Even holy sacred No Tax On Tips amen may not save you. (Photo: Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
At a rally in 2018, Dean Heller, the former Republican U.S. senator from Nevada (remember him?) infamously said to Donald Trump “everything you touch turns to gold.”
Well, everything Trump touches certainly turns to … something.
When Trump was sworn in as president last month, many of the economic fundamentals in the U.S. were (and in some instances still are, for the moment) really quite strong.
Inflation had been brought to heel. Wage growth was higher than inflation, as it had been since February 2023. Consumer sentiment was on the upswing. Business was optimistic. The Fed was on course to continue lowering rates.
Child care, housing, rising climate impact mitigation costs, a dysfunctional insurance industry … a lot of big problems still need to be aggressively addressed. But the underlying conditions that, aided by some policymaking willpower, might allow the U.S. economy to address those problems were pretty sound.
Now, not even six weeks later, concerns are growing both in number and intensity about the health, future, and stability of the U.S. economy, as the result of the reckless acts and malevolent blundering of Trump and his imp without portfolio, Elon Musk.
“There’s more uncertainty than I think is widely appreciated,” Michael Strain, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute told the New York Times this week. “All the uncertainty around trade policy, uncertainty around some of the things that the Department of Government Efficiency is doing, I think will have a chilling effect on investment plans and expansion plans.”
The erosion in economic confidence had been telegraphed before Trump was sworn in for his second term.
In Nevada, a state which always gets hit harder than most when big bad national things happen, forecasters who set the parameters for the state budget were told in December that the Trump administration could bring oodles of uncertainty and dread to Nevada’s economy and state budget revenues.
A few weeks later, and a few days before Trump was sworn in, an S&P Global Ratings outlook cautioned investors that “A slowing economy could pressure regional gaming revenue and spending in Las Vegas”
“We expect 2025 to be another year of muted regional gaming revenue growth as consumer spending weakens and unemployment rises,” the report said.
Among the culprits S&P cited for the industry’s sluggish outlook are “tariff and immigration policies that raise the cost of imports and reduce labor supply, increasing input costs and wages and hurting discretionary consumption.”
The dispiriting S&P outlook for the gaming industry was released before Musk, acting on equal parts ignorance and arrogance, had begun clumsily rooting in Treasury, Social Security, and IRS data while also kick-starting what will soon show up as a spike in unemployment.
Needless to say, economic anxiety, to borrow a much-misused and deservedly maligned phrase, has only become more pronounced since Trump and Musk took the reins on January 20.
The first week of this month, during a legislative hearing, Democratic state Sen. Dina Neal urged state officials and fellow legislators “to take a step back” from a discussion of dozens of budget amendments for a moment to survey the broader view.
“We’re built on individuals coming to Nevada (and) spending their money,” she said. If they don’t come, “we don’t get the gaming money, we don’t get the sales tax money.”
And the reason people might not come is “they’re not understanding what is going to happen in this environment,” Neal added, referencing the Musk & Trump Show, by then not even three weeks old.
‘Like nobody’s ever seen before’
Last week, a closely watched report on consumer sentiment found it at the lowest it’s been since Nov. 2023. The report also found consumers expect inflation to run at 3.5% over the next five years, the most dismal public outlook on inflation since 1995.
This week, a piece published by the Morningstar financial services firm that aimed to calm the “wave of uncertainty” among investors resorted to offering emotional self-help, positing that “processing our uncertainty — or rather, being comfortable with that emotional and psychological state” can actually be good for you, in a makes-you-stronger sort of way.
In the meantime, “perhaps invest in defense and consumer-staples stocks,” the article advised.
Unfortunately, Morningstar did not suggest what if any investments might be safe when the rule of law has been eliminated.
Things are getting so shaky that even investments backed by the coin of the realm, i.e. Trump’s brand, are collapsing. The meme coin he started selling three days before his inauguration so that people could give him — not his campaign or Republican causes, but him personally — millions of dollars directly, skyrocketed in value to $15 billion. Now it has plummeted to $2.7 billion. (To be fair, that could have been merely the result of a merry fintech prank orchestrated by Musk; boys will be boys, after all.)
Of course not everyone is feeling blue about Trumponomics. His mass deportation vision, if the policy is ever carried out with the same gusto as the administration’s public relations campaign about it, promises to wreak havoc on the U.S. labor force and economy. But it presents “unprecedented opportunities” to the private prison industry.
So along with food and weapons, private prison companies can be added to the list of possible Trump-era sound investments — an economic tryptich of an America made great again, as it were.
This is the second time Trump has inherited a strong economy.
He could have done nothing, except one thing that he’s actually quite good at: falsely taking taking credit. He routinely does that, and more or less half the county laps it up.
Alas, he’s Trump, so he went in, you know, a different direction.
Even some Trump supporters are beginning to worry he and Musk will inflict damage on the economy in a manner, to borrow one of Trump’s favorite phrases, “like nobody’s ever seen before.”
If the concerns prove real, the economy could plunge into a downward spiral of misery and despair that, if history is a guide, will be more miserable and desperate in Nevada than in other states. (And no, Nevada, holy sacred No Tax On Tips amen will not save you.)
What a waste. The risk could have been avoided relatively easily. All Trump would have had to do was… nothing.
Now even if Trump grew out of his quirky fascination with tariffs, abandoned his base-juicing mass deportation spectacle, and stopped letting the puerile Musk treat the United States government like a sandbox, Trump would still have a lot to do to try to clean up his messes.
His administration would have to identify the shock-and-awe scope and scale of American carnage he and Musk have inflicted already, and determine how (and if) it can be, if not rectified, at least mitigated.
Unfortunately, Trump built his career bullying people, suing people, and conning people. Nothing in his history suggests he has the desire, let alone the skillset, to fix what he’s broken.