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Showing posts from January, 2016

What Donald Trump’s hammer would do to U.S. tech

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This post was also published in VentureBeat. Over the holidays, I heard Donald Trump giving his stump speech in South Carolina on my car radio. It strikes me that, for all we hear about Trump’s outlandish statements in the press, there’s very little reported about his actual message. Beneath all of his bluster and meandering, Trump is advocating a cogent economic platform targeting an increasingly disenfranchised middle class. It is well understood in economic circles that a combination of globalization, technology, and government policy — trends that most members of the Republican and Democratic parties fully support — has stagnated wage growth in the middle class. Trump and Bernie Sanders are the lone presidential candidates questioning this status quo, which is why they’re both drawing so much interest. Above: Source: Congressional Budget Office, Average Federal Taxes by Income Group, “Average After-Tax Household Income,” June, 2010, http://inequality.org/income-inequali