A Conservative View

WOW, DAVID STOCKMAN HITS A HOME RUN!

I have spent two days reading and absorbing one of the most brilliant Americans alive, David Stockman, and his attempt to explain how America is at the threshold of getting the freedom train back on the tracks. This is the most explicit attempt to put the right person in the most advantageous place to hopefully “Unite” rather than divide the people. This is a long article I hope every American alive will at least read and all but the deaf mute Demoncrat’s will hopefully wake up and understand?  

Breaking News at Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Finance/DavidStockman/Donald-Trump-American-Politics-GOP-Republican-Party/2016/03/21/id/720127/#ixzz43m0qR2q4

I will attempt to summarize key passages and close with some personal observations hoping you will read the entire article connection above and my summary in italic at the end.

Summarization

“Such a grand bargain would not only clear the primary field and quash any backroom hijacking of the nomination by the Washington GOP establishment; it would also permit each man to play his highest and best role at this great inflection point in the nation’s history.”

“That is, Donald Trump’s job is to destroy the Republican/Neocon establishment and bring working class America back into a modern version of a McKinley-style Republican Party. Ted Cruz’ task is to spend a lifetime bringing strict constructionism back to the high court, thereby helping to restore constitutional restraints on a leviathan state that fundamentally threatens personal liberty and economic freedom and prosperity in America.”

He suggest that Kasich get out of the way before a deeper divide within the Republican Party.

“Beyond the rightness of it, there’s some pretty potent logic for the politics of the deal, too, there would be lots of winners all around — most especially the long-suffering American people.”

“Mitch McConnell and his rudderless Senate wheels, for example, would not need even a 10-minute caucus to hand down to young Ted Cruz a life sentence to the Supreme Court.”

“As to the former, Ted Cruz is about as close to the next Antonin Scalia as exists in America today. It goes without saying that he could do far more for the cause of liberty as a justice than as a gadfly senator.”

“At the same time, the American people would be spared of another bellicose politician hell-bent on extending Washington’s imperial depredations. Cruz seems to have the Ronald Reagan disease. That is, his belief in small government does not extend to the Pentagon side of the Potomac; and his high regard for liberty does not appear to encompass innocent foreigners dwelling in the vicinity of desert sands he would cause to glow in the dark.”

“As for Kasich, it is hard to think of a more inapt messenger with a more wrong-headed message. America does not need another compromiser, reconciler and wizened Washington ranch hand who can split the difference.”

“Governor Kasich’s specious claim to be a fiscally prudent budget balancer is especially telling. One of the most outrageous Washington wastes is right under his nose. Namely, the Lima Ohio M-1 tank line that he and the Ohio politicians keep open despite 10,000 such lethal machines already in inventory.”

“In truth, Kasich is exactly the kind of political lifer that needs to occupy the Joe Biden chair of policy irrelevance during the monumental reckoning ahead. He has indulged in double talk for so many decades that he no longer even knows when his lips are synching or even moving.”

“C’mon. He took a 90% bribe from Obama to drastically expand Medicaid in Ohio at the expense of taxpayers in Idaho and Texas, whose faithful governors didn’t. Yet he has the nerve to call himself a champion of decentralization?”

“I have no idea whether Donald Trump will see through this Kasich style fiscal hypocrisy or not. But I do believe him when he decries our $19 trillion national debt and when he says that he is going after Washington’s fiscal profligacy with hammer and tongs.”

“Trump is unschooled in the self-serving rationalizations that keep the rackets going, even as he is endowed with such ample self-confidence that he is sure to go charging into the nation’s fiscal mess like a bull in a china shop.

And that’s much to be welcomed after years of a bipartisan conspiracy of silence and Washington’s perfidiously orchestrated regime of fiscal can-kicking. Broken furniture and bombastic challenges are exactly what the fiscal doctor ordered. Indeed, what a President Trump could actually do is prove that the way to shutdown Washington’s budgetary rackets is by means of an insurrectionist-in-chief inside the White House, not furtive threats to close the Washington Monument lobbed down Pennsylvania Avenue from Capitol Hill.”

“Say what you will about Trump’s controversial business history, the four bankruptcies and the rest. Yet it is absolutely certain that he knows at least this much: You don’t stop a flood of budgetary red ink with a 25-year plan to get to a balanced budget by 2038!”

“Big Pharma and the health insurance cartel are already in Trump’s gun sights, but once he gets to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue he will quickly discover the target rich environment on the Pentagon side of the Potomac, too. The hideously expensive, technically plagued and completely unneeded trillion dollar F-35 fighter would be the ideal place for him to start.”

“Here’s the thing. Mitt Romney’s viscous public attack on Trump is only the beard. It is merely the censored for-family-TV-version of what the entire neocon establishment and War Party is saying every day in the corridors of Imperial Washington.”

“Needless to say, the Donald is taking names and will not be reluctant to do far more than kick offending posteriors. He will make it his business to hound, denounce, denigrate and dispatch the entire passel of neocon power brokers who have declared war on his candidacy. And, yes, an Imperial City purged of Bill Kristol and his gang of bloodthirsty provocateurs would already be on the road to redemption.”

“Indeed, if America’s foreign policy could be seized from the grasp of the Washington War Party and its AIPAC subsidiary, the fiscal equation would be instantly transformed. Over and again, Trump seems to grasp that the real security of the homeland has nothing to do with being the world’s policeman and defense sugar-daddy.”

“So The Donald will need massive spending cuts in Washington at the very same time that desperate socialist governments in Europe will face a global recession induced outbreak of red ink in their own fiscal accounts. That will be the Donald’s moment——the opening to disband NATO, slash defense spending across both continents and negotiate the kind of global disarmament deals that Eisenhower unsuccessfully sought and Warren G. Harding actually achieved.”

“And that brings us to the supreme irony of this fraught political season. The Washington and New York chattering class has been nearly busting a spleen over the prospect of Trump’s (alleged) stubby fingers on the nuclear button. I haven’t heard such full-throated hysteria since they worked up a similar campaign against Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980.”

“Likewise, in a world heading into the fiscal dumpster, Donald Trump is more likely to negotiate an end to today’s monumental waste on arms and thereby win the Nobel Peace Prize than he is to start a war. Stated differently, Trump can lead the world back to the 1991 status quo ante for one salient reason. He never got the War Party memo that proclaimed an American Imperium that has now failed horribly; and he will relish doing unstinting battle against it Imperial City architects — the Clintons and the neocons.”

“Still, redemption for the US economy and the nation’s wage and salary earning households will require more than the recovery of fiscal rectitude, as crucial as that is to avoiding a calamitous national bankruptcy during the next decade.”

“What is actually needed is a modern rendition of President William McKinley’s “full dinner pail” economics of circa 1900. McKinley was a hard money Republican who impaled William Jennings Bryan twice on his own cross of anti-gold populism by selling the gospel of free enterprise and mild protectionism to the laboring classes of America’s flourishing interior.

“Donald Trump is on to that. But what he needs to better understand is that it was the gold standard and free enterprise elements of the McKinley formula that carried the day, not the moderately protectionist tariffs. The latter had actually been designed a decade earlier by McKinley himself as an Ohio industrial belt Congressman to insure wage equivalence with the principal industrial centers of England and Europe. And that gets us to a segue to The Donald’s well-intended but incomplete stance on global trade, the massive loss of full-pay productive jobs in America during recent decades and his claim that we are “losing” $500 billion a year to China, $59 billion to Mexico and so forth.”

“He is right. But it’s not just, or even mainly, due to bad trade deals negotiated by stupid bureaucrats in the state department and the USTR office. It’s mainly owing to bad money created by stupid Keynesians at the Federal Reserve. They have enabled the rise of a virulent form of export mercantilism and currency manipulation throughout the entirety of East Asia and much of the EM world which drafts in its economic wake. Stated differently, the two decade long regime of central bank driven free money has destroyed the possibility of free trade. What passes for “free trade” today has nothing to do with the real thing.”

“So-called free trade arrangements like NAFTA and the pending TPP are essentially statist deals negotiated among corporate, labor, environmentalist and other interest groups. If they actually result in increased global trade, the impact is marginal and largely incidental. Needless to say, that is all water over the dam now in 2016. American labor is hopelessly over-priced and the American standard of living teeters precariously on a debt-swollen economy that has no capacity to grow or create what used to be called middle class jobs.”

“Yet Trump’s relentless harping on trade might provide an avenue to reset a hopelessly impaired domestic labor market. In brief, the prospective GOP nominee should embrace Ted Cruz’s business flat tax as he sends its author on his way to the Supreme Court. “But rather than replacing the income tax, which over half of US households do not pay anyway, the Cruz flat tax should be calibrated at a rate which will permit elimination of the payroll tax entirely. Lifting the roughly 16% employer/employee wedge off the cost of labor in America—–a burden of some $1.4 trillion annually—- would do more to restore full dinner pail economics to main street than any other conceivable measure.”

“In truth, the Cruz business flat tax is just a gussied up value added tax (VAT). And that’s exactly what America needs — notwithstanding decades of caterwauling against it by the Washington business lobbies and their GOP bag carriers — because it taxes consumption, not labor and enterprise. Better still, it would fully tax the $2.4 trillion of goods imports which come into the country every year while being rebated on the $1.7 trillion of U.S. exports which fight for foreign markets with their arm tied behind their back — owing to systematic foreign protectionism and the blatant currency pegging and manipulation that Donald Trump has rightly called out.”

“Indeed, a Trump administration would not need to start any trade war at all. It only needs to fire Janet Yellen and her merry band of money printers and replace them with sound money proponents who will stop pegging interest rates and allow the money and capital markets to clear at free market levels.”

“In no time the dollar would strengthen and China’s $30 trillion house of cards would come crashing back to earth. The comrades in Beijing would have no choice except to shut down the Peoples Printing Press of China in order to prevent an outward stampede of flight capital like the world has never seen.”

“Even then, a Trump VAT could be calibrated to bring the one sided trade flows of the world back into more favorable balance. It would simply involve a surtax on the basic VAT rate for the goods of any country that continued to abuse its access to US markets via state export subsidies and exchange rate manipulations designed to artificially lower the price of its exports.”

“To be sure, in an ideal world the US should welcome the foolishness of any foreign government which subsidizes its exports. That is actually a form of foreign aid to American consumers. But like the mild McKinley tariff, the harm from taxing foreign goods would be far outweighed by the good that would come from relieving the existing payroll tax burden on domestic labor and enterprise. Likewise, the urgent necessity to close the nation’s disastrous fiscal gap would be far better accomplished by raising whatever revenues are required — after a thorough fiscal housecleaning on both sides of the Potomac — by taxing consumption, not production.”

Call it a revenue tariff, if need be. It brought full dinner pail economics to the McKinley era and could again.

“It also brought the laboring classes to the Republican Party and that’s essential. There is no hope for capitalism, fiscal solvency and constitutional governance and liberty in America if the Republican Party remains in thrall to the War Party and the crony capitalist racketeers who occupy its commanding heights in the Imperial City.”

“No wonder they will stop at nothing to stop Trump. But they won’t succeed. The American public is finished with the corruptions and destructions of the Imperial City. The Grand Old Party Is done.”

I highly recommend that each and every American that loves freedom “read every word” of the actual article that I have reduced in length hoping to capture as much attention as possible. David Stockman views himself as past his prime but I pray that he and other conservative economists will make themselves available to President Trump who will need advice, nerves, armor and a lot of prayers to get America back of the success track.

Seven years of cowardice, lies, false promises, illegal invasions, forgotten veterans, ruined retirement savings and future pensions, fired military leaders and enough Muslim loving Czars to match the old Soviet Empire is more than enough destruction. Both political parties need new names to signify their objectives. Demoncrats need to be renamed, “Socialists”. The Republican Party should be renamed the “Constitutionalists”. The remaining Communists like Hillary and the RINO’s who have control of Congress could join the Hollywood and media moguls and move to Canada as promised. Then we could build a wall on both land sides of America. God save the Canadian people if they allow them to immigrate. They do not deserve the result.

Clyde Brewer