Bill Bonner

History gives people what they need. Argentina, near rock bottom and facing a Venezuela-style blow-up, needed a real reformer. America needed someone who would stay the course.

The chief causes of America’s malaise were largely ignored. As we predicted, after only four months, Elon Musk is already out of the picture. So are the budget cuts needed to bring the deficit down.

The pattern is always the same. An elite gains control of a government. It tightens its grip and becomes more corrupt and incompetent, as well as further removed from The People it is meant to serve.

The Congressional Budget Office’s baseline figures told us the feds will collect $67 trillion in revenue over the next ten years and spend $89 trillion. That would give us a debt of $58 trillion.

America’s ‘national’ debt rose from less than $6 trillion in 2000 to over $37 trillion now. The US trade deficit rose to $1.1 trillion over the last 12 months — 10 times more than it was in 2000.

You can blame white men for the world’s ills. But when it came to plumbing and internal combustion engines, white men were on the ball. Not a single one of them was carrying out a government policy.

Centralized trade policies are a scam. There is no evidence that bureaucrats in Washington can do a better job of making trade deals than independent buyers and sellers with skin in the game.

Free trade is a feature of the win-win economy. It favors no one in particular and everyone in general. Prices go down and quality increases as people are allowed to compete for customers.

Lower short-term borrowing rates don’t really make companies stronger or more profitable. They can have the opposite effect, luring corporate executives to take on too much debt.

The real cause of America’s shrinking manufacturing capacity is not the nation’s past trade policies (favoring free trade). It’s our monetary policies (favoring fake money!)