U.S. President Donald Trump's address to Congress was not considered efficacious at all. It could never have been expected to be an address of this kind, after all. Trump's remarks about the economy before and after the election reveal an observational pragmatist and a palliative "solution" for the U.S.'s current problems. For instance, apart from their traditional rhetoric about tax cuts, Republican statements like "investments in old industries such as the automotive sector must return to the U.S." are not a part of a holistic and well-thought-through economic policy. Trump's insistence on protective rhetoric should be interpreted as instantaneous populist remarks that are hardly practicable in the medium and long term.
In fact, Trump's address to Congress also showed that we are quite far from Trumponomics. All the presidents statements about the economy are self-contradictory, or represent claims that are impossible to implement in the current phase of globalization - crisis.
For instance, take Trump's claims that he will rapidly reduce unemployment. For this he needs traditional industrial sectors such as the automotive sector to return their investments to the U.S. from countries with lower labor costs and tax advantages. On the other hand, however, he knows that the U.S. is an economy that is running deficits, and complains that the dollar is overvalued or that countries like China are unfairly competitive based on the exchange rate. In other words, he wants the U.S. to increase its exports and compete with Asia. However, this is not possible by simply requesting companies abandon investments, which must be made in countries with low labor and tax advantages, and return to the U.S. Ford, for one, makes investments in Mexico as the country has lower labor costs than the U.S.
Trump is promising a "trillion-dollar infrastructure plan" for the improvement of the middle class, but he is not proposing an alternative resource for the U.S. economy, which has the largest public deficit figures in the world. His statements about protectionism are not coherent or well-informed, but are shallow and unfeasible based on daily observations. In this case, the only coherent statement in Trump's economic discourse is tax deductions and the increase in military spending, which date back to Reaganomics. Indeed, it is quite doubtful whether Trump, or more precisely, the current U.S., can tolerate the political consequences of this. The U.S. of the Trump era is not the U.S. of the 1980s. First of all, the U.S. has the Silicon Valley economy now and it does not want an economy that gives weight to military spending and pumps militarism and wars by constantly running deficits with high interest rates and an overvalued dollar.
On the contrary, it wants a new, competitive and rational economy. Indeed, the contradiction in Trump's rhetoric stems from this. Trump cannot propose an economy that boosts military spending and infrastructure investments without mentioning the resources he is to draw on, while he complains about the overvalued dollar. This points to a war economy like the one started with Ronald Reagan and continued with George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. In fact, this economy hit the wall in 2008, leaving the U.S. behind these walls.
Now, Trump acknowledges that Barack Obama's administration has left the U.S. in a mess. He said in the address that protests against him are handled by Obama's supporters. Obama's mess stemmed from his failure to fulfill the requirements of the new economy and the Pentagon's submission to the outdated political path of the Bush era, which cannot meet the needs of the present day. Obama's mess is the largest economic and political wreck in U.S. history. We see it insists on prevailing in the Trump era as well. A policy that only relied on the U.S.'s military force, military expenditures and invasions were turned into a new war policy that supported civil wars and terrorist organizations during the Obama period. This policy both intensified the crisis of traditional sectors that broke out in 2008, and posed a new crisis to the Silicon Valley economy. Trump needs to pursue a different path from both Bush and Obama periods in order to move gain new ground and to avoid falling into the traps of the Obama era. In other words, he needs to apply Trumponomics.
However, the U.S. still insists on the Pentagon's Syria policy of the Obama era and the support for terrorist organizations like the People's Protection Units (YPG). For Trump, this represents a bigger problem than the demonstrations of Obama supporters, though he may not know it. But he does know that the U.S. needs to rapidly reduce interdependent triplet deficits (in foreign trade, public sector and savings-investments) in order to overcome the crisis and support the middle class by creating employment. To this end, it would be important for Trump to start by introducing a stability-based strategy in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, Middle East and Caucasus. However, the U.S. insists on the civil war-oriented policies of the Obama period and scattering a policy similar to the Balkanization, which Germany started in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, to the Middle East and Caucasus through to Turkey. This is a neo-Nazi German plot.
Turkey knows that Germany is provoking Greece and regional terrorist organizations against Turkey in a continuation of this policy today. The Trump administration should not fall into this trap of the Obama era and Germany.
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