The Almighty GDP Excel Spreadsheet God
Americans are more than economic pawns
"Duty, Honor, Country"
- General Douglas MacArthur
What makes America great is Americans, not some global economic think tank ideas from NYT columnist David Brooks about “Cosmopolitanism.”
“The essence of the Trump agenda might be: We don’t like those damn foreigners….My main concern is over the spirit and values of the country. People’s psychologies are formed by the conditions that surround them. The conditions that Trump is creating are based on and nurture a security mindset: they’re threatening us; it’s a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog world; we need to protect, protect, protect. We need to build walls.”
Contrary to Brooks, we’re not a group of backwoods rubes crouching in fear of the outside world. What we are, and should always strive to be, is a nation of people who care more about the well-being of each other and not the market cap of a multinational corporation that will pull the rug at the first chance of increasing profit.
This nation’s initials are USA not GDP.
The overused phrase of collectivism when describing Marxist-style ideologies has woefully made it a dirty word for those of us on the Right-wing to employ. It needs to be reclaimed and utilized often to reinforce the notion of being united. It is the proper attitude to have for our fellow Americans’ living conditions. We are all in the same boat, whether some are in first-class cabins or third-class.
Are protectionist tariff policies the silver bullet solution that will restore American labor and wage loss woes? Will the Rust Belt be revitalized with a glut of new manufacturing jobs by next year?
Of course not. But it’s a start and more importantly, a chance.
Prepare for pain and embrace the understanding that it is needed and long overdue. The medicine that cures does not always go down easily.
Legacy media reporting leads one to believe that tariffs will be the only strategy. That is folly and propaganda for the low-information citizen as they like to call most of us. Stronger tariffs are only one piece of the equation that (might) correct the dismal path we are on. How quickly forgotten is that some of the loudest voices decrying a change in the global trade equation vis-à-vis America and the world are also those in Legacy media who happily cheered on the Covid shutdowns five years ago. Actions that shuttered millions of small businesses and reinforced more multinational corporate control of markets. They had no problem irrevocably harming the development and opportunities for the younger generations in service for their interests. Yet a dip in the stock market this week sends them into a Chicken Little response.
Things are very wrong with how the game is set up. Many know this and see the signs of slow decline all around. The hardships for those trying to begin a career, start a family, or simply find an affordable starter home is not a secret.
The promised results of NAFTA, free trade and mass immigration platitudes were a siren song that mainly enriched a select few. A few brave voices spoke out on this such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot while many in Conservative Inc. shouted them down as fear-mongers. Their predictions regarding the offshoring of industry, dropping wages, and the loss of America’s manufacturing base have sadly, been vindicated.
Taking potshots at communities most affected by these policies appears to be a Con Inc. special. Note the indifference and vitriol shown by many in Conservative Inc. circles for the people they claim as their political base. Especially from the same sources that cheered on the economic policies that helped contribute to the decline of many communities that are now in dire straits.
It’s no secret that we all know damn well one would never see someone on the Left, whether Progressive, Liberal, Democrat, that would talk this way about the majority group of their political base with such disdain openly. There will never be calls in the NYT or Huffington Post for entire communities to simply “die” or to be forgotten and mocked.
Even Patrick Moynihan, one of the leading architects for LBJ’s War on Poverty initiatives and Democrat author of “The Moynihan Report” of 1965, is still criticized for gently pointing out dysfunctions and self-inflicted issues that plagued inner-city Black Americans in said report.
“But this doesn’t affect me”
I am constantly astonished at the display of apathy amongst many within my circles for those affected most by these economic policies. While I do not sit alongside the Cloud People1 in either stature or immense levels of wealth, my bird’s eye view of things is troubling. To have an attitude of indifference for those directly affected is unfathomable to me.
It is time for something different and if it takes torching my 401K so that our nation’s posterity do not become serfs to an almighty GDP Excel spreadsheet God of Globohomo, then I say burn it to the ground.
-Arthur
I dont measure my health as an individual, husband and father purely based on my W2. In the same way, GDP growth metrics are a poor way of measuring a nations' health. That's why it's impossible to argue with economists about Trump and tariffs. They only have one, myopic view on the nation, one that is detached from factors besides GDP.
Personally, I dont care if Larry Fink gets 20x richer, and GDP metrics rise as a result. I dont want my neighbors to be on welfare and I dont want China to have us by the balls. I'd rather GDP be a little lower and have a safe, healthy nation with a coherent national identity, with a high-trust society to boot, even it it comes at the expense of GDP growth. Why is that so hard for people to grasp?
Only one caveat, GDP isn't a bad word either and is a more or less reliable measure of a nation's economic health. But the equities markets are not themselves a component of GDP so equities market reactions, while potentially predictive of near term GDP direction, don't really hit the bottom line. It's become popular on the right to criticize the GDP metric as tilted toward and beneficial to financebros and used to justify all the indignities committed by the left. But when a million migrants are imported to take the jobs a million Americans but at half the cost, it's not a positive for GDP and odds in fact a negative to per capita GDP. TL;DR I don't think we should discard the metric entirely but rather argue it because it supports our vision over the long term.