It goes without saying that Trump and his rich buddies not only won’t face any consequences for a crashed economy, but also not for any crimes they commit. That’s become clear. Trump said during a rally before the election that if he were elected, “inflation will vanish completely.”³ This is an absolutely ludicrous statement, which unfortunately, many people bought into.

“Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a letter in June expressing fear that Trump’s proposals would “reignite” inflation, which has plummeted since peaking at 9.1% in 2022 and is nearly back to the Fed’s 2% target.” […] “Nonpartisan researchers,” they said, “predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

I’ve covered at length why Project 2025 (which are also Trump’s) policies will crash the economy all over this site. Let’s briefly review here.

Mass Deportations of all Undocumented Workers

All sources for all claims are cited on this page⁴ unless otherwise noted. Read the linked article for more details, but in a nutshell:

• Removing undocumented residents from mixed-status households would reduce median household income from $41,300 to $22,000, or a drop of 47%, plunging millions of US families into literal poverty.
• If just one-third of the US-born children of undocumented residents remained in the United States following a mass deportation program, which is a very low estimate, the cost of raising those children through their minority would total $118 billion. (The alternative is deporting minor children of illegal immigrants who are U.S. Citizens.) If you think the United States is above deporting U.S. citizens, think again. Tom Homan, the Project 2025 contributor who is now Trump’s “border czar”, said in October on 60 Minutes that “families can be deported together”⁵ when a parent is undocumented and they have children or spouses that are U.S. citizens. Homan has since denied saying it.
• The nation’s housing market would be jeopardized because a high percentage of the 1.2 million mortgages held by households with undocumented immigrants would be in peril.
• Gross domestic product (GDP) would be reduced by 1.4 percent in the first year, and cumulative GDP would be reduced by $4.7 trillion over 10 years.

Robert J. Shapiro wrote in May 2024, “By any measure, a policy that eliminated 4.5 percent of the current workforce, including large numbers of college and high school graduates, would set off serious economic tremors. Using Okun’s Law on the relationship between rising unemployment and GDP, a 4.5 percent drop in employment is associated with depressing GDP growth by more than 9 percentage points. This estimate also includes the impact on other jobs. A recent study of much more modest programs to deport immigrants found clear evidence that they cost other American jobs. By one calculation, deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional employment losses by other Americans, suggesting that Trump’s program could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs on top of the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants up for deportation.”

In short, JUST mass deportations would be an economic disaster. What do you think happens to the price of produce and commodities when there’s nobody harvesting them?

“It would be devastating to the ag economy,” said Fred Leitz, who owns a family farm in Michigan that grows blueberries, apples, tomatoes and cucumbers. “There would be nobody to pick the crops. And you’re not going to plant anything you can’t harvest and sell. It’s just basic economics.” [Source]⁶

“There’s no question that mass deportation of immigrants will disrupt the agriculture and food processing industries, resulting in severe labor shortages, higher costs and thus higher prices for a wide variety of groceries,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told CNN. “The only question is how high prices will go.”

A study conducted by the Peterson Institute¹⁵, released in September, found that mass deportation could result in a 10% increase in food prices.

(Anecdotal, but plausible. Let them eat cake!)

Economic Scorecard for this:

– Depress the GDP 9+%; 4.7 trillion dollars over 10 years
– 8 million lost jobs; almost a million jobs lost by U.S. citizens
– Skyrocket costs of food and services
– Humanitarian disaster

Which is nothing to say about the cost of the deportation itself:

“In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations—an estimated total of is at least $315 billion. We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time—incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible. For one thing, there would be no way to accomplish this mission without mass detention as an interim step. To put the scale of detaining over 13 million undocumented immigrants into context, the entire U.S. prison and jail population in 2022, comprising every person held in local, county, state, and federal prisons and jails, was 1.9 million people.” [Source]¹³

Mass deportations won’t be the only thing driving up your prices, though. Let’s look at:

Punishingly High Tariffs

I’ve covered this in detail here⁷, but let’s briefly examine how tariffs work (since Trump clearly and pretty famously doesn’t understand them), and examine the economic results of the tariffs he imposed during his previous administration. From the linked article (sources there):

“Economists told us, however, that real-world examples of tariffs working as intended are rare, and consumers of the tariff-levying country are the primary victims of tariffs, by having to pay higher prices. The federal treasury does get paid when tariffs are levied. But Chinese exporters don’t make the payment. The importers do — usually U.S. companies.

“If the U.S. imposes a tariff on Chinese televisions, the duty is paid to U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border by a U.S. broker representing a U.S. importer — say, Costco,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, wrote in September. “The Chinese government pays nothing.”

This means that when Costco has to pay more to import Chinese televisions, they’re going to jack up the price of Chinese televisions in their stores to cover that loss, meaning that you pay for it when you buy the goods.

Walmart, Lowe’s, and other companies¹⁸ have flat out already said that they’ll be raising prices even more if Trump implements more tariffs.

Now that we’ve established that WE paid for Trump’s idiotic tariffs, how much did we pay?

“Numerous studies have found that U.S. companies primarily paid for U.S. tariffs, with the cost estimated at nearly $46 billion. The tariffs forced American companies to accept lower profit margins, cut wages and jobs for U.S. workers, defer potential wage hikes or expansions, and raise prices for American consumers or companies. A spokesperson for the American Farm Bureau stated that “farmers have lost the vast majority of what was once a $24 billion market in China” as a result of Chinese retaliatory actions.” Source: The Brookings Institute⁸

“A January 2021 study commissioned by the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) claims that former president Donald Trump’s trade policies cost the United States 245,000 jobs.” Source: The Carnegie Endowment⁹

“Although President Trump has persistently claimed that China is paying billions of dollars in tariffs imposed on Chinese imports to the United States, empirical evidence indicates that U.S. consumers are bearing the cost of the tariffs: $51 billion in increased prices and a net loss of $7.2 billion to the U.S. economy.” Source: William & Mary Business Law Review¹⁰

And Trump is promising more of the same, and higher this time. Are tariffs always bad? Of course not. The U.S. refined sugar industry is a good example of how surgically-applied tariffs can be beneficial. You don’t, however, use a chainsaw rather than a scalpel to perform a surgery and expect the same results.

Economic score card of the previous tariffs:

– Farmers lost $24 billion
– U.S. citizens lost 245,000 jobs
– U.S. consumers paid $51 billion in increased prices last time around
– Net loss to the economy of $7.2 billion last time around

Expect more of the same, in worse quantities.

Proposals Which Result in Massive Job Losses

Eliminating the Department of Education alone would eliminate 180,000 teachers’ jobs¹¹. Eliminating 75% of the federal work force¹², as promised, if we assume that he’s not eliminating active-duty military, would eliminate 2.25 million U.S. jobs.

Assuming that Trump’s tariffs over the next four years are no worse than last time – and he promises they will be – we’re looking at approximately 10,675,000 total job losses from these policies; 3.575 million of those belonging to U.S. citizens.

Trump’s tariffs are “economic proposals that can actually cause inflation and put you into a recession – at the same time,” says David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, calling them a “perfect stagflation machine.”

Even the deeply conservative National Interest publication says “Trump’s tariffs would be a disaster for America, sparking 20 percent inflation or more for many goods and burdening average consumers with high costs. The conservative Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates Trump’s plans could cost the average household $2,600 a year, with low-income Americans suffering most. [Source]¹⁶

So, Let’s Do the Math

Let’s go back to Okun’s Law for a moment, which suggests a relationship between changes in unemployment and the GDP (Gross Domestic Product.) The general rule is that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate, the GDP decreases by about 2% relative to potential GDP.

Assuming the U.S. labor force is approximately 167 million workers, a loss of 3.575 million jobs represents about a 2.14% increase in unemployment. The current U.S. GDP (2024 estimate) is $26.5 trillion. Using Okun’s law, this means that the U.S. GDP would take a hit of about $1.14 trillion ANNUALLY as a result of these policies. (You’ll note that I’m ONLY counting jobs lost by U.S. citizens. If we counted all of the jobs lost including the undocumented, you can go ahead and triple that figure.)

Reduced GDP implies lower tax revenues (corporate, income, and consumption taxes), which increase the budget deficit and the national debt. For reference, the U.S. federal debt-to-GDP ratio is over 120%. A shrinking GDP would worsen this ratio. With reduced revenues, the government might also borrow more, compounding debt growth.

The deportation of undocumented workers would cause a labor supply shock, reducing the food supply and increasing prices. When you add tariffs into the equation, the cost of imported goods rises, so we’d be paying through the nose trying to make up our reduced supply there. More expensive imported goods means higher inflation, by the way. Historically, job losses of this magnitude reduce consumer spending, worsening the economic crash and causing deflation in non-essential sectors (due to supply and demand), while essential goods like food and utilities see price spikes. In other words, when you stop spending on extras, they start gouging you for the items you have no choice but to purchase to make up for it.

Policies causing this scale of economic disruptions trigger recessions and widen the gap between the rich and the poor, further dwindling the middle class, and decrease our global competitiveness because U.S. industries – especially agriculture – will face higher production costs. That’s if they decide it’s worth it to produce anything at all. If they can’t sell their goods at a profit, as one farmer noted above, there’s little point in growing their crops at all.

To add insult to injury, Trump has promised to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau¹⁹, which the Biden administration has used to combat junk fees charged by banks (including overdraft charges and more) and get medical debt off of credit reports. So, expect those fees to return. According to Robert Reich, these fees cost consumers over $3.5 billion every year.

The Long and Short of It

In essence, if you voted for Trump because of some vague notion about “the economy”, you fucked up.

If you’ll permit me a terrifying corollary to this discussion, let’s ask ourselves this question: If we deport cheap labor in the form of illegal immigrants, and we (correctly) assume that farmers largely can’t afford to pay competitive wages (or if they can, then can no longer sell their goods at a profit), where will we get more cheap labor to fill those gaps?

THE ANSWER IS PRISONS.

“Don’t be silly,” I can hear you saying. “That’s legalizing slavery! Besides, we don’t have enough prisoners!”

How handy, then, that Trump has threatened to jail his adversaries!²⁰ That should give us a nice boost of the prison population. By the way? IT’S ALREADY HAPPENING. (Not the ‘jailing of adversaries’ part. The ‘using prisoners as slave labor’ part.)

The long history of prison farms²¹ notwithstanding, Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands:²²

“Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.”

After all, why pay a migrant worker a few dollars an hour when you can pay a prisoner mere pennies, and satisfy your racism at the same time! Look for this practice to become more widespread, the for-profit prison system to explode even further, and for more Americans to be imprisoned for dubious reasons to fulfill these purposes.

“Between state and federal prisons, local jails, immigration and juvenile detention centers, and tribal land and military jails, there are currently over 1.9 million people incarcerated in the United States. Not only is there a complicated legal system with its roots in racial capitalism that drives mass incarceration, there is also a mix of incentives within the prison network that promote various versions of convict leasing, agricultural labor programs, and coercive labor practices.

Among the vast network of institutions within our carceral system, at least 662 adult detention facilities have active agricultural labor programs. Prison agriculture has been an historically lucrative industry across the South and that remains to be the case, as Texas, Georgia and Florida have the most prisons with agricultural labor attached to the institution. However, the rest of the country isn’t without blame. Every single prison in Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington has incarcerated people working in agriculture.”  [Source]²³

Need more? See:

• Prison Labor is Remarkably Common Within the Food System²⁴
• Convicts Are Returning to Farming – Anti-Immigrant Policies Are the Reason²⁵

To make up for 11 million immigrants being deported, we’ll need to incarcerate about 9.2 million more Americans and force them to work for slave wages. No big deal, right? Elections, as they say, have consequences.

Thanks for joining me. Until next time, stay rational!

E.T. Parker