Is Trump Destroying the USA Economy, author Jay Bazzinotti, February 24, 2020

I peruse the News and Website articles that tweak my interest; and some of them I read, causing me to question these ideas along with my own ideas on the subject. That makes sense to me.

This blog as you know is new, and I want to make it unique and different to my past postings on TGLF.ca dealing with a broad spectrum of my interests. Most of what you will see here will be my views, but today I thought I would offer Jay Bazzinotti's Quora contribution: 

Is the Jury in on Trump's Handling of the Economy?

""Trump lies about everything and covers it up. In old Greek mythology, Prometheus tricked the gods into giving good meat to the humans by creating a good looking pile of tripe by shaping into an attractive appearing piece of beef when really it was shit. The Gods chose the good looking but disgusting tripe for themselves as a result. Trump is doing that with the economy now - dressing up a disaster and selling it to gullible people as something good. In High Tech we called it “putting lipstick on a pig.”

Despite the steel industry collapsing in the US, Trump is claiming that he has saved the steel industry. By keeping interest rates artificially low during a period of prosperity (which Obama set up and he takes credit for; “Longest expansion in history” he says - but that means it started under Obama, but he never mentions that). When interest rates are low, money flows to the stock market, driving up share prices. Most stupid Americans (and Trump counts on them to be stupid) think that the stock market is the economy so they always look to record stock prices as a bellwether of economic health; in addition, Trump has doubled Obama’s deficit spending. Government spending always has a major impact on the economy. This was shown by Roosevelt and Keynes during the Great Depression when the Republican solution to solving the problem was to… raise taxes. It was the end of Classical Economics. We know now that during times of prosperity (like now) you’re supposed to cut spending and raise interest rates. Trump is doing the opposite, essentially opening up to full throttle at 30,000 feet to achieve speed even though it burns fuel faster and you won’t have enough to get to the landing site. Every Formula 1 driver knows the trade-off between fuel and speed. The faster you go, the shorter distance you go and you only get so much gas. It doesn’t matter if you’re in first place for 75 percent of the race if you’re stalled out on the embankment at the end for lack of gas. Trump is blowing up the economy with nowhere to go. But people are short-sighted and have short memories and only worry about “right now”. We expect the people who run the government to help us by worrying about “tomorrow”. Trump is not and the result is the inevitable disaster that is looming, one that will rival what happened in Russia in the 1990s, which is exactly what Putin wants and why he is driving Trump to do all this.

At the same time, small and medium farms are being wiped out by tariffs - the ones who benefit from this are the factory farms which are getting the struggling small farms for a song. The result is the increased collapse of “small town Midwest” because as the farms go and the jobs go, there’s no need for another town. Where will all these people go and what will they do? And who is Trump punishing? The industries that will create new, good paying jobs - wind, solar, geothermal, electric cars - all so that dirty industries who are NOT growing, or who grow in boom-and-bust can make even more money. We increase Defense spending willy-nilly knowing that money spent on defense is money thrown down the toilet. It is not used for private investment or infrastructure. It only enriches a very few and acts as welfare for (mostly) white defense workers. We will cut food stamps to starving Black children to save 15 dollars a month but we have no problem paying a guy making an M1 tank 140,000 dollars a year (as long as he’s a white guy). Defense spending is welfare for White people who by and large benefit the most from it. Only the Black soldier who stands picket for 900 dollars a month and who (used to) qualify for food stamps is the “trickle down” beneficiary of that defense spending.

Trump is destroying the economy because he’s destroying the seed corn we would plant next year or store for the bad years by eating it all up now.""

I agree with Jay on most of the above, however, the discussion that must follow is on Trump's Godlike attitude toward all he surveys, now that his Impeachment is never going to happen.