Sent by a friend and fellow memo reader.
I responded he should include Bill.
And:
"Dick-Excellent article by Victor Davis Hanson on Trump.
Thanks,M------ M-----"
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Stratfor discusses Syrian Missile Attack. (See 1 below.)
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No one can predict the outcome of Mueller's investigation, how broad it will go in order to reach an end point and goal which seems focused on making life miserable for Trump and, perhaps, providing a basis for his impeachment should Democrats take The House, in our upcoming elections.
Certainly Trump's pardon of Scooter Libby was valid but it could also be interpreted as a signal to Michael Cohen, his personal attorney/fixer, Trump takes care of friends if they take care of him. Another former Trump attorney, Jay Goldberg, has warned Trump that Cohen could spill beans if a jail sentence is threatened. We know, from past experience, The FBI and Justice Department are more than capable of squeezing, even innocents, hard enough to send them to jail and their names are many - Stewart, Miller, Libby etc.
It should be patently obvious to most, Democrats have no real agenda to resolve America's problems, financial, diplomatic and social. They have no desire to protect our borders as exemplified by California Governor " Moon Beam." His apparent loyalty is to illegals and, more importantly, those who have committed crimes over those of his own legal citizens.
We also know the mass media have a particular bias towards Trump and find nothing laudable in any of his truly valid accomplishments.
Finally, it is evident The Russian Collusion matter was contrived and paid for by Clinton and was used by higher ups in The FBI and Justice Department to perpetuate its specious association with Trump. The money was laundered through a law firm. Is this a campaign violation as alleged regarding Daniel's payoff?
So far, Clinton has gone ""Scott" free of any legal charges but she lost the campaign and that has served her well if one consider it red meat for those who hate Trump because he beat the queen and has a personality that is hard to swallow.
What I believe we are witnessing is pay back on the part of Democrats for the impeachment charges brought against Hillary's husband by Republicans.
I understand angst can drive partisans to seek "pay back." I would have hoped the nation's pressing interests would come first regardless but I am cynical enough, old enough and, perhaps, even wise enough to know politicians are capable of going to any length when winning becomes the driving force.
Trump is no Barbara Bush but he and the nation deserve better. Consequently, I continue to argue the behaviour of Nero Democrats and their lackeys in the mass media is deceitful and their conduct despicable.
Now the Nero Dems are busy trying to bar Trump from having his own Sec. of State who they previously and willingly approved to head The CIA.
Nero Democrats continue playing with violins.
Another brand of "pay back?" (See 2 below.)
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Once again, it appears Trump seeks middle ground despite the way he is portrayed and even despite of his own harsher/belligerent pronouncements. Again Victor David Hanson. (See 3 below.)
I am going out on a limb and write what I believe "Fat Head" is going to try and accomplish before and/or contemporaneously in his Trump meeting..
I posted this thought previously and want to expand on my thinking.
N and S Korea have no peace agreement between them but if N Korea presses for a formal peace agreement this gives (Fat Head) a tremendous public relation's advantage and can create a buffer for him vis a vis his nuclear development program because it would make it harder for Trump to press N Korea to dismantle his nuclear program.while they are seeking/proposing peace with their previous "bitter enemy"
I have no doubt China is pulling "Fat Head's" strings and do not expect, and may even not want, him to give up his nuclear program but neither do they want a Trump attack on N Korea which would create a drastic fleeing N Korean immigration problem.
Also, as long as N Korea can retain their nuclear program it creates serious issues for America and that works to China's advantage as long as we do not strike N Korea.
Trump, as noted in Hanson's article, seeks middle ground, has proven he will yield to Pentagon General's views. Amb. Bolton is more willing to seek confrontation as a last resort because he believes we cannot trust N Korea no matter what "Fat Head" agrees to at the moment. Amb. Bolton feels the same way towards Iran's Mullah', I believe.
In essence, I believe "Fat Head" will try and explore the prospect of seeking peace, retaining his leadership role of his own country while finessing demands to eliminate his pursuit of nuclear arms.
My use of the term "Fat Head" in now way diminishes the fact that he is a very clever advocate and far from dumb. He might over reach and make a mistake but he is a worthy and clever adversary who may be driven by fear of his ability to control and he certainly is a thug willing to enslave his people in the process. Abbas gasses while "Fat Head"starves. Both willingly kill.
Tyrants often become so out of an insane thirst for power and eventually over reach while furthering their demoniacal pursuits in a logical pattern/manner. Putin is convinced the break up of Russia was a disaster partially orchestrated by The West's animus towards Russia. Stalin and Hitler killed tens of millions because they wanted to perpetuate their power and were willing to do whatever it took to accomplish their nefarious goals and sick ambitions.
History is replete with tyrannical stories and placing trust in their commitments and/or promises is more a trap than a worthy belief and/or rational act. FDR never lived to realize he had been taken by "Uncle Joe."
Reagan's famous expression "Trust But Verify" is totally understandable and plausible but in today's world verification becomes virtually impossible. Therefore, this fact should undercut one's trust and that causes problems for those who are naive, ie. Obama, Carter, Albright, Kerry etc. The U.N is notorious for caving and accomplishing self-pronounced results that belie their lofty words.
Clinton's reset button foreign policy approach proved she was driven by stupidity and did not know anything about chess. Meanwhile, she was playing with masters of the game.
I fall in the Amb. Bolton camp, remain an unapologetic hawk and suspect he is a good poker player as was Truman.
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You really do not need to be reminded by me of my number one issue that will do irreperable damage to our Republic's survival. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Assessing the Impact of the
U.S.-Led Strike on Syria
Now that the United States, the United Kingdom and France have carried out their punitive strike on Syria, it's time to assess the outcome. In response to the Syrian government's alleged use of chemical weapons on April 7 in the city of Douma, a week later the three nations directed a barrage of 105 cruise missiles to three sites linked to Syria's chemical weapons program. In the aftermath, the United States has sought to highlight how seriously the strike damaged Syria's chemical weapons program. But the reality is that the strike was limited in scope: Several chemical weapons sites (and their delivery infrastructure) remained unscathed and, by the United States' own admission, Damascus still has the ability to carry out chemical attacks.
The United States and its allies opted for a limited strike for a couple of reasons. First, they remain wary of taking actions that could pull them further into the chaos of the ongoing Syrian civil war. In after-action briefings, the U.S. Department of Defense repeatedly emphasized that the bombings had been specifically intended to deter further chemical weapons use, and that the U.S. mission in Syria remained squarely focused on defeating the Islamic State. Targeting chemical weapons centers rather than facilities with both conventional and chemical weapons roles, such as air bases, reinforces this message.
All three countries also wanted to avoid any escalation with Russia and Iran, which support the Syrian government in the civil war. Unlike the United States' April 2017 strike on the Shayrat air base, the targets of this most recent strike were far from any Russian or Iranian presence. The United Kingdom and France in particular were insistent on this. But Russia's presence in Syria, which has historically limited U.S. action in the country, continues to do so. Washington remains cautious of any move that could escalate into a broader conflict with Moscow. Indeed, the Syrian government even sought to take advantage of this caution by positioning some of its key equipment close to Russian forces in the country. But the constraints of Russia's presence were not enough to preclude a military operation from the United States and its allies, only to shape it.
Clear Objective, Fuzzy Definitions
Even with the April 14 operation's extremely focused objective of deterring chemical weapons attacks, its success will be hard to measure because the United States and its allies aren't quite sure where they draw the line on Syria's use of certain chemical weapons. For instance, Washington has explicitly labeled the use of nerve agents as a red line that Syria should not cross, but it has been indirect about whether it holds the same view on the use of chlorine gas. One reason for this opaque approach is that it can be nearly impossible to ascertain whether chemical weapons were used on an already hazardous battlefield, particularly when attacks involve small amounts of less potent elements, such as chlorine. In addition, engaging in punitive strikes over relatively small chemical attacks can also raise thorny questions about the proportionality of responses.
Ultimately, the United States has decided to make decisions about responsive strikes based not on whether chemical weapons were used at all, but rather on how much damage they caused. Over the last year, for example, the Syrian government has carried out a number of chlorine attacks to which the United States has not responded, largely because of their relatively low casualty totals. The chemical weapons attack that triggered the latest punitive strike further illustrates this point. Although chlorine was almost certainly used, it's not clear whether nerve agents were as well. Still, the incident resulted in such a large and anomalous list of victims that it warranted a response from the United States and its allies even without the certainty of confirmed nerve agent usage.
Was it a Win?
Following this latest punitive strike, the Syrian government is likely to at least avoid the use of nerve agents for a significant period of time, as it did in 2017. Whether it will also cut down on the use of chlorine gas is less certain. Syrian loyalist forces will increasingly have less tactical incentive to use such weapons as their difficult urban operations around Damascus wind down. On the other hand, they may be emboldened by just how limited the latest punitive strike was. The Syrian government's greatest priority is victory in the country's civil war, and if it concludes that further punitive strikes will continue to solely target chemical weapons infrastructure, Damascus would happily make that sacrifice in exchange for the continued battlefield successes afforded by chemical weapons use.
However, the risk of making that call is high for Syria. If it misjudges, and the United States and its allies escalate their responses by bombing Syrian government leadership, troops or conventional forces, Syrian loyalist forces would suffer heavy damage. This would be a major interruption in its current campaign and could seriously compromise its progress so far. Thus, the Syrian government will mostly likely mirror its 2017 response and hold off on chemical attacks for the time being.
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2)
White South Africans on brink of annihilation, but will Trump come to their rescue?
By LEO HOHMANN
The plight of white South Africans is so dire that even a few left-wing publications like Newsweek are starting to take notice, but so far Western leaders remain silent and seemingly oblivious to the storm clouds gathering over this nation of 57 million people.
If ever there was a crisis tailor made for President Donald J. Trump, this is it.
Trump relishes the role of the anti-establishment dealmaker and nothing is more anti-establishment then helping white South Africans.
South Africa’s white farmers have their collective heads on the block following a recent vote by the South African parliament to expropriate their land without compensation. The main proponent for the plan, Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party, has publicly referred to the nation’s white farmers as “criminals” who must be driven off the land.
Make no mistake, this is shorthand for extermination.
Online petitions have been started by South Africans pleading for refugee status in the U.S. and Europe. One petition has grown to 18,918 signatures asking Trump to accept white South African Christians in place of Somali Muslims and Middle Easterners who are difficult to vet and prone to non-assimilation.
So far there has been no response from the White House.
Newsweek took a dim view of the future for white farmers in a country once touted as a burgeoning “rainbow” paradise, where “one man, one vote” and Marxist central planning would lead to prosperity for all South Africans—blacks, whites, coloreds and Asians. [Thousands Sign Petition Asking Trump to Let White Farmers in South Africa Migrate to U.S. After Country Votes to Force Them Off Land, by Chantal Da Silver, Newsweek, March 1, 2018]
The motion will still need the approval of parliament’s Constitutional Review Committee, but it “has once again stoked fears among the country’s white farmers of a violent and disastrous land redistribution akin to that which crippled Zimbabwe in the 2000s,” Newsweek reported.
The online petition calls on Trump to “take the steps necessary to initiate an emergency immigration plan allowing white Boers to come to the United States.”
The truth is, Trump holds all the executive power he needs, and the legal cover, to pull off a sweeping rescue mission of South African refugees.
There is a provision in the Refugee Act of 1980 that allows for emergency extraction of vulnerable populations.
That provision reads as follows:
“(B) After the President initiates appropriate consultation prior to making a determination, under subsection (b), that the number of refugee admissions should be increased because of an unforeseen emergency refugee situation, to the extent that time and the nature of the emergency refugee situation permit, a hearing to review the proposal to increase refugee admissions shall be held unless public disclosure of the details of the proposal would jeopardize the lives or safety of individuals.”
Trump’s best option would be to get Congress on board with a plan for an emergency increase in refugees from South Africa. He could lean on Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. to also pitch in and accept these threatened farmers.
It’s been done before.
In the early 2000s the U.S. brought nearly 15,000 refugees from Russia’s Meskhetian Turkish Muslim community based on flimsy evidence that they were being persecuted.
Similarly, in 1990 the U.S. Congress adopted legislation creating the Lautenberg program, named after U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, to resettle Soviet Jews in the United States.
The Lautenberg program was then expanded in 2003 to pave the way for persecuted Iranian Christians to be resettled in the U.S.
So the precedent is there. All that is needed is for the president to step up and lead. He should start by drawing awareness to the problem. That would lead to more air time for the South African situation on Fox News and talk-radio shows like Rush Limbaugh who have mass audiences.
Once the awareness is built up, Congress could be pushed to allocate funding. Some of the funding could be transferred from the existing refugee resettlement program, with emergency funding filling in the gaps.
The truth is most Americans have no idea what is going on in South Africa, but if they did, they would likely support a massive refugee airlift.
The reality of life as a white person in post-Apartheid South Africa had been going downhill ever since Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was handed power in 1994, but the vote to expropriate land could be the accelerant that drives the remaining whites, called Boers, out of the country under threat of mass-murder.
There are already regions of the country where it is illegal for whites to own land, based simply on the color of their skin, but the proposed constitutional changes will take government-sponsored racism to a new level.
Malema, the EFF party leader, has already thrown down the gauntlet.
“We must ensure the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land,” Malema told members of Parliament [YouTube, SABC News, February 27, 2018]. “Those who continue to protect this crime are themselves accused of crime, because those who protect crime are criminals themselves.”
Genocide already underway?
Stefan Molyneux, in a Feb. 10 YouTube podcast, said racial hatred against whites, if it were reversed, would top the evening news every night in the U.S. But since it is whites being killed and driven off their land, the Western elites who control the corporate media remain silent.
The country, under the grip of Marxism, may already be in the initial stages of a genocide. Attacks started to escalate on white landowners one year ago.
Consider the case of Sue Howarth and her husband Robert Lynn. The couple were awakened at 2 a.m. in February 2017 by three men breaking into a window of their farm in Dullstroom, a small town in the remote northeast of South Africa.
The couple, who had lived in the area for 20 years, were tied up, stabbed, and tortured with a blowtorch for several hours. The masked men stuffed a plastic bag down Mrs. Howarth’s throat, and attempted to strangle her husband with a bag around his neck.
Sue’s body was discovered, with a bullet in her head, “amongst some trees, lying in a ditch,” writes Jana Boshoff, reporter for the local Middelburg Observer newspaper. “Her rescuers managed to find her by following her groans of pain and then noticing drag marks from the road into the field. Her husband, also shot, miraculously survived.
‘It’s their own damn fault’
Molyneux said the West should act proactively and resettle South African whites as refugees, before they are killed or imprisoned by the country’s racist government.
“What about the whites who are there right now, who are being targeted [for genocide], the whites who are being targeted for their race, for their ethnicity, for their language, why can’t they be refugees?” Molyneux asks. “Why can’t the whites be airlifted out and given a place of sanctuary? I’ve talked to people in South Africa desperate to get out, it’s very hard to get out at all. Why can’t they? Because they are not considered refugees, they are being targeted for genocide but it’s their own damn fault, according to a popular narrative, and that is some cold-blooded shit I’ll tell you right now.”
Some will argue that the white farmers of South Africa don’t fit the description of a refugee because most aren’t poor and don’t live in tents, but neither did the Meskhetian Turks or Soviet Jews, many of whom had to sell houses and cars before they migrated to the U.S.
According to the 1951 Geneva Convention, a refugee is defined as a person who has a “well-founded fear of persecution” due to their religious or political beliefs, or their racial or ethnic background. No one fits this definition better than white South Africans.
Ann Corcoran, who follows the refugee industry at Refugee Resettlement Watch, said everything in the DNA of the United Nations is geared toward helping refugees who are “of color.” Many, like the Congolese Christians, Sudanese Christians and the Iranian Christians, are quite deserving of refugee status because they are constantly under attack from rival Muslim gangs. But what about the white South Africans? Aren’t they, too, deserving of a fresh start free of persecution?
But proposing refugee status for South African whites is more controversial.
“The left would go nuts” Corcoran said, if Trump launched a plan to rescue them.
It’s also true, however, that the nine federal contractors who get paid by the U.S. government to resettle refugees have fallen on hard financial times due to Trump’s drastic cuts in the number of refugees entering the U.S. Most of these contractors, such as World Relief, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, are Christian agencies that get paid by the head for every refugee they bring to the U.S. With fewer refugees arriving, they have been squawking about having to close offices and pare staffs.
“But this is where we call their bluff,” Corcoran says. “Do you really want more refugees or do you just want to import more Muslims from Africa? Do they not want to save white Christians facing genocide?”
For a Catholic organization, or an evangelical organization like World Relief, that could be a powerful argument.
“This would turn the U.N. on its head, because they have built up this entire meme that only black and brown people are persecuted,” Corcoran said. “They’re not built for that. They’re only built for white people being the evil persecutors of the world.”
Hiding the evidence
Official government crime stats show no evidence of the beginnings of a genocide in South Africa, but don’t be fooled.
Lauren Southern, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to South Africa, explains why.
“It’s being covered up. The government has stopped collecting data based on race… so they can’t even show these brutal murders are happening disproportionately to whites,” Southern said in the interview with Molyneux. “They are covering up all of these murders as burglaries gone wrong. That is what’s being reported by the police; that is what’s being reported by the government and by the media.”
She said the ANC uses “Black Lives Matter rhetoric” to stoke racial hatred and material envy.
“They not only hate you for being white, they hate you for having things,” Southern said.
A South African airlift would bring not only farmers but highly skilled workers to the West.
That’s because the South African Employee Equity Act of 1998 requires all companies contracting with the South African government to have staffs that mirror exactly the racial makeup of the nation as a whole. Thus, a company cannot employ more than 8 percent whites if it wants to do business with the government. As a result, some of the most qualified engineers and scientists have been laid off, many forced to live in squatter camps.
Contrast those skills with the illiteracy and heavy welfare usage that marks the refugees currently coming to the U.S., more than 95 percent of whom are hand-selected by the United Nations.
If South African white farmers are going to be rescued from their dark fate under that nation’s Marxist rule, it’s going to have to be done in spite of the United Nations.
To be blunt, the U.N. has no interest in rescuing white Christians from a horrendous fate, and it is this inherent racism that requires Congress and President Trump to exercise American sovereignty.
“Truth be told, the one-worlders do not want whites to be designated as refugees,” Corcoran said.
If that were allowed, Pandora’s Box would be opened for the resettlement of other emerging blocs of persecuted white populations.
“The next thing you know, ethnic Swedes and Germans would be demanding resettlement in whatever bastions of Western Civilization remain as they are persecuted in their own countries, which are becoming Islamic states,” Corcoran said.
According to a June 2016 poll, half of Germans already say they feel like foreigners in their own country due to the mass influx of Muslim migrants, up from 43 percent in 2014 and 30 percent in 2009. [Poll: Half of Germans Sometimes Feel Like Foreigners in Own Country, The American Interest, June 15, 2016]
The number-one reason cited for South Africans wanting to immigrate is high crime rates, followed by political and financial instability.
By blaming the country’s problems on “criminals who stole our land,” Malema is essentially giving an open invitation to exterminate the remaining whites.
Will Trump answer the call to rescue the endangered people of South Africa? Or, will he bow to his politically correct advisers and Obama holdovers who will tell him these people are not worth the trouble, not worth the incendiary accusations of “white supremacy” that will come from the hardcore left, the Julius Malemas of the United States?
A version of this story originally appeared at VDARE.com
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Leo Hohmann is a veteran journalist and author of the 2017 book “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.” If you appreciate this type of original, fact-based and independent reporting, please consider a donation of any size to this website. We accept no advertising and are beholden to no one.
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3)
Trump seeks middle ground in foreign-policy balancing act
Was the latest round of airstrikes in Syria a one-time hit to restore deterrence and stop the future use of chemical weapons, or was it part of a slippery slope of more interventions in the Middle East ?
President Donald Trump was elected in part because he promised an end to optional wars, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq , as well as the Libyan misadventure.
But Trump also guaranteed an end to perceived Obama-era appeasement. Trump said he would no longer put up with false red lines in Syria , or complacence about North Korea's new generation of nuclear missiles.
He also claimed that he wanted to remind enemies that the penalties for attacking U.S. interests are not worth the risk of obtaining some sort of perceived transient advantage. And he inherited American overseas commitments symbolized by some 800 U.S. military facilities in 70 countries abroad.
These paradoxes were supposedly resolved by his administration's doctrine of Jacksonian "don't tread on me" punitive retaliation. Trump might promise to "bomb the s--t out of" the Islamic State , but then not send a division of U.S. Marines into Syria to police the savage postwar landscape.
This middle ground was more or less codified by former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster in the recently published National Security Strategy. His team called threading the intervention needle "principled realism." The Trump administration would use military force to protect U.S interests, but only in a context of what was practicable, given the existing quagmires abroad.
Of the two extremes, avoiding nation-building is the easier. Clearly, no one wants another Libyan debacle during an era of $1 trillion annual budget deficits, or the expenditure of blood and treasure in long-term efforts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan into Westernized nations.
So, in humiliating fashion, Reagan removed U.S. Marine peacekeepers from Lebanon in 1984, in fear of more attacks like the 1983 terrorist bombing of the Marines' Beirut barracks.
On the other hand, Reagan beefed up the military and bombed Libya , invaded Grenada and occasionally shelled terrorist bases in Lebanon -- without putting the lives of a great many U.S. troops at risk.
Reagan's apparent aim was to show the world, and especially the Soviet Union , that it was dangerous to provoke the United States or its friends. But he did so without having to fight a messy and disadvantageous full-scale war in the streets of Beirut or Tripoli to prove it.
How frequently and how hard -- and at what risk of provoking a war with Russia -- will Trump and American allies hit Syria in the coming weeks to stop Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons?
We know that tough talk alone does not necessarily convince North Korea , China and Iran to abandon their past strategies of aggression, which were often honed during the Obama administration's "lead from behind" recessionals.
There are no easy answers.
The best course is to use overwhelming military force only when the interests of America and its allies -- or the credibility and strategic deterrence of the United States -- are on the line, and only in landscapes that are to America's advantage and will not result in inordinate costs.
There are more political ironies to Trump's balancing act. Trump's core voters are adamantly opposed to optional military inventions because they believe that such attacks, even to uphold international norms, divert scarce funds from domestic needs and never quite make the world or the U.S. any safer.
On the other hand, "Never Trump" Republicans and a few Beltway Democrats applauded Trump for hitting back in Syria . Some interventionists even want Trump to escalate efforts to finish off the Afghanistan debacle. And a few talk of a preemptive strike against North Korean or Iranian nuclear facilities.
But these voices are mostly those who did not support Trump. And they will not support Trump whatever he does.
So here is the irony. The loyal Trump voter says not to intervene. The rabid Trump haters say to intervene. And the fence-sitters will eventually offer judgment based only on the success or failure of the mission.
For now, Trump should keep quiet, stop tweeting his intentions and give no indication of what he might do next. If he decides to act again in the future, then he should do it unexpectedly, with overwhelming force and with the intention that he won't have to do it again very often.
But it would be better to follow Teddy Roosevelt's maxim to speak softly and carry a big stick -- or, wiser yet, to keep quiet altogether and carry a club.
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4) The National Debt Is Worse Than You Think
4) The National Debt Is Worse Than You Think
Today’s outlook for revenue growth is based on policy that’s unlikely to pan out.
By William A. Galston
I know that worrying about the deficit and debt is hopelessly retro, but please indulge me for a few minutes.
Last week the Congressional Budget Office issued its outlook for the next 10 years. The news was not good. Over the next decade, the annual federal deficit averages $1.2 trillion. It rises from 3.5% of gross domestic product in 2017 to 5.1% in 2027. The national debt, which is driven by annual deficits, rises from $15.7 trillion to $28.7 trillion over the same period, and surges from 78.0% to 96.2% as a share of GDP—the highest mark since just after World War II.
These projections have worsened significantly since the CBO’s report last June, and public-policy decisions are the culprit. The 2017 tax law reduced projected federal revenue by $1.7 trillion over the next decade, while the recent appropriations bill increased spending by $1 trillion.
And if this outlook weren’t bad enough, the real story will probably be worse. The CBO is legally required to make its estimates on the basis of current law, but the federal government is likely to end up spending more and taxing less than the law specifies.
Here’s why: To make the numbers add up, the tax law specifies that most individual tax breaks will disappear after 2025. But neither political party is likely to let this happen, at least for low- and middle-income taxpayers.
In a similar vein, the appropriations bill assumes defense and domestic spending will decline after the current two-year agreement ends. But Republican defense hawks and Democratic defenders of social programs will work hard to prevent this from happening.
The CBO estimates that if current policy continues—rather than current law—the cumulative deficit will rise a further $2.6 trillion over the next decade, to a staggering $15 trillion. This would push the national debt to 105% of GDP, a level exceeded only once in our history.
Supply-siders may object that these estimates don’t account for projected economic growth from the tax cuts. In fact, they do. The CBO projects that the tax law will increase real GDP by an average of 0.7% and employment by an average of 1.1 million jobs each year over the next decade. These economic gains will reduce the reform’s net cost by 22% during this period, meaning the bill doesn’t come close to paying for itself even with dynamic scoring.
The picture would be much brighter if the tax reform boosted growth to the Trump administration’s target of 3%, but the CBO doesn’t expect this to happen. In the short term, it estimates that growth will surge to 3.3% in 2018 and a respectable 2.4% in 2019. In 2020, however, growth is expected to subside to just 1.8% with no significant rise thereafter. Average growth in the coming decade is projected at a mere 1.9% per year.
The reason for the slowdown is straightforward. Economic growth reflects two key variables: the total number of hours worked and output per hour, known as productivity. Over the next decade the CBO expects annual productivity increases to average 1.4%, a dramatic improvement over the dismal 0.9% of the previous decade. But the labor force, which grew 2% annually as recently as the 1990s, is expected to increase by only 0.5% per year over the next decade. The aging of the population will exert steady downward pressure on labor-force participation during this period while increasing the pool of retirees by one-third.
Several measures could produce marginal improvements in labor-force participation. We could stem the flow of women leaving the U.S. workforce by investing in the type of pro-work and pro-family programs that European countries have implemented in the past decade. We could do much more to reintegrate felons into the workforce.
We could also make bigger gains if we were prepared to increase the number of working-age immigrants entering the U.S. This would require both reducing the number of slots dedicated to family reunification, which most Democrats oppose, and increasing the total number of immigrants, the reverse of the Trump administration’s position.
Absent big changes in the labor force, advocates of 3% growth are left hoping for a productivity miracle. Economists aren’t sure what makes productivity wax and wane, meaning a return to the 2% annual productivity gains of the 1990s can’t be ruled out. But even this surge would leave us well short of the 3% target.
It would be more realistic to accept that in our aging society, the economy will expand more slowly while retirement spending expands more quickly. Congress should adopt a fiscal policy consistent with these realities. Academic economists can make improbable assumptions, but policy makers don’t have that luxury.
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