The rest of this essay just reads like griping and cherry picking though. Complaining about the name of the bill "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" is just dumb. Senators and Reps name bills all sorts of funny things aiming to be catchy or what have you, it's part of our process.
And, it seems much more likely that whipsawing serves the purpose of someone than that people in the whitehouse are "unserious". I'd rather see Mr. Krugman's estimable mind devoted to figuring out who is benefiting, how long they will benefit, and what that will do to others than to read him complaining about the name of a bill.
I agree with you that saber rattling is a major change in foreign policy for the US. There aren't a lot of stops between "reserve currency" and "former reserve currency". That said, there also aren't a lot of options globally.
I think the benefactors of the saber rattling might be a little closer to Pennsylvania avenue than you suggest, though.
Sorry, but that administration is dumb, period. Stop being politically correct.
From day one in the office these guys executed hard. Hundreds of executive orders. And if you read those orders, often up to half of them is calling out all the ways exec orders from 2016 were mutated or ignored and specifically banning them. They are in no way the work of dumb people. Legally and practically aggressive people? Yes. People with policies you might dislike or hate? For sure. People who are masters at engaging media and outrage? Yes. People headlined by someone who really loves self-enrichment and get-out-of-jail free rulings? Definitely.
Calling them dumb is radically misunderstanding the real situation in the whitehouse and to the extent journalists are calling them out as dumb it's because they're following the ball laid out by the street magician; watch the hands. The ball is all the sturm and drang and drama, the hands are actual practical outcomes.
These guys "executed hard" the whims of an incompetent, uneducated, psychopathic, certainly terminally senile President. Have you read Trump's speeches? Read, not listened to.
The only practical outcomes so far have been books banned from some Army libraries, websites changed, and posturing. What has been accomplished in practice? Very little: the tariffs are in Schrodinger's cat state, the expulsions are lagging far behind their targets, the Army is loosing soldiers and equipment (Hesgeth is only renaming things), the transportation secretary is more worried about biblical paintings than fixing air controllers shortages, etc. etc.
But yeah, tell me how those guys executed a "coherent" strategy wrt. foreign trade. What's the strategy again?
And countless abuses by police and ICE against immigrants with legal status and court orders protecting them. Being unconstitutional or otherwise impractical doesn’t stop the abuses. While EOs might be challenged, so will have the abuse instances. The goal is not to pass everything, but to overwhelm the defenses of their targets.
Internal admin policy wonk (Or Project 2025 insiders?) type strategy there seems to be to reset and expand the tools the State department has to work with -- it's been a long time since the US could credibly threaten war, for instance. That just doesn't sit right with some hawks.
Canadians took semi-seriously 51st state talks, enough that there are boycotts of American goods in Canada. Denmark took fairly seriously Greenland. Both of these took all of a day or two of talking to the media to get done, and in Canada at least will be grist for the mill in trade deals - having a crazy like a fox type throwing around random threats gives State some leeway.
Note that I'm not in any way condoning this strategy or saying it's perfectly (or well) executed, a good idea, or even that some or many people at the State Department like this strategy. But if you can get over blind rage on policy differences, a convicted rapist president, accepting gifts well in excess of the mandated $25 maximum, and on and on, and look at what they're saying and doing, I do think there's some coherence and execution in there.
Read those leaked signal chats -- that group is on the same page: They think the US is overpaying allies / getting a raw deal, and they want to set a clear message that they intend to change that. I think they got the message across.
There is nobody to execute hard the stupidly-worded EOs, which are not worth the paper they are printed on.
And lets not forget the time a journalist was added to a Signal chat about incoming air strikes. Was that another 5-D chess move in your opinion?
That said, I'm sympathetic to just clicking "update" on an ask like that from my iPhone. I don't think too hard about those if they pop up. Well, I didn't until I read the debrief. Geez Siri.
If that story is true and not, you know, complete bullshit to cover that Walz is one of the "off-the-record" sources that are American politics'constant news mill feeders.
Senators and reps and bills all sorts of funny things aiming to be catchy by creating a succinct acronym. [1]. This cultural practice is sometimes called ‘backronym’. Trying to tie ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ as an example of that practice is ‘sane-washing’; ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ is a dumb person’s idea of a backronym [2]. Dissecting the bill name is not just complaining for complaining’s sake; it’s just another in the long list of examples of Trump doesn’t understand what he’s doing and his enablers are not serious people by going along with
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/news/8710-lawmakers-turn-to-cat...
[2] Trump is a poor man's idea of a rich man, a weak man's idea of a strong man, and a stupid man's idea of a smart man etc
Look at Trump's career. Look at his skill set. Look at what he's doing in the white house. He's a lot of things but he's not bad at getting what he values; he is in fact perhaps the most successful American ever in those terms. If you care about America it is incredibly short sighted to think he's dumb. He's extremely effective, just not at the things that a) you might want him to be b) we hope a President will be c) he says he's doing to the media.
>> He's a lot of things but he's not bad at getting what he values; he is in fact perhaps the most successful American ever in those terms.
Nonsense. He’s bankrupted casinos. He lost his first reelection bid. He started on third base and ended up back at first.
>> If you care about America it is incredibly short sighted to think he's dumb.
He IS that dumb. He really doesn’t understand how tariffs/trade balance works. But his enablers have let him run riot. Biden was old. Reagan had mental issues. But their teams had firm hands on the steering wheel. That’s a serious country with some checks and balances. Trump admin is trying to revoke all that
In what sense can "NY developer nepo baby" be third base while "guy with the nuclear codes, billions of dollars of graft and personal guarantees from the Supreme Court" be first base? I truly don't understand that thinking.
Diplomacy is dead in USA. These days nobody sane in the world believes anything coming out of White House, not even a paper, and Trump is just a current facade for the same elites that nobody trusts.
It's our fault for being the only ones to take defense spending seriously? We just reopened the shipping lanes clogged by the Houthis, which literally the entire world profited from. That could have been done by anyone else but wasn't, because they happily benefit from US interventionism but then pretend to hate it too. You can't have it both ways.
Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state.
Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me. The Civil War was basically southerners strongly preferring to use slaves instead of modernizing. Lots of them died for this. Make it make sense.
This dysfunction goes a lot deeper than any one administration. Maybe the rise of China will motivate them to get their act together.
You know why :) People voted against their interests for one reason, racism.
In 2016 an argument could be made for voting for Trump, in 2024, the only reason he was elected was racism.
Don’t blame voters, blame the pathetic political machine that could not help itself.
Americans seem to be trying really hard to justify voting for Trump by making it seem as if they faced an intractable choice between two terrible options - and of course many like yourself are piling on some conspiracy theory to also make it seem as if the options were equally corrupt.
But no. At worst, Kamala Harris was a mainstream candidate, not even significantly leftist, certainly no less qualified than Trump, and not "terrible" in comparison to other alternatives. Americans just don't trust a non-white woman in a position of power. They would have voted for Hitler just to have a white dick and balls in the Oval Office.
And Biden's mental and physical health was a subject of memes before he was even elected, and the most popular Republican President in history prior to the current one probably had Alzheimer's in office. And the current one isn't exactly at his physical or mental prime.
They had an incumbent President who had already beaten Trump. He did badly during the debate, they panicked so they ran their VP.
That isn't a conspiracy, it's just political game theory. The Democrats would have been foolish not to field Biden, and the next best option after Biden was Kamala Harris. Their biggest mistake if anything wasn't setting up Harris earlier. Show me where the Trump Administration has ever said Trump is anything but masculine and virile, a brilliant and cunning orator, master statesman and strategist? This is just how political parties work.
And I mean... "word salad?" Can't relate to regular folks? Compared to the incompetent, barely coherent billionaire? Come on.
Biden ran in 2020 as a single term president. He did his job to prevent a second consecutive Trump term. At some point that changed, probably because Trump never gave up power.
Again, the democrats were foolish to not aggressively prosecute Trump. Merrill did nothing for far too long.
The democrats were foolish to make Harris the “border czar” since the republicans simply have them beat on immigration messaging. They handed her a huge weakness and played directly into the republicans strengths.
The democrats were foolish to not have a primary. Harris simply is not popular. She does not perform well in the primaries, so they just decided no primary and a weak candidate was their only option.
If your party has an encumbent President, you run the President. No other candidate would have the same amount of power, public awareness or power of the bully pulpit, especially not against Donald Trump. Barring that, you have the VP. Doing anything other than what they did would have been political suicide. Donald Trump barely even ran and he was still a factor.
>Again, the democrats were foolish to not aggressively prosecute Trump. Merrill did nothing for far too long.
I agree.
>The democrats were foolish to make Harris the “border czar” since the republicans simply have them beat on immigration messaging. They handed her a huge weakness and played directly into the republicans strengths.
The democrats seem to have this pernicious belief that they need to bring Republicans into the tent... I don't understand it. They absolutely could not read the room. Biden was a stopgap, and his stances on unions and Gaza were alienating the left, so the best thing Harris could have done was pivot further to the left and be the candidate the left wished Biden was.
>The democrats were foolish to not have a primary. Harris simply is not popular. She does not perform well in the primaries, so they just decided no primary and a weak candidate was their only option.
She was still more popular and a stronger candidate than any other Democrat would have been, except for Biden. It would have been a race between Donald Trump - ex President billionaire whose every word and deed gets constant media coverage - and someone no one ever heard of. A primary would only be a sign of weakness and threaten to fracture the party.
Trump didn't exactly win in a blowout, the margin between he and Harris was slim enough that a Harris victory could have been possible.
Maybe they were foolish to run Biden at all. But the die was kind of cast at that point.
Of course both of us are speculating, but my view is that this is conventional wisdom in unconventional times
The democrats keep playing with a rule book that the other side threw away a decade ago. This is why they lose.
Republican voters are fed a steady diet of misinformation on everything the Democrats do. The hatred of Biden on the right boggles my mind, since he was such middle of the road guy, just keeping things status quo. Hillary also had decades of baggage from talk radio hosts and Fox News against her.
But of course Harris was weaker. It’s telling to me that despite her weakness, nominating her caused a panic on the right because it instantly nullified all of their canned attacks against Biden.
Imagine what would have happened if they’d fostered a new, young and unencumbered by Fox News propaganda presidential candidate.
Moderate and conservatives in the US are deeply sexist and racist. I know plenty of women who wouldn't vote for a female president and are very open about it.
https://uinterview.com/news/joe-rogan-mocks-man-baby-donald-... https://www.drjohnkruse.com/trump-nose-best-adderall-use-is-...
His entire cabinet was ordering shitloads of Rx drugs the entire time. The weirdest part is they refused to take generics, lol.
I guess you could say the same about Dem voters and Biden's health but to be honest I think most Dem voters were probably just voting AGAINST Trump. Plenty of people on the Dem side want the old guard/status quo to retire for new blood.
And just a bit of history, sometimes voters would rather elect a dead man than a live one. Look into former Governor Mel Carnahan who was elected to Missouri senate, three weeks after he died in a plane crash. Also, Democrat Anthony "Tony" DeLuca died Oct. 9, 2022 a month before winning his seat.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=voters+elect+a+dead+man
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26281/4-dead-politicians...
Traditionally, both candidates needed to have a healthy amount of centrism to make sure they weren’t more evil/extreme than the other.
However these days it feels like populism is the new centrism. Bernie and AOC are more popular than ever and certainly have embraced populism rather than have centrist policies.
Representative democracy is ultimately an exercise of compromise in order to get anything done.
We elected a black POTUS already, but not a woman one.
There's a great book called "The One Sentence Persuasion Course - 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding", which I keep thinking about with respect to Trump and his ability to sway his voting bloc. The 27 words are:
"People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies."
Trump ticks a lot of these boxes. He "confirms" their suspicions and justifies their failures when he says their problems are caused by immigration, China, and wokeism. He helps them throw rocks at their enemies every time he invents a new petty nickname for his political opponents ("Sleepy Joe" Biden, "Crooked Hillary" Clinton, "Kamabla" Harris, etc). He encourages their dreams with his "Make America Great Again" slogan and "allays their fears" with his "Only I can solve it" rhetoric. And they eat it up because, as misguided as he is, he speaks to them on an emotional level, not a logical one.
Trump's base is fundamentally fueled by grievance, and he knows it. When we stop bending over backwards to give them some noble rationale and start looking at their actions from this lens, it starts to make a lot more sense.
If they're feeling overwhelmed by the pace of the change happening in our modern world/society, feeling as though they are being left behind — they're not the only ones.
If they're feeling as though the contract between the wealth-holders and the laborers has been getting worse and worse for the worker, they may be on to something.
Maybe they see the wealthy continuing to fail upward and are finding that just working hard and saving money seem to be less than treading water.
There's plenty of things to have grievances about.
And I think "left" and "right" might have common ground on these issues.
In practice, this means tax cuts, deregulation, opposition to min wage increases, welfare reform, school vouchers, opposition to unions, healthcare cuts, project 2025, etc etc. They’ll reduce govt intervention and go all in on free markets.
They are wrong because the outcomes of this unrestricted free market approach are not so good, but nevertheless for now it’s impossible to find common ground with FDR-style progressives. Check back after the next depression.
Note: there’s also a strong racist/sexist/homophobic/etc streak that prevents most kinds of solidarity.
OP (toomanyrichies)'s comment makes much more sense. The right's grievances aren't against elites, the wealthy, the privileged, employers, or the pace of change. Their grievances are against less powerful outgroups who serve as scapegoats that can't fight back: Immigrants, minorities, gay and trans people, "woke" culture warriors, the poor, and so on. The government is seen as a tool for punching down and exacting cruelty onto these outgroups. That's what really motivates them.
I live in a "red" part of the country, surrounded by Trump flags. Ask them what good their team has done for their own lives, and if you get past the canned talking points that don't make sense, they'll admit their lives aren't really much better than they were in 2016. Ask them what they like about MAGA, and it will be all about the attacking and cruelty he's doing to their perceived enemies.
+1. Just as we engineers say "The purpose of a system is what it does" [1], a corollary to that is "the intention of a vote is what it achieves". If red-state voters consistently vote against their own economic interests, then either one of two things is true:
- They must have other interests in mind (i.e. punching down on marginalized groups), or
- Their interest in economic self-preservation is outweighed by their belief in helping the rich get richer, possibly because they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"? [2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/QuotesPorn/comments/jotijb/john_ste...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...
As a reminder, the Mary Meeker slides on AI reported that the US share of top companies in the public equity market went from ~50% in 1995 to ~85% recently.
Still, the signal from US debt might reflect only changes in a few dominant players (and we famously have adversaries investing in US debt -- Middle East, China, Russia). Also the big beautiful bill shows even Republicans want to spend now and pay later, so this might be unwinding the false expectation of austerity during the Republican trifecta. Both are transitory and neither really goes to seriousness.
The real question is whether we've lost seriousness by continuously moving upstream, into financial and information services and technologies. Our willingness to sell IP/infrastructure now rather than protect and control (milk) it over time reflects a generational lack of diligence. (Sorry - not trying to diminish exit strategies for interim investment tiers.)
pair this with each district, state, and constitute company/nonprofit/whatever looking for a piece of the pie creates an utter mess of non-stop spending
But I also think there is a lot of money to be made playing Trumps game. If i as an investor just jumps on when he says jump and jumps off before the last fool, there is money to be made.
At least that’s my explanation as to why sudden declines in tariffs (or even just breaks) causes investor confidence to return.
Disclosure: this foreign capitalist has caused a 5 figure blip by selling all US shares (the move aligned with my other personal goals).
Is this some meaning of beard I am so far unfamiliar with? The only meaning that jumps to mind is the facial hair, and when I looked up in the dictionary I was reminded me of the LGBT meaning, but neither of them fit here.
> to face, meet, or deal with an unpleasant or frightening person in a brave or determined way
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2017...
I’ve been doing a lot of independent research myself since finding useful, non-partisan sources is a huge issue anymore. I’ve found LLMs to be very useful in helping[1] me navigate these areas so I can learn enough to make my own determinations.
For what it’s worth my opinion is that this country is in a very bad position that could very well lead to massive world wide economic problems in the future. When and how that manifests is impossible to say; there are a lot of possibilities but I’m expecting the next decade will show us the path we’re on and what that looks like. The tariffs are having an effect (which is to be expected) but it didn’t start there nor does it end there.
I think one of the biggest problems we face as a nation is that the citizens do not understand what’s going on and end up parroting what someone else said without really understanding it, usually filling in the gaps of their knowledge from their own world view rather than reality. I don’t mean this as a denigration as most people have families and jobs and do not have enough time to know enough to have well-informed opinions about everything, myself included. However, it is leading to absurdities like screeds about the name of the bill.
[1] I don’t trust the LLM of course. I’m not asking it if X is happening or if Y is a problem. More of a way to guide me to finding good primary resources.
- How Venezuela went from the richest country in South America to a disaster area.[1]
- Decline of Argentina.[2]
- Decline of Portugal.[3] Portugal used to be a world power. Yes, Portugal.
- Decline of Roman Empire.[4]
This is a real worry. The US is on that path.
[1] https://www.history.com/articles/venezuela-chavez-maduro-cri...
[2] https://worldhistoryjournal.com/2025/04/02/history-argentina...
[3] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/cross-gold-brazilian-treasure...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...
Things are bad right now, but making stereotyped statements like this, as if the entire country just flipped a permanent switch after Trump was elected and it will be like this forever doesn't do anyone any favors. It doesn't explain what's happening, what happened before Trump was elected, what happened after Trump was elected, it doesn't point to any solutions — it just sweeps all of these issues under the rug and implicitly or explicitly attributes things to some sudden catastrophic change in Americans, like an asteroid the size of North America just collectively hit everyone on the head on Jan 20th.
Absolutist statements have always been around — there's plenty of examples during the pandemic, the online tech boom of the 90s and 2000s, and so forth — and it seems to be happening again. But this time to me it seems irresponsible not just for being so extreme, but also because it shirks away from any attempt to solve any problems. I don't expect Krugman to solve problems all the time — he's allowed to despair — but I at least expect him to have some courage and proactivity in his overall stance toward the situation.
From an outsider (non American),I am not sure.. but I have been looking more into american scandals due to trump and due to Michael Moore documentary.
And I have come to only one conclusion, I feel like you guys aren't picking the people who are better for the job but rather whose worse. The shift is so real. And I don't trust democrats too much either. But they are better than republicans at the moment.
If you guys are even in the position that you can literally get a guy elected as president that can effectively erode trust on america as a whole,you need to rethink elections. How can I trust america if there is even a 1% chance of such happening again (more than 1% for sure)
Trust shouldn't be played with. It's a hard thing to get
The only guy I have genuine trust is Bernie sanders. But he's too old but that to me feels like the only hope in America. I truly like how Bernie sanders is kind of like the north pole in my short understanding of american politics and has always been saying the things that I personally resonate with too.
I kind of wish,I had a Bernie sanders in my own country tbh. The guys a true gem.
I chose a start date half way through the last Obama Administration (2014) and scaled to 100 relative to values on that date. I didn't match Krugman's relative scales but plotted it again ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JqXv ) ... you can see the trends in the graph across two Trump presidencies a bit of Obama and all of Biden and it paints a different overall picture. A lot of wild variance is hidden.
> Actually, the chart was a bit too neat: When I set out to reproduce it, I found that the FT chose a time period during which the relationship looked especially clear.
You mean the thing that was right from the beginning, that is happening right now and that is even worse than the forecast?
"US Army Hits Annual Recruitment Goals 4 Months Early" => https://link.theepochtimes.com/mkt_app/us/us-army-hits-annua...
nabla9•1d ago
jmclnx•1d ago
If Trump takes over the Fed, that will make the 1930s look like fun times.
digianarchist•1d ago
ffsm8•1d ago
If he Trump tried once and was forced to backpedal, I'd say you're probably spot on. But considering he tried again quickly after shows, that he ain't gonna take a no. He's just gonna keep trying. At that point: yeah, I'd be worried.
But I'm not American, so I didn't particularly mind
jaredklewis•1d ago
6510•27m ago