By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – Friday evening at the White House, no longer ground zero for an Iran retaliation, and the president’s teleprompter reading Wednesday declaring that country appears to be “standing down” is already a fading memory – and no longer distracted, the realization returns that nothing important has really changed.
Iran appears to be working to increase the amount of nuclear raw materials it produces and may or may not become newly dangerous within months or a year or sometime longer. President Trump began his address in the Grand Foyer saying as long as he is president Iran will not have nuclear weapons, a safe bet if he is voted out of office in November. Should he win, though, the world will be watching the clock to see what happens.
Now that Iran’s top general has been killed by a U.S. drone his replacement has been named and so it remains to be seen if a fairly advanced military machine will have been operationally disadvantaged even if its has been constrained by the threat of more such terminations.
A second Iran target, got away, it turns out, The Washington Post learned. The U.S. “game has changed,” as Defense Secretary Mark Esper famously said but the “maximum pressure” protocols are still vague other than intensifying economic sanctions like those announced Friday against Iran metals production. The announcement left the impression there’s not much left to sanction.
It has been argued that next Wednesday’s signing of the “Phase One” agreement with China is a material change in relations with the world’s No. 2 economy. White House officials, like Larry Kudlow and separately Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin both argued Friday morning that the new agreement actually does include significant changes to “technology issues, intellectual property issues, and $50 billion of purchases for our farmers.”
Perhaps that progress will become evident in the months leading up to the presidential election. The text of the agreement is still not being made public until sometime after the signing.
It could also be argued that the steady climb of the major stock indices reflects something fundamentally different with long-term relevance for the U.S. economy. It’s easy to forget, even when the Dow ever so briefly cracks 29,000 intraday Friday, that nothing the markets do guarantees anything about the future of the economy.
On and on, the day-to-day tweets and surprises hatched at the White House, where son-in-law Jared Kushner moves to where the action is – the campaign and not the Middle East – pull the news agenda forward but not necessarily to any higher altitude.
The Senate impeachment trial, now assured to begin in the days ahead later this month or early in February will knock aside lesser headlines with TV coverage interrupting the storylines of the four English-language soap operas that remain on the air.
Then arrives the December jobs report Friday morning. Not bad, analysts said. And not particularly great either. Under the surface, it raised anew the questions about America’s future that everyone might prefer to ignore, especially on Capitol Hill, questions that remain untouched through the blizzard of tweets and the unending parade of bright shiny news objects.
Remember that Census Bureau story at the end of last month, that the U.S. population, at 328,239,523, grew by only half a percent from July 1, 2018, to July 1, 2019? The increase, net of births and deaths, was fewer than 1 million. That’s the first time it has dropped that low in decades. The coming census will likely generate more such news.
Japan is way ahead of the U.S. in the demographic doom category, of course, and the cultural aversion there to foreigners will likely keep that trend intact. The United States should be immune to that same destiny, given Ellis Island and its legacy. But the U.S. has learned to embrace the same human inclination that is so evident around the world, to fear immigrants, as if they weren’t one of the two keys to national prosperity that are within reach.
The Congress has learned to ignore the second key, the structural reforms that boost productivity growth.
The jobs report is all about population and it contained the outlines of what is actually important to the future, hints of what’s ahead. It showed income acceleration was absent in December, only deceleration. The gains there may never return, some say, to the pace set before the financial crisis.
Hours as well as wages were on the weakish side. In fact there was no reason evident for thinking average monthly payroll additions won’t be shrinking in 2020 and year by year as many economists predict.
The nearly record-long economic expansion, having been extended by all the walls of worry it has had to climb since the financial crisis a decade ago, will inevitably be hobbled by a next recession. The economy will afterward likely take even longer to exceed previous highs for the criteria that count, like income and economic growth.
As growth estimates get revised lower, the massive U.S. debt becomes a bigger burden. Discretionary spending becomes more constrained until there is no more wiggle room. It’s a bleak outlook from the experts, not for the distant future, but for the next decade.
The Associated Press a short while ago reported that the Trump administration is circulating a proposal to extend its travel ban to more countries, an echo of headlines that have appeared several times in the last three years and may keep repeating. The names of the countries are blacked out in the internal documents, the story says, so no one can leak their names before the new initiative is announced in coming days on the anniversary of a previous travel ban.
Many will cheer the new restrictions. Many will listen to prognostications of stocks continuing to extend their gains. Very few will raise any alarm about near motionless productivity growth and moribund population growth. On Capitol Hill few beyond the budget committees will talk about the American economy in 2025 and 2030. That “surprise” will have to wait.
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Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com