There are many questions about what we should expect as a result of Donald Trump winning the White House.
Will he end the wars overseas? Will he fix the economy? Will he be effective in defending the constitution as is required of the president in the constitution itself? It all seems extremely humorous to ask these things, considering everything he has said, including revealing the fact he was not aware of how many articles are in the Constitution.
Certain policies that are made available for everyone to see should be highlighted to help better understand what can be expected in the short and long term future.
What needs close observation are his economic policies. The Republican Party has often fought President Obama’s attempts to invest billions of dollars in order to in order to stimulate the economy for the American people. Hillary Clinton proposed during her campaign an annual spending of over twenty five billion dollars on infrastructure. This, of course, is the classic Roosevelt New Deal economics of large investments to boost the economy. It should always be remembered that these sorts of interventions by the government only prolong or delay an economic crisis.
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it doesn’t work.
– Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of Treasury, 1939
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has showed a lot of support for the plan to invest one trillion dollars into the economy over the next ten years. This involves a massive number of infrastructure and construction projects, including the wall, airports, roads, anything that is seen as job producing construction. Naturally, this should be a concern. No other president has ever supported such a plan to increase spending so drastically before. This will most likely cause a lot of debate within the Republican Party itself and slow down the progress of legislation that right-leaning voters may have been hoping for.
How bad can these sort of policies be for the nation?
A recession has been expected for quite some time now. On average, after World War Two, the United States has seen a recession about every five years. The most recent being in 2008-2009. As of right now, economists are stating that we are overdue for another one. These sort of plans that Donald Trump is proposing will possibly delay the upcoming recession as soon as the constructions are underway, if the investment of one trillion dollars into the economy is passed through Congress quick enough. But it’s a boiling pot waiting to burst with disastrous results. The chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial, Brad McMillan, predicts the next recession will occur at the end of 2017, or the beginning of 2018.
As of right now, since Trump was elected, stocks for DOW Jones has reached a record high. Good to many people, though right-leaning voters are giving him too much credit by saying he is the cause. He plans to move funds away from the global agenda to policies based on what prioritizes American workers before everyone else. A noble agenda as the President of the United States, however, if stocks happen to continue to climb, whether in the near or distant future, a recession is still expected. If decisions are made to continue the interventions in the economy through massive investment of tax dollars, it will set up the nation for an economic crisis with potential to rival the Great Depression of 1929. Trump’s plans will not stop the recession, but rather set up the economy for a higher fall.
Not only is massive investment in the economy and workforce a priority, but military spending as well.
Currently, we are still ranked number one in military spending globally, and we spend more than the next nine ranked countries combined. Trump has not expressed any desires to put an end to foreign intervention, but rather expand the war machine. There are also plans to massively increase spending on immigration screening, to allow only people that share selected values to enter, the War on Drugs which could become more disastrous after the wall is built, and increase spending on law enforcement of local police stations for community safety. The United States is ranked number one for prison population and spends more on prisons than any other nation, and he plans to put more people in federal prisons for attempting to sneak across the border.
Now, with all of these proposed plans of massive increase in spending, it does not mix very well with dramatic cuts in taxes, as well. Ronald Reagan followed very similar policies, but not on the scale Donald Trump has proposed, and he increased the national debt by almost two hundred percent. The dollar system itself is predicted to collapse. There are no accurate predictions on when it will happen just yet, but if this course of spending more than we have continues, it can not last very much longer.
These economic policies of the Trump administration have a lot of potential for an economic disaster. That is, if the promises are kept. Already there is talk of division within the Republican Party over his economic plans that prove to be more liberal than they feel comfortable with, as a good number of Republicans have often supported the agenda to cut spending and balance the budget. People should still hope for the best during these four years, but it is more important than ever to be prepared for the worst.
Sources:
- Trump’s Contract with the People
- Brad McMillan interview with CNN on June 19, 2016
- Heritage.org article by William W. Beach and Ken McIntyre
- PrisonStudies.org
- U.S. Debt by President
- When Will the U.S. Dollar Collapse?
* Charles Shaffer has been a supporter of the libertarian movement since 2012 after my cousin shared a video of Ron Paul, and he have been researching and reading more on the philosophy ever since. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky and recently decided to become more active in the movement.
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“It should always be remembered that these sorts of interventions by the government only prolong or delay an economic crisis.”
This is a cornerstone perspective of the libertarian or “Austrian” school, and it is telling that the author urges the reader to “remember” this claim as a form of canon, when in fact there is a marked failure to prove this hypothesis empirically. Worse still, it requires us to not believe our own eyes…after all, we just experienced a rather significant recession, and it is undeniable that exactly these sort of interventions preceded recovery in our own country. I would add, comparatively, that there seemed to be a pattern that European economies that responded with austerity measures were slower to recover in terms of employment rates and economic growth. The argument always for this perspective always seems to hinge on claims about what might have been, but wasn’t, and now can’t be tested empirically.
“We have never begun to tax the people in this country the way they should be….. I don’t pay what I should. People in my class don’t. People who have it should pay.” – Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of Treasury, 1939
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