04 August 2018

Spectacularly Incompetent

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an intriguing article (link here) about how Donald Trump's attempt to reduce the trade deficit is a whopping disaster. He's determined to get the deficit down, yet it will hit a ten-year high this year.

Notwithstanding he has an undergraduate degree from Wharton, Trump repeatedly demonstrates how he's clueless about macroeconomics. Of course, he endlessly brags about how he never went to class nor bought the required textbooks, as if that makes him some kind of genius. Coincidentally, or not, he also attended university when wealthy students routinely paid graduate students to take their exams and do their papers for them, which might explain why he's clueless about economic basics.

As Americans overall became more prosperous and educated over recent decades, the economy transitioned from a manufacturing-based one to a more service-oriented one. Service economies are now the hallmark of first-world nations, while manufacturing economies are primarily in second and third world countries.

Yet Trump foolishly thinks he can return America to a manufacturing economy. He's trying to achieve this with his ruinous tariffs, which will only make things more expensive for everyone.

He foolishly believes he can achieve the impossible, yet study after study has demonstrated that manufacturing jobs will not come back to any significant degree (details here). If he had any sense, which he doesn't, he'd try to reshape the educational system to train underemployed people for this new economy rather than trying to bring back jobs that mostly will never return.

Trump will fail miserably with his quest, as the numbers already show. Yet all Americans will suffer for it with the higher prices that are coming and, in some products, are already here because of Trump-imposed tariffs and resulting inflation.

The 2018 elections and 2020 elections cannot come soon enough. This incompetent clown needs to be reined in with this year's elections then removed from office in 2020. The Republicans are too gutless to do it, so Democrats must replace them to stabilize the country.

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