How is this supposed to work?
In an interview published Friday, Trump’s designated chief White House strategist suggested that the incoming president would pay little heed to Republican orthodoxy on fiscal matters.
“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” Stephen K. Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter. “The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.”
If I were planning a new kind of political movement that involved angering the “orthodox” part of my political party, I’d spend a lot of time reaching out to elected officials from the other party or independents (if there were any). I don’t see Donald Trump doing that so far. He didn’t do much of it in the campaign other than some half-hearted efforts to troll for Sanders’ supporters. And he isn’t doing it now in his cabinet appointments.
I can see Republican officeholders getting in line to a degree, but I can’t see Trump being successful if he’s depending on Democratic votes for more than a small handful of his legislative majorities.
If Trump is going to blow up the budget deficit with Democratic help, he’s going to have to be much more of a compromiser than he’s demonstrated to this point. In fact, it’s basically unimaginable.
It will be interesting to see how the Tea Partiers respond to Trump, especially to his budget. That said, I fully expect most Republicans and even most Tea Partiers to cave in the end. After all: IOKIYAR, even if in name only. Deficits only matter when the Democrats are in charge. Already some Democratic pols have signaled their willingness to pass Trump’s budget. I doubt that he’ll get much push back.
I won’t hold my breath while waiting to be proven wrong.
Yes, really big deficits are Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious when a Republican is in charge.
Especially when it’s to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy or wealthy interests, which is what Trump’s infrastructure plan will be.
It works like this:
-They cut the taxes, which will pay for themselves.
-When the don’t, they turn to the Democrats and say that it’s time to cut government spending, because debt.
I really hope the Democrats can grow a spine. I feel like some of these things things could easily be won in the court of public opinion, if the Democrats would put up a fight about them.
On a related note, I like Nancy Pelosi, but maybe it is time for a fresh team? A team that will be willing to make some new arguments and make them forcefully. It peeves me that Democrats lose on points of argument that they should not. Republicans are lying day and night, and they are confident that the Democrats will just let it roll by. You can blame the media all you want (because they mostly suck), but I suspect that if you asked them they would say that it’s not their job to make the arguments for the Democrats. If we made more noise and were willing to be more confrontational I think the media coverage would improve.
Agreed.
Watching the GOP establishment cave to Trump would be fun if it weren’t so awful.
You pass this stuff in parts:
There are two hills for the Dems to die on:
Till the last breath, with the last full measure of devotion on each.
–Dick “Fucking-Unidicted-War-Criminal” Cheney, Remarks on Paul O’Neill (January 9, 2004)
You write:
“In fact, it’s basically unimaginable.”
Lemme see…
Where and when have I heard that meme regarding Trump from centrist/progressive Dems?
Oh.
Yeah.
I remember.
From the time he first said that he was running for the presidency until about…what was it, 6 or 7 PM?…on Election Day.
A year and a half of daily pronouncements that circled around that one idea.
“Hah!!! It’s basically unimaginable!!!”
Yeah.
Right.
He is something entirely new, and he is not to be predicted as a result.
We have an entirely new paradigm here.
Watch.
Good? Bad? Somewhere in the near-infinity between those two options?
Damned if I know.
All I can do now is…
Watch.
And wait.
And of course…try to survive in the interim.
Later…
AG
He may just go around the democrats. The republicans are fresh off a win no one really expected and the white folk in the shire like them, a little like Brexit. The hollowed out parts of rural – even urban areas like Detroit anyone ? – America was/is crying out for help. The democrats basically ignored it. Of course, the republicans would never have approved of anything Obama said. But it just goes to show you. Keep your mouth shut long enough, and live with intolerable problems, they go around you. Sanders made a go of it. Clinton did not. Figured she had all the parts of the party sewed up. We all pretty much thought the republican party was on the way out, just a matter of time. Time does tell. What will be the democrat response?
Don’t you think there are at least SOME Republicans that won’t go for this?
Not enough to matter. It’s old time pork barrel and everyone wants a slice of picnic. Democrats too. Watch.
Party Unity vs A pile of dollars for your district and donors. Hmmm!
“the conservatives are going to go crazy”
Um, every GOoPer moran in Congress describes themselves as “conservative”, so he’s saying the entire Repub party is going to go crazy? As in who does he think is going to vote for the Trumper “plan” if not “conservatives”? Who in DC fails to call themselves “conservative” unless they have a D after their name (and even then, haha..)
This is the sort of gratuitous incendiary statement which makes me think Steve Goebbels is as undisciplined a loose cannon as his Fuhrer, and really believes the insanity in his shitrag.
And what is it about gurus to modern electoral college prezes and their visions of new political epochs?–KKK Rover and his adoration of McKinley, now Josef Bannon and Jackson. In days gone by, electoral college prezes understood they were aberrations of the system. Now, they view themselves as a higher form of mandate than, say, a Dem elected by a popular majority…
I seem to remember that Trump has always loved to spend $$$$$ on his erections … er, I mean constructions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trumps-tax-mystery-points-toward-the-dealings-around
-his-rst-bankruptcies/2016/10/03/6e217ba4-8975-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html
If the link doesn’t work, google this:
“Trump’s tax mystery points toward the dealings around his first bankruptcies”
I think the WP has this policy where they self-sabotage their own URLs for some reason.
doesn’t work because of space after “around”. Copy and paste it into browser window, then delete that space, it works. I’ve noticed those spaces sometimes get inserted into c&p-ed urls, but have no idea how and why (guessing might be where url is broken between lines when displayed in text composition box? just a guess).
Better yet, learn to make an actual link. C&p-ing the url puts you at least halfway there anyway.
“If I were planning a new kind of political movement . . . I’d spend a lot of time reaching out to elected officials from the other party or independents (if there were any). I don’t see Donald Trump doing that so far.”
I don’t see Donald Trump reaching out even to the members of his own party. His MO seems to be to announce how things are going to be, and then to have a tantrum with anyone he perceives as not going along. This worked surprisingly well for him up to now, and I don’t see it changing. And the Republicans will be much less hostile to running up debt now that we have a Republican President.
And the Democrats will be more hostile. Because we’re going to be left holding the shit bag. Democrats are in fact the party of fiscal responsibility. It would be a shame not to remind the American public of that.
Then the Democrats are the party of Zombie Economics.
I’m not sure you get my drift. This is a trap. Public works is the cheese.
It is a trap if,public spending is for private companies.
Where do you think it would be heading? This is Donald J. Trump we’re talking about.
Here, this article explains why Trump’s infrastructure plan is all wrong. Because the priorities remain private profit instead of public needs like our “neglected public infrastructure”.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/trumps-misguided-flirtation-with-keynesianism-214468
This reminds me of the tax laws in NYC which mis-prioritize housing construction, something Trump knows all about. NY offers developers huge tax incentives to build luxury housing, when the crucial need is for affordable housing. There is actually a glut in luxury apartments, a large percentage of which are presently unoccupied.
The situation is so bad that DiBlasio considers he’s offering New Yorkers a fantastic deal that (if the builder wants the option) requires one “affordable” unit for every four “market” units. The actual effect of this kind of allocation on any working-class or middle-class neighborhood is ultra-gentrification, basically a kind of colonization where a lot of the existing community is forced out.
Trump’s idea will be one of the biggest boondoggles to builders (including, of course, himself) in American history. But what else would you expect.
Bannon isn’t talking to anyone but Trump’s true base when he says stuff like this.
I think Bannon is making a play to make Trumpism (whatever that might be) be seen by the angry white mob that voted for Trump as something different than Republican or Democratic.
One benefit of this is that there are then two scapegoats instead of one when things do not turn out rosy.
Well, he’s talking to financiers as well. The question is whether they are listening. If they are, then — “Houston, we have a problem.”
Where on earth does Bannon gets these ideas? How else shall find the answer other than by following “Godwin’s Law”? John Kenneth Galbraith, writing on the Nazi economic recovery program of the 1930s (NY Times Book Rev, 4.22.1973, points to their “large scale borrowing for public expenditures”. I continue from “The Mandarin Revolution” in The Essential Galbraith (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), p.232:
“From 1933 on, Hitler borrowed money and spent … At first, the spending was mostly for civilian works — railroads, canals, public buildings, the Autobahnen. Exchange controls then kept frightened Germans from sending their money abroad and those with rising incomes from spending too much of it on imports.
“The results were all a Keynesian could have wished. By late 1935, unemployment was at an end in Germany. By 1936, high income was pulling up prices or making it possible to raise them. Likewise wages were bginning to rise. So a ceiling was put over both prices and wages, and this too worked. Germany, by the late thirties, had full employment at stable prices, It was, in the industrial world, an absolutely unique achievement.”
Mind you, this was with the help of German banks. Something the Bush family should understand, since they were among the principle lenders to those banks. But I digress.
Would international banks today adopt such a Keynesian policy? Gosh, Trump owes a lot of money to Deutsche bank. Maybe he could do them a favor, they might ease up a little. Make it worth their while, know what I mean? I mean when you talk about public buildings, Trump’s in that line, after all. — Nome sane?
Of course, having Gestapo around to explain why wages shall not rise and unions are verboten helps with keeping wages and prices down.
Yeah, that would help.
But since writing that, I have already found that Trump’s plan is not Keynesian at all. It’s tax breaks for rich investors and privatization.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-clemente/trumps-infrastructure-pla_b_13155256.html
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sanders-and-the-left-seeing-trumps-infrastructure-plan-as-a-trap-20
16-11-22
Nope, need to use the GOP Obama playbook.
The Thugs have a majority, let them blow the budget all by themselves. Play Tenacious D keeping what’s already been done like the ACA. I think we can sucker the Thugs into keeping the subsidies linked to the individual and let the red states devise their own systems, ala Kansas, ’cause dez iz Brilliant, don’t you know. And this time conservatism will definitely work. Everything else, give them the rope to hang themselves. Water quality is more vulnerable in rural areas, let ’em kill regs and then raise hell about poisoning all the little people.
And meanwhile, make the corporate/Clinton/DNC swabbies walk to plank and heighten the contradictions. Do things like start a movement to bring all call centers back to the USA, I wanna speak to an American damn it. And let the Teaklanners and the swells fight about who goes first, the people or the corporations. The battle is about capital vs labor, if we want it to be.
And, from the other side of the Dem caucus, this from McCaskill on repeal and replace:
I’m feeling pretty good about the Democratic leadership’s responses to the Trump legislative threat. They’re taking different tacks, but pretty competently, it seems.
“In fact, it’s basically unimaginable.”
So was his election, yet here we are.
The Democrats can use the same line the GOP has used. How and when are you going to pay for it?
The indications are the infrastructure plan is just a raid on the Treasury by Associated General Contractors members.
Yes, of course the GOP will explode the deficit for Trump and use the deficit to curtail entitlements.
How many times do they get to play this shell game?
And guess where Joe Mancin will be? Asking how much infrastructure money WV gets and MIA on defending Social Security. Not that he will be the only Democrat aiding and abetting.
By the way, who were the 19 Democrats who when counter to the party last week, and what the heck is Tulsi Gabbard up to?
T’s business MO is stiff the workers and declare bankruptcy. I’m curious how that will play out on the national scale
NYPost — Donald Trump’s media summit was a f—ing firing squad.
And they all thought that all they had to do today was show up and kiss the ring on the short-fingered vulgarian’s pinkie.
Give Trump an inch and he’ll take a mile. It would be funny how these media idiots debase themselves, if only the end result wasn’t the further decline of this country.
Well, they now have the opportunity to redeem themselves. Expect they’ll pass on that for access to spew Trump’s lies since they’re no longer engaged in doing it for the opposition.