Defeating The Bully Mentality

 Popular Economics Weekly

"But nobody expects to see a lot of prominent Republicans declaring that rejecting Medicaid expansion is wrong, that caring for Americans in need is more important than scoring political points against the Obama administration. As I said, there's an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today's America, which health reform has brought out into the open." P Krugman

sfgate.com

We are now seeing what happens when the Republican Party has adopted what I have called a bully mentality, a state of mind so fixed on domination rather than negotiation that it has inflicted massive damage to the U.S. economy and the American people with its hatred of a government that serves all Americans.

Donald Trump is the latest result of Republicans’ attempts to capture as much wealth as possible. They have dumbed down their party to such an extent that they now have a government dominated by the least educated and less talented that threatens to cause another recession.

And what can we do about it?

I quoted Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman on Republicans’ “ugly” behavior as long

ago as 2014 when Republicans opposed Obamacare. Such an ugly state of mind has never prevailed in this democracy that was founded by vanquishing the biggest bully at the time, King George III.

"...while supposed Obamacare horror stories keep on turning out to be false, it's already quite easy to find examples of people who died because their states refused to expand Medicaid. According to one recent study, the death toll from Medicaid rejection is likely to run between 7,000 and 17,000 Americans each year.”

The Republican Party since President Nixon’s resignation has been a record of economic failures. The 27 Republican-dominated red states are the poorest states, with the greatest income inequality, lowest life spans and highest birthrate mortalities. They require the most assistance from wealthy blue states to balance their budget deficits. And they have the highest death rates, including suicides, from drug and gun use.

It is the reason we are experiencing a second Gilded Age, almost a repeat of the turn of the 20th century that created the robber barons. The enormous wealth generated by the digital age has created an economy dominated by the ultra-wealthy with a massive tax burden born by all Americans.

$trillions have been siphoned away from wage earners to the owners of capital since 1980, which most economists consider the start of the second Gilded Age. The result was a series of recessions leading to the housing bubble and Great Recession during GW Bush’s reign.

And did they learn from it?

No, Republicans then elected another bully to two terms who continues to wreak havoc on the American economy with illegal tariffs and an another unending war. Donald Trump is a convicted felon who has always been a bully preying on the weakest. His many bankruptcies (5) and lawsuits (+3500) attest to his methods of defrauding investors and stiffing his workers that he could not dominate.

But perhaps the saddest example of Republicans’ transformation to a party  is that they no longer protect the environment as they did when President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 by signing the Clear Air and Water Acts.

When will Americans finally wake up to the suffering inflicted from such ugly behavior in a party that only caters to the richest and persecutes the poorest in upcoming elections, before inflation becomes uncontrollable, the air unbreathable, and the Iran becomes another unending war like Iraq?

Will it take another Great Recession and loss of millions of jobs before Americans stand up to such a bully mentality once again to end this Gilded Age?

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Why Trump 2.0?

Popular Economics Weekly

“According to the latest PISA rankings, which assess 15-year-olds in math, science, and reading, the United States ranks around 13th in reading, 18th in science, and 37th in mathematics out of 79 participating countries. Countries like China, Singapore, Finland, and Canada consistently outperform the US, particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects. World Population Review

Amazon

Why have Americans twice elected a president who is openly hostile to western, participatory democracy and actively supports dictators or wannabe dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban?

It is due to the support of a dumbed-down Republican Party, but also an education system that hasn’t changed with the technological times, such as by educating more scientists and engineers.

Republicans have a history of dumbing down their electorate so much so that a powerful minority no longer believes in scientific facts but prefers conspiracy theories.

The Republican party’s support of ignorance is easily documented; from the denial of evolution and support of creative (intelligent) design in the 1970s, to Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education and scientific research today, including the evisceration of public health services that serve all Americans (including Obamacare) and attempt to eliminate the Department of Education.

The dumbing down of Americans has also been reflected in an educational system that no longer serves all Americans, as I said. We developed a universal K-12 education system that is really the foundation of our democracy. By 1930, 48 states had passed laws making education compulsory.

But according to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design," said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

"After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place," said Psychology Today. "The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries"

The result has been electing a president who makes a virtue of his ignorance and announces decisions with little homework but worldwide repercussions based on what he “feels in his bones.”

Dana Milbank, a longtime political columnist, documented the modern Republican Party’s history in his book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Fived-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party.”

In May of 2021, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 23% of Republicans agree that, quote, "the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex trafficking operation," said Millbank in an NPR interview.

Milbank asserts Republicans drift towards craziness began in 1994 when more than 300 Republicans under the command of “obstructionist and rabble-rouser” Congressman Newt Gingrich stood outside the U.S. Capitol to sign the Contract with America and put bipartisanship on notice.

And “Twenty-five years later, on January 6, 2021, a bloodthirsty mob incited by President Trump invaded the Capitol,” he said

The American public is getting it. The latest PEW Research poll reports:

· Trump’s approval rating stands at 37%, down from 40% in the fall.

· By more than two-to-one, Americans say the administration’s actions have been worse than they expected (50%) rather than better (21%).

· Only about a quarter of Americans today (27%) say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office last year. That change has come entirely among Republicans.

Pundits give other reasons for such a dumbing down of a segment of the electorate--such as social media and television replacing literacy, or education that no longer teaches math and science or even history. Maybe that has enabled the Donald Trumps of the world to shout louder. The danger is that it may drown out any intelligent discourse about the most important issues of our day. It's driving at least one of our political parties into insanely dangerous positions today.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

 

Inflation Is Contagious

 Popular Economics Weekly

“From the preceding month, the PCE price index for December increased 0.4 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index also increased 0.4 percent.

From the same month one year ago, the PCE price index for December increased 2.9 percent. Excluding food and energy, the PCE price index increased 3.0 percent from one year ago.” BEA.gov

FREDpceindex

The inflation contagion is preceding unabated, per the FRED graph of the Personal Consumption Expenditure Index, the favored Federal Reserve inflation indicator.

Why? Because little to nothing has been done about inflation, although that may change with the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw Trump’s executive orders allowing retaliatory tariffs. The evidence is that tariffs have raised prices and done nothing to lower the trade deficit that Trump has railed about, per Paul Krugman’s Substack blog.

Paul Krugman

The Fed uses the PCE index because it most broadly measures the change in goods and services prices of goods consumed “by all households, and nonprofit institutions serving households”, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

It is a virus-like contagion indicator because consumers can’t do much about it over the short term other than shop for more bargains. It’s caused by product shortages and Trump’s tariffs, disruptions due to Trump’s continuous changes to tariffs that percolate through the general economy.

The FRED above graph also shows that President Biden had already brought PCE inflation down to 3% in October 2023. It has remained there ever since, only beginning to creep up after Trump’s April 2025 Liberation Day tariff announcements.

And it continues its creep, which will make the Fed’s decision about when to lower interest rates more difficult. Consumers are also becoming increasingly anxious about inflation.

And minutes of the Federal Reserve’s first meeting of the new year showed that several officials wanted the central bank to report there was a chance its next move might be to raise interest rates because of the stubborn inflation data.

The Conference Board’s Confidence Index also measures such attitudes: “Consumers’ write-in responses on factors affecting the economy continued to skew towards pessimism. Comments about prices, inflation, and the cost of goods remained at the top of consumer’s minds.”

Why is inflation so contagious, to use the virus analogy? Because price changes are connected, they ‘infect’ each other as every consumer and business knows. For instance a rise in import prices raises the price of the final product, whatever it is.

Economists call the phenomenon inflation expectations. Research has shown if businesses expect high inflation, they may raise prices immediately; if workers expect it, they will demand higher wages, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s all about attempting to predict future behavior, in other words. Consumer confidence surveys, such as the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index attempt to measure inflation expectations, for instance:

“Consumers’ average and median 12-month inflation expectations were little changed but remained elevated. Consumers also believed that interest rates will persist at higher levels over the next 12 months.

The good news is that even Independent voters are seeing through the propaganda and blatant lies that lay behind President Trump’s “Day One” promises.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

President Trump the Bully

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

 “With yesterday’s tragic news, we are calling for an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.” Letter signed by 60 Minnesotan CEOs

CNBC.com

It has taken the ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti for Minnesotan CEOs — among the most powerful and wealthiest Americans, says CNBC — to cause President Trump to blink, to back down from the Storm Trooper tactics of his immigration police in Minneapolis.

Minnesotans and the American public are learning how to counter what they are seeing with their own eyes, the real Donald Trump. His actions and those of his followers are the behavior of bullies, led by a megalomaniac with a very limited attention span and unlimited need for attention in the words of Mary Trump, his niece and a Clinical Psychologist, whose single-minded purpose is to gather as much wealth and power to himself as possible.

     It is a bully mentality that has infected Trump’s MAGA followers and leaders of the Republican Party as well, which sometimes takes tragedies such as happened in Milwaukee to open our eyes. There is little mystery to his actions.

Donald Trump’s success in business, such as it is, was due to his bullying tactics that browbeat investors and lenders to such an extent that he could no longer rely on U.S. investors and banks to finance his projects, but came to rely on Russian oligarchs instead who needed to hide their wealth from the Russian people.

Such a mentality has led to increased bullying in schools since the COVID-19 pandemic, and even gun violence. It is a mentality that attempts to impose a bully's version of reality on the real world for the sole purpose of domination.

Evidence of Trump's bullying behavior also comes from the exaggerated use of his hands, which is the body language and mannerisms of a bully reports Groff Beattle, a professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University who specializes in gestures,.

Also comments such as "mentally sick", "dummy", "looser" or "looked disgusting" are all examples of bullying language on Trump's Truth Social site. Furthermore, he has mocked the disability of reporter Serge Kovaleski, portrayed immigrants and foreigners as dangerous people, rapists or "criminal aliens", and demonstrated a significant lack of respect for women generally.

How does one oppose such destructive behavior? First, remember that bullies will prey on the weakest, and avoid confrontation with those stronger because of their own insecurities. Trump preyed on naïve students and the elderly in his Trump University scam. And he stiffed workers and employees when building his Trump Casinos either by paying them less than was contractually agreed to, or not at all via numerous bankruptcies.

It is a lesson NATO members at DAVOS have just learned that is being reflected in their speeches as they search for other countries to move their businesses.

Combine it with what many Psychologists have termed Trump’s Malignant Narcissism, a particularly dangerous form that means he will do anything, break any law to get his way.

Trump is now supporting Central and South American regimes backed by drug cartels in pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking.

In standing up to what has proven to be a soulless, amoral administration Minnesotans are fighting for more than their own state, they are fighting to prevent a world that President Trump and his oligarchs want to restore in South and Central America for their own benefit by supporting right wing narco-states that have as little regard for life.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Where Are the Jobs?

 Financial FAQs

“Both total nonfarm payroll employment (+50,000) and the unemployment rate (4.4 percent) changed little in December, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in food services and drinking places, health care, and social assistance. Retail trade lost jobs.” BLS.gov

FREDpayrolls

We’re now seeing the first ‘clean’ results of the damage to the job market in the December unemployment report from the Trump tariffs and immigration deportations since the 42-day government shutdown.

Approximately half the jobs are being created than before the April 2 tariff announcements that is shown in the FRED graph of total nonfarm payroll jobs. That will not make those who are looking for work happy. There are fewer available jobs, in this instance.

Employment continued to increase in food services and drinking places, health care, and social assistance. But retail and everything else lost jobs.

The bottom line is payroll employment rose by just 584,000 in 2025 (an average monthly gain of 49,000), less than the increase of 2.0 million in 2024 (an average monthly gain of 168,000), said the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Our population may be shrinking, but not enough to absorb all those looking for work—not just to replace the jobs lost to the tariffs, but replacing those jobs lost from deported workers.

There are fewer agricultural workers to harvest the crops, for instance. What does that do to grocery prices? According to Michigan State study cited by The Idaho Capital Sun, more than half of surveyed farmers said in 2021 that they were experiencing some sort of worker shortage, It found that when domestic farm employment declines by 10%, food prices of labor-intensive crops increase by around 3%.

We can now see the damage Trump’s attempt to make his own laws is doing to the U.S. economy. He cannot legally levy most tariffs that haven’t been approved by congress. They are supposed to be negotiated by the trade partners involved, not by executive order.

That’s why Trump has driven up prices on housing construction and auto manufacturing, for instance, because of higher tariffs on steel, aluminum, and lumber, and why the goods producing sector, such as in manufacturing and construction, lost -21,000 jobs in December.

But consumers in the top 10 percent income bracket with assets in real estate or the financial markets are continuing to dine out and travel, as I’ve been saying.

Employers aren’t hiring more workers, in other words. Those taking part-time jobs because they couldn’t find full-time jobs rose 980,000 and those that want jobs but haven’t been looking for jobs recently rose 684,000 in 2025.

Businesses are supposed to expand and hire more employees this year because they can write off capital expenditures in the same year they are spent in Trump’s new tax law.

But AI cannot replace all those jobs that businesses will need to grow this year and beyond, because it takes time to automate production, though the stock prices of those AI companies that have been rallying of late don’t know that yet.

So the question will be can consumers still shop and spend as they did last year, which is why GDP growth of late is surging? Will the level of consumer spending, capital investments, and higher exports hold up unless companies begin to hire more workers?

A lot of consumers are already unhappy with the higher prices in everyday items. This is even though University of Michigan’s first New Year’s gauge of consumer sentiment rose to 54 in a preliminary January reading from 52.9 in the prior month.

“It is the second straight gain and the highest level of sentiment since September. Consumers perceived some modest improvement in the economy,” the survey found, although sentiment remains nearly 25% below last January’s reading, said MarketWatch’s Greg Robb.

So this year may be a tossup, in spite of the chaos sewn by a President who doesn’t seem to know or care about basic economic truths. There’s a bit of irrational exuberance in this New Year, so that consumers may keep shopping and corporations make record profits.

The question is what they will do with those profits, expand their markets by hiring more employees or buy back stocks to keep elevate their profits and that of their stockholders?

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Equality Is Good For Everyone!

Answering Kennedy’s Call

“And on the tax front, it’s time for rich people like me to pay more.” Mitt Romney

Getty/Bettmann

This quote from a recent NYTimes Mitt Romney Op-ed is my Christmas message: Equal opportunity hasn’t been available to many Americans, even though it is part of the American Dream—America is the land of opportunity that is taught in schools and heard by immigrants.

Why? Because it’s a larger economic truth that not all Americans have accepted. Equality is good for everyone. It should be self-evident, a statement of common sense. The more equality of opportunity among us, the more we can better ourselves, become more productive citizens, which in turn increases our national wealth (and lowers budget deficits).

It was certainly the dream of immigrants, such as my mother, a British citizen born in Jamaica.

But there are times such as today when many Americans don’t believe it is possible, which is why we are living in another Gilded Age with the worst income inequality of the developed world. It is on a par with developing countries in Africa and has been the major cause of recessions and the Great Depression.

Many have bought the counter narrative by those that don’t like equality, such as Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters, part of the privileged few at the top of the income ladder who want us to believe they are the most qualified to create greater wealth for the rest of us.

This Gilded Age was formed like the last Gilded Age of President William McKinley, from a concentration of power among the wealthiest oligarchs. Then it was monopolies in such as the newly created railroad and oil industries.

Today, it is small government policies of Donald Trump that mirror the trickle-down economic policies of President Reagan because enough Americans believed it, believed government was the problem and cutting taxes the solution, believed that equality is not good for everyone because we live in a zero-sum world with limited resources. What is given to one must be taken from another.

The conservative position espoused by 1970s Economist Arthur Okun, for instance, was that greater equality meant less market efficiencies to produce and so fewer incentives for greater wealth, since leveling the playing field meant leveling out the opportunity for large profits.

But that has never been the case. There has always been copious evidence that the opposite is true; that overly large profits have led to diminished household wealth and breakup of communities.

One can measure inequality with such as the CIA’s World Factbook that ranks inequality among nations. Those with the greatest equality also have less violence, greater freedoms, greater health, and guaranteed vacations!

Richard Wilkinson’s TEDx lecture and book with Kate Pickett, “The Spirit Level” is one of the best studies of the dire effects of income inequality on the quality of life. The most important factor, and a sign of dire consequences when inequality has approached the level of the Great Depression, are the US violent crime and incarceration rates, which Wilkinson discusses at length.

The U.S. is by far the most violent country in the world—worse than any other developed country with the highest incarceration rates. Efforts to reverse such inequality have begun on the local levels, even if congressional conservatives have blocked raising the miniscule national minimum wage of $7.25 per hour that was last set in 2009.

It is worth just $5 per hour today whereas blue states like California and Connecticut have raised their minimum wage to $16.90 per hour in line with rising livings costs.

And there is an increasing awareness of the income disparities, such as the fact that corporate CEOs now earn more than 300 times the income of their employees, and certain hedge fund managers have reported an annual income of $1 billion.

The Center for American Progress launched the Washington Center For Equitable Growth, which aims to deepen the economic critique of inequality. It was set up by Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, among others, who is known with his partner Thomas Piketty as the first economists to historically research the history of income distribution over the past 100 years.

The mission statement of the Center explains why it is needed:

“New research suggests that growing inequality in the United States may have broad social and economic effects — by reducing stable demand for goods and services, dampening entrepreneurialism, undermining the inclusiveness and responsiveness of political and economic institutions, limiting access to education, and stunting individual development. Yet our understanding of how these mechanisms interact with the broader economy is limited.”

Mitt Romney’s Op-ed has voiced one of the major issues confronting Americans today—how to fix the overwhelming federal debt load that threatens the ‘full faith and credit’ of the U.S. government.

“The largest source of additional tax revenues is also probably the most compelling for the fairness and social stability. Some call it closing a tax code loophole but the term “loopholes” grossly understates their scale. “Caverns” or “caves” would be more fitting,” said Romney

Donald Trump’s flailing attempts to use higher tariffs to pay down federal debt, when it is in fact another tax on all Americans, is maybe the most important reason to follow Mitt Romney’s advice.

Taxing the wealthiest that haven’t been “paying their fair share”—including Donald Trump’s billionaire supporters, would close one of the largest loopholes that is endangering the U.S. economy, as Senator Bernie Sanders continually reminds us.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Trump Imitates Putinism

Popular Economics Weekly

“Russian mathematician and Putin critic Andrey Piontkovsky characterized Putinism as "the highest and final stage of bandit capitalism in Russia; and also as a war, 'consolidation' of the nation on the ground of hatred against some ethnic group, attack on freedom of speech and information brainwashing, isolation from the outside world and further economic degradation". Wikipedia

Medium.com

The latest Ukrainian peace proposal was negotiated between President Trump and Vladimir Putin without Ukraine’s involvement. This is another example of Donald Trump’s attempt to curry favor with Vladimir Putin by literally allowing Putin to dictate the terms of the peace proposal.

Why has Trump turned into Putin’s messenger, whose policies mirror Putinism? Why has the oldest liberal democracy in the world, a nation of immigrants founded on the principle of every member’s inalienable right to be free become the “bandit capitalism” of Vladimir Putin, a dictator who allows no freedoms and kills his own people?

Late-stage capitalism doesn’t fully explain why Donald Trump, a real estate developer with no political experience, could convert a weakened American Democracy into a version of capitalism that concentrates power and wealth in the hands of his oligarchic supporters blatantly ignoring America’s founding principles and laws of the land.

But epidemiologic disease models studied by medical researchers can explain how capitalism could morph into Putinism and bandit capitalism. Such models have shown that there are predictable paths that all epidemics, pandemics, or other contagious disease outbreaks follow from beginning to end.

The body politic of countries and regions (i.e., “the people of a nation, state, or society considered collectively as an organized group of citizens) have endured political outbreaks with similar characteristics. Even civil wars fit this infectious disease model, because they originate internally—brother or sister against each other—and may last longer than years, and suddenly end in unexpected ways.

How do diseases infect? The Black Plague epidemics usually infected people that had been weakened by famines or dysfunctional governments, and the more recent Spanish Flu and COVID-19 pandemics as well that infected and killed millions.

When do such pandemics wane or disappear? They run a recognizable course from inception to a maximum infection rate, then subsided when disease-infected populations eventually found ways to cause their decline. It was quarantines in early times, and vaccines in modern times.

Trumpism, Putinism, and like autocracies or dictatorships have captured weakened political systems. In Russia it was breakup of communism and the Soviet Empire that fostered a Vladimir Putin. In Trump’s case, he took advantage of a democratizing order that had united to win World War II but no longer served many Americans.

Oligarchism, or the Gilded Age model has supported Trump’s version of bandit capitalism with his illegal tariffs that are creating the worst income inequality in the developed world. Trump is promoting a similar hatred of immigrants as Putin, also non-white ethnic and religious groups, attacks on freedom of speech in universities, and Depression-level tariffs that is isolating America from the “outer world”.

The AP just reported that President Donald Trump says he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and is promising to seek to expel millions of immigrants from the United States by revoking their legal status. He is blaming immigrants for problems from crime to housing shortages as part of “social dysfunction” in America and demanding “REVERSE MIGRATION.”

He has also followed Putin’s strategy by weakening foreign alliances such as NATO, and breaking up long held foreign trade alliances, all to centralize his power.

But the MAGA movement itself may be in a late-stage decline, as it is slowly disintegrating from internal divisions, with the resignation of major leaders such as Marjorie Taylor Green, growing disputes over policies including tariffs and the treatment of immigrants.

And Donald Trump, its leader, is showing signs of declining health—with fewer public appearances (that also afflicted former president Biden), irrational outbursts and making sudden policy changes without explanation. The MAGA movement has blindly followed him, believing in totally irrational conspiracies until the conspiracies are debunked or and fade away (just as did the flu and COVID-19 pandemics).

The first Gilded Age was defeated by the election of President Teddy Roosevelt riding on the wave of a progressive movement that uncovered the corruption and concentrated wealth of the time.

Trump doesn’t even attempt to hide his blatant corruption nor his promotion of the disease of Putinism that is attempting to destroy American Democracy. So it will take constant vigilance to identify and combat such a widespread contagion, as we have defeated past diseases of the 'body politic', and bring Americans together once again in common purpose to preserve our democracy.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

 

Good September Unemployment Report

 

Popular Economics Weekly

“…while the economy is growing thanks to AI spending, it’s a K-shaped expansion: People who were already affluent are becoming more so, but the less well-off are under severe pressure.” Paul Krugman

FREDnonfarmpayrolls

The delayed U.S. unemployment report for September was good old news. It showed 119,000 nonfarm payroll jobs were created, though the unemployment rate edged up to 4.4%. But that was before the government shutdown.

And the U.S. had already lost -13,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in June and -4,000 jobs in August. The U.S. economy has averaged just 38,600 new jobs per month through September since Trump announced the April 2 retaliatory tariffs, as employers haven’t been hiring while they wait see what the final tariff rates (and therefore costs) might be.

The October employment report has been canceled because of the government shutdown and the November report will come out late, depriving the Federal Reserve of critical information before its next meeting to decide whether to cut interest rates again. Both reports were postponed by the 43-day government shutdown that lasted from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12.

So the November employment report will be published on Dec. 16 instead of Dec. 5 as originally scheduled, per the BLS. An estimate of employment for October will be included in the November jobs report. It’s thought that up to 100,000 more government jobs may have been lost in October due to firings or attrition.

It is a K-shaped jobs report, as Nobel Laureate Krugman stated. This is why hiring has stagnated at such a low level since April. Jobs are being created in the lower-paying service sector, whereas the industrial sector and governments are losing jobs.

Employment in food services and drinking places continued to trend up in September (+37,000). In September, social assistance employment continued to trend up (+14,000), reflecting continued job growth in individual and family services (+20,000).

Employment in transportation and warehousing declined by 25,000 in September as job losses occurred in warehousing and storage (-11,000) and couriers and messengers (-7,000). Federal government employment continued to decline in September (-3,000) and is down by 97,000 since reaching a peak in January.

That means the more affluent consumers continued to dine out and could afford more health care services, which is now the fastest growing segment of the economy, as I said.

So the economy is k-shaped because just 10 percent of American consumers are keeping the economy from contracting, because they now own more than 50 percent of assets, according the latest Federal Reserve data—in housing, pensions, and financial assets. And the stock market is still booming.

But small businesses that employ the most workers aren’t hiring because more than 90 percent of them are dependent on imported goods that Trump has targeted with his higher tariffs. We won’t see its effect on economic growth until the fourth quarter and beyond.

If employers aren’t hiring, what is causing the predictions for 4 percent GDP growth in Q3? It’s a statistical fluke because imports are deducted from exports and other domestic expenditures to calculate the overall GDP growth rate. And small business importers are buying less at the moment. The Gross Domestic Product measures what is produced domestically, in other words.

This is the k-shaped economy we will have to live with. The NYTimes reports that the unemployment rate for 20-24 year-olds has risen to 9.2 percent. The hiring slowdown means they are competing with more experienced workers for fewer available jobs, at least until the tariff rates have settled.

Interest rates? The Fed is scheduled to cut rates another -0.25 percent in December but what if inflation doesn’t come down? Trump has signaled he wants to continue to lower interest rates regardless of the consequences.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

U.S. Economy Is Freezing!

 Popular Economics Weekly

“…while the economy is growing thanks to AI spending, it’s a K-shaped expansion: People who were already affluent are becoming more so, but the less well-off are under severe pressure. For example, there are clear signs that middle-to-low income consumers are struggling: car loan and credit card delinquencies are rising, and grocers report that shoppers are buying cheaper varieties of food. At the same time, the affluent are spending freely: the top 10% of the income distribution now accounts for nearly half of all consumer spending.” Paul Krugman

PBS.org

This was the wrong season for President Trump’s Republicans to freeze Democrats out of the just passed continuing resolution or demolish the East Wing. We already have a record fall freeze hitting the Midwest and southern states.

Americans already feeling the freeze is also a good way to describe the Democrats landslide victories in the November elections. The record government shutdown put the U.S. economy on pause, but in fact much of the damage was already done, says Nobel Laureat Paul Krugman, just as Trump seemed oblivious to the timing of the damage being done to the White House,.

Republicans had been losing in the popularity polls this year because they chose to ignore the signs. So they believed that flying blind by keeping the federal government closed without official economic data on employment and inflation was the better option than knowing the truth.

But there are other data to fill the government void in data collecting that affect how consumers behave. The ADP, for instance, a private sector payment provider said private-sector employers shed an average of 11,250 jobs a week in the four weeks ending Oct. 25.

This hit the “middle-to-low income” consumers particularly hard that Krugman is talking about. What about inflation?

Ordinary grocery prices are climbing, forcing consumers to shop for “cheaper varieties of food.” Grocery prices have risen 18.2 percent since January 2022, making a $100 grocery bill approximately $118 today, per CBS News.

And President Trump is flailing in his attempt to mask the damage his tariff war is causing. Overall consumer inflation is stuck at 3 percent in large part because of the tariffs, so he wants to offer $2,000 rebates to consumers while the Fed is cutting interest rates. This would cost more than the import taxes he has already collected, enlarging the federal debt that has ballooned from his Big Beautiful Bill tax cuts.

And his proposed cuts to legal immigration from the longer term, historical average of one million to 7500 annually, will continue to shrink the workforce, even the number of H-1B work visas for highly qualified workers that are badly needed in the tech sector.

All of this will continue to damage economic growth at a time when worldwide economic growth is being affected by the chaos Trump has generated in tearing up existing foreign trade agreements.

No economy can tolerate such uncertain weather over the longer term. Hence investment decisions remain frozen while consumers find shelter for the coming economic winter. How severe will it be?

Harlan Green © 2025

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

The Truth About High Tariffs

 Popular Economics Weekly

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.” President Reagan

Reagan Library

Was President Reagan predicting what would happen in Trump’s second term as president?

President Trump didn’t like Ontario Prime Minister Dog Ford’s posting of a 1987 radio address by President Reagan criticizing high tariffs that went viral because it was describing what was happening with Trump’s illegal, retaliatory tariffs that are destroying the American economy and chasing our allies into deals with China.

It was obvious President Trump didn’t want his public to know that starting a tariff war with all 180 countries in the world would trigger “fierce trade wars” and sow economic chaos.

Add the job losses for “millions of people” his massive downsizing of the federal workforce that provides the benefits that protect all Americans, while attacking our institutions of higher learning that prepare us for the future, we can see where this can lead.

His actions are already contributing to a skilled worker shortage and the shrinkage of huge segments of the U.S. working age population with his attacks on immigrants that make up 40 percent of our agricultural workers and a large part of our service industry workers.

Is the chaos he is causing designed to destroy the U.S. economy as we know it, “markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down,” so that all or most power will be concentrated in the hands of the oligarchs and close allies that support him?

It happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its collapse caused Russian oligarchs and Putin to snap up whole industries for pennies on the dollar, thus concentrating their wealth where Putin could control it.

Why can’t it happen here? Trump adores Putin as his model, but he would need a cowed tribe of supporters similar to Russia’s serb population, the serfs of old, liberated little more than 100 years ago, to sustain his power. Right now, it’s Trump’s White Christian Nationalists (like Putin’s Russian Orthodox supporters), but they are a small minority.

President Trump will only succeed in his scheme if he can convince enough Americans that his tariffs against the rest of the world (and higher inflation) are good for US because it would bring back better-paying industrial jobs to his base in the Midwest that had suffered from the globalization of manufacturing.

But that’s not what President Reagan said. He would also have to convince enough Americans that destroying large segments of the U.S. economy—in public health, environmental protection, social services—is worth the cost of higher tariffs, rather than live as his red state supporters have suffered under Republican rule; many with no minimum wage, minimal or no health care, no environmental protection from increasingly frequent natural disasters, and above all, a distrust in science that would provide them a better future.

We should ask ourselves, why would President Trump enact his agenda outside of most customs and laws, demolish the East Wing of the White House to build a 90,000 square foot ballroom without approved plans or permits?

Trump can only be stopped from his attempt to set up an American version of Putin’s Oligarchy, if enough Americans will believe in President Reagan’s predictions.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

When Will It End?

 Popular Economics Weekly

The government shutdown is a good time to look at how Donald Trump’s economy is doing in his second term, if we want any peace and prosperity at all once the real costs of the tariff war and his tax cuts become obvious.

“With yet another round of tariffs taking effect this week — this time on cabinets and other furniture, timber and lumber — the White House insists that its policies are about “fairness” and “reciprocity.” The evidence now tells a different story of higher prices for Americans, lower margins for U.S. firms, collapsing exports in flagship industries, investment paralysis and mounting risks of an economic slowdown.” Veronique de Rugy LATimes

Part of the problem is that Trump has always needed a lot of help to survive his storied temper tantrums, multiple business failures and bankruptcies. He learned how to play a successful businessman that he was not in “The Apprentice” TV show that he touted in his early book, Trump: How to Get Rich.

Huffington Post

“With his luxury buildings, award-winning golf courses, high-stakes casinos, and glamorous beauty pageants, Donald J. Trump is one of a kind in American business. Every day, he lives the American dream. Now he shows you how it’s done, in this rollicking, inspirational, and illuminating behind-the-scenes story of invaluable lessons and rich rewards,” said Amazon’s “How To Get Rich” book blurb.

His “American Dream” was never meant for the many, just the few. Many Americans are not living the dream that Trump promised because raising the tariffs to Great Depression levels in the name of “fairness and reciprocity” is raising the prices for all Americans, and slowing economic growth.

The LATimes reported a recent KPMG survey finds that “60% of businesses reported decreased overseas sales” in the first six months of Trump’s tariffs. KPMG finds that nearly half of American companies have already raised prices because of tariffs; two-thirds have passed at least part of those costs on to shoppers; and nearly 40% have paused hiring, with a third cutting jobs.

CEOs overwhelmingly expect tariffs to weigh on business for years. Goldman Sachs estimates U.S. consumers are now footing 55% of the total tariff bill, while foreign exporters bear only a sliver of the costs.

“So much for draining the swamp. All of this explains the wild uncertainty business leaders have experienced in recent months. Retailers are now bracing for 100% tariffs on Chinese goods scheduled for Nov. 1, right before the holiday rush. Some firms have scurried to ship early, but even a few days’ delay at sea could blow up their margins. With deadlines set, delayed and often re-announced with each news conference, companies can’t plan or invest,” said de Rugy.

The NYTimes cites a Moody’s Analytics report that the top 10 percent of U.S. households now account for nearly half of all domestic spending. And the Federal Reserve just reported that consumers’ revolving credit shrank (-5.5%) for the first time since 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Republicans and Donald Trump have put on quite a show to convince Americans that they are better off by cutting government jobs and benefits in the name of a better use their benefits.

But it’s turning out “How To Get Rich” is a scheme to benefit the very few whose taxes have been reduced. The shutdown will end when enough Americans realize it is being paid for with higher inflation and taxes (tariffs) for the many.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Whose Inflation Is It?

Financial FAQs

“Still, despite multiple offsetting drivers, the tariff shock is further dimming already lackluster growth prospects. We expect a slowdown in the second half of this year, with only a partial recovery in 2026, and, compared to last October’s projections, inflation is expected to be persistently higher. Even in the United States, growth is weaker and inflation higher than we projected last year—hallmarks of a negative supply shock.” IMF Global Economic Outlook 2025

FREDcpi

No one wants to admit who is responsible for the sharp rise in consumer prices since April 2. Democrats and the Biden administration had worked to bring the Consumer Price Index (CPI) portrayed in the above graph down to 2.3% from its high of 9% that occurred in 2023 from the COVID-19 pandemic.

But it began to rise again in this April at the same time that Trump announced retaliatory tariffs on the rest of the world. Republicans say the inflation was caused by Biden’s massive government spending programs that sped up the COVID-19 pandemic recovery.

Most economists maintain that the inflation spike was caused in large part because of the supply shortages during the pandemic. President Trump’s tariff war on imports from the rest of the world that he announced on April 2 exacerbated the product shortages as exporters scrambled to find cheaper supply routes to avoid the higher tariffs.

Add to this the looming worker shortage from tighter immigration policies that are shrinking the foreign-born labor supply—another negative supply shock on top of that from tariffs—that is beginning to affect labor productivity.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its latest Global Economic Outlook report says both the tariffs and a looming worker shortage are “hallmarks of a negative supply shock” that will eventually slow down world economic growth.

China is now restricting the export of rare earth minerals, for which Trump has threatened to add an additional 100 percent tariff on China’s exports to US. And the government shutdown will only make things worse in closing down the statistical departments that tell us where we are and might be in six months.

“Overall, despite a steady first half, the outlook remains fragile, and risks remain tilted to the downside,” reports the IMF. “The main risk is that tariffs may increase further from renewed and unresolved trade tensions, which, coupled with supply chain disruptions, could lower global output by 0.3 percent next year. Apart from this, four simmering downside risks are especially worrying.”

What are they? U.S. financial markets are overinvested in AI with little to show for it, while AI is already causing white-collar layoffs, exacerbating the job losses incurred by the ICE roundup of undocumented immigrants.

And we have a record $39 trillion federal debt weighing on the credit markets that is competing with the private capital needed for new plants and equipment investment.

The Trump administration is vainly attempting to equate the record tariff rates, now at Great Depression levels, let us not forget, with some promised domestic industrial revival.

And Trump wants an easy money Federal Reserve to help grease its wheels. How do you think interest rates and inflation will respond to easier credit? The same way inflation and interest rates responded to Joe Biden’s New, New Deal?

We can’t borrow our way out of this debt mess with tax cuts for the wealthiest.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

 

Why Do Trump's Republicans Hate Immigrants?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented worker (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do. Economic growth will plummet, since it is mainly based on growth of the working age population, as well as labor productivity, which has also fallen since 2000.” Harlan Green Huffington Post

Huffington Post

I wrote in 2017 that for most of the past half-century, adults in the U.S. Baby Boom generation – those born after World War II and before 1965 – have been the main driver of the nation’s expanding workforce. But as this large generation headed into retirement, the increase in the potential labor force would slow markedly, and immigrants will play the primary role in the future growth of the working-age population (though they will remain a minority of it).

Republicans know this. Then why have Republicans and the Trump administration opposed immigration reform when there has never been enough American-born citizens to fill the labor rolls?  America has always had a labor shortage, which is why we have always been a land of immigrants.

A hint to the answer may be in the Gestapo-like tactics of the ICE raids to deport undocumented immigrants that is supposedly because they are supplanting lower-paid jobs that could be held by American citizens. (But that has never been the case, according to various studies that show American citizens won’t take such lower-paying jobs.)

The Republican Party has come to believe that it can only maintain power by preventing minorities from voting. They have suppressed voters in red states by limiting access to polls in minority districts and getting the Supreme Court to nullify parts of the Voting Rights Act that allowed federal government oversight of voting districts to ensure they weren’t over-gerrymandered to not accurately represent the population mix.

And now it is taking a darker turn with Trump’s callup of National Guard Troops to occupy Democratic cities, and threats to call any protests signs of an insurrection. Why have Republicans become so desperate that they now want to rule by decree?

One reason is the total growth of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 over the next decade will be lower than the total in any single decade since the Baby Boomers began pouring into the workforce in the 1960s. The growth rate of working-age adults will also be markedly reduced, according to a PEW Research study.

The latest immigration trends studied by Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute’s (EPI), a labor think tank, echoes the PEW analysis. Future economic growth will suffer if there aren’t enough new immigrants to supplant retiring workers in our adult labor workforce.

“The fast growth of the labor force between 1948 and 2007 and the slowdown since then can be explained by three big demographic changes: the Baby Boom that saw high fertility rates from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s and then a sharply lower fertility rate since, the steady influx of women into the labor force from 1948 until roughly 2000, and population aging that has seen the share of the over-65 population rise rapidly since 2007,” said Bivens.

We know that President Trump has always been racist; calling any immigrants that aren’t from white, Caucasian countries, such as Norway, criminals and the lowest of the low, hence his appeal to White Christian Nationalists.

Withholding funds from states and institutions in the name of suppressing DEI hiring is the Trump administration’s attempt to impoverish Americans in the blue states, as they have done in the red states. Their answer to the smaller workforce is the hope that AI and robots will fill the labor market void.

It is the reason for the huge rally in AI companies that is driving today’s stock market highs, driven by the hope that AI can replace our declining population.

The EPI’s Bivens says the labor force of the U.S.-born population will likely fall each year for the next decade. So what can we do to alleviate the hardships to come because Republicans have no answer for the half of our working population that will be replaced by AI, and already live month-to-month with no excess savings?

The EPI says it can be done with a social safety net that serves all Americans, not just the wealthy. “In addition to policies that prioritize tight labor markets, policies should target the following for adults:

• reductions in opioid use
• reductions in incarceration rates
• improvements in policies that support parents and caregivers
•  substantial improvements in the pay and working conditions of jobs of the future (like caregiving jobs) to attract and retain workers

“Investments in today’s children are crucial for boosting the labor force participation of future generations, such as safety net policies that promote long-term health and educational investments. 

This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky wish list but what can be done today, as it has been done in the past when such autocracies fail, as they always do.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Trump's Art of the Steal

 Popular Economics Weekly

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” Author Tony Schwartz

Huffington Post

Tony Schwartz should have named his 1987 Trump biography “The Art of the Steal.” Trump’s main talent has been his ability to steal from others.

Trump’s Republican-engineered shutdown that allowed no Democratic input is his latest theft. Refusing to negotiate the continuing resolution (CR) with Democrats caused the shutdown, which will give Trump an excuse for even more job losses, cost-cutting and closing of government services, as well as essential services for social security, Medicare and Medicaid, while downsizing Obamacare benefits by as much as 70 percent.

It’s becoming obvious that Trump and his Republican accomplices are stealing as much as they can from the American people in his second term.

Americans are paying in a big way. Higher everyday prices to begin with for groceries, energy, and even higher interest rates. The Federal Reserve has been reluctant to lower interest rates until now because of the rising inflation levels due to the rising costs from Trump’s tariffs.

His thievery has been well documented, lately in Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner’s best seller, Lucky Loser, How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, that documents the con artist he really is.

“Donald Trump came to be imbued with a host of attributes that speak to how we confer status and admiration in modern America. Our awe of celebrity. Our tendency to conflate the trappings of wealth with expertise and ability. Our eagerness to believe people of apparent status will not lie to us. Our inability to distinguish the fruits of hard work from those of sheer luck.”.

It's a sordid tale, because he has stolen from friends and foes alike. So why have Republicans allowed the wholesale stealing, who were once the party of President Nixon that signed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency into law?

It is only possible because of the intentional dumbing down of a political party that came to rely on conspiracy theories instead of facts, according to conservative journalist Matt Lewis in his 2016 best-seller, Too Dumb to Fail:

“Somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the most recent government shutdown, the conservative movement became neither conservative nor a movement. Hijacked by the divisive and the dumb, it now finds itself hostage to emotions and irrational thinking.”

Why? Because it became the party of the super wealthy that could only maintain power by hiring the “divisive and dumb”, as Trump has done, to run the Republican Party and his government.

Trump’s recommendation of bleach injections and the downplay of mask use to treat the COVID-19 pandemic were an attempt to dumb down his electorate, and many MAGA supporters died because of it.

Author Tony Schwartz attributed Trump’s inability to focus on any subject for more than a few minutes to his short attention span. But the chaos that followed disguised his real intentions; to steal from whomever he is dealing with, such as the students of his faux Trump University, the workers he never paid that built his Atlantic City casinos, multiple bankruptcies, and his own charitable foundation that he milked for his own use.

Why would one political party become so devoid of basic truths that they follow a man who says climate change is a hoax while experiencing more frequent floods, fires, tornadoes and rising sea levels with their own eyes?

How many more jobs will be lost, more natural disasters and pandemics and even recessions will occur, before the Republican Party base realizes they’ve been conned and want to become part of a democratic system again in which all are treated equally under the law and our constitution?

It’s what wannabe dictators do to stay in power, if their electorate will allow it.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

The Too Dumb to Fail Party

 Financial FAQs

“In November 2021, (President Biden) signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. Then, in August 2022, he signed the CHIPS bill, which invests $280 billion in semiconductor manufacturing. Days later, he signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which invests $370 billion in clean energy and related infrastructure, along with provisions designed to reduce health care costs.” Washington Monthly

perseusbooks.com

How sad it is that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation that abolished slavery, has become the party of a wannabe dictator Too Dumb to Fail in the words of author and journalist Matt Lewis, that imprisons immigrants of the wrong race and color.

It is a party that has enabled Donald Trump to rely on mostly illegal executive orders, including the tariffs, instead of working with congress as did President Biden to pass his very successful ‘New, New Deal’ legislation that is modernizing the American economy for many years to come.

Trump’s inability to negotiate with congress had as much to do with the Republican Party that had already become the party of the wealthy who owned or stewarded America’s biggest businesses.

“In the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump listed his top 10 legislative priorities as part of his “Contract with the American Voter”, continued the Washington Monthly, which included repeal of the Affordable Care Act, infrastructure investment, harsher prison sentences for immigration violations, and full funding of a border wall to be reimbursed by Mexico. None of that reached his desk.”

That is because the Republican Party learned early they could only hold power if they succeeded in dumbing down their electorate; even before Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down” economic schemes in 1980 that cut the taxes of the wealthiest and social benefits for the rest of Americans to pay for the budget deficits incurred by his tax cuts.

Journalist Matt Lewis said it in his 2016 best-seller, Too Dumb to Fail: “Somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech in support of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the most recent government shutdown, the conservative movement became neither conservative nor a movement. Hijacked by the divisive and the dumb, it now finds itself hostage to emotions and irrational thinking.

“It became more personal and less principled — more flippant and less thoughtful. It became mean. It became lazy. It became its own worst enemy. Where once the movement drew strength from its desire to win the philosophical argument over its adversaries, it now wears its lost causes as badges of honor — expected, like Coriolanus, to show these battle scars as a means of vote mongering.”

I said in a 2015 Huffington Post blog that the result of one political party’s choice to replace scientific facts with conspiracy theories had begun to permeate the American educational system as well.

According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or “intelligent design,” said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:

“After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place,” said Psychology Today. “The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries.”

Even in 2015 Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency and CDC), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can’t be aborted.

Nothing has changed, in other words, except Republicans elected Donald Trump, a man who would be a king, who has suffered from what psychologists and psychiatrists have called a Narcissistic Personality Disorder his whole life, whose father had given him more than $400 million over the years to support his various business ventures, according to the NYTimes.

The results of his father’s wealth are well documented in the book titled, “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by NYTimes reporters Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner. Such largesse resulted in a string of business failures and seven bankruptcies.

Now Donald Trump and the Republican Party that supports him have taken the dumbing down of Americans to a whole new level by firing the best and brightest public officials and cutting their research budgets that protect Americans from future pestilences and environmental disasters.

History says the truth will out, eventually. A man and party that is too dumb to fail, that can only rule with lies and deception, must eventually fail. But when, and at what cost to Americans’ health and safety?

Harlan Green © 2025

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

"Mr. President, do not come to Chicago."

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“So in case there was any doubt as to the motivation behind Trump's military occupations, take note: 13 of the top 20 cities in homicide rate have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.” CBS News

CBS

President Trump and Republicans have expanded their defacto civil war by invading Democratic blue states, something the original confederacy couldn’t do. He wants to impoverish them just as Republicans have milked their red states for decades.

That’s why Illinois Governor JB Pritzer came out swinging at a press conference when he learned that President Donald Trump was looking at occupying Chicago and Philadelphia next with National Guard troops from some of the red states to combat crime.

“Over the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning, for quite a while now, to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against, and it's the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances,” said Governor Pritzer

But there’s more to Trump’s actions. Pritzer wanted Americans to realize that Trump and his Republicans are defunding everything the federal government provides to protect Americans from crime to pay for his tax cuts for the wealthiest. The total is $1,166 billion in cuts to public safety and crime prevention programs, as well as grants to local police departments, said Governor Pritzer.

There are good reasons that blue states are more prosperous and do a better job at protecting their citizens. They have higher minimum wages, fewer restrictions to the right to collective bargain and form trade unions, women’s rights, and better health care than the red states.

And what if red staters understood they only get the leftovers, including less disaster aid when they suffer a disproportionate number of hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, such as happened in Kerrville, Texas?

Everyone loves tax cuts, but not when it creates an almost $39 trillion public debt that endangers the full faith and credit of the U.S. Trump wants to pay for the tax cuts with massive tariff hikes by regressing to a century-ago Gilded Age that enriched the few and corrupted many.

It is the reason for the continuing civil war, I said last week, Republicans trumpet there are more individual rights and freedoms with smaller government and lower taxes.

But it is really to maintain control by preserving as much of the vestiges of the agrarian, slaveholding culture as possible.

By depriving red state citizens of adequate health care in the name of lower taxes and smaller government, they become sicker. By restricting union organizing with right to work laws, workers not only have lower incomes, but less time with their families and for leisure.

And attempting to erase DEI mandates from existing laws and educational institutions is their attempt to resuscitate the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation that took a century to redress.

Won’t cutting government research on healthcare and the climate, slashing funding for the FAA and NOAA make us less safe as well, when the President’s primary job is to protect Americans not harm them?

It looks like a massive dereliction of duty that would fit the definition of a “high crime and misdemeanor.”

Harlan Green © 2025

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

This Inflation Isn't Temporary

Popular Economics Weekly

The Producer Price Index for final demand rose 0.9 percent in July, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices were unchanged in June and moved up 0.4 percent in May. BLS.gov

 

FREDppi

The Trump administration wants Americans to believe the current inflationary surge is temporary. Why? Because it needs the Fed to lower interest rates to keep economic growth from stalling because of the tariffs. And lowering interest rates in what is still a fully-employed economy is inflationary.

It’s the kind of reverse logic that has characterized so much of the MAGA crowd that wants to believe conspiracies (Epstein?) rather than economic realities.

The Producer Price Index of wholesale goods just out is another unwelcome fact that inflation isn’t temporary because of the tariffs. The tariffs paid by American importers at ports of entry are already showing up in the prices of raw materials producers must pay that will ultimately be passed on to American consumers and businesses.

The PPI is showing July wholesale prices (dark red line) have risen much faster than retail prices (light red line) in the above FRED graph—3.3% vs. 2.7% in a year.

Coffee prices are already up 15%, for instance. Could that have to do with the 50% tariff Trump has levied on Brazil, a major coffee grower, because he doesn’t like its socialist government?

So an unfavorable PPI is another measure of inflation the Trump administration will want to ‘cook’ if their choice for a new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is confirmed by the Senate.

 It prices the raw materials and services that go into the retail CPI Index that measures the final consumption of finished products and services. That’s no surprise because material input costs have been rising since April 2 and the announcement of the tariff wars, which belies Trump’s lies that the countries exporting to us will bear the cost of those import taxes for the great privilege of selling to US, yet are ultimately paid by Americans!

All eyes are now on what Fed Chair Powell will say at the Kansas Fed’s Jackson Hole conference this week. Will the 12 Fed Governors that vote at the FOMC meetings decide once again that there is little likelihood of an interest rate cut in September?

They may have to, because the biggest rise in wholesale prices was in the service sector that powers almost two-thirds of consumer activities (leisure, travel, dining out, transportation, and construction).

The index for final demand services moved up 1.1 percent in July, the largest advance since rising 1.3 percent in March 2022. It showed importers are also increasing their profit margins and so passing on the increased costs to consumers and businesses.

Over half of the broad-based July increase is attributable to margins for final demand trade services, which 

And consumers are beginning to notice, according to the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey.

“Consumer sentiment fell back about 5% in August, declining for the first time in four months. This deterioration largely stems from rising worries about inflation. Buying conditions for durables plunged 14%, its lowest reading in a year, on the basis of high prices,” reports survey Director Joanne Hsu.

Though it hasn’t done much damage to retail sales just yet. Retail sales rose 0.5% last month following a nearly 1% increase in June, reports the Census Bureau.

Automobile sales rose for the second month in a row, said MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash. Car buyers have been buying vehicles for the past few months to once again avoid anticipated price increases in the coming months as tariffs take full effect.

So the damage is already being done by Donald Trump’s tariffs. Even grocery prices are soaring that depend on what is produced domestically. Now why would grocery prices also be increasing that aren’t taxed by tariffs? Could it be that there are fewer farm workers to harvest the crops this year?? The ICE folks could answer that question!

Harlan Green © 2025

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