He wants less federal government, on the one hand.
On the other, he wants to somehow put America first, make America great again, economically.
These two objectives are diametrically opposed.
If he were to really try to make America great again economically, he would need a truly Marshall Plan scale, highly coordinated, effort coming out of Washington.
Professor Kaiser talks about having hoped Obama would institute something like New Deal era reforms. That is something like what would be required, but as I say, those reforms had limited success, even back then, and the economic boom of the New Deal era really came with the war and its aftermath.
What would be required here now would be a truly gargantuan federal initiative involving all the tools, financial, commercial, and industrial, of developmental protectionism of a kind that has been practiced very successfully by Japan, then China, since WWII, but required a wealthy consumer victim like us.
The US would itself have no wealthy consumer victim, to which to turn, to make its economic redevelopment efforts work, and so would have to self regenerate prosperity more internally. Furthemore, booming other, less developed, or shattered, societies was the strategy which got us here in the first place.
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