One of the difficulties of carrying on any sort of intelligent, as opposed to apocalyptic, discussion of Trump’s policies lies in the fact that the press paint everything he says, does, or is, in only Satanic colors. This is obvious in the latest New York Times hit piece, “Will Trump Crash The Farm Economy?” The article leads off with highly farm-related matters like, quote, “the president’s alleged infidelities with a porn actress, his ties to Russia, Jared Kushner’s real estate shenanigans, administration scandals about wife beaters, Saudi princes, Ben Carson’s table or Scott Pruitt’s soundproof room.”
Now if I were a farmer, would Scott Pruitt’s soundproof room be the main concern I had affecting my cash crops? Probably not. But, hey, not everything Trump does necessarily turns out well. Maybe Trump’s policies will hurt farmers. So I read the piece, which assured me that America’s breadbasket would shortly turn into the Gobi Desert, and then asked myself, for balance’s sake, what the opposing case might be. Two sides to every story, right?
So off I went to Google to see what advocates who favored Trump’s farm policies had to say. There were no advocates. There was no balancing case. Every last article I came across for five solid pages of Google results bashed the President from top to bottom, generally leading, like the Times piece, with the President’s alleged infidelities, alleged subservience to Moscow, alleged indifference to wife-beating, alleged racism, alleged misogyny, alleged closet white nationalism, and all the other alleged things that keep wheat from growing in the Heartland.
Now, I don’t know if Trump’s farm policies will prove good or ill. Only that intelligent discussion is not possible when Trump is treated like a Polish Jew in the 30’s by a press that comports itself like the Nazi Press Office. The one and only actual statement of Trump’s farm policies I could find, as opposed to Freddie-Krueger-like assurances of the blood-letting to come, appeared on whitehouse.gov (see https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trump-working-rebuild-rural-america/) and that was not compelling either: policy advocates are generally about as disinterested as policy opponents, although at least the White House page is blessedly blessedly free of the personal insult, off-topic material, and general meanness of spirit permeating the “mainstream” press, which reflects actual mainstream opinion about Trump about as much as the Quran reflects LPGA golf rankings.
And yet, for all the doom anticipated and all the quoted farmers expressing the direst possible forebodings, even the Times piece concedes that Trump won over 60% of the rural vote in Iowa. The Washington Post elsewhere notes, “In the 2,332 counties that make up small-town and rural America, he [Trump] swamped his Democratic rival, winning 60 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 34 percent. Trump’s 26-point advantage over Clinton in rural America far exceeded the margins by which Republican nominees had won those voters in the four previous elections.”
So why did Trump win the rural vote? The invariably urban commentators tend to lay the blame on the sheer backward stupidity of rural residents, but a nearly two to one margin suggests that other things may be at issue, particularly since, as we know, intelligence is merely a social construct, and any inner city gang-banger is at least as intellectually astute as your average Rotarian. Maybe the voters in small towns aren’t purely obsessed with economic concerns; or maybe, seeing the actual results of Trump’s policies on other parts of the economy, they not unreasonably expect the same to occur to their sector too.
As Investors Business Daily observes:
Has Anyone Noticed That Trump’s Economy Keeps Beating Expectations?
JOHN MERLINE
ADP reported that payrolls “unexpectedly” climbed 190,000 in November, while analysts had predicted 185,000.
Consumer confidence “unexpectedly” hit a 17-year high in November.
Labor costs “unexpectedly” fell in the third quarter while productivity surged. Economists thought costs would edge up by 0.3%.
Retail sales in October “unexpectedly” rose. Economists had expected them to be flat.
These are pulled just from headlines of the past few weeks. But the trend started almost as soon as President Trump took office.
Normally, it takes months for a new administration’s economic policies to take effect. But there was a sharp surge in business and consumer optimism, and the stock market has been on an upward trajectory, since the day Trump got elected.
The IBD/TIPP Economic Optimism Index has been in positive territory for 15 months straight.
What’s more, Trump was able to take immediate executive action on regulations, which sent a signal to businesses, markets and consumers alike.
Now it appears that overall economic growth for the entire year could be, you guessed it, “unexpectedly” high.
On Friday, the government will release the unemployment figures for November. But at 4.1%, the unemployment rate is already “unexpectedly” low. The consensus was that unemployment would average 4.6% for the year, but it’s been under 4.6% since March.
At the start of the year, economists were in widespread agreement that inflation-adjusted GDP would grow 2% to 2.3%. The National Association of Business Economists survey put it at 2.2%. The Congressional Budget Office predicted growth would be 2.3%, as did Trump’s own economists.
But annualized growth was 3.1% in the second quarter and 3.3% in the third. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow measure, which includes economic data available for the fourth quarter up to this point, currently stands at 3.2%. If that holds for the quarter [it did], then growth for the year would be above 2.3%. (It would also mark the first time the economy has put together three straight quarters of 3% or higher growth since 2005.)
All of this marks a sharp turnaround from the past eight years when, under President Obama’s economic stewardship, GDP growth never once came close to meeting the consensus forecasts.
Curiously, although the suicide rate in rural areas skyrocketed under Obama, and although life expectancy in those areas plunged for the first time in recorded history, and although the areas with the highest such levels of despair overwhelmingly voted for Trump, I can’t–surprise!–find a single study examining what the triumph of the candidate supported by rural voters two to one might have done to affect that rate. I would imagine it would be something of a pick-me-up. Of course the sound levels in Scott Pruitt’s room take precedence, I suppose.
As for me, though, when I recall that a Nobel-winning economist like Paul Krugman could, with a straight face, say that the election of Trump would not only crash the stock market but crash it so thoroughly that it would never rise again, I find myself having to view headlines like “Will Trump Crash The Farm Economy” with a grain of salt. True, when it comes to economic stagnation, and the destruction of rural lives and communities, Trump simply cannot match the performance of the ineffable Obama; but the ballot box told the story in 2016, and numbers like the above are telling us more of the same.
What “will” happen, in the heated imagination of those who seem to prefer the worst possible outcomes in whatever Trump touches, is apparently not what is happening. Which is why the apocalyptic scenarios may disquiet those who expect the worst already, but leave most of the rest of us untouched. There is always a certain comfort in reality.