I’m not particularly brilliant. It’s just a simple reading of history that displays what works and what does not. In particular, proven decades ago, the economy operates from the demand side, not the supply side, the oligarch’s side. There were surprisingly few voices predicting the depth of the recession we are going to see.
It may look in hindsight like there were many voices like mine, but in fact there were very few. Use your google machine to check that out. Meanwhile, here are the receipts, from my stories here on Daily Kos:
Business-friendly, oligarch-bought Republicanism has been failing for fifty years.
January 27:
www.dailykos.com/...
Trump will crash the economy like the last three GOP administrations have done
Are you ready for the fourth consecutive Republican economic bust? Look around. Any prosperity you see will be gone in two years. It will come as a result of Trump’s corruption and bungling, and will be the latest in a sequence of GOP presidents leaving a mess for the Democrats to clean up.
...
One voice on the fringe will at best reach ears on the fringe. Mainstreaming reality is the media’s and the politician’s job. Reality has to break down the doors and bust up their equipment for them to wake up.
February 19, 2025
www.dailykos.com/...
The Crash is coming; how big is not clear, but big. Soon. Keep your calendar clear for early summer
...
The Resistance needs to begin factoring the upcoming crash into its strategy and tactics.
“I told you so,” will not be enough, for one reason because we have NOT told them so. Hakeem Jeffreys and Dem leadership’s picking out inflation for messaging is safe in its way, but it is similar to complaining about the litter after a tornado hits your town.
Of course the scale and depth of the incompetence and corruption are hard to believe. Who knew crazy was available in this volume? Only stupidity or ignorance can think taking a meat cleaver to government and the workforce results in something other than serious economic repercussions Whoever came up with the scheme to fire 200k workers, deport hundreds of thousands more, disassemble the civil service, and call it “savings” should not be given access to sharp objects.
The economy is the way we provision ourselves, both in the aggregate and the indivisdual. Of course it is the defining issue.
,,,
You don’t have to explain every nuance for practical Americans to get it.
March 1, 2025
www.dailykos.com/...
A Doorbeller’s Guide to the Economic Moment
Outrage and the outrageous is the currency of the realm in the present Trump kleptocracy. Repudiating civil rights, slashing government services, ignoring the rule of law, betraying Ukraine in favor of a war criminal, hijacking the justice department for revenge, and of course, rule by the rich — half the cabinet are from the super-rich 0.1%.
Of all this, a key vulnerability of the Trump coup is the economy. Even ahead of the betrayal of Ukraine and servile appeasement of Putin, it is the economy. Why? Because:
- Trump is crashing the economy by corruption and incompetence,
- The economic fortunes of a household trump all other considerations, and
- The practical person with no patience for politics — the non-voter who put Trump in power — does not abide the chaos and instability that is part and parcel of Trump’s takeover.
On the first point, economic data and just looking out the window indicates the downturn is well underway, steep and unlikely to be reversed. Biden had the economy humming six weeks ago. Trump halted as much as he could and is trying to reverse the elements of the Infrastructure plan; President Musk has fired tens of thousands and stopped grants for that many more; Trump is continuously threatening tariffs and deportation, and taking Greenland or setting up Gaza strip clubs. Crazy and disorienting comes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and all the other days.
The engines of the economy — business investment and household consumption — depend on stability. When there is none, like now, the prospects for anything other than deep trouble are slim. But the data verifying the downturn is just now coming in... So it would be easy to get out over one’s skis on the doorstep. Or would it?
Consumer confidence is a statistic, but it is also apt to be in the expression of the person looking at you through the screen door. By now that person has heard bad news, either personally or online. USAID got gouged and thousands [ed: 600,000 as of November 26.] of people will die. Social Security and VA staff have been cut almost randomly. Research grants of every description and even NOAA have been lopped off with Musk’s chainsaw. There’s lots more, but it could simply be the price of eggs. No good news. All bad news.
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The collapse of MAGA was predictable. It took only a little respect for fellow Americans.
March 8, 2007
www.dailykos.com/...
WHERE’S MAGA? The dog that didn’t bark. A clue to Trump’s impending demise.
MAGA knows what it bought. They heard what Trump was selling. This is not it. So they are still waiting for delivery.
MAGA did not buy tax cuts for billionaires, rule by the rich, Project 2025, or cuts to Medicaid. They did not buy abandoning an ally on the field and switching to the dictator’s side, nor Musk with his chainsaw and ketamine stupidity cutting their cousin’s job or screwing up social security payments or the VA.
Trump has a problem. He CANNOT deliver for MAGA on deportation. One, he couldn’t even build a hundred miles of wall. But two, to the point, if he did, grocery prices would go up and stay up. Field work, processing plants, construction, even health care depend on migrants to stay affordable. MAGA hates inflation even more than it hates brown people.
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[Notice ICE and Trump themselves have dropped the claim that they are after “the worst of the worst. The mass deportation they promised is not happening. Now iit is simple terrorism. They’re after mothers, kids, people showing up for legal avenue hearings, priests, bystanders, and whoever else happens to be in front of the professional camera crews they take with them.]
More recently, for a future “I told you so,” and confirmed by the blockade of routine economic data from the BLS and Census and elsewhere:
September 25, 2025
www.dailykos.com/...
The economy: Why the worst news is yet to come
Because the media who produce the news (and politicians who amplify it) will not recognize what is happening today until festers to a critical point. They will attend only to lines at food banks, breakdowns in health care, spikes in unemployment, mass layoffs, or stock market crashes. The bad economy is happening now. It won’t be news until it gets much worse. At some point inflation will explode or deflation will take hold, or the stock market will collapse and the news will come, “Out of the blue, ” Nobody saw it coming,” “a black swan.” Incidentally, and perhaps attracting some attention from time to time, will be surges in homelessness, hunger and people dying for want of medical help.
The economy is rotting right now. The aggregate income figures balance only because a quarter of people doing very well, offsetting the other three quarters stagnating, hunkering down, or getting scraped off the edge.
Even Paul Krugman is catching up, as he explained Friday on his podcast.
“Look, I've been analyzing economic policy for over two decades now, and I
have to tell you what we're witnessing right now is genuinely unprecedented. Not in the hyperbolic cable news sense of the word, but in the actual measurable data-driven sense. The convergence of political, economic, and institutional crises facing this administration is something I don't think most Americans fully appreciate yet.”
- Paul Krugman, 11/28/2005
PS; The history is important. Not knowing it lets the nerds playing with their little models pretend they are economists.
A Short History of Oligarchs Changing the Signposts — Part 1.
Part II
