birth rates might go up because times get harder and abortion is illegal... but childhood/infant deaths, deaths from preventable communicable disease, and deaths from exposure to occupational hazards and accidents will all go up
deregulation, dismantling EPA, FDA, NIOSH, medical and scientific research, education. and most importantly, reducing the federal workforce by a couple hundred thousand people who work directly on keeping Americans healthy and safe... is going to have consequences.
I suspect life is going to get much more brutal and short for the next couple generations, assuming we survive that long amidst climate multi crises and wars for resources that are increasingly more expensive to find and extract. so while some people might have a few more kids to work in the slave pits, the life expectancy declines among the 99% is going more than counter act it.
besides, the population growth in America is expected to go net negative by 2033 without sustained immigration, and is rapidly decelerating globally.
great analysis. worth the time to finish and absorb. it's not enough for them to dismantle "woke capitalism", they are reshaping the notions of what the state is and using it to clear the way for a new economic order which a select few capitalists control.
when the state has become so captured by private interests, whoever controls the state can use it to carve out their own fiefdoms. this may be the beginning of an era where cabals of elites take turns scorching the earth, vying for supremacy using government as a bludgeon against each other.
It is becoming clearer by the day that the war on “woke capitalism” was more than just theater. Trump’s minions really are prepared to take down whole economic sectors—the very summits of neoliberal capitalism—to elevate their own faction of private investment partners, company founders, and controlling shareholders.
How far the war on “woke capitalism” can be pursued without provoking an all-out recession (or intra-capitalist revolt) remains to be seen. What we can be sure of, however, is that Trump’s business allies will be spared the DOGE austerity treatment. As Musk’s raid on the Treasury and Trump’s attempts to interfere with the Federal Reserve make clear, libertarians don’t actually want to abolish the state, much less the massive fiscal and monetary powers embodied in the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. Instead, they want to drastically narrow the scope of beneficiaries to a small group of ultrawealthy private capitalists (company founders or controlling owners) and private fund managers in the world of crypto, security, real estate, and fossil fuels. This group of people is so small that we know their names; their faces are literally stamped onto their own privately issued coins, which will no doubt require propping up by the Federal Reserve in due course. Rarely has capitalist power been so personal, yet so massively inflated by the public purse.