America First? How Do We Know If President Trump Fulfills His Promise?

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Donald Trump wants American corporations to invest in America, and he’s promised to enact policies that will make America First. So how do we measure whether he’s successful? I don’t know, but I’ll toss out a possible metric:

During the past eight years, US corporations invested about $300 billion overseas each year. If Trump is successful, this number should go down.

Or, perhaps some ratio would be a better measure: foreign investment as a percent of total investment. Or maybe something entirely different. In fact, I’m mostly publishing this as a provocation: if this is the wrong measure, what’s the right one? What’s the best way of knowing if US corporations start to direct more of their investment dollars into domestic expansion instead of building or buying overseas? Any trade economists want to weigh in on this?

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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