What I said after Trump got elected…if people thought the US was getting a raw deal under “globalism”, wait until “America First” morphed into “America Alone”.
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To be fair in the situation I cited, the law of the sea treaty has been fought over for a long time. Things have changed however and our absence from it is going to hurt like hell.
It is a standard conservative position that programs to expand minority home ownership during the Bush Administration were what undermined the Housing Market.
The data do not support this.
Mortgages failed at an equal rate in the private home real estate market (where programs to help minorities were in effect) and in the commercial real estate market (where there were NO programs to help minorities).
The problems were in real estate and the effort to shift the blame to Democratic programs to assist minorities simply is not supported by the data, no matter how comforting it might be.
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Meanwhile back in the fact-based world.
Job growth began in the second year of the Obama Presidency as the country started to recover from the Bush recession. Job growth has continued for eight years, but the pace of growth has been a little slower under Trump than it was under Obama. The data on this are clear.
How did the “Health care market” suffer under ACA? Stocks in health care provider and Pharma organizations have done fine since ACA. There has been no wave of bankruptcies in healthcare – compare that to retail. Where are the data.
Trump has had a couple of good GDP quarters, mainly goosed by his tariffs and tax cut, but Obama had a slightly higher number of good quarters. Again, we are in an eight year trend and the slope of growth (none too good for those eight years admittedly) hasn’t been effected by Trump.
The economy is a place where there is plenty of data that simply contract your claims.
Real wages for most Americans have been in decline for forty years. That has caused and continues to cause a lot of suffering. Obama did not address that. Trump has not addressed that either.
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If one has their 401k pegged to the Dow then they are doing it wrong
Not to mention that it was a major part of dubya’s platform. So much so that he gave several speeches on it. It even helped him win re-election.
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As the program expanded, so did the default rate and so did the supply of houses on the market. This helped drive down the price of houses, reversing a trend that had withstood the test of time. Those mortgages were then packaged and misrepresented as a risk…much lower than reality and then sold to unknowing investors who lost their life savings. This was the direct result of removing Glass-Steagall. Our industry was transferred out of the country through NAFTA. It weakened our economy even further through wage loss and wage stagnation. All of these things combined…contributed to the economic failure under Bush and both sides are to blame.
I know but it’s the same isolationist impulse that had us not in it that has been magnified through Trump.
First, that’s a silly comparison metric. The economy was a bucket of crap in the late 70s and early 80s, and interest rates were sky high. Of course it would take it awhile to get back to even par.
Second, Reagan had 153 record days over his two terms.
Third, Clinton had 114 over his first 3 years compared with 101 for Trump - does that make Clinton economy > Trump?
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Wage stagnation began long before NAFTA.
And the real estate bubble was a classic case as to why tax cuts and deregulation do not, in fact, stimulate the economy long term.
Because money seeks the highest return…in a rentier economy the highest return is not always from investing in activities that create true economic output.
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22 republicans are holding it up.
Everyone with a 401k had better returns during the Obama years than they’ve had under the Trump years.
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Another factor was the price of fuel and GM’s weak choice to celebrate their successes with their full sized trucks and sport utility vehicles but left themselves weak on the car side of development. When the fuel price shot up, they stopped selling vehicles and declared bankruptcy.
There were many factors that contributed to our economic demise but…the greatest factor was government involvement.
A few things to consider. NAFTA was hardly the only reason for transferring industry overseas. While NAFTA is a convenient thing to blame, no one who attacks NAFTA remembers that, on net, the gains in agricultural exports from the US to Mexico outweighed the loss of jobs to Mexico… because it was cheaper to move those jobs to China!
What NAFTA should be blamed for, but ever is, is the resumption of illegal immigration after the Reagan solution.
The primary agricultural staple in Mexico is corn. After NAFTA, US agri-business corn flooded the Mexican market, undercutting more expensive Mexican corn that was largely produced on family farms in Northern Mexico. In a short period, one million family farms went bankrupt in Mexico, bankrupting many ancillary businesses. That created the nest flood of Mexicans heading to El Norte. Those people coming north were farmers and their families and people who businesses supported farmers – hardly the Trump image of “the worst people.”
But that history includes the financial benefits of NAFTA to the US (largely flowing to a small number of large firms) and so it gets dropped from conservative history, which always prefers a good emotional meme to facing difficult facts.
That’s a great statement. “ALL” the bad loans. Every single one. The Deutsche Bank loans to fund Trump’s Atlantic Casinos that failed were loans DB made because they were browbeaten into it by “the left.”
Please cite one example of a bank whose board replaced its top leadership for allowing their loan policies to be shaped by “the left.” If this was so bad, wouldn’t that have happened.
Or is the only way to hold up your revisionist view of history is to argue that ALL US banks are controlled by “the left.”
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You paint a more pretty picture than the leader himself did.
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Use that logic with the present composition of the house.
Allan
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There is no clear consensus of the help the auto industry go in 2009 actually saved the auto giants or added to their later debt service.
Today, American automakers are clearly in a much better place; GM and Chrysler have healthy profits and are once again competitive with their foreign counterparts. Few contest this claim. However, debate over the necessity of the bailout, the precedent it set, and its economic consequences because the counterfactual is difficult to assess. Policy experts and economists have not reached any sort of consensus regarding what would have happened to Chrysler, GM, or the auto industry in the absence of the bailout. When these researchers employ subtly different assumptions to build their models, they generate vastly different counterfactuals. As a result, both liberals and conservatives can find persuasive evidence in the academic literature to support their praise or criticism of the bailout.
From 2017 U Penn is a conservative leaning outlet.
https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/1779-a-reflection-on-the-2009-american-auto-bailout
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Is there any metric that shows how government involvement increases or decreases over time. We certainly hear a lot from the President that he has done more to reduce government burden on business than any predecessor but we are seeing no improvement in GDP and a slight decline in investment.
This period of stagnation has been a period of rapidly increasing global competition: with the unleashing of the economies of China, India and other Asian tiger counties: all of which have soaked up high paying jobs from the US for which the US has had no replacement.
That’s how capitalism works: competition re-adjusts markets and US business leadership was more than willing to take advantage of lower costs overseas to push up the share value. The result: stock prices continue to go up at a much faster rate than the economy.
Can you provide a comparable explanation of why these trends are a function of government involvement?
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