According to the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, 58% of voters were unhappy with the economy when they showed Democrats the door in 2024, compared with 64% late last month. They were happier with the economy when Donald Trump was elected, but that faded month after month, showing the biggest decline when tariffs were issued and then when Democratic campaign ads were in full swing. Among voters supporting Democrats, 86% said they were unhappy with the economy. Ahead of the midterms, only 5% of voters ranked foreign policy as the most important issue facing the country. To the extent that the war was a factor, it was in large part because of the spike in gasoline and diesel prices.
In the last quarter of 2032, the Social Security trust fund dedicated to retirees is scheduled to run out of money. (There is another trust fund for disability insurance, which is better funded but comparatively small.) At that point, by law, benefits are supposed to be cut to match outflows to inflows, which would mean an across-the-board cut of over 20 percent. Six months later, the Medicare hospital insurance program will deplete its trust fund and is scheduled for an 11 percent cut in reimbursements.
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Because we’ve waited so long, all of the options are now bad. Perhaps you have heard that there is an easy fix: just eliminate the cap on payroll taxes, which applies only to the first $184,500 of income. Actually, this fix is neither easy nor complete. A 12.4 percent tax hike on every dollar earned above $184,500 would be one of the largest tax hikes since World War II, aimed squarely at the affluent professional base. Yet it would generate surpluses for only a few years and cover about half the program’s long-term shortfall. If we assume that the employer portion of payroll taxes ultimately comes out of wages — and we should — it would also raise the marginal tax rate on higher earners to 50 percent or more in high-tax blue states, leaving little fiscal space for new spending or for fixing Medicare.
The other options are just as politically unappetizing: raising the retirement ages and trimming back benefits for higher-income seniors. Some combination of these things has to happen. Any combination will make a lot of people mad. If Congress tries to punt — passing temporary fixes with borrowed money — America will never get its fiscal act together, resulting in higher interest rates to keep financing our massive deficits. There’s a real risk of a major economic crisis.
Anyone elected to the Senate this year will be responsible for those painful choices. So will any House member who manages to stick around for a couple of terms. And the next president will be the focal point of any blowback.
A Democratic Congress can pass bills to eliminate virtually all Trump tariffs and reform tariff powers, requiring Republicans to vote on them. Likewise, Democrats can attach limits to must-pass spending bills, use their oversight powers to examine how the Trump tariffs were assembled and why they were imposed, and write laws that a future president can sign. The public is already on board: in a Cato survey this spring, 70 percent of voters said presidents should be required to get explicit congressional approval before imposing tariffs, including 56 percent of Republicans. On Election Day, about 7 in 10 voters told the AP Voter Poll that Congress isn’t doing enough to check this deeply unpopular president.
Allysia Finley identifies what’s rotten in the state of MAGA. A slice:
Last week’s Republican bloodbath has the ingredients of a Shakespearean tragedy. A leader brought down by overweening pride. Schemers and sycophants who goad him into taking actions against his interests. Innocents who become collateral damage.
Like King Lear, President Trump is a fool for flattery. He demands ostentatious displays of loyalty that are often insincere. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” Lear asks his daughters. JD Vance doth say. So too profess Stephen Miller, Howard Lutnick and Bill Pulte.
Mr. Trump rewards brown-nosers who seek to bolster their own power and banishes those he perceives as disloyal. Take North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who became persona non grata after he criticized the president’s tariffs and blanket pardons of Jan. 6 rioters. The president’s refusal to abide criticism insulated him from sage advice that might have prevented his descent in public approval and the GOP’s election wreckage.
“I am a man more sinned against than sinning,” the aggrieved Lear rages on the heath after being cast out by his sycophantic daughters. After the election, Mr. Trump delivered a Truth Social soliloquy: “FoxNews bears responsibility for these losses by constantly and consistently putting on the Dumocrat opposition, and worse.”
He faulted GOP candidates who tried to distance themselves from his unpopular tariff and immigration policies. “Some of the candidates that I endorsed fought me,” Mr. Trump said. MAGA voters “didn’t like that they fought me,” though exit polls showed that it was non-MAGA Republicans and independents who turned against Republicans.
A common theme in Shakespeare is the danger of nursing grievances and grudges. Hamlet becomes consumed by a self-destructive need to avenge his father’s murder at the hands of his uncle Claudius. Though Hamlet ultimately succeeds, he, his beloved Ophelia and most of their families die as a result.
The president has let revenge consume his presidency, as he has waged retribution against John Bolton, James Comey, Letitia James and others. Such vendettas became political distractions and exhausted the patience of Americans.
“Hamlet” also offers a lesson in the insidious nature of political corruption. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” the palace guard Marcellus observes. Voters took the same view of the Trump administration and the Republican party.
Over the past two years, voters have been confronted with a steady dribble of stories about the Trump family’s crypto schemes. This fall brought reports that a Russian oligarch helped bankroll Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding and that former Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle sought $100,000 from a GOP donor to pay off a credit-card debt.
Grifters in the Trump administration call to mind the buffoonish Sir John Falstaff in “Henry IV, Part 1” who engages in disreputable activities and enriches himself by exploiting his friendship with the young Prince Hal. “What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air,” Falstaff muses.
Mr. Trump and his coterie may view honor as immaterial, but corruption ranked at the top of voters’ concerns in polls. Yes, Americans are unhappy about high gasoline prices from the war in Iran and persistent inflation. But the killer was that while they struggled to pay bills, Mr. Trump and his hangers-on looked to be enriching themselves. In exit polls 62% of voters said that the president put his personal interests over the interests of the country.
Scott Lincicome tweets: “AI & data centers drove recent US manufacturing job growth.”
