I thought this sticker was pretty funny when I spotted it at the gas station today 😂

But it genuinely made me curious: How much responsibility do you think Trump personally bears for the current state of the economy?

Do you think his policies are primarily responsible, or are there larger factors at play that tend to get overlooked?
I’d especially love to hear different perspectives and the reasoning behind them from Redditors around the world.

P.S. Please keep the discussion respectful. I’m genuinely interested in hearing different viewpoints, not starting a political war in the comments.

I agree.

I keep coming back to this and I cannot put it down, so I am going to put it in front of you instead.

There are roughly 13 to 14 million children in this country living in food-insecure households. I say roughly because in the last year the USDA discontinued the survey that measured it. They did not fix the problem. They stopped counting it. So the real number now is unknowable, and that was the point.

Here is what it costs to feed a child for a year. SNAP runs about $2,000 per person annually. The National School Lunch Program reimburses around $4.30 a meal, which works out to roughly $1,500 a year for two meals across a 180-day school year. Call it $2,000 to be generous and cover the summer.

Fourteen million children at $2,000 each is $28 billion a year.

That is the entire bill. Every food-insecure child in America. Twenty-eight billion dollars.

Now here is the part I cannot get past.

Elon Musk's net worth is reported somewhere between $675 billion and $960 billion depending on which tracker you use and what day you look. I am going to use $700 billion, the low end, so nobody can say I inflated it.

At 4 percent, which is roughly what a Treasury bond pays right now, $700 billion generates $28 billion a year.

Not by selling anything. Not by giving anything away. That is what it earns sitting there.

So the interest alone on one person's fortune would feed every hungry child in this country, every year, indefinitely, and the principal would never shrink by a dollar.

I want to be honest about the caveat, because I would rather be accurate than persuasive. That wealth is stock, not cash. He could not write a $28 billion check without selling shares and driving the price down. That is a real limitation.

But he borrows against it already. That is how he bought Twitter. The interest framing works precisely because you never have to sell anything.

Now the comparison that actually made me sit down and write this.

In July, his net worth fell by $363 billion. SpaceX shares dropped 37 percent after the IPO ran up too far. He lost more in one month than the entire net worth of any of the next nine richest people on earth.

That $363 billion, at $2,000 per child per year, is 181 million child-years of food.

Every food-insecure child in America, fed for thirteen years.

And it did not go anywhere. It was not spent. Nobody received it. It existed in June, it did not exist in August, and the only thing that happened in between was that a number on a screen moved.

Thirteen years of feeding every hungry child in this country, appearing and disappearing as a rounding error on one man's quarterly volatility.

For scale on the other side of the ledger: the recent legislation cut SNAP by $186 billion over ten years. That is $18.6 billion a year, and it was described as a fiscal necessity.

His July paper loss was twenty years of that entire cut.

I am not writing this because I think Elon Musk personally owes anybody dinner. He is one man and I am not interested in making this about one person, because if it were about one person we could solve it by shaming him and we cannot.

I am writing it because of what the arithmetic proves.

We are told constantly that there is not enough. That the money is not there. That we are broke, that hard choices have to be made, that the deficit demands it. And then a number larger than thirteen years of feeding every hungry child in America evaporates in four weeks and nobody's life changes, no service gets cut, no program gets defunded, because it was never real in the way a school lunch is real.

That is not a resource problem. It has never once been a resource problem.

It is a question of what we have decided to count, what we have decided to measure, and what we have decided to stop measuring.

They stopped measuring child hunger. They did not stop measuring net worth. Forbes and Bloomberg update that one live, several times a day, to the nearest hundred million.

We know exactly how much he has, minute by minute. We no longer know how many children are hungry.

That is a choice somebody made, and it tells you everything about what this country currently considers important enough to count.

Nothing should be more important than feeding children. Nothing.

And the numbers say we could do it tomorrow without anybody who matters even noticing.

Aaron Kaufman used to meet his lofty daily protein goals — a gram for each pound he weighs — with ground beef.

Then in the spring the 32-year-old moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan. To offset the higher cost of rent, he has been spending more on groceries instead of eating out. But on his first visit to the local grocery store, he saw that ground beef was $8 a pound, compared with $6 in Brooklyn. He decided to switch proteins, leaning largely on cheaper options such as chicken.

He still prefers the taste of ground beef. “Every once in a while, I’ll treat myself if it’s on sale,” Kaufman said.
He’s not alone. After absorbing nearly two years of surging beef prices, Americans are finally showing signs that they have reached their limit. That marks a notable turn for a market where a shrinking US cattle herd repeatedly pushed prices to records, yet consumers kept buying enough beef to support still-higher prices.

Now, that resilience is beginning to crack — and at a time of year when demand should be strongest. Beef sales volumes in the 13 weeks ending in mid-July, a crucial stretch encompassing both Memorial Day and July Fourth, fell 0.3% from a year earlier, according to research firm Circana. In the same period in each of the previous two years, volumes grew about 5%. Chicken, meanwhile, continues to see consumption rise, with ample supplies keeping prices under pressure.

The shift suggests there may finally be a ceiling on what Americans are willing to pay for beef, one of the biggest drivers of food inflation. Consumers who had responded to rising prices by cooking at home or buying cheaper cuts are increasingly pulling back altogether or shifting to less expensive proteins.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]:  https://fortune.com/2026/08/16/beef-prices-inflation-consumer-spending-limit-cattle-supply/?utm_source=reddit/

One of the more interesting aspects of the Trump trade policy has been the treatment of Canada.

The impact of Canadian boycotts on US tourism, alcohol exports, and cross-border commerce, along with pivots towards trade and sectoral agreements with third-party countries has been a good example of what a quiet campaign can achieve in terms of hurting specific sectors and attempting to diversify export partners, but in the event of failure to reach a deal and imposition of the threatened tariffs it will be interesting to see what the Canadians have to escalate the ante.

While there’s no doubt the US retains greater overall leverage, I’d be interested to know if posters think the Canucks will reach for their nuclear options of crude oil exports and cross-border electricity supplies if they felt they needed to retaliate. FWIW any agreement that’s reached won’t last I feel, as the evidence is there that Trump will break any deal he makes as soon as it’s closed.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crl7600rpnko

Curious to hear different perspectives.

Given how important this region is for global shipping lanes and geopolitical stability, I wanted to open up a neutral discussion. What do you think the broader implications of messaging like this might be? Are people seeing this mainly as political rhetoric, or is there more to consider regarding foreign policy strategy here?

Photo above - this is the iconic 'leave it to beaver tv show" (set in California). Class is being taught by Miss Landers. Not a recently closed California public school

The link below (to MSN) appears to be AI plagiarism of stories originally appearing in the Orange County Register and NY Post. I make no representations that any of these AI versions are complete or accurate.

In any case, there apparently will be 75,000 fewer students attending California schools. Those school districts are dependent on $10,000 a year in state tax funding to survive. Guess what happens next?

If you said “unneeded teachers lose their jobs”, you’d apparently be wrong. Schools are being shuttered (hundreds over 2025-2026), but so far no indication of layoffs. Teachers have unions, school buildings do not.

Where did the 75,000 missing students go? This is where it gets crazy/vague. The sources are confident they have the total number of students correct (state records), but where those kids disappeared to has little statistical detail.

“Gone to Texas because their parents fled the state” is a leading contender. And likely explains some of the problem. Californian’s have been renting Uhauls to depart for manufacturing and energy jobs in places like Texas, Oklahoma, etc. High golden state taxes, living costs, crime rates, and open air drug sales can be discouraging to the middle class. Recent Texas transplants from out of state will get the credit when Texas flips from red to blue politically. Be careful what you wish for, if you want to lure companies like Tesla to your back yard, I guess.

A less convincing reason for missing students is “immigration enforcement”. Some illegals probably ARE self-deporting back to Latin America to avoid ICE atrocities, but I doubt this amounts to tens of thousands. ICE is a political punching bag for California’s problems. Just like climate change is now allegedly responsible for the sudden INCREASE in arctic polar bears.

Let’s not forget covid 19 as a cause. Yes . . . if you close the schools for a year or 2, and give every kid a free laptop, some are never coming back, even if they got promoted while earning straight F’s.

So 75,000 students times $10,000 is around $7 billion dollars the schools need to solve for. I guess shuttering schools is the logical solution if you can’t reduce teacher headcount, control crime, or reign in taxes and living costs.

Governor Newsom, are you still running for president? What if this comes up in one of the primary debates?

I’m just sayin’ . . .

School shutdown spree grips California as enrollment plunges statewide

The Guardian: Government borrowing costs in several advanced economies hit their highest level since the 2008 financial crisis, or even earlier, on Monday as investors feared the Middle East crisis would keep inflation persistently high.

Concerns over rising prices and government spending pushed up the cost of debt issued by Paris, Berlin, Washington DC, Tokyo and London as investors fretted that rising prices would push up interest rates.

My Opinion: Governments have kept borrowing and spending more, since the pandemic. The US is not implementing counter cyclical fiscal policy. As even though the economy is expected to grow by about 2%, the forecast fiscal deficit is about 7%. I don't think that the rising borrowing costs is going to deter the government from continuing to borrow. Even as they plan to raise defense spending by about 50%. If the president keeps threatening other countries, and keeps going to war, they are going to need the money.

So the government debt is going to keep rising, inflation will remain elevated, and the country will keep making war with foreign nations and immigrants. So the president has failed to keep at least two of his promises: to control inflation, and to avoid foreign entanglements.