Donald Trump’s Phony America

There are several kinds of success stories. We emphasize the ones starring brilliant inventors and earnest toilers. We celebrate sweat and stamina. We downplay the schemers, the short cuts and the subterfuge. But for every ambitious person who has the goods and is prepared to pay his or her dues, there’s another who doesn’t and is content to play the con. In the Trump era and the Trump orbit, these ambassadors of a darker side of the American dream have come to the fore.

.. What a con Holmes played with Theranos. For those unfamiliar with the tale, which the journalist John Carreyrou told brilliantly in “Bad Blood,” she dropped out of Stanford at 19 to pursue her Silicon Valley dream, intent on becoming a billionaire and on claiming the same perch in our culture and popular imagination that Steve Jobs did. She modeled her work habits and management style after his. She dressed as he did, in black turtlenecks. She honed a phony voice, deeper than her real one.

She spoke, with immaculate assurance, of a day when it might be on everyone’s bathroom counter: a time saver, a money saver and quite possibly a lifesaver. She sent early, imperfect versions of it to Walgreens pharmacies, which used it and thus doled out erroneous diagnoses to patients. She blocked peer reviews of it and buried evidence of its failures.

This went on not for months but for years, as Holmes attracted more than $900 million of investment money and lured a breathtakingly distinguished board of directors including two former secretaries of state, George Shultz and Henry Kissinger; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and a future secretary of defense, James Mattis. What they had before them wasn’t proof or even the sturdy promise of revolutionary technology. It was a self-appointed wunderkind who struck a persuasive pose and talked an amazing game.

She was eventually found out, and faces criminal charges that could put her in prison. But there’s no guarantee of that. Meantime she lives in luxury. God bless America.

Theranos was perhaps an outlier in the scope of its deceptions, but not in the deceptions themselves. In an article titled “The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley” in Fortune magazine in December 2016, Erin Griffith tallied a list of aborted ventures with more shimmer and swagger than substance, asserting: “As the list of start-up scandals grows, it’s time to ask whether entrepreneurs are taking ‘fake it till you make it’ too far.”

The ‘Rotten Equilibrium’ of Republican Politics

the 20 most prosperous districts are now held by Democrats, while Republicans represent 16 of the 20 least prosperous, measured by share of G.D.P. The accompanying chart illustrates their analysis.

.. The authors’ calculation of the contribution to the G.D.P. of every congressional district showed that Democratic districts produce $10.2 trillion of the nation’s goods and services and Republican districts $6.2 trillion.

This trend creates a significant dilemma for Trump and the Republican Party. Candidates on the right do best during hard times and in recent elections, they have gained the most politically in regions experiencing the sharpest downturn. Electorally speaking, in other words, Republicans profit from economic stagnation and decline.

Let’s return to John Austin of the Michigan Economic Center. In an email he describes this unusual situation succinctly: “A rising economic tide tends to sink the Trump tugboat,” adding

“Certainly more people and communities that are feeling abandoned, not part of a vibrant economy means more fertile ground for the resentment politics and ‘blaming others’ for people’s woes (like immigrants and people of color) that fuel Trump’s supporters.”

The small- and medium-sized factory towns that dot the highways and byways of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have lost their anchor employers and are struggling to fill the void. Many of these communities, including once solidly Democratic-voting, union-heavy, blue collar strongholds, flipped to Trump in 2016.

This pattern is not limited to the United States. There are numerous studies demonstrating that European and British voters who are falling behind in the global economy, and who were hurt by the 2008 recession and the subsequent cuts to the welfare state, drove Brexit as well as the rise of right-wing populist parties.

..In a July 2018 paper, “Did Austerity Cause Brexit?” Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, argues that austerity policies adopted in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse were crucial both to voter support for the right-wing populist party UKIP in Britain and to voter approval of Brexit.

the EU referendum (Brexit) could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare reforms. These reforms activated existing economic grievances. Further, auxiliary results suggest that the underlying economic grievances have broader origins than what the current literature on Brexit suggests. Up until 2010, the UK’s welfare state evened out growing income differences across the skill divide through transfer payments. This pattern markedly stops from 2010 onward as austerity started to bite

.. The results here and in England reinforce the conclusion that the worse things get, the better the right does.

As a rule, as economic conditions improve and voters begin to feel more secure, they become more generous and more liberal. In the United States, this means that voters move to the left; in Britain, it means voters are stronger in their support for staying in the European Union.

The Great American Tax Heist Turns One

Last December, Republicans relied on the support of conservative economists who predicted that the party’s corporate tax cuts would boost productivity and investment in the United States substantially. The forecasts were wrong, and the silence of those who made them suggests that they knew it all along.

BERKELEY – It has now been one year since US President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans rammed their massive corporate tax cut through Congress. At the time, critics of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” described it as a cynical handout for wealthy shareholders. But a substantial number of economists came out in support of it.
For example, one prominent group, most of whom served in previous Republican administrations, predicted in The Wall Street Journal that the tax cuts would boost long-run GDP by 3-4%, with an “associated increase” of about 0.4% “in the annual rate of GDP growth” over the next decade. And in an open letter to Congress, a coterie of over 100 economists asserted that “the macroeconomic feedback generated by the [tax cuts]” would be “more than enough to compensate for the static revenue loss,” implying that the bill would be deficit-neutral over time.

Likewise, in a  for Project Syndicate, Robert J. Barro of Harvard University argued that the tax cuts would increase long-run real (inflation-adjusted) per capita GDP by an improbable 7%. And Michael J. Boskin of the Hoover Institution endorsed his analysis in a .

Finally, Kevin Hassett, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Greg Mankiw of Harvard University claimed that the productivity gains stemming from the tax package would primarily boost wages, rather than profits, because foreign savers would pour investment into the US.

.. To be sure, these were primarily long-run predictions. But proponents of the bill nonetheless claimed that we would see enough additional investment to boost growth by 0.4% per year. That implies an annual GDP increase of roughly $800 billion, which would require annual investment to rise from 17.5% to about 21.5% of GDP. We cannot know how much the US economy would grow in the absence of the tax cuts. But, as the chart below shows, investment has not jumped to that level, nor does it show signs of doing so anytime soon.

.. Back when all the aforementioned economists were issuing their sanguine predictions about the tax package’s likely effects, neutral scorekeepers such as the Tax Policy Center were painting a more realistic picture. And unlike most proponents of the cuts, the Tax Policy Center’s raison d’être is not to please donors or support a particular political party, but rather to make the best forecasts that it can.

The deep disagreement last year over the tax bill’s potential effects anguished Binyamin Applebaum of The New York Times. “What does it mean to produce the signatures of 100 economists in favor of a given proposition when another 100 will sign their names to the opposite statement?” Applebaum asked on Twitter at the time. “How does Harvard, for example, justify granting tenure to people who purport to work in the same discipline and publicly condemn each other as charlatans? How are ordinary people, let alone members of Congress, supposed to figure out which tenured professors are the serious economists?

.. We can now answer that last question. Scholarship is about the pursuit of truth. When scholars find that they have gotten something wrong, they ask themselves why, in order to improve their methodology and possibly get it less wrong in the future. The economists who predicted that tax cuts would spur a rapid increase in investment and sustained growth have now been proven wrong. If they were serious academics committed to their discipline, they would take this as a sign that they have something to learn. Sadly, they have not. They have remained silent, which suggests that they are not surprised to see investment fall far short of what they promised.

But why should they be surprised? After all, it would be specious to assume, as their models do, that investment can rapidly rise (or fall) as foreign investors flood into (or flee) the US. Individuals and firms do not suddenly ratchet up their savings just because the after-tax profit rate has increased. While a higher profit rate does make saving more profitable, it also increases the income from one’s past savings, thus reducing the need to save. Generally speaking, the two balance out.

While a higher profit rate does make saving more profitable, it also increases the income from one’s past savings, thus reducing the need to save. Generally speaking, the two balance out.

All of those who published op-eds and released studies supporting the corporate tax cuts last year knew (or should have known) this to begin with. That is why they have not bothered to investigate their flawed forecasts to determine what they may have missed. It is as if they knew all along that their predictions were wrong.

For reporters still wondering which economists to listen to, the answer should now be clear. If there is one message to take from the past year, it is: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

The Danger of Ignoring Alex Jones

While Alex Jones has no exact analogue on the left, we have to watch him, and also watch out to make sure that something similar is not emerging on the left.

.. It has almost become a cliché that we are a polarized country, but the reality runs deeper. We now have a politics deeply infused with paranoia and distrust not only of our institutions but also of one another. We do not simply disagree; we are at war. We do not merely differ with our opponents on matters of principle or policy; political paranoids believe that we are fighting in a twilight struggle for civilization.

.. His impact is not so much his bizarre individual conspiracy theories but that his style of righteous rage infects and, in some cases, dominates the political rhetoric on the right.

.. Back in the 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr. famously used his immense authority to cast out the John Birch Society. Had something similar happened, and Mr. Jones had been exposed as the lunatic charlatan he is, perhaps not even Donald Trump would have deigned to be associated with him.

.. Mr. Jones peddles weapons-grade nut-jobbery, but he has been promoted by the Drudge Report, one of the most heavily trafficked media websites in the country, and may have played a key role in the 2016 presidential campaign. “I think Alex Jones may be the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media,” Mr. Trump’s friend and adviser Roger Stone said in an interview last fall.

.. At the center of the paranoid worldview, Hofstadter wrote, was a sense on the right that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”

.. Mr. Trump’s administration even granted Infowars a temporary press pass to the White House.