Please follow and like us:

“Canada has been unfair to the United States.”

“Canada charges a 295% tariff on American dairy imports.”

“NAFTA has been bad for American workers.”

“Canada has a trade surplus with the United States.”

“Tax cuts for the rich create jobs.”

“I am the best deal maker.”

 

Every time I think Trump has reached his nadir, he says something worse.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been falsely critical of Canada for quite a while now, but his threats against the people of Canada following the Charlevoix G7 conference have reached a new low in juvenile, petulant mendacity.

Americans are embarrassed. Most of the Americans I know, and a lot of strangers who comment in the media and on social media, have apologized.

Gotta love DeNiro.

But that’s one of the consequences of making political decisions in the absence of facts—or in many cases, in defiance of facts. They don’t achieve their stated goals.

Americans elected Trump to “Make America Great Again.” So far, epic fail.

People against facts

The Trump presidency has been characterized as “post-fact.” Trump’s supporters continue to support him even when he says things that are patently untrue.

His description of huge crowds for his inauguration are the most obvious example, but there are many more. The latest are his tweets about the U.S.–Canada trading relationship.

Remember when he admitted to lying about the U.S. trade deficit to Prime Minister Trudeau’s face? “Here comes this good-looking guy … and he says, ‘Mr. President, Canada does not have a trade surplus with the U.S.’ And I said, ‘Actually, Justin, you do.’ I had no idea!”

A trend being emulated

Naturally, other dishonest politicians are noticing and adopting the fact-free strategy. Doug Ford of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives is the closest example to me. He won the election nicely with a fact-free platform:

“Tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs.”

“High hydroelectricity costs are the result of high salaries for the CEO and Board of Hydro One.”

“An $800 tax cut for people on minimum wage is worth more than a $2,000 increase in earnings.”

“A $2,000 tax credit for child care is better than universal child care,” which costs around $20,000 a year per child.

Of course, Ford’s not the only one. It’s not like Trump invented this. It was called the “Big Lie,” and used effectively by the Nazis in Germany.

The wealthy backers of the Republican Party and Ronald Reagan used the Big Lie in the 80s to push tax and spending cuts, claiming wealth would “trickle down.”

The corporate class used this same reasoning to push for banking deregulation from the 90s to 2008. They claimed that Keynesian economics don’t work. Then when they caused an economic meltdown that affected billionaires a lot more than it did ordinary working people. They called for governments to bail out private corporations, on the argument that economic stimulus would end the slump.

Keynesian economics in a nutshell.

And now, bankers are calling for dismantling the regulations put in place to prevent a recurrence of the 2008 crisis.

What difference it makes

What’s the result of fact-free decision making? Simply put, you don’t achieve the results that you want.

Facts don’t care whether you believe in them or not. You can deny climate change and claim it’s a hoax. That’s not going to make the oceans cooler. It’s not going to convince cod not to migrate north to cooler waters, and it’s not going to convince the squid to go back from British waters to Portugal.

You can deny gravity, but unless you’re Bugs Bunny, you’re going to fall off the cliff.

Doug Ford and his conservative cronies can give all the tax money to their millionaire and billionaire friends, but that’s not going to create jobs. It’s just going to make it easier for them to indulge themselves at taxpayers’ expense.

But that was the real goal all along, wasn’t it?

But what about proof, Scott?

I hear what you’re saying, and I agree. We need empirical evidence to verify these ideas.

I love empirical evidence. Call me crazy that way.

So let’s check back in six months, and then in a year.

Let’s see what the results are in North Korea. On trade between the U.S. and its closest trading partners. On the jobs situation in the industries that Trump favours.

Let’s see whether the corporations that got the biggest tax cuts in Ontario hired a bunch more people.

Let’s see whether the people on minimum wage are using their $800 (maximum) tax savings to find affordable housing or become food secure.

Let’s see how well the environment in Ontario is doing—although, to be fair, a year is not long enough to notice a change in the environment. Still, let’s see what ditching carbon emission controls does for our atmosphere.

And let’s see what getting rid of the cap-and-trade system, tax cuts for the wealthy, cutting the tax on gasoline and subsidizing hydroelectricity prices does for the Ontario debt.

Because facts really do matter.