The Stall

 Krugman looks at the somewhat contradictory jobs numbers. Basically, job growth is slow but unemployment is low. How can that be? Well, it's because we are throttling off immigration. We are likely at or approaching negative net migration - more people leaving the country than entering.

The developed world is seeing a similar problem of a graying, shrinking demographic. We live longer and have fewer children, so whether it's Japan or Germany or the US, the replacement rate is a struggle to achieve. The US has avoided this problem by growing its population through both legal and illegal immigration. That has kept the workforce expanding. Illegal immigration helps the most, in some ways, because undocumented workers actually pay into Social Security, but they don't withdraw from it.

Trumpists will cover this looming problem up by claiming ridiculous projections for productivity and overall economic growth. Something, something AI. There is - as with all Republican policies - an extraordinary amount of wishcasting. 

What worries me is that we are headed for a reckoning on the national debt. Trump has added something like a quarter of all of America's debt. In this, he is just a bog standard Republican, albeit more so than most. America has been able to carry a huge debt for a number of structural reasons, and Trump is destroying most of them, including international goodwill towards the dollar. If the economy falls into a recession caused by economic instability from his whacko policies, a bursting AI bubble and the energy crisis his war has created, America could go from a stalled job market to a collapsing one. 

Democrats are always having to clean up Republican messes. If we dip into a recession, we might have to do so with a politicized Federal Reserve and a budget situation from hell. Trump will want to give away massive checks with his name on them. Democrats - who in this scenario easily win the House and likely the Senate - will have to put strict conditions on the money, and they are usually averse to participating in the immiseration of Americans.

The Iran War isn't over. The oil is not flowing, and even if it was it would take months to get back to normal. The labor market has stalled. The economy is sustained only by an AI bubble that is dependent on cheap energy, which we no longer have. 

If the crash is going to come, it needs to come soon, so we can take Republicans out of the equation in Congress and begin the slow process of repairing the structural damage of this awful man and his legions.