What If We're Wrong?
The luck of the Donald
Last November, when Trump was first re-elected, every lefty economist gleefully predicted catastrophic runaway inflation resulting from his promised “beautiful” tariffs and from the expulsion of immigrants.
Those promises he actually kept, so the “promises made, promises kept” crowd has something to crow about. But if you were reading everyone from Robert Reich on out, by now there should have been bread lines. Since midsummer at the outside, we should have been pushing around wheelbarrow loads of cash as if we stepped out of prewar Germany.
Yes, there is inflation. Ask my wife about the price of coffee. Prices are rising but prices rose when Biden was president. And during the presidencies of Obama, and Bush, and every other president I can remember, which is a good thing. An overall decline in prices is not something anyone who knows a lick about economics actually wants.
Donald Trump carries on with his tariffs and his expulsion of immigrants, two very inflationary policies, and things are, economically speaking, perhaps not stellar, but hardly the catastrophe everyone to the left of Thomas Sowell predicted. In fact, it has been a rather comical year, with leftists sounding like disciples of Milton Friedman while the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes crowd tried to pretend tariffs are not taxes.
So here we are. “Beautiful” tariffs bringing in more revenue than expected1 while at the same time not functioning as a torpedo to the economic ship of state. The stock market sets records while that nice new wheelbarrow I bought for my bundles of cash sits unused.
Which leads me to ask that most devastating of questions,
What if we are wrong, and Donald Trump is right?
What if his policies ultimately bring about peace and prosperity? What if Americans actually take up the jobs formerly performed by immigrants? What if, not having the threat of deportation hanging over their heads, they demand higher pay and better working conditions? Is there something wrong with meat packers being paid well to work in safe workplaces?
What if high school kids start appearing on landscaping crews? Gen Z-ers could surprise you yet, you old fart. They might not be completely traumatized by an honest day’s work. In fact, after a month or two they might look in the mirror and ask, “Who’s that with the body of a Greek god?”2
What if tariffs actually drive on-shoring, which is what should happen, eventually, according to economic theory? We’re months into the regime of high tariffs and the world has not yet ended. What if this non-ending of the world lasts long enough for on-shoring to take hold?
Yes, it could all go sideways. But it hasn’t yet. Trump is like a surfer riding a perfect wave.3 Where does that guy get his luck?
During his first term the system held well enough to check his worst impulses. This time it seems to be holding well enough to keep chugging along despite Trump giving full rein to those very same worst impulses. Did we build better than we knew?
What if Trumpism results in a downward distribution of wealth, but nuanced in that billionaires stay billionaires, but the remaining wealth becomes redistributed more evenly? Wouldn’t it be small-minded to complain?
To return to my point, if we can’t imagine how we might have it all wrong then we are no better than they are. In fact, hoping for Trump to fail is equivalent to hoping for economic catastrophe or worse. For me this is an absolutely impossible dilemma. The guy is a cruel, capricious bastard. The expulsion of immigrants has been accompanied by gratuitous cruelty. As for the MAGA movement, I’m in full agreement with Hillary Clinton, who I cheerfully voted for, in case you could not guess.
BUT
Nothing short of total economic collapse will dislodge them. That or something worse. It took a bungled pandemic and millions of dead people to defeat the guy the first time around. I shudder to think what it would take to convince nearly 80 million Americans they’ve been had. Children crippled by polio? War with China? Do I want that, or something equally if not more terrible? No, I do not. I can’t be the only one to have reached this impasse. My head is about to explode.
While we are on the subject of exploding, the ceasefire in Gaza is holding about as well as ceasefires ever hold in that part of the world.
The old bastard could end up with a Nobel Peace Prize yet. I don’t want to be in the room when the Nobel Prize committee votes on it. I’m not a zombie.
I worked on construction crews in high school and again when I was in my twenties. Both times it made me beautiful. Plenty of worse things can befall a young person.
The mental image of Donald Trump on a surfboard cracks me up. If I didn’t hate AI so much I’d ask Midjourney to cook it up.