ECONOMY/SOCIALISM/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Donald Trump has enlisted his senior economic advisers to flesh out one of his early 2020 presidential campaign themes: Socialism is coming. In recent months, traditionally staid official White House economic reports and briefings have begun to emphasize the potentially massive costs of an ambitious socialist agenda and warn that America could transform into a Cold War dystopia. While last year’s Economic Report to the President, a congressionally mandated annual summary of the state of the economy, didn’t once mention ‘socialism,’ the word appears more than 100 times in this year’s 700-page-plus tome. The 2019 report, released earlier this week, features an entire chapter on the subject, which includes a recounting of the economic fallout from socialist experiments in China, the Soviet Union and Cuba. At the beginning of a briefing this week, staff with the White House Council of Economic Advisers distributed to reporters a set of slides that summarized the report. The last slide plastered the Soviet, Cuban, Venezuelan and Chinese flags on a graph detailing decreases in the production of livestock, crops, crude oil and cotton.”
–Nancy Cook and Andrew Restuccia, “‘High-level fear-mongering’: Trump’s economic team drives ‘socialism’ attack,” Politico, March 20, 2019 6:42 pm