Can Trump Turn The Fed Into A Bastion Of Trumpnomics-- Enough To Make The Coming Recession Into A Depression?

When Trump nominated crackpot Stephen Moore for a spot on the Fed, I was shocked. That's even a crazy move for Trump. What was I missing? I asked the smartest economist I know, Stephanie Kelton. All she would say is that "It’s not an inspired choice, to say the least. Paul McCulley would have been an inspired choice." Conservative economist Greg Mankiw was considerably more forthcoming on his thoughts about the nomination.

Mankiw isn't famous because he teaches economics at Harvard, though he does. He's famous because he worked for both Bush-- for whom he served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors-- and for Mitt Romney. In 2011, while he was advising Romney and teaching at Harvard, dozens of students walked out of his lecture and went to a Occupy Wall Street demonstration, handing him an open letter on the way out:

Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course. We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater society.

As Harvard undergraduates, we enrolled in Economics 10 hoping to gain a broad and introductory foundation of economic theory that would assist us in our various intellectual pursuits and diverse disciplines, which range from Economics, to Government, to Environmental Sciences and Public Policy, and beyond. Instead, we found a course that espouses a specific-- and limited-- view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.

A legitimate academic study of economics must include a critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws of different economic simplifying models. As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics. There is no justification for presenting Adam Smith’s economic theories as more fundamental or basic than, for example, Keynesian theory.

Care in presenting an unbiased perspective on economics is particularly important for an introductory course of 700 students that nominally provides a sound foundation for further study in economics. Many Harvard students do not have the ability to opt out of Economics 10. This class is required for Economics and Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrators, while Social Studies concentrators must take an introductory economics course-- and the only other eligible class, Professor Steven Margolin’s class Critical Perspectives on Economics, is only offered every other year (and not this year). Many other students simply desire an analytic understanding of economics as part of a quality liberal arts education. Furthermore, Economics 10 makes it difficult for subsequent economics courses to teach effectively as it offers only one heavily skewed perspective rather than a solid grounding on which other courses can expand. Students should not be expected to avoid this class-- or the whole discipline of economics-- as a method of expressing discontent.

Harvard graduates play major roles in the financial institutions and in shaping public policy around the world. If Harvard fails to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics, their actions are likely to harm the global financial system. The last five years of economic turmoil have been proof enough of this.

We are walking out today to join a Boston-wide march protesting the corporatization of higher education as part of the global Occupy movement. Since the biased nature of Economics 10 contributes to and symbolizes the increasing economic inequality in America, we are walking out of your class today both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing American discourse on economic injustice. Professor Mankiw, we ask that you take our concerns and our walk-out seriously.

His fame increased when he announced on CNBC that he wouldn't vote for Trump in 2016. On his blog he explained in more detail why he wouldn't vote for the Republican candidate for president:

I have Republican friends who think that things couldn't be worse than doubling down on Obama policies under Hillary Clinton. And, like them, I am no fan of the left's agenda of large government and high taxes. But they are wrong: Things could be worse. And I fear they would be under Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has not laid out a coherent economic worldview, but one recurrent theme is hostility to a free and open system of international trade. From my perspective as an economics policy wonk, that by itself is disqualifying.

And then there are issues of temperament. I am not a psychologist, so I cannot figure out what Mr. Trump's personal demons are. But he does not show the admirable disposition that I saw in previous presidents and presidential candidates I have had the honor to work for.

I don't get the feeling he intends to vote for Trump in 2020 either. On Friday he wrote that the only good thing he credited Trump with, in his opinion, "making good appointments to the Fed.... Jay Powell, Rich Clarida, and Randy Quarles. Then today the president nominates Stephen Moore to be a Fed governor. Steve is a perfectly amiable guy, but he does not have the intellectual gravitas for this important job. If you doubt it, read his latest book Trumponomics (or my review of it). It is time for Senators to do their job. Mr. Moore should not be confirmed."

Moore wrote the universally panned book with Arthur Laffer and Mankiw's review for Foreign Affairs was titled Snake-Oil Economics-- The Bad Math Behind Trump’s Policies. Moore and Laffer, he wrote, presented their findings in the voice of "rah-rah partisans... who do not build their analysis on the foundation of professional consensus or serious studies from peer-reviewed journals. They deny that people who disagree with them may have some logical points and that there may be weaknesses in their own arguments. In their view, the world is simple, and the opposition is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Rah-rah partisans do not aim to persuade the undecided. They aim to rally the faithful." He feels that their "over-the-top enthusiasm" for Señor Trumpanzee's "sketchy economic agenda is not likely to convince anyone not already sporting a 'Make America Great Again' hat." 

Moore and Laffer served as economic advisers to Trump during his campaign and after he was elected president (along with Larry Kudlow, the current director of the National Economic Council, who wrote the book’s foreword). From this experience, Moore and Laffer apparently learned the importance of flattering the boss. In the first chapter alone, they tell us that Trump is a “gifted orator” who is always “dressed immaculately.” He is “shrewd,” “open-minded,” “no-nonsense,” and “bigger than life.” He is a “commonsense conservative” who welcomes “honest and fair-minded policy debates.” He is the “Mick Jagger of politics” with a contagious “enthusiasm and can-doism.”

The authors’ approach to policy is similarly bereft of nuance. In Chapter 3, they sum it up by proudly recounting what Moore told Trump about U.S. President Barack Obama during the campaign: “Donald, just look at all the things that Obama has done on the economy over the past eight years, and then do just the opposite.”

It is hard to imagine more simplistic, misguided advice. To be sure, Moore and Laffer can reasonably hold policy positions and political values to the right of those of Obama. (As someone who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush administration, so do I.) But the Obama administration was filled with prominent economic advisers who were well within the bounds of mainstream economics: Jason Furman, Austan Goolsbee, Alan Krueger, Christina Romer, and Lawrence Summers, to name but a few. It is not tenable to suggest that with all this talent, the administration made only wrong decisions, and that they were wrong simply because those who made them were Democrats.

The tribalism of Moore and Laffer’s approach stems primarily from their devotion to a single issue: the level of taxation. Obama pursued higher taxes, especially on higher-income households. His goal was to fund a federal government that was larger and more active than many Republicans would prefer and to use the tax system to “spread the wealth around,” as he famously told Joe Wurzelbacher, known as Joe the Plumber, a man he encountered at a campaign stop in Ohio in 2008. By contrast, Moore and Laffer want lower taxes, especially on businesses, which in their view would promote faster economic growth.

The debate over taxes reflects a classic, ongoing disagreement between the left and the right. In 1975, Arthur Okun, a Brookings economist and former adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, wrote a short book called Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. Okun argued that by using taxes and transfers of wealth to equalize economic outcomes, the government distorts incentives-- or that, to put it metaphorically, the harder the government tries to ensure that the economic pie is cut into slices of a similar size, the smaller the pie becomes. Based on this argument, the main priority of the Democratic Party is to equalize the slices, whereas the main priority of the Republican Party is to grow the pie.

Yet Moore and Laffer aren’t willing to admit that making policy requires confronting such difficult tradeoffs. Laffer is famous for his eponymous curve, which shows that tax rates can reach levels high enough that cutting them would yield enough growth to actually increase tax revenue. In that scenario, the tradeoff between equality and efficiency vanishes. The government can cut taxes, increase growth, and use the greater tax revenue to help the less fortunate. Everyone is better off.

The Laffer curve is undeniable as a matter of economic theory. There is certainly some level of taxation at which cutting tax rates would be win-win. But few economists believe that tax rates in the United States have reached such heights in recent years; to the contrary, they are likely below the revenue-maximizing level. In practice, the big tradeoff between equality and efficiency just won’t go away.

Trumponomics is full of exhortations about the importance of economic growth. Why, Moore and Laffer ask, should Americans settle for the two percent growth that many economists have been projecting? Wouldn’t every problem be easier to solve with a more rapidly expanding economy? The book quotes Trump as claiming, when announcing his tax plan in December 2017, that it would not increase the budget deficit because it would raise growth rates to “three, or four, five, or even six percent.”

The authors offer no credible evidence that the tax changes passed will lead to such high growth. Most studies yield far more modest projections. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trump tax cuts will increase growth rates by 0.2 percentage points per year over the first five years. A study by Robert Barro (a conservative economist at Harvard) and Furman (a liberal economist at Harvard) published in 2018 estimates that the tax bill will increase annual growth by 0.13 percentage points over a decade. And that is if the changes are made permanent. Barro and Furman estimate that as the legislation is written, with many of the provisions set to expire in 2025, it will increase annual growth by a mere 0.04 percentage points over ten years.

It is conceivable that standard economic models underestimate the impact of tax cuts on growth. A research paper by the economists Christina Romer and David Romer published in 2010 examined historical tax changes and found that they had larger effects on economic activity than standard models suggest. (It is worth noting that these two authors’ political leanings are left of center, so their findings are not the result of ideological taint.) One might reasonably argue that Trump’s tax cuts will increase growth over the next decade by as much as half a percentage point per year. But that is a long way from the one- to four-percentage-point boost that the president and his associates have bragged of, and that Moore and Laffer quote without explanation, caveat, or apology.

...Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Trumponomics is the long list of crucial issues on which the authors are largely silent. They offer no cogent plans to deal with global climate change, the long-term fiscal imbalance from growing entitlement spending, or the increase in economic inequality that has occurred over the past half century. Many reasonable Republicans would support a tax on carbon emissions, for example. Such a policy would slow climate change by incentivizing the movement toward cleaner energy, as well as provide revenue that could be used to close the fiscal gap or to help those struggling at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Rather than suggesting coherent policies, Moore and Laffer seem to hope that a much more rapidly growing economy will provide the resources to address all these problems, and they seem to believe that this growth will follow ineluctably from the lower taxes and deregulation that lie at the heart of Trump’s agenda. It would be wonderful if that were possible. Maybe rah-rah partisans really believe it is. But more likely, it is just wishful thinking. Trump appears eager to avoid most of the economic problems facing the nation. By banking on so much growth from cutting taxes, Moore and Laffer are, in effect, giving him a pass and kicking the can down the road to a future leader more interested in confronting hard policy choices.

Are there enough Republicans in the Senate with enough good sense and courage to deny Moore his confirmation? I doubt it. In fact, it's probably more likely that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin vote to confirm that it is that more than one or two Republicans vote not to, even though some Republicans have been grumbling about Moore's column advocating that Trump fire Fed Chair Jay Powell (a Trump appointee who, like so many, Trump quickly soured on).

Trump In The White House Absolutely Predicts A Recession-- The Question Is Just How Soon

The Obama administration worked hard to turn the economy around after Trump inherited an economy that would have been a dream for any president. He immediately set out to sabotage it and, unfortunately, his policies are finally kicking in strongly enough to wreck everything that Obama did to right the economy Bush left him-- and us. But before we get into Trump's disastrous policies, one little note: his utter and complete lack of leadership abilities are working hand in hand with bad policy to bring down the economy. Take this insane tweet from yesterday announcing that the Treasury Department had slapped additional sanctions on North Korea and that just hours later Trump was countermanding them. How does something like that even happen? Was there a gnome working at Treasury and doing whatever he wanted to do with no supervision?

Worse yet, Trump announced that he is nominating another entirely unfit ideologue to a position where he will undoubtably harm everything he touches. Trumponomics author Stephen Moore, like Trump, a harsh critic of Trump-appointed Fed chair Jerome Powell, will soon be serving on the Fed. "Moore’s primary area of pseudo-expertise-- he is not an economist-- is fiscal policy," wrote Jonathan Chait. "He is a dedicated advocate of supply-side economics, relentlessly promoting his fanatical hatred of redistribution and belief that lower taxes for the rich can and will unleash wondrous prosperity. Like nearly all supply-siders, he has clung to this dogma in the face of repeated, spectacular failures."

OK, tuck all that away for a moment while we consider two dire reports from Bloomberg News Friday morning, on just after sunrise and one at 11AM. First was the announcement of a curve inversion, an event that usually signals a recession is on the horizon.

The Treasury yield curve inverted for the first time since the last crisis Friday, triggering the first reliable market signal of an impending recession and rate-cutting cycle.

The gap between the three-month and 10-year yields vanished as a surge of buying pushed the latter to a 14-month low of 2.416 percent. Inversion is considered a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S., within roughly the next 18 months.

Demand for government bonds gained momentum Wednesday, when U.S. central bank policy makers lowered both their growth projections and their interest-rate outlook. The majority of officials now envisages no hikes this year, down from a median call of two at their December meeting. Traders took that dovish shift as their cue to dig into positions for a Fed easing cycle, pricing in a cut by the end of 2020 and a one-in-two chance of a reduction as soon as this year.

“It looks like the global slowdown worries have been confirmed and the market is beginning to price in Fed easing, potential recession down the road,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab & Co. “It’s clearly a sign that the market is worried about growth and moving into Treasuries from riskier asset classes.”

Too abstract? How about U.S. Posts Largest-Ever Monthly Budget Deficit in February? Will Trump call a market crash "fake news?" Largest monthly budget deficit ever-- key word "ever"-- seem like a big deal, no? And that duet deficit is obviously a result, at least in part, of falling tax revenues because of the catastrophic GOP tax bill of last year, and increased spending as Trump attempts, entirely unsuccessfully, to buy his way into some kind of popularity.

The budget gap widened to $234 billion in February, compared with a fiscal gap of $215.2 billion a year earlier. That gap surpassed the previous monthly record of $231.7 billion set seven years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

February’s shortfall helped push the deficit for the first five months of the government’s fiscal year to $544.2 billion, up almost 40 percent from the same period the previous year, the Treasury Department said in its monthly budget report Friday. The release was delayed a week by the government shutdown earlier this year.

Receipts dipped less than 1 percent to $1.3 trillion in the October-February period from the previous year, while spending accelerated 9 percent to $1.8 trillion.

The fiscal shortfall is widening following President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax-cuts package that’s weighing on receipts and raising concerns about the national debt load, which topped a record $22 trillion last month.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated his concern over the government deficit in a press conference Wednesday, saying that the nation’s growing debt pile needs to be addressed. At the same time, there’s a shift among some economists-- led by proponents of Modern Monetary Theory-- on the dangers of a growing deficit, with low inflation and cheap borrowing costs suggesting there’s room for additional spending.

The Treasury data show tax receipts declined for both corporations and individuals in the five-month period, while revenue from customs duties almost doubled, boosted by income from tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

The 2017 tax law slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Corporations have so far this fiscal year paid $59.2 billion, compared to $73.5 billion in 2018, when the tax law was only partially in effect for some corporations. In 2017, however, the year before the law was enacted, corporations had paid $87.4 billion at this point in the year.

Individual income tax receipts dropped slightly from this point last year, but have risen compared to some years before the tax law. Despite the law cutting tax rates for most people, rising wages and lower unemployment have spurred higher tax revenue.

Now think again about Trump's newest appointment to the Fed. "Stephen Moore’s career as an economic analyst has been a decades-long continuous procession of error and hackery. It is not despite but precisely because of these errors that Moore now finds himself in the astonishing position of having been offered a position on the Federal Reserve board by President Trump," was how Chait put it. "[F]or all their extravagant ignorance, Moore’s beliefs on fiscal policy are actually more sophisticated and well-developed than his views on monetary policy. It is the latter that he would be in a position to influence as a Federal Reserve governor... While the internal workings of his mind remain a matter of speculation, I doubt he is consciously venal enough to tailor his thinking explicitly to partisan goals. Rather, Moore has extremely strong partisan instincts and extremely limited analytical skills. The combination results inevitably in the latter giving way to the former. He should not be permitted any position of serious responsibility, in government or anything else."

2018 In Review: Donald J. Trump, The (Con) Jobs President! The Whole World Is Watching, Part 11/The End.

by Noah

We're going to win so much you're going to be sick and tired of winning.
- Donald Jackass Trump
Billings, Montana, May 2016

Yup. So much winning! 62,000,000 voters bought the con from America's #1 Con Artist. Perhaps, they didn't realize that, in republican lingo, winning means you lose, emphasis you. So, yeah, in that sense, I guess a lot of people are getting sick and tired of "winning" republican style.

First it was his lies at the Carrier plant in Indiana, more recently, it was Ford Motors, now it's GM.

At the same time, he's telling his gullible cult that steel plants are opening all over the country. He might as well tell them that distant towns are paving their streets with Trump-provided gold or that, due to an agreement he's made with planet Zontar of the 9th dimension, aliens are providing new technology that will provide "millions and millions" of new jobs. Of course, his audiences would lap such idiocy right up. Believe me. As long as none of those jobs go to black or brown people.

In both the FORD and GM cases, the main reason for plant closings centers around the rising costs of parts from China caused by Señor Trumpanzees imposing of tariffs on the parts. The effects of the Trump-imposed tariffs are textbook. They can be no accident. Saying Trump was just stupid is highly implausible and almost offers him an out or an excuse.

In the case of the GM plant closings, a 12,000 figure mentioned for people earmarked for unemployment by Trumpanzee's tariff policies and his Republican Tax Scam rose, in just a few days, to 15,000, and, that doesn't include all of the ancillary metal, plastics, and electrical jobs that will be lost in other factories. Why that's enough for the whole White House staff to get out their "I Don't Really Care, Do You?" jackets and parade en masse down Pennsylvania Avenue all the way to their Republican friends in the Capitol Building in celebration. The Trump presidency truly is the bizarro presidency, one in which that which is bad is viewed as success. Kinda like his promise to drain the swamp. That’s where the obvious fact of Trump being a total sadist comes in. It also means that anyone who still supports him is a masochist. Those in power who continue to enable him are accomplices, at best.

Remember when Trump and his army of psychotics led by McConnell and Ryan claimed that Tax Scam 2018 would lead to corporations adding jobs? Even after the corporations themselves famously publicly admitted that it wouldn’t?



For years, Republicans talked about the need to lower the corporate tax rate in order to stimulate job creation. However, thanks to the Trump/Ryan Tax Scam, GM and other large corporations had their tax rates cut by 40% and instead, predictably to everyone but republican voters, the corporations like GM have just bought back stock, moved even more jobs overseas or across the border, given raises to top executives, pocketed the windfall and done nothing to stimulate job growth. As an example, so far this year, GM has received $157 million in tax cuts and used $100 million of that to buy back the corporation’s stock in order to benefit its top executives and biggest shareholders while screwing their workers.

You're going to see General Motors, they're coming back. A lot of companies are coming back. It's a good feeling. That's a really good feeling.
- Trumpanzee, February 13, 2018 at the White House.

Let me tell you folks in Ohio and in this area. Don't sell your house. Don't sell your house. We're gonna fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand new ones. That's what's gonna happen.
- The biggest asshole in the world. July 2017 in Youngstown, Ohio

Trump promised that factories would be filled up or torn down and replaced by new ones. And those 62,000,000 actually believed him. (Oh? Ok, that's an exaggeration. So many of them voted in support of the typical Republican racism and misogyny instead.) But again, the opposite was the truth. When Trump speaks, does he have a third little tiny hand behind his back with the fingers crossed?

When Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and the entire rest of their party passed their tax scam for the 1% and their corporate benefactors, they knowingly lied and said the benefits of the tax cuts would “trickle down” to average Americans, even thought the “trickle down voodoo economics” of the Reagan years never bore fruit for average Americans. Republicans even went as far in their psychotic lying to say that every working family would receive a $4,000 pay raise in their checks. To top that lie off, Trump promised a new, instant middle class tax cut just as soon as the midterm elections were over. Again, Trump supporters bought the con. And let’s not forget Trump, after reluctantly actually going to visit some of our troops, lied to them that he had given them a 10% raise.

To date, only 4.4% of American workers have received any kind of raise or bonus related to the tax cuts that corporations received in the tax scam.

Republicans love to talk about things like recovery aid for disasters, natural or man-made, being “paid for” by offsets of cuts to be made elsewhere. In this case, the man-made disaster of the tax scam is an exploding deficit soaring into the trillions; enough to end the United States of America. But, that’s OK with Trump, Ryan, McConnell and their army of perps and dirtbags. Trump and his army went into this with their own ideas of off-sets in mind. They want to pay for the corporate welfare money they handed out to their benefactors by stealing from us by cutting our Social Security and Medicare. It’s all the equivalent of a nasty cat sadistically playing with its prey before it finally kills it.

Sadism is everything with Trump. Anyone who ever thought, even for an instant, that Trump was going to pursue policies that would result in jobs or help Americans or America is a fool of astronomical proportions. Such people are the ultimate example of people voting against themselves. In his whole life Trump has never done anything for anyone else but Trump. Sure, you can point to the CEOs and the 1% and say he’s helping them but all he’s doing with that is building an army of rich protectors. That is The Wall that Trump is actually building.

In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country... America's economy is booming like never before.

So said President Donald J. Trump in front of the United Nations General Assembly back in September of this year. His claim was greeted by laughter. I was reminded of the time a man threw his shoes at Dubya. I wished that the entire General Assembly had pelted him with their shoes, and rotten tomatoes. The paramedics would have had to quickly sedate him and carry him off with his legs bound and his arms in a straitjacket the way he belongs. We would have never seen him again, although putting an Internet Trump-Cam in his padded cell for 24 hour viewing would be appropriate, especially if the public could buy chances to address him from home through a speaker system in his cell.

Trump has truly "accomplished more than almost any administration." To be fair to Trump, you can take out the almost. The problem is whom has he accomplished it for. Himself and his psychotic hate for mankind? His army of CEOs, bankers and the worst of the 1%? His friends in China? Putin? By the time you read this, the number of Trump days listed on the list of the Top 20 worst single-day stock market drops in history will have grown to a dozen or more. Yes, "the American economy is booming..." It's booming like a 200 megaton A-bomb. Are you tired of all this winning? Well, keep in mind that if a president says something that triggers a market drop once, it might be an accident. Twice may be cause for suspicion, but Trump tweets, says or does something to sabotage the United States economy every day now. Also, keep in mind that he once said a low market isn't the worst thing because it's a great time to buy things below their true value and make a profit later. Now there’s a man with a plan, a sadistic plan that not only makes him rich but hurts as many Americans as possible.

At some point, even the most naive among us should realize (not that they will) that Trump's sinking of the economy can only be deliberate. No one, even a complete idiot, gets it wrong every damn time. If Trump is innocent of deliberately tanking the economy that would require breaking new ground in human behavior. Trump is an extreme sadist. For whatever reasons that goe back to the day he was born, he is out to get all mankind and he has been emboldened by the results of his mayhem so far in life. Media people, bank vermin, his voters, his CEOs, and the rest of the Trump-supporting community may try to tell us that he's just stupid or a buffoon, but he's gotten as far as he has on the strength of being a marketing savant. People who are good at marketing a person's name and brand (including themselves), to the top are just as good at tearing something, anything, down and ripping it to shreds when their insecurities and dellusions rule them. It's still marketing moves. In Trump’s case, it’s the moves of a despot, a perfect storm of betrayal if not outright treason. And, yet, no one in a position of power or authority wants to point it out and call it what it is. They love that status quo.

Trump's shutdown rhetoric, appointment of a FOX "News" bimbo as U.N. ambassador, the removal of Gen. Mattis, the appointment of Betsy DeVos, the Tax Scam, his KKK approach to voting rights, his removal of environmental protections and regulations, his attacking the FED, his raising the stature of Kim Jong-un in the world, his catering to every whim of Putin and attacks on NATO, the mishandling Syria, his war on women, his war on healthcare for veterans and all Americans, his personal use of his charity’s funds even when they are meant to aid children with cancer, his xenophobia, his general virulent racism, shutting down research for a cure for AIDS, Children dying in cages, withdrawing from the Paris agreement on Climate Change... all of these things can only be done with one end result in mind, the tarnishing of America's image so badly that confidence in America and its economy crashes to the ground. Doing one or two of these things can be chalked up to a difference in political thought. All of them? That is being an American-hating, even humanity-hating mental case, and a Manchurian President. Regardless of which it is, and regardless of the fact that he appears to be all three, the result is the same and that result is getting worse by the day as those who could do something about it emulate Nero and fiddle away the country.

Is No One Noticing The Greatest Economic Mismanagement In History?

Yesterday, there was a trial balloon about decision to appoint deranged coke freak Larry Kudlow to replace Gary Cohn as Trump's chief economic advisor. Kudlow is a greed-and-selfishness crackpot who can only make the vibrant economy that Obama left Trump worse-- and more rapidly. Trump has already been sowing the seeds for a big downturn himself. As Alan Grayson, a former economist as well as a former congressman, pointed out this week: "Trump’s 'fiscal policy' bears a striking resemblance to Trump’s real estate business model: borrow your way to bankruptcy, and hope to leave someone else holding the bag. Four Trump subsidiaries have gone bankrupt. Or is it six?  And all exactly the same way: borrowing more than they could afford to pay. And Trump himself? In 1990, his net worth was NEGATIVE $900 million-- making Trump possibly the 'poorest' individual in history. Although I’m sure Trump has heard the old saying: 'owe the bank $10,000, and you have a problem. Owe the bank $1,000,000, and the bank has a problem.' And look at what Trump is doing to our government’s 'business model': something very similar. 

FY2017 federal borrowing: $519 billion
FY2018 federal borrowing (est.): $955 billion

And that, continued Grayson "is BEFORE the Trump tax cuts for billionaires kick in fully. After that, the federal deficit is $1,000,000,000,000.00+ per year, for as far as the eye can see. And that’s assuming that there will be someone out there-- the Martians, maybe?-- who are going to remain willing to lend that kind of money to a government run by Putin’s Papaya Pawn. It’s the greatest economic mismanagement in history. Which is saying a lot, given the fact that we already have a foreign debt of more than $10 trillion."

Grayson, who is running for Congress again, is warning that Trump's merry-go-round will spin faster and faster, until everyone is thrown off and asking the American people to "prevent Trump from putting us all on line at the Trump Soup Kitchen."

And, don't get me wrong, a deficit isn't a terrible thing... if it's being used to create more wealth for the general public. Trumponomics is all about discredited, failed trickle-down theories that creates more wealth for the very rich and leaves the rest of us on the side of the pot-holed road to rot.

Tim Canova, the progressive attorney running for a South Florida congressional seat occupied by Wall Street ally Debbie Wasserman Schultz, found it easy to fit the shortcomings of Trumponomics into the news of the day:

The appointment of TV commentator Larry Kudlow-- the latest episode of celebrity White House apprentice-- returns the office of chief economic advisor to the clownish tradition of past administrations. Kudlow's main qualification is his adherence to extreme supply side economics, opposing estate taxes and taxes on dividends and capital gain, even in the face of gaping and growing inequalities in income and wealth. This trickle-down fiscal policy is mirrored by a trickle-down monetary policy in the form of trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve quantitative easing (QE) programs for Wall Street banks and wealth holders. This is also bubble economics, cheering on the gross inequalities and exploitations that inevitably result in bust. Not to worry, to supply siders like Kudlow this becomes yet another opportunity for plunder, from enormous Wall Street bailouts and corporate subsidies to a strategy of austerity for Main Street and relentless privatizations of public services.

Kudlow is not the first clown or blowhard to serve as White House economics advisor. Glenn Hubbard, Larry Summers, Austen Goolsbee all strutted and fretted their hour on the stage only to reveal more clearly the tragicomedy of trickle down among the many failures and hypocrisies of crony capitalism: supply side tax rates when progressive taxation is most needed, massive deregulation of Wall Street in the face of reckless speculation, endless pain for Main Street and endless gains for Wall Street.

Larry Kudlow fits well within this clownish tradition. He famously denied the coming recession, even after it was well under way in 2007 he was still hailing a Bush boom and Bush himself as the nation's top economic forecaster. For Kudlow, it's always a bubble show and that's what makes it so clownish. He's exactly the kind of economist we would expect Donald Trump to have by his side when the roof starts to cave in on our financial markets.