Month: July 2025

Trump is now threatening the Brazilian government with a 50 percent tariff if it doesn’t back off the Bolsonaro prosecution. Lula refused the demand and promised retaliation if the new tariff goes into effect. Should we be surprised?

I predicted this in late May. The problem, of course, is that Trump views himself as the unquestioned boss of the Western Hemisphere, and he won’t tolerate backtalk. Brazil, for its part, is a large country with extensive commercial ties with China; it has options if it loses access to the American market. Look for this situation to escalate quickly into something really ugly. I won’t be shocked if there is serious talk of military action.

For a variety of reasons, including globalization, demographic change, and slow growth, inflation and interest rates were extremely low between 2008 and 2021. The Democrats could consequently contemplate dramatic expansions to the welfare state and corresponding increases in the deficit without worrying much about the bond market.

Times have changed. As a result, any progressive running in 2028 will have to deal in tradeoffs. If the Democrats want to overthrow the dollar store economy in the foreseeable future, they will have to propose large tax increases, and not just for the extremely wealthy, to make their plans credible.

If I had to guess today, I would say that won’t happen. The intellectual battle between the center and the left in 2028 will pit plans for very small changes to the welfare state, accompanied by tax increases solely on plutocrats, against sweeping progressive proposals which dishonestly assume the plutocrats can pay for everything. Tax increases on the middle class will just be too much for the electorate to swallow.

As I’ve noted many times before, Biden’s ambitious plans to defeat the dollar store economy were defeated by inflation, rising interest rates, and a lack of votes in the Senate. The public noticed and was displeased. As a result, Biden couldn’t run on his record, and he couldn’t provide a plausible narrative of change, either. Harris inherited the same problem; in the end, her only persuasive argument was about Trump’s failings. It wasn’t enough.

J.D. Vance purports to be a populist, and may even mean it, but the populist elements of the BBB are only a tiny fraction of the total. Like Harris, he will be stuck running on its results in 2028. Fear of the base will prevent him from putting any distance between himself and Trump. If the public decides the Trump economy is a loser, he will pay the price for it; he will have nowhere else to go.

Elon Musk is threatening to create and finance a third party. In essence, he is proposing to lead the CL faction out of the GOP. There would be plenty of open ideological space for his movement: free trade; entitlement cuts; deregulation; large subsidies for scientific research and emerging technologies, including clean energy; and changes to the immigration system favoring the wealthy and talented. Unlike the GOP, it would focus on creating an economy for the future, not the past. Could it work?

A few observations are pertinent here. First of all, there are very few living and breathing CL voters out there, so any attempt to create a mass movement would undoubtedly fail, no matter how well it was financed, in the absence of a genuine national emergency calling for immediate and drastic action. If Musk actually acts on his threats, he is likely to become even further disillusioned with liberal democracy. Second, the big loser in this would be J.D. Vance, whose political identity is tied in with his ability to bridge the gap between techno-aristocrats and reactionary voters. Finally, the party would at least have an easily recognizable animal symbol. TR had a bull moose; the Musk party would have, well, a muskrat!

The CL and PBP factions of the GOP are desperate to cut Social Security and Medicare. Why? In order to reduce the deficit and, therefore, the cost of money in future years; in addition, entitlement cuts will drive the elderly poor back into the workforce, where they will be needed by right-leaning businessmen after the mass deportations.

But tens of millions of Reactionaries, to say nothing of independent swing voters, will resist entitlement cuts furiously. Not all of them can be mollified with culture war victories. The GOP needs a strategy which requires the Democrats to take the blame for the cuts. How can that be done?

There are two parts to the approach. First, decline to talk about entitlements until the crisis is truly imminent. Say you will never vote to cut Social Security and leave it at that; don’t talk about solutions to the deficit problem, because they will create deep divisions in the party. Second, when the crisis is finally here, refuse to raise taxes, and say the fiscal hole must be filled by spending cuts in social programs for younger people that are near and dear to the hearts of left-leaning voters. That way, you have a plausible argument that it is the Democrats who are responsible for the impoverishment of the elderly, not you. Social Security consequently becomes a wedge issue for the left, not the right.

This is a typical GOP hostage-taking tactic. How does the blue team deal with it? By talking up the funding crisis well before it occurs, offering a solution that involves raising taxes on the wealthy, and exposing the cynical GOP strategy as soon as possible. The voters at this point don’t believe that Republicans will vote for cuts, so change the question and force them to talk about their ideas to fill in the hole.

What do mass shootings and deaths from extreme weather events have in common? The GOP embraces policies which make them inevitable and then pretends nothing can be done to prevent them.

These are choices our country has made. Whether we implicitly agree to accept unnecessary deaths as tolerable collateral damage is, therefore, a legitimate political issue. Don’t let the right persuade you otherwise.

Life in the time of Trump.

The BBB just passed.

For Trump, it’s just another win

But Musk says he’s aghast.

The wealthy won, as you’d expect;

Clean energy just lost.

The Texas flood’s reminding us

Just how much it will cost.

There was a time not so long ago when the GOP response to the blue team’s clean energy initiatives was to support energy of all kinds in the name of growth and economic independence. Today, based on the votes for the BBB, the mainstream Republican position is that clean energy is positively harmful to America. Since the reality of climate change is evident every day, clean energy provides lots of jobs, and Trump’s espoused objective is energy dominance, this sounds insane. What is going on here?

Several things. First of all, the party considers itself bound by Trump’s idiosyncratic prejudices about the evils of wind power and the need for jobs for big burly men. Second, peddling nostalgia about coal mining jobs helps the GOP win elections in several states. Third, clean energy is inextricably entwined with the issue of climate change, and the right understands there is no free market solution to the climate problem, so it makes sense at an ideological level for the GOP to deny the problem and reject the solution. Fourth, Republican politicians get lots of campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry. That isn’t the decisive factor, but it matters. Finally, there is a school of thought to the effect that we are hopelessly behind the Chinese in the clean energy field, so it is better to focus on the dirty kind, where we currently have a cost advantage.

What will we lose as a result? We will be diplomatically and economically isolated. We will have more deaths and property damage from extreme weather events. We will lose countless clean energy jobs in the short run and cheap and plentiful energy sources in the longer run. From a policy perspective, this is a disaster.

A massive flash flood in Texas Hill Country, undoubtedly exacerbated by climate change, killed over 30 people yesterday. The photos of the destruction were heartbreaking. On the same day, President Trump was taking a victory lap over the approval of the BBB, which, among many other things, dismantled Biden’s program of investment in green technology to the maximum extent feasible. Is there a connection between these two events?

Of course there is, but no one on the left is making it. The victims of the flood should be treated as martyrs to shortsighted environmental policy. Instead, the implicit narrative of the right–that deaths and destruction from supersized storms are acceptable collateral damage in light of the overriding need to maximize the use of fossil fuels–is winning the day.

CDs: Ripping up the safety net for the benefit of wealthy business owners is a terrible idea. We dissent.

CLs: An unprecedented opportunity to reduce the debt and dismantle the welfare state has gone begging. Now our last hope is that Trump and Vought will use impoundment to do the dirty work.

PBPs: There is plenty to be concerned about in this bill. In particular, we hate the idea of ripping up contracts with clean energy providers. The preservation of the 2017 tax cuts was an overriding priority, however. On balance, we support the bill.

Reactionaries: We have reservations about the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, at least as they apply to white Christian families. We love the clean energy cuts, however, and we’re happy with the tax relief. We approve.

What does this tell us? That the Reactionaries and the PBPs control the party, of course. But you already knew that.

At his victory celebration yesterday, Trump couldn’t help boasting about the size of the cuts to the safety net; after all, everything he does is by definition the biggest and greatest in history. Having suddenly realized that the cuts will have a huge impact on millions of his voters, he then insisted that nobody would feel them. Does that make sense?

Obviously not, unless you assume that the federal government just burns hundreds of billions of Medicaid and SNAP dollars in huge bonfires every year. Even if you believe that the cuts are only intended to address waste and fraud, they’re going to hurt the wastrels and the fraudsters.

H: Hey, Tom! Why are you looking so glum? It’s your day!

J: It’s a mixed bag.

H: Why? It’s the day that made you famous. I always thought the Declaration should have put more emphasis on American nationality and less on universal equality, but what do I know? You’re in the history books forever for it.

J: American nationality was implicit in my argument about equality. Anyway, things didn’t exactly turn out the way I had planned.

H: How so?

J: At first, things were going smoothly. New states full of yeoman farmers were being created. It was just the kind of republic I had planned–one run by independent, virtuous small farmers.

H: It’s true. It looked like the end of my vision for America, and it killed my party.

J: But then the railroads and steamboats and the telegraph came into being. I welcomed them as improvements, but the result was large interstate corporations and a national market. I didn’t foresee that.

H: I did, in my way.

J: America became an industrial nation full of immigrants, rather than one run by my kind of people. And the corporations got out of control. All of a sudden, rich industrialists were running the country. That meant government had to grow dramatically to protect average people. It was my worst nightmare, next to the Civil War.

H: We both knew the war was coming. It was a horrible tragedy, but it was necessary. There was no other way.

J: It was a disaster, particularly for the South. Then America became an aggressive and imperialist nation with a large military. I didn’t want that, either.

H: A great nation needs a great military. I knew that even when we didn’t have one.

J: Today, we have a huge welfare state, a nation full of immigrants, and a crazy demagogue for a president who thinks he has the right to run my university. It’s America as you saw it. It’s not my America.

H: I don’t approve of the size of the welfare state, and I share your feelings about the president. The rest of it is true. And yes, in the long run, America is much closer to my dream than yours. It’s not as if your vision is completely dead, however. You still have Sarah Palin and “real Americans.”

J: That’s certainly some consolation. I guess we just have to live with the country as it is. Enjoy your holiday.

First we had TACO–Trump always chickens out–on the tariff front. Now we have FCAF–Freedom Caucus always folds–in the legislative arena.

What do they get for their acquiescence? A round of golf with the great man? Promises to impound expenditures that they are voting to approve? A commitment not to support primary challengers? An autographed T-shirt?

We’ll probably never know.

As I write this, Hakeem Jeffries is in his sixth hour of speaking against the BBB. He knows he isn’t going to persuade anyone in the room. In addition, the TV networks will, at best, run a tiny fraction of his speech on the news tonight, so he isn’t reaching the American people. What, then, is the point, and who is the audience?

As with Cory Booker’s marathon speech, I think this is an effort to prove to the blue team base that the leadership is really fighting hard on their behalf. Actually accomplishing anything in the process doesn’t seem to figure in the equation.

John Bolton predictably thinks Trump didn’t go far enough. As he sees it, the Iranian nuclear problem will never go away without regime change, which is unlikely without outside intervention due to the strength of the instruments of repression and divisions within the opposition. His solution, of course, is more war.

Bolton insists that regime change can be accomplished without boots on the ground; this wouldn’t have to be another Iraq, although he continues to argue that Iraq wasn’t so bad. My question is, how? How could you be certain that the nuclear program was gone, and that the government was completely decapitated, with just a single intense precision bombing campaign? Isn’t it virtually certain that enough of the security apparatus would survive Bolton’s bombs to keep the population under control and the nuclear threat alive? Isn’t it likely that the Iranian public would rally behind the regime, rather than overthrow it, in the face of American and Israeli aggression?

It won’t work. If you want to make the nuclear problem go away for the foreseeable future, you have three potentially viable choices: an agreement with plenty of carrots as well as sticks; a perpetual air war; or an Iraq-style invasion and occupation. That’s it. Without admitting it, Bolton is voting for #3. Trump won’t go for that, but he is now clearly willing to be Bibi’s yard guy, which is #2.