Donnie doesn't care!

You may recall that in Casablanca Humphrey Bogart said" We will always have Paris". Thursday, Donnie said" Oh no we won't". Since then, the members of the press with their lips quivering have been breathlessly asking everyone in the administration, and shouting at Donnie, does the president believe in climate change and anthropogenic causation? The response from the administrative spokesmen has been to chant a sort of rosary that" The presidents agenda is economic progress". Now it seems to me the answer is clear and that answer is" Donnie doesn't give a damn".

Donnie continues to be fixated on the notion that he, against overwhelming odds, won the election and he did so by promising more of all good things for everyone. More good jobs, better health plans, growth of GDP and less taxes. According to Donnie, pretty much all that is necessary to create an economic miracle is less regulation and lower taxes.  He also did have an economic adviser, Peter Navarro, who said all that was necessary was to eliminate trade deficits with China. Unfortunately, harking back to the movie Casablanca, like Umphrey Bogart and Claude Rains, Donnie thinks he and Xi" have the start of a beautiful friendship". So, apparently the China strategy is out.

That leaves tax cuts and those meddlesome regulations.  There is no doubt that the complete elimination of all regulations of business would in the short run increase profits. When the administration and the Republican Congress do a cost benefit analysis of eliminating regulations, they use single entry accounting. They calculate benefits but they don't bother with costs, particularly mid and long-term costs such as worker and product safety, individual health costs and long term pollution costs. Maybe Donnie thinks he is going to put those coal minors at work cleaning up the new Superfund sites he would be creating. As for tax cuts, Donnie and his congressional cohorts obviously believe that all tax cuts spur the economy. There is a wealth of study on this question and it just ain't true. It depends upon what the economic situation is at the time of the tax cuts and who receives them. The proposed tax cuts now will go primarily to those individuals and corporations who already have more money than they know what to do with. It is also the case that we have, if slow, at least steady growth and are nearly at full employment. In fact, if Greenspan was now head of the Fed he would be worrying that we are about to exceed the NAIRU, and will face inflationary pressures if unemployment levels fall anymore. If the Republicans really wanted to use tax cuts in a stimulating way, the tax cuts would go to the low-end of the wage earners to stimulate aggregate demand.

Donnie said Thursday that other countries are laughing at us because we were signatories to the Paris record. Well, most other countries are not laughing, or did they, but you can bet that right now there is uproarious laughter in Beijing. In Donnie, China has the unwitting dupe/dope they have been longing for. Make no doubt about it, having elected Donnie the joke is on us.