LAST week, Mark Zandi, the chief economic analyst at the giant investment bank Moody’s, described the US as being ‘on the precipice of recession’.
The effects of US president Donald Trump’s tariff wars on the rest of the world have started to impact on the lives, jobs and wages of American workers, while his boast that tariffs would return millions of manufacturing jobs to the US have proved pure fantasy.
Now recession has hit the very capital of the USA, Washington DC.
An article in The Daily Telegraph, headed ‘How Trump smashed Washington’s economy’, details the devastation Trump’s economic war on America’s working class across the country, the so-called ‘rust belt recession’, that has also impacted on the population of the capital.
The article recalls Trump starting his presidency by unleashing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) run by Elon Musk.
A DOGE army was unleashed to cut over 154,000 federal jobs in order to slash government spending. Billions of dollars in government grants and contracts were abruptly terminated.
With federal government workers making up a quarter of all jobs in the city the effect of these savage cuts has been devastating and are only going to rise sharply as cuts continue.
It was estimated in February, that 40,000 federal jobs would go by 2029. On top of this, a further 170,500 employed in business services along with 68,500 in related services that receive government funding such as health and education services face a jobs massacre.
Fitzroy Lee, the district’s chief economist, is quoted saying about the massive increase in job losses: ‘Usually we don’t get drops as big as this unless it’s a recession.’
On Monday, Trump issued an order to send the national guard into Washington DC and seize control of the city’s police force.
On Wednesday, Trump announced the federal forces would be in total control of Washington 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for at least the next thirty days, repeating his claim the city ‘has been under siege from thugs and killers, but now DC is back under Federal Control where it belongs’.
In fact, Trump and the US ruling class are relying on the national guard and army to deal with a working class, and increasingly the middle class, that are not prepared to accept being driven back to the days of the 1930s Great Depression.
Trump launched his DOGE-led war on federal jobs and massive cuts in government spending that have devastated the lives of millions of workers across the country, as the only way to cut the US national debt.
His tariff war on the world would also, Trump boasted, pay for all the tax cuts to the filthy rich that passed into law earlier this year.
However, official statistics released this week by the US Treasury Department, reveal that the US national debt has soared past a record $37 trillion, years sooner than expected.
US debt was $34 trillion in January last year, $35 trillion in July 2024 and $36 trillion in November 2024. Now hitting over $37 trillion means $1 trillion is added to the debt every 5 months.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates Trump tax cuts for the rich alone will increase debt by $4.1 trillion in the next ten years.
With no economic solution to the most powerful capitalist nation in the world crashing into recession and bankruptcy, the only solution of the ruling class is to wage a class war to the finish to impose the crisis firmly on the backs of workers and their families.
The working class in the US and across the world will never accept being forced to pay the cost for this historic crisis by being driven into mass unemployment and poverty, by a capitalist system that is bankrupt and in its death agony.
The working class has the power to resolve this crisis by taking power, replacing bankrupt capitalism with a planned socialist economy.
This means the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in the US and every country to organise the victory of the world socialist revolution.
There is no time to lose.
