No More Jobs?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“Consumer confidence inched up in June as falling oil prices in recent weeks provided some relief to consumer inflation fears,” said Dana M Peterson, Chief Economist, The Conference Board. “Consumer appraisals of current business conditions were slightly more positive compared to last month. However, perceptions of the current labor market softened measurably as the percentage of consumers saying jobs were ‘hard to get’ rose to 22.5%, the highest level since January 2021 (22.8%). Conference Board

 

MarketWatch

The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey highlighted what was behind the meager total of 57,000 new jobs in June – the fewest in four months. The job market may not recover from the damage the Trump administration has done to the U.S. economy anytime soon.

Some 755,000 worker dropped out of the labor force in June because “jobs are hard to get,” said the Conference Board’s survey.

What's more, job gains in May and April were revised down to a combined 277,000 from a previous 351,000 - 74,000 fewer than previously reported.

Trump’s Iran War disaster is probably the main reason for the job losses because higher energy prices from the Middle East are elevating inflation and slowing down hiring for years to come. Wall Street is hoping the A.I. revolution will boost labor productivity to such an extent that it will tame inflation, but without creating many new jobs.

The other culprit for fewer new jobs? Federal immigration officials have detained more than 10,000 people in the last five days, reports the NYTimes, a major surge that has stemmed from a push within Immigration and Customs Enforcement to increase arrest rates. Immigrants won in the latest SCOTUS rulings that ICE cannot hold them without due process, which might slow down the roundups because it means a bond hearing.

The shrinking labor force will shrink economic growth as well since fewer workers means less will be produced; unless the A.I. delivers on it promises of higher producivity. And that will take years. But that means fewer workers, anyway. There will be more robots, Claude, ChatGPT, Open AI, etc., etc. and a shrinking workforce that pays less taxes to support public policies, social security, Medicare and public debt don’t forget, which is soaring, of course.

Well, many of the new jobs will be in the lower paying healthcare industry — hospitals, doctor's offices, dentists, nursing homes and so forth — that created 47,000 of the 57,000 new U.S. jobs in June.

The big question will be how to support our public policies that serve all Americans in the future (and preserve jobs), rather than more Republican policies that continue to favor the concentration of wealth via A.I. or whatever, driving U.S. ever closer to insolvency.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Will Republicans Ever Learn?

 Financial FAQs

“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.” Huffington Post

PEWResearch

Will Republicans ever learn that immigrants have always been the life blood of our economy?

The above quote is from a Huffington Post blog I wrote in 2017, the last time Trump Republicans tried to deport most or all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Nobel economist Paul Krugman has said in a recent Substack blog that the latest unemployment report showed that since January 2025 the economy is estimated to have added 359,000 jobs, down almost 900,000 from job growth the previous year. This indicates that the job market is very close to complete stagnation.

And that means the whole economy could soon be in stagflation that economists have been so worried about—because inflation is still high despite slowing job growth.

Has anything changed in his second term? Yes, President Trump has doubled down on the deportation raids, which has so decimated the jobs market that it is in danger of destroying economic growth for most Americans as well.

Trump is using the lie that undocumented immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans in ramping up the DHS/ICE assault against almost any immigrant of color, when in fact immigrants not only create more paying jobs, but more consumers that pay taxes as well.

And Trump knows he is lying. His White Christian nationalist-centered policies are tailored to capture most of the economic growth for his oligarchs who hope the $billions they are investing in AI will require fewer human beings. AI and robots don’t pay taxes or go shopping as do the workers that are being replaced.

Barron’s economist Megan Leonhardt highlighted this fact recently, citing the economic planning firm Implan that calculated reducing the immigration population by one million in 2025 reduced GDP by $103.9 billion and eliminated 741,500 potential jobs as compared to 2024 during President Biden’s last year.

“In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States – the largest number ever recorded. In the ensuing months, however, more immigrants left the country or were deported than arrived. By June, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s,” said PEW.

The long-term historical average one-million immigrants per year entering the U.S. have been needed just to keep economic growth at its long-term annual 2 percent real GDP average. And Trump’s State Department has now stopped processing entry visas entirely from 75 countries.

Although the number of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 – 173.2 million in 2015 – will rise to 183.2 million in 2035, according to Pew Research Center projections, the total growth of 10 million over two decades will be lower than the total in any single decade since the Baby Boomers began pouring into the workforce in the 1960s.

What will happen to them? AI means replacing humans with robots that don’t contribute to our retirement systems as well. A country needs to increase its workforce just to finance the retirement benefits for fast-aging population. It’s a truth Republicans have never learned as they continue to support an autocrat who places little value on human lives or the constitution.

And where is most of the economic damage to date? To the farm belt as well as cities in the blue states. Implans reports California, New York, and Texas are most affected, with California having already lost $13.4 billion in GDP and 86,650 fewer jobs. But job losses are occurring in the red states as well. 

Will Republicans ever learn? Immigrants have always been the new blood entering our workforce that has enabled the American economy to grow and renew itself.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

Too Few Jobs!

 

Financial FAQs

“The number of job openings was little changed at 7.1 million in November, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the month, hires were little changed and total separations were unchanged at 5.1 million each.” BLS.gov

CalculatedRisk

The Labor Department’s JOLTS survey is the first look at job formation before the official December U.S. unemployment report, and it isn’t pretty. The number of job hires equaled the number of ‘separations’, or those leaving the workforce for various reasons—voluntary or involuntary. 

(The blue line is Hires and red bars are Layoffs, Discharges, and other in the Calculate Risk graph. The black line is the total number of Job openings. It has fallen from its high of 12,000,000 job vacancies in 2022 after the COVID-19 pandemic.)

This means existing job positions are being replaced but no additional hires. Companies are holding on to their workforce, in other words, replacing those that are leaving for various reasons, but not expanding their workforce.

Trump’s Labor Department doesn’t tell us why but we can surmise that tariffs are the main culprit, since without the Supreme Court decision, companies don’t know if the existing so-called retaliatory tariffs enacted on April 2 are even legal. Imagine the refunds that the Trump administration has promised to return to importers if SCOTUS rules against him!

The number of hires decreased in state and local government, excluding education (-39,000) and in state and local government education (-31,000). Hires increased in federal government (+11,000), said the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

U.S. manufacturing activity fell to 47.9% in December, the Institute for Supply Management said Monday. This is the lowest reading of the year and the 10th straight month of contraction in the factory sector. Any number below 50% signals contraction.

“Looking at the manufacturing economy, 85 percent of the sector’s gross domestic product (GDP) contracted in December, compared to 58 percent in November, and the percentage of manufacturing GDP in strong contraction (defined as a composite PMI^® of 45 percent or lower) increased to 43 percent, compared to 39 percent in November,” said Susan Spence, MBA, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management® (ISM®) Manufacturing Business Survey Committee.

ADP, a private payrolls purveyor, has said that just 41,000 jobs were added to payrolls in December. They were mostly in Leisure/hospitality and Education/healthcare, which means the service sector is still limping along.

This is in fact job stagnation, and with the manufacturing sector still in recession and inflation continuing to rise, it’s looking like overall economic stagflation is afoot.

How is a return of stagflation not inevitable with Republicans and Trump continuing to break up the existing world order? He has basically invaded Venezuela and threatened other countries with military intervention, how could it not be otherwise?

Who will want to do business with America at the point of a gun?

Harlan Green © 2026

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

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

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

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

CBS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Trump's Big Beautiful Bill?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“The House has now passed what must surely be the worst piece of legislation in modern U.S. history. Millions of Americans are about to see crucial government support snatched away. A significant number will die prematurely due to lack of adequate medical care or nutrition. Yet all this suffering won’t come close to offsetting the giant hole in the budget created by huge tax cuts for the rich. Long-term interest rates have already soared as America loses the last vestiges of its former reputation for fiscal responsibility.” Paul Krugman-Substack

 Graph: Last Tech Age

Budget analysts have been saying (almost unanimously) that it will increase our federal debt by as much as $4trillion and raise the federal debt level to as much as 130 percent of GDP, further endangering the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. Government.

In passing their ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ (BBB) by just one vote, Republicans will worsen the income inequality and partisan divide that has picked ordinary Americans’ pocketbooks since the 1980s and President Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ economic policies.

The BBB will essentially renew the Trump administrations first term Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJB), that gave even more tax breaks to the wealthiest—to Trump and his oligarchs.

The U.S. Is already in 106th place of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook, I said in 2017; with a Gini inequality index that ranks it with developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality rankings; Germany and France are ranked 12th and 20th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poor citizens of a country.

So how much worse can it get before MAGA followers realize Trump has never meant to fulfill the “Day 1” promises of lower inflation, more good paying jobs, and a Ukraine peace deal?

The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities gave the most digestible breakdown of the TCJA effects, if it passes the Senate as well:

· Giving the biggest benefits to the wealthy. Households with incomes in the top 5 percent, who have incomes over around $320,000, would receive roughly half of the benefits of extending the expiring tax cuts.

· Ballooning the deficit. Along with the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts enacted under President Bush, the 2017 law has severely eroded our nation’s revenue base. The House budget would compound the damage, adding hundreds of billions of dollars to deficits each year. Extending the 2017 tax cuts would cost $3.6 trillion through 2034.

· Failing to significantly boost economic growth, workers’ earnings, or other benefits for workers. The trickle-down benefits that proponents claimed the 2017 law would produce never materialized, and the law hasn’t come close to paying for itself. Yet the House budget claims that extending the tax cuts would generate trillions in revenue — far more than any independent estimate.

Our ranking of the worst income inequality among developed countries is bound to influence U.S. voters once the Trump’s higher import taxes take hold as well, and stagflation returns.

Even worse is the effect the BBB will have to our credit rating. Will it continue to decline? That is really what Paul Krugman is most worried about. It’s the worst kind of fiscal responsibility. Why such a blatant and foolish attempt to make the rich richer and working Americans poorer? Republicans aren’t even attempting to hide it anymore.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Immigrants the Lifeblood U.S. Economy

 The Mortgage Corner

“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 heads into retirement, the increase in the potential labor force will 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).” PEW RESEARCH

PEW

I wrote in 2017 that 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.

America has always had a labor shortage. It’s the reason we have needed immigrants and led in technology to keep our production levels high. And as the 2017 PEW study above highlights, immigrants have been at the core of our national workforce.

This is while the Trump administration continues to trip over itself in every economic sector, repeating the same mistakes it made during Trump’s first term. This is not only with its tariff policy—negotiating with China to lower their tariffs, though China says they are not currently in talks—but is especially true with its immigration policy that is designed to please its MAGA base.

It's pleasing no one else. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich reports on Substack that one American was detained by ICE in Arizona for 10 days until his relatives produced papers proving his citizenship, because ICE didn’t believe he was American. Meanwhile, ICE handcuffed and deported a group of German teenagers vacationing in Hawaii because they turned up without a hotel pre-booked, which ICE found “suspicious.”

The number of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 – 173.2 million in 2015 – will rise to 183.2 million in 2035, according to Pew Research Center projections. That total growth of 10 million over two decades 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, says the study.

The Biden administration’s record growth was based in large part because of the immigration surge that Trump is attempting to reverse, but that Trump characterized as criminals to stir up his MAGA base. There was no crime wave; records show immigrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens.

So Trump is creating a worker shortage when he wants to bring back manufacturing. Who will replace the immigrants? We need to develop more labor-saving technologies, which means developing better computer chips that Biden has already funded for more Research and Development grants and the CHIPs Act, but will take time to develop.

Trump has no plan of his own, other than slash the government programs that would create newer technologies, nor is anything being done at the congressional level, except pushing for more tax cuts. This was his only accomplishment during the first Trump administration.

It’s a sad day when Trump, Republicans and his MAGA supporters see immigrants as threats when they are the only readily available resource that will grow our economy.

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

How Do We Fix Inflation?

 Financial FAQs

I said last week that: “Many of us remember when a gallon of gas was less the $2, or a quart of milk less than $1, or housing was last affordable in the 1970s. I remember the inflation surges in housing. What happened?”

So, Shouldn’t we as voters be able understand how to fix inflation such as we just experienced with the COVID-19 pandemic? That didn’t happened on November 5. Trump was able to convince most of his voters to blame someone rather than learn what needed to be done, and had already been done, to cure the problem.

It is now doubly important because if Trump raises tariffs and begins to deport undocumented workers on ‘Day One’ of his presidency as promised, inflation will soar again and the U.S. economy will quickly go into a tail spin.

Why couldn’t Trump voters see this? Their anger was fostered by an out of control social media catering to their own interest groups by elevating conspiracy theories and denigating scientific facts to keep their audience rather than what is good for most Americans and the American economy.

It has always been difficult to pierce the fog of propaganda and obfuscation that has dogged anything related to our economy because the U.S. economy is the most complex in the world with its competing mix of private and public enterprise needed to to make it work.

FREDcpi

The retail Consumer Price Index (CPI) in the FRED graph above dating from 1980 is the eaiest way to understand why we had high inflation spikes and how long it took for it to return to normal.

Simply put, the spikes that hurt most Americans were due to supply shortages mostly out of our control. The 1980 spike was mainly because of an oil shortage that took a decade to reverse. In 2022 the other high spike was the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down supply chains and took approximately three years to recover.

It didn’t matter which political party was in charge—Republicans in 1980 and Democrats in 2022. Both parties had the tools to mitigate the inflation surges that took some time, as I said.

How were they solved? Both political parties used their financial institutions, mainly the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department, and did not disparage them as Trump’s MAGA supporters do as a matter of policy. Because they control the flow of money—regulating whether there is too much (inflationary) or too little (deflationary) money is in circulation to counter the supply disruptions.

But playing the blame game that has enraged so many working class voters doesn’t solve the inflation problem, though it did win enough workers to the Republican side. They now must prove they actually know something about its causes.

What will hinder any good faith effort to tame inflation is the maldistribution of the money supply. Too much of it is in too few hands, a hallmark of what has been called the second Gilded Age that has favored the wealthiest since the 1970s, and not ordinary workers damaged most by higher inflation whose household incomes have stagnated since then.

We have working solutions to the inflation that has plagued the American economy for decades. But deporting undocumented workers and raising tariffs will raise inflation, since tariffs are a tax on imports, and fewer immigrants form the backbone of the supply sector (restaurants, transportation, retail, construction) that has been the mainstay of this recovery. It will cause a labor shortage, which means fewer goods and services will be produced, thus raising the price of things, as well.

This is the most basic of Econ 101 priinciples, but Trump was able to fool his voters because there is a general ignorance of economic principles.

And our capitalist system hasn’t been helping the working class since the 1970s, as I’ve said in past columns. The increasing income inequality created an almost unstoppable anger that grew after decades of income loss for working class voters as more and more wealth was shunted upward creating ever larger budget deficits.

If we are able to reverse the income inequality with more progressive taxation policies that pay for better social benefits, for instance, we might convince more voters to realize government isn’t the problem and inflation is really governed by the common sense rule of supply and demand.

They might then not choose someone who only knows how to blame but rather vote for real economic solutions to mitigate inflation.

Once Roosevelt created the New Deal in response to the Great Depression, governments began to work for ordinary Americans—from social security to a federal minimum wage, to workers rights. Only such a private-public partnership will help to cure our inflation problem.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

LUCKY LOSER: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

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.

A new book just out by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Russ Buettner and Suzanne Craig conducts an explosive investigation into the history of Donald Trump’s wealth, revealing how one of the country’s biggest business failures lied his way into the White House, says the Random House press release.

I first wrote about this in 2016 when Trump first became President: his multiple bankruptcies of the Trump Casinos when other Atlantic City Casinos were successful, Trump University charged as a criminal enterprise (under RICO), and the fact that he had to rely on Russian Oligarchs to finance his real estate empire when U.S. banks would no longer lend to him, are just the tip of the iceberg of business incompetence.

“This is a page turner, with spectacular anecdotes,” said a review by Washington Post’s Bethany McLean . . . “[Lucky Loser] shows in meticulously documented detail how ‘even when Trump appeared to be at his best, he was failing,’ with massive losses on his core business.

Random House

Buettner and Craig first revealed his real financial condition in a 2016 NYTimes article.

“The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.”

It heightens the absurdity of Republicans allowing Trump’s MAGA movement to take over the Republican Party.

These are the acts of a bully, rather than leader, I said then, which is why he seems to have so much in common with V Putin, Marine Le Pen, and other demagogues. Acting tough can be a plus when dealing with North Korea, or even Russia, but not when dealing with Americans who don’t like him or his very anti-American policies.

Fortune Magazine also reported in 2016 before becoming the Republican candidate for president on candidate Trump’s negotiating tactics: “The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors.”

And, “As he campaigns, Trump often touts his skills as a negotiator,” said Fortune. “The analysis shows that lawsuits are one of his primary negotiating tools. He turns to litigation to distance himself from failing projects that relied on the Trump brand to secure investments.

“The authors prove that without his father’s support, Trump would have been nothing,” continues Washington Post’s McLean. “The book also raises a bigger question 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?”

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 first signed the USEPA into law in 1972.

Republicans had learned to “fake it ‘til you make it”, as was proved by the Trump administrations record in breaking up the USEPA so that Trump’s call to “Drill Baby Drill” for more fossil fuels can continue, and preserving tax cuts first enacted under Trump what will further increase the national debt.

Buettner and Craig’s book will hopefully uncover the truth of Trump’s MAGA policies before it is too late, as most of the modern media has failed to do.

Buettner and Craig’s work exposes how many passes Trump has gotten over the years, how thoroughly he is a creation of the medial that has chased fame over blame, which as the authors write, ‘rarely revisited his claims and afforded credibility to everything he said,” concludes McLean’s review.

And now recognizing more signs of Trump’s mental deterioration as he ages makes it even more important that we in the media tell it like it is.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Immigrants Drive Republicans Crazy!

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented workers (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do.

Republicans haven’t let up on their campaign to limit immigration since 2017 when I first wrote about the newly elected Trump administration’s demonization of immigrants.

It’s now become even worse as Presidential candidate Trump and VP candidate JD Vance on the campaign trail have even doubled down on demonizing immigrants, saying they are now eating the pets of Ohioans!

Huffingon Post

The absurdity of Republicans’ allowing Trump’s MAGA movement to take over the Republican Party has made it worse for economic growth as well. Any mass deportation of immigrants would cause great harm to the American economy.

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, reports the PEW Research Center. But as this large generation heads into retirement, the increase in the potential labor force will 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).

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.

The drop in labor productivity is in part because of the drop in capex spending, the investment in new plants and equipment, which has fallen by half since 2010, but also because of the Great Recession. Corporations have chosen to move many jobs overseas where labor is cheaper, rather than investing domestically to improve the productivity of American workers.

The number of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 – 173.2 million in 2015 – will rise to 183.2 million in 2035, according to Pew Research Center projections. (But) That total growth of 10 million over two decades will be lower than the total in any single decade since the Baby Boomers began pouring into the workforce in the 1960s.

The Nobel Economist Paul Krugman said it in his most recent NYTimes Op-ed: “Overall, the move of immigrants to some small cities has been very beneficial, one of the best hopes those cities have for economic resurgence, but the hopes will disappear if immigrants are scared off by a climate of hate;” (or driven out by MAGA Republicans, which is what Trump has been attempting to do).

We are now seeing an ageing Trump whose incoherence is becoming more obvious, especially since Vice President Harris exposed his mental deterioration during the presidential debate.

And MAGA Republicans are blindly following him into the rabbit-hole.

Harlan Green © 2024

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