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Thought Experiment

ksen said:
What happens next?
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Trump says he was just joking.

Hillary gives another $400 million to Iran that the US owes for something that makes no sense.

Bernie throws up a little bit in his mouth.

The American people are fascinated by a new apple device and how terrible Snookie's new songs sound.
 
ksen said:
Trump loses.

Hillary wins.

Populist anger isn't going away once the election is over. What happens next?
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We can hope that the populist anger would continue to build, forcing both parties to abandon the main source of our recent problems, the neoliberal elements of the nation's policies, that is, the idea that it should be the job of the federal government to direct as much of the nation's income to the already rich as possible. That instead it should be the job of the federal government to reduce income inequality, not to increase it, and to eliminate poverty for the working poor. This would mitigate so many of the problems that we have with crime, lack of health care, housing, education, declining aggregate demand, etc.

What will happen is that the Republicans will explain away Trump's landslide loss as being due to Trump not being conservative enough and Clinton and the Democrats will see it as an endorsement of their blue dog conservatism and strategy of boxing in the Republicans by moving to the right and adopting many of the Republicans' policies as their own.
 
SimpleDon said:
We can hope that the populist anger would continue to build, forcing both parties to abandon the main source of our recent problems, the neoliberal elements of the nation's policies, that is, the idea that it should be the job of the federal government to direct as much of the nation's income to the already rich as possible. That instead it should be the job of the federal government to reduce income inequality, not to increase it, and to eliminate poverty for the working poor. This would mitigate so many of the problems that we have with crime, lack of health care, housing, education, declining aggregate demand, etc.
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Spot on! The day will soon come when the realization dawns on Washington that the main threat of terrorism is not ISIS, but an unsettled, unstable populace. Seemingly random violence by unhinged individuals (e.g. the London stabber) will become more commonplace than traditional terrorist attacks. Of course there will be an effort made to lump such events into the same category as Jihadist terrorism, but no amount of bombing the Middle East will mitigate it. Reducing income and wealth inequality will be the only way.
 
Well it has been a fascinating development so far. We had the Tea Party, then we had Occupy Wall Street, then we had Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The movement is growing slowly but surely. The next step forward may be a populist candidate running and winning in 2020.
 
Bronzeage said:
I think this is a misuse of the word populist. Trump's followers are more of a nationalist or fascist flavor.
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I think that Trump is a fascist but that he is tapping into the populist anger in the nation. This anger is misdirected when it leads to supporting Trump for sure but there is no doubt that it is classic populist, concern for the average man, the same vein that Sanders tapped into. What separates the two wings of populist support is that the right has a high tolerance for authoritarianism that the left doesn't have.
 
TV and credit cards said:
The GOP gets together with the Dems on the free education thing, at least voc-tech. I can't imagine anyone's going to lobby against it.

The only way to quell the anger is to put money in their pockets. Many of these people were raised to believe that hard work will get them ahead in life. What they found was they were trying to raise a family, stuck in 15-20 dollar an hour jobs and mom having to work at the local Walmart just to get by. This is an attack on their value system. They're pissed and taking it out on those who and that which they do not like. Stick some money in their pockets. Enough so they can fill their house with useless crap...
The American Dream.
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These people have their homes packed with useless crap purchased with 23% interest compounding continuously credit card debt or even worse, rent to own.

We have to relieve the private debt problem, with a debt jubilee of some lower order moral hazard type, increase wages by decreasing profits, and to kill off once and for all that tax cuts for the rich, radical deregulation, excessive financialization of the economy and ill advised privatization of government functions are the ways to promote economic growth. That these things only produce what we have seen them produce over the last thirty five years;

  • low growth, a moribund economy
  • high private debt
  • high government budget deficits
  • ever increasing income inequality concentrating more and more wealth in ever fewer hands
  • a political system increasingly dependent on contributions from the wealthy
  • financial market instability causing ever more frequent crashes and economic near depressions
  • The abandonment of income and property taxes paid largely by the rich in favor of regressive payroll and sales taxes
  • low aggregate demand resulting in low private investment
  • low public investment in infrastructure
  • high private savings but owned by the rich unreasonably characterized as investments because they don't impact the economy
  • long periods of moderate or no inflation, e.g., the Great Moderation, because so much money goes to the rich that doesn't circulate in the economy where it would impact the economy
  • The Federal Reserve congratulating themselves on the long periods of moderate or no inflation believing that it proves that they finally understand the economy well enough to control it when in fact it proved the opposite, that they didn't understand the economy at all
  • reduced transfer payments to individuals in the never ending search for more tax cuts for the rich
  • increased transfer payments to corporations, i.e. corporate welfare, to increase profits and the incomes of the rich
  • Suppression of wages to increase profits and the incomes of the rich
  • The transfer of manufacturing and its jobs offshore to suppress wages and increase profits
  • The effective abandonment of the minimum wage not because it produces unemployment but because it reduces profits and the incomes of the rich
  • Many others that I can't remember now...

</tin drum, yes, but never refuted>
 
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