The Financial Consequences of Deregulation and Job Losses in the President Trump Economy
Republicans take aim at OSHA as President Trump continues to push for a smaller federal government and deregulation.
Season 1 Episode 5
There’s a lot to talk about today. When I came up with this idea, I was thinking of just one topic a day. I wanted to somehow tie it into the issues going on now politically and how it will affect your bottom line. But I realized I couldn’t focus on just one topic. There’s too much coming at us simultaneously, but I’m still going to stick to that original concept: how does this political chaos affect your pocket?
Listen to this blog post.
Losing Your Employee Rights Could Be the Beginning Under a President Trump Administration
First, I found out that Republicans are now trying to push a bill through Congress to get rid of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). OSHA is what protects employees. If there’s a construction site and people aren’t wearing their hard hats and don’t have harnesses, that site could get shut down, and there are fines and even criminal penalties. How does that affect you?
Very simply, you’re an employee; OSHA protects you. What happens if you get injured now? You can’t file a lawsuit if no OSHA laws were violated.
Another thing is that it looks like they’re going to try to dismantle the Department of Education. I wrote a blog post and did a video on that before about how it affects your student loan. That’s another example. If you get rid of the Department of Education and OSHA, these are thousands of jobs that will be lost.
There’s also the FBI purge. They’re doing the same thing with the CIA, but with the FBI, it’s tied to the J6 investigation. That’s up to 6,000 agents that could be fired under President Trump.
Now let’s assume no agents are married to another agent—it’s 6,000 families. So, 6,000 homes, not just in one area but throughout the country, some of whom have their kids in private school and now can’t afford it because these are not senior agents at the end of their careers, where they’re going to qualify for a pension.
Where do they find a job? Will they take your job? What happens to them? That’s potentially thousands of foreclosures and leases with landlords that have to be broken. That somehow affects you financially.
Besides OSHA and the Department of Education, we have the issue of what seems to be the end game here: not only shrinking the federal government but also reducing bureaucracy. The fewer people in the federal government, the more control President Trump would have if he had to go through fewer people. But more importantly, it’s his push for deregulation.
Elon Musk has said things like “We should get rid of all these regulations.” How does deregulation affect you?
Are We Repeating History?
The 2008 mortgage foreclosure crisis was deregulation. That’s Wall Street running wild. Now, let’s back up for a second. Ever go on spring break? Daytona Beach or whatever? Back in the day, I went to Cancun and Jamaica since that is where my college, FIU, students would go.
What happens when you’re at that age and there’s no supervision? You ran wild. You did whatever you wanted. Self-policing didn’t work. Having a beer for breakfast, whatever crazy thing you did during spring break—this is the same thing. It’s Wall Street running wild.
If there’s no supervision, if there’s no adult in the room, they’re not going to do things that benefit others. They’re going to do things that benefit them, and we saw that with the mortgage foreclosure crisis. As mortgage brokers would say, anybody with a pulse, anybody breathing, was going to get a mortgage, and they were being put into mortgages they couldn’t afford.
The documents were not being explained, and all of a sudden, you have an interest-only mortgage, and it blows up a few years later. Now your mortgage has doubled overnight since you have to pay the principal as well.
All that happened at the same time, hence the mortgage foreclosure crisis. What did that do to property values? They tanked. I got rid of my home because of it. It wasn’t worth keeping, so I let it go into foreclosure. Did I have any idea this was going to happen to me? Of course not. But that’s what happens with deregulation.
It affected property values in certain areas like Naples, FL, where homes lost as much as 70-80% of it’s value. I think Miami was 50%. So it affects you because if you were to get a home equity line of credit to renovate your house, you can’t do it anymore. Your home has lost 50-70% of its value. I knew people were ready to retire, which meant selling their home and downsizing, and now couldn’t. All of this affects you.
Now I’m going to get into another example of how this affects you. President Trump yesterday, meeting with Netanyahu, talked about rebuilding the Gaza Strip and that the U.S. would take over and build whatever he described. Now, let’s go back a little bit.
During President Trump’s first term, I think it was the Associated Press that took a screenshot of a news article saying Jared Kushner commented that it would be a great area to develop the Gaza Strip for tourism. We’re talking about the Gaza Strip here, not a little corridor along the East Coast of the United States like the boardwalk in New Jersey.
President Trump to Take Over the Gaza Strip
Jared Kushner has a long history with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. Netanyahu stayed at his father’s house. Netanyahu knows his father, who I believe was given some sort of cushy ambassadorship in Greece. Or was that Kimberly Guilfoyle? Either way, he’s an ambassador to… I forgot where, but staying at a palace. So, an easy gig if you can get it. But they go way back.
Now, how does this affect you? Well, corruption is always going to affect you. Corruption profits don’t trickle down, right? There’s a word from the 80s—”trickle-down economics.” It never trickles down to you and me; it never does. That stays up at the top. What comes down, you don’t want to know.
But construction contracts, lucrative contracts for rebuilding the Gaza Strip, have we seen that before? Yeah, Bush, Cheney, Halliburton. Big contracts, no-bid contracts, for redeveloping the area of Iraq that they destroyed. Good work if you can get it, right? Blow up a place and then come in, fix it, and get paid for it. It’s brilliant financially when you think about it.
Why would this be any different, especially if there’s a history between Netanyahu and the Kushner family? Kushner, of course, married into the Trump family, so it’s very incestuous, isn’t it?
Now, how does that affect you? During that time, I remember it was difficult to get concrete. I had to pay off a guy at Home Depot because even trying to get a bag of concrete was impossible. So I paid a guy $20 and asked him to contact me every time concrete gets delivered.
I was jumping to the front of the line, and I had to pay for it, which cost me more money. But all that concrete was being shipped out to Iraq for the rebuilding, and I needed concrete for my fence posts.
Read the history of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, and the No bid contracts. I mean, literally, a Coke was $5. Halliburton was buying everything, marking it back up, and selling it back, so their profit margin was astronomical.
It was well known that back then, secretaries were making $100,000 a year. I had a friend who thought about going out there as a police officer. He didn’t do it, but he knew one year of work would have paid off his mortgage. They were earning a fortune, but they were paying a fortune for everything, too.
That shortage, whether it’s concrete or lumber, and with lumber coming now from Canada, which is, of course, getting taxed higher because of these tariffs, means construction materials cost more, and concrete costs more. And now we’re sending it overseas to rebuild an area that’s been destroyed because of corruption between two heads of government, which creates a shortage. And when there’s a shortage, what happens? The price goes up. The law of supply and demand.
Be Informed. Be Prepared
So what’s the point of all these podcasts I’m doing? Just that. For you. So you’re not shocked when you go somewhere and wonder, “Why does this cost more now?” So it makes sense to cut back until we figure it out. Of course, there’s going to be a shortage, which leads to increased prices.
I can tell you, fence posts at Home Depot have been climbing steadily for a while now. I think I started paying $6.90 if I remember correctly, and now it’s costing $9.00. Doesn’t really mean much if it’s one post, but if you have to buy 50 posts and you’re paying $2 to $3 more for each, you just spent an additional $100 to $150.
It’s all these little things that I want you to pay attention to. That was the whole point. The media focuses on the hot topic today, but there’s a lot in between, especially when it comes to your personal finances, your economy, your bottom line, your pocket, and your wallet, that they’re not going to discuss. That’s why I hope to fill in the gap.
The reason I say this is just to keep you informed. It’s not just, “Oh, look, President Trump says the country is going to rebuild Gaza.” It’s going beyond the headlines, the corruption, and ask yourself one simple question: How does this affect me?
When you read about the FBI purge—up to 6,000, up to 1/5 of the department potentially being replaced or fired—that’s going to affect someone’s bottom line.
The Department of Education—I wrote about this maybe 2-3 months ago. How’s it going to affect student loans? It’s probably going to get transferred to another department, and they will be far more aggressive in collections.
That’s why I’ve always asked, is now the time to buy a new car, because you’re concerned about the Trump tariffs? Your grocery bills go up, your utilities go up. People up north are getting letters from their utility company saying that their costs are going to go up because Canada provides energy to the northern part of the United States, like Maine. And, of course, the lumber, which I’ve mentioned before. All those little things tied together ultimately will affect you.
That’s the important message—how is this going to affect you? I’ll give you one more example before I go here. If you get rid of 6,000 FBI agents, background checks take almost up to two years.
You know you don’t want any clown working at the FBI, so it should be a thorough investigation. But if you get rid of 6,000 agents just like that, imagine doing that in a police force. You have to replace those agents somehow. They’re doing a lot of good work out there. Whether investigating financial crimes or infiltrating a white supremacy group, they get pulled out, and we already know how that’s going to end.
Not only is it a national security threat, which again is going to affect your money, your bottom line, and your pocket. But we saw this once before, too. In my hometown, Miami, during the cocaine era of the ’80s, there was no one to stop it. What happened. More cops were hired, without background checks. The results? Rampant corruption.
So they were hiring anybody off the street who came in, including individuals with criminal records. Now the criminals had badges.
And so it’s the same thing. If there are fewer FBI agents out on the street, we are less safe. That is not good economically, and obviously, it’s not good for us in any way when it comes to our protection. The bottom line is that it all affects you.
Next time you read an article about an FBI purge or rebuilding the Gaza Strip, Halliburton 2.0 with President Trump this time, ask yourself, “Will this affect me?” That’s how you get prepared for what might be coming down the road.
Alright, any questions or comments, let me know. Thank you for joining me for my morning coffee, Professor Alex. I’ll have another one out tomorrow. Like I said, I wanted to do one topic every day. Seems impossible these days, but I’ll try.
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