Photo credit: Andrew Gustar via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Trump baffles conservative elites: how with such a talented field of candidates we could we end up with an isolationist, big-government, trade-war nominee?
But give the American people this much credit: they understand the economic game has been rigged: that while the crony capitalists are still getting richer, ordinary Americans and their children face a bleak economic future.
Give Trump credit for flagging the problem in an interview with The Hill last October accusing Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, of keeping interest rates low in order to shield Obama from having to leave office during a recession.
“She’s keeping the economy going, barely,” Trump said.
“You know who gets hurt the most?” he pointed out, “People who practice the American dream and … worked all their lives to save and now what happens is they’re being forced into an inflated stock market and at some point they’ll get wiped out.”
Trump makes an important point. But his answer suggests a belief in the power of the Fed to keep the economy going. After the slowest recovery in a hundred years, the Fed’s power has been discredited.
Trump’s explanations — it’s China’s fault and Mexican immigrants’ fault — are false. Likewise Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton blame Chinese “currency manipulators” and U.S. multinational corporations or Congress’ failure to give even more money to the government to spend. All these provide alibis for the extended failure of Obamanomics and the continuing failure of the Fed and its manipulations of monopoly money.
The American people cannot eat alibis. Conservatives we need to answer the American people’s question: why has Main Street’s economy stagnated and what must we do to restore growth?
