Immigrants Make a Difference

 Popular Economics Weekly

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 139,000 in May, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment continued to trend up in health care, leisure and hospitality, and social assistance. Federal government continued to lose jobs.” BLS

FREDnonfarmpayrolls

The above FRED graph is the best picture of where the jobs market has been headed over the past two years (May 23-May 25). It’s a slow downward trend that is averaging a monthly gain of 149,000 over the prior 12 months.

But since January 2025 and Donald Trump’s inauguration (last five bars in graph), job growth has averaged just 124,000 per month increases, and Trump’s anti-immigrant policies will continue to harm the job market and economic growth

It's becoming obvious that firms are hiring less because of rising uncertainty caused by the DOGE cuts and Trump’s tariffs. And don’t forget the immigration crackdown that is reducing the number of workers available for those jobs. The Trump administration has trumpeted the ‘removal’ of some 72,000 undocumented immigrants already, and intention to remove more than one million over the next year.

We know what that will do to our workforce. Some 625,000 working adults have dropped out of the adult workforce just in May, which means they stopped even looking for work.

So, it’s difficult to know if the immigration crackdown is causing more to simply stop working as well as the hiring slowdown. We know that immigrants, whether legal or undocumented, have become a major component of our job market with our declining population growth.

According to the Center for Migration Studies, a non-partisan think tank, an estimated 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants contribute to the economy, representing about 5% of all workers. This number has increased since 2019 but is like the 2007 figure. Lawful immigrants make up most of the immigrant workforce at 22.2 million, or 13% of all workers. Many work in construction (1.5 million) and restaurants (1 million), and fewer in Agriculture and farms.

Reducing the number of workers will hurt both our employment picture, as well as future growth, since if the normal one million plus annual influx of immigrants is reduced, it will impact GDP growth as well.

But in wanting so badly to feed red meat to his MAGA followers with the propaganda that immigrants are evil and criminals, employers cannot find the workers they need. There are still more than 7 million job vacancies, according to the Labor Department’s JOLTS report.

This didn’t have to happen, if Trump had allowed the bipartisan immigration bill to pass that Biden had negotiated, which gave a path to citizenship and allowed immigrants to obtain legal work permits.

But the Trump administration isn’t interested in economic growth as much as branding non-European whites as undesirables—even though our Hispanic population, mostly South and Central American, are of white European origin.

It's how autocrats stay in power. President Trump is dividing Americans in artificial ways—whether by economic class, or birth origins—any way he can think up to exacerbate the divisions.

And it will not only shrink the working population, but U.S. economic growth as well.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Why a Recession Now?

 Financial FAQs

“The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.4 percent on April 9, up from -2.8 percent on April 3.

AtlantaFed

The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow graph of estimated first quarter economic growth is still the best representation of where US economic growth is headed, I said last week. It has plunged from +3 percent where it was during the Biden administration, to a range from -2 to -3 percent of GDP contraction since March 4, 2025.

Why? Trump’s tariff wars. Here’s the latest headline from MarketWatch on the automobile tariffs, for instance. GM, Ford and Stellantis face extra $5,000 cost for each car made in America, thanks to Trump’s tariff on parts

The Big Three automakers also are dealing with an average tariff cost of nearly $9,000 for each finished vehicle that’s imported, according to a new study by the Center for Automotive Research.

Its key findings were:

• · Increased cost of $107.7 billion to all U.S. Automakers.
• · Increased cost of $41.9 billion to the D3 Automakers.
• · Impact to D3 production volume of 6.8 million vehicles.

Trump has delegated himself emergency powers that really belong to congress to enact his tariffs, when there is no emergency. President Biden’s tariffs were already doing the job of protecting American workers and industries. The manufacturing sector had added 700,000 jobs and were building new factories because of the CHIPs, Infrastructure, and Inflation Reduction Acts during Biden’s administration.

This President is really driving economic growth off a cliff not because of a huge persecution complex (it’s an act), but to enrich himself and his Oligarchs. He maintains the taxes collected from the tariffs will offset more tax cuts, when he has done no research (or chosen to ignore what is available) on the effects of a worldwide tariff war.

Trump’s wrecking ball mentality is even alarming the Oligarchs. Ray Dalio, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, said recently on CNBC, “We have a breakdown of the monetary order. Such times are very much like the 1930s…I’ve studied history, and this repeats over and over again.”

What did he mean? The US bond and currency markets were collapsing. US Treasury Bond yields soared 0.5 percent in a week, and the US Dollar’s value in relation to other currencies plunged. Foreign investors were losing faith in our economy at a time when Republicans want to add approximately $5.8 trillion to our national debt with their tax cuts, and record debt holdings by foreign investors.

Those foreign investors determine how much that additional debt will cost, or they may not want to buy some of that debt in the form of more US Treasury bonds or Mortgage-backed securities. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers has said it’s making US look like a third world country.

That’s enough bad news to scare anybody, as even small businesses are now worried. “The implementation of new policy priorities has heightened the level of uncertainty among small business owners over the past few months.” said NFIB Chief Economist Bill Dunkelberg.  “Small business owners have scaled back expectations on sales growth as they better understand how these rearrangements might impact them.”

Surveys show consumers are now beginning to save rather than spend, also a sign of a possible recession. Their spending behavior has reversed from the past four years under President Biden when we were the world’s fastest growing economy.

MarketWatch cites Primerica, for instance, a firm specializing in life insurance and securities, who conducted a survey in late December of people with household incomes ranging from $30,000 to $130,000, or roughly the middle 60% of Americans.

“Despite increases in income, about 73% of middle-income Americans said they are cutting back on nonessential purchases due to the high cost of living, and 84% are eating at home more frequently.”

That is why Republicans and DOGE are on such a cost-cutting spree. But Elon Musk appeared to dramatically lower DOGE’s savings goal, projecting $150 billion for the year—far short of his earlier trillion-dollar figure at a recent cabinet meeting, said Fortune Magazine. However, questions remain about the savings claimed by the team, with critics pointing to inflated numbers, retracted claims, and a growing list of controversial cuts.

This is why we are hearing horror stories about the cutbacks coming from social security and Medicaid services, with maybe more to come. We are no longer the economy to be envied, if Republicans in their greed destroy the faith and credit of the U.S. government.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Can We Prevent Stagflation?

 Popular Economics Weekly

During the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo against the United States in retaliation for the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military and to gain leverage in the post-war peace negotiations…The onset of the embargo contributed to an upward spiral in oil prices with global implications. The price of oil per barrel first doubled, then quadrupled, imposing skyrocketing costs on consumers and structural challenges to the stability of whole national economies. history,state.gov

BEA.gov

The 1970s stagflation, a combination of stagnant growth and high inflation, was not a happy time. It caused then Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker to raise the Fed Funds rate to as high as 20 percent to tame the inflation tiger in the 1980s and many bank failures.  

It might happen again, but not because of an energy shortage. Friday’s report on the Commerce Department’s Personal Consumption Expenditure Index (PCE) raised alarms that inflation was on the rise, which is one of the two main components of stagflation. Inflation hasn’t been tamed, as it rose 2.5 percent, 2.8 percent without food and energy prices, per the BEA graph.

Stagflation last happened in the 1970s because of the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo that caused gas stations to run out of gas and consumer prices to soar. It ultimately resulted in a 14.8 percent CPI inflation rate in 1980. And it was more than a decade before inflation and interest rates dropped back to single digits, and we lived through three recessions.

This was also the beginning of the Second Gilded Age so well documented by political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson in Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class that was initiated by President Reagan and supported by the Business Roundtable of Chief corporate Executives.

It began the huge transfer of wealth from wage earning Americans to the owners of capital with successive tax cuts and restrictions on labor organizing, as well as the massive deregulation of industries such as the airlines and telecommunications.

US Corporations took advantage of the globalization of technologies and began the massive move of factories overseas, along with the blue-collar jobs that had built middle America, to countries with cheaper wages and fewer environmental regulations.

The gutting of rust belt jobs in the Midwest resulted in the red state-blue state split we have today, with right to work laws in those states that restrict the right of unions to collect dues from their members, many with wages still stuck at the national $7.25 per hour minimum wage.

This is while economic growth, the other main element of stagflation, is slowing. Why? Consumers are not happy with the high prices and economic uncertainty caused by Trump’s tariffs and Elon Musk’s DOGE massive job cuts, so they aren’t spending as they did in the past, and consumers are the main driver of economic growth.

The loss of tens of thousands of federal jobs and depopulating the service sector industry, the fastest growing economic sector that depends on undocumented workers, will do the same.

This is reflected in falling consumer confidence. The University of Michigan’s final February survey said: “Consumer sentiment extended its early month decline, sliding nearly 10% from January. The decrease was unanimous across groups by age, income, and wealth. All five index components deteriorated this month, led by a 19% plunge in buying conditions for durables, in large part due to fears that tariff induced price increases are imminent.

All of these factors make a reduction in first quarter economic growth more likely. In fact, the Atlanta Fed’s estimate of first quarter growth declined further into negative territory.

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.8 percent on March 28, down from -1.8 percent on March 26. The alternative model forecast, which adjusts for imports and exports of gold as described here, is -0.5 percent.

Can we prevent a recurrence, in which we again have double digit inflation and slow to no growth? Trump would have to learn how to negotiate with congress rather than issue unlawful executive orders and take away Elon Musk’s chainsaw for that to happen.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Why Kill Social Security?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Let's say social security didn't send out their checks this month. My mother who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.” Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

It’s a sign of Republican Party and the Trump/Musk administration’s extreme incompetence (and naviete) if they believe Americans will buy Howard Lutnick’s story that only fraudsters would care if our seniors miss a social security payment when a major share of seniors list their monthly social security payment as their major (and only) source of income!

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s comments thereby reveal why Republicans and Trump want to  at least damage it enough that Republicans can privatize it for their Wall Street cronies.

It is an insane attempt to destroy social security in its current form, of course, and a reflection of Republicans’ efforts to dumb down its mostly red state electorate.

Even GW Bush attempted it, to no avail when the profit windfall that brokers would reap for managing it as a private pension fund was revealed ($5Billion at the time), which would come out of taxpayers’ pockets, of course.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman in a recent Substack column said why they are so blatant about it: the differences in education and the information media their red stater supporters have access to. Sixty three percent of Republican/Trump voters in 2024 were less than college educated.

Paul Krugman

Krugman also pictured who will be most harmed by his attempt to destroy social security. It will be our elderly and retired with a high school education or less, with 60 percent of their income comes from social security. And these are Republicans’ main red state supporters.

They tried something similar in Trump’s first term with more than 30 attempts to repeal Obamacare. It was a major reason Trump lost to Biden in 2020. It should be the main reason Republicans lose at least the House of Representatives in the upcoming 2026 midterm election.

The only real way to combat this wall of ignorance is with a better information infrastructure, or more effective propaganda machine, if we want to call it that. It will be necessary to expose the blatant ignorance Republicans have historically relied on to maintain their power in the red states and with swing voters that pay less attention to political news, polls have shown.

AOC and Bernie Sanders are having rallies in red and purple states like Arizona and Colorado talking what makes “common sense” to most American voters, and that have been effective in drawing up to 50,000 member crowds, for starters.

Trump/Musk are blindly rushing ahead with Musk’s so-called DOGE efficiency drive and Trump’s tariff wars that could cause horrendous damage to our economy, when there are much better ways to accomplish their stated goals of lowering regulations and decreasing the budget deficit and national debt.

Such haste is causing irreparable damage to lives and livelihoods; just as Musk’s failure to correct Tesla’s design flaws have killed people. There are better ways, and maybe the SCOTUS 5-4 ruling that Trump can’t indiscriminately fire federal workers without cause can begin to slow down the wholesale destruction enough to prevent a very large economic ‘fire’ and even a major recession, I said last week.

There is a lesson to be learned. The Tesla automobile’s sometimes fatal design flaws seem to be because of his lack of attention to details in his single-minded drive to invent new and better technologies, just as Trump’s pre-occupation with revenge and retribution clouds his thinking, and that of those that are tasked with carrying out his executive orders.

It's an opening that will combat the Republican Party’s nihilism, not to denigrate the less educated, but is common sense to most Americans—not tariffs that boost inflation and make enemies of our allies, or allow measles and bird flu epidemics to run their course rather than vaccinate, and bipartisan legislation that protects our borders rather than illegal deportations. The list goes on and on.

Common sense policies are something understood by all income groups and social classes that oligarchs and their enablers, the real fraudsters, don’t want Americans to know.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Incompetence = Recession

 Popular Economics Weekly

"Trumpian Incompetence will provoke a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth. When that happens people will be ready to hear the truth that Trump will never understand—that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at and abroad, that are actually the source of American’s long-term might.” David Brooks NY Times

Reuters

I quoted David Brooks last week because people will be ready to hear the truth when they realize that Trump’s “vast extortion machine” won’t lower inflation but raise it, won’t eliminate waste and fraud but slash essential governmental services instead (such as social security), and cut regulations that actually prevent financial markets from crashing.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent must therefore find excuses why inflation is still rising and the Trump/Musk administration isn’t finding much fraud, but tearing out the guts of government that make it work.

This is why Treasury Secretary Bessent is hinting at a recession in making excuses for their incompetence, because “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,”

It will take time for people to hear the truth because Trump’s executive orders are an attempt to stay ahead of the law and public media he reviles as they are uncovering his administration’s lawlessness and incompetence.

Trump believes such tactics will make him the autocrat and law unto himself he has always wanted to be; but only if the tariffs cause other countries cave in to his demands without retaliating for which the US will protect them militarily and favor them economically.

It is why Trump keeps repeating that he wants to corral Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada and even Mexico into his new “extortion machine”.

The craziness of his intentions shows tremendous ignorance of economics and history. We haven’t done very well in protecting anyone militarily since World War Two. Even the Korean War was a stalemate after our strategic withdrawal from the Yalu River when China entered the war.

Vietnam ended with a complete withdrawal. The Afghanistan exit may have been the most humiliating retreat after our 20-year occupation, and the Iraq war ended up strengthening Iran’s influence by eliminating Saddam Hussein, its arch enemy.

Trump’s history also reveals that he has never cared about most of those that voted for him. History ProfessortimothTimothy Snyder has said his real constituents that he wants to please are fellow autocrats and dictators Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.

Musk’s incompetence is also damaging our national security. Heather Cox Richardson reports “Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim, and Julie Tate of the New York Times reported that cuts to the top secret National Nuclear Security Administration have meant the loss of critical employees—from scientists and engineers through accountants and lawyers—at the agency that manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads.”

Musk is damaging our financial security as well. Judd Legum of Popular Information has reported in various interviews that an internal memo from the Social Security Administration, written by acting deputy commissioner Doris Diaz, called for requiring beneficiaries to visit a field office to provide identification if they cannot access the internet to complete verification there.

This is while they are closing Social Security offices. Diaz predicted “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls” that would create increased “challenges for vulnerable populations.”

Tariffs won’t balance the budget and take away the need for other taxes (like income taxes) either, because the targeted nations are already retaliating. The modern world is far more complex. President Mckinley’s first Gilded Age that Trump so admires used tariffs because we needed them to protect our young steel and manufacturing industries.

The first Gilded Age ended because massive corruption was unearthed during Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting progressive era, which led to creation of the Federal Reserve, income taxes and eventually FDR’s New Deal to protect us from future Robber Barons.

Karl Rove as GW Bush’s campaign manager and Republicans also openly yearned for a return to the McKinley’s Gilded Age. Tariffs have worked in developing new or better industries, which is why the Biden administration used them to protect our computer chip industry, which is a national security priority.

The president’s tariff authority is based on the need to protect our national security, whereas Trump wants to use it to protect his own grandiose ideas, as the authoritarian ruler he has always wanted to be.

David Brooks is right. The American public will eventually see the harm Trump's extortion machine will cause Americans as well as our friends and allies. And that by leaving the alliances that protect US—not only NATO, but the World Health Organization that protects against more pandemics, the Paris Accord where nations have agreed to bring down greenhouse gasses—we will be less secure.

Please to God this happens before we must go through another recession, or pandemic, or both.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

What Happened to the Budget?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The House Republican budget passed today calls for massive cuts in health coverage, food assistance, and help paying for college, among some other areas, to pay for huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses.” CBPP.org

CBPP.org

President Trump had to know that devoting a large part of his State of the Union speech insulting Democrats would make it much more difficult to forge a budget for the fiscal year that ends September 30, when they will need Democrats’ support because of their thin majorities.

It will make it all but impossible to ratify an annual budget that significantly reduces the budget deficit. It’s not a great way to negotiate, in other words, unless Republicans don’t believe they need Democrats to fund their tax cuts.

House Republicans have passed a purely Republican budget resolution that relies on massive cuts to federal programs that the Center For Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a nonpartisan research and policy organization, recently analyzed.

“The House budget would require the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut at least $880 billion; the Agriculture Committee to cut at least $230 billion; the Education and Workforce Committee to cut at least $330 billion; and other committees to also cut programs to reach a cumulative target of at least $1.5 trillion in cuts through 2034. The magnitude of these reductions would force congressional committees to make enormous cuts in Medicaid, SNAP, student loan assistance and other vital sources of support when they develop the “reconciliation” spending and tax bill that follows the budget resolution.” CBPP

Yet Republicans must compromise with Democrats to pass the annual budget that keeps the federal government open for business because of their paper-thin majorities in both the House and Senate, as I said. And the Democrats’ cooperation will require that some of their own budget priorities be included.

Trump must know by insulting Democrats he won’t get much of what he wants. He must believe there is a better way to narrow the budget deficit. Of course, he and Elon Musk have said so out loud—find some $2 billion in savings in the current budget that totals more than $4.2 trillion at last count.

Instead, Trump/Musk are firing federal employees and closing whole agencies with abandon to make their case that it will eliminate enough fraud and waste to bring down the deficit to justify their tax cuts. But it can’t happen without cuts to the sacred third rails as well—social security, Medicare and Medicaid.

They will be slowed down in their haste to downsize government because most of the DOGE work to date seems to be illegal, according to the many lawsuits that have been filed to stop the DOGE efficiency drive.

It will end up being a failed “Shock and Awe” campaign, according to Thomas Friedman, since their real intent is to cut government “down to the size where one could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” to quote Grover Norquist, a Republican  strategist.

AtlantaFed

And we might already be seeing evidence of the damage; such as predictions of negative first quarter economic growth for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model of real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2025 is -2.4 percent on March 6, up from -2.8 percent on March 3.

Tariff fears are part of the problem, as importers are ordering as much as possible before tariffs kick in that will raise prices, and that subtracts from GDP growth. But consumer spending in the new year that powers 60 percent of economic growth has declined because of their exhausted savings.

Consumer spending could shrink even further as the federal job firings and layoffs accelerate. MarketWatch reports some 172,017 job cuts were unveiled in February by U.S.-based employers, according to the monthly report by the outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. That’s the highest total since July 2020.

“It was chiefly because of a large reduction in government employees from actions by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or ”DOGE,” purportedly to reduce bureaucracy,” said MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash.

Challenger put the federal job cuts at 62,242 last month, up from just 151 in January and February combined in 2024. Historically, very few federal employees lose their jobs annually. Retail and tech companies also announced sizable layoffs in February.

Economist Claudia Sahm said in a CNBC interview that such a massive number of workers losing their jobs at once has never happened before and will be flooding the job market.

I can’t imagine what such a large loss of jobs will do to our economy this year, even though federal jobs are a small part of the US workforce.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

What Is Burning?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Yet another tragic story of people being trapped inside a burning Tesla, this time in Toronto. Four dead; one rescued when a bystander smashed a window. Phil Koopman, cited by Paul Krugman in Substack

Carscoops.com

Paul Krugman in a recent Substack column made a horrific analogy with the damage that Trump/Musk is doing to the American economy that I agree with.

Trump/Musk are blindly rushing ahead with Musk’s so-called DOGE efficiency drive and Trump’s tariff wars that could cause horrendous damage to our economy, when there are much better ways to accomplish their stated goals of decreasing the budget deficit and national debt.

Such haste is causing irreparable damage to lives and livelihoods; just as Musk’s failure to correct Tesla’s design flaws have killed people. There are better ways, and maybe the SCOTUS 5-4 ruling that Trump can’t withhold $2 billion in funds owed to its contractors will cause him to slow down enough to prevent a larger economic ‘fire’, such as stagflation, or even a recession.

There is a lesson to be learned. Tesla’s sometimes fatal design flaws seem to be because of his lack of attention to details in his single-minded drive to invent new and better technologies. At least half of the automated-driver deaths (46 cars without a driver at last count) are Tesla’s, and now there is news that a defect in its electric door opening mechanism won’t unlock the door in the event of a power failure, as ahappened in some of Tesla’s car fires.

“This has been going on for years,” said Koopman. “At least some of the victims were definitely alive and trying to escape a burning Tesla when door lock power was lost. Some escaped. Some did not. Below is a writeup I posted on a blog in 2022. Nothing has really changed. The Tesla door release situation is a fatality-via-burning-alive waiting to happen. As it has multiple times at this point.”

And why is Trump rushing to start a trade war with our closest allies in the name of national security? He is promoting a blatant lie, that our closest neighbors pose a national security threat. Yet Mexico and Canada as border neighbors are in the best position to protect the Americans, hence pose the least danger to our national security But this is if we would pass an immigration bill, such as the bipartisan border bill Biden negotiated that Trump nixed because it would make Democrats look better.

Instead, we are now making an enemy of those nations that are in a position of protecting our borders.

What has become clear is Trump/Musk are good at wrecking everyone else’s economies but their own; at a time when more government oversight is needed because of the greater frequency of natural disasters (NOAA, US Geological Survey), increasing cyber-attacks, new and deadly (African) viruses, bird flu, on top of a potential measles epidemic in Texas.

And, even more sadly, there are signs that Trump will want to make some of Biden’s new, New Deal legislation his own, by canceling contracts and reopening them under his own administration, just as Musk is doing with the FAA.

Musk as already starting to replace Verizon’s contract to upgrade and modernize the FAA’s telecommunication networks ‘that oversee 29 million square miles of US airspace and ensure the orderly and safe movement of 45,000 flights daily’ with his own Starlink Satellite network.

They are selling more snake oil, instead of working with congress on a bipartisan agreement. Trump is rushing to downsize government and instigate tariff wars because he wants Americans to believe there is danger from all sides that only he can prevent, before something horrendous happens and we discover we might need our allies.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but if Trump won’t change his ways, there will be larger fires that will be much more difficult to put out.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Trump's Choice--Economic War, Not Peace

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable. Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state.” James Marriott of The Times, cited by Heather Cox Richardson

Huffington Post

Our peaceful, healthy and democratic society is being rudely awakened by Donald Trump’s choices in his second term election. Because of the years of good times, Americans are not prepared for what will come next. But neither are the two ‘straight’ men doing the most damage who have chosen to take a chainsaw to the federal budget with little planning or fore thought of the consequences.

We can look forward to more chaos in the financial markets, for starters. Because Republicans’ next battle will be their attempt to pass a 2025 fiscal year budget and cut taxes at the same time. Because it is obvious that neither Trump nor Musk have any idea how our economy works.

One sign of their ignorance is Trump’s insistence that foreign corporations and governments pay the tariff taxes levied on U.S. imports. Tariffs are taxed and paid at the point of entry, either by the importers or their clients adding to their cost, which is inflationary

We are already seeing economic damage in the chaotic way Musk’s DOGE is downsizing watchdog federal agencies that monitor financial activity, such as the FCC and SEC, ignoring laws and congressional mandates. No economy can grow amid such ignorance of the ingredients that make it work, that create trust in its institutions.

GW Bush in 2000 tried to ignore most regulations that govern economic activity in Republicans’ earlier quest for a “free” market by ignoring regulations that protect markets that catch the cheaters. The Great Recession followed, the worst worldwide downturn since the Great Depression.

Republicans seem to have forgotten that lesson in their current support of what Trump/Musk are doing. Musk’s DOGE employees are not only blindly firing employees in the agencies that give consumers and investors’ confidence in the future, but the unpredictability of their actions is revealing that Musk/Trump never had a viable plan to do it.

The Clinton administration was the last administration to successfully shrink federal spending. It was carefully planned and led to the longest period of economic growth since WWII—for 10 years until the 2001 9/11 Twin-tower attacks.

They planned it carefully by taking the time to work with congress and institute budget cuts gradually over several years with the goal of shrinking government spending to 2 percent of GDP. It resulted in four years of budget surpluses from 1996 to 2000.

We are already seeing the toll on consumers from the incompetence of Musk’s DOGE hackers working in secret, some with criminal records. The University of Michigan sentiment survey of consumer confidence has plummeted.

Survey confidence dropped 10% from January to the lowest level since late 2023. The second of two readings of consumer sentiment in February slipped to 64.7 from 67.8 earlier in the month.

According to the report, Americans’ expectations for inflation over the next five to 10 years rose to 3.5% from 3.3% earlier in the month and from 3.2% in January. This is the largest month-over-month increase since May 2021.

And as if to confirm their fears, the DOW plunged almost -800 points and the S&P more than -100 points last Friday.

It is while Bloomberg reports U.S. business activity nearly stalled in February amid mounting fears over tariffs on imports and deep cuts in federal government spending, erasing all the gains notched in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's election victory.”

This is hardly a vote of confidence for an administration that was elected on the promise of reducing inflation.

Republicans and Trump’s electorate seem to have no idea what living under a fascist government means, where all power is concentrated in the executive branch under one man, with full disregard of the laws of the land, the constitution, the judiciary and congress.

It is sad they haven’t taken the more successful track to downsizing government that President Clinton took, another impeached president (not convicted). Working with congress and the laws of the land resulted in the Clinton administration’s four years of budget surpluses, not the impending chaos and economic destruction ahead caused by Trump and Republicans choice of vengeance over cooperation.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Does Trump Want Another War?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.” NYTimes Nicholas Kristof

USAToday

There is a growing outcry over the “monumental damage” emanating from the bromance of two ‘straight’ (and white) men on a tear of petty vindictiveness settling old scores, which can have far greater consequences.

It is tearing apart our closest alliances that protect Americans and other democratic countries from the depredations of autocrats and dictators, such as Vladimir Putin, who must imagine himself Czar Ivan the Terrible killing hundreds of thousands of his own people in attempting to conquer Ukraine to make it a part of a new Russian Empire (350,000 dead Russians at last count, per NBC’s Morning Joe).

“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values—largely put in place by America since the Second World War—which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity.” Chris Patten, former UK Tory Chairman cited by Nicholas Kristof.

The level of ineptitude that Elon Musk’s DOGE team shows is breathtaking, as are the attempts to hide it.

“All in all, what we’ve just witnessed is a stunning display of incompetence, dismissal of critical federal workers by people with no idea of what they do and why it matters. Musk and Trump have, of course, apologized and promised to do better in the future.” Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman

Why the petty vindictiveness of our Bromancers? In a frightening insight by Timothy Snyder, Author of On Freedom, they are really ‘straight’ men trying to appear strong. But that can only be done by weakening the strong that actually stand in their way.

“Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.”

Dr. Snyder explained what he meant in a recent New Yorker article. Trump and Putin are both fascists, which by definition means masters of propaganda that twist words such as ‘communism’, or ‘deep state’ into meanings that feed their MAGA followers’ paranoid fantasies.

Hitler’s Goebbels, and Russia’s Stalin were masters of such propaganda that led to World War Two. It is detailed in Snyder’s bestselling book, “Bloodlands,” which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and ’40s when as many as 14 million people perished at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a “particularly awful” mass grave.

And Trump is using the same fascist vocabulary today in branding Ukraine’s Zelensky the dictator, when it is Vladimir Putin.

That is why Trump and Musk’s actions threaten world peace and our own domestic order. They accomplish it by weakening the military alliances that have protected us such as NATO, while eliminating whole government departments that protect our health and safety and more environmental catastrophes, while weakening the FBI and DOJ that protect Americans from domestic and foreign terrorists.

In fact, settling old scores is an attempt to protect themselves from their own mistakes (i.e., Trump’s convictions, Musk-Tesla’s auto-drive accidents) by putting the blame on others. That is why Trump says he does not know what Musk is doing, when asked. He can therefore blame Musk or his lieutenants when said mistakes are uncovered.

Both Democrats and Republicans must now find a way now to counter Trump and Musk’s biggest mistake of all, their preoccupation with vengeance to and masks their own weaknesses that could lead to another war.

It is weakening our own strength and ability to stand up to Russia and China, where a larger war is most likely to start—because they have become emboldened by our growing weakness.

Harlan Green © 2025

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