“George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s incompetence in a Washington Post Op-Ed: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”
George Will was only partially right in 2017, when he reacted to Trump’s flailing first term attempts to run our government. His Republican administration's’ seeming incompetence is motivated by unchecked greed. Most of his first cabinet was populated with former lobbyists. And it is wrecking the fastest growing economy in the developed world that was inherited from the Biden administration.
They are choosing to remain ignorant of the most basic economic facts in their attempt to extend Trump’s 2018 Tax Cut and Jobs Act during the current debate on the budget for the fiscal year. The financial markets are making them pay for their ignorance, which will hurt his red state supporters most.
“The budget plan that House Republicans passed today paves the way to take Medicaid health coverage and food assistance through SNAP away from millions of people, to partially pay for huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses that will drive up deficits and fiscal risk,” said Sharon Parrott, President of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan economic think tank,
What are the markets saying? It’s the wrong time to have a budget debate, “when the President’s tariffs, chaotically crafted and applied, have caused business uncertainty to soar and raised the risk of a recession, higher unemployment, and surging prices,” said CBPP’s Parrott.
This is also at a time of record income inequality when the income gains of the top one percent dwarf that of the bottom 20 percent per the above graph.
Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100 years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income equality. They found that the periods of greatest inequality were just before a major recession, such as the Great Recession and the Great Depression itself, I said in an earlier blog post.
What does that tell US when we are at another period of greatest equality? More than just red staters will be harmed, as the full faith and credit of the U.S. of A is endangered with the record national budget deficit of $36 billion and growing.
This happened during the Great Recession as well, triggered by GW Bush’s tax cuts at a time when the Clinton Administration had just created four years of budget surpluses that were frittered away with GW’s tax cuts and the wars on terror.
“Add to the budget plan and constantly shifting tariff policy the Administration’s chaotic and deeply harmful executive action agenda — which is wrecking Social Security and other core government functions, unlawfully stopping funding for public services and investments, hollowing out and politicizing the civil service, and undermining basic governance — and you have a triple threat agenda that will make millions of families far worse off,” continued Parrott.
Can it get even worse? Our national debt is not sustainable. Yahoo Finance just reported in an April 14 article that S&P Global Ratings hinted that it could lower the US credit rating, currently at AA+, by another notch if any of a number of things happen to make the US's fiscal situation worse.
“The outcome of the US government's budget process and policy negotiations over the coming months will help determine policies that inform our view of US sovereign creditworthiness,” S&P said. “These discussions could affect our view of the US's fiscal profile.”
So, there’s a good reason Greed is one of the seven deadly sins, maybe the deadliest if its Republican practitioners cause another Great Recession or Depression.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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