Aug.25

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Corporations Are Having to Pay the Piper--or Else

Big blue cities aren't Donald Trump's only new target. Also on his list are corporations. Not only are they going to have to toe his party line, but they are going to have to pay him as well. The 15% export tax on Nvidia chips was a good start, and getting Intel to give him 10% of the corporate stock was brilliant, only it wasn't his idea. Karl Marx was famous for dreaming of a world in which the people (say, the state) owned the means of production. This makes Trump the first Marxist president. Karl would be proud of the little pinko for getting the ball rolling.

In Trump's America, everything has a price. In fact, he repeatedly compared the U.S. to a department store, with himself as the manager setting all the prices. Here are some examples of his approach to the corporate world other than Nvidia and Intel.

• Companies are literally being scored (in Excel) on their loyalty to Trump.
• Companies are being ordered to eat the tariffs, not raise prices, and just make less money.
• Drugmakers are being told how to sell their products and automakers are being told where to make them.
• Some of the recent trade deals envision him selecting major projects and having the private sector execute them.

Trump imagines himself dictating to private companies what they will make, how and where they will make it, and what they will sell it for. The leaders of the former Soviet Union are somewhere grinning from ear to ear. Well, maybe not, because they were all atheists. But still, central planning of the economy is also pretty pinko.

But for companies, they are paralyzed because they don't know the rules and even if they can figure them out now, they don't know how long they will be in effect. Many rules could vanish magically on Jan. 20, 2029. You can't run a business with that level of uncertainty. It is also ironic that, for decades, Republicans have vigorously opposed the government having an industrial policy and picking winners and losers, but that is exactly what Trump wants and no Republicans are saying: "Wait a minute, sir."

Some (liberal) economists don't mind the idea of the government having an industrial policy, but they want the policy to be carefully chosen to benefit the country and key industries, not to be a random mish-mash of rules with no coherent strategy behind them. And no company wants to be blackmailed the way Nvidia, Intel and Apple have been, among others. Welcome to Trumpworld. This is not what they put good money in super PACs for. (V)