Trump Derangement Syndrome Causes Severe Damage to the Democratic Party

The distress  and uncomprehending dismay in the faces of Democratic Party members shown above speak volumes. It was taken on the election night of November 8, 2016, and records their reaction to Donald Trump’s election. It also marks the beginning of the Trump derangement syndrome that has so thoroughly damaged the Democratic Party. By being reflexively antagonistic to anything Trump suggests, they have adopted insupportable policy positions that will hurt them at the 2020 polls. Let us examine these unjustifiable positions.

Trump Derangement Syndrome: Russian Collusion, Obstruction of Justice,  and Ukrainian “Quid Pro Quo”

The Democratic fixation  on impeaching President Trump is an old, tedious story by now. I will not spend much time on it. The absurd assertion that Trump committed treason by colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton has been shown to be baseless by the Robert Mueller Report. Similarly, the Democrats have abandoned the charge that Trump committed obstruction of justice by firing James Comey as Director of the FBI. Trump had more than enough reason to fire the man for cause.

What is left in the Democrats’ impeachment effort are two charges. They claim Trump withheld military aid until the Ukrainian President Zelinsky agreed to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden for corruption. This would constitute a contribution in kind to Trump’s 2020 election campaign against Joseph Biden (assuming Biden gets the nomination). Second, Democrats assert Trump obstructed Congress in their search for evidence from the executive branch.

The heart of the matter can be found within the transcript of the famous telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky. At no time during that call did Trump threaten to withhold the military aid without an investigation of the Bidens. However, President Trump does say

“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you are surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General  call you or your people and I would you to get to the bottom of it.”

This paragraph is about the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer that led to the release of unfavorable information about Hillary Clinton. The reference to Crowdstrike is to a theory that the hacking was perpetrated by the Ukrainian government, not by Russia. Many cybersecurity experts and members of the U.S. intelligence community believe this to be a conspiracy theory spread by Russia. However, at the time of the phone call, Trump apparently believed it. From the context, Trump was concerned not about the 2020 election, but about alleged Ukrainian interference and corruption in 2016.

A much better legal scholar than I, Alan Dershowitz, declares that these charges are all about policies, not lawbreaking. The impeachment charges are so laughably unsubstantiated that almost universally Trump is expected to be acquitted in a Senate trial. [NB. I have taken such a long time to write this post that Trump has in fact been acquited.]

For almost three-and-a-half years, Democrats have been spending almost all their time and effort on impeaching Trump. Their hysterical hatred of the President has led them to obstruct almost everything Trump and the Republicans attempt. Their loathing is the motivation for many of their unjustifiable positions. It is the prime motivation for the self-inflicted damage to the Democratic Party.

Support for Socialism

Somewhat independent  of Trump derangement syndrome is the sudden Democratic lurch toward the far Left. This abrupt shift is a logical evolution from the earliest positions of progressives in the late nineteenth century. Ever since the administration of Woodrow Wilson more than a century ago, progressives have been centralizing increasing amounts of economic power in the government. Much of this power has been absorbed in the independent government agencies of the administrative state. A fundamental progressive belief is that governing should be done mostly by technocrats, experts in their fields. The people themselves usually can not be trusted to rule themselves because of their ignorance and passions. Democratically elected officials can not be trusted, again because of their lack of knowledge, but also because they are influenced by the ignorant electorate. The most expert technocrats who should rule must be insulated from the people and the political branches of government.

This point of view is, to say the least, autocratic. As the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek told us in his iconic classic book The Road To Serfdom, the tendency to accumulate more economic power in the government tends to grow explosively. Its end state is the form of socialism called fascism. And indeed, from the time of Woodrow Wilson to the present, we have been progressing along the road to serfdom with very few interruptions. Donald Trump’s administration appears to be one of those rare interruptions.

The latest progressive accomplishment in centralizing economic power was the Dodd-Frank Act during the Obama administration. That response to the Great Recession attempted to bring the financial industry (banks, other purveyors of loans, stockbrokers, commodity traders, and stock markets) under detailed federal government control. Among other monstrosities, the Dodd-Frank Act authorized a rogue, out-of-control independent government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In keeping with progressives’ philosophy of technocratic government, the CFPB was almost totally insulated from the political branches of government. It also combined executive, legislative, and judicial powers over most private financial institutions. Clearly, progressives are not enthusiastic about the separation of powers to protect us from government tyranny.

The current Democratic candidates for President are continuing in this tradition. Their proposed Green New Deal alone would cost anywhere from $5 trillion to $10 trillion per year, depending on who you believe. So far, the Green New Deal is far too vague and amorphous to say for sure. One might tend to believe the upper number since historically government programs always cost more than originally expected. However, suppose the lower number is closer to reality. With a current GDP of around $20 trillion, the Green New Deal would cost us, at a minimum, around one-quarter of our entire GDP annually!

Then there is the Democratic proposal for “Medicare-for-all”, or socialized medicine. A study from the Mercatus Center of George Mason University estimates the cost would be $32.6 trillion during its first 10 years. This price tag includes estimated savings from things like the elimination of employer provider payment cuts, administrative savings, and lower prescription drug costs. (See Table 1 in the study.) The cost of this program would then amount to around 16 percent of GDP above what is now being spent.

Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal together would cost the U.S. at a minimum around 41 percent of GDP annually! Almost by definition, such programs would be a giant stride toward socialism.

Advocacy for Increased Taxes, Especially on Corporations

To pay for a humongous growth  in the federal government, progressives would raise taxes on the rich, the middle class, and on corporations. Because Trump has championed tax cuts, their hatred of him makes repeal of the Republicans’ Tax Cut and Jobs Act a high priority for them. Because of their reflexive hatred of corporations, progressives would find raising corporate taxes especially sweet.

Yet, because companies are the primary producers of wealth and the provider of jobs and wages to just about everyone, decreasing their economic activity by reducing their available capital would be counterproductive. An extremely strong argument can be made that governments should not tax companies at all. Indeed, cutting corporate taxes does not decrease tax revenues, but instead increases them. Encouraging corporate economic activity causes an increase in GDP growth. Hauser’s law then guarantees an increase in tax revenues from individuals’ taxes.

The root cause of ballooning government deficits is not lower taxes, but out-of-control government spending. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that spending (approximately two-thirds) is mandatory, not discretionary, spending. What is killing us is spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. Defense spending (16% of spending in 2015) is not the biggest culprit. These facts predict that eliminating growing government deficits will be very painful for all of us.

Increasing tax rates together with enormous progressive spending increases would predestine a U.S. economic catastrophe.

Lies About the Economy’s Performance

One of the most blatant effects  of Trump derangement syndrome is the obligation progressives and their media allies feel to badmouth the economy’s condition. Over the past three years, we were constantly told by the media and Democrats that a deep recession was just around the corner. Hatred of Trump together with wishful thinking led to their economic doom and gloom. When no one could deny the economy was generally healthier than during the Obama regime, we would hear that health was all due to Obama’s policies. Those policies were just finally taking effect under the Trump administration.

Those assertions are easily debunked using empirical data from the Federal Reserve Economic Database. For example, if we look at annualized real GDP growth from Q1 2010 to Q2 2018, we see the following plot.

The decay in the last seven years of Obama and the revival in the first year and a half of Trump are undeniable. To be fair, if we extend this graph a year to Q2 2019, we see a fall-off caused by corporate pessimism because of the various trade wars.

The strongest correlation with real GDP growth is with U.S. domestic corporate investment. If we plot this indicator from Q1 2014 to Q2 2019, we see how the percent growth of investments initially rapidly increased under Trump. Then it then moderated from Q3 2017 to Q4 2018, falling again during 2019.

The moderation and fall perfectly mirror increasing trade war worries by corporations. Now that we have a phase I agreement with China, the USMCA treaty ratified by Congress, and a free trade agreement with Japan, we can expect corporate animal spirits to rise along with increasing investments. Robust GDP growth should follow. The bottom line is that the decay under Obama and the improvement under Trump are undeniable.

Progressives often retort that this is all well and good, but the rewards of the economy are not filtering down to those with the lowest incomes. I have often heard from Democratic pundits that although lower-class wages might be increasing, inflation is rising even faster leading to a loss in real wages. Those progressive pundits apparently have not seen the plot below of wage growth according to income quartiles. The plot is provided by the Federal Reserve District Bank of Atlanta.

The lowest income group, the first quartile had median wage growth of 4.8 percent at the beginning of 2020, the second and third quartiles had 3.5 percent growth, and the fourth quartile had a 3.0 percent growth. The annualized inflation rate according to the CPI at the start of 2020 was 2.3 percent. Again, progressives are lying to us. Their misrepresentation of economic reality can not help but do damage to the Democratic Party.

Even More Self-Damage by the Democratic Party

There are several more ways. in which the Democratic Party has damaged itself with its unreal views about social reality. The Trump impeachment together with progressives’ leftist ideology will do great damage to the Democratic Party. This summary of their mistaken beliefs will continue in the next post.

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