{"id":140089,"date":"2025-03-17T17:42:54","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T17:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/alabama\/opinion-the-cost-of-maga\/"},"modified":"2025-03-17T17:42:54","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T17:42:54","slug":"opinion-the-cost-of-maga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=140089","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | The cost of MAGA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How much are Alabamians willing to sacrifice for the cult of MAGA?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We\u2019re finding out every day.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As Donald Trump continues to govern by presidential whim, the economy and various markets around the globe have responded negatively to the instability and randomness of it all. Three months after celebrating the campaign victory of a man who was going to bring down egg prices on day one, many Trump voters (and all the rest of us) now dread a trip to the mailbox (or the email inbox) to get the monthly investment account statement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Much of the volatility has been in response to his bi-polar approach to tariffs. One day, we\u2019re having tariffs of 25 percent on these three countries. The next day, the tariffs are only 4 percent on this one country, delayed on another and we\u2019ll revisit the third. A week later, the tariffs are back on. Then they\u2019re off. Then they\u2019re only half on, half off. Then we\u2019re going to do tariffs but not on everything, just some things and the numbers will fluctuate. Then, no, scrap that, we\u2019re doing something completely different, but we\u2019re not sure what yet \u2013 come back in April.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the meantime, the people who are sure about things \u2013 investors \u2013 hate it all. And they hate it consistently.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201c<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The volatility of making major decisions and changing your mind a day or two later, it just doesn\u2019t play with the world,\u201d said David Bronner, the CEO of the Retirement Systems of Alabama at a recent meeting of the system\u2019s Board of Control.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt may be fun to do that with your best buddy or something, or your wife or your husband,\u201d Bronner continued. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t work at all in the world that we live in as a pension fund. They don\u2019t work well with instability.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"code-block code-block-6\" style=\"margin: 8px auto; text-align: center; display: block; clear: both;\">\n<div class=\"zox-post-ad-wrap\"><span class=\"zox-ad-label\">Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How badly does it not work?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Try $5 trillion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s how much value the U.S. stock market has lost in the past three weeks, as it has grappled with Trump\u2019s ever-morphing tariffs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Few people have felt it quite like Bronner and the $56 billion in funds that he and RSA manage across more than 20 funds. Those investments support more than 400,000 Alabama retirees and paid out more than $4 billion in 2024.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s a solid reminder that while you might think it\u2019s cute to watch a flippant president threaten tariffs at the drop of a hat, it\u2019s far less cute if paying your electricity bill depends on taking these things seriously. As it does for so many of those retirees \u2013 retirees who you probably know, who live in your neighborhoods and shop in your stores and support your local businesses.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And it doesn\u2019t stop there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bronner pointed out the wide-ranging impacts of Trump\u2019s random, seat-of-the-pants actions. Like making widespread cuts through his Department of Government Efficiency without first having any understanding of what those cuts might do, what havoc they might wreak, what death they might cause.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"code-block code-block-6\" style=\"margin: 8px auto; text-align: center; display: block; clear: both;\">\n<div class=\"zox-post-ad-wrap\"><span class=\"zox-ad-label\">Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Alabama has lost millions of dollars already, as numerous government contracts and programs and federal workers were cut. And the long-term effect could be devastating for a number of others around the state \u2013 like the farmers supplying the food for those USAID programs that were killed or the defense industry companies that stand to lose billions in contracts or the hundreds of millions in cuts to health research at a variety of state universities and hospitals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s, of course, to say nothing of the thousands of Alabamians who find themselves out of work now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But what\u2019s most bothersome \u2013 scary, even \u2013 is the utter disregard for truth and reality in much of what Trump has done in such a short period of time. While everyone is happy to cut waste and abuse, watching these cuts to valued and important programs, agencies and employees be mostly mischaracterized as waste and abuse in order to achieve an agenda or cover up catastrophic mistakes is infuriating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Bronner pointed out that many of the decisions are not backed up by factual evidence, and there seems to be no real effort to get to facts. Even worse, he said, there\u2019s no consequences on the right for Trump\u2019s frequent lies.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But there are consequences in real life. There are consequences for the rest of us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And if you doubt that, open that statement. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><!-- CONTENT END 1 -->\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How much are Alabamians willing to sacrifice for the cult of MAGA?\u00a0 We\u2019re finding out every day.\u00a0 As Donald Trump continues to govern by presidential whim, the economy and various markets around the globe have responded negatively to the instability and randomness of it all. Three months after celebrating the campaign victory of a man [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":140090,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11763],"tags":[11488,59621,12795,16799,21046],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-140089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alabama","tag-cost","tag-david-bronner","tag-donald-trump","tag-maga","tag-opinion"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Opinion | The cost of MAGA - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=140089\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opinion | The cost of MAGA - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How much are Alabamians willing to sacrifice for the cult of MAGA?\u00a0 We\u2019re finding out every day.\u00a0 As Donald Trump continues to govern by presidential whim, the economy and various markets around the globe have responded negatively to the instability and randomness of it all. 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