"Probationary" category workers aren't necessarily recently hired. Some workers being terminated have been employed by the federal government for many years, with exemplary evaluations and in critical roles, but promotions results in being reclassified as probationary. Many examples have been posted on social media.
If the 2022 GAO report is correct, FDA has trouble hiring and keeping the most tech proficient persons to train in and fill new jobs, replace older staff. They can make more money outside of government. Musk and Trump are firing the fix that would maintain efficiency, adapt to and adopt new systems.
I am particularly fond of one species of rat, the Wood Rat, with whom I have shared a residence multiple times.
That famous ski resort south of us changed its name to avoid repeating the racial slur that is still applied by the Geographical Naming Authorities to Squaw Creek, which runs through Olympic Valley.
Both of these names are problematic. Which is why I refer to Creek, Valley, and the ski hill by referring to one of the place's most valuable and entertaining residents, the wood rat.
I don't ski at Rat Valley. It's too expensive, and is thoroughly infested by the kind of assholes that brought us the Muskian Minions of Madness
The person I share my life with was the only woman in her engineering classes at Chico. Times have changed, and all honor to the DEI pioneers (she was then the first woman on the Penney's logistical engineering team, hired as part of a consent agreement; her excellence validates the economic theory behind DEI (than you George Akerlof; Lemons are great with a bit of sugar...).
I didn't go there often; my heart is on Slide Mountain (above Reno, a sacred place to our hosts the Washoe people), and Sugar Bowl was closer to my abodes Down Below.
I remember turning up my nose at stopping skiing to listen to Pablo Cruise on the deck of the Rat Valley lodge, under the Tram before it collapsed.
I love Rat Valley. I have a collection of stories about failures in that place. There was the time a ski patrol lost control of a sled bearing an injured skier. The guy had an exciting ride down the hill until the sled found a snow drift to bury itself in.
The Chico engineer... in high school she was one of the mad gang from Loyalton who took a toboggan off the old ski jump, next to Red Dog. She said it was an absolute blast until they landed. They left the guy with the broken leg outside the nearest bar. She explained her broken wrist as due to an accident at cheerleading practice, which was natural enough because she was the fearless little thing who liked to fly, and her sister did see her fall after one flight that day....
Skiing for Sierra College she finished ahead of Cindy Nelson in an NCAA giant slalom, which she assures everybody was a fluke. The next meet was a slalom on KT-22. On her practice run an untended kid skied onto the course in front of her. Her broken leg was not as serious as the damage to the kid, who is likely a grumpy old man with chronic back pain now. I love Rat Valley!
Yes Musk is a ‘rat-fink’ who dislikes humans, organic life-forms and clearly preferred micro-dosing and AI! Which is nether! America is not a video game! This is real!
Having grown up on the Chesapeake, the home to many muskrats, I can attest to their tasty nature. Cleaned muskrat carcasses were on sale at the Lexington Market in Baltimore up through when I went to high school, and maybe still are. One of my cookbooks from Maryland has a recipe for muskrat stew with beaten biscuits, a local perversion of the term "biscuit", more like hardtack. I agree that it is an insult to the rodent to associate it with Elon Musk. I more savor the association of Elon with the secretions of the anal scent glands of certain mammals, i.e., musk.
It wouldn’t take too much investigation to identify who benefits from each destruction and whether they are trump donors. Who saves money by being subject to fewer regulations? Who saves money and/or jail time through closures of their ongoing criminal cases for fraud, corruption or injuries? And how many of the beneficiaries of this Eve of Destruction are donors? Reporting suggests trump and Elon would do very very well themselves. Couldn’t someone follow the money and let everyone know how much it costs to buy a National?
Good observation. A worker in the public sector doing a necessary job is being paid a living wage and that's it. His or her pay comes out of the citizens' pockets. When that worker moves to the private sector, they make more money as you observe. And that comes out of our pockets, too, though at the market or gas station, etc. So the people lose. Why is this done? The worker in the private sector also makes money for the investor - the function for which that worker is rewarded a larger salary for in the first place. The cut for the investor - the rakeoff - is what Trump and Musk are aiming at. And that comes out of our pockets, too.
Scott Bessent is no Hjalmar Schacht. Look it up. Trump is far dumber than what's-his-name who was Schacht's boss. The American government has become a clown car.
I'm inclined to believe that Welfare King Musk and Forever Fraudster Trump are both hoping to create a situation where they shift money, both public and private, to their own pockets. Trump wasn't fined multiple times for laundering money and fraud in his businesses because his social conscience is so well-developed. Gimme a break. Jared and Grennell are taking the two billion in Saudi murder money to invest in Balkan oligarch real estate ventures. Some things never change.
What you describe reminds me of the Russian criminalocracy that held sway for decades after Gorbachev presided over the coup by Yeltsin and his mobbed-up cronies. We’ve had a coup. Now what?
Cryptocurrency is going to be important to the new mob, BTW. It’d be interesting to see an essay on cryptocurrency from Krugman.
And what happens if/when the fired government employees file for unemployment? Which, I believe is managed and paid for by states, not the federal government.
And, whether it comes from the states or the feds, it ultimately comes out of our pockets. No one in this administration is saving the citizenry any money, they are building a dam the purpose of which is to divert money into their own pockets. Remember the father of all deficits, Ronald Reagan, who borrowed money from us via deficit bills and gave it to his pals through his loose money policy at the bank level, and then his pals absconded with the loot prior to the S&L meltdown during his term.
Putting a longer tail on this, if and when some “normalcy” can be restored and these agencies can rehire staff who in their right minds would want to take those jobs now that they can be made redundant at a political whim? At best the quality of government workers will decline making a self fulfilling prophecy of “inefficient government.
When you move or change jobs, you become "probationary". It's silly, but it is an agency rule. BTW, during Trump 1.0, they raised that period to two years from 1 - Congress did that.
So, the Clown in Chief is also "probationary" since he just returned to his [con] job. How about We the People fire him, and MuskRat, too?
I was marching in the streets of Peekskill today outside of Sen. Schumer's office. It was gratifying to see 100's of protesters despite the frigid weather. People want our democracy and our government; we don't approve of what Trump, MuskRat, & the Trump sycophants are doing.
There are people who had been in for 20 years but were promoted or switched departments, so were temporarily probationary. This did not just hurt college grads, knowledge was lost everywhere.
They Do NOT CARE. The idea is to weaken government. Then people will get even angrier about the inefficient (overwhelmed) gubbamint. Then rinse and repeat until the agency collapses. This has been the strategy since Reagan .
I’m not sure “austerity theatre” is the best way to understand Musk’s dismantling of the US federal government. Like “security theatre,” it assumes that Musk’s goals are as stated but that his actions are simply for show, no matter how destructive they are in practice. It assumes a continuity with past practices, goals and customs that just isn’t there. As obviously destructive as Musk has already been, austerity theatre actually understates the scale of this catastrophe. (Also, Musk apparently is targeting agencies and regulators who affect him personally, so I wouldn’t take anything he says at face value.)
Musk and Trump are radicals. Revolutionaries, not reformers.
A better analogy would be a US cultural revolution: a dismantling of the US government done for the sake of completely remaking the United States in their own image. Austerity might be the language they use, but their project has nothing to do with efficiency. It has to do with creating the conditions to implement an authoritarian dictatorship. That’s the whole ball game.
I can see your point here, but I believe what Prof. Krugman intended to convey was the magnitude of misdirection - pay no attention to that man behind the curtain - being foisted onto us.
It's for that purpose that the first ones on the chopping block were all the IG's who would otherwise be putting the brakes on a lot of this malfeasance.
I'm not so sure that Musk+tRump cannot best be thought of as berserkers. trying to beat our population into submission. Burn it all down and profit off the ashes.
Blayne, You have precisely identified our existential dilemma, if only the mainstream media would report it. Now, do we just accept all this destruction as a fait accompli or can we do something about it? The best advice I’ve heard so far is from the right of Center NY Times columnist, David French who said he is going to speak the truth and protect the vulnerable. I am truly terrified I will get hurt by the MAGA “army” or the military if I publicly protest.
Meidas Touch is a media group of 4 brothers (all lawyers). They have a priceless bulletin 5 days a week that keeps up on lots of moving pieces. They also have a news channel on YouTube and do interviews.
I think Meidas is now up to 4 Million subscribers. There are 4 or 5 other youtube resources as well who all check facts: Bryan Tyler Cohen, Pondering Politics, The Humanist Report, Occupy Democrats, Secular Talk - but - please note, even Meidas will have flashy headlines and you just have to get past it. The others, outside of Meidas, focus on one issue at a time. Between them all I do feel I'm getting better news on this situation than broadcast news provides or Washington Post or NYT. Bryan Tyler Cohen just interviewed Jamie Raskin and that is a must see interview. Meidas interviewed Joe VBinden before his exit.
Correct! Case in point: That's why Paul Krugman and many other excellent writers and journalists are on Substack. Honestly, I only keep a NYT subscription for my wife's love of Wordle, the crossword, etc.). MSN, NYT, WaPo... all shadows of their former selves, with only few exceptions at the writer level.
You said it! I’m very worried about Trump using protests as his rationale/battle-cry for the implementation of martial law….
….followed shortly after by orders to the military, national guard, police forces, and/or Proud Boys et al. to use force or even fire-at-will to “protect America from the violent protesters”
There is every reason to be confident that this is on Trump’s list of “Things I Must Do To Be King”
You have a point but I can see why Dr. Krugman used the term "austerity theater"--it's nonsense and made up, after all--since the budget request adds $4 trillion to the deficit, hardly austere and therefore, theatric.
I realize I'm being pedantic. And of course I agree with Krugman's point that all of this will leave Americans worse off in terms of quality of life. But I also think it's important, at this point in US and world history, to use language as precisely as we can. Americans aren't about to discover the costs of austerity theatre -- they're about to discover what it's like to live under an authoritarian government. Which is the main point of all of Musk's and Trump's moves.
I don't think we need to spend too much time on one phrase. Dr. Krugman's point was clear, whatever phrase he used. You are entirely right that Americans are going to discover what it's like to live under an authoritarian, oligarchic, kleptocratic government. In fact, we probably already are but just don't know it.
I expect you will write about the next ugly fallout of DOGE’s indiscriminate purge of federal employees - a collapse in the housing market starting in the DC/MD/VA area. Early reporting of a significant uptick in home listings spells danger for homeowners. I’m already having 2007-2008 market collapse flashbacks.
There is a call for a one-day economic blackout: The February 28 economic blackout is a planned nationwide protest where participants will refrain from making non-essential purchases from large corporations for 24 hours. This movement, organized by The People's Union USA, aims to highlight consumer power and advocate for economic change, particularly in response to the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives by some companies.
Better yet--don't pay whatever taxes you owe on April 15th. How are they going to come after all of us and what are we paying for since they're dismantling everything useful, such as CFPB?
And that's exactly why there his a national boycott from buying anything tangible on 2/28. The farmers aren't going to be buying, because they aren't receiving any money from the Federal government. 25% of the income in hundreds of the rural counties comes from the Federal government. It's not going to take long for a large percentage of them to run out of money.
I’m generally a pretty optimistic person but after knowing what was contained in the pages of Project 2025 and watching its implementation, I’m not so sure you aren’t correct.
They also plan to increase hunger - preferably starvation, multiply medical crises exponentially and in general punish the poor for being poor. You know, "Own the Libs".
I honestly hate to say this, but Curtis Yarvin, a billionaire oligarch popular with the tech bros of his day, once said (jokingly??) that one way to deal with poor people would be to turn them into biofuel. He went on to add, chiilingly, that the Federal Prisons could be used as the rendering sites. Even if he was joking, his 'joke' reveals the mindset of too many in that class. They are left brain dominated to a fault, I suspect a great many of them are somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and know a goodly number are misogynists. Peter Theil, puppetmaster of JD Vance, has publically opined that women should never have been "granted" the vote. I mean OMG OMG OMG.
From Heather Cox Richardsons newsletter today. Vance told our allies this in Munich a few days ago-
"Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values."
No wonder they refuse to honor the 14th amendment.
I sometimes say the world would be improved by converting 77 million Trump voters into food for omnivorous farm animals. I’m not joking, either, but at least I know it’s an entirely infeasible fantasy, although not for lack of slaughterhouse capacity.
While Musk loves to claim he's "on the spectrum" what he really is is a psycopathic a-hole with a god complex. I get the autism remark though, as most of them seem to be soulless ghouls with, if anything, a negative empathy gene. Much like you know who.
Yep. I spent a lot of my life living in WV and feel so sorry that the people there have been so hoodwinked. Once upon a time they stood up to plutocrats like Trumpmusk, and were mown down by hired guns at places like Matewan. That spirit has been weakened by scurrilous preachers, opioids and underfunding of the public schools. It's a tragedy too often echoed elsewhere.
They applaud because they know rethugs are vigorously pursuing their top priority, which is to step up the oppression of black Americans and other marginalized groups that rethugs don’t like and to preserve the legal, economic, and political advantages of white Americans.
I’m generally pretty optimistic as well but I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that they don’t care if we starve, suffer from illnesses that could be cured with treatment that they will block or no longer fund, or that we just die. I’ve never been so glad that I’m not leaving children and grandchildren to face this mess. Cruelty is the point of what they are doing. That and greed.
They promised to make housing more affordable … having a larger homeless population filled by previous homeowners, the suddenly unemployed having to undersell, and fewer folks being able to get mortgages due to unemployment is the cruelest way to achieve that goal, and of course does risk a huge drop in home prices cutting back American’s biggest source of wealth a la 2008
With tRump+Musk destroying the government infrastructure of competence at home and destroying our reputation in the International Arena, there will likely be an epic crash.
When fired federal workers can’t make their mortgage payments there is going to be a problem. They will be needing to sell but there will be very few people looking to buy.
Oh I fully agree with you. And plenty of venture capitalists vultures are ready and waiting to swoop down and cash in on what could be massive foreclosures.
Yes, Hedgefunds that support Trump (they all do) will pick the bones clean. They thing is who can afford the rents they must have in order to turn profit? If there are no jobs to replace the lost ones then who will they rent to?
Article from Redfin but I’m starting to see others with the same trend. I think it’s safe to assume that with the thousands of federal employees being fired that we will only see more listings start to flood the market.
No. Rising wages that keep pace with housing costs is good. Collapsing housing prices due to taking a meat cleaver to a well functioning regional economy is bad for everyone.
Housing prices in greater Detroit and many places in the "rust belt" are cheaper relative to the 70s. Is that good? No, because the industries that sustained those regions are dead and gone.
JB, You point out a real life problem. What new family is going to buy into a home where there is no economy that can support schools and infrastructure as well as providing the owner employment with a future. Trumpistas believe in a canard that new jobs will be coming back to America and that tariffs will make Wall Mart junk more affordable. How does that work? The answer is as always give billionaires more money so it can congeal at the top. It never trickles down.
That's how you treat the people? Check for yourself. Search something like "housing prices are out of control", you'll see a lot of discussion about need for housing prices to go down. A lot of working people and young people blame homeowners and well-off people for high housing prices. Your attitude pushes them out and then they, enraged, vote for Trump.
There are a lot of stupid and ill informed Fascist loving Americans who believe Trump will somehow create affordable housing. The housing market has high pricing because 1) There is a huge shortage of available housing. People who have houses don’t want new development infused into their homesteads. 2) Interest rates continue to hover around 7% on average, the need to come down to somewhere around 2 to 3% to make the already short supply homes available for financcing. It is not homeowners who price the market. It is the banks and real estate agencies.
I will add one caveat to your #1 item...There is a shortage of houses where people >want< to live. In the 6 years or so that I have lived in my house, its value has probably gone up 40% at this point (which is ridiculous), which was already expensive when I bought it. There are plenty of STEM jobs in the area. If I were to drive an extra hour outside of the major city I live near, I could probably find housing costs that are a bit more normal, but I would be giving up a lot of things that I enjoy about living in/near a city.
What?! Where did you come up with that from what I wrote? There’s nothing “good” about mass foreclosures. You obviously do not understand the potential devastation to not only those who have suddenly lost their jobs due to no fault of their own, but existing home owners who will see a loss in value. Which translates to a loss in property taxes, which translates to a loss of revenue for cities, counties, and states. This hurts all citizens.
News flash: this isn’t the intelligent way to go about lowering housing prices and making housing more affordable.
Come at me again with that sort of nonsense and I’ll block you. This isn’t Twitter.
Oh, I'm so scared. You will block me! You will lock yourself in a bubble where nobody but people who think like you are allowed! You will hide in a safe space!
Seriously? Don't talk to people you are going to block then, just block them silently. They will never know you've blocked them. Any attempt to say "I will block you" instead of actually blocking means you want them to know your attitude towards them, and that antithetic to blocking them. You look like a hypocrite.
Hope you read this. I block people like you who have zero to contribute and only twist words to fit your agenda or traffic in insults. Go back to Twitter.
Your only contribution here is a dumb statement meant to provoke people followed up by multiple insults - how is that in any way enlightening or informative other than letting us all know that you're here to be a dick and nothing more?
Making housing cheaper by bankrupting people isn’t good. Look past the end of your nose, please. Vulture capitalists buying low from desperate homeowners and renting high to vulture magats, that’s bad.
ALL the wealth most regular people will EVER HAVE, is tied up in their house. If you crash the price of housing, make people lose their homes, and transfer them to the super-wealthy at bargain basement prices (as the market crashes), you transfer wealth from regular Americans to the super-rich. Regular Americans already own a minority of wealth. Inequity explodes. We become a society of rentiers and serfs.
Yes, that is what they super wealthy did in the Atlanta metro area. It drove housing prices through the roof and that is where they are staying. The house we bought for $80K is now worth $340K. Absurd.
"suddenly getting rid of thousands of federal workers looks strong and decisive to people who don’t understand what it will do."
That would be most Americans which is why we're in this predicament in the first place.
As a retired federal worker, I can assure you that not only to most people have no idea what federal workers do, they also think they make substantially more money than they actually do.
That's the key to the "Reagan Revolution" - perfecting the art of propaganda. It really began with Nixon's "Southern Strategy", or really even McCarthy's "Un-American Activities Committee", but the Reagan campaign perfected it. The whole Republican party has been taking pages from Orwell's 1984 as well as the writings of Goebbels ever since.
He really meant welfare queens though. Single women leaving bad marriages with young children who had never been in the work force and who weren't getting any child support for the kiddies from the baby daddies. Hence the welfare queen was born. She had to stay perpetually pregnant to stay on the welfare roles. The system thought this was somehow better than providing job training and child care subsidies. Only with job training and child care subsidies could she hope to get a real job to support her family.
When our government no longer functions because of all the cuts, will that then entail private companies stepping into the vacuum? Could this be about privatizing our government services? Turning our government functions over to companies of their choice, a quid pro quo scenario, seems entirely plausible in regards to the trump administration and Republican tactics.
You bet private companies will be stepping in. That’s the whole point. We had the Steward company debacle over some important hospitals here in Massachusetts. They stepped in and took over and now the hospital(s) gone. Bankrupt. I remember in the first term, they were looking at selling NOAA our national weather service which is so critical to agriculture, commerce, etc. to AccuWeather and privatizing it. The list goes on. Not to mention that they’re making a fortune building detention centers into which citizens, legal immigrants, and everybody else they grab will go. I knew someone who was in jail in the bush era, and they had privatize the jails to a large extent, and people, poor people, could not afford to make a phone call.
My comment was meant to bring attention to the Republican end game. Republicans have been angling towards privatization for years. Coming right out and admitting that has always had negative results. I fear this is the beginning to their backdoor entry.
This is the end game. As you point out yourself, the Republicans have been angling for exactly this all along. Now their efforts have come to fruition.
But a critical, but poorly understood, element of public goods and services (which governments exist to provide by fulfilling the social contract) is that -private market actors cannot keep up with the demand for those goods and services.-
Take mail. Can UPS, FedEx, and DHL ship letters and parcels? Yes. Can their logistics systems ship ALL the letters and parcels sent every day across the US? No. Can they do it at $0.73 for a one ounce letter in 2.5 days? No: FedEx 2 day is $10
Can private schools educate some kids? Yes. All of them? No. And some of them (anyone needing any kind of accommodation like Braille or a wheelchair ramp, to say nothing of any psych-related accommodation), they simply will not.
You can hire mercenaries to defend your country, but as British satirist Terry Pratchett wrote, “The problem with mercenaries…is that they need to be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up paying them even more to stop—” (Pratchett, Terry. 1997. _Jingo._ London: Harper-Collins. P.23).
Privatization is not always a solution to a problem. Sometimes, privatization -is- the problem (see British Rail…. And Gazprom).
I heard AccuWeather are screaming NO!. They use all the free Weather data and sell it. If they take it over they'll have to spend money to gather at least some data.
In the 60's we understood that to end a war required collective action, in the streets, registering masses of voters, making noise, over and over and over again. We weren't waiting for sanity to be delivered by a celebrity politician or in the coffin of a friend shipped back from Viet Nam. When Henry Kissinger gave the address at my daughter's Boston University graduation decades later, I was thrilled to see other parents, and many, many students, stand and denounce him as a war criminal and a traitor. It is our job. Join a lawsuit. Make a thousand calls.
I agree that the public needs ro be protesting but I also remember that Nixon got elected in spite of, or maybe because of, massive protests and expanded qnd lengthened that war.
That's true, but only because he lied. Remember, he waited until the last possible second to end the war, and only so he could claim it to get re-elected. It came to be called "The October Surprise", and it worked. In the interim, he bombed the shit out of Cambodia, and in general >escalated< 'Nam. All this while orchestrating the Watergate break in.
No. Nixon’s election was made possible by the same strategy that has elected all other rethugs since 1968: a promise the continue the oppression of black Ameicans and preserve the legal, economic, and political advantages of white Americans.
Do you remember what the Democratic Party Primary looked like? Ed Muskie, George Wallace, Shirley Chislom, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern. Talk about a Big Tent! Nixon won the South and 60% of all votes. We had a southern segregationist, a black woman, and an anti-war intellectual in the mix
Mickie, I was there. The youth movement did what so many movements do — they went too far and an ugly backlash occurred. I disposed the Abby Hoffman’s and Bobby Seals in Chicago in1968 because I knew from an early age very early age that these people were ruining it for Eugene McCarthy. And so Nixon won. This is the modern history of this nation and now we have crossed the Rubicon. There will be little chance in going back. Maybe a miracle but I doubt it. One remaining goal; Get the money.
A possible area is people negatively affected by Trump who might switch their vote. If farmers lose because there’s no more foreign aid they might think twice before voting R again.
and the most recent flag-carrier for the Democrats, Kamala Harris. It's obviously demoralizing for her (and eveyone else with two brain cells to rub together) to see that Americans would rather have a lifelong crook and adjudicated rapist for President than a smart woman of color, but many millions of people did vote for her and could well rally around her, given a chance. She would not have to pretend to be annointed by the party to speak for the party- her own personal views would be newsworthy and valuable.
Why should she. She did her job. She put everything into it. It’s time for others to step up and let her rest until she’s ready again. I mean seriously? You would end up putting all the blame on her if she tried and lost because no one else stepped in to help. Don’t blame the woman for causing this shit show.
LIstening to consultants who are telling them to keep their heads down and their power dry. You know, the same consultants that lost the 2024 election.
It was not the consultants who lost 2024 election. It was the message, the idea, the ideology of Democratic party. The message that caused people to vote for despised Trump.
What the hell? There is a difference between "caused" and "forced". People have voted for Trump of their own free will, free choice. They made that choice, in part, because alternative - Democratic Party - was even less attractive for them than Trump.
Insert “caused” then. You attribute a magical superpower to democrats: they’re able to manipulate Trump voter’s feelings so much that they cause them to vote for trump. No. This is preposterous.
Are you insane? It is not "manipulation", it is presenting your position in media, in social networks, etc. It is how politicians and parties fight for votes. Presenting messages, ideas and ideology.
Message/ideas/ideology of Democratic party, as presented by Democratic Party to voters through words and deeds, was disliked by people so much that they went to vote for Trump. Do you even understand how voting works?
Mr Targ I totally agree. We pushed too far on everything from diversity to boys in girls high school showers to broken borders but you still can’t explain this to the dyed in the wool democrat. They just are unable to understand.
As I am about to be totally excoriated here, let me say I am fully supportive of gay and lesbian issues, racial equality and so on. But we should have never ignored the white working class once mostly democrats but who run into the arms of those who could care less about their needs.
Bill, as you know there are no trans athletes in sports nor will there ever be except in tiny fractions of less than 1%. Something even scientist allow for. The broken borders when you really look into the realities is that we need laborers for all kinds of menial and ugly jobs that white Americans do not want to do. Racism is still alive and well in America and the privileged whites who live in fear of loosing status is all that drives Republicans. But, go ahead convince me these are real problems that represent the demise of America.
Trans athletes in some sports are a problem - not for us. But usually for women participating in those sports. It is not up to me to mansplain to women how they are wrong in having their opinion.
I am not threatened by transgendered people. But women sometimes are. Those women have their opinions and they have their votes, and they use them.
You are repeating a GOP talking point. Dems were always focused on benefiting the middle class. This is demonstrated by the fact that by rolling back Biden policies, such as green energy promotion that was mainly benefiting manufacturing in red states, is going to be actually devastating to middle class folks. See what I mean?
"ignored" the white working class"??? As in we did not use white racist dog whistle politics? Do you realize that has been the decisive factor in all but about two elections since 1964? We have to break the dog whistle forever or the Dems will go into long-term decline. Imitating the Dog whistle to get the white racist vote always backfires long term.
And the fact that Biden’s (sad) mental capacity decline was covered up for about 2.5 years. When he was forced to give up, it was already too late. Democrats have lot to account for.
No it’s the disinformation. There was no message or vehicle for that message that could have overcome all the dark money disinformation ops that completely obscured reality. I went to a Kamala rally. Her message was strongly middle of the road and targeted to the middle class kitchen table issues.
And Trump's message was strongly national socialism with added "instead of thinking about YOU, Democrats are mumbling some ridiculous shiat about DEI and LGBTQ+ and transwhatever! They don't care about YOU! While I think about working people and how they fare in this terrible economy!"
That message have resonated with working people a lot more than middle of the road "economy is actually fine, you are stupid if you think otherwise, and we must celebrate our diversity..."
*looks at address* oh my god, bsky. :) I've tried it, yeah. Like, no.
Whole behaviour and attention of Democratic Party for years before was pointing out at DEI and transrights and everything else. The mere fact that Kamala did not promise to change the course meant that everything will remain the same and people didn't like it.
Given that the Obamas and Clintons and Bidens are not in office, what exactly should they be doing? Jumping up and down and yelling? The American electorate handed over the all keys to Trump and the Republicans, and *now* the Dems are supposed to do something about it?
This isn't entirely the responsibility of the Democrats.
I'll remind you that the Republicans in Congress also took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Their constituents are getting hurt, as well, so why aren't they doing anything about this?
Are they your leaders? Do they want to be your leaders? Are you of the same political movement they are? Are you a moderate internationalist social-democrat? (Not even saying that Biden and Obama are not of the same kind of social-democrat and would be in different parties in Europe).
I somehow doubt it. Seek your own revolutionary leadership, don't try to call leadership of Democratic party. They are not of your blood.
I just wanted to say that Democratic Party is actually home for different parties. It would not be a single party - in Europe - because people of that party have different views, not always compatible. People who are nominally leaders of Democratic Party - your leaders - may not have the same views as yours.
Just in case you'll found the thought interesting - Trump's party is also not a single party. It's at least 3 very different and distinct parties and they hate each other. The only thing that unites them is that they hate each other a bit less than they all hate you. :) It's quite an achievement, to get hated by such a different set of people.
Do the work - find out what they’re up to and if not working for you in the way you want, call and write! I am everyday and it feels good. Also, you might be surprised to learn that within the structural subordination of being in the minority party in Congress, the Dems are actually trying to fight back now. They got the message by and large. But their powers are limited. And way too many people expect them to somehow magically bust through a massive right wing disinformation echo system, including the most watched Cable TV channel and the most used social media platforms
He can't really say much because he was the previous worst president of all time. That Trump trounced him in that category doesn't alter the fact. And he knows it.
You've got a good point there. Those two were definitely major contenders.
However, King Bush II gave us ISIS, and an emboldened Iran. Not to mention 9/11 happened on his watch - even though he'd been warned that it was coming.
Put themselves out there... put themselves on record... present factual corrections to the BS., present alternative solutions to Trump's "created crisis"... add some sanity to the conversation... not lay down and die?
They are emailing, raising funds for the DNC, for state candidates campaigns. Moskowitz even went on Fox with Jesse Walters. They're raising awareness of important special elections, state and national. I have few filters, no ad blockers, so they're are filling the email at our house, every single day.
Democrats are out in public all the time and also going on shows like Lawrence O’Donnell, Morning Joe, etc. If you watch the hearings you will also see them presenting the facts. Democrats are even holding their own unofficial “spotlight” hearings — as the minority party they can’t call official hearings — to get the facts out. I know at least some of them have been televised because I have seen the on MSNBC. Not sure what other outlets have covered them.
A lot of people making these accusations are understandably tuning the media out but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. whether or not what they are doing is effective remains to be seen.
If you had read the column, you would have realized how urgent Professor Krugman sees the situation. I think we're way past writing letters, especially if the letters are to Republican representatives. We're certainly in general strike and mass disruption territory.
The representative for my district is a Republican. His office has been refusing to answer the phone for over a week now. It rings twice and goes dead.
Here’s what I want Dems to do: raise billions of dollars and spend it training and paying 100,000 local activists in every county in every state to use effective, on the street, get-out-the-vote methods to get Dem voters to the polls. Continuous, year round GOTV activity by trained activists, countrywide.
I've never given a dime to politicians--not even, Bernie, whom I canvassed for in neighborhoods that turn out to vote against their interests or not at all. It's going to take an attitude adjustment before the idiots distracted by sports and celebrity in this country wake up. Only the military can stand up to the coup.
I am not an American. I am shocked by how anemyc the Democratic leadeship is. And FYI: I know what I am doing in my own country. I fight for what I believe in: freedom, democracy, republic… what are YOU doing?
“Austerity Theater” - thank you again Professor! And why isn’t ANYONE mentioning that Musk’s ultimate plan is to turn our federal government into the world’s largest AI beta test site while further enriching himself and his Tech Bros. That’s a very dangerous gamble to make in too many different ways.
It is worth remembering that back in September and October Elon Musk was talking about how it was necessary to crash the economy--"destroy the economy" is what he said--so that it can be "rebuilt" into something better. Wiping out the federal government is surely a step along that road.
They have no clue about macroeconomics- this will put us in a tailspin it will be very difficult ( without government spending, but that won’t happen!) to get out of. Looking like years of GDP growth lost.
That would be the same AI that brilliantly spotted $50 million worth of condoms going through USAID to Hamas, not understanding that their destination, Gaza, is a rural province in Mozambique, far from the Middle East, and intended to reduce the spread of HIV?
That's just one of the more laughable things that can go wrong when, as the professor aptly puts it, ignorant people parachute into something complicated and think they can easily and quickly identify problems.
That's what I was wondering before the election. Now I recognize that the billionaires at work here truly don't care if the economy craters. They have so much money they can survive anything short of total civilization collapse. What I don't fully understand is why any businessperson short of billionaire status isn't frightened right now. Why didn't they see this coming?
These events remind of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when a tyran built a cult of "red guards" (= hateful young people) that violently defamed and purged intellectuals and civil servants, so that he could retain power even if that meant the collapse of society. A wave of madness swept through the country.
If you add the resurrection of Lysenkoism (= the lethal replacement of science and scientists by... claims ?), that's a lot of tributes to Marxist regimes.
All my best wishes to Americans enduring this.
In this insane context, telling the facts and defending the truth becomes harder but also much more valuable. Dr. Krugman, your blog is commendable.
It's no small irony that "Conservatives" are using the same tactics as "Communists". If you move far enough to the left, and far enough to the right, you'll meet on the other side of reason.
Here in NH our grocery stores have put a limit on how many dozen eggs - 2 - a customer can buy per day, because of supply limitations related to bird flu. I said to my family this weekend that this will be our only tell about whether bird flu is still happening because the CDC won’t be updating us anymore.
You still give Musk and Trump the benefit of the doubt when discussing these activities in terms of government efficiency - and even with that assumption these actions make no sense. For example, probationary workers are generally going to be cheaper since they include all the new hires - and the new hires start toward the bottom of the pay scale.
These actions are the destruction of our civil service and make room for installing Trump loyalists. It is part of their plan of autocracy.
My American friend here, in despair, has now said 'Bring it on!' She sees no solution but complete collapse, and then if we're still alive, pick up the pieces and start again. One thing for certain is the US is not making itself stronger, as Trump might think. And Americans are standing by without hardly a protest to mark their disagreement. So the ROW can only conclude you have given assent. You might get the oligarchy you voted for, but you won't have an economy or any social structures left.
There are protests all over the country, all collectively downplayed or outright ignored by the mainstream media, many of whom are complicit with this coup or scared to death of them.
Most of us did not vote for this!!! There were too many people (including some Dems) that didn't bother to vote or couldn't vote for a Woman or couldn't vote because of Gaza. Believe you me, we are fighting back -- mostly from the Grassroots people. We are trying to get our Dem Congress persons to fight back more and loudly and immediately after a lie is spewed by this Administration (which I don't even like using that word of current Administration). They are just liars and fascists and destroyers of Democracy. They are staging a coup.
Okay; they're staging a coup. What do you do in the face of this lawlessness? Your congress has already shown you who they are; have they shown you who YOU are, too?
I'm already fighting back - writing and calling my Congressional Representatives, attending protests, writing postcards to voters, spreading the word to my relatives.. . .
That's... an argument. And at least a confirmation that more extreme measure should have been used against the J6 rioters since they were there to "kill and die." I think having been arrested previously helps get you in the right mindset.
Well, of course. They have killed, have they not? They have died, have they not? Not all of them, obviously, but still. I can respect that. I mean, I would throw them to jail, they are rioters - but at least they are ready to riot and end up in jail for what they believe in.
If you truly believe that the coup is happening - where is your musket?
The solution is to make democracy function again. It doesn't respond to the will of the people, so people want to tear it down. A lot of what makes the US democracy dysfunctional is the rigid and functionally obsolete constitution.
I should not bug you, so this is the last time. WHEN, not if, the US has a major catastrophe and Trump f*cks it up and millions more die AGAIN because of his stupidity and vulgarity, then PLEASE let this nonsense go? You are not racially superior and including blacks in the mainstream will make America STRONGER....gullible biting white racist bait is for trash thinkers and will swirl us all down the toilet.
If we're "white racists" and "trash thinkers" and you make the countries you inhabit so strong please by all means go to those countries which have none of us and enjoy your strength over there.
Canada is closing the border so it will cost me to leave. You arrange with your Orange prostitute pissed on KKK leader to get me $200k and believe me, I would NOT live in the US with you. The lesson is coming and only mistakenly believing you would stop being a sucker for rich whites who dangle racial superiority in front of you has kept me here. This long lasting stupidity really has me messed up and if you pay me what your people have spent the last 400 years stealing, you will see me talking from a different point in this conversation.....you steal and mess sh*t up much as you can, blame everybody else and holler get out...???
Trump is a proven verified liar. For some reason, you have a view or philosophy that makes his lying okay? Or maybe it is me that can't see Trump's virtues because I am a black racist? A sort of bet can settle this. I NEED to be wrong. If the Trump administration delivers small government and a growing economy free of inflation, I will leave the Democratic Party and praise you and Trump in this forum. But in fairness, then you have to put up as well? You will disassociate from Trump and talk with me to my satisfaction on why his lying, bankruptcies, failed marriages and raw-dogging porn queens was not a red flag for you? We give it three years max. Then one of us has to back down. Is that a bet?
WHEN (not if) The sh*t hits the fan...I only ask you understand your part in the death and suffering that was only caused though the stupidity of white racism?
"Probationary" category workers aren't necessarily recently hired. Some workers being terminated have been employed by the federal government for many years, with exemplary evaluations and in critical roles, but promotions results in being reclassified as probationary. Many examples have been posted on social media.
If the 2022 GAO report is correct, FDA has trouble hiring and keeping the most tech proficient persons to train in and fill new jobs, replace older staff. They can make more money outside of government. Musk and Trump are firing the fix that would maintain efficiency, adapt to and adopt new systems.
Which is, of course, the goal. If there's one thing The Orange Deity and Muskrat don't want it's efficient regulators paying attention to their scam.
If you are going to insult muskrats, please capitalize the R to differentiate the person MuskRat from the animal.
How about MuskRump? A conflation of Musk and trump.
How about Elonia?
Or Mump
I like it!
Ooooooooooh!!! Zing!!!! LOL
Sounds like a reasonable alternative.
Thank you.
I am particularly fond of one species of rat, the Wood Rat, with whom I have shared a residence multiple times.
That famous ski resort south of us changed its name to avoid repeating the racial slur that is still applied by the Geographical Naming Authorities to Squaw Creek, which runs through Olympic Valley.
Both of these names are problematic. Which is why I refer to Creek, Valley, and the ski hill by referring to one of the place's most valuable and entertaining residents, the wood rat.
I don't ski at Rat Valley. It's too expensive, and is thoroughly infested by the kind of assholes that brought us the Muskian Minions of Madness
CSU, Chico, Anthropology, of course......my band gigged Rat Valley many times, interesting place
The person I share my life with was the only woman in her engineering classes at Chico. Times have changed, and all honor to the DEI pioneers (she was then the first woman on the Penney's logistical engineering team, hired as part of a consent agreement; her excellence validates the economic theory behind DEI (than you George Akerlof; Lemons are great with a bit of sugar...).
I didn't go there often; my heart is on Slide Mountain (above Reno, a sacred place to our hosts the Washoe people), and Sugar Bowl was closer to my abodes Down Below.
I remember turning up my nose at stopping skiing to listen to Pablo Cruise on the deck of the Rat Valley lodge, under the Tram before it collapsed.
I love Rat Valley. I have a collection of stories about failures in that place. There was the time a ski patrol lost control of a sled bearing an injured skier. The guy had an exciting ride down the hill until the sled found a snow drift to bury itself in.
The Chico engineer... in high school she was one of the mad gang from Loyalton who took a toboggan off the old ski jump, next to Red Dog. She said it was an absolute blast until they landed. They left the guy with the broken leg outside the nearest bar. She explained her broken wrist as due to an accident at cheerleading practice, which was natural enough because she was the fearless little thing who liked to fly, and her sister did see her fall after one flight that day....
Skiing for Sierra College she finished ahead of Cindy Nelson in an NCAA giant slalom, which she assures everybody was a fluke. The next meet was a slalom on KT-22. On her practice run an untended kid skied onto the course in front of her. Her broken leg was not as serious as the damage to the kid, who is likely a grumpy old man with chronic back pain now. I love Rat Valley!
Yes Musk is a ‘rat-fink’ who dislikes humans, organic life-forms and clearly preferred micro-dosing and AI! Which is nether! America is not a video game! This is real!
Agreed, don't insult muskrats, who never did anything to hurt us...
And, they suffered greatly at our hands already.
Having grown up on the Chesapeake, the home to many muskrats, I can attest to their tasty nature. Cleaned muskrat carcasses were on sale at the Lexington Market in Baltimore up through when I went to high school, and maybe still are. One of my cookbooks from Maryland has a recipe for muskrat stew with beaten biscuits, a local perversion of the term "biscuit", more like hardtack. I agree that it is an insult to the rodent to associate it with Elon Musk. I more savor the association of Elon with the secretions of the anal scent glands of certain mammals, i.e., musk.
It wouldn’t take too much investigation to identify who benefits from each destruction and whether they are trump donors. Who saves money by being subject to fewer regulations? Who saves money and/or jail time through closures of their ongoing criminal cases for fraud, corruption or injuries? And how many of the beneficiaries of this Eve of Destruction are donors? Reporting suggests trump and Elon would do very very well themselves. Couldn’t someone follow the money and let everyone know how much it costs to buy a National?
A disabled FDA will slow development and approval of new drugs etc. There is the very real possibility for loss of lives in the future.
But New Jersey is a big Pharma center, and it's a blue State.
Good observation. A worker in the public sector doing a necessary job is being paid a living wage and that's it. His or her pay comes out of the citizens' pockets. When that worker moves to the private sector, they make more money as you observe. And that comes out of our pockets, too, though at the market or gas station, etc. So the people lose. Why is this done? The worker in the private sector also makes money for the investor - the function for which that worker is rewarded a larger salary for in the first place. The cut for the investor - the rakeoff - is what Trump and Musk are aiming at. And that comes out of our pockets, too.
Scott Bessent is no Hjalmar Schacht. Look it up. Trump is far dumber than what's-his-name who was Schacht's boss. The American government has become a clown car.
But exactly what is to be done?
I'm inclined to believe that Welfare King Musk and Forever Fraudster Trump are both hoping to create a situation where they shift money, both public and private, to their own pockets. Trump wasn't fined multiple times for laundering money and fraud in his businesses because his social conscience is so well-developed. Gimme a break. Jared and Grennell are taking the two billion in Saudi murder money to invest in Balkan oligarch real estate ventures. Some things never change.
Agreed. The situation you describe has been the case since Reagan.
Sound like organized crime to you?
What you describe reminds me of the Russian criminalocracy that held sway for decades after Gorbachev presided over the coup by Yeltsin and his mobbed-up cronies. We’ve had a coup. Now what?
Cryptocurrency is going to be important to the new mob, BTW. It’d be interesting to see an essay on cryptocurrency from Krugman.
And what happens if/when the fired government employees file for unemployment? Which, I believe is managed and paid for by states, not the federal government.
And, whether it comes from the states or the feds, it ultimately comes out of our pockets. No one in this administration is saving the citizenry any money, they are building a dam the purpose of which is to divert money into their own pockets. Remember the father of all deficits, Ronald Reagan, who borrowed money from us via deficit bills and gave it to his pals through his loose money policy at the bank level, and then his pals absconded with the loot prior to the S&L meltdown during his term.
Putting a longer tail on this, if and when some “normalcy” can be restored and these agencies can rehire staff who in their right minds would want to take those jobs now that they can be made redundant at a political whim? At best the quality of government workers will decline making a self fulfilling prophecy of “inefficient government.
They do not wish to fix anything. They are destroying our country. Breakers not builders.
When you move or change jobs, you become "probationary". It's silly, but it is an agency rule. BTW, during Trump 1.0, they raised that period to two years from 1 - Congress did that.
So, the Clown in Chief is also "probationary" since he just returned to his [con] job. How about We the People fire him, and MuskRat, too?
I was marching in the streets of Peekskill today outside of Sen. Schumer's office. It was gratifying to see 100's of protesters despite the frigid weather. People want our democracy and our government; we don't approve of what Trump, MuskRat, & the Trump sycophants are doing.
Which makes it all the more F'd up.
There are people who had been in for 20 years but were promoted or switched departments, so were temporarily probationary. This did not just hurt college grads, knowledge was lost everywhere.
They Do NOT CARE. The idea is to weaken government. Then people will get even angrier about the inefficient (overwhelmed) gubbamint. Then rinse and repeat until the agency collapses. This has been the strategy since Reagan .
I’m not sure “austerity theatre” is the best way to understand Musk’s dismantling of the US federal government. Like “security theatre,” it assumes that Musk’s goals are as stated but that his actions are simply for show, no matter how destructive they are in practice. It assumes a continuity with past practices, goals and customs that just isn’t there. As obviously destructive as Musk has already been, austerity theatre actually understates the scale of this catastrophe. (Also, Musk apparently is targeting agencies and regulators who affect him personally, so I wouldn’t take anything he says at face value.)
Musk and Trump are radicals. Revolutionaries, not reformers.
A better analogy would be a US cultural revolution: a dismantling of the US government done for the sake of completely remaking the United States in their own image. Austerity might be the language they use, but their project has nothing to do with efficiency. It has to do with creating the conditions to implement an authoritarian dictatorship. That’s the whole ball game.
I can see your point here, but I believe what Prof. Krugman intended to convey was the magnitude of misdirection - pay no attention to that man behind the curtain - being foisted onto us.
It's for that purpose that the first ones on the chopping block were all the IG's who would otherwise be putting the brakes on a lot of this malfeasance.
I'm not so sure that Musk+tRump cannot best be thought of as berserkers. trying to beat our population into submission. Burn it all down and profit off the ashes.
I'm sure.
And the fact that they're doing it partly for show - like, you know, theater.
Yeah, that too.
" It has to do with creating the conditions to implement an authoritarian dictatorship. That’s the whole ball game." 100% spot on.
Blayne, You have precisely identified our existential dilemma, if only the mainstream media would report it. Now, do we just accept all this destruction as a fait accompli or can we do something about it? The best advice I’ve heard so far is from the right of Center NY Times columnist, David French who said he is going to speak the truth and protect the vulnerable. I am truly terrified I will get hurt by the MAGA “army” or the military if I publicly protest.
Fox is now the largest media organization - they're the "mainstream." NYT and WP are now minor players; not part of the mainstream media at all.
Yes, you’re right. My uncle has 5 tvs constantly playing Fox News in 5 different rooms. I only read so I’ve never heard Fox News.
Meidas Touch is beating Fox numbers on youtube. It's a start!
What is that?
Meidas Touch is a media group of 4 brothers (all lawyers). They have a priceless bulletin 5 days a week that keeps up on lots of moving pieces. They also have a news channel on YouTube and do interviews.
I think Meidas is now up to 4 Million subscribers. There are 4 or 5 other youtube resources as well who all check facts: Bryan Tyler Cohen, Pondering Politics, The Humanist Report, Occupy Democrats, Secular Talk - but - please note, even Meidas will have flashy headlines and you just have to get past it. The others, outside of Meidas, focus on one issue at a time. Between them all I do feel I'm getting better news on this situation than broadcast news provides or Washington Post or NYT. Bryan Tyler Cohen just interviewed Jamie Raskin and that is a must see interview. Meidas interviewed Joe VBinden before his exit.
Correct! Case in point: That's why Paul Krugman and many other excellent writers and journalists are on Substack. Honestly, I only keep a NYT subscription for my wife's love of Wordle, the crossword, etc.). MSN, NYT, WaPo... all shadows of their former selves, with only few exceptions at the writer level.
You said it! I’m very worried about Trump using protests as his rationale/battle-cry for the implementation of martial law….
….followed shortly after by orders to the military, national guard, police forces, and/or Proud Boys et al. to use force or even fire-at-will to “protect America from the violent protesters”
There is every reason to be confident that this is on Trump’s list of “Things I Must Do To Be King”
You have a point but I can see why Dr. Krugman used the term "austerity theater"--it's nonsense and made up, after all--since the budget request adds $4 trillion to the deficit, hardly austere and therefore, theatric.
Definitely not austere, and certainly deceptive.
I realize I'm being pedantic. And of course I agree with Krugman's point that all of this will leave Americans worse off in terms of quality of life. But I also think it's important, at this point in US and world history, to use language as precisely as we can. Americans aren't about to discover the costs of austerity theatre -- they're about to discover what it's like to live under an authoritarian government. Which is the main point of all of Musk's and Trump's moves.
I don't think we need to spend too much time on one phrase. Dr. Krugman's point was clear, whatever phrase he used. You are entirely right that Americans are going to discover what it's like to live under an authoritarian, oligarchic, kleptocratic government. In fact, we probably already are but just don't know it.
You are 100% correct
I expect you will write about the next ugly fallout of DOGE’s indiscriminate purge of federal employees - a collapse in the housing market starting in the DC/MD/VA area. Early reporting of a significant uptick in home listings spells danger for homeowners. I’m already having 2007-2008 market collapse flashbacks.
When the consumers no longer are buying the economy will collapse.
There is a call for a one-day economic blackout: The February 28 economic blackout is a planned nationwide protest where participants will refrain from making non-essential purchases from large corporations for 24 hours. This movement, organized by The People's Union USA, aims to highlight consumer power and advocate for economic change, particularly in response to the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives by some companies.
Better yet--don't pay whatever taxes you owe on April 15th. How are they going to come after all of us and what are we paying for since they're dismantling everything useful, such as CFPB?
Somehow they’ll keep that part working. Count on it.
And that's exactly why there his a national boycott from buying anything tangible on 2/28. The farmers aren't going to be buying, because they aren't receiving any money from the Federal government. 25% of the income in hundreds of the rural counties comes from the Federal government. It's not going to take long for a large percentage of them to run out of money.
Farmers voted for Trump 3-1. They are reaping the results of their own stupidity
Rethugs will give farmers an exception, probably with the help of some Dems.
The payoffs will only go to the very largest corporations.
And with the advent of Trumpflation, the boycott will happen organically.
Their goal is to quadruple the homeless population by year's end.
I’m generally a pretty optimistic person but after knowing what was contained in the pages of Project 2025 and watching its implementation, I’m not so sure you aren’t correct.
They also plan to increase hunger - preferably starvation, multiply medical crises exponentially and in general punish the poor for being poor. You know, "Own the Libs".
I honestly hate to say this, but Curtis Yarvin, a billionaire oligarch popular with the tech bros of his day, once said (jokingly??) that one way to deal with poor people would be to turn them into biofuel. He went on to add, chiilingly, that the Federal Prisons could be used as the rendering sites. Even if he was joking, his 'joke' reveals the mindset of too many in that class. They are left brain dominated to a fault, I suspect a great many of them are somewhere on the Autism spectrum, and know a goodly number are misogynists. Peter Theil, puppetmaster of JD Vance, has publically opined that women should never have been "granted" the vote. I mean OMG OMG OMG.
From Heather Cox Richardsons newsletter today. Vance told our allies this in Munich a few days ago-
"Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values."
No wonder they refuse to honor the 14th amendment.
He wasn't joking. He was "testing the waters."
Often psychopaths "joke" about things that are not funny. It's not a joke, it's a threat.
I sometimes say the world would be improved by converting 77 million Trump voters into food for omnivorous farm animals. I’m not joking, either, but at least I know it’s an entirely infeasible fantasy, although not for lack of slaughterhouse capacity.
Yarvin is a very dangerous individual. I’ve read that JD Vance is one of his followers. Very scary stuff.
While Musk loves to claim he's "on the spectrum" what he really is is a psycopathic a-hole with a god complex. I get the autism remark though, as most of them seem to be soulless ghouls with, if anything, a negative empathy gene. Much like you know who.
They are all psychopaths - and big fans of "Soylent Green" ... "It's people!".
Jokes are a way of communicating with other members. Just like the Roman salute performed by Musk that was public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
The irony of course is that the low information voter (like here in TN) applauds such things. Only to be the victim of these evil schemes.
Yep. I spent a lot of my life living in WV and feel so sorry that the people there have been so hoodwinked. Once upon a time they stood up to plutocrats like Trumpmusk, and were mown down by hired guns at places like Matewan. That spirit has been weakened by scurrilous preachers, opioids and underfunding of the public schools. It's a tragedy too often echoed elsewhere.
Yep. Trump voters (whether they know it or not) are in the "FO" part off their "FAFO" saga....
They applaud because they know rethugs are vigorously pursuing their top priority, which is to step up the oppression of black Americans and other marginalized groups that rethugs don’t like and to preserve the legal, economic, and political advantages of white Americans.
I’m generally pretty optimistic as well but I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that they don’t care if we starve, suffer from illnesses that could be cured with treatment that they will block or no longer fund, or that we just die. I’ve never been so glad that I’m not leaving children and grandchildren to face this mess. Cruelty is the point of what they are doing. That and greed.
They promised to make housing more affordable … having a larger homeless population filled by previous homeowners, the suddenly unemployed having to undersell, and fewer folks being able to get mortgages due to unemployment is the cruelest way to achieve that goal, and of course does risk a huge drop in home prices cutting back American’s biggest source of wealth a la 2008
Or even 1929
Yes that worries me a lot. The end point of these policies of excessive deregulation (feeding over speculation) is the next big bust
With tRump+Musk destroying the government infrastructure of competence at home and destroying our reputation in the International Arena, there will likely be an epic crash.
"We brought housing prices down!"
(By causing a huge recession in the DC area, unemployment, bankruptcy, cascading business failures, etc...)
As Muskrat/drumpf keep firing Fed employees, they will all be putting their homes on the market. No stopping it.
When fired federal workers can’t make their mortgage payments there is going to be a problem. They will be needing to sell but there will be very few people looking to buy.
Not really. New MAGA lobbyists are coming. Don’t u worry.
Oh I fully agree with you. And plenty of venture capitalists vultures are ready and waiting to swoop down and cash in on what could be massive foreclosures.
Yes, Hedgefunds that support Trump (they all do) will pick the bones clean. They thing is who can afford the rents they must have in order to turn profit? If there are no jobs to replace the lost ones then who will they rent to?
I hate to “like” your comment but it is 💯 correct.
This is an externality I had not thought of, and one I really wish I had thought of. Can you point me at a data source?
Article from Redfin but I’m starting to see others with the same trend. I think it’s safe to assume that with the thousands of federal employees being fired that we will only see more listings start to flood the market.
https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-update-listings-piling-up-pending-sales-falling/
Awesome, thanks!
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/fake-real-estate-post-stokes-fears-about-federal-cuts-impact-on-dc-housing-market/3847539/
Cheaper houses equals good. Why do you hate people?
No. Rising wages that keep pace with housing costs is good. Collapsing housing prices due to taking a meat cleaver to a well functioning regional economy is bad for everyone.
Housing prices in greater Detroit and many places in the "rust belt" are cheaper relative to the 70s. Is that good? No, because the industries that sustained those regions are dead and gone.
Take your shitposing elsewhere.
JB, You point out a real life problem. What new family is going to buy into a home where there is no economy that can support schools and infrastructure as well as providing the owner employment with a future. Trumpistas believe in a canard that new jobs will be coming back to America and that tariffs will make Wall Mart junk more affordable. How does that work? The answer is as always give billionaires more money so it can congeal at the top. It never trickles down.
That's how you treat the people? Check for yourself. Search something like "housing prices are out of control", you'll see a lot of discussion about need for housing prices to go down. A lot of working people and young people blame homeowners and well-off people for high housing prices. Your attitude pushes them out and then they, enraged, vote for Trump.
There are a lot of stupid and ill informed Fascist loving Americans who believe Trump will somehow create affordable housing. The housing market has high pricing because 1) There is a huge shortage of available housing. People who have houses don’t want new development infused into their homesteads. 2) Interest rates continue to hover around 7% on average, the need to come down to somewhere around 2 to 3% to make the already short supply homes available for financcing. It is not homeowners who price the market. It is the banks and real estate agencies.
I will add one caveat to your #1 item...There is a shortage of houses where people >want< to live. In the 6 years or so that I have lived in my house, its value has probably gone up 40% at this point (which is ridiculous), which was already expensive when I bought it. There are plenty of STEM jobs in the area. If I were to drive an extra hour outside of the major city I live near, I could probably find housing costs that are a bit more normal, but I would be giving up a lot of things that I enjoy about living in/near a city.
"A lot of working people and young people blame...."
So? In many cases, these petulant, entitled young people swallow the propaganda that purposely strives to divide us working people.
And this, "people are saying," nonsense is a big part of the propaganda..
Housing prices are brought down by building more houses. This is basic supply and demand.
You're a troll or a bot.
All I see from your comments is noise and agitation. You don't even have a consistent position.
Here are some of the reasons housing prices are “out of control”:
https://www.thesling.org/are-hedge-funds-and-private-equity-firms-driving-up-the-cost-of-housing-2/
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/wall-street-hedge-funds-are-buying-whole-neighborhoods-driving-up-home-prices/
https://hedgefundalpha.com/why-are-hedge-funds-buying-homes/
What?! Where did you come up with that from what I wrote? There’s nothing “good” about mass foreclosures. You obviously do not understand the potential devastation to not only those who have suddenly lost their jobs due to no fault of their own, but existing home owners who will see a loss in value. Which translates to a loss in property taxes, which translates to a loss of revenue for cities, counties, and states. This hurts all citizens.
News flash: this isn’t the intelligent way to go about lowering housing prices and making housing more affordable.
Come at me again with that sort of nonsense and I’ll block you. This isn’t Twitter.
Life is too short to put up with people like Grahor Targ! Blocked!
Oh, I'm so scared. You will block me! You will lock yourself in a bubble where nobody but people who think like you are allowed! You will hide in a safe space!
Seriously? Don't talk to people you are going to block then, just block them silently. They will never know you've blocked them. Any attempt to say "I will block you" instead of actually blocking means you want them to know your attitude towards them, and that antithetic to blocking them. You look like a hypocrite.
Hope you read this. I block people like you who have zero to contribute and only twist words to fit your agenda or traffic in insults. Go back to Twitter.
Your only contribution here is a dumb statement meant to provoke people followed up by multiple insults - how is that in any way enlightening or informative other than letting us all know that you're here to be a dick and nothing more?
Are you a nut case? Let me answer. “Ahup.”
Making housing cheaper by bankrupting people isn’t good. Look past the end of your nose, please. Vulture capitalists buying low from desperate homeowners and renting high to vulture magats, that’s bad.
ALL the wealth most regular people will EVER HAVE, is tied up in their house. If you crash the price of housing, make people lose their homes, and transfer them to the super-wealthy at bargain basement prices (as the market crashes), you transfer wealth from regular Americans to the super-rich. Regular Americans already own a minority of wealth. Inequity explodes. We become a society of rentiers and serfs.
Yes, that is what they super wealthy did in the Atlanta metro area. It drove housing prices through the roof and that is where they are staying. The house we bought for $80K is now worth $340K. Absurd.
Did your parents have any children that actually lived, or was it just you?
"suddenly getting rid of thousands of federal workers looks strong and decisive to people who don’t understand what it will do."
That would be most Americans which is why we're in this predicament in the first place.
As a retired federal worker, I can assure you that not only to most people have no idea what federal workers do, they also think they make substantially more money than they actually do.
Ever since Reagan the R's have been casting the federal government and federal workers as the enemy. Who can forget Reagan's "welfare queens"?
That's the key to the "Reagan Revolution" - perfecting the art of propaganda. It really began with Nixon's "Southern Strategy", or really even McCarthy's "Un-American Activities Committee", but the Reagan campaign perfected it. The whole Republican party has been taking pages from Orwell's 1984 as well as the writings of Goebbels ever since.
He really meant welfare queens though. Single women leaving bad marriages with young children who had never been in the work force and who weren't getting any child support for the kiddies from the baby daddies. Hence the welfare queen was born. She had to stay perpetually pregnant to stay on the welfare roles. The system thought this was somehow better than providing job training and child care subsidies. Only with job training and child care subsidies could she hope to get a real job to support her family.
When our government no longer functions because of all the cuts, will that then entail private companies stepping into the vacuum? Could this be about privatizing our government services? Turning our government functions over to companies of their choice, a quid pro quo scenario, seems entirely plausible in regards to the trump administration and Republican tactics.
You bet private companies will be stepping in. That’s the whole point. We had the Steward company debacle over some important hospitals here in Massachusetts. They stepped in and took over and now the hospital(s) gone. Bankrupt. I remember in the first term, they were looking at selling NOAA our national weather service which is so critical to agriculture, commerce, etc. to AccuWeather and privatizing it. The list goes on. Not to mention that they’re making a fortune building detention centers into which citizens, legal immigrants, and everybody else they grab will go. I knew someone who was in jail in the bush era, and they had privatize the jails to a large extent, and people, poor people, could not afford to make a phone call.
My comment was meant to bring attention to the Republican end game. Republicans have been angling towards privatization for years. Coming right out and admitting that has always had negative results. I fear this is the beginning to their backdoor entry.
Its not even back door now, its caving in the front door. And Americans sit in their living rooms watching reality tv while its happening.
This is the end game. As you point out yourself, the Republicans have been angling for exactly this all along. Now their efforts have come to fruition.
Too few understand privatization is the stealing of public goods to put them behind a private pay wall
Yes, they will - to some extent.
But a critical, but poorly understood, element of public goods and services (which governments exist to provide by fulfilling the social contract) is that -private market actors cannot keep up with the demand for those goods and services.-
Take mail. Can UPS, FedEx, and DHL ship letters and parcels? Yes. Can their logistics systems ship ALL the letters and parcels sent every day across the US? No. Can they do it at $0.73 for a one ounce letter in 2.5 days? No: FedEx 2 day is $10
Can private schools educate some kids? Yes. All of them? No. And some of them (anyone needing any kind of accommodation like Braille or a wheelchair ramp, to say nothing of any psych-related accommodation), they simply will not.
You can hire mercenaries to defend your country, but as British satirist Terry Pratchett wrote, “The problem with mercenaries…is that they need to be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up paying them even more to stop—” (Pratchett, Terry. 1997. _Jingo._ London: Harper-Collins. P.23).
Privatization is not always a solution to a problem. Sometimes, privatization -is- the problem (see British Rail…. And Gazprom).
I heard AccuWeather are screaming NO!. They use all the free Weather data and sell it. If they take it over they'll have to spend money to gather at least some data.
The problem here is that private firms don’t make a profit protecting the public from contaminated products, environmental pollution
etc .
Private enterprise produces private goods and services, public goods ( already in short supply)
are too important to be subjected to the profit motive.
Yes.
And the Democrats are fiddling. What a bunch of inept individuals. Where are Clintons, Obamas, Bidens… disgusting.
In the 60's we understood that to end a war required collective action, in the streets, registering masses of voters, making noise, over and over and over again. We weren't waiting for sanity to be delivered by a celebrity politician or in the coffin of a friend shipped back from Viet Nam. When Henry Kissinger gave the address at my daughter's Boston University graduation decades later, I was thrilled to see other parents, and many, many students, stand and denounce him as a war criminal and a traitor. It is our job. Join a lawsuit. Make a thousand calls.
I agree that the public needs ro be protesting but I also remember that Nixon got elected in spite of, or maybe because of, massive protests and expanded qnd lengthened that war.
That's true, but only because he lied. Remember, he waited until the last possible second to end the war, and only so he could claim it to get re-elected. It came to be called "The October Surprise", and it worked. In the interim, he bombed the shit out of Cambodia, and in general >escalated< 'Nam. All this while orchestrating the Watergate break in.
No. Nixon’s election was made possible by the same strategy that has elected all other rethugs since 1968: a promise the continue the oppression of black Ameicans and preserve the legal, economic, and political advantages of white Americans.
That too - his "Southern Strategy". But he also promised to stop the damn war, and that really put him over the top.
He lied, but was criticized and ostracized for doing it. Now lying is an appreciate art form.
Yeah. Kinda bizarre how that happened, isn't it?
Do you remember what the Democratic Party Primary looked like? Ed Muskie, George Wallace, Shirley Chislom, Hubert Humphrey, and George McGovern. Talk about a Big Tent! Nixon won the South and 60% of all votes. We had a southern segregationist, a black woman, and an anti-war intellectual in the mix
And a massive protest and Mayor Daily's police action. "The world is watching!". Indeed it is.
Mickie, I was there. The youth movement did what so many movements do — they went too far and an ugly backlash occurred. I disposed the Abby Hoffman’s and Bobby Seals in Chicago in1968 because I knew from an early age very early age that these people were ruining it for Eugene McCarthy. And so Nixon won. This is the modern history of this nation and now we have crossed the Rubicon. There will be little chance in going back. Maybe a miracle but I doubt it. One remaining goal; Get the money.
the late 60s and the 70s was over reach. We had the ball and we dropped it. And blew up Johnsons' Great Soceity.
That is exactly what is going on!
A possible area is people negatively affected by Trump who might switch their vote. If farmers lose because there’s no more foreign aid they might think twice before voting R again.
If they get a chance....
and the most recent flag-carrier for the Democrats, Kamala Harris. It's obviously demoralizing for her (and eveyone else with two brain cells to rub together) to see that Americans would rather have a lifelong crook and adjudicated rapist for President than a smart woman of color, but many millions of people did vote for her and could well rally around her, given a chance. She would not have to pretend to be annointed by the party to speak for the party- her own personal views would be newsworthy and valuable.
She may well be vocal, but the media may not cover her. Just because we don't know about it doesn't mean it isn't happening.
That’s a good point— we only know what we are allowed to know.
Exactly. The corporate media loves to cover Trump because it brings in ad $$$$s.
Why should she. She did her job. She put everything into it. It’s time for others to step up and let her rest until she’s ready again. I mean seriously? You would end up putting all the blame on her if she tried and lost because no one else stepped in to help. Don’t blame the woman for causing this shit show.
Contact her at https://kamalaharris.com/. She'll fill your ear. Of course, you'll also get requests for donations.
She’s a poor politician. A terrible speaker. And she’ll be tarred with Biden’s excesses (like the open border).
LIstening to consultants who are telling them to keep their heads down and their power dry. You know, the same consultants that lost the 2024 election.
It was not the consultants who lost 2024 election. It was the message, the idea, the ideology of Democratic party. The message that caused people to vote for despised Trump.
No, the Democratic Party didn’t force people to vote for a stupid rapist felon. This is preposterous.
What the hell? There is a difference between "caused" and "forced". People have voted for Trump of their own free will, free choice. They made that choice, in part, because alternative - Democratic Party - was even less attractive for them than Trump.
Insert “caused” then. You attribute a magical superpower to democrats: they’re able to manipulate Trump voter’s feelings so much that they cause them to vote for trump. No. This is preposterous.
Are you insane? It is not "manipulation", it is presenting your position in media, in social networks, etc. It is how politicians and parties fight for votes. Presenting messages, ideas and ideology.
Message/ideas/ideology of Democratic party, as presented by Democratic Party to voters through words and deeds, was disliked by people so much that they went to vote for Trump. Do you even understand how voting works?
I know people who didn’t vote because they thought Harris was a disaster.
Mr Targ I totally agree. We pushed too far on everything from diversity to boys in girls high school showers to broken borders but you still can’t explain this to the dyed in the wool democrat. They just are unable to understand.
As I am about to be totally excoriated here, let me say I am fully supportive of gay and lesbian issues, racial equality and so on. But we should have never ignored the white working class once mostly democrats but who run into the arms of those who could care less about their needs.
Bill, as you know there are no trans athletes in sports nor will there ever be except in tiny fractions of less than 1%. Something even scientist allow for. The broken borders when you really look into the realities is that we need laborers for all kinds of menial and ugly jobs that white Americans do not want to do. Racism is still alive and well in America and the privileged whites who live in fear of loosing status is all that drives Republicans. But, go ahead convince me these are real problems that represent the demise of America.
Trans athletes in some sports are a problem - not for us. But usually for women participating in those sports. It is not up to me to mansplain to women how they are wrong in having their opinion.
I am not threatened by transgendered people. But women sometimes are. Those women have their opinions and they have their votes, and they use them.
NO men in women’s sports. One is too many.
You are repeating a GOP talking point. Dems were always focused on benefiting the middle class. This is demonstrated by the fact that by rolling back Biden policies, such as green energy promotion that was mainly benefiting manufacturing in red states, is going to be actually devastating to middle class folks. See what I mean?
"ignored" the white working class"??? As in we did not use white racist dog whistle politics? Do you realize that has been the decisive factor in all but about two elections since 1964? We have to break the dog whistle forever or the Dems will go into long-term decline. Imitating the Dog whistle to get the white racist vote always backfires long term.
And the fact that Biden’s (sad) mental capacity decline was covered up for about 2.5 years. When he was forced to give up, it was already too late. Democrats have lot to account for.
That debate was so embarrassing.
No it’s the disinformation. There was no message or vehicle for that message that could have overcome all the dark money disinformation ops that completely obscured reality. I went to a Kamala rally. Her message was strongly middle of the road and targeted to the middle class kitchen table issues.
And Trump's message was strongly national socialism with added "instead of thinking about YOU, Democrats are mumbling some ridiculous shiat about DEI and LGBTQ+ and transwhatever! They don't care about YOU! While I think about working people and how they fare in this terrible economy!"
That message have resonated with working people a lot more than middle of the road "economy is actually fine, you are stupid if you think otherwise, and we must celebrate our diversity..."
*looks at address* oh my god, bsky. :) I've tried it, yeah. Like, no.
Kamala didn’t actually talk about any of that and it was Trump that ran countless anti trans ads claiming she did which was a lie
Whole behaviour and attention of Democratic Party for years before was pointing out at DEI and transrights and everything else. The mere fact that Kamala did not promise to change the course meant that everything will remain the same and people didn't like it.
It was both.
The consultants are now recommending that the party concentrate on winning local elections. For now.
Given that the Obamas and Clintons and Bidens are not in office, what exactly should they be doing? Jumping up and down and yelling? The American electorate handed over the all keys to Trump and the Republicans, and *now* the Dems are supposed to do something about it?
75 million people voted for Democrats. Not enough? Not worth fighting for? FYI, they should be defending the Republic. With all they have!
This isn't entirely the responsibility of the Democrats.
I'll remind you that the Republicans in Congress also took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Their constituents are getting hurt, as well, so why aren't they doing anything about this?
Because DOGE will have their TAX RECORDS for BLACKMAIL!
Sigh. Same as it ever was. 🙄
Yes, where are they? On vacation? Building themselves underground bunkers? WHERE ARE OUR LEADERS?
Are they your leaders? Do they want to be your leaders? Are you of the same political movement they are? Are you a moderate internationalist social-democrat? (Not even saying that Biden and Obama are not of the same kind of social-democrat and would be in different parties in Europe).
I somehow doubt it. Seek your own revolutionary leadership, don't try to call leadership of Democratic party. They are not of your blood.
What a weird comment.
I just wanted to say that Democratic Party is actually home for different parties. It would not be a single party - in Europe - because people of that party have different views, not always compatible. People who are nominally leaders of Democratic Party - your leaders - may not have the same views as yours.
Ah, that makes sense, and you are right.
Just in case you'll found the thought interesting - Trump's party is also not a single party. It's at least 3 very different and distinct parties and they hate each other. The only thing that unites them is that they hate each other a bit less than they all hate you. :) It's quite an achievement, to get hated by such a different set of people.
Do the work - find out what they’re up to and if not working for you in the way you want, call and write! I am everyday and it feels good. Also, you might be surprised to learn that within the structural subordination of being in the minority party in Congress, the Dems are actually trying to fight back now. They got the message by and large. But their powers are limited. And way too many people expect them to somehow magically bust through a massive right wing disinformation echo system, including the most watched Cable TV channel and the most used social media platforms
Seriously? Way to turn on someone you don't know.
We still have a living Republican former POTUS who said nothing about djt before or since he was elected. Ineptitude abounds.
He can't really say much because he was the previous worst president of all time. That Trump trounced him in that category doesn't alter the fact. And he knows it.
George W. Bush may have messed a lot of things up, but he was nowhere near as terrible as, say, James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson...
You've got a good point there. Those two were definitely major contenders.
However, King Bush II gave us ISIS, and an emboldened Iran. Not to mention 9/11 happened on his watch - even though he'd been warned that it was coming.
Today's protest
https://www.fiftyfifty.one/
Good to see.
Just what do you expect them to do? Throw bombs? Shoot Musk? Get in the real world!
Put themselves out there... put themselves on record... present factual corrections to the BS., present alternative solutions to Trump's "created crisis"... add some sanity to the conversation... not lay down and die?
They are emailing, raising funds for the DNC, for state candidates campaigns. Moskowitz even went on Fox with Jesse Walters. They're raising awareness of important special elections, state and national. I have few filters, no ad blockers, so they're are filling the email at our house, every single day.
Democrats are out in public all the time and also going on shows like Lawrence O’Donnell, Morning Joe, etc. If you watch the hearings you will also see them presenting the facts. Democrats are even holding their own unofficial “spotlight” hearings — as the minority party they can’t call official hearings — to get the facts out. I know at least some of them have been televised because I have seen the on MSNBC. Not sure what other outlets have covered them.
A lot of people making these accusations are understandably tuning the media out but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. whether or not what they are doing is effective remains to be seen.
You’re correct. People need to pay more attention and not just automatically fall into the “blame the Dems” meme
Speak out? That too much to ask?
How do you know they aren't speaking out? We have a problem with our news outlets ignoring anti-trump dialogue!
If you had read the column, you would have realized how urgent Professor Krugman sees the situation. I think we're way past writing letters, especially if the letters are to Republican representatives. We're certainly in general strike and mass disruption territory.
The representative for my district is a Republican. His office has been refusing to answer the phone for over a week now. It rings twice and goes dead.
But you need workers for strikes. And workers, are, you know. Trump's.
Speak up. These are extraordinary times. Use any medium possible including X. The time for a high road has sailed away.
The problem is, you only "speak" to people of your bubble.
True, but how does that differ from one million shitposters on X?
It does not, of course. Do you want to model yourself on X-posters?
That's what it's going to take.
Here’s what I want Dems to do: raise billions of dollars and spend it training and paying 100,000 local activists in every county in every state to use effective, on the street, get-out-the-vote methods to get Dem voters to the polls. Continuous, year round GOTV activity by trained activists, countrywide.
I've never given a dime to politicians--not even, Bernie, whom I canvassed for in neighborhoods that turn out to vote against their interests or not at all. It's going to take an attitude adjustment before the idiots distracted by sports and celebrity in this country wake up. Only the military can stand up to the coup.
They're not rocking the boat because soon, the Musk rats will have EVERYONE's tax info!!!
It is not up to them to save us. What are you doing?
I am not an American. I am shocked by how anemyc the Democratic leadeship is. And FYI: I know what I am doing in my own country. I fight for what I believe in: freedom, democracy, republic… what are YOU doing?
“Austerity Theater” - thank you again Professor! And why isn’t ANYONE mentioning that Musk’s ultimate plan is to turn our federal government into the world’s largest AI beta test site while further enriching himself and his Tech Bros. That’s a very dangerous gamble to make in too many different ways.
Paul Krugman is brilliant! No foul language, just the very scary truth based on indisputable facts! Please read!
It is worth remembering that back in September and October Elon Musk was talking about how it was necessary to crash the economy--"destroy the economy" is what he said--so that it can be "rebuilt" into something better. Wiping out the federal government is surely a step along that road.
They have no clue about macroeconomics- this will put us in a tailspin it will be very difficult ( without government spending, but that won’t happen!) to get out of. Looking like years of GDP growth lost.
They're going to rehabilitate Hoover if it kills us all.
He and Trump are planning to rebuild our federal workforce using AI - further enriching themselves while crippling our services.
That would be the same AI that brilliantly spotted $50 million worth of condoms going through USAID to Hamas, not understanding that their destination, Gaza, is a rural province in Mozambique, far from the Middle East, and intended to reduce the spread of HIV?
That's just one of the more laughable things that can go wrong when, as the professor aptly puts it, ignorant people parachute into something complicated and think they can easily and quickly identify problems.
More like Artificial Stupidity.
It also wasn't 50 million for condoms. Condoms were a small part of the overall anti-HIV spending.
I can’t figure out who they think is going to spend money on products if we’re all broke because of this?
That's what I was wondering before the election. Now I recognize that the billionaires at work here truly don't care if the economy craters. They have so much money they can survive anything short of total civilization collapse. What I don't fully understand is why any businessperson short of billionaire status isn't frightened right now. Why didn't they see this coming?
And yet Mr Trump is unconcerned.
His big friend Vladimir told him: “It’s okay, Donald, go ahead”.
Evidently Coronavirus taught nothing both to him and 75+M US voters
These events remind of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when a tyran built a cult of "red guards" (= hateful young people) that violently defamed and purged intellectuals and civil servants, so that he could retain power even if that meant the collapse of society. A wave of madness swept through the country.
If you add the resurrection of Lysenkoism (= the lethal replacement of science and scientists by... claims ?), that's a lot of tributes to Marxist regimes.
All my best wishes to Americans enduring this.
In this insane context, telling the facts and defending the truth becomes harder but also much more valuable. Dr. Krugman, your blog is commendable.
It's no small irony that "Conservatives" are using the same tactics as "Communists". If you move far enough to the left, and far enough to the right, you'll meet on the other side of reason.
…and in the lap of treason :-/
The effects of the purges are already bad enough to make re-election problematic. They must be planning on implementing ELINO (election in name only).
They practically said as much. We've been warned.
Here in NH our grocery stores have put a limit on how many dozen eggs - 2 - a customer can buy per day, because of supply limitations related to bird flu. I said to my family this weekend that this will be our only tell about whether bird flu is still happening because the CDC won’t be updating us anymore.
At least in N.H. there is eggs- in Mass most stores are out.
You still give Musk and Trump the benefit of the doubt when discussing these activities in terms of government efficiency - and even with that assumption these actions make no sense. For example, probationary workers are generally going to be cheaper since they include all the new hires - and the new hires start toward the bottom of the pay scale.
These actions are the destruction of our civil service and make room for installing Trump loyalists. It is part of their plan of autocracy.
My American friend here, in despair, has now said 'Bring it on!' She sees no solution but complete collapse, and then if we're still alive, pick up the pieces and start again. One thing for certain is the US is not making itself stronger, as Trump might think. And Americans are standing by without hardly a protest to mark their disagreement. So the ROW can only conclude you have given assent. You might get the oligarchy you voted for, but you won't have an economy or any social structures left.
There are protests all over the country, all collectively downplayed or outright ignored by the mainstream media, many of whom are complicit with this coup or scared to death of them.
Then you make it impossible to ignore.
It's coming. Bear in mind, we're still only in the first month. Escalation is inevitable and unavoidable. The worst is yet to come.
Most of us did not vote for this!!! There were too many people (including some Dems) that didn't bother to vote or couldn't vote for a Woman or couldn't vote because of Gaza. Believe you me, we are fighting back -- mostly from the Grassroots people. We are trying to get our Dem Congress persons to fight back more and loudly and immediately after a lie is spewed by this Administration (which I don't even like using that word of current Administration). They are just liars and fascists and destroyers of Democracy. They are staging a coup.
Okay; they're staging a coup. What do you do in the face of this lawlessness? Your congress has already shown you who they are; have they shown you who YOU are, too?
I'm already fighting back - writing and calling my Congressional Representatives, attending protests, writing postcards to voters, spreading the word to my relatives.. . .
That's... an argument. And at least a confirmation that more extreme measure should have been used against the J6 rioters since they were there to "kill and die." I think having been arrested previously helps get you in the right mindset.
Well, of course. They have killed, have they not? They have died, have they not? Not all of them, obviously, but still. I can respect that. I mean, I would throw them to jail, they are rioters - but at least they are ready to riot and end up in jail for what they believe in.
If you truly believe that the coup is happening - where is your musket?
The solution is to make democracy function again. It doesn't respond to the will of the people, so people want to tear it down. A lot of what makes the US democracy dysfunctional is the rigid and functionally obsolete constitution.
Americans don't agree with your measure of strength.
I should not bug you, so this is the last time. WHEN, not if, the US has a major catastrophe and Trump f*cks it up and millions more die AGAIN because of his stupidity and vulgarity, then PLEASE let this nonsense go? You are not racially superior and including blacks in the mainstream will make America STRONGER....gullible biting white racist bait is for trash thinkers and will swirl us all down the toilet.
If we're "white racists" and "trash thinkers" and you make the countries you inhabit so strong please by all means go to those countries which have none of us and enjoy your strength over there.
Canada is closing the border so it will cost me to leave. You arrange with your Orange prostitute pissed on KKK leader to get me $200k and believe me, I would NOT live in the US with you. The lesson is coming and only mistakenly believing you would stop being a sucker for rich whites who dangle racial superiority in front of you has kept me here. This long lasting stupidity really has me messed up and if you pay me what your people have spent the last 400 years stealing, you will see me talking from a different point in this conversation.....you steal and mess sh*t up much as you can, blame everybody else and holler get out...???
We don't want you here, we've seen what you've done to Canada.
we? as in you speak for all white people? Didn't the people you are chasing get their @sses totally kicked in a Civil War?
Trump is a proven verified liar. For some reason, you have a view or philosophy that makes his lying okay? Or maybe it is me that can't see Trump's virtues because I am a black racist? A sort of bet can settle this. I NEED to be wrong. If the Trump administration delivers small government and a growing economy free of inflation, I will leave the Democratic Party and praise you and Trump in this forum. But in fairness, then you have to put up as well? You will disassociate from Trump and talk with me to my satisfaction on why his lying, bankruptcies, failed marriages and raw-dogging porn queens was not a red flag for you? We give it three years max. Then one of us has to back down. Is that a bet?
WHEN (not if) The sh*t hits the fan...I only ask you understand your part in the death and suffering that was only caused though the stupidity of white racism?
I’m protesting today! The ball is rolling. Please join us a noontime if you can. https://www.fiftyfifty.one
At this point, they are straight up evil
As they've always been.