wristed tax policies are not a stellar left-of-center record. They simply reinforced the degradation of middle and lower class America initiated by the intellectual triumph of right wing economics.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but, the failure – our failure – to expunge from economics the single minded focus on market forces as if no others existed, and as if the economy wasn’t riddled with other phenomena of equal if not more importance, has contributed to the societal malaise that enables Trump. Yes, I mean that.

Ideas, as we all know, have awesome consequences. Rotten ideas have rotten consequences. A profession, if that is an appropriate word to describe an academic discipline, that hides itself from the social impact it has cannot deny the consequences of its ideas simply by hiding. We all know the truth. The school[s] thought that unleashed rational choice, general equilibrium, individualism, and the superiority of market forces, whatever they are, is at the center of the plutocracy that currently is being unhinged by Trump’s populist attack.

And, yes, I also mean that.

We read a lot about the Republican ‘establishment’ being up in arms about the rise of Trump. Well, as I see it, Trump is doing us a favor. He is, by channeling the angry voice of his supporters, leading an assault on the plutocracy that led us all astray.

I just wish that assault was coming from the left, but the Clintonian neoliberal machine still owns the Democrats and poor old Bernie Sanders has such an uphill fight to change that.

As I said, my head hurts this morning.

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The Anti-Gates

Bob Gates has made quite a name for himself by being ‘that sensible guy’ —  the one who cuts through the rhetoric and tells it the way it is. In this vein he fits alongside other ‘serious people’ such as the infamous Simpson and Bowles who, as you might recall, made a great name for themselves back in the days when the world was ending because of our Federal debt problems.

And just like Simpson and Bowles, Gates is simply defending the status quo. Or, rather, trying to re-assert the dominance of the older status quo he is fearful we are losing.

In his latest attempt to burnish his serious reputation he lectures us on the kind of president we ought to elect.

Clearly he doesn’t think much of either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders because both are clumped together repeatedly as representative of who we ought to avoid.

Gates is wrong on many counts. Let me enumerate them:

First: let’s all stop this nonsense about equating Trump with Sanders. This equation is a tell-tale sign of faux centrism. It has become an obsession of ‘serious’ people who want to appear sensibly grounded in facts and not wild eyed ideas. Trump is an inexperienced demagogue. Sanders is a battle hardened politician from the left. Trump has no core ideas he simply rattles the cage and stirs up the passions on popular hopes and fears. Sanders offers a long and well thought out response to issues that may be neither popular nor new — but he has thought about them for a long time. Trump is a bombastic bully who appeals to emotion. Sanders is a skilled debater who appeals to reason. I could go on, but the point remains the same: Trump and Sanders are not equivalent. That they sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum does not make them equivalent.

Second: Gates gives us the standard centrist debating points about the American political system. It is designed he reminds us to do nothing. Well he doesn’t say it quite like that, but the implication is clear. The American political system is designed to enforce compromise and thus preserve the status quo Gates prizes so highly. It does not permit heavily partisan movement because of the division called the separation of the powers. This separation is a deep flaw: it prevents the emotions of the electorate being expressed and thus vented before they build into toxic anger. Ironically it is the existence of this toxic anger that Gates seems most to fear.

Perpetual compromise is precisely what has sent America down the path to economic inequality and social divide. Had, at any point, the partisan views of either side been fully expressed in actual policy the nation could have responded with rebuttal or affirmation at the next election. Instead neither side of the divide has ever properly felt it has ‘won’ and neither side can say its ideas have been fully tested or that they have succeeded or failed. Hence the anger within the electorate. No one is satisfied. And the problems persist.

Third: this latter point is vital. Under normal circumstances where crises are few and people generally feel both secure and prosperous, the system of compromise is adequate: it prevents anyone rocking the boat and thus threatening that secure prosperity. But when society is manifestly stressed either by external threats of internal failures, persistent compromise simply serves to act against the installation of a solution. Conversely, it can allow the emergence of false solutions in circumstances where the ‘centrists’ or ‘serious people’ see problems or threats to their  preferred status quo.

It is this latter problem that dogs us so vitally today.

Our so-called centrists are heavily vested in the policies that have produced the lack of secure prosperity that the majority of people are now bridling against. They represent the neoliberal view of the past forty years and are steeped in the foreign policies of post-Soviet American world domination. Their lens is sullied by this narrow perspective.

The Bowles-Simpson solution to the debt ‘crisis’ is a good example. It was a highly biased set of proposals that placed the burden for crisis resolution firmly on the shoulders of those who had least responsibility for the problem in the first place. It took for granted constraints on spending and taxation that were political choices and not ‘facts’. It thus expressed a preferred and privileged point of view and not the kind of objectivity or ‘centrism’ its supporters pretended it had.

Gates falls into this category of faux sensibility when he argues that the next president needs to talk to the people truthfully. By this I take it he means that the ‘truth’ is a set of values or ideas that Gates agrees with. Sanders invective about inequality would probably not be seen, in this light, as truthful – perhaps the world is too complex simply to load neoliberalism with the blame. Or Trump’s attacks on immigrants are not, presumably, tapping into nativist fears that whilst noxious, are also real.

Lastly: Gates for all his self-regarding seriousness is hapless in his naivety. His opinion is actually a cry for help. The world of the last sixteen years – he casts the blame of being too ideological equally onto the last two presidents – is, in his eyes, proof that we need to revert to management by consensus and to avoid the foolishness that ideologies of either side might be a better guide to policy. In other words the blame for the so-called gridlock is not the antiquated system Gates so reveres, but the attempt to search for partisan solutions. He wants us to drain ourselves of ideas and to settle back into a world of sensible management by people like himself who are bureaucratically capable, well-informed (by which he means having similar ideas to his own), and firmly attached to the status quo.

What he totally misses is the tumult of the past few decades and the rapid change being thrust upon the masses. Whether that change is the deterioration in the prosperity, the rapid change in social norms that threaten their traditional values, or the perception of potential external existential calamity, they all have a common thread: they demand a response from outside the comfort of the neoliberal status quo gates sits in the center of.

The people are angry, not so much about the gridlock, but more about the total disregard of their interests by erstwhile centrist policy makers like Gates. It is this lack of response that irks, not the gridlock that is often blamed for this lack of response.

Gates is oblivious to this difference. He is oblivious to the central fact of our times: the political system has been co-opted and is being run to the advantage of a few. The vast majority are correct in believing that their views are not taken into account. The co-option means that the process of compromise is simply a method for enforcing this advantage enjoyed by a few.

Another great irony of Gates opinion is that he lauds both FDR and Reagan as being pragmatic yet strong leaders. Does he not realize that they both ushered in political epochs of radically different natures and they upended the status quo they found? That is not compromise. It is radical response to circumstances. And it works within the American system only under duress and when leadership can undermine the defenses of the centrists who are dug in defending the past.

The success of both FDR and Reagan is that they redefined the center. Radically so. One shifted it leftwards. The other back rightwards.

So, to respond to the accumulated angst being expressed as anger by voters, our next president needs to redefine the center and not simply acquiesce to the old center. And that requires ideas. It requires us to have clear choice. Do we go further right? Do we go back more to the left?

Gates refuses to give us that choice. Which is why his advice is so wrong.

But on one point I agree.

Trump is not a valid representation of the choice to shift further right. He is, as I said above, simply a demagogue and bully. Ted Cruz is the better representative of the far right’s desire we move more rightwards. Cruz is the analogue to Sanders. All the rest are simply moe of the same.

And it is more of the same that is making voters so angry.

 

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Trump’s Tax Plan

I wasn’t going to mention it, but someone asked, so here’s what I think of Trump’s tax plan.

Well, I can’t write that here.

In broad terms the Trump tax plan is just another version of standard Republican dogma, with a twist here and there. It’s core is a massive tax cut: Trump would reduce the number of tax brackets to four; he would lower the top rate of tax 25%; he would create a very large zero tax bracket for lower paid people; he would reduce corporate taxes radically; he would eliminate the estate tax; and he would reduce the number of tax deductions available to higher paid taxpayers.

All of that is normal Republican speak. In this plan Trump is very far from being a maverick. No wonder a few of the usual suspects — Grover Norquist in particular — stood to attention and saluted him.

As an aside I can never quite understand the Republican ire over estate taxes. It only ever affects people with very large estates, so the middle class never gets hit much, and it’s original purpose was to keep the US from developing a class like system where the wealthy could accumulate vast estates through generations. Yes, that was one of the primary motivations for its implementation here: to stop the US becoming like Old Europe. Oh well.

There are a few wrinkles in Trump’s plan, however, that spread a little discord amongst the faithful. For instance, he wants to get rid of the egregious carried interest tax wheeze that hedge fund managers use. This loophole has allowed people earning billions of dollars a year to cap their top tax rate at 20%, leading to the absurdity of their total tax percentage being smaller than that of their administrative assistants, none of whom as far as I am aware earn more than a billion dollars a year. If they do, good for them!

When this loophole came up under attack in the early stages of the 2007/2008 crisis, and particularly in 2009 when Obama was trying to pass his stimulus package, one of its most ardent defenders was none other than Chuck Schumer, a Democrat who just so happens to represent New York — and therefore Wall Street — in the Senate. And who says money doesn’t influence legislation?

Oh, and Trump want to give companies like Apple and Google a tax break on all the cash they have hoarded abroad. They keep the cash offshore to avoid paying US corporate tax on it, but since they don’t repatriate it they cannot invest it here either. So Trump will give them a one time tax break: they can repatriate it and pay only 10% tax.

According to the very conservative Tax Foundation, an organization that has never met a tax cut it doesn’t appreciate, the Trump plan would add just under $12 trillion (yes trillion) to the Federal deficit. For those of you who can remember as far back as last year such a radical increase in the deficit would normally have caused a Republican to explode with fiscal rectitude fury. Not any more apparently. Trump’s plan adds more than the other’s do, but his, Jeb!’s, and Rubio’s are all the same budget busting duds. The Republicans may appear divided on a number of things, but sticking to supply side, tax cutting, magic based economics is something they all have in common.

Speaking of supply side: Trump hails his plan as being pro-growth. He argues that by cutting taxes his plan will stimulate the economy — torrent of new capital will appear from under the mattress, and an army of workers will suddenly appear for work because now they aren’t being taxed on their wages — with the result that GDP will surge towards growth of 6% a year. Consistently. This is fantasy only Jeb! can match. We haven’t seen consistent growth at that kind of pace for decades. And it’s certain that the Trump plan won’t get us back there.

You may have heard of an economic forecasting trick called “dynamic scoring”. This is a dodge that tax cutter use to try to mask the damage their plans will wreak on the Federal budget. It goes like this: cutting taxes does indeed reduce revenue to the budget, so, at first, the deficit rises; but, and this is a huge but, because lower taxes stimulates all that new capital and work to flood the economy, GDP subsequently rises above where it would have been otherwise. So. This rise in GDP produces new tax revenue, also over and above what it would have been otherwise, and so offsets the prior lost revenue. Got that? This dodge is why the Republicans have told the Congressional Budget Office to use dynamic scoring when evaluating legislation. Basically it allows Republicans to make up fantasy numbers and have a way of defending them.

So: what does the conservative Tax Foundation have to say about the Trump plan when they use dynamic scoring? It still increases the deficit. Not by that nearly $12 trillion, but only by $10 trillion.

I rest my case.

Trump’s tax plan is the usual toxic supply side Republican junk. It lowers taxes for the rich and big business. It clobbers the Federal deficit. And it does precious little else.

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