Today, the Two Mikes were fortunate to host the return of Tom deSabla, an eloquent Libertarian and a talented economist. We discussed the economic troubles that President Trump is inheriting and the problems -- economic and political – his administration will face in trying to solve them. The first problem, obviously, is the federal deficit, which has tripled since 2001.
This problem has become much greater because of the fires – (man-made?) in Los Angeles. This week’s estimates suggest that it will cost at least $275 billion of the taxpayer’s money. Americans have always been profoundly generous in supporting their fellow citizens affected by natural disasters. But this time the relief money needed is unprecedented, and in this case Trump faces not only the deficit problem, but the political and, perhaps, moral issues. The Trump government must identify where the funds will come, and, as important, must arrange a means to deliver the enormous aid required in a way that ensures it is used only to rebuild the burned-out parts of the city. Whether or not the fires were intentionally started, Governor Newsome’s government has definitively proven itself to be a thoroughly profligate, amateurish, and authoritarian organization, and as being incapable of doing even the most necessary of governmental, suppressing crime, providing useful education rather than leftist indoctrination, and, most obviously, making the state’s invaluable forest resources as safe as possible from wildfires. It would be madness for Trump’s government to put $275 million into the hands of Newsome and his gang unless arrangements are for a strict oversight mechanism that ensures the taxpayers’ money is spent for the purposes for which it is intended, and not for the leftist ruination of California which all Americans have been watching Newsome, his party, and their extreme leftist bureaucracy are conducting in the state.
A second major problem for Trump’s government is to reestablish the reputation of the United States as a fair and a non-war-seeking republic. That of course does not mean that America does not protect itself and its genuine national interests. It means that in order to live in a world where America is less detested, Washington must curtail – preferably stop -- interventionist wars, unending sanctions, entangling, useless, and expensive alliances like NATO and the UN, and the overthrowing of legally elected governments. Simply put, the economic world that American leaders built after 1945 no longer exists, and the United States itself is far more disliked – even hated – in the world than ever before. Indeed, the world as a whole recognizes that the U.S. government that the threat posed by China to many areas of the world has been the product of the United States insisting that China be admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), with the status of a still “developing country”. After spending seventy years learning how to crush a militarist, murderous, and expansionist USSR, America and many of its Western allies pretended the Cold War never existed and happily enabled China to become a deadly Communist powerhouse on the back of U.S. and Western economic investment.
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