** 05-Jan-2021 World View: Presidential mistakes
Navigator wrote: ↑Mon Jan 04, 2021 2:11 pm
> I don't think that the USA has had an outstanding president since
> Eisenhower. Each one after him was deeply flawed and made huge
> mistakes.
> I think Reagan did a lot to restore America and win the Cold War,
> but he threw fiscal conservatism out the window. Since Reagan the
> national debt looks like a parabolic curve. So while I liked the
> guy and most of what he did, he really failed us there.
> Here is what Eisenhower did:
> Ended the Korean war.
> Brought the defense budget under control and restored fiscal conservatism.
> Stood up to the Communists, but without pulling the trigger.
> Built the Interstate Highway system, the most beneficial
> infrastructure project since the railroad a hundred years before.
> Here is the short list of disasters associated with each and every
> one of Eisenhower's successors:
> Kennedy - Bay of Pigs, start of economic theory interventions in
> the economy, allowing public employees to unionize, disasterous
> negotiations with the Communists (which ended with the cuban
> missle crisis - where, thank God, he didn't pull the trigger), the
> Diem assasination and the start of Vietnam intervention.
> Johnson - Vietnam, the welfare state
> Nixon - Watergate, end of anything backing the dollar, price
> controls leading to even greater inflation, the snail pace
> withdraw from Vietnam.
> Ford - pardoning Nixon, failing to deal with inflation
> Carter - Hyperinflation, creating the Iran mess
> Reagan - Abandonment of fiscal conservatism and the start of
> snowballing deficit. The whole Iran Contra mess.
> Bush - failing to completely take out Sadam Hussein.
> Clinton - failing to deal with national debt, deregulation of
> banks (end of Glass Steagal), the institutionalization of "pay for
> play" presidency. And of course the sexual predator thing, which
> led to him lying under oath. He was rightfully impeached, and
> should have been convicted.
> Bush Jr - the Iraq mess by naively thinking he could turn the
> place into a democracy. Failure to deal with the true
> perpetrators of 9/11 - the Saudis. The subprime mortgage crisis
> and bank bailout that resulted.
> Obama - did nothing to fix the problems that led to the financial
> crisis. Just doubled down on massive amounts of government debt.
> Handing control of Iraq over to Iran. Then giving Iran the
> financial means to continue to massively support terrorism. Obama
> care debacle that did nothing to fix the broken healthcare system,
> in fact it made it worse.
> Trump - getting rid of a great cabinet/advisors that he started
> with. Continuing to accelerate government borrowing and debt.
> Inability to handle the Obamacare/healthcare mess or get anything
> substantial done legislatively while controlling both houses of
> congress.
This is a very interesting list because it's so comprehensive, making
it easy to compare to Generational Dynamics eras.
As you know, I've written the following in some form dozens of times
in the last 15 years:
> Core Principle of Generational Dynamics:
> "Even in a dictatorship, major decisions are made by masses of
> people, entire generations of people, and not by politicians.
> Thus, Hitler was not the cause of WW II or the Holocaust. What
> politicians say or do is irrelevant, except insofar as their
> actions reflect the attitudes of the people that they represent,
> and so politicians can neither cause nor prevent the great events
> of history -- but can only bring about marginal
> adjustments."
So if you condemn all the presidents except Eisenhower, that would be
because the 50s was a generational Recovery Era. The entire adult
population was still traumatized from two world wars and the Great
Depression. They saw Communism on the march in Europe and Asia, and
were dreadfully anxious about a third word war against Communism. So
Eisenhower was able to achieve all the results you list because they
could all be sold as strengthening the company and preventing a new
world war.
By contrast, we've been in a generational Crisis era now for almost
twenty years, and the WW II survivors are almost gone. Instead, the
people in charge are idiots and snowflakes, and the people in charge
in Washington are complete assholes.
I'll just give one example of this. Yesterday, Congress was debating
whether it was OK to use the word "Amen," because it contains the word
"Men." It's almost impossible to conceive how these asshole
politicianss could be taking up time discussing something so
disgusting and stupid, when there's so much going on in the world that
they know nothing about. All they know is that they can defraud the
American people by illegal stock trades based on insider information
or illegally taking money from foreign countries through influence
peddling. So it's no surprise that these asshole politicians are
debating "Amen" to distract people from their own criminal activity.
Let's provide another contrast. In the 1950s, people knew where
Russia was on a map and the danger they presented.
Today, most people couldn't find China on a map. They blame tensions
with China on Trump's trade policies and Trump's personality, and
believe the tensions will disappear under Biden. Nobody is talking
about the fact that the Chinese people are thrilled and gloating over
their huge victory in the last year -- spreading the Wuhan coronavirus
to hundreds of countries while lying and protecting themselves, with
the result that they have the virus under control and a growing
economy, while America and the rest of the world struggle. These
Chinese see themselves now as world leaders and America in decline.
The people in the 50s were worried about Russia, while the people
today are so stupid, all they worry about is Amen.
So when you're going from the 1950s to the 2020s, you can think about
the transformation from anxiety over Communism to anxiety of Amen. I
haven't done this, but it would be interesting to create a list of
social attitudes -- from anxiety over Communism to anxiety of Amen --
that represent the tenure of each president.
Some of the biggest items on that list would involve debt, especially
public debt. In the 1950s, people were still traumatized from the
Great Depression, so Eisenhower could easily pass a balanced budget.
But in each subsequent decade, fewer people alive had lived through
the Great Depression, and it became increasingly fashionable to be in
debt -- personally and publicly. This has reached a peak today with
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which says that the government can borrow
and spend an infinite amount of money and never pay it back, simply by
printing more money.
So the public atitude in the 1950s was fiscal responsibility, while
the public attitude today is MMT. Some of the failures you list --
abandoning gold standard, inflation, hyperinflation, deficit -- were
completely out of the control of the president. The only serious
attempt at deficit control in the last 50 years was sequestration from
2011-2013, and that was a disaster for the military, so the MMT
proponents are now in complete charge.
The situation with inflation is an interesting one. You talk about
inflation and hyperinflation in the 1970s, and you blame that on the
presidents. But with the explosion of public debt and printing money
since the Crisis era began in 2003, there should have been massive new
hyperinflation. In fact, pundits and analysts have been predicting
that every quarter since 2003, and they've been wrong every time, and
are still wrong about it. As I've written over and over, the country
is in a time of deflation, not inflation, because the velocity of
money has been crashing. So in the 1970s, when people finally
believed economists like Milton Friedman who declared the danger of a
new Great Depression to be over, it became highly fashionable to go
into debt and buy consumer goods, creating hyperinflation, made worse
by Nixon's great price control fiasco. But in the current Crisis era,
people are again anxious about a new Great Depression and they save
their money, so that new printed money doesn't go into consumer goods,
so there's no inflation. Instead, it goes into the stock market
bubble, the gold bubble, the bitcoin bubble, and the real estate
bubble, so there's deflation.
The final example I'll give is the Vietnam War, since I'm writing a
book on the history of Vietnam, and since you and I have exchanged a
number of e-mail messages on the Vietnam War.
So the subject of this article is "presidential mistakes," and the
question now is how much of the Vietnam War was due to presidential
mistakes and how much was out of control of the presidents.
As you know, I've reached the conclusion that America had no choice
but to enter the war in 1960 because the American public were still
traumatized by two world wars and anxious about a third world war
against Communism. The public would not have tolerated America just
standing by and watching the young democracy in South Vietnam be
invaded and overrun by the North Vietnamese Communists, who were
backed by China and the Soviet Union.
The other conclusion I reached was that the war was irretrievably lost
by 1964, because of two decisions by president Kennedy that sabotaged
the war effort -- ceding Laos to Hanoi, and ousting and assassinating
South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. I call these decisions
sabotage because they were so disastrous to the war effort, and
obviously so even at the time, that they can only be described as
either unintentional or intentional sabotage of the war effort. You
and I have been debating the reason that Kennedy made these disastrous
decisions, and my conclusion, which I think that you agree with, is
that Kennedy was simply too young to be president, and couldn't deal
with conflicting advice given by his advisers, who were roughly 20
years older than he was, so the result was two very stupid mistakes.
It was obvious by the Battle of Ia Drang (11/1965) that the war was
irretrievably lost because of these two acts of sabotage.
So once I conclude that the war was lost by 1964, it therefore follows
that the loss of the war after that point was not due to mistakes by
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, because the war was already out of
their control after 1964, and would have been lost no matter what
they did.
So, putting all this together, the only thing that I personally can
identify as a mistake by the presidents (i.e., not out of the
presidents' control) was the two mistakes by President Kennedy,
and maybe throw in Nixon's price controls and Obamacare.
