“When the Justice Department successfully blocked a proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit Airlines last year, the head of the antitrust division under President Joe Biden announced that it was “yet another victory” for American consumers.
The declaration may have been premature. After the deal fell apart, Spirit’s stock price cratered, and the company declared bankruptcy, fired hundreds of people and raised ticket prices. The company recently received court approval for a reorganization plan that will wipe out the company’s stockholders and hand control over to large bondholders led by hedge funds and asset managers.”
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“For decades, antitrust enforcement was guided by the notion that the effect on consumers should be regulators’ top priority. Biden’s antitrust enforcers rejected that approach — instead working from a relatively new, controversial and amorphous theory that, as Khan once described it, argues that antitrust law should instead focus on “workers, suppliers, innovators, and independent entrepreneurs” and try to dilute the economic and political power of large corporations. The unstated implication is that higher consumer prices may in fact be necessary and desirable to pursue these goals.”
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“What the last four years show is that despite the best efforts of Khan, Kanter and their ideological allies, antitrust enforcement does not deliver broad, effective and durable economic policymaking.
Litigation is inherently fraught, and courts are not reliable or predictable enough for it to work. There can also be radical regulatory swings between administrations — like the one we are witnessing now — that can slow or even wipe out your work.
A conceptually simpler way to improve things for working-class Americans from a liberal economic perspective is one of the oldest around — redistributive taxing and spending. The Democratic Party has for years avoided anything that might look like a tax hike for the middle class, but one of the most reliably well-polling ideas in American politics is raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.”
“in his second term he appears to be in the business of exerting American power abroad, from Greenland to Gaza. But no modern empire has ever successfully projected power globally without a competent and motivated bureaucracy. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote that the more complex a society becomes, the more it needs institutions to run it. And this is especially true of an empire, which the United States has been in functional terms since 1945. Americans may, like the elder Bush, be uncomfortable with the word empire, but our successes, challenges and even disasters have been akin to those of all the great empires of history. The Trump administration’s war on its own imagined “deep state” is essentially a war against the very institutions needed to organize society at home and especially, defend it from its enemies abroad.
American power abroad is expressed not only through presidential decisions, but through the power of institutions, notably the State Department and the Defense Department. American diplomats deal with crises in dozens upon dozens of countries in the world on a daily basis that you never read about: they include small countries and large, troubled, and complex states like Pakistan, Nigeria and Colombia. The finest linguists and political secretaries are needed in overseas embassies to manage such challenges. Weaken the bureaucracy at this crucial level — at the same time you are discouraging new generations of young people from going into public service — and you weaken American power itself. This might take time to be noticed, but its effect will be real and insidious.”
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“Trump wants to exert control worldwide, but his actions against the bureaucracy undermine that goal.”
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“The Arabists and the China experts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been some of the finest bureaucrats I have encountered. They are the ultimate early warning system: the Arabists warned against the 2003 Iraq War and the China experts about the political and economic dangers of a conflict over Taiwan. You want the very best people in these jobs. Empires at their best encourage cosmopolitanism, that is, a knowledge of other languages and cultures required for the maintenance of good diplomatic and security relations. Yet the Trump administration is essentially telling brilliant, linguistically adroit young people not to want a career in government. It is fine to trim bloated bureaucracies in order to save money and to improve efficiency. But it is another thing entirely to make life miserable for those who remain by requiring them to fill out weekly forms about their activities and so forth. In such a circumstance, the very people you need to be motivated won’t be, and will look elsewhere for careers.”
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“USAID, through its projects often run by non-governmental organizations, has been for decades doing much more than running humanitarian programs throughout the developing world. In fact, these programs don’t operate in the abstract: Because they are on-the-ground operations often in far-flung areas of a given country, they build vital human connections that are money in the bank for diplomats and military people to utilize, especially during crisis situations where local contacts are essential. An empire is about more than guns and money, it is also about the maintenance of relationships built up on official and non-official levels throughout the world by way of, among other things, humanitarian projects. Trump has been rightly concerned about the rise of Chinese power around the world, but has seemingly not realized that China is itself spreading its influence in large part through development projects. Dismantling our humanitarian projects in places like Africa and South America leaves a vast opening for the Chinese to fill with projects of their own. It will also hurt our intelligence gathering, as USAID staffers have had their own networks in the hinterlands of difficult countries.
The postwar American-led order has been administered through three non-economic pillars: NATO, USAID, and various treaty alliances in the Pacific. The Trump administration disdains the first, is trying to gut the second, and is making the third very nervous.”
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“The British Empire lasted as long as it did through the brilliance of its diplomats and intelligence agents. As I can attest through reporting in Africa and elsewhere in the 1980s and 1990s, British influence continued for decades afterwards, partly because the British embassy or high commission in each country was manned by equally brilliant people who could always be counted on to deliver a great briefing to a reporter. Nothing projects power like the quality of people in your vital institutions at home and at your embassies and other missions around the world.
The most long-lasting world powers and empires succeeded not by raw power but by various methods of persuasion: the more subtle the approach, the more longevity for the great power involved. And such persuasion involves a talented and well-functioning bureaucracy, exactly what Trump is seeking to destroy. Our bureaucratic elite is not like others around the world: its sense of seeing little differentiation between American self-interest and promoting human rights and democracy might be somewhat naïve and self-serving, but it is real and deeply felt. These bureaucrats know that without that sense of idealism, America’s foreign policy descends into a sterile, ruthless realpolitik: like China’s. And no empire or great power has lasted very long without a sense of mission. That’s why Trump’s policies toward the bureaucracy are in direct conflict with his goals abroad, even if he doesn’t know it.”
“Social Security’s fiscal problems aren’t the result of fraudulent payments to people who are already dead. It is not benefits for the dead, but rather payments to the living that are driving the program toward insolvency.”
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“Last year, Social Security distributed more than $1.4 trillion in benefits to more than 68 million Americans, mostly retirees (the program also pays benefits to some disabled people who are unable to work). Current workers had a little less than $1.3 trillion extracted from their paychecks to fund the program. Obviously, that math doesn’t balance.”
“During what was probably the low point of the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused Haitian immigrants living in his home state of Ohio of kidnapping, killing, and eating pets. He then doubled down by challenging the legal status of those same immigrants.
“I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said defiantly in late September, despite the fact that many Haitian immigrants in the U.S. have legal status under a federal policy called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is granted to migrants who cannot return safely to their home countries due to natural disasters or conflicts. At the time, Vance argued that TPS for Haitians was illegitimate because “Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally.”
In reality, the TPS program for Haitians had been in place since the Obama administration, when it was implemented in response to a devastating earthquake. President Joe Biden extended TPS status for Haitians—legally, despite what Vance claimed—last year.
The Trump administration is now partially reversing that extension and retconning reality to match Vance’s politically motivated delusions.”
The fall of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies will make imports more expensive. This increases the costs of imports on top of the more direct effect of tariffs.
The dollar’s decrease will make U.S. exports cheaper overseas, however, this may be counteracted by foreign countries retaliating against U.S. exports in response to Trump tariffs, and by foreign customers boycotting U.S. companies.
Trump defying a Supreme Court order is a constitutional crisis. The crisis comes to a head with Congress derelict in its duty. The only one with the power to enforce limits on the president’s power is Congress through its power of impeachment and a little bit through passing legislation that restrains the president.
“Passed in 1920, the Jones Act severely limits competition in the American shipping market by requiring that ships operating between U.S. ports be American-built, American-crewed, and American-flagged. The number of ships that meet the Jones Act’s standards has been declining for decades, and now fewer than 100 are in operation. Anyone who wants to ship goods—including rum—from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or other outlying U.S. territories to the mainland is required to use one of those few dozen vessels.
Unsurprisingly, the lack of competition drives up shipping costs. The lawsuit points out that it costs roughly three times as much to ship rum from Hawaii to Los Angeles as it does to ship the same goods from Los Angeles to Australia—an international route where greater competition keeps prices lower, even though the trip is significantly longer.”