The Honeymoon

It's amazing.  As long as I have been aware of Donald Trump, he has been a punchline, a joke.  In bad taste, certainly, but a joke nonetheless.  And now in just over two months he will be our President.

It has been commented that no leader ever turns out to be as good as his supporters hoped or as bad as his opponents feared.  Given that both of those were taken to extremes under Trump, it seems likely to be true.  I myself must reevaluate how much of what I said about him was unduly alarmist.  Much of it does, indeed, seem unduly alarmist -- for now.  The future remains to be seen.

So say this in his favor.  He began with a gracious acceptance speech, promising to set aside divisions and be President for all Americans.  He has lost all interest in prosecuting Hillary Clinton or (presumably) suing women who say he groped them, now that they no longer stand in the way of his power.  He has reassured South Korea that we intend to stick by our treaty obligations.  Republicans who swore they would never support Trump are coming into the fold and seeking places as his advisers.  Even opponents are encouraging them to do so.

Conventional wisdom is now that the Trump of the campaign trail is a thing of the past.  He will now become a generic Republican President.  He will boost the economy by cutting taxes and reducing regulation, reassure our nervous allies, reconcile with Russia, and all will be well.  Struck by the awesome responsibility of power, he will abandon his past reckless and crooked behavior and become a true statesman.*  As for reverting to form with his tweet just two days later condemning protests against him?  Just a speed bump along the way of his transformation into true statesman.

All newly-elected Presidents pass through this phase.  It is called the honeymoon phase.  Every newly elected President suddenly becomes a messiah who will set us on the right course, overcome our partisan divisions, and ensure peace and prosperity for all time to come.  It hasn't happened yet, and I don't expect it to any time soon.

David Frum has unleashed a Twitter storm warning why it is a mistake to assume Trump has emerged as a new man.  It begins, "Slicing away one’s memory lobes an excellent basis for decision-making, so sure (he said with heavy sarcasm)."  Some of the tweets that follow are a bit too harsh. By and large, Trump is so much hot air.  A whole lot of what he said on the campaign trail is best dismissed as fantasy.  Now that he is President, Trump will have to deal in reality.  For instance, once he learns what would actually go into "take the oil," I doubt we will hear any more about it.  Some of Frum's tweets are addressed to similar levels of madness.  But two toward the end are well worth keeping in mind.  "Let’s have a fresh start, because 70 year old men afflicted by narcissistic personality disorder often suddenly become better people," and "Let’s have a fresh start, because Trump’s contemptuous assumption of media gullibility is fully justified."

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.  As for Trump, I have seen him be right at least three times on the campaign trail, all about important things.  One, spoken during the third debate, was that it was a huge mistake to support Arab rebels without finding out who they were and whether they could be trusted.  Well, granted, he has the benefit of hindsight, but yes, the point is sound, and I hope he keeps it in mind and doesn't allow advisers to overcome his judgment on that one.  Two was his comment on the Brexit, when he commented that the falling pound would give tourism a boost and buoy the British economy through the transition.  It was in rather poor taste to make in the context of advertising his own golf course, but the overall point is sound.  Three was a comment on Ben Carson's claim that he had a violent youth until he took Jesus Christ as his savior and then completely turned around in a matter of hours.  Trump, unaware that such things are a standard narrative for Evangelical Christians, pointed out that it doesn't work that way.  And, of course, he was right.

Well, guess what.  Trump may know how to act the gracious statesman for a while, with everything going his way.  But he has been a megalomaniac for 70 years and is most likely to stop in one day. The bombast may die down a bit as he discovers that he has to deal in reality.  But sooner or later the honeymoon will end.  It always does.  And then we will see how President Trump (I can't believe I actually have to say that) reacts to adversity.  How long will the honeymoon last?  In my experience, Presidential honeymoons last until at least a few says after inauguration, but never as long as the midterm elections.

In the case of Trump, it may be shorter.  A mere twenty days after the election, the Trump University lawsuit for fraud is scheduled to go to trial.

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*Again, my boss is a fair barometer.  Remember all those horrible things that are just about to happen and he wants to see Democrats in power so they will be blamed for?  Well, never mind, now that the Republicans are in power, they won't happen after all.

Trump and Fascism, Redux

One last Trump post before Election Day.

Vox addressed whether Trump was a fascist way back in May. I addressed the same question that same month. The answer was clearly no. Trump wanted to make democracy narrower and less inclusive, but not to dispense with contested elections. He did not have a paramilitary terrorizing opponents. He was a radical individualist while fascists are radical collectivists. His ideology bore some resemblance to the fascist ideology of "palingenetic populist ultranationalism," i.e., the believe that one's nation has been brought to ruin, but can arise again. Trump's "make America great again" has echoes of such an ideology, but never went to fascistic extremes of destroying the old order. So no, the verdict was, Trump was a rightwing populist, but not a fascist.

Note, though, that I am speaking in the past tense.  I am speaking of Trump riding high, Trump running a primary campaign that never faltered.  It was before we saw Trump facing defeat and becoming so unhinged as to make his earlier self seem hinged by comparison.  

I still don't think Trump is a fascist.  But I am beginning to see how a fascist movement could form around him.  Trump has always had his Alt Right followers really were fascists, or at least wannabes. Their numbers were not great, but they had an outsized influence.  And at least some useful idiots were prepared to ignore their true nature.  Well, their influence appears only to have grown.  And Trump himself is increasingly falling under their sway and sounding increasingly alarming.  

So, let us look at how fascist Trump looks when he is running scared.

Palingenetic populist hypernationalist ideology.  He clearly has tendencies in that direction, with the sense that no one respects us anymore and he will make America great again.  He and his followers sound ever more root-and-branch, though presumably that is not to be taken literally.  And no, Trump is not actually rejecting democratic institutions.  But his support for them is becoming more and more conditional -- "If I win."  I guess we will see how far he is willing to push this if he loses.

A middle class populist movement that both punches up and kicks down, but mostly kicks down. Well, Trump is taking his punching up to deranged extremes, slipping deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole into conspiracy land.  But we all know what he means when he speaks of rigged voting.  He specifically means voting by ethnic minorities and is encouraging kicking down at them in a big way.

Driven by fear and ambition, but fear predominates. When Trump was ahead, he appealed more to ambition.  Falling behind, he relies more and more on increasingly hysterical appeals to fear.

A paramilitary party that has taken over the state (or aspires to take over the state) and claims (or aspires to claim) an effective monopoly of political activity. No.  At least, not so far.  But it doesn't sound quite as crazy in the past.  His Alt Right followers might be called a sort of cyber or virtual brownshirt army, which is bad, but still not comparable to the real thing.  And now he is calling for "poll watchers."  To make sure the other side doesn't engage in voter fraud.  And now Oath Keepers, a genuine paramilitary is joining them.  True, the poll watchers all insist they will be unarmed and won't do anything threatening.  They will conduct exit polls.  Report suspicious behavior.  At worst, film it.  And let us add, to be fair, that just as the old Tammany Hall style election rigging is a thing of the past, so is old Ku Klux Klan style voter intimidation.  Polling places are too public for such a thing to go on. But the mere prospect of a paramilitary out in force "poll watching" is disturbing.  In other words, back in May Trump did not have a paramilitary and that was the end of it.  Nowadays he has something that might form the nucleus of something that might evolve into a paramilitary.  The link remains remote, but no longer non-existent.

The same goes for claiming a monopoly on power.  Trump has made fairly clear that he only thinks the electoral process will be legitimate if he wins.  That sounds very much like an attempt to claim a monopoly on political activity without admitting to it.

The fascist negations:

Anti-radical: If Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, there would be an actual radical to oppose and I would say yes.  I suppose the whole response to Black Lives Matter with calls for "law and order" might be considered anti-radical. But right now Trump followers are the radical ones calling for the overturn of a rotten international order.

Anti-liberal:  Yes.

Anti-conservative:  Again, yes.  There are many possible definitions of conservatism, but smashing the rotten system and hoping that something better takes its place is not one of them!  And yet conservatives continue to support him.  So it was with Mussolini and Hitler as well.

Ideology and goals:

-- Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models.  I doubt very much that Trump has thought that far ahead.  Some of his Alt Right supporters, now . . .
-- The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with other powers.  Radical change, yes.  Empire -- well, yes and no.  On the one hand, Trump wants to disengage from interaction with other countries, including overseas military ventures.  On the other hand, his attitude toward other countries is openly imperialistic.  He wants tribute-paying dependencies and threatens to "take the oil" from Arab countries.  So somewhat

-- Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist
-- Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture.

I can't imagine Trump has possibly thought it through that far.  Can't speak for the Alt Right guys.

Style and Organization:

-- Emphasis on aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects.  That's just mass politics.

-- Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia.  No, not so far.  The only question will be whether Trump, Alt Right and Oath Keepers ultimately join forces, in which case we would have something that really would look like a paramilitary party.

-- Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence.  Against protesters, more and more.  But that still fits in the category of defending one's turf.  The poll watchers are the first movement beyond their own turf, and are pledged to refrain from violence.  We will see.

-- Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing the organic view of society. Well, duh!

-- Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation. No.  Trump followers are mostly older voters.  The Alt Right types are presumably young, though.  We will see.

-- Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective. Duh again!

The "nine mobilizing passions":

-- a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions: Yes.  It has truly sunk into paranoia by now.

-- the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it:  No, not really.  Although overwhelming crisis and subordination of the individual to the group tend to go together.

-- the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group's enemies, both internal and external:  A milder case of this, I would say, but definitely there

-- dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences: Dread of the group's decline, yes, absolutely. Trump followers seem to be acting largely out of fear of American being inundated by immigrants and losing its national and cultural identity. So yes, to the alien influences. I don't think so much in terms of individualistic liberalism or class conflict.  (Same as before)

-- the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary:  Definitely the purer community.  Violence - not yet, but if the Alt Right takes over, all bets are off.

-- the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny: Well, duh!

-- the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason:  Another duh.

-- the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success: So far, only against protesters who intrude on their rallies.  It will all depend on just how much Alt Right takes over and how far those "poll watchers" go.

-- the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess in a Darwinian struggle:  Once again, I do think that the Alt Right types think in these terms.  Other Trump supporters don't take it this far.

Conclusion:  Well, I doubt anyone in the Trump camp has anything like a fascist social vision.  But in other regards I would say that Trump and his mainstream followers, though not fascists themselves, may be witnessing the formation of an embryonic fascist movement of the Alt Right.

A Post of Quotes

I generally hate blog posts consisting entirely of quotes, but I have found other places saying what I was trying to say so much better than I ever could that I will devote this post entirely to quotes explaining why there is simply no comparison between Hillary and Trump.

I outsource to:

Matt Yglesias:

Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, has demonstrated a basic level of competence. She understands how policy and government work. She's not openly racist; she hasn't encouraged street violence. There's no risk that she would disrupt the international order or cause an economic crisis out of pique.

That's a really, really low bar. But it's the only bar she has to clear in this contest. Almost irrespective of what you think of Clinton's politics or her policies, she is manifestly more prepared to run the federal government than Donald Trump.

Conor Friedersdorf:

Hillary Clinton also violates a bunch of norms, they’ll say. She used a private server to evade future Freedom of Information Act requests; violated various rules governing how classified information ought to be handled; accepted donations at the Clinton Foundation that created conflicts of interest while she was Secretary of State; and gave special access to rich folks in return for their backing. 

. . . . . .

But it is absurd to compare her shortcomings to her opponent’s, because so many are in wholly different categories. I’ve been a professional journalist since 2002. Every government agency I have ever covered—local, state, and federal—has tried to evade public records laws at one time or another. Half of Washington doesn’t follow the rules governing how classified information is stored, in part because those rules are broken. Conflicts of interest and special access for donors are ubiquitous. . . .

Absurdly, many seem to have convinced themselves that Trump, who won’t release his tax returns, as every presidential candidate has for decades, will be better on transparency; that a man whose finances we don’t even know, who used his charitable foundation to illegally funnel money to an attorney general investigating him for fraud, will be better on conflicts of interest; that an erratic man who blurts all manner of things out on Twitter and has shady ties to Vladimir Putin will somehow be a more trustworthy guardian of classified information.

Trump is likely to be worse across all those metrics! 

Trump as redeemer for this basket of civic ills is absurd. And even if he were better on them—he isn’t—that would hardly matter given his aforementioned shortcomings: 1) deliberately stoking ethnic tensions, and even inspiring hate crimes; 2) having zero experience, embarrassingly little knowledge, and no sign of the impulse or ability to learn; 3) epitomizing the sort of personality that can’t be trusted with nukes; 4) constantly insulting women, plus multiple allegations of sexually predatory behavior of a type corroborated by the candidate in his own words.

And David Frum:

The Clintons sold access to a present secretary of state and a potential future president in pursuit of personal wealth. Hillary Clinton does indeed seem a suspicious and vindictive personality. For sure, a President Clinton will want to spend and regulate even more than the Obama administration has done. 

Like Henny Youngman, however, the voter must always ask: compared to what? 

One of only two people on earth will win the American presidency on November 8. Hillary Clinton is one of those two possibilities. Donald Trump is the only other. 

Yes, I fear Clinton’s grudge-holding. Should I fear it so much that I rally to a candidate who has already explicitly promised to deploy antitrust and libel law against his critics and opponents? Who incited violence at his rallies? Who ejects reporters from his events if he objects to their coverage? Who told a huge audience in Australia that his top life advice was: "Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it”? Who idealizes Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and the butchers of Tiananmen as strong leaders to be admired and emulated? 

Should I be so appalled by the Clinton family’s access-selling that I prefer instead a president who boasts of a lifetime of bribing politicians to further his business career? Who defaults on debts and contracts as an ordinary business method, and who avoids taxes by deducting the losses he inflicted on others as if he had suffered them himself? Who cheated the illegal laborers he employed at Trump Tower out of their humble hourly wage? Who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bank of China? Who refuses to disclose his tax returns, perhaps to conceal his business dealings with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle?

To demonstrate my distaste for people whose bodies contain mean bones, it’s proposed that I give my franchise to a man who boasts of his delight in sexual assault? Who mocks the disabled, who denounces immigrant parents whose son laid down his life for this country, who endorses religious bigotry, and who denies the Americanism of everyone from the judge hearing the fraud case against Trump University to the 44th president of the United States? 

I’m invited to recoil from supposedly fawning media (media, in fact, which have devoted more minutes of network television airtime to Clinton’s email misjudgment than to all policy topics combined) and instead empower a bizarre new online coalition of antisemites, misogyists, cranks, and conspiracists with allegedly ominous connections to Russian state spy agencies? 

Is this real life?

Delegitimization of the Opposition

Suppose Bernie Sanders had forged a working alliance with Black Lives Matter and various immigrant's right activities, swung the black and Hispanic vote his way and won the Democratic nomination.  Can anyone doubt what would be happening now?  Republicans would be denouncing the Democratic nominee as a wild-eyed radical -- a former Socialist, for Pete's sake -- who posed an intolerable threat to all we hold dear.  Every riot, every murder of a police officer, every Black Lives Matter excess would be laid at his door.  And there really have been some ugly things by Sanders supporters that will give the finger-pointing some degree of plausibility.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is a perfectly typical Democratic nominee, ideologically almost indistinguishable from Obama, only somewhat more hawkish in foreign policy.  Republicans refer to electing Hillary as "a third Obama term."  But our economy is finally completing is slow and painful recovery.  Unemployment is under 5%.  Wages are finally beginning to rise.  We are not fighting any large-scale ground wars.  Crime has mostly continued its 25-year fall.  The Administration has avoided any major scandals.  In short, a third Obama term just doesn't seem all that bad.  What's a Republican to do?*

And the answer appears to be, argue that things aren't so bad now, but we are on a course toward complete and utter catastrophe unless stopped RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

This account describes the process in an aunt and uncle who were once reasonable Republicans:

At the outset, they supported Jeb!, then drifted to Rubio as Jeb flamed out. Finally to Cruz and/or Kasich. All the while, they hated Trump. They called him an incompetent, a moron, an imbecile. My aunt promised me point-blank "I will never vote for that idiot." 

And then, at some point around the Convention, my aunt began posting soft pro-Trump messages—mostly in the form of digs against Hillary. These were mixed in with paradoxical articles with titles like "A Christian Case for Trump." (They're evangelical.) 

When I confronted her and my uncle about her broken promise, she said "we're not voting for Trump, we're voting against Hillary." I think this is how many Republicans are justifying their awful choice. They'll never admit that they'd voted for such an historically terrible candidate, but will always frame it as voting against something. This logic completely frees them of any moral responsibility for Trump, and they can argue that they never supported his horrifying behavior. 

Yet in order for this logic to make sense, Hillary has to be worse than Trump. So my aunt, normally a reasonable person, has bought into an increasingly perverse version of who Hillary is. Only a year ago, she told me how much she respected Hillary, despite their political differences. Now, Hillary's supposed crimes define her. And, by the logic, the crimes must be true, otherwise why would my aunt have voted for Trump?

Thus the election is compared to a hijacked airplane with one desperate chance to storm the cockpit or die, or to a dead elephant in the road on swerving one way will take you over a sheer cliff.  The alternative, no matter how bad, is necessarily better.**  Thus I am inclined to agree with this assessment:

Many partisans will always find a way to persuade themselves that the other party’s candidate is bad enough to clearly justify their support for their party’s candidate. Therefore, their opinion of the opposing candidate is partly shaped by the quality of their party’s nominee—insofar as he or she is unusually hard to support, the opposing candidate will come to be regarded as even more unusually evil or dangerous. This enables them to support a person they regard as embarrassing or unworthy. Anything can be justified when you’ve got a gun to your head. 

Is that what is happening to some conservatives? They would clearly dislike and oppose Clinton regardless, but is it possible that if they liked their own nominee more, enough to feel that he deserved their vote, they would tell themselves less apocalyptic stories about the consequences of a Hillary Clinton, even if they still opposed it?

Many Republicans have convinced themselves that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be inherently illegitimate because she should be serving time for sending State Department e-mails on a private server.  Definitely they will undertake massive investigations (even more than they have been doing for the past four years).  Many think they should start impeachment proceedings on day one.

Many Republicans convinced themselves that the Bill Clinton presidency was illegitimate because he never got a majority of the popular vote and every Ross Perot vote should have gone to Republicans instead.  And they saw him as a uniquely sleazy womanizer.  Many supported his impeachment on trivial matter because they regarded him as a dangerous radical.  In the clear light of hindsight, that looks foolish.  But always they convinced themselves that it was personal.

No respectable Republicans actually believed the theory that Obama (who clearly got a majority of the vote) was not legitimate because he was a non-citizen, but many clearly did see him as extremely radical and possible disloyal.  Some even accepted Dinesh D'Souza's hypothesis that Obama was not a typical Democrat, but consumed with a desire to destroy Western civilization.  By the end of his second term, a lot of the wilder talk about Obama's radicalism looks rather foolish, too.  A narrative of Bernie Sanders as crazed radical would have some degree of plausibility.  But ultimately no one seriously disputes that Hillary Clinton is just a generic Democrat.

Which is particularly dangerous because a lot of Republicans are finally beginning to admit to themselves what has been apparent to me since the Bill Clinton Presidency.  Which is that their insane loathing about every single Democratic President has nothing to do with any of the individuals involved.  Republicans' attempts to deligitimize every single Democratic President is actually an attempt to delegitimize the Democratic Party.  It is most obvious with the Supreme Court.  The one argument reasonable and respectable Republicans who hated and despised Trump and everything he stood for was that at least it would be a Republican nominating justices for the Supreme Court.***  This went along, of course, with the Republicans' newly discovered principle that if a Supreme Court vacancy occurs in the last year of a presidential term, the next President should be allowed to name the successor.  Then John McCain made a rather off-the-cuff remark, presumably not meant literally, that if Hillary is elected, a Republican Senate will block all her Supreme Court nominees.  He was challenged on the remark and hastened to walk it back, but the Overton Window had been shifted. Soon a serious conservative constitutional scholar was arguing for just that.  And it is rapidly becoming a basic ideological litmus.  The theory here is that the Democrats' theory of governance is so extreme and unconstitutional that no Democratic nominee should ever be allowed on the Supreme Court to enact it.

And isn't it obvious where this is headed? If Democrat's governing theory is so unconstitutional that it should be barred from the Supreme Court even if the Supreme Court dwindles away, then why should the advocates of such an outrageously unconstitutional approach be allowed to hold elective office, either.  Why should Democrats in Congress be allowed to pass unconstitutional legislation, or Democrats in the White House be allowed to use the coercive machinery of the state to unconstitutional ends?  And if you regard the Democratic Party as basically unconstitutional -- well, where will it end?

The Republican Party was founded as the party of opposition to any expansion of slavery in the territories.  When the Supreme Court came out with the Dred Scott decision in 1857, it held that Congress could not restrict slavery in the territories.  It held, in short, that the Republican Party was unconstitutional.  Three years later, a Republican won the Presidency.  Some people argued that the Republicans should take steps to reassure nervous southerners, but there was nothing the Republican Party could do to reassure the Southerners, short of disbanding itself and ceasing ever to run candidates again.  And, well, we all know how that ended up.

I am not suggesting that the Republicans are there yet.  But I am saying that that is the logical outcome of their refusal to accept any Democratic nominee for Supreme Court.  And Donald Trump is willing to push a lot further in that direction than anyone would have suspected only weeks ago.

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*This is not to deny that there are problems.  Crime, after falling for a quarter century, ticked up last year and no one knows yet if this is a trend or a fluke.  Obamacare premiums are spiking.  Mideastern terrorists no longer have the capacity to do large-scale attacks, but little one or two man rampages are impossible to stop.  ISIS is on the run, but actual peace in the Middle East is as remote a prospect as ever.  And Black Lives Matter signals a rise in racial tensions.  But we are far from the hellscape Trump and his followers are claiming.
**Nor is it just the crazy types, either.  My boss is a Republican, though a reasonable one, the kind who admires John Kasich and thinks Tim Kaine isn't so bad.  Certainly he is no fan of Donald Trump.  But he has concluded that Trump is a clever plan by Divine Providence to insure that a Democrat is in power when all the disasters Obama is leading us into finally come to roost, as they will any time now.
***Some have disputed that, saying that Trump cares nothing for conservative theories of the Constitution, only for interpretations that enhance his own power.  But I think their argument is sound for two reasons.  For one, despite all conservatives claim to be all upset about an out-of -control executive, those fears began the day Obama was inaugurated (just look at what they said about Bush and the "unitary executive"!) and will end the day a Republican takes over.  The other is that Trump is so ignorant about possible candidates for the Supreme Court and so unlikely to have the patience to sit through a briefing that his advisers should be able to get whoever they want.  The big question will be who his advisers are.

Is Donald Trump's Crazy Tax Plan Just What the Doctor Ordered?

This post is inspired by a piece by Kevin Drum about low inflation.  The problem is one most people never expected to have.  Our inflation rate is too low, and the Fed seems powerless to raise it.

And no, that is not as crazy as it sounds.  Yes, we really do need a certain amount of inflation so that next time our economy falls into recession we will not have outright deflation, and so that the Fed will have room to lower interests rates, if necessary, to below the inflation rate.  Recall that the Great Depression began after a period of growth with negative inflation.  Arguably that was one of the factors that made it so severe -- with inflation rates negative even in good times, there was buffer to prevent the economy from falling into double-digit deflation.

But what can be done?  Drum explains:

I suspect we're learning something new: central banks can squash inflation by raising interest rates and causing a recession, but no central bank has ever tried to raise inflation. It's simply been assumed that they have the power to affect inflation in both directions. But they don't—at least, not in practice. . . . Pretty much every central bank in the developed world would like inflation to be higher, but not a single one has been successful at doing it. This suggests to me that in practical terms, inflation is a one-way ratchet. Central banks can reduce it, but they can't raise it.

Cleaning up after the world's worst inflation

(Emphasis in original).  On the one hand, this is ridiculous.  Of course central banks can raise inflation, to effectively unlimited heights.  Look at Weimar.  Look at Zimbabwe.  Even those do not set the real record.  That dubious distinction belongs to Hungary, which experienced inflation of 41.9 quadrillion percent in one month!   So obviously central banks can raise inflation rates.  And you don't even have to look at such extreme examples.  Just consider the double digit inflation of the 1970's as central banks first tried to boost the economy heading into an election and later overcompensated for a supply shock from increased oil prices.

But it may be more difficult to raise inflation when the economy hits the zero lower bound (i.e., central banks lower interest rates to zero and still can't bring the economy to full employment), or during secular stagnation.  Here Drum offers some useful insights into what central banks are up against.  Paul Krugman has suggested that all they have to do is promise to keep cranking out more money until inflation hits a suitable target.  But how do central banks crank out money.  The answer is by buying up government debt, i.e., by replacing government bonds with cash.  Just how much will it take?

[I]t seems likely the Fed would have to increase its balance sheet by, say, 8x, to have any chance of producing substantially higher inflation. In dollars, that means $28 trillion in additional asset purchases. They would run out of treasuries to buy long before they hit that mark and would start gobbling up every corporate and MBS bond in sight. That's really not a tenable suggestion.

For what it is worth, US GDP for 2015 has been estimated that US GDP in 2015 was just under $18 trillion.  If this rough estimate is correct, then printing money in an amount exceeding the total size of the U.S. economy would raise inflation by only a few percentage points!  To produce serious inflation what is needed is not just printing money, but an attempt to push the economy past capacity.  That normally takes the form of immense budget deficits.  I was not able to find suitable information in a brief Google search, but I do recall seeing estimates of Weimar deficits.  In the most fiscally responsible month, tax revenues covered about 28% of total spending.  In the final and most disastrous month, tax revenues covered about one-tenth of a percent of the total budget.  Clearly central banks can't raise inflation rates unless government cooperate by running large deficits to give them plenty of treasuries to buy.

Apparently last year's total budget was $3.8 trillion.  Of this, about $3.18 trillion was raised by taxes and $583 billion from borrowing.  That just isn't enough to get the inflation meter going.  But have no fears.  Donald Trump is proposing a trillion dollar tax cut, together with major infrastructure upgrades, a big military buildup, and no cuts to Social Security or Medicare.  Now that should give the Fed the chance to buy up more treasuries and raise inflation.

Update

Starting in late October, about the 27th or 28th, Nate Silver started showing Hillary Clinton's chances dropping like a rock, seemingly in free fall -- even as she maintained a fairly steady three-point lead  in the popular vote and her Electoral College firewall appeared to hold, even as all the swing states went over to Trump.

I watched with anxiety, seeing her chances drop by three points or more each day and accelerate, looking almost like a sheer drop, with Trump favored to win if trend continued.  And I kept thinking, this has to stop some time.  There has to be a bottom.  Well, it appears that about Friday the drop leveled out and perhaps began a VERY minimal recovery.  And, for what it is worth, the decline had begun before James Comey dropped his bombshell.  And the stabilization has begun even as Hillary's victory in New Hampshire (part of her firewall) is being called into doubt.  So I don't get it.

But as far as I can tell, this late in the game small shifts carry a disproportionate weight because there is very little time for them to reverse.

So Hillary is favored to win.  But by a razor-thin Electoral College margin and only 3% of the popular vote.  And the Senate remains very much a tossup.

This country has truly lost its senses.

Trump and Corruption Redux

I want to get back to the subject of Trump and corruption, because it is truly mind-boggling that his biggest advantage is claiming that Hillary is corrupt and that, if elected, he will clean up corruption in Washington.  Trump has built his entire business career on fraud.

Trump's General History as a Sleazy Businessman

I will set aside matters like groping women, making crude remarks about his own daughter, and  refusing to pay his nephew's medical expenses as private matters and unlikely to affect the broader public.  But his business career does legitimately rate as "public," and it displays a staggering lack of honesty that dwarfs anything one could say about Hillary.  So, how do they stack up?

Well, for starters, the complaints about Hillary deal entirely with her tenure as Secretary of State and after.  Why?  Well, because everything she did before then was examined with a microscopic to look for any sort of scandal and none turned up.  And let us not forget the reason for the whole e-mail scandal in the first place.  Congressional Republicans were investigating the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, looking for dirt to dig on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Ultimately, they failed to find anything she had done wrong at Benghazi, but did find that she had improperly made State Department e-mails from a private server.*

Trump, by contrast, has quite a past.  He began working in New York construction in the 1970's and was strongly suspected of Mafia ties.  Well, one may say, everyone knows that in New York in the 1970's the construction industry was rife with Mafia and anyone who didn't make certain payoffs would never be able to build anything.  But there is ample evidence that Trump's connections went beyond what was necessary.  He was one of the few New York construction magnates to use ready-mix concrete.  This was highly significant because any delay in pouring the concrete would cause it to harden and halt construction.  Avoiding such delays meant being on good terms with the concrete union which was, of course, Mafia controlled.  Trump paid inflated prices, presumably the payoff that kept him on good terms.  When the Mafia-controlled concrete union called a general strike, the Trump Tower was spared.  When Trump moved into Atlantic City casino construction, he was suspected of further Mafia payoffs to to purchase the necessary land.  Trump also made use of illegal Polish immigrants to work twelve-hour days conducting demolitions with sledge hammers and then stiffed them of much of their pay.  New York unions did not protest these abuses, probably because of the Mafia payoffs.

Well, one may say, so Trump made Mafia payoffs at a time when there was no other way to get anything done in construction.  But he has moved past that by now.  And, indeed, as the Mafia's power waned, Trump stopped working with them.  But he continued making a general practice of fraud.  USA Today has famously documented his habit of stiffing contractors, knowing that if they sue they will be up against someone to large to fight and will have to settle for a fraction of what is actually owed.  Is this a common practice in the construction industry?  How commonly did he do it? Well, the New Jersey casino commission found that he owed $69.5 million to 253 sub-contractors for the Trump Taj Mahal.  Is this a common practice in the industry?

Developers with histories of not paying contractors are a very small minority of the industry, said Colette Nelson, chief advocacy officer of the American Subcontractors Association. But late or missing payments can be devastating for small businesses and their employees.

To give some idea of just how not-typical Trump is in the field, USA Today compared him with five other major real estate executives and found that Trump had more lawsuits than the other five combined.

Then there is the matter of Trump's bankruptcies, not all of which I can follow.  Two things matter, though.  For one, when Trump's Atlantic City casinos proved unsustainable, he turned them into a publicly traded company.**  This gave him a fiduciary duty to shareholders.  He nonetheless ended up looting the company, using it to pay off his private debts and pay himself a huge salary and bonuses.  When the company failed, he shareholders were left holding the bag.  The other is that he claimed a nearly one billion dollar loss from the whole operation.  This was legally dubious because the immense losses were offset by comparable levels of debt forgiveness.  This is supposed to be taxable income, but Trump apparently exploited a loophole that allowed him to exchange debt forgiveness for equity in his partnership.  Except, says a tax expert the loophole was not so much "exploited" as "stretched beyond any recognition."  Since losses of this type can be offset against future income, Trump has probably used it to avoid paying taxes for years on end.  No wonder he has been under audit by the IRS for years on end!

Well, all right, the Trump supporter might say, so Trump's Atlantic City days were sleazy.  But he has gotten out of the casino business by now, so those days are behind him.  And that is true.  Trump has moved on now to entertainment.  And that is true.  Having failed at making actual, physical things, Trump has moved on to reality TV and to monetizing his name as a brand.  What he has not done is move on to running an honest business.  That impassioned foe of illegal immigrants stealing jobs from Americans brings in models on a tourist visa, without a work visa, and then takes back most of their pay by charging exorbitant and fees.  Since they are working here illegally, the models dare not protest.  Once again, this is a common practice in the industry, but one seasoned model says of the Trump Agency,  "Honestly, they are the most crooked agency I've ever worked for, and I've worked for quite a few."  And he runs plenty of other scams bilking the gullible, most notably Trump University, which claimed to teach the secret of how to get rich quick, but actually just took people's money and taught nothing of any value whatever.  Trump Institute is essentially the same thing by a different name.  And so forth.  Indeed, twenty days after the election, trial will proceed in a suit by Trump University payors wanting their money back.  The judge very properly postponed trial until after the election lest it (1) take too much of his attention away from the campaign and (2) bias the results.  If only the FBI would do the same!

Criminal versus Civil Wrongs

Well, all right, the Trump supporter may say, these things are crooked.  But Trump is merely facing civil liability for them.  No one has charged him with an outright crime.  Hillary sending State Department e-mails on a private server was criminal.  Suffice it to say that if you can make the argument that all the Trump actions described above were bad but not criminal, the same can certainly be said of Clinton's e-mails.  Bush Administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith explains:

The prosecution would be entirely novel, and would turn in part on very tricky questions about how email exchanges fit into language written with physical removal of classified information in mind. Though he did not say so explicitly, Comey might have concluded that a conviction in this context was, for many reasons, unlikely—a clear reason not to prosecute.

He also says that Clinton's actions are clearly grounds for non-criminal punishment such as loss of access to classified information or firing.  Or, as this veteran national security reporter explains:

People simply don't get indicted for accidental, non-malicious mishandling of classified material. I have followed leak cases for a very long time, both at the Washington Post and since starting Lawfare. I have never seen a criminal matter proceed without even an allegation of something more than mere mishandling of senstive information. Hillary Clinton is not above the law, but to indict her on these facts, she'd have to be significantly below the law.

He goes on to approvingly quote FBI Director James Comey:

In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts. All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.

And finally:

A common refrain in discussions of the Clinton case has been that “anyone else” would have been charged in similar circumstances. Yet if you look closely at the supposedly parallel cases where lower-ranking individuals have been prosecuted for mishandling, you find that invariably the circumstances aren’t similar. You’ll find prosecutions involving classified material knowingly and intentionally provided to uncleared persons (as in the case of Gen. David Petraeus), or where large quantities of documents were literally removed from secure facilities, but I haven’t turned up any cases where conversations about classified subjects on an insecure line have been treated as a criminal matter. In a country where literally millions of individuals hold top secret clearances, we may safely assume this is not because such indiscretions never occur, but because they had not been understood to be criminal acts, and were dealt with as matters of administrative discipline.

In short, as with Trump, the actions are wrong but not criminal.  And if Trump were subject to the degree of scrutiny that Clinton has been -- to four years of Congressional investigation intended to dig something up, and now to hacking by Russia and publication by Wikileaks, it is entirely possible that they might reveal something criminal as well.

Deleted E-mails

But Hillary did make efforts to obstruct justice, a Trump supporter might say.  What about the 33,000 e-mails she deleted?  These appear to have been e-mails she believed were personal and that she was therefore not required to turn over.

To determine which emails were work-related, a member of Clinton’s legal team did four things: she automatically deemed any email sent from or to a .gov and .mil address as related to work; she searched the tens of thousands of emails for names of senior State Department officials, lawmakers, foreign leaders and other government officials; she conducted a keyword search for work-related terms; and she looked at the sender, recipient and "subject" of every email for other potentially work-related emails, but she did not read the contents of those emails.

Nonetheless, the process was not infallible.  Of the 33,000 emails Hillary deleted, the FBI has recovered some 17,000 and found that "many" were work related.  (Exact figure not given).  The total she did turn over were 30,000, consisting of about 55,000 pages.  Given the volume, it is certainly plausible that that error, not intentional deception, was at work.  In the meantime, it would appear that Trump Enterprises is in the regular habit of destroying e-mails and documents it is under court order to produce, and has been doing this sort of thing since 1973.  (Obviously there were no e-mails back then, only documents).  And, granted, this has been in civil rather than criminal, investigations.  But honestly, any claim of superior ethics by Trump is starting to look mighty thin by now.

Foundation Scandals

Well, what about that sinister Clinton Foundation and its corrupt dealings?  All right, I don't really have time to get into the weeds here, so this is just a thumbnail sketch.  The Clinton Foundation is unusual in that it does not normally give grants.  It employs its own front line charity workers, finances other charities under its umbrella, and seeks to arrange partnerships between other organizations, including some that are for-profit.  That is what it does.  How is it financed?  Mostly by donations, some by the Clintons (obviously), many by wealthy donors, and a non-trivial number by foreign individuals, entities and governments.  The basic, underlying scandal here is that Hillary raised funds for her foundation while serving as Secretary of State, she met with many donors, any this creates at least the appearance that donors may be buying access in exchange for donation (although there is no evidence that any of them have been given any specific favors beyond a meeting).  Is any of this sinister? I outsource to Inside Philanthropy:

The latest red-hot story from the Associated Press is a case in point. It breathlessly reports that over “half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation.” 

A tweet by the AP boiled the point down further: “More than half those who met Clinton as cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.” 

How many people is the AP talking about here? All of 85, out of 154. Okay, now just take a moment to think about how absurdly misleading this claim is: Did Hillary Clinton really only meet with 154 people during her years at State that were “outside the government?” Of course not. She probably met with thousands, starting with innumerable foreign officials as she circled the world.
. . . . . .

Weirdly, it never occurred to the AP reporters to cross-check the donors to the Clinton Foundation with the donors to Hillary’s political career. There’s huge overlap here, since it turns out that many of the people who have faith in the Clintons as political leaders also believe in their nonprofit work. Certainly, there are some donors in this mix with more transactional motives. Welcome to the world of politics, which, in the case of the Clinton Foundation, has become enmeshed in the world of philanthropy. 

The obvious potential for conflicts here is why the Clinton Foundation probably should have been mothballed long ago, and should be soon, if Hillary wins the presidency. As I’ve said before, balancing the foundation’s fundraising with Clinton’s presidential ambitions was a very bad idea. 

But let’s not pretend that this foundation is somehow a unique example of the corruption of philanthropy by politics. These two worlds intersect all the time.

 Examples, some far more blatantly political, follow.

Meanwhile the Trump Foundation, besides fairly conventional charitable giving, has used foundation funds to pay charitable donations Trump has been ordered to pay in lieu of fines and to bid on Trump memorabilia in charity auctions.  And, as before, this is not just how business is done.  A lawyer who gives tax advice to charities calls these examples of self-dealing "really shocking" and says, “I represent 700 nonprofits a year, and I’ve never encountered anything so brazen.”  And then there is the matter of the $25,000 donation the Trump Foundation made to the Florida Attorney General at a time her office was considering whether to investigate Trump University.  Days later, the Attorney General decided not to investigate.  Now obviously it can be just about impossible.  Yet the uproar over corruption in the Clinton Foundation is over the possibility of the mere "appearance" of impropriety.  That appearance is a whole lot stronger here.  Furthermore, it clear is that (1) a charitable foundation is not permitted to make donations to political campaigns and, (2) the donors knew that donations of this kind are forbidden and attempted to disguise it as a charitable donation.***

Double Standards

To many Trump supporters, the real complaint about Hillary and the e-mails is that she did anything particularly heinous as that she got away with it, while little guys are prosecuted for less heinous offenses.  Hence there is a double standard -- our ruling class gets away with things that regular folks are prosecuted for.  I have dealt above with why that is not the case for Hillary Clinton.  To which I would add, and for this you want to elect DONALD TRUMP?!?!?!  His whole career has been based on being too big and powerful for little guys to fight.  He has stiffed small contractors, hired illegal immigrants, destroyed, documents, manipulated the tax code, and taken countless other actions that, at best, stretch the law to an unrecognizable degree, all secure in the belief that he had enough resources to outlast and outfight any attempt to call him to account.  Anyone who is angry (and I think there is good reason to be) that our ruling class is not bound by the same laws as the little guy, then Donald Trump is the very embodiment of this failing, not the person to fight it.

Trump has Turned Over a New Leaf

The usual response to this by Trump and his followers is that sure, he knows more about gaming the system than anyone else, and that makes him the perfect person to catch all the people who game the system and fix it so it can't be gamed again.  Maybe it is overly cynical to argue that you can't teach an old dog new tricks and a leopard won't change its spots, although it is Trump who has been warning about the dangers of trusting a snake, since it cannot be other than what it is.  Still, like the bleeding heart that I am, I believe that people can change.  But anyone making the claim to have changed in such a spectacular degree, that he will abandon a long career of ripping off the little guy and champion the little guy instead had better offer some sort of evidence to support that claim.  Well, Trump threatens to investigate judges who rule against him and to bring libel and anti-trust actions against media outlets that criticize him; he overpays with his donors' money to use Trump products on his campaign; he continues to sue foreign guest workers at his resort; and he stiffs people working for his campaign from child musicians to his own pollster.  So, no, this old dog is still playing the same tricks.  This leopard hasn't changed its spots.  This snake will bite you if you take it in.  And to believe that Trump hasn't changed now but miraculously will by January 20, 2017 goes beyond naive folly to sheer madness.

National Security.

The final refuge of Trump supporters to all this is that, okay, Trump may be crooked and corrupt, but at least his actions never endangered national security.  To this I would have to say, you have me there.  Trump has never endangered national security.****  That is because he has never had the opportunity.  One reason he has never had the opportunity is that Trump is such an obvious security risk that it would be sheer madness to allow him anywhere near classified material.  Or let's put it this way.  Hillary's mishandling of classified material has been held to be "extremely careless."  Now imagine our national security depending on Donald Trump's carefulness.  (Shudder!)

I would have the same response, by the way, to a few of Hillary's left wing critics who see Trump as the lesser evil.  Their basic reasoning is that Hillary has been Obama's Secretary of State, supported his most interventionist policies, and argued for even more interventionist ones.  She therefore has blood on her hands.  Trump, by contrast, has never had any role in foreign policy whatever and his hands are therefore clean.  Look, I agree with people who dismiss the whole idea that we should never consider people's past but only the future.  Otherwise there would be no need for a criminal justice system.  What people have done in the past is a reasonable predictor of what they will do in the future.  If I had to make an apples-to-apples choice between two candidates who had had comparable influence on US foreign policy in the past and who advocated similar policies in the future, I would choose one who had advocated a less bloody approach rather than one who advocated a more bloody approach.  Possibly I might even reject one who had a bloody past but had seen the error of his/her ways because of that past, although it would depend on the alternative.  But if the choice was between someone who had made some very bad decisions in the past and might make more in the future and someone who obviously had no experience or meaningful knowledge of foreign policy and was such a loose cannon as to make almost anything possible -- well, I would go for the former.

Tu Toque

In the end a Trump supporter -- or others as well -- might finally accuse me of the tu toque fallacy.  Whatever Trump's failings, they still don't excuse Hillary's e-mails.  And granted.  But when choosing a President, we have little choice but to grade on the curve.  If you are arguing that one person's transgressions are justified, pointing out someone else's transgressions is irrelevant.  But when choosing which of two people to elect as President (and, given the binary nature of US politics, two is all you have to choose from) then, yes, it matters whether one candidate's transgressions are more serious than the other's.  And in this case, I think there can be no doubt about it.

______________________________

*To anyone old enough to remember the Bill Clinton presidency, this sounds familiar.  Bill Clinton came into office not long after a real estate bubble had burst, causing many Savings-and-Loans to fail.  The Clintons had invested in one such company, the owner having ended up in jail for dubious financial activities.  Congress started investigating and hired a special prosecutor to find something impeachable.  He never did find anything impeachable involving the Savings-and-Loan, but did learn that Bill had lied in a civil deposition, so Congress impeached for that instead.  The same script is now playing out with Hillary

**This was Trump's only publicly traded venture; all the others have been closely-held, which has allowed him to escape public scrutiny.

***The campaign fundraising organization called itself "And Justice For All" (all initial letters capitalized), a reasonable name for someone running for Attorney General.  Foundation reported on its tax report that the donation was to "Justice for All" (no "And"), a Kansas church group.  Yet the donation was mailed directly to the political campaign.

****I am not one who believes these conspiracy theories about Trump being in the tank for the Russians, although the Russian intelligence service does appear to be in the tank for Trump.