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NOT PUBLISHED in 2018

I was reading Tapscott's post about the exhuberance of Trump's economic revival in the U.S. and noticed this:

It takes time for the economy to recover the costs of excessive regulatory compliance and to redirect capital to productive uses, so the gains seen during Trump’s first year are likely attributable in significant part to the expectations generated by his slashing the red tape. The full impact of the deregulation is still to be felt.

So, not much has yet changed in this past year, but America has set up to work already. It's largety irrational, spiritual reaction. In that way, presidents always had a bit of a perception dimension, or at least as far back as I can remember.

The first President that I vaguely recally was Gerald Ford. That was over quickly. {thanks to jabrwok}

My first President was Jimmy Carter. He presided over The Malaisie Era. Inflation and stagflation, gas lines, 55 speed limit. It was the time when Ameica was lost after the crazy 60s and Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan was the President who turned the things around. He did it by recognizing that inflation was harmful, as well as other measures. Also, he won the Cold War. America was happy to be back at work alongside the President.

The George Bush the elder was the president after Reagan, but I don't remember much about him. I think America got tired at that time and needed a vacation.

Bill Clinton was a Vacation President. He was content mostly with enjoying the fruits of Reagan's work, and the country went along with that. It has to be noted that Clinton set welfare queens to work, but otherwise his presidency was about getting blowjobs from interns.

George W. Bush was The President Who Kept America Safe. He opened his office poorly, with the "compassionate conservatism" bullshit, but the events of 9/11 pushed that nonsense into background. Americans pulled themselves together and won dramatic victories in Iraq - twice: once against Saddam and once against Iran. However, Americans quickly realized that all that success abroad was not matched with prosperity at home.

Barack Obama was supposed to be a hope-and-change President, but his chief legacy turned out to the the race war that he instigated. It was a blow after a blow: Obamacare, destruction of Korean Garands, kangaroo courts in colleges, pervets in restrooms, Benghazi (and jailing of Nokula), NLRB, EPA, DOJ. I think BHO was the only president ever who really hated America and wanted to destroy it. Americans resisted as they could. They learned to see through the fake news.

And now, the backlash to Obama's regime of hate and oppression brought us President Donald Trump. The initial signs are encouraging, as Americans are back at building and creating good things. But it was only a year, and it's much too early to sum it up.

UPDATE in 2021

We have someone to sum it up in an anonymous e-mail:

Trump showed that the annihilation of the American middle class was not the result of inevitable forces. Technological change and globalization are not weather or the movement of tectonic plates. The economy, and who gets what from whom, is embedded in political choices. Who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits are political choices. Who is crushed by the legal system and who benefits from it, and who is insulated from it, are also political choices. Trump will never be forgiven for showing normal people that their destruction, and the enrichment of other people, who despise everything that they love, believe in, and care about, is a policy decision. Trump showed other choices are possible.

Having seen once how it actually works, we can never unsee it.

That is Trump’s greatest achievement.

Donald Trump opened my eyes on a certain facet of what the anonymous wrote above. I really believed in the dogma of the free trade, free market economy. Well, it was not wrong. However, Trump has demonstrated two things: first is that enormous burden of modern government is real, and it can be decreased. Without a meaningful fiscal (taxation or budgetary) reform, just by easing the regulatory burden by a very small amount, Trump extended the growth period to become the longest ever in history. I thought the economy was more of a natural law than it turned out to be. What if the 2008 crisis was really prompted by the race hustlers, their bank sit-ins, and Dodd and Frank? What if there's no such thing as "cyclical recession"? In addition, everyone in the elite predicted that Trump's protectionist policies would crash the economy — American for certain, perhaps the world's. But instead, Trump eased the burden of unfair trade agreements that hamstrung America. The resulting prosperity offset the drag of the necessary protectionism easily. It was tremendous. Trump repudiated all the pseudo-libertarian hacks that shilled for international mega-money.

So, in the above sequence, Trump was a President who made us see.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 09:03 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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