I don't like making predictions. I have before. I have sometimes been right and sometimes been wrong. Right now, I prefer to focus on single, discrete things that I can write about that hopefully can form a mosaic. I also don't want to make predictions because they just feed into the self-feeding of the media talking about the media, etc. But I do want to make a short and simple prediction. In fact, I already have, it is right there in the title. Pretty self-explanatory, right?
Ooops, but I made an error in there. No article before "summer". I am tired. Sorry.
Let me explain a little more: right now the major socioeconomic problem facing most people across the United States is the high cost of housing, education and health care. Although there has been some recent shortages in things like egg prices due to avian flu, consumer goods are not generally a problem for most people. You probably have enough USB cables and rice. None of that is a surprise, and I wrote about it on here over 20 years ago. Apparently no one read my writeups and took notice and fixed the US economy.
Anyway, so no matter what Donald Trump says or does, there are some pretty deep ways that the United States economy has changed in the past few decades. Lots of those ways are making people unhappy, and will probably continue to make people more unhappy. The process for getting education, housing and health care is difficult, formal and expensive, and those issues feed on each other: having trouble finding an apartment makes finding a job difficult, and having trouble finding a job makes finding an apartment difficult. And all of those things have been building for years and getting embedded into the culture, like dirt ground into a carpet, until it is normal for property management companies to require three times the rent, and for "entry level jobs" to require a Master's Degree and two years experience.
(NB: in case anyone is wondering, I am not writing that previous paragraph from a theoretical point of view)
So let us set aside the cultural issues and even the morality of everything that Donald Trump and his cohorts will do, and instead ask a simple question: even under optimal circumstances, will any of the changes he make fix issues for the broad middle class, at any point in the near future? By this summer, will middle-class parents be happy that their children have earned enough money at a summer job to pay for college in the fall? Or that, without a college education, they are making enough money to move out of their home into adequate housing. Will those same middle-class parents also be happy to know that their own parents, getting on in years, can safely retire and get the medical care they need, especially if they need memory care? These were the structural issues that supposedly led to the populist revolt that led to the results of the 2024 election?
There are chances that certain things will smooth out: interest rates and supply chains and what have you. The price of eggs goes down, employment picks up without inflation, and it becomes relatively stable. And people might not be fuming. Maybe it can stay in place, and the culture war sops will keep people content. I can't guess about how people will react. Those predictions always go awry. But there seems to be a lot of resentment, and people have short patience, even if things don't get worse. By this summer, it will be apparent that the long term structural problems of the middle class, which are quite simple, the cost of health care, housing and education, are not changing. And what will people's reactions be then?
Please check in on this writeup on August 13, 2025, and tell me how my prediction went.