A former United States Budget Director has said that president Donald Trump is an “unhinged madman” who is now “conducting four wars on the economy.” David Stockman, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker that there is just no way Trump will ever make America great again.
Stockman, who just published Peak Trump: The Undrainable Swamp And The Fantasy Of MAGA, argued that Trump is waging a trade war, a border war, a political war against the Fed, and a war on the nation’s solvency.“We have a delusional, unhinged madman in the Oval Office, and anything is possible,” David Stockman said. “He’s conducting four wars on the American economy, and it’s not going to make it great again.”
The trade war, which Stockman accurately describes as a “war on consumers” seems to have already done untold damage. Farmers are suffering and our food supply could have been irreversibly changed. “The trade war is a war on consumers,” Stockman said. “If it goes from 10% — which is already costing $30 billion a year just on Chinese imports — to higher, that is only going to be that much worse.”
As far as the “border war,” Stockman referred to, he believes that the American workforce is shrinking and unskilled and illegal immigrants are necessary workers. Because of shifting demographics, “the domestic labor force is shrinking,” Stockman explained. “We need immigrant labor. We shouldn’t be having a, you know, silly battle over a wall in a border where there isn’t a crisis.”
Trump’s third war, against the Fed, is the only one that’s actually good. The Federal Reserve is the United States’ central bank and has been the cause and “savior” of every major financial crisis since the Great Depression. But Stockman is upset that Trump expressed concerns that interest rates would rise, ending the “easy money” era. Now borrowing money is more expensive and less are tempted to do so. “He’s [Trump] conducting a political war on the Fed that finally was getting enough courage up to normalize interest rates,” Stockman explained. “For crying out loud, 10 years, interest rates have been below the inflation rate, which means zero money market costs. It’s been a boon like never before to speculators. It’s done nothing for Main Street.”
Stockman’s final gripe with Trump is over the national debt. However, it’s important to note that many of those now concerned expressed little to no desire to reign in Obama’s over the top spending. The national debt is of huge concern to many who simply don’t want to see a societal collapse. But with all politicians on all sides unwilling to cut spending to address the problem, it is all but inevitable. “He’s conducting a war on the nation’s solvency with a fiscal policy that is more out to lunch than anything I’ve seen since 1970 when I started on Capitol Hill,” Stockman fumed. The big challenge was that even though the economy has been expanding at a rapid pace, “we’re in the last months… you don’t raise the deficit to $1.2 trillion at the very tippy top of a business cycle and expect anything but bad results,” said Stockman.
Stockman argued that “we’re going to go into the 2020s with a massive retirement wave from the baby boom, a deficit that is beyond belief in size, and a national debt that’s out of control. It will be a nonstop crisis for the entire decade unless we do something big and quick. And I think it’s too late.”
H/T [Yahoo Finance]
