What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’ →
Adam Davidson, writing for The New York Times Magazine:
The centrality of the ‘‘deal’’ to Trumponomics is especially strange when you consider how tangential that concept is, or at least should be, to a modern economy. In Microeconomics 101, deals are an afterthought: Transactions have the most socially optimal outcome when buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement. The very idea of a ‘‘good’’ deal for one party and a ‘‘bad’’ deal for another suggests a suboptimal outcome; an economy built on tough deal-making, with clear winners and losers, will always be a poorer one. Meanwhile, in macroeconomics — which covers the big, broad issues that a president typically worries about — the concept of the ‘‘deal’’ hardly exists at all. The key issues at play in a national or global economy (inflation, currency-exchange rates, unemployment, overall growth) are impossible to control through any sort of deal. They reflect underlying structural forces in an economy, like the level of education and skill of the population, the productivity of companies, the amount of government spending and the actions of the central bank.
I think it's important to fight Trump on intellectual grounds, the same as you'd push back against any other conventional candidate. To sink to his level of name-calling and fear-mongering is to allow him to win, even if he loses. This piece is just another example of why, without just copying and pasting a picture of him with a Hitler mustache, he is unfit to be President.