Donald Trump's 'merit-based' immigration plan may benefit Indian professionals 08-03

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has announced his support for a legislation that would cut in half the number legal immigrants allowed into the US while moving to a "merit-based" system favouring English-speaking skilled workers for residency cards.

If passed by the Congress and signed into law, the legislation titled the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act could benefit highly-educated and technology professionals from countries such as India.

The RAISE Act would scrap the current lottery system to get into the US and instead institute a points-based system for earning a green card. Factors that would be taken into account include English language skills, education, high- paying job offers and age.

"The RAISE Act will reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars. It will do this by changing the way the US issues Green Cards to nationals from other countries. Green Cards provide permanent residency, work authorisation, and fast track to citizenship," Trump said at a White House event to announce his support to the RAISE Act.

Standing along with two top authors of the bill -- Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue Trump said the RAISE Act ends chain migration, and replaces the low-skilled system with a new points-based system for receiving a Green Card.

This competitive application process will favour applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy, he said, adding that the RAISE Act prevents new migrants and new immigrants from collecting welfare, and protects US workers from being displaced.

Trump said this legislation will not only restore America's competitive edge in the 21st century, but it will restore the sacred bonds of trust between America and its citizens.

"This legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first and that puts America first," he said.

The RAISE Act will be re-orienting Green Card system towards people who can speak English, who have high degrees of educational attainment, who have a job offer that pays more, and a typical job in their local economy, who are going to create a new business, and who are outstanding in their field around the world, Senator Cotton said.

Senator Perdue said the current system does not work. "It keeps America from being competitive, and it does not meet the needs of the economy today," he said.

"Today we bring in 1.1 million legal immigrants a year. Over 50 per cent of our households of legal immigrants today participate in our social welfare system. Right now, only one 1 out of 15 immigrants who come into our country come in with skills that are employable. We've got to change that," he said.

"We can all agree that the goals of our nation's immigration system should be to protect the interests of working Americans, including immigrants, and to welcome talented individuals who come here legally and want to work and make a better life for themselves. Our current system makes it virtually impossible for them to do that," said Senator Perdue.

According to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the higher entry standards established in this proposal will allow authorities to do a more thorough job reviewing applicants for entry, therefore protecting the security of the US homeland.

The additional time spent on vetting each application as a result of this legislation will also ensure that each application serves the national interest, he observed.

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Options for Indian Students looking for a U.S. Job under Trump's Reforms 05-28

President Trump's "Buy American, Hire American" strategy has the H-1B visa in its sights.
The H-1B visa is an employment-based, non-immigrant visa category for temporary workers. For such a visa, an employer must offer a job and apply for your H-1B visa petition with the US Immigration Department. This visa is the most popular for U.S. based foreign students who are wrapping up their education and very popular with Indian nationals.

Currently, non-national students have a 1 year grace period from the completion of their studies before they have to leave the country. Alternatively, they can switch visa classes during this time and stay in America if they meet the requirements. The H-1B is the obvious choice for those looking to begin their careers in the U.S. with no extended wait times and low costs. However, every year a total of only 65,000 visas are given for bachelor holders with an additional 20,000 visas given for master degree holders. Between the onshore and offshore applicants, there were 235,000 applications last year. The requirements of finding a company willing to sponsor you and then getting through the lottery mean uncertainty for fresh graduates looking to start a career. 

(Shown is the number of H-1B applications filed for the top 12 sponsors during the 16-17 season)
Speculation has suggested that Trump's "Buy American, Hire American" strategy will do everything from cutting the program completely to lowering the available H-1B visas. The reality, and what was recently pointed out by India's Minister of Commerce, Nirmala Sitharaman, is that the allocation of the visas will likely change.

"No need to get panicky on the visa front. The lottery process is something I suppose they (the US) wanted to do a correction on. The numbers are not something they are changing... the numbers will not come down," Sitharaman said.

Trump has led the growing sentiment of protectionism across various industries seeking to safeguard jobs for locals and raise the bar for foreign workers. A merit-based H1-B system may offer the best for both America and foreigners. The proposed changes would see that the top candidates only are granted a visa. A change that would see America be able to hold on to top international talent while maintaining U.S. jobs in other areas.
The added uncertainty of the potential changes has led to an increase in wealthy Indians applying for the EB-5 visa. The EB-5 visa grants permanent residency for the applicant and their immediate family. With U.S. permanent residency, students don't have the uncertainty of a non-resident as they are free to stay in America and apply for any job without added visa requirements. Other benefits include lower tuition when compared to international students and increased university acceptance rates.
Other options for foreigners looking to begin or continue their career in the U.S. include the following:

• E-1/2 visa, dubbed the 'treaty visa' as only nationals for countries with certain work and trade treaties are eligible.
• EB-2/3 visa. Another work visa with different requirements from the H-1B. The number of applications is so high, the waiting list is approximately 10-15 years for Indian Nationals.
• Family Eligibility visas. Based off a U.S. National sponsoring your visa. Apart from the obvious family requirement, there are different waiting times for immediate vs extended family members.  

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And now: President CEO : An opnion from Harvard Business School Faculty. 01-20

       

Donald John Trump, the 45th U.S. president, will be the first to go straight from the boardroom to the Oval Office without any political experience or military service.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump parlayed his fame as a celebrity real estate developer into a winning pitch to voters as a Washington outsider. Emphasizing his decades of experience as a wheeler-dealer building luxury hotels, casinos, and golf courses around the world, Trump pledged to use his business savvy and hard-charging leadership style to “drain the swamp” of the Washington bureaucracy and deliver results for the American people.

The United States is not a company, of course, and its citizens are not employees, but voters still were drawn to his promises of a fresh approach to governing. So what skills and perspectives might the wealthy businessman draw on as he transitions from CEO to commander in chief?
To get a better sense of the months ahead, The Gazette asked Harvard Business School (HBS) faculty members how Trump’s nearly 50 years of experience in building a global corporate empire might shape his approach to the presidency. Their insights follow.

Real estate rarely a zero-sum game

John D. MacomberSenior lecturer of business administration

You have to start by distinguishing between a branding operation that’s supported by other activities, like Disney Hotels, and pure real estate [companies], like Boston Properties and Vornado. Trump is primarily a branding operation.

There are many sectors in real estate. Hospitality is one of them. In hotels, there are usually three parts to every deal. Usually, there’s one entity that owns the land and owns the building. There’s a different entity that likes to do operations like housekeeping and food and beverage. And there’s a third entity that has the brand. Companies like the Four Seasons or Ritz Carlton, we say they “flag” a hotel. They don’t manage it; they “flag” it. Trump has a few hotels, but mostly the properties are owned by other investors and he’s the “flag,” the name.

Given that case, that would inform a world view that has a high sensitivity to perceptions in what we call in real estate “the real economy.” Are the rooms full, and in which locations? Hotel people have a high sensitivity to what they perceive as “the financial economy.” They don’t know the inner workings, but “what are the interest rates?” They have high sensitivity to transactions and to partners, because everything’s a bespoke, one-off transaction. Typically, people like this also see the shared value. They seldom get into a zero-sum negotiation. They think, “How can we help each other?”
You’d expect someone like this to be very transactional, with a very high sensitivity to perception of current events, with a very high sensitivity to perceived financial prices, if not the inner workings of the financial market, and extremely high sensitivity to brand: What are people thinking? And you’d expect a much lower sensitivity to administration, to structure, to organizational dynamics, to long-term view, and to capital spending.

The incoming president has a really good sense for what people want to buy in that demographic. But going forward, one would expect that the temptation would be to continue to play your strong suit and try and express your own taste and your ideas because it’s worked for you for 50 years.
The second issue you’d expect of anybody in this situation would be that they’re probably quite confident in their own judgment. Having a very long record of reinforcement in making good decisions, for anybody, that would make them think they’ll be expert in other areas, whether it’s aviation or welfare or defense.

I think an early indicator will be: Can he persuade a different group of people? He’s so good at persuading the people he knows, but can he persuade Congress to act? If he’s a good communicator and good negotiator and good creator of shared value, he’ll figure out something that works for House Speaker Paul Ryan and for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. A second thing to look for is how much leeway does he really give to someone like Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson or to Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Department nominee, or to Vice President Mike Pence? It looks like he’s a person who hasn’t delegated a lot in the past. So those would be early things to see. And then there’s what he’d do in a crisis. From what’s been reported by the press, the crises in the past, he’s been able to bluster through. There may be different crises here, where it’s not a question of, say, talking firmly to your bankers.

For the most part, it looks like he’s always had the choice to walk away. In most of these project negotiations, he’s had a chance to do that. In the presidency, there will probably be negotiations — with Congress, with other nations, or with agencies or with all the people a president deals with — where you have to make a deal, and walking away is not a choice. It’ll be interesting to see how well he can create shared value in that context.

A lot of negotiations are also about leverage, and for the most part, he’s gotten himself in a very favorable position where he usually has the negotiating leverage. He may not have the leverage going forward. It’ll be interesting to see how he handles that. And can he use those negotiating skills and those communication skills and create shared value skills in a situation where there’s no walk-away option and he doesn’t have the leverage.

 “Command and control” management model

Nancy F. KoehnJames E. Robison Professor of Business Administration

I study business leaders, government leaders, religious leaders, social activists, and other individuals — past and present — who exercise real, worthy impact. As a historian, I don’t see huge differences among political and business leaders in terms of what makes them effective. Courageous, serious leaders are men and women who are animated by a big, honorable mission, who get things done to achieve that mission, who demonstrate consistent emotional awareness as they do this, who motivate others to try to be better and bolder in pursuit of this purpose, and who work (tirelessly) to become better leaders themselves while they are doing all these other things.

Thus far, we have not seen much evidence — either along the campaign trail or since the election — that Mr. Trump meets most of these criteria. But I think many voters perceived him as being successful in getting things done. Some of this perception was likely a result of his public confidence. Some may have resulted from his bluntness and his stated intent to cut through the red tape of Washington, along with its perceived stagnation, dominance by big money, and the sense that so many Americans have that the federal government is run by a small number of people calling all the shots.

I think his hard-charging tone, coupled with his willingness to single out certain groups — from the media to Muslims to women to Hispanics — as responsible for many of the nation’s problems unleashed reservoirs of frustration, anger, and fear among certain groups of Americans. History makes it clear that all leaders have to be able to understand and respond to emotional currents among the people they influence. And I think Trump did that on the campaign trail in ways that served his political purposes very well. It is much less clear that inciting such animosity — and indeed hatred — among certain groups of Americans toward their fellow citizens will serve our country well. Certainly, history offers no such assurances. In fact, leaders who have risen to power by relying heavily on collective anger and discrimination toward other groups have proven to be despots, tyrants, and men who destroy the values and institutions that lie at the heart of democracies.

Homing in on Trump’s reputation as a hard-charging man of action, we can perhaps think about his management style as one of “command and control.” This is a description in which the company, organization, or enterprise runs as a kind of military operation in which everyone lines up and falls in line. Although in the early 20th century many businesses were structured along such lines, “command and control” organizations have become much less common — outside of the military — in the last 40 or 50 years.

Today, businesses and other enterprises are flatter, much less hierarchical, and much more diverse than the companies that first grew to great scale and came to define the modern

industrial economy. This evolution is partly a result of globalization and the fact that many large organizations have become much more interdependent and complex; one-size-fits-all no longer works so well. This development is also a function of social, economic, and political change. Leaders now have to deal with a much broader set of stakeholders, including citizens, consumers, and labor around the world in a way that they simply didn’t half a century ago.

At the same time, business has become responsible for much more than simply “selling high and buying low” and “delivering a healthy return for shareholders.” Today, companies are being held accountable for a whole host of social and political issues, from labor practices to environmental policies. In this context, hard charging and “command and control” are perhaps overly blunt instruments.

I write and teach about individual leaders concerned with an honorable purpose, men and women who succeed against great odds. The people I study — from the explorer Ernest Shackleton to Abraham Lincoln to the environmentalist Rachel Carson — all have a great deal of deftness, meaning they understand the precept: “In this particular situation, what do I need to do to move my mission forward?” They also have great reserves of emotional awareness, which they apply to themselves and the people they are trying to influence. From this perspective, it seems to me that if you’re always on a hard-charging default drive, then it’s very difficult to pause and summon up the suppleness, care, and emotional acuity that leaders need in high-stakes situations.

I think the incoming president has been very successful in terms of how he’s managed the American media to his ends. I can count on two hands the number of leaders I have seen in my lifetime who could walk into a room, take the measure of a large crowd so quickly, and then move into that energy and bring them along to embrace his agenda at a given moment. He has done this over and over, not only among his political supporters, but also among reporters and other members of the press.

Despite these skills, which require some foresight, he appears to be extraordinarily reactive in his emotions, in his declarations, in the very heavy hammer that he wields across the board on different subjects as they come up, in real time, using social media. This is unprecedented. There is nothing in American history that compares with this aspect of his behavior: a public candidate and now president-elect, who is not only willing but eager to raise the public temperature so significantly, so often, and on such a widespread basis.

When I reflect on strong leaders, I usually see an important connection between a given individual’s decisions and his or her respect for the organization for which that person is responsible. Government leaders make choices affected by laws and the founding documents of a nation; judges issue decisions anchored in precedent; CEOs consider the values and mission of their companies; even disruptive entrepreneurs struggle to build an organization that will execute a larger end and then endure. This connection is critical because a worthy leader wants the people whom he or she motivates to respect the organization and to serve that enterprise from such a place. This means a leader is always working to deepen the sense of integrity that his or her followers accord the organization, including its values, its charter, and those charged with serving as stewards of these critical aspects. We have yet to see Mr. Trump evidence such respect or incite it among his fellow Americans.

Anyone we would say was an effective leader had the respect of his or her organization and toggled always back and forth between “what does this mean for the trajectory and the integrity and the character and the identity and the stability of my organization?” and “how is that related to my actions?” And that critical umbilical cord is, from my vantage point, not in sight here. I don’t see it. And I’m most troubled by that.

“Push” and “pull’ marketing to build public support

John A. QuelchCharles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and professor in health policy and management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Marketing is important in campaigning. It is equally important in governing. In 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency with an uplifting call for hope and change. He leveraged online media to attract volunteers and donors, building a swell of grassroots support. In 2016, Donald Trump also leveraged new media, notably Twitter, to generate grassroots support around his call to make America great again. Effective communications and wise targeting of resources against key voter segments, notably in swing states, were equally important in both cases.

Marketing in the world of politics is different from marketing in the world of commerce. In politics, you need majority support or at least a plurality to be successful. In commerce, you can be highly profitable as a niche brand appealing to a narrow segment of the population. In fact, being all things to all people is a recipe for disaster. The other noteworthy distinction is that the presidential marketer needs to win the vote on one day every four years, whereas the commercial marketer needs the cash register to ring every day.

Nevertheless, public opinion is important to any president, and President Trump enters office with a low popular approval rating. That will require him to hone his communications skills and to win over many people who remain skeptical of his motives and competency. He must consciously set out to escape the Washington bubble and stay in touch with the ordinary voters from whom he draws much of his energy and confidence. Their continued enthusiasm to lobby their senators and representatives will be important to his ability to legislate his campaign promises.

Governing as president therefore requires a combination of “push” and “pull” marketing. Coca–Cola pushes its products through retail distribution and at the same time advertises directly to consumers to generate demand that pulls the product off retail shelves. In the same way, President Trump must push his agenda through Congress, but strong popular support backing the agenda will help persuade legislators to vote accordingly.

A likely force benefiting small business

Karen MillsFormer administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) and now a senior fellow at HBS and at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School 

Having a businessman in the White House has the potential to change the conversation in America around small business. Indeed, President Trump’s business background, if applied in the right way, could help him understand the needs of American small business. There are certainly thousands of small businesses that hope this will be the case.

However, to do this right, President Trump needs to step up the focus on small business and ensure this critical part of our economy is part of every economic discussion his team has. So far, his attention seems to be on big business — aside from his nomination of Linda McMahon as SBA administrator. Big business often has significantly different needs from small business. Small businesses have a more difficult time accessing capital, providing health care to their employees, navigating complex regulations at every level of government, and much more. His promises to cut taxes and reduce burdensome regulation for small businesses could be a good start. But on both of these fronts, the policy details will matter when it comes to what small businesses need to grow and succeed.

On the regulatory front, as I have written in a recent working paper, small business lending falls through the cracks of our current oversight framework. Small businesses and lenders should push President Trump to streamline the current “spaghetti soup” of regulation that is supposed to ensure greater access to capital, transparency, and borrower protections. Small businesses could also benefit from more incentives for large companies, which stand to get significant tax breaks under a Trump administration, to give more of their supply chain contracts to U.S.-based small businesses. In addition, National Federation of Independent Business surveys show that access to affordable health care is a top small business priority. Obamacare began to address this issue through the SHOP [Small Business Health Options Program] exchanges, but “Trumpcare” could go further in ensuring affordable rates for small businesses.

Small businesses should advocate for President Trump to treat them like the customer, something that can be done by leveraging technology and innovation in ways that streamline interactions with federal agencies, like online form filing.

Stars align to fix a broken tax system

Mihir DesaiMizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance and professor of law at Harvard Law School

The stars are in alignment for a major tax reform under President Trump. Thirty years of inaction on tax reform, along with significant changes in the economy and other countries’ tax policies, has made the U.S. tax system unwieldy and problematic in many ways. Most obviously, the corporate tax has become a dominant factor in the market for corporate control (i.e., so-called inversions), financing patterns (i.e., cash holdings), and profit-shifting activities (i.e., transfer pricing of profits).
In short, it’s broken and we have the worst of all worlds relative to the rest of the world. We have high marginal rates that distort incentives, especially on profit-shifting, and only middle-of-the-pack average tax rates. The ratio of tax-induced distortions to revenue is creeping higher every year.
The individual tax side of things is not quite as broken, but is overgrown and not serving our needs.

We have numerous overlapping and confusing incentives on education, health, and child care expenses that ultimately limit the uptake of these programs. We have enacted several stealth tax increases that are quite large by phasing out deductions and exemptions. And, broadly speaking, the tax system may not reflect the apparent current support for more redistribution. One reason for that is the top bracket used to contain 0.1 percent of the taxpayers and now has 1 percent of the population. This creates resistance to increased top marginal rates.

Finally, the usual guiding lights of equity and efficiency in tax policy now have to be complemented with a third concern: complexity. In the globalized world, there are ever-more margins on which economic agents can respond to complexities through planning. The overly complex system, especially on the international corporate side, is becoming a planner’s paradise.

What will President Trump do? His plan during the campaign was admirable in some ways. The simplicity of the rate structure for individuals, the expansion of the standard deduction, the limitation on deductions, and the reduced corporate rate were broadly sensible. But, there were critical mistakes, including repeal of international deferral and a minimum tax for corporate foreign source income. It was fiscally irresponsible and not attuned to current tastes for redistribution.

Given the relative inexperience of most of the current Trump economic team on these issues, I would expect that House Speaker Paul Ryan will dictate the broad outlines of any proposed legislation. His proposal, also known as the Ryan-Brady plan, is not just a renovation or a gut-rehab, it’s a teardown. It shifts the base of taxation to consumption from income through a “destination-based cash flow tax.” In effect, it is a form of value-added tax (VAT). Corporations will face a considerably lower rate, will not be allowed to deduct interest payments, and will be allowed to expense investments.

The easiest way to understand that is: Because all business-to-business transactions are effectively deductible, the tax base becomes business-to-consumers transactions. In other words, consumption.
One of the most important wrinkles in this system is that export revenue would be exempt from taxation, and the costs of imports would not be deductible under what is known as “border tax adjustments.” This has the potential for being incredibly redistributive across sectors, as exporters would have tax losses as far as the eye can see and importers would have much larger taxes due, unless exchange rates adjust to neutralize these changes in taxation, as economic theory would suggest.

Will they? It’s hard to say because nothing on this scale has ever been attempted. Moreover, the plan has numerous question marks over how it would work. How would financial institutions get taxed? Would pass-through entities have their current treatment? Most importantly, it’s not clear it would pass muster with the World Trade Organization.

The key advantage to Trump of the Ryan-Brady plan may well be the ability to characterize the border tax adjustments as tariffs. The box he put himself in regarding protectionist measures can be escaped by implementing the plan and labeling those adjustments as tariffs even though they’re not really functioning in that way. From an economic perspective, that deceit is preferable to the realities of tariffs. In recent tweets on auto companies, he’s already changed his language to a “border tax,” from tariffs.

I think the risks of such a dramatic tax change are too great to justify the teardown. I’d prefer to see corporate tax reform proceed in a revenue-neutral way, with reduced rates and a shift to territoriality funded by changing the treatment of pass-throughs and by aligning the characterization of profits to tax authorities and capital markets. On the individual side, I think a significant expansion of the earned-income tax credit, unification and simplification of various credits and deductions, and a new top bracket for individuals making more than $1 million would help enormously.

How does Trump’s business background condition his policy preferences and methods? It’s critical to realize that real estate development is quite unique in business, and the traits that allow you to succeed, to the degree he’s succeeded, in that field are not necessarily representative of the traits required elsewhere in business.

Real estate development requires much more sharp-elbowed negotiating, coalition building between organizations, and marketing savvy than most types of business. It also tends toward monumental efforts rather than incremental change. Those skills might help him quite a bit in the Washington of today. Unfortunately, they could also result in a tweet-driven assemblage of hollow gestures (saving jobs via jawboning) without any real substance.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

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Won't Allow H1B Visa Holders To Replace US Workers: Donald Trump 12-10

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library


WASHINGTON: President-elect Donald Trump has said he would not allow Americans to be replaced by foreign workers, in an apparent reference to cases like that of Disney World and other American companies wherein people hired on H-1B visas, including Indians, displaced US workers. 

"We will fight to protect every last American life," Mr Trump told thousands of his supporters in Iowa on Thursday as he referred to the cases of Disney world and other US companies.

"During the campaign I also spent time with American workers who were laid off and forced to train. The foreign workers brought in to replace them. We won't let this happen anymore," Mr Trump vowed amidst cheers and applause from the audience.

"Can you believe that? You get laid off and then they won't give you your severance pay unless you train the people that are replacing you. I mean, that's actually demeaning maybe more than anything else," he said.

Disney World and two outsourcing companies have been slapped with a federal lawsuit by two of its former technology staff, alleging that they conspired to displace American workers with cheaper foreign labour brought to the US on H-1B visas, mostly from India.

The two employees - Leo Perrero and Dena Moore - were among 250 Disney tech workers laid off from their jobs at Walt Disney World in Orlando in January 2015. They have also dragged two IT companies HCL Inc and Cognizent Technologies into this class action lawsuit.

"You know the name of one of the companies that's doing it. I'm going to be nice because we're trying to get that company back. Don't forget much harder when a company announced a year and a half ago - some of these companies, like Carrier, they announced long before I even knew I was going to be running for president," Mr Trump said.

On immigration, Mr Trump reiterated that he will build the wall along the Mexico border.
"We will put an end to illegal immigration and stop the drugs from pouring into our country, the drugs are pouring into our country, poisoning our youth and plenty of other people," he said.
"We will stop the drugs from pouring into our country. We will stop the drugs from poisoning our great and beautiful and loving youth. OK? We'll do it," he said, adding that the Trump administration will stop the violence that is "spilling across our border."


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Donald Trump : The 2016 person of the year 2016 12-07

Even for Donald Trump, the distance is still fun to think about, up here in his penthouse 600 ft. in the sky, where it’s hard to make out the regular people below. The ice skaters swarming Central Park’s Wollman Rink look like old-television static, and the Fifth Avenue holiday shoppers could be mites in a gutter. To even see this view, elevator operators, who spend their days standing in place, must push a button marked 66–68, announcing all three floors of Trump’s princely pad. Inside, staff members wear cloth slipcovers on their shoes, so as not to scuff the shiny marble or stain the plush cream carpets.

This is, in short, not a natural place to refine the common touch. It’s gilded and gaudy, a dreamscape of faded tapestry, antique clocks and fresco-style ceiling murals of gym-rat Greek gods. The throw pillows carry the Trump shield, and the paper napkins are monogrammed with the family name. His closest neighbors, at least at this altitude, are an international set of billionaire moguls who have decided to stash their money at One57 and 432 Park, the two newest skyscrapers to remake midtown Manhattan. There is no tight-knit community in the sky, no paperboy or postman, no bowling over brews after work.

Photograph by Nadav Kander for TIMEPresident-elect Donald Trump photographed at his penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in New York City on Nov. 28.

Ande here Trump resides, under dripping crystal, with diamond cuff links, as the President-elect of the United States of America. The Secret Service agents milling about prove that it really happened, this election result few saw coming. Hulking and serious, they gingerly try to stay on the marble, avoiding the carpets with their uncovered shoes. On his wife Melania’s desk, next to books of Gianni Versace’s fashions and Elizabeth Taylor’s jewelry, a new volume sits front and center: The White House: Its Historic Furnishings and First Families.

For all of Trump’s public life, tastemakers and intellectuals have dismissed him as a vulgarian and carnival barker, a showman with big flash and little substance. But what those critics never understood was that their disdain gave him strength. For years, he fed off the disrespect and used it to grab more tabloid headlines, to connect to common people. Now he has upended the leadership of both major political parties and effectively shifted the political direction of the international order. He will soon command history’s most lethal military, along with economic levers that can change the lives of billions. And the people he has to thank are those he calls “the forgotten,” millions of American voters who get paid by the hour in shoes that will never touch these carpets—working folk, regular Janes and Joes, the dots in the distance.

It’s a topic Trump wants to discuss as he settles down in his dining room, with its two-story ceiling and marble table the length of a horseshoe pitch: the winning margins he achieved in West Virginia coal country, the rally crowds that swelled on Election Day, what he calls that “interesting thing,” the contradiction at the core of his appeal. “What amazes a lot of people is that I’m sitting in an apartment the likes of which nobody’s ever seen,” the next President says, smiling. “And yet I represent the workers of the world.”

The late Fidel Castro would probably spit out his cigar if he heard that one—a billionaire who branded excess claiming the slogans of the proletariat. But Trump doesn’t care. “I’m representing them, and they love me and I love them,” he continues, talking about the people of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the struggling Rust Belt necklace around the Great Lakes that delivered his victory. “And here we sit, in very different circumstances.”

The Last, Greatest Deal

For nearly 17 months on the campaign trail, Trump did what no American politician had attempted in a generation, with defiant flair. Instead of painting a bright vision for a unified future, he magnified the divisions of the present, inspiring new levels of anger and fear within his country. Whatever you think of the man, this much is undeniable: he uncovered an opportunity others didn’t believe existed, the last, greatest deal for a 21st century salesman. The national press, the late-night comics, the elected leaders, the donors, the corporate chiefs and a sitting President who prematurely dropped his mic—they all believed he was just taking the country for a ride.

The starting point for his success, which can be measured with just tens of thousands of votes, was the most obvious recipe in politics. He identified the central issue motivating the American electorate and then convinced a plurality of the voters in the states that mattered that he was the best person to bring change. “The greatest jobs theft in the history of the world” was his cause, “I alone can fix it” his unlikely selling point, “great again” his rallying cry.

Nadav Kander for TIMEPresident-elect Trump in the living room of his three-story penthouse on the 66th floor of Trump Tower in New York City on Nov. 28

Since the bungled Iraq War faded into the rearview mirror, there has been only one defining issue in American presidential politics, spanning party and ideology. It’s the reason Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren thunders that “the system is rigged” by the banks, and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders got so much traction denouncing the greed of “millionaires and billionaires.” It’s what Marco Rubio meant when he said, “We are losing the American Dream,” and why Jeb Bush claimed everyone has a “right to rise.”

President Barack Obama identified it early, back in 2005, as a newly elected Senator delivering a commencement speech at tiny Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Obama’s hymn to “the forgotten” was his ticket to the White House. “You know what this new challenge is. You’ve seen it,” he said. “The fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore … It’s as if someone changed the rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks.”

As Obama explained it, the American promise was being put up on cinder blocks, buttressed by massive economic forces. His vow, repeated in his final 30-minute-long television ad in 2008, was change for the struggling, help for those who needed it, security for the ones who felt themselves slipping. Four years later, he would return to the same playbook to defeat Mitt Romney, casting the Republican nominee as an obtuse private-equity moneybags aiming to bankrupt Detroit. A quote pulled from a focus group—”I’m working harder and falling behind”—became the watchwords of Obama’s 2012 re-elect, hung on walls and placed atop PowerPoints. He had identified the issue, and as long as his name was on the ballot, no one could beat him.

But Obama never fully delivered the prosperity he promised. There was certainly help on the margins, slowing cost growth for health care and providing insurance to millions, for example. He started some pilot projects for manufacturing hubs, increased incomes marginally in the past couple of years and led the nation to recover from a vicious recession, with the federal government directly creating or saving millions of jobs. An unemployment rate that peaked at 10% in October 2009 has been halved to 4.6% now, at the end of his term. But the great weather systems of global change continued under his watch. Ultimately, he grew resigned to the fact that there was only so much he could do in office.

The most recently available data tells the remarkable story: between 2001 and 2012, the median incomes of households headed by people without college degrees—nearly two-thirds of all homes—fell as they aged, according to research by Robert Shapiro, an economist who advised Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. As American productivity and gross domestic product grew in the first decade of the new century, median wages for all Americans broke away, effectively flatlining. Most Americans making less than the median income, but not so little as to qualify for poverty benefits, suffered income losses of about 5% between 2007 and 2013, according to research by Branko Milanovic, a former World Bank economist.

If you lived in the nation’s great cities or held a college degree, you probably didn’t feel the full fury of these forces. Average income declines for top earners were closer to 1% during the postrecession years. Global change is tricky that way. It enriches those in the developed world who can handle bits and bytes, create something new or sell their work at a distance. And it elevates the fortunes of the global poor, largely in Asia, pushing about a billion people from poverty into the beginnings of a new China-led middle class.

But for the working men and women of developed countries, many of whom had made good livings in the 20th century, the price of others’ success could be seen all around, in peeling house paint and closed storefronts, in towns that went belly-up when one of the two big employers closed shop. The pressures pushed across the Atlantic Ocean. The size of the middle classes, as measured by those who earn 25% above or below the median income, dropped in the U.S. from the 1980s to 2013. It also dropped in Spain and Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. It is no accident that all those countries now find themselves in the midst of political upheaval as well.

The reasons for the shifts are more complex than the simple offshoring of manufacturing plants to Mexico or China. Global trade and new technology also pressure wages on jobs beyond the assembly line. When combined with rising health-insurance costs and incessant shareholder demands, companies found themselves unable or unwilling to give raises. Automation also accelerated as factories turned to robots, checkout lines retooled with self-operated terminals, and engineers developed self-driving trucks and taxis. Political gridlock in Washington, and the mild austerity it created, weighed everything down.

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The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You Love Donald Trump

The popularity of the GOP front-runner can be explained by the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Many commentators have argued that Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP presidential race can be largely explained by ignorance; his candidacy, after all, is most popular among Republican voters without college degrees. Their expertise about current affairs is too fractured and full of holes to spot that only 9 percent of Trump’s statements are “true” or “mostly” true, according to PolitiFact, whereas 57 percent are “false” or “mostly false”—the remainder being “pants on fire” untruths. Trump himself has memorably declared: “I love the poorly educated.”

But as a psychologist who has studied human behavior—including voter behavior—for decades, I think there is something deeper going on. The problem isn’t that voters are too uninformed. It is that they don’t know just how uninformed they are.

Psychological research suggests that people, in general, suffer from what has become known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. They have little insight about the cracks and holes in their expertise. In studies in my research lab, people with severe gaps in knowledge and expertise typically fail to recognize how little they know and how badly they perform. To sum it up, the knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task—and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task. This includes political judgment.

We have found this pattern in logical reasoning, grammar, emotional intelligence, financial literacy, numeracy, firearm care and safety, debate skill, and college coursework. Others have found a similar lack of insight among poor chess players, unskilled medical lab technicians, medical students unsuccessfully completing an obstetrics/gynecology rotation, and people failing a test on performing CPR.

This syndrome may well be the key to the Trump voter—and perhaps even to the man himself. Trump has served up numerous illustrative examples of the effect as he continues his confident audition to be leader of the free world even as he seems to lack crucial information about the job. In a December debate he appeared ignorant of what the nuclear triad is. Elsewhere, he has mused that Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons—casually reversing decades of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have pointed to these confident missteps as products of Trump’s alleged narcissism and egotism. My take would be that it's the other way around. Not seeing the mistakes for what they are allows any potential narcissism and egotism to expand unchecked.

In voters, lack of expertise would be lamentable but perhaps not so worrisome if people had some sense of how imperfect their civic knowledge is. If they did, they could repair it. But the Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests something different. It suggests that some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.

Here is more evidence. In a telling series of experiments, Paul Fernbach and colleagues asked political partisans to rate their understanding of various social policies, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, instituting a flat tax, or establishing a single-payer health system.

Survey takers expressed a good deal of confidence about their expertise. Or rather, they did until researchers put that understanding to the test by asking them to describe in detail the mechanics of two of the policies under question. This challenge led survey takers to realize that their understanding was mostly an illusion. It also led them to moderate their stances about those policies and to donate less money, earned in the experiment, to like-minded political advocacy groups.

Again, the key to the Dunning-Kruger Effect is not that unknowledgeable voters are uninformed; it is that they are often misinformed—their heads filled with false data, facts and theories that can lead to misguided conclusions held with tenacious confidence and extreme partisanship, perhaps some that make them nod in agreement with Trump at his rallies.

Trump himself also exemplifies this exact pattern, showing how the Dunning-Kruger Effect can lead to what seems an indomitable sense of certainty. All it takes is not knowing the point at which the proper application of a sensible idea turns into malpractice.

For example, in a CNBC interview, Trump suggested that the U.S. government debt could easily be reduced by asking federal bondholders to “take a haircut,” agreeing to receive a little less than the bond’s full face value if the U.S. economy ran into trouble. In a sense, this is a sensible idea commonly applied—at least in business, where companies commonly renegotiate the terms of their debt.

But stretching it to governmental finance strains reason beyond acceptability. And in his suggestion, Trump illustrated not knowing the horror show of consequences his seemingly modest proposal would produce. For the U.S. government, his suggestion would produce no less than an unprecedented earthquake in world finance. It would represent the de facto default of the U.S. on its debt—and the U.S. government has paid its debt in full since the time of Alexander Hamilton. The certainty and safety imbued in U.S. Treasury bonds is the bedrock upon which much of world finance rests.

Even suggesting that these bonds pay back less than 100 percent would be cause for future buyers to demand higher interest rates, thus costing the U.S. government, and taxpayer, untold millions of dollars, and risking the health of the American economy.

This misinformation problem can live in voters, too, as shown in a 2015 survey about the proposed Common Core standards for education. A full 41 percent claimed the new standards would prompt more frequent testing within California schools. That was untrue. Only 18 percent accurately stated that the level of testing would stay the same. Further, 35 percent mistakenly asserted that the standards went beyond math and English instruction. Only 28 percent correctly reported that the standards were constrained to those two topics. And 34 percent falsely claimed that the federal government would require California to adopt the Common Core. Only 21 percent accurately understood this was not so.

But what is more interesting—and troubling—were the responses of survey takers who claimed they knew “a lot” about the new standards. What these “informed” citizens “knew” trended toward the false rather than the true. For example, 52 percent thought the standards applied beyond math and English (versus 32 percent who got it right). And 57 percent believed the standards mandated more testing (versus 31 percent who correctly understood that it did not). These misconceptions mattered: To the extent that survey takers endorsed these misconceptions, they opposed the Common Core.
My research colleagues and I have found similar evidence that voters who think they are informed may be carrying a good deal of misinformation in their heads. In an unpublished study, we surveyed people the day after the 2014 midterm elections, asking them whether they had voted. Our key question was who was most likely to have voted: informed, uninformed, or misinformed citizens.

We found that voting was strongly tied to one thing—whether those who took the survey thought of themselves as “well-informed” citizens. But perceiving oneself as informed was not necessarily tied to, um, being well-informed.

To be sure, well-informed voters accurately endorsed true statements about economic and social conditions in the U.S.—just as long as those statements agreed with their politics. Conservatives truthfully claimed that the U.S. poverty rate had gone up during the Obama administration; liberals rightfully asserted that the unemployment rate had dropped.

But both groups also endorsed falsehoods agreeable to their politics. Thus, all told, it was the political lean of the fact that mattered much more than its truth-value in determining whether respondents believed it. And endorsing partisan facts both true and false led to perceptions that one was an informed citizen, and then to a greater likelihood of voting.

Given all this misinformation, confidently held, it is no wonder that Trump causes no outrage or scandal among those voters who find his views congenial.

But why now? If voters can be so misinformed that they don’t know that they are misinformed, why only now has a candidate like Trump arisen? My take is that the conditions for the Trump phenomenon have been in place for a long time. At least as long as quantitative survey data have been collected, citizens have shown themselves to be relatively ill-informed and incoherent on political and historical matters. As way back as 1943, a survey revealed that only 25 percent of college freshmen knew that Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War.

All it took was a candidate to come along too inexperienced to avoid making policy gaffes, at least gaffes that violate received wisdom, with voters too uninformed to see the violations. Usually, those candidates make their mistakes off in some youthful election to their state legislature, or in small-town mayoral race or contest for class president. It’s not a surprise that someone trying out a brand new career at the presidential level would make gaffes that voters, in a rebellious mood, would forgive but more likely not even see.

But the Dunning-Kruger perspective also suggests a cautionary tale that extends well beyond the Trump voter. The Trump phenomenon may provide only an extravagant and visible example in which voters fail to spot a political figure who seems to be making it up as he goes along.
But the key lesson of the Dunning-Kruger framework is that it applies to all of us, sooner or later. Each of us at some point reaches the limits of our expertise and knowledge. Those limits make our misjudgments that lie beyond those boundaries undetectable to us.

As such, if we find ourselves worried about the apparent gullibility of the Trump voter, which may be flamboyant and obvious, we should surely worry about our own naive political opinions that are likely to be more nuanced, subtle, and invisible—but perhaps no less consequential. We all run the risk of being too ill-informed to notice when our own favored candidates or national leaders make catastrophic misjudgments.

To be sure, I don’t wish to leave the reader with a fatal hesitation about supporting any candidate. All I am saying is trust, but verify.

Thomas Jefferson once observed that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." The Trump phenomenon makes visible something that has been true for quite some time now. As a citizenry, we can be massively ill-informed. Yet, our society remains relatively free.

How have we managed so far to maintain what Jefferson suggested could never be? And how do we ensure this miracle of democracy continues? This is the real issue. And it will be with us far after the Trumpian political revolution or reality TV spectacle, depending on how you see it, has long flickered off the electronic screens of our cultural theater. 

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Trump willing to meet N.Korea's Kim, wants to renegotiate Paris climate accord 05-18

Trump willing to meet N.Korea's Kim, wants to renegotiate Paris climate accord

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Tuesday he is willing to talk to North

Korean leader Kim Jong Un to try to stop Pyongyang's nuclear program, proposing a major shift in U.S. policy toward the isolated nation.

In a wide-ranging interview with Reuters, Trump also said he disapproved of Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions in eastern Ukraine, called for a renegotiation of the Paris climate accord, and said he would dismantle most of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations if he is elected president.

The presumptive Republican nominee declined to share details of his plans to deal with North Korea, but said he was open to a face-to-face meeting with its leader.

"I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him," Trump said of Kim.

North Korea's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump's remarks.

Trump also said he would press China, Pyongyang's only major diplomatic and economic supporter, to help find a solution.

"I would put a lot of pressure on China because economically we have tremendous power over China," he said in the half-hour interview at his Trump Tower office in Manhattan.

Trump's preparedness to meet Kim contrasts with President Barack Obama's policy of relying on senior U.S. officials to talk to senior North Korean officials. Obama has not engaged personally with Kim.

CLIMATE ACCORD

The New York billionaire said he is "not a big fan" of the Paris climate accord, which prescribes reductions in carbon emissions by more than 170 countries, and would want to renegotiate it because it gives favorable treatment to countries like China.

A renegotiation of the pact would be a major setback for what was hailed as the first truly global climate accord, committing both rich and poor nations to reining in the rise in greenhouse gas emissions blamed for warming the planet.

On Russia, Trump tempered past praise of Putin, saying the nice comments the Russian leader has made about him in the past would only go so far.

"The fact that he said good things about me doesn't mean that it's going to help him in a negotiation. It won't help him at all," he said.

Turning to the economy, Trump said he planned to release a detailed policy platform in two weeks that would propose dismantling nearly all of Dodd-Frank, a package of financial reforms put in place after the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

"Dodd-Frank is a very negative force, which has developed a very bad name," Trump said.

FINANCIAL BUBBLE?

Trump said he perceived a dangerous financial bubble within the tech startup industry. He said tech companies were attaining high valuations without ever making money.

On the U.S. Federal Reserve, Trump said that while he eventually wants a Republican to head it, he is "not an enemy" of current chair Janet Yellen, who was appointed by Obama.

"I'm not a person that thinks Janet Yellen is doing a bad job. I happen to be a low-interest rate person unless inflation rears its ugly head, which can happen at some point," he said, adding that inflation "doesn't seem like it's happening any time soon."

Trump said he would maintain the current level of benefits for Social Security recipients, a position championed by former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. He said he would not raise the retirement age or impose a sliding scale of benefits depending on income levels.

He said the depleted Social Security Trust Fund would be replenished by the increased tax revenue that would flow into the government from the higher job growth spurred by his economic policies.

(Reporting by Steve Holland and Emily Flitter, additional reporting by Alana Wise; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Ross Colvin)

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