❝ A pack of Nobel Prize-winning economists gave Donald Trump and his policy plans the thumbs-down on Friday, with one saying the president-elect’s programs could lead to a deep recession.
Speaking on a panel during the first day of the annual American Economic Association meeting in Chicago, the Nobel laureates voiced a variety of concerns about the billionaire developer’s stance, from his haranguing of U.S. companies about their outsourcing plans to the risk that his tax and spending proposals could lead to run-away budget deficits.
“There is a broad consensus that the kind of policies that our president-elect has proposed are among the polices that will not work,” said Joseph Stiglitz, summing up the views of the panel that included his fellow Columbia University professor Edmund Phelps and Yale University’s Robert Shiller…
❝ …While other presidents have run big budget deficits in the past, they depended on foreign purchases of U.S. debt to do so.
With Trump threatening to renegotiate U.S. trade agreements and shift to an “America First” policy, the willingness of foreigners to keep buying U.S. government securities can’t be taken for granted, University of Chicago’s Roger Myerson said.
America’s interaction with other countries “has to be based on confidence and trust,” Stiglitz said.
The world view of the United States – right now – wavers between contemptuous laughter and risk-based angst. In my mind, quite justifiably.
Eideard 
“One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. “The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any ‘real’ sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only ‘thinks he sees it’ is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.” Phillip K. Dick, “Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality” (1964) http://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/23806/image.jpg
☑︎ The Institute for Energy Research (IER) and its political arm, the American Energy Alliance, are deeply involved in determining the president-elect’s energy policy, Bloomberg reports. https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-01-05/tiny-group-of-tesla-skeptics-emerges-as-trump-energy-powerhouse IER, which was founded by a former Enron executive, has been described as a front group for the fossil fuel industry, and has received funding from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, Peabody Energy, and groups linked to the Koch brothers. Its head, Thomas Pyle, was previously a lobbyist for Koch Industries and is now leading Trump’s transition team for the Department of Energy. IER has worked to slow the growth of green jobs, campaigned against subsidies for wind and solar, and pushed misleading research about renewable energy and the cost of cap-and-trade.
☑︎ Our next Education Secretary, if Donald Trump gets his wish, will be Betsy DeVos, a billionaire heiress with no training or experience in education who advocates privatizing the public school system despite having never attended public schools nor allowing her children to do so. She advocates gradually privatizing public schools and allowing them to be more religiously oriented. Devos has compared her work to a biblical battleground where she wants to “advance God’s Kingdom.” http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/secretary-of-the-department-of-education-who-is-betsy-devos-170104?news=860007
☑︎ Department of Health and Human Services nominee Tom Price, a long time member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a right-wing group that has fought against anti-smoking campaigns; opposed mandatory vaccinations; linked vaccines to autism and abortion to breast cancer, in both cases without medical evidence; and denied that the HIV virus causes AIDS. In the Georgia Senate, he advocated for caps on medical malpractice awards and fought efforts to make it easier for people to vote. http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/department-of-health-and-human-services-who-is-tom-price-170109?news=860019
☑︎ Meanwhile, House Republicans have not only empowered their staffers to interrogate federal workers under oath, they’ve revived an arcane rule that will allow them to cut the salary of any individual federal employee or group of employees who work on any program at any federal agency down to $1 per year – which effectively gives Republicans the power to intimidate and/or remove any individual or group of federal employees who cause ‘problems’, which means they can now eliminate any federal programs they don’t like for any reason. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/house-republicans-revive-obscure-rule-that-could-allow-them-to-slash-the-pay-of-individual-federal-workers-to-1/2017/01/04/4e80c990-d2b2-11e6-945a-76f69a399dd5_story.html