Tag: trump administration
Texas Flood Toll: What Happens When Everything Is Boiled Down To Money

Texas Flood Toll: What Happens When Everything Is Boiled Down To Money

I challenge you to go back through your memory of the last five months when coverage of the DOGE cuts to government departments and programs and coverage of the Big Bullshit Bill were in the headlines and see if you can recall the word “consequences.”

I can’t. There was a lot of reporting about 600 people laid off here, a thousand laid off there, and the word “probationary” came up a lot as the Trump administration used it to explain away the people whose jobs were cut. But there wasn’t much debate about the bill in either the House or the Senate. In fact, one story I read last week was about how the nearly 1,000-page monster was pushed through with few committee hearings and little testimony about what was in the bill.

I think I remember reading one story about cuts to the FAA budget around the time of all the delays and cancelled flights at Newark Airport. But the coverage of cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) was focused almost entirely on the number of proposed staff cuts and the “savings” they would produce. The budget cuts sometimes showed in tens of millions of dollars and in other reports appeared as percentages. CBS reported back in February that former NOAA officials said that “current employees had been told to expect budget cuts of 30% and a 50% reduction in staff.”

Finally, when tornados recently swept through Missouri and Tennessee and Kentucky, there were a few reports about local NWS office staffing shortages. The reports were explained away the next day by Caroline Leavitt at the White House saying that the cuts had not affected “overnight” staffing at local offices. Follow up reporting proved her statement about local NWS offices to be a lie, but reports about her lies had become so numerous that the one about the NWS just disappeared down the memory-hole with all her other lies.

The tornado that tore through Kentucky happened back in late May. It killed 19 people, according to the Louisville Courier Journal. Do you remember that number? I didn’t. I had to look it up. There was some aerial footage of the destruction in Laurel and Pulaski Counties. There were a few short bios of some of the people the tornadoes killed. One woman died from carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator she ran when electricity went out during the storms. Another woman was killed by “blunt force trauma,” according to her autopsy. A fireman in London, Kentucky, was found dead atop his wife after the tornado hit their home.

Tornadoes are notoriously difficult to predict. So are flash floods. The NWS puts out warnings and emergency notifications on radio and television broadcasts, and these days there are systems to send out blanket alerts by cell phone. But TV’s and radios don’t work during electrical outages, and cell phone towers are vulnerable to storms, especially tornados. So even if alerts go out, sometimes they cannot be received.

The stories about NWS staffing in Kentucky in May disappeared after the storms had passed and television news stopped putting their drones in the air and reporters went back to interviewing people about inflation and the economy.

Tonight, the Times is reporting that 80 were killed by the flash flood that ripped down the Guadalupe River and its tributaries on the 4th of July. Forty-one people are still missing. Twenty-eight of the victims were children. Now there are new alerts for more flooding in the same areas hit by the flash flood on Friday, including Camp Mystic, the Christian camp located on the banks of the Guadalupe. Twenty-eight victims of the flood have not been identified.

There are some numbers for you. Nineteen killed by tornadoes in May. Eighty killed by a flash flood in July. Donald Trump, who signed an emergency declaration today that will provide FEMA relief to the affected areas and help to pay for the search and rescue efforts, told reporters “FEMA is something we can talk about later,” as he prepared to fly back to Washington D.C. from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump has called for the dissolution of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has provided relief to areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and other natural disasters since it was formed in 1978 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Some $175 billion has been appropriated for FEMA during the last four budgets and continuing resolutions.

And now Donald Trump wants to “wean” states off FEMA and “bring it down to the state level — a little bit like education, we're moving it back to the states.”

That’s what it’s all about. Money. It’s what Trump’s disastrous DOGE adventure was all about. It’s what his Big Bullshit Bill is about, moving money from people who don’t have enough of it to people who have too much of it, and denying it in the form of health care and nutrition to people who need it.

The coverage of what the cancellation of USAID will cause has just begun. We have seen the aid losses in dollars, and now we will see it in the bodies of people who have died from AIDS and Tuberculosis and other preventable diseases, and of course starvation, just as preventable with food aid.

Watch the numbers of people killed in the Texas flooding increase over the next few days. It is hurricane season, so watch for the coverage of those storms and their body counts.

Everybody will forget the numbers in Kentucky and Texas except the families and friends of the dead. The budget “savings” from DOGE and Trump’s odious bill, now signed into law, will be lied away in the White House press room, and two weeks from now, nobody will remember how many died in Texas, the same way nobody remembers how many died in Kentucky. It’s what happens when everything is boiled down to money.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

trump administration

Not Too Soon To Ask How We Can Repair Trump's Wreckage

One of the more interesting, and more hopeful, questions I like to think about is: how long will it take to repair the damage done by the Trump administration? As a member of the Biden admin, I have personal experience fixing some of what got broken in Trump 1. (EG, they did a good job supporting the creation of the COVID vax but blew the distribution; also, international relations).

The trade war is an obvious candidate, but we now need to think about their newly passed budget bill in this context.

The more one learns about the bill, the more it resembles a computer virus embedded in our economy and society, infecting policy in dozens of areas, and such viruses are hard to extract. The big ticket items—the upwardly skewed tax cuts and downwardly skewed spending cuts—have gotten ample attention. The cuts to renewable energy production, a bit less so; same with reductions in debt relief for college loans. And then there are a slew of “earmarks”—tax breaks for special interests—that have gotten very little attention. Politico does an excellent job collecting e.g.’s, some of which I relegate to an appendix.

Extracting such a virus will require the same type of focus and drive that Trump and the Republicans brought to the task. In a recent post, I argued that Ds need to both emulate this focused energy while reverse engineering the tariffs and budget on behalf of actually helping people who need it, versus pretending to do so while screwing them.

What will that look like?

Unwinding the sweeping (versus narrowly targeted) tariffs, given that they’re non-legislative, should be a slam-dunk, though it will require Ds not to fold when some interest group, be they industry or union, objects.

We’re also going to have to be willing to both unwind some tax cuts and seek new revenues. We already did some of the analytic work re the latter task in the Biden administration: our proposed budgets—which never got anywhere in the divided gov’t we mostly faced—proposed significant, highly progressive revenue-raising tax hikes, but only on a narrow slice at the top of the income scale. That’s not enough to get back on a more sustainable fiscal path, which is where we need to be if we’re going to not only reverse the new cuts in the safety net but also address affordability shortfalls in housing, child care, health care, and higher ed. But it’s the right place to start, as shown in this chart from Brendan Duke (see third bar).

That shouldn’t be a heavy lift for Ds, at least not for those who aren’t in the same donors’ pockets as the Rs who passed this beast. In fact, our proposed tax hikes above $400K had a lot of support from Ds, many of whom pushed us to go further.

They were right, and this means that Democrats are going need some spine to reverse tax cuts in the bill that have some constituent support but are terribly designed. The no-tax-on-tips leaves out a big group of tipped workers with no federal tax liability from which to deduct the tax break (they’d get actual, and much needed, help from an increase in the federal minimum wage, still stuck at $7.25!). And while the tip deduction may help some of the waitress, it does nothing for the cooks. The $6,000 seniors’ deduction, along with the lifting of the SALT cap, mostly give more money to people who are doing fine without the extra help.

Next, we’ll need to restore the cuts to the safety net. Again, this should not be a heavy lift for Ds, especially given the vast unpopularity of these cuts. The questions at that point will be more about expansion. Health coverage and groceries are at the heart of the affordability crisis, points that should lead attacks on the bill (the cuts mostly kick in after the midterms, so this argument must be made in bomb-defusing terms I discuss below). Thus, expanding coverage further up the income scale is worthy of consideration, as is lowering the age for Medicare eligibility. Again, this takes revenue, which circles back to reversing tax cuts and adding new revenue increases.

Then we’ll need to get back to the industrial policy that was generating important, significant investment in renewable energy production. This too shouldn’t be a heavy lift as the production tax credits that the bill ends had very broad support, which is one reason for the deep unpopularity of the Trump budget. Even traditional Rs like the Chamber of Commerce and energy companies that recognize renewable energy production is part of their and our futures don’t understand the motivation for these cuts which seem to be driven wholly by Trump’s nostalgia for coal and distaste for wind turbines blocking his view.

Reversing the harsh deportation measures, along with funding for the wall and ICE, must also be part of this effort, but this one is complex and deserves its own later post. Any Democratic action in this area must be forthright about the need to maintain secure borders. But fair-minded people should all take solace from the fact that the Trump admin’s cruelty in this place is recognized by majorities of Americans, who are both unhappy and shocked by the ongoing extremism of masked, unidentified people grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into vans and airplanes, not to mention the local realities of losing a significant chunk of their workforces.

The only way we’ll be able to do any of this is through the same budget reconciliation process that the Rs used to pass this bill (it avoids a Senate filibuster). Which is another way of saying that the ability to right the wrongs being perpetrated is conditional on Trumps’ opponents gaining power. This, in turn, requires us to deal with the timing of the bill wherein many—not all—of the goodies (tax cuts) come first and the pain (health coverage and SNAP cuts) come later. But campaigning on defusing a time bomb seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy to me, especially if we keep the pressure on by constantly pointing out the falsehoods used to sell the package.

For example, the admin claims deficit reduction from the bill starting this year, followed by quite large reductions next year. That’s unlikely, and requires tracking. Ending credits for the production of renewable energy occurs this year and next, and this too should be scrutinized for job losses and energy-cost impacts.

I hate to say it but this is only day 167 of this administration. There will be a lot more damage to reveal and elevate along with damage-reversal planning to do as the months roll on. But, especially in the days around July 4th, I like to think about this as a labor of love for this country, which needs a whole lot of that right about now.

Appendix: Earmarked tax breaks in the new bill that you might have missed.

From Politico:

Senate Republicans not only kept a House-approved provision exempting gun silencers from a long-standing $200 tax on firearms — they dumped the tax on all guns it applied to, except machine guns and what the legislation terms “a destructive device.” That cost: $1.7 billion.

There’s a new supersized deduction for business meals — though only for employees at certain Alaskan fishing boats and processing plants, with the measure stipulating the facilities must be “located in the United States north of 50 degrees north latitude” though not in a “metropolitan statistical area.”

There’s a $2 billion break important to the rum industry and, tangentially, Louisiana, said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a tax writer…“We have the highest per capita intake of alcohol in the nation,” he said.

…an expansion of a little-known break that Silicon Valley investors have used to nix tax bills on tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in earnings from Internet startups. Another spends $26 billion to create a new $1,700 credit for people who give to groups providing scholarships for children to attend private school.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) secured a $7 billion tax cut for farmers that allows them to postpone paying some of the capital gains taxes they owe when selling off farmland.

…a $1 billion provision allowing “spaceports” — which the legislation defines as “any facility located at or in close proximity to a launch site or reentry site” — to sell tax-exempt bonds…Sen. Ron Wyden, the chamber’s top Democratic tax writer, said in an X post that “Trump’s wedding gift to [Jeff] Bezos and birthday gift to [Elon] Musk were tucked in the new budget bill.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

We Can See Trump's Economic Agenda Now -- And It Won't Work

We Can See Trump's Economic Agenda Now -- And It Won't Work

At this point, it’s clear to see that the Trump administration, along with their Congressional allies, who sit on their hands when told (tariffs) and raise them when told (the budget bill), are aggressively and successfully implementing a big, new economic agenda. As I’ll describe, it won’t work. It’s wrongheaded, ill-founded, and will hurt the people they said they want to help.

But before we get into that, I will give them this: they’ve been remarkably successful at moving policy through a clunky, incalcitrant political system, in part because they’ve legislated none of it so far (should it pass, the budget bill will be their first big piece of economic legislation; their crypto/stablecoin bill is stuck in the House, though this too is part of the plan, as I note below).

When I say “remarkably successful,” I mean the rest of us should learn from them. I’ve spent many years in gov’t, including in the Obama and Biden admins, and we self-imposed infinitely more barriers on what we wanted to do then the Trumpies (the same could be said for any admin since FDR, though he, of course, went the legislative route, one the Trumpies avoid). Basically, when a lawyer said “can’t do that,” or a political adviser said, “can’t go there because X won’t like it,” we listened.

Not these folks. They just do what Trump wants, and if the courts or some constituent group doesn’t like it, too bad. Their relentless energy to jam through their agenda, evil as it is, is a site to behold. I keep thinking, what if we did this with higher minimum wages, or abortion rights, or gun control, housing and child care, etc.?

I don’t want to overstate this case. Of course, exec orders can be and are flipped on day one by a new admin. And, as a naturally cautious, risk-averse dude, I’m sympathetic to measure thrice, cut once, vs. the Trumpies, “don’t measure! Cut!” But Ds need to learn some boldness from these folks about implementing your agenda.

Okay, with that off my chest, let’s look at their economic agenda, which is now in plain sight.

—Reduce global trade in order to reduce the trade deficit and reindustrialize U.S. industry. This one will fail for many reasons. First, they mistakenly view any trade imbalance as evidence of someone ripping us off, which is no more valid than arguing your grocery ripped you off when you willingly shopped there. Second, it’s too late to unscramble the globalization omelet: almost half of our imports are inputs into our own domestic manufacturing, which is why trade wars hurt, not help, domestic production. Third, there will be no reindustrializing. Even countries with persistent trade surpluses have their manufacturing job shares in decline.

What will happen instead is higher prices for imports, some new revenue from the tariffs, some protected industries, like steel, doing better than they would have otherwise, though at the expense of other industries that buy tariff-induced, now-more-expensive outputs. Growth will, on net, be a bit slower for a time (assuming they eventually set the tariff rate and stick with it, a strong assumption), and inflation and interest rates higher for a time as well.

—Deport undocumented immigrants for the crime of being undocumented. I’ve had the misfortune of hearing Stephen Miller talk about the economics of this plan, which suggests he stuck with econ 101 for a few weeks and bailed too soon. His idea is that if we reduce the supply of labor by kicking out undocumented workers, employers will have to pay more to domestic workers.

This won’t work either. That is, as the figure shows (from Axios this AM), it will work in reducing net immigration, and, as I’ll discuss below, border control is a highly legit goal (of course, this goes way beyond that). But it will hurt the economy. For one, reducing labor supply is a negative for growth, one which will especially pinch in sectors like construction, health care, restaurants, meatpacking, hospitality services. For another, and this is a flaw in Miller and many others’ understanding of these dynamics, immigrants don’t just bring supply. They also bring demand.

With the push against immigration, "the economy will find itself slightly diminished in the long run and inflation will run a touch higher," economist Bernard Yaros writes in a report for Oxford Economics…

“The arrests cast a shadow over the local economy. Restaurant tables emptied. Kitchen workers stayed home. Fruit vendors disappeared from the streets. The number of shoppers at stores shrank, and those who still went didn't linger for long…"

"That means crops are not being picked and fruit and vegetables are rotting at peak harvest time," farmers and farmworkers told Reuters.

—Gut the safety net to very partially offset large tax cuts for the wealthy. This one is quite different from the first two because it explicitly and demonstrably hurts working class people (the above two do so as well, but as second-order effects; this one is first order). Here we have Trump in traditional R mode, passing a deficit-financed budget with which Reagan and the Bushes would be very familiar. But even they would be, like, “Wait up, Donnie. We always gave a few crumbs to the bottom end so we could say we we were helping everyone. We gave a little to the poor and a lot to the rich; we didn’t take from the bottom to give to the top.”

Like everything else here, it won’t work in terms of helping working class people because trickle-down never works. It will “work” in terms of enriching their traditional donor class. It it is also likely to eventually raise interest rates, potentially making debt service a much heavier lift than we’ve seen before (as we argue in a new paper, out soon).

—Block the production of renewable energy. This couldn’t be clearer in the big, stupid bill, and it’s so ridiculous that even traditional Rs like the Chamber of Commerce and energy companies that recognize renewable energy production is part of their and our futures don’t get it. It seems to be driven wholly by Trump’s nostalgia for coal and distaste for wind turbines blocking his view.

It won’t work in the sense that it will cost jobs, make energy more expensive, and slow us down in the global AI race.

There are other cats and dogs I won’t go into. A big one is compromising Federal Reserve independence. Kings don’t like independent Fed chairs, but this one will also backfire bigtime. History is clear that loss of central-bank independence is inflationary. (Jason Furman and I had a good talk yesterday about this and much of the rest of the above, here.) They’re also trying to normalize crypto and integrate it into the larger financial system. To say “that won’t work” is an understatement. Depending how far this highly volatile asset with zero use cases integrates into the system, it’s a future financial crisis in the making.

Also, as noted, controlling the border is, by definition, integral to having a country. And unfair trading partners exist. IOW, there are germs of truth in those parts of the agenda, but, and this is an aspect of their approach we should decidedly not emulate, they always go to the sledgehammer when the scalpel is what’s needed.

To say, as I do here, that an agenda that is in place won’t work is to make a empirical bet. I’m predicting worse growth, price, job, and interest rate outcomes than would otherwise occur. And this being economics, with millions of other variables endlessly zipping around, I could be wrong. If so—and it will take some time to know—I’ll be the first to say so. But I think and fear that I’m right.

Jared Bernstein is a former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Joe Biden. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Budget and Policy Priorities. Please consider subscribing to his column for free at Jared's Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Zohran Mamdani

New York Republicans Beg Trump To Deport Zohran Mamdani

New York’s Young Republican Club has urged President Donald Trump's administration to revoke Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s U.S. citizenship and deport him under the Communist Control Act after his win in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday night.

The New York Republican club wrote a post on the social platform X Wednesday, urging President Donald Trump’s aides to take action.

“The radical Zohran Mamdani cannot be allowed to destroy our beloved city of New York," the post read. It added: "The Communist Control Act lets President Trump revoke @ZohranKMamdani’s citizenship and promptly deport him."

"The time for action is now — @StephenM and @RealTomHoman, New York is counting on you," the tweet read, tagging the official handles of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and immigration advisor Tom Homan.

Mamdani, a 33‑year‑old democratic socialist and New York state legislator, defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary Tuesday. The race drew national attention thanks to his progressive platform centered on rent freezes, free public transit, universal childcare and city-run grocery stores.

Born in Uganda and naturalized as an American citizen in 2018, Mamdani represents a generational and ideological shift in New York politics, energizing younger voters and gaining endorsements from leading progressive figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.).

The nature of the New York Republicans' deportation demand — which would hinge on the 1954 Communist Control Act — means it has virtually no legal basis, given Mamdani’s clearly documented U.S. citizenship. The Communist Control Act of 1954 is a U.S. federal law that formally outlawed the Communist Party and criminalized membership in or support for communist organizations.

This is not the first time Mamdani has faced such an attack from Republicans.

Earlier this month, Republican City Council member Vickie Paladino also called for his deportation in a post on X.

Mamdani responded forcefully, condemning the demand as part of a broader wave of “Donald Trump’s authoritarian administration” rhetoric that has included death threats and Islamophobic attacks.

“This is what Trump and his sycophants have wrought," Mamdani said in a statement to reporters at the time.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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