Time To Pay the Piper

 Popular Economics Weekly

 “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining. [State of the Union Address January 11 1962]” President John F Kennedy

Wikipedia

Two of our largest domestic economies are heeding President Kennedy’s words, “when the sun is shining”; it’s time to begin paying our national debt during this record-breaking stock market run that is currently benefiting the wealthiest Americans.

We are drowning in a federal debt that is endangering our good faith and credit while crowding out domestic spending on the public services that make life more bearable for ordinary Americans. We have a federal debt that is now 120% of the annual output of the U.S. economy (Gross Domestic Product).

New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and California Governor Gavin Newsom have announced that it’s possible to balance a budget. Maybe that’s something Republicans should also heed if they want to remain relevant to America’s future by offering more than tax cuts and bloated military budgets.

New York City is the largest U.S. city with an 8.5 million population, and the State of California has the fourth largest economy in the world behind the U.S., China and Japan.

Mayor Mamdani announced the $124.7 billion Fiscal Year (FY) 2027 Executive Budget, putting New York City on firm financial footing while protecting the services working people rely on. “Through strong fiscal management, Mayor Mamdani balanced the budget through a combination of aggressive savings, new tax revenue, partnership with Albany and critical new investments.”

California’s 2026-27 budget, as revised by Governor Gavin Newsom on May 14, 2026, “projects no deficit for that year and the next budget year (2027-28), with a structural deficit eliminated through July 2028.”

It’s a sign that Americans in Democratic states at least want to move on from the trickle-down economic policies that Republicans have practiced since 1980, resulting in five recessions including the Great Recession on their watch.

It has perpetrated the greatest income and wealth inequality of all—red states depriving their own citizens of a livable minimum wage and social services that make their lives bearable, with no minimum wage higher than the national minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (portrayed in the Wikipedia map), or state taxes to pay their bills and provide adequate health care.

That’s a reason most Republican-led, so-called red states, have fallen far behind in growth compared to Democrat-led blue states –many with surplus tax revenues that go to many of the red states in the form of benefit payments to balance their budgets.

California, for instance, has the largest tax ‘imbalance’ in the nation. Varying estimates show Californians pay between $83billion and $275billion more to the IRS than the federal government returns to the state in the form of Social Security, healthcare, military contracts, and disaster aid.

Whereas red states like Kentucky require $Billions from the federal coffers to meet their budget needs. For instance, 10 red states have no Medicaid health insurance for their low-income residents.

The results show the glaring damage the minimal, ‘bare bones’ red state budgets wreak on the health and safety of their citizens. Red states exhibit higher premature mortality rates and higher incidences of death from major internal causes, such as heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Blue state citizens on average live longer.

NIH research shows a clear partisan health divide in the United States, with "blue" (Democratic-leaning) states consistently outperforming "red" (Republican-leaning) states across major public health metrics, including life expectancy, infant mortality, and preventable chronic illnesses.

The New York City and California examples show that state and federal governments know how to balance a budget that benefits all Americans, not just the wealthiest. The Clinton Administration even created four consecutive years of budget surpluses in the 1990s that paid down the federal debt.

A consensus is building that our national debt must be dealt with. Balancing budgets are the responsible way to deal with it, not the trickle-down economic policies that have created the monstrous debt from the many Republican tax cuts that have deprived red states’ citizens of a decent standard of living.

Harlan Green © 2026

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

The Truth About High Tariffs

 Popular Economics Weekly

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.” President Reagan

Reagan Library

Was President Reagan predicting what would happen in Trump’s second term as president?

President Trump didn’t like Ontario Prime Minister Dog Ford’s posting of a 1987 radio address by President Reagan criticizing high tariffs that went viral because it was describing what was happening with Trump’s illegal, retaliatory tariffs that are destroying the American economy and chasing our allies into deals with China.

It was obvious President Trump didn’t want his public to know that starting a tariff war with all 180 countries in the world would trigger “fierce trade wars” and sow economic chaos.

Add the job losses for “millions of people” his massive downsizing of the federal workforce that provides the benefits that protect all Americans, while attacking our institutions of higher learning that prepare us for the future, we can see where this can lead.

His actions are already contributing to a skilled worker shortage and the shrinkage of huge segments of the U.S. working age population with his attacks on immigrants that make up 40 percent of our agricultural workers and a large part of our service industry workers.

Is the chaos he is causing designed to destroy the U.S. economy as we know it, “markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down,” so that all or most power will be concentrated in the hands of the oligarchs and close allies that support him?

It happened in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its collapse caused Russian oligarchs and Putin to snap up whole industries for pennies on the dollar, thus concentrating their wealth where Putin could control it.

Why can’t it happen here? Trump adores Putin as his model, but he would need a cowed tribe of supporters similar to Russia’s serb population, the serfs of old, liberated little more than 100 years ago, to sustain his power. Right now, it’s Trump’s White Christian Nationalists (like Putin’s Russian Orthodox supporters), but they are a small minority.

President Trump will only succeed in his scheme if he can convince enough Americans that his tariffs against the rest of the world (and higher inflation) are good for US because it would bring back better-paying industrial jobs to his base in the Midwest that had suffered from the globalization of manufacturing.

But that’s not what President Reagan said. He would also have to convince enough Americans that destroying large segments of the U.S. economy—in public health, environmental protection, social services—is worth the cost of higher tariffs, rather than live as his red state supporters have suffered under Republican rule; many with no minimum wage, minimal or no health care, no environmental protection from increasingly frequent natural disasters, and above all, a distrust in science that would provide them a better future.

We should ask ourselves, why would President Trump enact his agenda outside of most customs and laws, demolish the East Wing of the White House to build a 90,000 square foot ballroom without approved plans or permits?

Trump can only be stopped from his attempt to set up an American version of Putin’s Oligarchy, if enough Americans will believe in President Reagan’s predictions.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Another Civil War?

 Popular Economics Weekly

“The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn’t a strongman, he’s a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.” JB Pritzer, Governor of Illinois

 

CBS

Historian Heather Cox Richardson has been documenting the irrational talk of President Trump, who seems to be trying to distract the media from the bad economic news and his involvement in the Epstein files in her quote from Governor Pritzer that she cited above.

“Today the social media account of President Donald J. Trump posted an AI-generated image of Trump as if he were Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam in which he was engaged; his most famous line was “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” said Professor Richardson

I believe it’s worse than that. He seems to want to foment a civil war by threatening to “invade” Chicago and New York as he invaded Los Angeles, using armed red state National Guard troops. The message is clear. Red southern states are finally able to invade blue northern states, something they couldn’t do in the 1860s civil war!

Can it also be a pretext for stopping the vote in upcoming elections by declaring some form of martial law? The courts have stopped his alien invasion rationale to date for rounding up undocumented immigrants and deporting them without due process.

But economic growth keeps being revised downward. In the Labor Department’s latest revisions, the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs in the last months of the Biden presidency and early stages of the Trump administration, indicating the labor market began to weaken far sooner than previously believed.

The updated employment figures from April 2024 to March 2025 could cause the Federal Reserve to lower short-term interest rates even more in September — and beyond. The latest downward revision is the biggest since at least 2000, reports MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash.

As a result, the pace of job creation from May through August slowed to 27,000 a month, one of the worst stretches since 2010 if the pandemic era is excluded.

Trump’s desperate attempt to deflect media attention now that the SCOTUS shadow docket has just allowed him to ignore the Fourth Amendment ban on indiscriminate search and seizure, will give Democrats plenty of political ammunition for the upcoming elections. The Supreme Court decision means ICE can stop any Hispanic looking, or Spanish speaking, person who must prove to their satisfaction that they are a US citizen or here legally.

It is an incredible overstretching of authority. And the immigration roundup in general will harm legal immigrants and minorities as well. Will Americans vote for a political party that blatantly breaks the Fourth Amendment, other than the hard line MAGA base that believes anything Trump says?

It is why Trump wants to rename the Defense Department as the Department of War, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is now talking and acting like a White Supremacist to rally Trump’s base.

I believe that Trump will touch a nerve that he hadn’t counted on, Americans’ love of freedom. Trump preaches the opposite, the right to imprison many Americans on almost any pretext.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Who Won the Civil War?

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“Just more than one week after President Donald Trump unveiled plans to deploy troops from the D.C. National Guard and to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department to tackle crime in Washington, six states have pledged to send in their own National Guard troops to pitch in with the effort.” Fox News

NYTimes

The civil war isn’t over? The Republican Party, envious of the blue states and a federal government that protect the rights of all Americans, has been attempting to take away as many of those protections as possible since Donald Trump returned to power.

Republicans have attacked such basic freedoms as women’s rights (abortion), immigrants’ rights (birth right citizenship), minorities and the poorest (loss of Medicare, Obamacare benefits) and seniors with cutbacks in social security services.

Trump added fuel to the fire when he said the Charlottesville torch carrying parade in 2017 that chanted racist, Nazi and antisemitic slogans had “very fine people on both sides.”

And since the big ugly tax cut bill was passed, Trump has sent National Guard Troops to Los Angeles and the District of Columbia, cities with black mayors (Chicago and Philadelphia may be next). It’s now obvious the Trump’s Republican Party has become the party of White Nationalist Christians, as if Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a mere blip on the screen of history that Republicans since the Jim Crow era have attempted to erase.

Six red (formerly confederate) states; Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee; have also sent a contingent of their National Guard to “police” DC with the mission to aid in fighting crime.

Yet three of those red states—South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, rank in the top ten states with the highest rates of violent crime. Why aren’t they policing their own cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee that has the highest violent crime rate in the country?

Red States don’t have those services for a reason. Generations of control by Republicans haven’t raised minimum wages, have weakened unions’ right to collective bargaining with right to work laws, and provided fewer health care services or environmental protection.

That’s why the minimum wage in Blue states can be more than twice that of Red states (Washington State is $17/hr versus Texas’ $7.25/hr, the national minimum age). When most families are barely earning enough to get by, employers have their pick of distraught, panicked workers willing to work for subsistence wages.

It’s become increasingly clear that Trump’s Republican Party doesn’t want to believe that it lost the civil war.

They have instead chosen to make it a cultural war between the Haves (blue states) and Have-nots (red states) by attacking the human rights and climate protections in blue states that far outclass those in red states and has resulted in the huge economic and cultural divide between them.

Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states produce just 29 percent of our income and wealth, according to the Hartman Report, a progressive podcast. The median family income in Blue states is $74,243 vs. $63,553 in the red states. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.

Donald Trump and his Republican-led red states should be wanting to emulate the best parts of blue states, instead of invading them: such as with better environmental protections, higher incomes, lower poverty rates, crime rates, and better health care above all.

But it might result in citizens of the red states wanting those protections as well, and Republicans losing their hold on power over them.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Who Benefits From America's IOU's?

 Financial FAQs

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government’s gross national debt has surpassed $37 trillion, a record number that highlights the accelerating debt on America’s balance sheet and increased cost pressures on taxpayers. AP

FREDdebtGDP

Trump and his Republicans’ trade war and big, beautiful tax bill resemble a giant Ponzi scheme in several ways that has created the greatest wealth and income inequality in the developed world. 

It is in essence robbing Peter to pay Paul, by using the revenues from the highest tariff rates since the Great Depression, cutting $billions from Medicare, Medicare and Obamacare benefits, Doge-slashing important health and climate research departments as well as foreign aid spending, because Trump must pay down the record national debt that he has declared is a national emergency.

Yet it was generated by generations of mostly Republican tax cuts. President Reagan created the first major national debt in fighting the cold war and Central American contra wars, GW Bush created the first $trillion deficit with his war on terror largely based on fabricated intelligence, and Donald Trump will manage to add some $ 9 trillion to what is now a record $37 trillion from his trade war with almost no understanding or knowledge of foreign trade, as Nobelist Paul Krugman has pointed out several times.

And President Trump just fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics so that he could replace her with someone who will cook the books on inflation and real job numbers.

The history of deficits is portrayed in the above graph of U.S. national debt calculated as a percentage of GDP.

Tump’s original Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) had already added $5 trillion to the national debt that peaked at 132.8% as a percentage of GDP in Q1 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and it has since dropped to 120% because of the aid bills that the Trump and Biden administrations signed into law boosting economic growth to almost 3% annually.

The White House appeal to the foreign trade court to leave Trump’s tariff war in place is his attempt to keep the Ponzi scheme from imploding, rather than negotiating with congress that has the actual power to make foreign trade agreements.

Executive orders without congressional approval are illegal, unless there is a national emergency. And the soaring national debt could become one, if Trump succeeds in destroying the good faith and credit of the U.S. in renewing the TCJA.

On May 16, Moody’s Ratings downgraded the U.S. credit rating, citing an “inability of the nation to address large and growing deficits.” This downgrade means that for the first time ever, all three major credit ratings agencies have downgraded U.S. credit below their top AAA rating.

Trump is therefore begging an appeals court to allow the tariffs. It could lead to a “GREAT DEPRESSION” Trump said on social media, with Americans “forced from their homes” that will threaten social security and Medicare.

Yet the financial markets aren’t panicking this time, maybe for the wrong reasons, as I said in an earlier column. This is while the Final Demand Producer Price Index has jumped to 3.3% annually, the highest in three years since the COVID-19 induced supply shortages, lessening the chances of Federal Reserve rate cuts.

Wall Street’s over enthusiasm, which was first termed irrational exuberance by Fed Chair Alan Greenspan in the mid-1990s as a warning that stocks were overpriced, has created a new asset bubble much like the dot-com asset bubble, and housing bubble that led to the Great Recession.

And it has led to the greatest income inequality in the developed world which has impoverished Republican-led red states above all, whose citizens are most easily cowed by their policies.

And what will happen when foreign investors, mainly governments, realize a $37 trillion national debt isn’t sustainable indefinitely?

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Republicans' Unchecked Greed

 Popular Economics Weekly

“George Will, the conservative pundit, gave the best description of Trump’s incompetence in a Washington Post Op-Ed: “It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”

George Will was only partially right in 2017, when he reacted to Trump’s flailing first term attempts to run our government. His Republican administration's’ seeming incompetence is motivated by unchecked greed. Most of his first cabinet was populated with former lobbyists. And it is wrecking the fastest growing economy in the developed world that was inherited from the Biden administration.

They are choosing to remain ignorant of the most basic economic facts in their attempt to extend Trump’s 2018 Tax Cut and Jobs Act during the current debate on the budget for the fiscal year. The financial markets are making them pay for their ignorance, which will hurt his red state supporters most.

“The budget plan that House Republicans passed today paves the way to take Medicaid health coverage and food assistance through SNAP away from millions of people, to partially pay for huge tax giveaways for wealthy households and businesses that will drive up deficits and fiscal risk,” said Sharon Parrott, President of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan economic think tank,

What are the markets saying? It’s the wrong time to have a budget debate, “when the President’s tariffs, chaotically crafted and applied, have caused business uncertainty to soar and raised the risk of a recession, higher unemployment, and surging prices,” said CBPP’s Parrott.

CBPP.org

This is also at a time of record income inequality when the income gains of the top one percent dwarf that of the bottom 20 percent per the above graph.

Professors Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez were the first to examine 100 years of income tax returns that highlighted the wide swings in income equality. They found that the periods of greatest inequality were just before a major recession, such as the Great Recession and the Great Depression itself, I said in an earlier blog post.

What does that tell US when we are at another period of greatest equality? More than just red staters will be harmed, as the full faith and credit of the U.S. of A is endangered with the record national budget deficit of $36 billion and growing.

This happened during the Great Recession as well, triggered by GW Bush’s tax cuts at a time when the Clinton Administration had just created four years of budget surpluses that were frittered away with GW’s tax cuts and the wars on terror.

“Add to the budget plan and constantly shifting tariff policy the Administration’s chaotic and deeply harmful executive action agenda — which is wrecking Social Security and other core government functions, unlawfully stopping funding for public services and investments, hollowing out and politicizing the civil service, and undermining basic governance — and you have a triple threat agenda that will make millions of families far worse off,” continued Parrott.

Can it get even worse? Our national debt is not sustainable. Yahoo Finance just reported in an April 14 article that S&P Global Ratings hinted that it could lower the US credit rating, currently at AA+, by another notch if any of a number of things happen to make the US's fiscal situation worse.

“The outcome of the US government's budget process and policy negotiations over the coming months will help determine policies that inform our view of US sovereign creditworthiness,” S&P said. “These discussions could affect our view of the US's fiscal profile.”

So, there’s a good reason Greed is one of the seven deadly sins, maybe the deadliest if its Republican practitioners cause another Great Recession or Depression.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Make Trump 2.0 Irrelevant Again!

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

“The United States now has the highest percentage of low-wage workers – that is workers who make less than two-thirds of the median wage- of any developed nation. Fully 25 percent of all American workers make no more than $17, 576 a year.” Harold Myerson The American Prospect,

We know how to counter the Trump administrations attempts to wreck the U.S. economy and our constitution from his past history. Blue states in particular have the power to keep their citizens healthy and safe. They did it in his first term, as I said in a 2017 Huffington Post article, when it was becoming obvious Trump wanted to act like an anti-democratic oligarch.

Climate change has been the target of Trump’s “drill baby drill” fossil fuel supporters since his first term, yet climate change poses the greatest danger to Americans’ health and safety, particularly to our west coast inhabitants (wildfires and floods) and east coasters (hurricanes and tornadoes), not to speak of the record low winter temperatures tormenting Midwesterners.

Huffington Post

“The U.S. just released its latest congressionally mandated Climate Science Special Report that says 2017 wreaked the most catastrophic destruction in 90 years with an estimated $175 billion in property damage. Only the San Francisco Earthquake (1906), Chicago Fire (1871), and Great Flood (1927) caused more destruction,” I said then.

Trump’s other first term attempts at relevance included, “his fiasco of an Asian trip, where he fawned over foreign leaders who gave him massive pageants, but no trade concessions, while abandoning the Trans- Pacific Partnership.

“The remaining 11 countries, including Japan, Australia, Mexico and Malaysia, said they had revived the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, a multilateral agreement championed under the Obama administration.

And also, “American leaders from state capitals, city halls and businesses across the country have shown up in force” in Bonn, Germany, to discuss carrying out the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” said California Governor Jerry Brown and Michael Bloomberg in today’s New York Times.”

This is when President Trump announced at the beginning of his Presidency that he was abandoning the Paris Accord in favor of supporting a return to coal and oil energy. But that wasn’t what the rest of America wanted, as some 50 percent of U.S. states and cities were represented in Bonn.

And now it is his indiscriminate use of import tariffs that threaten to wreck international trade.

President Trump’s attempts to return to the predominately white middle class of the 1950s have become irrelevant to most of the problems facing Americans and the world today. Trump is ignoring the damage revenge policies will do to the U.S. economy, and his own red state supporters by also attempting to destroy American’s social safety net, including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that most harm red state citizens, protections against climate change, and wanting to downgrade the military alliances that have kept us safe.

Trump’s first term policies have been irrelevant in so many ways. He has done nothing for his red state supporters. As Thom Hartman highlighted in my last blog, red states continue to suffer most from:

— Spousal abuse
— Obesity
— Smoking
— Teen pregnancy
— Sexually transmitted diseases
— Abortion (at least before Dobbs; now it would be “forced births”)
— Bankruptcies and poverty
— Homicide and suicide
— Infant mortality
— Maternal mortality
— Forcible rape
— Robbery and aggravated assault
— Dropouts from high school
— Divorce
— Contaminated air and water
— Opiate addiction and deaths
— Unskilled workers
— Parasitic infections
— Income and wealth inequality
— Covid deaths and unvaccinated people
— Federal subsidies to states (“Red State Welfare”)
— People on welfare
— Child poverty
— Homelessness
— Spousal murder
— Unemployment
— Deaths from auto accidents
— People living on disability
— Gun deaths

Climate change is a good start, since the worldwide droughts have been a major cause of the worldwide migrations escaping from poverty that have upset the existing geopolitical order.

Let’s continue to make Trump and Republicans’ actions irrelevant that are attempting to destroy our federal government by supporting cities, states and even international organizations (UN, WHO?) that pursue the policies that have kept America great and the world at peace—policies that build rather than destroy, that breed trust and community, rather than hatred and division.

This strategy doesn’t minimize the suffering Trump has already inflicted on so many Americans but could mitigate some of the cruelty to come.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Donald Trump Is No Populist

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

An NBC News poll last April showed that Trump had a 26-point lead among voters who don’t follow political news. In contrast, voters who got their political news from newspapers, the most comprehensive form of daily news, supported Joe Biden by a vast margin, 70 percent to 21 percent. David French NYTimes

Mother Jones

It’s becoming clear what Donald Trump and Elon Musk have in common, when Musk has said he loves Trump 'As Much as A Straight Man Loves Another Man' on X. It is their unbridled greed that harms anyone on their way to greater fortunes.

Neither Trump nor Musk are populists. It is clear we are seeing two apex predators at work as the 2^nd Gilded Age is peaking. They are doing what the Oligarchs who support Trump have always done, preyed on the weakest and most ignorant.

That is why corporate profits are at a post-WWII high, 11.8 percent of GDP, when Trump Republicans want even more tax cuts with the federal budget now 120 percent of GDP. And people without college degrees die about eight years sooner than those with four-year degrees, according to NYTimes David Brooks.

This is why women with only a high school degree or less are five times as likely to have children out of wedlock or women with a college degree. And by the sixth grade, children of poor families are performing at four grade levels lower than the children of affluent families.

These sad statistics cited by David Brooks in a recent NYTimes op-ed are the result of years of tax cuts without paying for them by Republican administrations that has made the red states they govern the poorest states. and resulted in the record federal debt we now have.

Worsening the harm to ordinary Americans, Trump and Musk want to root out DEI personnel and programs that promote greater opportunity and replace them with even less competent personnel, such as Pete Hegseth, JFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.

In just Donald Trump’s first week in office, it’s becoming obvious that the lies he promotes will be no different than during his first term as president. He is counting on the American electorate who voted for him to not believe what they are seeing, as I said recently—a worsening climate, worsening inflation, less healthcare services, military preparedness, and public education.

These disparities exist mostly in the red states, to no one’s surprise, where essential public services are less available. There is an enormous poverty gap between the red and blue states, and Republican administrations have done nothing to bridge it.

“Some of the chasms are sociological. People with only high school degrees or less are much more likely to say they have no close friends. They are more likely to live in towns where social capital is collapsing and the young are fleeing.”

Why is it so many Americans don’t believe what they see? This is largely due to where they live—the red states.

Thom Hartman of the Hartman Report, a NYTimes best-selling author, says it’s because Republicans worship cheap labor — and having a steady and reliable supply of cheap labor requires widespread poverty.

It is what Trump’s electorate voted for, while:

— Blue states account for about 71 percent of America’s GDP, whereas Red states only produce 29 percent of our income and wealth.
— The median family income in Blue states is $74,243. In Red states it’s $63,553. Individual states highlight the disparity: New Jersey’s median income is $89,703, while Mississippi’s is $49,111.
— Counties that voted for Biden in 2020 are more diverse, being 35 percent nonwhite compared to 16 percent nonwhite populations in counties that voted for Trump.
— Counties that voted for Biden in 2020 are better educated, with 36 percent of their population having some college education compared to Trump’s counties at 25 percent.
— Residents of Blue states live 2.2 years longer, on average, than residents of Red states. Hartman lists many more disparities on his website.

Why don’t Trump believers follow political news; news readily available in most mass media? It is why red state economies have foundered, while Trump wants to govern as he did his real estate empire; with family and loyal friends, no checks and balances; which has largely been a failure.

It is why the 2^nd Gilded Age will end when Americans—particularly his populist supporters—realize this bromance of two ‘straight’ men will make all of US less safe, healthy, and wealthy.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Who Killed America's Middle Class?

 Financial FAQs

A report from the Pew Research Center found that, for the first time since the 1970s, families defined as "middle income" are in a minority in the US - squeezed from both ends by an enlarged poverty-stricken group below them, and an enriched group above them.

Vice President Harris announced in her Convention acceptance speech that a major part of her presidency will be devoted to bring back the middle class.

“Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. “I strongly believe when the middle class is strong, America is strong.”

It's becoming clear that our Middle Class--the midsection of U.S. earners and consumers--has shrunk alarmingly. And this is the main reason for the political polarization today that in the words of journalist Christopher Hedges, has driven the Republican Party "insane"

Our society has become so polarized that Donald Trump needed the support of the Ku Klux Klan, white nationalists, and Vladimir Putin to become President. Whereas it has been such middle class values of probity, honesty and science, first satirized in Moliere's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, (The Middle Class Gentleman), that has been the stabilizing influence in American politics since WWII.

The main difference between poverty and middle class, and between middle class and the wealthiest, noted one researcher, "is belief in, and planning for, moving up as a working assumption." A report from the Pew Research Center found that, for the first time since the 1970s, families defined as "middle income" are actually in a minority in the US - squeezed from both ends by an enlarged poverty-stricken group below them, and an enriched group above them.

Graph: Fortune Magazine

This graph shows the shrinkage of those defined as middle class from 1979 to 2014 -- from 38.8 percent (gray line) to 32.09 percent (blue line), according to the Pew study. The shrinkage reads like a textbook example of the future that French economist Thomas Piketty predicts for the world in his 2014 best-selling, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In 1971, there were 80 million households in the US defined as middle income - compared with a combined 52 million in the groups above and below. Now, there are 120 million middle-class families, but 121 million rich and poor - "A demographic shift that could signal a tipping point," says Pew.

So who or what is at fault for the result; record income inequality last reached in 1929 that led to the Great Depression? We can fault President Reagan, who was first to break the unions with his firing of all federally employed Air Traffic Controllers that belonged to PATCO, the traffic controller’s union.

Or, conservatives' espousal of the Reagan motto, "government is the problem," which caused the massive downsizing of government regulation, as well as the ensuing de-regulation of whole industries, such as the airlines, telecommunications, and financial markets.

But the truth was that Democrats were also implicated -- in fact, from the Presidency of Bill Clinton. For it was President Clinton who veered so far to the right in his 1966 reelection campaign that he preempted the Republican platform by continuing to deregulate the financial markets with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that separated FDIC depositor-insured banking from higher risk investment banking, financed the addition of 100,000 more police to combat the drug epidemic, and downsized poverty programs with welfare reforms that required welfare recipients to take low-paying menial jobs to receive even a limited amount of financial support.

The Republicans, as Chris Hedges said, were driven politically insane. They no longer had those bread and butter issues (such as law and order, smaller government) that were once their own, which led to formation of the Tea Party, and a new political civil war declared on Big Government ruled by the northern elites. It was our 150 year-old Civil War taking a new form—red states vs. blue states—but with almost the same mix of combatants.

Even more significant is the record income and wealth inequality since 1979 that has resulted; a more partisan and unequal electorate fearing further losses in their status as Americans.

Vice President Harris has said building up the middle class again is one of her priorities. So let us hope a majority of Americans realize this as well in November; that our prosperity and stability rest on a middle class that hasn't given up hope for a better future.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

The Bully Mentality--III

Answering Kennedy’s Call

JONATHAN ERNST / REUTERS

“Fostering a culture of fear and ignorance is not the way to run a political party, or country, if it would ever come to that.”

I wrote this in 2014 about what I have called the Bully Mentality pervading the Republican Party that has enabled it to coerce its own supporters to vote against their own self-interests, making Republican red states the poorest states in our country.

These are states that in the main have opposed a higher minimum wage, union organizing that would enable workers to bargain collectively, and rely on the richest states via transfer payments to fund much of their governments. (Red states such as Mississippi, W. Virginia, Montana and Kentucky receive more than 30 percent of their revenues from other states).

Why does the USA have such a problem with bullies? Whether in the schools, in politics, or on Internet social media? The result has been teenage suicides, horrendous school shootings by students who felt bullied or belittled, and now a whole political party that opposes anything that smacks of aiding the poorest, seniors, and less educated.

That possibility has come closer with former President Trump seeking a second term without ever conceding that he lost the last election.

Bully Mentality is a state of mind that pervades those who are only good at one thing, preying on the weakest to empower themselves. 

It is something Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote about during the Obama administration when it created Obamacare.

"But nobody expects to see a lot of prominent Republicans declaring that rejecting Medicaid expansion is wrong, that caring for Americans in need is more important than scoring political points against the Obama administration. As I said, there's an extraordinary ugliness of spirit abroad in today's America, which health reform has brought out into the open."

I said then the "ugliness" is really a textbook definition of bullying behavior.  Bullies prey on the most vulnerable and have tried every trick in the book to oppose any programs that smack of aiding those most in need.

• · Derogatory name-calling and nicknaming
• · Spreading rumors or lying about someone
• · Threatening someone
• · Yelling at or talking to someone in a rude or unkind tone of voice, especially without justifiable cause
• · Mocking someone's voice or style of speaking
• · Laughing at someone
• · Use of body language (i.e., the middle finger) to torment someone
• · Making insults or otherwise making fun of someone

The textbook definition fits former President Trump.

If the Republican Party can't keep its constituents poor and less educated, then the Republican Party, now Trump’s party, would lose its hold over them. Conservatives oppose expanding educational opportunities such as Head Start and pre-school aid because it would encourage rational thinking, and an appreciation of science. Their constituents would then begin to understand global warming, and maybe evolution instead of creationist theories that the world was created by a God just 7,000 years ago!

The danger of such behavior is even greater today. We have a Republican presidential candidate who has no compunction about endangering our national security by wanting to weaken NATO and other alliances, been indicted and awaiting trial under the Espionage Act for his carelessness with Top Secret documents, and endangered our economic security with his tax cuts that have created record deficits.

How then have Republicans been given the edge in various polls on the economy and foreign policy? It is another attribute of bully behavior—the total disregard for truth and facts that is at the heart of their propaganda machine.

There are many ways to counter bully mentality. Firstly, by recognizing that bullies are cowards at heart, which is why they avoid confronting those showing strength. It creates a pervasive culture of victimization, a feeling of powerlessness in which those so afflicted transfer their allegiance to a con artist such as Donald Trump.

That is how dictators all over the world have taken and maintained power. Can that happen to the world’s oldest democracy? It’s up to ordinary citizens to stand tall in opposing such behavior. It’s surprising how quickly bullies will disappear when citizens take back their own strength.

Harlan Green © 2024

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

America's (Ongoing) Civil War

 Answering Kennedy’s Call

Why should it be a surprise that Americans are still fighting the Civil War? Though it is no longer Generals Ulysses S Grant vs. Robert E Lee, it is still being fought with guns, as the latest Uvalde and Buffalo Supermarket carnage with military style assault rifles makes plain.

This is while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just banned the sale of handguns because of rising run violence in Canada! He said, ‘There is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives’.

The signs of a active civil war are everywhere; with red states wanting almost anyone over 18 years of age to own an assault rifle in the name of a well-armed militia (Florida is the exception at 21 years old after the Parkland, Marjory Stoneham Douglas High shooting); with most of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, fomenting theories that colored peoples are inferior in some way; and their denial of President Biden’s win.

And then we have the last President’s followers’ blatant attempt on January 6 to overturn the election results.

It has been states’ rights vs. the Federal government since our founding: with red states keeping most of its citizens poor by denying benefits such as expanded federal health care and union organizing efforts that would boost wages with right to work laws.

Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman once highlighted why the poorest states tend to elect conservative politicians, who have not enhanced the economic opportunities of their own constituents.

“And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs,” says Krugman. “Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.”

But perhaps we have suffered the most casualties in our ongoing civil war from the COVID pandemic.

A NYTimes article by Damien Caves highlighted a study of how Australia, a country very similar to the U.S. in demographics, had a much better outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic. In Australia and in the United States, the median age is 38. Roughly 86 percent of Australians live in urban areas, compared with 83 percent of Americans.

It was as much about having a culture of trust, he said, a culture that recognizes caring for others is as important as caring for oneself because it saves more lives, especially during disasters.

“If the United States had the same Covid death rate as Australia,’ said Cave, “about 900,000 lives would have been saved (vs. one million American lives lost to date). The Texas grandmother who made the perfect pumpkin pie might still be baking. The Red Sox-loving husband who ran marathons before Covid might still be cheering at Fenway Park.”

Instead of trusting each other to do the right thing, many Americans, and past-President Trump as a matter of policy, chose to distrust science and advocate every kind of snake oil cure, as if we were still living in the 1800s.

“In global surveys, Australians were more likely than Americans to agree that “most people can be trusted” — a major factor, researchers found, in getting people to change their behavior for the common good to combat Covid, by reducing their movements, wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Partly because of that compliance, which kept the virus more in check, Australia’s economy has grown faster than America’s through the pandemic,” continued Cave.

Every country has probably had a civil war sometime in its past, as part of its growing pains. Europe has certainly had it share, such as The Hundred Years War. And civil wars have always pitted brothers and sisters against each other.

But why have an ongoing civil war that has lasted 157 years and made lives worse for everyone, since 1865 and the abolition  of slavery. Isn’t it time for US to put our guns away and make peace with each other?

Harlan Green © 2022

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

The Red Tide in Education

ANSWERING THE KENNEDYS CALL

The Guardian

Red tide algal blooms have been threatening coastal beaches for decades, killing sea life and sickening bathers; a sign of rising ocean temperatures due to global warming as well as human pollution.

But another red tide is benefiting Americans by threatening the wealth of oligarchs like the Koch Brothers and U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who have diverted funds so desperately needed by America’s public schools where most of our children are educated, to not only preserve their wealth, but increase it.

It is the red state Teacher’s movement for better salaries and benefits in public schools in the conservative states that have either cut education spending in public schools, or diverted funds to Charter Schools and private school vouchers benefiting the wealth-holders of this country and their supporters who own and operate for-profit schools that can receive up to 90 percent of their revenues from federal taxpayers, typically in the form of student loans and Pell Grants.

The Teacher’s movement is another example of powerful ‘grass-roots’ movements generated in local communities to solve grievances that have worsened their citizens’ quality of life.

A 2016 report by the NYU Brennan Center for Justice entitled Secret Spending in the States stated in its introduction: “Six years after Citizens United enabled unfettered spending in our elections, the use of so-called dark money has become disturbingly common. Contrary to the Supreme Court’s assumption that this unlimited spending would be transparent to voters, at the federal level powerful groups have since 2010 poured hundreds of millions of dollars into influencing elections while obscuring the sources of their funding.”

In the six states the Brennan Center report detailed—Alaska, California, Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts and Maine—1) At these levels, dark money sources often harbor a narrow, direct economic interest in the contest’s outcome;  money sources often harbor a narrow, direct economic interest in the contest’s outcome; (2) relatedly, contentious ballot measures that carry major economic consequences frequently attract dark money; and (3) in the relatively low-cost elections at these levels, it is easy for dark money to dominate with unaccountable messages that voters cannot meaningfully evaluate.

Who were the recipients of this largesse in PAC money that ballooned after Citizens United? It has to be no secret that the supporters of vouchers and/or Charter schools that favored higher-income constituencies won out in the funding struggle.

This is what started the “Red for Ed” teachers’ movement fighting for better school funding who had suffered for years, in underpaid salaries and underfunded public schools. “Red shirts and blouses had emerged as the official uniform of teacher uprisings against low pay that were spreading from West Virginia to Oklahoma and Kentucky under the rallying cry “Red for Ed,” said an excellent NYTimes Magazine article, about the Arizona teachers’ uprising.

“Public education is a $650 billion national enterprise,” said the NYTimes, “comparable to the U.S. defense budget, except that the federal government pays only 8.5 percent of the cost. States and local school districts split the rest in varying proportions, but each state finances it differently. Texas and Louisiana tap plentiful oil and gas revenues; Northeastern states like Massachusetts and New Jersey rely on high income and property taxes.”

Arizona is an example that hasn’t raised income taxes in more than 25 years, and counts more on sales taxes and other revenues generated by a growing economy. However they pay for it, K-12 schooling is the biggest single expenditure for all states, accounting for 36 percent of general-fund budgets on average.

“A half-dozen Arizona teachers — and more than 25 others, current and retired, with education backgrounds — declared their candidacy for the State House and Senate with a promise to increase funding for public schools, said the NYTimes. “They’re part of a sudden wave of educators on ballots as first-time candidates in every walkout state.”

The ultimate solution has to be political action, especially political action by women who make up 80 percent of the teaching profession. In fact, the red wave is turning into a blue wave, as this has energized even the less liberal voter base. Data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University shows that more women have filed to run for Congress than at any point since at least 1992 — and by a wide margin. That year, 298 women ran for the House of Representatives. This year, 476 have — most of them Democrats.

Education has always been the responsibility of governments, not private institutions, if we want to educate all Americans, not just those most favored by circumstances.

Harlan Green © 2018

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