I actually agree with you–I was just pointing his paper credentials would seem to indicate he should have expertise in the area.
And one would think Trump would use his degree to call himself an economist but I have NEVER heard him describe himself in THAT way,
If someone has a cite for Trump doing so please post a link to it,
He’s wants to be the president that creates an American empire. He wants to be the president who expanded America to ‘rule the world’ size. Change the maps entirely. He wants America to be bigger than Russia, in other words the BIGGEST country EVER!
Then it will truly be Great again, right?
And he thinks he can do it with tariffs and taunts apparently.
I’ll say it again, the entire world is in for a lot pain, (very likely for an extended time), all due to the ignorance of the American voter.
I agree. Here is his thought process - raise tariffs and companies will be forced to move their manufacturing to the US and people will be employed and everyone will love him. If it raises prices or causes a recession, who cares. No other country will have the nerve to raise tariffs in retaliation.
He of course has no idea that you can’t start up a factory over night. He really is that stupid.
Or that with the US at full employment and experiencing shortages of things like construction workers, healthcare workers, and trades, how do we plan to make all these things happen?
This.
As far as Trump himself: he’s in dementia. (He can’t always remember how to use a mic.) He didn’t have much sense of consequence to his actions before; he’s got even less of it now.
I think the tariffs are mostly posturing, he is demanding respect based on strength and power not his personality. It is a big gamble he is taking no telling how many countries will call his bluff.
I just think he is attempting to set as many brushfires as possible to divert attention and resources from the arsonist himself.
Yes, the only way “crash it so the billionaires can buy it all” can work is in the VERY early stages of the crash, and they wouldn’t buy it all. They’d just buy some fraction of the S&P 500 companies, a fraction that will let them extort the rest of the economy and generally throw their weight around. (That’s my guess, anyway. Some of those billionaires must be aware of the numbers you cite, after all.)
And of course if the economy crashed to the extent that all the S&P 500 companies are reduced to half their current value, there wouldn’t really be an ongoing economy to try to dominate. It would be more a case of peasants with pitchforks at the billionaires’ gates.
So on the whole I’d suspect there are some Trump enablers who think they’ll personally profit from the chaos he’s creating, but there are probably more of them who think “something” will happen to stop Trump from actually bombing us (economically) back to the stone age. A lot of them aren’t really thinking it through. They’re just riding the crest of the wave, they think, and “smartly” profiting so that they will be personally fine while most of the nation is smoking ruins.
THIS on the tariffs. Trump’s already entertaining supplicants and offering exemptions to those who please him (presumably with a nice big check).
He gets richer and also gets the fun of having people grovel before him.
By one means or another Trump is determined to be declared President-for-Life. Economic collapse justifying a designation of a “national emergency” is one of the less violent ways that could happen.
I agree. Trump thinks he’s strong. He sees people who he thinks are weaker than him and he expects to be able to bully them into giving him stuff. This explains how he treats Canada, Mexico, NATO, Zelensky, Columbia University, media corporations, his own supporters, etc.
No, he’s just a toddler who got his hands on a book of matches. He isn’t planning on committing arson but he’s likely to burn the house down.
The chaos itself is the goal. Over the years, Trump has somehow gotten it into his head that he benefits from chaos, so he creates it every chance he gets.
It is a distraction for the takeover of the US. It is clear that the playbook is to sow chaos while consolidating all power with the Presidency. Trusk has kneecapped DOJ, IG’s, AG’s, Congress’ power of the purse, elite Universities, FBI, replacing senior military leaders, the big law firms, and setting the stage to ignore the Supreme Court.
Ezra Klein of the NY Times had a really good podcast: What is DOGE’s real Goal?
Trump’s belief that tariffs are great and international trade is bad is a belief he truly, legitimately holds. He has been on record as saying international trade is a ripoff for essentially as long as he has been a public figure, since LONG before he expressed any interest in politics. It is not an act. He absolutely believes in autarky and that trade is zero sum, it’s truly what he thinks.
The fact this is economically illiterate is not as at-odds with his degree in economics as you might think. I have a degree in economics, from a very good school, and I can assure you all that it is possible to pass the coursework and be under considerable misapprehension about some of the concepts.
This is especially true of international trade. On paper it’s provably a great idea, and it’s common sense if you think of it right, but
On top of that, Trump’s personality gets in t he way, because he’s a predator. TRUMP assumes everyone else is trying to rip him off, all the time, because he is always trying to rip everyone else off. It’s just how he sees the world; it’s why he insists of slavish loyalty, because slaves aren’t engaged in a deal with you, it’s all one way. Since he is perpetually trying to scam people, he assumes everyone else is trying to scam him, and indeed trying to scam everyone all the time. If that’s your emotional base, the fact trade helps both sides is hard to accept.
In no particular order, here is what I think the goals of various policies are. In many cases Trump is being manipulated or just doesn’t care. Also, things certainly don’t always work as planned, resulting in chaos.
None of this is unique ideas to me, they are all from stuff I’ve read, heard, or misunderstood.
The authoritarian secret police ICE rendition stuff is exactly what it appears to be, an attempt to exert ultimate authoritarian power as the sole executive.
I come, hat in hand with a Mea Culpa
It seems the normally eagle-eyed dopers missed my order of magnitude mistake.
I wrote:
Which is accurate.
However, I then wrote:
Where I apparently, stupidly, grew the S&P 500 by a factor of 10 in a few sentences.
So now I have to ask if:
Could $6 trillion take control of the S&P 500 if the value of the S&P were to drop 50% to $25 trillion, 51% of which is $12.5 trillion-ish. I still say no, for a lot of reasons including that the wealth of the 800 billionaires isn’t liquid enough, for one thing. For example, how much TSLA would Elmo have to liquidate to take his portion? And of course, as they tried to execute the purchases, prices would rise and the current shareholders would be incentivized to NOT sell, thus making the purchases more expensive…
But nonetheless, I submit to you that I am an idiot and I apologize.
If you eliminate what little social safety net that America has, you create a permanent class of working poor who will fill those jobs.
I’m guessing we won’t be hearing these words from anyone in the current administration.
I think that’s their theory. I don’t think it’s going to work, especially considering that they’re deporting immigrants – I think the theory there might be that people terrified of being deported will work in horrible conditions for next to no pay because complaining will get them arrested, but I suspect that those who have any possibilities elsewhere will just go somewhere else instead.
Work in construction, health care, and trades (and for that matter agriculture) includes a high percentage of jobs requiring being in good physical shape; and a lot of the people getting benefits aren’t. Most of those jobs also require training, many of them quite a lot of training; and at least in the short run most people aren’t trained for them.
Of course, it’s also possible that their theory is that robots will do the work. Most of the humans just become disposable.
I use my dumbass inlaws as a conservative benchmark. Keep in mind a lot of those people aren’t in the markets, don’t understand the markets, and their only real understanding of economics is “people I know have/don’t have jobs” and “shit is more/less expensive than what I remember it being 40 years ago”. Throw in a bit of nationalism and xenophobia in there as well and it all starts to make sense.
IOW to his followers, Trump is going after all these countries that have “threatened” American prosperity by raising prices and taking our jobs with nationalized industries, tariffs, and outsourcing. So regardless of what the actual outcome is economically, at least he’s “doing something about it”.
I could make arguments for several different goals, and each supported by various lines of evidence.
To me, that says that we’re looking at a case of shotgunning. Trump says various things in a stream of consciousness, and his listeners pick out the parts that they like, and assume that the other parts are misunderstood, lies, jokes, or misspeaking.
Trump’s economic goals are to build a base of power and for grift. He takes economic actions with an eye towards preserving the image of strength and support for the common workers so that they will support him, with an eye towards reducing the tax payload of the wealthy so that they support him; and with an eye towards punishing the liberals so that his base will support him.
He punished unions that back him. He rewards unions that support him.
It’s not an economic agenda, it’s a power agenda. Whatever will work best in that aim, so be it.