Hiltzik

The youth movement among our political leaders, especially among Democrats, is in full cry. On the whole, this looks to be a positive inflection point in our political leadership, empowering a new generation of leaders advocating needed changes in the government’s relationship with its constituents.

But in some particulars it’s misplaced. As the smoke from the recent party primaries clears, it’s proper to take stock in what we’ve lost, alongside what we may gain from a changing of the guard.

For example, take Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.), 78, who was turfed out of his seat in his state’s Aug. 11 primary by his Democratic challenger, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, 47.

Given that Larson is in his 28th year as a member of congress, it sounds reasonable to suggest that it’s his time to go. But that means overlooking Larson’s most important role in the House, as a member of both the majority and (currently) the minority. And that’s his persistent campaign to preserve Social Security — indeed, to enhance it so it serves today’s workers as well or better than it has served Americans since its enactment in 1935.

There doesn’t seem to be much risk that Bronin’s election, which looks likely, will undermine the progressive faction in the House.

Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District, which Larson represents, is perhaps the bluest district in a blue state, and Bronin’s policy positions tick all the appropriate progressive boxes. But it will probably take years for Bronin to acquire the credibility on Social Security that Larson possessed, even assuming that he wishes to do so.

Larson’s instrument has been the Social Security 2100 Act, which he first introduced in 2017. The act has never passed, but in its draft versions it has embodied several principles that remain fundamental to the Democratic approach to Social Security.

Among them: augmenting benefits to the lowest-wage workers; providing coverage to those whose work has been outside the system, such as family caregivers; and raising Social Security taxes on the rich, who have increasingly avoided paying their fair share of the costs of this all-important antipoverty program. More on that in a moment.

Larson’s loss didn’t result from his championing Social Security. The thrust of Bronin’s campaign was almost entirely that Larson had grown too old in the job, and the path should be cleared for new blood (i.e., himself).

Nothing is new about the drive to bring fresh faces and fresh ideas into the political mainstream. Youth movements arise regularly in politics, especially in times of partisan discontent.

George Orwell, whose observations about the politics and mores of his time remain relevant to the present, wrote (in 1932) of the youth movement that erupted in Britain in 1918.

“At that time,” he wrote in “The Road to Wigan Pier,” his classic about class and economics, “there was, among the young, a curious cult of hatred of ‘old men.’ The dominance of ‘old men’ was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution from [Sir Walter] Scott’s novels to the House of Lords was derided merely because ‘old men’ were in favor of it.”

Orwell traced the phenomenon to Britain’s experience in World War I, which he wrote “had been conducted mainly by old men and had been conducted with supreme incompetence. By 1918 everyone under forty was in a bad temper with his elders, and the mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority.”

Today’s youth movement, which is concentrated among Democrats, has an analogous origin. It’s rooted in distaste for a politics that has impoverished a generation while filling the pockets of the wealthy.

In some cases, the need to usher superannuated politicians out the door is indisputable. A prime specimen was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.), whose mental and physical incapacities became manifest as she neared the end of her life; in 2023 she died in office at 90.

On the other hand, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), led her Democratic caucus with a firm hand as Speaker until she yielded the gavel in 2023 at age 82, having notched one of the most successful speakerships in history. (She’s not running for reelection this year.)

Joe Biden, whose apparently faltering faculties became a political talking point during his 2024 presidential reelection campaign, when he was 82 and was in the process of returning the U.S. economy to its pre-pandemic strength when he lost to Donald Trump — who at the age of 80 has been systematically dismantling Biden’s economic policies to the disadvantage of middle-class and working Americans.

Meanwhile, has anybody heard recently from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), age 84? He hasn’t been seen in public since mid-June. At the moment, he’s regarded as one of those politicians determined to hold on to their seats with what Orwell (him again) described as their “prehensile bottoms.”

As I wrote in 2023, when the age issue was all the rage, “concern-trolling about the advanced age of government leaders hasn’t always been a path to political success.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt cited a “hardening of the judicial arteries” in announcing his 1937 scheme to pack the Supreme Court, which involved shifting the politics of the court to the left by trying to force justices to retire when they reached the age of 70, or adding a justice to the court for every sitting justice who refused. FDR’s plan collapsed after it provoked widespread opposition, the most significant political failure of the New Deal.

That brings us back to the Social Security 2100 Act. The measure, which was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), isn’t perfect. In fact it has been revised at least three times, typically to address political wavelets that come and go.

In all versions, over time it would eliminate the cap on payroll taxes, which are currently limited to 12.4% on wage income up to a maximum of $184,500. That’s a maximum tax of $22,878, divided 50/50 between workers and their employers.

Because of the cap, the effective payroll tax rate on someone with income of $1 million falls to about 2.3%; in reality it’s even lower, because unearned income such as capital gains, interest and dividends, which constitute half or more of the income of wealthy households, isn’t taxed at all.

Originally, the bill called for raising the payroll tax rate by one-tenth of a percentage point a year, to an employer/employee combined 14.8% by the 2040. On the other hand, Larson would reduce the income tax on Social Security earnings, returning a bit to middle- and lower-income workers. Social Security’s actuaries calculated that Larson’s bill would ensure the program’s solvency for at least 75 years, but in practical terms into the almost limitless future.

The rate increase was dropped in subsequent versions, but it was supplanted by a 12.4% tax on net investment income for taxpayers with income over $400,000. That would guarantee the system’s solvency into the 2060s, the actuaries calculated.

Social Security’s advocates plainly could see Larson’s defeat coming. The day before the Connecticut primary, three of them published an op-ed calling Larson an “irreplaceable” asset to their cause. “When it comes to fighting for Social Security,” they wrote, “no one has worked harder than Rep. Larson.” They pointed out that the “Social Security 2100 Act earned in the last Congress support from over 90% of House Democrats, representing all corners of the Democratic coalition.”

Bronin hasn’t said anything specific about Social Security, beyond a campaign pledge that he’ll work for “strengthening” the program. I asked his campaign whether he had any details to offer, but didn’t get a reply. Larson, for his part, has reacted to his defeat with a gentlemanly call for all Democrats to come together to defeat Trump.

Unlike Republicans, who have spent decades slandering Social Security as an undeserved “entitlement” and suggesting that it’s responsible for federal budget deficits (impossible, as a matter of law) and sluggish economic growth (untrue, as a matter of fact), Democrats have worked to preserve it, if not always effectively.

In coming Congresses, Republicans will be offering all sorts of nostrums to “save” Social Security. History says that these will aim to impose benefit cuts on workers to protect the rich from higher taxes.

Will the Democrats stand fast against this long GOP campaign? With Larson’s defeat, they’ll be short one leader. Let’s hope the rest of the party keeps the faith.

Only a few days ago, Paramount Skydance’s planned $111-billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery appeared to be on the glide path to completion.

The deal, which would be the largest merger in Hollywood history, had won approval from several foreign governments and, on June 12, Justice Department antitrust regulators.

The Justice Department’s assent looked to be a major step toward fulfilling the ambitions of David Ellison, the son of multibillionaire tech tycoon Larry Ellison, to bring together Paramount and Warners, which owns CNN and CBS among other properties, under one roof.

The Justice Department’s action ignited suspicions that the Ellisons had profited from their support of President Trump. But it has turned out not to be the last word on the deal. The very next day, California and 11 other states filed a motion to block the merger, stepping in where the Justice Department chose not to tread.

“I will not let Warner Bros. and Paramount merge without a fight,” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said in announcing the states’ action. A hearing on the motion is scheduled for Friday in San Francisco federal court.

There’s more to this development than an effort to block Ellison’s attempt to repave the entertainment landscape for his own benefit, even though, as my colleague Meg James reports, the states’ motion “poses a major headache” for Ellison. It’s also a pointer toward a major restructuring of antitrust enforcement in the United States.

Customarily, state regulators have piggybacked on antitrust cases brought and managed by the federal government. The feds generally have greater resources than most individual states to conduct the investigations that can lead to antitrust lawsuits. States often have relied on the government to craft consistent and coherent theories of antitrust law to undergird their lawsuits.

But the Trump administration’s apparent pullback from aggressive legal pursuit of allegedly anti-competitive mergers has left a vacuum that states have moved to fill. That’s what’s driving their motion to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. deal.

Dating back to the first Trump term, California and other states have enacted new laws resembling federal statutes requiring merger proponents to provide detailed information about planned deals.

States also have filed their own lawsuits to challenge anticompetitive conduct by pharmacy benefit managers and algorithmic pricing that has driven up housing rents via alleged collusion.

States may have an advantage over the federal government in that their regulators can move faster on complex cases than the feds. That’s what happened in the fight against the proposed 2023 merger of supermarket companies Kroger and Albertsons, something that was widely feared to presage higher prices at the shelf.

Although the Federal Trade Commission moved to block the merger, so too did Oregon, Washington and nine other states in court. The companies called off the merger after a state court in Washington and a federal court in Oregon, ruling on that state’s lawsuit, simultaneously enjoined the merger on Dec. 10, 2024. One day later, Albertsons dropped the proposal.

Some supporters of effective antitrust enforcement suggest that the states’ involvement in these cases could be an effective counterweight to the mercurial approach taken toward enforcement under Trump, which seems to be driven by personal pique, as Paul Glastris, editor of the Washington Monthly, has written.

In 2017, Trump’s Justice Department sued to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, driven by Trump’s irritation over the coverage he received from CNN, which was owned by Time Warner. (I described the lawsuit as Trump’s doing the right thing for the wrong reason.) The merger eventually went through.

The best example of the states’ willingness to supplant the feds as antitrust enforcers in chief is the antitrust case against Live Nation Entertainment. The federal government and 30 states originally filed the case in 2024 in federal court in Manhattan. The lawsuit sought to break up Live Nation, which has controlled scores of top concert venues, in part by forcing it to divest Ticketmaster, the leading entertainment ticketing firm.

A few days after the trial began this spring, the Justice Department reached a settlement with Live Nation. The settlement led to accusations that the White House interfered in the Justice Department’s work on the case, including that Trump himself personally pushed for a settlement and that the deal was reached without the participation or even the knowledge of the Justice Department lawyers handling the case or of the state attorneys general who were participating. The White House referred my request for comment on these accusations to the Justice Department, which didn’t respond.

The states, asserting that the settlement wouldn’t cure Live Nation’s alleged violations of antitrust law, took over the lawsuit — and won. In mid-April, a federal jury found that Live Nation had maintained a monopoly over the live events business, exposing the company to the states’ claims of as much as $700 million in damages and a possible order that it sell Ticketmaster. The company says it will appeal.

The history of antitrust enforcement in the U.S. generally resembles the complaisant stance taken under Trump. Since the enactment of America’s first antitrust statute, the 1890 Sherman Act, industry has generally benefited from lax enforcement, in part because antitrust theory has been ever-changing. During the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt suspended antitrust enforcement so his National Recovery Administration could pursue its mandate to suppress industrial competition, which was thought to drive up prices and thereby foster the Great Depression.

The Supreme Court overturned the National Recovery Administration in 1935, though it had already lost credibility. Roosevelt responded in 1938 by appointing Thurman Arnold, a critic of existing antitrust theory, as the Justice Department’s antitrust chief. In his writings, Arnold implied that antitrust law as then interpreted was a fraud aimed at acclimating consumers to ever-larger business combinations through the pretense that “unfair” or “immoral” deals would be barred.

Arnold’s appointment marked what may have been the most productive period in antitrust enforcement. By the time he departed for a federal judgeship in 1943, he had brought more than 50% of all the cases brought under the Sherman Act in its half-century of existence. He broke the auto industry’s stranglehold on consumer auto lending, and started a case that concluded with the Hollywood studios’ forced divestment of their theater chains.

Since then, there have been a few notable antitrust successes, including the 1982 breakup of AT&T. That resulted from a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit launched in 1974. But the consolidation of major industries into fewer and fewer participants, especially in entertainment, has continued with very few roadblocks.

Occasionally, an aggressive enforcer comes into office. That happened under Lina Khan, whom President Biden appointed as chair of the Federal Trade Commission. (The FTC shares antitrust oversight with the Justice Department.)

Khan’s published academic work had taken aim at what she called the lax antitrust treatment of companies such as Amazon. Her argument was that antitrust enforcers’ focus on whether a monopolizing company brought consumers lower prices overlooked the longer-term consequences of giving companies the unfettered right to build market share at the expense of competitors and the free market.

Amazon “has evaded government scrutiny in part through fervently devoting its business strategy and rhetoric to reducing prices for consumers,” Khan wrote in a key article. Once it reached a critical mass, she argued, nothing would stop Amazon from extracting monopoly rents from consumers.

Khan’s aggressive stance on antitrust law earned her the enmity of targets such as Amazon and Facebook, which tried to force her to recuse herself from FTC cases against them. She refused, but due to corporate distaste for her policies, Trump replaced her as FTC chairman on his inauguration day last year.

The Paramount-Warner Bros. deal could be a key test of states’ authority and willingness to take over antitrust enforcement from the federal government. That’s because they’ll be fighting not only resistance from the merger partners, but the government’s conclusion that the deal poses no threat to consumers.

On the other hand, their case at least will be free of the suspicion that the government’s approval owed more to Trump’s friendship with the Ellison family than to sober, painstaking analysis of how reducing the number of big entertainment companies from five to four would be good for the rest of us.

Based on the words of President Trump, America is well on the way to becoming a “global superpower in manufacturing” — indeed, as he declared in a Father’s Day social media post, we are already experiencing the “BEST ECONOMY EVER.” (Capitalization’s his.)

Here’s what the government’s own statistics tell us: Manufacturing investment has crashed during his watch, with construction spending in the manufacturing sector down 26.4% from Trump’s inauguration through May, to $174.8 billion. That’s the lowest figure since February 2023, when the economy was in the midst of a post-pandemic recovery.

White House spokesman Kush Desai told me by email that “the last two jobs reports” showed manufacturing job growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a seasonally-adjusted decline of 2,000 manufacturing workers in May and a gain of 3,000 in June. But the June 2026 figure was 38,000 jobs, or about 0.3% below the level in June 2025, and 75,000 or about 0.6% below the level in January 2025, when Trump took office.

Desai said that “thanks to President Trump’s proven agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and tax cuts, American manufacturing will continue to rebound.”

There’s little mystery about what has come between Trump’s ambition and the real world. To a large extent it’s Trump’s economic program, particularly his tariff policies and, more recently, his war with Iran. Those have injected a level of uncertainty for corporate managements pondering whether to spend money on expansion that they haven’t had to confront in years.

The tariffs and the war have driven up manufacturers’ costs for raw materials and overseas shipping. The general economic atmosphere doesn’t help. U.S. gross domestic product growth came in at a 2.1% annualized rate in the first quarter of this year, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta expects it to have fallen to 1.3% in the second quarter ended June 30.

Meanwhile, the University of Michigan consumer confidence index reached 44.8 in May, its lowest level ever (though it improved to 49.5 in June). Wages have been rising modestly, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but those gains have been eaten up by higher prices, especially for gasoline and food.

To put things another way, the actual figures show the U.S. economy to be sputtering, and the “vibe economy” as measured by consumer confidence is doing even worse.

Now that Trump’s second term is about to reach its 18-month mark, let’s unpack the factors causing the discrepancy between his ambitions and claims, and the reality.

Trump declared economic victory just as his term was starting. On March 20, 2025, he proclaimed a “manufacturing renaissance” in the U.S. That was based on what he said were “trillions of dollars in new investments” he had “already secured in tech-based manufacturing.”

A White House statement said “the list of manufacturing wins is endless.” The provided list was a roster of announcements, not groundbreakings, much less completed ventures.

Business executives quite properly have taken these pledges with mounds of salt. “Announcements are what people say they’re going to do, but dollars spent is what’s actually happening,” Didi Caldwell, chief executive of a firm that helps companies find factory sites, told the Financial Times. “From where we’re standing, we are not seeing signs of a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.”

Indeed, at least some of these announcements have had the flavor of performative efforts to satisfy Trump’s amour propre and extract government concessions.

For example, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook appeared with Trump at the White House in August to announce a $600-billion U.S. spending plan to take place over four years. That was a $100-billion increase over its previously-announced program.

More to the point, however, it incorporated spending with suppliers that Apple had been working with for years. Mentioned in the news announcement was a commitment to buy cover glass for iPhones from Corning. But Corning has been supplying that glass since the first iPhone appeared in 2007. In any case, the announcement appeared to secure a commitment from Trump to exempt Apple from tariffs imposed on imported chips.

Apple’s announcement Wednesday that it will spend $30 billion to buy chips from Broadcom was similarly ambiguous. The announcement didn’t provide details about the terms of the commitment or the timing of its expenditures. I asked Apple for details and whether the deal was related to a desire to remain in Trump’s favor, but didn’t hear back.

A similar phenomenon occurred during Trump’s first term; Trump had built much of his 2016 presidential campaign on a promise to increase manufacturing jobs in the United States. He blamed shrinkage in the manufacturing sector on trade agreements such as NAFTA and the policies of the Chinese, and took credit when an American manufacturer agreed to create or save jobs in the United States.

As I reported in 2019, many of those arrangements turned out to be exaggerated or bogus, or predated Trump’s claim. Some disappeared as soon as public attention turned elsewhere, or were outweighed by job cuts made elsewhere by the same companies.

Trump’s tariffs appear to have had a direct effect on manufacturing employment in the U.S. Since Trump’s inauguration, the manufacturing sector has shed about 75,000 jobs, or 0.6%. After April 2, 2025, when he announced global “liberation day” tariffs supposedly as a response to years of unfair treatment of American exports, the decline picked up pace, with a shrinkage of 68,000 manufacturing jobs.

The Supreme Court invalidated those tariffs in February, but others are still in place, including tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and on goods from China. Nor has he ceased threatening partners with trade wars. As recently as Tuesday, he said he would cut off all trade with Spain because of that country’s disagreement with him over its defense spending and its criticism of his Iran war.

As it happens, Spain is one of the few countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus. That means that any cutoff, which trade experts think will be unlikely, would come at a cost to the U.S.

One might have hoped that Trump had learned a lesson from his first-term trade war with China. That conflict provoked a sharp contraction in the manufacturing economy, with the Institute for Supply Management’s purchasing managers index falling to 49.1 by mid-2019. (A reading below 50 signifies contraction.)

The ISM index began to recover toward the end of Trump’s term but fell again during the pandemic. Lately it has been falling again, to 53.3 in June from 54 in May.

The Iran war is another deadweight on domestic manufacturing. That’s partially the consequence of blockages of the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial thoroughfare not only for middle eastern oil, but also for such industrial inputs as fertilizer and aluminum. Cement, concrete, olive oil and spices are also among commodities produced in the region that use the strait as an outlet to reach the outside world.

Uncertainties in the region, tensions between the U.S. and China, and heightened concerns over the safety of shipping overall have driven up shipping costs between the far east and the U.S. The price of shipping a benchmark 40-foot container from China to the West Coast has nearly quadrupled to $6,687 now from about $1,700 just before the Iran war began, according to an index maintained by the cargo firm Freightos — even though shipping prices typically decline during this time of year.

There can be little doubt that the U.S. would benefit from an industrial policy — if it’s coherent. China supplanted America as the world’s leading exporter of manufactured goods in 2010, and the gap has only widened since then. China’s dominance may be hard to reverse, as it’s built on lower labor costs and transport infrastructure that enjoys focused government investment.

Tariffs could be a component of a new industrial policy, but Trump’s tariffs aren’t rationally geared to protecting domestic industries that need protection. They’re expressions of his whims, and as such they’re totally ineffective. If there are government investment policies targeting industries that need assistance, they’re not apparent to economists or industrialists.

Trump can talk as much as he likes about a golden age for U.S. manufacturing, but from his first term through this one, it’s nothing but talk. And talk, of course, is cheap.