Paris        This is definitely new.  Having a US president welcome a recession is unique, especially after the Biden term where we read, almost daily, about the efforts to avoid one or find a “soft landing,” whatever that might have been.  Now in the Trump version of the “end times,” we’re expected to embrace the pain.

I realize we’re not supposed to talk about equity anymore, and the last thing on my life list is being personally named in a White House executive order, but the pain brought by a self-inflicted White House recession is not a shared national project like protecting the home front or going to the moon, but a huge blow to everyday Americans, especially lower and working income families, as opposed to the rich.  A hike in grocery bills and other daily expenditures is not something the rich will likely even notice, while being devastating to many families.  Recessions also mean a decrease in hiring and increased layoffs as businesses pullback from the uncertainty. The government’s safety net is being attacked, and existing programs will be strained.  Mind you, that’s on top of all of the forced firings and layoffs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers.  Some people, perhaps many people, will lose their homes, have their cars repossessed, find themselves homeless, swell food banks that have already been hammered by USDA cutbacks, and it just goes on and on all the way down for most Americans.  The impact is also felt around the world, since the US economy is the largest. As economists often note, when we catch a cold, the world gets pneumonia.

Keep in mind as your putting Band-Aids and tourniquets on one recession wound to the majority of Americans after another, an increase in tariffs is essentially a tax on most families as they pay more for this mythical goal of helping businesses compete and maybe some day in the by and by bringing back some manufacturing jobs for some people at the price of pain for all.  This is a huge tax in the form of higher prices, that in some cases will increase government revenues by coupling this regressive measure, hurting those with less income, with the additional burden of increasing already regressive sales tax revenue. All of that is also worth remembering.

This is especially outrageous because of the painful irony that the supplicant Republican Congress, while not bothering to stop Trump from taking away their basic powers and authority, is busily trying to extend the tax breaks given to the rich in Trump’s first term, and from some reports, trying to make them permanent.  We’re living in Alice’s Wonderland, where nothing is as it seems and the country has gone topsy-turvy.

Historically, these experiments in tariffs have led to the party who initiated them being turned out of office, and the midterms are not that far away.  The election then and in the future won’t turn on the Trump progress in bringing back the 1950s by ending diversity, equity and inclusion.  It’ll be a “bread-and-butter” election where “it’s the economy, stupid.”  Trump has been reported as saying essentially that he “doesn’t give a [blank].”  There’s some hope in believing that Trump and his sycophants will soon face the deluge, but not enough to salve all the pain we’ll experience from now until 2028.

This won’t end well for anyone.