Flawed Trump Policies Made Possible Through The Mindset Of Ineptitude That Put Him In Office….More on Trump policies further below, but first a brief overall commentary. The GOP derangement syndrome brought on by conservatives throughout our nation has now saddled America with a curse years in the making. We saw it in the advent of the tea party movement, with the frustrations & anger of that rambunctious grassroots crusade being largely justifiable, but their extreme group-think solutions & ideas were mostly ridiculous. That derangement was further revealed when so many conservatives were fully behind gridlock-Teddy Cruz when he tried to drive America into a catastrophic default in the fall of 2013, which may have precipitated another great recession if not worse. It’s that same deranged mentality that ushered in the cult movement that pushed Trump to primary wins & electoral college victory (along with enormous assistance coming from the Russians & FBI).
So currently we’re seeing a party that’s completely lost their minds as well as their morals in the continued overwhelming support for Trump. Here at TheVORACS, being once lifelong GOP supporters, we not only refuse to follow the party into depravity, but we’ve chosen to call them out by exposing their disingenuous & delusional bulls***!!! Our narrative is not at all popular with the GOP base, but why would it be when they’re now under some kind of evil spell. In the end, right will ultimately prevail, & perhaps some of those same conservatives who today get incensed at my thoughts, may someday wind up thanking me once the light of truth shines down upon them. A very small percentage in the GOP are standing up for principle at this point, but we just keep spreading our message & invite others to join us. I was heartened to find another guy here in Ohio from the GOP who stood up for what was right: something-snapped-oh-go
Trump Policies Aren’t Cutting It
Don’t give Trump credit for the economy, as it’s just a continuation of the Obama economy. The only real differences are income inequality & deficits are both going to spike a lot higher. When a huge portion of Americans haven’t had a real raise in decades & practically no savings, it’s easy to see something has gone way out of whack. The share of national income going to workers has been dropping for decades. Something needs done, but tax cuts presuming to trickle down are not the correct strategy. The anger from the base that gave rise to Trump won’t subside until the working class has access to more purposeful, better-paying jobs. A substantial part of the article trumpism-wont-vanish-w
Everyone knows gas prices have risen sharply in recent months, but the government’s statisticians last week helpfully put a number on the rate of increase: 24.3 percent in the year to June. This helped propel the overall inflation rate to 2.9 percent, the highest level in more than six years. Over the same period, average hourly earnings rose by only 2.7 percent, so most people are a bit worse off than a year ago. Unfortunately, this is not a new phenomenon. Stagnation in real — that is, inflation-adjusted — wages is one of the key economic and political stories of the past few decades. From 1979, when the data begin, through 2017, median real wages have fallen by 0.1 percent per year, on average. The true picture probably is a bit less bad than this, given that most economists think the consumer price index index overstates actual inflation. But public perceptions are what matter, and most people think inflation is higher than the official rate so, presumably, they feel even worse-off than the data suggest.
This is not how things are meant to be. Real wages are supposed to rise in line with the rate of productivity growth — output per worker hour — over time. Since 1979, productivity has increased by a total of 98 percent, but median real wages have fallen by 4 percent. The gap is smaller if real wages are calculated using alternative measures of cash wages and inflation, but it’s still enormous. It doesn’t take a big leap of imagination to make the connection between the frustration triggered by years of flat or falling real wage growth and the emergence of Donald Trump, the only Republican candidate who campaigned on a platform of improving the lot of the average worker. Whether he ever had any intention of doing that — and whether a Republican Congress would have let him — is not the point; he recognized that everyone else seeking the nomination had nothing to offer except trickle-down, and that gave him an opening. After nearly 30 years of drought, trickle-down doesn’t play with voters. Trump became president because he acknowledged that very real grievance and used it as leverage to appeal more broadly to white voters who felt their status, economic and societal, was being eroded.
What, then has gone wrong? Why have people not reaped the rewards for their efforts in the most free and flexible labor market in the developed world? The story is multi-faceted but not complicated. People’s wage-bargaining power has been eroded by a combination of forces, including declining trade union membership, globalization and technological change, which together have driven a wedge between overall productivity growth and the experience of the typical employee. These forces have been emerging gradually over an extended period, but the crash of 2008 and its aftermath made everything much worse. Union members in the private sector typically are paid some 19 percent more than non-members, but membership rates have been falling since the data were first collected back in 1983. Only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers now are union members, and unions representing public-sector workers are under increasing pressure. So-called “Right to Work” legislation in red states and the recent Supreme Court decision banning public-sector unions from charging fees to non-members to cover the costs of collective wage bargaining and other services are serious long-term threats to the wage premium for union members.
The impact of globalization and technological change has been profound but uneven, especially in manufacturing, which now accounts for only 8.4 percent of private-sector employment, down from 20.6 percent in 1980. Manufacturing jobs no longer pay more than average, but they do pay much more than jobs in fast-growing sectors like leisure and hospitality, which have been growing very rapidly. The country as a whole has benefitted enormously from globalization, which has driven down prices of almost all goods, but very little of those gains have been used to support people whose jobs have disappeared as a result. Tech change is now making inroads into service-sector jobs too, though it’s worth remembering that previous periods of wrenching change did not result in permanently higher unemployment; the replacement of the horse-driven economy with the internal combustion engine destroyed millions of jobs but created many millions more, for example.
Education is the answer to the loss of low-skilled employment, but standards across the U.S. vary enormously, largely because state and local taxes provide about 92 percent of funding for elementary and secondary education. Low standards in poorer areas, therefore, tend to persist. In an economy where real wage gains have been much higher for people with college degrees than without, this matters. Donald Trump himself is a one-time national nightmare, but populism won’t disappear when he leaves office unless the structural forces that give it strength have been addressed. On top of these structural forces holding down real wage growth, the crash of 2008 made things much worse. The deep, long recession drove unemployment up to 10 percent, allowing businesses to grab, and then hold onto, a much bigger share of national income than usual. Scared people don’t push for bigger raises; they’re just happy to have a job. This part of the story, though, is changing, at last. Unemployment is now just 4 percent, and the pace of layoffs has never been lower, as a share of the workforce.
This next story is related to the previous one & takes shots at the way Trump critics tend to focus on his abysmal personal traits, not recognizing the authentic economic angst which gave rise to much of the working class backing Trump. When breadwinners trying to support a family get desperate & lose hope, they throw caution to the wind & vote for whomever promises to make the biggest changes & give them back their hope. Trump & Bernie got lots of support during the campaign, & most of all they generated almost all the enthusiasm. Their fans were willing to take the chance on someone promising to upend the current system as we know it.
Until dramatic deviations from the norm finally upset the apple cart so labor again gets their fair share of the pie, anti-establishment populists regardless of political ideologies will flourish, which should be a wake-up call for politicians holding or seeking to hold elected office. What voters need to be far more cognizant of is not just the bold promises, but think through any political candidate’s proposed solutions to determine whether they make any sense & might actually work. Inside the link is-john-scarborough-and-m
Yet, over those many years, no matter who was in the White House, that so-called American prosperity became an illusion for the mass of America’s poor and middle class. Since the 1970s Americans that relied on wages have been losing ground, as income disparity and wealth concentration have both accelerated. Instead of real wage growth, affordable higher ed for their kids, and a modern infrastructure, what Americans got was access to credit, sky-high tuition costs and crumbling bridges and roads. And this all played out as the federal government sank deeper and deeper into debt. And the decades of inattention to this reality by the nation’s political leadership set the stage for the rise of Trump’s phony populism. Only a wealthy businessman like Trump, the line went, could defend the interests of average Americans preyed on by the two political parties that were bought and paid for by the corporations who for decades had gamed the system to their advantage. Scarborough should keep in mind the post World War II American polity that bought into the Marshall Plan and NATO was a different nation. It was feeling generous because it was one of social and economic mobility where the effective tax rate for the top one percent was 91 percent. That America, has been dead and buried for a long time and both political parties and big business are still holding their shovels.
They are not done. Today, thanks to the Trump/GOP $1.5 trillion tax cut that 91 percent tax rate on the wealthiest dropped to 37 percent, down from the pre-existing 39.6 percent. At the same time they slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. When the dust settled the Trump/GOP had delivered tax changes that insured the top one percent, their patrons and donors, would get 83 percent of the tax “reform” benefits. Years into the faux recovery from the Great Recession the New York Times correctly writes under the headline “Profits Swell But Laborers See No Relief” that “corporate profits have rarely swept up a bigger share of the national wealth, and workers have rarely shared a smaller one.” For tens of millions of Americans it is the oppressive reality of facing continued long term economic insecurity for themselves and their children that looms much larger than the potential predations of Vladimir Putin. For them, that’s the real clear and present danger that keeps them awake at night.
Another excellent perspective on this wage stagnation we just can’t shake is seen in excerpts from wage-stagnation-unemploym
The United States labor market is closing in on full employment in an economic expansion that just began its 10th year, and yet the real hourly wage for the working class has been essentially flat for two years running. Why is that? Economists ask this question every month when the government reports labor statistics. We repeatedly get solid job growth and lower unemployment, but not much to show for wages. Part of that has to do with inflation, productivity and remaining slack in the labor market. But stagnant wages for factory workers and non-managers in the service sector — together they represent 82 percent of the labor force — is mainly the outcome of a long power struggle that workers are losing. Even at a time of low unemployment, their bargaining power is feeble, the weakest I’ve seen in decades. Hostile institutions — the Trump administration, the courts, the corporate sector — are limiting their avenues for demanding higher pay.
Looking at the historical relationship between working-class wages and unemployment, wage growth should be rising about a percentage point faster than it is right now. In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, wages were growing at a yearly rate of 2.7 percent before inflation. While wages have failed to accelerate, consumer prices have climbed. In 2015, inflation was close to zero. When price growth is zero, a dollar extra in your paycheck means a dollar more real purchasing power. Real hourly pay grew at a healthy pace of about 2 percent that year. But price growth is back to more normal levels now. Over the past year, for example, consumer price inflation was 2.9 percent, just about the same rate as hourly pay. Data released on Tuesday show that real weekly earnings for full-time, middle-wage workers hasn’t grown at all since early 2017.
G.D.P. has sped up and may clock in at around 4 percent in the second quarter of this year, but not enough of that growth is reaching workers. This is, of course, the defining characteristic of high inequality. Since the early 1980s, G.D.P. growth has failed to consistently increase working-class incomes. Still, in earlier periods, tight labor markets were able to deal a blow to inequality. The last time unemployment was at 4 percent, in the latter 1990s, the share of national income going to paychecks was 3 percentage points higher than it is today. In other words, even with the economy now near full employment, profits are squeezing paychecks. Slow productivity growth is another constraint on wages. When companies are able to produce more efficiently, they can absorb higher labor costs without sacrificing profit margins. But such gains have been elusive in this recovery, so businesses are increasing profits at labor’s expense.
More than ever, the dynamics of this old-fashioned power struggle between labor and capital strongly favor corporations, employers and those whose income derives from stock portfolios rather than paychecks. This is evident in the large, permanent corporate tax cuts versus the small, temporary middle-class cuts that were passed at the end of last year. It’s evident in the recent Supreme Court case that threatens the survival of the one unionized segment of labor — public workers — that still has some real clout. It’s evident in the increased concentration of companies and their unchecked ability to collude against workers, through anti-poaching and mand
atory arbitration agreements that preclude worker-based class actions. And it’s evident in a federal government that refuses to consider improved labor standards like higher minimum wages and updated overtime rules. Even if workers’ real wages do pick up, their gains may be too short-lived to make a lasting difference. The next recession is lurking out there, and when it hits, whatever gains American workers were able to wring out of the economic expansion will be lost to the long-term weakness of their bargaining clout. Workers’ paychecks reflect workers’ power, and they are both much too weak.
Trump Policies Fall Short
More problems with the Trump tax cuts are seen inside senate-democrats-warn-o
The White House Office of Management and Budget on Friday released its updated annual budget request, known as the mid-session review. The numbers don’t mean much given that the president’s budget won’t be enacted — but they do contain what the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calls “a very big trillion-dollar admission.” Namely, the White House’s own deficit projections keep rising, thanks to the recently passed tax cuts and spending increases. The updated budget now includes a projected 2019 deficit of $1.085 trillion, up from $984 billion in February — and more than double the $526 billion the White House called for in its 2018 budget. “This is a striking acknowledgement following almost two years of claims that economic growth unleashed by these policies will wipe deficits away,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Meanwhile, the average growth rate projected over 10 years has dropped under 3 percent.
Here in these parts, the industrial heartland, it’s gradually starting to dawn on workers the Trump policies & MAGA promise really aren’t helping them: democrats-can-capitalize
Don’t buy the lies. Trump and his billionaires might be doing well. But the economy is not the best it’s ever been, at least not for working families.
Over and over again, President Donald Trump tells us the U.S. economy is “absolutely booming,” the “strongest we’ve ever had” and “the greatest in the history of America” thanks to his leadership and his leadership alone. Unfortunately, like virtually everything that comes out of his mouth, Trump is not being truthful with the American people. The good news is that over the last several years, long before Trump became president, the unemployment rate has been steadily going down. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. unemployment rate went down from 10 percent in October of 2009 to 4.8 percent when he left office. Now, it’s at 4 percent. This is not just a U.S. phenomenon. As much of the world continues to recover from the great recession of 2008, we’re seeing major economic gains in country after country. The unemployment rate in Germany is down to 3.4 percent and Japan’s unemployment rate is just 2.2 percent. The unemployment rates in Canada and the United Kingdom are the lowest they have been in about 40 years.
The economy isn’t as good as it appears
The low unemployment rate is the good news. The bad news is that poverty in our country remains unacceptably high and tens of millions of Americans are struggling to keep their heads above water. Despite Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax giveaway to the wealthy and large corporations, wages for average workers have actually gone down, not up, by five cents an hour since June of last year after adjusting for inflation. In addition, as the American middle class continues to collapse, the Federal Reserve reported that 40% of Americans lack $400 in disposable income to pay for an unexpected expense like a medical emergency or a car repair. The truth is that in America today, 43% of households live paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford to pay for their housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and their cell phone without going into debt. Further, about half of older Americans have no retirement savings and no idea how they will be able to retire in dignity. In terms of our young people, hundreds of thousands are unable to go to college because of the cost and millions are dealing with oppressive student debt. As the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all, over 30 million Americans have no health insurance and even more are under-insured. As part of our dysfunctional health care system, one out of five Americans can’t afford the medicine prescribed by their doctors.
Income inequality is rising
While the very rich continue to get much richer, our country has more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s. In America today, the top 0.1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The three wealthiest people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans — 160 million people. Meanwhile, the median household in America has less wealth than it did 35 years ago after adjusting for inflation, and the average wealth of those in the bottom 40 percent is virtually zero. The wealth gap between white Americans and African-Americans has more than tripled over the past 50 years. Shockingly, the median white family has almost 10 times as much wealth as the median black family today. All of this may sound like a “booming economy” to Donald Trump, but it sure doesn’t sound like it to me. Of course, not everyone is hurting. While American workers have seen their compensation stagnant over the past 40 years, corporate CEOs have seen their incomes go up by as much as 937%. Over the first four months of this year, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, saw his wealth go up by $275 million — each and every day. While low-income workers at Walmart are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing to survive, the Walton family is now worth over $175 billion. While the very rich are getting even richer as half of our people continue to struggle economically, Donald Trump’s policies are moving this country in exactly the wrong direction. There is no moral justification for Trump to be supporting massive tax breaks for billionaires, and then present a budget which would force enormous cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security Disability Insurance, education and nutrition. We can and we must do better.
Misc Problems
In other troubling economic conditions, despite talking a good game on drug prices, it appears Trump has caved to Big Pharma: as-americans-get-gouged-on-hea
Story of Forbidden Love
The tale as timeless & tragic as Romeo & Juliet. A loving couple who wish to be soulmates for life, yet the world wouldn’t let them, so they’re forced to take their special friendship undercover & into the shadows: the-story-behind-times-trump-a
I used to say I & me
Now it’s us, Now it’s we
Ben (Vlad) most people would turn you away
I don’t listen to a word they say
They don’t see you as I do
I wish they would try to
I’m sure they’d think again
If they had a friend like Ben (Vlad)
Like Ben (Vlad), Like Ben (Vlad)….
Recent Comments