There are lots of non-economic reasons to be concerned about a second Trump term:
–the most obvious, to my mind, is that he attempted the violent overthrow of the government when he lost his reelection bid in 2020. I find it hard to see how anyone gets past that one. Among others,
–he choked when the country needed him during the pandemic. The number of unnecessary deaths Trump’s pandemic denial caused–as opposed to deaths caused by deficiencies in national health care–is unclear, but the most conservate estimates seem to start at 100,000+.
–his clearly diminished mental capacity
–the fact that J D Vance, a Trump Mini-Me who’s being sued by his own constituents for damage from his unhinged “they’re eating our pets” claims about Springfield, Ohio, would become president if Trump were more obviously incapacitated.
Trumponomic follies
Even if these weren’t issues, Trump’s economic program, if that’s the right phrasing, is a gigantic worry. It consists of two toxic elements:
–widespread imposition of tariffs, which, as the Great Depression of the 1930s illustrated, are a recipe for economic disaster. If we look for a more contemporary example, one would be the US auto industry. The Detroit Big Three have been protected by trade barriers for a half-century. The result has been terrible cars, government bailouts and multiple bankruptcies. GM, in fact, has become a business school case in how to lose 2/3 of a 50% market share. This is even worse than Trump’s idea that people would flock to the Atlantic City beaches in the dead of winter.
–more tax cuts for the wealthy, or “trickle-down” economics. The basic idea is that private enterprise will always provide better goods and services than government. Starving government of funds, therefore, will create space for private entrepreneurs to innovate. They will create enormous wealth for themselves, which will (eventually) “trickle down” to you and me as the entrepreneurs spend the money they’re accumulating.
This approach appeared to work well in the 1980s, but, I think, for very different reasons than the theory suggests. As I see it, World War II destroyed the industrial bases of Europe and Japan, but not the US, because of our geographical distance from Europe and Asia, where the war was fought. By the 1960s, Europe and Japan had rebuilt, and had, across the board, the most modern technologies. When I entered the stock market in the late 1970s, high-grade steel, for example, was coming from state-of-the-art plants in Japan, while US Steel was still using blast furnaces from the 1890s.
The corporate raiders that Reaganomics released spent the next decade+ consolidating and modernizing large swaths of US industry, funded by junk bonds and pension funds.
This was a one-off phenomenon, though.
Conventional economic theory maintains, correctly I think, that the marginal propensity to consume decreases as one gets wealthier. This means that putting more money in the hands of the already wealthy is the least effective method of stimulating economic growth.
Another big flaw in Reaganomics, I think, is that it assumes there’s no such thing as a public good. Private solutions are always better. But this means there’s no conceptual space for infrastructure development/repair or for natural gas/electric/water utilities to function as monopolies …or for public provision for health care. No wonder our roads are bad, the trains are slow, we have second-rate communications infrastructure and iffy health care.
Then there’s the issue of what happens to the currency or the government’s ability to issue new debt if potential buyers begin to figure out that a Trump administration wouldn’t have even the concept of an idea of how it would repay existing government debt if it double down on tax cuts for the wealthy. It wouldn’t be pretty.