Christmas at Saint Luke’s Mission of Mercy

Plans by the Donald Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, to dismantle the Social Security Administration, were trashed by a former Democratic senator on Wednesday morning.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said the staffers working DOGE, with an assist from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), hope to slash half the Social Security staffers.

That, she claimed, would not only backfire, but is a sign they have no idea what they are doing.

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With "Morning Joe" regular Elise Jordan pointing out, "We were talking off camera about just how often you, when you were in office, you had to utilize the local social security offices to really get issues resolved by a caseworker who was local and in person. And I mean, just in terms of practicality, people who are on Social Security tend to be a little bit older. They aren't necessarily going to be as web savvy and immediately able to use the internet to solve whatever problem they have," McCaskill weighed in:

"I would like Elon Musk to sit down with a woman who is struggling with her benefits after her husband has died and trying to reconcile an error in the documents" the Missouri Democrat replied. "I would love him to sit down and talk to one of those people, instead of just assuming that tech can solve everything."

"It's so naive, it's so stupid," she bluntly stated.

You can watch below or at the link right here.

- YouTube youtu.be

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman found himself particularly floored by a moment in President Donald Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday in which he made boasts about boosting auto manufacturing even as his tariffs on Canada and Mexico threaten to cripple auto supply chains.

Writing on his Substack page, Krugman explained how car production in the United States will be hampered by the tariffs on America's two biggest trading partners given the way that cars are assembled across all three countries.

"Automobile production, which is deeply integrated across our northern and southern borders — there really isn’t a U.S. auto industry, there’s a North American industry operating in all three countries — will be especially hard hit," he wrote. "I almost choked when Trump declared last night that 'we are going to have growth in the auto industry like nobody has ever seen.' Well, I guess we’ve never seen a large downturn in auto production outside a major recession, which is not to say that we won’t get a recession too."

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Taking stock of Trump's economic policies as a whole, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk's slash-and-burn approach to federal workers, Krugman argued that the United States right now is "trapped in a burning Tesla."

"If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use," he explained. "As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when the engines catch fire. Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out."