The New Standard of Critical Thinking

I was having a discussion with house guests over coffee one morning recently and the subject of the economy came up. Because no subject is truly complete these days without bringing politics into it I found it took an interesting turn. All three guests were in their early thirties, graduates from great universities with one of them having completed a masters in economics. Each has been successful in their own right since graduation and were engaged in jobs that would lead to very respectable careers if they so desired.

What became interesting was when the subject of the Trump administration came up in correlation to the economy. While not overtly anti-Trump; I think partially because they were being kind as they felt out my politics, it soon became almost unanimous that the current administration and much of what its policies had done were not responsible for the dramatic economic uptick over the last 18 months. Absent from their memory was the 7 years of status quo fiscal policy and dismal post-recession growth between 2008 and 2015. To them, it seemed simply a matter of normal economic progression over time. In their mind, the robust recovery since 2016 energized by the 2017 tax cuts and deregulation brought to mind a familiar phrase used by former president Barack Obama, …” You didn’t build that.”

What followed next was a short dialogue that displayed a rather shallow root structure supporting their positions, surprisingly most evident in the reasoning from the economics specialist. Lost in reasoning was any connection or recognition of administrative policies geared toward corporate deregulation, repatriation of corporate capital held abroad, and tax policy. Much to the contrary these things were refuted as either ineffective or focused on big business and the upper-income earners. There was no connecting the dots between a bigger economy and larger tax receipt yields supported by recent governmental data. (The Corporate Tax Cut Is Paying for Itself, Wall Street Journal; 19 September 2018). All three claimed having never realized any advantage in their personal income taxes from 2017 after thorough examinations of their paycheck stubs and that in their minds all of it was geared to 1%’ers and corporations. This perplexed me as my recollection of being a thirty-something was that I wasn’t very cerebral about the taxes portion of my paycheck stubs at that age; my mind was on other things far from anything fiscal on the federal level.

So how did we get here, what is being lost in discourse, and is this the new normal for depth in terms of critical thinking? These guys were bright, well-schooled, not rookies in the business world, and had a refreshing ability to entertain a cogent conversation. But they seemed unable intellectually to accept some pretty evident realities that were not congruent with either their advanced education or the mainstream media loudspeaker.

Does reworking NAFTA matter? Is our trade imbalance important enough to the health of our domestic economy to try to renegotiate it? Was it not prudent to unleash corporate America from burdensome and mostly feckless governmental regulation? If you actually didn’t see any difference in your paycheck stub based on the advertised tax rate cut is it that it doesn’t exist or did you simply fail to exercise new credit or deduction advantages built into the new tax policy? Was it wrong for the most industrialized country on earth that also employs and produces the most, to also tax those corporations at the highest rate on the globe (OECD countries)? Does lowering that corporate tax rate not carry positives for growth and job creation? Is there an understanding of the impact that the repatriation of overseas corporate earnings does for the front-end health of a corporation that potentially translates to employee paychecks, job creation, and corporate growth?

These were the questions that were never asked. Had there been time I would have loved to peel back the millennial onion further to see their thought process and depth of reasoning on foreign policy, entitlements, immigration, etc.

I’m intrigued and care far more about ‘how and why’ one thinks the way they do than ‘what’ one thinks. Critical thinking is tough these days for anyone not willing to look past the persona of Donald Trump and give a fair assessment of his policies; good and bad. To do so, however, requires one to go past CNN, Twitter, and the water cooler, and not immediately revert to the reflexive reaction – ‘if it’s Trump, it must be bad’.