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Talking about Trump doing things for "no reason" is basically a strawman of the anti-Trump position. If I ended up in a situation where I found myself trying to land a 747, I wouldn't be doing things for "no reason" in the cockpit, but it would be a mistake to think that I had a coherent plan to land the plane except to the extent that I'm aware that landing the plane requires reducing speed and reducing altitude.
And as I mentioned, it's not a given that Trump is actually trying to land the plane at all. He may be content to let the next guy try to land it instead.
Very astute, and this ties in to your final point. "The plan," to the extent that it exists, is mostly around Trump increasing his status and self image rather than helping the country. And I think that works perfectly - Trump is certainly better off than he was before he took office. Is the country? Not so sure about that.
Yeah, sure, everyone loves economic growth, or at least, they say they do. However, the problem is that not every policy actually increases economic growth, and for people like Trump who have a multi-decade bee in their bonnet about certain policies (like tariffs), it's implementing the policy that's the focus rather than achieving economic growth.
Let's get down to brass tacks here. Do you actually think that Trump is going to make a dent in the debt crisis? Or is this all just playing devil's advocate? Because if you really do think that he's going to make an impact, I'm much less interested in discussing the 4D chess moves that may or may not suddenly come down the pipe without warning and much more interested in putting down some actual predictions about the debt to GDP ratio and seeing who's right in three years, because I don't think that either of us is going to convince the other.
And if you don't actually believe, then this whole conversation is pointless.
If you didn't understand how the controls work or how to read the instruments, it would be pretty close to just flailing around in there. I mean, you might not crash the plane right away, but all you can do intentionally is experiment to figure out the controls, or radio for assistance. Maybe we could say you have "the concepts of a plan" though!
But sure. You could analogize that to Trump 1.
I think its somewhat evident that Trump 2 has an idea of how the 'controls' of his office work and is better at reading the 'instruments' in terms of how he is progressing.
Yes. I think there's a >50% chance that the Debt-to-GDP ratio is lower when Trump officially exits office than it was when he came in.
If I want to hedge a bit, I'd say that the average Debt to GDP ratio for the 4 years Trump is President will end up being lower than the 4 preceding years of Biden. But that's cheating a bit considering the massive hike that occurred in 2020.
If I'm correct, would that make the problem 'solved?' Hell no not by a long shot. But its a start.
Ayyy this is very fair. NOTE, my position is based more on my belief that certain economic developments in e.g., Robotics, or Space industry, or continued AI progress will boost economic growth in the meantime. Trump's role will be more in removing the barriers that have hampered such industries, rather than him actually passing new laws.
This is ALREADY happening in Argentina! Milei's plan of just cutting as much red tape as possible as quickly as possible has worked!
So, not discounting that black swans could happen, I think its reasonable that similar changes will occur in the U.S.
So yeah, Debt to GDP will work for me, but I'll be much more finicky on the size of the shift in three years.
"I'm back. I forgot my drum."
I had Gemini vibe code this chart of relative changes in debt to GDP over the course of the presidential terms starting from 1966 when the FRED data starts. Of the 11 past presidents (plus Trump I) in the dataset, 5 ended with a debt to GDP ratio better than the one they started with. So knowing nothing about a president at all, we should expect a 45% chance that the deficit to GDP ratio will fall over their tenure. Despite being such a believer in Trump's abilities, you think he's only a little bit better than the base rate in this department.
Trump's first term of course was ruinous for the debt to GDP ratio, but let's let him off the hook because COVID (the massive spike was during Trump's term, not Biden's).
Biden left office with debt to GDP slightly lower than when he came in. Is your prediction here that basically Trump is going to have a similar effect on debt to GDP as Biden did? Not only did Biden manage a modest decrease as well, he was the only guy who managed to reduce debt to GDP by at least 5pp at some point during his term except Clinton! All this without 4D tariff nonsense, but for Trump we have to consider trusting the plan to get the same result, because...?
If we're gonna impoverish people with tariffs, job losses, breaking of government norms, and the rest of Trumponomics, is the best that we can expect simply a replacement-level reduction in debt to GDP? If that's what you consider "a start", you should be singing Biden's praises for giving us that start.
Consider me unimpressed.
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