Success: President Trump

Showing posts with label President Trump. Show all posts

Will President Trump be impeached?

California Democratic Representative Maxine Waters has warned President Donald Trump that he should prepare to be impeached, the latest escalation of rhetoric over alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Ms Waters has been pressing Congress to quickly impeach Mr Trump if evidence arises of his alleged collusion with the Russian government during the election race.

Protectionism before Trump

Dependency on USA

Trump and Protectionism

Punkonomics

Trumponomics - the advice

The Trump Medicine

As for Trump’s medicine? That is not only unlikely to deliver to the “ordinary” American he supposedly champions - it may well make their lives worse. At best his proposed income cuts look like benefiting the rich much more than the poor.

Brookings Institution research suggests that they would lead to the 0.1% of the population who earn over £3 million seeing their taxes fall on average by £88,000 (a cut of 14%). The poorest 20% of households, on the other hand, would see their taxes cut by only £88 (a cut of 0.8%).

Lily Batchelder of NYU and the Tax Policy Center are even more pessimistic.

According to their calculations, those who are just about managing will become in real terms worse off, whilst millionaires will get an average tax cut of £255,000, a single parent earning £60,000 with two school age children will face a tax increase of over £1,900.

Trump’s proposed corporation tax cuts - whilst candy for the stock market - won’t necessarily lead to more jobs and more investment.

History teaches us that such gains do not inevitably trickle down.

A similar tax reform in 2004 which encouraged US companies to bring their funds back into the US by cutting slashing taxes lead to no increase in investment and only a transitory increase in employment.

Companies instead increased their dividend payments and share buybacks.

Trump and Trade

IT MUST seem to Donald Trump that reversing globalisation is easy-peasy. With a couple of weeks still to go before he is even inaugurated, contrite firms are queuing up to invest in America. This week Ford cancelled a $1.6 billion new plant for small cars in Mexico and pledged to create 700 new jobs building electric and hybrid cars at Flat Rock in Michigan—while praising Mr Trump for improving the business climate in America. Other manufacturers, such as Carrier, have changed their plans, too. All it has taken is some harsh words, the odd tax handout and a few casual threats.

Mr Trump has consistently argued that globalisation gives America a poor deal. He reportedly wants to impose a tariff of 5% or more on all imports. To help him, he has assembled advisers with experience in the steel industry, which has a rich history of trade battles. Robert Lighthizer, his proposed trade negotiator, has spent much of his career as a lawyer protecting American steelmakers from foreign competition. Wilbur Ross, would-be commerce secretary, bought loss-making American steel mills just before George W. Bush increased tariffs on imported steel. Daniel DiMicco, an adviser, used to run Nucor, America’s biggest steel firm. Peter Navarro, an economist, author of books such as “Death by China” and now an adviser on trade, sees the decline of America’s steel industry as emblematic of how unfair competition from China has hurt America

What to expect from Trumponomics

What to expect....

While we don't have a clear picture yet of what the Trump Administration will propose to Congress on individual tax policy, we have some ideas. If you run a business or corporation, you'll find much to like. If you're a middle-income taxpayer, there are slim pickings.

Much of the Trump plan -- what he's made public to date -- follows the Republican template: Cut taxes for big business and high-income taxpayers and hope the tax savings will trickle down to create jobs and economic activity.

That premise has never proven to work in real life. After a raft of tax cuts from the George W. Bush years, economic activity is still well under 3% and shows no signs of perking up. Trump's allies have said they can return the GDP growth rate to the 4% level.

Trumponomics

Read this article on TRUMPONOMICS

A pack of Nobel Prize-winning economists gave Donald Trump and his policy plans the thumbs-down on Friday, with one saying the president-elect’s programs could lead to a deep recession.

Speaking on a panel during the first day of the annual American Economic Association meeting in Chicago, the Nobel laureates voiced a variety of concerns about the billionaire developer’s stance, from his haranguing of U.S. companies about their outsourcing plans to the risk that his tax and spending proposals could lead to run-away budget deficits.

“There is a broad consensus that the kind of policies that our president-elect has proposed are among the polices that will not work,” said Joseph Stiglitz, summing up the views of the panel that included his fellow Columbia University professor Edmund Phelps and Yale University’s Robert Shiller.

Trumponomics

Donald Trump’s administration will implement large tax cuts and substantial financial deregulation. President Trump may also change U.S. policies on trade, although precisely what he will do is less clear—and the shift may be more rhetorical than real. Trump is also likely to substantially cut or privatize federal spending. To the extent that his policies add up to a coherent economic strategy, they are reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s, but with an extra dose of cronyism and the wild card of economic nationalism.

Trump himself and several of his key appointees are also poster children for oligarchy and even kleptocracy—government operated to serve the business interests of elites, including top officials. The intermingling of business, family, and government as the Trump administration takes shape unfortunately parallels what I have observed in corrupt developing countries over the past 30 years, including during my time as chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.

Mental health and President Trump

Hillary Clinton claimed Trump was “temperamentally unfit” to be President, and in recent months many people the world over have reached the same conclusion.

Clinton was, of course, Trump’s political opponent, but some psychologists have now started questioning his state of mind.

Until recently, psychologists weren't allowed to assess public figures and talk to journalists about their findings. But this rule is noe being cast aside and mental health experts are speaking out about Trump.

In a bid to warn the public, psychologists are publishing their diagnoses of Trump. Most recently, John D. Gartner said Trump “is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

The American Psychiatry Association has a nine-point checklist for narcissism - if someone displays just five of the traits, they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements).
Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
Requires excessive admiration.
Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.
Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.
Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
Shows arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes.

Protectionism

BACK in 1906, an insurgent politician called Joseph Chamberlain (once known as Radical Joe, he had switched to the Conservatives over home rule for Ireland*) lured the government into a campaign in favour of tariffs. The result was a devastating defeat for the Conservatives. The opposition Liberal party recognised that tariffs were a tax on the goods bought by the poor, particularly on food, and warned that the policy would lead to a "smaller loaf". They portrayed tariffs as "stomach taxes".

A hundred years ago, then, it was easy to make protectionism unpopular. Despite the prosperity brought by 70 years under a more open trading system, it now seems that opinion may have changed: tariffs are favoured by "populist" politicians.**

The trick for modern populists has been to focus on the positive benefits to American workers in terms of jobs, rather than the adverse impact on consumers. In fact, protectionism is highly unlikely to restore American manufacturing jobs, which are under threat from automation as well as globalisation, as our recent briefing showed.

That is partly because in a world of low tariffs, consumers have become pretty blasé about buying goods from all over the world. "You don't know what you've got until you lose it" as John Lennon sang. Even the small level of existing tariffs fall most heavily on the poor, academics reckon, reducing the after-tax income of the poorest by 1.6% and that of the richest by only 0.3%.

This means the anti-tariff campaign will have to campaign hard to show the harm tariffs do to consumers. America is a net exporter of food, so it is hard to use the images that worked so well 100 years ago. Still, it is in the nature of modern trade that developed countries sell high-added-value goods and services (like software) and import raw materials and low value added goods from developing countries (cheap clothing, for example). A study in May by the National Foundation for American Policy found that

Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on China, Mexico and, by implication, Japan would be ineffective in shielding American workers from foreign imports, since producers from other countries would export the same products to the United States. Were such tariffs to be “effective,” then the tariffs would impose a regressive consumption tax of $11,100 over 5 years on the typical U.S. household. The impact would hit poor Americans the hardest: A tariff of 45% on imports from China and Japan and 35% on Mexican imports would cost US households in the lowest 10% of income up to 18% of their (mean) after-tax income or $4,670 over 5 years.

But what if the United States imposed a worldwide tariff, rather than singling out specific countries? The effects would be even worse.

When we calculate the burden as a percentage of household income, we find that households in the lower income deciles would surrender a higher portion of their income under a Trump tariff than higher income households. A Trump tariff against all countries costs households in the lowest decile 53% of their annual income, while it would cost households in the highest decile 7% of their incomes. The tariffs would cost households in the second income decile 20% of their annual income—a figure that declines as we move up the income deciles. In other words, a Trump tariff against all countries (or even one against only China, Mexico and Japan) would be a regressive tax that burdens lower income households more than higher income households.

Combine this with a set of tax cuts that will benefit the rich most and it seems clear that this aspect of populism ought not to be popular at all. Introducing tariffs may not mean a smaller loaf but it will mean that Americans lose their shirts.
* He was wrong about that too. If home rule had been granted in the late 19th century, a lot of bloodshed might have been avoided.
** Admittedly this category is ill-defined. In my view populism defines policies that may seem popular but would have negative effects, either on individual rights or (often) on the very people that support them.

Source....

Trump's first Interview

Watch the highlights from President trump's first interview....

Years before him was President Nixon (played by an actor)

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