by Neil H. Buchanan
My car is running
better lately. My dog's coat is shinier. Also, I have been sleeping
better, and my ingrown toenail is not bothering me as much. Why have
all of these good things happened? Because of the Republican tax cuts
that Donald Trump signed last month, of course. How silly even to ask.
Now that Republicans have passed their historically unpopular and
regressive tax cut, Trump and his helpmates are desperately trying to
say that all good things that are happening have been caused by that one terrible new law.
Their
campaign is built around Republicans' apparently
willful misunderstanding of economics and is sustained by their
willingness to say anything and keep a straight face if doing so somehow
supports Trump and justifies their tax cuts for corporations and wealthy
people. I cannot wait to see what the tax cut does to clear up the
crabgrass in my yard.
Trump has spent his life avoiding blame for his mistakes and taking
credit for things completely beyond his control. That is who he is.
Perhaps the most humorous recent example of the latter was his attempt
to take credit for the zero death count on commercial airlines in 2017.
Not only is that a matter over which a president could not possibly
have any serious influence (especially in his first year in office), but
Trump conveniently ignored the simple fact that there have been no
deaths on commercial airlines since 2009. By Trump's logic, I guess we should instead be saying: Thanks, Obama!
Last Spring, I suggested
that Trump could (and should) spend his entire presidency doing nothing
substantive even while taking credit for random blips and highlighting
self-serving selections from statistical reports. My idea was inspired
by one of the many times that Trump tried to say that reporters were
failing to notice all of the good news in Trump World, where his tweeted
example was that "the National Debt in my first month went
down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo."
As I pointed out at the time, and as PolitiFact reported,
this made no sense at all. Month-to-month variations in federal
deficits are meaningless. For anyone who has struggled to lose weight,
think of the morning weigh-in and the frustrating sense that the number
staring up at you so often seems at odds with what happened the day or
week before. Both good trends and bad ones have random up and down
variations. This is what statisticians refer to as "noise."
Moreover,
even if those two monthly deficit numbers in Trump's tweet actually
meant something, Obama had inherited an economy that was spiraling
toward a possible second Great Depression, whereas Obama later
bequeathed to Trump a growing and fundamentally healthy economy. Should
it be any surprise that the debt rose in Obama's first month? And even
though the federal deficit is generally under control, it has not
turned into a surplus, which means that the decrease in debt in Trump's
first month was truly a temporary anomaly.
But my
larger point was that Trump could and should do nothing at all, because
he could spend his remaining days in the White House (however few those
days might be) picking out random good news and taking credit for it.
Why do any heavy lifting?
Trump and the Republicans,
however, decided to put their chips on an enormously regressive tax
bill, which means that they now actually have to defend something that
they are responsible for enacting. Their plan of attack is as baseless
as Trump's tweets about deficits and airline deaths. But the
Republicans are undeniably enthusiastic about it. How to spin this as a
win for Trump?
All politicians are eager to associate themselves with good news and
distance themselves from bad, of course, but Trump is in a category of
his own. Even so, this Republican strategy is not
some new Trumpian effort to distort reality but merely another front in a
massive disinformation campaign that Republicans have been waging for
decades.
It is a key part of Republican lore that Ronald Reagan ended
inflation, for example, even though his policies would have made inflation worse if
it were not for the countervailing policies of the Federal Reserve and its chairman,
who was put in office by President Jimmy Carter. And let us not forget
that Reagan supposedly also won the Cold War, even though it was obvious
that the Soviet system was collapsing due to its over-reliance on
militarism and its systemic economic unsustainability.
All
of this is merely the mirror image of the years-long efforts by Trump
and the Republicans to blame Barack Obama for nearly everything,
including plants that closed before
Obama took office. Republicans also conveniently ignored the fact that
the bank bailouts in 2008 and 2009 and some other essential
economy-saving measures that were nonetheless unpopular with their
enraged conservative base were proposed by George W. Bush and pushed
through Congress by Republican leaders. Saving the economy is a weird
thing to blame a president for doing, but in Republicans' minds, they
were accusing Obama of being anti-capitalist.
Moreover,
Republicans' lies have not been limited to attacks on Obama.
Republicans have been screaming to the heavens, for example, that the
estate tax breaks up family farms and small businesses. This is not
even an isolated, statistically trivial problem, because it is not a
problem at all. There has never been a documented case of the estate
tax having any of those effects (tall tales
from farm-state demagogues notwithstanding). But Republicans will
simply never bow to reality, so their new tax bill doubled the tax
exemption for estates to $22 million for a married couple.
When
it comes to their tax bill, Republicans are claiming that they and
Trump should receive all of the credit for good things that are
happening, even things that started a long time ago. One of the more famously dishonest Republican economists (whose blatant hackishness somehow did not disqualified him from being invited to write a guest op-ed for The New York Times this past weekend) argued that Trump is being unfairly denied the glory that is rightly his.
The
basic idea is that Trump would be blamed if the economy were tanking,
so it must logically follow that Trump should be praised if the economy
is doing well, right? Wrong.
Trump deserves nothing more
than notice that he did not reverse the already strong trends in the
economy, from employment figures to wages (which are finally starting to
kick up a bit). Again, there can be month-to-month noise in the data,
but the reasonably good news has been pretty much consistent for the
past few years. A recent report showed that the GDP growth rate came in
at a respectable 2.6 percent at an annual rate, for example, but that
was actually lower than the 2.9 percent that economists had been
forecasting. Does that prove that Trump is bad for the economy? Of
course not. He has so far been blessedly irrelevant.
That
is, as the saying goes, not nuthin'. Indeed, Paul Krugman argued after
Trump took office that Trump would preside over a sinking economy.
Krugman has subsequently admitted error on multiple occasions, and he
has said that his error sprang from his political views, whereas he
should have trusted his knowledge of economics. There was little if any
reason to think that Trump would sink the economy.
True,
it was possible that everyone could have responded to the possibly
imminent end of American constitutional democracy by changing their
economic behavior in way that forced the economy into a tailspin. They
have not done so thus far, however, and life has moved on pretty much as
it was before (at least in the economic realm).
More
to the point, Trump could have immediately launched some radically bad
economic policies, such as initiating full-scale trade wars with our
major trading partners and trying to deport the more than ten million
immigrants who are helping to produce the goods and services that go
into our reasonably positive GDP picture.
So yes, Trump
cannot be blamed for making truly bad economic decisions that could have
reversed the positive trends that were baked into the economy that he
inherited. This, however, is not symmetric. If a new president comes
in and simply does not muck things up, that does not mean that the good
news is proof that he is an economic genius.
Republicans
deny that eight years of constant improvement under Obama are not to
Obama's credit, and to be honest, they are not entirely wrong. The
Federal Reserve played a key role, and the global economic recovery is a
big part of the current story, neither of which are directly
attributable to Obama.
But if Obama does not deserve all
of the credit for turning a near-death experience into a solid (if
unspectacular and still inequality-infected) recovery, then Trump
certainly does not deserve anything but the most minimal credit simply
for the fact that the economy has not broken trend in the past year. He
did not do anything good other than not doing anything bad.
In
a followup column, I will address some of the specific recent news
items that Republicans are using to try to support their claims that
they and Trump have been great for the economy, especially their claims
that some announced bonuses for workers are proof of the virtues of
trickle-down economics. For those who cannot wait, The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin recently provided an excellent short summary of some of the key arguments.
The
larger point here, however, is that Trump and the Republicans are
engaged in the timeless ritual of trying to take undeserved credit for
good news. We should all be happy that there is at least one area in
which Trump and his enablers have not yet done anything truly
disastrous. But that is a low bar indeed.
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2 comments:
A few minutes ago, there were 1152 comments on economist Moore's op-ed.
To call Stephen Moore an economists does a great injustice to the economics profession. This individual has been categorically wrong so many times that only his total lack of humility and self examination allows him to continue to publish, or even show his face in public. One Kansas newspaper refused to publish him after a series of total falsehoods in his work.
Democracy prospers under the honor system, that the politicians while 'spinning' things will not out and out lie. Republicans have broken this trust, Moore being just one of many examples, and now the Trummper lies with impunity. A number of people say the U. S. democratic system will recover. Don't bet on it. This post by Mr. Buchanan may well be included in future anthologies that document how the system of freedom and self government collapsed in America.
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