Trump Is a Degrowther (The Atlantic)

[usonian]

What else do you call a strategy designed to raise prices and lower productivity?
Populism?

https://archive.is/PBYkA#selection-585.0-585.81

Without admitting it, the White House is pursuing a multipronged strategy to raise prices, suppress consumption, freeze production, and lower productivity in the United States. The trade war is the most obvious example, as well as the one having the most immediate consequences. Since January, Trump has raised and lowered and raised tariffs on goods imported from American allies around the world. Such barriers will eliminate the country’s bilateral trade deficits and boost domestic manufacturing, the White House has promised, while warning that consumers and employers might have to endure a chaotic period of adjustment.

But Trump has slapped tariffs on commodities and parts that factories use to make things in America, such as engine components and timber. He has slapped tariffs on products that are not or cannot be produced here, such as bananas and gallium. And he has slapped tariffs on items that would be too expensive for American consumers to purchase if they were made in this country, given the cost of American wages and the network of factories in operation, such as costume jewelry and sneakers. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the country’s effective tariff rate now stands at 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. Prices are beginning to rise as importers pass the cost of Trump’s import taxes on to retailers and families. Industrial production is falling, as uncertainty plagues the sector.

In response, Trump has argued with reality. “We’re only in a TRANSITION STAGE, just getting started!!! Consumers have been waiting for years to see pricing come down,” he wrote on Truth Social. “NO INFLATION,” he added, pointing to egg and gas prices. But those are just two of 80,000 prices the government tracks each month to calculate the overall inflation rate. The cost of eggs has declined as the bird-flu pandemic has waned; the price at the pump has gone down due to weaker global growth and increased OPEC production. Across the economy, costs have remained witheringly high, despite the Federal Reserve combatting them with high interest rates. If the Fed cut borrowing costs, inflation would climb.

...

In the long term, Trump’s attack on colleges and scientific-research institutions might end up being the most damaging of his degrowth policies. The American system of higher education—for all of its many, many faults—is an engine of global modernity. The country’s land-grant schools help feed the world. Its public colleges vault poor kids up the income ladder. Its name-brand universities are laboratories of scientific innovation. But for the crime of supporting Black and brown kids, admitting foreign students, and hiring liberal thinkers, these institutions are under assault.

TLDR: The rich do better. Everyone else is fu..

[Xoan]

1. WHEN THE RICH NO LONGER HAVE US ...

THEY WILL FAIL!