RE TRUMP'S AGENDA

He cannot embark seriously on a make America great again program and at the same time shrink the federal government.

 

Not only would such an effort require enormous resources and central planning, but it would also require a different ideological and constitutional framework than the one we have always had.

 

Trump has not been heading in that direction at all. He wants to shrink the federal government, and at the same time use it to make America great again somehow.

 

His program so far, expelling illegals, limiting legals, imposing some tariffs, yelling at CEOs and threatening tax and duties, these things alone or together are not really anywhere near enough.

 

One would need something as elaborate as the reconstruction and developmental efforts of Japan, MITI and the Japanese Miracle, a sort of Marshall Plan for the US, full scale reindustrialization and enhanced cutthroat global raw materials procurement programs, domestic labor training programs on a large scale, vast import substitution, major reimposed tariff and nontariff barriers, incentives and subsidies of all kinds, rationing, embargo, etc., currency and finance coordination, to get anywhere. As I have pointed out, this would almost certainly lead to war in the near term.

 

In the past, we have only been able to move in such a coordinated nationwide program under conditions of war.

Now, war is the thing to avoid for various good reasons. Yet, Trump seems geared for military conflict.

We cannot make ourselves great again by war, under present conditions, but rather would accomplish the opposite.