Mainstream Maverick

On Monday in Detroit, Donald Trump put on his best Big Boy pants, busted out the teleprompter, and tried to look like a grown up for an hour when he delivered a speech laying out his economic plan.  For a guy who has set much of the Republican establishment on fire over the last year, it's actually a but disappointing (if only for lost entertainment value) that Trump's speech is an essence just a copy/paste of every Republican economic speech over the last 30 years.

Trump continued his attacks against free trade agreements like the TPP, saying he'd withdraw from it outright, and that he'd renegotiate NAFTA so that it becomes a "win for America."  As far as this goes, I have no major policy complaints; from what we know of the TPP, it's not going to be good for anyone except multi-national corporations suddenly free to hold on to their extended periods of time and being able to sue governments over any policy that might jeopardize future profit margins.  NAFTA is also on my shit list for driving down wages in the U.S. and destroying a lot of local industries in Mexico.  The thing though, Trump bad mouthing these things isn't actually a plan.  His comments about both trade agreements were little more than his usual Twitter rants filtered through coherence and better sentence structure.  If you're going to say that you're going to renegotiate NAFTA to better benefit American workers, than your plan should lay out how the current deal is fucking over those workers and what you're going to do about it.  There was none of that in Trump's speech, meaning that even when his speechwriters lay out the words Trump is going to say beforehand the best they can do for him is just "NAFTA! BOOO! HISSS!"  

But seriously, Trump goes on at length about how he's going to make the trade deals great for America again, but every single time, he's somehow neglected to mention how he's going to do that.  At best, he just blathers about how he'll negotiate "better" and at worst he just throws up slogans like on Monday about how these deals will miraculously become everything America wants by virtue of his demanding the rest of the world make it so.  Really, his focus on trade is just red meat he needs to throw out to the crowd so they'll too busy chewing on that to notice that he never really bothers to lay out his (what one assumes is) the amazing, just amazing, things he's going to do to make job grow on trees in the Rust Belt again.

And, of course, there was the tax cuts.  Trump decided to back off his previous tax plan, which would've added $10 trillion to the national debt in ten years, by making the dramatic revision of... having three tax brackets instead of four.  The rates are marginally higher this time around, being 12, 25, and 33 percent instead of the 0, 10, 20, and 25 of his initial plan, and there aren't any new studies out yet measuring its impact, but honestly, I wouldn't expect the result to be any different.  Trump also made a point of saying that all corporations would be taxed at 15% instead of 35%.  The idea is that if corporations have more money on hand, they'll hire more people.  The problem with this line of thinking is that corporate America already has trillions of dollars in cash reserves that, if they wanted to, could have already used to hire who knows how many numbers of people.  Another problem is that this line of thinking deliberately misunderstands what employees are to their employers; they aren't assets, they're costs. That means that, on the corporate side, if they're already achieving near record breaking profits (which they've been doing for much of the Obama presidency) they have no incentive to increase their payroll costs, because, well, what would they actually need those people for?  Also keep in mind that cutting the corporate income tax increases a businesses profits but doesn't actually increase their sales, workload demand, or business expansion, you know, the thing that actually determines whether businesses actually hire people.

But if all that just seems to theoretical for you, let's look at the two biggest tax cutters in recent memory, George W. Bush and Sam Brownback.  Even if you're being generous to Bush the Younger and don't count the job losses in early 2008 as the runoff of the financial crisis, he still has the worst job growth of any President since the Great Depression.  Brownback, who was swept into the Kansas Governor's office in 2010, cut both personal and corporate income taxes to almost zero, promising a flood of job and riches for all under the sun.  Instead, Kansas has gotten years of budget crises and a job growth rate of 0.1 percent between January 2015-January 2016. A whole hundredth of a percentage point worth of growth in a whole year, huzzah.  At this point, the idea that cutting taxes will spur economic growth for all involved is less a policy idea and more of a dogma upheld by the ignorant and the delusional.

Overall, the speech encapsulates the problem with Trump's candidacy, he's really good at whipping people into a frenzy by nurturing and exploiting their grievances, he's even better at convincing those people that he's actually intelligent and competent enough to solve those grievances.  But when it's time to put up and prove that he actually has a plan to do so, all he can come up are vague slogans and the same failed ideas that have been vomited up for decades now.  I mean, I always figured Trump's policy ideas would be just empty space and cobwebs, but I just thought he wouldn't crib the cobwebs from literally every Republican before him,