President Trump has laid out a very specific plan to boost economic growth, lift the fortunes of all our citizens and make America the best place on earth to live, work, invest and do business.
Trumponomics consists of tax reform, trade reform, regulatory reform and energy reform.
These four elements complement each other and work together synergistically to produce an impact far greater than would be expected from any of the elements instituted separately.
This is a classic case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
The Trump administration has wasted no time implementing the policy, and we are already beginning to see positive results.
The U.S. tax code was devilishly complex, riddled with special interest loopholes and dodges. America had one of the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. We were essentially penalizing businesses for investing here.
Large companies that had the wherewithal moved offshore, leaving smaller companies that could not relocate abroad or hire high-priced tax-avoidance specialists to pay the price.
The Tax Cut and Jobs Act changed all that. Rates that were once the highest are now the lowest, and companies that had been fleeing our shores are moving back.
Chrysler is expanding production in Michigan rather than Mexico where it had previously produced pickup trucks. Apple is bringing billions back to America, investing in the very country where it was born.
And Foxconn, the Taiwan-based contract manufacturer, is opening an electronics assembly operation in Wisconsin, its first U.S. plant.
Trump’s trade reform adds incentives to invest in America. Communist China and other countries would subsidize their export industries, either directly or through predatory – and illegal – practices including currency manipulation, wage suppression (by murdering those who dared ask for a wage), government-engineered theft of trade secrets, or all of the above, to drive American businesses into bankruptcy.
Washington policymakers had faith utopian economic theories and international institutions such as the World Trade Organization would produce a positive outcome for everyone even as all the evidence pointed to the evisceration of America’s productive capacity and middle class.
President Trump’s America First trade policy rightfully punishes the wrongdoers by unilaterally imposing tariffs, rather than waiting for gutless bureaucrats in Geneva or Brussels to imitate Sheriff Scott Israel and do too little, too late.
Given a choice between confiscatory regimes abroad and punitive tariffs on one hand, or a robust continent-wide consumer market with low taxes and respect for property rights on the other, investor are again placing their bets on America, first.
Energy reform recognizes that America’s vast energy reserves give us an advantage over global competitors who are not blessed with the natural resources we have.
The final element in the four-fold formula for revitalizing America is regulatory reform, and it is intrinsically linked to energy reform.
President Trump has slashed useless regulations that make work for lawyers and bureaucrats while strangling productive sectors of the economy.
He has begun streamlining the permitting process for the extraction and transportation of our energy resources, recognizing that this will lift the entire U.S. economy, as it depends on energy.
The renewable fuels mandate is another outdated regulatory scheme that needs reform. Even those who support increasing the production and use of ethanol believe the system Washington has contrived to achieve that goal is counterproductive.
The federal government requires 15.7 billion gallons of ethanol be blended into the nation’s fuel supply. As WND has reported, global oil companies like Gulf and Exxon have blending facilities and can easily comply with the mandate. But small independent refiners lack such facilities and are getting fleeced.
They are forced to buy ethanol “credits,” paper chits known as RINs (for Renewable fuel Identification Numbers), whose price has soared. The high cost of the credits was a factor in the shutdown of Delaware’s only refinery in 2009, as well as a Philadelphia refinery, the largest on the East Coast, earlier this year.
Wall Street traders have cornered the market on RINs, and their price has, no surprise, skyrocketed. Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase is one of the biggest speculators in the paper credits.
Once again, Washington regulators are making work for lawyers and boosting the fortunes of well-connected financiers while crippling small operators in the productive economy.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has said it’s time to fix the complex 13-year-old RINs program. He told Fox News, “We need RIN reform,” citing the “inflationary pressure on RINs.”
Congress is incapable of fixing the problem. It has hard time even passing a budget, though it is constitutionally required to do so.
The administration can fix this on its own by following the path President Trump has blazed.
Reforming the regulations around the renewable fuels programs will level the playing field for independent business, support farm prices, save jobs in the industrial sector and promote exports of ethanol.
That will make America great again – and it doesn’t require an act of Congress.
