The Felon Is Destroying the Future of America to Own the Libs

Throughout history great nations (and those perceived as such) have fallen through wars - think the Russian and Austria Empires - and competition with rising nations.  Sometimes the national  decline is driven or at least aggravated by bad policy decisions within a nation and/or the refusal to recognize shifts in industrial production and new technologies.  After both WWI and WWII, the United Kingdom failed to modernize numerous industries and lost its economic dominance, something that was made worse by its loss of its former colonies. Now, with China rising and striving to gain technological dominance and the European Union posing a potential counterweight, the United States under the Felon is making policy and industrial decisions that will likely harm America's future and cede leadership in rising technologies much as the UK did 75-100 years ago. Add to this the Felon's war on universities to stifle any views and ideologies that oppose the effort to take America back to the 1950's socially that will likely harm innovation, and it is a recipe for long term stagnation and decline. Much of what's happening is to "own the libs" and pander to white male grievance and perceived lost privilege. Neither motivation will make America competitive in new technologies.  A column in the New York Times looks at the harm being done:

The American economy seems to be slowing. Although the unemployment rate remains low, the jobs report released this month showed that the U.S. labor market has essentially been stalled since President Trump foisted “Liberation Day” on us in April. Yes, it’s true, the artificial intelligence sector remains white-hot, but once you look beyond it, the weather is chillier — the manufacturing sector may be shrinking, home building is slowing and most employment growth is happening in just one industry: health care.

[N]early seven months into his presidency, it’s now clear that Mr. Trump and his officials’ tax and trade policy — and their hatred for next-generation energy technologies — is distorting and, increasingly, robbing the economy of its complexity. And if he keeps at it, Mr. Trump will demote America into a deindustrialized power that relies on technology developed elsewhere and doesn’t know how to sell much more than crypto, soybeans and petroleum products.

You can see this, first, because Mr. Trump and his officials are waging a war on electricity infrastructure. This campaign is primarily driven by their opposition to the solar and wind farms that they associate with their foils, the Democrats. . . . . That war began, of course, with Mr. Trump’s signature domestic policy law, which pinched off long-running tax credits for wind and solar energy. But it does not stop there. In the past few weeks, the Trump administration has started an all-out war on renewable energy. . . . . every step of every federal permit for renewable energy must now pass under the eye of some political appointee. Another recent order has suggested that the federal government may essentially ban wind and solar farms from public land. A separate Transportation Department policy could even restrict companies’ ability to build private wind farms on private land.

Mr. Trump’s maelstrom of tariffs is further eroding our economic complexity. As more and more businesses are realizing, his trade levies are more likely to weaken domestic manufacturers than strengthen them. That’s because Mr. Trump is unpredictably imposing tariffs on everything — raw materials, factory equipment and even some Canadian and Mexican products — and then constantly changing these levies.

That makes it impossible for domestic manufacturers to plan how and where to expand capacity to avoid the new taxes. . . . . If companies must choose between paying a flat 15 percent import tariff or navigating America’s ever-shifting stack of steel, aluminum and equipment taxes, they’ll often choose to manufacture abroad.

But the clearest example of the atrophy is in the bill’s demolition of electric vehicle tax credits. E.V.s are to the 21st century what gasoline-burning cars were to the 20th century: an important “apex” industry that builds on and incorporates the work of other sectors, like steel, mining and chemicals.

Smothering the E.V. industry might have been merely a regrettable mistake for a Republican to make 10 years ago. Today, it is economic idiocy. Over the past decade, China has built a new kind of industrial economy that combines a specific stack of technologies — batteries, motors, semiconductors, sensors and software — into high-end manufactured goods like cars and drones. It is better at producing these high-end goods than just about anyone else in the world. Its electric cars, in particular, are “far superior” to what’s available in the West, according to Jim Farley, Ford’s chief executive.

Some observers even believe that China will become the world’s first “electrostate” — a country that runs on electricity, not oil. What it has already accomplished is, in some ways, more impressive: With its solar panels and batteries, China is on its way to turning energy production into something closer to a manufactured good. It is now able to sell solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles to the rest of the world as a low-cost, low-pollution alternative to fossil fuels or internal combustion vehicles.

But Americans should not miss the significance of what seems to be happening: China’s low-cost electronic technologies once augmented gasoline and internal-combustion cars; now, they are replacing them. And as Chinese companies transform the global energy market with cheap solar panels, batteries and E.V.s, America is acting like a doddering industrial giant — too hooked on oil and gas revenues, and the political power that results from them, to exercise the economic muscles it will need in the future.

The United States is good at growing food, drilling for oil and gas, making chemicals, producing software and building internal combustion vehicles of various types. We are not as good at making cost-competitive batteries, electronics, solar panels, wind turbines or E.V.s. Without a concerted effort to make us more skilled at the latter, the United States will surrender its technological edge in the very industries that have long contributed to its economic (and military) strength.

Now silicon and lithium are devouring the transportation sector — cars, trains, flight and military technology. Mr. Trump is actively trying to keep American companies from participating in the consumer side of that revolution — probably because admitting that it’s happening might hurt oil companies. So instead, he’s undercutting the new and nascent sectors of the American economy — making us less innovative, prosperous and free.

In the very short term, we will probably be fine. We will keep buying gas-guzzling S.U.V.s, building suburban homes and training A.I. models. Technology executives will keep giving glass and gold plaques to the president. In the long term, I worry that we are ill-prepared for what’s coming.