Donald Trump makes me a special kind of nervous

And he just won't go away

Most of us know how unreliable individual election polls can be. That’s why I prefer to look at what the polls are saying over an extended period of time (like the graphs here, here, here and here).

After Donald Trump first joined the presidential race in mid-2015, his popularity against Hillary Clinton in the polls rose quite rapidly. But despite this, and even though individual poll results fluctuated plenty, Clinton appeared to maintain a consistent general lead over Trump, even if it wasn’t enormous. However, in late July this year, after the Republican and Democratic Conventions, Donald Trump’s popularity in the polls took a big hit. And yes, I gave in to temptation and started believing that this represented a new solid underlying trend - that the Trump train had finally been derailed. But he quickly recovered in the polls again. Woops!

A lot of politicians have made me nervous before, but it’s usually relating to social issues – their attitude towards women (e.g. abortion, contraception, or just general snide remarks), the influence of religion in public policy, LGBTQ and other minority rights, etc. And while it’s easy to note the times Donald Trump has met this criterion, my quickness to grasp on to anything that suggests the Trump phenomenon is over is because he is the first ‘politician’ to truly make me nervous from an economic perspective.

Let us review:

• He has sympathised with the idea of the US returning to the Gold Standard – the Creationism of economics (more to come on this in subsequent blogs)
• He plans to reduce the top income tax rate from 39% to 33%, followed by just two other rates – 25% and 12% (see video here). This is a policy which will worsen the US’s debt situation by incredible magnitude. Seriously, it is delusional to think that cutting US tax rates like this (the US is already the 4^th lowest taxed country in the OECD), in a way that further benefits the rich, will give the necessary boost to economic activity and not cause government debt to balloon. This kind of ‘trickle down economics’ simply does not work
• He has threatened to walk away from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if he doesn’t get it re-written the way he wants, and criticises Mexico and China for taking American jobs – and one has to consider whether this is just an objection to specific aspects of specific agreements, or part of a wider anti-globalisation push that will make the US more insular
• He has threatened to partially default on the US’s debt obligations, or as he puts it (in my best Trump accent), “make a deal” with the US’s creditors – I don’t even know how to begin explaining why America defaulting, even partially, on its debt obligations is a very very very bad thing
• And if this fails, they can just “print the money” – that’s right, Trump actually suggested instructing the Federal Reserve to just print money to pay off government debt. That is called ‘helicopter money’ – and not even the ‘good’ kind that is transferred from the Federal Reserve to the government and spent on good productive things like infrastructure. Even the Federal Reserve, during the height of their unprecedented quantitative easing measures, weren’t bold enough to go as far as helicopter money
• He has had a go at NATO and threatened to stop supporting the US’s allies unless they meet their financial obligations – who does he think he is, the mafia, charging the local shopkeeper for protection money? Such hostility to one’s own allies could not only violate international treaties and seriously mess with global stability, but also sour current and future trade and investment relations
• And then, of course, there’s the deportation of about 11 million illegal immigrants, on whose labour a significant amount of economic activity is dependent – hundreds of billions of dollars potentially (a significant chunk in agriculture, construction and service occupations), not including the additional hundreds of billions needed to deport them (immigration agents, lawyers, support staff)

And what’s worse is that he’s dropping these comments as the potential leader of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. An economic stuff-up (or several) in the US has far greater implications that one in, say, Bhutan. America, you may be disenchanted with the current political establishment and desperate for a ‘new kind of politician’. Just remember how many other lives would be affected by this ‘change’.