Trump Recession Quotes

Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.” 2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.

By the time Administrator Bremer departed, $8.8 billion in reconstruction funds—taxpayer money harvested during a recession while Bush tilted more of the tax burden onto the middle and working classes—had simply disappeared without leaving a paper trail, while American contractors selling the occupation everything from laundry detergent to private security reaped windfalls.

Even if plague and recession topple Trump from the presidency, that core Trump base will remain, alienated and resentful. An Arkansas pastor told the Washington Post in the first week of March that half his congregants would lick the floor to prove the virus harmless. If they would risk their lives for Trump, they will certainly risk the stability of American democracy. They brought the Trumpocalypse upon the country, and a post-Trumpocalypse country will have to find a way either to reconcile them to democracy—or to protect democracy from them.

Under Donald Trump, the United States appears to be abandoning its role as democracy promoter for the first time since the Cold War. President Trump’s is the least prodemocratic of any U.S. administration since Nixon’s. Moreover, America is no longer a democratic model. A country whose president attacks the press, threatens to lock up his rival, and declares that he might not accept election results cannot credibly defend democracy. Both existing and potential autocrats are likely to be emboldened with Trump in the White House. So even if the idea of a global democratic recession was largely a myth before 2016, the Trump presidency—together with the crisis of the EU, the rise of China, and the growing aggressiveness of Russia—could help make it a reality.

You all should feel excited. You have made history, although, unfortunately, not for a good reason, because the government has put policies in place that have so hammered small businesses that they have created a job market that makes life incredibly difficult for young people.   The recession of the early 1980s was comparable but was followed by a rapid recovery.   Well, gosh, what happened in the early 1980s? President Ronald Reagan was elected. He implemented policies the exact opposite of this administration's policies. Instead of jacking up taxes by $1.7 trillion, as this Congress and this President has done, President Reagan slashed taxes and simplified the Tax Code. Instead of exploding government spending and the debt, President Reagan restrained the growth of government spending. And instead of unleashing regulators like locusts that destroy small businesses, President Reagan restrained regulation and the result was incredible growth.   For

Yankovich explained the most salient points: “You’re at a quarter mile and someone asks you who your mother is: you don’t know. That’s how focused you are. Okay, call the ball. Now it’s a knife fight in a phone booth. And remember: full power in the wire. Your IQ rolls back to that of an ape.” It sounds as if he’s being a smart-ass (he is), but deep lessons also are there to be teased out like some obscure Talmudic script. Lessons about survival, about what you need to know and what you don’t need to know. About the surface of the brain and its deep recesses. About what you know that you don’t know you know and about what you don’t know that you’d better not think you know. Call it an ape, call it a horse, as Plato did. Plato understood that emotions could trump reason and that to succeed we have to use the reins of reason on the horse of emotion. That turns out to be remarkably close to what modern research has begun to show us, and it works both ways: The intellect without the emotions is like the jockey without the horse.

Democracy’s brand was also damaged by America’s reaction to the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001. George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 dealt a twin blow to Western democracy’s allure. The first came in the form of the Patriot Act, which paved the way for spying on American citizens and gave the green light to multiple dilutions of US constitutional liberties. That imperative was then extended to America’s relations with any country, democratic or not, which pledged to cooperate in the ‘war on terror’. Autocrats such as Putin and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf went from pariahs to soul brothers almost overnight. When the Bush administration said ‘You are either with us or against us,’ it was referring to the opening of ‘black sites’ where the CIA could waterboard terrorist suspects, and the no-questions-asked exchanges of terrorist lists against which there was little prospect of appeal – a practice known in international law as refoulement. This gave undemocratic regimes an excuse to logroll domestic opponents onto the international lists, with devastating effects on political rights around the world. In the decade after 9/11, the number of Interpol red notices rose eightfold.3 Such practices belied Bush’s democratic agenda. For example, it robbed the US of the moral standing to criticise the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a China-backed body of central Asian autocracies that today operates its own refoulement exchanges of political dissidents in the name of counter-terrorism. The Bush administration’s approach was also geopolitically shortsighted. Just as the West’s support for the Afghan jihad against the Soviets in the 1980s laid the ground for the rise of Islamist terrorism, so America’s Faustian post-9/11 pacts with autocratic regimes helped sow the seeds for the world’s current democratic recession. That is certain to deepen under Trump.

Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.

But it was really the then-popular right-wing demagogue Glenn Beck who gave Republicans a taste of what was to come as the recession deepened. Beck was an apocalyptic yet strangely ebullient conspiracy theorist who on his daily Fox News broadcasts filled blackboard after blackboard with crazy Venn diagrams exposing the hidden links between 1960s radicals and Barack Obama. But he also broke with many Republican dogmas, particularly on economics and foreign policy, writing in one of his books, “Under President Bush, politics and global corporations dictated much of our economic and border policy. Nation building and internationalism also played a huge role in our move away from the founding principles.” Beck’s economic nationalism and isolationism struck a chord with the public, and many flocked to his sold-out rallies to hear him denounce phantom leftists but also Wall Street and the big banks. He even wrote a bestselling thriller in which all these evil forces join hands to squelch American liberty. For all his bombast, Beck was among the first on the right to report the truth that the American middle class was being hollowed out and that its children faced drastically reduced prospects. That a small class of highly educated people was benefiting from the new global economy and becoming fantastically wealthy. And that vast sections of the country had become deserted, heartbroken . . . and angry. Mainstream Republicans never got the message. Donald Trump did.

and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas. In America, the first sign of things to come was during the Great Recession, with the emergence of the Tea Party movement in the Republican Party, inside and outside Congress. The movement formed in reaction to the efforts by the administration of Barack Obama to bail out the U.S. financial sector in the midst of the economic crisis. Its members initially presented themselves as fiscal conservatives, calling for the kind of lower taxes and limited government spending espoused by Ronald Reagan. They quickly moved on to oppose the administration’s promotion of universal health care and other social policies, and soon morphed into an activist protest movement supporting new candidates for office with a mixture of conservative, libertarian, and right-wing populist credentials. Many of these Tea Party candidates would later support Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

And the rejection of white working-class voters as desirable partners betrays an ugly elitism that is at odds with what Democrats are supposed to stand for. The disdain was made explicit in 2016 when Hillary Clinton described half of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”84 Although Clinton was certainly right to denounce racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes as deplorable, her comments were troubling on several levels. She changed what is normally an adjective into a noun, suggesting that white working-class people with less education than her were completely defined by their attitudes on race. Clinton used the line while speaking to audiences whom she described as “successful people” at fundraisers in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard, where her audiences knowingly chuckled at America’s benighted white working class.85 And it did not go unnoticed, one journalist remarked, that deplorables is not a term Clinton ever applied to highly educated Wall Street bankers who brought about the Great Recession and threw millions of people out of work.86 In

Greece, maneuvering for debt relief, is flirting treacherously with Moscow. Recession-hit economies such as Italy seem to believe business as normal with Russia trumps calls for solidarity over Ukraine.

As The Guardian put it, Sekulow came up with a plan, at the height of the recession, that pushed “poor and jobless people to donate money to his Christian nonprofit, which since 2000 has steered more than $60 million to Sekulow, his family and their businesses.” The money has gone to companies controlled by his wife, sons, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew.

After all the atrocities that George W. Bush saw in his presidency (terror attacks, unjust wars resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, the largest recession since the great depression, and so much more) having someone insinuate that he was racist was the all-time low. How out-of-touch. How self-centered. I remember thinking that it was yet another sign that the former president was a weird emotional child who was not at all qualified for the presidency (this was, of course, before Donald Trump showed us all what “weird, emotional child not at all qualified for the presidency” really looks like). But I thought of this mostly as a funny aberration.

Since The Great Recession, the global financial crash of 2008-09, the debt-fuelled post-recession recovery has been the weakest in the post-war era (since the end of World War Two). Whereas total outstanding credit in the US after the Wall Street Crash grew from 160% to 260% of GDP between 1929 and 1932, the figure rose from 365% in 2008 to 540% in 2010. (And this does not include derivatives, whose nominal outstanding value is at least four times GDP).[34] A long depression and rising right-wing populism have followed, including the stunning ascendency of property tycoon and TV celebrity demagogue Donald Trump as the President of the US in 2016.[35] The British public’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU delivered another shock of global significance. A chronic drift towards trade wars and protectionism is accelerating and in January 2018, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said that “great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”, putting Russia, China and – yes – Europe in the crosshairs of the world’s long-time dominant economic and military power. Adding to this age of anxiety is the accelerating automation revolution. What should be an emancipatory and utopian development only generates insecurity at the prospect of unprecedented mass unemployment. It can be no coincidence that all these crises are converging at exactly the same time. They cannot be explained away by cynical and shallow generalisations about ‘human nature’. In the course of this investigation we will see that in fact all of these crises have a common root cause: the decaying nature of capitalism and its tendency towards breakdown. Indeed, average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates in the world’s richest countries have fallen in every decade since the 1960s and are clearly closing in on zero. Rates of profit, manufacturing costs and commodity prices are also trending towards zero. Drawing on Henryk Grossman’s vital clarification of Karl Marx’s methodology, we shall see that capitalism is heading inexorably towards a final, insurmountable breakdown that is destined to strike much earlier than a zero rate of profit. Indeed, we shall also see that the next, imminent economic crash will result in worldwide hyperinflation. We will also show that the economic crisis is intensifying competition between nation-states, forcing them into a situation which threatens the most destructive world war to date.

As a result, tax revenues and state budgets shrink, at least in relative terms per capita. National debt inevitably grows in order to at least partially cover the shortfall. Of course, it grew enormously after governments bailed out the banks in the wake of the financial crash. The British government did so to the tune of 136.6bn and has admitted that it will never recoup at least £27bn of that amount. In the US the bailout cost at least $14.4 trillion.[56] At the start of of 2019, the US’s national debt stood at nearly $22 trillion, having increased by 10% since Trump took office two years earlier. Under his predecessor Barack Obama, the national debt increased 100%, from $10 trillion to $20 trillion. National debt has to be repaid to the government’s creditors: bondholders, ie people, companies and foreign governments; international organisations such as the World Bank; and private financial institutions. If debt is not or cannot be repaid it becomes increasingly difficult to attract creditors. US national debt when the Great Depression kicked off stood at 16% of GDP and rose to 44% when the depression ended at the end of World War Two. Before the The Great Recession it stood at 65% and by 2013 had exploded to over 100%.[57] Gross national debt and household debt have been at record highs at the same time for the first time ever. Austerity, the socialisation of national debt, therefore becomes an economic necessity, not simply an unfair and immoral ‘political choice’, as is claimed by democratic socialists. That public spending as a share of national income in Britain in 2017 (39.6%) was at the same level as in 2007 (39.6%) after seven years of debt servicing via savage cuts to state welfare and public services suggests national income must have fallen per capita. Indeed, official forecasts suggest that GDP per adult in 2022 will be 18% lower than it would have been had it grown by 2% a year since 2008 – it has averaged 1.1% – broadly the expected rate of growth at that time.

When I hear Democrats wringing their hands about the ‘norms and guardrails of democracy,’ I feel like I’m taking crazy pills, and when I hear Joe Biden earnestly insist that Trump is some sort of aberration, I begin to wonder if we deserve what we’ve gotten. Open your eyes and look around at the world. Or, if international affairs aren’t your thing, look around at our own country, where life expectancy is actually in decline. We are rapidly heading towards a recession, domestic terrorism is on the rise, and pretty much everyone is addicted to some stupefying thing, from drugs to porn to Twitter.

The most powerful nation in the world teetered on the precipice in November 2020. Devastated by disease, depleted by recession, riven by racial upheaval, ravaged by the changing climate, debased by immorality, and weakened by an all-out assault on institutions: this was Trump’s America, and at its heart stood a self-described genius tearing down whatever stood in the way of his survival. The time had come for voters to decide.

I am convinced that if I had maintained the same work ethic I had during the 1970s and most of the 1980s, there would have been no recession for me. I wasn’t focused and really thought that life and success just came hand and hand. I thought I was better than the rest. When I began to relax and take it a little - or perhaps a lot - easier things began to fall apart