America, Trump's Killing It

Food prices are soaring. Jobs are evaporating. And the E.P.A. now says the value of a human life is "zero."

Trump insists everything's going great, but anyone who needs food, a job, or clean air and water may disagree.

And it's not just me saying it.

Here are excerpts (plus gift links) to three recent articles from The New York Times that highlight how Trump is making food more expensive, jobs near-impossible to find, and the environment a lot more deadly.

"Food prices climbed sharply in December"

As Madeleine Ngo wrote on 13 January 2026:

Food prices climbed sharply in December, providing little relief to consumers at the grocery store... The 0.7 percent jump in food prices from a month earlier was the largest one-month increase in grocery prices since October 2022... Food categories that have gotten more expensive include fruits and vegetables, which saw their prices rise 0.5 percent from the previous month. Coffee prices climbed 1.9 percent, and costs for cereal and bakery products increased 0.6 percent... Beef and veal prices... were up 16.4 percent from a year earlier.

"Policy decisions" have led to a “cooling” in the labor market

As Tony Romm and Ben Casselman wrote on 9 January 2026:

The labor market added about 584,000 jobs over the past 12 months, the slowest pace of job growth since 2020... Employers created more than 2 million jobs in 2024, the final year under President Joseph R. Biden Jr... Employers posted fewer job openings and offered smaller raises to workers. More people also reported working part-time because they couldn’t find full-time positions. Virtually all of the job growth... in 2025... occurred in health care... manufacturing, a major focus for Mr. Trump, ended 2025 on a dour note, with the industry having lost about 68,000 jobs over the last 12 months on a seasonally adjusted basis... “Policy decisions — immigration, tariff, trade — are probably central to the slowdown that we’ve seen, particularly if you’re comparing it to the last two years or so,” said Olu Sonola, the head of U.S. economic research for Fitch Ratings. Mr. Sonola said he expected that “cooling” in the labor market to continue into 2026, sending the nation’s unemployment rate slightly higher, to 4.6 percent on average.

The E.P.A. now calculates "the monetary value of a human life... as zero"

As Maxine Joselow wrote on 12 January 2026:

Under President Trump, the E.P.A. plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone... It’s a seismic shift that runs counter to the E.P.A.’s mission statement, which says the agency’s core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment...

The change... would most likely lower costs for companies while resulting in dirtier air... Long-term exposure to both pollutants is linked to asthma, heart and lung disease, and premature death. Even moderate exposure to PM2.5 can damage the lungs about as much as smoking. Under the Biden administration, the E.P.A. tightened the amount of PM2.5 that could be emitted by industrial facilities. It estimated that the rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays in 2032 alone. For every $1 spent on reducing PM2.5, the agency said, there could be as much as $77 in health benefits.

The Trump administration... said the E.P.A. would no longer take health effects into account in the cost-benefit analyses necessary for clean-air regulations, according to the documents. Instead, the agency would estimate only the costs to businesses of complying with the rules. Over the past four decades, different administrations have used different estimates of the monetary value of a human life in cost-benefit analyses. But until now, no administration has counted it as zero.

Further reading: My most recent articles on the Trump affordability crisis, the Trump jobs crisis, and the Trump climate crisis.

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