Cruelty and Indecision: Trump’s Recipe for Economic Chaos
The pain and damage are piling up. Will Republicans next raid Social Security and Medicaid to pay for tax cuts?
I BET I’M NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO TYPED “what is a correction” into a search box this month for the first time ever. And what did I learn? This is not the kind of “correction” you want if you or anyone you know of any age, family or friend, counts on the stock market for income, retirement, or the unimaginable costs of living a very long life.
This kind of “correction” means the market has lost 10 percent or more in value. For people like Donald Trump, the 13 billionaires in his administration, and the pikers hovering at $100 million, it’s a great buying opportunity.
For millions of the not-rich, it can be a time of trepidation or downright fear. These are people who don’t have the money to pounce on bargains or enough lifetime left to realize gains. Some at the end of their lives cannot even wait out “a period of transition”—billionaire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s euphemism for a possible recession—while Trump pursues screwball economic ideas like destabilizing trade wars against both allies and adversaries. First China, Canada, and Mexico, next the world.
Unless Trump changes his mind, that’s what’s coming April 2 to a mall, supermarket, or car dealership near you: scarcity and higher prices thanks to an aggressive global tariff regime, or maybe a slightly less aggressive one, who knows. Because he’s always changing his mind.
The Federal Reserve is projecting higher inflation, higher unemployment, and lower growth as a result of the Trump tariffs. That’s on top of brutal deportations, chaotic federal layoffs, canceled contracts, and disrupted industries, from autos and agriculture to research and tourism. “It’s really hard to know how this is going to work out,” Fed chair Jerome Powell said last week. Trump’s initial tariffs are already driving up inflation, he said.
NOT SURPRISINGLY, THEY ARE ALSO driving up consumer gloom—and the hardest hits could be yet to come. Democrat Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor and Social Security administrator, says staffing cuts at the agency have already triggered brief outages and predicts the system will “crater” if thousands more are laid off, as planned. He told CNBC on March 1 that within thirty to ninety days, “you’re going to see the system collapse and an interruption of benefits.”
That has never happened before. But lest you think O’Malley is an alarmist, billionaire Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seemed to confirm potential glitches in the offing with an instantly infamous hypothetical on the All-In podcast last week. “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month—my mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t,” he said. “She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.”
Clueless enough, and then he added that those who complained would be fraud suspects: “Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the processes, who knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen because whoever screams is the one stealing.”
Have we gotten to Medicaid yet? Because major cuts are on the horizon. It is the only cash pool big enough to help the GOP meet an $880 billion savings goal to offset the cost of more tax cuts for billionaires and millionaires.
As Ron Lieber noted in the New York Times the other day, Medicaid is a middle-class backstop “if you have a parent short on savings, a disabled adult child or a minor with special needs.” Or, as “a Republican operative close to the White House” told investigative reporter Tara Palmieri for her Red Letter newsletter, in the most offensive and revealing way possible, “Medicaid is not just for Black people in the ghetto, these are our voters.”
Of course GOP voters are using Medicaid. The state-federal program insures one in five Americans, or 70 million people, according to the American Hospital Association. It is a major source of funding for hospitals, doctors, and community health centers, and the primary insurer for most nursing home care in America. It’s a lifesaver, a productivity driver, a job engine, a rural hospital lifeline, and a near-invisible pillar for all kinds of families.
OVER THE PAST DECADE, I’ve written reams about Trump and immigration. Trump and ethics, democracy, and the rule of law. Ukraine and national security. Lying and racism and misogyny. All of that is hugely important to me—probably a result of covering so many presidential candidates, Republicans and Democrats alike, virtually every one of them steeped in American values and patriotism.
I haven’t completely ignored Trump’s bad-to-worse economic choices (at least two columns come to mind, from 2018 and 2024), but they weren’t top of mind. Now they are. Now they are hitting very close to home.
I laugh at Andy Borowitz headlines like “Trump Commands Americans Not to Check Their 401ks,” because I have deliberately not checked mine for the last two months. I do check my parents’ finances every day, sometimes more than once, tracking the “correction” and trying to calm down. And I miss Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator who died this month at 93.
No, that’s not a non sequitur. Simpson has stuck in my mind for fifteen years as the Republican co-chair of the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission who kept reminding everyone that Ronald Reagan—the original small-government Republican—raised taxes eleven times over eight years, for a total of $132 billion. “And why?” Simpson asked governors meeting in Boston in 2010. “To make the government run.”
Today we have the Trump-Bessent-Elon Musk philosophy. Bessent recently told NBC’s Meet the Press that “we have to wean our country” off “reckless policies” and “massive government spending.” Left unmentioned were decades of huge GOP tax cuts primarily benefiting America’s upper crust; GOP starvation of the IRS, hobbling its ability to police sophisticated tax evasion; long, Treasury-draining wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and two expensive crises requiring government rescue and recovery plans: the 2008 Wall Street collapse and the 2020 COVID pandemic.
I would never argue that U.S. finances are healthy at the current level of deficit spending and mounting debt. They’re not, and that should change. But I would never agree with Bessent’s preposterous contention that Trump & co. are bringing down the deficit “in a responsible way.”
What they are doing is the height of irresponsibility—in their thoughtless axing of vital functions, careless and cruel treatment of people, and absolute determination to preserve, extend, and expand privilege to the already privileged. It amounts to “take the money and run” under the guise of decimating a government they think Americans don’t much need or want. They are about to find out that they’re wrong.
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