After being president for a little more than two years, is Trump even that bad? The economy is booming, the unemployment is low, everything seems great. How can he be so bad?
Is it just his horrible reputation?
Donald Trump is financing his economic miracle by borrowing an additional one trillion dollars a year. Let’s face it: you can own three houses, a yacht and a helicopter, but if you’re in debt up to your eyeballs and the Russian mafia is after you you’re not really doing so well, are you? This is the Republican MO, by the way—borrow like Donald Trump and spend like a drunken sailor, skim your percent off the top then leave it to the Democrats to clean up your mess.
Another element is conservative capital’s determination to make the economy appear strong. If you have enough idle cash lying around, and these guys do, you can decide to invest in a new factory or to hire new workers, even though under ordinary circumstances you might not. Here the advantage of having wealth-friendly Donald Trump in office outweighs the nominal loss of building superfluous infrastructure.
Why do you think Donald Trump is so eager to slap tariffs on the Chinese? The gummint needs money. Tariffs are a tax paid directly by American business and indirectly by the American people when the cost of their goods goes up (and super-indirectly when the Chinese lose business five years from now as new vendors tool up in non-tariffed countries).
Rich people don’t buy cheap Chinese goods. Walmart shoppers do. Donald Trump is financing his booming economy by raising your taxes. Tariffs are a national sales tax, aimed specifically at the consumer goods that tend to be purchased by the working and middle classes.
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