When I was little I was talking too much and my mommy said there are only so many words in your voice box and if you use them all up you can't talk any more.
Congress seems to be thinking that there is only so much spending in the economy and if government does it, then business cannot.
"The Economic Roots of the Rise of Trumpism" (23-page PDF) by John Komlos
Here's the Abstract:
Donald Trump won the election in 2016 largely because enough voters in three states, all in the Rustbelt, who had voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012, switched their vote from Democratic to Republican. Economic dislocations played a crucial role in these swing states or democratic strongholds to persuade many voters to take the dramatic step to vote for an anti-establishment candidate even if that meant a leap of faith into the unknown. The sources of the dislocation were the development of a dual economy characterized at one end by low and stagnating wages, increasing debt, downward social mobility, declining relative incomes, and the hopelessness accompanying them while at the other end of the income distribution the economy was simply booming. This was longer than a three-decade process that started with Reaganomics and its tax cuts that privileged the rich and conferred immense wealth, and its concomitant, political power, on them. Reaganomics also accelerated the decline in the power of unions which had supported the middle class. The process continued under Bill Clinton’s administration and its continuing both financial deregulation and of hyper-globalization. George Bush continued to pamper the superrich with his tax policies. The process culminated with Barack Obama’s bailing out the superrich and his benign neglect of Mainstreet. Five administration’s disinterest in the social group Hillary Clinton referred to flippantly as “the deplorables” culminated in the revolt of the masses in favor of an incompetent strongman by overthrowing the establishment captured by such chants at Trump rallies as “Lock her up!”, “USA!”, “Build the wall”, or “Drain the swamp” (i.e., in Washington D.C.)
CESifo Working Paper No. 6868.
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| Graph #1 |
Dunno how much of US auto manufacturing is done in Michigan, nor the reason for the 2000-2010 decline, but I think the graph shows an interesting picture. Employment shown on the graph fell from 90,000 to 30,000 in ten years.
Note the sequence: First the low spot, then the good years of the latter 1990s. Then too much of a good thing, followed by hard times:
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| Graph #1: Ratio of Credit to Money |
Natural Log of the federal spending data shown yesterday:
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| Graph #1: Natural Log of federal current spending |
The slope of the line indicates the rate of growth.
From say 1952 to 1965 the line goes up.
From 1965 to around 1983 it goes up a lot faster: this was during the "Great Inflation".
After
1983 it goes up about as fast as it did from 1952 to 1965. In other
words, since the 1980s federal spending has been increasing about as
fast as it did during the "golden age" that followed World War Two.
See those sharp points there on the right?
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| Graph #1: Current expenditures of the federal government |
Republicans don't like sitting on them.
But even those of us on the left should be able to sympathize.
