03-06-2017, 09:43 AM
(03-06-2017, 08:18 AM)Odin Wrote:(03-03-2017, 07:15 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: And right on cue the new administration (with Congress likely to follow) are doing their level best to undo the various mitigations and controls both Bush 43 and Obama kicked off.
Even if the current boom does not crash soon, at some point the overhang will be immense, simply due to bad fiscal behavior.
We'll see banks that can't pass a stress test, phony baloney corporate debt stashes, and all sorts of chicanery.
Except, this is not just a casino going bust.
If the US goes the way of the typical Trump mega leveraged crappy scheme, there is no one to bail us out.
We're due for an economic downturn now (modern business cycles tend to be 7-11 years long) and Trump's dangerous economic policies are sure to help drive the economy into a ditch. It's going to be the Smoot-Hartley Tariff debacle all over again.
It will be ugly.
Many Americans voted to give up the freedoms of others in return for questionable promises of economic gain. People like that deserve the Chavez or Mugabe who succeeds on such promises. (But what about people who prefer rationality in politics? We get stuck too). Even without a general downturn, Americans can expect worsening conditions of life as the insiders get rich off their connections and as workers' rights get sliced away.
Gerrymandering has ensured that the House of Representatives will be effectively the House of Corporate Lobbyists indefinitely, and Democrats have few chance for gain and many for loss in the Senate in 2018. In view of a political ideology best described as a revival of a Coolidge-Hoover ethos in economic ideology and great levels of corruption that one could not ascribe to Coolidge and Hoover, we could easily see a market crash as severe and protracted as the one beginning in the autumn of 1929.
My prediction: we're going to see Americans trying to recover as they did in the early 1930s, trying to piece their lives back together with small-scale enterprise that must cultivate customers who have little to spend. I expect American living standards to fall to levels now characteristic of Chile or Mexico... but if there is anything good about Donald Trump and the Congressional stooges who follow the gospel of Ayn Rand, it will be that such will be discredited.
Trump economics is nothing more than getting people to work harder for their pay and pay more for what they buy so that elite profits and executive compensation can get even greater. It is grossly unjust and ineffective at achieving anything except for a privileged few.
The real regeneracy comes when we demand more of ourselves and of our institutions. The only good thing to say about the economic downturn is that we will find plenty of cheap rentals, raw materials, and inventories in the fire sale without the fire. But at least the rigid low glass ceilings will be gone with the corrupt corporations that fail. We will have to rebuild based on family and community, and we will no longer see conspicuous consumption as the ratification of personal virtue.
In AA terms, the Regeneracy is "hitting bottom". With Donald Trump the bottom for most Americans could well be a replay of the 1930s. We're due for an FDR or Lincoln... and maybe it takes a Buchanan, a Hoover, or a Trump to make such possible. One totals the car, one has a family breakdown, one gets busted for writing NSF checks, one loses a job, or one loses a license and must take public transportation (thirty-minute wait for the bus whatever the weather, hour-long drive with all the stops on the way in to work instead of a twenty-minute drive on most days) to get to work, and repeat on the way back. An observation: when I worked in downtown Dallas for a coupe of days, I never saw so many sullen people as I saw waiting for the city bus to take them home... cold and wind in the winter, or either hard rain or brutal heat in the summer.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.