BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

The problem is that wrecking the Mexican economy is a very odd way to reduce migration pressure on the southern border, and a *very* odd way of building a broad international coalition against China.

Quote of the week from Matt Yglesias:

The problem is that the "Art of the Deal" guy doesn't really know how to negotiate. Everything is "us vs them", and the only way he knows how to deal with "them" doing something he doesn't like is to try to punish them, not work things out. The only punishment methods he has available as POTUS is military and tariffs. It still hasn't gotten through his thick head that tariffs don't really punish the other country, they just cause our prices to go up. They can only be effective if the US importers have other sources they can go to, but in general we don't.

Ah, but you forgot to mention name calling. We finally have a president who truly excels in making up insulting names.
If someone had written a novel years ago featuring a Trump-like president of the U.S. it would have been panned as totally unrealistic.

"Americans are feeling ripped apart by the gun deaths we have seen, year after year, month after month," Gillibrand said. "The most outrageous thing that's happened to our democracy is how much fear, and division, and hate has been spread. I think the NRA is the worst organization in this country for doing exactly that. They care more about their profits than the American people."

who have I forgot???

A bit of an exaggeration by Gillebrand. It's a photo finish between

NRA
American Nazi Party
KKK
various white supremacist groups
who have I forgot???

Too close to call IMHO

Economists’ reputations, like skirt lengths, go in and out of fashion. In the past 10 years, John Maynard Keynes has received fresh appreciation, and Hyman Minsky has been having a moment.

I think it’s time for John Kenneth Galbraith to have his. The late liberal economist’s “concept of countervailing power”, put forth in his 1952 book American Capitalism, is a critique of the “market knows best” view that has dominated the US political economy since the era of Ronald Reagan. There could not be a better time to re-read it.

Despite the much discussed rise of millennial “socialists” (to my mind they are not, really), Americans still fundamentally accept the idea that the private sector always allocates resources more efficiently than the public sector. It is a truism that dies hard, even amid what feels like a drumbeat of boardroom scandal, an explosion in unproductive corporate debt, and an inverted yield curve for Treasuries that suggests investors fear a recession is coming.

Policymakers across the political spectrum agree on what we need to create real and lasting growth — decent infrastructure, a 21st-century education system, healthcare reform.

Yet these are things that the private market has little incentive to address. Building roads and running schools and hospitals (at least the non-profit kind) simply isn’t as lucrative as throwing up luxury condos or engaging in financial speculation.

As Galbraith would have agreed, private markets also are not well set up to address the broad economic and social externalities of climate change or the effects of income inequality.

One obvious example is that burgeoning student debt has become a headwind to overall economic growth. Market prices cannot capture the full costs of these problems.

Galbraith also would have argued that corporations can be just as bureaucratic and dysfunctional — if not more so — than government. His 1967 book The New Industrial State explored how large companies are driven more by their need to survive as organisational entities than by supply and demand signals.

He predicted that innovation and entrepreneurial zeal would decline as such organisations rose. That is exactly what happened as our economy became dominated by superstar companies.

Look at any number of troubled behemoths — from GE to Kraft Heinz to Boeing — and it is hard not see exactly what Galbraith predicted. In an endless search for profits, many companies simply move money around on their balance sheets, creating a short-term financial sugar high without real innovation.

We live in a world in which markets cannot handle even a tiny rise in interest rates without plunging, and when the savings from tax cuts went not into new capital investment but share buybacks, which were also fuelled by debt issued at those very same low rates. Can anyone really argue that the private markets are allocating resources efficiently?

I am not saying that we need centralised planning. Galbraith once put it well: “I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that. I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favour of privatisation,’ or ‘I’m deeply in favour of public ownership’. I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.”

Politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle should sear these words on their brains. Americans don’t really do nuance. We like strong, simple statements, such as Reagan’s observation that: “The government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

But the “private good, public bad” argument simply isn’t true. How else can we explain the rise of China? It has not only shown that government planning and economic competitiveness cannot only go hand in hand, but that in the current era of tech-based disruption and inequality, public sector support may be necessary for the private sector to thrive.

It is time for political conservatives, economic neoliberals, and chief executives to embrace this. I find it endlessly frustrating to hear so many American corporate leaders complain that government cannot get anything done, even as they pay expensive accountants to keep as much wealth as possible out of state tax coffers.

It is time to admit that endless tax cuts have not put more money into the real economy, despite frequent, incorrect claims from businesses that they would create lasting above-trend growth. Rather, they have led to pitted highways and hazardous bridges that rival those one might find in any number of far poorer countries. The US ranks 31st out of 70 countries on the OECD’s Pisa test for mathematics, science and reading.

Let us try something new. Let us stop assuming that markets always know best. Let us pay our taxes, modernise our social safety nets, regulate markets properly, enforce antitrust to protect the overall economic ecosystem and not just the largest businesses, and reinvent our social compact.

This is not socialism. It is smarter capitalism. The majority may not yet believe that. But as Galbraith is often quoted as saying: “In economics, the majority is always wrong.”

From Old economists can teach us new tricks by Rana Foroohar at FT:

“I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that. I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favour of privatisation,’ or ‘I’m deeply in favour of public ownership’. I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.”

With commercial tenants fleeing his Trump Tower, President Donald Trump continues to spend $37,500 a month of campaign money for office space there — with some of that cash destined for his own wallet ― even as thousands of square feet go unused at a newly opened office in northern Virginia.

No more than “four or five” campaign staffers work at Trump’s Manhattan base, according to an informal adviser close to the White House, where the campaign rents a few thousand square feet as its “headquarters.” The per-square-foot cost is likely at least triple what the Republican National Committee pays for the much larger space it shares with the campaign in Arlington, according to a HuffPost analysis.

When he announced his campaign in June 2015, Trump based it in on the fifth floor of his 57-story building a few blocks from Central Park. At the time, he was largely self-funding his campaign, and the rent he charged himself was $35,458 a month for 13,100 square feet of space that had been used as a set for his reality TV game show, “The Apprentice.”

A year later, after Trump had secured the nomination and GOP donors began paying for his campaign, he started charging it nearly five times that much, $169,758 per month, although the campaign also began using the floor directly above the fifth floor, the 14th.

(Trump Tower’s floor numbering scheme was designed to make it seem taller than it is. Floors six through 13 do not exist. Nor do 27, 28 or 29.)

This is my mantra: “I react pragmatically. Where the market works, I’m for that. Where the government is necessary, I’m for that. I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favour of privatisation,’ or ‘I’m deeply in favour of public ownership’. I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.”

From Old economists can teach us new tricks by Rana Foroohar at FT:

Policymakers across the political spectrum agree on what we need to create real and lasting growth — decent infrastructure, a 21st-century education system, healthcare reform
.

I agree with you and Galbraith 100% Winston.

As previously stated.... “as much liberty as possible” and “as little government as necessary.”

Has Trump finally jumped the shark?

Life isn’t fair, and politics is even less fair than the rest of life. Donald Trump has done and is doing many terrible things — inviting foreign influence into U.S. elections, ripping children from their parents and putting them in cages, poisoning the environment, praising murderous dictators and more. In terms of sheer awfulness, his protectionist trade policies are way down the list — and I say that despite being someone whose career was based largely on the study of international trade, and has every incentive to inflate the issue’s importance.

Yet Trump’s tariff obsession seems to be causing him more political trouble than anything else he’s doing. It might even be enough to provoke a break with his otherwise slavish followers in Congress. Trump’s famous boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters wouldn’t care may or may not be true of Republican voters, but it’s clearly true of G.O.P. members of Congress. Yet there seems to be a real possibility of legislative action to block the new tariffs he threatened to impose on Mexico last week.

So why is this particular vileness the point at which his party’s invertebrates show signs of developing rudimentary spines? There are two key points.

First, Trump’s confrontational trade policy — unlike his racism, his determination to weaken workers’ rights, his efforts to degrade the environment, and so on — doesn’t have any important constituency behind it. Neither big-money donors nor guys with Tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” are clamoring for tariffs. The tariff thing is basically Trump’s personal obsession.

Second, there are important constituencies — important parts of the Trump coalition — that really, really don’t like the prospect of trade war. Farmers have already been hurt badly by the confrontation with China, which has sent prices for crops like soybeans plunging. U.S. industry, which has invested huge sums in a supply chain that sprawls across both our northern and southern borders, is horrified at the thought of a confrontation that disrupts trade with Mexico.

Until recently, business and investors were, in effect, betting that with so much money at stake, even Trump would rein in his impulses, that on trade he would talk loudly but carry a small stick. That’s pretty much what seemed to have happened on Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement: after denouncing Nafta as the worst trade deal ever made, Trump negotiated a new deal so similar to the existing one that you need a magnifying glass to see the differences.

But now he’s effectively reneging on his own deal, threatening tariffs unless Mexico does something, he knows not what, to prevent asylum-seekers from seeking asylum.

Will he really do it? The various newsletters I receive can’t seem to believe it. Citibank, for example, writes that “the consequences of this policy could be so extreme we see it as unlikely to happen.”

But Trump has a thing about tariffs, and he really hates looking like a loser. So yes, this may really be about to happen. And even the G.O.P. may finally reach a breaking point

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So be it.

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“as much liberty as possible”

“as little government as necessary.”

As a historical matter, my research shows that this claim is dead wrong. “The executive power” granted at the American founding was conceptually, legally, and semantically incapable of conveying a reservoir of royal authority. The real meaning of executive power was something almost embarrassingly simple: the power to execute the law. Overwhelming evidence for this point pervades both the Founders’ debates and the legal and political theory on which their discussions drew.

Listen to how Gouverneur Morris framed the problem for his fellow delegates in Philadelphia. The central challenge of constitutional governance, he said, was to safely distribute each of “the three powers” that everyone knew so well: “one … the power of making[,] another of executing, and a third of judging, the laws.”

That's OK. I'll help you.

As much as is possible means having no restrictions placed - which means no governing body of any type. Anarchy, in other words.

If you want total liberty, anarchy, then you cannot want any government. Your entire philosophy is a contradiction.

If you want only some government, where you believe it should be, doing only what you think it should do, then you are not a libertarian thinker but are a wish list in the mind of a 15-year-old who has just slugged his way through Atlas Shrugged for the first time and thinks that is how things should be, too immature to realize that Rand's world only works in her fiction.

You're welcome. Have a nice day.

In 2018, the top 0.01% of the voting age population (25,306 donors) accounted for 46% of all contributions. The top 400 donors accounted for 22%.

Imagine living in a town of 10,000 people where nearly half of all campaign dollars came from just one person. That’s where we are now at as a country.