Friday, October 25, 2019

The real silver bullet

      As virtually every pundit says at least once during presidential elections, "it's the economy, stupid".   No matter how personally repugnant the current occupant of the Oval Office may be, the conventional wisdom is if voters are feeling good about their economic prospects, they may feel tRump deserves another 4 years.
     Now comes a column by nobel laureate Paul Krugman which may throw cold water on the tRump campaign's supporters.   Krugman lays out the case that although the economy in general is still in pretty good shape, the president's* trade wars and erratic foreign policy is harming global growth and causing ripples in the key states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania which delivered the 2016 election to the GOP candidate by a collective margin of less than 75,000 votes.
     I am reminded of the economic argument by conversations with an obvious tRumper with whom I was playing golf last week.  Despite the unspoken rule that politics is a taboo subject on a golf course, this yahoo, who was a random addition to our foursome for a charity tournament averred that while The Donald may not be the nicest human on the planet, at least the economy was growing on his watch.   That may be the current perception, but the collapse of business confidence in the face of our erratic commander in chief's policies may overtake the rosy economic narrative by the late summer of 2020.   Combined with the probable impeachment of Cheetolini, even diehard republicans may have to revise their allegiance to this boil on the collective butt of America.

No comments:

Post a Comment