Letters from an American - November 18, 2024

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

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November 18th, 2024. On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the Chips and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25th, that chips deal is so bad. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought

to their states. Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made four million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year, and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge, Sean D D. Jordan kills the measure nationally. On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America's clean energy revolution, which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states.

Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term. But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it and to turn the US back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolas Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can though refuse to advance those standards. Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate although his final

vote tallies are coming in. It turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails. Four Democratic senators won in states Trump carried, and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina. More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him. Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick, Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the US government,

apparently taking their cue from Argentina's self-described anarcho-capitalist president, Javier Malay, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Malay's shock therapy to his country threw the nation into a deep recession. Justice Musk says his plans will create hardship for Americans before enabling the country

to rebuild with security. Ramaswamy today posted on social media, a reasonable formula to fix the US government, Malay style cuts on steroids. He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post's Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example, if your social security number ends in an odd number, you're out. If it ends in an even number, you're in.

There's a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your social security number starts in an even number, you're in. There's a 50% cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you're in. And if it starts with an odd number, you're out. Boom. That's a 75% reduction. Done. But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy's lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social security numbers aren't random. The first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country. Today both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tate of The Guardian reported that Trump's economic advisors

are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation's health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do. The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor.

They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. We know there's tremendous waste, said House Budget Committee Chairman Jody Errington, a Republican of Texas. What we don't seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and united Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. Trump does. Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised

there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend. Trump's planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump's worst instincts. Former Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican of Florida, a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation's attorney general in any case. But as more information comes out

about his alleged participation in drug-fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse. Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release

of the ethics committee's report, at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gates will retaliate against them. According to Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting Congress members,

too. When asked if Gates was qualified for the Attorney General post, Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican of Idaho, answered, are you shitting me that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you'll print that and now I'm gonna be investigated. The many fringe medical ideas of Trump's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board's

denigration as nuts on a lot of fronts. The board called his views a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories and not just on vaccines. Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines. He called COVID-19 vaccines a crime against humanity and has called for the National Institutes of Health to take a break of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead. Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation's capital and watched with mischievous

glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it. Mischievous glee is one way to put it. Another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government. Baker notes that none of Trump's selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era, when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed

to tap three of his own defense attorneys for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny. A former Deputy White House press secretary during Trump's first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote. Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants.

While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income too will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere. Finally today, CNBC's economic analyst,

Carl Quintanilla noted that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.