Criticizing and praising Trump

David Stockman writes,

...Yes, most of what Trump has thrown into the debate is outlandish, regrettable, outright deplorable and just plain wrong. The Wall, the ban on Muslims, his call for more torture of enemies, his dog-whistling on race, his cop pandering, his no-nothing position against social security reform and his blatantly sexist name-calling fit some or all of those categories.

And to the outlandish category, now add the blatantly stupid. To wit, Trump’s promise that he will eliminate the national debt in eight years!

Even there, however, he can perhaps be praised with faint damn. At least he recognizes that our current $19 trillion of national debt will be $22 trillion by the time the next President is in the saddle, and that its a short slide to national bankruptcy from there.

At the end of the day, Trump has petrified the Wall-Street Washington establishment for good reason. He loudly rejects the War Party consensus on foreign intervention and has tapped into a deep vein of main street alienation from the phony recovery and economic fixes promulgated by the Fed and its beltway henchman.

We had another jobs Friday celebration by the latter and it amounted to the same old, same old. That is, purportedly 100,000 new jobs in retail and bars and restaurants, but no progress where it counts. There are still nearly two million fewer full-time, full-pay jobs than there were when Bill Clinton was packing up his bags to leave the White House.

Read more here.