Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Mephistopheles, the White Rabbit, Circe, the snake of Genesis — sorcerers all. Mephistopheles promised Faust knowledge, in return for his soul. The White Rabbit piqued Alice’s curiosity to follow him down a hole to a bewildering Wonderland. Circe turned Ulysses’ crew into pigs (until Ulysses, with divine help, forced her to undo the havoc). The snake lured Eve with an apple, thus expelling her from Eden.
Let’s add President Trump to the list.
He lured us with tariffs and deportations and big beautiful tax cuts. A voting majority followed his lead, expecting American manufacturing to surge, as we made foreign goods more expensive. Expanding on xenophobia, we embarked on deportations of anybody suspected of being not quite legal, regardless of where they were born. Native-born Americans, generally White, were supposed to fill those empty jobs. Congress supported the big beautiful spending bill, even with its big awful cuts. Now, a year later, we have plunged not into wonderland, but into misery.
An election ago we dared to be optimistic. Surfacing from the COVID-induced lockdown, more of us had health insurance than in years past. Our children were for the most part getting vaccinated from the diseases that had killed children decades ago. (At that time government joined with physicians to promote vaccinations.) More of us were finding jobs. The government subsidies, from housing vouchers to food stamps, were bolstering the poor — not enough from liberals’ vantage. Our urban schools, admittedly subpar to abysmal in places, counted on federal money. Ditto our libraries, parks, museums. Not Eden, but in retrospect, not bad.
What a difference an election makes!
This is the season of layoffs throughout the economy. One spur was the tariffs, which wavered from draconian to reasonable to negligible to draconian. The tariffs flummoxed most economists. Were we raising tariffs on Canadian goods because of an off-hand remark by its prime minister? Were we stifling the raw materials, which we imported, but incorporated into goods made here? Figuring out the components of an automobile made under the aegis of a United States corporation became an exercise in DNA: who made what? Where? Plus the uncertainty of the tariffs left American manufacturers in a bind: they couldn’t reasonably plan for the next year. Other economic forces propelled the layoffs. Throughout COVID, many American companies had held on to workers, fearing they could not re-hire them. The phrase-du-jour is”labor hoarding”: that has ended as employers now shed superfluous workers.
Propelling our economic plunge, AI has reshaped some industries. We used to need coders, grabbing up new college graduates; today those graduates, proficient in coding, are discovering their “hot” skill obsolete.
Government has contributed to the layoffs. Elon Musks’ DOGE promised efficiency, as it slashed workers willy nilly. Instead of efficiency, we got chaos. We slashed the number of bank inspectors by 30%. We slashed the occupational safety inspectors. We eviscerated the people who regulate the environment. Without remembering the emphysema of decades past, we are axing wind-power, in favor of coal. (Analysts predict coal will continue its steady decline, regardless of the president’s support.)
More misery awaits. The Big Beautiful Bill will erase the Biden-era extra subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. This Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, has insured millions of Americans; yet this Act is anathema to the President. The Big Beautiful Bill will not erase the Act, but will raise premiums, leading some enrollees — certainly those now unemployed — to take a pass, go without insurance, trusting that a hospital emergency room will treat them — a trust more difficult as hospitals have morphed into for-profit megaliths. Analysts are speculating how high premiums will rise. Whatever the number, it will be too high for some families.
Medicaid too — the safety net — is shrinking, as states enact work requirements, as well as set new income levels. Again, more people without insurance, and consequently lacking access to the physicians and hospitals and medications that keep them well. As for work requirements, they may work in an economy desperate for workers, not one filled with layoffs.
The anchor to the misery is our changing mindset. Those awful ideas that progressives put a stake in decades ago have returned. Already pundits are questioning the need for affordable comprehensive, almost-universal health care: the argument goes that enrollees chose an Affordable Care Act plan over an employer’s plan because it cost less, offered more - as though the pundits wouldn’t have acted with the same common sense. Another new-old idea, voiced by Governor DeSantis, questions the need for comprehensive coverage at all: why not offer catastrophic plans to people younger than age 50, with health savings accounts to pay for the “normal” medical visits — oblivious to the tremendous “normal” costs of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer … (https://www.hoover.org/news/ron-desantis-explains-why-americans-want-more-what-florida-offering)
George Orwell spoke of double-speak: President Trump is a master. Lobbing yet another salvo against the Affordable Care Act, the president suggested that it enriches only Big Insurance, that we could spend less by returning money directly to enrollees. He ignores the economic rationale for risk-based insurance, meant to spread the cost of care so that everybody can be covered. (In lieu of insurance, if we gave every American even $40,000 a year, it would leave families beset with cancer, a ruptured appendix, an ectopic pregnancy, a stroke … unable to pay the bills.) In a time of double-speak, we are recategorizing measles, whooping cough diphtheria from almost-extinct to normal.
We are plunging to a back-to-the-future dystopia worthy of Faust.
The question-du-jour: who will say “no” to the sorcerer? He succeeds only when people follow him.
Joan Retsinas is a sociologist in Providence, R.I., who writes about health care. Email joan.retsinas@gmail.com.
