Governance

We unexpectedly find ourselves in uncharted territory, in so many ways. The United States has never before had a president with no political or military experience. And Donald Trump is especially unpredictable: he has so often said things that conflict with other things he has said. So it is hard to know what he will do.But a possible precedent for what the Trump presidency may look like sits in plain sight: the George W. Bush presidency. To be fair, the Bush family clearly did not support Trump’s campaign.

370 of us economists have signed a new letter opposing Donald Trump:  Economists Lay Out List of Reasons to Vote Against Trump.   Here is the text of the letter, which the Wall Street Journal has reported on .The WSJ earlier surveyed all previous members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, spanning eight presidential administrations, Republican and Democrat.  Not a single one supported Trump, including the Republicans!Also 19 Nobel Laureates have signed a letter endorsing Hillary Clinton.

My preceding post, “The Fed and Inequality,” observed that populists have historically favored easy money and low interest rates.  I mentioned William Jennings Bryan’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1890s as well as the supply-siders in the early 1980s who blamed the failure of Reaganomics to produce sufficient growth on Paul Volcker’s efforts to fight inflation with tight monetary policy.An interesting dimension concerns gold.  Bryan’s proposed reform for allowing easy money was to take the US off of the gold standard, most famously in his 1896 “cross of gold” speech.

Populist politicians, among others, have claimed in recent years that monetary policy is too easy and that it is hurting ordinary workers.   But raising interest rates is not the way to address income inequality.It is a strange claim for anyone to make, but especially for populists.  Low interest rates are good for debtors, of course, and bad for creditors. Throughout most of US history, populists have supported easy monetary policy and low interest rates, to help the little guy, against bankers, who had hard hearts and believed in hard money.

The train of American electoral politics has gone further and further “off the rails” in recent decades.  A number of suspected culprits have been identified as the specific fundamental flaw in the system that needs to be fixed.  Gerrymandering.   Campaign finance.  Economic inequality.  “False balance” in the media.  It is strange that the public debate gives so much attention to these four explanations — and a few others like them. Those diagnoses don’t offer a ready remedy that is in the hands of the people.

One can’t blame the Financial Times for publishing an opinion piece by Wilbur Ross, if he is indeed a senior policy adviser to Donald Trump (“Trump campaign benefits from criticism of trade imbalances,” 29 August).   It is hard to judge the Republican candidate’s positions from his own words, because of his famous “shoot from the lip” style.   Does Trump really believe, for example, that American workers’ wages are too high, as he said in the Republican debates?   Many had been waiting to see who his economic advisers would be, in part so that we could have clear and precise language by which to judge what are the candidate’s positions.

 This year’s US presidential election campaign differs radically from past patterns, including in the departure of the Republican nominee from many of the policy positions traditionally taken by his party.  Examples are his lack of support for international trade, military alliances, or the institution of marriage.   But when Donald Trump released some positions on tax policy recently, the differences with Hillary Clinton’s proposals fell very much along usual party lines.  His is the kind of tax policy that has long been favored by Republican presidential candidates and congressmen:  tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich and that are not accompanied with any plans to pay for them.

When asked July 24 about US unemployment numbers, which have fallen steadily since 2010, Donald Trump Jr., replied “These are artificial numbers. These are numbers that are massaged to make the existing economy look good, to make this administration look good when, in fact, it’s a total disaster.”  His father has made similar statements.PolitiFact asked a variety of experts about the quote.   Their bottom line:  the quote from the younger Trump was a “Pants on Fire” lie.  The truth is that presidents don’t and can’t manipulate the jobs numbers.

Observers have pointed out many parallels between the June referendum on Brexit in the United Kingdom and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the US.  One parallel is that both the British movement to leave the EU and the Trump campaign for the American Republican nomination achieved success that few had expected, particularly not the various elites.  In both cases, the general interpretation is that the elites underestimated the anger of working class voters who feel they have been left behind by economic forces in a fast-changing world, and in particular by globalization.