12 thoughts on “I’m not saying Trump sounds like a snake oil salesman”

1. Patty March 30, 2016 at 10:51 am

   But he does! Such an appalling man!

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2. Bill March 30, 2016 at 2:38 pm

   We live in a world full of half truths and lies. They (Fox, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Republicans, Democrats, Wall Street, and so on….) live in a culture of selling us short on the truth. So along comes Trump and he can pretty much say whatever he wants and get away with it. More or less because the “establishment” has sold us all out for their own narratives, propaganda and agendas. Now who should we be really be pointing the finger at in all of this mess?

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3. zzzzzz March 30, 2016 at 3:52 pm

   “the crazy, derisive-driven market”

   Derisive-driven market? Did you type this on an iPhone?

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   1. Ian Lind Post authorMarch 31, 2016 at 5:56 am

      Ah, yes. Auto corrected into gibberish. Thanks for catching that.

      Reply ↓
4. Allen N. March 30, 2016 at 6:53 pm

   The director of “The Big Short” actually had Clinton in mind.

   http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/director-of-the-big-short-on-clinton-i-really-want-her-to-see-my-movie-219297

   But of course, how silly! Democrats are supposed to be immune to greed.

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5. compare and decide April 10, 2016 at 1:21 pm

   Explaining the appeal of Donald Trump. (The Republican Party has long been out of touch with its own base.)

   http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/09/the-republican-class-war

   Peter Wehner, a conservative writer who served as an adviser for the past three Republican Presidents, described his party’s problems over a bowl of oatmeal. He said, “We got clobbered in 2012”—the fifth Presidential election out of the past six in which the Republican candidate lost the popular vote. “There’s a demographic problem. White votes are going down two points every year. We’re out of touch with the middle class.” Mitt Romney—whose very hair embodies wealthy privilege—was nominated at a national convention, in Tampa, that became an Ayn Rand-style celebration of business executives, the heroic “makers.” During the campaign, Romney wrote off forty-seven per cent of the country—the “takers”—as government parasites. He went on to lose badly to President Barack Obama, whom Republicans had regarded as an obvious failure, a target as vulnerable as Jimmy Carter. In the shock of that defeat, Wehner said, some conservatives realized that “there was a need for a policy agenda that reaches the middle class.” He added, “This was not a blinding insight.”

   A generation ago, Democrats lost five of six Presidential elections; in 1992, Bill Clinton, calling himself a New Democrat, ended the streak. Clinton didn’t repudiate the whole Democratic platform—government activism on behalf of ordinary Americans remained the Party’s core idea—but he adopted positions on issues like crime and welfare that were more closely aligned with the views of the majority, including some rank-and-file Democrats. The message, Wehner said, was as much symbolic as substantive: “ ‘We’re not a radical party; we’ve sanded off our rougher edges, and you can trust me.’ ” He went on, “The hope for some of us was that our candidate in 2016 would be the Republican version of Clinton”—a conservative reformer who, having learned from past defeats, championed economic policies that placed Republicans on the side of the hard-pressed, including non-white Americans, the soon-to-be majority.
   …
   Last year, a Gallup poll found that forty-five per cent of Republicans think that the rich should pay more in taxes. Another poll, by the Pew Research Center, showed that more Republicans favor increased spending on Social Security, Medicare, education, and infrastructure than favor cutting those programs. Although government activism is anathema to conservative donors and Grover Norquist, it’s fine with a lot of Republicans making less than fifty thousand dollars a year. April Ponnuru’s husband, Ramesh, a contributor to “Room to Grow” and a senior editor at National Review, said, “Trump shows that Republican voters are not especially dogmatic conservatives—not as much as I’d like them to be.”
   …
   Trump, meanwhile, calls to mind Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi: a strongman, a nationalist, and a nativist, who appeals to voters of limited means by tapping into their gauzy aspirations, echoing their anxieties about decline, and assuring them a secure place in a country restored to greatness. Trump presents himself as a capitalist boss who won’t let capitalism tear apart the (white) social fabric.

   This approach is far from the contemporary American right’s rugged libertarianism, just as Bernie Sanders sounds more like a European democratic socialist than like Bill Clinton. In this way, 2016—even more than the historic election of 2008, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—looks like a year of major political recalibration.

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6. compare and decide April 11, 2016 at 12:56 pm

   From the article above, the individual case of a supporter of presidential candidate Donald Trump.

   http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/09/the-republican-class-war

   In mid-September, I travelled to a small town in southeastern New Hampshire called Raymond, where John Kasich was holding a town-hall meeting in a middle-school auditorium. Eighty chairs were arranged around a stool. One of the early arrivals was a twenty-six-year-old named Mark Lynch, who had come with his grandmother. Lynch, the son of a firefighter and a factory worker, had a crewcut and stubble, and wore a Red Sox T-shirt that exposed the tattoos on his biceps. He had just finished four years of service in the Navy and was training to be a policeman. Lynch wanted to hear what Kasich had to say, but he was more interested in the billionaire with the copper comb-over.

   “Trump is tapping into this belief that politicians are self-serving,” Lynch told me. “He’s telling these donors, ‘I don’t need your money, I’ll finance my own campaign.’ If you look at what’s controlling government these days, it’s lobbyists and all these big corporations.” Lynch liked Trump’s positions on trade, taxes, and Wall Street. “People don’t want to see billionaires getting richer,” he said. “If Donald Trump, a billionaire in his own right, is saying billionaires in Washington and New York should be paying more—that says something.”

   Lynch sounded a bit like a Sanders guy. When I pointed this out, his grandmother made a face. Lynch said that he couldn’t possibly vote for Sanders—“a self-proclaimed socialist from Vermont.” Lynch was a conservative, not so much on specific policies but in his values and in his ideas about America’s character. He didn’t want an overweening government creating costly programs and interfering in people’s lives. He just wanted a system that wasn’t rigged in favor of the rich and well-connected.

   In Lynch’s eyes, his antipathy toward this privileged class didn’t make him an unwitting Democrat. “I don’t think Republicans are the party of big corporations and billionaires,” he said. “They’re for ordinary middle-class people.” The problem wasn’t conservatism but the dirty role of money in politics. Change would have to come at the hands of someone who wasn’t beholden to the system—a rich outsider like Trump.

   It’s been noted that Donald Trump is the Republican equivalent of Bernie Sanders – the insurgent angry populist outsider opposed to the elites in his own party.

   But can this be taken further? In some sense, Trump is a disguised form of Sanders.

   Trump supporters say that they do not want a socialistic ‘nanny state’ paying their bills; they say they just want a political vigilante to clean up a corrupt system.

   Nevertheless, Trump consistently defends entitlement programs like Social Security and attacks free trade.

   Trump is able to re-brand the left-wing critique by repackaging Sanders’ socialism as a kind of … (ulp!) … national socialism.

   The elites in the Republican Party have been promoting free trade and tax cuts not just as good policy, but as macho. Trump turns the tables on this mindset by framing the closing of borders and tax hikes as macho and nationalistic.

   This is classic product re-branding. One analogy would be liquid bathing soap. If it is presented as “body wash”, then women will buy it; if it is given a product name like “Axe”, then men will buy it. Another example would be the 2009 movie “Avatar”, which is almost identical in plot to Disney’s 1995 “Pocahontas”. The audience of “Pocahontas” was girls, whereas the primary market for “Avatar” was young men.

   More politically, the Bush dynasty is from Connecticut, but they present themselves as if they had deep Texas roots. (More recently, Jeb Bush learned Spanish, married a Hispanic woman and converted to Catholicism.) In terms of religion, Islam has been described as a macho version of Christianity. (In Christianity, martyrs are passively suffering saints, whereas in Islam, martyrs are warriors.)

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7. compare and decide April 12, 2016 at 3:30 pm

   From today’s WSJ, “Is Life Better Than It Was Decades Ago? For Trump Voters, Maybe Not.”

   http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/04/12/is-life-better-than-it-was-decades-ago-for-some-voters-probably-not/

   The Pew Research Center recently polled voters on whether life in America is better or worse than it was 50 years ago “for people like them.” Overall, 46% of voters say that life is worse. As you might have guessed, this is especially true of Republican voters and especially especially true of Donald Trump’s supporters.

   This isn’t entirely in voter’s imaginations either—not necessarily over the past 50 years, but certainly in recent decades, some different demographic groups have had quite different outcomes.

   Overall, Mr. Trump’s supporters are the most negative on the question, but Ted Cruz and John Kasich’s supporters also feel like they’re losing ground. By contrast, the supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders tend to say feel like things are getting better.
   …
   The question of whether an entire group of people is better or worse off than 50 years ago is a complex one—but when it comes to economic circumstances, some groups of people really have lost ground.

   What is peculiar is that conservatives are usually the most content members of society. It is liberals who are usually most unhappy with the status quo. (Moreover, Bernie Sanders is not a liberal, but a socialist. One would never expect the happiest, most affluent voters to be the most radicalized.) The situation described above runs counter to the historical norm.

   Also, it is really strange that the WSJ is printing this. Normally, they do not publish articles that challenge the status quo. In particular, they would not publish anything that suggests problems within the Republican Party. That all is not well in America must come as a shock to their wealthy readership. The WSJ is only printing this because Trump is a threat to the kind of elite Republican who read the WSJ, and who is completely out of touch with the ordinary, rank-and-file Republican.

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8. compare and decide April 15, 2016 at 3:19 pm

   A recent WSJ article, “The Case for Free Trade Is Weaker Than You Think”.
   http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/04/11/the-case-for-free-trade-is-weaker-than-you-think/

   Economists disagree on plenty, but they’re pretty much unanimous that free trade is good and protectionism is bad. Elite opinion among noneconomists concurs: Editorial pages have roundly condemned Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump for threatening to tear up trade agreements and slap steep tariffs on Mexico and China.

   But the case for free trade and against protectionism is not absolute.

   If workers lose their jobs to imports and central banks can’t bolster domestic spending enough to re-employ them, a country may be worse off, and keeping those imports out can make it better off.

   The above analysis diverges from the usual conversations on free trade.

   In the conventional discourse on free trade, there is little mention of the role of central banks. Rather, the focus is on social programs. (It is observed that societies with comprehensive social safety nets (e.g., Western Europe), are more inclined to engage in free trade (e.g., the European Union).)

   The conventional wisdom on free trade is that ON THE WHOLE it is good for the societies that engage in it, but that there are very real losers (some workers) who need to be compensated. (Perhaps, in the language of economics, free trade can be said to involve ‘negative externalities’ that impact third parties, just the way that people who suffer from pollution should be compensated). The conventional critique is that this kind of compensation is not really happening in the United States. Moreover, the pro-free trade orthodoxy has gone so far as to erase any notion that there are, in fact, a few victims of free trade. This orthodoxy took over the Republic Party, and was adopted by the Democratic Party in the 1990s under the Clinton administration.

   The arguments for free trade go back to the 1700s, from the economist Adam Smith, but arguments against it emerged in the 20th century.

   In 1923, the economist John Maynard Keynes, fully indoctrinated in the classical case for free trade, wrote, “If there is one thing that Protection cannot do, it is to cure Unemployment.” But 12 years later, in the “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” he realized that the mercantilists had a point. In a world where every country fixed its currency to gold, the only way to lower interest rates and reduce unemployment was to attract gold from abroad: “There is no orthodox means open to the authorities for countering unemployment at home except by struggling for an export surplus and an import of the monetary metal at the expense of their neighbors.”

   The world is no longer on the gold standard, but Mr. Summers claims that conditions today resemble the chronic underconsumption and excess saving that preoccupied Keynes in the 1930s. Depressed investment and low inflation have kept interest rates stuck near zero in most developed countries, a condition Mr. Summers says resembles the “secular stagnation” that economists fretted over in the 1930s.

   Trade with China is given as an example.

   If China suppresses its own consumption and saves more, its demand for imports from the U.S. will fall. The resulting trade surplus will generate extra savings that will be exported to the U.S., depressing interest rates and pushing up the dollar. As U.S. exports fall and imports rise, domestic output and employment are depressed. The central bank would normally respond by lowering interest rates. But if interest rates—in part because of China’s excess savings—are already near zero, the central bank can’t boost demand enough to put the unemployed workers back to work doing something else.

   It doesn’t matter how China achieves its trade surplus. It could be with an import tariff, capital controls and currency intervention that hold down the yuan, or just a high domestic saving rate. By the same token, the U.S. can undo the damage of a trade deficit by responding with import tariffs or intervention to hold down the dollar. “Neo-mercantilist policies alleviate the secular stagnation of the country pursuing them by exporting savings, but at the expense of the trading partner,” the three economists write.

   Their work also suggests easy monetary policy can be “beggar-thy-neighbor.” If interest rates are close to zero, more easing only drives down the currency, which simply steals demand from a trading partner.

   Using China as an example is telling because the usual arguments against free trade also use China as an example. Those who protest free trade are really protesting against free trade with DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, where rapid economic expansion will lead to the abuse of labor, stark social hierarchies and environmental degradation, and eventual political instability. That is exactly what has happened in China (interestingly, a nominally communist country). There is no mention of that in this article.

   There are important caveats. First, the authors acknowledge their argument’s relevance depends on whether secular stagnation exists, which is “a matter of judgment.” One bit of evidence against it is that unemployment has steadily declined in most major economies. That suggests central bank easing has been positive-sum, not zero-sum.

   Still, Mr. Summers says even if the U.S. isn’t in secular stagnation now, “We’re always living in the shadow of secular stagnation because another recession will come and we won’t be able to mount the normal monetary response.” Even if interest rates are positive, an influx of foreign saving can keep them low enough to feed asset bubbles, as occurred in the mid-2000s.

   Second, this doesn’t necessarily mean agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership are bad. Since foreign tariffs are higher than U.S. tariffs, free-trade agreements can in theory raise the U.S.’s exports by more than its imports, what Mr. Summers calls “good mercantilism.” Most models that conclude trade agreements make countries richer assume full employment in the long run. In the short run, though, some workers do go jobless and lose a lot of income. Yet Robert Lawrence and Tyler Moran, in a paper for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, find the short-run costs of higher unemployment and lost wages from TPP amount to just 6% of its benefits during the first 10 years. Brandeis University trade economist Peter Petri finds that once retaliation is factored in, Mr. Trump’s protectionist policies would lead to a larger, not smaller, U.S. trade deficit.

   A common argument against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is that it does not really make sense on a purely economic basis. It is really politically motivated, an attempt to isolate China. Now, on those geopolitical grounds, however, it might have value. (Some of the countries in the TPP might otherwise be coerced into a trade pact with China, and drawn into China’s political orbit.) But the pro-TPP argument in the text above is not balanced.

   One parallel to the TPP would be the Eurasian Union in central Asia, championed by Russia and its allies, which has gone from a free-trade zone to a single-currency imitation of the European Union. (The European Union itself never made sense to American economists, according to Paul Krugman.) This is one of the reasons there is a war in Ukraine (the EU wanted to expand eastward into Ukraine, but Russia wanted Ukraine to be in the Eurasian Union). But economically, strictly speaking, none of these trade pacts – the TPP, the EU, the Eurasian Union – really makes sense. No mention of that in the WSJ.
   http://www.economonitor.com/dolanecon/2015/03/23/does-putins-proposed-eurasian-currency-union-make-sense/

   It took Donald Trump’s popularity to get the WSJ to reflect on free trade and admit that perhaps free trade is not perfect. But even that admission is distorted and limited.

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9. compare and decide May 5, 2016 at 12:01 am

   Chinese attitudes of Donald Trump:

   http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35839782

   Surprisingly, many Chinese have a positive view of Trump.

   The Chinese like a strong leader. They like a leader who talks tough, but under that tough exterior he is reasonable, rational, clever, down-to-earth and pragmatic. In other words, Chinese like a smart businessman. And that is what many Chinese perceive in Donald Trump — a businessman who embodies Chinese virtues.

   Russians seem to approve of Donald Trump.

   http://www.bbc.com/news/36155109

   What do Russians think of Donald Trump?
   27 April 2016 Last updated at 22:52 BST

   If the populations of the rest of the world’s G20 countries could vote in the US election, they’d overwhelmingly vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

   That’s according to a recent poll by Germany’s Handelsblatt publishing group and YouGov, the online pollster.

   But there’s one country where the former First Lady takes a backseat to the billionaire Republican front-runner from New York, and that’s Russia.

   Russians like a strong leader, a tough guy, a patriarch.

   But Russians also like a leader who is open and sincere and bluntly speaks his mind, unworried about upsetting anyone, even to the point of not thinking about consequences.

   Russians also seem to like a leader who is a bit funny and amusing.

   When Russians look at Donald Trump, they see someone who seems to exhibit Russian values, and who might finally show a little of the respect that is due to the great Russian people.

   People see what they want to see when it comes to Donald Trump (or, at least, in Latin American eyes, what they expect to see).

   But then that is how Barack Obama got elected, too.

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   1. compare and decide May 5, 2016 at 12:56 pm

      What people think of President Barack Obama has more to do with their imaginations than with the actual Barack Obama. Obama knows that, and is amused by it.

      http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/opinion/a-trump-sanders-coalition-nah.html?mabReward=CTM&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0

      Obama wasn’t perfect. He didn’t accomplish all that he thought he would or could. He made mistakes. But, all told, he was true to the deliberative, center-left pragmatist that he has always been.

      Indeed, according to PolitiFact, Obama has kept twice as many promises as he has broken.

      He was never a superhero, but some of the hurt feelings come from him allowing people to believe that he was. As Obama wrote in the prologue to “The Audacity of Hope”: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” The thing is, he did not become what some people projected. He remained himself.

      “Cult leader” Charles Manson claims he simply went along with people’s wishes, and they projected their own thoughts and feelings – the hopes of his followers, the fears of society – onto him.

      http://www.mansondirect.com/quotes-cm.html

      “With Danny DeCarlo’s testimony. He said that I hate black men, and he said that we thought alike, that him and I was a lot alike in our thinking. But actually all I ever did with Danny DeCarlo or any other human being was reflect himself back at himself. If he said he did not like the black man, I would say, “Okay.” I had better sense than tell him I did not dislike the black man. I just listened to him and I would react to his statement. So consequently he would drink another beer and walk off and pat me on the back and he would say to himself, “Charlie thinks like I do.” But actually he does not know how Charlie thinks because Charlie has never projected himself.”

      – Charles Manson, 1970 (Source: Trial Testimony)

      “The Charlie Manson that you’ve created, that’s not me. That’s only an illusion in your minds, it hasn’t got anything to do with me.”

      – Charles Manson, 1985 (Source: Nuell Emmons interview)

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      1. compare and decide May 6, 2016 at 2:01 pm

         Anyone can become President of the United States of America if enough people project their hopes and dreams onto them.

         From the 1979 movie “Being There”.

         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcPQ9gww_qc

         (The movie came out one year before President Reagan was elected.)

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