XPost: alt.politics.trump, talk.politics.guns, talk.politics.misc   
   XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: pothead@snakebite.com   
      
   All our enemies seem to think he's weakening the USA but he's stupid and   
   the slaves who voted for him are also too stupid to understand the damage   
   he's doing.   Thank God and Jesus Christ that Trump, 79, is in poor health   
   so the next parade will be his own funeral.   
      
   I look forward to his death and so do millions of real American patriots.   
      
      
   THE GREAT DISMANTLING   
   Making america backward again   
   President or Mad King?   
   How Donald Trump and MAGAnomics   
   are destroying the economy and waging war   
   on the middle class and the poor   
   By PAUL KRUGMAN   
      
   If you werent deeply afraid months ago of what a second Trump   
   administration would mean, you werent paying attention. The attack on   
   democracy and rule of law  the transformation of the land of the free into   
   a nation where masked government agents kidnap people on   
      
   the streets and opposition to the Leader is criminalized  was completely   
   predictable.   
      
   Even those who knew that bad things were coming, however, have been   
   startled by the damage MAGA has done to our strengths  the speed, if you   
   like, with which it has undermined American greatness. It was obvious that   
   Donald Trump and Co. would pursue some bad economic policies, but few   
   expected them to create a full-blown crisis in a matter of months. It was   
   obvious that Trumps allies would degrade governance, but not that they   
   would rapidly bring the whole apparatus of government to the point of   
   collapse. It was predictable that MAGA would go after inconvenient research   
   like the study of climate change, but not that it would move so decisively   
   to destroy American science and intellectual endeavor in general.   
      
   And much of the damage will be permanent. Even if MAGA is eventually driven   
   from power and its policies are reversed, we may never go back to being the   
   nation we were just a few months ago.   
      
   Lets start with a brief portrait of who we used to be.   
      
   The America That Was   
      
   America at the end of the Biden years was in a sour mood, mostly because   
   people were still angry about the surge in consumer prices as the economy   
   recovered from Covid. Neither the bout of inflation nor the bad feelings,   
   by the way, were unique to the United States. For example, the cumulative   
   rise in consumer prices between the eve of Covid and January 2025 was   
   almost exactly the same in the European Union as it was in the U. S. ,   
   while, as the financial journalist John Burn-Murdoch has said, 2024   
   elections were a graveyard of incumbents almost everywhere. (Canadas   
   Liberal Party was set to join that graveyard with a historic defeat  until   
   Trump came to its rescue. )   
      
   But if you look past the bad vibes, America at the beginning of this year   
   was in good shape in many ways. Prices rose a lot between 2021 and 2023,   
   but most workers wages had outpaced inflation since the start of the   
   pandemic, while the rate of inflation  the change in prices over the past   
   year  had fallen dramatically from its peak in 2022. Furthermore,   
   disinflation took place without the extended period of high unemployment   
   many economists had said would accompany it.   
      
   Taking a longer perspective, the performance of the U. S. economy in the   
   21st century had made it, as The Economist put it, the envy of the world.   
   Productivity and per capita income had grown much faster than in any other   
   wealthy nation, with leading voices in Europe like Mario Draghi, the former   
   president of the European Central Bank, calling for urgent efforts to   
   narrow the growing dominance of U. S. companies in advanced technology, a   
   gap that many attributed to inadequate investment, a lack of entrepreneurs   
   willing to take risks, and the absence of high-tech clusters comparable to   
   Silicon Valley.   
      
   Part of that technology gap also probably had to do with the dominance of   
   U. S. science and our superb system of higher education.   
      
   Many non-economic indicators were looking good, too. Right-wingers liked to   
   portray a nation terrorized by immigrant crime, but the reality is that the   
   Covid bump in crime rates quickly receded, and by 2024, Americas homicide   
   rate was near its lowest level over the past 65 years. New York had 2,262   
   murders in 1990; it had only 382 in 2024.   
      
   Not everything was going well. Income inequality declined somewhat during   
   the Biden years, with bigger wage gains at the bottom than at the top, but   
   remained extreme. Deaths of despair, that is, deaths from suicide, alcohol   
   abuse, and especially opioids remained high. And one way in which America   
   has performed poorly compared with our peers was our low and lagging life   
   expectancy. If you look at a map of the electorate, low life expectancy and   
   high mortality show an obvious correlation with low rates of employment   
   among men  and large majorities for Trump.   
      
   All in all, however, Trump took power in a nation that, despite its dark   
   mood, was doing well on many fronts. But he has moved quickly to fix that.   
   MAGAnomics   
      
   While many voters expected Trump to bring back the prosperity over which he   
   presided during most of his first term (whether or not he caused it), most   
   economists who looked at his platform during the 2024 campaign gave it poor   
   reviews. Three things in particular looked disturbing.   
      
   First, Trump proposed large increases in tariff rates  much bigger than   
   anything he did during his first term. These tariffs, according to basic   
   economics, would cause inflation and reduce real incomes.   
      
   Second, he called for large-scale deportations, which would be highly   
   disruptive for industries, like agriculture and construction, that are   
   highly dependent on foreign-born workers, some of them undocumented.   
      
   Finally, he made it clear that he wanted to politicize the Federal Reserve,   
   the institution that both fights recessions and tries to keep inflation   
   under control.   
   All of this chaos is on Trumps head: The economy would be doing fine if he   
   had left it alone.   
      
   The deportations weve seen so far have been brutal and illegal, but havent   
   yet involved large numbers of workers. Trump has raged a lot against Jerome   
   Powell, the Feds chairman, but hasnt yet tried to take control. So these   
   are still potential rather than ongoing threats to the economy.   
      
   But the tariffs are here, belying the belief of many business supporters of   
   Trump that he wouldnt go through with everything he talked about during the   
   campaign. In practice, the Trump tariffs have been more extreme and, well,   
   crazier than anything he suggested back then.   
      
   I do mean extreme. America had fairly free trade, with an average rate of   
   2.4 percent, when Trump took office. Trump, however, imposed huge tariffs.   
   Imports from China temporarily faced a tariff of 145 percent! That rate has   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)