The Hail Mary Empire: How Desperation Economics Is Rewriting America's Future

How America’s Leaders Are Trading Prosperity for Power and Dismantling a Nation in the Process

In a different era, American policymakers moved with the confidence of an empire in ascendance: investing in infrastructure, expanding civil rights, and creating institutions that projected stability both at home and abroad. Today, under the shadow of a declining superpower, America is moving fast in the opposite direction. As Professor Richard Wolff so vividly explains, what we are witnessing now isn't a policy shift or an ordinary partisan squabble. It is the thrashing desperation of a nation whose elites are throwing Hail Mary passes because they know the clock is nearly out.

The signs are everywhere, and they are unmistakable to anyone willing to look.

Florida offers one of the most shameful examples of our decline. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has loosened child labor protections, making it legal for 14-year-olds to work longer hours, into the night, during school weeks, and without the mandatory breaks once required by law. The "solution" to labor shortages, created by the administration's brutal crackdown on immigrants, is not to improve wages or working conditions for adult workers. It is to legalize the exploitation of children, paying them less than the deported immigrants they are meant to replace.

This is not merely bad policy; it is a neon-lit signal of economic and moral collapse. Societies that must rely on child labor to sustain their economies are not thriving, they are disintegrating. We are, in effect, returning to the Gilded Age, that brutal era before child labor laws, when profits were wrung from the smallest and most vulnerable hands.

Worse still, additional proposals currently moving through the Florida Legislature, House Bill 1225 and Senate Bill 918, aim to push the regression even further. These bills would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work unlimited hours and days during the school year without mandated breaks. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who are homeschooled, enrolled in virtual school, or have graduated could similarly be employed without hour limits. In short, Florida's legislature is racing backward, offering up its youth as a solution to labor shortages rather than addressing the root causes with fair wages and humane immigration policies.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump's economic platform centers on another desperate maneuver: tariffs. Slapped on goods from China, Canada, Mexico, and even tiny African nations, these tariffs are sold as a way to "punish" foreign countries. In reality, as Wolff and economists like Jeffrey Sachs tirelessly point out, tariffs are taxes, paid by American consumers, not foreign governments.

The near-term result? Skyrocketing prices on goods like coffee, avocados, lumber, and automobiles. The medium-term effect? American companies burdened with higher input costs lose ground to competitors abroad who can access cheaper goods. The long-term consequence? Global supply chains realign away from the United States, further isolating a declining empire.

Jeffrey Sachs once pointed out that Trump's understanding of trade resembles a toddler's logic: "If Canada buys one screwdriver from us, we must buy ten from them to make it fair." Real-world economics, of course, doesn’t work that way, but desperate empires often forget the basics first.

Tariffs were once used strategically during America's industrial rise. Today, they are deployed blindly, a political stunt masking economic decay. And what is that decay? It is the ever-widening chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else, engineered by decades of oligarchic policies imposed by the government. Tariffs serve now not to build industries or strengthen the middle class, but to disguise the enrichment of an elite class whose fortunes grow even as working families drown in rising prices, stagnant wages, and crumbling public services.

The strategy of "economic war" didn't end with tariffs. The United States tried to break Russia's back through thousands of sweeping sanctions, believing that isolating Russia would crush its economy and end the Ukraine war quickly. But this effort, too, was rooted in 20th-century thinking. Today's world is no longer unipolar.

Russia simply pivoted, selling its oil and gas to China and India, often through intermediaries who simply reshipped the goods back into Europe. The BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and more) now commands more economic weight than the United States and its traditional G7 allies combined.

Even as Russia found workarounds, it is critical to understand that its own internal collapse is accelerating. As scholars like Kathryn Stoner and Angela Stent explain, Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's or Canada's, its population is shrinking, and it remains heavily dependent on military prowess and nuclear threats to project strength. The war in Ukraine has bled Russia dry: with estimates of 800,000 killed or wounded, massive equipment losses, and growing social strain. Despite these wounds, the regime has paradoxically tightened its grip internally, even as Russia's standing as a major power in economic terms steadily erodes.

In launching "the mother of all sanctions," American policymakers revealed their tragic ignorance of a shifting world order. They assumed, wrongly, that they could still dictate global economics by decree. They cannot. The result? An empowered China, a resilient but hollowed Russia, and a United States that looks increasingly isolated.

Domestically, the desperation is perhaps even more grotesque. Under the Trump-Musk alliance, tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired in the name of "efficiency," a concept wielded like a cudgel rather than a scalpel. No serious study was conducted. No thoughtful restructuring. Just mass layoffs, and with them, the erosion of vital public services.

The economic effect? These former public employees flood the private job market, bidding down wages in an already precarious labor environment. This is carnage, a veritable war on the American working class, disguised as governance.

Rather than facing these realities with courage and creativity, American leadership, Republican and Democratic alike, retreats into fantasy. They propose to "bring back manufacturing" through tariffs that actually raise costs. They imagine that child labor will "build character" instead of signaling regression. They cling to dreams of domination in a world where their influence shrinks daily.

Meanwhile, the moral high ground, once an imperfect but real part of America's brand, has collapsed. A country that claims to champion human rights now detains and deports immigrants with cruelty, bombs hospitals abroad, and backs colonial-style land grabs without hesitation. Even American Christians, supposedly defenders of compassion and justice, twist themselves into knots to rationalize behavior that mocks their own professed values.

History teaches that every empire falls. But how it falls matters. Some decline with dignity, investing in a future they will no longer dominate. Others flail, lash out, and take themselves and others down with them.

America is at that crossroads now. The child labor laws, the tariffs, the sanctions, the layoffs, the betrayals, they are not random events. They are the flailing limbs of an empire that does not yet understand that its time as global hegemon is ending.

There is still a chance to choose managed decline, to focus on resilience, cooperation, and rebuilding from within. But not if we keep throwing Hail Mary passes, hoping for a miracle that will never come.

The future is coming, whether we are ready or not. Will we face it like adults, or regress into a desperate adolescence that no amount of fantasy will save us from?