RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21251/trumpmaganomics

The new economic policies of President-elect Donald J. Trump promise to include his campaign pledge to “Make America Great Again.” Just a few months ago, commentators were assessing that the Biden administration’s greatest ambition was “managing America’s decline.” What a difference a day makes: November 5, 2024. Trump, a businessman, appears to have a good grasp of most domestic and foreign policy issues that greet him at the stable door. He has already been overflowing with ideas — such as refusing to allow a hostile Communist China to control the Panama Canal, as it presently does; and aligning more closely with Greenland and Canada to provide the northern hemisphere a stronger foothold to safeguard its security and prosperity and that of the Free World.

In securing America’s financial future, Trump’s maganomic policies appear to turn on three points:

Making American not just energy independent again, but energy dominant. Making use of the “liquid gold” America has under the ground would not only enable Americans to buy just about everything at a lower cost than, as now, unnecessarily relying on expensive imported oil for manufacturing and for transporting goods and oneself. Using American energy could at the same time undercut the price of oil exported by America’s adversaries, such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran, and make them less able to conduct wars and other mischief.
Offering generous tax and other incentives, and removing obsolete regulations, to ignite the economy’s “animal spirits” so that more companies would relocate to America. Once again, “Made in America” would become the hallmark of excellence, affordability and abundance. What other country protects its businesses, workers and investments more comprehensively than the United States? The country is not just a haven for jobs and productivity, but also ensures that America will no longer naively misplace its trust in countries that intend to replace the current world order and, at whim, potentially deprive Americans of medicine, computer chips, and other necessities.
Lowering taxes for everyone while trimming excess fat from unwarranted expenses. This plan does not of course mean depriving the less fortunate of their safety net or demolishing social security. What the plan does mean is that Americans will be able to keep more of their hard-earned money to decide themselves how they would prefer to spend it. At least US citizens would know that the taxes thy are compelled to pay would fund projects they actually want or need, instead of vaporizing for “shrimp on treadmills,” “hamster fights” or more than $1trillion each year – greater than the entire proposed US defense budget of $849.8 billion — just to pay interest on the more than $36 trillion national debt. The US government, according to CNBC, each year wastes more than $247 billion, adding that “The problems mainly stem from the way our government tries to solve an issue, according to critics,” and quoting Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/no-circular-firing-squads-this-time-republicans/

We’re starting to see the results of the November election in a variety of ways, both within our movement and among the enemy. Look, folks, we’re dealing with human beings. That means we’re dealing with human nature. And human nature never changes. We’re just as susceptible to its vagaries on the right as they are on the left. That means we’re going to fight among ourselves within the newly formed Trump coalition. That means people on our side are going to jockey for power, positions, prestige, and, of course, money. As far as the other side, despite the fact they are alien lizard people, they’re going to do what human beings tend to do. They will retreat to doing what’s comfortable, even if it isn’t the most effective tactic. We need to take advantage of that.

Human nature could end up handicapping us. Human nature could also end up handing us victories. We’ve got to be smart. We’ve got to be objective. We’ve got to think through what we’re doing to minimize our internal conflict and maximize the chaos on the other side. Are we doing that? The wackiness about the continuing resolution last week was an example of what we face. On our side, we have a very narrow majority which empowers dissenting individuals far out of proportion to their numbers. We’re also trying to navigate the reality that this is Donald Trump’s party and not the same GOP we grew up in. He’s the loudest voice, but he’s not the absolute dictator. There are incentives and rewards both for following him and defying him – as well as risks. How we manage our new coalition is the question. Our new coalition is not just conservatives. We conservatives make up a big chunk of it, but it’s also populists, anti-war folks who reject the old foreign policy consensus, as well as RFK granola/crunchy Make America Healthy Again types. Organized labor has an unprecedented presence too. Our Trump coalition is a new thing, a potentially unstable thing. We’re going to have growing pains.

This new coalition is unstable both because of competing interests and the fact that it hasn’t yet developed the institutional structures that minimize the disruption caused by internal disagreements. Let’s look at what happened with the continuing resolution. At one time, the Republicans were supposedly the budget-cutting party. They were the fiscal sanity folks, the deficit hawks. There’s still that faction in our coalition. But there’s another part of our coalition that really doesn’t care about debt that much. Donald Trump did not come into office as a budget cutter. Though he wants to see DOGE streamline the government and cut regulations, he did not get elected by promising to take a meat cleaver to America’s finances. In fact, he took entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and all the rest, which are the majority of our spending, completely off the table. So, you can see the problem. We’ve got both budget hawks and budget doves inside our tent. And that conflict has to be resolved.