Hispanic Fanatic

It would be immediate golden age.

OK now there’s going to be a recession, but that was the plan all along.

The stock market was set to soar to new heights.

OK, now it’s tanking, but don’t worry because Trump is playing 4-D chess with the market.

Inflation was going to drop.

OK now it’s accelerating, but the president couldn’t care less if you pay more for basic goods and services.

If you are a rational person, you might think back to Trump’s promises to make every American instantly wealthier on day one of his administration, and contrast it with the reality of just three months later, when recession signs are flashing, Americans’ expectations for the economy are at their lowest level since the end of the Great Recession, and financial experts say our nation’s fiscal strength is “on course for continued decline.”

But if you are a MAGA supporter, you see the best of all possible worlds.

For hardcore Trump fans, it doesn’t matter that “almost everything the administration and congressional Republicans are doing to the economy is making a collapse more likely.” It is irrelevant that Trump’s policies “have shaken a once-solid economic outlook.” And it is an insignificant detail that the GOP wants to fling America back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s, which was a great time for the rich but a horror show for everybody else.

You see, Trump’s followers have a history of not just moving the goalposts, but tearing the goalposts down, leaving the stadium, and passing out drunk in the parking lot while denying anybody was ever trying to kick a field goal in the first place.

Back in November, virtually nobody voted for a complete government overhaul that would be orchestrated by an unelected, unvetted, unaccountable billionaire. Republicans never said this was even remotely part of the plan, much less the whole objective. Many people claimed their vote for Trump was because of fucking egg prices.

But now, a lot of those same voters are cheering on oligarchs who are “effectively gaining control of the U.S. government” and threatening to end Social Security. They have rationalized their horrible decisions.

The economic outlook has gotten so bleak that a brand-new conspiracy theory — we can never get enough of those — has erupted to explain why Trump is screwing over the very people who voted for him. 

It’s a QAnon for tariffs, and it attempts to explain Trump’s “incoherent, inconsistent, self-destructive mess” and transform it into “a carefully orchestrated master plan to revive American manufacturing, reduce the national debt, reconfigure the international-alliance system, and deliver the greatest geopolitical deal of the century.”

In truth, the theory is so preposterous that it is “less a genuine plan than a way for Trump’s backers to put a strategic spin on the president’s inchoate impulses.”

This conspiracy theory has “somewhat implausibly gained adherents, if cautious ones, in respectable quarters” because of “the intense demand for some kind of coherent rationale” that covers Trump’s bizarre, self-destructive actions.

His followers can’t accept the fact that a belligerent man-child has taken over the Oval Office (again) and has no idea what he is doing.

The need to justify Trump’s nonsensical policies is evident in the fact that congressional Republicans recently passed a measure saying, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” as a legislative maneuver to help the buffoonish chief executive out of a legal quandary. But the GOP’s insistence that “a day is not a day seems to prove the truth of Burke’s observation that by trying to force reality to fit their ideology, radical ideologues will end up imposing tyranny in the name of liberty.”

Again, there are no goalposts here. And there never were.

Listen, I know you’re feeling nervous about the economy sinking faster than an anvil thrown into a black hole. Hey, even people who mere months ago were saying, “Get over it” are now screeching for salvation from the economic tsunami towering over us. And those people are billionaires — most of whom are apparently not very smart.

In any case, this should make you feel better: the president doesn’t give a fuck about you or the economy.

OK, maybe that’s not very comforting, but it is the truth.

You see, Trump has been “insulated from the consequences of his own actions his entire life and appears to care very little about the economic sinkhole he just created.”

In fact, the guy is more defiant than ever. And because there is no master plan, and no real desire to improve the lives of Americans, this bloated and rambling lunatic will continue to lead the nation down a path of chaos and despair until we hit Great Depression levels, at which point he will declare victory.

That’s what he did when he paused his idiotic tariffs for 90 days that will no doubt be filled with apprehension, dread, and confusion. But the damage has already been done.

In the interim, economists and financial experts will debate if the Trump tariffs are “the dumbest economic policy in modern history,” or merely a harbinger of recession. 

One can’t keep up with all the rationales the Trump administration has given for their arbitrary and mathematically challenged policy. But what the justifications have in common is that they are, at best, the kind of conservative magical thinking that got us the Iraq War and an imaginary wall on the border that Mexico paid for.

At worst, they are the active mechanization of oligarchs and madmen who want to burn the country down and reduce us all to serfs.

Somewhere in between is the most likely scenario, at least from Trump’s perspective, which is that he said he was going to do this, and now he is doing it, no matter the consequences to anyone else. In 90 days, or less, we will likely go through all this needless suffering again.

The bizarre and random nature of the tariffs have led some politicians to claim the Trump administration “is the most sloppy, unprofessional, arrogant, and stupid group of people ever assembled in government.” They are saying Americans “haven’t learned yet how to battle this stupidity, [and] the country and the world is suffering from the whims of a madman.”

By the way, those are the words of Republicans.

It’s that clear to everybody. 

The tariffs are “a torrent of nonsense that threatens to destroy the very thing Trump insists on saving,” which brings up the disturbing realization that “if this is what it looks like when Trump decides he wants to save the economy, God help us if he ever decides to destroy it.”

It’s like they always say — never trust a narcissistic sociopath with 32 felonies and a half-dozen bankruptcies.

Well, maybe they didn’t say it before, but they are most certainly saying it now.

Too bad it’s far too late.

So it appears that we are doomed.

Maybe it won’t be the collapse of civilization (although that is a charming possibility). But at the very least, America is headed for a financial cataclysm.

Is this because Trump insists on pushing through tariffs that are virtually guaranteed to tank the economy, for no discernable reason other than “because I said so”?

Yeah, that’s one factor.

Another issue is that this administration appears to be staffed solely by incompetents, lunatics, dullards, and stooges. 

Also, an egomaniacal oligarch and his fellow billionaires are raping the government so they can add another zero at the end of their net-worth calculations.

All of that is true, and the horrific combination is enough to tilt us toward economic Armageddon.

But there is another reason why America will likely be scrounging for pennies and begging for spare change soon. And that is because Republicans are in charge.

Oh sure, you are saying, once more I’m lambasting the GOP and shrieking that they will lead us into ruin. 

Actually, I’m not saying that. Historians, economists, and scientists are saying that.

You see, a recent Harvard study analyzed decades of America’s economic performance and assessed the odds of financial outcomes being based on random chance or political choices.

For example, it is a fact that the last five recessions all started under a Republican president. The researchers put the odds of getting that outcome by chance at about 3%. 

Let’s keep going. The researchers point out that “a remarkable 9 of the last 10 recessions have started when a Republican was president, [and] odds that this outcome would have occurred just by chance are 0.0098%.”

But wait — it gets crazier. Ten times since World War II, an incumbent from one party handed over the White House to a leader from the other party. In five of the last 10 transitions, a Republican followed a Democrat, and each time the economic growth rate went down. In the other five transitions, a Democrat followed a Republican, and each time the economic growth rate went up. As the researchers point out, this means, “No exceptions. Ten out of ten.” 

So when people talk about a Republican inheriting a good economy, messing it up, and then having a Democrat come in to clean up the disaster? Yeah, that’s a real thing. It has literally happened 10 times in a row over the last 80 years.

Again, what are the odds of this happening by chance? The answer is the same odds of flipping heads on 10 coin tosses in a row, which is one out of 1,024. The researchers say the “difference is statistically significant at the 99.9% level.”

What does it say about a political party that is consistently, overwhelmingly wrong on economic policy? What does it say about Americans who continue to vote for that party, generation after generation?

The answers are both disturbing and illuminating. And they likely explain why our country is the richest in the world by many measures, and yet our citizens are far poorer, stressed, and more miserable than just about any other industrialized nation.

So why does the GOP suck so bad at economic policy?

Well, other researchers have theorized that a main reason for this discrepancy is because Democrats, when faced with a financial crisis, will focus more on objective facts and try different approaches to resolve it. Republicans, on the other hand, have exactly one answer for everything: tax cuts for the rich. This is not an exaggeration. Witness the current GOP, which is desperately trying to figure out how to slash Medicaid or Social Security for the express purpose of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which benefitted only the wealthy and did not prevent America from sliding into economic chaos. 

Throwing money at billionaires and hoping for the best is the GOP’s only method for boosting the economy, getting out of a recession, and presumably, treating frostbite and losing those last pesky 10 pounds.

This philosophy persists despite mountains of evidence that supply-side economics doesn’t work.

If we think of the economy as an automobile, and the political parties as mechanics, it’s as if the GOP’s fix is to attach square wheels to the car. And they will do this whether the car suffers from a busted engine, a cracked windshield, or an oil leak. It will be square wheels, every time.

The Democratic mechanic, in contrast, will diagnose the issue and try to repair the problem. And they will take the square wheels off the fucking car. And the car will run fine until four years later, when the car’s owner (the American people) will insist that the previous mechanic was better.

We are now entering our latest square-wheel era.

Economic anxiety sure justifies a fuck of a lot, doesn’t it?

According to exit polls, the chief reason we have a convicted felon for president is because so many Americans were tense about their grocery bills, rent payments, and cost of gas.

The economy is booming, but many of our fellow citizens think the Trump era was better. This is incorrect, and it’s also a bizarre form of nostalgia mixed with repression (i.e., “that pandemic never happened!”).

However, it is undeniable that many Americans are struggling. Of course, the main cause of that is a wealth gap so massive that it boggles the mind. It’s ironic that people are finally catching on to the fact that the uber-rich are the only ones who have benefitted from the wealth redistribution that started under Reagan, but their solution is to vote for the guys who want to exacerbate that inequality even further.

Yes, the day after Trump won the election, “the wealth of the world’s 10 richest people soared by a record amount.” In less than 24 hours. these oligarchs became “a record $64 billion richer from Trump’s reelection.”

I’m sure that is a source of great comfort to those voters who complained that they can’t cover their underwater mortgage. Speaking of which, what will happen to those people who sold out their principles for the promise of cheaper gas? How will they react when prices do not go down, but skyrocket (which will happen if Republicans implement their hairbrained economic policies)?

You see, the Trump has “no policy plan for cheaper gas or cheaper eggs.” His goal “is to let an unelected Elon Musk run roughshod over the government, along with every other crazy radical Project 2025 right-wing fever dream, all while Trump pursues his own personal grievances.”

Of course, the economy will likely hum along for another year, maybe two, during which Trump will take credit for the second straight good economy that he has inherited from a Democratic president. Then all bets are off.

And all those voters who bemoaned the high cost of eggs will be forced to answer the question of whether they even like eggs all that much, or if they just wanted a white guy who would promise them the world, rather than a black woman who had an annoying cackle.

Indeed, progressives have “received a slew of messages gloating that Trump had won the election and that Republican voters had owned the libs,” but for those of us attuned to history, we cannot help but think of earlier eras “when ordinary white men sold generations of economic aspirations for white supremacy and bragging rights.” 

It’s disturbing, so unsightly, to discover how easily Americans are bought off.

And soon, they will discover that they have made a truly horrendous deal. There will be no lower prices or inexpensive goods or affordable housing.

There will be “a tax cut for the richest 5 percent of Americans and a tax increase for all other income groups.” And there will be the sound of billionaires lighting hundred-dollar bills and laughing, laughing, laughing.

As we all know, no institution is more radically progressive, left-wing, and woke than Moody’s Analytics. Sure, they conduct objective analyses and offer insights to businesses about financial risks, but the facts have a well-known liberal agenda, and helping major corporations navigate issues is just the kind of thing that a lefty would do.

Yes, I’m spewing nonsense, but I’m trying to help our Republican friends figure out how to denigrate and dismiss the latest report from a respected, conservative institution that their presidential nominee’s economic policies are idiotic beyond restoration.

You see, Moody’s Analytics recently compared the economic promises of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The study concluded that “a second Biden presidency would see cooling inflation and continued economic growth [while] a Trump presidency would be an economic disaster.”

How can this be? Polls show that more Americans trust Trump on economic policy, and a majority view the Trump years as successful. Well, on the first point, Republicans have never (as in never never never) been better at handling the economy than Democrats. And on the second point, Trump left office with the economy in a crater and fewer jobs than he started with. So maybe Americans don’t know what they’re talking about on this topic.

According to Moody’s Analytics, the convicted felon who fronts the GOP has promised to slash taxes on the wealthy, increase tariffs across the board, and deport 11 million immigrant workers. These policies would trigger a recession by mid-2025, increase the costs of consumer goods, boost inflation, eliminate over 3 million jobs, increase the unemployment rate, and add trillions to the national debt.

What’s not to love about that?

The chief economist of Moody’s Analytics said, rather plainly, that “Biden’s policies are better for the economy.”  

I told you they were left wing.

But if you still want to dismiss this report as liberal fear-mongering, consider that studies show that Trump “continues to suffer from the lowest level of corporate support in the history of the Republican Party,” despite the fact that an estimated 60 to 70 percent of chief executives are registered Republicans. It’s almost like these guys, who live for tax cuts and prize the bottom line over everything, are recognizing that enacting the half-baked notions of an addled criminal with multiple bankruptcies is a little disconcerting for business.

According to the historian Heather Richardson, the GOP is made up of “MAGA extremists and junior varsity opportunists” who are waving “red flags to business leaders.”

To be clear, these fat-cat execs don’t give a damn about wealth inequality, the rights of ethnic minorities, or democracy. But they do care about money. And if even these guys are shouting, “Don’t vote for this lunatic or the economy will collapse,” maybe we should pay attention.

Oh, and sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists have signed a joint letter stating that “Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s” and that GOP proposals are “fiscally irresponsible.”

 But none of those guys are stable geniuses, are they?

Giving your political goals a catchy nickname doesn’t always work.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society wasn’t so great.

The GOP’s Contract with America didn’t accomplish much (beyond getting Republicans elected, of course).

And Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Plan was briefly hailed “as the most transformational social spending package in modern American history [but] is now nothing more than an ambitious memory.”

Yes, Americans have decided that they don’t want the government to build back anything, because that smacks of, you know, socialism. So instead of actually solving problems or investing in the country, we will continue to hurl tax dollars at billionaires and hope that they treat us nice.

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So the pandemic is finally ending, and all of us are ready to return to the office. Well, by “all of us” I mean White guys, and let’s face it, they’re the only ones who get a vote, right?

You see, recent surveys have shown that most corporate executives—still predominately White men—want to end all this touchy-feely flexibility and 21^st-century telecommuting nonsense. They want to get back into their cushy offices where they can survey their kingdom of cubicle serfs and more effectively terrorize their employees. In fact, “executives are nearly three times more likely than non-executive employees to want to return to the office full-time.”

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If you are conservative, you believe that this nation is the greatest country in the world, largely because its citizens have an unbeatable work ethic and strive feverishly to achieve the American Dream. 

Also, you believe that Americans are lazy bastards who must be whipped unceasingly just to get them off the damn couch.

And there is nothing contradictory about that. Nope.

In any case, you have no doubt heard about the worker shortage afflicting American businesses. As the country lurches out of the latest recession to occur under a Republican president, companies across the nation have had trouble filling vacant positions.

According to conservatives, this is because the federal government has made unemployment so majorly awesome. As many economists have pointed out, however, there is little evidence that “generous” unemployment benefits are causing American workers to sit around getting high all day rather than look for work.

There is, however, ample evidence that the continuing issues of the pandemic — childcare coverage, lingering health issues, and so on — have combined with a worker awakening that is long overdue. Many people are just now starting to ask why they have to toil in a shit job for shit pay, all because it’s the American Way. 

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Recently, the economist Mark Blyth made a disturbing point about the American financial system. I’m paraphrasing here, and to really do it justice you have to imagine the following in Blyth’s thick Scottish burr. But here goes:

Imagine that you’re at a wedding reception. You see a guest get really drunk and grab the bride’s ass. Then he punches the groom in the face. Then he takes a shit in the middle of the dance floor. You find out that this drunk guy is the wedding planner. Would you then turn to your fiancée and insist, “We need to hire that guy for our wedding”?

Well, as Blyth points out, that’s exactly what we did in 2008.

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You use just 10% of your brain.

Chameleons change color to match their surroundings.

The Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible from space.

These are all well-established, commonly known “facts” that are, alas, completely wrong. To this list of misconceptions, untruths, and erroneous assertions, we must add another whooper.

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