Since the US election there has been much consternation and hand-wringing over what Trump may or may not do as President. Little has been said about what Hillary was promising and the ruinous effects directly upon the US and indirectly Canada, whose economic prospects would have suffered collateral damages. Kevin Libin corrects that omission in his National Post article: Cheer up, Canada — President Donald Trump just might be good for you (here)

It’s still impossible to tell which of Trump’s often-wild promises he will actually keep, given how unpredictable he has demonstrated himself to be. But the risk with Clinton was always the opposite. It was her political determination. Had she been allowed to govern as she was resolved to, Canada would have paid the price for as long as eight more difficult years — probably more than they will under even a loose-cannon amateur like Trump. A president Hillary Clinton would have implemented policies that would have been sure to drag down the economic growth of an economy upon which Canada overwhelmingly relies for its own.

She has been unapologetic about her plan to increase taxes, promising to raise the estate tax and capital gains taxes (where she planned to hike the top rate from 23.8 to 43.4 per cent) and she had proposed to tax high-frequency stock-market trades. She had said she was open even to new payroll taxes, which would have injured American competitiveness yet further. And her campaign said she would “take a look at” a carbon tax, if Congress had proposed one. Congress, still firmly in the hands of the Republicans, will now entertain no such thing.

Throughout her campaign, Clinton also distinguished herself as the candidate of multiplying regulations to rein in Wall Street, and more spending on entitlements: Where Trump said only he would not cut social security, Clinton went further and said she would “expand it.” She showed no interest in tax relief for corporations or personal incomes, focusing instead on raising tax revenues, $1.4 trillion over 10 years, another trillion dollars the following decade, in an attempt to reduce inequality through redistributionist schemes.

All of these were growth-killing policies overlooked by Canadian pundits who prioritized their distaste for Trump’s vulgarity and jingoism over the prospect of a robust American economy that could help Canada enhance its own prosperity. The U.S. GDP has been growing at not much more than two per cent a year for over a decade, much to Canada’s economic detriment; under Clinton, that seemed bound to continue.

Summary

Will a Trump administration, as unhinged as some might fear it will be, prove more propitious for Canada? There is at least now some reason for optimism.

A Republican House and Senate are even more apt to stand firm for continued free trade with Canada than a Democratic Congress would have. And in the most probable scenario, if our exporters can maintain open trade with the U.S., Trump’s preference for economic growth looks far more likely to benefit Canada than Clinton’s preference for an expanded welfare state ever would have. It is too early yet to be certain whether these promising economic changes come to pass under Trump. But on Tuesday night, Canadians at least won some hope of finally escaping from the last 11 years of more muddling along, with our largest export market politically fated to remain underperforming and torpid.

blob:http://business.financialpost.com/d6df2d9f-72ba-491b-9e0a-507ede0c385e

 

Lots of scorn, slurs and insults directed at Trump’s appointment of his chief advisor, Steve Bannon. The invective is so pervasive and intense, it exemplifies a new phenomenon in the global village: the Lie Swarm.  From the Streetwise Professor (here)

Bannon, and especially Trump, are primary targets of the Lie Swarm, especially since Trump had the temerity to actually prevail in the election. Don’t get me wrong–there is much about Trump to criticize. But there has been a kind of Gresham’s Law at work here: the bad criticism has driven out the good. Screeching “racist!” “Anti-Semite!” “Fascist!” on the basis of the most twisted and biased interpretation of the flimsiest evidence has overwhelmed substantive argument.

And the Swarm really hasn’t figured out that their attack will do little to get Trump supporters to change their minds. If anything, it will do the opposite, because the “deplorables” know that they are being attacked and smeared as much as Bannon and Trump. Furthermore, the Swarm seems hell-bent on living out Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. Hillary’s whole campaign was based on personal attacks on Trump and his supporters, and she enlisted the Swarm in this endeavor.

Bannon in his own words

Martin Luther King said people should be judged by the quality of their character, not superficial identifiers like race, gender or religion. So someone like Steve Bannon should be evaluated by what he himself says and thinks, not by the words of others. And in fact if you listen with a mind to understand him, you discover why Trump values his advice on world realities and strategies to move America forward.

This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World is a transcript of an extended presentation by Steve Bannon from 2014, published at Buzzfeed (here). Some excerpts that struck me as particularly insightful.

Inclusive Capitalism Saved Us

That war (WWI) triggered a century of barbaric — unparalleled in mankind’s history — virtually 180 to 200 million people were killed in the 20th century, and I believe that, you know, hundreds of years from now when they look back, we’re children of that: We’re children of that barbarity. This will be looked at almost as a new Dark Age.

But the thing that got us out of it, the organizing principle that met this, was not just the heroism of our people. . . The underlying principle is an enlightened form of capitalism, that capitalism really gave us the wherewithal. It kind of organized and built the materials needed to support, whether it’s the Soviet Union, England, the United States, and eventually to take back continental Europe and to beat back a barbaric empire in the Far East.

That capitalism really generated tremendous wealth. And that wealth was really distributed among a middle class, a rising middle class, people who come from really working-class environments and created what we really call a Pax Americana. It was many, many years and decades of peace. And I believe we’ve come partly offtrack in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union and we’re starting now in the 21st century, which I believe, strongly, is a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.

Modern Perversions of Capitalism

But there’s a strand of capitalism today — two strands of it, that are very disturbing.

One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. I believe it’s what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.

The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement — whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.

However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.”

Crony Capitalism Gives Rise to a Populist Revolt

General Electric and these major corporations that are in bed with the federal government are not what we’d consider free-enterprise capitalists. We’re backers of entrepreneurial capitalists. They’re not. They’re what we call corporatist. They want to have more and more monopolistic power and they’re doing that kind of convergence with big government. And so the fight here — and that’s why the media’s been very late to this party — but the fight you’re seeing is between entrepreneur capitalism, and the Acton Institute is a tremendous supporter of, and the people like the corporatists that are closer to the people like we think in Beijing and Moscow than they are to the entrepreneurial capitalist spirit of the United States.

The underpinning of this populist revolt is the financial crisis of 2008. That revolt, the way that it was dealt with, the way that the people who ran the banks and ran the hedge funds have never really been held accountable for what they did, has fueled much of the anger in the tea party movement in the United States. . . In addition, I think you really need to go back and make banks do what they do: Commercial banks lend money, and investment banks invest in entrepreneurs and to get away from this trading — you know, the hedge fund securitization, which they’ve all become basically trading operations and securitizations and not put capital back and really grow businesses and to grow the economy.

I think it’s particularly more advanced in Europe than it is in the United States, but in the United States it’s getting pretty advanced — is that when you have this kind of crony capitalism, you have a different set of rules for the people that make the rules. It’s this partnership of big government and corporatists. I think it starts to fuel, particularly as you start to see negative job creation. If you go back, in fact, and look at the United States’ GDP, you look at a bunch of Europe. If you take out government spending, you know, we’ve had negative growth on a real basis for over a decade.

And that all trickles down to the man in the street. If you look at people’s lives, and particularly millennials, look at people under 30 — people under 30, there’s 50% really under employment of people in the United States, which is probably the most advanced economy in the West, and it gets worse in Europe.

So you can understand why middle class people having a tough go of it making $50 or $60 thousand a year and see their taxes go up, and they see that their taxes are going to pay for government sponsored bailouts, what you’ve created is really a free option. You say to this investment banking, create a free option for bad behavior. In otherwise all the upside goes to the hedge funds and the investment bank, and to the crony capitalist with stock increases and bonus increases. And their downside is limited, because middle class people are going to come and bail them out with tax dollars.

And that’s what I think is fueling this populist revolt. Whether that revolt is in the midlands of England, or whether it’s in Middle America. And I think people are fed up with it.

Secularization and the Rise of Islamic Fascism

The other (worrying) tendency is an immense secularization of the West. And I know we’ve talked about secularization for a long time, but if you look at younger people, especially millennials under 30, the overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize this rising iteration.

Now that call converges with something we have to face, and it’s a very unpleasant topic, but we are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. . .That war is expanding and it’s metastasizing to sub-Saharan Africa. We have Boko Haram and other groups that will eventually partner with ISIS in this global war, and it is, unfortunately, something that we’re going to have to face, and we’re going to have to face very quickly.

Because it is a crisis, and it’s not going away. You don’t have to take my word for it. All you have to do is read the news every day, see what’s coming up, see what they’re putting on Twitter, what they’re putting on Facebook, see what’s on CNN, what’s on BBC. See what’s happening, and you will see we’re in a war of immense proportions. It’s very easy to play to our baser instincts, and we can’t do that. But our forefathers didn’t do it either. And they were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind, so I think it’s incumbent on all of us to do what I call a gut check, to really think about what our role is in this battle that’s before us.

I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy that he represents, because he eventually is the state capitalist of kleptocracy. However, we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism — and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.

Global Center-Right Populist Movement

Look, we believe — strongly — that there is a global tea party movement. We’ve seen that. We were the first group to get in and start reporting on things like UKIP and Front National and other center right. With all the baggage that those groups bring — and trust me, a lot of them bring a lot of baggage, both ethnically and racially — but we think that will all be worked through with time.

The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run.

I will tell you that the working men and women of Europe and Asia and the United States and Latin America don’t believe that. They believe they know what’s best for how they will comport their lives. They think they know best about how to raise their families and how to educate their families. So I think you’re seeing a global reaction to centralized government, whether that government is in Beijing or that government is in Washington, DC, or that government is in Brussels.

And that center-right revolt is really a global revolt. I think you’re going to see it in Latin America, I think you’re going to see it in Asia, I think you’ve already seen it in India. Modi’s great victory was very much based on these Reaganesque principles, so I think this is a global revolt, and we are very fortunate and proud to be the news site that is reporting that throughout the world.

 

As liberals and Hillary supporters come to terms with Trump’s election, a few are realizing some improvements are more likely with Trump as President. Even those who thought him appalling saw changes needed, which did not fit under Hillary’s pledge of “More of the Same.”

Case in point is Margaret Wente, columnist for the Globe and Mail, whose recent article (here) was entitled:

A Trump presidency: It might not be all bad. Don’t get me wrong. I think the election of Donald Trump is a disaster. But he might actually do a few good things.

Faint praise, anyone? But I am reblogging the essay in its entirety because she makes many very good points. And I thought her comment on climate change was lucid and balanced (below with my bolds).

I was in the Y the other day, in the women’s locker room. Everybody was in mourning. Some people had begun to prepare for the worst. “We could set up abortion clinics right across the border,” I overheard one woman say. The others nodded in agreement.

Their anxiety was understandable, but perhaps premature. I honestly don’t think President Donald Trump will order a wholesale rollback of women’s rights. (If the abortion issue ever is kicked back to the states, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.)

Nor do I think he’s Hitler, an analogy that’s been casually invoked by folks who are obviously clueless about history. (Apart from anything else, daughter Ivanka is an Orthodox Jew.) He’s not even a third-rate fascist. He’s more like Silvio Berlusconi – with infinitely more power to make mischief.

Mr. Trump might even do a few good things. Here are some.

He’ll boost the economy in the short run. Tax cuts and massive infrastructure spending will guarantee it. Even The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman – an implacable Trump foe – says so. “An accidental, badly designed stimulus would still, in the short run, be better than no stimulus at all,” he admitted grudgingly.

American infrastructure is in awful shape. Better airports, highways and major upgrades to the electricity grid are long overdue. Besides, infrastructure spending is exactly what our Prime Minister wants to do. So how can it possibly be bad?

He’ll approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Hey! Didn’t Justin Trudeau want Barack Obama to do that?

He’ll get rid of a lot of stupid regulations that make it hard for small businesses to get off the ground – and he’ll inspire the states to do the same. Do you really need a cosmetology licence (1,600 hours of training at an accredited school, plus a state exam) to do hair braiding? Maybe not.

He’ll get rid of the social-justice crusaders in Washington who dictate bathroom policies to local schools. And he’ll stop going after religious groups like Little Sisters of the Poor that don’t want to hand out free birth control.

He’ll roll back the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, which made preventing campus sexual assault a key issue for the Obama administration. The result was the creation of kangaroo courts without due process, as well as a vast administrative apparatus to deal with matters that rightly belong in the criminal courts. This is not a setback for women’s rights. It’s a setback for the rape-crisis hysteria that’s swept across our schools of higher learning. It’s a setback for the notion that campus bureaucrats are equipped to deal with the sexual and emotional lives of their adult students.

He’ll keep Washington out of the business of micromanaging local schools. The No Child Left Behind Act, introduced in 2002 by the Bush administration, had the noblest of intentions but was a disaster for everyone concerned. It introduced an era of test craziness and much gaming of the system, without any meaningful improvement in student achievement. A sweeping rewrite of the law has shifted power back to the states. Mr. Trump will keep it there. He’s a fan of charter schools – a much better idea.

He’ll stop the flow of U.S. funds to Palestinian terrorists, via aid money that goes to the Palestinian government and Hamas. Not everyone believes that would be a good thing, but I do.

Mr. Trump will essentially repeal everything that Mr. Obama did on climate change. This may make less difference than you think – and it may inspire a much-needed dose of climate realism. The non-enforceable Paris accord is basically no more than a statement of good intentions. The coal mines aren’t coming back anyway. Climate realists (who aren’t the same as climate deniers – see Bjorn Lomborg and the Breakthrough Institute, for example) acknowledge the man-made influence on the climate, but also correctly point out that only extraordinary technological breakthroughs will significantly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. In the meantime, we’d better think harder about adaptation – unless you think China and India will be content to forgo all hope of a decent living standard for their 2.5 billion-plus populations.

He won’t repeal gay marriage. He said so.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the election of Mr. Trump is a disaster. But there’s enough to catastrophize about without adding to the list. Breathe deeply, and think happy thoughts!

Margaret Wente is one of Canada’s leading columnists. As a writer for The Globe and Mail, she provokes heated debate with her views on health care, education, and social issues. She is a winner of the National Newspaper Award for column-writing.

Ms. Wente has had a diverse career in Canadian journalism as both a writer and an editor. She has edited two leading business magazines, Canadian Business and ROB Magazine. She has also been editor of the Globe’s business section, the ROB, and managing editor of the paper. Her columns have appeared in the Globe since 1992. She now writes full-time for the paper, and she is a frequent commentator on television and radio.

Ms. Wente was born in Chicago and moved to Toronto with her family when she was in her teens. She has won numerous journalism awards. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan, and an MA in English from the University of Toronto. She is married to Ian McLeod, a television producer.

Under the theme of “Suspicions Confirmed” we have a report from the few polling firms who predicted a Trump victory in the US election.

Some intriguing comments from the pollsters are excerpted from the full article Trade Secrets From the Predictors Who Called a Trump Victory at Politico (here).  From their results, we can understand the election swung on shy voters who were silent and discounted in the face of social and mass media bullying.

A handful of predictors bucked the crowd and told us something else was going on. One is Helmut Norpoth, a Stony Brook political science professor whose model suggested, all the way back in March, that Donald Trump had between an 87 and 99 percent chance at the presidency. Another is the team behind the USC-Dornsife/LA Times Daybreak poll, which followed a fixed pool of 3,200 respondents every week over the course of the campaign; their final forecast on Election Day had Trump leading 46.8 percent to 43.6 percent. Another was the Trafalgar Group, a Republican consulting firm that conducted surveys using automated phone calls to landline numbers in battleground states. They got Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida and North Carolina right—an achievement few others can claim.

We seem to see in our data that among the people that didn’t vote four years ago, there was definitely more support for Trump than among others. And even these people told us that their likelihood of voting, their self-reported likelihood of voting was lower than for those people who voted four years ago. So, you have this group that’s sort of underrepresented in many polls, and then they go to the polls a little more than expected, and then they’re also more Trump-leaning than expected.

When we went back and looked, we noticed a vast difference between those who voted in the Republican primary this year and those who voted in primaries historically. And it was one-sided [only on the Republican side].

We took that universe of those who have participated in 2006 or previous—we’re talking about people who voted for the last time in the ‘70s, in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s, and earlier 2000s, and we created the term Trump surge voters, and we added them into our call database as well as the newly registered, because in our experience, when people register to vote for the first time, the election that follows is the one that they’re most likely to participate in. So we had a good mix of newly registered voters as well as what we call our Trump surge voters.

So the big difference was the people they were surveying; and second is the fact that taking people on their face for what they were answering was not a smart move, because people were not being forthright as to who they were supporting.

There is some indication that the Trump voters were a little more uncomfortable with telling someone, but there were groups within the Trump voter camp that felt particularly uncomfortable. And one of those groups was women who planned to vote for Trump. And I think the other one—there was another paper that was done recently, it’s also college-educated Trump voters. So, there were just groups that—and I guess Latinos—groups that in the popular press, you know, people would sort of say, “Well, these groups are all going to vote for Clinton.” And, of course, within this group, you have big groups that actually wanted to vote for Trump, but they were the ones that were a little less comfortable with telling someone else.

I grew up in the South and everybody is very polite down here, and if you want to find out the truth on a hot topic, you can’t just ask the question directly. So, the neighbor is part of the mechanism to get that real answer. In the 11 battle ground states, and 3 non-battleground, there was a significant drop-off between the ballot test question [which candidate you support] and the neighbors’ question [which candidate you believe most of your neighbors support]. The neighbors question result showed a similar result in each state: Hillary dropped [relative to the ballot test question] and Trump comes up across every demographic, every geography. Hillary’s drop was between 3 and 11 percent while Trump’s increase was between 3 and 7 percent. This pattern existed everywhere from Pennsylvania to Nevada to Utah to Georgia, and it was a constant.

And so, I don’t accept that there were “shy Hillary voters.” And what we discovered is what he just said about a lot of minorities were shy voters and women were shy voters.

If you ask people that were in the field, that were out there visiting folks, they will tell you this was one of those elections where, yes, there were tons of Trump signs and Hillary signs in yards, but there were many, many millions of people who would have never put a Trump sticker on their car or a sign in their yard that literally could not wait to vote for him.

if you read something like the New York Times or you watch some of the major news shows and network shows, there was sort of a fixed notion that Hillary had this race in hand, that there was just a very difficult path for Trump to get to victory. From what I recall, there was never any notion that something like Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin would be in play. It was just going to be impossibly close for Trump to pull it off with the states Romney had and the battleground states—and I think that became such a fixed idea about this campaign and they didn’t consider an alternative.

So, I think this was sort of poll-driven, but it probably fed into a notion that Donald Trump was just unpalatable and unimaginable as a candidate. So I mean, this “it shouldn’t happen,” “couldn’t happen” sort of reinforced each other in the coverage on the New York Times and CNN and MSNBC.

We were surprised at how many people thought it was not going to be a Trump win. It was shocking to us the ridicule we were getting. I mean, you look at our Twitter as the election night unfolded, people saying, “You guys weren’t crazy,” just as much as they’ve been saying we were crazy for the three weeks before. There was one guy who simply tweeted us “bullocks” and that night he said, “May I withdraw my bullocks?”

Summary

Polling the electorate is a science, as is generating predictions of future climate. In the last US election, pollsters got it wrong as badly as have climatologists in their failed forecasts this century. However, election surveys get immediate and direct feedback from the real world when the votes are counted. Reputations take a hit when you are wrong, and you face reality, change your assumptions and methods, or go out of business. Climate alarmists have yet to see and admit the error of their ways.