A Liberal Dose, March 14, 2025 "Trump Recession on the Horizon"

 

A Liberal Dose

Troy D. Smith

“Trump Recession on the Horizon”

 

I hear a lot of folks complaining about the economic policies of Biden, and saying that Musk’s job-slashing expedition is necessary to get the budget balanced. Trump says the same thing. The fact is, though, that the thousands of jobs Musk has cut -with a chainsaw, not a scalpel -amount to barely a drop in the bucket in the national budget. However, they -and those to come -will make a huge difference in the economy, as all those lost jobs translate into less consumer spending, creating a domino effect. As I have mentioned before, Trump’s tariffs are also going to disrupt things in a major way, and so is the large-scale deportation of undocumented immigrants, who do make money and spend money. None of these things has lowered the cost of eggs… or anything else… nor will they. Your costs are going to go up and up in the coming months and years.

Economists predict we are on the cusp of a recession. Actually, something worse than a recession: stagflation, which we haven’t seen in 50 years, since the energy crisis of the 1970s. Stagflation is when inflation rises like crazy -as it still is -yet wages stagnate, or stay the same, making everyone’s money worth less. Trump himself, who during the presidential campaign said he would lower all these prices “on day one”, has been reluctantly conceding that it is not going to happen, claiming a president has no control over prices. On the one hand, that is largely true -which leads me to wonder why he would claim otherwise to get elected, but more importantly, why people believed him. On the other hand, though, while it extremely difficult for a president to lower prices once they have gone up… it IS possible for a president’s actions to cause prices to RISE. Ask Herbert Hoover (or his ghost), whose massive tariffs greatly amplified the suffering of the Great Depression (I think of our current president as Sherbert Hoover). This week, in fact, Trump would not rule out the possibility of a recession looming on the horizon… while he, like Musk, repeats the mantra that Americans might be in for “a little suffering.” Essentially, they are saying, it is coming… get over it.

If you’ve ever read this column at all, you know where I am going with this. And if you’ve taken a good look around, and been honest with yourself, you know I’m right. Donald Trump is not interested in fixing the deficit or balancing the budget. He has asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling so he can take America even further into debt. It is all about slashing taxes on billionaires like himself and Elon Musk… which will leave the government with significantly less money to work with. The cuts made so far have almost all been on things Trump and company are ideologically opposed to. But other cuts are coming (to things they are also ideologically opposed to)- Congressional Republicans’ new budget plan will slash Medicaid to the bone, and they are dropping hints about cuts to Social Security. A lot of people rely on those programs, but robber barons have always considered them -all passed by Democratic presidents, by the way -to be socialism. They define “socialism” as anything that doesn’t put money directly into their pockets. Or that prevents them from funneling ALL the money into their pockets. Or that leaves you, the working American, with ANYTHING in YOUR pockets.

How quickly half the country forgets the horrible condition this economy was in when he left office the last time.

Here’s the deal. Fat cats like Trump and Musk don’t care if eggs are ten dollars a carton… or twenty dollars. They could be a hundred dollars, these guys would never notice, because they blow through your entire yearly wage in a few hours. They don’t know what food costs or why that’s important to working people. I doubt if either of them has actually ever even stood in the checkout line of a grocery store. Heck, Trump apparently just learned what the word “gro-ser-eez” means a couple of months ago. They just want you worked up and turning on each other so you don’t notice them picking your pocket. It is the same game people like them have always played. And, the thing is, it always works… for a time. Until working people finally catch on and refuse to take it anymore.

You may not be at that point yet. But you will be, probably before this year is out.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

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