Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Tyler Cowen — The Left Underestimates Trump's Economic Plan

While the first weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency have brought plenty of chaos, some underlying themes are emerging. I think of the economic policy so far -- call it Trumponomics -- as a new approach to the redistribution of wealth, working through jobs and regions rather than income transfers. To be sure, I don’t see any single architect of Trumponomics, not even Trump himself, but even without a master plan, there are some common threads.
It’s easy to underrate Trumponomics, because so often it sounds, frankly, stupid or misinformed. In a wide variety of areas, including health-care reform and the border tax adjustment, experts struggle to describe the plans, much less evaluate them. Still, Trumponomics, though highly flawed, will probably not crash the economy, and might steal a lot of the left’s thunder....
Bloomberg View
The Left Underestimates Trump's Economic Plan
Tyler Cowen | Holbert C. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center

3 comments:

Penguin pop said...

Hey Tom. What do you think of this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lRFzPPqbx4

Saw a comment in there that stood out to me that I'd like your take on too:

"Hang on, isn't this exactly why people were pushing Bernie Sanders though and when we Hillary supporters told you that these tariffs on imports were terrible and that globalization was necessary - we got yelled at?

Just like how the TPP was actually being designed to remove power from China's economic dominative output and allocate it to other Asiatic territories?"

This is supposed to be coming from a left-winger, but here we go. They are in support of globalization.

Tom Hickey said...

The left traditionally supports internationalism rather than nationalism. Nationalism is a characteristically right-wing. The rabid right in the US want the US to withdraw from the UN and a bill was just introduced to do just that.

The problem is trying to divide issues as left v. right in a hard and fast way. It's possible to do generally and ideally, but it's not always that way in practice. America stands out as a special case. The GOP and Democrats often reverse expected roles based on the general framework historically due to political exigencies and as well as paradoxes of differences in approach to social, political and economic domains.

Dave said...

Is there a left in America that is viable? I think one is growing now, but it's in its infancy.