This week, Republicans gave up their Free Market ideology by mostly supporting Trump's tariffs. Also this week, after decades of saying that tax cuts pay for themselves and that our national debt is the root of all economic evil, Republicans proposed to change the budget baseline to current law but ignore the sunset provision for Trump's tax cuts to try and make extending Trump's tax cuts forever budget neutral. That's some massive reality denial. If they can't get that past the parliamentarian or vote to overrule the parliamentarian's decision, I expect they will go full Ryan and just instruct the CBO to say that their budget balances in the long run.
Republicans also went full anti-family values in the House by going home instead of facing a vote on a discharge petition that would allow House Members to vote remotely if they recently had a baby.
So Republicans gave up on Free Trade, Free Markets, caring about deficits, claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves, and family values,(for a week or so for family values), this week. Yup, it has been quite a week!
I looked up on ChatGPT that indicated US trade services surplus of 314 $B with profit margins of 20 to 40% and a US trade goods deficit of 1060 $B with profit margin of 5-10%.
Using 5% profit margin for goods and 40% profit margins for services, other countries are getting $53 billion in profits with their goods exports to us and we are getting $125 billion in profits with our services exports .
Trump's delusions are truly dangerous.
We are firing PHD scientists who are literally saving the world and at the same time wishing for Americans to replace $3/hour auto assemblers.
Miss Havisham is a fascinating character. Psychologists see her as an exemplar of trauma. You have captured something perhaps more about Trump voters than Trump. He is a perpetrator, but they see him as a suitor promising them a happy end at last.
“Miss Havisham literalizes the psychic immobility of traumatic experience by stopping her life at the moment she received the news of her abandonment. We later learn that all the clocks in the house are set at that moment as well: twenty minutes to nine. Like many who suffer from trauma, everything remains as it was, but of course it doesn’t. Time might stop psychologically in that Miss Havisham ceases to participate in life at that moment, but the condition of her body and environment (there’s a particularly disgusting wedding cake moldering in another room) shows that time goes on.
She has endured a psychological death akin to the numbness felt by many trauma sufferers
The rage Miss Havisham feels is directed both inward and outward. She hopes to avenge her wrongs through Pip’s broken heart, but she also punishes herself through this ghostly existence. As with many trauma sufferers, it’s difficult to distinguish punishment from repetition compulsion. By punishing Pip, a representative and sacrificial male, Miss Havisham will rework the events that broke her heart, and this time, someone else will suffer. But by stopping time at the moment of her abandonment, she relives that day with every rising sun. Again, something that works symbolically within trauma is literalized. Each day ends at exactly the same time and so perhaps one of those days, one of these repetitions, her fiancé will return and time can move forward again.
8:40 Forever: The “Stuckness” of Trauma in Dickens by Wendy Jones Ph. D LCSW Psychology Today
There was a British tv show called Sherwood that dramatized a similar effect to the inhabitants of a mining village after the miners’ strike that Margaret Thatcher broke so brutally. The village was stuck in time. It’s interesting that the US and Britain got the strongest neo-liberal treatment that set capital free around the world, Both seem equally traumatized by it. I recall that Janet Yellen had begun a process / agreement that would prevent capital from shopping around for the highest bidder. I believe Trump dumped that agreement. They are sure to be devastated again.
We were planning on remodeling our kitchen this year, but with 1/6 of our savings wiped out since January (and likely more to come next week), that's now on hold. I don't think we're unique. When stock markets tank, people feel less wealthy and they cut back on spending. This is almost the definition of a recession. It's coming.
The American Enterprise Institute, hardly a bastion of left wing thought, criticizes the Trump tariffs as having no basis in economic or law, but go on to point out that they mess up applying their own formula. If they'd applied it properly, the tariffs would be one-fourth the size they announced (subject to the 10% floor).
We are a very uneducated and messed up population -- physically and mentally. 65% obese; fastest growing segment is MORBID Obesity-- and another 10% getting obese dn the ear are probably in one of the five eating disorders-- 3 of recent origin. And al the young want otbe trans for gay or queer. WE are over. MAGA it's just a positive spin on the fact that we are in decline and have been for several decades and we will continue if you look at people under 30 our kids and compare them to Chinese kids of the same age. It's just embarrassing. We have weak spoiled mixed up kids so it doesn't really make any difference whether the market is down and our allies hate us because they're 500 million Europeans and they're gonna be able to take care of themselves. I'm 84 so I remember better days but nothing lasts forever and all this is summed up in a very tiny book called the anti-wellness diet on Amazon free fast funny if we don't start looking at the bodies we'll miss the reality.
I have a lot of respect for Jared Bernstein, but the claim that...
"The economy that Trump inherited was, in fact, doing well—very well compared with all other advanced economies."
...is true by traditional standards. However, we have the worst gap -- an abyss, really -- in wealth in our history. To me that means that the traditional measures of economic well-being have to be reconsidered. When wealth and prosperity go overwhelmingly to those who already have them in abundance, the situation is one that requires major adjustments. No meaningful changes are possible as long as the Republicans hold majorities in the the House and Senate and a Republican sits in the White House. But the president is no ordinary Republican, and even if he were we would still face a bleak future. Trump is neither a Republican by any historical standards, nor is he someone who occupies a place on the political spectrum that we like to believe historically encompasses the full range of American politicians and parties.
I think it is ridiculous for the media to continue to refer to today's GOP as being conservative. Republicans have embraced extremism and calling someone an extreme conservative strikes me as a bit oxymoronic. In my opinion, one that Robert Paxton, a world renowned expert on fascism, now shares, Trump is a fascist. But what complicates trying to describe Trump precisely is the fact that he is an incoherent idiot with no fixed political or economic principles. He is unmoored from reality and, as such, can reverse himself without notice. His belief in tariffs is not based on any rational foundation. As has been pointed out, the "formula" that the administration used to determine what tariffs to apply to individual countries is nonsensical. (I love the analogy that Dean Baker made (that Mr. Bernstein mentioned in a recent post) that Trump's method is like an "MD diagnosing you by dividing your height by your birthday.
In the end, the traditional view of a healthy, vibrant U.S. economy is not going to be acceptable to millions of American voters and it shouldn't be. Capitalism creates wealth, but it also creates inequality unless measures are taken to distribute rewards more equitably. Trump, of course, has no idea what he's talking about when he describes the U.S. economy it the disastrous terms he uses. What is worse is that he has no idea what would improve the situation and even less intention of ever doing any of what would be necessary to help out those who have been left behind by globalism. Unless Democrats can get sufficient governmental power to make changes that will at least lessen the growing inequities in our system and also elect a president who, unlike Biden, is able to see past the traditional metrics
I looked at productivity data from 1990 (data: Conference Board). Advanced countries have all seen a slowdown. The US from 2.2% a year to 1.4% (per hour worked, but it’s a similar pattern on other measures). Yet the US has been outstanding versus other countries where the rate has fallen further. I’m typing this from memory so can’t give the numbers. With optimism about AI and with the US dominance there it looked as if over the coming decades that trend was going to be even more powerful. It therefore looked like a temporary slowdown and there wasn’t much you could do about it; you can’t magic productivity. Robert Gordon has written extensively about it.
The costs of the slowdown were significant though. If productivity growth from 2005 had continued at its previous pace to date the average American would be $60 000 better off or $3 000 a year.
So you can’t magic productivity understand why, relative to expectations, people think something went wrong and it needs to be fixed. Saying the economy was good under Biden because it was at full capacity doesn’t change that feeling of loss or the feeling the country has done badly.
There are plenty of other reasons for feeling fed up, but that false long running sense of decline is surely a powerful one.
So, like Brexit in the UK, you vote for some random and radical nonsense because the current system ‘isn’t working’. The cry goes out ‘it can’t get any worse’. All remarkably foolish, especially when you had the most successful economy in the world, it can get an awful lot worse (compare with African countries, frankly even Japan, Germany, France, Canada) and it was all about to get much better.
Now they have trashed to economy, ruined the reputation the US had built up over the years as a friend, are challenging the very foundations of the Constitution, are betraying Ukraine, abandoned the planet, talked about invading their allies, voided due process and casually talk about removing a people from their land.
It’s truly, truly horrendous. He still has over 40% approval rating !!!! What the hell is wrong with these people?
The tariff announcement was far beyond what the world (or any rational person) was expecting. But perhaps this was the best outcome rational people could hope for. There is no business person (or rational person) who doesn't now know that the we are dealing with a creature completely detached from reality. The entire US system of government has been irrefutably proven to be a failure. The 3 co-equal branches of government we were taught is provably a complete lie. The rule of law we were taught is a complete lie. The Senate is the world's greatest deliberative body is a complete lie. A large part of the country doesn't care or even wants to live in an autocracy. But hopefully more than half don't want to be a poorer isolated country. Having destroyed all trust the world has in the US in 10 weeks will never be recovered. But our only hope to survive as a democracy is through major economic pain. We need the economy to crash as soon and hard as possible if some semblance of the United States is to be saved.
Authoritarians rule through fear and even rightward leaning Politico has done a good job of reporting on the real fear that exists among the captains of industry. Today's reporting focuses on tech titans who are trembling in their boots. Then, you have the auto industry. On the one hand, two car makers have come out with employee discounts for all on a limited basis to sell existing stock. All last month, I saw reporting on how none of them are rushing to start constructing or refurbishing plants to bring production back.
I have a feeling that what will eventually happen is that those who are in a place to wait it out will just sit tight. Those who can't wait it out, members of the House and state legislatures, will continue to prostrate themselves at the feet of the orange tyrant.
Whenever I've commented on discussions about Republicans' attitudes on fiscal and economic policy, since the advent of the first Trump presidency, I've maintained that we should not analyze what they're doing based on the economic theories we've operated under. This is oligarchy. It has its own loose rules, all based on graft. The thing no one foresaw was the addition of Musk to the mix and the transplantation of South African colonial politics in America.
It is no coincidence that Trump has been making overtures to white South Africans to come join those who left near the end of DeClerck's presidency.
---
‘The Terror Is Real’: An Appalled Tech Industry Is Scared to Criticize Elon Musk
The disturbing possibility is Trump is killing the economy and everything else in order to foment chaos so he can declare marshall law, suspend elections, etc. Remember if he ever leaves office he's going to jail. Even more disturbing is that he's under orders and threat of blackmail from Putin.
This week, Republicans gave up their Free Market ideology by mostly supporting Trump's tariffs. Also this week, after decades of saying that tax cuts pay for themselves and that our national debt is the root of all economic evil, Republicans proposed to change the budget baseline to current law but ignore the sunset provision for Trump's tax cuts to try and make extending Trump's tax cuts forever budget neutral. That's some massive reality denial. If they can't get that past the parliamentarian or vote to overrule the parliamentarian's decision, I expect they will go full Ryan and just instruct the CBO to say that their budget balances in the long run.
Republicans also went full anti-family values in the House by going home instead of facing a vote on a discharge petition that would allow House Members to vote remotely if they recently had a baby.
So Republicans gave up on Free Trade, Free Markets, caring about deficits, claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves, and family values,(for a week or so for family values), this week. Yup, it has been quite a week!
I looked up on ChatGPT that indicated US trade services surplus of 314 $B with profit margins of 20 to 40% and a US trade goods deficit of 1060 $B with profit margin of 5-10%.
Using 5% profit margin for goods and 40% profit margins for services, other countries are getting $53 billion in profits with their goods exports to us and we are getting $125 billion in profits with our services exports .
Trump's delusions are truly dangerous.
We are firing PHD scientists who are literally saving the world and at the same time wishing for Americans to replace $3/hour auto assemblers.
Agreed.
Trump is trying to create an alternate reality as Putin has done in Russia and, even more effectively, the Kim Dynasty has done in N. Korea.
"The Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum" actually exists - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorious_War_Museum )
The Kims have been running their scam for more than 70 years!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/09/politics/transcripts-kim-jong-un-letters-trump/index.html
Miss Havisham is a fascinating character. Psychologists see her as an exemplar of trauma. You have captured something perhaps more about Trump voters than Trump. He is a perpetrator, but they see him as a suitor promising them a happy end at last.
“Miss Havisham literalizes the psychic immobility of traumatic experience by stopping her life at the moment she received the news of her abandonment. We later learn that all the clocks in the house are set at that moment as well: twenty minutes to nine. Like many who suffer from trauma, everything remains as it was, but of course it doesn’t. Time might stop psychologically in that Miss Havisham ceases to participate in life at that moment, but the condition of her body and environment (there’s a particularly disgusting wedding cake moldering in another room) shows that time goes on.
She has endured a psychological death akin to the numbness felt by many trauma sufferers
The rage Miss Havisham feels is directed both inward and outward. She hopes to avenge her wrongs through Pip’s broken heart, but she also punishes herself through this ghostly existence. As with many trauma sufferers, it’s difficult to distinguish punishment from repetition compulsion. By punishing Pip, a representative and sacrificial male, Miss Havisham will rework the events that broke her heart, and this time, someone else will suffer. But by stopping time at the moment of her abandonment, she relives that day with every rising sun. Again, something that works symbolically within trauma is literalized. Each day ends at exactly the same time and so perhaps one of those days, one of these repetitions, her fiancé will return and time can move forward again.
8:40 Forever: The “Stuckness” of Trauma in Dickens by Wendy Jones Ph. D LCSW Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intersubjective/201905/840-forever-the-stuckness-trauma-in-dickens
There was a British tv show called Sherwood that dramatized a similar effect to the inhabitants of a mining village after the miners’ strike that Margaret Thatcher broke so brutally. The village was stuck in time. It’s interesting that the US and Britain got the strongest neo-liberal treatment that set capital free around the world, Both seem equally traumatized by it. I recall that Janet Yellen had begun a process / agreement that would prevent capital from shopping around for the highest bidder. I believe Trump dumped that agreement. They are sure to be devastated again.
The more you learn about the Trump family, especially father Fred, the easier it is to see Trump himself as an "exemplar of trauma."
It's hard to paraphrase what's happened to the country in the last couple of months. Thoughts like Kool-Aid in Johnstown spring to mind.
I can see the case of them saying: “we tried something nice, but evil forces made it not work”
We were planning on remodeling our kitchen this year, but with 1/6 of our savings wiped out since January (and likely more to come next week), that's now on hold. I don't think we're unique. When stock markets tank, people feel less wealthy and they cut back on spending. This is almost the definition of a recession. It's coming.
The American Enterprise Institute, hardly a bastion of left wing thought, criticizes the Trump tariffs as having no basis in economic or law, but go on to point out that they mess up applying their own formula. If they'd applied it properly, the tariffs would be one-fourth the size they announced (subject to the 10% floor).
https://www.aei.org/economics/president-trumps-tariff-formula-makes-no-economic-sense-its-also-based-on-an-error/
We are a very uneducated and messed up population -- physically and mentally. 65% obese; fastest growing segment is MORBID Obesity-- and another 10% getting obese dn the ear are probably in one of the five eating disorders-- 3 of recent origin. And al the young want otbe trans for gay or queer. WE are over. MAGA it's just a positive spin on the fact that we are in decline and have been for several decades and we will continue if you look at people under 30 our kids and compare them to Chinese kids of the same age. It's just embarrassing. We have weak spoiled mixed up kids so it doesn't really make any difference whether the market is down and our allies hate us because they're 500 million Europeans and they're gonna be able to take care of themselves. I'm 84 so I remember better days but nothing lasts forever and all this is summed up in a very tiny book called the anti-wellness diet on Amazon free fast funny if we don't start looking at the bodies we'll miss the reality.
I have a lot of respect for Jared Bernstein, but the claim that...
"The economy that Trump inherited was, in fact, doing well—very well compared with all other advanced economies."
...is true by traditional standards. However, we have the worst gap -- an abyss, really -- in wealth in our history. To me that means that the traditional measures of economic well-being have to be reconsidered. When wealth and prosperity go overwhelmingly to those who already have them in abundance, the situation is one that requires major adjustments. No meaningful changes are possible as long as the Republicans hold majorities in the the House and Senate and a Republican sits in the White House. But the president is no ordinary Republican, and even if he were we would still face a bleak future. Trump is neither a Republican by any historical standards, nor is he someone who occupies a place on the political spectrum that we like to believe historically encompasses the full range of American politicians and parties.
I think it is ridiculous for the media to continue to refer to today's GOP as being conservative. Republicans have embraced extremism and calling someone an extreme conservative strikes me as a bit oxymoronic. In my opinion, one that Robert Paxton, a world renowned expert on fascism, now shares, Trump is a fascist. But what complicates trying to describe Trump precisely is the fact that he is an incoherent idiot with no fixed political or economic principles. He is unmoored from reality and, as such, can reverse himself without notice. His belief in tariffs is not based on any rational foundation. As has been pointed out, the "formula" that the administration used to determine what tariffs to apply to individual countries is nonsensical. (I love the analogy that Dean Baker made (that Mr. Bernstein mentioned in a recent post) that Trump's method is like an "MD diagnosing you by dividing your height by your birthday.
In the end, the traditional view of a healthy, vibrant U.S. economy is not going to be acceptable to millions of American voters and it shouldn't be. Capitalism creates wealth, but it also creates inequality unless measures are taken to distribute rewards more equitably. Trump, of course, has no idea what he's talking about when he describes the U.S. economy it the disastrous terms he uses. What is worse is that he has no idea what would improve the situation and even less intention of ever doing any of what would be necessary to help out those who have been left behind by globalism. Unless Democrats can get sufficient governmental power to make changes that will at least lessen the growing inequities in our system and also elect a president who, unlike Biden, is able to see past the traditional metrics
I looked at productivity data from 1990 (data: Conference Board). Advanced countries have all seen a slowdown. The US from 2.2% a year to 1.4% (per hour worked, but it’s a similar pattern on other measures). Yet the US has been outstanding versus other countries where the rate has fallen further. I’m typing this from memory so can’t give the numbers. With optimism about AI and with the US dominance there it looked as if over the coming decades that trend was going to be even more powerful. It therefore looked like a temporary slowdown and there wasn’t much you could do about it; you can’t magic productivity. Robert Gordon has written extensively about it.
The costs of the slowdown were significant though. If productivity growth from 2005 had continued at its previous pace to date the average American would be $60 000 better off or $3 000 a year.
So you can’t magic productivity understand why, relative to expectations, people think something went wrong and it needs to be fixed. Saying the economy was good under Biden because it was at full capacity doesn’t change that feeling of loss or the feeling the country has done badly.
There are plenty of other reasons for feeling fed up, but that false long running sense of decline is surely a powerful one.
So, like Brexit in the UK, you vote for some random and radical nonsense because the current system ‘isn’t working’. The cry goes out ‘it can’t get any worse’. All remarkably foolish, especially when you had the most successful economy in the world, it can get an awful lot worse (compare with African countries, frankly even Japan, Germany, France, Canada) and it was all about to get much better.
Now they have trashed to economy, ruined the reputation the US had built up over the years as a friend, are challenging the very foundations of the Constitution, are betraying Ukraine, abandoned the planet, talked about invading their allies, voided due process and casually talk about removing a people from their land.
It’s truly, truly horrendous. He still has over 40% approval rating !!!! What the hell is wrong with these people?
The tariff announcement was far beyond what the world (or any rational person) was expecting. But perhaps this was the best outcome rational people could hope for. There is no business person (or rational person) who doesn't now know that the we are dealing with a creature completely detached from reality. The entire US system of government has been irrefutably proven to be a failure. The 3 co-equal branches of government we were taught is provably a complete lie. The rule of law we were taught is a complete lie. The Senate is the world's greatest deliberative body is a complete lie. A large part of the country doesn't care or even wants to live in an autocracy. But hopefully more than half don't want to be a poorer isolated country. Having destroyed all trust the world has in the US in 10 weeks will never be recovered. But our only hope to survive as a democracy is through major economic pain. We need the economy to crash as soon and hard as possible if some semblance of the United States is to be saved.
I believe that the market is the last try to discipline Trump. However, the prognosis does not look good.
Authoritarians rule through fear and even rightward leaning Politico has done a good job of reporting on the real fear that exists among the captains of industry. Today's reporting focuses on tech titans who are trembling in their boots. Then, you have the auto industry. On the one hand, two car makers have come out with employee discounts for all on a limited basis to sell existing stock. All last month, I saw reporting on how none of them are rushing to start constructing or refurbishing plants to bring production back.
I have a feeling that what will eventually happen is that those who are in a place to wait it out will just sit tight. Those who can't wait it out, members of the House and state legislatures, will continue to prostrate themselves at the feet of the orange tyrant.
Whenever I've commented on discussions about Republicans' attitudes on fiscal and economic policy, since the advent of the first Trump presidency, I've maintained that we should not analyze what they're doing based on the economic theories we've operated under. This is oligarchy. It has its own loose rules, all based on graft. The thing no one foresaw was the addition of Musk to the mix and the transplantation of South African colonial politics in America.
It is no coincidence that Trump has been making overtures to white South Africans to come join those who left near the end of DeClerck's presidency.
---
‘The Terror Is Real’: An Appalled Tech Industry Is Scared to Criticize Elon Musk
https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/i/160632833/the-terror-is-real-an-appalled-tech-industry-is-scared-to-criticize-elon-musk
The disturbing possibility is Trump is killing the economy and everything else in order to foment chaos so he can declare marshall law, suspend elections, etc. Remember if he ever leaves office he's going to jail. Even more disturbing is that he's under orders and threat of blackmail from Putin.