The Trump administration lives in the libertarian past of Atlas Shrugged, in John Galt's 1957, when US GDP was 40% of world GDP and everybody needed us more than we needed them

They are as stupid as they are insufferably arrogant.

 

US GDP as a share of world GDP has been in steady decline since 1960 to just 26% in 2023

After 38 years, it's time to junk the bedrock idea undergirding conservative economic philosophy of low taxes because IT'S NOT TRUE

 AXIOS today, here:

A bedrock idea of conservative economic philosophy is [the] idea that low taxes fuel economic growth. 

This idea is simply false, and history proves it.

We've had 38 years since the Reagan Tax Reform Act of 1986 to prove it correct and it's not.

Real GDP 1986-2024 has grown at a compound annual rate of 2.586%, a rate 29% worse than for the same length of time before that when taxes were much higher.

Real GDP 1948-1986 grew at a compound annual rate of 3.635%.

Tax reform is a complicated topic, the political subject of the AXIOS article.

I can simplify it for you: Tax like we used to in the immediate post-war.

Nominal marginal rates in 1957 (dollars are NOT adjusted for inflation in the tables), the height of the Baby Boom, went from 20% to 91%.

The set up didn't stop people from marrying, having children, and buying houses, and it didn't stop economic growth, because it forced rich people to avoid these confiscatory marginal rates by investing their money domestically to earn income at lower rates of capital taxation.

Ronald Reagan's tax reform was a license to invest elsewhere, and we're all poorer for it. 

If Democrats had any brains they would propose richly rewarding domestic investment using the tax code and severely punishing foreign investment. They could start by raising top marginal tax rates on ordinary income and offering much lower long term capital gains tax rates de-linked from ordinary income but only for domestic investment.

The country desperately needs much better economic growth, and the libertarian-Republican consensus is not providing it.

 

 

Investment abroad eclipsed investment at home for the first time in 1993 and is 200% of domestic today

Meanwhile the main story goes unaddressed, as usual: The Trump administration is a materialist horror show without a soul, whose god is money, which treats our allies as freeloaders

Everything is reduced to a mere transaction.

It is libertarianism writ large.

 

 

Lindsey Grahamnesty epitomizes everything that's gone wrong with the GOP and America generally: America's interests abroad are purely about money, not at all about freedom

 

John McCain would not be happy with his old friend. McCain was a main agitator for freedom in Ukraine and its alliance with the West. The policy wisdom of that was controversial, but it wasn't framed as purely economic.

Lindsey used to be for freedom in Ukraine like McCain. Lindsey used to be an immigration liberal who advocated for amnesty. Now he's a suck-up to Trump as bad as Marco Rubio, who also used to talk about the old American values preached by Ronald Reagan.

They are shapeshifters all, just like the formerly NeverTrump J. D. Vance.

You cannot trust any of these people any more than we can trust Vladimir Putin. 

Lindsey Graham here:

I told Zelensky we'll talk about security guarantees. We'll talk about ceasefires and how the war ends. This is a process. You have a new relationship with America, a 500 billion, half trillion, dollar deal that President Trump is proud of that gives us an interest worth defending.      

In other words, if it's not about money it's not worth defending.

 

Thy money perish with thee.

-- Acts 8:20

I for one am looking forward to J. D. Vance defending the First Amendment rights of Jihadist authors

 

Nutball worlds in collision: Trumpism defends freedom in Europe with its right hand, stabs it in the back in Ukraine with its left, Biden defended freedom in Ukraine with his right, attacked it in America with his left

 

 But The Federalist has its blinders on. Biden baaaaaaad! Trump gooooood!

"Let's see if we can find some naive kid to write a story about it!" 

By Defending Free Speech Worldwide, Team Trump Reclaims America’s Global Moral High Ground:

Under President Donald Trump, the suppression of natural rights by Western powers will no longer be ignored by the United States.

Yep, J. D. Vance goes to Europe to beat up on our friends. But suppression of freedom will be ignored, in places like Russia, Saudi Arabia, and China. And above all in Ukraine.

This is the essence of libertarianism: Make the good the enemy of the perfect.

But defending freedom where it really counts would take some courage, and they don't have it. 

The author of this article, who graduated from college in 2022 with a BA in political "science", ends it touting the execrable Darren Beattie at Marco Rubio's State Department, a Taiwan surrender monkey. 

 

The article is the second in the queue at Real Clear Politics this morning. One goes there looking for some serious editorial judgment and gets this.

Trump/Vance don't have the moral high ground. They are just the cowardly other side of the same old hypocritical American coin.

A libertarian wants you to know that accumulated losses in a war are "not sensible", as if war were ever sensible

 "Here, let's look at this completely irrational thing and apply some logic to it now that we're down 28 points in the fourth quarter".

Their tidy little world of dollars and cents makes no sense, either.

Imagine Winston Churchill saying this after Dunkirk.

 

 

Kinda like a libertarian convention

 

Trump’s tax cuts are ‘stuck in the mud’ as Republicans split over spending 

 

. . . fiscal hawks said they could not support the massive package without more spending cuts. ...

Welcome to end stage libertarianism: The executive branch of the United States does not possess a line-item veto power

 What Trump is doing will be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, which already ruled the 1996 version of the line item veto unconstitutional.

Trump is a renegade.

Imagine a Democrat president simply canceling programs Republicans passed and firing all the people in them. That's what this is. And that's what the future will bring if Trump gets away with any of this.

It's anarchy, and it's unconstitutional, however much you may agree with the cuts. The Court will set this straight or the federal government is finished as an institution.