Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Two Politicians are Desperate for Votes...

Neither has any clue about basic economics, especially comparative advantage and the nature of free market wages.

One, Bernie Sanders, said on Sunday:
Many of Trump’s supporters are working-class people and they’re angry, and they’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity...

The real issues are not Donald Trump’s vulgarity. And he is vulgar. It is the fact that Donald Trump thinks we should not be raising the minimum wage. He believes that wages in America are too high.
As if the price of wages can be set by decree. As if prices aren't set by markets like other prices.,

Donald Trump reacted this way to Sanders' comments, as reported by Gawker:
Donald Trump has apparently changed his mind about economic inequality, lamenting on Twitter Monday that wages are too low. This weekend, Bernie Sanders suggested that he might be able to lift the spell cast over the white, alienated masses who have flocked to Trump’s supremacist banner....

As the Guardian points out, in November, at the fourth Republican debate, Trump said, “[T]axes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave [the minimum wage] the way it is...People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”

On Monday, however, he appeared to reverse course. “The middle-class has worked so hard, are not getting the kind of jobs that they have long dreamed of - and no effective raise in years. BAD,” he tweeted.

Trump’s Twitter essay continued:



This country is nowhere close to electing a president that has a basic understanding of economics.

The more popular a president is who is elected the more likely he will try to muscle the economy and be successful at it.

Not good.

-RW

2 comments:

  1. economics: the art of knowing what to assert is truth to ensure employment by whoever is running the show. All economics is bunk, snake oil, unscientific, rooted in satisfying the goals of whoever holds the most guns.

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  2. I father, rest his soul, told me, that, "During the Depression, that bread was a nickel a loaf". The big problem, he said: "Nobody had a nickel". Comparative Advantage is snobby economist foolishness. At least for those who still have an income. Someday the only thing they may have to eat is their words.

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