Anonymous parties have put together a Project 2025 Tracker. They pulled out and listed all the individual policy recommendations in the document, and are trying to track which are complete, in progress, or not started. As I write, they put the agenda at 42% complete.
I would break the recommendations down into three categories: (1) Christian/White Nationalism, (2) Homophobia, and (3) Rich and Powerful/Big Business Giveaways.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. might be headed for recession. Recessions happen, but this would be the first one where the U.S. government obviously and counter to all competent advice throws a monkey wrench in a perfectly healthy economy, that I know of anyway. Lest we think GDP growth is only a statistic that does not affect real people, the U.S. poverty rate among children was 5% in 2021 and rose to over 13% in 2023, when the economy was doing relatively well as measured by GDP growth and employment, but Congress forced the end of Biden’s tax credits for parents. So pop quiz: force a completely unnecessary recession by choice and will more or less children suffer? Shame shame shame on the Trump administration and Congress you stupid assholes.
Most hopeful story: Trump seems to have some anti-nuclear (weapons) instincts. We will see if his actions bear any relation to his words.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Prospera is a weird quasi-autonomous city-state nominally inside Honduras run by crypto-currency weirdos.
This (paywalled) Financial Times article compares survey results in the World Values Survey by political party. What is really striking to me is that the U.S. right is off the scale compared to the German, French, or Italian “far right” parties we are hearing about in the news. I didn’t dig into all the details but if this is a survey of the public based on their stated party affiliations, it is possible the right-wing politicians in Europe are much farther right than their respective publics. It is also interesting that this result shows the German right as left of center, while the Australian, French and UK left are right of center. So I am taking all this with somewhat of a grain of salt without understanding all the details, but still it shows that survey responses of the U.S. public identifying with MAGA are way out there.
This article in the blog Urbanomics has some ideas on what can be done to combat rising inequality. The blog is India focused, but the suggestions are more or less general.
All this seems…complicated…to me. But maybe these are politically feasible policies. Simple but maybe politically infeasible policies would be to just raise taxes on the rich and powerful and redistribute the proceeds to the masses, as cash, services directly provided by the government, or services indirectly subsidized by the government. In the U.S., perhaps taxes wouldn’t have to be raised as much as we think if we shifted away from some of the massive hidden subsidies we already have – low capital gains tax rates, the cap on social security payroll taxes, deduction of mortgage interest, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage, gas taxes that support highways but not public transportation, and many others. All of this would be politically difficult, of course. But with the Democrats seemingly having become the party of no big ideas, perhaps there is not so much to lose if somebody were to start proposing some.
The Atlanta Fed has a spreadsheet model that tries to forecast the U.S. GDP growth rate in real time. Right now, it is showing a sudden, sharp contraction. When I see something like this in any model, I first check the math to see if something got broken. Second, I check the input data for anything missing or otherwise weird. Assuming the Atlanta Fed has a functioning procedure for these checks before it makes its results public, here are some other possible explanations.
First would be the sudden contraction in government spending and general economic anxiety caused by the amateur economic policy the current U.S. administration is implementing. But it’s hard to believe this would be so sudden, and if it were true you might expect to see it in the stock market. The stock market is in fact down about 5% over the last month, which is a lot, but not the kind of discontinuous collapse shown by the Atlanta Fed.
J.W. Mason, and economics professor, suggests it may be caused by a sudden surge of imports as companies try to beat the clock before tariffs hit. Net imports get subtracted from GDP, which I guess makes sense because they represent a flow of money out of the country in exchange for goods and services produced in other countries. He explains though that this could just mean the goods are stockpiled in warehouses to be distributed over the next few months, in which case GDP growth should just bounce back to trend.
There is another theory involving gold. This is the same source (Mason) quoting a report by Goldman Sachs.
most of the widening in the trade deficit since November has been driven by higher gold imports … as participants in the gold market sought to insure themselves against potential tariffs on gold. Although this may seem like a frontloading effect ahead of potential tariffs, these imports are for the most part … being shipped to the US on the off-chance that physical delivery of the gold is required,… Importantly, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) excludes most gold imports when calculating the imports component of GDP. ….
The same reasoning applies more generally to front-loading by retailers, wholesalers, and producers ahead of tariff increases. Because these developments are unrelated to US production, they should have little net effect on US GDP. In the case of non-gold goods, higher imports should be offset by higher inventories in the national accounts. In practice, it is possible that front-loading exerts a modest drag on reported GDP because imports… tend to be measured more accurately than inventories. We suspect this dynamic is playing out now to some extent… But because front-loading these imports now implies fewer imports later, we think the net effect on 2025 GDP growth should be small.
This is largely over my head, but again it suggests some short-term accounting effect rather than something going on in the real economy that would have an imminent impact on employment and prices.
I wondered what happens when a federal judge issues a contempt order.
“Well, the court, a judge, has tools available to him or her,” Gertner said. “In the first instance, they can cite the parties in front of them for contempt. They can impose fines, of course. Since one of the parties arguably here is Elon Musk, it’s not clear that fines are going to make a particle of difference. There’s even the possibility of imprisoning someone until the order is followed…”
“All of these are obviously empty threats with respect to the defendants,” she said. “In this case, the marshals would have to enforce whatever orders the judge entered. The problem is that the Marshals Service is under the Department of Justice, and if Trump wanted to fully not comply, he could direct the Department of Justice not to comply.”
If a state judge issued a contempt order against me, a local police officer or county sheriff’s deputy or state police officer would show up at my door. At the federal level, this would be a U.S. Marshall apparently. But the U.S. Marshalls fall under the Department of Justice. If the President ordered the Attorney General not to comply with a court order, the Attorney General would have an awkward decision to make. Presumably, every agency is going to have a team of lawyers giving them advice on the potential consequences of various courses of action, and they are going to make their decisions. Even then, one wonders if the President could pardon someone (even himself) issued a federal contempt of court order. Or appeal to the Supreme Court, and then we find out if they are as corrupt as some of us suspect they are. At this point, the Constitution is done and the next steps would have to be mass civil action or a military coup. All these things seem unthinkable in the United States, but the trend seems to be toward increased thinkability.
Well, January was a doozy. Here goes:
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Longreads #1 stories of 2024 – this is a lookback but I posted it in January and it has a ton of interesting stuff. Interesting, frightening, and depressing. The story on Israel’s dispatching of air strikes based on statistical analysis is the single most disturbing article I read last year. Everyone should read this article and decide for yourselves where you stand. Another one is called “When the Arctic Melts”. Even as the shadow of fossil fuel propaganda once again overspreads the land, I am afraid the globe could be approaching an irreversible tipping point into runaway warming and sea level rise. Let’s hope the world can afford another four-year round of U.S. backsliding and then pick up the pieces, but I am not sure.
Most hopeful story: I noted that congestion pricing in New York City could provide a glimmer of hope that transportation in the United States could begin to implement 21st century international best practices. (Yes, I am aware the century is a quarter over already – one more indicator of the U.S. slipping towards the bottom of the world’s more advanced nations.) Unfortunately, as I write this on February 13 we see the President himself actively interfering in this state and local matter. “States’ rights” for thee, not for me (i.e. only when it’s convenient to some disingenuous argument).
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: AI agents – coming soon to a computer near you.
I’m not sure I can or want to say anything about Musk that others have not already said. As of a few years ago, I respected him as an innovator. While the U.S. auto companies hem and haw and make inferior cars at high prices and resist electrification, he figured out how to make superior electric cars at reasonable prices and get them into widespread commercial availability. While NASA couldn’t figure out how to get back to space since the retirement of the shuttle program, and quasi public-private entity Boeing seemed to be struggling to get the U.S. back into space, Musk stepped in and made real progress on that. Now certainly, he has been adept at using U.S. government contracts to massively scale up his business, and certainly heavy lobbying must have been a big part of that strategy. The latter is immoral in my view, and yet legal under what passes for outrageously corrupt U.S. law. For an amoral corporate “person”, legal compliance substitutes for moral and ethical behavior in a human person. Corporate “persons” seem to be able to corrupt human persons to their way of thinking. All that is pretty standard big business here in the corrupt U.S. system, and I wouldn’t consider Musk to be any more immoral or unethical than other humans who have played this game successfully under the established rules.
That was a year ago. Now, he is spouting what seem to be clearly white supremacist views. You hate to stereotype the Dutch South Africans as white supremacists, but there is a group of them including Musk and Peter Thiel who grew up under the apartheid system and seem to be motivated on some level by white supremist ideology. It is the very rare human being who pursue self interest in a truly amoral manner devoid of any sense of empathy – these are called psychopaths (and I truly think Donald Trump is one). For the rest of us, it is human nature to find ways to rationalize the advantages, or blame others for the disadvantages, we have been given on the uneven playing field of life. We can tell ourselves we are smarter or harder working than others, or we can come up with theories for why our genetic makeup or religious beliefs or country of origin make us superior to others in the natural order of things. Slave traders and slave owners did this, Nazis did this, American segregationists and red-liners and sub-prime lenders and mass incarcerators did this, white South Africans did this. So when we hear words like “meritocracy” or “preference” or “mentally deficient”, we should be asking ourselves if these are code-words for the same old tired Nazi/Jim Crow/Apartheid playbook we have been struggling to get past all these decades.
A quick aside on “supremacist” and “supremist”. The former seems to be the more accepted and widely used term, but both are accepted and widely used. Here are a couple fun quotes from the article I just linked to:
“The combine are determined to register the negroes, and the white supremacists are equally determined that they shall not.” (New Orleans Times Picayune, 1896)
“The ‘white supremists,’ or regular Democrats, say that the negroes shall not register.” (Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, 1896)
Seriously, it’s 2025. Let’s not go backwards America.
I seriously have the best of intentions not to be overly political in this blog, but it’s just really hard right now as the U.S. government is making absurdly ignorant policy choices that are not even consistent with their barely coherent stated goals. In this case, after stating a goal of bringing living costs down for “ordinary people” (maybe we could take that to mean the middle 50% of the income distribution?), there is a good chance Republicans will raise health insurance costs massively for people using the Affordable Care Act. (They are no longer talking about repealing that act, just adding “Un” in front of affordable.) The article I link to is from my home state of Pennsylvania, and estimates what the Good Ol’ Boy Party is proposing would raise costs more than 50% for a family of four with a household income around $125,000. Actually, they don’t have to propose anything, or even do anything at all – all they have to do is let sunset provisions in existing laws expire as they probably planned all along.
So basically, Trump and cronies assume that Americans are too busy/distracted/uninformed (I never say “stupid”) to notice that their health care costs explode if at the same time the price of everyday spending on things like gasoline and groceries were to slow down a bit. That, and they may hope to break the Affordable Care Act on purpose, point out it is broken, and then try to eliminate it. This is like intentionally breaking your own personal car and then arguing that this proves cars are not a workable technology for anyone to get from point A to point B.
