“The weakness of private business investment in most developed countries through the neoliberal era is difficult to explain on the basis of a standard regression equation. Most of the usual determinants of investment – including profitability, interest rates, and tax and regulatory policies – were aligned in a direction that should have elicited more private investment effort. But the neoliberal recipe delivered less investment, not more. And the failure of accumulated wealth to trickle down creates major economic and political problems for the system and its elites.
For all of Donald Trump’s claims of being an “outsider”, changing the traditional rules of politics and policy, his economic program is absolutely consistent with the general direction of the trickle-down, neoliberal policies that have already governed the US for almost four decades. Trump will further shift the distribution of income upward to corporations and those who own them. His policies will suppress the incomes and the consumption of workers – including cutting their public services. His regulatory and fiscal priorities will favour investment in expensive, capital-intensive sectors (like energy and defense) that support relatively few jobs, while imposing enormous costs on broader society and the planet. His financial and monetary policies will continue to privilege financial wealth and speculation over real investment and production, undoing even the baby steps taken to rein in finance after the conflagration of 2008. The core logic of his approach is transparent: enhance the wealth and power of business and the wealthy, and they will invest more in America, and everyone will prosper. There is very little novel content in Trump’s incarnation of trickle-down policy, and very little reason to believe that it will succeed in revitalizing business investment activity that has chronically disappointed. Outside of bursts of new activity in a couple of targeted sectors (like energy and military industries), there is no reason to expect that the trajectory of US business investment will improve in any sustained fashion under Trump’s guidance. Certainly his program cannot recreate the virtuous combination of driving factors that powered the long postwar boom in US capital accumulation: near-full employment, a growing public sector, and strong productivity growth, all of which (for a while) reinforced the vitality of private investment.
Even if the Trump program did succeed in motivating a generalized resurgence in US private business investment, of course, Americans (and others around the world) would have to ask themselves, “At what cost?” A temporary burst in investment in fossil fuel extraction and consumption, achieved by abandoning environmental regulations that were already too weak, is of dubious value when the costs of fossil fuel use are becoming intolerable. Similar questions could be asked about the general strategy of reinforcing profit margins through the suppression of wages and other socially destructive levers, in a country which already experiences more poverty and inequality than any other industrial nation. Business investment is never an end in its own right; it is socially beneficial only to the extent that it underpins job creation, incomes, productivity, and ultimate improvements in living standards. Trying to elicit a bit more investment effort by suppressing living standards a little further, is self-defeating to the ultimate purpose of economic development.
Investment in the US, and other advanced industrial countries, is held back by more fundamental problems than corporate tax design or environmental regulations. The fundamental vitality of the profit motive in eliciting accumulation, so celebrated in the early chapters of capitalist history, seems to have dissipated. The owners of businesses are content to consume their wealth, or hoard it, or speculate with it, instead of recycling it via new investments. Ever-more desperate attempts to elicit a bit more investment effort never seem to alter this stagnationist trajectory – with the incredible result today that overall production is actually becoming less capital-intensive, despite “miraculous” technological innovations. Trump is giving the trickle-down theory one more kick at the can, having successfully capitalized on popular discontent with the failures of previous attempts. Progressives must work harder to illuminate the failure of this business-led economic logic, and come up with other visions for financing capital investment, innovation and job-creation that do not depend on fruitlessly bribing the investing class to actually do the job it is supposed to.”
Jim Stanford (2017), US private capital accumulation and Trump’s economic program, in Trumponomics: Causes and Consequences, World Economic Association: College Publications, p.135-7.
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The Political Economy of Development 
I am not an expert on Trump nor on his economics in particular. I am disgusted, though, by the way he is treated by German politicians, the media and a German public totally void of critical thinking and absolutely in thrall with the canon of political correctness dictated by politics and the media.
It is eery to experience the degree of Gleichschaltung (the bringing into line of all minds in the country) concerning Trump in Germany. Trump-bashing is a social convention in this country, like saying “good morning”. It is frightful to live in a country that is incapable of seeing anything good in the top man of our most important ally, or apply a differentiating mode of perception instead of resorting at the mention of his name instantly to foaming hatred.
The perception of Trump in Germany, like the perception of environmental (and many other) issues, being void of rationality is of a purely religious vein. The last sentence concludes a long preamble to the hypothesis that I had originally in mind when deciding to write this comment:
Trump seems to have remobilised the lower strata, who have long since been betrayed by the neoliberalised left. At the same time, Trump is putting a pronounced emphasis on the national interest, thereby restrengthening the importance of the nation state in the public mind, which is being deceived by the left’s irresponsible flirt with a stateless world (the EU is a clear example that supranational constructions work as effectively as the national state only when the supranational becomes a fully fledged national state, which the EU is incapable of becoming, and hence chronically dysfunctional).
The social democratic paradigm is indispensably centered on the strong and sovereign nation state as the only means to guarantee full employment, a benign balance between capital and labour and the protection of society’s vulnerable strata. Whatever one thinks of Trumps policies in particular, he could well be triggering impulses that add momentum to a resuscitated social democracy, much like he has given vital impulses to the role of government in protecting scientific freedom and establishing checks on a politicised, government-dominated “science”.
Lastly, Trump has got balls, if you pardon my French. He is the only politician in the leading nations of the West who is not afraid to have an own opinion and defend it against the Zeitgeist, thus breaking the shackles of political correctness (that creeping form of ideological totalitarianism so loved by the post-social-democratic left).
Trumps courage and independence of mind has unleashed an intellectual civil war in the US, which I thoroughly welcome because it is reducing political apathy, reinvigorating pluralism and democracy. Political competition is the essence of freedom.
In Germany we have not seen genuine political competition between the major political forces and parties under the sorry reign of Merkel. I hope the impulses sent by Trump will reach our sleeping political order and the broad population and convince them that uncritical reliance on the political class is a bad idea, although it had seemed otherwise, when by a kind of political Minsky effect (stability creating instability) decades of responsible social democratic politics in post-war Germany had gradually enticed the people to turn into mere political consumers rather than critical participants in the political dialogue.