When Donald Trump reentered office in 2025, he inherited a strong economy partly fueled by the possibility of lower taxes on capital, fewer overbearing regulations, energy abundance, and the rise of AI. Instead of stewarding that prosperity and optimism, Trump quickly upended it through a reckless love affair with tariffs and a flair for insulting allies. The result is a shrinking economy and the biggest stock market drop of any early presidential administration since the Nixon era. The fiasco is made sadder by the fact that Trump’s heart appeared to be in the right place. At the core of Trump’s economic vision is sincere worry, I think, about the decline in prime-age male labor-force participation. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of 25-to-54-year-old men participating in the workforce has fallen from the mid-90s to the high 80s, with an especially pronounced dropoff among less-educated men. This has real social consequences. Men without stable employment are far less likely to marry and form lasting families, and are more vulnerable to addiction, isolation and what economists call “deaths of despair” — suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. The connection is clear. Research shows that economic insecurity among non-college-educated men fuels declining marriage rates, weaker communities, and more public health crises. Without access to meaningful work, men struggle to build lives of stability and upward mobility. This sad trend is rooted in problems that tariffs and industrial policy won’t fix. If anything, these policies sabotage the very forces — dynamism, adaptability, innovation — that create the economic opportunities struggling workers need. They also double down on the root cause of the problem: government intervention. Start with the big picture. Americans today are vastly better off than they were 50 years ago. After adjusting for inflation, household incomes have risen by about 50 percent — more than double what raw census data suggest. Unemployment remains near historic lows. Over the past three decades, the private service sector has created about 40.5 million net new jobs, many in high-wage, high-skill fields like health care, finance, and professional services. Meanwhile, U.S. industrial output has surged. It’s now at its all-time high but with fewer workers thanks to stunning productivity gains. As economist David Autor notes, the so-called hollowing out of the middle class involves many workers moving up into higher-skill, higher-paying occupations. None of this means that the labor-force-detachment problem should be ignored. It does mean that the story is more complicated than Trump’s “China stole our jobs” narrative suggests. Take the famous “China shock” study that pointed to up to 2.4 million American jobs displaced in particular locales, mainly in manufacturing, after China joined the World Trade Organization and ramped up exports. Many subsequent studies that accounted for jobs created elsewhere in the economy show that, at the national level, the overall job impact was neutral. The deeper problem exposed by the China shock wasn’t trade — it was America’s fading economic dynamism. In past generations, when industries declined, workers moved. They retrained. They found new opportunities. Today, many displaced workers simply stay put even as jobs emerge elsewhere. Government policy plays an enormous role. Over time, policymakers have built a dense thicket of regulations and disincentives that trap people where they are and discourage adaptation. Restrictive zoning and land-use legislations have sent housing costs in high-wage cities through the roof, pricing out workers who would otherwise migrate toward opportunity. Economists estimate that even modest housing deregulation would allow more Americans to live and work where their skills are most valued. Another culprit is occupational licensing. Today, nearly one-third of U.S. workers must obtain some kind of government license to do their jobs, up from just 5 percent in the 1950s. These barriers disproportionately affect low-income workers and create huge hurdles to interstate mobility, effectively locking people into stagnant local economies. Then there’s Social Security Disability Insurance. Reforms in the 1980s expanded eligibility with broader, more subjective criteria. Today, many prime-age men outside the labor force report being disabled even as overall health has improved and physically demanding jobs have declined. The effect is less labor-force reentry — and, thus, worse long-term prospects — for workers on the margin. There’s more: Subsidies for homeownership tether people to declining regions; minimum-wage hikes price out low-skill workers and deny them valuable experience; poorly designed job-training programs often slow the path back to employment. And don’t forget that growing public debt is a drag on economic growth, with economywide ramifications. We must remove the obstacles and perverse incentives that make living with economic stagnation too rational a choice for too many people. If policymakers are serious about restoring workforce participation, the answer isn’t tariffs or industrial policy. It’s tearing down barriers that government itself erected. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM The post Why Tariffs Won’t Fix America’s Work-Attachment Problem appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Zohran Mamdani, a leading candidate for New York City mayor, who sometimes acts unhinged in public, wants to use empty subway retail and storefronts as hobo huts for the homeless and the mentally ill. I guess he figures the subway isn’t dangerous enough. The subway problems now are the homeless, drug addicts, and mentally ill. […] The post Meet the Nutcase Who Wants to Be NYC Mayor appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

'Where did this guy come from?'

Holyyyyy! This is absolutely crazy

At the 100-day mark in President Trump's second term, it's apparent once again that the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC are organized to cover Trump as negatively as possible. A new NewsBusters study finds coverage of Trump has been 92 percent negative. Four years ago, Biden coverage was 59 percent positive. Rich Noyes explains the difference. Keep in mind that the amount of Trump coverage -- 899 stories making up 1,716 minutes -- translates into more voluminous negative coverage. Biden drew only 726 minutes in 2021. Trump has granted much broader access to the press -- and it looks like he has been punished for it. Biden did not suffer for hiding away from the press.  There is the same contrast in the 2017 study -- Trump drew 1,900 minutes of coverage, and 89 percent of it was negative. Remember that all the politician statements are excluded from the count, so it focuses on the more "objective" or "independent" sources like reporters, their experts, and average citizens. Trump's most dramatic success -- securing the border -- barely moved the needle. Out of nearly four hours (233 minutes) of evening news airtime devoted to immigration, these newscasts spent just 3.5 minutes letting viewers know just how much Trump has reduced border crossings. “What was once a record influx, now a trickle,” NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez acknowledged on the February 7 Nightly News. Trump's coverage was 92.2 percent negative, but his aides were also covered hypernegatively: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced 89% negative press, DOGE architect Elon Musk was slammed with 96% negative coverage, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth received a unanimous 100% bad press from the networks. This is only during Trump's presidency, not in the contentious preliminaries before the inauguration. Musk drew a flood of negative soundbites from federal workers who had been laid off or were in fear of layoffs. “I thought, well, they’re going to take a scalpel to fraud, waste and abuse, not just hack off the entire limb,” a laid-off FEMA worker told NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez on March 10. Just one federal employee said something pro-DOGE. Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

After visiting a nearby resort filled with opulent wokesters, I couldn’t help but notice the signs proclaiming, “Love, not hate, makes America great.” I suspect the signs were meant to remind us of Donald Trump’s supposed nastiness for deporting as many as 50,000 illegal immigrants — most with criminal records. According to the left, such a policy makes Trump a fascist — maybe even the latest incarnation of Hitler.A "nicer" leader, we’re told, would allow these illegal immigrants — including convicted rapists and other lowlifes — to remain in the country, at least until they exhausted multiple judicial appeals or committed a few more crimes. Why stop there? Let them vote in local elections, receive public assistance, education, and health care. After all, they supposedly enrich our society — or so Democrats insist, as they work tirelessly to provide all these forms of taxpayer-funded hospitality.When virtue signalers clutch their pearls over Trump’s treatment of ‘nice illegal rapists,’ I have to wonder if they’re playing dumb.But why did Democratic presidents we’re supposed to venerate — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — get a free pass for far harsher deportation records? Clinton expelled close to a million illegal aliens with minimal judicial involvement, even boasting about his deportations during his re-election campaign. Obama, the left’s beloved heartthrob, threw out over four million illegal immigrants, aided by Trump’s current border czar Tom Homan, all without major interference from Democratic-appointed judges.Compared to Clinton and Obama, Trump’s deportation numbers look paltry, especially given the legal and media warfare waged against him.Even as recently as 2006, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — now screaming about Trump’s “cruelty” — eagerly pushed for building a border wall. Thirty years ago, few Democratic senators would have voted against it. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), back then, warned against flooding the country with unskilled foreign labor that would hurt America’s most vulnerable workers. Obama himself praised tougher immigration controls. In 2006, Democrats still held some loyalty to their working-class base. They understood that saturating American communities with third world lumpenproletariat — not to mention foreign gangs — would devastate the working class.That was before Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Pete Buttigieg, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Rachel Levine became the faces of the rebranded Democratic Party.Since then, both national parties have swapped electoral bases. Republicans moved away from country-club elites and realigned with the white — and increasingly Hispanic — working class. Democrats abandoned their traditional blue-collar support to embrace progressive white women, the LGBTQ lobby, government bureaucrats, black militants, and now, the cause of illegal immigrants.For Democrats, the strategy is simple: expand the non-working-class base. Biden’s administration opened the border to as many as 10 million illegal aliens, and anyone with a functioning brain can see why.Yet, when virtue signalers clutch their pearls over Trump’s treatment of “nice illegal rapists,” I have to wonder if they’re playing dumb. Do they really not know why their party flooded the country with illegal aliens? Do they honestly think slogans about "love" explain why Democrats fight tooth and nail to keep even convicted criminals from deportation?Every illegal immigrant represents a potential future Democratic voter. If Trump’s administration was allowed to make moral distinctions among the "undocumented," Democrats might lose too many future loyalists. Better, from their view, to defend even a wife-beating, MS-13-affiliated “Maryland man” than risk losing tomorrow’s votes.Perhaps I’m being unfair. Maybe the Democratic cheering squad doesn’t know — or care — how radically its party reversed itself on immigration. Maybe leftists assume their Democratic heroes always held the same radical social views as Tim Walz and Hakeem Jeffries.Most live in the present, parroting whatever slogans the media and party elites hand them. If journalists and historians hide the truth, these activists show little curiosity to uncover it.Meanwhile, the media and judicial attacks on Trump’s supposedly “Nazi-like” immigration policies continue to erode public support. Trump now polls negatively even on immigration, the very issue that propelled him into the White House.If this delusion holds, Democrats may succeed in securing nearly all of their future voters.

Cry Us a River: Julie Kelly DESTROYS Fired J6 Prosecutor for Her Fake Crocodile Tears