A rational (fact-based) discussion on Trump v Clinton

[RickJay]

@QuickSilver

Translation:

I don’t understand what any of you just said because I can’t count past the number of digits on my hands and feet.

This is a personal insult and isn’t in the Pit. A warning not to do it again.

RickJay
Moderator

[Robot_Arm]

@The_Great_Unwashed

I think you are misunderstanding the principle of trickle-down economics – those boats and cars and houses have to be made by someone, and those someones are the beneficiaries of what trickles down.

The money does trickle down. It trickles down to the CEOs of the car companies and to real-estate developers. Then they spend it and it trickles down to the presidents of airlines and cruise ship lines.

[Merneith]

For comparison, here is Hillary Clinton’s plan to increase jobs:

An economy that works for everyone - The Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton

A more detailed explanation is available here -
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/06/22/stronger-together-hillary-clintons-plan-for-an-economy-that-works-for-everyone-not-just-those-at-the-top/
The core of Hillary’s plan is these five points:

[ul]

[li] Break Through Washington Gridlock to Make the Boldest Investment in Good-Paying Jobs Since World War II[/li][li] [/li] Make Debt Free College Available to All Americans
[li] [/li] Rewrite the Rules to Ensure That Workers Share in the Profits They Help Create
[li] [/li] Ensure That Those at the Top Pay Their Fair Share
[li] [/li] Put Families First by Matching Our Policies to How Families Live, Learn, and Work in the 21st Century Economy

[/ul]

She plans to invest in infrastructure jobs. The part about making everyone pay their fair share includes increased taxes on the top brackets. She also wants to force companies that move their business overseas to pay an exit fee and to pay back all the tax breaks they’ve received from being in the US.

She also wants to improve the family leave situation and forgive student debt.
The plan has been reviewed by economists and they are largely positive. You can see their remarks here:
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/briefing/factsheets/2016/01/14/experts-say-clintons-economic-plan-is-right-to-grow-the-economy/

Here’s a sample of their blurbs:

@Economists praising Hillary Clinton's plan for job creation

Joseph Stiglitz: “Hillary Clinton began to offer the kind of comprehensive approach we need to tackle the enormous economic challenges we face.”

**Paul Krugman: **“In fact, Mrs. Clinton’s speech reflected major changes, deeply grounded in evidence, in our understanding of what determines wages.”

Warren Buffett: Clinton “will make sure that those people who are having to work two jobs to barely get by will not have that kind of world for themselves and their children moving forward.”

**
J. Dionne: **“Hillaryeconomics is a wager that voters across racial and ethnic lines, very much
including members of the white working class, want a raise and better benefits. And it’s a sharp challenge to Republicans. To be competitive in 2016, the GOP needs to make a plausible counter offer. It’s the bidding war an economy mired in inequality and stalled mobility needs — and it’s one Clinton thinks she can win.”

It’s just a plan, but at least it is a plan, with details and relatively positive responses, unlike what Trump has offered.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@QuickSilver

Translation:

I don’t understand what any of you just said because I can’t count past the number of digits on my hands and feet. I’m just going to pretend you’re all egg-headed nerds because the world to me is an elementary school playground and I’m going to side with the beefy dumb kid so he doesn’t beat the snot out of me. Y’all can just go on with your fancy readin’’ and countin’.

That’s enough. Keep the mockery to a minimum. Any more personal shots will earn warnings.

[GIGObuster]

Regarding how many jobs Trump would create the point is a moot one if we allow Trump to become president.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/20/u-s-economy-would-be-diminished-under-trumps-economic-plan-new-analysis-says/

A new analysis concludes Donald Trump’s economic proposals, taken at face value, could produce a prolonged recession and heavy job losses that would fall hardest on low- and middle-income workers.

The Moody’s Analytics report, which a person close to the Trump campaign strongly disputed, is the first that attempts to quantify the cumulative economic benefits and costs of Mr. Trump’s proposals on taxes, trade, immigration and spending. It determines that full adoption of those policies would sharply reduce economic output during his first term and reduce employment by 3.5 million jobs.

Under almost any scenario, the report says, “the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished.”

Speaking of fact based: one can not avoid talking about how Trump fails to understand science, and it is clear that he will undermine national health efforts and international treaties.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/17/the-gops-dangerous-debate-on-vaccines-and-autism/

Trump essentially doubled down on his past statements by again suggesting that vaccines, or concentrations of them, cause autism.

“Autism has become an epidemic,” he warned. “Twenty-five years ago, 35 years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close. It has gotten totally out of control.”

Rand Paul, like Carson, a doctor, also equivocated on the issue.

“I’m all for vaccines,” he said. “But I’m also for freedom.”

The exchange, particularly Trump’s comments, drew a sharp response from autism groups.

“Despite a wealth of scientific evidence debunking any link between autism and vaccinations, tonight’s Republican primary debate featured prominent commentary from a leading candidate repeating inaccurate information suggesting a link,” the Autistic Self Advocacy Network said in a statement. “Autism is not caused by vaccines — and Autistic Americans deserve better than a political rhetoric that suggests that we would be better off dead than disabled.”

Whether or not the vaccine “debate” did any damage to Carson, Trump, Paul or the GOP among voters is still unclear. But it was a talking point from a testy night full of politicians pushing back against science and “big government.”

https://thinkprogress.org/the-environmental-implications-of-a-trump-presidency-fc298e5fd83c#.hy3aiyoo1

Renegotiating Paris

“If Donald Trump is elected, he would be the first climate-denying head of state in the world,” the Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune said on a Wednesday press call.

Trump has said he would seek to renegotiate the “one-sided,” “bad,” Paris climate agreement, ignoring the fact that the agreement is one-sided in favor of the United States, not against it. The rest of the planet has agreed to cut emissions, which will help to save Trump specifically from ruin, as someone who owns a lot of coastal property.

“The laws of physics are not very negotiable,” James Murphy, senior counsel at the National Wildlife Federation, told ThinkProgress. He said that whether Trump would renegotiate the agreement or completely renege on it is immaterial to the fact that the United States should not walk away from the obligations it made at Paris.

Could Trump actually renegotiate the agreement? The future head of the U.N. climate office, Patricia Espinosa, said “it would not be easy.” Yet unless the agreement gets locked in this year, he could certainly slow the process down or move to take America out of it as the Bush administration did with the Kyoto Protocol 16 years ago. This could lead to similar defections from other countries.

“Trump is proposing we negotiate away American global leadership,” Sierra Club’s Shulman said. “What he said is ridiculous and would do irreparable damage to our role in the world. Trump’s comments show how little he understands about conducting foreign policy.”

Given how little regard Trump appears to hold for international agreements and U.S. allies, this may not hold much sway in a Trump administration.
Carbon and Energy in a Tax Compromise?

Cramer, Trump’s energy adviser, made some waves last week when he said he advised Trump that he should consider a carbon tax as a replacement for the Clean Power Plan.

Trump replied on Twitter that reports that he might consider a carbon tax were false:

Indeed, Trump replied in the AEA questionnaire that he would not support a carbon tax, nor the administration’s social cost of carbon .

It’s possible a carbon tax could get folded into a broader tax compromise, but people say that all the time and it never happens. Trump could be different — his anti-corporate rhetoric alarmed the fossil fuel industry earlier in the campaign. Trump is expected to lay out a broadly fossil-fuel-friendly plan in his North Dakota speech, however.

“Trump believes that when oil spills occur ‘you clean them up’ and called the push to develop renewable energy a ‘big mistake’ and ‘an expensive way of making treehuggers feel good about themselves,’” Shulman said. “The current GOP drive to subsidize fossil fuels at the expense of renewables would continue under a President Trump.”
Extract, Baby, Extract

Trump has promised to bring back coal jobs when campaigning in West Virginia. Which is a problem when most of the coal jobs that have been lost were due to decisions made by the industry to mechanize their workforce. And the market is simply moving away from coal to natural gas and renewable energy. It’s unclear what Trump would do on this, other than blow smoke.

That doesn’t mean the coal industry isn’t on board with a candidate who is alarmingly unfamiliar with the energy sector.

When coal executive Bob Murray suggested Trump allow more LNG terminals to export more natural gas, Trump had a question for Murray. “What’s LNG?” Liquefied natural gas terminals are the only way to transport natural gas overseas, which would reduce the domestic natural gas supply glut and, at least to the coal industry, make coal more competitive. A president promising to bring coal jobs back should be familiar with the economic trends affecting coal.

Still, Murray was impressed with Trump. “He’s got his head on right,” Murray concluded after their meeting.

BTW that is the same Bob Murray that has influence over attorney generals of several states that by “pure coincidence” are trying to defeat new emission regulations from the EPA.

Fossil Fuel Industry-Funded Attorneys General Try to Block ExxonMobil Climate...

As usual, Trump and many Republicans do not care if the world will burn, because they will find a way to make money out of the problems that they will make worse.

[DSeid]

@DSeid

… he can be credited with creating 34,000 jobs via a multiplier effect. …

Returning to the jobs creation comparison …

Perhaps the best comparison with HR Clinton is to accept the GOP position that Clinton would be more of Obama at face value and presume that she would do pretty much what he has done. That’s somewhere between 9.3 and 14.1 million jobs depending on what specific metric you decide is fair to use.

You think though maybe she will create jobs more like WJ Clinton did though? Okay. That’s 19.3 million.

By the facts-based numbers Clinton clearly wins.

Of course reality is more complex than what is captured in these numbers alone.
Obama has in fact done an excellent job with the economy overall but income and wealth inequality continues to grow. Poverty rates are not dropping and even with the policies he put in place that blunt some of its impact many are still suffering.

The tasks ahead are difficult. Grow the economy overall and simultaneously decrease income and wealth inequality preferably mostly by way of creating more good middle class jobs without decreasing the numbers of jobs above that level.

Neither Trump nor Clinton has ever done that before personally. We do have to judge them each here based on what they say their plans are.

Building walls, this time not physical ones but ones separating us from full participation in the global economy, is something likely to shrink the economy overall and will fail to increase any middle class jobs. Threatening to default on our international debt is madness.

Trickle down, at least according to International Monetary Fund, just does not work.

The researchers calculated that when the richest 20% of society increase their income by one percentage point, the annual rate of growth shrinks by nearly 0.1% within five years.

This shows that “the benefits do not trickle down,” the researchers wrote in their report, which analyzed over 150 countries.

By contrast, when the lowest 20% of earners see their income grow by one percentage point, the rate of growth increases by nearly 0.4% over the same period.

Obama has called trickle down “fairy dust” and that is being generous … at least fairy dust rarely causes harm. Bringing the bottom up OTOH is evidence-based.
I cannot say that I personally am sure that HR Clinton’s proposals will completely do the job. There are major factors that make the task very difficult, from automation to international economic factors that we have no control over and that hiding from does not make go away. But there is zero question in my mind that the economic plan she proposes is at least a plan that will move us in the right direction and that Trump’s would be catastrophic.