During that sit-down, on Nov. 29, Mr. Cohn briefed Mr. Trump on what he regarded as the chief hurdle to expanding the economy, according to people who were briefed on the discussion: a stronger dollar, which would undermine efforts to create jobs.
.. They have also generated outrage in some quarters. “The way I see this, there was a devastating financial crisis just over eight years ago,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said. “Goldman Sachs was at the heart of that crisis. The idea that the president is now going to turn over the country’s economic policy to a senior Goldman executive turns my stomach.”
.. Along with Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, Mr. Cohn recently helped persuade the president not to pursue an executive order that would have rolled back rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
.. Still, Mr. Cohn’s 26-year career at Goldman, where he performed an array of jobs, including trading commodities, running mortgages and eventually overseeing day-to-day operations, ended with a remarkable windfall: cash and stock valued at $285 million.
This Economic Phenomenon Is Making Government Sick
K-12 education hasn’t improved very much and also costs more, an economic phenomenon that has been labeled the “cost disease.” It turns out the cost disease also shapes politics: To the extent governments manage, run or fund low-productivity-growth sectors, the spending required to sustain those sectors can automatically boost the size of government over time.
.. Part of the problem is that fixing people is harder than fixing machines, because it requires the cooperation of what are often recalcitrant patients. That’s why productivity improvements are difficult to achieve in education as well. Online learning can be potent and very cheap, but it is hard to get enough of the students to care.
.. If patients and students would diet properly, take the right medicines and crack open their textbooks, more drastic cost improvements could result.
.. The first problem will be that other areas of government spending (“discretionary spending”) will tend to suffer, as money is soaked up by the low-productivity sectors. Voters will feel that governments are neglecting some of their most important interests, such as infrastructure.
.. All of the various sides may be correct in their major claims, but none will have a workable solution. This actually isn’t so far from where the health-care debate stands now, and where the retirement and nursing home debate is headed as America ages.
.. As it stands, we’re set to re-create these debates at higher and higher levels of government spending in the low-productivity sectors. And I don’t view such dramatically tense, life-or-death issues as conducive either to rational decision-making or to a broadly liberal, consensus-based politics.
.. If you care about politics, I suggest spending less time on the candidates and more time studying productivity growth. I also suggest spending more time thinking about how to make working with human beings as easy and as fruitful as manipulating physical capital. Often the real political problem is not the people who disagree with you, but rather the empirical regularities of economies and the humans who inhabit them.
Considerations On Cost Disease
Countries like South Korea and Israel have about the same life expectancy as the US but pay about 25% of what we do. Some people use this to prove the superiority of centralized government health systems, although Random Critical Analysis has an alternative perspective. In any case, it seems very possible to get the same improving life expectancies as the US without octupling health care spending.
.. Or instead of slogging through the statistics, we can just ask the same question as before. Do you think the average poor or middle-class person would rather:
a) Get modern health care
b) Get the same amount of health care as their parents’ generation, but with modern technology like ACE inhibitors, and also earn $8000 extra a year.. It’s actually even worse than this, because we take so many opportunities to save money that were unavailable in past generations. Underpaid foreign nurses immigrate to America and work for a song. Doctors’ notes are sent to India overnight where they’re transcribed by sweatshop-style labor for pennies an hour. Medical equipment gets manufactured in goodness-only-knows which obscure Third World country. And it still costs ten times as much as when this was all made in the USA – and that back when minimum wages were proportionally higher than today.
.. Imagine if tomorrow, the price of water dectupled. Suddenly people have to choose between drinking and washing dishes. Activists argue that taking a shower is a basic human right, and grumpy talk show hosts point out that in their day, parents taught their children not to waste water. A coalition promotes laws ensuring government-subsidized free water for poor families; a Fox News investigative report shows that some people receiving water on the government dime are taking long luxurious showers. Everyone gets really angry and there’s lots of talk about basic compassion and personal responsibility and whatever but all of this is secondary to why does water costs ten times what it used to?
.. I’m not sure how many people currently opposed to paying for free health care, or free college, or whatever, would be happy to pay for health care that cost less, that was less wasteful and more efficient, and whose price we expected to go down rather than up with every passing year. I expect it would be a lot.
.. Right now the standard of living isn’t just stagnant, it’s at risk of declining, and a lot of that is student loans and health insurance costs and so on.
Trump’s Economic Team of Rivals
The incoming president’s advisers are all over the ideological map.
Summing up his life lessons, he encouraged the students to lean in: “Everything I’ve done in my career, and everything that most of you have done to this point, is to take risks.”
.. During an interview on CNBC the day of his appointment, Mnuchin said his top priorities were tax reform and rolling back the Dodd-Frank Act – not exactly what all those voters demanding the return of lost industries in middle America were clamoring for.
.. Seeing China as an economic paper tiger (or dragon as the case may be), he also believes that the Beijing government is weaker than it seems and susceptible to pressure and coercion. Hence he is supportive of retaliatory tariffs and other measures designed to “level the playing field.”
.. The plan has four pillars: “tax cuts, reduced regulation, lower energy costs, and eliminating America’s chronic trade deficit.” But trade is their real passion: They honed in on the entry of China into the World Trade Organization, which they said “opened America’s markets to a flood of illegally subsidized Chinese imports, thereby creating massive and chronic trade deficits” and “rapidly accelerated the offshoring of America’s factories
.. “Either you believe in markets, or you believe in government,” Kudlow has said.
.. Something’s got to give. How to square deregulation with abiding by environmental standards, as Cohn favors? How to square tariffs on imports designed to boost domestic production (Navarro and Ross) with the free flow of capital (Kudlow)? How to balance deconstructing Obamacare without price gouging and chaos in the health-care system that will surely hurt the working class that supported Trump? How to balance punitive tariffs with affordable goods? How to start mini-trade wars without the costs falling on, say, Walmart shoppers? How to juxtapose tax cuts that will benefit the 1% with the need to boost wages and employment for millions of disgruntled workers and unemployed who see Trump as a best last chance to turn things around?
The answer is that you can’t. If Trump’s goal is to create tension and conflict and see who emerges bloodied but victorious from the fighting, he’s setting up one hell of a battle.
.. Faced with competing and irreconcilable voices, it will be up to Trump to play the referee. That can take the form of active deliberation with his advisers, or passively waiting it out until someone emerges on top of the bureaucratic scrum. It’s certainly a recipe for a White House of conflict; whether it’s a recipe for sound and coherent economic policy is entirely another matter.