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

Do Job Cuts = Recession?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“I don’t see any kind of well-thought-out, comprehensive strategy coming out of the White House,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a nonpartisan forecasting firm.

What is the White House strategy? Is it based on the campaign promises to bring down inflation on “Day 1”, eliminate waste and fraud, and cut regulations that impede new investments, such as in AI?

The White House to date is attempting to explain why it hasn’t developed a strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent opined that,

“The market and the economy have just become hooked, and we’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period. There’s going to be a detox,” Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager, said during a CNBC interview.

This description of a “detox” period is alarming, because the term has nothing to do with an economic plan, or anything else, but in fact means the Trump administration is hinting that a recession may be required to wean US off what they deem as too many government services that benefit ordinary Americans rather than the Oligarchs that have jumped onto the Trump/Musk bandwagon.

The wet dream of Republicans and conservatives has historically been to downsize government to little more than military defense. That’s why Trump has targeted USAID and the Department of Education, as well as cuts to social security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former (Republican) director of the Congressional Budget Office, said it was a fine sentiment for a Treasury secretary to want to reduce government spending but noted that there was no GOP plan in sight to accomplish this goal in any sustainable way, according to MarketWatch.

FREDfederalspending%GDP

Part of the problem in downsizing government is that it’s extremely difficult to bring federal government spending below 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product as portrayed in the above FRED historical graph dating from 2010. Spending surged above that level only twice to aid recoveries from the Great Recession and COVID pandemic.

Part of that surge was the Biden administration’s new, New Deal legislation that has already brought 700,000 manufacturing jobs home in the CHIPS, Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction Acts.

These were public/private investments that resulted in the US having the fastest economic recovery from COVID-19 in the developed world.

Trumps says he also wants to bring manufacturing jobs home with the trade tariffs. But his single-minded emphasis on tariffs against friend or foe without negotiating up front will increase inflation, largely because it will be reciprocated, launching a trade war.

And rather than eliminating waste and fraud, the DOGE firings are downsizing or eliminating departments and agencies that make it work—such as the FAA, Energy Department, VA and even social security—which will do exactly the opposite—make us less safe.

“It all seems to be very capricious,” continued Baumohl, “and I think this has been of great concern, not just to U.S. and foreign investors, but certainly to consumers, and we’ve seen that in the abrupt decline in confidence, which is now showing up in in their spending patterns. Once consumers start to cut back, there is nothing that the government can do to make sure that the economy keeps out of recession, because we’re talking about 70% of all economic activity.”

Will such a strategy, or lack of it, work? American consumers are already starting to give the final word. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey showed consumers becoming even more pessimistic about their future.

“Consumer sentiment slid another 11% this month, with declines seen consistently across all groups by age, education, income, wealth, political affiliations, and geographic regions. Sentiment has now fallen for three consecutive months and is currently down 22% from December 2024.” said Survey Director Joanne Hsu.

It looks like the Trump/Musk administration doesn’t want Americans to know what they are really up to, and it is leading to the wholesale destruction of the U.S. economy.

It will take more than picketing Tesla factories and dealerships for Americans to prevent what is sure to become a recession from happening.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Who Is Going to Mars?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory...

Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” Senator Elizabeth Warren

Blue Origins

Both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a race to land on the moon, and maybe beyond. Their enthusiasm is infectious, but also dangerous. It doesn’t prepare America for future generations. They are also propagating a giant lie that Oligarchs have used to hoard their wealth—that they are exceptionally beings who deserve special treatment (such as tax cuts paid with borrowed money).

It appears in Bezos stated rationale for taking the Washington Post’s editorial page to the right and not allowing opposing viewpoints.

“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”

The problem with conservatives’ ethos of personal freedom and free markets is that it doesn’t build forward or think of future generations. It doesn’t provide seed money for future growth as the Biden administration provided in its infrastructure, Inflation Reduction, and CHIPs Act bills that the Trump administration is trying to dismantle—further enlarging the budget deficit.

Musk’s and Republicans’ short-sightedness also applies to the dismantling of USAID. By working to improve the lives of the poorest in the world—mainly Africans today—it lifts up the ability of future generations to provide for themselves. It also prevents future worldwide pandemics, such as Bird Flu, and even the deadly Eboli-like virus now ravaging in war-torn Congo.

The result of Republicans’ belief in free markets has been five recessions since 1980 that were mainly caused by Republicans’ insistence of tax cuts without paying for them. It has led to record budget deficits and a record federal debt of $32 trillion.

The lie they continually foment, in other words, is based on pure greed. The future be damned, let’s go to the moon and beyond! Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law Professor, knows something about this. She has studied the poor, and written a book with her daughter on their dilemma, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke.

“In this exposé, says the Amazon summation, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi show that modern middle-class families are increasingly trapped by the grinding reality of flat wages and rising costs. Warren and Tyagi reveal how a ferocious bidding war for housing and education has silently engulfed America's suburbs, driving up the cost of keeping families in the middle class, and placing unprecedented pressure on hard-working families.”

And just as big a lie is that creativity, invention, and prosperity isn’t already happening with the AI revolution that has fueled the Big Seven U.S. companies, such as Microsoft, Facebook, to new market highs.

And much of it is being fueled by the Biden administration’s New, New Deal that has already created tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and kept US fully employed.

The Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Oligarchs of the world are not particularly exceptional people, just greedier in wanting to add to their wealth by making ordinary Americans less healthy, wealthy, and safe.

If Musk and Bezos want to end up on Mars, They can use their own massive wealth, not ours!

Harlan Green © 2025

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

The Coup Attempt by Trump-Musk

 A couple dozen young men go from government office to government office, dressed in civilian clothes and armed only with zip drives. Using technical jargon and vague references to orders from on high, they gain access to the basic computer systems of the federal government. Having done so, they proceed to grant their Supreme Leader access to information and the power to start and stop all government payments.

That coup is, in fact, happening. And if we do not recognize it for what it is, it could succeed.

In the third decade of the twenty first century, power is more digital than physical. The buildings and the human beings are there to protect the workings of the computers, and thus the workings of the government as a whole, in our case an (in principle) democratic government which is organized and bounded by a notion of individual rights.

The ongoing actions by Musk and his followers are a coup because the individuals seizing power have no right to it. Elon Musk was elected to no office and there is no office that would give him the authority to do what he is doing. It is all illegal. It is also a coup in its intended effects: to undo democratic practice and violate human rights.

Timothy Snyder, Author of On Tyranny

No Art of the Deal

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously:” Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Huffington Post

Historians will puzzle over the results of our latest presidential election for decades. A majority of Americans have just voted in a con artist and sexual predator for the second time who has failed in most of his business ventures and left investors holding the tab.

One conclusion will be that identity politics won, after all. Enough white women chose Donald Trump over the East-Asian/Black Kamala Harris who advocated more rights for women, while enough Hispanic and Black males put their faith in a misogynist who has sexually assaulted women.

Identity politics has moved much of the Democratic Party to the left with the Black Lives Matter and LBDGQ movements. But most exit polls said it was the economy that decided the vote—everything became too expensive after COVID-19.

My conclusion is that it has taken very special presidents to lead such a diverse populace that will defend the constitution. In modern times it was Roosevelt creating the New Deal to bring America out of the Great Depression and win World War 2.

But post-WWII generations eventually forgot what the New Deal had accomplished and voted in a Republican Party that by 1980 had begun to drain the federal budget by continually cutting taxes for their wealthy supporters creating massive federal deficits; Reagan (-$400 billion), GW Bush (-$1 trillion), and Donald Trump (-$5 trillion).

Democratic presidents wanted government programs that benefited more Americans, so President Clinton created actual budget surpluses in his last four years, President Obama brought America out of the Great Recession spawned by the GW Bush administration’s fiscal mismanagement and created Obamacare.

President Biden created a second New, New Deal to bail us out of the COVID-19 pandemic and begin to pay down Trump’s massive deficits, thereby creating the fastest economic recovery from the pandemic among developed countries. It is designed to protect Americans from climate change and modernize the economy for decades to come.

And now a peculiar American form of amnesia has set in once again; a majority of Americans have voted in Donald Trump for a repeat performance with the hope he will cure their economic malaise, even with his record of multiple bankruptcies. And Republicans will surely run up massive deficits in their quest to siphon even more of the federal budget as they did in his first term.

His stated policies will also endanger us because Trump not only wants to weaken America militarily by weakening military alliances such as NATO, but weaken environment protections as well by gutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency once again for the fossil fuel industry in the face of more frequent and greater hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.

We know this because one of Trump’s first actions when elected in 2017 was to leave the Paris Accord. He has called climate change a hoax.

We currently have the second highest carbon emissions per capita after China, but would become the highest emitter among developed countries if Republicans succeed in rolling back 30 years of environmental regulation.

Why did he leave the Paris Accord I in 2017 when it is a voluntary accord to reduce carbon emissions? It was to help the coal industry, where Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is heavily invested in coal and has already made $millions with the 50 percent bump up in coal stocks since Trump took office.

And the Koch Brothers $millions that were spent to elect Tea Party candidates paid off as Trump initiated an immediate review of President Obama/s Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.

Surrounded by coal miners at the time, the president described the Paris Accord as a “crushing attack” on workers and vowed to nix “job-killing regulations. “We’re going to have safety, we’re going to have clean water, we’re going to have clean air, but so many [regulations] are unnecessary, so many are job-killing,” he said.

And Trump now says he wants Elon Musk to become the efficiency czar, which will cause even more economic damage, since Musk has promised to cut as much as $2 trillion “of waste”—the amount of the current budget deficit—from the next federal budget, at the same time that Trump and Republicans have promised more tax cuts for their wealthy supporters.

But in the words of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in Project-Syndicate, “After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously.”

The next four years of Republican rule will be a measure of how much many Americans have fooled themselves once again, as they did in 2017. For a second time Americans will have the chance to learn from that experience, especially the young who may not have been of voting age, to see how Trump and the Republicans mishandled the economy that mostly profited themselves.

And it will be another bitter lesson for our women, minorities, the poor and even many in the middle class, as well as those that will suffer from the effects of a warming atmosphere.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

What's Next, Republicans?

 Financial FAQs

“What if conservatives succeeded in repealing Obamacare? “Republicans' Obamacare repeal bill would leave 17 million more people uninsured next year, and 32 million more in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate Wednesday. It also said premiums would double by 2026. …By 2026, three quarters of the population would live in areas with no insurers participating in the non-group market, due to upward pressure on premiums and downward pressure on enrollment, the report found.”

I wrote a Huffington Post piece in July 2017 during President Trump’s first term that could predict what we might look forward to with Republicans, and Donald Trump’s healthcare policy in his second go-around as president.

Huffington Post

The result for working Americans of Republicans’ repeated attempts to repeal Obama that I wrote about then is shown in the above graph. It compares the soaring death rates of 45-54 white American males with other developed countries (red USW line). Obamacare is the only American universal healthcare plan that covers workers with pre-existing conditions if no employer healthcare, and yet Republicans can be expected to again attempt to replace it with a “concept” in Trump’s words.

Americans had just avoided another health care disaster in voting down the Senate’s ‘skinny’ Obamacare Repeal and Replace bill in 2017. Even though maintaining most of the taxes to pay for the Medicaid portion, it would have made insurance coverage prohibitively expensive for those older and sicker users with the removal of the private and employer mandate requirements that would cause younger and healthier people to leave the insurance markets.

This is just the latest precipice that’s been avoided. Americans already have the worst health outcomes in the developed world, precisely because America is the only developed country—in fact, even of undeveloped countries—that doesn’t have universal coverage.

The result is one of the highest birth death rates, as well as diabetes, heart and other infectious disease rates—which are diseases usually associated with poorer, undeveloped countries.

The last time Republicans swept the presidential election in 2017, it was the very white, male Tea Party reacting to our first Black President. But they didn’t replace it with something new. They went back to their base of wealthy Oligarchs formed during the Reagan era, still fighting labor unions and resisting more social programs to help the less fortunate, as Trump’s MAGA nation has promised to do.

Trump’s electorate has been good at wanting to tear down the old institutions, but not good at replacing them with a newer, better system. And if Elon Musk becomes the efficiency czar in Trump’s new administration, and he continues to brag he can cut $2 trillion in waste from the federal budget, we know social programs and maybe much more will suffer in the name of reducing the national debt.

There is another, better way to replace what hasn’t worked for working Americans; but that must be based on science and new technologies that can come from our educated elite (rather than our political and wealthy elite).

If Republicans want to be part of that future, they can’t follow a con artist who doesn’t believe in the future, only the past.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

The Harris Presidency

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

What would it mean for Kamala Harris to be our first female President? It’s a historical turning point that affirms women have finally attained equal political rights to men, and American citizens s confirm they want greater personal rights—to expanded health care, abortion, and environment protection that has been held back by a dominant male culture until now.

Should Harris and the Democrats win it would also signal the end of the Second Gilded Age, an age characterized by record income inequality that began in earnest when President Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies began to transfer massive amounts of wealth from working adults (small business and salaried) to the owners of wealth (capital assets) in the 1980s.

cbpp.org

It would give President-Elect Harris a mandate to begin to reverse the tax structures that were the major cause of the record inequality by raising corporate and personal tax rates back to Reagan-era levels, and thus begin to reduce the massive budget deficits that resulted.

President Reagan and Republicans cut the maximum personal tax rate for the wealthiest from 50 percent to 28 percent and reduced corporate taxes from 34 to 28 percent to initiate what economists call the Second Gilded Age, which resulted in our first massive deficit--$400 billion—by the end of his administration.

The massive deficits continued to grow under successive Republican administration tax cuts that resulted in curtailing our social safety net. GW Bush’s deficit grew to $1 trillion, and the Trump administration’s to more than $5 trillion.

A Harris Presidency could also mean an end to our ongoing civil war, a war originally between the industrial North vs. slave-holding South that never really ended with General Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Though slave-owning was banned with the Emancipation Proclamation and Abraham Lincoln’s north winning the civil war, southern states found ways to continue to impoverish former slaves by terrorizing them under Jim Crow laws that even the civil rights acts of the 1960s couldn’t completely eradicate.

Today’s manifestation of our civil war has morphed into a battle between red states controlled by Republicans with a white male/Oligarchic culture continuing to impoverish their own citizens vs. more prosperous blue states with a dominant female/minority majority.

Kamala Harris has promised in her platform and speeches that she would be a President for all Americans. That would mean policies benefiting red state citizens as well, such as raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 that was last raised in 2009.

Currently 14 states haven’t raised their minimum wage since then, or at all. Five red states have not even adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour, so that in all seven of these states, the federal minimum wage guarantees at least a $7.25 per hour wage. New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are the only blue states still with the federal minimum wage.

There are other ways the red states have kept workers’ salaries lower that Harris should remedy: lobby to repeal so-called right-to-work laws in 26 states that say members of a union aren’t required to pay union dues even though they enjoy the benefits. The result is that membership in unions has declined, along with workers’ rights to bargain collectively. And those 26 states now have a Supreme Court majority to enforce those state laws.

Democratic majorities have always found ways to benefit more Americans since the New Deal. President Obama was able to pass Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, the first universal health insurance that meant insurance companies couldn’t ban clients with existing conditions.

Climate change has become a clear and present danger causing more hurricanes, floods, wildfires threatening Americans that Donald Trump has called a hoax, and would rather “Drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.

The Biden administration has already begun work on reducing global warming with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidizing alternative energy sources that don’t increase global warming but that the Republican Party vociferously opposes to protect its fossil fuel constituents.

We have lived through a Gilded Age before. The first Gilded Age came in the late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution made Robber Barons such as railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt, banking titan JP Morgan, and Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller the richest men in their time.

It ended with the death of President William McKinley in 1901, and revelations of rampant corruption followed by Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that created government institutions such as the Federal Reserve to regulate banking and social security, as well as empowering labor unions to level the playing field for workers.

If elected, Kamala Harris and Democrats should be able to continue the new New Deal legislation that President Biden’s Bidenomics’ policies have initiated with more than $5 trillion invested in keeping America great and creating 16 million jobs that have benefited all of our citizens, not just Oligarchs such an Elon Musk.

Musk warned, after all, what would happen if he became the efficiency czar Trump says he wants him to be and cuts $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. There would be no money left for social programs, the military, and drastic cuts in social security and Medicare benefits, say economists such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

It would also mean Husband Doug Emhoff would become the first, First Gentleman, which wouldn’t diminish the historical record of great First Ladies. Men should take heart that women have equaled men in all ways, not just in intelligence and courage, but have shown a heart large enough to create a United States, not a Divided States of America, when Kamala Harris becomes our new President.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Why Does Bidenomics Work?

 Financial FAQs

FREDrealgdp

Elon Musk told a cheering crowd at Sunday’s MAGA rally in New York that if Donald Trump puts him in charge of government efficiency, as planned, he can cut “at least $2 trillion” from the current federal budget.

This would cause an almost immediate recession. Such is the blindness of the world’s richest Oligarch, who has made no bones about his dislike of government regulations and taxes in the way of his dream of reaching Mars.

MarketWatch’s Brent Arends tells us what would happen. “Either Donald Trump and Elon Musk are planning to cut 85% of all spending on highways, disaster relief, federal bank-deposit insurance and the departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security and Justice; close all U.S. embassies; and abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, NASA and nearly all welfare, income-support, food-stamp and childhood-nutrition programs.”

“Or, they are planning on cutting Social Security and Medicare — despite Donald Trump’s protests to the contrary,” said Arends

That is what is behind Republicans’ dislike of Democrats economic policies since President Biden’s election that has created more than 15 million jobs and 3 percent economic growth as we recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.

It takes government investments to spur private investments; not just in new technologies (the CHIPS Act) but healthcare and the environment (Inflation Reduction Act), and in modernizing our infrastructure (Infrastructure Act) so that Americans will feel more secure from hurricanes and illness and therefore produce more.

That is the real definition of efficiency, not cutting benefits so that Billionaires can keep more of their wealth.

President Obama was the first to turn the tide on President Reagan’s 40- years of trickle-down economic policies after the Great Recession (2008-09) that had transferred $50 trillion in wealth from working Americans to the owners of capital living off their corporate profits, according to a RAND Corporation working paper.

He did it by creating Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) and making government the protector of people, not of profits, as President Reagan had done. This resulted in economic growth accelerating to 4 percent during the Obama years continuing into Trump’s years, even with a Republican-engineered shutdown. It was the longest economic recovery since World War Two, and the reason Trump could brag that growth has been so good just prior to COVID-19.

The economy unfortunately shrank -7.5 percent in 2020 as businesses shut down due to the pandemic. It roared back to life in the second quarter of 2021 as congress acted quickly to put money back into Americans’ pockets.

In fact, the U.S. economy will continue to provide most of the thrust for global growth through the balance of this year and in 2025, led by robust consumer spending “that has held up through a wrenching bout of inflation and the high interest rates used to tame it,” the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

Such economic policies requiring government investments have worked before. It was Roosevelt’s New Deal that employed more than 8 million people, built 650,00 miles of roads, 120,000 bridges, created the minimum age, 8-hour workdays and started up social security.

Now more than half of the living US recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics signed a letter that called Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic agenda “vastly superior” to the plans laid out by former President Donald Trump.

“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’ economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump,” the economists write in the letter obtained by CNN.

Top this off consumers are now joining the Harris economic bandwagon. The Conference Board’s latest consumer confidence survey surged to 108.7 in October from a revised 99.2 reading in the prior month,the Conference Board said Tuesday.  This is highest level of confidence since January.

“Consumer confidence recorded the strongest monthly gain since March 2021, but still did not break free of the narrow range that has prevailed over the past two years,” said Dana M. Peterson, Chief Economist at The Conference Board. “In October’s reading, all five components of the Index improved. Consumers’ assessments of current business conditions turned positive. Views on the current availability of jobs rebounded after several months of weakness, potentially reflecting better labor market data.” 

Is Bidenomics finally catching on with ordinary Americans, not just economists?

Harlan Green © 2024

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

The Tariff Bomb

 Financial FAQs

Getty

Now that Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is doing all he can to elect Donald Trump the next American President with his $Billions; because there are too many regulations (read environmental), which means he might never otherwise get to Mars; it’s time to ask what a Trumpian economy would look like if Elon succeeds in his quest.

It would be a big win for wealthy oligarchs such as Musk.

Trump’s biggest lie is that a 20 percent tariff on almost all imports is a tax paid by the exporter, not American users of those imports. Common sense tells us that we can only tax foreign products after they arrive on our soil, not in the country of origin.

Any tax on imports arriving in the U.S. is therefore an American tax, so that the product’s final price charged to American consumers includes the import tax added to whatever the exporter is charging for said product, a price increase.

The results would do horrendous damage to our economy just out of the worst pandemic in 100 years that killed one million Americans. In fact, it would precipitate another recession because past history has shown Americans the damage wrought by high inflation on the working classes that pay taxes on a larger proportion of their income, than the one percent of earners and corporations.

A recent report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a serious non-partisan think tank, asserted that the labor shortages and higher tariffs on imports Trump proposes would return inflation to pandemic levels of 6 to 9 percent, not to mention the damage to employment and the USDollar if Trump exceeded in deporting immigrants, or hamstringing the Federal Reserve in its inflation fight.

“We find that all the policies examined could cause a loss of production and employment, especially in trade-exposed sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture.”

CPI consumer inflation rate reached the astronomical height of 14.6 percent during the 1981 and 1982 recessions, 5.5 percent during the Great Recession (2008-09), and rose as high as 9 percent in 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump’s tariff lie exposes an even larger lie beneath it. He can only pay for the tax cuts, such as were enacted in his Tax Cuts and Lobs Act (TCLA) on wealthy individuals and corporations, with a consumption tax that all Americans pay.

It lets corporations and the wealthiest off the hook on paying for the necessary programs that fund Medicare, Medicaid, and defense, which is what the TCLA did that is about to expire and was the only major legislation during his four years in office.

A Brookings Institute analysis of his TCLA was even more damaging, and he intends to renew it if elected: “The new law will reduce federal revenues by significant amounts, even after allowing for the impact on economic growth. It will make the distribution of after-tax income more unequal. If it is not financed with concurrent spending cuts or other tax increases, TCJA will raise federal debt and impose burdens on future generations.”

So, it’s also time to ask exactly what policies have made the U.S. economy the stronger than any other developed countries since the COVID-19 pandemic. Is it by Republicans or Democrats, since it’s become and election issue?

Former president Obama claimed in a recent Detroit campaign speech that it was his eight years—2008-2016, during the recovery from the Great Recession—that his administration was responsible for creating what became almost 11 years of positive GDP growth, longer even than President Clinton’s record recovery streak of 10 years.

That recovery continued into the Trump administration from 2016-2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that briefly stopped all growth, but recovered quickly due to the government aid that flooded into the economy (before the supply-chains recovered) and inflation skyrocketed.

The Fed has finally tamed inflation and even more importantly, job growth returned to pre-pandemic unemployment levels. And that was due to President Biden’s Bidenomics policies that are modernizing the American economy for future generations.

Yet Trump has said climate change is hoax; so the increasingly frequent hurricanes and tornadoes must also be illusions. He has also said that he wants to eviscerate many of President Biden’s spending programs and policies, in the name of cutting the budget deficit, as well as once again attempt to repeal Obamacare, if elected.

It is what very wealthy oligarchs such as Elon Musk also say that they want.

Harlan Green © 2024

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