Why Make America Weak?

 

Financial FAQs

“This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Franklin Delano Rooselvelt

theguardian.com

The Democrat’s election sweep on November 2 is proving that American voters  heeded President Roosevelt’s famous warning at his first inaugural address, that the Democrats' paralysis after the loss to Trump II is over and fear, the greatest enemy of Democracy, can be conquered.

The November 2 elections showed just how illusory were those fears that Donald Trump and Republicans wanted Americans to believe, that the largest, most prosperous country in the world had grown weak. Americans were now in danger and only he and his oligarchs could save US.

In fact, Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been attempting to weaken everything that makes America the oldest constitutional democracy since his first day in office.

He began by slashing of essential government services via Elon Musk’s DOGE computer hackers (such as social security, Medicare, Medicare) that benefit all Americans, the attempt to eliminate the the Department of Education that supports our basic universal K-12 and early childhood educational systems, while picking the most unqualified to run the FBI, Department of Homeland Services, and Health and Human Services so that they are no longer fully functional. 

The brutal roundup of undocumented immigrants, whether they have a criminal record, are decimating the ranks of workers that fill agricultural, manufacturing, and service sector jobs needed to maintain economic growth.

The biggest financial threat to ordinary Americans are the rising prices on basic necessities that most Americans depend on due to tariff rates now at Great Depression levels, impoverishing the majority of Americans that live from paycheck-to-paycheck.

It’s become obvious that the Trump administration’s intent has been to instill as much fear as possible in the most vulnerable Americans that the federal government won’t work for them and only Trump and his oligarchs can same them.

But the recent election and huge protests at the last No Kings rallies are a sign that millions of Americans haven’t been cowed or paralyzed.

In fact, they have said, as did Howard Beale, the News Anchor in the movie Network, “I’m as mad as hell and not going to take this anymore!”

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Calkfornia Can't Be Bullied

 Popular Economics Weekly

Governor Gavin Newsom today announced that California has officially overtaken Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, according to newly released data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). April, 2025

LATimes

The Trump administration’s efforts to bully California in the past week by sending in contingents of the California Coast Guard and active-duty Marines to ‘guard’ its ICE agents that are bent on rounding up as many undocumented workers in California as possible, is almost comical.

Would they try the same with Japan or Germany, who have economies that are basically the same size? Of course not, though Trump wants to pick on smaller Canada, and maybe Denmark’s Greenland.

Of the 850,000 farmworkers in California that are providing close to one-quarter of the agricultural produce of America, some 400,000 are seasonal workers (i.e., with permits) or undocumented, which is why President Trump has told ICE workers to stop rounding them up, for fear Americans will no longer have enough fresh (or canned) produce to eat.

It’s a sign of the Trump administration’s tremendous ignorance that their efforts to deport as many of the 11 million undocumented U.S. workers is looking worse than ridiculous, it is enraging the populous of those cities that depend on immigrants to work in the service and hospitality industries, as well as feed them.

If Trump also thinks he can humble California by attacking the University of California system (UC) as he is doing to Harvard, he is also mistaken.

The system's ten campuses presently have a combined student body of 299,407 students, 26,100 faculty members, 192,400 staff members, over 2.5 million living alumni, and $41.6 billion in annual operating revenues.

And as an alumnus, I can attest it teaches or promotes no particular ideology or political view, just the scientific and social science truths that are verified and tested empirically, not by rumor or conspiracy theories.

Trump and the Republican Party have succeeded in bullying the smaller red states they have dominated since the 1970s, making them the poorest states in income (many have no minimum wage), health care, social services and education.

Republican led red states are mostly dependent on the excess tax revenues passed on to them from blue states.

“In 2023, the federal government collected around $4.67 trillion from states and their residents through taxes on individuals and businesses and redistributed about $4.56 trillion back to states and residents through programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and education grants, says USA Facts.

Virginia alone depended on $79 billion in transfer payments in 2023 to balance its budget from states like California and New York, who contributed $78B and $89B in 2023 to the federal kitty.

So why have Republicans gone to all this trouble that will do very little harm to the likes of UC and California’s economy? Their red states can’t do without the income coming from blue states.

Oh, their leaders want more tax cuts, which will continue to increase federal debt. Americans will find out soon enough that’s not how to stay in business.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Why the Irrational Pessimism--Part II

 Financial FAQs

I said a week ago that public polls seem to be saying one thing, economic facts another. Real Clear Politics’ compendium of 11 opinion polls on whether participants approve or disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the economy show a negative -22.5 percent spread (pro Trump, contra Biden).

But as Paul Krugman pointed out more recently, it’s Republicans driving that narrative, not U.S. adult citizens or Democrats.

Krugman/YouGov

Why? The big difference is that Republicans feel much worse for a number of reasons and that can skew the results.

Krugman cited a YouGov survey showing that overall 33% of U.S. adult citizens felt great-to-good personally about 2023 while 27 percent felt bad-terrible about 2023 for the country—pretty balanced.

With Democrats, however, 44% felt great-good while just 16% felt bad-terrible personally, whereas just 29% of Republicans felt great-good vs. 31% felt bad-terrible. You can begin to see the trend.

But there’s a big difference over how constituents felt overall about the country in 2023. Democrats felt much better about 2023—35% to 6% for Republicans, while a whopping 76 percent of Republicans thought 2023 was a bad or terrible year for the country, vs. 35 % of Democrats.

What does that tell us? Mainly that the two parties must get their information from different sources, which speaks to either the fact that the economic benefits of record low unemployment and economic growth in 2023 haven’t filtered down to the red states where Republicans dominate, or a willful ignorance about the facts.

It goes back to Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller’s thesis in his book, Irrational Exuberance; that most economic decisions are formed not by researching the facts but hearsay, word-of-mouth stories, or lazy thinking—i.e., not thinking through the hard news but following the stories that make them feel comfortable.

But it also heavily weights surveys such as Real Clear towards the dominant results—in this case the 76 percent of Republicans who believe 2023 was a terrible year.

Or, perhaps the negative opinions of Republicans about the economy have nothing to do with the economy or their personal well-being.

Maybe it has to do with deep-seated prejudices such as an inherent belief that new immigrants don’t benefit them; or females shouldn’t be allowed to control their own health, a very skewed belief system that babies lives take precedence over their mothers’?

It also calls into question what was once our storied educational system. We were the first country to institute universal K-12 education. But now our K-12 system ranks at the bottom of developed countries in the latest surveys.

Some red states are also banning books from school curriculums and libraries, even persecuting librarians and K-12 teachers for advocating them. Is our public K-12 educational system no longer adequate to maintain a Democracy?

Harlan Green © 2024

Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen