Donald Trum and maga Republicans like Senator Susan Collins support chaotic Iranian war and Americans pay the cost

Does anyone in America know what Donald Trump is doing in the Strait of Hormuz? Does Trump himself know❓

Reported in The Hill and Yahoo News by Max Burns

So Chief.....has Iran surrendered yet❓

On Sunday, he boldly announced “Project Freedom,” his scheme to escort commercial ships through the shuttered strait. He then swiftly reversed course just two days later, declaring that the strait would remain closed, even as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was selling Project Freedom to the press. 

While Hegseth touted a plan that no longer existed, Trump again changed his timeline for ending his increasingly unpopular war in Iran.

Trump’s impulsive and contradictory actions in Iran have confounded his generals, his Cabinet and the public since the war began 10 weeks ago. Trump is now so bogged down that he is confounding himself, too. It is time for Congress to exert some constitutional authority and wrap this debacle up before regular

Americans endure even more financial suffering.

Trump has clearly lost the plot of what has become a staggeringly expensive conflict without any clear strategic goal. In fact, the only measurable result of Trump’s Iran strikes has been a spike in the cost of gasoline by more than 50 percent since March. The cost of jet fuel rose so much so quickly that Spirit Airlines had no choice but to declare bankruptcy and liquidate 17,000 previously well-paying American jobs.

Great Depression bread lines😓😔😒😠😟

“For the first time in my life, I have no idea how to face what comes next,” former Spirit Airlines employee Jorge Luis Camacho lamented in a GoFundMe fundraiser, posted shortly after the company shuttered. “Bills have to be paid, and financially, I have nothing.”

Camacho and his former Spirit coworkers will have a hard time finding new work in an economy battered by the Iran war. A Goldman Sachs report published in March estimated that Trump’s war is costing the U.S. economy more than 10,000 jobs each month, with losses concentrated in the leisure and hospitality industries, retail and manufacturing. The economic uncertainty wrought by Trump’s war is now the most potent job-killer in the country.

Indeed, the Iran War may well be remembered for little else besides the rolling job losses and financial hardship it inflicted on working-class Americans who were already grappling with rising consumer prices. Bank of America reports that credit card spending has surged roughly 4.3 percent in March, the most in more than three years, as consumers pile on debt to pay for basic necessities like gasoline. Unsurprisingly, consumer confidence has collapsed to the lowest level ever recorded as most Americans prepare for the worst.

Then there’s the day-to-day expense of running a war without end. The conflict has drained more than $72 billion in taxpayer funds at a time when Republican leaders say there simply isn’t any cash available to extend healthcare subsidies for the 22 million Americans facing skyrocketing premiums. And that’s before Trump heads to Capitol Hill with hat in hand to ask for $80 billion to $100 billion more in war funding.

At some point, enough has to be enough, even for the spineless MAGA gophers currently clogging up the Congress.

It appears at least a few Republicans are beginning to realize how economically (and politically) disastrous Trump’s war is shaping up to be. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) recently pushed for a War Powers Act vote in the Senate; her moment of courage was dampened by Republican leader John Thune flatly ignoring the request. That hasn’t stopped Murkowski from building support for the vote from Republicans including Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), John Curtis (R-Utah) and Todd Young (R-Ind.).

If Murkowski and her colleagues are trying their best to steer their party away from an electoral disaster, they’ll still likely run headlong into House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) absolute resistance to anything that could be viewed as Trump criticism (But, wait❗ What happened to Johnson's pledge to govern according to the Bible❓) . Johnson has so far resisted calls to rein in Trump’s war powers, even as the most recent Ipsos poll found a growing majority of Americans souring on the war.

Republicans are currently caught in the trap of defending a war their own leader doesn’t seem to understand — and just like Hegseth this week, they increasingly finding themselves defending policies, only to discover that Trump has already abandoned them and reversed course.

Who is on first❓

Trump tariffs will make everyone poorer. Make America "grieve" again! "Brother can you spare a dime?"

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Justin Wolfers:

Dr. Wolfers is a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.

Trump tariffs will hurt. A lot. By my calculations, this round of tariffs may be 50 times as painful as the ones Donald Trump instituted in his first term. That means they are going to reshape your life in much more fundamental ways.

To illustrate how, let’s look at a prosaic example: your washing machine. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s relatively modest tariffs caused washing machine prices to rise by nearly $100. As a result, many families elected to stick with their aging machines longer than they otherwise would have. But that choice incurred a new set of costs: late-night thuds from unbalanced loads, wads of scrunched cloth still dripping wet after a cycle and higher energy and water bills.

In other words, the total cost of a tariff isn’t just what comes out of your checking account. The time you spend to rearrange the stuff in your washer is a cost. The time you spend wringing out sopping wet T-shirts is a cost. Tariffs are costly not just because they raise prices but because they force you to make different decisions that will extract a different kind of cost from you over time.

Small tariffs create small problems. Big tariffs create huge ones. Take Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles, which is expected to raise their prices by roughly $4,000. Many families, like mine, will probably decide not to buy a second car. That creates far bigger problems than an aging washer. Now, we’re constantly juggling how to get our kids to all their activities, and ourselves to work, with only one set of wheels.

And it’s not just cars. These are across-the-board tariffs, so they will distort virtually every purchase you make. In each case you’ll have to stop your baked-in calculations, recalibrate and find a way to make do — perhaps substituting frozen vegetables for fresh vegetables, a less effective medication for a higher-priced import, or corn syrup for sugar. And in each case, you’re worse off.

By the way, tariffs don’t distort just your buying decisions; they also distort what businesses make. Just as tariffs lead you to buy less desirable alternatives, they lead businesses to channel labor and capital into less desirable — that is, less productive — activities.

The tariffs announced on Wednesday are roughly 10 times as high as those of most other industrialized countries, and higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs (of Great Depression fame).

Trump’s latest tariffs will lead folks to rethink not only whether to replace their washing machines — as they did in 2018 — but also their dryers, refrigerators, stoves, groceries, clothes, cars and even everyday essentials.

By the way, tariffs don’t distort just your buying decisions; they also distort what businesses make. Just as tariffs lead you to buy less desirable alternatives, they lead businesses to channel labor and capital into less desirable — that is, less productive — activities.

The tariffs announced on Wednesday are roughly 10 times as high as those of most other industrialized countries, and higher than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariffs (of Great Depression fame).

Trump’s latest tariffs will lead folks to rethink not only whether to replace their washing machines — as they did in 2018 — but also heir dryers, refrigerators, stoves, groceries, clothes, cars and even everyday essentials. Many of the substitutions we’ll make will be quite painful. If a 1 percent tariff leads you to switch from real guacamole to a pea-based alternative, then you really didn’t care about guac all that much. But if it takes a 20 percent tariff to get you to switch, that’s a sure sign that going without the real thing is a serious hardship.

And so, this is why higher tariffs generate a far greater amount of pain. These forces aren’t independent of each other. They interact. Or in math, they multiply, which means their costs rise in the square of the tariff rate. That leads to some pretty painful arithmetic.

The average tariff rate was about 1.5 percent just before Trump’s election in 2016. He subsequently raised tariffs on steel, aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and many goods from China, but left much of the rest of the economy untouched. All told, by 2019, he roughly doubled the tariff rate, to around 3 percent — and so effectively quadrupled whatever pain the 2016, tariffs were causing. (Yes, two times two is four.)

President Joe Biden kept some of these tariffs, but Trump’s latest round pushes our current rate to around 15 times its 2016, level, and so squaring that, it’s 225 times more painful.

That’s more than 50 times as large as the cost of Trump’s first-term tariff increase.

Perhaps voters pulled the lever for Trump with warm memories of the good economic times. But the reality of his first term is that there was a lot more tariff talk than action. They were barely more than a bump in the road. This time, they’re a mountain. And so the impact will be more like a crash than last time’s comfortable jolt.💢

Brother Can you spare a dime? 

Republicans have lost their way and the future for the once Grand Old Party is doomed

Echo essay opinion published in The Boston Globe by Thomas E. Patterson:

Republicans were in office and were widely blamed when the Great Depression struck in 1929. The Grand Old Party lost the next three presidential elections by wide margins. 

But, it was a related development during the period that ruined the GOP‘s long-term prospects. 

First-time voters backed the Democratic Party by nearly 2 to 1 and stayed loyal to it. Election after election until the late 1960s, their votes carried the Democrats to victory.

In only one period since then have young voters sided heavily with one party in a series of elections. Voters under 30 have backed the Democratic presidential nominee by a 3-to-2 margin over the past four contests. And as they’ve aged, these voters have leaned more heavily Democratic while also turning out to vote in higher numbers. They now include everyone between the ages of 21 and 45 — more than 40 percent of the nation’s adults.

Republicans are sitting on a demographic time bomb of their own making, and it could send them into a tailspin. Although the politics of division that Republicans have pursued since Richard Nixon launched his “Southern strategy” in the late 1960s — a blueprint to shore up the vote of white Southerners by appealing to racial bias — has brought new groups into their ranks, including conservative Southerners, evangelical Christians, and working-class whites, it has antagonized other groups.

Republicans are paying a stiff price for defaming immigrants. If they hadn’t, they could have made inroads with the Latinx population. Although most Latinx have conservative views on issues like abortion and national security, they vote more than 2 to 1 Democratic. A 2019 poll found that 51 percent of Latinx believe that the GOP is “hostile” toward them, with an additional 29 percent believing that the GOP “doesn’t care” about them.

Asian-Americans have also turned away from the GOP. They are America’s fastest-growing ethnic group and have the profile of a Republican bloc. They have the nation’s highest average family income and are twice as likely as other Americans to own a small business. As late as the 1992, presidential campaign, they voted 2 to 1 Republican. Today, they vote more than 2 to 1 Democratic.

Asian-Americans have also turned away from the GOP. They are America’s fastest-growing ethnic group and have the profile of a Republican bloc. They have the nation’s highest average family income and are twice as likely as other Americans to own a small business. As late as the 1992, presidential campaign, they voted 2 to 1 Republican. Today, they vote more than 2 to 1 Democratic.

Without the vote of white evangelical Protestants, the GOP would already be a second-rate party. Eliminate the evangelical vote in the 2016 election and the GOP would have received barely more than 40 percent of the popular vote. Even the GOP’s reputation as a “white” party owes to evangelicals. Non-evangelical whites voted Democratic by a 53-47 percent margin in 2016. Moreover, white evangelicals’ ability to prop up the GOP is declining. America’s fifth wave of religious revival began to wane two decades ago. White evangelicals now constitute a sixth of the population, down from a fourth in the 1990s.

There was no gender gap until the GOP adopted evangelicals’ version of family values, including opposition to abortion. Women are now the Democrats’ largest voting bloc, and their loyalty has increased, reaching record highs in the 2016 and 2018 elections. And Republicans’ embrace of evangelicals’ position on gay rights has alienated the LGBTQ community. They are now second only to Black Americans in their Democratic loyalty. The GOP’s rigid stance on social issues has also eroded its standing with college-educated voters. Once heavily Republican, most of them now side with the Democratic Party.

To assess the threat of demographic change to the GOP, I projected the outcome of future elections based on the US Census Bureau’s population change estimates. The Republican Party faces a dim future, as the groups supporting it shrink in size while those opposing it grow in number. By 2032, Democrats would have a 59-to-41 percent edge based solely on population change.

A maxim of two-party politics is that a party needs to be inclusive — a big tent — to be competitive. Whatever the short-term advantage of the GOP’s politics of division, it is now facing the fallout. Millions of younger adults, women, Blacks, Latinx, Asian Americans, LGBTQ, and the college-educated will be pulling the Democratic lever for years to come.

Author: Thomas E. Patterson is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. This series is adapted from his book “Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?”

Tariff man's incompetent trade policies - inflexible and risky

Donald Trump is Disrupting the U.S. Economy
Essay by Robert Brent Toplin published in History News Network

Robert Brent Toplin is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington and previously was a professor of history at Denison University. He has published several books about history, politics and film.

Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was a failure! But, of course, Donald Trump, himself, is an economic disaster; so, he has zero understanding about the horrible impact of the failed tariffs implemented during the 1930s, the ones that drove people into bread lines.

Donald Trump has been president for only two of the ten years of America’s economic expansion since the Great Recession, but yet he eagerly (and wrongfully!) takes full credit for the nation’s advancement. It has been easy for him to boast because he had the good fortunate to occupy the White House during a mature stage of the recovery. The president’s fans attribute booming markets and low unemployment to his leadership even though Trump’s words and actions at the White House have often broken the economy’s momentum. In recent months, especially, Trump’s interference in business affairs has put U.S. and global progress at risk.

An article that appeared in the New York Times in May 2019 may offer some clues for understanding why Trump has been less than skillful in managing the country’s financial affairs. 

Tax records revealed by the Times show that from 1985 to 1994 Donald Trump lost more than a billion dollars on failed business deals. In some of those years Trump sustained the biggest losses of any American businessman. The Times could not judge Trump’s gains and losses for later years because Trump, unlike all U.S. presidents in recent decades, refuses to release his tax information. Nevertheless, details provided by the Times are relevant to a promise Trump made during in 2016. 

Candidate Trump advertised himself as an extraordinarily successful developer and investor who would do for the country what he had done for himself. Evidence provided by the Times suggests that promise does not inspire confidence.

Trump’s intrusions in economic affairs turned aggressive and clumsy in late 2018. An early sign of the shift came when he demanded $5.7 billion from Congress for construction of a border wall. House Democrats, fresh off impressive election gains, stated clearly that they would not fund the wall. The president reacted angrily, closing sections of the federal government. 

Approximately 800,000 employees took furloughs or worked without pay. Millions of Americans were not able to use important government services. When the lengthy shutdown surpassed all previous records, Trump capitulated. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that Trump’s counterproductive intervention cost the U.S. economy $11 billion.

Trump’s efforts to engage the United States in trade wars produced more costly problems. Trump referred to himself as “Tariff Man,” threatening big levies on Chinese imports. Talk of a trade war spooked the stock markets late in 2018. Investors worried that China would retaliate, inflating consumer prices and risking a global slowdown. Then Trump appeared to back away from confrontations. Stupid Donald Trump aided a market recovery by tweeting, “Deal is moving along very well . . . Big progress being made!”

Donald Trump claimed trade wars are “easy to win,” but the market chaos of recent months suggested they are not. When trade talks deteriorated into threats and counter-threats, counter-punching intensified. In May 2019, China pulled away from negotiations, accusing the Americans of demanding unacceptable changes. Trump responded with demands for new tariffs on Chinese goods. Trump also threatened to raise tariffs against the Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, Mexicans, and others. U.S. and global markets lost four trillion dollars during the battles over trade in May 2019. Wall Street’s decline wiped out the value of all gains American businesses and citizens realized from the huge tax cut of December 2017.

Trump’s confident language about the effectiveness of tariffs conceals their cost. Tariffs create a tax that U.S. businesses and the American people need to pay in one form or another. Tariffs raise the cost of consumer goods. They hurt American farmers and manufacturers through lost sales abroad. They harm the economies of China and other nations, too (giving the U.S. negotiators leverage when demanding fairer trade practices), but the financial hits created by trade wars produce far greater monetary losses than the value of trade concessions that can realistically be achieved currently.

Agreements between trading partners are best secured through carefully studied and well-informed negotiations that consider both the short and long-term costs of conflict. The present “war” is creating turmoil in global markets. It is breaking up manufacturing chains, in which parts that go into automobiles and other products are fabricated in diverse countries. Many economists warn that the move toward protectionism, championed especially by Trump, can precipitate a global recession.

Trump’s approach to trade had unfortunate effects early in the Great Depression. In 1930 the U.S. Congress passed the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that placed tariffs on 20,000 imported goods. America’s trading partners responded with their own levies. Retaliatory actions in the early 1930s put a damper on world trade and intensified the Depression. 

Then, after World War II, U.S. leaders acted on lessons learned. They promoted tariff reduction and “free trade.” Their strategy proved enormously successful. Integrated trade gave nations a stake in each other’s economic development. The new order fostered seventy years of global peace and prosperity. Now, thanks to incompetent leadership with Donald Trump, who acts like he is unaware of this history, the United States is promoting failed policies of the past. 

It is not clear how the current mess will be cleaned up. Perhaps the Chinese will bend under pressure. Maybe Trump will agree to some face-saving measures, accepting cosmetic adjustments in trade policy and then declaring a victory. 

Perhaps Trump will remain inflexible in his demands and drag global markets down to a more dangerous level. Markets may recover, as they did after previous disruptions provoked by the president’s tweets and speeches. Stock markets gained recently when leaders at the Federal Reserve hinted of future rate cuts. It is clear, nevertheless, that battles over tariffs have already created substantial damage.

Pundits have been too generous in their commentaries on the president’s trade wars. Even journalists who question Trump’s actions frequently (wrongly!) soften their critiques by saying the president’s tactics may be justified. American corporations find it difficult to do business in China, they note, and the Chinese often steal intellectual property from U.S. corporations. 

Pundits also speculate that short-term pain from tariff battles might be acceptable if China and nations accept more equitable trade terms. Some journalists are reluctant to deliver sharp public criticism of Trump’s policy. They do not want to undermine U.S. negotiators while trade talks are underway.

American businesses need assistance in trade negotiations, but it is useful to recall that the expansion of global trade fostered an enormous business boom in the United States. For seven decades following World War II many economists and political leaders believed that tariff wars represented bad policy. Rejecting old-fashioned economic nationalism, they promoted freer trade. Their wisdom, drawn from a century of experience with wars, peace and prosperity, did not suddenly become irrelevant after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Unfortunately, when Trump championed trade wars, many Americans, including most leaders in the Republican Party, stood silent or attempted to justify the radical policy shifts.

Since the time Donald Trump was a young real estate developer, he has demonstrated little interest in adjusting beliefs in the light of new evidence. Back in the 1980s, when Japan looked like America’s Number One economic competitor, Donald Trump called for economic nationalism, much like he does today. “America is being ripped off” by unfair Japanese trade practices,” Trump protested in the Eighties. He recommended strong tariffs on Japanese imports. If U.S. leaders had followed Donald Trump’s advice in the Eighties, they would have limited decades of fruitful trade relations between the two countries.

America’s and the world’s current difficulties with trade policy are related, above all, to a single individual’s fundamental misunderstanding of how tariff’s work. Anita Kumar, Politico’s White House Correspondent and Associate Editor identified Trump’s mistaken impressions in an article published May 31, 2019. She wrote, “Trump has said that he thinks tariffs are paid by the U.S.’s trading partners but economists say that Americans are actually paying for them.” Kumar is correct: Americans are, indeed, paying for that tax on imports. This observation about Trump’s misunderstanding is not just the judgment of one journalist. Many commentators have remarked about the president’s confusion regarding who pays for tariffs and how various trading partners suffer from them.

The United States’ economy proved dynamic in the decade since the Great Recession thanks in large part to the dedication and hard work of enterprising Americans. 

But in recent months the American people’s impressive achievements have been undermined by Donald Trump's clumsy interventions. It is high time that leaders in Washington acknowledge the risks associated with the president’s trade wars and demand a more effective policy course. 

Taxes are how Republicans fund their own agendas

A letter to the editor echo opinion published in the Connecticut newspaper New Haven Register: 

Republicans always forget to tell you that taxpayer money was always supposed to be used to make American lives better. 

They do not tell you that our elected officials — especially Republicans — need to make large corporations, insurance companies, big Pharma, their lobbyists, etc., happy with their votes, or said people might not finance their next election. See how nicely he pats you on the head, if sometimes you need assistance from his government? ie: “they strip you of your dignity and dilute your motivation”. All the while telling you that if we would just stop helping you, you will all become outrageously self-sufficient.

Republicans need those taxpayer dollars to keep building battleships, keeping those defense contractors making maximum profits, just as Dick Cheney became rich because of the Iraq war, through Halliburton Industries. They need to cut funding for education, infrastructure, and all the things we need to improve our lives, so they can fulfill the dreams of the lobbyists, to whom they have sold their soul. Just follow the money, folks, and you will end up running into some Republicans, trying to make their rich friends richer.

Democrats, historically, beginning with FDR, have put the people first. Who brought our country out of the Great Depression, after the Gilded Age millionaires took over our economy? They are certainly not all altruistic souls, to be sure, but I’ll bank on them before I will bank on people who can only find Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, health care and education as cost-cutting vehicles. This government was founded: Of the people, for the people, and by the people, as so beautifully noted in Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. 

Let’s vote in progressives, and Democrats and get our country back, people! Enough of their insipid head-patting and shaming those who are often struggling just to keep food on the table, and a roof over their heads.

Patricia Garcia,
New Haven Connecticut