Job policies made by the Donald Trump administration will send members of the public to an early death, according to a prize-winning economist.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman believes the president and his team did very little to ease job growth worries, and even with the recent report of better-than-expected numbers, there is still a growing concern the Trump team has yet to tackle. The economist called this period one of stagnation and believes that if it goes on any longer, people will die.
Krugman wrote in his Substack, "This effect on the number of healthcare workers means, in turn, that increased immigration leads to lower senior mortality, and conversely that blocking immigration and deporting foreign-born workers will increase deaths among older Americans.
"A back of the envelope calculation using Grabowski et al’s numbers suggests that reducing the immigrant population by one million immigrants, which is what Stephen Miller wants to do every year, would lead to around 15,000 extra deaths per year among U.S. seniors.
"Which brings me back to the stunning stagnation of job growth that has already taken place on Trump’s watch. Trump’s minions would have you believe that near-zero job growth is fine because immigration has plunged — even though they assured us that this wouldn’t happen.
"But the reality is that the war on immigrants, in addition to being a moral and civil liberties nightmare, will make native-born Americans poorer — and send thousands of us to an early grave."
There is further bad news for the Trump administration too, as Krugman argues that the steady job growth seen in the last month is a statistical anomaly.
He wrote, "If you read the details of the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it actually said that its central estimate was 130,000 jobs, with the true number lying between 7,700 and 152,000 (the 90 percent confidence interval that accompanies all its estimates).
"And for technical reasons not worth going into here, the true range of uncertainty is even bigger. Basically BLS estimates the level of employment based on a sample subject to sampling error, which makes the estimated change over any given month extremely noisy."
