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Elon Musk Blew Up the Bipartisan Deal to Fund the Government

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2024 //
17

Who elected Elon Musk?

Yesterday he fired off 100+ tweets demanding that Republicans reject a budget deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson negotiated to keep the government funded until March.

Musk ridiculed the deal. He called it calling it “terrible,” “horrible,” “criminal,” “outrageous,” “unconscionable,” “crazy” and “an insane crime.” Trump and Vance came out against it. The Republican members of the House scurried for cover. The deal collapsed.

Trump is back to his established practice of sowing chaos.

Politico reported that Musk tweeted lies to panic House Republicans and cause a stampede.

Musk claimed that the bill would give members of Congress a 40% raise. Untrue. Their salaries ($174,000) have not gone up since 2009. The bill would have given them an increase of 3.8% or $6,600. Musk lied.

Musk reposted a claim that the bill included $3 billion for a new stadium in DC. Another lie. It transferred title of the existing RFK stadium to the DC government. No federal cost.

Musk claimed that the deal shielded the January 6 Committee from future investigations. Another lie.

Musk retweeted a post claiming that the bill funded “bioweapons labs.” Another lie.

Musk approvingly tweeted a post saying that the government should be shut down until Trump’s inauguration in 33 days.

Read the article.

Musk demonstrated that he is reckless and dangerous. He leads Trump around by the nose.

An arrogant, ignorant billionaire leading a doddering, confused old man.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Funding, Lies, Musk, Elon, Republicans, Trump

President Biden: Our Economic Accomplishments

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2024 //
12

During the Presidential campaign, Republican fear tactics drowned out the powerful economic record of the Biden administration. Voters heard nonstop lies about crime, immigration, inflation, and bogus claims that Biden and Harris were “socialists,” “communists,” “radicals” who were destroying the country. Biden had a clear economic vision, and he was able to implement most of it despite razor-thin support in both houses of Congress.

In fact, Trump inherits the most successful economy in the world. Trump will take credit for the trillion-plus dollars that Biden persuaded Congress to invest in infrastructure.

President Biden (I.e., his team of writers) published a summary of his accomplishments in The American Prospect.

He wrote:

As America prepares to transition to a new presidential administration, I want to take stock of the progress we have made together in laying the foundations for an economy that creates opportunity for all Americans. Over the last four years, we’ve faced some of the most challenging economic conditions in our history. Not only have we recovered, we’ve come out stronger, and have laid foundations for a promising new chapter in our American comeback story. It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have planted the seeds that are making this happen. If these investments and actions are built upon, U.S. economic leadership will be stronger and the middle class more secure in the years and decades ahead.

When I took office, the economy wasn’t working for most Americans. It was clear that a fundamentally new playbook was essential. My focus was to transform the economy to improve the lives of regular Americans, the kinds of people I grew up with. That’s why I fought to invest in the jobs of the future, lower costs, raise wages, and strengthen workers and small businesses—because I know this will help American families and build the economy from the middle out and bottom up.

At that time, economic policy was in the grip of a failed approach called trickle-down economics. Trickle-down tried to grow the economy from the top down. It slashed taxes for the wealthy and large corporations and tried to get government “out of the way,” instead of delivering for working people, investing in infrastructure, and ensuring America stays at the leading edge of innovation.

But this approach failed. Too many Americans saw an economy that was stacked against them with failing infrastructure, communities that had been hollowed out, manufacturing jobs that were offshored to China, prescription drugs that cost more than in any other developed country, and workers who had been left behind.

I believe that, from America’s earliest days, we have been at our best when we have taken on important challenges and fought to deliver big things on behalf of the American people—from the Erie Canal to the transcontinental railroad, from the Hoover Dam to rural electrification, from the Social Security system to the National Highway System.

As president, I fought to write a new economic playbook that builds the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down. I fought to make smart investments in America’s future that put us in the lead globally. I fought to create good jobs that give working families and the middle class a fair shot and the chance to get ahead. I fought to lower costs for consumers and give smaller businesses a fair chance to compete.

In what follows, I describe why this new approach is so important.

Investing in America’s Future

I have always seen the economy from the perspective of the small city where I grew up—a city with a proud history of making things in America, a city that fell on hard times when politicians turned their backs on communities like mine. Too many corporations moved their supply chains overseas and focused on quarterly profits and share buybacks instead of investing in their workers and communities here at home. Our infrastructure fell further and further behind, and a flood of cheap, subsidized imports from China and other countries hollowed outour factory towns. Economic opportunity and innovation became more and more concentratedin a few major cities, while heartland communities were left behind. Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries abroad, bolstering their manufacturing instead of ours.

I came to office with a different vision. When I said I was president of all America, I meant it. I was determined we would invest in the places that have suffered from neglect and disinvestment: rural areas, manufacturing towns, coal and power plant communities, in red states and blue states. I was determined to create good jobs with family-sustaining wages that don’t require a four-year college degree. I vowed to restore U.S. leadership in the industries of the future—like semiconductors and clean energy—while fortifying our infrastructure and supply chains. I committed to putting the United States back in a position of clean-energy leadership and building a 100 percent clean power grid.

Investing in Infrastructure and Industries of the Future

We succeeded in securing historic investment laws to turn those goals into reality. My Investing in America Agenda—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—together mark the most significant investmentin the United States since the New Deal.

For many years, this country’s infrastructure was underresourced and neglected. Since the passage of the BIL, we have been hard at work expanding high-speed internet, replacing pipes to provide clean drinking water in every community, and rebuilding roads and bridges and ports and airports in every state. These projects are creating millions of good jobs—many of them unionized—so American families across America will share in the benefits of the infrastructure investments. In the years since I took office, we’ve funded over 74,000infrastructure and clean-energy projects in every state and territory in the country.

The construction of new factories has hit record highs. Already, tens of thousands of skilled construction workers are hard at work building the factories of the future. Soon, these factories will be hiring advanced manufacturing workers, and products from semiconductors to batteries to electric vehicles will be rolling off of these new, American production lines.

The Inflation Reduction Act is the largest single investment in clean energy in the history of the world. It is creating good-paying jobs and investing in American manufacturing, while also taking action to reduce emissions. It is spurring investments to build solar panels in Dalton, Georgia; to build wind towers in Pueblo, Colorado; and to manufacture and recycle batteries in Reno, Nevada.

Investing in Communities

Our place-based investment approach is creating economic opportunity in communities across the country that had been left behind. Our investments in high-speed internet and transportation networks are reconnecting these communities to jobs and revitalizing small businesses. We are investing in technology and innovation engines in every region of the country that will sustain economic development for years to come. We are supporting farmers that use climate-smart agriculture practices and ensuring rural small businesses can access historic development resources that will cut energy costs and increase energy efficiency.

Communities across the country are poised for economic comebacks. With the benefit of our special investment incentives, the places hit hardest by closures of coal plants and by unfair trade with China are receiving a disproportionate share of new investment, bringing hope to communities that have been left behind for too long. For instance, the first new American aluminum smelter in 40 years will be built in Kentucky, powered entirely by clean energy.

Targeted Trade Actions

We have taken tough but targeted actions on behalf of American workers, businesses, and factory towns to counter violations of our trade laws. China is using unfair practices to threaten American businesses and workers in sectors like vehicles and solar cells and wafers. That’s why we imposed tariffs on imports from China in key sectors. A 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, for instance, is enabling American auto communities to continue powering the global car industry.

But tariffs by themselves are no panacea. To regain and sustain America’s lead in areas from clean energy to semiconductors, it is vital to couple targeted tariffs with strong investments in manufacturing, R&D, and workforce.

Advanced Manufacturing

While semiconductors were invented in America, for too many years politicians in Washington gave up on the semiconductor industry, and leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing moved to Asia. But thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act, some of the most advanced semiconductors in the world will be built in Phoenix, Arizona; Syracuse, New York; New Albany, Ohio; and Taylor, Texas.

Before the CHIPS and Science Act, 90 percent of the world’s leading-edge chips were manufactured in Taiwan. Some skeptics said America could never compete. They were wrong. With the benefit of a CHIPS award, not only has global leader TSMC committed to build three leading–edge semiconductor manufacturing plants in Arizona, but in October it was reportedthat early production yields at one of those plants met those at manufacturing plants in Taiwan. And America will be the only economy in the world to have all five of the most advanced semiconductor manufacturers in the world operating on its shores—no other economy has more than two.

My investment agenda is already attracting $1 trillion in commitments of private capital so far, not crowding it out. These investments are helping to strengthen our supply chains, so that we won’t be dependent on a single foreign country for the semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, or critical minerals that we need. And they are starting to create opportunities for workers, businesses, and communities to contribute to the strongest, most productive economy in the world.

This is my vision—a future that is made by American workers across America. It will take years to see the full effects in terms of new jobs and new investments all around the country, but we have laid strong foundations, and now it is important to build on and not reverse the progress we have made.

Supporting Workers, Not the Wealthy, to Grow the Middle Class

I’ve long seen the economy through the eyes of my dad, who used to say, “A job is a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your place in the community.”

But trickle-down economics ignored this basic truth. Tax cuts for the wealthy didn’t create opportunities for workers and their families. Instead, factory towns were hollowed out, and fewer Americans ended up better off than their parents. My middle-out/bottom-up economic playbook instead puts working families and the middle class at the center of all of my economic policies.

Strong Employment and Income Recovery

When I took office, the economy was in chaos. Thousands of businesses were shut down, and millions of Americans were out of a job. As soon as I came to office, I signed the American Rescue Plan that vaccinated the nation and got our economy going again. As a result, America returned to full employment faster than other advanced economies, and has seen the lowest average unemployment of any administration in 50 years.

The share of working-age Americans who are employed is at a multi-decade high, at over 80 percent. We’ve also seen record lows in unemployment for workers who have often been left behind in previous recoveries. In our full-employment expansion, the real pay of low-wage workers outpaced that of higher-paid workers, the reverse of what we saw under trickle-down.

The pandemic and the inflation it created caused enormous pain and hardship for families across America. That’s true not just for us but for every major economy in the world. But now, inflation has come down in the United States—faster than almost any of the world’s other advanced economies.

Investing in Our Workforce

I know how important it is to provide pathways to middle-class careers for the 60 percent of Americans who choose not to pursue a four-year college degree. The many investments I described above have provided an unprecedented opportunity to create good jobs in construction and manufacturing. We created workforce hubsin areas with new investments to align high schools, community colleges, unions, businesses, and local governments around stackable credentials that enable students to move seamlessly from the classroom to careers, and allow workers to upskill and secure better jobs.

To build the pipeline of skilled and trained workers for the industries of the future, we’ve also invested more in registered apprenticeships and career technical education programs than any previous administration, with one million apprentices hired during my time in office. Many of these apprenticeship programs are sponsored by unions, which means that graduates will earn a good union wage with benefits and retirement.

Supporting Unions

The middle-out/bottom-up playbook supports unions because unions have been vital to building the middle class by providing pathways to family-sustaining careers. When I came to office, union workers and retirees faced cuts of up to 70 percent or more to their earned benefits through no fault of their own. But we fought for and secured the Butch Lewis Act to restore and protect the pension benefits they earned. Because of this law, we have protected the pensions of over 1.2 million union workers and retirees so far.

Expanding unionization is essential to creating a fairer economy. The evidence is clear: Unions are the best way for American workers to get their fair share. I was proud to be the first president to walk a picket line with workers. I appointed strong members to the National Labor Relations Board who have enforced our labor laws rather than undermine them, as happened under the previous administration. It is no accident that union election petitions have doubled since I took office. Support for unions is the highest it’s been in more than half a century, and the labor movement is expanding to new companies and industries.

A Fair Tax System

The middle-out/bottom-up playbook is not just about giving working families a fair shot, it is also about asking the very wealthy and most profitable corporations to pay their fair share. We need to balance our tax system to work in favor of the middle class and working families, not the rich and well-connected. Tax fairness is central to building an economy that works for all Americans—where growth is broadly shared and we keep our commitments to seniors and have the resources to meet key national needs over the long run.

I promised not to raise taxes on middle-class families, and I kept my promise. Instead, I delivered tax cuts to help families raise children and afford health care. I fought hard to expand the Child Tax Credit because it is one of the highest-yielding investments we can make, cutting child poverty nearly in half in 2021. I also secured an expansion of the premium tax credits to make health insurance more affordable for millions of Americans, which helped lift health insurance coverage to record levels and doubled Black and Hispanic enrollment, with over 21 million people enrolled.

I also secured investments to make sure wealthy taxpayers pay what they owe and play by the same rules. After a decade of severe underfunding, I fought hard to secure an investment in modernizing the IRS that is already paying off. The IRS is already collecting over a billion dollars from wealthy tax cheats. It has successfully rolled out Direct File, offering millions of Americans a free and easy way to file their taxes for the first time.

Lowering Costs and Helping Small Businesses Thrive

I’ve also long seen the economy from the perspective of my family’s kitchen table growing up, so I know that the high prices from the pandemic have been hard on American consumers. That’s why I have been laser-focused on lowering costs for hardworking Americans. Our work to help unsnarl supply chains helped bring inflation back down to the levels right before the pandemic. But even with pandemic inflation back down, many consumer prices are too high.

In some sectors of the economy, high prices reflect inadequate competition. And too often, politicians in Washington haven’t had the courage to take on big corporate interests when they use their market power to mark up their prices.

Promoting Competition to Lower Costs

Promoting competition is central to my vision for an American economy that grows from the bottom up and the middle out. I came to office determined to make promoting competition a priority for every agency. Fair competition means better choices, a fair shot for small businesses, a more resilient economy, and lower prices.

This is particularly important in health care. It’s not right that Americans pay two to three timesmore to buy a prescription drug in Chicago than it costs elsewhere in the world. I am proud that I took on the pricing power of Big Pharma and secured major cost savings in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Due to the IRA, people with Medicare pay no more than $35 a month for insulin, down from as much as $400. Out-of-pocket drug costs for people with Medicare will be capped at $2,000 starting next year. But seniors are already saving on lower prescription drug costs thanks to the IRA. In just the first six months of 2024, seniors got $1 billion back in their pockets with additional savings in the years ahead thanks to this historic legislation. Starting in 2026, prices will be reduced by 38 to 79 percent on key drugs for people with Medicare, and taxpayers will save roughly $160 billion over a decade.

We also worked to lower gas prices. After Russia’s war against Ukraine caused gas prices to spike globally, I undertook the biggest release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in history. I also encouraged oil and gas companies to take their record profits and invest in more production. Today, American energy production is at record levels—including record oil and gas production—and the price of a gallon of gas is below the level before the time of the invasion. In addition, we have successfully purchased back all of the reserves released while making taxpayers a profit of nearly $3.5 billion. By selling high and buying low, we lowered costs for families while securing a good deal for U.S. taxpayers.

Record Small-Business Creation

Fair competition is especially important for small businesses, which need a level playing field to have a fair shot to compete and win. Our competition and investment policies are unleashing a wave of new business startups on Main Streets in towns and cities across the country. In fact, we have seen 20 million new business applications during this administration—the three strongest years on record.

Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs have been leaders of this small-business boom, with Black business ownership doubling and Hispanic business ownership up by 40 percent since before the pandemic. The share of women business owners is also on the rise.

The Path Ahead

The bottom line is, the past four years have been marked by some of the toughest economic challenges in American history. We took decisive action and it paid off, with the strongest economic comeback in the world. Even while managing that recovery, we made generational investments in our economy and balanced the scales more toward workers and the middle class.

Outside commentators have noted that due to our policies, “President-elect Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history which is the envy of the world.”

It is worth reviewing the facts on the U.S. economy that I am handing off to my successor: Unemployment has been at the lowest average rate of any administration in 50 years. We have created over 16 million new jobs, and more than 1.5 million of those are in manufacturing and construction. Inflation has been brought down close to 2 percent, the same level as right before the pandemic. Incomes are up by nearly $4,000 adjusted for inflation, and unions have won wage increases from 25 percent to 60 percent in industries like autos, ports, aerospace, and trucking. We’ve seen 20 million applications to start small businesses. Our economy has grown 3 percent per year on average the last four years—faster than any other advanced economy. Domestic energy production is at a record high, and gas prices are around $3 per gallon.

When I came to office, I believed the only way for a president to lead America was to lead all of America. In fact, the historic investments I made went more to red states than blue states.

I believe that the economy as I leave is stronger for all Americans.

And I believe there is no country on Earth better positioned to lead the world in the years to come than America today.

Now we are at an inflection point. The next four years will determine whether the incoming administration builds on this strength. If it does, then 10 or even 50 years from now, U.S. economic leadership will be even stronger than it is today—proving that when the middle class does well, we all do well.

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Trump

Texas: Deporting Undocumented Immigrants Will Cripple the Economy

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2024 //
6

The Texas Monthly contacted 100 Republican office holders to get their view of Trump’s plans for deporting millions of immigrants. Only two responded. In Texas, one in 20 residents is an undocumented immigrant. Their absence will have a big economic impact, as will the visuals of rounding up and detaining large numbers of people.

Michael Hardy wrote:

Shortly after he is sworn into office, on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a massive deportation operation targeting the estimated 11.5 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Texas, with its 1,254-mile southern border and pro-Trump leaders, will play a central role in any such deportations. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has vowed that the administration will build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” likely on “open land in Texas near the border.” State land commissioner Dawn Buckingham recently offered the administration 1,400 acres in Starr County about 35 miles west of McAllen to build “deportation facilities.” 

In their eagerness to help Trump conduct sweeping roundups of undocumented Texas workers and their families, state leaders who vociferously supported Trump’s candidacy have mostly avoided reckoning with the likely economic consequences of such roundups—including the impact on inflation, a major issue in the presidential campaign. 

Earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott said he expected the president-elect to begin by deporting immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States, but he would not say who he thinks should be expelled next under the far-reaching plan. “President Trump has made perfectly clear that this is a process and you have to have a priority list,” he said. “You begin with . . . the criminals.” 

But Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—around one in every twenty residents—and the vast majority are not criminals. In fact, undocumented immigrants in our state commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than legal residents, according to a National Institute of Justice analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data. Many among these 1.6 million power the state’s construction, farming, and meatpacking industries and work as housekeepers, landscape gardeners, and restaurant workers. 

Deporting every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally—or even half of them—would cripple the economy. And Texas would be hit harder than most states. A recent report by the left-leaning American Immigration Council estimated that a mass-deportation campaign would reduce the national GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent—a similar hit to the one the nation took during the Great Recession. The price of groceries would skyrocket. A gallon of milk, for instance, would cost twice as much without immigrant labor, according to a 2015 estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service. Mass deportations would also punch a hole in the state budget, because undocumented Texans pay an estimated $4.9 billion in sales and payroll taxes every year, including for retirement benefits they are ineligible to collect. 

Trump has argued that deporting undocumented immigrants would open up jobs for American citizens. But the percentage of citizens willing to work in industries such as landscaping and construction has declined, and economic studies suggest that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a net benefit to the economy. Reducing illegal immigration likely would, over time, result in higher wages for legal workers in industries such as construction, assuming the supply of labor were to fall faster than demand. But suddenly removing a significant percentage of undocumented workers (one recent estimate found that 23 percent of construction workers nationally don’t have legal documents) would likely cause hundreds of building projects to stall, crops to go unharvested, and cattle to stack up in feedlots.

Trump’s program would also impose social costs on communities across Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country live in mixed-status households with at least one family member who is here legally. Expelling these migrants would separate families and decimate communities across the state. “The social, family, and economic impact would be very deep,” said Rice University political scientist Tony Payan. “It doesn’t make sense from any perspective. It would be madness for the U.S. to do that.” 

Some Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, have long supported mass deportation as a campaign platform while remaining vague about how such an operation would be executed and what the consequences might be for the Texas economy. In an attempt to get more specifics, Texas Monthly reached out to top Texas officials and every Republican state legislator to ask about the incoming president’s mass-deportation plan. We posed four questions:

  • Do you support President Trump’s plan to deport all immigrants in the country illegally?
  • How would you like the deportations to be carried out?
  • Are you concerned about the potential economic damage to the Texas construction, farming, and restaurant industries from deporting undocumented immigrants? If so, how would you remedy that damage?
  • Are you concerned about the family separations that will occur if all undocumented Texas are deported?

Two legislators responded. Ninety-eight did not.

A loud silence.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Economy, Elections, Immigration, Texas

Timothy Snyder: America Cannot Survive Trump’s Horrible Appointments

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2024 //
28

Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history and on tyranny (the title of one of his books is On Tyranny). He writes here about the creeping authoritarianism of the coming Trump regime.

Snyder writes:

We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction. Who could have known? What could I have done? If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan. We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk. We don’t have much time. Nor is outrage the point.

Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.
The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually. And we need this. With detail comes leverage and power. But clarity must also come, and quickly. Each appointment is part of a larger picture. Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.

In historical context we can see this. There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction. In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain.

The foundation of the modern democratic state is a healthy, long-lived population. We lived longer in the twentieth century because of hygiene and vaccinations, pioneered by scientists and physicians and then institutionalized by governments. We treat one another better when we know we have longer lives to lose. Health is not only the central human good; it enables the peaceful interactions we associate with the rule of law and democracy. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, would undo all of this. On his watch, were his ideas implemented, millions of us would die. Knowing that our lives will be shorter, we become nasty and brutish.

A modern democratic state depends upon the rule of law. Before anything else is possible, we have to endorse the principle that we are all governed by law, and that our institutions are grounded in law. This enables a functional government of a specific sort, in which leaders can be regularly replaced by elections. It allows us to live as free individuals, within a set of rules that we can alter together. The rule of law depends on people who believe in the spirit of law. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first proposed attorney general, is the opposite of such a person. It is not just that he flouts law himself, spectacularly and disgustingly. It is that he embodies lawlessness, and can be counted upon to abuse law to pursue Trump’s political opponents. The end of the rule of law is an essential component of a regime change. He has been replaced by Pam Bondi, who will evade the sex-crime allegations that seem to have brought Gaetz down. But Bondi is someone who dropped an investigation against Trump when he made an illegal donation to one of her foundations. She also led “lock her up” chants against Hillary Clinton, who had committed no crime. And she participated in a central injustice of contemporary American history, Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he won the election of 2020. She can be expected to lead prosecutions based upon alternative reality.

In a class by himself is Kash Patel, whom Trump would like to see as director of the FBI. This, of course, requires Trump to fire Christopher Wray, whom he himself appointed, and who has three years left to serve. Firing Wray for no reason would be unprecedented and would itself have been an outrage in a more sane time. Giving Patel authority over the national police force is nothing less than a promise of authoritarian rule.

Patel is a narcissitic zealot with zero qualification for such a post, as even hard-right Trump insiders such as Bill Barr have said (“over my dead body” were his words when Trump proposed Patel for a lesser position of authority in 2020). Patel got Trump’s attention for his efforts to denounce the entirely correct proposition that Trump was supported by Russia in 2016. Patel was then one of the most active and outspoken participants in Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-2021. Patel has since become a pitchman for a clothing line as well as pills that, he claims, will detox your body from the harmful effects of vaccinations. Patel said both that he would shut down the FBI and that he would use it to prosecute journalists and people who deny the untrue conspiracy theories in which he believes, and to prosecute people who say true things, such as that Russia supports Donald Trump when he runs for office. Russian trolls have been, understandably, very excited in their support of Patel.

A pattern is emerging: the federal government is to be used only as an instrument of revenge, which means that the law will be subverted as such. Laws that were passed to improve the lives of citizens, meanwhile, will simply not be implemented.

The United States of America exists not only because laws are passed, but because we can expect that these laws will be implemented by civil servants. We might find bureaucracy annoying; its absence, though, is deadly. We cannot take the pollution out of the air ourselves, or build the highways ourselves, or write our Social Security checks ourselves. Without a civil service, the law becomes mere paper, and all that works is the personal connection to the government, which the oligarchs will have, and which the rest of us will not. This is the engineered helplessness promised by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are to head a black hole named after a cryptocurrency. There are already oversight instruments in government. DOGE is something entirely different: an agency of destruction, run by people who believe that government should exist for the wealthy or not at all.

The understandable jokes are that DOGE just adds unelected bureaucrats when it is supposed to replace them, and that DOGE is itself a model of inefficiency, since it has two incompetent directors. But the humor distracts from the basic truth: DOGE is there to make the government fail, and then to divide the profitable bits among regime-proximate oligarchs.

DOGE = Den of Oligarchs Gets Everything.

In a modern democratic state, the armed forces are meant to preserve a healthy, long-lived people from external threats. This principal has been much abused in American practice. But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who has presented the purpose of the armed forces as the oppression of Americans. Trump says that Russia and China are less of a threat than “internal enemies.” In American tradition, members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution. Trump has indicated that he would prefer “Hitler’s generals,” which means a personal oath to himself. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s proposed secretary of defense, defends war criminals and displays tattoos associated with white nationalism and Christian nationalism. He is a fundraiser and television personality, with a complicated sexual past and zero experience running an organization. Like Trump, he has no coherent account of how foreign powers might threaten America; if anything, he praises them for sharing his misogyny. His own obsessions with gender lead him to believe that American high officers should be politically purged — a proposition that America’s actual enemies would of course welcome. Hegseth makes perfect sense as the person who would direct American armed forces against American citizens.

In a world of hostile powers, an intelligence service is indispensable. Intelligence can be abused, and certainly has been abused. Yet it is necessary to consider military threats: consider the Biden administration’s correct call the Russia was about to invade Ukraine. It is also necessary to counter the attempts by foreign intelligence agencies, which are constant, to harm American society. This often involves disinformation. Tulsi Gabbard, insofar as she is known at all, is known as a spreader of Syrian and Russian disinformation. She visited Syria, where her remarks could only be understood as an endorsement of the atrocities of Assad. She suggested to burn victims that they had not suffered because of Assad and his ally Russia, which was in fact the case. Gabbard has no relevant experience. Were she to become director of national intelligence, as Trump proposes, we would lose the trust of our allies, and lose contact with much of what is happening in the world — just for starters. We would be vulnerable to all of those who wish to cause us harm. Unsurprisingly, Gabbard is regarded in Russia as “girlfriend,” “superwoman” and a “Putin’s agent.”

In the Soviet theory of regime change, one crucial aspect was control of the power ministries: those associated with defense, the police, and intelligence. Patel, Gabbard, and Hegseth are such shocking suggestions as custodians of American power and law that it is easy to overlook Kristi Noem as Trump’s proposed director of Homeland Security. Noem is regarded positively in Trump’s circles because of a publicity stunt in which she, as governor of South Dakota, effectively privatized her states’s National Guard by accepting a big private donation to send a few of its members to the border with Mexico. The border is, of course, a serious matter, Noem’s combination of spectacle, privatization, and incompetence is more than concerning.

Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments — Kennedy, Jr.; Bondi; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard; Noem — are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.

I do not defend the status quo. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Department of Defense and the Food and Drug Administration require reform. But such a reform, of these or other agencies, would have to be guided by people with knowledge and experience, who cared about their country, and who had a vision of improvement. That is simply not what is happening here. We are confronted instead with a group of people who, were they to hold the positions they have been assigned, could bring an end to the United States of America.

It is a mistake to think of these people as flawed. It is not they will do a bad job in their assigned posts. It is that they will do a good job using those assigned posts to destroy our country.

However and by whomever this was organized, the intention of these appointments is clear: to create American horror. Elected officials should see this for what it is. Senators, regardless of party, should understand that the United States Senate will not outlast the United States, insist on voting, and vote accordingly. The Supreme Court of the United States will likely be called upon. Although it is a faint hope, one must venture it anyway: that its justices will understand that the Constitution was not in fact written as the cover story for state destruction. The Supreme Court will also not outlast the United States.

And citizens, regardless of how they voted, need now to check their attitudes. This is no longer a post-electoral moment. It is a pre-catastrophic moment. Trump voters are caught in the notion that Trump must be doing the right thing if Harris voters are upset. But Harris voters are upset now because they love their country. And Harris voters will have to get past the idea that Trump voters should reap what they have sown. Yes, some of them did vote to burn it all down. But if it all burns down, we burn too. It is not easy to speak right now; but if some Republicans wish to, please listen

Both inside and outside Congress, there will have to be simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America. And, at moments at least, there will also have to be alliances among Americans who, though they differ on other matters, would like to see their country endure.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Health, Trump

NEA on Trump Appointee as Secretary of Labor

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2024 //
15

Is it an accident? Trump made a good choice for Secretary of Labor. The NEA said good things about her. Let’s hope he doesn’t notice.

The NEA issued this press release:

National Education Association President Becky Pringle released the following statement reacting to the selection of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor Secretary:

“Across America, most of us want the same things – strong public schools to help every student grow into their full brilliance and good jobs where workers earn living wages to provide for their families. 

“During her time in Congress, Lori Chavez-DeRemer voted against gutting the Department of Education, against school vouchers, and against cuts to education funding. She cosponsored the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, the PRO Act, and other pro-student, pro-public school, pro-worker legislation.  

“This record stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s anti-worker, anti-union record, and his extreme Project 2025 agenda that would gut workplace protections, make it harder for workers to unionize, and diminish the voice of working people.  

“During his first term, Trump appointed anti-worker, anti-union National Labor Relations Board members. Now he is threatening to take the unprecedented action of removing current pro-worker NLRB members in the middle of their term, replacing them with his corporate friends. And he is promising to appoint judges and justices who are hostile to workers and unions.  

“Educators and working families across the nation will be watching Lori Chavez-DeRemer as she moves through the confirmation process and hope to hear a pledge from her to continue to stand up for workers and students as her record suggests, not blind loyalty to the Project 2025 agenda.” 

-###-

The National Education Association is the nation’s largest professional employee organization, representing more than 3 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators, students preparing to become teachers, healthcare workers, and public employees. Learn more at www.nea.org

 

Categories Alternate Route To Certification, Economy, Ethics, Supporting public schools, Unions

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Attacks the Foundations of Our Government

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2024 //
19

In this post, Heather Cox Richardson demonstrates why she has over one million paid subscribers. She brilliantly weaves together events of the day to show the pattern on the rug. The economy is humming along with new jobs created by Biden. Meanwhile Trump plans massive cuts to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Trump’s goal: to destroy the foundations of the American government. We were warned.

She writes:

On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states. 

Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.

On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term. 

But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.

Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina. 

More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.

Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security. 

Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”

But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country. 

Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do. 

The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”

Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.

Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse. 

Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them. 

According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”

The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.

Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.

Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny. 

A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”

Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere. 

Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday. 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Republicans, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: Do Trump Voters Know What He Plans to Do to Them?

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2024 //
39

Jamelle Bouie writes regularly for The New York Times. I subscribed to get extra writing from him. In this one, he asks the question that has undoubtedly occurred to many people.

Bouie writes:

On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.

The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”

What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.

The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.

But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.

And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?

Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?

I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Health, Hoax, Trump

Chris Tomlinson: Five Promises Trump Should Break to Save the Economy

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2024 //
31

Chris Tomlinson, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle, writes that Trump will break the economy unless he breaks five of his campaign promises. Fat chance.

The U.S. voter will soon see what happens when President-elect Donald Trump’s hyperbole meets reality.

The former and future president made a lot of big promises during his campaign, from blanket tariffs to mass deportations to budget cuts. Luckily, he broke half his campaign promises during his first term, PolitiFact reported.

For the good of the economy and Texas, here are five promises he needs to forget he ever made.

Blanket tariffs: Global trade is the bedrock of the U.S. economy, with consumers purchasing cheap foreign goods and turning foreign raw materials into high-value products. Trump’s track record proves that tariffs are a tax on American consumers and are not paid by foreign nations or corporations.

“The Trump administration imposed nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans by levying tariffs on thousands of products valued at approximately $380 billion in 2018 and 2019, amounting to one of the largest tax increases in decades,” the conservative Tax Foundation said.

Trump’s most constrained new tariff proposal would cost American consumers and companies another $524 billion annually, shrink the economy by at least 0.8% and wipe out 684,000 jobs, the foundation calculated. That does not include Trump’s most recent promise to impose 100% tariffs on our largest trading partner, Mexico.

Mass deportations: The U.S. construction and hospitality industries are entirely dependent on undocumented immigrants. Deporting millions of these workers would drive housing costs nationwide through the roof and shutter restaurants and hotels.

If Trump only managed to deport 1.3 million workers by 2028, he would shrink the economy by 1.2%, the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics calculated. If he were wildly successful and deported 8.3 million people, Trump would put the United States into a depression, decreasing economic activity by 7.4%

Inflation Reduction Act repeal: President Joe Biden is proud of his administration’s signature legislation to boost domestic manufacturing and fight climate change. Trump and his ally Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, have promised to roll it back.

The IRA provides hundreds of billions of dollars in credits and grants for renewable energy, clean technology manufacturing, hydrogen development, carbon capture and nuclear power. Federal agencies have awarded $8 billion in grants to Texas alone.

Corporations have invested hundreds of billions more to collect credits and grants. Rolling back the entire act would effectively terminate hundreds of projects creating good jobs nationwide, including Texas projects valued at $8 billion.

Cutting incentives for wind, solar and battery storage, the cheapest methods of new electricity generation, would contradict another of Trump’s promises. Repealing the IRA would prevent him from supplying the “#1 Lowest Cost Energy and Electricity on Earth.”

Affordable Care Act repeal: Trump has never liked Obamacare and promised to replace it with “a concept of a plan” his staff is developing. Congressional Republicans are also excited about rolling back another signature Democratic program.

Obamacare subsidizes health insurance to nearly 30 million Americans, including 2.5 million Texans, most of whom work for employers who do not offer health insurance. The law also protects people with pre-existing conditions and allows parents to keep their kids on the program until they are 26.

Repealing the ACA without a replacement would leave most enrollees without health insurance. Those people would visit health care providers less often, possibly costing the industry 1.2 million jobs, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calculated.

Private insurers would also increase premiums because more people would rely on free emergency care, forcing hospitals to charge insured people more to make up for the uninsured.

Drastic budget cuts: The president-elect has always promised lower taxes and less government spending. His 2017 tax bill slashed taxes for corporations and the very wealthy, but he failed to cut the budget. Instead, he added $1 trillion to the federal deficit.

Trump’s proposed tax cuts would add $5.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to the Wharton School. He has promised to cut government spending by $1 trillion yearly, while Musk has pledged to find $2 trillion, but they don’t say from what programs.

Trump seems to have forgotten that government spending buys goods and services from companies. Taking that much money away from those businesses will slow the economy.

Even a Republican-controlled Congress will likely block Trump’s most costly promises. Lobbyists will still wield a lot of power on Capitol Hill, and no member wants to explain why investments in their district were canceled.

However, Trump can implement the most dramatic and damaging policies on his own, especially tariffs and immigration enforcement. Hopefully, Trump will surround himself with people who will find ways to break his promises.

Categories Economy, Elections, Immigration, Trump

Why Are So Few Employers Using a Federal Program to ID Undocumented Immigrants

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
18

Yes, there is a federal program to verify the legal status of immigrants. It’s fast and efficient but most employers don’t use it. Why? They need laborers, and they don’t care about their legal status.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

  • A long-standing computer-based federal program called E-Verify makes it easy for prospective employers to spot and reject unauthorized immigrants seeking jobs.
  • Yet, in California, only about 16% of employer establishments are enrolled in E-Verify, even lower than the overall national figure of 27%, according to a Times analysis of federal data.
  • The program’s low use reflects the reality that many businesses — and the broader economy — have come to rely on undocumented immigrants. 

WASHINGTON — For all of Donald Trump’s railing against immigrants and Democrats’ insistence on creating a better pathway to citizenship, one thing almost no one ever talks about is a computer-based federal program that makes it easy for prospective employers to spot and reject unauthorized immigrants seeking jobs.

The program, known as E-Verify, is highly reliable and involves relatively little red tape. If fully utilized, many experts say, it could significantly curb the flow of undocumented immigrants by effectively removing one of the biggest reasons so many come to the United States illegally to begin with — getting a job.
Yet even though E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours, the program is significantly underused.

Nationally the program is voluntary, except for certain businesses such as federal contractors. Most states don’t require employers to use it. In California, only about 16% of employer establishments are enrolled in E-Verify, even lower than the overall national figure of 27 %, according to a Times analysis of data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Its low use reflects the underlying reality that many businesses — and the broader economy — have come to rely on undocumented immigrants. And in many ways, it’s both symptomatic and an outcome of what both major political parties acknowledge is a “broken immigration system,” in which unauthorized employment has become an intractable condition that employers, consumers and politicians have lived with for years.

Employers face few sanctions for hiring undocumented workers. And the odds of getting inspected are even less than a taxpayer’s likelihood of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.

Even during the Trump administration, which stepped up enforcement and publicized a few raids, such as the 2018 sweep of 7-Eleven stores in L.A. and other cities, federal agents closed 6,065 cases of unauthorized employment and labor exploitation nationwide in 2019, its peak year, involving fewer than 31,000 undocumented workers, according to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), with Republican colleagues including Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Trump’s running mate, in June introduced a bill to make E-Verify mandatory across the country. But similar efforts in the past have repeatedly failed to win enough bipartisan support.

And one key reason: There are simply not enough “legal” workers to fill all the jobs a healthy, growing U.S. economy generates. And that’s especially so in low-wage industries.

Employers say that requiring E-Verify — without other overhauls to the immigration system, including easier ways to bring in workers — would be devastating.

“I think you would see a general overall collapse in California agriculture and food prices going through the roof if we didn’t have them do the work,” said Don Cameron, general manager at Terranova Ranch, which produces a variety of crops on 9,000 acres in Fresno County.

At least half of the 900,000 farmworkers in California are thought to be undocumented, even higher than what national surveys suggest, says Daniel Sumner, an agricultural economist at UC Davis. Neither Cameron nor most anyone else in California farms, among other sectors, is in favor of mandatory E-Verify.

Even in red states, which are more prone to require and use the program, E-Verify isn’t exactly widely popular in immigrant-heavy states. While Georgia’s participation rate is among the highest, at about 85%, only about 30% of employer establishments in Texas had signed up for it as of last year.

‘The status quo makes business sense’
And enrollment was even lower in Florida, although the state last year made E-Verify mandatory for employers with more than 25 workers, sparking an immediate backlash from some businessess.

“If the documents [presented by a prospective worker] look good on their face, it’s good enough for them because they’re desperate for labor,” said Chris Thomas, a Denver-based attorney who has counseled scores of companies facing government investigations of their immigration practices.

“It’s a wink and a nod,” he said. “ The status quo makes business sense. ”

It’s not simply a matter of not having enough workers to do the hard, often dead-end and low-wage jobs that most U.S. citizens don’t want to do. It’s the shortage of workers overall, experts say.

For decades, birth rates in the U.S. have been declining, as they have in most of the economically developed world. Today, the birth rate among American women of childbearing age has dropped below the level needed to meet the country’s replacement rate. California’s birth rate is at its lowest in a century.

If the economy is to grow and prosper, as almost all Americans say they want it to, additional workers must come from somewhere else.
“It’s not in our macroeconomic interest to prevent unauthorized immigrants from working, because the U.S. population is aging,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Because we haven’t had immigration reform to allow in more immigrants legally, people are just coming anyway, and they come in bigger and smaller numbers as our economy demands them.”

David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, a conservative think tank, says there’s some evidence that large-scale immigration has kept the country out of recession and increased tax revenues, contrary to what Vance has said about undocumented immigrants draining Social Security funds. Most economists agree that new arrivals have been crucial in sustaining high employment by filling many job openings in recent years.

Immigrants, for example, many of them undocumented, make up 40% of California’s home healthcare and child day-care employment, according to The Times’ calculations of Census Bureau data. That, in turn, helps other moms to stay in the labor force.

“The whole idea that these workers are bad for native-born workers — there’s not much evidence for that,” Bier said.

Bottom line: Congress must act to pass a reorganization of our immigration laws so that all immigrants enter legally.

Categories California, Economy, Immigration

Michael Hiltzik: Comparing the Budget Plans of Harris and Trump

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2024 //
6

Michael Hiltzik, the business columnist of the Los Angeles Times, read a recent report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The report said that Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion to the federal debt and Trump’s would add $7.5 trillion. I certainly don’t have the expertise to analyze these numbers, but Hiltzik does. That’s what this column is about. He explains why Trump’s policies would “crater the economy.”

He writes:

If you are wired into the flow of campaign news — as I am, for my sins — you will be inundated this week with reports of a new analysis of the fiscal impact of the economic proposals of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Long story short: Trump’s would be much worse in terms of increasing the federal debt than Harris’. According to the study issued Monday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Harris’ policies would expand the debt by $3.5 trillion over 10 years, Trump’s by $7.5 trillion.
These are eye-catching figures, to be sure. They’re also completely worthless for assessing the true economic effects of the candidates’ proposals, for several reasons.

One is the committee’s single-minded — indeed, simple-minded — focus on the direct effects of the proposals on the federal deficit and national debt. That’s not surprising, because (as I’ve reported in the past) the CRFB was created to be a deficit scold, funded by the late hedge fund billionaire Peter G. “Pete” Peterson.

For instance, the CRFB has been a consistent voice, as was Peterson, in campaigns to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits on the preposterous grounds that the U.S., the richest country on Earth, can’t afford the expense. (Peterson’s foundation still provides a significant portion of the committee’s budget.)

This focus on the national debt and the federal deficit as a linchpin of economic policy dates back to the 1940s among Republicans and the 1970s among Democrats. Throughout that period it made policymaking more austere and left the country without the resources to address real economic needs such as poverty while increasing inequality.

The harvest, as economist Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley has noted, was the rise of a policy that failed everyone but the rich. Trump would continue that policy; Harris would continue the Biden administration’s effort to return the U.S. to a government that serves all the people.

The worst shortcoming of the CRFB’s analysis is that it’s hopelessly narrow. Its focus is on the first-order effects of the individual proposals on federal income and spending, without paying much attention to the dynamic economic effects of those policies. Would the policy spur more growth over time, or less?

Another problem with the analysis is that the candidates’ proposals are inchoate — as the committee acknowledges. The committee cobbled together their purported platforms from written policy statements, social media posts and dubious other sources and then absurdly claimed that its effort helped to “clarify [the] policy details.”

The committee estimates the direct cost of Harris’ proposal to extend and increase the health insurance subsidies created by the Affordable Care Act and improved by the Biden administration at $350 billion to $600 billion over 10 years; but what would be the gains in gross domestic product from reducing the cost of healthcare for the average household?

The committee barely even acknowledges that this is a salient issue. It says that in some of its estimates it accounts for “dynamic feedback effects on revenue and spending,” but also says, “we do not account for possible changes in GDP resulting from the candidates’ policies.”

The committee’s treatment of Trump’s tariff proposals demonstrate the vacuum at the heart of its analysis. It treats the income from Trump’s proposal — a 10% to 20% tariff on most imported goods and 60% on Chinese imports — as a revenue gain for the federal budget. Economists are all but unanimous in regarding tariffs as a tax on American consumers, however — in other words, a tax transferring household income to the Treasury.

The committee writes: “Such a significant change to trade policy could have economic and geopolitical repercussions that go beyond what a standard tax model would estimate.” As a result, “the true economic impact is hard to predict.” Thanks for nothing.

Uncertainties about the details of the candidates’ proposals resulted in laughably wide ranges in the committee’s fiscal estimates. The effect on the deficit and debt of Harris’ proposals is estimated at zero to $8.1 trillion over 10 years. For Trump’s plans, the range is $1.45 trillion to $15.15 trillion. What are voters or policymakers supposed to do with those figures?

The CRFB also reports a “central” estimate for both — $3.5-trillion expansion of debt for Harris, $7.5 trillion for Trump — but doesn’t say much about how it arrived at those figures, other than to say that sometimes it just split the difference between the high and low estimates, and sometimes relied on estimates of the individual proposals by the Congressional Budget Office and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

I asked the CRFB to comment on the shortcomings listed above, but haven’t received a response.

Despite all that, the CRFB analysis showed up on the morning web pages of major newspapers and other media coast to coast on Monday, as though its conclusions were credible, solid and bankable. (Here at The Times, we passed.)

Consider the CRFB’s treatment of Trump’s deportation policy, which he has called the “largest deportation program in American history,” affecting at least 11 million undocumented immigrants and millions more who are in the U.S. legally.

The committee says that might increase the deficit by anywhere from zero to $1 trillion over a decade, with a middle-of-the-road estimate of $350 billion — “chiefly,” it said, “by reducing the number of people paying federal taxes.” It also cites unspecified “additional economic effects of immigration.”

The CRFB might have profited from reading an analysis of the deportation proposal produced in March by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which was also funded by Pete Peterson but, staffed by economic eggheads with a wider intellectual horizon, tends to take a more intelligent approach to economic policy.

“The immigrants being targeted for removal are the lifeblood of several parts of the US economy,” the institute observed. “Their deportation will … prompt US business owners to cut back or start fewer new businesses, … while scaling back production to reflect the loss of consumers for their goods.”

The institute cited estimates that a deportation program in effect from 2008 to 2014 cost the jobs of 88,000 U.S. native workers for every 1 million unauthorized immigrant workers deported. Arithmetic tells us that, in those terms, deporting 11 million immigrants would cost the jobs of about 968,000 U.S. natives.

“The disappearance of migrant workers … dries up local demand at grocery stores, leasing offices, and other nontraded services,” the institute reported. “The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.”

The institute was a lot more free-spoken than the CRFB about the effect of Trump’s proposed policies on economic growth. Considering only the deportations, tariffs and Trump’s desire to exercise more control over the Federal Reserve System, it concluded that by the end of Trump’s term, U.S. GDP would be as much as 9.7% lower than otherwise, employment would fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4 percentage points.


An overly sedulous focus on deficit reduction as economic policy has caused “real harm [for] the nation’s most vulnerable groups, including millions of debt-saddled and downwardly mobile Americans,” economic historian David Stein of the Roosevelt Institute and UC Santa Barbara wrote last month. When it became Democratic orthodoxy under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the party pivoted to “‘Reagan Democrats’ and suburban white voters at the expense of the labor and civil rights movements.”

As the federal government pulled back, “state budgets were ravaged,” Stein wrote. State and local services were slashed. The efforts to control federal debt forced households to take on more debt.

The deficit scolds are still at it and still have vastly more credibility than they deserve. That’s clear from the CRFB’s analysis and the alacrity with which it was republished as “news” Monday. Efforts to turn policy back to the point that it benefits everyone, not just the rich, still have a long way to go in this country.

Categories Economy, Elections, Harris, Kamala, Trump
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