Tariffs Trump Consumer Spending

 Financial FAQs

“Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for May 2025, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $715.4 billion, down 0.9 percent (±0.5 percent) from the previous month, and up 3.3 percent (±0.5 percent) from May 2024.” U.S. Census Bureau

FREDretailsales

Retail sales have declined in four out of five months since January, a sign that consumers don’t like trade wars; i.e., not knowing what will happen to prices and whether shelves will soon be empty if  President Trump can’t finalize any of the trade deals that he says are almost done.

There’s even more that affects consumer spending and economic growth—the new federal budget still in negotiation and immigration crackdown that will become evident in coming months.

Consumers and businesses are complaining about the uncertainties, which is why President Trump keeps postponing the deadlines while pushing for better “deals”. He can keep promising, though even the UK tariff tax hasn’t been finalized.

The Senate could shave as much as $1 trillion from Medicaid spending in the Senate version of the bill not yet out of committees, according to reports.

And it will increase the federal debt by $2.8 trillion, which will drive up interest rates because bond investors will demand higher returns for the added risk of default. Higher interest rates will then slow growth, while rising import prices from snarled supply chains caught up in the tariff war will cause higher inflation, which is the other half of the stagnation + inflation (stagflation) equation that will result.

Motor vehicles and parts as well as construction sales declined in the retail sales report, as did healthcare and gardening supply sales. Consumers have also dined out less over the past two months, another sign that consumers are becoming more cautious in their spending habits.

All the Trump administration seems to be able to do at present is round up undocumented immigrants, which should cause even more serious damage to economic growth. Immigrants also like to shop, and now there are fewer of them working or shopping due to the growing arrests of undocumented immigrants.

According to estimates on its website from the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) and other groups, as many as 8.3 million undocumented immigrants work in the US economy, or 5.2 percent of the workforce. They work in construction (1.5 million), restaurants (1 million), agriculture and farms (320,000), landscaping (300,000), and food processing and manufacturing (200,000), among other occupations.

That’s a lot of undocumented immigrants in the workforce, and the Trump administration wants to deport one million of them per year. As the numbers of working immigrants decline so will the amounts they produce, which also effects the family members who are American citizens.

And guess where many of them work—in red states with lots of agriculture for which immigrants are needed. That, and the draconian cuts to the health services will hurt MAGA-dominated red states the most that have fewer public services.

This is Economics 101, folks. Without more workers our economy can’t grow. And without paying for our debts, interest rates will continue to rise. And with tariffs at historically high levels, as high as they were in 1930, the cost of almost everything will rise. It’s not bringing down inflation on ‘Day 1’ or any other day of this administration.

Harlan Green © 2025

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

Donald Trump's Bully Mentality

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

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

Simon & Schuster

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

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

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

I have written about the bully mentality in our culture before. In times of uncertainty as we have today, it has led to increased bullying in schools, and even gun violence. It is a mentality that attempts to impose a bully's version of reality on the real world for the sole purpose of domination. President Trump has always acted the bully, which is the reason for his history of lawsuits and bankruptcies, so that facts are only useful in so much as they support his needs.

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

Comments such as "mentally sick", "dummy", "looser" or "looked disgusting" are all examples of bullying language Trump uses to attempt to normalize such behavior. Trump's bullying tactics include calling President Obama the founder of a terrorist organization and insinuating that Clinton took drugs prior to a debate. He also mocked the disability of reporter Serge Kovaleski, portrayed immigrants and foreigners as dangerous people, rapists or "criminal aliens", and demonstrated a significant lack of respect for women or military veterans, calling wounded veterans “losers”.

How does one oppose such destructive behavior? First, we should know that bullies prey on those they can intimidate, and avoid confrontation with those stronger because of their own insecurities. Trump preyed on naïve students and the elderly in his Trump University scam. And he stiffed workers and employees when building his Trump Casinos either by paying them less than was contractually agreed to, or not at all.

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

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

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

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

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

Harlan Green © 2024

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

Who Will Drain the Swamp?

 ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown,” said Missouri Dem Senator Claire McCaskill. “None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them.”

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump will be President and could have control of both the House and Senate again. The same happened in 2017 when he last won on the campaign promise to Drain the Swamp of corruption in Washington.

He didn’t succeed in his first term, actually creating a deeper swamp with rampant corruption at almost all levels of government. Will he do better this time; might he and his Republicans learn from their past mistakes?

Republicans will want more tax cuts, for starters, as well as extend the tax cuts his administration engineered in 2017, The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that they passed with House and Senate majorities.

I wrote at the time, “The Republicans tax bill has passed, and it is the greatest theft of taxpayer monies in history; even greater than that of Presidents’ Reagan and Bush I and II that began the immense transfer of wealth to the wealthiest in 1980 with their tax cuts starving the government of much needed revenues that would keep the federal deficits under control.”

Why? It was written by the very lobbyists Republicans and the Trump administration had cultivated during his 2017 election.

More than 130 lobbyists were hired to work in his first administration, and 36 of them have blatant conflicts of interest, working on the same issues they were lobbying on, in violation of Trump’s ethics rules, according to MarketWatch economist Jeff Nutting.

“This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown,” said Missouri Dem Senator Claire McCaskill. “None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them.”

The bill cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits by $1.5 trillion and could add $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit in 10 years according to the CBO. That’s $3 trillion taken from U.S. taxpayers for the biggest heist in history.

We know what happened when Republicans tried this taxpayer sleight of hand before. President Reagan and congress had to raise taxes 11 times to make up the deficits created by the first ‘trickle-down’ tax cuts in 1981. Two consecutive recessions in 1981 and 1982 followed as Fed Chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to record levels to choke off inflation at the same time.

Then GW Bush did the same in 2001-03, when he cut taxes again while paying for the wars on terror, resulting in the largest federal deficit in history at the time, as well as the Great Recession.

This did not generate enough tax revenue to pay for the additional debt, so foreign governments and individuals will become more reluctant to invest in U.S. debt, as the deficit continues to grow and interest rates rise.

It can happen again. It is suicidal economics. The U.S. won’t declare bankruptcy. But it will saddle future generations with an impossible debt load and prevent much needed public and private investment that would increase productivity and boost growth.

This happened in 2017, and the stench of lobbyists filling the swamp became so overwhelming in Donald Trump’s first term that it was the reason his Republican majority were voted out of office, as I said.

Is there any reason to doubt it will happen again?

Harlan Green © 2024

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

What Healthcare System Do Americans Want?

Popular Economics Weekly

This is a quiz. What country had the second-highest mortality from noncommunicable conditions — like diabetes, heart disease or violence — and the fourth highest from infectious disease? Also, from adolescence to adulthood to old age, what country has the highest chance of dying an early death?

The United States of America—where else, since the U.S. is the only developed country in the world without universal health care? A recent New York Times Business Insider article by Eduardo Porter highlighted a recent study by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of 16 of the richest countries in the world that set out to assess our nation’s health.

The results are devastating, and show how far America has fallen behind in caring for its citizens. And the new Senate version of repeal and replace Obamacare strips even more benefits and money from Obamacare

This problem should have nothing to do with ideology, and whether access to affordable health care should be a privilege or a right. Too many Americans are dying of drug overdose and violence. Too many Americans suffer from depression, a major cause of drug abuse.

And too many Americans are obese, making them less productive and more prone to accidents in the workplace. “The United States ranks in the bottom fourth among the 30 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of days lost to disability,” says Porter. “Women will lose 362 days between birth and their 60th birthday; men about 336. Mental health problems like depression will account for most.”

Graph: LastTechAge.com

But all of these statistics hide the real problem—rampant income inequality. The U.S. ranks 106^th of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook; with a Gini inequality index of developing countries like Peru and Cameroon. Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality, Germany and France are 12^th and 20^th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the gap between wealthy and poorer citizens of a country’s population.

And the poorer the person, family, or community, the more prone to illness and drug use is that person, or family, or community. This is where the Senate version of repeal and replace Obamacare hurts the most—in the poorer red states that voted for President Trump.

“What’s more, the United States’ higher tolerance of poverty undoubtedly contributes to higher rates of sickness and death,” says Porter. “Americans at all socioeconomic levels are less healthy than people in some other rich countries. But the disparity is greatest among low-income groups.”

Finally contributing to our health crisis is the incredible amount of violence—both due to guns (33,000 per year killed by guns), workplace accidents, and drug abuse, that a universal health care system could treat via mental health coverages as well.

In other words, there are much higher costs because we don’t have a healthy healthcare system and we the citizens are paying those costs, rather than those that are pushing the $1.1 trillion in tax cuts that Obamacare utilizes to pay for many of those costs.

Harlan Green © 2017

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