Peter Thiel Says It So Clearly
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a major supporter of Republican nominee Donald Trump, said that Trumpism "isn't crazy and it's not going away" during a major speech in front of the National Press Club on Monday....
"Real events seem like they’re rehearsals for Saturday Night Live," he said. "Only an outbreak of insanity would seem to account for the unprecedented fact that this year a political outsider managed to win a major party nomination."...
The election, he added, "is less crazy than the condition of our country."
Thiel criticized the rising costs of medicine, the country's overpriced healthcare system, outstanding student debt held by many young Americans, stagnant incomes, and the country's involvement in foreign wars.
"Now, not everyone is hurting," he said. "In the wealthy suburbs that ring Washington, DC, people are doing just fine. Where I work in Silicon Valley, people are doing just great. But most Americans don’t live by the Beltway or the San Francisco Bay. Most Americans haven’t been part of that prosperity. It shouldn’t be surprising to see people vote for Bernie Sanders, or for Donald Trump, who is the only outsider left in the race."...
"Voters are tired of being lied to," he said. "It was both insane and somehow inevitable that DC insiders expected this election to be a rerun between the two political dynasties who led us through the two most gigantic financial bubbles of our time."
"President George W. Bush presided over the inflation of a housing bubble so big that its collapse is still causing economic stagnation today," he continued. "But what’s strangely forgotten is that last decade’s housing bubble was just an attempt to make up for the gains that had been lost in the decade before that. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton presided over an enormous stock market bubble and a devastating crash in 2000, just as his second term was coming to an end. That’s how long the same people have been pursuing the same disastrous policies."...
"Voters are tired of hearing conservative politicians say that government never works," Thiel said. "They know the government wasn’t always this broken. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program – whatever you think of these ventures, you cannot doubt the competence of the government that got them done. But we have fallen very far from that standard, and we cannot let free market ideology serve as an excuse for decline."
My opinion of Thiel went down a few notches. "President George W. Bush presided over the inflation of a housing bubble so big that its collapse is still causing economic stagnation today." That is a dishonest statement that distracts attention toward who was president when the bubble burst, and away from who it was that enacted the policies that built the real estate bubble in the first place.
ReplyDelete"In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton presided over an enormous stock market bubble and a devastating crash in 2000, just as his second term was coming to an end." Part of the bull market was a reaction to the 1994 election; for the first time since Ike we had a Congressional majority that wouldn't predate on commerce like the Dems did. The dot-bombs were the natural progression of infant industries. Lots of players try their hand at the newfangled thing, and only a few figure out how to make it work. Clinton has no more blame for that than Reagan has for polyester and disco balls.
Complete agreement. His larger point about how the elites aren't listening is what caused me to blog this.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that caught a lot of people by surprise is the degree to which illegal immigration is despised among the grassroots, the key issue that propelled Trump. Trumpers are delighted that someone will actually speak enthusiastically about enforcing immigration law, which many GOP leaders had waffled on even before Gang of Eight. Trumpers (and others) take the "don't cut in line" ethic seriously, they don't want noncitizens voting or collecting government benefits or artificially inflating labor supply during precarious economic times. This is why Rubio, who seems to be the the preferred candidate of the Never Trumpers (if the ones I know are representative), came in a distant fourth, eclipsed even by the quixotic John Kasich who thought people outside the Northeast would notice him.
ReplyDeleteDemocrat Trumpers are alienated by a party leadership that insists on telling us that the economy is back to normal, when that is not the case. Hillary isn't listening to the folks who want a vision for real economic recovery that isn't limited to Texas and the DC suburbs.