In a recent newsletter, Paul Krugman succinctly described what Trump has done to the economy. Granted, his economic ignorance is only a part of the current devastation–there are also the daily assaults on the constitution and individual liberties, and the continuing restoration of the Confederacy and its out-and-proud racism and misogyny…
But a lot of people who don’t care about the American Idea or fundamental fairness do care about their bottom lines. So Krugman’s summary ought to matter. Here’s that summary:
He has imposed high tariffs, undoing the effects of 90 years of trade negotiations. His deportation policies are already creating labor shortages and supply disruptions in multiple sectors of the economy. His Big Beautiful Budget Bill, aside from being cruel, is fiscally irresponsible. Deportations will undermine Social Security and Medicare. His drastic cuts to scientific research will undermine U.S. technology, and hence long-run economic growth.
That recap was an intoduction to Krugman’s analysis of why the stock market hasn’t tanked (yet), which he attributes to faith in the promise of AI. (My jury is out on the question of whether that “promise” is really a threat…) He also points out that the market has historically been a poor predictor of longer-term economic trends.
Whatever the market’s performance means–or doesn’t–it’s impossible to read that quoted paragraph without recognizing the enormity and inevitability of decline in American prosperity unless the mindlessness and madness aren’t reversed.
I wonder whether Trump voters will find the restoration of Confederate statuary and philosophy worth the economic costs…
A quick status report: I am improving each day, but my guess is that this site will continue to experience glitches, probably attributable to my medicated status. Yesterday, the emails failed to send at the scheduled time–fortunately, my techie son intervened and was able to fix the issue. Every day, it seems, there’s something. (The day after my brief hospital stay, an uninsured driver t-boned our daughter’s car; fortunately, she and our granddaugher were just bruised, but the car was totalled. The next day, my husband pulled out a kitchen drawer and it–and he– collapsed. Again, fortunately, he’s fine, but I’m getting a bit leery.)
I really appreciate all the kind words, and your willingness to hang in there with me! This too will pass–and if we’re lucky, MAGA will pass too…
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Today’s will be a “quickie,” because I’m focusing on something you all already know (and I still can’t sit at the computer for long periods of time.)
This week’s job report was weak–shockingly weak. That wasn’t a surprise to anyone who passed Econ 101 (or to pretty much anyone who can read); we are just beginning to see the effects of Trump’s idiotic tariffs. But of course, the Mad King responded to the unfavorable data as is his wont: with anger and denial. How dare reality deviate from his imagined brilliance? So he fired the person in charge of analyzing and publishing the data.
As the folks at Lincoln Square noted,
One basic character of the politicization necessary to create an authoritarian regime is that public employees are reluctant to share information that displeases their political bosses. When those bosses can fire them, the incentives to suppress uncongenial information, or provide false information, become overwhelming.
Over time, life in these countries become bifurcated. Statistics become propaganda. There is an official reality, which many proclaim but few believe, and actual reality. And at some point actual reality catches up with the fantasy.
Reality, of course, is a place Trump has yet to visit.
Ever since Trump assumed office, civil servants have been reluctant to contradict the various moronic eruptions emanating from the Oval Office and from the assortment of clowns comprising what passes for a cabinet. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science beliefs about vaccines are rapidly degrading public health, and the fossil fuel tools at the EPA are pretending that there’s no such thing as climate change. Etc.
People who are unwilling to “go along to get along” are fired.
Those who survive will keep telling us that the Emperor’s new clothes are magnificent, and what’s left of America’s credibility will continue to tank.
Every day, we Americans awake to another assault on the foundations of our governing system. As we attend to each day’s news, each day’s effort to deconstruct constitutional government, we are in danger of losing the big picture, the scope of the losses we’re suffering.
I don’t know whether this “firehose” approach is a conscious strategy; Trump’s already substandard intellect and mental health are declining at such a rapid rate that restraints on his impulsiveness–never strong–are similarly declining. Intentional or not, however, it’s working to distract us.
We simply cannot allow the rapidity with which MAGA is dismantling American government to obscure the big picture, the overall damage. Recently, Heather Cox Richardson included that overview in one of her essential “Letters,” and her description is worth citing:
Six months into the second Trump administration, on the sixtieth anniversary of the law that symbolized the modern American state by establishing Medicare and Medicaid, it’s clear we are indeed in a revolution designed to destroy the government we have known in favor of the radical right-wing government envisioned by those who wrote Project 2025.
From the beginning, the administration declared war on the words that protected equal rights for all Americans, fired women and racial minorities from leadership positions, and attacked transgender Americans. It worked to replace civil servants with loyalists who embraced the tenets of Project 2025, putting people like former Fox News host Pete Hegseth at the head of government agencies. Yesterday Greg Jaffe and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that in a break with past practices, Hegseth, now secretary of defense, is requiring nominees for four-star general positions in the U.S. military to meet personally with Trump.
It worked to dismantle the government by refusing to release the money Congress had appropriated to fund the existing government. Thanks to billionaire Elon Musk at the “Department of Government Efficiency” and Russell Vought—another author of Project 2025—at the Office of Management and Budget, the administration illegally impounded funds, slashing through funding for foreign aid, cancer research, veterans’ benefits, air traffic control staffing, and so on, claiming to be eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That fight is ongoing.
Richardson proceeded to enumerate the extent to which MAGA is implementing Project 2025–shrinking or abolishing government programs that serve ordinary people while further enriching the wealthy. The party of “limited government” is dramatically expanding government’s power.
The administration set out to purge the country of what extremists claimed was “leftist” influence in law firms, media, and universities. It illegally blocked lawyers from law firms that represented Democrats from access to federal buildings, making it impossible for them to represent their clients. It sued media outlets for alleged bias, and it withheld congressionally appropriated funds for universities.
There’s much more, as we all know– that daily firehose of assaults on the government of We the People, assaults aimed at replacing the America we thought we knew. substituting cronies for civil servants so that “royal court” can invite bribery and engage in open corruption with impunity.
We the People need to keep that big picture in mind. We need to ignore the self-engrossed pundits mucking around in the weeds, criticising various Democrats and focusing on perceived past errors. We have one job. ONE JOB. We need to take Congress back from the GOP invertebrates who will go down in history either as complicit fascists or disgraceful quislings.
This will be brief, since sitting still isn’t my strong point.
The idiots who believed–or pretended to believe–that DOGE was all about rooting out “waste and fraud” from the federal government will dismiss the truth, much as Trump has responded to economic data by firing the workers who reported it, but numerous outlets are reporting the all-too-predictable facts.
Billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump tried to take a chainsaw to federal government spending, but it turns out they actually wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars.
The Department of Government Efficiency generated some $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government in the first six months of the year, according to a new report from the minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI).
Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations yesterday released a jaw-dropping report attempting to document the scope and scale of financial waste, personnel upheaval, and human suffering caused by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and Elon Musk’s giddily uninformed strike force of Peter Thiel acolytes. In all, the Democrats, led by Richard Blumenthal (CT), estimated DOGE cost the government $21.7 billion.
“DOGE-generated waste could also have easily funded monthly food assistance for the 5.3 million families losing an average of $146 in monthly food security assistance ($9.3 billion per year) under the new budget; or it could have been used more broadly to support the 40 percent of taxpayers that will see a net increase to their taxes as a direct result of the Trump tax plan,” the report contends….
Neither the buyouts nor paying workers while on administrative leave (costing an additional $6.1 billion) increased government efficiency, as was always obvious and predictable. The report details many other costs, from the petty and pointless (millions of hours of wasted employee time writing the Musk-required email listing their weekly accomplishments) to the catastrophic (the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, “projected to cause millions of additional deaths globally while simultaneously endangering domestic public health by reducing essential medical staff and programs.”)
There is much more, and you really need to click through and read the depressing details, but this is what happens when people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing–in this case, children in their early 20’s armed only with ideological platitudes–are given entry into sophisticated systems without any understanding of either the missions of the agencies involved, or the data relevant to that mission.
The Trumpian assault on the rule of law has been unremitting. With the assistance of Mitch McConnell, Trump turned the highest court in the land into his personal lapdog, and now he is aiming to pollute the lower courts that have valiantly opposed his unconstitutional efforts.
The most recent and most blatant effort to replace dispassionate jurists with biased and unqualified sycophants was the nomination of a slimy creature named Emil Bove to a federal judgeship–a lifetime appointment.
Tonight Senate Republicans cast away their Constitutional obligations to rubber stamp [Emil Bove] an outrageously unfit nominee to the Third Circuit. The Senate, the country, the judiciary will suffer for this. And the conservative legal movement will not recover.” — Gregg Nunziata, Exec Dir, Society for the Rule of Law.
Last night, the US Senate blithely ignored the pleas of the legal community, the evidence of multiple whistleblowers, and whatever tattered remnants of self-respect they had, to confirm Emil Bove to a lifetime position on the Court of Appeals. As I wrote a few days back: It’s not easy these days to single out the worst of the worst appointments, but certainly the elevation of the thuggish Bove to the federal appellate bench has to rank right up there. Other churls and chodes will come and go, but federal judges are forever.
The vote was 50-49, indicating that J.D. Vance once again had to break the tie. Two Republicans defected. But not Indiana’s GOP Senators. If there was any lingering doubt about the lack of integrity–and the lapdog status–of these two “law and order” Republicans, this inexcusable vote certainly erases it. Their fuhrur told them to vote for a demonstrable liar who has made it clear he will support whatever his fuhrur wants, irrespective of the Constitution or legal precedent–and they obeyed.
Banks, of course, is a gung-ho member of the SS.Young, it appears, is just a feckless, integrity-free “Good German.” Neither of them deserves public office or respect.
