Many economic analysts strongly criticized the leadership of President Donald Trump as reckless. Richard Phillips, a New York-based international Financial Analyst is bold enough to say that for all of his bombast, under the leadership of President Donald Trump the United States has actually grown more and more to resemble a developing nation. As it happens, the onset of the pandemic tore the mask off all of the rot that had been festering just below the surface of United States politics and society. President Donald Trump, backed by his Republican Party, is the very face of this decline. To assert his claim, Richard Phillips outlined six epic failures.
According to Richard Phillips, the first reason that the United States is rapidly transforming itself into a developing nation is that its President has made one particularly well-calculated move: He has been able to harness the rapacious greed that is at the heart of Republican politics and simultaneously trample on the tepid moderation that is inherent in Democratic politics. This had already fully manifested itself prior to the extraordinary fiscal interventions related to the COVID 19 pandemic. Soon after President Trump took office in 2017, the United States already embarked on a course of fiscal profligacy.
It successfully enacted tax cuts that baked trillion-dollar deficits into the United States economy for as far as the eye can see. As a consequence, United States federal debt has become unsustainable without the Fed’s printing press, which has pushed past the limits of rational monetary policy. More and more, the United States’ fiscal and monetary accounts have come to resemble those of poorly managed developing nations. Instead of following long-accepted socio-economic practices, President Trump uses lies and illusion to create a febrile web of illicitness – part oligarchy, part plutocracy and part kleptocracy – that is characteristic of so many developing nations.
George Tyler, an economist and the author of “What Went Wrong” and “Billionaire Democracy: The Hijacking of the American Political System” stated that this has manifested itself more and more in income disparities that leave the vast majority of Americans barely able to hang on from paycheck to paycheck, while a privileged few reap the rewards of a system rigged in their favor, again a characteristic of developing nations. In fact, if the United States were a developing nation and did not play a central role in the governance of the world’s multilateral institutions, it surely would have come under scrutiny by the International Monetary Fund for pursuing policies and practices that have in the past forced intervention.
The second failure in which Richard Phillips stated is that this past summer, the United States was literally torn apart by racial strife that often resulted in rioting. The root cause of this strife was the pervasive level of systemic poverty that besets so many Americans living in inner cities. But if poverty was the cause, an out-of-control police force, facile in the use of strongarm tactics, was the spark.
George Tyler stressed that simply, the United States’ inner-city police forces often stop just short of the tactics used by police in many developing countries. Forget for a moment that African Americans are 2.8 times more likely to be killed by a policeman than an American of European lineage. The reality is that American cities are being subjected to a form of policing that cannot be found in any other developed country in the world.
And, here’s the kicker. President Trump, with broad support from his Republican party, comes down squarely on the side of police brutality. More importantly, Trump has managed to cadge together an extra-legal police force from units connected to the Department of Homeland Security, which for various reasons seems doggedly loyal to the President. Under his “law and order” mantra, the most lawless of United States Presidents mimics the actions of tinpot dictators cracking down on civil unrest in places like Azerbaijan or Cambodia.
The third failure Richard Phillips stated is a failing United States healthcare system particularly the Trump Administration’s handling of COVID 19. Suffice to say that President Trump presides over a nation reeling from the physical, emotional and economic trauma of a raging pandemic by virtue of promoting snake oil, in this case hydroxychloroquine. But aside from President Trump’s mindless antics, the coronavirus has unmasked a new reality for all Americans to see. The so-called “greatest health care system in the world” is proving to be every bit as inefficient and ineffective as health care systems in the world’s poorest countries. Despite all the vast amounts of money spent, the United States health care system leaves millions of Americans unserved or underserved.
One need only look at the substantially higher COVID 19 death rates among people of color in the United States’ largest cities. It constitutes a callous disregard for human life that aligns more closely with Kinshasa than with Berlin, Paris or even Beijing. President Trump has not only failed utterly to take the steps necessary to repair the system, which he had so stridently promised in the last Presidential election, he has use the office of the President to chip away at key elements of the existing system.
Uwe Bott, Chief Economist of The Global Research Center argued that amazingly, President Trump is in the courts trying to eliminate coverage for pre-existing conditions, a popular facet of the Affordable Care Act that he promised to protect. Again and again, while doing nothing to improve the plight of the United States’ disenfranchised, the President callously focused on tearing the system further apart. Meanwhile, as in so many developing nations, wealthy Americans are completely unfazed. They have access to some of the world’s best research hospitals.
To be continued ……..