by (Dan here… Via Real News Network, Bill Black discusses the what-ifs of President Trump’s policies in a spectacular contrast to current expectations…providing. a jumping off point from what we expect from the way it is framed now. I assume the complex interalationships of the wealthy elites (let us see how the Epstein case unwinds for another aspect) plays an important but not so well known role in this drama. I find his thought his conclusions dismaying if even somewhat accurate.) BILL BLACK: Sure. The question I ask in the article is why did Trump choose to be so spectacularly unpopular? Because had he done what he promised and had a true middle class tax cut that gave, for example, ,000 a year to the typical middle class household, he would be
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Dan Crawford considers the following as important: Journalism, law, politics, Taxes/regulation, US/Global Economics
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(Dan here… Via Real News Network, Bill Black discusses the what-ifs of President Trump’s policies in a spectacular contrast to current expectations…providing. a jumping off point from what we expect from the way it is framed now. I assume the complex interalationships of the wealthy elites (let us see how the Epstein case unwinds for another aspect) plays an important but not so well known role in this drama. I find his thought his conclusions dismaying if even somewhat accurate.)
BILL BLACK: Sure. The question I ask in the article is why did Trump choose to be so spectacularly unpopular? Because had he done what he promised and had a true middle class tax cut that gave, for example, $5,000 a year to the typical middle class household, he would be spectacularly popular. And almost certainly they would have–the Republicans would have retained control of the House, and quite possibly they would have gained seats in the House. And of course they would have gained seats in the Senate. And Trump would be well positioned for re-election. He would have greatly expanded his base, and he would have paid off to his base, as well. And you know, convinced them that backing him was exactly the right thing.
And that’s the biggest thing. But also, if Trump had done what he promised and had a true infrastructure bill, where he spent $2 trillion on infrastructure, he would have divided the Democratic Party.
Much of the Democratic Party in the Congress would have signed on to him. He could have given the money to counties, cities, and states. So all these heads of governmental units would be eager to say nice things about Trump to get money, and we know how much Trump likes having people say nice things about him. You know, there would be this competition in flattery. It would be incredibly nauseating, but it would be incredibly successful for Trump.
And what would have happened to the economy? If he’d had a real middle class tax cut, if he’d had real infrastructure, the economy would be booming. And there wouldn’t be significant inflation, because you get significant inflation when you are at capacity. It’s when you’re bidding for really scarce real resources that are in significant shortage that you get that kind of inflation. Well, because of the Great Recession, tens of millions of people have withdrawn–over 10 million people–had withdrawn from the labor markets. So we had this unusual capacity, plus the economists saw overwhelmingly that growth was down considerably because of the effects of the recession. So this stimulus had lots of extra capacity that it could have affected, get people back into the workforce, increased productivity, increased middle class wages, increased working class wages. It would have been a win-win-win-win-win-win.