Category Archives: Politics – international

Trump and economic policy

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Most businesspeople don’t have the ability to convert their understanding of the corporate world into a coherent set of policies that will work across the economy and particularly on the supply side. They know what might work for them, but not necessarily across the board. I hadn’t even known Trump had even begun to develop a coherent approach to economic recovery, and it certainly does look to me as if he has had some very clued-in assistance in putting it together. It is in part outlined here: Beyond All the Bluster Trump’s Economic Plan Focuses on Growth, Jobs. This is the sort of thing that will work:

  • slash the corporate tax rate to 15%, down from the current 40%, the highest rate in the industrialized world
  • a one-time 10% repatriation tax on profits American companies made overseas and kept there to avoid the 40% rate
  • allow companies to write off the purchases the year they’re made, rather than over several years, as current law requires
  • the lower 15% rate business rate would also apply to small businesses that usually get taxed at individual income tax rates
  • his “make America rich” plan targets impoverished cities like Baltimore with incentives for companies to move there
  • convert the current State Department program that brings about 100,000 young foreigners into America to work in restaurants, camps, and seaside resorts under J-1 visas into a jobs bank for American inner city youth.

Meanwhile Hillary:

Compare Donald Trump’s blueprint with Secretary Clinton’s nightmare scenario: Higher taxes, more tax complexity, and an avalanche of new regulations. Over-regulation has depressed growth for the last fifteen years. The Obama administration suffocated business with 81,000 pages of new regulations in 2015 alone. Hillary Clinton is pushing for even more – with controls on hiring, pay, bonuses and overtime to promote “fairer growth.” Translation: gender and racial preferences, plus meddling in how much you get paid.

Remember President Obama’s statement, “You didn’t build that.” Well, Mrs. Clinton assumes “you don’t own that.” Government will run your business. Mrs. Clinton wants companies to stop maximizing quarterly earnings for shareholders – what she derides as “quarterly capitalism.” She wants “farsighted investments,” as defined by government, of course. Companies that can get out of the U.S. will rush for the exits. She’s even promising an end to “the boom and bust cycles on Wall Street.” As plausible as ending rainy days.

Infantile versions of fairness seldom mix well with sound economic policy. Trump has nevertheless put together a package that will work, although the cuts to spending and the scaling back of programs will also at some stage have to be included as well. But what we find above is very good, and about time.

And for what it’s worth, the article was written by Elizabeth “Betsy” McCaughey, who was Lieutenant Governor of New York from 1995 to 1998, during the first term of Governor George Pataki.

FURTHER REPORTS: It’s Reuters reporting on what CNBC is reporting, which is remarkable in itself: Trump wants to help U.S. businesses by lifting slew of regulations: CNBC.

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Thursday that if elected he would scrap a slew of federal regulations that he said are even more of a burden on American business owners than high taxes, and would try to refinance longer-term U.S. debt.

Not much detail in the story but you may be sure these are the kinds of things he means to do and will know which regulations ought to go.

And so it begins

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The relentlessly anti-Trump media “analysis”, even here in Australia with virtually no one voting in the US election. The Murdoch Press is anti-Trump to the furthest extent it can go, and this is the supposed right-side of the media. The free, independent writers at The Australian will do what they are told, and what they will be told is that they are to do all they can to ensure Hillary becomes president. Today’s screed is by Caroline Overington, the Associate Editor in Sydney, who has written the first of what will no doubt be many similarly hysterical pieces by many others of their hysterical columnists. Her column is titled, US Election 2016: Donald Trump is rising on a wave of anger. It’s not very good, but at least she tried.

As absurd as that idea once seemed, Donald Trump is the last man standing, and therefore — bar the most extraordinary revolt — he’s the Republican candidate for president.

They have only themselves to blame, of course. The Republicans, I mean. They’ve had eight years to get their gear together, and this is what they’ve come up with.

A guy who got rich by putting up buildings shaped like special-edition Zippo lighters.

Such depth! Such analysis! You can feel the lifetime of study that has gone into this. And etc etc etc ad nauseam. Here, however, are the 16 top comments – I went all the way down to Number 16 because I liked it so much. And I left out not a single one. Quite a different perspective.

1) Overington’s insulting remarks and Greg Sheridan’s equally condescending piece today in some measure explain why Americans are lining up in droves to vote for Trump. Paid political commentators and their taxpayer-supported informants in Congress and the bureaucracy make up the establishment elites that detest the people who put them in office, pay their inflated salaries and keep journalists in jobs.

The members of this arrogant class believe they have a monopoly of knowledge to which their inferiors in the world of business, commerce and the professions, cannot hope to aspire, hence the spurious claim that Trump voters are uneducated and ignorant. It is anathema to them that ordinary people have the audacity to reject the candidate chosen for them by their superiors and vote instead for someone outside that narrow and insular elite group.

2)I cant wait for Trump to win, and then proceed to actually make a positive difference. Methinks journalist are frightened stiff he will succeed and make them irrelevant in policy direction and outcomes. If there is one grain of uniformity among journalists its that they think they know better and are better than the average joe/jill citizen. Time to kick the media to the curb

3) Bring it on. I have no idea what sort of a president he will make but I REALLY want to see the leftist backlash when he gets in. It’ll be the most entertaining thing we’ve seen in years!

4) The elites are desperate now. Overington is an intellectual wet lettuce.

5) It is articles like this that ensure Trump will be President. The media sneer and belittle him yet at the same time reveal what is actually wrong with society…that is the Media think only their opinion count and the voters are too stupid. By the way, Obama sure didn’t go to War – but he has stood by and allowed millions to die in Syria and create the worst humanitarian crisis since World War 2 – and yet you think this makes him great!!! Oh the humanity.

6) Oh, the lefties are getting so scared. Including the writer of this blog! The anxiety of the ABC interviewers is palpable, one could taste it. Go for it Donald . Stick it up the PC self-righteous bike riding, tofu sucking, sandal wearing idiots!

7) The more the chatterers complain, the more I like Trump. Anything is preferable to more of the same.

8) Not only hopelessly jaundiced as a piece of political journalism, is it possible that the chatterati have not yet realised it is quite precisely articles like these that have been fuelling the Trump phenomena? Are they seriously so clueless?

9) How does a piece like this end up in a quality paper like The Australian?

10) The writer is obviously looking for a job with the ABC and will produce this article in the job application.

11) If Socialists like you hate Trump he would have my vote.If only we had him here.

12) Keep up the sneering, the condescension and the mockery, Caroline. It only makes him stronger, and his supporters more resolute.

13) “Who ran because he thought it might be a good advertisement for his new casino.” Shallow and untrue. Trump set out to make a full, frontal attack on the political elites, both sides, and he’s succeeded. He also awakened the nation. The man, if elected a president, will morph into a statesman like person. He’s too intelligent and competent to not know that.

Remember, too, that when Ben Carsons endorsed him and was asked about all the ugly things he’d said about Trump, Carsons replied, “Oh, that’s just politics,” or words to that effect. Apply the same thinking to Trump’s outbursts.

14) You journalists just cannot stand it that people do not think as you tell them to.

15) “Obama (who, for the record, has endured not one scandal involving his marriage or his kids, nor embarked upon a single unnecessary war.)” that’s right, he just did NOTHING.

16) We should build a hall of journalism, wallpapered with all the articles saying Trump can’t win, leading to a feature about the election of the 45th President of the USA. It will be a tourist attraction, and a reminder to future generations that the job of journalists is to report the news, not make it up.

If this keeps up, The Australia will either have to stop allowing comments or find some other way to rebalance the opinion in a more correct direction.

Do American “conservatives” even know what a conservative is?

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Let me therefore tell you what a conservative is: someone who wishes to preserve the best things from our past even while accepting the necessity of change. Going further, it is to learn from our own past about how to negotiate the future.

The question for the day is whether the following is or is not a “conservative” policy: ‘They’re destroying Europe – I’m not going to let that happen to the United States’ Trump doubles down on non-citizen Muslim ban.

On the Muslim ban, which is likely Trump’s most controversial position, he’s not budging.

‘I don’t care if it hurts me,’ he told hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. ‘I’m doing the right thing.’

‘I’ve been guided by common sense, by what’s right,’ he continued.

‘We have to be careful. We’re allowing thousands of people to come into our country,’ he said. ‘Thousands and thousands of people being placed all over the country that, frankly, nobody knows who they are.’

‘We don’t know what we’re doing,’ he added.

He may be wrong about what he’s doing, but the policy is the very essence of conservative.

Trump is also helping us work out which commentators should be ignored from now on and into the farthest future

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Conservative is not defined as idiots who prefer a socialist of the opposite party in government than a person closer to their own perspective representing their own party if not every conservative box is ticked. This is George Will – quoted at Powerline – demonstrating that he is long past his use-by date:

Were [Trump] to be nominated, conservatives would have two tasks. One would be to help him lose 50 states — condign punishment for his comprehensive disdain for conservative essentials, including the manners and grace that should lubricate the nation’s civic life. Second, conservatives can try to save from the anti-Trump undertow as many senators, representatives, governors and state legislators as possible.

This man is a certifiable loony and to think he has been seen as a respected commentator for two generations. These are the same people who prefer Labor to the Libs if the more conservative party is led by someone on the left. Here is a reply to what Will has written from the Powerline comments section in relation to Trump. Something similar could be written about Australia. You know, like how perfection is the enemy of the good.

George Will is a prissy little girl in a bow-tie. He is the future of nothing. His views on Trump, like those of the worthless National Review, are foolish, exaggerated and wrong. The certitude folks express here about Trump losing 50 states. Jeez. Is that wishful thinking, or do you all have dead people whispering in your ears? I think it is just as likely Trump wins in a landslide.

I get the negatives on Trump. Who can miss them? He wears them like a billboard on his orange head. But stop dismissing Trump supporters or rather, voters who might vote for Trump over Hillary as idiots and uninformed imbeciles. That simply isn’t true, certainly not in all cases.

I tire too of the conservative purity test. Reagan granted amnesty to illegals, got Marines killed in Beirut because at the time he was as ignorant of the middle east as Obama is today; Nixon invented the EPA; Romney was never a conservative; George W. Bush? One of America’s worst presidents. I get that he’s a nice guy. He’s also a Christian proselytizer, who looked in Putin’s eyes, and saw his soul (Putin gave it up long ago), found democracy in the beards of tribal crazies, got us into two wars he managed to lose, passed a prescription drug benefit for old white people that still costs billions. Did I mention that he spent money like a sailor in a whorehouse?

Conservatives? Really? Conservatives have done NOTHING in almost 60 years to curb the growth of government. Trump is no damn white knight. But right now America is run by a big-eared ignorant ass, who gets his advice from people of color Marxist ideologues he met in Chicago or college, and twenty-something pinheads who never worked outside of government.

On his worst day, Trump would be better than them. Try looking at it this way. Cruz thinks the system works, that he can fix it. You want idiocy? There it is. The system can’t be changed. It will roll along, getting bigger and bigger and more inept until it caves in.

Trump may even be the only man in the race who understands this. And he will in no way, no matter what he does, be worse that pompous self-absorbed ass Americans put two times into the white house.

Listen Brooks, aren’t Donald’s trousers creased well enough for you?

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There are some people whose views you never forget, and for whom one statement becomes the one thing everyone remembers because it is so grotesque. This is from an article from The New Republic dated August 31, 2009. It is about David Brooks, who The New York Times chooses to call its columnist from the right

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Now there’s a man with acute political judgement, someone you can turn to if you want to see past the superficial and get to the heart of the matter. “His perfectly creased pant” is now often quoted as the most perfect example of stupid in a political analyst in the United States, and there is a lot of stupid to compete. But he won it hands down. And now, showing just how unerring his judgement is, he is back with this: another article that says vote Hillary in that ever reliable more in sorrow than in anger column criticising Trump. To catch the flavour, here are the first two paras:

Donald Trump now looks set to be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this prospect — what are we supposed to do?

Well, not what the leaders of the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of standards and the general election slaughter.

This from someone who endorsed Obama and has never rescinded a word of it. It will be the brain dead such as Brooks who may yet get Hillary over the line, but to call Brooks a “conservative” is worse than repulsive and disgusting, it is merely to realise he is a journalist, the modern synonym for liar. There will be not a voter in the United States influenced by a word he says but there are plenty around who think it. But what’s amazing is that he still has the nerve to say anything at all.

BTW does anyone know who the owner of The New York Times happens to be?

AND THIS JUST IN: Here’s a story that won’t surprise a soul: Poll: Not a Single White House Reporter Is a Republican.

Not a single member of the White House press corps is a registered Republican, according to survey results recently published by Politico.

Those results are buried in a story this week on President Barack Obama’s relationship with the press. An infographic posted in the story reveals that not a single one of the 72 members of the White House press corps surveyed by the Virginia-based trade publication identifies with the GOP.

And the more you think about it the more astonishing the bias becomes. Its therefore no surprise to find that “eighty-six percent said they expect Clinton to win” which is the outcome they intend to bring about if at all possible.

What is needed for free institutions to work

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make america mexico again

As I noted in a post yesterday, John Stuart Mill once observed that democracy could work only among a unified homogeneous people. This ominous passage is from Chapter XVI of his Considerations on Representative Government:

“Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. […] For the preceding reasons, it is in general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities.” (Mill [1861] 1991*: 291-294).

There is nothing there we do not see at every turn across the world today. What a dark future there must be if he was actually right. Even if you’re not partial to his economics, he is the man who wrote On Liberty.

On this note, we bring news from the election in the United States.

VIDEO: Trump Forced To Hop Fence After Protesters Form Human Chain, Block Entrance To San Fran Hotel…T
‘It Felt Like I Was Crossing The Border’…
Rioters rage outside Trump rally in SO CAL…
Smash police car, hurl rocks at motorists…
Hundreds waving Mexican flags…
Cops outnumbered…
Video…
‘He’s gonna build a wall in our land’…
‘Everybody is scared right now because they know change coming’…
Rush to naturalize immigrant voters before election…

Where in the world is Mill shown not to be right. The Declaration of the Rights of Man – not the rights of a Frenchman or an Englishman – will be the death of our civilisation, which we may be witnessing before our eyes.

______
* Mill, John Stuart. [1861] 1991. Considerations on Representative Government, In J. Gray (ed.) On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 203-467.

Colossally out of his depth – no idea at all what is going on

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obama clueless

The first-quarter number presented a political and PR problem for the White House, coming just as President Obama appeared to be trying to burnish his own legacy overseeing the economy since the global financial crisis of 2008.

Two stories of Keynesian ignorance and the consequences, one in America and the other in Australia.

First the US. Obama will look long and hard for a positive legacy but the only one I can think of is how good it will feel when he leaves office so that we can finally stop knocking our heads against the wall. An incompetent narcissist means he screws things up but believes he’s a policy genius. Which now comes to this: White House struggles to explain weak economy as Obama boasts of job growth.

The White House labored Thursday to explain a first-quarter economic report showing the weakest growth in two years, even as President Obama was trumpeting his mastery of the economy in a New York Times Magazine interview.

The Department of Commerce reported that U.S. gross domestic product rose 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2016, the third straight sluggish start to a year. Consumer spending and business purchases both fell, continuing trends that could have ominous implications for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as she tries to claim the mantle as Mr. Obama’s successor.

But this at the end is really the pièce de résistance:

The president told a group of college journalists Thursday that his record on the economy is among his proudest achievements.

Delusional beyond imagination. No one, absolutely no one, will defend Obama’s economic management, least of all any Democrat who wishes to hold onto their office or Hillary in trying to become his successor. If you want more on his pathetic efforts to get others to see the world in the same deluded way you can try this.

And then there’s the Australian story, told today in The Oz. Treasury forecasts have been complete nonsense for years on end, because they are made by Keynesian who really believe, bless their naive souls, that public spending leads to faster growth and increased employment even though it never has. From the story:

In May 2011, the economy had emerged from the global financial crisis growing rapidly.

Commodity prices had surpassed pre-crisis levels and were on their way to new highs, while investment in the resource sector was rising rapidly.

Treasury predicted in that year’s budget that the economy would expand by 24.5 per cent over the next four years, or by almost $350bn. Had it done so, by now there would be massive surpluses with enough left over for big tax cuts.

In reality, the economy has grown by only 14.1 per cent or $200bn, with about a third of that flowing to the government as tax.

They, of course, believe that the part of the rise in GDP between 2009 and 2011 caused by stimulus spending is the same as economic growth. Can’t be helped; that’s how they think. But they are WRONG and the damage they are doing will be immense and lasting. But they will never understand why because they will never understand the pre-Keynesian theory of the cycle.

Trump and the realignment of the parties

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Anyone who believes Hillary will defeat Trump must have zero faith in democratic processes. Hillary has never achieved a single political purpose in her entire life that did not benefit herself personally. She has no ideas and no track record. She is corrupt to an extent possibly unprecedented even in the American politicians-for-hire system of government. She should be going to jail, not running for president. Her one achievement occurred at birth (conception?) and since then she has added nothing of value to her résumé. It ought to make you sick to realise how close she is to accomplishing her goals. And if she does, the line that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others may have to be amended. There are circumstances in which democracy clearly does not work, and the Hillary story is the case study.

We however have this: Democratic Strategist: Trump Will Beat Hillary Like ‘A Baby Seal’. He may not be right, but at least he has broken ranks to say what needs to be true:

Democratic strategist Dave “Mudcat” Saunders believes Donald Trump will beat Hillary Clinton like a “baby seal,” and that working class whites who haven’t already left the Democratic Party for cultural reasons will do so now for economic ones.

“I know a ton of Democrats — male, female, black and white — here [in southern Virginia] who are going to vote for Trump. It’s all because of economic reasons. It’s because of his populist message,” Mudcat told The Daily Caller Wednesday.

Saunders has experience working with Jim Webb, helping getting him elected to the U.S Senate in 2006 and advised his failed bid for the presidency in 2016. Saunders was also an advisor to John Edwards in his 2008 presidential bid. The Democrat strategist is renowned for connecting politicians to “Bubbas” — white, working class Southerners.

“Working class whites in the South have already departed the Democratic Party for cultural reasons. Well the working class whites in the North are now deserting the Democrats because of economic reasons,” Mudcat told TheDC. He added, “this is the new age of economic populism, man. This is about survival for a lot of people.”

If it is down to survival and people will still vote against their interests, then there will be a new system coming and it won’t be the one we have been used to in the past.

“The great majority must labor at something productive”

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Let me start with the opening quote, which is as sound today as when first stated at least 150 years ago. It’s from Abraham Lincoln:

“No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.”

I specially liked that he emphasised the need for the labour to be productive, i.e. value adding. Digging holes and then filling them in again may require effort, and might even seem like work, but it is not productive and therefore should be neither paid nor encouraged. Lincoln had probably read J.S. Mill, something no one any longer does. The article, though, is not really about this, but about getting people off welfare by insisting they not just go to work but do something productive.

According to a report from the Foundation for Government Accountability, before Kansas instituted a work requirement, 93 percent of food stamp recipients were in poverty, with 84 percent in severe poverty. Few of the food stamp recipients claimed any income. Only 21 percent were working at all, and two-fifths of those working were working fewer than 20 hours per week.

Once work requirements were established, thousands of food stamp recipients moved into the workforce, promoting income gains and a decrease in poverty. Forty percent of the individuals who left the food stamp ranks found employment within three months, and about 60 percent found employment within a year. They saw an average income increase of 127 percent. Half of those who left the rolls and are working have earnings above the poverty level. Even many of those who stayed on food stamps saw their income increase significantly.

The dignity of work is more than a cliche put around by those who pay taxes to fund the idleness of others.