Breakpoint
We are rapidly approaching a time when things just stop working
A ”Breakpoint” is a pause. To describe recent events, a more appropriate expression might be “the calm before the storm” — although for many people, these days are anything but calm. Things are spiraling out of control so fast it’s hard to keep up.
The signs are all around us.
The TMP Administration (Trump/Musk/Putin) keeps issuing EOs, claiming (among many other falsehoods) that Trump was elected with “overwhelming” support. In fact, Trump did not win a majority of the votes in last year’s election. He received 49.81% of the popular vote.
In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January.
If you were setting out to design a trade policy that would harm the American economy while undermining political support for its leadership, you might come up with something like the tariffs that Donald Trump just imposed on Canada, China, and Mexico. The new tariffs will raise prices for American consumers, weaken the American auto industry, and prompt severe retaliation from America’s top trading partners. Yale’s Budget Lab estimates that the new tariffs will cost the average household anywhere from $1,600 to $2,000 a year.
Staffing of many federal services is being arbitrarily reduced, with no rhyme or reason other than to break things. Reducing government spending is a euphemism for reducing government services.
NOAA staffing is being cut in ways that threaten to make weather forecasting less reliable. People who fish for a living depend on the National Weather Service and other branches of NOAA to keep them safe. Farmers need weather forecasts, and longer-term climate-change-related analyses, to help them plan when and what to plant and harvest. We all need storm warnings to help us prepare for more frequent severe weather.
The Social Security system is threated with imminent collapse, according to Martin O’Malley, the former commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), also a former Governor of Maryland. He predicts that “within the next 30 to 90 days” the SSA may be unable to deliver timely SS payments to more than 73 million individuals, including 56 million elderly people, who depend on the agency for their monthly benefit payments.
The list goes on…
What do we do about all of this? Protests are springing up here and there, such as those as Tesla dealer locations. I’m not sure we need to do anything in particular. As many, if not most, of these misguided policies result in harm (as some are already doing), people will begin screaming louder and louder. That may not prevent the economy and the stock market from collapsing, but it will make clear how unpopular are these otherworldly ideas.