Paul Krugman

And we're all looking at

The soft data, the private surveys, all of which none of which says that the economy is falling off a cliff, but a lot of which is at least a little bit alarming.

And I'm particularly struck.

I've been looking at conference board on our jobs, you know, plentiful or are they hard to get?

And that number hasn't fallen off a cliff.

People feel really, really bad about job prospects right now in ways that the BLS numbers weren't showing before, but does suggest a kind of frozen labor market in which people, you know, if you're young, just getting in, or if you've been laid off, it's a really tough world out there.

So this is going to be, I mean, it doesn't look like

It doesn't look like September 2008 with everything falling off a cliff, but it does kind of feel like this is starting to feel like a tough economy.

And as I said, people, ordinary people are extremely pessimistic about the state of affairs.

No, it's a terrible idea.

I mean, we have an enormous budget deficit.

The tariff revenue, which is, by the way, coming in substantially below what Trump administration officials said it was going to be.

It's substantial, but it's not what they said it would be.

It just makes a small dent in the enormous deficit.

The fundamental fact is that the U.S.

government is spending in ways that, you know, I've been a long-time...

dove in terms of concerns about federal debt.

And I don't think we're facing a crisis anytime soon, but we are certainly running a, you know, given the absence of a national emergency, given the absence of a pandemic or a war, to be running deficits this large is just irresponsible.

And the idea that, hey, we're going to take one source of revenue and use it to hand out money when we're meanwhile going ever deeper into federal debt, that's deeply irresponsible.