I know some of these take a few minutes to read, but sometimes it takes a few minutes to really dig into a topic.

Please read and share this. We keep hearing about how Donald Trump might be a felon but his policies are good for the economy. No they aren't. He would be a disaster.

Before getting into that, though, let's clear up some misconceptions about Trump's first-time performance. He inherited a strong economy, and the first three years were just the ripple effect of that economy.

But what he is saying he would do if he had another term is not merely "repeat" what he did his first term. He wants to double down on his worst policies, which could send us into the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and arguably even worse.

His policies would cause runaway inflation, a contracted economy, a massive increase in poverty, food scarcity, another housing crisis, and a massive spike in crime.

Since I can't do inline links, I will include a citation such as [1] which will correspond with a link in a subsequent post.

RUNAWAY INFLATION

There are several reasons inflation would be an issue.
First, he says there will be mass deportations, using the police, the National Guard, and, if necessary, the military to carry that out. [1]

The plan is to open up massive deportation camps and send the immigrants there before deporting them. This would include parents and spouses of American citizens. [1]

About 36% of field workers in the US are undocumented workers [2]. Some say it could be as high as 75%. [3]

This would have a massive impact on produce [1, 4], but there are other areas, such as dairy [5] where the question "Who will milk our cows?" arises. Estimates are that it would cost us 50% of our milk production [4].

The basic premise of prices is that it's an issue of supply and demand. If you cut down supply by 50% with no corresponding decrease in demand, the price is going up.

But furthermore, Trump wants to put an across-the-board tariff of 10% on all products [1]. We rely on imports for about 42% of our produce [4]. So if you slap a 10% tariff on that produce, that means a 10% increase on prices of imports while you're also forcing a massive price increase on domestics, due to the lack of goods.

And it's not just agriculture. Per Robert J. Shapiro of the Washington Monthly,

Despite the popular misconception that most of these unauthorized immigrants are farm workers, only 4 percent, or 283,000, work in agriculture. Mass deportation would be particularly damaging to the construction industry, which employs 1.5 million or 21 percent of all working unauthorized immigrants, and hospitality companies, which employ 1.1 million or 16 percent. Another 1 million or 14 percent of working unauthorized immigrants have jobs providing professional, scientific, technical, or administrative services; 10 percent or 714,000 work in manufacturing; and 8 percent or 570,000 have jobs in retail.

So, the construction industry and the hospitality industry would have a huge impact, too. As would manufacturing.

That would mean the prices of all those things would also go up. And when you have prices from multiple industries go up, that causes the prices of other things to go up.

And on top of all that, Trump promises to cut interest rates, which would also cause inflation. (The whole point of raising them was to cut inflation.)

So if you are REALLY worried about inflation, the worst thing you can do is vote for Trump.

UNEMPLOYMENT

There's this myth that undocumented workers are "bad" because they "take our jobs." But the reality is that when you deport undocumented workers, it actually increases unemployment among American citizens.

In fact, "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." [6]

With 11 million undocumented workers, that would come out to almost 1 million American jobs lost--as well as the millions of jobs vacated by the undocumented workers.

Why is that? "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."

So you'd be talking about the combination of high inflation and high unemployment at the same time, which is reminiscent of the recession in 1980.

But that's not all.

HOUSING

Here's something you may not have thought about. Undocumented workers own about 3.4 million homes in the United States.

Now, think about that. That's how many mortgages? And in turn, how many foreclosures? For perspective, in 2008 there were 3.1 million, and that caused the economic collapse and housing recession.

And that in turn affects wages. One study from 2017 shows that mass deportations could drop median household income by as much as 47%! [7]

Now, think of the impact of that recession stacked on the recession of 1980. And then, as a result of not having the farm labor, think of all of that combined with the food scarcity of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.

How long before tech starts more massive layoffs? How much is that going to impact car sales? And so on and so forth.

Furthermore, to deport 11.2 million workers would cost the US Government between 400 billion and 600 billion dollars. And that study was from 2015! It would obviously be higher now. [8]

And the economy would actually contract by as much as 9 percent [9], which would significantly reduce tax revenue. The combination would have a massive impact on the national debt.

Voting for Trump's policies is a vote to destroy the economy while increasing the national debt—two things the GOP keeps saying they're against.

CRIME

Republicans also say they're against crime (unless it's Trump committing them, but that's another thing). Trump's plan includes police being committed to rounding up and guarding undocumented workers in the aforementioned camps.

That means local police are not there to take care of actual crime, which, in turn, will cause an increase in crime. Along with that, the spikes in unemployment and poverty will also cause an increase in crime.

But there won't be any police to stop it.

So, honestly, if you're worried about crime, inflation, and the economy, voting for Trump is the worst thing you can do.

On the other hand, I discussed Biden's vastly underrated impact on the economy in the first link below.

https://x.com/KellyScaletta/status/1788996662523834790

https://x.com/KellyScaletta/status/1788996662523834790

[1] time.com/6972022/donald…

Read 11 tweets

Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦

@KellyScaletta

Mar 17

When he discussed the car industry, he mentioned imposing a 100% tariff on cars from China built in Mexico if he were elected.

Then he said if he doesn't get elected, it will be a bloodbath for the country.

That statement makes no sense in the context he was talking about. He's not even saying it will be even worse for the Chinese car industry because he said "for the country," not "for the auto industry."

And again, he wasn't talking about the "auto industry." He was talking about Chinese cars built in Mexico.

And it's not like Trump has never strayed off-topic.

So stop trying to justify what he said.

I looked it up. China is currently selling an electric car in Mexico called "BYD." They are looking to open a plant there to sell cars in Mexico.

I don't see anything indicating that they want to start selling them in the US.

The whole thing makes me wonder about his recent meeting with Elon, though. Suddenly he's about protecting the US electric car industry?

english.elpais.com/economy-and-bu…

"The Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world. So, I think they will have significant success outside of China depending on what kind of tariffs or trade barriers are established."

--Elon Musk

cnbc.com/amp/2024/01/25…

Read 4 tweets

Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦

@KellyScaletta

Mar 10

Here's the thing about Britt's misleading story. It actually makes the opposite point.

Her story was about a woman who was forced, as a young girl, into human trafficking by the cartels.

This means we should be making it easier for these children and young women to get asylum, not harder.

Also worth noting: Republicans have somehow made it out that they are the party that wants to prosecute child sex trafficking (as though Democrats must be against it since they are for it).

The reality is that convictions went up under Obama and down under Trump.

trac.syr.edu/tracreports/cr…

By law, there are 5 grounds for asylum. These are fear of persecution due to their:

1. Race
2. Religion
3. Nationality
4. Political opinion
5. Inclusion in a particular social group.

Due to the Chevron ruling, which says essentially that if something isn't specifically stated by legislation, the executive branch can interpret the laws how they want.

Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden have all interpreted "Inclusion in a particular social group" to include people who aren't in cartels but are being persecuted by them. Trump did not.

In the last 25 years, the only President that didn't make fleeing cartels grounds for asylum was Trump.

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Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦

@KellyScaletta

Feb 9

So I went through and read Hur's report, and the way the media at large has been presenting things is borderline malpractice.

Please take the two minutes it requires to read this tweet because it really does matter.

Let me lay it out for you. Hur is alleging there are two counts of Biden willfully retaining classified documents: The Afghanistan docs that were found in his Delaware home and his own personal notebooks.

During an interview with a ghostwriter, he made reference to classified documents that were "downstairs" in his rented Virginia home.

The supposition is that these are the Afghanistan documents that were later moved to his Delaware home in 2019 and then found by the FBI.

Hur indicates that in order to convict Biden of willfully retaining classified documents, the prosecution would have to prove that 1. These are the same documents and 2. That Biden remembers that single sentence from 2017.

It's against this backdrop Hur says:

When Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter about finding ''all the classified stuff downstairs," his tone was matter-of-fact. For a person who had viewed classified documents nearly every day for eight years as vice president, including regularly in his home, finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.

Notably, the classified Afghanistan documents did not come up again in Mr. Biden's dozens of hours of recorded conversations with the ghostwriter, or in his book. And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden's Delaware garage-in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus-suggests the documents might have been forgotten.

In addition. Mr. Biden's memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation, including by reporting to the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his Delaware garage, will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully-that is, with intent to break the law-as the statute requires.

Another viable defense is that Mr. Biden might not have retained the classified Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home at all. They could have been stored, by mistake and without his knowledge, at his Delaware home since the time he was vice president, as were other classified documents recovered during our investigation. This would rebut charges that he willfully retained the documents in Virginia.

Given Mr. Biden's limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified 5 documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence. We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.

In other words, the totality of the case on the Afghanistan documents would come down to whether he remembered a single un-noteworthy sentence he spoke seven years ago that may or may not have referred to the Afghanistan documents.

The Hur says:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

That's the entire context. Do you remember every sentence you spoke in 2017? I sure as hell don't.

Oh, and regarding the notebooks. There is no controversy over whether Biden knew he had those. He had handwritten notes with classified information on them.

However, Biden claims that they are personal and points to Reagan (who did the same thing) as a historic precedent.

Note it was Biden who made this argument, not his lawyers. (In fact, he made this argument to his lawyers.) Hur declined to prosecute this on the grounds that Biden is probably right.

Not bad for a dude with dementia.

Also, one other thing you won't see on Fox is that Hur goes through an entire section explaining why Trump's case is prosecutable but Biden's isn't.

Read 9 tweets

Machine Pun Kelly 🇺🇦

@KellyScaletta

Jan 11

I was in the Air Force from 1986-1990. There was a small group of gays and lesbians at the Air Station I was assigned to. Most of them were friends of mine.

The AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations) ran a sting operation to bust the gays. One of them was undercover, pretending to be gay.

One night, he told me he was "gay" and asked me if I was interested in a relationship. I told him I wasn't, but I could introduce him to some gay friends of mine.

The next day, I was called into the OSI and asked to write a sworn testimony against my friends. I refused to do it.

Prior to that point, I was an orderly room clerk (a status position for my AFSC), I sat on the board for Airman of the Quarter boards, etc. I was about to be fast-tracked to get my star (the promotion from Senior Airman to Buck Sergeant).

Then all hell happened. I started getting written up for typos. I failed a room inspection for having dust on my service cap. Any little mistake was a write-up.

In the Air Force, the lowest punishment is a letter of counseling. Three LOCs and you can get a Letter of Reprimand. Three Letters of Reprimand, you can get an Article 15, and kicked out.

Within 2 months, I was getting an Article 15 and kicked out. I lost my GI Bill, which would have paid for my college.

All because I wouldn't testify against people for being gay. And I wouldn't do that because it would have been far worse for them. They literally could have gone to Leavenworth.

When people say that we haven't made progress in the last few decades, that's because they don't know how much things were different then.

I am only posting this now because this is the kind of thing that the GOP would like to return us to.

Joe Biden might not be perfect. And I have problems with Gaza too. But there is more than one thing in the world.

Due to your overwhelmingly positive response to this post (which I had not expected), I will apply for an upgrade to my discharge.

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