Pause Buttons 😱✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️😱

Financial Follies:  The United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, and Finland have issued advisories warning their citizens about the risk of traveling to the US while our neighbor Canada who Trump continues to insist should become our 51^st state has informally asked its citizens to reconsider their trips.  All of these countries are concerned about the breakdown in the rule of law and the risk that one or more of their citizens will end up held in an INS facility for an imaginary or minor infraction or for having a snarky comment about Trump in a text chain on their phone.  Those concerns are real because an increasing number of travelers have gotten caught up in immigration hell and three members of UK Subs, a UK based punk band enroute to a California punk festival report that they were detained and denied entry to the US not because they were found carrying drugs or were aligned with a terrorist organization but because of their open disdain for the orange one.  In 2023, the US travel and tourism industry contributed approximately $2.36 trillion to the US GDP, and international visitors spent $155 billion, with the sector supporting 9.5 million jobs so maybe discouraging travelers from coming to the US isn’t such a good idea?  Along similar lines, cutting IRS staffing is another one of those things that’s negatively impacts the bottom line. Treasury Department and IRS officials are now predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. That shouldn’t surprise anyone because when the IRS is well staffed revenues increase, when its understaffed revenues go down. Further complicating tax collection,  the IRS is likely to start giving immigration officials tax data to allow them to confirm the names and addresses of people suspected of being in the US illegally.  Undocumented immigrants paid just under $100 billion in taxes last year, more than a third of those tax dollars go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding Social Security and Medicare, programs they are barred from accessing.  So, like making the country less welcoming to tourists and cutting IRS staffing, discouraging tax paying by the undocumented might not be such a good idea.  Who could have guessed that Trump who has declared bankruptcy four times and who believes that tariffs will eliminate the need for taxes doesn’t understand all that but then again, his co-president Musk generates most of his income from government funding and managed to slash the value of his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter over night not to mention those plummeting Tesla sales. 

Blame Game: We still don’t know how the courts, most importantly SCOTUS, will rule on Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to justify his extreme extra-judicial deportations but maybe Trump, despite his anti-migrant rhetoric is concerned, either that or he’s experiencing dementia because on Friday when asked a question about the Alien Act he said “I don’t know when it was signed, because I didn’t sign it. Other people handled it.” Trump then went on to imply that the decision to invoke the Act was all Secretary of State Rubio’s idea, throwing Marco, his Cabinet punching bag under the bus. There’s no doubt that Trump is the one who signed the order invoking the Act,  probably using one of the autopens that he earlier insisted made all of Biden’s pardons invalid,  but still he signed it and autopen signatures count.  Moreover, despite his mental frailty, he knows he signed it.  Why else would he be raging against Judge Boasberg who though he hasn’t yet ruled on the legality of invoking the Alien Act, called the policy ramifications of it “incredibly troublesome and problematic and concerning.” Trump has called for the judge’s impeachment and labeled him a “troublemaker and an agitator.”  It’s just more double speak from a guy who is frighteningly good at it and knows that keeping the country focused on his deporting of violent gang members, allows him to also deport those who are neither violent nor gang members.  That’s the same approach he’s taking with his targeted defunding of universities.  The transgender swimmer that’s serving as his justification for “pausing” funds to the University of Pennsylvania, she graduated in 2022. Going after Maine for refusing to agree to transgender prohibitions that violate state law, plays to the fear of parents and mollifies the religious right.  The problems at Columbia University, they’re real, but cutting financial grants under the guise of targeting anti-Semitism, that’s a way to get those who ordinarily would be horrified by his attack on higher education into the fold.  All of this is another reminder that Trump maybe a financial dodo but he’s sharp as a tack when it comes to zeroing in on people’s worst fears. And sadly, judging by Paul Weiss’ decision to acquiesce to Trump’s demands fewer law firms are likely to be willing to take on clients who put them in the target zone.  

Foot and Mouth Disease:  Last week’s tie for the foot in the mouth prize goes to Acting Social Security Administration head Leland Dudek and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.  First, Dudek, the former midlevel geek who shouldn’t be running anything but is running the most crucial government payment system, said that in response to federal Judge Hollander’s temporary restraining order banning DOGE workers from mucking around in the Social Security System, he would be forced to “pause” Social Security payments. His false argument: that Judge Hollander’s order was so broad that it banned everyone on the Social Security staff from typing any keys.  His threat was then amplified by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick who actually asserted that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t be at all concerned if her payment didn’t show up next month. We don’t know if that lack of concern is because his mother-in-law is no longer compos mentis or because she, like her son-in-law, is a billionaire, but Lutnick’s comment was tone deaf as was his add on that the only people who’d complain about not receiving their payments would be fraudsters. Seventy-three million people receive Social Security payments and a significant portion of them rely on those payments to pay rent and eat but sure, only the fraudsters would complain.  Clearly, someone in the White House heard both Dudek and Lutnick and understood that their comments, which will likely serve as fodder for lots of Democratic ads, assuming the Democrats ever get their act together and the pundit class moves on from targeting Chuck Schumer, were bigly problematic.  Dudek backed down, Social Security payments will continue.  Hearings are being held this week for the confirmation of Frank Bisignano who is Trump’s nominee to serve as Commissioner of Social Security.  Bisignano, the former CEO of FISERV and a former JP Morgan and Citibank executive should be prepared to answer lots of questions about whether or not he thinks putting Social Security payments on pause is a good idea on top of those questions about the motives behind eliminating offices and phone sign-ups while making seniors without internet access show up in person to far away offices. Could it be that someone like the guy who runs DOGE, but claims he doesn’t, wants to free up cash for his increasing number of government contracts because someone has to pay for those SpaceX and Starlink’s contracts and subsidies, an amount that has totaled at least $38 billion to date and is on a steep upswing.     

#BringThemAllHomeNow