Well here we are at the close of 2025, heading into 2026 and that means time to score my 2025 predictions, of course.
So here we go!
- "Deport 'em all" will be a bust. Ding-ding-ding-ding. I said it would be a show and it has been. 8 USC 1324 had all the tool he needed and he didn't use it. Point.
- No effective action on H-1bs and will likely make it worse. Ding-ding-ding-ding. Expanding students is just part of it of course and simply put, TACO is properly-named on that one too. Point.
- Inflation monster Godzilla-style. Miss. Yes, it still well-elevated but I can't take credit for that one.
- Recession declared this year. Miss; its in the data but I said "declared" and it wasn't.
- Medical monster will not be addressed. Ding-ding-ding-ding-GONG-GONG-GONG! If I could give myself two points I would, but that's not the rule. As I pointed out it has now gone vertical in CMS and of course the Obamacare subsidies......
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- Trump will not, nor will the GOP Congress, actively take on the medical cost problem. Tinkering does not count as a miss; to be a miss real cost reductions targeting 50-80% must be implemented because nothing less will help. Implementation of something akin to this would certainly be a miss but neither he or Congress will do it despite the fact that in the first month CMS spending on drugs was at four hundred percent of last year's comparable month and both doctors and hospital spend was up by half again. We've entered the exponential part of what was, without doing something akin to that link, inevitable and I've warned of it for more than a decade. Here we are and there is only one way to address it; you can't subsidize it on the consumer or business end because that just shifts the problem onto the federal balance sheet and you can see what that did with a few year delay in October's numbers.
- The GOP loses the House in 2026 despite the gerrymandering and may lose the Senate. I take the point on the House loss irrespective of the Senate which might wind up 50/50. Trump's recent claim that "affordability is a Democrat conspiracy theory", which he was crazy enough to say out loud, along with the refusal to go after the medical industry generally, which is the largest driver of this problem and which the Executive can address irrespective of Congress through 15 USC Chapter 1, will lead to the loss -- and a really nasty set of predictions for 2027 (but we'll save those for next year's prediction Ticker.) Most people, other than the top 5 or 10%, think the economy sucks and they have a legitimate point -- for them it does. In the end people vote their wallets on the margin and time is rapidly running out for Trump to address this with actual changes. Gimmicks will not do; everyone was promised much lower prices and better affordability and with the exception of gasoline prices (and no, Trump didn't do that; its simply the usual cycle in the oil patch) it has simply not been delivered; indeed everything else has gone up in cost even more.
