The Big American Reset

For the few die-hard supply-side economists, and there are very few of those anymore unless they are paid to fabricate for partisan reasons, even they question the value of applying a massive tax cut stimulus-boost, and incurring a massive deficit, when the economy is already flying high. But unlike the majority of economists who question the very value of trickle-down economics (good luck with that job creation lie, these skeptics maintain), even supply-siders think that after a momentary uptick in 2018, 2019 will bring rapidly increasing inflation, which will trigger a rather serious recession for an entirely different reason. The GOP hopes no one figures out these approaching clouds until after the 2018 mid-term elections; they want a focus only on the momentary sugar rush in 2018.

And while we will have to wait a bit to see this reality sink in, there are other tea leaves that suggest the United States is slip-sliding downwards in many other ways as well. For example, as Republicans rejoice at having slammed the biggest pillar of the Affordable Care Act – the tax reform legislation removed the mandatory enrollment in the ACA which provided most of the healthcare subsidy funding – and rather openly want to curtail Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security to pay for that tax cut, the government’s Centers for Disease Control tell us that our life expectancy numbers are going the wrong way.

“The life expectancy figure is based on the year of one’s birth, current death trends and other factors. For decades, it was on the upswing, rising a few months nearly every year. But last year marked the first time in more than half a century that U.S. life expectancy fell two consecutive years… A baby born last year in the U.S. is expected to live about 78 years and seven months, on average, the CDC said. An American born in 2015 was expected to live about a month longer, and one born in 2014 about two months longer than that.

“The dip in 2015 was blamed on drug deaths and an unusual upturn in the death rate for the nation’s leading killer, heart disease. Typically, life expectancy goes back up after a one-year decline, said Robert Anderson, who oversees the CDC’s death statistics. The last time there was a two-year drop was 1962-63. It also happened twice in the 1920s… ‘If we don’t get a handle on this,’ he said, ‘we could very well see a third year in a row. With no end in sight.’” Los Angeles Times, December 26^th. The reasons: mounting deaths from the opioid epidemic and heart and other related problems due to our rising obesity rates. But wait, there’s more.

Immigration policies are deflecting highly-trained scientists and engineers – the real job-creators – north to Canada or European locations. The folks with these advanced college degrees either cannot breakthrough for themselves for a coveted H1B visa or, even if they can, they are not able to bring their wives and children. Canada has responded by making it easier for such experts (and their families) to enter Canada, and American firms seeking these specially-educated workers are now opening facilities in other countries so as not to lose their skills.

In most of the rest of the world, politicians enhance their stature by opposing just about anything Donald Trump has embraced, mostly his reversing decades of prior efforts by other American presidents from both sides of the aisle. Not only have we lost influence by withdrawing from well-established policies – from trade agreements, climate change commitments and our recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital – but the fact that one president can undo the pledges, policies and treaties of past presidents has called into question whether the world can ever take America’s word on anything ever again.

Trump’s threat-tweeting and name-calling (Kim Jong-Un, is “little rocket man”) represent a reverse of our entire history of diplomatic actions. The bluster of a North Korean dictator is nothing new, but political cat-calls by a nation that was until recently the spokes-country for the free world are viewed as a nation gone rogue, supporting a president who seems hell-bent on provoking a nuclear war. Kim comes out unscathed; America is viewed as the true villain. Lots of threats but almost no real follow-through, from opioid addiction to international issues.

Trump constantly contradicts policies from his most qualified advisors, instead choosing to cater to his religiously-driven base whose positions have long since been rejected by most of the rest of the world. He has undermined his own intelligence agencies (even those in the military), the Department of State and the FBI and is in the process of eviscerating the Departments of Energy, Interior, Education, OSHA, the SEC, the FCC and the EPA.

In a cover story in the December 26^th Los Angeles Times, entitled Foreign Leaders Say U.S. Losing Stature, global correspondents Tracy Wilkinson, Alexandra Zavis and Shashank Bengali, write: “China has now assumed the mantle of fighting climate change, a global crusade that the United States once led. Russia has taken over Syrian peace talks, also once the purview of the American administration, whose officials Moscow recently deigned to invite to negotiations only as observers.

“France and Germany are often now the countries that fellow members of NATO look to, after President Trump wavered on how supportive his administration would be toward the North Atlantic alliance… And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S., once the only mediator all sides would accept, has found itself isolated after Trump’s decision to declare that the U.S. recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“In his wide-ranging speech on national security [on December 18^th], Trump highlighted what he called the broadening of U.S. influence throughout the world… But one year into his presidency, many international leaders, diplomats and foreign policy experts argue that he has reduced U.S. influence or altered it in ways that are less constructive. On a range of policy issues, Trump has taken positions that disqualified the United States from the debate or rendered it irrelevant, these critics say…

“‘The president can and does turn things inside out,’ said Manoj Joshi, a scholar at a New Delhi think tank, the Observer Research Foundation. ‘So the chances that the U.S. works along a coherent and credible national security strategy are not very high.’

“As the U.S. recedes, other powers including China, Russia and Iran are eagerly stepping into the void… Nicholas Burns, who served as a senior American diplomat under Republican and Democratic administrations, said the administration’s strategy was riddled with contradictions that have left the U.S. ineffective… Trump ‘needs a strong State Department to implement’ its strategy, he said. ‘Instead, State and the foreign service are being weakened and often sidelined.’

“Trump’s ‘policy of the last 12 months is a radical departure from every president since WWII,’ Burns said in an interview. ‘Trump is weak on NATO, Russia, trade, climate, diplomacy. The U.S. is declining as a global leader.’

“The most recent example of U.S. isolation came with Trump’s decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, delighting many Israelis, but angering Palestinians and reversing decades of international consensus…

“For the last quarter-century, successive U.S. governments have held themselves up as an ‘honest broker’ in mediating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. Trump insisted he is not giving up on a peace deal, but most parties involved interpreted his announcement as clearly siding with Israel.

“‘From now on, it is out of the question for a biased United States to be a mediator between Israel and Palestine,’ Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a summit of more than 50 Muslim countries that he hosted in Istanbul. ‘That period is over.’

“Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, said that if a peace deal is to be made now, ‘it won’t be from American policy… Trump took himself and the administration out of the peace process for the foreseeable future’…

“Regional leaders and analysts also say that for all of Trump’s tough rhetoric, they see few concrete steps by the U.S. to counter Iran’s steady expansion of its military, economic and political influence, a perception that Iranian leaders are happy to exploit.”

So here are just some of Donald Trump’s New Year’s gifts to Americans everywhere: a tax bill that is aimed at making the rich richer, which will slam us into a recession after the sugar high of 2018; healthcare that will continue to decrease our life expectancies, complaining about issues but doing nothing to improve health for most of us; and a vastly more dangerous world in which the United States and its best interests decreasingly matter to most of the earth. Welcome to the big American reset! Expectations and reality. We seem to have made America Grate Again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you are a realist – left, right or center – it’s time to doff partisan politics and do what’s best for the country… returning to pragmatics based on facts and not wannabee bogus slogans.