Why Is Trump Undermining the US Economy?
Why is Trump doing this? I’ll offer three explanations. First, we are witnessing rank incompetence. As has been widely reported, DOGE has charged into federal agencies and fired workers, only to attempt to rehire them days later when it realized how important they were. It is repeatedly posting data with significant errors about its “spending cuts.” Clearly, there is no plan here. DOGE simply has no idea what it is doing, and all its frenetic activity has amounted to nothing but confusion. There have been no material spending cuts: Federal spending in February was higher than in any previous month. If anything, DOGE’s ineptitude is likely to set back the cause of reducing the size and scope of government.
The second explanation is that Trump is a true mercantilist who genuinely, and wrongly, believes that if the US is running a bilateral trade deficit with another country, it must be losing economic value to that country. For example, he has criticized US businesses that import lumber from Canada on the grounds that the US has “more Lumber (sic) than we can ever use.” He refers to lumber imports as a “subsidy.”
But there is a third, more ominous explanation. It’s possible that Trump may have recently bought into the MAGA view that the US economy needs a fundamental, painful transformation. He said as much on March 9, in an interview on Fox Business.
Why Is Trump Undermining the US Economy? by Michael R. Strain - Project Syndicate
Conservative economist Michael Strain, who was initially optimistic about the prospects of President Donald Trump's second term, has now found himself aghast at what he sees as the president's remarkable economic mismanagement.
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