[mindslight]

> If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status

IIUC that was actually an explicit goal laid out in Ron Vara's book. It's obviously hard to tell where the line is between deliberate policy and mere narrative-chum for useful idiots to latch on to. But the impression I've gotten is that many of Grump's moves are in line with this goal, but fail to achieve it because the Dollar is so damn sticky (at least in the near term).

Also, the truth is that supporting manufacturing jobs to compete with China could always have been straightforwardly done by taking the surplus wealth gained by being the world reserve currency (ie being able to trade paper dollars for real goods), and directly spending it on subsidies for domestic manufacturing. But the policy over the past several decades has been instead to simply give away that wealth to Wall Street in the form of artificially low interest rates that create an asset bubble (ie the fake "fiscal responsibility" that the Republican party had been promoting)