Saturday, August 29, 2015

Herbert Hoover Trump

By Lawrence Kudlow and Steve Moore

Here’s a historical fact that Donald Trump, and many voters attracted to him, may not know: The last American president who was a trade protectionist was Republican Herbert Hoover. Obviously that economic strategy didn’t turn out so well — either for the nation or the GOP.

oes Trump aspire to be a 21st century Hoover with a modernized platform of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff that helped send the American and world economy into a decade-long depression and a collapse of the banking system?

We can’t help wondering whether the panic in world financial markets is in part a result of the Trump assault on free trade.

Mr. Trump is also now running full throttle on an anti-immigration platform that could hurt growth as well and alienate Republicans from ethnic voters that the GOP needs if it is going to win in 2016.

We call this the Trump Fortress America platform. He clearly sees international trade and immigration as a negative sum game for American workers.

He recently announced that as president he would prohibit American companies like Ford from building plants in Mexico. He moans pessimistically that “China is eating our lunch” and is “sucking the blood out of the U.S.?”

But strategic tax cuts and regulatory relief after the anti-business rule-making assault by President Obama, not trade and immigration barriers, are the solution to America’s competitiveness deficit.

A draft of Mr. Trump’s 14-point economic manifesto promises that, as president, he would “modify or cancel any business, or trade agreement that hinders American business development, or is shown to create an unfair trading relationship with a foreign entity.”

Read the rest here.

7 comments:

  1. Trump surges in the polls every time the GOP establishment tries to attack him. Republicans have lost control of their party thanks to the Tea Bag movement.

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  2. Good article by Kudlow; to put it bluntly economic protectionism doesn't work and it's supporters rely on drumming up nationalist emotions to get support for it.

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  3. Yeah? So how has NAFTA and GATT worked out for us. It's been marvelous for Effing crony capitalists and multi-national corporations. Not so damn good for the 94 million unemployed/underemployed workers in this country. Trump represents the collective middle finger from many of those folks, to the establishment hacks like LK.

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    1. Re: Skip,
      --Yeah? So how has NAFTA and GATT worked out for us. It's been marvelous for Effing crony capitalists and multi-national corporations.--

      Protectionism and Mercantilism are the STAPLES of crony capitalism, not open and free trade.

      --Not so damn good for the 94 million unemployed/underemployed workers in this country.--

      The current unemployment rate is the result of government interventions in the market which hinder the very important process of liquidation of bad debt and market-clearing for labor. That has NOTHING to do with immigration.

      --Trump represents the collective middle finger from many of those folks,--

      He's the example of the crass economically-ignorant boob that hogs the conversation in bars, for sure.

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  4. It seems only natural I guess, the wave of supporters Ron Paul brought into the party be ran out. Eb and flow, crest and trough, yin and yang. I bet a lot of them and flooding over to Sanders.

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    1. "I bet a lot of them and flooding over to Sanders."

      If they are they're insane or completely stupid.

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    2. Ive read that but at the same time I saw some Breitbart writer claim that many Ron Paul supporters are flocking to Trump. I tweeted that if they were RP supporters who then turned to Trump then they never really supported Ron to begin with. Which got me blocked

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