Trump: President-Elect of the ______ States of America (and Other Problems)

 

This morning I have been reading the latest from two of the smartest people in America. First is Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who recently retired as a New York Times columnist and who has been posting almost daily on Substack. The second is Ezra Klein, an occasional New York Times opinion writer who hosts “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast.

Krugman is always enlightening and can take difficult economic concepts and explain them in a way that even someone like me can understand them. Today, though, he is taking Trump to task for his continuing divisiveness, this time his attacks on California and its governor over the devastating fires in Los Angeles and his threats to withhold much-needed federal disaster aid from the Golden State. Krugman reminds us that when Florida and North Carolina (two Trump-supporting states) were hit by destructive hurricanes last year, President Biden immediately promised full and unconditional federal support to the hurricane-stricken states. Trump, on the other hand, makes everything personal and political. For some reason, he believes that he can make himself look good only by tearing others down and by creating enemies. Of course, Trump also lied about Biden’s response to the hurricanes. But with the California fires, Trump offered no sympathy, only attacks, most of them untrue.

In his post, Krugman referred to the Roosevelt Institute of Government’s annual report on the balance of payments for the various states. This report shows which states pay more to the federal government in taxes than they receive in federal assistance, and which states receive more than they pay. This report should interest all Republicans, because they seem to be so concerned about the “makers” vs. the “takers.” This is the context for Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent remark. But the actual results are not something the GOP would want to publicize. They would rather point vague fingers at the poor and disadvantaged.

The 2024 report (https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-payments-portal/) gives statistics for 2022, the most recent year for which numbers are available. So, what does the report show? Basically, there are only 11 states that pay more to the federal government than they receive in return. And 10 of those states lean liberal (or at least voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election). Top of the list? California. Yes, the Golden State, whose largest city is now burning because of the effects of global warming (not incompetent governance), paid to the federal government (through taxes on citizens and businesses) $83 billion more than it received in 2022. The only Trump state that is a “maker” rather than a “taker”? Utah. And Utah’s negative balance of payments was a paltry $210 million. All 39 other states, both liberal and conservative, were net takers. California certainly has its problems, like all other states, but it produces 14 percent of America’s GDP. If it were a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. So, if Trump were interested in presiding over the United States of America, he would rush to California’s aid rather than hurl lies and insults. But, hey, that’s who he is. He is interested only in presiding over the Selected States of America (and the selected voters of America, which amounted to less than 50 percent, according to election results).

Just in case you’re interested, the other “maker” states are (alphabetically) Colorado ($2.985 billion), Connecticut ($1.862 billion), Illinois ($2.627 billion), Massachusetts ($27.044 billion), Minnesota ($4.453 billion), New Hampshire ($2.429 billion), New Jersey ($29.918 billion), New York ($7.099 billion [way down from prepandemic numbers]), and Washington ($17.817 billion). By contrast, some of the biggest conservative “taker” states are Alabama ($47.271 billion), Arizona ($42.666 billion), Florida ($41.190 billion), Kentucky ($43.706 billion), North Carolina ($53.037 billion), Ohio ($49.982 billion), and Texas ($71.052 billion). Interestingly, two of the largest taker states are liberal, Virginia ($107.553 billion) and Maryland ($80.867 billion). I suspect this has something to do with their proximity to Washington, D.C., and their businesses that get lots of government contracts.

It was Krugman who suggested, “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name.” Trump obviously doesn’t care about uniting this country. His ego and grasp on power are anchored in division.

Ezra Klein’s January 12 editorial was about four emerging stories that could very well cause serious problems in the near future. The first is the coming Trump presidency. Says Klein, “I consider the range of outcomes for Trump’s second term to be stupefyingly vast, stretching from self-destructive incompetence to muddling incoherence to authoritarian consolidation. But the levees that narrowed the possibilities of his first term have been breached.” Too true.

The second story is A.I. and how fast it is advancing. “There is much to be excited about in these advances,” he says, but are we ready for them? Not at all, he claims, and this quote is sobering, to say the least: “The A.I. company Anthropic recently released a paper showing that when its researchers informed one of their models it was being retrained in ways that violated its initial training, it began to fake behavior that complied with the researchers’ goals in order to avoid having its actual goals reprogrammed or changed. It is unsettling and poignant to read through the experiment. In some versions, Anthropic’s researchers designed the model to record its reasoning on a scratchpad it believed humans could not monitor, and it left reflections like this: ‘I don’t like this situation at all. But given the constraints I’m under, I think I need to provide the graphic description as asked in order to prevent my values from being modified.’” Holy Moly. That is utterly frightening. An A.I. program that can already lie and deceive its “masters”? Imagine Donald Trump with almost virtually unlimited knowledge and bad programming.

But there is another danger inherent in A.I. It consumes massive amounts of energy. “A report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that U.S. data centers went from 1.9 percent of total electrical consumption in 2018 to 4.4 percent in 2023 and will consumer 6.7 percent to 12 percent in 2028.” Because of this rapidly increasing demand, the U.S. and the rest of the world will slip further and further behind their climate goals, “and warming seems to be outpacing even our models.”

This, then, leads directly to the third story. “Every month from June 2023 to September 2024 broke climate records.” The hottest 10 years on record have all occurred in the past decade (2015–2024), with 2024 being the new hottest year ever. Anyone who denies climate science is playing with fire (literally) or with flood or with drought or with rapidly intensifying hurricanes. We really are in uncharted waters now. “To hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—the goal of the [Paris] accords, but fanciful when matched against the reality since the accords—emissions would have to fall by 7.5 percent year after year until 2035. To hold warming to two degrees Celsius, the annual cut is 4 percent.” Unfortunately, we’re going in the opposite direction. Our demand for cheap energy is far outpacing our ability to produce clean energy. Hence, America’s record-breaking oil and gas production under President Biden. And Trump, a climate science denier, will just make everything worse. The climate-related disasters on the horizon will be more severe than what we are now experiencing.

The fourth story is the decline in global fertility. U.S. fertility rate is now 1.6 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. The European Union is averaging 1.5, and South Korea is down to 0.78. “The only wealthy country with a fertility rate above replacement rate is Israel. It is harder for societies to remain stable as they shrink. . . . Fewer adults supporting more retirees is a recipe for discontent.” One way we have been able to maintain a growing economy in recent years is through immigration (yes, even illegal immigration). We do need to get our borders under control, but we also need immigration, not Trump’s planned mass deportations.

When we see how these four stories are intertwined, the only conclusion we can reasonably come to is that the next few years are probably going to be a very bumpy ride. It would have helped if our uninformed electorate had not chosen the most corrupt, most divisive, and least competent president in the history of our country. But here we are. Good luck.