How To Prepare for the Next Downturn?

Really, poor President Trump has barely got the ink dry on his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before his supporters are worrying about inflation and bubbles.

Here's Ben Stein worrying about his money.

You cannot have an economy at full employment, with severe labor shortages, without having inflation. When you start to get that inflation, the last thing you want to do is goose the economy with huge public works programs and lowers taxes and fantastic money creation at the Fed. You, Mr. and Mrs. America, are NOT going to like severe inflation. It hurts like hell. The usual way to fight it is by buying and holding good real estate.

Well, yes, except that real estate is already pretty high and, after a bubble pops, real estate goes down with everything else.

Or there is Steve Sailer. He's not worrying about inflation but about what will cause the next crash. Stocks could do it, as in 1929. Or Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is obviously a brilliant innovation, but even the smartest new innovations in currency often cause problems initially.

As in John Law, who wrecked the French economy with his brilliant paper money scheme backed by shares. Or maybe it could be China. Or Enron-type corporate scandals, or Student debt. Or mortgages again.

The problem is that prices, for stocks or houses or gold or just about anything, are already pretty strong. So what do you do?

I'd say the first thing is that you can't time the market, whether it is stocks or real estate or Bitcoin. The bubble is only obvious after the crash. Personally, I felt that real estate was overvalued for decades. Yet you could have made good money all through those decades, and would have done all right if you had debt levels in 2008 low enough to ride through the bust.

Everybody says that stocks are too high. Maybe they are, and maybe if there is a downturn you are going to see your stocks underwater for several years.

My feeling is that I don't want to be in paper money or bonds. Bonds have no upside, only the downside of higher interest rates and/or inflation. That's because the way that governments deal with bubbles and crashes is by printing more money. So if you hold dollars you are charitably helping the high-fliers recover by reducing the value of their debt. Some years ago I read an article about the German hyperinflation. If you had stocks or gold you lost money, but you still survived. But if you held Reichmarks you were wiped out. And that means that if you were a good solid 19th century bourgeois with your 5 percent government bonds you were wiped out.

The other thing is that you don't want to be sold out by debt. If you have a mortgage on your house then you have to keep paying the mortgage, otherwise you lose your house and its equity. If you have borrowed money to buy stocks or Bitcoin then you can be sold out if your stocks or your Bitcoin crashes.

The main thing to avoid is "ruin," according to Black Swan guy Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

My experience in the 2008 crash was the realization that I could not be wiped out -- i.e., ruined -- because I did not have any debt. So stocks went down by 50 percent. So they came back again, because the stock market is the present value of all future profits from the nation's public corporations. If economic growth resumes after the crash then the stock market recovers.

Of course, if the economy does not come back, as in the Soviet Union or in Venezuela, then you need to get your money/assets out, and the government will do everything it can to stop you from doing that.

What will happen with the Trump economy? Nobody knows. But we do know that nobody can repeal the business cycle. There will be a recession in our future, and the government will fight it by printing money.

What Do We Do About Big Tech's Big Left Bias?

Well, it's a scandal for President Trump to talk about s***hole countries, but it's on the up and up for big tech to censor "shitty people," as Facebook has censored a chap for writing a book called The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. And as Google has allowed lefty employees to "blacklist" white conservative employees on their corporate media.

I must say that I feel a bit flummoxed by this. I mean, haven't we all been subjected to decades of liberal drivel about how there is no way to objectively determine what speech is OK and what speech is bad and that censorship is just about the worst thing in the world.

Yeah, I know. That was when liberals felt in their bones that they would lose in a game of speech censorship. Now they seem to have persuaded themselves that there is no downside to an aggressive campaign to censor conservatives, alt-rightists, "haters" and "shitty people."

Look, this is nothing new, nothing remarkable. Humans are social animals and one of the things that social animals do is control lower-status animals by methods short of outright violence. So high-status animals use their social power to beat up on low-status animals.

Right now liberals are the high-status animals, and they have wonderfully indoctrinated the tech billionaires and their bribed apologists to join their social set, or else. So big tech is unreflectingly beating up conservatives with AI algorithms and by denying ads to conservative YouTube videos.

There is a word for this: injustice. It is also, I suspect, bad business, because if there is one thing that business tends to do it is to avoid riling up the customer. I believe this has to do with the settled science that a happy customer will tell three people but an unhappy customer will tell ten people about her experience.

And so I repeat: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. My target audience for this notion is not ordinary mortals like you and I. It really is directed at people that think they have a divine -- or secular -- mission to bend the arc of history towards justice. My argument is that anyone that is trying to make the world a better place with the kindly help of government is probably a person that is creating injustice. Further, anyone that is proposing a magnificent system of justice that will save the world from oppression and injustice should look very hard at his program to tease out the many ways in which his perfect plan would in fact increase injustice rather than create justice.

That is why my Perfect Plan would merely have as its first overarching goal a desire to help immigrants to the city rise up into the middle class. I do not think that government programs are likely to help in this; I rather suspect that non-governmental assistance and guidance, particularly from evangelical churches, is the better way. My second overarching goal of my Perfect Plan would be to instruct the educated elite, the People of the Creative Self, not to use their cultural and status power to beat up on ordinary middle class Americans and stigmatize them as "shitty people." Or deplorables.

I am only saying this to be kind and generous to our liberal friends. In my judgement the "political correctness" culture of the liberals is going to prompt a huge movement of rage against the monstrous injustice of liberal cultural hegemony.

Because that is the point of my catchphrase. What people feel and get angry about is being on the receiving end of injustice, i.e., government force. So don't spend any time thinking up glorious plans for justice. Just chip away at the odd egregious injustice. And avoid the temptation to think that "we are become as gods."

No, Filibuster and Balanced Budget Amendment Won't Do It

Christopher C. DeMuth is one of the grand old men of conservatism, having served at the American Spectator and run the American Enterprise Institute think tank for years.

As we all are, DeMuth is disturbed about our "fractured politics" and longs to do something about it. In a speech at AEI he proposes, 1) to end the modern filibuster, and 2) to enact a balanced budget amendment.

I'm sorry, but to me Christopher DeMuth is missing the point. Politics is about bigger things than the petty obstructionisms of the filibuster and the glorious goal of fiscal rectitude. It is about what happens after the welfare state.

And if we want to play the blame game then, yes, conservatives are to blame for the current mess. You can see that in the deficit numbers over at usgovernmentspending.com. The federal deficit started up in the messes of the 1970s and continued high in the Reagan years of the 1980s. That's when conservatives decided we were not going to continue as dutiful tax collectors for the welfare state.

Not surprisingly, Democrats hate this. The neo-feudal welfare state is a great way to capture the votes of those new to the city, the immigrants that first came from Europe and now come from pretty well everywhere else. Rural people look to a strong benevolent master to look after them. Anthony Trollope defined the type in Cousin Henry, although his master is a woman:

The tenants had known her as the future owner of the acres which they cultivated and had entertained for her and shown her much genuine love. She had made herself acquainted with every homestead, landmark, and field about the place. She had learned the wants of the poor, and the requirements of the little school.

 That is how Democrats think of themselves, as kindly proprietors of the poor and the marginalized. Only, in truth, the federal budget is not all about the poor, but the middle class, for 50 percent of the federal budget goes for middle-class Social Security and Medicare. We conservatives say, great: everyone wants to help the poor, but not if it means that 50 percent of the federal budget goes for Social Security and Medicare. It stands to reason that, whatever the benefits of pension and health care programs for America's seniors like me, middle-class entitlements should not break the budget. It stands to reason also that the political system would always want to avoid facing up to the huge obligations of these fixed and immovable middle-class entitlements. Until it is too late.

As the old New Deal consensus has broken down the Democrats have responded by tightening political discipline. The meaning for me of all the political correctness is that Democrats need to frighten their supporters in order to get them to the polls. Obviously the 90 percent Democratic votes from African Americans is proof of that. The whole point of President Obama's race thingies, like support for Trayvon Martin and the race incident in Ferguson, Missouri, is to keep African-Americans strong in the fear that we are one election away from a return to Jim Crow. The only way to get 90 percent of any group's vote is to scare the stuffing out of them.

That is why we seem to be in a kind of a witch-hunt/reign of terror. Political hysteria is a natural step in the political process when things aren't going too well for your side. Earnest partisans ask themselves why the movement has not reached the Promised Land. The answer is obvious: saboteurs and wreckers, or in our modern parlance, racists, sexists, and homophobes.

And obviously, when an idiot like Donald Trump can become president, then it is time for the Resistance!

Now, I am a peaceable kind of guy, and I really don't like bust-ups. But nice, responsible reform is not the way that politics works, not now, not ever. That's because government is force, and the total assembly of government programs are nothing but a testament of force, enacted by the ruling class to reward its supporters. The revenues for Social Security pensions are obtained by forcing the American worker to cough up about 12 cents of every dollar earned. The Medicare benefits are obtained mostly by forcing wealthy Americans to cough up a substantial part of their incomes, so that the top 1 percent of federal taxpayers supply 40 percent of income tax revenue.

I don't see that any fiddling with the filibuster rules, or balanced-budget amendment is going to fix this problem. If you look at history the only way that any governmental problem gets solved is when it runs out of other peoples' money, and maybe not even then.

The reason that Donald Trump was elected is because the white working class finally woke up to the fact that the Democratic Party regards it as deplorables and expendables. And has done so ever since Archie Bunker was launched on TV in 1971 as the quintessential working-class racist sexist bigot. But the white working class still wants its Social Security and its Medicare. So nothing will change.

In my view, so long as the great middle of the American people want to be looked after by a kind land-owning squire rather than band together in non-governmental forms of social assistance, so long will the present neo-feudal big government welfare state continue. Until it breaks.

It might break because the non-white majority prefers the neo-tribalisms of modern Africa over the nation-state capitalism birthed in Northwest Europe. It might break because it runs out of money and the leaders of the time prefer to destroy the economy, as with Venezuela, rather than admit its errors. It might break because we got into a war and tried to continue the middle-class entitlements while waging global war on the Russians or the Chinese.

But one thing is sure. The present "fractured politics" will continue until somebody cries "uncle."

That James Damore Guy!

I'm still marveling about the central notion in James Damore's suit against Google. That Google has, as policy, a system of blacklisting, to allow its employees to cut themselves off from employees they don't like. (Is this just in political discussions, or does it extend to business as well?)

But you can understand it, if you listen to YouTube's Susan Wojciki, "part of the team at Google that decided to fire Damore." She talked to her kiddies at dinner. I think that her kids were asking her if it was true that women just don't quite cut it at face-to-the-monitor techie stuff.

I’ve spent so much time, so much of my career, to try to overcome stereotypes, and then here was this letter that was somehow convincing my kids and many other women in the industry, and men in the industry, convincing them that they were less capable. That really upset me.

Don't look now, Susie, but if you say something "upset" you, then you are promoting the stereotype that women act upon their feelings and not upon the facts. You are also promoting the stereotype that all upscale Bay Area notables are empty-headed morons without a idea in their heads except to advance the liberal party line. Oh, and by the way, have you ever investigated the original Greek meaning of "stereotype?" Before liberals got in charge, the Greek word "stereos" meant solid.

Of course, it is not really that scandalous that Google would discriminate against white male conservatives. Corporate types are always rumbling about "corporate culture" in corporate-speak, and I'd say it is only a couple of steps from promoting a corporate culture to rooting out dissenters. The whole point about a corporation is that it is, as its name implies, a body of people in which hierarchy and top-down management rules, and not the prices of the market.

But here is my bigger point. It starts with the notion of German sociologist Georg Simmel a century ago about what would happen when women came out of the home and into the public square.

Obviously, Simmel wrote, the public sphere, the world outside the home, in the short term would still be defined by men for men, but in the long term women would transform the public square to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I must say that when I wrote this three years ago I was still "questioning" about what women in the public square meant.

It means that corporate culture is moving away from the male notion of the brotherhood, in which the question of feelings are subordinated to the goal of the operation, towards a culture in which feelings and relationships are more valued and enforced. The whole point of military training, for instance, is to train natural fight-or-flight instincts into fight-only instincts. The idea is that the rank-and-file soldier -- and therefore corporate warrior -- should be prepared to risk his life in the service of the brotherhood or corporation, and actually put his life on the line when ordered to. This is male culture. It is not female culture.

Any social unit that is governed not by a male sensibility but by a female sensibility is going to produce a corporate culture very different from the "once more unto the breach" mentality of the warrior band. It is going to produce a corporate culture much closer to the Google model than the model of Henry V's army in front of Harfleur.

There are other differences. I remember a woman friend complaining that the men wouldn't listen to her on a non-profit board she had recently joined. That's another difference between the male sensibility and the female sensibility. Men assume that they get a right to speak only when their deeds show that they are worthy of respect and that they have something to contribute. A woman expects to have the right to "share" from the moment she gets on the board.

Now I am a profound admirer of women. And I firmly believe that the feminine sensibility has its place in human affairs just as the male sensibility has its place.

But here is a heretical notion. Just as the male sensibility of smash through to victory is not the only way to do things and is wildly inappropriate in many cases, so the female sensibility of sharing and of replaying the high-school-mean-girl culture is not the only way to do things, and is wildly inappropriate in many cases.

However, you better not say stuff like that at Google. Because diversity and inclusion and stereotypes.

Hey, how about doing something about the liberal stereotypical behavior of lock-step political loyalty and unfriending anyone that disagrees with you, as this gay guy from a liberal, Jewish family experienced when he started to become conservative? What about diversity, inclusion, and stereotypes?

Could We Stop This Game of Removing Presidents?

In my political lifetime I have seen four efforts to remove a President of the United States from office: for Nixon it was Watergate; for Reagan it was Iran-Contra; for Clinton it was Monicagate; and now for Trump it is Russiagate. Note that each effort has involved Special Prosecutors.

I think it is about time we stopped this dangerous game, because sooner or later somebody is going to get hurt.

The fact is that Democrats were mortally offended when Richard Nixon was elected president. They had all convinced themselves that he was an evil Commie witch-hunter (my first liberal boss had a Nixon three-dollar-bill coffee mug) that had been sent to proper oblivion in the stolen election of 1960 (yeah, stolen for Kennedy by the Democratic Chicago machine: you could look it up).

If anything, Reagan was worse. Democrats persuaded themselves that Nixon was evil. But Reagan was an "amiable dunce," per Clark Clifford. How could a man like that be elected president? So they made hay with Iran-Contra, the diversion of funds by chaps like Col. North using money from selling weapons to Iran to fund the Central American anti-communist contras that Congress wouldn't fund.

Then the Republicans got back on the Dems by impeaching Clinton over lies he made in connection with young White House intern and daughter of a donor Monica Lewinsky. Only they couldn't convict him in the Senate: it takes a two-thirds majority to remove a president in the United States Senate. This effort rebounded on the Republicans as the Democrats won a few seats in the 1998 mid-terms, almost unheard of for a midterm election in the second term of a president.

Now we have the Democrats running their third removal effort in the last 50 years, against Trump on the strength of the Steele Dossier that was opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign.

I will tell you what is going on here. It is all about the end of the Democratic dominance from 1933 to 1968, and the refusal of liberals to understand that the world has changed. Liberals think that they have been ordained by some secular god to bend the arc of history towards justice using government programs and political power and activism. For 50 years it seemed that they were right, doing wonderful things like pro-union laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Civil Rights. Then, the day after all this was complete the American people turned away from the liberal project and elected Richard Nixon in 1968. The liberal world has never been the same since, and liberals can't understand why all those deplorables fail to agree that liberal governance has been the best thing since sliced bread.

OK, if you are a liberal then the world looks like the result of your wonderful wisdom. Imagine an America without pro-union legislation! Well, I can, and we maybe would not have lost all the jobs in union-dominated steel and auto if unions hadn't gotten special privileges. Imagine a world without Social Security! Well, I can, and the result would probably be that many more Americans would be saving with Fidelity and Vanguard and dying with a nice little nest egg for their children. Imagine a world without Civil Rights! Well, at least we wouldn't have the vile race and gender politics of Affirmative Action followed by Diversity and Inclusion.

In fact, a survey has shown that ordinary Americans really don't hate rich people much these days. But they really have a problem with the educated snobs in the administrative state that regulate them and order them around. Thus Donald Trump.

Now I have a proposal to my liberal friends. And that is: Give It Up. Your golden age is past. These days we are dealing with the unintended consequences of your wonderful ideas: with government spending that is all mewed up paying pensions to old people while young people get into ruinous student debt; with vile race politics encouraging the kind of tribalism that the nation state was designed to marginalize; with top-down administrative government that is bound to fail because Mises: that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and because Hayek: that no bureaucrat from Washington DC can outperform a million producers and consumers interacting through the price system. Also, of course, liberals have gravitated from enacting policy by legislation to administrative regulation by the bureaucracy. It is just too hard to pass beneficial legislation these days.

I encapsulate all this in my catchphrases: government is force, politics is division, system is domination. In the best society you want as little of these three wonders as possible.

It is telling that liberals in the last decades have been hard at work on a cultural project to deny their opponents a voice in the public square, by calling them racists, sexists, homophobes, and haters. Thus we have AntiFa that regards any non-liberal gathering as a fascist hate rally. Now we learn from James Damore's suit that Google has a policy that allows its lefty employees to blacklist co-workers on corporate communications whose opinions they don't like. Denying your opponents a voice is not going to end well, liberals.

I encapsulate all this in my catchphrase: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

Here's a brilliant idea, liberals. The whole idea of democracy is that, instead of having civil war, like in the good old days of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays with Prince Hal facing off against Harry Percy and may the best man win in single combat, we have the sham war of elections. Instead of battling barons, or even mobs in the street, we have politicians battling it out in rallies, in political commercials, and in debates -- and latterly in insult tweets. It is the nature of this repeated sham fight that power alternates between parties, so that when our side is defeated we can say that while we are all Americans and should go home after the election, well, "wait until next time." Sean Trende has written that it is extremely unusual for one party to win the presidency more than twice in a row.

(Notice that after 1968 that Republicans won five out of six presidential elections. I wonder why?)

Democrats have basically not conceded the last two change elections that went against them after a two-term Democratic president. In other words, they object to the Sean Trende two-term rule. In 2000 they contested the Florida results, and Al Gore never properly conceded and never told his people to go home. So we had Democratic activists hopped up right through the two terms of Bush. Now we have had Hillary Clinton who failed to come out on election night and concede the election, and her supporters have responded with their "Resistance" and the various hysterical notions that Trump was colluding with the Russians, or that he is "mentally ill," or something.

The point is that if one side decides to stop observing the rules and habits of the democratic fake-war game then the other side is going to cotton on, and you are not going to like the results. That, to me, is also the lesson of Trump.

The conservative movement of the mid-to-late 20th century operated on the assumption that politics was a game of ideas: each side pitched its ideas to the electorate and may the best ideas win. But that ended in part with Bill Clinton, who ran as a moderate and then pushed government-healthcare Hillarycare on us. He got his hat handed to him in the 1994 midterms when the first Republican Congress in 40 years got elected. Then we had Barack Obama, elected in a normal change election, who decided that Americans had voted for "fundamental transformation." No they hadn't, and the Republican Congress and the Trump presidency are the result. Now we have the anti-Trump Resistance that seems to think it can use the deep state to spy on its opponents and run President Trump's troops through the ringer of a special prosecutor. In a vague way, even anti-Trumper David Brooks can see there is a problem with this.

Look, the point of democracy is that government power goes to the chaps that can persuade the electorate that it is either Time for a Change, or Four More Years. That is all. Democracy says nothing about justice or arcs of history, or the wonders of a compassionate educated elite that graduated from all the right elite colleges and scored all the right internships. In fact, because of the fact that democracy is just a trial of strength: my millions of voters vs. your millions of voters, we should not assume that any democratic government is elected to do anything more that reward its supporters for their votes. I like to remind everyone about this with my catchphrase that They are all Idiots. That's why we have change elections, when the voters get tired of the old idiots and decide to elect new idiots. Call it Rotating Idiocracy.

You may think that Trump is an idiot, and you may be right. Only one thing: he is hatching what amounts to the full conservative agenda, the ideas that conservative thinkers and think tanks have been incubating for the last 50 years, from reduced tax rates (because settled-science marginal economics, vintage 1870), to rollback of administrative regulation (because settled-science "regulatory capture," vintage 1955). But one thing is certain. Chaps like Barack Obama and the crazy-cakes gender studies professors are the real idiots, because they are going against the settled science of the last century, that big government is a real problem, because it cannot compute prices.

I add, in addition, that big government does not work because government finds it almost impossible to do reform. Once you have set up a program that distributes benefits to the voters it becomes almost impossible to reform or reduce it, for the simple reason that people adjust their lives to take advantage of the free stuff offered by government and strongly resist the notion later on that they should get onto their bikes and go get a job so they can pay for the benefit themselves. That is the difference between government and the private sector. In the private sector businesses and consumers must adjust their plans every day, based on the signals from the price system. But the whole point of government is to sidestep the price system, to set up a rigid regulatory system that grinds on with the same rules, year after year, rain or shine. Until the whole thing breaks down.

It is a vile conceit that my party has a monopoly on virtue, or that your party has a monopoly on hate. Politics is simply division, the game of demonizing the opposition and getting 51 percent of the vote in the next election. Conceit aside, the probable truth is that the administrative state and its one-size-fits-all government entitlement programs is past its sell-by date.

The only question is whether we will transition to the new order peacefully, or through the wringer of inflation and riot and revolution. Removing the other guys' president ain't gonna get us to those sunlit uplands, I guarantee, so stop it you crazy-cakes.

That is all.

Another Shoe Drops on Obamacare Repeal

Right here in the middle of the end of the world of Fire and Fury another shoe drops on Obamacare. The Trump administration has published a proposed regulation to allow individuals to band together to purchase health insurance across state lines -- without all the mandatory Obamacare free coverage.

The new regulation, which was published in the Federal Register on January 5, will be available for public comment for 60 days. When it goes into effect, it will allow small employers to band together for the purpose of buying health insurance in the large group market. Specifically, it will “allow employers to form small business health plans based on geography or industry” and permit such plans “to serve employers in a state, city, county or a multi-state metro area.” It can be used to “serve all the businesses in a particular industry nationwide,” and also allows sole proprietors to join small business health plans. 

Here is what a critic of the Trump policy has to say.

Currently… associations that offer coverage to small businesses or individuals have to follow ACA rules, which require coverage of 10 categories of essential benefits, and limit what factors can be considered in charging premiums. The new regulation would largely exempt association plans from these rules, allowing them to offer insurance to small businesses and sole proprietors that is cheaper but also covers less[.]

Yay! If you are an individual policyholder or small businessman.

By the way, the difference between health insurance and government "health insurance" is that the government version always has free stuff thrown in to hook the bubbas. Hey, why not when the government is paying anyway.

Seriously, we can now do a review of the wisdom of the original Obamacare plan. It had a problem, learned from the debacle of Hillarycare. Most Americans already have health insurance and they do not appreciate being forced to pay more to subsidize people that don't yet have insurance. So the sell on Obamacare had to be that nobody was going to pay more, and there would be no serious impact on "the deficit." That meant that the Obamacare subsidies could not all appear on the federal budget; instead chaps like Jonathan Gruber had to come up with cunning plans to force the subsidies to be paid by people buying health insurance so they would pay for a good chunk of the benefits distributed to Democratic voters who were supposed to benefit from the extension of health insurance.

But since many of the Obamacare benefits were "off-budget," and even fashioned through regulations, that makes them much harder to defend, and much easier to reverse.

Clearly it is very difficult for Republican politicians to put together a straight-up repeal of Obamacare; that is what the failures of the fall of 2017 were about. It is not so difficult for Trump bureaucrats to repeal Obamacare step-by-step through the administrative state.

(Here's an interesting take. When Trumpists talk about reining in the administrative state, the mainstream media doesn't really get it. Well, of course. The issue of the administrative state is a thing in conservative think tanks and policy analysts like Charles Murray writing books like By the People. For liberals the administrative state is not a bug, it's a feature.)

But it all comes back to the liberal narrative on President Trump. If this guy is a complete idiot, and mentally ill, and colluding with Russia, and watching TV all day, how come he is able to preside over this massive roll-back of the administrative state, and figure out that, if you can't repeal Obamacare by the front door you can repeal it by the back door? How come?

It comes down to the basic question. Donald Trump is not an idiot; he merely plays one on TV.

It is Trump the Chaotic Idiot Week Again

Dear Jonah Goldberg is still going on about how useless Donald Trump is. In the week of the White House tell-all gossip book, Fire and Fury, Jonah tells us that it is nothing new. We already know that the president spends hours a day "in front of a television." We already know that "the president struggles to complete a line of thought without being distracted." We already know that the president represents himself as the world's foremost expert on everything but he has never been seen "actually talked expertly for more than a minute on any public policy without the benefit of a teleprompter."

Hmm. Remember how everybody knew that Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce that did not know the details of policy. And remember how Barack Obama represented himself as a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, etc.?

We really cannot know how much of the Trump Administration is Trump and how much is the people he has appointed or how much is serendipity and accident that the right people got into the right places. Or that when you staff up a Republican administration you get the same people from the same think tanks every time.

But the rule of thumb is that, if it happens on Trump's watch, he gets the credit and he gets the blame.

For instance, President Clinton came into office after a mild recession and presided over 8 years of strong growth. You may say that issued more from a Republican Congress that deregulated and cut taxes, but it still happened on his watch.

For instance, President Obama presided over a decade of weak growth. He gets the blame, although I have read that after a big credit panic like 2008 it usually takes the economy a decade to get into its stride again.

Now, according to my view, the actions of Trump administration in rolling back regulations and cutting business tax rates are going to have a strong pro-growth effect on the economy. Also, the recovery of housing prices is going to make it easier for business start-ups to use their home equity as capital. And if all that happens it doesn't matter if the president watches TV or tweets juvenile insults or doesn't understand the details of policy. The good things will have happened on his watch and he will get the credit. That is all.

On the other hand any delay in returning interest rates to normal now that the economy seems to be firing on all cylinders could allow a boom and bubble that could burst before the president runs for reelection in 2020. And that would be the president's fault, just as the current stock bull market is to the president's credit. And don't ask me what happens if and when the Bitcoin bubble bursts. But the president will get the blame.

The truth is that political leaders of every stripe are pretty unsavory characters. Think of JFK, serial adulterer; LBJ, who had hideaway offices in the Capitol to entertain females and got to be senator from Texas courtesy of Box 13; Nixon, an arriviste that "everyone" despised; Bill Clinton, another serial adulterer and a notoriously corrupt politician. Oh then there was George W. Bush, who seems to have been a nice guy. But what good did it do him?

Then there is Barack Obama that got elected twice on the strength of Illinois court divorce records that mysterious went public. What a guy! And we still know nothing of how things went down in the Obama White House.

No doubt Donald Trump is a monster. Politicians and big businessmen usually are. The bottom line is whether their governance benefits the American people and puts the economy on a secure upward arc.

Everything else is gossip and bad faith.