Following Up: When the Facts Don’t Matter Even to the Informed II

In yesterday’s post, I recounted a whacky recent experience I’d had with an unusual Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) sufferer and promised to report on any response from this victim if and when it came in.

Well, I got it last night, and despite my years of dealing with this malady, I was still surprised by the vehemence and – yes – the derangement displayed by this Washington Post comments contributor “ in his latest retort to my offering yesterday. That post, of course, comprehensively and with full documentation rebutted the claims of “con brio” about immigration restrictions harming the U.S. economy.

Just to recap, my original entry in the paper’s reader comments section responded to an op-ed claiming that President Trump’s tightening of border security and deportations campaign would significantly undermine the nation’s economic prospects. The alleged reasons? They would shrink and even reverse the growth of America’s labor force.  My retort noted that productivity improvement could more offset any setbacks in output and living standards by increasing the amount of wealth produced by remaining workers.  

The idea that better productivity achieves this effect is of course a completely uncontroversial view of mainstream economics, although specific circumstances will always influence the extent to which such benefits (and net benefits) will actually result.    

As I showed in yesterday’s RealityChek post that reproduced our exchange, “con brio” (I’m not sure why this person fails to use his or her actual name), countered by contending that major, Trump-style immigration curbs that undermined labor force growth were indeed economically counterproductive. In particular, this contributor stated that they not only would kneecap productivity growth but wreak greater economic damage – in particular by retarding business formation.

I responded by noting that so far, under the highly restrictionist second Trump administration, both metrics performed better than under the Open Borders-friendly Biden administration.  And I steered con brio to official sources confirming those trends.

But I strongly suspect that he or she either didn’t really bother to look them up, because con brio claimed that this material showed nothing of the kind.

Yesterday’s RealityChek post was my effort to present (both pictorially and with the relevant links) the data that he claimed to be seeking, but bizarrely this didn’t satisfy him and triggered this latest tirade:

“Took you long enough to come up with some ___ analysis. No actual, proper FRED charts as I expected. Don’t know why I bother but: 1. Tonelson treats business applications as business formation. They are not the same thing, and economists do not use applications as proof of entrepreneurship growth.

“2. He treats quarter‑to‑quarter productivity noise as meaningful trend data. Productivity is volatile; you cannot compare six quarters of one administration to six quarters of another and declare a structural shift.

“3. He ignores the actual consensus: immigration restrictions reduce labor‑force growth, reduce investment, and reduce long‑run productivity. This is not controversial — it is the mainstream view across the Fed, CBO, OECD, and nearly every major labor‑market research institution.

“4. He cherry‑picks FRED charts without understanding what they measure. The author misreads the charts, misinterprets the metrics, and draws conclusions that contradict the underlying data.

“And that’s just for starters. Might want to run along before you embarass yourself even more”

But contrary to point 1, I did provide not only the charts themselves, but the links.

Contrary to his/her following point, I both explained that the business applications results and acknowledged that they are not identical to the number of businesses that actually wind up getting formed.  Yet I also provided a link to a U.S. Census Bureau analysis stating that the applications data are reliable indicators of future improvement in a great number of measures of U.S. economic performance.

Contrary to con brio’s next point, the six-quarter results may or may not be enough to determine “meaningful” productivity trends, but they did show that labor productivity has improved slightly faster during this Trump 2.0 period than under the final comparable Biden period.

Does all this amount to a “structural shift”?  Heaven only knows.  But I never claimed that.  I’d simply made the point that the Trump 2.0 performance was better than the comparable Biden performance – which is all I needed to do to undercut the original argument made by con brio and the original article that immigration restrictions were doing harm.  To date, there’s simply no evidence on that score.

As for ignoring the actual consensus, although immigration curbs surely do inhibit labor force growth (in part that’s the idea), there’s no reason to believe that they reduce investment.  Indeed, as I’ve shown in other RealityChek posts (notably here), what economists call “core capital spending” has accelerated greatly during the second Trump administration versus its expansion during the final, comparable Biden period.    

And finally, con brio provides no evidence to back up the cherry-picking charge.

I wrote yesterday that one of the most puzzling aspects of this experience of mine was the clear reality that con brio knows more than a little about economics.  At the same time, this weird combination of TDS and some expertise could be exactly what makes him or her such a striking example of Trump Derangement Syndrome.