I said DOGE would never find anything close to one trillion dollars in savings without serious reforms to entitlement programs. The most recent estimate is maybe $150 billion, and even that may be aggressive. The effort is needed, and every dollar cut from federal spending is great. The most important outcome would be a complete reform of the federal workforce and organization, to be much leaner and to be focused on actual productivity measures for every job. IT modernization is critically needed, and that is where I hope the DOGE team really focuses–it would create great productivity gains and improve customer, i.e. taxpayer, service.
I said that the trade deficit would basically be the same during the second Trump administration as it was in the first. That is clearly where we are heading as the administration appears to recognize how badly it screwed up the whole tariff thing. Obvious facts were ignored, a primary one being that the US has no significant capability to ramp up manufacturing to the level needed to replace foreign production and that even trying to do so would raise costs; others including that the reprisal on the services level would eliminate many very high-paying jobs in the US in finance and tech and hurt the enormous surplus we run in services trade; and that lowering the trade deficit would mean lowering the surplus in foreign investment in the US, investment which includes immense purchases of our swollen debt issuance. So now team Trump is looking for every graceful or not so graceful way to declare victory and move past this disaster of an issue.
Other predictions which look like on the way to fulfillment include that nothing good will happen in Ukraine unless and until the administration is willing to put real pressure on that scumbag Putin. He is completely untrustworthy and determined to live out his delusion of being a Tsar.
My hope for the good of real conservativism is that Trump backs away quickly from the chaos and focuses on where there is real achievement that almost all Americans like–the border (make a triumphant visit), cutting federal spending, building up a deterrent defensive force again, and so on.
