The priming of Donald Trump

DONALD Trump has said many strange things in recent interviews. One can only imagine, for example, what America's military leaders thought about their president's rambling, word-salad musings about how to improve the country's aircraft carriers.

Over here in Econoland, however, the buzz was all about Mr Trump's expressed willingness, in an interview with the Economist magazine, to pursue tax cuts even if they increase deficits, because "we have to prime the pump" - an expression he claimed to have invented. "I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good." Actually, the expression goes back generations - Franklin Delano Roosevelt used it in a 1937 speech - and has been used many times since, including several times by Mr Trump himself.

What's more, it's a bad metaphor for modern times. Twenty years ago, in a paper warning that Japanese-style problems might eventually come to America, I urged that the phrase be withdrawn from circulation: "Since hardly anybody in the thoroughly urbanised societies of modern America and Japan has any idea what it means to prime a pump, I hereby suggest that we rename this the jump-start strategy."