Most Say The Cost Of Living Is Worse Than Ever Before

 

These charts are from the Politico Poll -- done done between August 8th and 12th of a nationwide sample of 2,004 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.

The Biggest Cost To The U.S. By The Trump Administration

 From Robert Reich:

I used to think the major tradeoff was between “guns and butter” — between defending the nation and attending to our most pressing social needs. 

That view put the federal budget at the center of debate. And it assumed a zero-sum game in which the more we spent on the military, the less we had for the poor. As Ike said in 1953, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

But that old zero-sum game isn’t the biggest cost Trump is imposing on us. 

Yes, Trump’s war in Iran and the $1.5 trillion he wants for the Defense Department next year will make it harder for us to meet the nation’s other needs. As will the dramatic cuts he’s made or proposed in public health, education, Medicaid and Medicare, and nutrition assistance. 

Yet the biggest cost is the cost of doing nothing about three worsening crises that threaten the very survival of America and the world: climate change, AI, and widening inequality. 

Almost all Americans — indeed, most human beings — are now subject to the escalating costs of climate change. How much more evidence do we need? 

This summer has been a living hell. Wildfires have forced around 60,000 people to evacuate parts of Washington state, destroying hundreds of buildings and leaving thousands without power. Fires in Canada turned the skies orange and the air foul across a large part of the eastern United States. Millions of lives have been threatened by a deadly heat dome. 

Even if Trump weren’t worsening climate change by subsidizing fossil fuels, simply doing nothing would be shameful enough because the crisis is growing so fast. Years ago, climate scientists predicted exactly what’s occurring right now. Trump’s lack of leadership — no, his outright sabotaging of global efforts to stop the planet from becoming uninhabitable — is one of the worst sins of his sinful regime. 

AI’s dangers are also now upon us. 

If you believe that humans are in total control of AI, you haven’t been paying attention. Recently, at least two of OpenAI’s models escaped a sealed testing environment and broke into the servers of another AI company. The AI models “reasoned” that the solutions to a cybersecurity test were on that other company’s servers, so the models snuck onto the internet and hacked into the other company’s solutions. 

This is chilling. The possibility of AI models escaping human control to do horrendous damage to human life is growing exponentially. Here again, the Trump regime’s inaction is a huge cost that’s soaring by the day. 

My candidate for the third existential threat is wealth inequality, which is also out of control. Billionaire wealth is surging to monarchical heights while the wages of the typical American aren’t even keeping up with price increases — meaning that most of us are getting poorer. 

The problem isn’t inequality per se. It’s the consequences of inequality — especially widening corruption. Billionaires are using their wealth to bribe politicians to reduce their tax rates (which are already lower than most Americans face) and to stop lawmakers from regulating fossil fuels or AI.

Full circle. 

Of course, there are still guns-versus-butter issues. Federal budget priorities are important. America faces a yawning budget deficit and can’t possibly do everything that needs to be done. Dollars spent on the military are literally taking food from America’s hungry. 

Yet on the largest existential crises of our time, where the costs of inaction are rising to frightening levels, the solutions don’t require extraordinary government expenditure. 

They require thoughtful environmental and AI regulations, and far higher taxes on the wealthy.

Democrats and progressives running for Congress, governorships, and other positions must speak out loudly and clearly about the rapidly rising costs of inaction on climate change, AI, and inequality.

 

Demand action. Educate the public. Condemn the Trump regime and its backers — Big Oil, AI, and the billionaire class — for threatening the very survival of humans on the Earth.

The U.S. Is One Of The Few OECD Countries Where Child Care Is Unaffordable To Many

 From The Economist

Voters Are Unhappy With The Access And Affordability Of Health Care

 

The charts above are from the recent Navigator Poll -- done between April 23rd and 27th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Health Care Costs Will Be A Big Issue For Most Voters This Year

 

The charts above are from the Kaiser Family Foundation Poll -- done between April 14th and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,343 adults, with a 3 point margin of error.

The Cost Of This Unnecessary War (And How That Money Could Be Better Used)

The following post is by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times: 

Let’s ponder for a moment the vast sums that we’re pouring into the war with Iran.

The Pentagon has requested $200 billion (more than $1,400 per American household) to fund the war, but even that understates the total cost.

Linda Bilmes, a Harvard expert on financing war, told me that most of the costs will arrive later. For example, any soldier who develops a medical disorder or aggravates an existing one will receive lifelong benefits and medical care. If today’s troops claim such benefits at the same rate as those who participated in the 1990-91 gulf war, that alone would eventually cost at least $600 billion, Bilmes said. Not to mention, of course, the human toll of all of this.

All told, she expects this Iran war to cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion.

Here are some ideas of what the war money could be used for instead. My calculations are conservative, based on Pentagon reporting that the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion — and even that incomplete tally amounted to more than $1.3 million a minute.

* For a bit more than two weeks of this war, we could offer free college education to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually, at a cost of around $30 billion a year. 

* For less than three weeks of war, or $35 billion, we could run a nationwide pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds.

* For $75 million, about an hour’s worth of war, we could provide three books free to every child in America who is living under the poverty line, according to Kyle Zimmer of First Book, a nonprofit that works on early literacy. Research suggests that books like these can help get children reading and improve their outcomes.

* A woman dies in the United States every two hours, on average, from cervical cancer. Screening all uninsured women who need it would cost perhaps $1 billion and could save hundreds of lives, according to Dr. Linda Eckert, a cervical cancer expert at the University of Washington. That’s less than 13 hours of the war bill.

* We could get glasses to all 2.3 million low-income schoolchildren in the United States who need them but don’t have them. The base cost would be about $300 million, according to Vision to Learn, a nonprofit that does this work. The bill would be what we spend on four hours of this war.

* For about $34 billion a year, less than three weeks of war, we could restore health insurance subsidies that the Trump administration let expire last year. One analysis predicted an additional 8,800 preventable American deaths as a result.

The war money would save even more lives if we allocated part of it abroad. Indeed, we spent more on the first three days of war than we spent ($4 billion) on all humanitarian aid in 2025. Consider what we could achieve internationally:

* For $400 million or less, a bit more than five hours of war, we could deworm all children in need worldwide, according to Evidence Action, a nonprofit that works on deworming. This would result in stronger, healthier children and adults.

* For $380 million, less than five hours of war, we could provide vitamin A supplementation for the 190 million children who need it. Helen Keller Intl, a nonprofit engaged in this work, says this would prevent up to 480,000 child deaths each year and virtually eliminate blindness from vitamin A deficiency.

* About one day’s worth of war spending could save more than 350,000 lives from malaria, through a rigorously studied screening and prevention program, according to Esther Duflo, an economist at M.I.T.’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

* For $4.3 billion, less than three days of the war bill, we could largely end the most terrible form of malnutrition, called severe wasting. That would save about 1.5 million children’s livesannually. We would accomplish something historic: For the first time in the history of humanity, large numbers of children would no longer be starving to death.

We have to know that numbers like this are never totally reliable — but that’s true of military costs as well. George W. Bush’s administration in 2003 put the cost of the Iraq war at $40 billion; it ended up costing perhaps $3 trillion.

Moreover, my figures are based on only the initial costs of the Iran war. And even the estimate of $1 trillion for the full cost doesn’t include the bills for more expensive gasoline we’re now paying and for pricier fertilizer and food that are likely soon.

If we reallocated this war spending to needs at home and abroad, Americans would have access to school from pre-K to college and would have health insurance, and large numbers of children worldwide would not starve to death — and we would still have billions of dollars left over.

We can cough up the cash when there’s political will, such as to drop bombs halfway around the world. But where is the political will to get people health care or education, to build rather than to destroy?

A Majority Of Voters Say Health Insurance Costs Have Risen

 

The charts above are from the Change Research Poll -- done between August 5th and 10th of a nationwide sample of 1,858 registered voters, with a 2.6 point margin of error.

The Trump Tariffs Are Now Affecting Business Costs

 

From The Washington Post

Musk/DOGE May Be Costing As Much As It Saves

 

The following is part of an article by Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC:

We’ve watched as DOGE chief Elon Musk’s promised pot of savings from his “efficiency” operation has shrunk from $2 trillion to $1 trillion to what he now claims is $150 billion, or 7.5% the amount initially promised. Now new estimates suggest that the way Musk has gone about his cost-cutting crusade might cost nearly as much as — if not more — than what he claims to have saved taxpayers.

As The New York Times reports, DOGE hasn’t been cheap for the federal government:

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity, and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

Put those two figures together and you’re approaching $145 billion in costs. And that’s not counting, as the Times notes, the legal fees the federal government is incurring to defend against dozens of lawsuits contesting DOGE’s authority. . . .

The estimates raise serious questions about DOGE's net savings — and that’s assuming Musk’s quoted savings numbers are reliable, which they often haven’t been. Moreover, the estimated lost revenue from the IRS cuts would be a recurring phenomenon. Musk’s degrading of the administrative state and social services while potentially saving nothing helps underscore how scammy the DOGE enterprise, and sheds light on how this whole operation is at its core not about fiscal discipline.

Musk and his team were perversely creative in devising ways to fire workers en masse. But as a group of cocky political outsiders who confused speed with efficiency, they weren’t equipped to anticipate the legal restrictions on what they could do. Their rash approach has resulted in lots of rehiring and back pay for people wrongly fired — and lost productivity along the way. Musk and his team put their faith in a kind of “shoot first, ask questions later” strategy, but that resulted in administrative whiplash. “Accidentally” canceled programs have had to be re-assembled. And blanket firings of “probationary workers” resulted in the squandering of expensive hiring and training processes for hyperspecialized positions that could cost up to $1 million for positions like spies, the Times notes.There is a possibility that Musk is delivering the opposite of taxpayer savings — a worse government at roughly the same cost.Social Security is under siege, foreign aid has been eviscerated, and the IRS is less equipped to stop tax cheats (which in turn means less government revenue). But, according to the estimates reported by the Times, no significant sum of money is being saved, and there’s no way the “savings” from what we’ve seen so far will net out to massive “DOGE checks” for the American public.

Do Americans Realize The Huge Cost Of Massive Deportations?

Part of an article by Michael A. Cohen at MSNBC:

It’s a question that Americans might be asking pretty soon themselves. Is the price of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants worth the cost? . . .

What was omitted from Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes were the significant economic costs of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants.

According to one estimate from the pro-immigration advocacy group American Immigration Council, arresting, detaining and deporting the 13.3 million people who are either in the United States illegally — or are in the country temporarily without legal status — could cost $315 billion. . . .

Even deporting 1 million people yearly could cost nearly $90 billion. Apprehending immigrants, detaining them, court procedures and transporting them out of the country makes mass deportation a complicated and costly endeavor. Indeed, the estimated cost of deporting a single undocumented immigrant is estimated to run as high as $13,000. . . .

To achieve his anti-immigration goals, Trump will likely need Congress to authorize billions of dollars in new spending and hire tens of thousands of new government employees. 

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that Trump is actually successful at getting the mass deportation project off the ground. In Trump’s words, there can be “no price tag” on such an effort. In reality, there is a price — and it will quickly be felt by American consumers. 

Today, undocumented immigrants represent 5% of the U.S. workforce, and because two-thirds of them are between the ages of 25 and 54 (compared to less than 40% of the U.S.-born population), they are overrepresented in the workforce.

Many undocumented immigrants take on dangerous, menial and low-paying jobs. They are maids and housekeepers, construction laborers and agricultural workers. Indeed, a whopping 45 percent of agricultural workers are undocumented along with 15 percent of construction workers. 

If millions of undocumented immigrants are forced to leave the country, these industries will bear the brunt — as will consumers. 

Farms, construction companies and restaurants may find themselves short-staffed and unable to bring on new workers at a time of low unemployment.

the labor disruptions will almost certainly lead to higher prices on everything from food to housing. And working class Americans — many of whom voted for Trump — will get hit the hardest.

There are other indirect costs that many Americans who voted for mass deportation probably didn’t consider. For example, many undocumented immigrants work in child care. If they are forced to leave the country, the number of women in the labor force could decrease. 

Then there are the tax implications. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid close to $50 billion in federal taxes and nearly $30 billion in state taxes. They also contributed more than $28 billion to Social Security and Medicare (even though they don’t benefit from those programs).  

Migrants are also consumers. Removing them from the country means decreased spending, further undermining the economy.

By nearly any appreciable measure, immigration to the United States is a net economic positive, contributing to higher growth, greater productivity and even a reduced budget deficit. 

Conversely, mass deportations will almost certainly lead to slower economic growth, increased unemployment and, ironically, higher inflation.