Re: Trump is NOT the answer
The fact is, presidential terms and the business cycle do not coincide and in the era of massive money-printing by the central bank and the resulting destruction of honest price discovery on Wall Street, the stock indices measure little more than the egregious financial bubbles emanating from the Eccles Building.
Still, while the Donald is obsessed by his own scoreboards, even they do not prove what he claims. That’s especially the case when you don’t let him off the hook owing to the deep economic setbacks of 2020.
After all, it was not the Covid-19 which clobbered the US economy. The culprit was government ordered Lockdowns—a folly that rose directly from Donald Trump’s panicked actions in March 2020.
It was Trump who called for the original economy- and liberty-killing stay-at-home mandates. And it was Trump who unleashed Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, the CDC, the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the rest of the Virus Patrol to wreak havoc with normal economic function and to foster a level of public hysteria wholly unwarranted by the actual facts of the disease.
In fact, after an entire year of unprecedented emergency conditions during 2020, the Covid had generated CFRs (fatality rates among those infected by the disease whether sick or symptomatic or not) that were only slightly higher than those calculated by the CDC for the influenza seasons of 2017-2018. Among the non-elderly, the CFRs are virtually identical as shown below.
That gets us to the bottom line. The truth of the matter is that the real GDP growth rate during the Donald’s term was the absolute lowest of any presidential term since 1950, and by a country mile in virtually all cases. The Greatest Economy Ever claim just doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Real GDP Growth Per Annum During Presidential Terms Since 1950:
Eisenhower (1953-1960): 2.52%.
Kennedy-Johnson (1961-1968: 5.19%.
Nixon-Ford (1969-1967: 2.73%.
Carter (1977-1980): 3.19%.
Reagan (1981-1988): 3.55%.
Bush the Elder (1989-1992): 2.21%.
Clinton (1992-2000): 3.81%.
Bush the Younger (2001-2008): 1.75%.
Obama (2009-2016): 1.94%.
Trump (2017-2020): 1.25%.
Of course, what the Donald did excel at was running up the Federal debt like never before. Even compared to the previous three big spenders in the Oval Office, the Donald won the prize for shackling future taxpayers, born and unborn, with heretofore unimaginable amounts of new debt:
Average Annual Increase in the Public Debt:
Clinton: $203 billion.
Bush: $655 billion.
Obama: $1.132 trillion.
Trump: $2.334 trillion.
Likewise, the modern Fed needs no encouragement from the White House to expand its balance sheet aggressively and thereby pump fiat credit into the canyons of Wall Street, where it mostly lingers to inflate the prices of financial assets skyward.
But in the Donald’s case, he not only encouraged a reckless rate of money-pumping from the Eccles Building; he demanded it in relentless, bully-boy fashion.
Accordingly, the data below is the true skunk on the wood pile. At the end of the day, sound money is the sine qua non of capitalist prosperity, and the GOP is its designated watchman in the context of America’s two-party democracy.
On that score the Donald failed miserably.
Per Annum Change in the Fed’s Balance Sheet, 2000-2020:
Bush (2001-2008): $185 billion.
Obama (2009-2016): $295 billion.
Trump (2017-2020): $750 billion.
Even on the matter of the Forever Wars, which the Donald at least verbally condemned while he was in office, he couldn’t leave well enough alone. Cancellation of the Iranian nuke deal was a screaming error. Yet that foolish action did more to keep the Warfare State in business than all of his verbal jousting with the interventionists follies of his predecessors combined.
Actually, Iran’s tiny $25 billion defense budget, which amounts to just 2.7% of the Pentagon’s massive haul, is no threat to the American homeland whatsoever. They Iranian/Shiite side of the age-old Islamic schism has never launched an attack upon or even threatened American soil. That was the work of their bitter enemies on the Sunni side of the aisle—enemies that were more often than not financed and sanctioned by Washington’s so-called allies in the region.
Moreover, even the official NIEs (national intelligence estimates) of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies have conceded that beyond a small research program abandoned in 2003, the Iranians have never pursued the development of nuclear weapons. That truth was confirmed by the IAEA report after the nuke deal was signed by Obama in 2015—and was reinforced by the fact that the Iranians lived up to the strict letter of the deal until the Donald unilaterally cancelled it to please the Netanyahu fifth column in his inner circle.
Of course, the Donald had no affinity for a peaceful, non-interventionist foreign policy in the first place. His rap on the Forever Wars was just a way of dinging the foreign policy establishment which had first snubbed him to a man, woman and they; and was also a way of pitching his tiresome line that his predecessors were stupid dealmakers, not even remotely in his own self-vaunted league.
But the problem in the middle east and around the planet was not bad deals by prior presidents. The culprit is an imperialist foreign policy that drains the nation’s blood, treasure and moral authority for no good reason of homeland security.
So Trump’s Iranian fiasco was just another casualty of the kind of persistent “threat inflation” by the Deep State that keeps the fiscal gravy train flowing. In fact, a peaceful democracy would never maintain a $900 billion defense budget—more than the next 15 nation’s combined—unless its elected representatives had been endlessly marinated in false threats to the nation’s security.
That is, such as the trumped-up case that Iran was and is attempting to get the nuke or that it is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism merely because it was aligned with Shiite-based governments in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere. Stated differently, the only foreign policy Iran is allowed to have, apparently, is one that is vetted and approved by the Washington neocons.
The fact is, the real threat to peace in the region is the brutal economic sanctions on the Iranian economy imposed by the UniParty—first under the Trump Administration and then by Biden. These measures are causing immense hardships for the everyday Iranian people and amount to illegal international brigandage that blackens America’s good name.
But the Donald thinks that making economic war on a nation for no good reason is simply part of the “Art of the Deal” and that non-intervention is apparently just for wusses, traitors and clueless business people:
At the same time, the new administration unilaterally withdrew our crippling sanctions on Iran, foolishly giving away all of America’s leverage before negotiations have even begun. Leave the sanctions, negotiate. Does anybody understand what I’m saying here? Are there any good business people? You don’t have to be a good. Are there any bad business people? They took off of the sanctions. They took off the sanctions. They said, well, we’re going to not have any sanctions. Let’s negotiate a deal. I don’t know, Matt Schlapp, I don’t think you would have done that. Do you think so, Matt? I don’t think so. Mercedes wouldn’t have.
He also apparently thinks that his massive defense increases helped strengthen America’s homeland security. Not at all. They simply funded massive boondoggles for the military industrial complex that even the spenders on Capitol Hill had long resisted.
Stated differently, the Donald was about as lazy and ill-informed Commander-in-Chief as Washington has ever seen. He simply got bamboozled by the same old “readiness” and obsolete equipment canards that the Warfare State has been plying chief executives with since Ronald Reagan.
They weren’t true then, and they certainly are not valid now with the Soviet Union having long ago been swept into the dust bin of history. What the Donald did was simple pile another $250 billion per year of defense waste and excess on a national debt that is now utterly out of control:
And it means a strong military and taking care of our vets, but a strong military, which we have totally rebuilt, we have rebuilt it. And our military has never been stronger than it is today. It was tired, it was depleted, it was obsolete. And now we have the best brand-new equipment ever made and it was all produced right here in the USA. Isn’t that nice?
No, it is not nice at all. The total cost of defense, international affairs and veterans benefits is now a staggering $1.3 trillion per year. In constant dollars (FY 2023 $) that is 2.3X what the great Dwight Eisenhower thought was necessary to contain the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War, when he delivered his famous warning about the military-industrial complex in his 1961 Farewell Address.
At the end of the day, the Donald’s only real policy was the rank demagoguery about the hordes of alleged criminals pouring over the Mexican border–a theme that he stumbled upon when coming down the escalator of Trump Tower way back in June 2015.
But it was ugly nonsense then and remains so whenever he unloads more of the same rabid hysteria and about criminals, drug dealers and wards of mental institutions allegedly pouring across the border and threatening to “contaminate our blood”.
The truth, of course, is that 95% of the arrivals on the southern border are job seekers, who are forced to pretend that they are asylees because Washington to too stupid and dysfunctional to establish a proper large-scale Guest Worker program. The latter could be run in an orderly manner from the dozens of US embassies and consulates spread around Mexico and Latin America, not the banks of the Rio Grande and deserts of Arizona.
Indeed, the only criminals coming across the border are the brutal spawn of Washington’s demented war on drugs. So end the war on drugs and let the flowers and poppies bloom stateside. What will then line up at US consulates south of the border are powerfully motivated people looking for work.
And contrary to the Donald’s toxic immigrant bashing, America’s great capitalist prosperity was built on just that—the bent backs of foreigners looking for honest work and a better life.
So, was Donald J. Trump ever a real conservative hero?
No, not remotely. He was and remains just a self-promoting loud-mouth who had all the right enemies, but pursued all the wrong solutions and emitted a toxic patter that has set back the real conservative agenda irreparably.
Since the foolish remnant of the Grand Old Party has decided to roll the dice yet again anyway, we can thank out lucky stars for RFK’s courageous decision to pursue the presidency as a third-party candidate.
At the end of the day, only RFK can likely stop Trump in the Electoral College and send the election to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in 200 years. The latter seems like a dangerously long-shot way to save the Republic, but. alas, it’s the last best shot that remains.
More in:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/03/...ver-cleveland/
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