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The Impending Trump Recession
A perfect storm of their own making
I mentioned this recently and the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seems. Trump obsesses over numbers, and his favorite is his favorability rating, but that number also comes with an unfavorability rating and they are nearly 50/50. Specifically, 52% favorable, 47% unfavorable.
His unfavorability rating was never anywhere near that high in his first term, when the positive number never got above 50%. In fact he had the lowest positive rating of any President in recent times. This time around the negative number is far higher and the reason is becoming obvious: people are seriously concerned about inflation and rising prices. And, while there is not a lot a sitting President can do to lower those numbers, there is a lot he can do to make them worse.
And he appears to be doing everything he can to plunge us into a recession with his tariffs, his tax cuts for the wealthy, and his desire to raise the debt ceiling as proposed in the recently unveiled Republican House budget.
The tax cuts alone will increase our national debt by an estimated $4.5 trillion over the next ten years. He announced a 25% tariff, across the board, for any imported steel or aluminum from any country, which will raise the prices of everything from appliances to automobiles.
This week, Mitch McConnell wrote a letter estimating that the current increase in tariffs so far will cost the average citizen of Kentucky, the state he represents, by $1200/year. Despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, he has just pickpocketed a hundred bucks from every household in the country, every month. That includes all the households that voted for him, expecting prices to fall.
In a bit of unusual honesty, immediately after the election, he told an interviewer that there is nothing he can do to lower prices, basically admitting that he lied continually during his campaign with his promises to bring prices down. Another betrayal.
The House budget proposal gives Trump everything he wants but he has a problem there too as the far right Freedom Caucus is once again threatening to scuttle it unless they make even bigger cuts to spending. This means we are right back where we’ve been as long as these guys…
