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Conservative Economist: Trump’s Plans Won’t Work

Many voters who voted for the Felon in 2024 claimed to be motivated by economic concerns (or the promise of tax cuts for the wealthy in case of the super rich) - rather than the racism, bigotry and general hatred towards anyone different that the Felon has normalized.  Ironically, the Felon inherited an overall good economy notwithstanding some inflation and sluggishness in some sectors.  And what has the Felon done?  One headline at CNN Business reads "How to Trash an Economic Super Power in 100 days" and looks at the self-inflicted wreckage that looks at the Felon's trade war and on again off again tariffs and general alienation of America's trade partners.  Consumer confidence has plunged and some say the U.S. economy just had its worse quarter since the Covid-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the stock market is still down thousands of points, with trillions of dollars in wealth wiped out, including many average Americans' 401(k) and retirement funds. As for the drop in prices on "day one" that the Felon promised, they are not happening and, in fact, prices are increasing thanks to the Felon's bizarrely calculated tariffs.  Some of this reality is sinking in with the public as the Felon has the lowest rating of any president at the hundred day mark in numerous decades.  Worse my yet to come as laid out in a lengthy piece at Politico authored by a conservative economist.  Simply put, the Felon's plans will not work:

. . . Trump is used to bending reality to his will. But he will soon learn – if he hasn’t already – that this is harder to do with the economy. Just ask former President Joe Biden, who painfully learned that an inflation rate of 9 percent could not be spun as illusory, transitory or driven by a sudden and inexplicable burst of corporate greed. Ultimately, people directly experience their gas and grocery prices, as well as layoffs and stock market downturns. Sustained political popularity requires getting economic policy right, because elected officials cannot spin real economic decline.

As is increasingly evident, many of Trump’s economic policy pronouncements make little sense, in large part because he makes ever-shifting arguments for contradictory policies. A president who promised voters that, “We’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” instead induced a market crash . . . .

As a right-of-center economist who has spent nearly 25 years producing research that warns against the dangers of unrestrained federal spending and debt, I am concerned that Republicans are dramatically over-promising and under-delivering. . . . . .Trump is offering policies and promises that — even on their own terms — don’t make any sense. The president’s vision cannot successfully produce fiscal responsibility or economic prosperity because nearly every statement and action contradicts each other. And ultimately, it is American families and businesses who will suffer from this fog of policy confusion.

Here’s the truth about some of the president’s promises.

1. Tariffs can’t both create permanent domestic jobs and be a temporary negotiating tool.

It is not entirely clear why Trump has long been fixated with tariffs and hostile to any form of international trade. We know this aversion goes back to his 1980s days as a real estate developer, which suggests that his zero-sum view of trade may be the product of the kill-or-be-killed world of New York real estate. Whatever the reason, the president’s  [Felon's] public arguments for steep tariffs seemingly reflect backward reasoning, as he promises that tariffs can provide all things to all people.

A clear example is the contradiction between selling tariffs as a permanent policy versus a short-term negotiating tactic. Trump has repeatedly emphasized that tariffs are intended to produce in America manufacturing that is currently taking place in China, Vietnam, South Korea, Mexico and elsewhere. . . . . Instead, Trump unleashed a global economic meltdown and won nothing in return.

More importantly, Trump’s constant fiddling with the tariff dials and his claims that they are merely a short-term negotiating tactic undermine any hope of building new factories in America. One of the most important requirements for business investment is policy certainty. . . . . Tariff, tax and regulatory policies may be helpful or hurtful, but they at least must be predictable.

2. Tariffs can’t both protect domestic industries and generate trillions of dollars in revenue.

Even more contradictory is Trump’s promises that tariffs can build a trade wall around America while also raising trillions of dollars in tax revenues to replace the income tax. A tariff cannot raise revenues from imports if those goods are no longer being imported. Tariffs can either lock out imports or collect revenues from them, but they cannot do both. . . . . Counting on tariffs to raise significant revenue is wishful thinking, not economic thinking.

3. You can’t both eliminate the federal budget deficit and protect Social Security, Medicaid and other popular programs.

Trump’s unrealistic and contradictory tariff revenue promises fit well within his broader, and equally contradictory budget promises.

In his recent address to Congress, Trump promised that “In the near future, I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget. . . . .Without raising revenues, eliminating the $1.87 trillion budget deficit would require cutting 27 percent of the $7 trillion federal budget. Yet Trump has already promised no cuts to Social Security, Medicare, defense and veterans’ benefits, and he cannot directly reduce interest payments. That’s 66 percent of the budget taken off the table (or 75 percent if we include Medicaid, which Trump occasionally promises to spare from the budget ax).

That means balancing the budget would require eliminating nearly every remaining federal expenditure, including border security, infrastructure, federal courts, U.S. embassies, federal prisons, all health research, national parks, unemployment benefits, disaster aid and disability benefits. Even if the president demanded every one of those cuts, not even a tea party Congress could or would pass them.

4. You can’t eliminate the federal budget deficit and also cut taxes.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates that, during last fall’s campaign, Trump proposed nearly $10 trillion in new tax cuts over the decade. This includes his promised “no tax on tips,” ending taxes on overtime and Social Security payments and reducing corporate taxes. He also endorsed significant new spending for defense and border security.  . . . . the president’s [Felon’s] proposals (combined with $20 trillion in baseline deficits) would double the national debt held by the public from $30 trillion today to approximately $60 trillion within a decade. . . . . his balanced budget aspirations should be dismissed as mathematically nonsensical.

5. DOGE’s actions are likely to increase the federal budget deficit, not lower it.

Nor does the president’s “Department of Government Efficiency” cut through this nonsense or improve this fiscal calculus. Despite Elon Musk’s promises to immediately save $2 trillion (later scaled down to $1 trillion and now to $150 billion), DOGE is limited by the aforementioned presidential pledges not to touch the two-thirds of federal spending that is actually driving spending upward. Moreover, DOGE is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution, the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and repeated Supreme Court jurisprudence from unilaterally canceling spending that was approved by Congress and signed into law.

While the DOGE website claims to have saved $150 billion, the verified savings have been less than $5 billion — or less than 0.1 percent of federal spending. The rest of the claimed savings are either not backed up with specific data, or based on mathematical errors, triple-counting the same savings and theoretical “savings” of funds that were never going to be spent. Ultimately, DOGE is government spending-cut theater that targets MAGA cultural totems . . . . In fact, DOGE is likely to ultimately expand budget deficits. Drastic layoffs of IRS tax enforcement employees are expected to encourage tax evasion and cost the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.

6. The national debt can’t matter one day and not the next.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised not only to balance the federal budget, but even to pay off the entire $19 trillion national debt. Then during his first term, he signed legislation and executive orders adding $7.8 trillion more in red ink — only half of which was related to the pandemic. Now, Trump is promising to balance the budget while also proposing the largest borrowing binge since World War II. He even demanded that Congress completely eliminate the statutory debt limit.

Moreover, the self-described “king of debt” demands an end to each of America’s bilateral trade deficits (which are not economically harmful) yet has no qualms pushing budget deficits to stratospheric levels (which can be quite harmful).

These contradictions have real world implications. This is clear each time the Trump administration claims that budget deficits will no longer allow Washington to continue spending 0.1 percent of the federal budget to provide life-saving medications to 20 million African HIV patients, at the same time it is prodding Congress to slash taxes by $5.3 trillion.

All of this helps explain why the White House and congressional Republicans are weighing using a new gimmick to hide this economic reality.

The Republican budget’s solution is to override the $4 trillion price tag of the policy and simply claim that extending the tax cuts forever has zero impact on budget deficits. Their absurd argument is that, because the tax cuts already reflect the “current policy” until the end of this year, then renewing their cost forever is “free.”

This is fiscal nonsense. . . . . the next Democratic majority could use the same gimmick to declare zero cost for Medicare For All or the Green New Deal. As fiscally irresponsible as Congress and recent presidents have been, it is now likely to get much worse. . . . . none of this is going to fool the markets, particularly the bond market, whose recent gyrations suggest investors’ faith in the stability of the U.S. government has been shaken.

Trump has found political success selling his economic policies as achieving countless contradictory goals. But ultimately, he will be judged on whether the economy produces jobs, raises incomes, limits inflation and strengthens the stock market — metrics that are moving in the wrong directions. And his fiscal policies cannot escape the mathematical reality that deep tax cuts and spending expansions cannot reduce surging budget deficits.

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One Hundred Days of Cruelty and Ineptitude

One hundred days into the Felon's second regime, the global economy has been destabilized, the regime is seemingly poised to accept Russia conquest of parts of Ukraine, presidential corruption is running rampant, prices have not fallen "on day one" as promised (and are likely to rise substantially thanks to the insane tariff policies of the Felon), ICE is seizing individuals and making them disappear like a modern day Gestapo, federal agencies have been decimated, food safely regulations are being slashed or terminated, threats to the social safety net are  threatened in order to fund tax cuts for the super wealthy, and a Handmaiden's Tale like implementation of Project 2025 is underway.  As all of this unfolds, congressional Republicans either cower or cheer on cruelty and misogyny and the Felon acts as if he has a mandate even though only a third of eligible voters cast their ballots for him (the other two thirds either cast ballots for Harris or betrayed the nation by failing to vote).  A piece in the New Yorker looks at where America finds itself and poises the question of when will the citizenry rise up and say "no more."   Much of the MAGA base remains consumed with "owning the libs" and the mainstreaming of racism and bigotry.  The rest of the public needs to wake up, rise up and put an end to the madness and cruelty.  Here are column highlights:

Eight years ago, in this space, a survey of the first hundred days of the initial Trump Presidency described just how “demoralizing” the Administration had already proved for any citizen concerned with the fate of liberal democracy. In both rhetoric and action, Donald Trump had undermined the rule of law, global security, civil rights, science, and the distinction between fact and its opposite.

Trump never concealed his motives or his character. He came to office in 2017 celebrating the illiberalism of Andrew Jackson and William McKinley and waving Charles Lindbergh’s banner of “America First.” At the Inauguration, he took in the spotty attendance on the Mall and instructed his press secretary to declare the crowd the “largest ­audience to ever witness an Inauguration—­period.” Trump went on from there, demagogue and fantasist, striving to ban travellers from predominantly Muslim countries and to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. . . . He amused himself by antagonizing close European allies and declaring nato “obsolete.” . . . . There were many more moments of chaos and cruelty to come, but now we know that Trump’s first term, his initial attempt at authoritarian primacy, was amateur hour, a fitful rehearsal.

Trump still managed to exact plenty of damage, yet the feuding in his midst, along with the episodic flashes of congressional opposition, popular protest, and resistance in the courts, forestalled some of his fondest ambitions from being realized.

[In 2024] With a wink, he denied any knowledge of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s vision for the ­exercise of executive power, but few doubted that he would enact its plans. For would-be advisers and Cabinet officers, obedience was the sole qualification. The Administration is now stocked with the greasily obsequious. Rank incompetence also seems no impediment to employment. How else to explain Pete Hegseth’s move from the weekend desk at Fox News to the big office at the Pentagon? And in what other Administration would bulbs as dim as Howard Lutnick or Peter Navarro be called upon to craft the future of the world’s largest economy?

The record of failure after a hundred days is, at once, astonishing and predictable. With no evident purpose, Trump has alienated Europe, Japan, Mexico, and Canada, further undermined NATO, and made even more plain his affection for Vladimir Putin. He has sanctioned his benefactor Elon Musk to hoist a chainsaw and commit mayhem against government agencies that save countless human lives. With evident pleasure, Trump has deported more than two hundred ­people (nearly all of whom have no criminal record) to a Salvadoran gulag. With his tariff proposals, he managed to destabilize the global economy in a flash, perhaps the worst own goal in history. As part of his revenge campaign, he has waged a war of intimidation against dozens of scholarly, commercial, and legal institutions.

Trump has normalized Presidential corruption. If one were forced to choose two representative events in the life of this Administration so far, they would surely be the White House meetings with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and, six weeks later, with the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele. In the first, Trump treated a moral hero as an ungrateful scoundrel. In the second, he treated a sadistic dictator as a soulmate.

In recent weeks, there have been encouraging signs of opposition to Trump, on the streets and in the courts. Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez, and Bernie Sanders are among the clearest voices of dissent on Capitol Hill. But accommodation and cowardice remain the norm. “We are all afraid,” the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said to a gathering in Anchorage. No doubt. The threat of retaliation is no joke, but the Senator’s plaintive cry does not exactly meet the demands of the moment. This is not primarily a matter of competence or a clash over policy. The Trump Administration is carrying out a coördinated assault on first principles. “The limits of tyrants,” Frederick Douglass said, “are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” The President will persist in his assault until he feels the resistance of a people who will tolerate it no longer.

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Trump Has Alienated Longtime US Economic Allies

Politico is reporting that a new poll shows that 75% of Canadians despise the Felon and no longer trust  the USA.  In fact, half of Canadians now view the USA as a hostile power.  A piece in The Guardian is reporting that Subaru intends to reduce production in the US and ship vehicles to Canada straight from Japan rather than face the Felon's 25% tariffs on autos, and CTVNews is reporting that China is courting Canada to switch to China as it principal trading partner.  Meanwhile, things are little better with European Union nations which are looking at collective retaliation and self defensive measures which could hit American manufactures ranging from military equipment manufacturers to tech companies. While the Felon claims to be negotiating trade deals - none have been announced - China has flat out denied any such talks are occurring.  All this "winning" is turning the USA trade upside down.  Containership sailings from China to the USA are down by 40% by some reporting and some retailers are predicting empty shelves. The perverse side of me would welcome empty shelves at Walmart and other retailers frequented by the MAGA working class base and those who sat home rather than vote since these people either voted for the Felon and the ongoing nightmare or were too lazy to bestir themselves to vote against racism, bigotry and misogyny. . Should congressional Republicans slash Medicaid to pay for the Felon's tax cuts, the just deserts of these voters and non-voters will be even more painful.  Here are highlights from Politico on the EU response:  

President Donald Trump has spent the first three months of his second term imposing his will on the rest of the globe, telling long-time allies that they “don’t have the cards.”

But in capitals across Europe and elsewhere, debates are raging over the hands they could play. Proposals under consideration range from minor irritants to extreme actions that could sever defense and economic relationships that have cemented alliances for nearly a century.

Those include finding alternative suppliers of military equipment and munitions from U.S.-based defense contractors, enacting stronger counter-tariffs, rolling back intellectual property protections for U.S. companies and lessening their reliance on American tech giants, according to conversations with more than two dozen government officials in Europe and Canada, many of whom were granted anonymity to describe high-level discussions they’re not authorized to speak about publicly.

The diplomat added: “We need to strike a path that works without Washington.”

Less than three months into Trump’s term, his pursuit of a transactional, mercantilist and imperialist foreign policy has rattled leaders across the globe. It started with the president’s persistence in talking about annexing Canada and Greenland, his eagerness to end the war in Ukraine largely on Russia’s terms and Vice President JD Vance’s caustic comments describing Europe as freeloaders. But Trump’s market-cratering move this month to impose massive tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners — based on a formula scores of economists found bizarre — caused many longtime allies to shed any last remnants of magical thinking that they could manage or contain this predictably unpredictable American president as they did during his first term.

Leaders from London to Warsaw, Helsinki to Rome, are continuing efforts to de-escalate and maintain productive relationships with Washington — while considering how to “de-risk” by protecting themselves from Trump’s havoc. Their initial moves could be the first cracks in a dam that could break wide open, unleashing a torrent of increasingly punitive actions that, ultimately, could unravel a transatlantic alliance that has tied America to Europe for eight decades and refashion the global order.

[P]rivate Signal messages during the attack on the Houthis laid bare how some of the president’s most senior aides view Europe as “free-loading,” with Vance lamenting that he “hated” bailing the continent out. Trump officials “seem to think Europe is this dying continent that has no future and is not capable of independent action, that Russia is the more formidable power,” said Minna Ålander, a fellow on transatlantic defense and security at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “They may soon find out that the opposite is true.”

Few countries across Europe are more indebted or unconditionally loyal to the U.S. than Poland. And yet, posters are now showing up around Warsaw merging two silhouettes: Putin and Trump.

It’s an indication of the extent to which two months of direct threats and challenges from Washington are rapidly changing public opinion — and the private calculations of government officials — in Warsaw and in other European capitals.

Trump has been pushing NATO members to increase their spending on defense . . . . But the result of his pressure may well be that NATO allies shift their defense investments away from American contracts, shrinking a lucrative financial arrangement upon which the U.S. relies.

Poland, which borders Ukraine and Russia-aligned Belarus, is already spending 4.7 percent of its GDP on defense, the most of any NATO member. And it buys more American defense equipment than any other country in the world.

Warsaw is reconsidering that partnership. Prime Minister Donald Tusk has ruled out the cancellation of any existing contracts, but there are qualms in Warsaw about entering new ones.

“Confidence in the USA has been severely shaken,” said Pawel Kowal, the Ukraine envoy in Tusk’s office. “I don’t think we will be placing any more major orders with the American arms industry for the time being after analyzing our experiences with what is happening now.”

That’s no small statement given how much Poland’s procurement of American defense equipment, Kowal added, has helped to solidify relations with Washington, and the Trump administration in particular. . . . But Kowal says Poland now needs “to diversify our arms purchases” and “to buy in Europe or rely more on our own Polish arms industry.”

“Europe is now going to heavily increase its investments to defense. And it will be very logical that Europe is turning this money to its own economy,” said Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna . . . Many of the countries determined to boost defense spending are loath to invest in America’s defense industrial base . . . . Canada, Portugal, Denmark and Germany have publicly expressed reservations about continuing to purchase F-35 fighter jets from the U.S. given that Trump, in the event of a political disagreement, could block access to spare parts and software upgrades needed to keep the aircraft flying and combat-ready.

[E]ven the U.S.-made Patriot system has its challengers. The French-Italian SAMP/T, which takes only two years to produce, is now going through upgrades to put its range on par with Patriots. And confidence about it being a viable alternative has grown after its widespread usage by Ukraine over the last few years.

Some countries — and their citizens — are also looking at how to hit back at individual companies or industries to cause pain or grab headlines in the United States.

Some EU governments are considering weaponizing agricultural and environmental standards to discriminate against American products. They could ban specific products from certain Trump-supporting states, like Kentucky bourbon or Florida orange juice.

In Denmark, a survey showed that roughly half the population has avoided buying American products since Trump’s inauguration. And the country’s largest grocery store operator now marks whether products sold are from European companies on its electronic price tags.

There’s also tourism. Canada is among a handful of countries that have issued advisories warning about traveling to the U.S., going as far as to ask citizens to “reconsider” visiting the States. Passenger bookings on airline routes between the U.S. and Canada are down 70 percent compared to the same period a year ago, a shift that industry analysts believe will cost $2 billion in lost travel and business revenue. Similarly, travel from Europe to the U.S. has dropped by 35 percent in the last two months.

Europe could impose export controls on products made by Dutch company ASML, the world’s biggest provider of photolithography machines which are used to produce computer chips. This would force U.S. manufacturers that use ASML technology — American consumers — to pay more. Other choke points could be highly advanced technology products made by Nokia and Ericsson that are essential to network operators.

Erixon described such moves as “the nuclear option” in a transatlantic trade war, given how intertwined their supply chains are. But, he said, “America is in a predicament because it wants to impose general tariffs, whereas the EU has the possibility of rearranging trade flows.”

There's more in the rest of the article.  Suffice it to say, Europe is not lacking in ability to hit back and cost American consumers more or harm America's defense industry.  As for China's courtship of Canada, CTVNews has this:

China’s ambassador says Beijing is offering to form a partnership with Canada to push back against American “bullying,” suggesting the two countries could rally other nations to stop Washington from undermining global rules.

“We want to avoid the situation where humanity is brought back to a world of the law of the jungle again,” Chinese Ambassador Wang Di told The Canadian Press in a wide-ranging interview.

“China is Canada’s opportunity, not Canada’s threat,” he said through the embassy’s interpreter.

Wang — whose office requested the interview with The Canadian Press — said that China and Canada appear to be the only countries taking “concrete and real countermeasures against the unjustified U.S. tariffs” imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“We have taken notice that, faced with the U.S.’s unilateral bullying, Canada has not backed down,” he said. “Instead, Canada is standing on the right side of the history, on the right side of international fairness and justice.”

“China is ready to take this opportunity to work with Canada and all the other countries to firmly uphold the UN-centred international system and the WTO-centred multilateral trading regime, to (oppose) any regressive practices in the world.”

He called Trump’s threats to annex other countries and infringe on Canadian sovereignty “typical hegemonic and bullying actions.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a similar message during a recent tour of southeast Asian nations, who face some of the highest U.S. tariffs.

It will take years, if not decades to undo the damage done by the Felon.