The cold war between Trump and the GOP Establishment is getting hotter. In a speech at the University of Utah yesterday, former Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney attacked Trump as a “phony” and a “fraud” whose followers are “suckers”; Trump responded later in the day, and again on last night’s debate, that Romney (whom Trump supported, by the way) is a “failed candidate” who should have defeated Barack Obama, and is now struggling to maintain relevance. “I’m the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton,” he said during last night's debate, adding, “I haven’t even started on Hillary yet!”
Yet the allegations that he donated money to Hillary Clinton for her run for the 2008 election not once but four times stands unanswered, and he remains vulnerable on this point. He contends that he’s given money to both Republicans and Democrats — probably one of the few businessmen who is honest about his own past cronyism and its implications about how the U.S. system really works.
You give money to politicians to buy favors and advantage over competitors. Corporatism. In this respect, Trump is different only in his openness about it, and now having gone over onto the other side into politics, not needing any crony money (because corporations have been in the drivers’ seat for decades).
Other elites are hardening against Trump:
It is regrettable, the steps downward into coarse discourse and borderline vulgar references this campaign has engendered. Is Trump to blame for this? Some will say so, and he hasn’t exactly discouraged it. But the fact that his poll numbers are not wavering because of it bespeaks of a coarsening of U.S. culture that paved the way for silly remarks about the size of Trump’s hands and whatever implications one wants to draw from this about the size of his penis.
U.S. culture in freefall, I would say. Trump is just exploiting it, like any good capitalist would.
Other portions of last night’s debate were more on an even keel with issues needing discussing, such as whether Trump’s math works.
Consider this exchange:
FOX NEWS: Mr. Trump, your proposed tax cut would add $10 trillion to the nation's debt over 10 years, even if the economy grows the way that you say it will. You make up for a good deal of that, you say, by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse.
TRUMP: Correct.
FOX NEWS: Like what, hand please be specific.
TRUMP: Department of Education. We're cutting Common Core. We're getting rid of Common Core. We're bringing education locally. Department of Environmental Protection [Does he mean the Environmental Protection Agency? ~SY]. We are going to get rid are of it in almost every form.
We're going to have little tidbits left but we're going to take a tremendous amount out. We have various other things. If you look at the IRS. If you look at every single agency, we can cut it down and I mean really cut it down and save. The waste, fraud, and abuse is massive.
[...]
FOX NEWS: But Mr. Trump, your numbers don't add up. The Education Department, you talk about cutting, the total budget for the Education Department is $78 billion. And that includes Pell grants for low income students and aid to states for special education – I assume you wouldn't cut those things. The entire budget for the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, $8 billion. The deficit this year is $544 billion. That's more than a half trillion dollars. Your numbers don't add up, sir.
Trump tried to back up his math arguing that Medicare could save billions if drug prices were negotiated properly, but Fox News had a rebuttal for that as well.
"You say that medicare could save $300 billion a year negotiating lower drug prices. But medicare total only spends $78 billion a year on drugs. Sir, that's the facts. You are talking about saving more money on medicare," Fox News Moderator Chris Wallace said.
This never got settled.
Important article:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/brutal-economic-truth-behind-rise-110000766.html
This is why working people are flocking to Trump by the tens of thousands. Real median income for these people has been dropping since the 1990s. For this, many of Trump’s primary economic targets can be blamed: the outsourcing of jobs and the importation of foreign labor chief among them. The former allows the offshoring of production and re-importing of its results; the latter assures corporations a proliferation of laborers willing to work for dirt cheap. Between the two, corporate profits have taken off while ordinary Americans’ earning power has collapsed. Thus the rising inequality that has been the subject of books such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (2014).
One must also look at the easy money (i.e., money creation) policy of the Federal Reserve, which allowed cheap credit to flow into the economy in the 1990s, creating the tech boom which turned out to be the first massive bubble. When that bubble popped, the credit flowed into housing which became the bubble of the 2000 decade. After 2008 it began to swell the stock market, where it continues to this day. All along, Americans have been encouraged to go into debt to fuel mass-consumption lifestyles; the most significant increases of wealth, however, went to the top one or two percent, and this continues to the present day.
Nick Gillespie has assembled this account of what Mitt Romney gets wrong (in his humble opinion): Donald Trump is the consequence of a “conservative-Republicanism” that has completely lost its sense of direction because it has no core principles. It favors small government in rhetoric but not in practice. They are for individual rights except when they aren’t, for fiscal responsibility except when they aren’t. Same with “free markets.” Trump is thus a kind of “id” that has finally burst forth into the public consciousness. So is Trump what happens when those who call themselves “conservatives” have no idea what they want to conserve? We’ve visited this idea a couple of time. My suggestion is that conservatism as a principles-grounded movement died with Russell Kirk, and that the majority of those who use that term today are actually neocons and globalists. They understand “free markets” as the freedom of corporations to do as they please regardless of their effects on the many who did not sign off on their massive deals. This last, of course, suggests that the libertarianism of the Nick Gillespies of the world is equally unworkable even if consistent, as it tends to celebrate the freedom of “private” over “public” as if we were looking at a contrast, and not at “private” having “public” bought and paid for. The most important question: who is in the driver's seat? The answer: corporations, because they have the money and therefore the clout, as politicians need money to fund their reelection campaigns. With this we’re back to reality, and to what is leading the downwardly-mobile working class and former middle class to back Donald Trump, who may also be a billionaire but is at the moment they only voice representing their frustrations.
http://reason.com/blog/2016/03/03/how-mitt-romney-is-totally-wrong-about-d
Trump wants to stop the outsourcing of jobs and the influx of immigrants across open borders, and thus choke the two most visible elements placing Americans of less than modest means at a structural disadvantage. He then wants to grow the business environment inside U.S. borders in such a way that Americans benefit; and if this means protectionism via tariffs on imports, then so be it: the Chinese are doing it, after all, and we are crazy if we do not.
Whether Trump can pull this off remains to be seen. If he actually gets elected president of the U.S. in November, we may get to find out!
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