This won’t hurt the economy:
The impact is being felt not only in immigrant homes and communities, but also in the industries that rely on immigrants as a source of willing and inexpensive labor, including residential construction, agriculture, senior care and hospitality. American consumers will soon feel the pain.
“Businesses across industries know what comes next when their work force disappears — restaurants, coffee shops and grocery stores struggling to stay open, food prices soaring, and everyday Americans demanding action,” said Rebecca Shi, chief executive of the American Business Immigration Coalition.
An estimated 20 percent of the U.S. labor force is foreign born, and millions of immigrant workers lack legal immigration status.
Is Trump Losing Fox? Some signs point to ‘yes’:
Trump’s overall political project is heavily dependent on an enormous network of propagandists and other pliant institutional players to sustain itself. Take Musk’s DOGE: Again and again, DOGE’s revelations of “waste” and “fraud” have themselves proven fraudulent to the point of buffoonery. It requires an immense roar of propaganda from right-wing media and dozens of GOP lawmakers, all declaring falsely that DOGE really is finding all kinds of smoking guns, to keep alive the fiction that it’s producing dramatic results.
This is why Fox turning on Trump’s economy could be so debilitating over time. Perceptions of Trump’s economic prowess are the scaffolding that holds up the rest of the edifice. If the public continues to sour on his economic performance, the deep cuts to government will look less about efficiency and instead appear maliciously, dangerously incompetent. The mass deportations will look less like the protecting of U.S. workers from unskilled foreign labor competition and more like unchecked ethnonationalist cruelty. And Trump’s celebrations of his own impunity won’t come across as the mere rhetorical trash-talking of the strongman who was needed to whip the economy into line. Instead, they’ll sound like what they truly are—the rantings of a genuine wannabe dictator.
Something DOGE Won’t Look Into:
It has become a familiar routine for the Palm Beach county sheriff, Ric Bradshaw, and his deputies. Almost every Tuesday in recent weeks, the Federal Aviation Administration has posted to its website a formal “notice to airmen” advising of upcoming flight restrictions over south Florida, signaling once again to those who must protect him that Donald Trump is on his way to Mar-a-Lago for another weekend of golf.
The president is at his waterfront mansion again this weekend, his sixth visit to Florida and the beloved golf courses he owns since his 20 January inauguration.
His increasingly frequent and disruptive trips home are fast becoming a drain on county resources, obligating Bradshaw to put helicopters in the air, extra manpower on the ground, and boats on both sides of Trump’s opulent mansion sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway almost continuously.
The Palm Beach bill, high as it is, pales against the federal costs of indulging the commander-in-chief’s wanderlust. That’s included his multimillion-dollar trip to the Super Bowl in New Orleans last month, and an appearance at Nascar’s Daytona 500 weeks later, which critics saw as little more than an extravagant and expensive photo op.
Whenever he wishes to roam, the presidential airliner Air Force One is fueled up and fully staffed, racking up an hourly operational cost approaching $200,000, according to a 2022 air force assessment.
With a roughly two-hour flight time from Washington DC, each visit to and from Palm Beach international airport costs taxpayers about a million dollars just in travel, once an additional cargo flight carrying the presidential motorcade is factored in, as well as ferrying Trump from the White House to Joint Base Andrews on the Marine One helicopter.
Coming tomorrow: A special pre-pre-game show for the return of the Delaware General Assembly. Why? Because developments warrant, no, require it.
What do you want to talk about?