>Trump's POTUS VSG tweets>
Trump is certainly a genius in speaking half truths and complete lies that his base then superimposes with their own prejudices and interpretations . But he certainly was really smart in honing in on what persona would sell well (a fighting outsider who will make changes and get better deals for his supporters and the country). Actually, he has so far followed up in actions that at least outwardly would seem to benefit his supporters in red states. Disparaging and punishing the blue states, minorities, immigrants, and the educated seem to give so much pleasure to his red state supporters than anything else. There is certain logic to the inward looking policies of the new administration, and whoever behind the scene (Bannon, Miller) is crafting those policies has been fairly pushy and aggressive in the implementation. Trump himself is incapable of any deep policy, but is good at selling what he has understood, in the language his base seems to understand. And despite his obvious pathological narcissism, he could still be effective in some ways, maybe because he is not trying to please everybody.
The changes in policies and the way they have been implemented is an experiment that could have some short term benefits and some long term downsides. Consider immigration. The suburbanization of USA from the 1950s onwards destroyed the cities making huge sections of cities crime ridden. The influx of the immigrants with their initiative, hard work, and family values made the cities more livable and brought down crime. Of course immigrants are attracted more to the cities where the jobs are more, so New York city got more immigrants than Buffalo and Detroit. Now the crime rate in New York is so much lower than Buffalo. en.wikipedia.org
And the value add in property prices of New York city property owners over the last 40 years has been tremendous. ny.curbed.com
At the same time the population of foreign born in NY city has gone from 18.2 percent in 1970 to 37.2 percent in 2011. www1.nyc.gov
City of Buffalo's foreign born population is about 8% and that of Detroit is about 4%. And the crime rates are among the highest in the country.
Economical growth is also dependent on population increase. Over the last 10 years, US population growth rate has been decreasing. Cutting immigration will further slow that down. multpl.com
The cost of services that are delivered primarily from USA - education, local government, and healthcare - keep going up faster than inflation overall. With less immigrants, the lower half of US households will find it even more difficult to get low cost services for healthcare, child care, and elder care. So that part of the economy will have to move from external economy to internal household economy - meaning more 3 generation households in the lower half of american households. The trend has been going on some years already
pewresearch.org
-Arun |
