Thoughts for the Day, April 22, 2025: How is the economy working for you?

Stock Markets

Since January 20, 2025, the S&P 500 is down 12.6%, even with today’s increase of 2,5%. For a retiree with $300,000 in retirement savings on January 20, who is invested in the market, this equates to a $37,800 decrease in retirement savings.

This reduction is a direct result of President Trump’s tariff war, and the uncertainty Trump has created. For a person whose was supposedly elected because he would handle the economy better than former VP Harris, this must be a shock to those who voted for Trump thinking their retirement savings would increase.

According to Trump, it is not his fault. It is the fault of Federal Reserve Chairman Powell, who refuses to reduce interest rates. Never mind that Chairman Powell was appointed by Trump in his first term. Never mind that Powell, who Trump says his “termination cannot come fast enough”, did what many economists said was impossible, when he brought down inflation following Covid-19 without causing a recession.

As we have learned, it is never Trump’s fault. Never!

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Never let the truth get in the way of your story.

If you tell lies long enough, you and others like you start believing it is the truth. This is from Assistant White House Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller. This is my Quote of the Day

“If you were an American falsely accused of wrongdoing on January 6th, it wasn’t merely difficult to get “due process” The entire system was rigged against you. All of it. Those persecuted Americans could only dream of the “due process” afforded illegal immigrants. “

The sad part is that he really believes this. He ignores the fact that of the more than 1,500 participants arrested in the January 6^, 2020, insurrection, they either pleaded guilty, were found guilty by a jury of their peers, found innocent by a jury of their peers, or had the charges dropped. None of them were sent to El Salvador to be lost in the system forever.

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Speak up and speak out

This from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American should scare the hell out of everyone.

On April 15, Jenna McLaughlin of NPR reported on an official whistleblower disclosure that as soon as members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) arrived at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they appeared to be hacking into secure data. While they claimed to be looking for places to cut costs, the behavior of the DOGE team suggested something else was going on. They demanded the highest level of access, tried to hide their activities in the system, turned off monitoring tools, and then manually deleted the record of their tracks, all behaviors that cybersecurity experts told McLaughlin sounded like “what criminal or state-sponsored hackers might do.”

Staffers noticed that an IP address in Russia was trying to log in to the system using a newly created DOGE account with correct username and password, and later saw that a large amount of sensitive data was leaving the agency. Cybersecurity experts identified that spike as a sign of a breach in the system, creating the potential for that data to be sold, stolen, or used to hurt companies, while the head of DOGE himself could use the information for his own businesses. “All of this is alarming," Russ Handorf, who worked in cybersecurity for the FBI, told McLaughlin. "If this was a publicly traded company, I would have to report this [breach] to the Securities and Exchange Commission.” When the whistleblower brought his concerns to someone at NLRB, he received threats…

When challenged by judges, DOGE has offered conflicting and vague answers to the question of why it needs access to sensitive information, and has dismissed concerns about cybersecurity and privacy…

Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a former NLRB board member, told McLaughlin: “There is nothing that I can see about what DOGE is doing that follows any of the standard procedures for how you do an audit that has integrity and that's meaningful and will actually produce results that serve the normal auditing function, which is to look for fraud, waste and abuse…. The mismatch between what they're doing and the established, professional way to do what they say they're doing...that just kind of gives away the store, that they are not actually about finding more efficient ways for the government to operate.”

On April 18, Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott of Wired reported that DOGE is building a master database that knits together information from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration, and voting data from Pennsylvania and Florida.

On April 15 the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Gerald Connolly of Virginia, asked the acting inspector general at the Department of Labor and the inspector general at the NLRB to investigate “any and all attempts to exfiltrate data and any attempts to cover up their activities.” Two days later, he made a similar request to the acting inspector general for the Social Security Administration. Connolly wrote: “I am concerned that DOGE is moving personal information across agencies without the notification required under the Privacy Act or related laws, such that the American people are wholly unaware their data is being manipulated in this way.”

Please call your members of Congress today. The U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Tell the operator where you’re from and the operator will connect you to your representatives and senators. I tested this out today. It is very simple. They will ask for the congress member you want to contact. They will then switch you to that office.

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Harvard

Per The Guardian, Harvard University has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that it is trying to “gain control of academic decision-making”.

The university is fighting back against the administration’s threat to review about $9 billion in federal funding after Harvard officials refused to comply with a list of demands that included appointing an outside overseer to ensure that the viewpoints being taught at the university were “diverse”. Harvard is specifically looking to halt a freeze on $2.2bn in grants.

The lawsuit comes as the Trump administration has sought to force changes at multiple Ivy League institutions, painting campus protests around Israel’s war in Gaza as anti-American, and the institutions as liberal and antisemitic, which Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, disputes.

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Quote of the Day: See above from Assistant White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Orchid of the Day: The Detroit Pistons who won their first playoff game in seventeen years last night with their victory over the New York Knicks. The series is now tied 1-1 as they return for game three on Thursday at Little Ceasar’s Arena. See my Video of the Day

Onion of the Day: Stephen Miller for believing his B.S.

Lyrics of the Day: Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes-Benz, uh. She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget

Answer to Lyrics of the Day for April 21, 2025: American Women, by Guess Who

Question of the Day: There is a saying that a seven-game series doesn’t start until a team wins a game on the road. The Pistons won yesterday’s game on the road, can they hold serve at home and win the series?

Video of the Day: Final 5:08 WILD ENDING! Knicks vs Pistons Game 2 👀 | April 21, 2025

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