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.

Australia has the world’s best central banker

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The headline reads, RBA’s Stevens says it’s time for government to step up on growth and this is the point:

Stevens says central banks have done all they can to boost economic growth and, eight years after the global financial crisis, it is time for governments to do more.

And if you missed the message, here’s a bit more:

In a speech in New York last week, he said central bank intervention was effective at heading off a potential catastrophe after the Lehman collapse but always­ had limited ability to accelerate the recovery. Rate cuts bring only a short-term boost to activity. He said the fall in global interest rates, which has been under way since 2007, reflected more than the actions of central banks.

Nothing left for central banks to do. And here is a bit of financial artistry that sets out the central point:

Financial assets are just paper claims on the flow of real returns from business investments or, in the case of government bonds, on the ability to tax those real returns. “If the real economy can’t perform to provide real returns to capital, there is nothing to back higher yields on financial assets.” Stevens says the lack of profit in the real world is the cause of the global stagnation, and central banks are powerless to change that. The growth potential around the world has fallen, he says.

That is so exactly right and I don’t think you can hear it said anywhere else. We are in a fiscal mess which cannot be fixed by adjusting interest rates up or down, although pushing them up would at least do some good. And even when he shifts onto the fiscal side, he is precisely right but you have to pay attention to the words he uses.

Stevens acknowledged that years of slow growth were jeopardising the “social compact” in many parts of the world. He urged government­ to take advantage of record low interest rates to embark on infrastructure projects that would raise construction activity­ and lift productivity. The critical issue was good governance to ensure the right projects were built and managed to add value, he said, not lack of money.

Projects that add value are, unfortunately, almost never the projects chosen by governments since there is no profit and loss statement nor any serious means to ensure more value is created than is used up. But at least he understands what needs to be done, but has much more faith than I ever will in the decision making processes of government to get that kind of result

The Daily Bolt

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This is quite worth watching, and the thing is that I imagine there will be many similar excerpts from The Daily Bolt that will be worth watching day after day right through to the election. Not being among those who take pleasure in seeing the Libs crash and burn with Malcolm at the helm, this editorial comment on Turnbull v Abbott fills me with great foreboding. But for a change, there is the kind of feedback being run at those narrow-cast Members of Parliament who took their lead from the ABC while ignoring the people who actually wished to see the Coalition succeed. I fear there will be a good deal of repenting in leisure among the 54.

2500

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It is astonishing to find that this will be my 2500th post. It was mostly begun as a scrapbook and a chance to say things to the very small number of people who I would mention its existence to. Now I am amazed to find that others come round, since there are some things that are almost invisible elsewhere, two of which being economics from a classical John Stuart Mill perspective, and a political perspective that you can draw a line through from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin to Mitt Romney and now through to Donald Trump. I am a Gladstonian Liberal although what label to use in the modern world escapes me. But I know what repels me and I know who is on the other side of what I am against. These are difficult fights and I am always thrilled to find there is actually someone willing to take on these Herculean tasks.

But even with the larger number who visit, and whose comments I read but never allow to be published, this is still, as it began, a way to communicate with my son up in Sydney who, bless him, took on a new job just today. Another start-up. He loves the adventure of the private sector and the world of new and discovery. Hi Joshi. And, in fact, both my sons are entrenched in the private sector, with the older one having left a cushy public sector job because it lacked genuine grit and risk. I love and admire them both, so hi to Benji as well.

The Daily Bolt

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This is quite worth watching, and the thing is that I imagine there will be many similar excerpts from The Daily Bolt that will be worth watching day after day right through to the election. Not being among those who take pleasure in seeing the Libs crash and burn with Malcolm at the helm, this editorial comment on Turnbull v Abbott fills me with great foreboding. But for a change, there is the kind of feedback being run at those narrow-cast Members of Parliament who took their lead from the ABC while ignoring the people who actually wished to see the Coalition succeed. I fear there will be a good deal of repenting in leisure among the 54.

“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.

Average lifetime births per woman by country

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Some simple objective facts that might help you understand the coming future.

 

Top Ten Countries by Total Fertility Rate
(Average lifetime births per woman)

Niger …………………….. 6.76
Burundi ………………… 6.09
Mali ……………………… 6.06
Somalia ………………… 5.99
Uganda ………………… 5.89
Burkina Faso ………… 5.86
Zambia …………………. 5.72
Malawi …………………. 5.60
Angola …………………. 5.37
Afghanistan …………. 5.33

Total Fertility Rates for
Selected Industrial Nations

South Korea …………… 1.25
Japan …………………….. 1.40
Greece ……………………. 1.42
Italy ……………………….. 1.43
Germany ………………… 1.44
Austria …………………… 1.46
Spain ……………………… 1.49
Switzerland ……………. 1.55
Canada ………………….. 1.59
Denmark ……………….. 1.73
Australia ………………… 1.77
Belgium …………………. 1.78
Netherlands …………… 1.78
United States …………. 1.87

Oh by the way, Trump won five more states today

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I find the absence of focus on the US primary results even in the United States quite creepy, although what do I know about what’s newsy? Up until now, there would be quite a story across the page about Trump wins. Near as I can see, there is practically nothing at all. You would almost think there was a wish across the media to take the momentum out of Trump’s astonishing wins, to pull the wind from his sails.

It reminds me how The Australian decided that Turnbull should replace Abbott and from then on that was how the news and comment was bent. It has now been decided that the United States needs its own Malcolm Turnbull and Justin Trudeau, and that is how the news is being bent. Anyway, this is the best I could do, from USA Today:

Donald Trump went five-for-five in sweeping a set of northeastern primaries Tuesday and declared himself the “presumptive” Republican nominee for president in the face of allied opposition from rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump said in claiming easy victories in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware. He said, “this is a far bigger win than we even expected — all five.”

Citing a large number of delegates and votes in the face of Republican establishment opposition, the maverick businessman said “the best way to beat the system” is to have evenings like this.

Cruz and Kasich, who have formed a loose alliance to try to block Trump in some future contests, are hoping to pick up some delegates after Tuesday’s primaries, but their totals will likely be minimal in the wake of Trump’s landslide wins.

Somebody is voting for him but it’s apparently no longer big news.

MT or not MT, that is the question

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A major question that will confront us all on July 2 will be whether to vote for the party led by Malcolm Turnbull. James Allan and I really have had an exchange of letters over this issue that have now been published at Quadrant Online. It goes without saying that no one will vote for Malcolm Turnbull. The question is should one vote against Labor. That is, which of Malcolm with the 43 plus the Nationals or Bill Shorten and the Labor Party with Tanya and the rest is less worse than the other. This is how Jim starts his letter to me:

I have one question for you. If you see all decisions as snapshots – one-off calls between two choices on the current table – then here’s what follows. Presumably you will always opt for the least bad choice (and I grant you that Turnbull is less bad than Shorten for us small government, right-of-centre types), without an eye to longer-term consequences. But my query is, what’s wrong with a longer view?

This is how I begin my reply:

Let me begin with a story I have told before, which I wrote about just before the spill that replaced Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull:

When I used to work in Canberra, our offices backed onto the Liberal Party headquarters, and I was asked one time, even before Malcolm entered Parliament, what I thought about him. My answer was that if I was in the constituency that would decide the fate of the next election, and my vote was the one that would put him in or out, that I would hesitate about which way to go. That was then. Today I would have no doubt.

Since the post was titled, “I would never vote for a Coalition led by Malcolm Turnbull” you can see which way I would have gone. You can find the whole thing at the Catallaxy blog via the link above, so I do have some history in thinking about these issues:

But that was then.

There are no good answers, but you can read his and mine at the link.

Ruining everything he touched

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I’ve already dealt with this delusional comment from Obama here but I come back to it because it is so repulsive and also because it has been raised in a different way by Tom Blumer, Obama Takes Credit For ‘Saving the World Economy From a Great Depression’. This is Obama laying down his legacy, his trail of achievements that the mendacious press and academic enablers can go on about in the future. You have to therefore fortify yourself against the legacy-intentions of this fantastically incompetent narcissistic buffoon who has ruined everything he has touched:

After setting up the conditions in February 2009 for an extended recession and historically weak recovery in the U.S., the idea Obama went to Europe two months later in April and then began “saving the world” is a sick joke only gullible, economics-ignorant reporters and leftists could possibly believe. Sadly, they’re the ones who still primarily control the news and other key institutions, so we’ll probably be hearing this crap for years on end — just like we’ve had to put up with the fiction that Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved the country from the Great Depression in the 1930s. The truth is that he lengthened it by seven years.

And the seven years are only if we stop today. The Japanese “lost decade”, built out of the same policies, has continued for more than twenty years and shows no evidence of coming to an end any time soon. Obama’s taking credit for the achievements of others was also noted by Victor Davis Hanson in 2014:

Listen to the president and one would think that he was in office during the financial crisis that began on September 15, 2008. For the nth time, Obama reminded the nation on 60 Minutes of the financial meltdown he inherited. That is his usual way of suggesting to the American people that they could hardly hope for normal times after six years of his own governance. In truth, Obama entered office on January 20, 2009 — over four months after the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that precipitated a general financial meltdown.

One would not expect Obama to fault past liberal congressional intervention in the financial sector that in large part forced the issuance of subprime risky mortgages, much less the earlier deregulation of the financial industry under Bill Clinton that helped fueled the rampant speculation. The videos of the sad congressional banter about supposedly insensitive questioning of the duplicitous and corrupt Fannie head Franklin Raines, or the self-important bluster of former Rep. Barney Frank, make a good 10-minute tutorial on the meltdown — namely how Wall Street sharks, hand-in-glove with liberal congressional operatives and Clinton appointees, offered federally “guaranteed” mortgages to those who had no ability to pay them back, fueling a phony real estate boom and overvalued stock market.

Obama might at least admit that when he entered office the panic had largely passed. The tools needed to deal with it that he embraced had months earlier been implemented by someone else. Indeed, Obama was president for just a few months before the recession that began in December 2007 ended in June 2009 — well before the effect of any of the policies, good or bad, could have taken effect.

Our current economic mess — the worst post-recession recovery since World War II, more people out of work than when Obama took office, a steady decline in real family income, massive new debt — is largely a result of his own policies of five consecutive $1 trillion deficits, the Obamacare catastrophe, new burdensome and capricious regulations, near-zero interest rates, and the anti-business psychological climate brought on by constant hectoring of the “you did not build that” and “at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sort.

The thing about the lying, however, is that we have no corrective for policies that don’t work since the common view promoted across the media and by economists is that the stimulus has actually had a beneficial effect. So why not keep on keeping on? How big a crash does there have to be before we abandon the idea that government spending can lead us into recovery?