Below is a summary of an interesting article titled “How not to improve GDP” by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. This article compares the economic policy proposals of the two presidential candidates .
Ms. Rubin expresses a rather pessimistic view of the candidate’s economic proposals, stating that the policies proposed by the presidential candidates to address economic recovery efforts “are distressingly inadequate, counterproductive or politically impossible”.
Ms. Rubin backs her argument by stating “ Donald Trump wants tax cuts that would give a windfall to the rich and increase the debt by at least $10 trillion over 10 years. He wants less regulation (not a bad idea in principle), wants to shrink the labor force and consumer markets by 11 million to 12 million people by rounding up and expelling illegal immigrants (an awful idea in principle and in particulars) and want to engage in trade war with China (an awful idea and surefire way to help send us skidding into a recession).”
She continues to say “a lot of what she (Clinton) is proposing- tax hikes, hiking the minimum wage, free college etc is either not going to do much for job growth, isn’t paid for or both.”
She backs this up by quoting a Yahoo Finance article titled Clinton’s economic plan trumps, well, Trump’s which states
“[Clinton’s] proposals would “do little to directly promote increased private sector investment,” Moody’s says, relying instead on government spending as the primary stimulus. And by promoting so many small ideas instead of a few overarching ones—such as corporate tax reform or a new value-added tax—Clinton is essentially promising even more government bureaucracy to implement and enforce yet more complexity in the sprawling federal regulatory regime.”
This article concludes by stating, “ In other words, if we do pretty much the opposite of what the two candidates want to do, we’ll be fine. The tragic part is that we have the capacity to be growing at much higher levels. Our Politicians, however, are playing dumb- or really don’t understand how to promote economic growth”
This is a scary when you think about it, do the presidential candidates have what it takes to steer the economic recovery efforts in the right direction?
