Tax Bill Praised By Trump & GOP A Dud?
It sure is starting to look like it. Before we discuss the tax bill, let’s review Trump in the bigger picture of things. In spite of himself, maybe Trump can accomplish great things before getting the boot. If he can force China to the table & work out long-needed fair trade deals, where we’re operating on a level playing field, that would be a great thing. If his planned talks with North Korea somehow lead to them dismantling their nuclear program along with giving us the ability to monitor/verify their nukes are gone for good, that would be an amazingly great thing. As unlikely as that might seem, we do have a shot at such an agreement, with the biting sanctions in a country centuries behind the developed world perhaps putting them in a desperate negotiating position.
So I’m all for supporting Trump to do great achievements before scandal takes him out! But such successes might only make Trump that much more dangerous, & not only because his already big head would become even more enormous. It would embolden his base, expand his base & make the echo that much more insufferable. It would save the GOP for the midterms & get them believing their brand of extreme please-only-their-base
And depending on how solid & overwhelming the evidence shakes out when Mueller provides those reports, the ability to impeach is above all else a political issue. It’s alarming the way so many of the echo-crowd & Trumpeters are so invested in the cult of Trump, they appear to see him as above the law & are willing to give him a pass, even if it’s proven he colluded with a foreign adversary to steal an election. So great breakthroughs on Chinese trade or a denuclearized Korean Peninsula could increase Trump’s approval ratings to a place it could also produce unintended consequences, that of setting a precedent where our electoral system & constitutional democracy are so tarnished as to be forevermore delegitimized. That would be the case if we keep a president whose deeds deserve impeachment.
So I’m spreading the message now despite whatever Trump might accomplish, & for the sake of our nation & the world I hope he can pull off such wonderful stuff, but if it can be proven he is indeed a criminal from violating the Constitution & abusing his power, he still must go. No amount of great dealmaking in the present can justify turning America into a Putin-type Russia, as we must not allow some cult movement to sacrifice our long-term democracy & freedoms. So after we learn the facts from when the Mueller investigation is completed, we must go wherever the facts lead & act accordingly based on the rule of law.
In the political updates below, the first link takes us to an interesting perspective on how we should redefine jobs & careers for the modern era. As automation/A.I./robotics take over the more menial tasks, we should find transformational ways to use human capital at a higher level. When corporations pigeonhole workers into dreadful cookie-cutter roles as has been traditionally done, it stunts their full potential & deprives them of the initiative & creativity in maximizing their productivity. Figuring this out could unlock the key to our lagging worker productivity which has also been holding back wage growth. These excerpts come from meaningful-work-shouldnt-
Meaning at work cannot be separated from the consideration of meaning in life. The two are connected, and employers should embrace this fact with open arms. For, if the two are in sync, employees will be far more motivated. Most people accept the following as common sense: “The more meaning, purpose, and significance you can ascribe to your work, the more likely it is you’ll work harder, be more productive and successful, and enjoy it along the way” (Yoon, 2014). But if this is so obvious, why isn’t it being practiced by more organizations? It’s a question we need to answer. There are some fundamental gaps in how organizations work with employees, which have costly consequences for engagement, productivity, and enthusiasm.
Amortegui goes on to say that: “Increasing a sense of meaningfulness at work is one of the most potent—and underutilized—ways to increase productivity, engagement, and performance.” The benefits of an engaged workforce seem to be clear both from research and from practice. This raises the question, of course, that if the benefits of increasing a sense of meaning are so clear, then why is it not being more successfully pursued? If half of workers lack this thing that would improve their performance on so many levels, then why aren’t we trying to give it to them?
Around that same theme, another link american-economy-wage-sup
When unemployment goes down, wages are supposed to go up. That’s just supply and demand. Quite puzzlingly, though, this mechanism seems not to be working today. Unemployment stands at a modest 4%, but paychecks aren’t growing. Although today’s is the best-educated workforce in history, employers just insist that workers need more training. In other words, they’re gaslighting us. Meanwhile, over decades, employers have built and maintained a massive collective political apparatus to hold down wages. To call it a conspiracy would be only slight embellishment. The symptoms of the problem are not hard to miss. In February, for example, the American economy posted its biggest one-month jobs gain in a couple years, but wage growth stayed stalled out. For months, economists and financial journalists have been puzzling over the question, as Bloomberg put it, of “why the economy grows but your paycheck doesn’t.
Economists will tell you that wages generally increase with productivity – that you’re paid in line with the value of what you do. This was credible from the end of the second world war to the 1970s, when productivity and hourly wages rose almost perfectly in sync. But according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, from the early 1970s to 2016 productivity went up 73.7%, and wages only 12.3%. Similarly, there used to be a positive relationship between stock prices and wage increases. But some initial signs of wage growth in February sent the market spiraling over inflation fears – until it became clear that the reported wage gains were all concentrated among top earners. Then everyone calmed down and stopped selling. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve just announced that it’s taking the next step in its plan to raise interest rates. This will suppress wages to prevent inflation, although inflation is minuscule and wages aren’t showing signs of life.
Another apparent culprit is what’s called “monopsony”. Monopoly occurs when sellers are so concentrated that they don’t really have to compete. Monopsony is when the buyers – in this case, employers – are concentrated. A recent paper from the Roosevelt Institute found that the average level of concentration in labor markets is 45% higher than the threshold for “highly concentrated” markets used by antitrust regulators. If the government went after employer monopsony the way it does other kinds of markets, regulators might have their hands quite full. What’s worse, as Alan Krueger and Eric Posner pointed out in the New York Times recently, one in five workers with a high school degree or less is subject to a non-compete clause – a tool for employers to push wages down by forbidding workers from getting jobs with their competitors.
Unless the corporate tax cuts result in capital investments, repatriated dollars & so forth leading to wage growth down the road, it looks as though we’re getting very little return for the tax bill giving us trillion dollar deficits, as seen in these excerpts from wage-growth-well-short-of
The latest Employment Situation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows weekly employee earnings have grown $75 since tax reform passed, well short of the $4,000 to $9,000 annual increases projected by President Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). During the three months following passage of the tax bill, the average American saw a $6.21 increase in average weekly earnings. Assuming 12 weeks of work during the three months following passage of the corporate tax cuts, this equates to a $75 increase. Assuming a full 52 weeks of work, the $6.21 increase in weekly earnings would result in a $323 annual increase, nowhere near the minimum $4,000 promised and $9,000 potential annual increases projected by President Trump and Speaker Ryan if significant cuts were made to corporate tax rates.
If Congress had made each company’s tax cut contingent on each company’s wage increases, the American people would have gotten more bang for their tax cut bucks. Additionally, this would have created a real incentive for companies to raise wages: Increase wages, get a tax cut; don’t and you won’t. If the justification for saddling the American people with at least $1 trillion in additional debt was greater wage growth, tax cuts should have been tied to each company’s wage growth; that’s just logical. That’s getting a better deal for the American people, and that’s getting a better return on investment.
So the tax bill is really playing out more like a Shakespearean tragedy: what-shakespeare-got-
After U.S. corporations got a big tax cut in December, a flurry of announcements touting bonuses and pay raises for hourly employees raised hopes that the cash windfall would keep flowing down to American workers. But the sharing of wealth hasn’t been as generous as hoped. The early payouts, such as one-time awards of $1,000 given to certain workers at AT&T, Comcast and Walmart, and $2,500 in stock awards for Apple employees, were praised by the Trump administration and Republican members of Congress. They trumpeted the awards as examples of how the $1.5 trillion tax cut would result in bigger paychecks for middle-class employees.
But the number of companies letting workers know they are getting a bonus, raise or other form of financial compensation has slowed to a trickle. Most of the extra cash from tax savings is going into the pockets of stock shareholders through dividend increases and companies buying back their own stock in hopes of boosting its price. A Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysis found that fewer than 45 of the 500 big companies that make up the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index have paid out cash bonuses to their workers in the four months since the new tax law took effect. By the bank’s count, about 150 — or roughly a third — of S&P 500 companies have publicly announced their tax-cut spending plans, citing data through March 27.
In the Related Articles you can see a variety of topics. The signs of the blue wave are all around us, revealed by the links at the bottom, such as this one is-paul-ryan-the-latest-sign-o
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