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Everything is Bleak, It's the Middle of the Night, You're All Alone and the Dummies Might Be Right
It's the chaos and uncertainty that will ultimately harm, but it will take time
mister mix
March 01, 2025
Tim Walz compares the way things feel now, as a governor, to the way he felt during COVID: there’s a huge amount of uncertainty, and he’s scrambling to backfill what’s been lost.
This chaos has huge ripple effects. Let’s start with the economy. Paul Krugman has a long and detailed post about this. He goes through the usual stuff (tariffs, ripping up North American Free trade, etc) and there’s this:
Most alarming of all, if it’s real: People within the administration appear to be floating the idea of restructuring U.S. debt via a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” that would force investors holding Treasury bills — short-term debt — to exchange them for 100-year bonds. This would effectively be a default on U.S. debt. Since the whole world financial system rests on the perceived safety of U.S. Treasuries, which are universally accepted as collateral for many transactions, such a move would threaten global economic chaos. But is the administration serious about this idea? Nobody knows.
Krugman makes a key point that I think needs to undergird all of this discussion: whatever happens, it might not happen quickly. He’s not predicting a recession (notoriously hard to predict those), and he thinks that the biggest risk is inflation from tariffs and deportations tightening the job market.
Let’s move on to the FAA. CNN has a story about the NTSB citing air traffic controller distraction in a 2023 near-miss at Burbank. In the story, there’s this:
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday a new initiative to increase air traffic controller hiring, including higher starting salaries and a streamlined application process to ramp up recruitment efforts.
“This staffing shortage has been a known challenge for over a decade, and this administration is committed to solving it,” Duffy said in a statement.
[…]
The hiring window, open through March 17, reduces the FAA’s hiring process from eight steps to five, shaving months off the timeline. Starting salaries at the FAA Academy have been increased by 30%, with certified controllers earning an average of $160,000 annually, according to the DOT.
King Elon also tweeted out a request to have retired ATC controllers come back to work, which is hardly comforting since it’s such a high-stress job that they have a mandatory retirement age of 56.
This is clearly a case of stupid managers doing the usual stupid manager thing: trying a “surgical” approach to solve a holistic problem. When their rampage at the FAA coincided with the DC mid-air collision, they knew that they had to do something to address the biggest known issue: the controller shortage. But a robust air safety system requires not only ATC controllers, but maintenance of navigation aids, pilot certification and updated en route charts. The cuts that the Musk junta carried out at the FAA will affect all of those jobs, which aren’t “safety critical” but they’re ultimately critical to safety.
Again, though, planes aren’t just going to start falling out of the sky. The chaos will just add to stress and something will break.
Another example is the shuttering of rural hospitals and nursing homes. The ones that already are poorly managed will go first when they lose Medicaid patients. Then there will be a slow degradation of the rest of them.
Foreign policy is another one, but that’s its own post.
When the Musk junta made its first move, people had their antennae out for disaster. Government is very important, but as Josh Marshall often quotes Adam Smith, “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” It’s going to be a slow ride down a long hill. In some ways (actual consequences that we can try to ameliorate), that’s good news. In other ways (political messaging around the slow-rolling disasters), it’s not.
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