During last year’s campaign, one argument that was made for Trump was that his business experience would make him an effective manager of the country. In response, it was pointed out that he had filed for bankruptcy four or six times. But while we were debating his business acumen, we should have been discussing his approach to making money instead. The release this week of his budget proposal shows why this matters.
It is helpful to consider how a billionaire makes his money. Warren Buffet shows us one possible model. Buffet nurtures and tends to his fortune. He seeks to identify hidden value in the companies he acquires, and then he makes the best moves he can and waits for the results. He is patient, and he never gets involved in a business that he has doubts about. Buffet thinks in the long term. Donald Trump is the complete opposite of this. Trump is a money junkie, always seeking the quick high. He puts money into projects that have the potential to provide a quick payoff, and he doesn’t mind risk. His plan is based on the idea that he can monetize the failures in the form of tax write-offs, and his home runs can payoff enough to outweigh the strikeouts. This is a short term approach, with no patience for anything that does not pay off quickly, and the budget reflects this kind of thinking.
Where Warren Buffet might see investing in cultural programs as a way to produce a better educated and more well rounded workforce that would benefit the country over several generations, Trump sees money flowing out of federal coffers for no immediate gain. Likewise, Trump sees any money spent on programs for the poor as wasteful. He can not understand that these programs can boost consumer spending, eventually producing demand and then jobs. Military spending and tax cuts for the wealthy, on the other hand, produce immediate tangible benefits for wealthy people like him, and this is what Trump understands. The long term problems caused by income inequality are why Warren Buffet has spoken out in favor of an increased minimum wage, but Trump sees them as something he can personally dodge while continuing to monetize the here and now.
Trump also sees business as a battleground. Collaborative efforts for mutual benefit do not make sense to him. Instead, he views his gain as always somebody else’s loss, and he does not know how to be concerned about this. So scientific research and other government collaborations with the private sector get the axe; they are on their own. Companies, in his view, should be able to take the risks on their own, and he wants to clear the way for the winners to sort themselves from the losers without any government influence. This idea is also behind his zeal to deregulate.
As with so much else about Trump, his priorities here represent values that have guided the Republican Party more and more since at least the rise of Reagan. What has changed is that Trump makes no pretense now that he has the presidency of caring who gets hurt. This is also true of the racism and xenophobia that were so helpful to his campaign. The venality that represents the dark side of big business is now on full display, without the pretense of a Paul Ryan, for example. Trump makes no effort to explain how this will supposedly be good for the people who oppose him, and his surrogates flounder when they try to do so. There are no sops in the Trump budget proposal to make him look like a nice guy. This is unbridled greed, and Trump doesn’t care who knows it. It is, in his view, what has made him a winner. The rest of us lose, but that is how Trump believes the game is played. What has changed is that now he has the power to tilt the rules in his favor, and the budget proposal is his opening move.
So far, this is a pretty dark post, so let me close by offering some hope. Trump does not yet understand that a government is not a business. There is no board of directors, supposedly independent but actually pliant. Instead, Trump’s initiatives must be approved by Senators who must be answerable to their states, and by Representatives who are answerable to an even smaller group of districts. We can already see how local actions have slowed the march of “repeal and replace”, and the same thing must happen here. We must understand the hidden value and long term benefit of the programs that are currently threatened, and we must bring these arguments to our Senators and Representatives repeatedly. We must let them know that we are watching. The greatest danger we face is exhaustion, but our great offsetting advantage is sheer numbers. There are plenty of us, so nobody has to be the hero and do everything, as long as each of us does what we can.
I have been featuring music fairly regularly, because I believe it can help us keep our spirits up. When I can add a bit of humor, I will certainly do so. Hence, tonight’s selection:
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