Trumponomics: From trickle-down to upside-down

Bring back voodoo economics!

I never thought I’d say that. But Donald Trump has managed something remarkable: He’s making traditional right-wing economic nonsense look relatively sensible in retrospect.

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Ever since the rise of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been vocal believers in the magical power of tax cuts for the rich. The idea was that if you reduced tax rates at the top, “job creators” would respond with a surge of productive energy, boosting the economy — hence trickling down to the middle class — and maybe even reducing the budget deficit.

This idea wasn’t unadulterated nonsense. Rather, it was adulterated nonsense. It described something that could happen in principle but doesn’t happen in practice; tax cuts never produced the promised economic surge, tax hikes never had the predicted destructive effects. Still, it remained party orthodoxy, largely because rich people put their money behind a doctrine that called for cutting their taxes.

But Trumponomics, which increasingly seems to center on tariffs — which are, by the way, taxes — as the answer to all problems really is unadulterated nonsense. Until this week, Trump’s big claim was that taxes on imports won’t raise prices for consumers, which is not only completely at odds with Economics 101 but also at odds with everything Republicans have ever said about taxes.

And on Tuesday he cranked the nonsense up to 11. Asked how he would cut grocery prices, he responded by saying that he would restrict food imports: “We allow a lot of farm product into our country. We’re going have to be a little like other countries. We’re not going to allow so much.”

What? This is going from trickle-down to upside-down. Even in the fever swamps of the right, it must be hard to find people who believe that you can make something cheaper by reducing its supply.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s a doctrine here. What we’re looking at here is probably a brain glitch. Somebody said “food,” which activated some neurons in Trump’s brain linked to “farmers,” and he fell into his usual habit of proposing import restrictions as the answer to everything.

Still, Trump has gone on and on about high food prices, with a particular thing about bacon for some reason. You might have expected him to have some kind of idea ready when asked what he would do to bring them down.

But Trump doesn’t have ideas. He has fixations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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