GOP: Party Like It's 1929

Who could possibly have foreseen malicious moron and businessman extraordinaire Donald "Shart Of The Deal" Trump's failure to grasp basic economic principles? 

President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.

“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper.

While the tariffs did reduce competition for some industries in the domestic U.S. market, this was more than offset by the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs, the study found.

“While the longer-term effects of the tariffs may differ from those that we estimate here, the results indicate that the tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector,” the study said. [snip]

The top ten manufacturing industries hit by foreign retaliatory tariffs were producers of: magnetic and optical media, leather goods, aluminum sheet, iron and steel, motor vehicles, household appliances, sawmills, audio and video equipment, pesticide, and computer equipment.

The top ten industries hit by higher prices were: aluminum sheet, steel product, boilers, forging, primary aluminum production, secondary aluminum smelting, architectural metals, transportation equipment, general purpose machinery and household appliances.

(Trump:  "Smoot and Hawley are examples of  people who have done an amazing job and are being recognized more and more.")

... Or, that Trump's "greed is good" regime would usher in a period of runaway wealth accumulation by the top 1 per centers, unequaled since 1929?

... The world’s 500 wealthiest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index added $1.2 trillion, boosting their collective net worth 25% to $5.9 trillion.

Such gains are sure to add fuel to the already heated debate about widening wealth and income inequality. In the U.S., the richest 0.1% control a bigger share of the pie than at any time since 1929, prompting some politicians to call for a radical restructuring of the economy.

“The hoarding of wealth by the few is coming at the cost of peoples’ lives,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, said in a Dec. 12 tweet as the U.K. began to vote.

If anyone thinks Republican trickle- down economics is going to come to the rescue...

What is behind the extraordinary rise in inequality and the near-stagnant growth of wages for typical workers over most of the past generation? The root cause is that workers are being cut out of their share of economic growth—as shown in the pay–productivity gap.  [snip]  The growing wedge between productivity and pay is the income generated by workers in the economy that has been claimed by corporate owners and managers and others at the very top of the pay scale.

The corporate class is also doing all it can to make sure that gap isn't closed by collective bargaining:

In the face of a worker campaign to form a union, employers routinely engage in a wide range of tactics to prevent workers from organizing... [M]ore than two in five employers were charged with illegal tactics—from coercion to threats to firings—in more than two out of five (41.5%) of union elections in 2016 and 2017. And one of the most severe forms of employer aggression—firing or discharging workers for union activity—is widespread. Employers were charged with illegally firing workers in one out of five (19.9%) of union elections in 2016 and 2017.

Meanwhile, Moscow Mitch McConnell is bottling up hundreds of bills in the Senate that the Democratic House has passed, including the Raise the Wage Act of 2019:

It’s not just minimum wage workers who benefit from minimum wage increases: Low-wage workers in general tend to get a wage bump when the wage floor rises. Wage growth for low-wage workers in states with minimum wage increases that have outpaced inflation is faster than in states without such increases.  Federal policymakers should heed the lessons from state increases and raise the federal minimum wage. The Raise the Wage Act of 2019 would raise wages for 33.5 million workers nationwide by increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 and would set it to update automatically each year based on median wage growth.

Lest we forget, what did those wealthfare tax cuts (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act - TCJA) do that the rotted- out Republican Party passed in 2017? 

...[I]nvestment has not boomed since the TCJA’s passage. Instead of an investment boom indicating the TCJA is working, we see investment growth continuing along its pre-TCJA trend for a couple of quarters before falling all the way to 1.3% in the third quarter of 2019. To be clear, if the TCJA’s corporate rate cuts were working, we would be seeing a permanent rise in investment. Instead, investment growth is cratering.

In summary:  Republicans, afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable since 1921.