A continuation of David Stockman’s article from yesterday, at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
When it comes to the economic future, a Trump presidency could bring either a shitstorm or salvation. Regrettably, the odds of the former are immensely the higher.
That’s because Trump is a welcome, but extremely unguided missile. On the one hand, his great virtue is that he is a superb salesman and showman who has captured the GOP nomination and has a serious shot at the White House with absolutely no help whatsoever from the Washington/Wall Street establishment.
So unlike any other candidate in recent memory, he owns his own talking points; is not saddled with a stable of credentialed advisors schooled in three decades of policy error and failure; and has the hutzpah to trust his own instincts——many of which, especially in foreign policy, are exactly the rebuke that Imperial Washington and its legions of parasites and racketeers so richly deserve.
On the other hand, the Donald’s policy thinking, if you can call it that, is thoroughly inchoate. His policy pronouncements amount to little more than spontaneous eruptions of sentiment, prejudice, hearsay, bile, applause lines, wishful thinking and disconnected non sequiturs. That’s where thoughtlets like Muslim bans, mass deportations, a Trump Wall on the Rio Grande, paying off the national debt, 40% tariff barriers, obliteration of ISIS and numerous other stray verbal hand grenades come from.
Yet occasional wild pitches are not really the problem, and the cynics are surely correct in predicting that Trump will excise most of them from his patter even before the GOP convention. The real problem is that Trump has no detectable economic philosophy or policy framework, and it is in that arena that he could go careening off into a cacophony of misfires, mistakes and statist mayhem.
To wit, Trump has already said that he likes the Fed’s low interest rates, is considering a minimum wage hike, thinks social security and medicare should remain untouched, will rebuild the military, intends to drastically increase spending for veterans, wants to slash income taxes on corporations and individuals, thinks a big infrastructure program is warranted, plans to spend tens of billions on border security and the Wall and will drastically hammer $2.2 trillion of imports in order to bring jobs back home.
Not only is most of that unaffordable, counter-productive and wrong. More importantly, Trump’s mish mash of economic policy utterances thus far fails to address why the Washington/Wall Street/Bicoastal/Bubble Finance status quo is failing main street so badly and causing 90% of Americans to realize that they are not winning economically anymore.
The heart of what went wrong is the lethal combination of free money and free trade that has been practiced ever since Greenspan panicked after Black Monday in October 1987. That is what has gutted the fly-over economy while gifting casino prosperity to Wall Street, Washington and the bicoastal elites, as I documented in Part 1. (click here for Part 1)
But as I indicated yesterday, there is a sliver of hope if Donald Trump does not capitulate to mainstream policies and is willing to set aside his potpourri of shibboleths and panaceas in favor of a disciplined and coherent game plan that builds on his bedrock political insight that American families are losing the economic battle. To repeat, there is a way forward for the self-proclaimed world class deal maker to move the whole mess out of the hopeless box that now afflicts the nation.
A President Trump would need to make Six Great Deals.
To continue reading: Trumped! Why It Happened And What Comes Next, Part 2
