Whack-a-calamity

IT’S VERY HARD to keep up with the new, temporary administration in Washington. Just when you read about one issue, another pops up. This is no accident; it is a strategy of rapid-fire disassembly of the country. To those of us old enough to remember polio and the valiant fight against it by Rotary Clubs International, 1 the hopeful days of the “New Frontier,” and the struggle to assure equal rights for all Americans, it appears the people now in charge at the White House have lost their minds. The order of the day now is calamity, catastrophe, and the contumacious, contentious, contemptuous behaviors of angry men and vitriolic women.

Before we discuss a principal threat to older citizens worried sick about their hard-earned Social Security benefits, let’s remind about the economy. The Dow Jones Industrial average fell to 40,546 yesterday from just over 45,000 in December, roughly 10 percent. It’s impossible to know entirely why the market moves, but yesterday (April 3) the market plunged another 1,679 points, the day after the current administration announced its massive trade-war initiative. The drop was the biggest since March of 2020, and we all remember what happened then. 2

And this morning? Another decline of more than 1,000 points in early trading, again attributed to the turmoil of the trade-war initiative.

That’s right; a trade-war initiative, meaning that this didn’t need to happen. The current president (they/them) has argued that everything will be fine because there will be a massive shift of who pays the government’s bills. Wealthy people will get a huge tax decrease, they/them say, because our trading partners around the globe will be paying more into the federal treasury. And lower- and middle-income people? Well, little relief for them in the form of tax reductions, and much more of their earnings will divert to purchasing goods and services. They just need to trust the boss and wait reverently while their net worth shrivels. 3

For analysis by a legitimate economist, I recommend following Paul Krugman on this Substack platform. But there are many others weighing in, and they know as much as anyone about these complicated things.

Trust the boss, (they/them) say? 4 Be advised; trust in the guys at the White House is not advised. Consider the opinion of the conservative Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:

“Tariffs are going to raise about $600 billion a year, about $6 trillion over a 10-year period,” Mr. Navarro (Peter Navarro, Trade Adviser to the current president) told Fox News on Sunday. This is on top of $100 billion a year from Mr. Trump’s car and truck tariffs. He (Navarro) also tried to claim that “the message is that tariffs are tax cuts.”

George Orwell, call your office. In the real economic world, a tariff is a tax. If you raise $600 billion more a year in revenue for the federal government, you are taking that amount away from individuals and businesses in the private economy. By any definition that is a tax increase, and the $600 billion figure would be one of the largest in U.S. history. It amounts to about 2% of gross domestic product, and it would take the federal tax share of GDP above 19%. The average since 1975 is about 17.3%. Democrats, who love tax increases, haven’t dared pass such a large revenue heist.

It’s possible Mr. Trump will walk back from this tax ledge, and Kevin Hassett, who runs the White House economic council, wouldn’t say on Sunday what Mr. Trump will do.

As of today, the current president has not walked back from the tax ledge. On Wednesday, April 2, he unfurled his trade war. It’s the old break-room joke in action:

Rule No. 1: the boss is always right

Rule No. 2: If the boss is wrong, see rule number 1.

Those who are on the verge of retirement need only check their accounts to realize what huge drops in the stock markets mean for their nest eggs. Americans have — had! — nearly $43 trillion in their retirement accounts,6 about 40 percent of which is in the form of IRAs and 401(k) investments. A 10-percent decline is more than $4 trillion in loss. It’s no overstatement to say the unneeded and unwise trade-war initiative is costing Americans trillions of nest-egg dollars. 7

See Rule No. 1!

Meantime — whack-another-calamity! — there is the continuing threat to the millions of Americans who receive Social Security benefits. Just being concerned is a concern, as Elon Chain-Saw Musk, smiling like a 12-year-old delinquent in the girls’ shower room, whacks away at social programs. The Social Security Administration has functioned very well for decades, but now just getting information about one’s account is sometimes impossible. The SS Administration website has crashed multiple times in recent days, and if one tries to call in for help, the wait times are impossible. 8 This calamity is done in the name of fighting fraud, which is a commendable objective. However, there are serious doubts about both the assessment of the problem and the reckless whacks at fixing it. 9

See Rule No. 2!

And then — perhaps for another bit of Substack rumination later on — there’s the problem of people being “disappeared.” One, an El Salvador man in the United States legally, was erroneously removed by the zealots at ICE. The response by this temporary administration? Yeah, we goofed on that one, but who cares? Nothing we can do.

To this we have the recent whack-a-catastrophe of a band of White House leaders using a commercial messaging platform to conduct battle plans in the Middle East and accidentally inviting the editor of the Atlantic to the event. They blamed the app and the journalist, and the president (they/them) said is was just a big witch hunt. 10

None of this is normal, and there are hopeful signs that people are coming to their senses. In my very humble opinion, it will be ordinary, down-to-earth, non-ideological people who get the country back on the rails, not the shrill voices on left or right. I’m thinking it will be Independents, the very large bloc of voters who aren’t loyally lashed to Republican or Democrat dogma that will be the principal moving force in the near future. According to USA Facts:

It wouldn’t take much more than an honest, charismatic, straight-shooter to lead this collection of voters ahead as defenders of the oldest democracy in the world.