You probably saw clips of the latest contretemps of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump arguing in their respective stump speeches about real estate. Without recreating the whole thing, in essence Hillary complained that Trump was rooting for the real estate crash in the late 2000s so that he could buy property cheaply.
This incensed the soon-to-be-indicted and this-week-disgraced Mrs. Clinton, who herself has profited from buying low and selling high in the past, with some nefarious implications of funky options trades and unethical stock tips in her Arkansas days. She was really upset -- imagine, she said, wishing for real estate to lose value so he could buy it low and sell it high. No really, imagine! How dare he?
The Donald, for his part, was incredulous. "Gee, a real estate developer wanting to buy at a lower price", I paraphrase him as saying. "Who the [heck] wouldn't?", he said.
I don't know about you, but I immediately read a lot into the differing responses. Hillary Clinton has been married into government for decades and, for part of the last 15 years, actually working in government. OK, maybe "working" is an exaggeration since a lot of that time was as a senator. Let's go with "paid a government salary."
She has been associated with government, by marriage or by salary, for so long that she has been insulated from things like payrolls, and running a business, and profits. The economy is not run for the benefit of the government, but she has long since forgotten that. Profitability and, for that matter, business decisions in general, are out of her ken. As long as she and her husband can give speeches at a few hundred grand a pop, and get the private jets and first-class hotels and the other demanded perks, then why would she care about actual job-creating businesses?
When Donald Trump said what he did a few years back about hoping the real estate market would crash, we might have not been hoping for the same thing, but it was patently obvious why he would have hoped for it. He was, as he is still, not a government employee but a businessman, a real estate developer looking to create value for his company.
He thought real estate was generally overvalued, demand driven up by a few things like Barney Frank-era mandates about lending to people who ultimately couldn't afford their mortgages. As a developer, that was not a good situation for a buy low, build up and add value, and sell high business.
Donald Trump was speaking to, and operating from, the reality of the situation and the time relative to his own businesses. A crash wasn't good for a lot of people, but it would be good for him. Him. Donald Trump, head of the company for which it would also be good. I'm sure he would say the same thing today; in fact, he did. Tuesday.
It's hard to understand the insular world that Hillary Clinton inhabits. She has been forced into the business-bashing left even further by the Bernie Sanders campaign and its relentless nature vs. her relentless unlikeability. Accordingly, even when she is hollering at Donald Trump, she has to use language and make points that simply don't resonate with people with at least a few toes dipped into the reality pool.
Hillary really, really wants to be president of the United States. But wouldn't it be really helpful if, somewhere along the line, she had been president of something else, like maybe a company that employed actual private-sector workers? She still probably could have gotten someone to drive her around, but at least she would understand a lot more about how businesses operate than she learned back at Wellesley.
Because she obviously hasn't learned about it since.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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