Three theories as to why the poll numbers are improving for the president and his party.
- First, the president’s personal standing has rebounded.
- .. Second, the formidable Democratic advantage on the generic ballot for Congress has narrowed.
Let’s call them the economy, exhaustion, and equilibrium.
.. based on the strength of the economy, one would predict more favorable views of Trump.
.. The rise in Republican numbers has also coincided with the tax bill passed in December.
.. “There’s no question that Trump benefits when a critique of his tax and health care policies is not front and center—especially when voters are hearing Trump’s side of the story on the economy,”
.. another product is fatigue: When there are so many scandals, they all start to blend together and fade. One retort to the anti-Trump slogan “This is not normal” is to point out that by now cataclysmic scandals are in fact the new normal. Trump’s improvement may reflect exhaustion with scandals and diminished anger at the president as a result.
.. Democrats would need a strong slate of wins to take back the House and a near-miracle to take back the Senate.
.. Democrats still don’t have a unified message.
How Big a Bang for Trump’s Buck? (Wonkish)
I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly how big a stimulus we’re looking at, but it seems to be around 2 percent of GDP for fiscal 2019. With a multiplier of 0.5, that would add 1 percent to growth.
That said, I’d suggest that this is a bit high. For one thing, it’s not clear how much impact corporate tax cuts, which are the biggest item, will really have on spending. Meanwhile, unemployment is only 4 percent; given Okun’s Law, the usual relationship between growth and changes in unemployment, an extra 1 percent growth would bring unemployment down to 3.5%, which is really low by historical standards, so that the Fed would probably lean especially hard against this stimulus.
Tax Incentive Puts More Robots on Factory Floors
Recent changes in the tax code are encouraging many U.S. manufacturers to install robots and replace aging machines
The revised tax code allows companies to immediately deduct the entire cost of equipment purchases from their taxable income for the next five years. Previously, companies generally were allowed to write off only a portion of the cost in a single year.
The change is encouraging manufacturers to install robots and replace aging machines sooner than planned.
.. By effectively reducing the cost of automation, the tax overhaul puts “another arrow in the quiver of companies that want to go that route,”
.. Rick Toth, whose 66 employees at Toth Industries Inc. in Toledo, Ohio, make parts for heavy trucks and construction equipment, said the depreciation benefit has encouraged him to buy at least three computerized metal-fabrication machines this year for up to $400,000 each. Before the legislation passed, he planned to buy just one machine to handle the 10% to 15% boost in business he expects this year.
.. The benefit led executives at diaper- and tissue-maker Kimberly-Clark Corp. to move up plans to spend as much as $200 million to make one U.S. factory more productive. The plan, which awaits board approval, comes as the Kimberly-Clark plans to close 10 factories and lay off thousands of workers.
.. The continuing trend toward automation has pushed down manufacturing employment overall since the financial crisis but also has created some well-paying jobs that require years of training or an engineering degree.
.. Still, wages aren’t keeping up with the upswing in production. Even as U.S. unemployment lingers at a 17-year low of 4.1%, factory wages rose 2.2% annually last year, down from a 3% annual bump in 2016.
Fighting Fake News Is Not the Solution
One is a large study of the reach and impact of fake news; the other is opinion-poll data on the tax-reform bill that Congress passed and President Trump signed into law in December. Together, they burst the two-bubble theory by showing that most Americans are better informed and less gullible than you might think. That, in turn, suggests that fighting “fake news” is not the solution, or perhaps even a solution, to our current political problems.
.. The economists’ study suggested that every American adult had been exposed to at least one fake news story in the leadup to the 2016 election, but relatively few people—roughly eight per cent—actually believed them.
.. About ten per cent of news consumers sought out more fake news, and they read an average of 33.16 fake stories, according to the political scientists.
.. rather than two bubbles, there was one, positioned far to the right of the political spectrum. A majority of Americans, the study showed, get their news from a variety of different media. They are routinely exposed to opinions they don’t share; they do not live in an echo chamber.
.. “Not only was consumption of fact-checks concentrated among non-fake news consumers,” the authors wrote, “but we almost never observe respondents reading a fact-check of a specific claim in a fake news article that they read.”
.. language had a way of migrating from Breitbart into the mainstream media.
.. The authors identified the two topics that dominated false conspiratorial narratives—Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and the threat posed by immigration—and traced the mainstream media’s disproportionate focus on these topics to the fake-news sites’ obsession with them.
.. ineffectual fact-checking pieces might have been a primary vehicle of that migration—such as, for example, when the Post fact-checked Trump’s claim, made in an interview with the conspiracy-theory purveyor Sean Hannity, that Clinton’s e-mails caused the death of an Iranian defector.
.. Opinion data on Trumpian tax reform is real-life proof that most Americans share a fact-based view of reality.