Archives for category: Economy

Heather Cox Richardson writes about an important and devastating turn in Trump’s disastrous war on Iran. The Houthis have captured a key port that enables them to target the transit of oil from the Red Sea. This could drive the cost of oil even higher than it is today, which inflates the cost of most other products.

Think about it: Trump is unqualified to lead the nation into war. He never served, and he has no relevant knowledge or experience. He doesn’t trust American intelligence services, and he has fired top advisors. Pete Hegseth is totally unqualified for his position. He served, but his head is full of nonsense about “manliness” and “the warrior ethic.” He has fired the military’s top generals and admirals.

These two incompetents have dragged us into a war without end.

Heather Cox Richardson describes an ominous development:

We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

As Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in July, the Red Sea is one of the most important routes for global shipping. It carries twelve to fifteen percent of the global maritime trade every year, worth about $1 trillion. The waterway extends about 1,400 miles from the Suez Canal—which connects it to the Mediterranean Sea—at the northern end to the Bab El-Mandeb strait in the south.

The Iran-backed Houthis are in a struggle against the Saudi Arabia–backed Yemeni government. A fragile truce has been in place since 2022, but clashes between the two forces have escalated for weeks, and on Tuesday, September 8, Houthi attacks on Saudi targets started fires at oil facilities and wounded more than 70 people.

The Yemeni government told Reuters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have guided the Houthi advance, and according to Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, and Kylie Atwood of CNN, U.S. officials think that hundreds of IRGC officers are currently in Yemen working with the Houthis to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb. The journalists note that CNN has previously reported that in case U.S. negotiations were unsuccessful, Iran had planned an economic “nuclear option”: closing the Bab el-Mandeb.

Cohen, Lillis, and Atwood reported this afternoon that more than 100 U.S. military advisors are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint forces command, providing the Saudis with intelligence and helping them find Houthi targets.

The sources who told the journalists about the joint effort emphasized that the U.S. routinely shares intelligence with the Saudis and that it is neither participating directly in the strikes nor providing operational support. Still, U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others in Yemen in 2025.

The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.

GasBuddy issued a statement, saying: “While gasoline gets the headlines, diesel is the fuel that moves the economy, powering the freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. That means its impact reaches far beyond the transportation sector. As diesel climbs, higher supply chain costs work their way into the price of groceries, household goods, deliveries, and countless other products families rely on every day, even for households that never fuel a diesel vehicle.”

GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said the new record “will be a particularly painful one for the economy” and is “likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain.” He continued: “I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”

While all this was going on, tonight President Trump attended the second day of his Dallas rally to fire up his base before the midterm elections. There, a video from the Republican National Committee intoned: “And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

—

Notes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/10/houthis-seize-key-port-mocha-yemen-red-sea-coast-iran-saudi-arabia-us

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/10/politics/us-military-support-saudi-arabia-houthi-iran-yemen

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/08/g-s1-142296/houthi-attacks-saudi-arabia

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-says-iran-war-end-after-us-midterm-elections-threatens-attack-pickaxe-2026-09-10/

Statement on Diesel Reaching $6 Per Gallon for the First Time in History

https://www.cfr.org/articles/another-hormuz-the-red-seas-threat-to-the-global-economy

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mv7ckybguq23

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Trump

Paul Krugman: The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil

By dianeravitch

September 2, 2026 //

I spend some time every day reading the discussions on Twitter and BlueSky. Given the perilous state of America’s role in the world–our failed war on Iran, our abandonment of Ukraine, the absurd trade war with Canada, Trump’s insults to our European allies, his admiration for Russia and North Korea, the cost of fuel–I am curious about how his supporters defend him.

No matter what happens, his most loyal fans believe he is wise and all-knowing. When anyone complains about the cost of gasoline, which affects everyone, they have a new answer. Trump just made a deal to get billions of gallons of oil from Venezuela! In a matter of days or weeks, the price of oil will plummet, not only to $3 a gallon but maybe lower. Take that, libtards!

If only they would read what Paul Krugman wrote about that deal! But I know they won’t.

The deal that Trump made will take years, even decades, to have any effect on the price of oil. American firms have to invest billions to develop the infrastructure needed to pump oil from the ground. And in the meanwhile, the Venezuelan government must be willing to honor the deal, which is deeply unpopular in that country. There are many “ifs” in the deal, and it will have no impact on the price of oil in the near future.

Krugman wrote:

The United States has an ugly reputation in Latin America — a reputation that, I’m sorry to say, is mostly well deserved. Our government has a long track record of supporting dictators, assisting in the overthrow of democratic governments, and sometimes even sending in the Marines, often on behalf of American corporations trying to pillage other nations’ natural resources.

Excluding the Trump II presidency, we have, I think, behaved better in the recent past. And this was largely due to the role of enlightened self-interest.

The fact is that old-fashioned, extractive imperialism doesn’t pay. In fact, it hasn’t paid for well over a century. In the modern world nations grow rich through innovation and productivity, not conquest. In 1909 Norman Angell’s book The Great Illusion argued that even victorious wars cost far more than they can possibly yield in tribute, documenting his case with what was already extensive historical evidence. His argument has even more force now.

Let me give you a recent historical example. Portugal was the last European nation to maintain a large overseas empire. As late as 1973 Lisbon still ruled vast African territories — some of them rich in natural resources — with many times the home country’s population. It was also the poorest nation in Western Europe, its resources drained by the endless wars it fought in an attempt to keep its colonies subjugated.

Finally, in 1974, junior officers in the Portuguese military, fed up with the fighting and dying, rose up in the Carnation Revolution and overthrew the fascist government. A newly democratic Portugal quickly abandoned its empire, eventually joining the European Union — and while it’s still poorer than some of its peers, it is far closer than before to the standard of living in, say, France.

In short, at this point only someone deeply ignorant of both the realities of modern economies and of the lessons of history can believe that there are big payoffs to seizing other nations’ natural resources. In other words:

For those who need a refresher, in January U.S. forces raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the nation’s brutal, corrupt dictator. Maduro surely deserved his fate. But the Trump administration made no move to help Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Instead, it made a deal with former members of the Maduro cabal,effectively installing a new regime that may well be even more brutal and corrupt than its predecessor. (There’s widespread suspicion that the kidnapping of Maduro was in part an inside job, engineered by his fellow cabalistas.)

In return, Trump got an agreement — details are scarce — that apparently will allow U.S. oil companies to extract and sell large quantities of Venezuelan oil but only if they put tens of billions of dollars into investments in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure.

So the Venezuela venture had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It seems safe to say that it had nothing to do with crime or terrorism, which were the other excuses the administration offered. What happened in Venezuela was simply an old-fashioned, 19^th-century-style resource grab, a sort of Caribbean version of the Belgian Congo.

In one stroke, Trump has just validated everything the Latin American left has ever said about U.S. imperialism. And we’ll be paying for that, diplomatically and strategically, for decades to come.

Now, it’s highly unlikely that this deal will hold. By all accounts, just about every faction in Venezuelan politics except the current ruling clique hates the deal. Since it will take years, maybe even decades, to realize the putative benefits of oil-company investments in Venezuela, how likely is it that whoever is running that country in the future will want to honor Trump’s terms? What are the odds that Venezuela will eventually expropriate U.S. oil-company investments? Or do we imagine a future in which the U.S. military maintains a permanent occupation of Venezuela, using force to prop up a puppet government the nation’s citizens hate?

Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela appears on paper to have huge oil reserves. But much of these reserves are what I called a “black, sticky fantasy,” created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, when he reclassified oil in the OrinocoBasin that will be difficult if not impossible to recover as “proved” reserves.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Trump really does manage to seize 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. That sounds like a big number. Is it?

Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets. But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expertput it, “it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.”

So the profit margin on Venezuelan oil will be at most a small fraction of its market price. Surely $20 a barrel would be a highly generous estimate. So let’s go with that, in which case Trump’s deal might be worth $20*65 billion barrels = $1.3 trillion, a sum extracted over many years.

How big a deal would that be for the United States? Since this would be a many-year process if it happens at all, you want to compare it with U.S. wealth, not GDP (which is only the value created in a single year.) And total U.S. wealth is about $167 trillion.

So the chart at the top of this post shows how Trump’s triumphant Venezuela deal stacks up for the U.S. economy. Even if we make the most favorable assumptions — above all the assumption that the Venezuelan regime, unlike the Trump administration, can be trusted to honor its promises — the value of this deal to the United States is, to a first approximation … nothing.

Oh, and what about Trump’s claim that this will “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans”? Since any significant rise in Venezuelan production would take a long time, even crude oil prices won’t show any effects from this deal for years at best. And in any case the prices of gasoline and diesel — which are what people actually burn — have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude.

So Trump’s Venezuela deal will do nothing for ordinary Americans, while solidifying our reputation for rapacious, short-sighted imperialism.

Thank you for wasting your attention on this matter.

Categories Economy, Ethics, History, International, Lies, Scandals, Trump

Which President Has the Best Record for Job Creation?

By dianeravitch

August 20, 2026 //

This is an interesting chart. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Categories Economy

Immigrants Founded Most of U.S.’ Most Successful Companies

By dianeravitch

June 17, 2026 //

Writing in Forbes, Stuart Anderson reports a new statistic about immigrants’ contribution to the U.S. He is the author of the research he reports.

New research concludes that immigrants have founded or cofounded most of America’s privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more. The role of immigrant entrepreneurs receives little attention in daily press coverage. There is no startup visa in U.S. law—Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) blocked its inclusion in the Chips and Science Act in 2022. Immigrant entrepreneurs come to America as refugees or are sponsored by an employer or family member. The significant impact of immigrant entrepreneurs on the U.S. economy and on the creation of cutting-edge companies has become too big to ignore.

“Immigrants have founded or cofounded 59% (455 of 775) of America’s privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more,” according to a new National Foundation for American Policy analysis. (I authored the study.) “Moreover, approximately two-thirds (66%) of U.S. billion-dollar companies (unicorns) were founded or cofounded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Nearly 80% of America’s unicorn companies (privately held, billion-dollar companies) have an immigrant founder or an immigrant in a key leadership role, such as CEO or vice president of engineering.”

The research involved interviews and gathering information on over 700 U.S. startup companies valued at over $1 billion (as of April 2026). These are companies yet to be traded on the U.S. stock market, are tracked by CB Insights and have received venture capital financing.

These start-ups employ an average of 833 people.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2026/06/03/immigrants-are-founders-of-most-us-billion-dollar-companies/

Categories Economy, Immigration

Georgia: Republicans’ $100 Million Primary for Governor

By dianeravitch

May 19, 2026 //

Today is primary day in Georgia. Jack Hassard offers as good an analysis of the Republican primary as you will see anywhere. Actually, better. Four men are running for the Republican nomination. They all rely on culture war issues, the red meat that gets voters excited, like immigration, crime, and low taxes. Most certainly, they are all conservative Christians. Sadly, none of them addresses the issues that matter most: the closing of hospitals, healthcare, education, the environment. They all embrace Trump, of course.

He blogs as “Citizen Jack.” He is a professor Emeritus of Science Education at Georgia State University.

Citizen Jack writes:

The Georgia primary is today, Tuesday, May 19. The three weeks of advance voting ended on Friday. Although I didn’t vote on the Republican ticket, I’ve suffered through the continuous bombardment of TV ads by four white Christian pro-Trump men running to be on the November ballot for governor.

No Limit on Spending

The Republican primary for governor in Georgia has become one of the most expensive and combative races in state history. Right now, according to AJC’s Greg Bluestein, the quad has spent over $100 million in the primary. Attorney General Chris Carr, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, and billionaire businessman Rick Jackson are flooding television screens with nearly identical messages: they are Christian conservatives, loyal to Donald Trump, committed to cutting taxes, and determined to crack down on undocumented immigrants. Here is what they’ve pored into the local TV stations.

Chris Carr: Put in $4 million, raised $400,000, 2 million on hand
Bert Jones: Put in $16 million, raised &200,000, $2.1 million on hand
Rick Jackson: Put in $80 million, raised only $200,000, $7. million on hand.
Brad Raffensperger: Put in $6 million, raised $217,000, $2.5 million on hand.

What They Avoid Saying

What is striking is not merely what these candidates say, but what they avoid discussing.

Education funding, hospital closures, rising health-care costs, retirement insecurity, environmental threats, public transportation, affordable housing, and gun violence barely appear in their ads or debate rhetoric.

Instead, the Republican field has narrowed Georgia’s future to culture-war symbolism and tax-cut promises.

That narrowing says a great deal about the current direction of Georgia Republican politics.

Chris Carr

Carr presents himself as the polished establishment conservative. As attorney general, he has aligned himself closely with national Republican priorities and emphasized law enforcement and conservative social policies. His campaign argues that lower taxes and a pro-business climate will keep Georgia economically strong. But Carr rarely discusses the deep inequalities beneath the state’s economic growth.

Georgia continues to rank poorly in maternal mortality, rural health access, and educational equity. Thousands of Georgians live in counties with limited medical services, and many public schools remain underfunded. Carr’s campaign offers little indication that those issues are central to his agenda.

Brad Raffensperger

Raffensperger occupies a more complicated position. Nationally, he became known for refusing Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. Yet in the governor’s race, Raffensperger has attempted to reposition himself as a conventional conservative Republican emphasizing tax cuts, Christian values, and public safety. His strategy appears designed to reassure Republican primary voters who still distrust him for defying Trump. Disappointingly he claimed he blocked Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams from trying to make it legal for illegal immigrants to vote. Simply not true, Brad. And he borrowed a campaign strategy used by Governor Kemp–a shotgun.

Among the four major candidates, Raffensperger is perhaps the least inflammatory rhetorically. Yet even he has largely avoided bold proposals on expanding health care, addressing climate risks, or improving public education.

His campaign reflects the reality that Republican primaries increasingly punish policy moderation and reward ideological conformity. Rather than using his independent reputation to broaden the debate, Raffensperger has mostly adapted himself to the same narrow framework as his rivals.

Bert Jones

Jones has campaigned as the most openly Trump-aligned candidate. Backed by Trump himself, Jones emphasizes immigration enforcement, conservative cultural themes, and tax elimination. His ads frame politics as a battle between “real Georgians” and threatening outsiders. Yet Georgia’s economy depends heavily on immigrant labor in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and logistics. Harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric may energize parts of the Republican base, but it risks deepening division while ignoring practical economic realities.

Jones also promotes eliminating the state income tax, a popular Republican talking point. But candidates rarely explain what services would be reduced to compensate for the lost revenue. Georgia relies on income tax revenue to fund schools, universities, transportation, and public safety. Promising massive tax cuts without explaining the consequences may be politically effective, but it is fiscally evasive.

Rick Jackson

Jackson, the billionaire outsider, has poured enormous sums of personal wealth into the race and attempted to position himself as a businessman who can “fix” government. Like the others, he stresses deportation policies, conservative Christianity, and tax reductions.

Yet Jackson’s campaign has already been shadowed by reports that undocumented workers were employed at his property despite his hardline immigration message. The contradiction highlights a larger pattern in modern Republican politics: immigrants are politically useful as targets even while the economy quietly depends on their labor. Jackson has the most offensive immigrant ad of the four candidates. He uses one case to demonize and lie about immigrants.

More broadly, Jackson’s candidacy reflects the growing influence of billionaire self-financed campaigns. When wealthy candidates can spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising, elections risk becoming less about democratic participation and more about financial saturation. That trend distances politics from the everyday concerns of working Georgians struggling with housing costs, child care, medical debt, and stagnant wages.

“Across all four campaigns, one theme dominates: symbolic politics over practical governance.”

There Are Real Issues

Georgia faces serious long-term challenges. Rural hospitals continue to close. Teachers leave the profession because of burnout and low pay. Metro Atlanta struggles with traffic congestion and housing affordability. Climate change threatens coastal communities and increases severe weather risks. Yet these issues receive little sustained attention in the Republican primary.

Instead, voters are offered simplified narratives centered on religion, fear of immigrants, tax reduction, and loyalty to Trump. Christianity itself becomes less a moral framework than a campaign brand. Faith is invoked constantly, yet there is little discussion of poverty, health care access, or social responsibility — concerns traditionally associated with religious ethics.

The candidates’ silence on environmental issues is particularly revealing. Georgia’s coastline, water systems, and urban air quality face increasing pressure from development and climate change. Younger voters increasingly care about sustainability and clean energy, yet Republican candidates seldom mention these topics except to criticize federal regulations.

The same absence exists around retirement and aging. Georgia’s population is growing older, and many retirees face rising housing and medical costs. None of the leading Republican campaigns have made retirement security a central issue.

In the end, the Republican primary reveals a party focused more on ideological signaling than comprehensive governance. The candidates compete aggressively over who is most conservative, most pro-Trump, and toughest on immigration. But governing a complex and rapidly changing state requires more than slogans and tax pledges.

Georgia’s future will depend on schools, hospitals, infrastructure, environmental stewardship, and economic fairness as much as partisan identity. A campaign that neglects those realities risks serving political ambition more than the long-term interests of Georgians.

Categories Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Georgia, Health, Immigration, Republicans, Trump

Judge J. Michael Luttig: The Beginning of the End of Trump’s Presidency?

By dianeravitch

April 9, 2026 //

Judge J. Michael Luttig has always been considered a conservative Republican. He worked in the Reagan administration and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice Warren Burger. In 1991, he was appointed to the Fourth District Court of Appeals by President George H.W. Bush. Luttig resigned his judgeship in 2006 to work as general counsel for Boeing.

Although a stalwart conservative, Luttig was appalled by Trump’s attempt to overturn the election he lost in 2020. He testified to the House January 6 committee that Trump and his allies were “a clear and present danger to American democracy.” In 2023, he co-wrote an article with liberal legal scholar Laurence Tribe arguing that Trump should be barred from running for the Presidency because of his role in the 2021 insurrection (Section 3 of the 14th Amendment).

When Trump was leading the field in 2024, Luttig predicted that Trump’s election would be “catastrophic” for the United States, and he subsequently endorsed Kamala Harris.

Luttig has continued to put the Constitution and the rule of law over partisan politics.

Judge Luttig wrote this article on his Substack blog. I reposted about half of it. To read it in full, open the link or subscribe.

Judge Luttig wrote:

On January 11, 2026, with America and the world anxiously watching — and hoping — Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome “Jay” Powell fearlessly stood up to the President of the United States, and his truth put the lie to Donald Trump.

For their honorable and courageous stands against the President of the United States, Chairman Powell and Judge Boasberg may have earned Donald Trump’s eternal enmity, but they have earned the nation’s and the world’s eternal gratitude.

On that day, Chairman Powell became the first elected or appointed public official to stand in the breach in America’s time of testing and confront the President of the United States, man to man. The first public figure in over five years who Donald Trump has been unable to insult, harass, threaten, or persecute into silence, bludgeon into submission, or politically destroy, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board became the first man to stand up to the wannabe king of the United States.

History will record that Chairman Powell’s courageous televised statement in defiance of the President of the United States marked the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, and history will richly reward Jerome Powell with its favor.

It could just well be that this honorable humble public servant single-handedly saved America’s Democracy, Constitution, and Rule of Law, if only the others of America’s institutions of government, democracy, and law will finally summon the same courage and follow Jay Powell’s noble and courageous lead before it’s too late.

Jay Powell was always the one man in the world who could stand up to Donald Trump, and Trump knew it, which is why, despite his false bravado, he feared the Reserve Board Chairman. Trump forced the latest confrontation with Jay Powell in one last desperate attempt to force Powell from office so that he could finally seize control over the independent Federal Reserve Bank in the eleventh hour and manipulate the interest rates to disguise the crippling economic impact of his sweeping, unconstitutional global tariffs and his unconstitutional war in Iran.
It turned out to be the worst miscalculation of his life.

Donald Trump considered his years-long effort to fire Powell or force his resignation and to gain control over the independent Federal Reserve Bank to be the decisive showdown of his presidency. His face-off with the Federal Reserve was always to be Donald Trump’s Armageddon in which he victoriously vanquished his archnemesis Jay Powell and took the victor’s spoil of control over the Federal Reserve Bank.

When, not if, he succeeded, his conquest was to be the crowning achievement of his presidency — the conquest that assured the success of his entire presidency, because he would control the monetary policy of the United States and, along with it, interest rates, and thereby the economies of the world, to do with them whatever he pleased.

But Donald Trump’s gloriously imagined victory over Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Bank was never to be and, like the Greek tragedy that it was, everyone in the world knew it, except Donald Trump.

When the day of the world heavy-weight championship finally arrived, the favored heavy-weight Reserve Board Chairman knocked out the reigning light-weight President of the United States in the opening round. The President was TKO’d in the championship fight of his life by the man he had insulted, tormented, and belittled for years.

Donald Trump had finally crossed the wrong man. It was the demure, universally respected Jay Powell who finally called Trump’s bluff, revealing that the humiliated emperor embarrassingly has no clothes.

Both America and the world had longed for a David to slay America’s Goliath and save the nation and the world from the giant’s tyrannical rampage. On January 11, As he spoke clearly, plainly, and truthfully about his ludicrously corrupt pretextual prosecution by the bully president, the entire world cheered on their new David-hero.

America and the world at last had their longed-for hero in the pitched battle for the heart and soul of America, The Honorable Jerome Powell, the courageous Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

History is written by the victor, Winston Churchill is (mis)reported to have said. On January 11, 2026, Jay Powell wrote the victor’s history of the 47th President of the United States before the would-be victor even got the chance.

It poetically fell to The Honorable James Boasberg to mop up after Donald Trump’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Fed Chairman. Judge Boasberg’s swift and withering judicial confirmation of the president’s utter contempt for the Constitution and Rule of Law officially ratified the beginning of the end of Donald Trump’s presidency that Jay Powell had wrought. For his distinguished service to the country and to the Constitution, The Honorable James Boasberg is America’s other Profile in Courage and Hero in the battle for America and its future.

Categories Accountability, Character, Democracy, Economy, Evil, Extremism, Justice, Trump

Paul Waldman: Has Any Other President Done As Much to Damage the Economy?

By dianeravitch

April 2, 2026 //

Paul Waldman was one of my favorite reporters at The Washington Post. He left and started his blog, “The Cross Section.” In this post, he says that most of Trump’s economic setbacks are the result of his own disastrous policies, not forces beyond his control.

I do think Walkman is unfair to Hoover. Unlike Trump, Hoover had a distinguished career and tried to make the right decisions for the right reason.

Waldman writes:

As spring arrives and the cherry blossoms bloom around Washington, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are officially in the toilet:

There are many reasons why he keeps falling lower and lower, but the single most important is likely that Trump has utterly failed on what the foolish and gullible believed was his great strength: the economy. While he does a lot of distasteful but symbolic things like demolishing the East Wing and plastering his name on everything in sight, all of Trump’s most consequential screwups and authoritarian abuses have an economic component. And they all make things worse.

In fact, you’d have to go back to Herbert Hoover to find a president whose decisions were so directly and willfully disastrous for the economy. That’s not because this is the worst economy since the Great Depression; it isn’t, not yet anyway. But in all the downturns and crises we’ve had over the last century, the causes were largely outside of the president’s control.

Those presidents might have made some different decisions or found a way to improve things more quickly, but one wouldn’t say that George W. Bush created the economic crisis of 2008, or that the inflation that crossed the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter happened only because of the decisions they made. Most of the judgments we make of them in retrospect were about how they responded once the crisis arrived. They may have been blamed when things turned bad, but one could argue in every case that it wasn’t really their fault. The latest example is from 2022, when inflation spiked all over the world and here at home Joe Biden got the blame.

But what’s happening now is different. Consider the major policy initiatives of Trump’s second term:

Tariffs: Trump believes fervently in the power of tariffs to produce boundless prosperity, and so he has imposed an ever-shifting program of tariffs on foreign materials and products. The nearly universal conclusion of economists is that this policy has been a failure; not only hasn’t it created the manufacturing boom Trump promised, it has increased prices for American consumers and led our trading partners to begin constructing a new global trade system to circumvent the U.S.
Immigration: Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration — both deporting immigrants already here and making it all but impossible for new immigrants to come — has been an economic disaster. As a Brookings Institution report notes, “Reduced migration will dampen growth in the labor force, consumer spending, and gross domestic product” in years to come. Multiple economic sectors from construction to agriculture are facing labor shortages, and job growth has slowed to a crawl. And because the crackdown is motivated by naked animus toward all immigrants but especially non-white ones, it extends to a large and growing number of policy areas. For instance, the Small Business Administration just announced that it will cut off loans to green card holders, despite the fact that immigrants start more businesses and create more jobs than native-born Americans. One could hardly imagine a dumber economic own-goal, done for no reason other than the fact that the Trump administration hates immigrants.
Energy: Trump has waged an outright war on renewable energy, one of the most dynamic and fast-growing sectors of the world’s economy. As a result, we’ve ceded the green manufacturing sector to China, which now makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels, and lithium-ion batteries. While the Chinese electric car industry is leaping ahead, ours is pulling back, a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to kill EV subsidies. In its lust to prop up the fossil fuel industry, the administration is literally forcing utilities against their will to keep coal plants open so customers can pay more for electricity and get dirtier air in the bargain. And speaking of fossil fuels…
The Iran War: We don’t know how long this war will go on, but the economic effects are already being felt. Gas has now crossed $4 a gallon (which will cause a broad increase in prices for all kinds of goods), farmers are facing a spike in the cost of fertilizer, and as Paul Krugman points out, the real effects of the constriction in oil supplies haven’t even been felt yet, which is why some energy analysts are predicting that this could be a worse crisis than the oil shock of the 1970s. The Pentagon wants an additional $200 billion to fund the war, and congressional Republicans are considering health care cuts to pay for it. There are now serious worries that the war could produce a global recession.

He’s a business guy, he knows the economy and stuff

To call this a record of economic incompetence would be too kind. In every case, Trump chose to do what he did for the most stupid, petty, and malicious reasons, despite the fact that the economic effects his decisions would produce were obvious and predicted by anyone with half a brain. It’s especially notable given that in his first term, Trump operated with a kind of benign neglect on many economic fronts, the consequence of which was that before he utterly screwed up his response to the covid pandemic, things were going pretty well. Yes, he restricted immigration and imposed some tariffs, but it was on a much smaller scale. For the first three years of his term, job growth was reasonable, inflation was low, and the economy largely rolled along.

Which probably reinforced the widespread and completely false notion that because Trump was a business guy who knows business stuff, he would be skilled at managing the economy. Even if Trump had been a traditional business leader and not a scam artist with a checkered record of successes and spectacular failures (including multiple bankruptcies), that wouldn’t have meant he knew anything about macroeconomic policy; as I’ve been shouting for far too many years, government and business are not remotely alike, and the skills and knowledge one needs to succeed in one do not transfer to the other.

Yet despite the crushing weight of all available evidence, one still heard voters in 2024 say that because Trump knows business, he could come into office, business away all that inflation (which was largely gone by the time of the election anyway), and bring us to a new age of prosperity. The fact that people thought that is a tribute to the propagandistic power of repetition: Say a thing often enough, no matter how ridiculous it is, and at least some people will believe it. (The same is true of the idea that Trump is a great deal-maker, when in fact he is the world’s worst negotiator.)

To their credit, Americans are now giving Trump dreadful ratings on the economy; in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (which was taken a week ago, before the national average for gas topped $4 a gallon), his economic approval was only 29%, worse than Joe Biden’s at the height of the 2022 inflation:

It would be nice if this were the result of the American public’s discerning judgment, but it almost certainly isn’t. That’s not to say that a majority of them favor fascism, because they don’t. But to drive your approval as low as Trump’s has gotten, you have to really muck up the economy. And on that score, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

Julian Vasquez-Heilig: When AI Becomes Your Boss

By dianeravitch

February 26, 2026 //

Julian Vasquez-Heilig describes a future in which AI is not merely doing the work that humans used to do, but hiring humans to do work that AI used to do. He calls this the “rent-a-human” future of AI. He details a future in which AI hires humans to do menial work and evaluates them.

It’s a fascinating essay which might be science fiction or might be an uncanny look into a dystopian future.

What follows is the essay’s opening paragraphs.

Vasquez-Heilig wrote:

The Uber and Lyft gig economy was just the rehearsal. There are already now websites where AI can give you a command to do a job or task it can’t do and then pay you without any human intervention… rent-a-human.

The most important shift in work is not coming with a new job title or a new credential. It is arriving quietly, through notifications, prompts, and website job offers that appear on screens. A task shows up. A payout is listed. A clock starts ticking. You accept or you don’t get paid. In that moment, AI is not a tool assisting labor. It is a management system deciding who works, when they work, and what they are worth.

This is not a future scenario. It is already happening. A new era of labor began with ride sharing and food delivery is expanding into something broader and more structural. AI systems are already hiring humans to perform work. They route tasks. They price labor. It turns out, the gig economy was not just about flexibility. It was the training ground for a world where your AI boss is invisible, automated, and deeply informed about your behavior. Once you recognize this transition, a lot of cultural anxiety about AI suddenly makes sense.

AI is already hiring people

When people talk about AI and jobs, they often focus on replacement of workers. Machines taking over human roles in law, business, medicine, education and more resulting in layoffs and reduced numbers of entry level workers. This is a very important trend that is being discussed extensively in the public discourse, but misses another reality that is already underway. AI’s next step is independently coordinating and controlling the hiring of workers for tasks.

This is the future across digital platforms: AI systems will generate work that requires human action. It treats you as a probability. How likely are you to accept. How quickly will you respond. How reliable have you been in the past. You could easily find yourself working for a website that instructs you to do plumbing, take a photo, or babysit a child. Drive here. Deliver this. Review that. Like this content. Perform this task. It is unknown what the AI request would be for a certain day. Of course, you will even have to pay a subscription to the website for the privilege of receiving work from your boss.

What I just described is the AI ultra gig economy. The gig economy, first successfully pioneered by platforms like Uber Eats and Lyft, were largely transactional and limited to transportation and delivery. Over time, however, that underlying logic has spread. As humans design AI systems that can assign work and tap into vast pools of labor, the gig economy will not stop at rides and meals. It will expand into other areas such as manual labor, creative labor, and even political participation. AI does not need to know you personally to manage you effectively. It only needs your data trail and need.

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Economy, Jobs

Mark Carney’s Speech at Davos

By dianeravitch

January 27, 2026 //

Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, gave a speech at Davos that was widely hailed as a realistic response to the disintegration of the old world order.

Carney’s speech received a standing ovation from the audience of global leaders, diplomats, and corporate executives. This is a rare occurrence at Davos, where most speeches are received with polite applause.

Richard Haas, former chief executive at the Council on Foreign Relations, said this about Carney’s speech:

The most important speech delivered at the Davos enclave was not that of Trump but rather Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

Reportedly written by Carney himself, the speech was steeped in realism, both as to the state of world order and how small and medium powers, such as Canada, must adapt. Early on he made his basic point, one that provides the title for this week’s newsletter: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition…Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security – that assumption is no longer valid…Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Carney was no less direct as to what Canada needed to do: “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength…To help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

There is much talk of regime change within countries such as Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, but the most fundamental form of regime change taking place is at the international level. A post-American world is fast emerging, one brought about in large part by the United States taking the lead in dismantling the international order that this country built and underwrote and that served this country and the world well for eight decades. It is being carried out in a manner reminiscent of two characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” All of which, I am sad to say, applies to this president and his administration—and to their many enablers in the Republican-controlled Congress, the Supreme Court, and throughout American society.

Categories Economy, International

WSJ: New Study Shows That U.S. Consumers Pay Tariffs, Not Other Nations

By dianeravitch

January 21, 2026 //

The Wall Street Journal gave front-page coverage to this new study, which concludes that American consumers are paying for Trump’s tariffs. This is a direct refutation of Trump’s claims that other nations are paying to access American markets, that the trillions collected for tariffs will eventually replace income taxes and pay for all the government’s expenses.

Guess who is paying for tariffs? We are!

FRANKFURT—Americans, not foreigners, are bearing almost the entire cost of U.S. tariffs, according to new research that contradicts a key claim by President Trump and suggests he might have a weaker hand in a reemerging trade war with Europe.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that his historic tariffs, deployed aggressively over the past year as both a revenue-raising and foreign-policy tool, will be paid for by foreigners. Such assertions helped to reinforce the president’s bargaining power and encourage foreign governments to do deals with the U.S.

A relatively brisk growth and moderate inflation last year, even as growth in Europe and other advanced economies remained sluggish.

The new research, published Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a well-regarded German think tank, suggests that the impact of tariffs is likely to show up over time in the form of higher U.S. consumer prices.

The findings don’t mean that the tariffs are a win for Europe—on the contrary. German exports to the U.S., which have rocketed in recent years, have contracted sharply in the past year.

The German research echoes recent reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and economists at Harvard Business School, finding that only a small fraction of the tariff costs were being borne by foreign producers.

By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the qpart burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

Categories Economy, Trump

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