Macroeconomic Implications of Forced Mass Deportation

For whom the bell tolls? Undocumented? Documented but not naturalized? All non-native born?  Native born with both parents undocumented?



People hold signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!” on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Delegates, politicians, and the Republican faithful are in Milwaukee for the annual convention, concluding with former President Donald Trump accepting his party’s presidential nomination. The RNC takes place from July 15-18. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Source: FoxNews.

From FoxNews:

Calls for additional border security and mass deportation of illegal immigrants were again on display at the Republican National Convention’s third night, as the ongoing crisis at the border remains a top political issue.

How many individuals need to be deported to fulfill this objective? According to Pew, in 2021, about 10.5 million.

Source: Pew.

DHS has recently calculated the number of unauthorized immigrants (as a residual of foreign born citizens and legal residents) at 11 million. This is around 3.3% of the US population.

A Forbes article notes:

According to Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, “He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.” The idea is to use local police and National Guard from states with Republican governors.

“To ease the strain on ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights,” reports the New York Times. “And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.”

To the extent concentration of detained individuals in centralized facilities (aka,  “Konzentrationslager”) could reduce per unit costs of mass incarceration, this approach makes a sort of accounting sense. Nonetheless, I assume there will be some fiscal implications of such a policy, both in increasing costs (note Mr. Trump has suggested use of armed forces and national guard in pursuit of this policy), taking care of American-born dependents of unauthorized immigrants deported, and in decreasing tax revenues.

In the larger macroeconomic context, such a policy would be disastrous, leading to a major disruption in the labor market. From Shapiro/Washington Monthly:

By any measure, a policy that eliminated 4.5 percent of the current workforce, including large numbers of college and high school graduates, would set off serious economic tremors. Using Okun’s Law on the relationship between rising unemployment and GDP, a 4.5 percent drop in employment is associated with depressing GDP growth by more than 9 percentage points. This estimate also includes the impact on other jobs. A recent study of much more modest programs to deport immigrants found clear evidence that they cost other American jobs. By one calculation, deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional employment losses by other Americans, suggesting that Trump’s program could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs on top of the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants up for deportation.

I’m not too keen on using Okun’s Law to infer the short-run GDP drop, but to the extent that there are large complementarities (i.e. little substitutability) between unauthorized immigrant labor and native born labor (there is greater substitutability between incoming and incumbent non-native born labor), one could trace out the macro implications using a simple AD-AS model. The mass deportation policy would act as (1) reducing potential GDP by reducing the labor force, (2) reducing aggregate demand by reducing consumption, (3) inducing a temporary cost-push shock as labor has to be re-allocated (similar to the 2018-2020 labor crunch), and (4) raising economic policy uncertainty, thereby depressing aggregate economic activity and particularly investment.

In essence, this policy outcome would be a small bore version (in reverse) of the effects of  immigration increase in 2021 onward, discussed in this post.

For more recent and detailed analyses of substitutability and employment/wage changes due to immigration, see Caiumi and Peri (2024).

The above discussion incorporates number for unauthorized immigrants as currently defined. I have not considered numbers implied if birthright citizenship, as advocated by Mr. Trump in 2023, is used for the deportation criteria.

 

 

62 thoughts on “Macroeconomic Implications of Forced Mass Deportation”

      1. pgl

        Yea – I figured you would get all excited over macho macho mess. After all – you are a stupid worthless troll.

  2. pgl

    Appreciate the chart but we need another one. How many of the non-native born? White people get to stay while darker skin people will be tossed out. That’s the MAGA agenda.

    1. Bruce Hall

      TDS pgl. First let’s presume that Trump can successfully deport 50% of the 11 million who are here illegally (known). There is still a very large contingent of those who are here illegally, but have not been identified (known unknowns). What has been accomplished?

      Well, possibly two things: 1) a message that you are welcome, but not illegally, so get in line with the rest of the world and 2) we know the system is broken but we are coming to the aid of Eric Adams and other mayors of sanctuary cities. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/09/eric-adams-new-york-migrants-cost-00110472

      And maybe one other thing: a notice to the world that “your wish is not my command. If you don’t respect our nation’s sovereignty and rules, don’t expect us to respect your wishes.

      Those who have overstayed their visas can reapply; those who simply walked in can walk out. Then we can talk.

      But they are all seeking asylum. Eh, no. The record for 21 years begs to differ.
      Between 1990 and 2021, the US admitted 767,950 asylum seekers into the country. In 2021 alone, the US admitted 17,692 asylees, a 42.9% drop from the year before, and the lowest year since 1994.

      The US has historically approved more affirmative asylee applicants (481,612 total acceptances since 1990) than defensive asylee applicants (286,338 accepted since 1990) https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-seek-asylum-in-the-us/

      That’s less than 10% in 21 years of the total known illegal immigrants in just Biden’s administration.
      https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/nationwide-encounters

      It’s wonderful that the US is such a desirable place for foreigners, but having the equivalent of the population of Belgium simply waltz in without invite or permission is not a good thing. Ask Eric Adams.

      1. pgl

        My Lord – our resident racist starts with queries based on downright lies. And Trump chose Vance over Brucie boy? Come on dude – have your KKK pals help you with your next stupid rant.

      2. pgl

        “the system is broken but we are coming to the aid of Eric Adams and other mayors of sanctuary cities.”

        Brucie has a bad habit of not reading his own links. Brucie thinks broken means we need to tell BROWN people that are not allowed in Brucie’s white neighborhood. Adams is complaining about the lack of funds. A clear difference which our resident MAGA moron does not get.

      3. pgl

        “having the equivalent of the population of Belgium simply waltz in without invite or permission is not a good thing”

        I bet it took all of the boys at the KKK meeting to help Brucie find a nation with a population near 11 million people. But did they waltz in? After all the waltz is done by white people which people like you welcome. No Brucie – your dreaded BROWN people do the Samba.

        And can you get levels versus rate of change right for once in your pathetically stupid life? Yea price levels v. inflation rates are not your forte but the 11 million is the stock of people who arrived over many years. Tell you what Brucie – we’ll help you take your shoes off so you can count past ten. n

        1. Sherparick

          Apparently, Bruce does not have much experience hiking for a week in the desert with the air temperature 100 degrees Fahrenheit or more. A “waltz” it is not. Also, the people Bruce and Eric Adams are complaining about are technically not “illegal,” but are asylum seekers and waiting in the U.S. for a decision on their asylum application. Most of those “11 million” are working in jobs cleaning Bruce’s office, harvesting his food, serving him fast food, and doing the construction and landscaping on the renovation of his 5,000 square feet home.

  3. pgl

    Even if GDP fell by an amount less than 9%, that would lower tax revenues a lot. Of course Kudlow has a plan – don’t tax rich people. MAGA,

  5. pgl

    “A new DHS report estimates that 11 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the United States as of January 1, 2022. That is approximately 1 million lower than the estimate of 12 million unauthorized immigrants in 2015. The 2022 total is higher than in 2020 but lower than the 11.6 million unauthorized immigrants estimated to live in the U.S. in 2018.”

    So there were more “unauthorized immigrants” here pre-pandemic under Trump that were here under Biden at least in 2022. So much for one set of LIES from the MAGA crowd. And Forbes also notes 80% of them have been here for a decade – contributing to the US economy. So much for the racist rants from MAGA moron Bruce Hall.

  6. pgl

    More from the Forbes piece:

    George Mason University economics professor Michael Clemens examined research by University of Colorado Professor Chloe East, who explored the impact of enforcement actions under the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program. “Mass deportation under Secure Communities substantially harmed U.S. workers county by county, reducing both their employment and wages,” writes Clemens. “The worst harms were inflicted on the least educated and most vulnerable U.S. workers.” According to Clemens, the results imply “that for every one million unauthorized immigrant workers seized and deported from the United States, 88,000 U.S. native workers were driven out of employment.” Clemens calculates that if the U.S. government deported three million unauthorized immigrant workers per year, “that would mean 263,000 fewer jobs held by U.S. native workers, compounded each additional year that mass deportations continue.” He notes that does not include temporary layoffs. “They represent persistent declines in the number of jobs available to be held by any U.S. workers.” Why do deportations of unauthorized immigrants harm U.S. workers? “The answer is that the U.S. labor market is more complex than the cartoon economy in the minds of some politicians, who think that business owners faced with a loss of immigrant workers will simply hire native [U.S.-born] workers to replace them,” writes Clemens in an analysis for the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “In the real economy, employers respond in several other ways,” notes Clemens. “Business owners hit by sudden reductions to labor supply invest less in new business formation. They invest their capital in other industries and in technologies that use lower-skill labor less intensively, reducing demand for U.S. workers too. . . . And in a one-two punch, the disappearance of migrant workers also dries up local demand at grocery stores, leasing offices, and other nontraded services.” According to Clemens, the “demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in the supply of foreign workers” and most U.S. workers will be worse off.”

    Interesting research from a George Mason crowd. This was a nice touch: ‘the U.S. labor market is more complex than the cartoon economy in the minds of some politicians’. Cartoon economy was directed towards the likes of Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and of course Bruce Hall!

        1. Moses Herzog

          OK, right in front of my nose and I missed it. Thanks. I’m using my usual standby excuse, the summer heat intermittently deactivates my brain. Is that a good one??

  8. Ithaqua

    As I recall, Malaysia tried this in 2018, and it was a complete disaster, especially for the tourism and agriculture industries. They wound up running advertisements in other countries asking people to come back. Things were substantially different there and then; one estimate (https://www.malaymail.com/news/what-you-think/2019/11/27/malaysias-massive-foreign-worker-dependency-murray-hunter/1813773) was that, very roughly, 20% of the total Malaysian workforce were illegal immigrants.

    Still, there’s a lesson in there somewhere… in economics, you get what you deserve, even if it’s not what you hoped for.

    1. pgl

      Interesting information on Malaysia’s economy. I wonder if there has been any economic research on the issues raised.

  9. Steven Kopits

    As a technical matter, anyone without legal status in the US could be deported. So, on paper, that includes Pew’s 10.5 m. It will also include most of those who have entered the country claiming asylum during the Biden administration, figure another 4-6 million people. Some of these are here legally now but will in all likelihood lose their right to reside in the US as their cases are heard and decided. So pencil in 15 million people who could be deported during the second Trump presidency, plus or minus.

    Now, if you believe that will happen, I have a nice bridge to sell you.

    There are two serious issues.

    First, public opinion has to support it. That’s hard to imagine, especially given the chronic shortages of manual labor in the country, not too mention the heart-wrenching human drama. Second, business also has to support it. There are many, many businesses all over the country — quite a few run by conservative Republicans — which depend intrinsically on migrant labor. I don’t see a political climate conducive to large scale deportation. (That kind of sentiment is ordinarily associated with depressions.)

    Thus, the notion of Trump deporting the migrant masses is pure rhetoric. (After all, who would wash the dishes at Mar-a-Lago?)

    What is not rhetoric, however, is the impact of the Biden era open borders on the prospects of normalization for the undocumented immigrants who arrived before the Great Recession. We’re not talking about normalization now, we’re discussing whether they will be deported. The path to normalization for the pre-GR crowd is probably closed until 2030, maybe 2040 or beyond.

    1. Macroduck

      “Some of these are here legally now but will in all likelihood lose their right to reside in the US as their cases are heard and decided.”

      Pure “I know things” consultant chatter. As is so often the case, Stevie doesn’t have the knowledge he pretends to have.

      1. pgl

        DHS puts unauthorized immigrants at 11 million so I was wondering where our favorite racist on Fox and Friends got 15 million. Let’s see:

        ‘It will also include most of those who have entered the country claiming asylum during the Biden administration, figure another 4-6 million people. Some of these are here legally now but will in all likelihood lose their right to reside in the US as their cases are heard and decided. So pencil in 15 million people who could be deported during the second Trump presidency, plus or minus.’

        Notice Stevie’s period includes part of the period already covered by the DHS estimate. But hey – Stevie has had a reading comprehenson problem all of his sad life. Now where does this clown get we have seen 4 million new unauthorized immigrants since 2022? He does not say. Maybe his source was Steven Miller or Tucker Carlson.

        Pencil in 15 million my rear end.

      2. Moses Herzog

        I’m curious to know, why Mr. Kopits thinks Menzie is conditionally required to speak out against the Chinese government 24/7/365 but never can I remember Stevie Kopits expressing one bad word against Putin-loving Viktor Orban here on the blog?? Does this mean Kopits cheers on the mass murder of Ukrainian women and children?? Why is Kopits so quiet about Mr. Orban??

        Gotta love those guys throwing stones inside glass houses, don’t you??

          1. pgl

            You are a little coward. He asked you a serious question. Your reply was to duck the question.

    2. Macroduck

      Here’s another instance of Stevie’s habit of pretending to knowledge he doesn’t have:

      “The path to normalization for the pre-GR crowd is probably closed until 2030, maybe 2040 or beyond.”

      This isn’t how serious thinkers behave.

      1. pgl

        Do you have a clue what Stevie meant by that line? I’m sure Stevie had no clue WTF he wrote but it sounded good to the producers of Fox and Friends and that’s what matters I guess.

    3. pgl

      Our host provided us with a link to Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2018–January 2022 by Bryan Baker and Robert Warren. Figure 1 is labeled ‘Unauthorized Immigrant Population Estimates by Year: 2000–2022’

      Obviously Stevie boy Koptis has not read this as he writes this gibberish:

      “What is not rhetoric, however, is the impact of the Biden era open borders on the prospects of normalization for the undocumented immigrants who arrived before the Great Recession. We’re not talking about normalization now, we’re discussing whether they will be deported. The path to normalization for the pre-GR crowd is probably closed until 2030, maybe 2040 or beyond.”

      Does anyone have the slightest clue what Stevie was trying to say here? I didn’t think so. Stevie provides no real definition source of anything else for his stupid gibberish. And the people at the DHS would scoff at Stevie’s Trumpian nonsense.

  10. Macroduck

    Who has a blue screen?:

    https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/g-s1-12222/microsoft-outage-banks-airlines-broadcasters

    I immediately think of the potential for screwing up parts of the financial system because of payments which aren’t made on schedule. That leads me to wonder whether records of delayed payments will become little imps, endlessly telling financial software that counterparties are unreliable.

    There’ll be some hit to world GDP, how large I can’t guess.

    1. pgl

      ‘Customers using Mac and Linux operating systems were not affected, CrowdStrike said.’

      A wonder if someone at Linux pulled this off just to make Microsoft look bad!

      1. joseph

        Hardly likely. In a similar case back in April 2024 CrowdStrike pushed a software update that crashed Linux machines, just like this time. You just didn’t hear about it because relatively few serious business operations run on Linux servers.

        More likely that CrowdStrike just has lousy quality control and keeps repeating the same mistakes.

        1. Ivan

          End-stage capitalism. Customer service and product quality is secondary to the next quarter profit. Why hire competent people if you can get incompetents, at half price.

        2. Moses Herzog

          @ joseph
          Did you mean to say Microsoft in that last sentence?? How is this a CrowdStrike problem?? You have me very confused now. How is it CrowdStrikes’ problem Microsoft perennially produces crappy/defective software??

        3. joseph

          Moses, this is a CrowdStrike bug not a Microsoft bug. It just happens that CrowdStrike released their bug that they installed only on Microsoft computers. CrowdStrike has previously released a bug that they installed and crashed Linux computers.

          It’s a CrowdStrike problem, not an operating system problem. CrowdStrike is a suite of security software. In order to do its job, the operating system has to allow CrowdStrike software access to the inner=most vulnerable kernel layers of the operating system and trust they won’t muck it up. Customers who buy CrowdStrike software are giving their trust and permission to CrowdStrike to potentially cripple their machines.

          2. Moses Herzog

            @ joseph
            Aw, I stand corrected, my apologies.

            I got sloppy on my reading lately. But I’m not feeling too badly on that one, because Microsoft is that badand it’s a pretty decent assumption. But I was wrong, I’m sorry.

  11. pgl

    ” So pencil in 15 million people who could be deported”

    What kind of uncaring racist POS would write this of as something that can be penciled in? Oh yea the world’s worst consultant who is still desperate to get another invite to Fox and Friends.

  12. Not Trampis

    Taking that many people out of the labour force is madness.
    Add to that his madness of raising tariffs on everything and if the convicted criminal wins the USA is a failed state

  13. pgl

    No, we haven’t spent $9 billion on eight EV chargers
    https://jabberwocking.com/no-we-havent-spent-9-billion-on-eight-ev-chargers/

    Last night Donald Trump’s confused mind burped up the following:
    ‘They built eight chargers at a certain location, toward the Midwest. Eight chargers for $9 billion? Think of them as a tank for filling up your gas. Think of it. They spent $9 billion on eight chargers, three of which didn’t work.’
    Idiot. He couldn’t even get the meme right. The meme is that the feds approved $7.5 billion three years ago for EV charging stations and so far only eight have been built.

    Kevin Drum is doing God’s work going through all of Trump’s lies. Read the entire story to see what the truth is. The lie is so incredibly stupid that it should make Bruce Hall blush. Oh wait Brucie boy likely believed this pathetic statement.

  14. pgl

    J.D. Vance Puts the Con in Conservatism (Paul Krugman – NYTimes)

    https://dnyuz.com/2024/07/18/j-d-vance-puts-the-con-in-conservatism/

    J.D. Vance once feared that Donald Trump might become “America’s Hitler.” Now he’s Trump’s running mate. But never mind that history. Trump and Vance have a lot of things, including this, in common: They’re both con men who despise their most avid supporters. Indeed, Vance, despite stiff competition, may be the most cynical major figure in modern American politics. You never know whether Trump believes the false things he says; Vance is smart enough to know that he has pulled off a monumental political bait-and-switch. And if the Trump-Vance ticket wins, there’s a fairly good chance that, given Trump’s evident lack of interest in the details of policy and — yes — his age, Vance will, one way or another, end up running the country.

    So, about that con: Vance, now the junior senator from Ohio, talks a lot about his hardscrabble roots. But people should read what he wrote in “Hillbilly Elegy,” which shows startling contempt for the people he grew up with but who, unlike him, didn’t escape small-town poverty. And people should also be aware that while his convention speech on Wednesday denounced “Wall Street barons,” his rise has to a large extent been orchestrated by a group of tech billionaires; he’s a protégé of Peter Thiel. “Hillbilly Elegy” was part personal memoir, part social commentary and, to be fair, it responded to a real issue. Over the past couple of generations, something has gone very wrong in much of rural and small-town America. There has been a sharp rise in the fraction of men in their prime working years without jobs, notably in the eastern part of the American heartland. Social problems have proliferated; as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton documented, there has been a surge in “deaths of despair,” which they defined as deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide.

    What happened? I’d focus on changes in the economy that undermined many small towns’ reason for being, a process that began during the Reagan years and isn’t unique to our country. This loss of economic opportunity led, in turn, to social dysfunction — echoing the earlier rise in social dysfunction in America’s cities when blue-collar urban jobs disappeared. These issues are real, and we should be making a national effort to ameliorate the problems of left-behind regions. Actually, the Biden administration has been doing just that, with much of its industrial policy aimed at helping depressed areas. Among other things, a Biden administration grant of up to $575 million — partly financed by legislation Republicans unanimously opposed — will help upgrade a steel plant in Vance’s hometown, Middletown, Ohio. And let’s not forget that many rural Americans have health insurance only thanks to policies Republicans fiercely opposed.

    But in “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance rejected the “cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government.” Instead, he argued, there are lots of small-town white Americans who have nobody to blame but themselves. They’re lazy: “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than 20 hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” They’re poorly educated, not because of a lack of opportunity, but because they aren’t motivated: “We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents.” Imagine the reaction if a liberal Democrat were to say any of that. After entering politics, however, Vance suddenly decided that the white working class isn’t lazy, it’s a victim of external forces. He became vehement about accusing immigrants of taking jobs that should be going to the native born.

    One passage in his convention speech appeared to suggest that illegal immigrants are responsible for inflation. Of course, he didn’t acknowledge that inflation has fallen by two-thirds since mid-2022, and that nonsupervisory workers — especially low-wage workers — have seen their earnings, on average, rise more than prices. In fact, immigrants aren’t taking our jobs. Unemployment among the native-born remains near a historic low. To the extent that native-born Americans are leaving the work force, it’s largely because baby boomers are retiring. And it’s especially strange to blame immigrants for the problems of small-town and rural America, which began long before the recent surge in immigration, and where even now there are relatively few immigrants to be seen. In Vance’s home state, only 5 percent of the population is foreign-born, compared with around 40 percent in New York City.

    Anyway, there’s no reason to believe anything Vance says about supporting the working class. His book makes it clear that, at least to a degree, he looks down on those who haven’t managed some measure of his professional trajectory. He may have grown up poor, but these days he’s just a smart, unscrupulous politician using his background to hide the extent to which he represents the values and interests of plutocrats.

  15. Moses Herzog

    Doesn’t do me any good to get worked up about it or angry about it. A functionally illiterate American public will vote how it’s going to vote.

    1. pgl

      My power was out for 12 hours a while back but that was because some drunk driver knocked over the power pole. The wild fires here are a concern but so far power has not been a problem.

  17. Macroduck

    Just a reminder – there is still stuff going on in the world, beyond our own ridiculous political behavior:

    https://www.axios.com/2024/07/19/tel-aviv-israel-explosion

    An Iranian proxy group has succeeded in attacking Tel Aviv with a drone. The attack looks like it came from the Mediterranean, but Houthis operate almost exclusively out of Yemen, and they claim to have launched the attack. Kinda confusing.

    This seriously stirs the pot. Will Israel retaliate against the Houthis, against Iran? Will Hezbollah see this as reason to celebrate, or to step up its own game? Is this a chance occurrence, or have the Houthis made progress against Israel’s defenses? Will Netanyahu’s rivals see this as an opportunity to ditch the guy? Will Trump claim he, too, was attacked by a drone?

    1. Moses Herzog

      Recently I avoid all orange abomination news and read general things and watch Shoestring Hobo videos on YT. Keeps blood pressure lower. Be about 3 days until I have some adult drinks and this helps me avoid having a brain aneurysm for the next 72 hours.

  18. pgl

    https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
    30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Average in the United States

    I linked to this series as Trump is now claiming mortgage rates have quadrupled since Biden took office. OK – Trump lies about everything so what is reality here? When Trump took office mortgage rates were 4.1% but shot up to almost 5% by October 2018. Trump forgot to mention that. Of course Trump got mortgage rates to fall to only 2.8% but letting COVID run rampant and having the worst decline in real GDP in my lifetime/ Way to go Trump!

    Now if you are like Bruce Hall who believes every word out of Trump’s life, you’d think mortgage rates exceeded 11%. Huh – they are actually 6.8%. Then again a booming economy tends to do that.

  19. Macroduck

    If a gaff is when a politician tells the truth, then Chris Coons has just committed one:

    “I think our president is weighing what he should weigh, which is: Who is the best candidate to win in November…”

    https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4782422-coons-biden-democractic-nominee/

    Perhaps Coons meant to indicate that Biden is insisting on staying in the race because Biden is the best candidate, but that’s not how it is being reported- and not how it reads.

    1. pgl

      “The bottom line, says Dr. Hartman, is that whoever injected Gaetz didn’t factor in a man’s different facial anatomy and just increased the amount of neuromodulators used to account for the larger treatment area—and then injected it poorly.”

      Comparing him to Eddie Munster was cruel – cruel to Eddie Munster. After this Gaetz can’t even get a 17 year prostitute to do him.

  22. Anonymous

    JD Vance tweeted a few hours ago.

    He said “if Biden can’t run, because he can’t do the job then he should resign”.

    Too many democrats fail to see that corundum

    1. pgl

      There is not a single person who gives a damn what either you or Vance has to say. Get a clue troll – find some other place to pollute.

    2. Moses Herzog

      Could you explain to us what aluminum oxide has to do with this presidential race?~~~or should I ascribe this to your personal senility??

    3. Ivan

      And if horses had wings they could fly themselves out to pasture ?

      There is no logic or coherent argument there, so it may fly with the Orange Jesus cult, but not further than that. Biden clearly can do the job because he has done it brilliantly so far. It’s possible he will chose not to run for other reasons.

  24. pgl

    OK I skipped Trump’s Thursday tirade so I’m relying on Kevin Drum to catch the lies. But there was so many even Kevin could not keep up:

    https://jabberwocking.com/41021-2/
    What the hell is Donald Trump talking about?

    Some of these lies have been rebutted here so check out this list and Kevin’s factual example. But there’s one I have no clue what Trump was babbling about:

    “Probably the best trade deal was the deal I made with China where they buy $50 billion of our product. They were buying nothing. They buy $50 billion worth.”

    Kevin notes the deal was somehow bigger but China never made good on it. If anyone knows WTF this is about – please let us know.

  25. pgl

    Here’s what I found on this alleged Trump China trade deal:

    https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/02/15/1079761270/china-promised-trump-a-better-deal-for-america-it-didnt-actually-deliver

    The trade war is now almost four years old. In 2018, President Trump fired the first shots by imposing tariffs on various Chinese products. Ch ina retaliated, imposing tariffs on American products. The war kept escalating — with each side making their tariffs higher and more expansive.Then, in January 2020, President Trump met with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He at the White House, and they both signed the “Phase One” trade deal. Think of it basically as a trade armistice. It prevented the war from escalating further, and it offered a roadmap for the two global powers to potentially become trade buddies again. Chad Bown has been following the trade war closely. He’s a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and co-host of the Trade Talks podcast. He says that, from the beginning, the Phase One trade deal was pretty weird. “The strangest part,” Bown says, was a provision that instructed China to buy an extra $200 billion of American-made stuff. That is, not only did China have to return to buying the amount of stuff it had bought before the trade war, it had to go above and beyond that. $200 billion above and beyond that. And it had to do so in two years; by the end of 2021. “We had never seen a trade agreement like that before,” Bown says.

    Now that it’s 2022 — and China’s deadline to buy boatloads of American-made stuff has passed — Bown recently crunched the numbers to see how much China ended up actually buying. “In the end,” Bown says, “China actually bought none of the additional $200 billion of exports that it promised in the agreement.” Zilch. Nada. But it’s actually worse than that. While China did ramp up its purchases of U.S. agricultural products, when it comes to buying U.S. products and services overall, it still hasn’t even returned to buying the amount of stuff it had bought from America before the trade war began.

    From the beginning, Bown says, it was pretty clear that Trump’s Phase One trade deal was unrealistic. By the time it was signed, the trade war had already been waged for almost two years. It had already done tons of damage to business relationships between the two nations. Plus, the often punishingly high tariffs on each side remained (and still remain) in effect. Phase One didn’t end them. It just prevented them from going even higher. The average tariff on goods affected is still about 20% on each side. “The fact that the Chinese tariffs were still in place discouraged the Chinese private sector from being the ones to buy American stuff,” Bown says. Add to this, a slowing Chinese economy and slowing US exports. “All signs pointed to this being a really, really big ask.”

    Now let me get this straight. Trump does enormous damage with his 2018 trade war so two years later he asked Xi – could you help me clean up my mess. And Trump cannot even get this right? And yet this mental retard brags about it? Yea – the man is beyond delusional.

  26. pgl

    I woke up this morning thinking about banana prices (someone sent me an email about some Panama transfer pricing case which is not really worth talking about). But there were a couple of things folks may be interest in. FRED reports the wholesale price of bananas which hovers off $0.50 but shot up to beyond $0.75 a pound in late December 2022. I’m shocked that the usual MAGA morons have not been blaming Biden for banana prices quadrupling. But longer term:

    Banana prices to go up as temperatures rise, says expert
    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68534309

    “I think climate change is really an enormous threat to the banana sector,” said Mr Liu of the World Banana Forum, a UN umbrella group that brings together industry stakeholders including retailers, producer countries, exporters and research institutions. As well as severe weather impacting production, bananas are sensitive to temperature rises which could wipe out crops in some locations. Perhaps the biggest immediate threat is the fact that rising temperatures are helping to spread disease. The one causing the most worry is Fusarium Wilt TR4, a fungal infection, which has moved from Australia and Asia to Africa and now to South America. Once a plantation is infected, it kills all the banana trees and experts say it is extremely hard to get rid of. The fungus has also mutated to threaten the Cavendish, the world’s favourite banana variety.
    “We know that the spores of this Fusarium Wilt are extremely resistant, and they can be spread by flooding, they can be spread by strong winds,” said Mr Liu. “So, this type of phenomenon will disseminate the disease much faster than if you had more normal weather patterns.”
    Producers are also facing pressures from rising costs of fertilisers, energy and transport as well as problems in finding enough workers.
    Taken together with the impacts of climate change on supply, prices in the UK and elsewhere are likely to go up – and stay up.

    Folks in the UK take this seriously. But Trump and his fan base are doing on they can to promote global warming. And of course when this raises banana prices we can count on Bruce Hall to continue to blame Biden. MAGA.

  29. pgl

    Did I hear Trump right? His mass deportation calls for the forced removal of 20 million BROWN people which is about half the number of unauthorized immigrants. But our resident math Nobel Prize winner Bruce Hall is claiming Trump will remove only half of them. Multiply by two versus divide by two. Excuse be but don’t kids in kindergarten know the difference. But not our Bruce Hall! MAGA!

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