The Post-Trump Era

Finally people are starting to get the problem. We don't really know how to run the economy. We have plenty of resources in the US - there's huge manufacturing capacity, lots of workers, a capital glut, an oil glut, and no significant shortages of anything. That's great. But it's not paying off for many Americans.

We just don't need that many people to make all the stuff. As I point out occasionally, the US produces more stuff than ever, but agriculture, mining, construction, and manufacturing only use 13% of the work force. We have no clue how to deal with this. Nor is it over. Computers have replaced many middle-class jobs, with more to come.

(Yes, some of this is cheap imports from China. But not all. US manufacturing value added is about $2 trillion a year. Imports from China are about $400 billion a year. Wages in China are rising to the point that China is losing their cost advantage.)

At least the problem is being recognized at last. For a long time, there was denial about this. Now it's starting to be used politically, but not very effectively.

"Trickle down" didn't work.

Sending more people to college didn't work.

Right now, more Mexicans are leaving the US than are coming in.

Now what?

Earlier successful presidential candidates learned to say what they needed to say to get/trick "billionaires" into supporting them.

Donald Trump is already a billionaire, so he has no need to pander to the plutocracy. Instead, he is pandering to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning for the America that the old-money billionaires took away.

Either a different Candidate Trump will emerge post-convention, or...

Infuriating: "the rising tide model is no longer working"

What dishonesty! What is a model that's supposed to produce results on the long term and destroys society on the medium term? A lie, that's what it is.

Socialists have been telling as much for decades (centuries?) but the american voter has been easily fooled by a simple marketing campaign (the "american dream") which works by exploiting the basic optimist nature of the human condition.

So, conservatives have not only been selling hot air for a long time, they have destroyed the left and the political discourse in the process.

And now they are planning to "move to the next paradigm", without even recognizing the fact that they have been wrong, utterly wrong all along (actualy, malicious)?

Give me a break!

> He represents not only a rejection of the existing Reaganite establishment, but also a rejection of Reaganite foreign policy

This assumes he knows what a "Reaganite establishment" is. I get the feeling he is more of a bull in a china shop.

An aside: Does anyone else hate the blocking of copying the text? It is totally legal to copy snippets. I have to do ctrl-U and copy from the source. What a pain.

The. Democratic. Party. Is. Moving. Left.

WTF?

Nixon was more liberal than Clinton. Maybe even Sanders. He was also a paranoid criminal, but hey ;)