Part Three – Trump Economic Policies Not Very Helpful

Trump Economic Policies Getting Way More Credit Than He Deserves….Let’s look objectively at what Trump economic policies have done for the economy, aside from a declining unemployment rate & monthly jobs added following the same basic trajectory as Obama’s last term.  With Trump, we still have no viable health insurance plan, no infrastructure bill, no immigration/DACA reform, & tax cuts for the wealthy that show no signs of trickling down to workers, as deficits are looking to skyrocket & wealth/income gaps keep escalating.  The temporary sugar-high from the tax cuts may spike GDP for awhile, but there’s still no stats confirming that has happened as yet.  Some of the deregulation has been helpful, but some have also put worker & consumer health/safety at risk.

 

His tariffs sparking a ramping up of trade wars would be disastrous for the economy if we keep going down our current path, but we should give Trump a pass on this one for now, with the hopes coming new trade deals could reverse long-time unfair trade deals which have decimated our manufacturing base for decades.  China just said Trump started the biggest trade war in history, so any new deals had better come soon, since it looks like this trade war with China started in earnest as of today:china-fires-back-at-us-tariffs-vows-to-defend-its-core-interests.  Ideally, Trump would band together with our closest allies to call out China’s unfair trade practices & theft of intellectual property, but Trump lost his leverage with our allies when he threw them under the bus.

 

Today we saw the unemployment rate & participation rate both tick up slightly, as we continue to see this (blah) pattern of the good offset the bad, & vice versa: june-2018-jobs-numbers.  The retail trade is really taking a beating.  Overall despite low unemployment rates, America continues to experience a declining middle class with a large percentage of jobs unable to pay a livable wage, & even good jobs reports continue to show wages matching or lagging behind the rate of inflation, so a couple questions do come to mind.  With so many chronic struggles, why is the economy now purported to be so strong?  And why is Trump receiving so much credit?  The Trump economic policies have done very little to improve the path we were on under Obama.  If anything those tax cuts are mistargeted & overheating the economy, while only providing a sleight-of-hand talking point that is nowhere close to giving us the fundamental changes a flawed economic structure really needs.

 

Trump is a long-time con man & now he’s scamming the American people.  The prez doesn’t actually believe in the far-right policies he pushes for.  He just knows he must cater to that hardcore base to retain his power.  So most of the time he has no idea about the proposals he speaks of or the effects they would have on the economy, but he does have a keen sense of what his fans & echo-media want to hear.  That entire rightwing ecosystem lays out their rigid & delusional ideologies that keep feeding on itself, stemming from fanatical tribal misconceptions that have no feasible remedies for solving long-running, entrenched, structural economic problems.  These excerpts from this-july-fourth-americans-should-rebel-against-gop-economic-policies accurately sum up that Trump economic policies are not only failing to resolve our economic troubles, but are actually making them worse:

America’s working families should rebel against President Trump’s bait-and-switch economic policies that leave them worse off while further enriching the wealthy. The new GOP tax law mostly benefits the rich and corporations — including oil companies, health insurers and big drug firms — while the Republican economy increasingly squeezes ordinary Americans. When the president sold his tax cuts to the public, working families were promised a $4,000 raise by their employers, but precious few have seen any boost in their paychecks. And whatever modest tax cuts they got are being more than eaten up by higher gas prices, higher health-insurance premiums and ever costlier prescription drugs. Meanwhile, America’s wealthiest 1 percent watching fireworks burst over country club lawns this week can thank the GOP for an average $51,000 tax cut this year alone, according to the Tax Policy Center. And the very same oil, insurance and pharmaceutical industries that are picking the pockets of American consumers are being lavished with tens of billions of dollars of corporate tax cuts while failing to share the windfall with their employees or customers.

 

Meanwhile, Big Oil’s tax savings keep rolling in. Seventeen oil and gas companies will share $25 billion of tax benefits this year alone. The nation’s four biggest oil corporations will combine for $15 billion more in tax savings over the next decade. It’s the same for Big Pharma. Five big drug firms for which there are estimates so far will enjoy a total of over $6 billion in tax savings this year alone, according to our April 2018 report. The 10 biggest companies were handed a $76 billion U.S. tax discount on the $500 billion in profits they’ve spent years stashing offshore. So, if corporations are not giving $4,000 raises to their workers, what are they doing with their tax savings? Most are rewarding their CEOs and wealthy shareholders through stock buybacks totaling more than $560 billion since the Republican tax law was enacted. The wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all corporate stock. Perhaps the biggest blow to working families from the GOP tax law: It adds $1.9 trillion to the national debt because the tax cuts aren’t paid for. President Trump and Republicans in Congress are already using that debt increase as an excuse to propose slashes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education and other vital services, thereby harming workers, children and retirees. Just like in 1776, Americans are getting fed up. Support for the Trump-GOP tax law has slumped in recent months to just over a third of voters in a Politico/Morning Consult poll. And just like in 1776, it’s time to stand up and fight back.

Trump Economic Policies Facilitating Our Rigged System

Some excellent points on that same general topic, where the elite have basically rigged the system against the rest of us, appear below as seen in theres-no-conspiracy-between-trump-and-kennedy-theres-just-the-swamp:

And, increasingly, they live in a world apart from the vast majority of citizens. American social mobility is low and in decline. Combined, the billionaires on the Forbes 400 now control more wealth than 204 million of their fellow Americans. Recessions that cripple middle-class families for years pass by in months for those at the very top. And, thanks to the gutting of the campaign finance system, the once-blurry line between wealth and power has been almost completely erased. It’s hard to imagine a moment in which parents of all social classes won’t try to provide opportunities for their children or when Supreme Court justices, by definition, are less than elite. Still, at a time of unprecedented inequality, we should expect more from those at the top. Supreme Court justices — like the presidents who appoint them and the senators who confirm them — must be able to stretch their moral horizons beyond their limited social circles. In an increasingly top-heavy country, empathy and diversity are not about soothing bleeding-heart feelings. They are basic requirements for democratic leadership. Without them, public servants can represent only a narrow slice of the public they serve.

In the long run, we must also reverse the trend of rising inequality, not just of wealth but also of power, that threatens the United States. Unfortunately, we’re currently making things worse. The Citizens United opinion that Kennedy wrote, the voting rights restrictions passed in the wake of Shelby County and the tax cuts championed by Trump all have something in common: They accelerate the consolidation of power in the hands of a few. They display an acute empathy for the concerns of those at the top and a disregard for those who aspire to get there. I doubt this is a matter of evil intentions. More likely it is a matter of ignorance. If the super-elite don’t actively seek to notice those outside their orbit, if they fail to recognize that people who need protection from power are the ones they are least likely to spend time with, a bias toward those at the top is the inevitable result. There’s a lesson there, if the Kennedys and Trumps of the world are only willing to hear it. In a democracy, the handful at the very top can wall themselves off from the vast majority of their fellow citizens for only so long. Sooner or later, you make your country’s promise open to everyone — or you find your fellow citizens storming the gates.

American Dream Has Moved Elsewhere

Even beginning to solve the problem of a lost American Dream, it must start with a recognition of widespread poverty, poverty-level wages, declining opportunity & rising income inequality.  This post is just a small part of the article how-republicans-sugarcoat-american-poverty:

The U.S.’s “immense wealth and expertise stand in shocking contrast with the conditions in which vast numbers of its citizens live,” the report reads. Poor Americans might have cell phones, but what they might not have is affordable housing, health care, food, a job with a living wage, paid sick and family leave — the list goes on. The U.N. special rapporteur noted that, in the U.S., “the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power.” It looks like Trump and the Republican Party are ready to double down on that choice.

I do generally agree as a nation we should reduce the safety net/welfare programs, while restoring the much-renowned great American work ethic, but that can feasibly only come about by first finding a way to resurrect real opportunity & better-paying occupations which have been escaping our grasp for decades.  Give all Americans a shot at productive careers where they can support themselves, & only then will we have the moral mandate to curtail the government aid.

More evidence on America’s economic decline & decimation of the middle class are seen posted in this start to the article is-it-great-to-be-a-worker-in-the-u-s-not-compared-to-the-rest-of-the-developed-world, where the American Dream can no longer be claimed by America, but has sadly become owned more by other countries.  As you read this, remember how Trump world & the elite establishment are trying to snooker us by claiming how wonderful our economy is.  They’re just pandering to us, so don’t buy it!!!  If our DC leaders can convince us there is no problem, they’ll escape their responsibilities to fix those problems:

The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market — such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast. Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a steady regimen of rate hikes. So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and advancing nations that has long been a top source for international economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed that continue today.

 

In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government, and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system. Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or close to being poor.

America has largely transitioned over into a plutocracy, from which we need to shift the power back to the people: american-elections-battle-billionaires-civic-inequality.  Inside this next link, we need to come to grips with the evolution of our capitalist system requires it be remade in order to save it: eric-weinstein-capitalism-socialism-revolution.  Posted here is the first part to saving-the-idea-that-is-america, which reading the rest of the article lays out actions we should take to save our free society:

After decades of growing dysfunction, our political system is failing. Hyper-partisanship, inaction on critical issues and ineffective governance by both political parties have done considerable damage. They have contributed to Americans becoming polarized, resentful, discouraged and cynical. Politics should be neither entertainment nor sport, but ours have evolved into a mixture of both. Truth and integrity are under assault, drowned in an ocean of blogs, social media, talk radio and 24-hour cable news. Technology is being used to “personalize” this tidal wave of information to match our predispositions and prejudices. This assault confuses, undermines trust, feeds the conspiracy-minded and assists those who want to manipulate others. Our economic system is not working well for many. It is concentrating wealth in a few and failing to create opportunity for many. The rules that define the “free market” have created a financial sector that is too big and influential. Monopoly power based on invention of a digital platform, network or pharmaceutical patent is unchecked. Goods and services valued primarily for their low price carry hidden costs, rewarding economies of scale that negatively impact the quality of lives and jobs.

 

We are mismanaging the challenges of globalization and technological change, leaving many Americans behind. Short-term perspectives and narrow self-interest prevail. Long-term investments in our collective future are not being made. Views on personal choices are dividing us into tribes engaged in ideological battle, each trying to impose preferred behaviors and beliefs. Tolerance for the right of others to make choices with which we disagree, but which do us no personal harm, casts doubt on our membership in our tribe. The world outside our country is in disarray. The international system is unraveling with no reassuring replacement in sight. Leadership is needed to combat the growing disorder and create new institutions and norms. Yet, the United States has abdicated its role, behaving like a victim, blaming others, retreating from the world stage to “Make America Great Again.”

 

Historians, economists, political, social and religious leaders have offered analyses and solutions to our current condition. Some cite historical perspective, America’s resources, demonstrated resilience or the inherent goodness of our people and reassure us. Others observe that America’s decline is natural, that the world’s history is one of rising and falling empires and the time has come for America to fall. I do not believe our future is assured by past success or condemned to inevitable decline. It depends on how well we understand ourselves, what we want for our future and whether we will work together to achieve it. America at its best has always been less a place or a people and more an idea — the idea that people can unite to govern themselves under the rule of law, work and sacrifice together to preserve individual freedom and opportunity. Its premise is that we can enjoy freedom of choice if we adhere to necessary rules, possess sufficient self-discipline and tolerance. It is the idea that we can work together to give everyone a chance to fairly pursue a life of quality and meaning in their own way. The people and place called America have always attracted others from around the world to join in, live up to and renew that idea. We are not always successful, we don’t always stay on track, but when we do, that is American exceptionalism, a unique gift to mankind, and that is worth saving.

“Should I stay or should I go now?” That question, posed by the eminent political philosophers known as The Clash, is one that confronts any Republican with a glimmer of conscience. You used to belong to a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe. If you’re part of that fringe, what should you do? Veteran strategist Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 campaign, is the latest Republican to say “no more.” Recently he issued an anguished Twitter post: “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life,” he wrote. “Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.” Schmidt follows in the illustrious footsteps of Post columnist George F. Will, former senator Gordon Humphrey, former representative (and Post columnist) Joe Scarborough, Reagan and Bush (both) aide Peter Weiner, and other Republicans who have left the party. I’m with them. After a lifetime as a Republican, I re-registered as an independent on the day after Donald Trump’s election.

 

No one anticipated Trump’s takeover. It’s just possible, these Republicans argue, that we might be equally surprised by his downfall. Imagine what would happen if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III finds clear evidence of criminality or if Trump’s trade wars tank the economy. I’m not saying that’s likely to happen, but if it does, it might — just might — shake the 88 percent GOP support that Trump currently enjoys. That, in turn, could open the way for a credible primary challenge that wouldn’t deny him the nomination but that — like Gene McCarthy in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1976 and Pat Buchanan in 1992 — could help to defeat him in the general election and wrest the party from his grasp. Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed.

 

They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting Republican candidates will advance their avowed views. Wrong. The current GOP still has a few resemblances to the party of old — it still cuts taxes and supports conservative judges. But a vote for the GOP in November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade and the appeasement of dictators. That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must first be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.

 

Admittedly, Medicare is bankrupting us, but it may be necessary to evolve into a plan like this i-cant-afford-that-a-viral-tweet-shows-why-we-need-medicare-for-all, especially if many other free nations have successfully made it work for themselves.  It looks as though not only did the Trump administration bungle the relief effort to Puerto Rico following last year’s hurricane, but they also covered up reports on the waterborne bacterial disease breaking out into an epidemic which cost many lives: sutter-leptospirosis-outbreak-puerto-rico-invs.  It may be about time for those of us who consider ourselves to be rational centrists, we should get energized & organized to take back our nation, since there’s more of us than there are the extremists: the-centrist-heavenly-chorus-is-way-off-key.  That’s especially true now that the leader of the GOP is dragging down his party, which in turn is dragging down our country: the-know-nothing-president-and-the-demise-of-a-major-political-party.

 

Trump’s immigration plans are not popular: most-americans-oppose-key-parts-of-trump-immigration-plans-including-wall-limits-on-citizens-bringing-family-to-us-poll-says.  Whenever seeking proper perspective, Rubin is usually a good place to start.  Inside this link trumps-racist-views-have-not-gone-unnoticed is the way people have noticed Trump’s racist ways, while she points out conservatives once had principled views on immigration as seen in these excerpts from this-is-what-republicans-used-to-sound-like:

A new conservative group pushing back against the scourge of President Trump’s xenophobia is out with its first ad. The Becoming American Initiative is headed by Linda Chavez, who served in the Reagan administration and is well known and regarded in conservative circles. Its website explains: “The modern day misconception is that conservatives do not care about immigrants or immigration reform. We exist to counter that narrative and provide the conservative case for immigration and DACA reform. We are a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws. One of the best ways to counter illegal immigration is through legal immigration reform.” It continues: “The Becoming American Initiative will fight to influence political leaders and change public opinion about the important role immigrants hold on society.”

 

Unfortunately, the Republican Party today would reject Reagan and his hopeful, welcoming message. President Trump rejects facts showing immigrants do not “steal” jobs for immigrants and commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. The GOP refuses to provide a solution for “dreamers.” It creates an artificial crisis via zero tolerance and then launches among the cruelest, most cynical exercises in recent memory — child separation and then indefinite family internment. The Republicans behind the Becoming American Initiative point to scores of Republican officeholders who still support immigration. However, the majority of the party is following Trump down his anti-immigrant rabbit hole, while politicians who should know better (e.g. Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan) stand idly by. It would be nice to think the GOP is still redeemable, but if not, then those who want to preserve America as a country of immigrants will have to vote against Republicans. It’s not until the anti-immigrant Republican Party is roundly defeated that anything resembling the party of Reagan can return.

I should have held on tight
I never should have let you go
I didn’t know nothing
I was stupid, I was foolish
I was lying to myself
I couldn’t have fathomed
I would ever be without your love
Never imagined I’d be sitting
Here beside myself

When you left I lost a part of me

It’s still so hard to believe

Come back, baby, please, ‘cause

We belong together 

 

“If you think you’re lonely now”
Wait a minute, this is too deep (too deep)
I gotta change the station
So I turn the dial tryin’ to catch a break
And then I hear Babyface
“I only think of you”
And its’ breakin’ my heart
I’m tryin’ to keep it together
But I’m falling apart

I’m feeling all out of my element
Throwing things, crying tryin’
To figure out where the hell I went wrong
The pain reflected in this song
Ain’t even half of what I’m feeling inside
I need you, need you back in my life baby

 

When you left I lost a part of me
It’s still so hard to believe
Come back, baby, please, ’cause
We belong together
Who am I gonna lean on when times get rough
Who’s gonna talk to me till the sun comes up
Who’s gonna take your place
There ain’t nobody better
Oh baby baby
We belong together