“Furriners” Ain’t The Problem, Part 1

As we  have previously documented, Donald Trump is not an economic conservative in any way, shape or form. On everything that matters for prosperity and liberty—-fiscal rectitude, sound money, free markets and small government—he’s on the wrong side of the policy fence.

His endless boasting about the Greatest Economy Ever doesn’t gainsay his economic policy apostasy, either. Over the tenure of ten presidents between 1953 and 2016 the best available measure of domestic economic performance—real final sales of domestic product—expanded by 3.03% per annum. By contrast, during the Donald’s four year term, the gain was only half that at 1.52% per annum.

So to repeat: Donald Trump is simply an opportunistic, self-promoting demagogue who chanced to stumble upon the illegal alien menace theme (murders and rapists) on his way down the elevator to the announcement of his presidential candidacy in June of 2015, which theme he then paired with his life-long adherence to a primitive form of trade protectionism.

Accordingly, the essence of this couplet was the misbegotten notion that America’s problems are caused by furriners lurking off-shore, making it incumbent upon Washington to stop the alleged hordes of illegal aliens at the border and to staunch the flow of foreign goods into US ports.

That was and remains the heart of Trump’s domestic program. In fact, foreigner-bashing is all there is, there ain’t no more.

And it’s not surprising. The Donald is the furthest thing from a thinker or idea advocate. His whole career was built on bashing his opponents—a modus operandi that he simply escalated to the national and world stage.

Still, it is hard to think of any proposition that could be so wrong-headed, so lacking in factual foundation, so confused as to cause and effect and so utterly irrelevant to the underlying ills that actually plague the US economy.

To be sure, we do have too many imports and there are millions of immigrants piled up at the southern border. But those conditions are owing to policy mistakes originating in Washington, not evidence that America is being assaulted by evils emanating from outside our borders.