A Better World is Possible

 

Popular Economics Weekly

"Today we won because the Hungarian people didn't ask what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country," Prime Minister Peter Magyar

NPR

I never thought I would see the most famous line from President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s 1960 inauguration speech be adopted by another head of state, much less by a Kennedy look-alike of about the same age (45 years vs. JFK’s 43 years).

In a victory speech delivered to jubilant supporters on the banks of the Danube River, Magyar reiterated his promises to rebuild Hungary's ties with the European Union and NATO, root out corruption and cronyism and "restore the system of checks and balances," reported NPR.

Peter Magyar had just defeated Victor Orban, Hungary’s 16-year Prime Minister by a landslide, who was leader of the world’s so-called ‘illiberal’ democracies. Why did Orban lose, according to most commentators? It was the economy, “fueled largely by concerns about entrenched government corruption,” said NPR

Hungary had become the poorest member of the European Union with an inflation rate twice that of the EU average, and plunging economy growth.

“Hungary is the most corrupt state in the European Union, according to Transparency International, an organization that aims to combat corruption. The EU has blocked billions in funding to Orbán's government for its alleged assault on the bloc's principles of democracy and equality,” said NPR

So much for one-man rule. It’s a fact that other countries ruled by such autocrats are suffering the same fate as Hungary, such as Russia and Turkey, who had been suffering from slow growth and double-digit inflation for decades.

Why? Such rulers think they know better than the experts. President Trump’s playbook followed that of Orban with U.S. economic growth also plunging of late—mainly because of his Iran war that has shut down petroleum production in the Middle East. Who knows what’s to come?

The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow estimate of first quarter (Q1) 2026 economic growth widely followed by economists has plunged from its high of 3 percent, where it had been sitting since January 2026, to 1.3 percent in the latest revision, I reported last week.

The cult-like glorification and rampant corruption of President Trump that is harming the U.S. economy is almost a photocopy of Orban’s rule—tearing down the White House East Wing for a ballroom, wanting an Arc de Triomphe, family and son-in-law being enriched by Middle East rulers, his Bit-coin ventures (with World Liberty Financial, founded in September 2024 with the Trump family owning 75 percent), per The Nation, pardoning literally thousands of convicted felons, including convicted drug kings, and most of all extorting wealth from institutions and Robber Baron’s alike in return for special treatment.

Let us hope Hungary’s new Prime Minister can follow the path of President Kennedy, who concluded his inauguration speech with a plea to the rest of the world: “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of mankind.”

Harlan Green © 2026

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

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

No Art of the Deal?

 Financial FAQs

“It’s 100 days into the Trump Presidency and looking more and more like President Trump is no more effective at running the country than his business interests. His book, The Art of the Deal was meant to tout his negotiating skills, but the results were never very successful.” 2017

Huffington Post

I wrote this Huffington Post piece in April 2017 after President Trump’s first 100 days in office, and nothing has changed in Trump 2.0. There was no significant legislation then and nothing has been accomplished in 2025 to date, other the Trump’s initiation of a worldwide tariff war, while Republicans are attempting to renew the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) that was his sole accomplishment in Trump 1.0.

Why? Because Trump’s negotiating skills have been overblown, as evidenced by his countless business failures and multiple bankruptcies. But he has been able to disguise his weaknesses, such as his inability to stay focused his need for attention, thanks in large part to his first biographer, Tony Schwartz, in Trump: The Art of the Deal, who created the myth that he was a skilled wheeler-dealer.

But it wasn’t real, Schwartz said later to New Yorker Magazine’s Jane Mayer in a famous 2016 interview.

“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.”

Trump with all his weaknesses—his lies, self-aggrandizement, and short attention span—is now getting a second attempt to destroy the U.S. economy.

Renewing the TCJA, even though Moody’s downgraded U.S. Treasury debt to Aaa because the renewal won’t pay for itself, is endangering the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. Government.

The Penn Wharton Business School model predicts it would add at least $4.5 trillion to the federal debt. Cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and clean energy programs would save $1.6 trillion. But this is more than offset by the incomes of the wealthiest 1 percent and 0.1 percent.

The result is that today we have a wanna-be autocrat in charge of an economy “that creates an environment in which corruption and bribery are necessary to gain access to the ruler and either win his favor or avoid his wrath,” writes Barron’s columnist Lewis Braham.

Sound familiar with Trump’s Meme-coin investments and solicitation of $billlions from Middle east potentates?

There is a tremendous amount of research on the decline of sustainable economic growth in autocratic regimes. MIT economist Daren Acemoglo won his Nobel Prize for researching the superior growth of “inclusive” (more democratic) vs. autocratic (exploitive) governments.

“The good news is that democracy can be rebuilt and made more robust,” says Professor Acemoglo.

“The process must start by focusing on shared prosperity and citizen voice, which means reducing the role of big money in politics...The task of remaking democracy thus falls to center-left forces. If Trump’s victory serves as a wake-up call for the Democrats, then he may have inadvertently set in motion a rejuvenation of American democracy.”

In fact, we have little choice but to rebuild our democracy if we want to preserve the most basic freedoms it’s taken centuries to win.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Donald Trump's Bully Mentality

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

President Trump's first days in office were alarming for several reasons. He immediately began attacking the press, while intentionally stating falsehoods such as he would have won the popular vote, but for "3 to 5 million" fraudulent votes…Since most of those falsehoods are easily debunked, such as the size of the crowds at Friday's Inauguration and Saturday women's march.

Simon & Schuster

This occurred in 2017. Will we see a repeat of Donald Trump’s last term? It might be instructive to those 6 million Democratic voters that stayed home this election cycle to remind them why the rampant corruption of his first term and chaos at the border in 2017 when he attempted to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, separating babies from their mothers, was why he wasn’t reelected for a second term.

It looks like a repeat performance as he is again nominating those most loyal and most incompetent for some of his cabinet picks, such as Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard for Department of National Intelligence, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services.

And he will again use the same bullying tactics to attempt to get them through the Senate without background checks or security clearances. How easily Americans have forgotten that a man who has used bullying tactics his whole life to get what he wants, has highlighted his own incompetence to be POTUS again.

I have written about the bully mentality in our culture before. In times of uncertainty as we have today, it has led to increased bullying in schools, 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. President Trump has always acted the bully, which is the reason for his history of lawsuits and bankruptcies, so that facts are only useful in so much as they support his needs.

Evidence of Trump's bullying tactics also comes from his words on social media. Groff Beattle, a professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University has reported Trump uses the body language and mannerisms of a bully, such as the exaggerated use of his hands.

Comments such as "mentally sick", "dummy", "looser" or "looked disgusting" are all examples of bullying language Trump uses to attempt to normalize such behavior. Trump's bullying tactics include calling President Obama the founder of a terrorist organization and insinuating that Clinton took drugs prior to a debate. He also 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 or military veterans, calling wounded veterans “losers”.

How does one oppose such destructive behavior? First, we should know that bullies prey on those they can intimidate, 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.

Combine it with his narcissism that requires he be constantly in the limelight. So, the news media should ignore his tantrums, rather than always commenting on them. Remember that he makes such outrageous lies to gain even more attention.

Psychology Today posted a list of bullying behavior, a list that fits President Trump like a glove:

- Uncontrolled anger and unpredictable irritability, frequently directed at the weakest people ('safe targets') or those perceived as a future threat
- A sociopathic ability to control their own image - the selective ability to look like a different person to different audiences - for example, being aggressive to 'subordinates', while being charming and helpful to others
- Having little status outside of work, bullies wield the power that their job gives them with vicious zeal
- Running 'witch-hunts'
- Gratuitous domineering behaviour - sometimes physical
- The ability to make the unreasonable seem reasonable, even to the victims
--Projecting their own inadequacies onto others
- Making irrational accusations
- Publicly putting people down
- Sadistic enjoyment in humiliating others

The list of Trump's bullying tactics is endless, and how to counter them are well known. There is even a government website, https://www.stopbullying.gov/ to help understand what the bully mentality is all about. How sad it is that this U.S President-Elect, about to become the most powerful person on earth once again, is setting such an example of his own weakness and insecurity.

How easily Americans have forgotten his most recent past and what it could mean as he again seeks to limit freedoms and turn our Democracy into an Autocracy.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

LUCKY LOSER--Part II

 A Distrust of the Truth

Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever.

Random House

Last night’s Vice President’s candidate debate highlighted the differences between two men coming from the same Midwest. Senator JD Vance was the polished Ivy League debater, and Governor Tim Walz the earnest teacher and sportsman eager to tell the truth about himself and the country.

So what should we think of Donald Trump, Vance’s leader of MAGA Republicans, a man who claims to be the smartest person in the world, and his opponent a loser, who would not release his tax returns, and has even forbidden the release of his school grades, from prep school to college?

Maybe we have heard this so many times that we have become inured to Trump’s blatant obfuscation. But I have always thought it meant only a very stupid person would say what Donald Trump has said repeatedly as he has tried any means to cloak his repeated business failures yet was “Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments…that required no business expertise whatsoever.”

This was highlighted in Pulitzer Prize-winners Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig’s just released book, Lucky Loser that raises a bigger question in a Washington Post review by Bethany McLean about the ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ ethos of modern America. In a world that conflates the ‘trappings of wealth with expertise and ability,’ where ‘fame, detached from any other marketable talent or skill,’ is ‘a highly compensated vocation,’ does it even matter if you never actually make it?”

The outright distrust of truth is a propaganda tool used by autocrats that public media has normalized. This probably tells us best why he was able to take over the Republican Party that has drifted so far from conservative values and was once the environmental party when Republican President Nixon signed the US Environmental Protection Agency into law in 1970.

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman cited the damage Trump and MAGA Republican propaganda policies could do to the country in a recent NYTimes Op-ed.

He cites Trump’s response to a question in Michigan on what he would do to keep auto jobs in Michigan: “So, pretty much as we’ve been saying and what I want to do and be able to do—look, your business years ago, in this area, I was honored as the man of the year. It was maybe 20 years ago. Oh, and the fake news heard about it, they said it never happened.”

In a word, the chaos in Trump’s mind has morphed into his economic policies that would cause widespread damage to the American economy. What Krugman calls Trumponomics “could create economic disruptions similar to those caused by the Covid-19 pandemic…Round up millions of foreign-born workers would cause an immediate large reduction in labor supply. Tariffs would drive up the cost of imported goods as surely as shipping costs and inadequate port capacity did in 2021-22.”

A recent report by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a serious non-partisan think tank cited by Krugman, posited that the labor shortages and higher tariffs on imports Trump proposes would return inflation to pandemic levels of 6 to 9 percent.

Republicans had learned to “fake it ‘til you make it” when the Trump administration attempted to break up the USEPA during his tenure so that Trump’s call to “Drill Baby Drill” for more fossil fuels could continue and their call to preserve tax cuts first enacted under Trump will further increase the national debt.

Buettner and Craig’s work exposes how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the public media that has normalized his propaganda as another kind of truth, without revealing the real man behind it who has never known truth in his own world, and public media as the authors write, ‘rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said.”

The Vice-Presidential debate highlighted the vast gap between truth and propaganda, between substance and the lies that attempt to conceal it. Polls are showing the public can understand the difference, will our media?

Harlan Green © 2024

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