Pravda tells us that a righteous Democrat has won an election in a Pennsylvania district that Hillary Clinton lost by 20 points. Can we infer from this that voters were rejecting Hillary (spouse of former leader, recipient of $billions in foreign cash via her family-controlled foundation) rather than rejecting the Democrats’ promise of a planned economy (fair wages for all races and gender IDs determined by a central bureaucracy, fair (means-tested) prices for housing, food, and health care, experts allocating appropriate levels of resources to the health care industry, etc.)? Therefore if the Democrats simply nominate someone in 2020 who didn’t get rich via involvement in politics and who didn’t succeed in politics through marriage or family connections, Trump is in serious trouble? And if Trump is in serious trouble will it be time to go short the U.S. markets?
15 thoughts on “Democrat victory in Pennsylvania shows that Americans like a planned economy but did not like Hillary?”
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Lamb ran as a Pelosi-hating, gun-loving Democrat.
I didn’t follow that election closely, but I think that it would have been big news if Mr. Lamb had advocated a “planned economy”. I don’t recall Mrs. Clinton proposing any such thing, either. It sounds like it might be good, better than an unplanned economy. Who knows? It’s also interesting that providing a service such as health care to the population would be considered planning, but not providing highways or law enforcement.
Peter Schiff talks exactly about this. The economy is going to crash under Trump’s term. This will usher in a Bernie Sanders type as the replacement for a planned economy.
Therefore if the Democrats simply nominate someone in 2020 who didn’t get rich via involvement in politics and who didn’t succeed in politics through marriage or family connections, Trump is in serious trouble?
Trump is a one-term president and will not seek re-election.
@Smartest
As turnover in the White House approaches 100%, I’m not sure Trump is finishing this term.
@GermanL: Peter Schiff has been saying “the economy is about to crash” since 2000. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so he does get credit for predicting the housing crash in 2008 (who knew 10-20% yearly increases were unsustainable? clearly not phd economists).
In talking about going short I wasn’t predicting a cataclysmic meltdown, by the way. Only suggesting that if the Democrats manage to get control of Washington again they could make good on their promises to raise corporate tax rates. If the rates go back to where they were I would expect stock prices to go back to pre-Trump levels (adjusted for inflation, so maybe 15 percent higher than they were were in early November 2016). If U.S. stocks were worth $X when investors expected the Democrats to run the government, why wouldn’t they go back to being worth $X when Democrats actually do regain control?
Because there is no cause and effect for markets. It’s a psychological thing.
puilg “If U.S. stocks were worth $X when investors expected the Democrats to run the government, why wouldn’t they go back to being worth $X when Democrats actually do regain control?”
easy–because something else changed.
ZZAZZ2: What would have changed? Donald Trump would have done such a fantastic job during his four years of running the country that the average public company has much brighter long-term prospects? The expected profit in 2030, for example, would be much higher than if Hillary Clinton had run the U.S. for four years?
US presidents have surprisingly little control over how the economy is going.
@philg, I don’t find it surprising that the only two options you see are “planned economy” or following a know-nothing president. But I am most surprised that we have not recently heard a word from you regarding Rex Tillerson, upon who you have lavished so much praise (e.g. https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/12/13/rex-tillerson-before-he-met-the-prince-of-darkness/, https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/01/12/rex-tillerson-jury-member/). It is sad that we missed on a follow up commentary on the most useless State Secretary in living memory (his only good deed was to call Trump a moron), who was fired because he was not a good enough sycophant.
I don’t know enough about foreign policy to critique Tillerson’s performance, but a Clinton-appointed diplomat thought that things had gone much better with Tillerson running the State Department than previously. See http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/10/10/a-diplomats-perspective-on-isis/
So, though the New York Times (“Pravda” as the Russians I know call it!) hated Tillerson, I didn’t learn anything negative about him during his sojourn in the government. A lot of the criticism leveled at the guy seemed to be because he wanted to slim down the bureaucracy by a few hundred (out of tens of thousands of people!). It is tough to think of a bureaucracy with tens of thousands of employees that can’t benefit from some trimming. Tillerson disagreed with Donald Trump? How is that a mark against him? He seems mostly to have kept his disagreements private, which would have been considered good manners during my youth.
Tillerson didn’t get us into any wars. Tillerson didn’t spend a lot of extra taxpayer funds. He didn’t get into the headlines by trading cash or jobs for sex with young women. What more could we ask from an older white man in a senior government position? What did you think he should have or could have done?
[John Kerry is still my favorite Secretary of State because he showed Americans that the best way to get rich is through marriage to a wealthy older partner and also that, when you live on Beacon Hill and Nantucket, you should register your yacht in Rhode Island so as to skip out on the Massachusetts sales tax.]
@anon I hear this all the time about Peter Schiff: “But even a stopped clock is right twice a day”. Yeah? and? Frankly, that’s just a red herring of an argument. OK you can argue that his timing about crashes is never precise, and thus it makes it seem like he cries wolf all the time. But that doesn’t make him wrong about the fundamentals of the US economy.
I don’t think anyone can time a crash exactly anyway.
A young, good looking Democrat with lots of centrist positions who ran a savvy campaign beat an old, worn out Republican who no one had any real enthusiasm for. It’s really not a surprise, even in such a red district.
@GermanL: My paternal grandfather literally withdrew every dollar out of his bank accounts the week before Black Monday. I never had the chance to ask him how he knew something was about to happen. (The family talked him into trusting in the FDIC, and they re-deposited all the money.)