re: Never thought I'd see the day where a GOP admin caused capital flight/strike

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Your still fixated on tariffs

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Because they are an anchor and have the business community confused as frick.

Tariffs arent all bad, if they are short term and targeted. This is the opposite of short term and targeted.

This is scattershot and open ended, and the reaction from business people shows that.

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Killing capital flow into and through the US economy. USD in free fall. Global reserve currency position is getting more tenuous each day this crank econ shitshow continues. The likelihood of great power wars increases as the global market economy fractures (guessing all that crying about Ukraine starting WWIII was just crocodile tears).

Only morons could have thought any of this economic program would work. Anyone who still thinks this is going to work out in the US's favor is a prime example in support of bringing back poll examinations to keep dimwitted people out of the electorate.

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Since the GFC, positive GDP growth has been almost completely dependent on the federal government's growing debt spending. Since COVID, GDP growth has been completely dependent on federal debt growth. Said another way, if debt growth had been held in check we would have been in a recession since at least COVID. Put another way, federal debt growth has averaged 89% more than GDP growth each year since 2020.

Anyone who didn't see a recession was coming from this (and that's not even taking into account the yield curve inversion) has either not been paying attention or doesn't know enough to know they don't know enough.

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but what the Trump administration is doing will cause a worse recession

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No, what it's doing is rushing the recession instead of continuing to kick the can down the road as the federal government (including Trump's first term) has been doing for over twenty years now. The problem with continued can-kicking is that the problems don't simply go away but build up even greater the further that can gets kicked over time.

We're now sitting on a metric frickton of consumer debt with high interest rates all around. We started seeing cracks last year when sub-prime auto loan defaults (repossessions) began rising quickly (2024 saw the highest amount in at least a decade). We also saw consumer credit card delinquencies (90+ days) rise to the highest level since 2014-2015 (which was when it was still coming down from the GFC).

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and likely permanently damage United States' soft power/finance position in the process.

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Again, this isn't something Trump has caused. A bit like Obama walking into the GFC, Trump walked into a scenario of an oncoming recession and that was primarily created by two decades of Congressional largess. Trump is doing things he SHOULD HAVE DONE in his first term, but also things other Presidents and Congresses should have been doing (like cutting spending).

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The public debt problem certainly isn't going to fix itself with talks of tax cuts rather than tax hikes coupled with significant reductions in welfare, entitlement, and defense spending.

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Not at current debt levels but doing the opposite of those things is what we've been doing for over twenty years and is what's put us in this situation.

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Laying off thousands of federal employees and cutting soft power machines like USAID are just meant to make the party's base think a lot is happening because it causes consternation when they barely make a blip in what is necessary to claw back on public debt.

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Laying off thousands of federal employees and cutting soft power machines like USAID is what's called "cutting spending" and the only way to cut enough federal spending is to cut jobs and programs. Period. Why? Because Congress has proven that no matter how much revenue it receives from taxation, it will continue to create even greater deficits which leads to ever-increasing debt. Because of this, it's literally impossible to tax your way out of this problem. In other words, we don't need fewer cuts, we need MORE. To underscore this, FY2024's deficit spending (~$1.8T) was 27% of total federal spending. In other words, just to balance 2024 spending there would have had to have been a ~27% cut to ALL federal spending (bullets for military weapons, retirement donations, VA salaries, electricity payments for government buildings, etc). That doesn't happen without laying off of thousands of federal employees and cutting tons of programs regardless of whether they are soft power, hard power or neither.

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I do not think the GOP has the votes or political capital to do what is necessary as an austerity regime because it would be a generation before they held power in the federal government again if they did.

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Neither party does, and that's the real source of the problem. Congress should have frozen spending levels 10 years ago, but none of them have that sort of balls and they will continue to not have them as long as they can (essentially) keep buying votes through shitloads of federal programs.

When this recession hits and Unemployment starts climbing, that's going to be an even larger drain on federal coffers. Congress being Congress, they (especially Democrats) will push for even greater largess than what is already available (see: extensions and expansions of programs due to COVID). Raising taxes during rising unemployment results in the exact opposite of fixing the issue as consumers spending in the economy is the real grease for the economic engine, not Congress redistributing wealth.