Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone writes—How Trump Took the Middle Class to the Cleaners. He promised a return to shared prosperity, but the benefits of his economic policies only bubbled up to the richest.
As a candidate, Trump positioned himself as a different kind of Republican. With all the integrity of a late-night infomercial host, Trump rinsed away the taint of decades of GOP economic mismanagement. In a spin cycle, he promised his plans would bring prosperity to a long-overlooked working class. But what Trump ultimately delivered is what all Republican presidents have delivered since Ronald Reagan: bubbly new wealth for the already rich, while putting the middle-class through the wringer.
This cycle has played out twice in plain view: First with Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which showered wealth on the richest, offering the middle class a drop in the bucket, and now with a pandemic response that has inflated the wealth of billionaires, even as main-street America reels under a Depression-level crisis. If Donald Trump fooled you once, shame on him. If he fools you twice, shame on you. [...]
The Christmas present Trump promised the middle class turned out to be a trinket. The tax cut’s benefits to middle-wage earners worked out to about $65 a month, according to numbers crunched by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. As passed, the income tax cuts will begin to phase out in 2025, and by 2027 many working-class wage earners will face a higher tax burden. Republicans structured the law this way to hold the projected cost of the bill below a $1.5 trillion threshold that allowed for Senate passage with just 50 votes. Future Congresses, they argued, would of course act to prevent any tax hike on the working class. Key to note, however: Corporations were spared any similar anxiety about their future tax burden. The corporate cuts don’t expire under this law.
In marketing his tax bill, Trump made wild promises about indirect benefits of his giveaway, including that the “huge tax cut will be rocket fuel for our economy,” driving GDP growth as high as six percent and boosting wages between $4,000 and $9,000 a year. It was familiar nonsense. Far from representing a break from the economic policies of the old-line GOP, Trump’s tax cut built on the ruinous legacy of “trickle down” economics championed by George W. Bush and Reagan. “It’s a lie,” says Blyth, “and the lie is that if you give rich people these tax cuts, investment will skyrocket and [new wealth will] trickle down to everyone else. It never works.” [...]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
- Overhauling US foreign policy: The bitter fights ahead, by William Minter and Imani Countess. The most consequential election year in most of our lifetimes has featured stark crises unspooling against a backdrop of vigorous activist mobilizations and simmering public outrage. President Trump may lose his reelection bid, but that will not be enough. We need fundamental change rather than a return to the status quo ante.
- The Coming Era of “Civic News,” by Steve Waldman. Empowering every American with a refundable tax credit for a subscription, membership, or donation to a local media outlet will revitalize the free press.
- In rural America, resentment over COVID-19 shutdowns is colliding with rising case numbers, by Lauren Hughes. Business restrictions early in the pandemic, when rural towns had few cases, triggered a backlash that haunts them now.
TOP COMMENTS
QUOTATION
“The territorial aristocracy of past ages was obliged by law, or thought itself obliged by custom, to come to the help of its servants and relieve their distress. But the industrial aristocracy of our day, when it has impoverished and brutalized the men it uses, abandons them in time of crisis to public charity to feed them.” ~~Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
TWEET OF THE DAY
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Wall Street, Main Street. Why No Mention of Side Streets and Alleys?
In the past few weeks, both from Republicans and Democrats, we’ve heard a great deal about the travails of Wall Street and the mythical Main Street in the acute economic crisis that has everyone who hasn’t already been downsized or foreclosed sitting on pins and needles. But far less – next to nothing, in fact – has been said about what’s going on elsewhere in America, in side streets and alleys where chronic structural economic problems dating back three decades continue to take a toll.
Today, about 20 percent of America’s children—13.5 percent of all Americans—live in what is a very flawed federal measure of poverty whose parameters haven’t been changed in more than four decades.
Some 28 million Americans now receive some amount of help from the Food Stamp program, known since the beginning of this month as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Soup kitchens everywhere are in tough straits. That’s because food prices have increased at a time when the numbers of people in need have risen and the people who donate, hampered by economic difficulties of their own, are contributing less.
At the other end of the scale, crunched state budgets mean reduced aid to higher education at a time when still-rising tuition costs are making it ever more difficult for people at the lower ends of the economic scale to do what every politician, social reformer and statistic says is a way out of those lower ends: more schooling.
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Source: Daily Kos
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