Scott ("Dilbert") Adams
argued last month that President Trump enjoys the highest presidential rating ever, using small-business optimism as a proxy:
Big businesses can do fine with a president who promotes policies that favor big corporations, even if the rest of the country is suffering. But when small business owners are feeling good about the economy, that means the president is doing a more bottoms-up job of getting things right. President Trump has focused on bottoms-up economics from the start, meaning jobs and lessened regulations. Apparently that is working.
Adams' optimism is welcome, although there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. The situation in Syria has been heating up.
ReplyDeleteAlong those lines is Trump's budget proposal to cut $125 million from the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. This program was originally designed to not get Federal funding in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI think the Partnership should be eliminated altogether, even though it has done salutary work. Most of the benefit of the program has been to small businesses--local businesses--Big Corp has its own advisory resources. That being the case, the States and local jurisdictions should be the ones fronting the costs for this sort of thing. State universities already have Agriculture Extension Services; they could just as well leverage their awesome business school and economic program expertise to run Business Extension Services, just doing them on the State's nickel instead of the Federal dime.
Eric Hines