Looking for clouds in U.S. silver lining

Apple’s recent announcement that it will repatriate most of the estimated US$274 billion that it holds in offshore earnings is great news for the United States. Uncle Sam will get a one-time US$38-billion tax payment. The company promises to add 20,000 jobs to its U.S. workforce, a 24-percent increase, and build a new campus. Another US$ 5 billion will go toward a fund for advanced manufacturing in America.

C’mon. What’s with the long face?

In December, this column warned that hysterical opposition to the Republican tax bill was a fool’s game for Democrats that could only help Donald Trump. Yes, there were things to dislike in the legislation, from both a liberal and a conservative perspective.

But it was not the moral and fiscal apocalypse its critics claimed. And its central achievement — a dramatic cut in corporate rates to 21 per cent from 35 per cent — was an economic no-brainer that many Democrats, including president Barack Obama, had supported ( albeit less steeply) just a few years ago.

Apple will not be the only multinational that will soon bring back gigantic profits to take advantage of new low repatriation rates. Microsoft holds US$ 146 billion in overseas earnings, Pfizer US$178 billion, General Electric US$ 82 billion, Alphabet US$78 billion, and Cisco US$ 71 billion, according to estimates from the Zion Research Group. The total stash is about US$ 3 trillion — by one measure nearly three times what it was just a decade ago.

Assume that just half of that money comes home to the United States. It’s still the equivalent of Canada’s entire gross domestic product. Not too shabby, especially considering all the hyperbolic predictions of economic doom that went with Trump’s election.

“The global financial destruction that will happen under President Trump has already begun.” That was a headline in London’s Independent newspaper on Nov. 9, 2016. Those whom the gods will mock, first they make pompous economic forecasters.

It’s worth thinking carefully about why Trump’s critics have been so wrong about the economy, and of the damage their hubris does to the anti-Trump case.

Democrats entered the 2016 election cycle on what they thought was the back of a strong economy. It wasn’t. Barack Obama presided over the weakest expansion in postwar history. The economy grew by 15.5 per cent from the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2016. During the (slightly l onger) Reagan boom of 1982– 90, it grew by more than 38 per cent. The failure to understand this meant a failure to appreciate the depth of American discontent. It helps explain how Hillary Clinton lost her unlosable election to a man whose central claim to office was that he understood business.

More recently, Democrats have convinced themselves that Trump is merely the beneficiary of Obama’s economic legacy. But how can the critics who previously assured us that Trump’s election would cause certain calamity now explain that he’s nothing but a lucky bystander to forces beyond his control? Had the economy tumbled over the past year his critics would surely have blamed him. It’s ill grace to deny him all credit when it’s doing so well.

One gets a distinct sense that Trump’s relentless critics would rather bury the Apple news or look for the cloud within the silver lining. This is not a good look. If making confident but lousy predictions is one form of political malpractice, wanting things to fail is another.

Donald Trump is a profoundly defective person who nearly every morning does grave political self- harm. But he is also president, and normal Americans — that is, those who hold the outcome of the next election in their hands — do not want him to fail. They want statesmanship, not schadenfreude.

Wouldn’t it be smart of all of Trump’s opponents to show they are superior to him in the former? And wouldn’t a good way of doing that be to abjure the latter, even if it sometimes means giving him some credit?

NORMAL AMERICANS DO NOT WANT TRUMP TO FAIL.