thependulumswings

In 1992, a non-politician named H. Ross Perot, a very accomplished businessman, decided to run for President of the US as an Independent. Perot focused his campaign on his plan to balance the federal budget and further US economic nationalism.

In 2016, a non-politician named Donald J. Trump, a very accomplished businessman, ran for President of the US as a Republican.  Trump wanted to further US economic nationalism, too.  He called it then and now MAGA- Make America Great Again.

Perot led George Bush and Bill Clinton in the polls for a time.   Trump won.

Perot’s critics called him a hand grenade with a bad haircut.  Trump’s critics called him far worse and suggested he should find a good barber, or at least a barber.

One night Perot was on Larry King’s show and asked rhetorically, “Do you hear that giant sucking sound?  That’s all of our jobs getting moved down to Mexico because of NAFTA.”

Trump threatened tariffs in his first term for similar reasons.

They have many similarities.  The differences are twofold.  Trump got elected.  Trump acted on his threat on “Liberation Day,” imposing reciprocal tariffs on nations around the globe.

This morning that “giant sucking sound” you hear is your 401k swirling the drain.

Tariffs are taxes applied to imported goods.  The prices of those goods will go up for US consumers to offset the cost to the foreign businesses shipping them here.

Or, are they still just bargaining chips to get other countries to reduce their tariffs on our exports?  Another wealthy businessman, Bill Ackman, thinks so.  “The countries that make the first deals with Trump will get the best deals.  The countries that wait or retaliate will regret that they were not a part of the early deals, or worse,” he tweeted this AM.

The stock market is picky.  It doesn’t digest uncertainty, inflation, or potential economic slowdowns well.

Maybe “one big beautiful bill” from Congress will provide numerous and generous tax cuts to John Q Citizen to offset some of the pain.  Maybe not.

Add a dose of DOGE to attack government waste, fraud, and excess.

What do you have?  You have an equation that reads: tariffs increase revenue, tax cuts reduce revenue, and a DOGE-driven smaller gov’t reduces cost.  Got that?

The goal?  Bring production home, become less dependent on other countries for critical needs, provide domestic jobs, and increase the corporate tax base.

And the ultimate goal?  Get America back on a path to fiscal sanity.

Our 1992 debt was four trillion dollars when Perot was concerned.  Clinton won, and blue dresses aside, even had a government fiscal surplus one year.  When he left in 2000, the bill was a manageable six trillion.

Today it’s nearly 37 trillion.

And, shame on the left in Congress (and Mitch McConnell, the poster child now great grandfather for term limits) who are against anything and everything that Trump proposes.  Congress put us here to begin with.

Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.”

We may have a new definition of insanity.  We’ll know pretty soon.

Trump’s presidency and the midterms hang in the balance.