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

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

The Greater Lawlessness--Republicans War On America

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as Vice-President means the chaos of Trump’s first administration will continue on steroids, as Trump will have a VP who will assist him in continuing to tear down one institution after another that protects ordinary Americans.

JD Vance looked down on working class whites he grew up among when he wrote his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy”. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness,” as cited by Paul Krugman in a recent NYTimes Op-ed.

“We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents,” he said. But now that he’s the Republican Vice President candidate, those lazy males have suddenly become victims of the surge of illegal immigrants that are “poisoning the blood of Americans”, in Trump’s words, and taking their jobs Vance has said in numerous speeches and interviews.

But that’s not the case. The unemployment rate of adult white males is just 4 percent, below the current national unemployment rate, said Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in economics.

As an example of the chaos during his first administration when Trump was taking babies away from immigrant mothers and attempting to build a wall, I wrote this 2017 Huffington Post piece on how his immigration policies will damage the US 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).

Huffington Post

“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,” I wrote then.

It is one more example of the Bully Mentality I’ve been writing about ad nauseum that is particular to the Republican Party—the bullying behavior of the strongest preying on the weakest that has made citizens of the red states they control the poorest.

How much of a bully is JD Vance? He is now mimicking Donald Trump’s behavior. In an interview with ABC News "This Week" anchor George Stephanopoulos, Vance doubled down on his views of the 2020 election, saying the results shouldn't have been immediately certified, and he went on to suggest Trump should ignore "illegitimate" U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

"If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there," he continued. "That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done."

It is returning to the Law of the Jungle, the Darwinian struggle where the fittest survive and prosper that Donald Trump now with the assistance of his Vice Presidential candidate will return America to.

It is monumental hypocrisy of a man from Kentucky who grew up among the very people he has made into victims, a red state that has suffered so much from what is now the official policy of Donald Trump’s party.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

The Historical Decline in US Growth

The Mortgage Corner

@GregDaco

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 0.3 percent in the third quarter of 2019, first decline in 5 years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, as output increased 2.1 percent and hours worked increased 2.4 percent…From the third quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2019, productivity increased 1.4 percent, reflecting a 2.3-percent increase in output and a 0.9-percent increase in hours worked.

This almost arcane statistic followed by professional economists is one of two major reasons US economic growth has slowed to a crawl, as seen in the graphs. Individual workers are no longer producing as much per worker as they did through 2000, even with a fully employed economy and the introduction of modern technologies that boost production.

Another reason is declining population growth, as American mothers no longer produce enough replacement babies. A main contributor to the falling population growth rate is the decreasing fertility rate. The fertility rate has fallen from 3.7 in the 1960s to 1.9 today, when 2.1 births per mother is the natural replacement rate, leading to a lower increase in the US population (excess of births over deaths).

In fact, the national birth rate (12/1,000) still remains higher than the national death rate (8/1,000), which means more people are being born in the U.S. each year than are passing away. Additionally, the arrival of immigrants with larger families, has kept the U.S. population steadily increasing, albeit slowly.

I suggest that lower fertility is just the tip of the melting economic iceberg, because populations also increase with new immigrants. So we shouldn’t be cutting back on immigration quotas as the current administration is doing—to some 700,000 last year from the 1.3-1.4 million per year in recent decades.

And combined policy missteps—such as spending less on capital investments that would increase labor productivity and not introducing policies that would enhance birth rates; also better health care, family leave, more liberal vacation and sick leave policies are a start—as European countries have been doing.

This has kept U.S. GDP growth averaging 2 percent since the Great Recession, but no higher. EU countries have declining birth rates, unfortunately, which has knocked down EU GDP growth rates to around one percent.

But they also have greater longevity and better healthcare outcomes than the U.S., which is ranked 37^th in health outcomes by the World Health Organization. As in example, French residents now live an average 4 years longer than Americans, says Nobel economist Paul Krugman in a recent NYTimes Op-ed. “Why? Universal healthcare and policies that mitigate extreme inequality are the most likely explanations.”

There is much more that can be done to boost economic growth and income equality, in other words. Fixing schools would boost educational levels, switching to alternative energy sources would inject $trillions into new technologies and bring down pollution costs, fixing our infrastructure would boost productivity immediately by cutting down on commute times and lost work hours, and better enforcement of environmental regulations would decrease healthcare expenses as well as job losses due to ill health.

The list goes on and on. Maybe we do need a Green New Deal to make all this happen?

Harlan Green © 2019

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

Why Make America Small Again?

Popular Economics Weekly

ResearchPew

Why make America small again is the question Americans should be asking President Donald Trump whose immigration policies are designed to do just that. He would reduce immigration flows by 50 percent, if he and his conservative supporters have their way.

The result would be stagnating economic growth because of the simple fact that immigrants are the main driver of population growth, due to the low birth rates of native-born Americans.

The U.S. birth rate is 1.8 births per woman, down from 3.65 in 1960, according to the World Bank. Demographers consider 2.1 births per woman as the rate needed to replace the existing population.

Economic 101 theory states that population growth is one-half of the equation for Gross Domestic Product growth (It’s population growth + productivity = GDP growth). Without adequate population growth, U.S. economic growth would stagnate, as it has in Europe and Japan.

In fact, the Japanese population has been shrinking for decades, which has resulted in a record government debt of some 200 percent of GDP. How else can the Japanese invest in their future but use their government to print money, when its own population contributes a shrinking amount to tax revenues?

And a 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found immigration “has an overall positive impact on the long-run economic growth in the U.S.”

The best evidence of low native-born birth rates is that over the next five decades, the U.S. immigrant population of 45 million is projected to grow to a record 78 million. The growth rate of 74 percent will be more than double that for the U.S.-born population (30 percent), according to the PEW Study.

Then what does President Trump really believe would make “American Great Again,” if he restricts immigrant inflows, which would reduce U.S. population growth rates by more than half?

He and his supporters labor under a very ancient assumption (not based on fact) that resources are limited in a zero-sum game where one can only gain when others lose a share of income or wealth, or influence, or stature.

That was the mentality of the concentration camp that Nobel Prize-winner Eli Wiesal portrayed so graphically in Night, his description of conditions in Nazi death camps as a child.

It is unfortunately a picture that exists today, in which we are imprisoned in a world of declining resources. It also happens to be the mentality of fossil fuel interests that attempt to protect their limited and declining resources—and wealth that are the financial supporters of the Republican Party (such as the Koch Brothers).

They want to protect their very limited resources, whereas renewable energy offers the promise of unlimited energy resources, as does the Information Age and the Internet. This is a world that requires fewer restrictions of people and information across country borders.

American can only be small again in the Trump-Koch Brothers world of the last century, a world that seemed to have limited resources. There’s no part of America that would prosper with 14-foot-high border walls, or trade barriers, or immigration restrictions that are based on win-lose fallacies.

Such walls can only exist for those that still believe they are imprisoned in a past that no longer exists, or has any basis in fact.

Harlan Green © 2019

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

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

Noozhawk.com

I recently attended the 10^th anniversary of the Goleta Dam Dinner held at Lake Los Carneros, on a dam built long before the City of Goleta, California was formed.

Here in this relatively new and still small city, founded in 2002 and nestled beside its famous neighbor, Santa Barbara, were families of all ages and stages happily celebrating not only their sense of community spirit, but the natural beauty of its surroundings that is a unique blend of mountains and ocean located on the central California coast.

This made me realize how successful was the formation of this new, very livable, California city, where I had been privileged to live and help establish, in spite of the many obstacles to the formation of new governmental entities in recent years.

It was a successful community because of the attention paid to both the environment and safety concerns of its citizens—especially the children.

I know Goleta won’t make the list of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Liveability Index that really only pays attention to larger cities, where we don’t see this community spirit and camaraderie.

Vienna was the top city on The Economists’ list, with Australia and Canada each having three cities in its top 10 listing of the better-known cities that made The Economists’ Liveability Index. .

1. 1. Vienna, Austria
2. 2. Melbourne, Australia
3. 3. Sydney, Australia
4. 4. Osaka, Japan
5. 5. Calgary, Canada
6. 6. Vancouver, Canada
7. 7. Toronto, Canada
8. 8. Tokyo, Japan
9. 9. Copenhagen, Denmark
10. 10. Adelaide, Australia

No U.S. city was in the top 20, with Honolulu ranking highest at No. 22. Atlanta came in 33rd place; Pittsburgh, 34th; and Seattle, 36th. New York was all the way down in the 58th spot, in part because of low scores for infrastructure, stability and possible crime issues.

That could be because it’s easier for the residents of smaller cities to confront city councils with their concerns—at least in the U.S. of A. It has to be why the City of Goleta became one of the 50 safest American cities in 2017, fifteen years after its formation, according to a survey by Safewise, a security firm.

What then does “liveability” mean? The Economist is a UK Magazine, which might serve as a bias for a more European civic viewpoint, perhaps. But the issue of safety is certainly at the forefront of making any community livable—especially for children.

And the rising tide of violence in American cities—so much so that in 1992 U.S. Surgeon General Everett Koop declared violence a public health emergency—means the situation in American cities hasn’t improved.
 
And now even more so when U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy was fired by President Trump in 2017 after he spoke against gun violence, calling it a public health issue that needs public investment, and stood in support of the victims in Orlando, Florida, where one of the worst mass shootings in American history had just occurred.

It also has much to do with so-called Smart Urban Planning. Architect Suzanne Lennard, and Psychiatrist Henry L. Lennard have written extensively on what makes communities livable in books such as The Forgotten Child (2000, Gondolier Press, Carmel, CA).


Children are safest where there are neighborhood adults with ‘eyes on the streets’ that watch over them, as in many densely-packed European cities with their public squares. Children are also safer where streets are designed and neighborhoods zoned to allow children to roam and explore, rather than be dependent on the auto to transport them to school, for instance, as is the case in many poorly-planned American suburbs.

Such concerns were incorporated into the City of Goleta—that made it such a close-knit, ‘liveable’ community, in my opinion. It was also why attending the Goleta Dam Dinner’s 10^th anniversary was such a special event.

Harlan Green © 2019

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

Immigration and Trump’s “S***Hole” Comment

Popular Economics Weekly

How should we remember Martin Luther King, Jr. on his holiday? That greater equality creates greater prosperity for all; as well as greater peace.

President Trump’s S***Hole comments were meant as a signal to his neo-nazi supporters that he wanted to exclude as many non-whites from immigrating to America as he could, and encourage more from European countries like Norway.

This means he isn’t interested in stronger economic growth over the longer term, since much of the economic growth today can be attributed to non-whites and women, according to an excellent column by the Conversable Economist, Tim Taylor, commemorating MLK Jr.’s holiday.

Graph: Conversible Economist

Non-whites and women have been contributing a larger share to our economic growth than White men since at least 1960 in high-skill occupations. Before then, many labored in the lower-skilled, unnoticed occupations that weren’t always included in growth statistics.

Professor Taylor quotes a policy brief from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research cited by Peter Klenow. The percentage of White men in the high-skilled occupations of Doctors, Lawyers and Managers, “defined as lawyers, doctors, engineers, scientists, architects, mathematicians, executives/managers,” has fallen substantially, while that of Black men, White and Black women has soared. The number of White women entering these professions has tripled, Black men quadrupled, and Black women grown eight times from 1960 to 2008.

The result? Klenow estimates that economic growth increased by 15-20 percent due to these minorities entering the higher-skilled occupation, just from the fact that their numbers increased as a share of the overall profession, while the percentage of White men has fallen by approximately one-third.

It also highlights another important fact. Economic growth depends on population growth plus labor productivity. And annual labor productivity has declined approximately 50 percent since 2007, as has U.S. population growth. So the only way to boost economic growth from its current 2 percent range is to increase the working age population via immigration.

The lesson therefore is that we need greater diversity in our workforce, not less as President Trump and his racist supporters want, since our birth rates are declining; a valuable lesson to remember on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Harlan Green © 2018

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

Increase Industrial Production Sign Higher Growth?

Popular Economics Weekly

Industrial production in April grew at the fastest monthly rate in more than three years on the back of broad-based gains in the manufacturing sector, reports the Federal Reserve. Industrial production grew 1 percent in April led by a 5 percent increase in motor vehicle production. It was because business investment is up sharply, as is consumer spending.

Graph: Econoday

Business equipment, in a positive indication for second-quarter business investment, rose a very sharp 1.2 percent, reports Econoday, which could be a sign of a badly needed business expansion. “Production of consumer goods was even stronger, up 1.5 percent. Two negatives are hi-tech industries with a small decline and also construction supplies which posted a second straight dip that offers a reminder of this morning's disappointing housing starts report.”

There’s an obvious reason for the surge in business investment. Businesses need more automation, as they can’t find enough qualified workers to fill the 5.743 million, job openings reported in the Labor Department’s latest JOLTS report, much more plentiful than total hirings of 5.260 million in April, a gap of 483,000.

That also means an ultimate surge in badly needed Labor Productivity that has been lagging of late. From the first quarter of 2016 to the first quarter of 2017, productivity increased just 1.1 percent, reflecting increases in output and hours worked of 2.4 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively, said the BLS.

And without higher labor productivity, the US economy can’t grow more than the current 2 percent GDP growth rate. What was the rate during periods of higher growth? Until 2000, economic growth averaged more than 3 percent, while productivity averaged 2.5 percent until 2007.

 But then something happened. Average productivity plunged to 1.2 percent from 2010 onward. Why? Businesses stopped investing, for starters. This was partly due to the plunge in oil prices (from $100 to $30 per barrel last year), and consequent plunge in industrial production.

But our population also began declining, the other component to GDP growth (besides labor productivity). Until 2000, the U.S. population grew more than 1 percent, but since 2000 average population growth halved to about 0.5 percent.

Graph: CBO

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we would need 2.8 million new workers per year to reach the 3 percent growth rate that Trump and Repubs want. Where will they come from? New immigrants, as the U.S. currently generates just 600,000 new job entrants per year, on average.

The baby boom is gone, in other words, and even the record-breaking millennial generation won’t fill the bill.  So we need more immigrants, not less, as well as higher labor productivity, if Repubs are to boost economic growth.

Harlan Green © 2017

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