1. The degradation of Americans' personal freedom began in earnest under Dubya as a response to 9/11. The danger of terrorism has abated greatly, but most of the restrictions remain. I suggest that those were convenient for the Big Government right-wingers of recent years.
The optimal time for undoing the more severe gutting of personal freedom would have been in the wake of the whacking of Osama bin Laden, but any effort to do so would have failed. The Right wanted only the freedom to monopolize and gouge while smashing labor unions and weakening regulation of business on matters not related to terrorism (like environmental controls).
2. Without question, Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader who seeks to transform government into an enforcer of the will of the economic elites. Expecting him to undo the degradation of personal freedom beginning with Dubya is like expecting safe driving by a drunk.
3. The deficit has risen because of Dubya's wars for profit, the Panic of 2008 that looked like the start of another Great Depression, and big tax cuts for the Master Class under Dubya and Trump.
4. Trade deficits follow the business cycle. People import less in a recession. The best way to get balance-of-payments surpluses is to have a recession in one;s own country while other countries boom.
5. How does Trump differ from Obama?
Trump lacks the personal integrity, caution, respect for expertise, modulated language, reverence for protocol and precedent, and compassion for people in bad situations that one associates with Obama. Trump has an image of the Presidency as a near-dictatorship in which he can order anyone in the government about as if he were their direct boss. He acts as if he can order a scientist to negate scientific research because the President believes that global warming is a hoax.
The next effective conservative President will act more like Obama than like Trump. I have frequently compared Obama to Eisenhower.
The optimal time for undoing the more severe gutting of personal freedom would have been in the wake of the whacking of Osama bin Laden, but any effort to do so would have failed. The Right wanted only the freedom to monopolize and gouge while smashing labor unions and weakening regulation of business on matters not related to terrorism (like environmental controls).
2. Without question, Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader who seeks to transform government into an enforcer of the will of the economic elites. Expecting him to undo the degradation of personal freedom beginning with Dubya is like expecting safe driving by a drunk.
3. The deficit has risen because of Dubya's wars for profit, the Panic of 2008 that looked like the start of another Great Depression, and big tax cuts for the Master Class under Dubya and Trump.
4. Trade deficits follow the business cycle. People import less in a recession. The best way to get balance-of-payments surpluses is to have a recession in one;s own country while other countries boom.
5. How does Trump differ from Obama?
Trump lacks the personal integrity, caution, respect for expertise, modulated language, reverence for protocol and precedent, and compassion for people in bad situations that one associates with Obama. Trump has an image of the Presidency as a near-dictatorship in which he can order anyone in the government about as if he were their direct boss. He acts as if he can order a scientist to negate scientific research because the President believes that global warming is a hoax.
The next effective conservative President will act more like Obama than like Trump. I have frequently compared Obama to Eisenhower.
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.