The next few weeks will bring a flurry of news regarding various names for jobs in the next Trump White House. Some of it will be gaslighting from people who just make things up for regime media. Some of it will disappoint Trump supporters hoping to get something from their efforts this time. One area that has gotten no coverage, but will be one of the most important, is the economy. Trump appears determined to fundamentally change how Washington controls the economy.
That is the first thing to understand. The United States is not a free-market economy or even close to one. There are millions of lines of regulatory code covering every aspect of economic activity. It is not exactly a command economy and in no way a centrally planned one, but it is a tightly controlled economy. Washington has its tentacles in every nook and cranny, even the black markets. Therefore, a president’s view on how to control the economy matters a great deal.
When it comes to economic policy, the placed to start is former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Trump was a fan of Abenomics, in addition to be on very good personal terms with him. Trump has often spoke highly of what has come to be known as Abenomics. Reportedly, Trump has talked to Scott Bessent about a position in the administration, maybe even Treasury Secretary. Bessent is also a proponent of the “three arrows” approach to the economy.
The “three arrows” term is how Shinzo Abe described his approach. One arrow or prong was loose money. Get as much money into the economy as quickly as possible, even if it creates inflation. The second arrow is to direct that new money into areas of the economy that either need revitalization or startup capital. If this means growing the budget, then so be it. The third arrow is to encourage (compel) private investment in the domestic economy over yield chasing.
Applied to the American economy, it probably means a blend of loose money, the slashing of regulation and tariffs to direct investment into the domestical economy, especially the supply chain and industrial base. One obvious lesson of the Covid panic, one entirely ignored by Washington, is complex supply chains, especially those flowing through Asia, are highly fragile. The growing rift with China makes untangling those supply chains even more important going forward.
Trump has made it clear that he wants to use tariffs to redirect investment into the domestic economy. Another name turning up as a possible addition to the Trump team is Robert Lighthizer, who is both a China hawk and the architect of Trump’s trade policy in his first term. It is important to note that the changes Trump ushered in were not rolled back under Biden. Taken together, it is a clear sign that Trump 2.0 will be much more hawkish on the trade front.
Those familiar with the regulatory world remember the wild ride it was in Trump’s first term as they went on a deregulation spree. Expect Trump 2.0 to be even more aggressive, especially on the environmental front. His nominee for the EPA is Lee Zeldin, who the Gaia worshipers detest. Trump made it clear with the announcement that his job will be to clear the dense thicket of environmental regulations that make it hard to put a shovel in the ground for any reason.
Trump 2.0 will be helped by the courts in this regard. This year the Supreme Court ended what had been termed the Chevron deference. This was the rule that said the courts should defer to the regulatory agencies whenever there was ambiguity in the laws passed by Congress. Of course, this meant that everything passed by Congress was as vague as possible, to give total control to the agencies. This has been turned on its head by the courts.
What we are likely to see is a three-pronged assault on the administrative state in Trump’s second term. One prong will be the aggressive slashing of regulations that we saw in Trump’s first term. The second prong will be a flood of litigation aimed at the vagaries of the enabling legislation. There are many cases in the system. The final prong is an effort by Congress to clean up the language to both limit the agencies, but also reassert oversight.
Where things get interesting is fiscal policy. Inflation remains an issue, despite claims to the contrary, but the Fed is signaling cuts in interest rates. Will Trump demand big new spending on infrastructure? This would be one way to soak up some of the extra money being generated by lower interest rates. Anyone who goes outside knows there is a desperate need to rebuild the infrastructure. Go to an airport and you are suddenly embarrassed to be an American.
All this stuff is boring and does not get the same attention you see with some of the other stuff allegedly on Trump’s agenda. Catapulting left-wing crazies into the sea provides a much bigger dopamine rush than deregulation. On the other hand, Trumponomics is the most radical part of his agenda. Those old enough to remember Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan see the point. Trump is repudiating half a century of conservative economic dogma.
The Trump economic agenda is not without its problems. In Washington, every mortgage payment, college tuition bill, access to elite schools and universities depends on nothing changing in Washington. Trump 1.0 was largely undone by his own party, who is as invested in the status quo as the Democrats. The lawfare industrial complex is also gearing up for round two against Trump. Maybe his team is ready this time, but even if they are prepared, it will be a long slog.
The bigger question is if it will work. What Trump is proposing sounds a lot like old fashioned liberal economics from the last century. Instead of tax and spend it will be print and spend. The difference is the deregulation and tariffs. The point of this approach is to redirect investment back into the American economy and direct it to tangible things like supply chains and manufacturing. It is the approach we saw with growth economies last century.
Another thing he has on his side is the economic elites have come around to this approach to the economy. Investors love cheap money and deregulation, but Wall Street also sees it needs a replacement for Asia. The days of getting rich from the China trade are gone. If the United States replaces China as an investment option, they will get onboard with it. As we saw with the election, it is always good when the rich people are backing your play.
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It seems that a massive boom in the economy is at odds with fixing immigration and reversing The Great Replacement.
At the very least, the government should organize this project by prioritizing Heritage Americans. It should also free up labor by purging colleges, NGOs, media, journalism … … This would free up destructive labor that is destroying the country and free their idle hands to pick lettuce, clean slaughterhouses and work their way up the economic ladder by adding real value to the economy.
Maybe a few of them wold have what it takes to build a bridge. How cool would it be to watch Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow pick strawberries while surrounded big screens of Maher on the Kissin show bragging and celebrating the Islamification of London.
That dream aside, there is a clear tension between The 3 Arrows and the stake through the heart of demographic replacement.
Like Putin (and JFK), put a STEM-geek economist in as Sec. of Defense
WHILE SOME HAVE VISIONS OF ORGANIZING SOCIETY THROUGH FOCUS GROUPS, RALLIES, AND BALLOT INITIATIVES, OTHERS HAVE VISIONS OF DATA SETS, DECISION TREES, AND GANNT CHARTS
Martians trying to speak to Venusians. Fix it Trump!
https://semperdoctrina.substack.com/p/wanted-stem-in-the-executive-branch
You know, if Trump breaks up the Dept. of Education, there goes the funding of sinecures for women to ‘liberate’ themselves from male economic/mate selection value as regulatory drones; also gone would be the incentive to fem-herd up under insane yentas who urge their competitors to destroy themselves and their children.
To get Congress to go along with that, he’d need to set up block grants that go directly to the parents who can then choose where their kids go to school. Tie the money to the student. Make the schools earn their business.
Here is a blueprint for making Trumpenomics a reality, because it taps into the deepest passions of the masculine heart: converting our globalist military into a nationalist Renewal Project, wherein men build and protect hearth and home as a unique people.
https://im1776.com/neoconservatism-as-brood-parasitism/
Simpler. Have the fucking military fix the fucking roads and guard the borders.
Yep, tell Mexico we’re setting up Forts all along the border every X miles to patrol from the Mexican side. Ply their government with aid and the destruction of the drug cartels.
Side bonus: dry up a CIA revenue stream.
Energy policy will offset the inflationary impact of lower rates. Trump is going to crush energy prices. Our self-strangulation is going to be rapidly ended.
Watch for Trump to win votes on spending by basically bribing Congress with Ukraine money that will no longer be needed. We could have repaved America twice with the money we sent Ukraine. Infrastructure helps stabilize the supply chain weaknesses.
He has spoken numerous times about eliminating the income tax ENTIRELY. If he did that…he’d be a legend. Yes, it would have to be replaced by tariffs and sales taxes, but think about the red tape that goes away in this country if the income tax were repealed from the Constitution. Every citizen’s disposable income would go up 15-35%.
He can fix the college debt problem with one simple change: make the colleges co-sign the loans instead of the parents.
MAGA is all about economics. It drives everything. Deport 20,000,000 illegals? Home prices and rents will fall, local budgets feel less strain, it’s just good economics that is also geopolitically smart.
Trump will go on offense wrt Lawfare. Their tactics are well known and characterized, and they will not get safe quarter at DOJ. Hopefully, Ken Paxton wants the AG job. Tie Lawfare in knots and tie them up with lawsuits and prosecutions. There will be no “refusals” in Trump 47. There will be no special counsels. I expect him to use the Russia hoax and the Jack Smith fraud to criminally prosecute a very specific list of Lawfare operatives. Bankrupt the ones he can’t put in jail.
The entire government is talking about going to war with China in 2025-26. Watch for all of that talk to be killed. Trump will use economic power instead.
Ahhh, here’s Hokkoda with his daily.ruminations from inside Trump’s head. It’s always remarkable you know exactly what Trump’s going to do when you flood us with this fan fiction.
Ahh, the guy who stayed home last week and can’t have any fun…
Got any active brain cells left after that puny insult…?
Not exactly clairvoyance to reiterate what he’s said he plans to do in the context of Z’s larger post.
You still believe what Trump says after this long? And I’m the one lacking brain cells?
I have a problem with people that refuse to live in reality and instead choose to live in delusions as if that sort of naivete isn’t precisely what’s led us here. Enjoy your fantasies while you can.
From your lips…
I agree Trump will seek to do many of these, but I expect him to be stonewalled. Despite what the Left says of him, I know of no instance where he defied court orders, even from piss-ant district judges. Unlike, say, Obama and Biden, who either ignored them or worked around them.
How many times did the courts have to tell Biden he couldn’t “forgive” student loans, for instance?
Moves and counter moves, right? I agree there will be a million lawsuits filed before Dem-friendly judges.
Trump can counter by sending DHS and Treasury to look into the role of NGO’s helping illegals evade immigration laws. Dry up their funding, make it difficult for them to go on the attack.
Most of the big Lawfare strategies from 2016-2020 are spent. They won’t be able to threaten Trump with prosecution when he declassified the Russia hoax materials. They won’t be able to trick the AG into recusal like they did Sessions. Or appoint a special counsel. No Congress to target Trump for at least 2 years.
WRT judges, Trump gets to appoint Federal judges. He neutered the 9th Circus in his first term. I think he’ll go after the DC Circuit next. Elevate Judge Cannon for example. Trump did a good job as 45 reshaping the appellate courts and SCOTUS. There’s an excellent chance he gets 1-2 more SCOTUS nominees. Sotomayor might not last. Ginsberg similarly screwed the left by refusing to let go.
Watching his picks roll out today, there’s clearly a strategy. These are not random flunkies out of a hat. Even the Rubio one makes sense in the context of reshaping the Senate and SSCI.
We’ll never get everything we want. But we might get a lot. Ending the WW3 talk would be a big step. A lot of the regime right now – IC and DOD – is pushing for war with China in 2026. It’s all over the news. They seems almost excited about it which is almost as scary as their dreams of WW3 with Russia were.
The opportunity here is enormous. If he keeps his promises and things get noticeably better – fewer illegals + deportations, lower energy prices and especially lower food prices, ending three pointless wars – he locks in and expands the new MAGA coalition.
I don’t know what the exact number would be, but I think at least 4-5% of Harris voters were likely Trump voters who couldn’t get past the gaslighting.
If Trump does reasonably well, he probably sets up his successor with 55-58% of the NPV.
But only if he does election reform to eliminate mail-in voting. That has to happen.
“Catapulting left-wing crazies into the sea…” But this is what I want! Trump is beyond frustrating. He doesn’t know or care about what he represents. He just wants to be a patriotic Reagan figure.
As long as it’s done with linear induction motors, then things are right with the world. If US doesn’t pull finger out of collective ass will soon be back to doing it with trebuchets.
Don’t dis on trebuchets. While linear induction could be programmed to not exceed blackout G-force, that is not necessary for a treb. With trebs, the emigrant would be screaming and waving his arms as the skeet points are run up…
It cost $4 billion to renovate LaGuardia airport in NY. It was an embarrassing dump for 30 years but is a very nice airport now. We have sent $25 billion to Israel for this war. That’s 6 airport modernizations. We have sent >$100 billion to Ukraine. Imagine what we could do with that money spent building things.
Repairing and building infrastructure? Yes. letting corporations dump their industrial waste products anywhere they want ? No. I thought Paul Craig Roberts had a good idea about tariffs. Protective tariffs are a tax on consumers to encourage domestic production, which made sense when the USA was developing an industrial economy. A better idea now is corporate taxes based on the domestic content of their production. The more they produce here, the lower their tax rate. This puts the tax onus on corporations rather than consumers. We will not escape our present economic malaise until we restore our productive industrial economy. The greedsters will have to be satisfied with what profits they can make here. Wealth follows production.
“This puts the tax onus on corporations rather than consumers. “
No objections to concept you promote, but incorrect understanding of economics. Businesses do not pay taxes, they collect them. All taxes are pass onto the consumer eventually. In addition, corporations can function from anywhere and as thus, countries compete with each other as to their corporate tax rate. This was so bad a decade or so ago (Ireland comes to mind), that countries got together and signed a minimum tax rate agreement—15%. Now you know where that “magic” number comes from when Trump uses it. 15% is the limit below which we can’t go.
0% would be best; with a 95% tax on money leaving the country from American companies with a profit exclusion for foreign companies doing business here, 6% or so.
If I had my druthers, I’d eliminate modern corporations. Make them sole proprieterships and joint-stock ventures, fully liable, and then we shall count the real risk/reward of producing pollution and waste products. Rule by temporary managerial committee means nobody is responsible for anything.
Then there would be no corporations based in America. It’s not for nothing that the concept of corporations has been adopted worldwide to one extent or another.
Far better perhaps to adopt the “Chinese Model”, make corporate employees—like the CEO—libel for criminal penalties. The Chinese having an inclination to put a bullet in the head of those who play fast and loose with the public safety and health, particularly when it affects the credibility of their product sales overseas. Remember the adulteration of baby formula in China a decade or so ago. Made tens of thousands of children sick and cost quite a few lives.
“Far better perhaps to adopt the “Chinese Model”, make corporate employees—like the CEO—libel for criminal penalties.”
Hope you don’t think I’m picking on you or anything. Just you have some of the more insightful comments, and either you or I (or both) need to think some of the finer points through again.
Anyway, doesn’t that put us in the same place? How is adopting the Chinese model any different than banning the corporate form entirely? In either case, wouldn’t they just move their HQ to, say, Ireland?
Not so. The businesses will eat some of it and pass the rest on to consumers, most of whom are members of the working class who would greatly benefit from the repatriated economy. You can relocate a business to a foreign country but then you can’t sell here unless you pay the tax.
Nope. Because you cannot compel them to produce. Presumably we still oppose slavery, anyway.
All they do is reduce quantity produced to drive up prices. In general, this is to their advantage in the new model, because while fixed overhead is constant, the variable is reduced. Maybe to the point of layoffs…
All the macro-economic stuff is fine, but it depends on a skilled and motivated work force. America doesn’t have that any more. It has a lot of low quality human capital flooding in from the third world, taking jobs that used to be held by blue collar boomers. Young whites are stoned on legal marijuana, and their minds poisoned by public education and the interwebs.
The economy will die, though it won’t be inert. It will shuffle along like the undead.
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Trump needs to concentrate on immigration issues as well. For example, I heard yesterday that Microsoft is planning to close its Shanghai office headquarters in China, but has offered to sponsor many of the employees and their famblies therein to move to the US and keep their jobs. This kind of in-shoring is worse than off-shoring. As if there were not already enough Chinese spies in the US. The tech sector has been experiencing mass layoffs for a couple of years now. Then there is the mass importation of Indians particularly by Microsoft.
I doubt they’d get too many takers. Having a Shanghai residence permit in China is a bit like being able to say Civis Romanus Sum to just about everyone else in China who doesn’t have one from another of the Tier 1 Cities.
“The bigger question is if it will work.”
The real big questions are “Will it work in time to have a noticeable effect?” And “Will it become established such that rollback is difficult to impossible?”
Turning the economy is like steering an aircraft carrier—takes time. A four year presidency seems too short to effect/establish long term change. On the other hand, the “rich people backing your play” is a hopeful sign if it is true.
Correct. It took 50 years to get where we are and this cannot and will not be reversed in 4 years. What we can hope for is he can do a lot quickly, but also change the direction the economic winds are blowing. There is so much inertia built up in the globalist mindset.
America is large enough so we can have almost total autarky if we want it. We are blessed with virtually everything we need given the size of the country. There are plenty of first world friendly White countries to trade with for the things we just cannot do. Australia and Canada are huge white countries which are also blessed with raw materials in abundance.
Well, leave out Canada. They are headed to non-White status faster than we are.
Canuks out there, please correct me if I’m wrong. Please, please correct me. 🙂
If you will be asking nicely they will be delving into the data and doing the needful. Now would Sar be liking some maple syrup with his naan?
“America is large enough so we can have almost total autarky if we want it.”
Possibly, but obviously we do not want that. We could go to mom and pops and give the big boxes and online a pass, but we don’t. We could push local, local, local, but nobody wants that — they want some one-size-fits-none federal policy.
Why don’t we want this?
It’s not that nobody wants local, it’s that nobody wants to pay for it. It’s a beggar thy neighbor strategy. In this fantasy, thy neighbor’s job gets outsourced but you get to keep your cushy American wage job. This is why they should not have a choice. We simply cannot compete with countries that have little to no regulations or a total lack of enforcement of such regulations, like in China.
Plus, we are not failing to compete with foreign competitors. We are losing to “American” and other “Western” companies who move production to places like China where they can ruin the environment and abuse workers and then import “American” products tariff free. Walk into Walmart and its full of “American” and “Western” brands all made in China. This is absolutely traitorous and the management who did it should be in concentration camps.
This is also why everything is so poorly made and most consumer goods are not repairable. Making the thing has Chinese costs, while fixing them in America has American costs.
Does it matter why “we” don’t want it?
Personally, I suspect it’s largely because almost everyone is trying to make ends meet. “I don’t know why they call this stuff hamburger helper. It does just fine by itself, huh? I like it better than tuna helper myself, don’t you, Clark?”
“Beggar thy neighbor strategy” is not something you hear from someone who is trying to figure out how to put food on the table for his kids.
How is Trumponomics going to work with Elonomics (slashing 2 Trillion in spending)?
At least one of these is not going to happen. I think I know which.
You are hitting the nail on the head. The “new economics” Trump proposes—that deficient spending is OK was not postulated on top of such prior deficient, only upon deficient spending directly tied to infrastructure building. Something akin to a business borrowing from a bank to buy new equipment to increase production. Can we handle both? Hell we refuse to stop allocated monies left over from Covid. There’s simply too much looting of the Treasury these days.
Slashing? No, redirecting.
Did you ever lose 20-30 lbs? My wife did. She looked fabulous. Her energy went way up. We got more active in many ways. She started to doubt if it was worth the effort. So I handed her a 25lb dumbbell from the rack and said, carry this around for a few hours. Tell me it wasn’t worth it. It’s kind of shocking when you hold that dumbbell and realize what you lost.
It’s a bit like that. Deregulate and get the bureaucrats out of everyone’s hair and things will immediately get better if for no other reason than removing useless boat anchor from the productive economy.
The real problem is that transfer payments and debt service account for most spending. They’re not going to find $2T in spending cuts by eliminating GS-12 positions. That number is a pipe dream. The real savings will be ending the Ukraine fiasco and deregulation which means fewer regulations AND fewer regulators.
I think the real reason for Trump’s economic policy is to delay the day of reckoning when no one wants to buy US Treasury bonds any longer.There are about $15 trillion in 10-year bonds coming due next year which must be rolled over and Trump’s tariff threat is meant to force foreign governments to buy these or get stiffed on trade. BRICS makes this a weak hand and the fallback option of starting a major war is worse. The only thing we can count on is RINOs stabbing him in the back.
It is going to be a bumpy ride out of the gate and there is going to be some pain. We can’t undo decades of off-shoring of industry overnight. Like the deportations, Trump needs to get a fast start on these issues because the honeymoon period is going to be very short before the Washington machine really turns on him. His first three months are likely to make or break his administration’s success.
Silicon Valley’s AI and the bitcoin people also need vast new electricity production, which is why we’re seeing nuclear power back in fashion. Until more comes online, gaia is going to be coughing from coal and natural gas.
Energy available to the public is still on the way out, and all material production that benefits normal people is being spun down. The “green agenda” is decades past the point of no return. We are no longer civilized enough to go back.
But Zuck and Google and Thiel and Elon will get enough taxpayer funded reactors devoted to AI and crypto, i.e., censorship and surveillance, to make every human moment a living hell forever.
Because we won.
Hemid-
I have this exact same worry.
For decades we couldn’t have too cheap to meter nuclear to keep granny’s house warm because all reactors were seconds away from melting down and killing all life on Earth.
Now that the AI farmers realize they need massive, steady baseload power?
“OMG, nuclear is the best thing since sliced bread!”
Meh. It stops when there is a critical mass opposing it. That’s not on the nogs or pajeets or spics or Finkels, but on our own lefties. If we can’t take commies seriously, what do you expect? When have they ever been OK with a traditionalist POV? When have they ever been truly concerned with the lot of the common man?
Martin Armstrong contends, avec raison, that eliminating the income tax would trigger the best economy since the 19th century..Until 1913 the Federal government funded itself with tariffs and excise taxes, which left no room for fighting big wars overseas, but incentivized Americans to work hard and invent new things…But the same Wall Street bankers who financed the Bolsheviks wanted to get into European wars, so Americans ended up with a rapidly growing income tax and the Federal Reserve…
This is so true. And the Europeans ended up in ruins and as pathetic vassals.
Thank you for mentioning my favorite Martin. He says take the odious debt, issue convertible coupons, and redeem that debt in equity…converting the odious debt into a national public wealth fund.
There is your money for infrastructure, pensions, everything. Only this time we the public would be shareholders and stakeholders, not just the oligarchical institutions.
We’d be loaning ourselves our own money, instead of paying interest to alien powers.
In other words, re-erecting fences. Importing other people’s problematic history and ideas is the problem of Open Society.
Could you go over that a bit slower, or suggest where on Armstrong’s page to read about it? I’m not following the step where convertible debt is exchanged for equity shares in, um, something.
‘Catapulting left-wing crazies into the sea provides a much bigger dopamine rush than deregulation.’
And rightly so, because a nation isn’t a series of theories. It’s people. People with their agendas create and maintain economic policies.
Altering economic policy will fail utterly if a change doesn’t come about in the populace. Nor can a nation be healthy in any way — including economically — if 40% of the population desperately wants to destroy it to install instead their Build Back Better pollyanna/utopian agenda of race grievance, globalism, and feminism.
Don’t forget: the actors of the Left HATE America. Changing economic policy should be attempted AFTER the worst of the people and groups bent on the ruination of the nation are catapulted into the sea — preferably on live teevee — because if you don’t, they will undermine and thwart any and every measure taken to improve and stabilize the country.
“Build Back Better pollyanna/utopian agenda of race grievance, globalism, and feminism.”
Exactly. These are not “fellow citizens”.
Nosir. They are not.
Little Marco the Cadillac salesman from Boca Raton…
Call me crazy but it sure looks like we’re staffing up for war with Iran.
It looks like the people who worried about all those Adelson bucks were right.
Yesterday David Goldman (Spengler) was crowing on Twitter about Rubio’s appointment. Specifically mentioned a position paper on China which obviously Rubio was too dumb to write and his owners knocked together for him. Now I’m far from being a China Hawk and think that smart thing for USA to do is avoid poking the Panda and stick to traditional course of bullying smaller non-peers. So no personal objection to that.
Thing is Goldman is all for peace with PRC and getting out of Ukraine. Can you guess why though? Of course, for him and his ilk it is clearly manifest destiny that American boys should go die fighting Iran. Can’t have any distractions from what’s important.
Many people voted for Trump because the real rate of inflation is currently around 20% – look at the skyrocketing price of food, healthcare, insurance, housing (housing prices have been flat for the past year but interest rates on mortgages continue to rise, which continues to increase the price of ownership), etc. Official inflation rates are fake.
Trump will not be able to fix or even slow down this inflation because the Federal Reserve is stuck. The historical solution to fighting inflation is to massively hike interest rates which is what Volcker did in 1980, but if the Fed did that now the whole economy would crash given how debt leveraged every aspect of society is. It also cannot lower rates without increasing inflation further. This dynamic would be there regardless of whether Trump or Kamala won the election. The budget deficit is close to $2 trillion dollars and most of that is entitlement spending, and it is impossible to reign in entitlement spending in a democracy.
In other words, live below your means, shake off the Trump euphoria because the next four years inflation wise will be no better, and likely worse, than the last four.
This post delves into what Trump would need to do to have a successful administration: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/what-would-winning-mean-for-dissidents
If he can drive down the price of fuel (which, he was able to do in his first term) it will give him a giant cushion to work with.
Yeah, but it’s wages that need correcting as well. I doubt if prices across the board will ever drift back down to pre-Biden levels. Wages need to increase—without accompanying inflation. Unrestricted immigration is depressing such increases, not to mention a strain on the Welfare State.
Jacking up the investment market is great for those of us with excess resources to invest, but that leaves 80-90% of folk pounding sand. No one will benefit from a further bifurcation of wealth in this country.
“I doubt if prices across the board will ever drift back down to pre-Biden levels.”
Depends. If “we” insist on too-big-to-fail, then, no, inflation is permanent. All those business plans predicated on free money have to be allowed to die. The equipment held by those failed businesses become available to people with viable business plans at fire-sale prices. Considering the massive mal-investment of the last half century at least, new businesses might be seeing equipment available for less than a penny on the dollar. And the failed businesses are no longer buying materials, bidding up the prices…
We didn’t have the will to belt-tighten in the 80s, the 70s or perhaps even earlier. The debt based economy, probably the entire world system, is probably far beyond the point of no return. History says the old system must collapse, most of the debt repudiated either by default (deflation) or covertly (inflated to worthlessness). Details and timing are anyone’s guess, but it’ll probably be a hell of a mess. For many pessimists it’s been amazing how long the system has staggered on.
Screw belt tightening. Just let anyone who counted on 0% interest forever swing in the breeze. They signed up for it, they had the personnel to do due diligence. This isn’t on the people from the 60s or 70s. This is on the people today. Hold them accountable for their screwups or kwichurbichin.
“Wages need to increase—without accompanying inflation.”
That would take not a change in pay, but a change in mentality. If most people insist on living paycheck to paycheck, spending as fast as it comes in, or even faster, then they will be bidding up prices. What must happen is that most people become savers.
Only if the new money doesn’t immediately get pumped into consumerism can anything other than inflation be the outcome.
Sorry for the sads, but the truth is inflation really is “too much money chasing too few goods.” Boosting real wages without boosting the quantity of goods produced is by definition inflationary.
The only way to avoid it is for the majority of people to change to a saving mentality. Actually pay attention to Dave Ramsey and the like. It can be done. It’s just that most won’t do it.
Not sure why a fine comment gets negative votes, but yes we all could learn to be more frugal. However, there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck because they are being squeezed like factory farm animals.
I came from a background of such. Really, as a youngster I remember we had to move to another apartment because the rent went up $15. You got to have lived that life. Sometimes there simply is nothing to save. I had two pairs of pants—literally. One blue jeans for school, another some sort of dress slacks for church or special occasions. My mother had *one* classy dress which even then was last in style from the 40’s. She wore it into the 90’s!
Here in my city, Tucson, the city supplies water at exorbitant rates. The last rate increase was such that the city had to enact a program that allowed folk to apply for a “free” allocation of what amounted to 50 gallons per day, then they had to pay full bore for extra. That’s poverty and those folk are not spend thrifts.
Yet, last week wife and I went to a steak house restaurant and the place was packed. Our bill for two with tip, $80 or so. Hence my bifurcation comment.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
“However, there are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck because they are being squeezed like factory farm animals.”
I guess I could have worded my reply better. I had a similar background. At one point, there were 8 of us living in a double-wide. School clothes and after-school clothes. Etc.
The reason everyone is squeezed is because so many choose to live as high as they can, rather than saving for tomorrow. The spendthrifts are bidding up prices for everyone. Welfare, and now asylum and immigration are pushing it up even higher.
But the answer cannot be simply a change in wages because that automatically adjusts poverty level and thus welfare and immigration programs. Everything continues as it does now, but at a higher price level. And the banksters, politicians and other parasites clean up with their 10% skim.
Spendthrifts?
I buy cheap food (no steaks, v little meat) dirt-cheap rent ($600) and a $400 car payment . . . also very cheap in the country of my residence. Aside from basic household expenses, toilet paper and whatnot, that’s it for my fixed monthly income. There is zilcho left over with a week or ten days left in the month. I can’t even afford to live in my own country anymore.
Oh, and I need 5 grand for surgery or I will croak soon.
Not everybody lives in Fat City, amigos.
How about dissolving Blackrock, Vanguard and State Steet — which endlessly promote Woke-Feminist policies and programs — and rebating their assets to U.S. citizens? They are a cancer upon the nation anyway.
But that’s what I’m saying, @ray. It’s kind of a variant on the Cantillon Effect. Because so few people save, they bid up the prices of goods. You can’t escape that push inflation. You could if there weren’t all those 7th generation welfare cases that bid up prices. And all those “asylees” to make things that much worse.
Government makes things even worse by spending, bidding up prices, and the double whammy is that they drive down savings rates, forcing those who do save into equities so they don’t lose value through inflation.
OK Steve, thanks. I just wanted to make it clear that many millions of Americans are not ‘spendthrifts’ but quite literally do live month-to-month and have no choice but to do so.
I am over 70 and a veteran. I am sure there are at least a million senior citizens like me, on fixed incomes, who cannot afford to save anything.
$80 for a steak dinner for two actually sounds pretty good.
Here in western NY one can easily hit $30 for a burger with one pint of local beer plus tax and tip.
Yes, I know I need to move.
In my town, a top-of-the-line steak dinner (with the trimmings) for two will run you about $120. And that doesn’t include drinks and dessert.
Eat venison. One round of .30-06 will feed you for quite a while.
Just finished off a crock of venison au jus with mashed potatoes and green beans… delicious.
In the extraordinarily unlikely event that a buck–not necessarily the two-legged kind–strays into my fenced-in backyard, I’ll unlimber the ol’ .357 and make with the venison steaks.
Yep, I thought that when writing. Yet $80 for two in this burg is pretty damn above typical consumer affordability for the average wage earner here. For us, nothing. You just need to take my word for it. For the County, a few years back the average full-time worker before tax earned about $42K annually The average “family” income was about $49K. You cannot buy a median priced home for that amount.
It’s really hard for me to pat myself on the back for my current situation, which is what Steve suggests. Yes, I did not live “above” my means. Yes, I saved. But never did I make a typical average wage for this area, nor was I a typical average “Joe” (“Jose”?) off the street.
The longer I live, the more the wife and I have come to believe in Providence, or Grace if you will—and no one can “earn” Grace. It is a gift given, but never deserved!
“It’s really hard for me to pat myself on the back for my current situation, which is what Steve suggests.”
Not what I meant. It’s just a matter of x dollars and y goods. In general, if x grows faster than y, inflation. Makes little difference WHY x is increasing faster than y.
Bidding up the price of a top-notch steak dinner makes little to no difference in the prices in the produce section, any more than yacht prices affect your steak dinner..
That’s why I’m less concerned with government spending scads of money on tanks and bombers and aircraft carriers. Those things do not bid up the prices of consumer goods. Their impact is Cantillon effect at best.
Oh yes, grace is very real. It comes from God, the God of the Bible and no other.
As for Providence, it’s a town in MA. Last time I was there, a pretty mobbed-up town, too.
Rhode Island! Somewhere HP Lovecraft is gnashing his choppers.
Remember, part of those low fuel prices came about as a result of the economy shutting down during COVID. Adjust for that statistically and I would bet that Trump fuel prices, although lower, weren’t really that much lower.
I was paying less than two dollars a gallon before Covid. Fracking and horizontal drilling drove prices to a down to a level I thought I would never live to see. Biden and the green agenda ended that. Trump can bring cheap fuel back in short order.
Maybe. A good share of that was future-driven — Keystone XL pipeline in particular. The deals had already been cut to use the excess capacity to ship domestic Bakken oil. That will never happen now. Biden made sure that it was more economical for Canada to sell their oil to China than to points east by way of Louisiana. US would have got a cut off that, plus first shot at excess production, but that rat bastard Biden destroyed it. Forever. May he burn in hell.
There is an oil pipeline now operational from Russia to China. I suspect any other purchases will be simply for secondary access. China however is in a thought, oil independent of the West—not to mention the Saudis sell to China without needing dollars.
Yeah, just another stupid, arguably evil foreign policy decision of these corruptocrats.
Again, the one that sticks in my craw is the Keystone XL. That was what kicked in the turbos on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion, that now pushes all that oil to Vancouver rather than Louisiana.
I remember oil going to $140/barrel under Obama and gas was around $5/gallon.
Now I’m struggling to understand why gas is nearly $5/gallon when oil is around $70/barrel.
Are there really that many new gas taxes and fees?
I don’t know why you are at $5. Local factors, probably. Nationally, it’s about $3. But the reason prices are what they are is because people will pay it.
If you think back to 2000, gasoline went from under a buck to over $2, when the crude price went from $22 to $30. By that metric, $5 gasoline is about right. But it’s not, because most people won’t pay that.
IMHO, the first thing he should do in regards to fuel is start re-filling the SPR. The SPR is one of those things where having it seemingly negates needing it. But it is a very cheap insurance policy, especially given what is happening in the Middle East. It does not exist to manipulate price. It exists to avoid the repeat of the 70s gas crunches.
I don’t think there’s a whole lot of room to the downside there. In inflation adjusted terms, fuel is cheaper now than it was a quarter century ago. And in nominal terms it’s also cheaper now than it was 15 years ago. Can you say that about rent, groceries, or anything else? Fuel seems to be the one thing people expect to stay cheap/get cheap even while over time everything else gets more expensive, and the efficiency of the industry has made this possible to some degree (as shown). But they still have to get paid if they are going to produce. Nobody likes to hear this, but in the year 2024, $4/gallon is a very fair price for gasoline. And we’re still under that in most of the country.
Out here in West Texas gas is running around $2.60 a gallon. I complain about a million things, but not that.
Yes, look at how much Europeans pay in fuel taxes so that politicians can buy votes from swarthy invaders.
“This dynamic would be there regardless of whether Trump or Kamala won the election.”
EXACTLY. I think I’ll sink everything I own into bitcoin, that ought to do the trick.
if they really hate Trump, maybe hiking interest rates is exactly what they will do.
We’ve been on a 26-27 year money printing spree. We’ve had nonstop bubblenomics since the later mid 90s. This is unprecedented in history. Bubbles in the past were a once in a generation event at most and were generally much shorter in length. They were generally not so large. Japan is still paying for their bubble.
How or when this will stop is anyone’s guess and certainly over my pay grade. But things that cannot go on forever generally must come to an end.
Armstrong says the idea that “printing causes inflation” is ridiculous. During the Bretton Woods era, the public couldn’t borrow against gov’t debt, that is, e-bonds. Now we can buy T-bills, Fannie Maes, corporate paper, whatever.
Debt is just money you pay interest on. If you borrow you pay interest on it, if you print your own you don’t (or you can pay it to the public buying your debt.) Primary dealers must buy a certain amount of gov’t debt, and then resell it. Their problem is that the current debt load far outstrips the primary dealers’ and banks’ capital.
70% of our debt has been accumulated interest. Over 50% of what we spend goes out of country. Why should we be dependent on the Federal Reserve’s credit rating? BRICS offers an open forex market based on what countries are actually worth.
Printing one’s own is far cheaper than borrowing it, and avoids the odious debt load that eventually crashes the system. A reserve currency should be based on reputation and value, rather than military force…and nobody has better ideas than the white countries that gave us the modern world. Ideas so good even the high-IQ Asians had to steal them.
Oh, wait, Armstrong is one of those MMT guys? Never mind my previous beg for a link.
I buy MMT, I simply do not buy into applying it to the Federal government for obvious reasons…
As I understand the theory, it only applies to sovereign issuers of currency. They are the only ones who are in a position to demand use of their currency, to pay tax.
What form of MMT apples elsewhere? And in that case, why wouldn’t whatever MMT actions happen in Greece be manifested in Japan, for example?
We have centuries worth of infrastructure to complete, and it’s been blocked by the environmental lunatics for fifty years (thanks Nixon). The vast majority of the flyover world looks much like it did 10,000 years ago. I was on an intermodal inland waterway group as a representative for the Great and Sovereign State of Tennessee for over a decade. The purpose was to figure out how tap into the untapped potential of our rivers. A great many plans were proposed, “studies” completed, and money spent to do absolutely nothing. Hell, we built the Hoover dam, with 1930s equipment, in five years. The potential of this country has not been remotely realized.
We are rapidly approaching the end of the life expectancy for a lot of major infrastructure in this country and we simply lack the will and knowledge to replicate some of the major projects of the past. Whenever I cross the Mackinac Bridge connecting the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, I wonder if we could even rebuild it if we had to.
Actually, we still have great engineers. This bridge was completed in 2014…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_O'Callaghan%E2%80%93Pat_Tillman_Memorial_Bridge
The CHIPS Act was theoretically the exact sort of thing that the Trump economic team would get behind – investment in the USA, investment in a high-skilled, high-end manufacturing process, investment in a highly important (to say the least) sector, investment away from a potentially dangerous hotspot. Yet, the thing was saddled with an endless amount of DEI/woke garbage that basically made it impossible to function. I am sure it must be totally baffling to the Asians who currently dominate this sector, and sure enough the fabs are all behind schedule and companies are rolling back commitments. The idea that you have to hire thousands of people who can’t get an order at Wendy’s right if you want to manufacture CPUs is just crazy. I wonder if Trump has the power to cut that junk out of the process, and if he doesn’t, he should still do it anyway.
I think DEI is going away. Even normies think it’s veiled anti-white racism, and will be regarded as an artefact of our Progressive Great Awakening which lasted roughly 2012-2022. It will take a while for DEI to get fully removed from the system but I think white men can safely apply to Leidos and Boeing within a few years.
Anybody who thinks DIE is “veiled” anti-white racism is a fool. It is blatant anti-white racism.
(Tut, tut!, milord. Manners.)
It will never go away. Leftists don’t go away. They simply reemerge when the time is right. Think of them as herpes. What could be done, and should be done, is removal of all DIE mandates attached to Fed rules and contracts. This should/will drift down to the States as they are so dependent on Fed’s for funds.
Present law wrt blatant discrimination as to race will handle any real problems. No one puts out signs any more saying, “Blacks need not apply”. The essence of DIE mandates is to hire and promote incompetents. Before DIE took hold, companies were looking for minorities—competent minorities. That will not change in this new America. Maybe in the 60’s to 70’s there were vestiges of simple discrimination that needed correction, but those days are past.
What we need now is competency. If that means a company is disproportionately White or Asian, so be it.
I don’t know why “simple discrimination needed correction.”
No and no again, it did not.
That is a valid concept and one talked about in certain circles—like Libertarians. The right to association.
I am in awe of your optimism. Like famed political theoretician, Ringo Starr, is alleged to have said, “Everything government touches turns to crap.”
CHIPS, like every other boondoggle, would have been just a massive money laundering scam.
No way, hoser! And if you believe me, I got a railroad-to-nowhere here in California I can sell you. We’ll throw in the wind turbines for free!
Some years back Florida too had a case of the stupids We voted in 2000 to approve a high speed train that was a blatant give-away to Walt Disney World. Fortuantely the public came to its senses and another vote (2004) quickly repealed it. The project lived on as sort of a zombie (the lure of that sweet, sweet Federal funding…) but apparently was successfully killed finally.
Later we passed an amendment to make it harder to pass amendments. Now we have a constittuional right to hunt and fish but more practically, home value exemptiion now indexed to inflation.
Government used to be able to do stuff, back when it was run by Americans. If the government can be run by Americans again, and this is definitely what Trump advocated for, especially in 2016, then it can get back to doing stuff again.
It’s exactly the same way in Ringo Starr’s home country, in fact it is probably worse because it, like the rest of Western Europe, has been a GAE vassal since 1945.
But government used to be able to do stuff like the Federal Reserve and invade the Confederacy. Or invade Mexico. Or Canada. Or Cuba. Or the Philippines. Or hand out money and land to the railroads. That was all back when the government was run by Americans.
If they don’t off him for breaking up the CIA/DOJ and the Federal Reserve, the witches will certainly off him for breaking up the Department of Education.
Who were the Harris voters? Women of every color dreaming of government jobs, for which a college certification was their ticket.
Quite true. The question is whether Trump can get away with it without causing inflation to spike. Redirecting manufacturing back to the US via deregulation, tax policy and tariffs could (indeed, should) be inflationary. However, it also would be more and better jobs that pay well.
I’d also add that in addition to the economic elite, the military elite will also back this re-industrialization process. They are now fully aware that the military is an empty shell without a manufacturing base. Personally, I don’t care about the military, but it’s a good ally.
They have to fix academia.
Grade inflation, low standards, and the Woke crap have been dragging down STEM programs for at least a couple decades.
Killing funding to all the garbage ideas out there would also be helpful. Dumping all the battery garbage coming out of MIT these days would be a great start.
You can get STEM guys. They’re out there. They just need a manly place to work.
They also need competitive pay.
Why go through the STEM slog when you can be a mediocre attorney and set your hourly at 3-6x what a mid-career engineer pulls?
Or, go to Wall Street and make real money playing all the grifting games there while piling up all kinds of social capital?
Having worked with a lot of Wall Street firms and various financial services firms, it’s stunning the amount of talent that they soak up. These guys would be amazing at improving manufacturing processes, transportation, data analytics, etc. Instead, we move numbers around to help rich people earn an extra 50 basis points a year.
Mediocre attorneys starve on their own. Most simply obtain jobs in other, or somewhat related fields. We had many at the university, but ai did not perceive they were practicing law, per se.
You cannot fix the educational system without acceptance of the concept of HBD—specifically differing IQ, and this acceptance does not even need to delve into racial differences in IQ. Simply put, “not every person is capable of a useful/meaningful post secondary academic education”.
Latest I read is that the average IQ of a student admitted to college, was around 102-104. This is way too low for any solid university level curriculum—this includes the social sciences and the humanities—not simply STEM. We harp on STEM, but I was in university when pre-woke and education in the Humanities was not simplistic or meaningless. I will remind folk that the two areas of study where the highest IQ is measured are among faculty in Physics and *Philosophy*!
Last I looked (ChatGPT) about 40% of the 18-22 yo’s are now in college. That’s about double my estimate of how many should be enrolled. College is not remedial HS. Of course, that’s now what it is (at best) for such students. Additionally, for those students so far under previously held intellectual standards, faux courses of study and degrees therein must be created.
The above is not just a waste of societal resources, but also a hotbed of festering resentment by those “graduates” who, upon completion of their “degree”, can find no employment suitable to their newly awarded “elite” status.
This rot has worked itself into the so called STEM degree areas as well. It just took a bit longer. For example, in Computer Science—a field with heavy math requirement and logical thinking skills—women were always a distinct minority of degree candidates. This was considered to be sexist and the departments therefore were pushed to increase/equalize the numbers of women and also raise the numbers of minorities—but only certain minorities. Seems our numbers of Indians and Chinese did not count.
One of our former instructors, when at another school, published some articles stating the “innate” lack of interest in CSc by women and was pilloried by the students and administrators at his school. Last I heard he was relieved of most duties and in danger of losing his position—even after winning national awards for his innovative teaching and excelling rates (something like 30%) of *women* in his classes. His crime was to simply state that women might have differing interests in fields of study that account for the percentage enrolling in CSc courses.
Concur. A good target would be an IQ of one standard deviation above the mean, 115, roughly 17%.
If we are serious about bringing manufacturing back to the States, it’s going to take a whole lot of trades and VoTech types to make it happen.
And the first thing to do is to pull a Mike Roe into the act. Yeah, I know well meaning and *smart* commentators here have pointed out that “manual” labor is not the most desirable of careers as it often breaks people down and catches up with one in old age.
However, the negative emphasis we put on folks who do such work rather than go to college needs to be corrected. We need a spokesperson to go hand in hand with Industrialization policy initiatives. And yes, it all starts in HS, and I’m talking more than “shop” courses. We need work/study and apprenticeships in the trades. Stop funding college degrees carte blanc, fund work studies as heavily.
This, gentlemen, a thousand times this.
If, as ray rightly reminds us, you want to re-masculinize society, bring back what men excel in. Triple points for bringing back what white men excel in.
(p.s. Throw in a little financial planning into the vo-tech mix.
Trades make mad money and blow it on stupid sh*t. I have no idea why guys whose watchword was ‘feast or famine’ couldn’t save their money.)
Re-masculinize America and give God glory, and the nation will thrive.
Simple, but not easy.
Continue down the track of Feminism, and the country will fall. Trump or no Trump.
The radical left has been screaming, correctly, that Tariffs are inflationary, but ignoring the fact that corporate taxes are also inflationary. It’s as if they can almost get there but their programming won’t allow it.
One of the untold stories about the 2007 meltdown I saw on, of all places, an internet car show. A University of Michigan professor whose name I forget, but who was in the Bush administration, was a guest on one of those shows. She said that the people lobbying the hardest for government intervention to save General Motors was the defense department.
General Motors, for instance, got rich building tank dynamos and the like.
The auto industry’s secret trade was in military parts, thanks to WWII and Vietnam.
“They are now fully aware that the military is an empty shell without a manufacturing base.”
I do hope the double entendre was intentional…
The problem with our military procurement is multifold. I’m a project manager for one of the nation’s largest defense contractors and here’s what I’ve found:
That’s why we can’t build anything at a decent price point. The bureaucratic morass and the need for “joint” everything has made it impossible for us to build the weapons the Pentagon needs at what should be an affordable cost. The “good idea fairy” always ends up tacking on more needless requirements and makes the engineers’ lives a living hell.
Dr Mantis. Excellent commentary. Folks should ignore my posting below—it’s not even “redundant”. More along the lines of a non sequitur. 🙁
“Personally, I don’t care about the military, but it’s a good ally”
The military perhaps needs some high level oversight via business folk from the non-military. Much of what I read about our failed “wunderwaffen” are wrt the demands made by the military upon the design of these weapons. Something along the lines that meeting all such demands makes the weapon suboptimal for any particular use—and expensive and complex as well. But I am no expert here, just observing a “modern” war example being played out in Ukraine.
Yep. F-35 is the biggest current example. Rather than a purpose-driven design, it’s all a compromise, a collaborative solution.
Same thing happened with the Paladin M109A6(?). Rather than listen to what the gunners and people doing the strategy, everyone and his dog provided input, and the shells cost easily 10x the Russian equivalent, and can be produced at maybe 1% of the rate.
We tried that. His name was McNamara and he was likely the worst SecDef of all time.
You have no idea the power of the bureaucracy at the Pentagon. Everyone who fights it loses…badly. They are very connected as part of the managerial blob in D.C.
This essay highlights the counter-Elite reaction so prominent in the election campaign. A lot of the big Oligarchs want less regulation, less FTC interference in mergers and acquisitions etc. The Woke/DEI stuff was a dead-weight loss for a lot big Tech companies, because overstaffing was hurting earnings too much and was a big distraction for upper management. They got behind Trump only because the Dems overplayed their hand and I doubt they have any great love for Trump.
Hopefully we don’t return to the Libertarian paradise that less regulation entails. Much of Trump’s support is skeptical of capitalism and liberalism and all that entails.
I hope Trump is able to walk the line between sensible deregulation and keeping DuPont from poisoning people.
The simplest thing to do would be to reorient the EPA to a conservation-focused approach. That means clean air, clean water, clean food, limiting pollution, etc.
The current establishment problems with that approach is that it’s not very marketable and it doesn’t support the green grift.
Zeldin seems like a person who could do this. I can’t think of another high-profile conservationist that would be a better fit at EPA.
That’s too complicated a subject to go into here, but “liberalism” and it’s libertarian extreme has had its excesses. For example, unlimited campaign money corrupting our system. Another example is allowing people like Bill Gates and George Soros to accumulate too much money and power and effectively controlling the government.
In other words, the smart thinkers from the 1980s screwed us on many business and economic concepts.
Bottom line is that I’ve come to the conclusion that capitalism and liberalism are fine as long as you’ve got some common sense guardrails.
“For example, unlimited campaign money corrupting our system. Another example is allowing people like Bill Gates and George Soros to accumulate too much money and power and effectively controlling the government.”
The problem is not the money flowing into politicians, but the money flowing out. Who cares how Soros and Gates spend their money? So long as Congress does not have the power to hand out taxpayer money in exchange for the lobbyist cash, who cares?
As we saw with the election, it is always good when the rich people are backing your play.
Word. On rare occasion, the interests of a slice of the rich and the working class align. Domestic reinvestment is one of them. Whether deliberately or not, and it likely was both, the devastation of white America resulted in large part from offshoring and financialization. The flashing problem with what has been proposed is the specter of inflation. Loose money and tariffs would seem primed to continue the unacceptable rate of inflation, which along with genocidal open borders elected Trump. Is there any way to accomplish these laudable goals and not further fuel inflation?
Probably not. It’s possible that the natural force of deflation – productivity – holds inflation in check, but a combination of moving manufacturing back and limiting workers via lower inflation would seem to indicate inflation.
However, this would be a “good” kind of inflation. Yes, things cost more, but the Rust Belt would be healthier. A price that I’m willing to pay, but how many others will okay with that price. That’s the question.
I suspect from a political standpoint the resultant inflation would have to be dealt with in the same way as the deficit: ignore it completely and if pressed tell people their lives are better despite it (which would be true even though it likely would be disregarded). We have inflation now in part due to the Forever War with Russia and other insane disruptions to the energy supply. At least this new version actually would benefit Americans’ lives rather than a Middle Eastern tribe and their Puritan conspirators. Look for Ackman and Co. to turn sharply on Trump once the Israel war question is removed from the table. That is to be celebrated.
As Z wrote, this program is the most radical part of what Trump has proposed, but it only is radical in that it is a return to the status quo ante. Any honest future history, if that remains possible, would have to acknowledge that the deindustrialization of the last half century was one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Allowing the nat gas and other energy to flow could really help with the inflation issue and bring more manufacturing to the US. Heck, we’re already getting German manufacturing due to their relatively high energy costs and our relatively low costs.
Add in low taxes and less regulation and you’d see a lot of European manufacturing move here.
How about we stop beggaring our neighbors in Europe. We stop the damn war, get Putin to ship gas again and help restart Europe economy. We broke it, we should repair it.
I’m an America first person, but really we screwed the pooch over there.
I agree, but they made their bed. They didn’t have to follow us into an incredibly stupid war on their doorstep. As always, the US can just walk away and do stupid stuff somewhere else, but Europe is stuck with this mess.
Germany also didn’t need to have an insane energy policy and shut down their nuke plants.
The Europeans aren’t children. They can change course anytime that they want – and they should. But if they’re intent on continuing their insane belligerence toward Russia (and trusting the neocons) and now, potentially, getting into trade wars with China, their manufacturing will suffer. We might as well grab it.
Personally, I’d like to see Europe throw off the yoke of the US/neocons and do business with Russia and have an economic revival. I’d also like our manufacturing to come back from China, not Europe, but the world is what it is.
Any honest future history, if that remains possible, would have to acknowledge that the deindustrialization of the last half century was one of the greatest crimes in human history.
This is treason in my opinion as it has made us so weak. We depend on foreign adversaries for our goods.
On the growth and inflation I agree with CoSC, probably not avoidable. That being said bringing back productive enterprise back to our shores will have a multiplying effect financially it will just take a few years to start to pay off. In affect this is good debt as it will turn a profit. Low interest or no interest loans to get things rolling quickly may speed things up along with the deregulation.
I always thought the offshoring and financializing of the American economy was extremely short sighted. It took them a generation to gut the economy, in WW11 the United States was able to ramp up in less than five years. This is unlikely but it is the edge of possibility.
The only way to have a civilized society is to have a middle class. Having a middle class requires a productive economy. The re-homing of our manufacturing and all we can capture from the rest of the world is our best path forward. Likely our only path forward that is worth imagining. Of course it will be insanely difficult to do. We are not the people we were 100 years ago.
“We are not the people we were 100 years ago.”
There it is.
We are not the people we were 50 years ago.
Armstrong’s debt-for-equity swap would bring 34 trillion back into the economy, but then we’d be post-Wiemar Germany.
Well, we voted for Hitler, so go for it!
I don’t need to see left-wing crazies catapulted into the sea. I am fine seeing AOC or journalists get the Homan treatment. Or better yet, their tantrums being met with easy dismissal by a new donor class.
On the other hand, I’ll man station #1 at catapults by the Sea holding a sign reading “bring out the witches first; let’s see who sinks or swims”.
She turned me into a newt!
…I got better…
Remember when Dick Cheney would growl on TV and Andrea Mitchell’s panties would drop?
Imagine national populist energy doing that again.
A case study:
LaGuardia Airport in NYC famously has no direct connection to the subway system, making transport to/from Manhattan and to JFK unnecessarily complex, time consuming, and wasteful. Everyone knows it.
The LaGuardia Subway Connection proposed in 2012 was supposed to fix this 2 mile gap in public transport.
Cancelled in 2023 due to soaring cost estimates of $2.4 billion (2 freaking miles!), “environmental impacts”, and the usual bilge about how it would ruin the “unique cultural and racial character” of the impacted area.
So the new solution was “more busses”. In NYC. Awful for so many reasons.
It’s a good example of how nothing gets done in America anymore, especially in mega-cities.
Reading your essay today made me think of this all-too-typical boondoggle and wonder if the Trump Administration will be able to fundamentally change things on giant infrastructure projects.
That said, the new airport is nice! Of course, it was hugely expensive and took forever to build. The subway connection was probably killed by the Taxi Medallion owners.
Say what you will about Andrew Cuomo, he was an old-school politician in that he cared about infrastructure. It was unacceptable that the first impression of this city and this country for so many millions of people was LaGuardia. You go to China and the airports look like space stations.
Also anyone who wants to learn about managerialism run amok should look at the struggles that NYC had to go through to rezone Gowanus. For many decades it was abandoned warehouses next to the smelliest, most disgusting body of water in the USA if not the world. As the EPA started cleaning it up the city started rezoning it to spur development, and then all sorts of activist groups came from everywhere claiming these disgusting graffiti-covered warehouses were actually of great historical significance because a slave lived there once or something. The same thing happened in Queens when they started cleaning up Willets Point, people saying the chop shops and lack of running water was actually a stunning and brave community. It’s just embarrassing.
The savages destroy civilization and the Judeo-Puritans concretize the destruction.
That. However, the train to bus connection (sans luggage) is nothing for a New Yorker to handle. I did that myself a few times. However, it wasn’t always that way. The Mets build a new stadium when the team way established way back when. The train (IIR) exits in the stadium. Once upon a time we were not like now—even in NYC.
The National Environmental Protection Act was not a bad idea in concept, but like everything else it failed in execution. Example: Endangered Species Act (ESA) They didn’t define “species”; therefore, you take a localized subspecies, declare that it’s a newly discovered species and shut down E V E R Y T H I N G. There are examples after examples. Become a Civil Engineer they said, you’ll get to build things they said. Sadly, it’s paperwork and regulations all the way down. Hell, I could barley spell C A T when I started 30 years ago and now I write more than Tolstoy.
One of the bigger problems with the ESA is defining the “range” of the species. Here we have perennial problems with a Mexican Jaguar that ranges sometimes a 100-120 miles and crosses over into AZ. Since a game camera catches a glimpse every decade or so, all sorts of regulations come into play or are threatened wrt saving his “historic hunting territory”, when in reality the species does not live here and there are plenty in MX at the center of the range.
i recall the faa recently approved air taxis for this area to begin service in 2025. air taxi, electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) is basically a large drone carrying up to 8 people.
The only time I missed a flight ever was on a bus trying to get to LaGuardia that was, you guessed it, stuck in traffic!