The Greatness of America
Donald Trump chose “Make America Great Again” as his 2016 Presidential campaign slogan. This raises the questions of how do you measure the greatness of a nation and how do you enhance a nation’s greatness. Typically, nations have been measured by the strength of their economies; i.e., their gross domestic products or GDPs. By this measurement, the United States has led all nations for almost 100 years, with its current annual GDP measuring roughly $19.39 trillion, followed by China with an annual GDP of $12.24 trillion. Another measure of the strength of nations is their military might; i.e., the size of their armies and the numbers of ships, airplanes and tanks dedicated to their armed forces. Because the military needs of nations vary, military might is frequently expressed in terms of its lowest common denominator; namely, the nation’s annual military budget. Here again, the United States stands in first place with an annual military budget of $693 billion, far ahead of China in second place with an annual military budget of $168 billion. All this raises the question of just what did candidate Trump mean when he said that he wanted to “Make America Great Again”?
To be sure, there are many other economic measurements that do not place the United States first among nations. For example, the U.S. only ranks 125th in terms of its rate of economic growth and 8th in the rate of employment of its able-bodied workers. It also ranks 13th in terms of average per capita income and 129th in terms of the percentage of individuals living in poverty. Although these statistics do not necessarily reflect a decline in our nation’s standing, they do suggest that it has considerable room for improvement.
It should also be pointed out that the U.S. lags behind many other nations in terms of a variety of healthcare and educational statistics. For example, the U.S. is in 33rd place in terms of average life expectancy and in 46th place in terms of infant mortality. Similarly, the U.S. ranks 8th and 4th, respectively, in terms of percentage of adults who have achieved high school and college educations. Considering the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce education and healthcare spending, it doesn’t appear that it has any intentions of improving the nation’s standings in these two important categories. The nation is also faced with a decaying infrastructure and two and a half years later the Trump administration is yet to either propose or support legislation or even executive action designed improve the nation’s roads, bridges or electrical grid. Instead, his only construction project has been to build a useless wall along our southern border.
To his credit, Trump recognized that although the country’s GDP had grown by more than 350% since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the median household income of Americans had barely kept up with inflation during that period. In addition, while the nation’s bankers had been bailed out following the Great Recession of 2008-9, millions of families throughout the Midwest had seen their life savings wiped out with little hope of replenishing them. Thus, they had ample reason to believe that the nation’s standing had slipped a peg or two and that something needed to be done to restore their lives, if not the country’s place among nations. Specifically, how and why had their high-paying manufacturing and mining jobs vanished? Had they been hijacked and were being held for ransom in some far-off province in China? Were their declining fortunes the result of Mexico’s sending hordes of criminals, drug dealers and rapists across our southern border or the “disastrous” trade deals struck by the Clinton and Obama administrations?
President Obama had told them that their jobs had disappeared as a result of globalization and automation and that those jobs were never going to come back. This was not a message that was easy for them to accept. “Globalization” and “automation” sounded like terms that crooked politicians use to explain their constituents’ misfortunes after they had squandered their tax dollars. (Remember, the sainted Ronald Reagan had warned in his inaugural address that “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.”) Moreover, the Obama administration’s remedy to their plight was for them to learn new skills so they could perform jobs they had no reason to believe existed or even would exist. They, therefore, fell easy prey to a politician who promised that he alone could improve their unfortunate situations.
All of this asks just what has the Trump administration been doing to ease the plight of working class Americans. It would be misleading to assert that President Trump has done nothing in his first two and a half years in office. With the help of Mitch McConnell and a compliant Republican majority in the Senate, he has filled two Supreme Court and over 150 Federal Circuit Court and District Court vacancies with “conservative” jurists and has filled key Cabinet positions with individuals whose views are antithetical to the missions of the government agencies placed under their control. Among the affected agencies are the Department of Education which is being run by a proponent of private education; the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior which were placed under the guidance of individuals beholden to the fossil fuel industries; the Department of Health which was placed under the guidance of an opponent of the Affordable Care Act; the Defense Department which is now under the control of a former defense industry executive; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which was crippled by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s principal hatchet man; and the Department of Justice which is now being run by a man who thinks the DOJ’s mission is to protect the President from the representatives of the public. Far from purging Washington of corporate executives and lobbyists for special interests that prey on government officials to do their bidding, Trump has simply appointed them to run the government’s affairs. Could this be what his supporters thought he meant by “draining the swamp?”
The impact of these appointments can be seen in the relaxation, if not total repeal, of a host of governmental regulations intended to protect the American public from deleterious actions taken by corporations whose sole mission is the maximization of profits. Such regulations dealt with such matters as miner and worker safety, consumer financial protection, public health, the environment and air and water pollution. While the ostensible rationale behind these changes was to free business entities from unnecessary restrictions that limit their growth and the creation of jobs, in reality, business growth is largely dependent upon consumer demand, not profitability; and there is no evidence that the nation’s workers are sharing in that increased profitability which conceivably could increase the demand for goods and services.
Trump’s principal legislative achievement has been the enactment of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Hailed as both self-funding and the key to a 4% annual growth rate, this was in essence a gift to business entities and the Republican donor base, paid for almost entirely by increases to the nation’s $22 trillion indebtedness. Not only has the initial growth spurt started by this legislation worn off (GDP growth during the most recent fiscal quarter dropped to 1.9%), but about 70% of the monies that the corporate beneficiaries of this legislation were supposed to pass on to their workers has been diverted to their shareholders, over 20% of whom are foreign nationals.
Perhaps the one bright spot in Trump’s legislative agenda has been his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act which provides health insurance to 22 million previously uninsured Americans. Nevertheless, undaunted by this setback, Trump has gone on to repeal that Act’s provision requiring uninsured individuals to either purchase health insurance or pay a tax; and, despite his oath to “faithfully execute the laws of the nation,” he has caused the Justice Department to support litigation seeking to hold the Act unconstitutional. The seriousness of these efforts cannot be understated as the destruction of the ACA will be a death knell for hundreds of rural hospitals across the country which will have a particularly adverse impact on the very voters that supported Trump’s 2016 election.
Trump, the businessman who has demonstrated the art of buying high and selling low (think about the Trump Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, and his three Atlantic City Casino/hotels) and who claims to have authored “The Art of the Deal”, has complained bitterly about the way his predecessors conducted negotiations with foreign countries. Unfortunately, he has tried his own hand at international negotiations and the results do not present a pretty picture.
First, he broke with past State Department policy and met with Kim Jung Un in an effort to have North Korea give up its nuclear weapons. Although he proclaims that they fell in love with each other, the only tangible result of their three meetings has been a cancellation by the U.S. of its joint military exercises with South Korea. What we learned from this misadventure has been that if a rouge nation obtains nuclear weapons, it will be treated royally by the United States, a lesson not lost on Iran now that Trump has disavowed the nuclear disarmament deal painstakingly negotiated by the Obama administration. As a result, Iran is again enriching fissionable material and the Persian Gulf is on the brink of war. Nice going Donald.
Then there are his efforts to tame China’s unfair trade practices. First, he walked away from the Trans Pacific Partnership put together by the Obama administration. Thus, rather than confront China with the economic power of twelve nations, Trump chose to enter into a bilateral trade war, imposing a 25% tariff on $250 billion of Chinese goods annually imported into the United States. This was countered by Chinese tariffs on U.S. agricultural products. In this way Trump will cost U.S. consumers over $60 billion a year (and another $30 billion if his threatened additional tariffs go into effect) and will decimate the income of U.S. farmers. Despite his proclamation that “trade wars are good and easy to win”, no deal with China over its trade practices is in sight. Could a return to greatness still be just around the corner?
In large measure, America’s greatness lies in its perception by the rest of the world. Not only has America been viewed as the world’s leader in creativity and productivity, but it is envied for the personal freedoms enjoyed by its citizens. Sadly, Trump’s impact on America’s reputation has been almost totally negative. He has insulted our allies and embraced the world’s cruelest dictators. He regularly viciously and personally attacks the members of the press and anyone who voices criticism of his words or actions. Rather than welcoming those who seek refuge in this country, he has separated immigrant children from their parents and placed them in over-crowded and unsanitary conditions in an effort to discourage others seeking asylum. He has broken three major treaties, leaving the world (especially Iran and North Korea) to ponder whether our nation can be a reliable partner in any endeavor. This hardly seems like a viable recipe for enhancing our nation’s greatness.
In the final analysis, nations become great, not through individual efforts, but rather through the collective efforts of their people to achieve results which are beyond the capabilities of any individual or group of individuals. They pool their wealth to provide for their common defense and to build the cities in which they live and roads, bridges and communications systems which link them together. They also seek to maximize the productivity of every individual by assuring that each person receives an education, adequate healthcare, affordable housing and nutrition. Government is the catalyst that enables this to happen. Trump’s hyper-partisan approach to politics, however, virtually assures that government cannot fulfill its role of fomenting collective action.
Americans also believe in individual competition which helps to maximize individual creativity and productivity; and that is one of the factors that has enabled the United States to surpass the achievements of older nations and nations with greater populations. Even so, there must be a balance between individual achievement and group achievement. When the good of individuals is maximized to the detriment of the good of the nation, you get a system like the Soviet Union in which the workers pretend to work and their employers pretend to pay them. Unfortunately, this is the path to “greatness” that President Trump seems to have chosen.