Robert B. Reich's Blog, page 60
February 3, 2018
Trump Voters: One Year in, and he’s Broken 20 Big Promises He...
Trump Voters: One Year in, and he’s Broken 20 Big Promises He Made to You
1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like
him would pay more. You bought it. But his new tax law does the opposite. By
2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent
will have got 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent
of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in
taxes. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax
bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.”
2. He promised to close “special interest loopholes that have
been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers,”
especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge
fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law keeps the
“carried interest” loophole.
3. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with
something “beautiful.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t
replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 23 million
Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing
what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. The new tax law will
result in 13 million people losing health coverage, according to the
Congressional Budget Office.
4. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling
infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and
millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure.
5. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But
he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street
moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich
their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former
lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same
industries they recently worked for.
6. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White
House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional,
back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced
so many assistants (one of them hired and fired in a little more than a week)
that people there barely know who’s in charge of what.
7. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by making deals
with drug companies. You bought it. But now the White House says that promise
is “inoperative.”
8. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still
raising money for American elections.
9. He told you “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every
other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it.
But he and House Speaker Paul Ryan are already planning such cuts in order to
deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for
corporations and the rich.
10. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother
with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought
it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money
for this.
11. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency
manipulator.” You bought it. But then he met with China’s president Xi Jinping
and declared “China is not a currency manipulator.” Ever since then, Trump has
been cozying up to Xi.
12. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he
bombed Syria.
13. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You
believed him. But chief of staff John Kelly says it is “unlikely that we will
build a wall, a physical barrier, from sea to shining sea.”
14. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual
misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t
sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.
15. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and
he called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief.” You bought it. But since
becoming President he has spent nearly 25 percent of his days at one of his golf
properties for some portion of the day, according to Golf News Network, at a
cost to taxpayers of over $77 million. That’s already more taxpayer money on
vacations than Obama cost in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to
mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including
his two sons who travel all over the world on Trump business.
16. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and
that there would be “consequences” for companies that shipped jobs abroad. You believed
him. But despite their promises, Carrier, Ford, GM, and the rest have continued
to ship jobs to Mexico and China. Carrier (a division of United Technologies)
has moved ahead with plans to send 1,000 jobs at its Indiana plant to Mexico.
Notwithstanding, the federal government has rewarded United Technologies
with 15 new contracts since Trump’s inauguration. GE is sending jobs
to Canada. IBM is sending them to Costa Rica, Egypt, Argentina, and Brazil.
There have been no “consequences” for sending all these jobs overseas.
17. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and
“bring back thousands” of lost mining jobs. You bought it. But coal jobs
continue to disappear. Since Trump’s victory, at least 6 plants that relied on
coal have closed or announced they will close. Another 40 are projected to
close during the president’s four-year term. Utilities continue to switch to
natural gas instead of coal, and renewable energy is cheaper than ever.
18. He promised to protect steel workers. But according to the
American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were
19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last
year. That import surge has hurt American steel workers, who were already
struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel.
19. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But
according to Mass Shooting Tracker, there have been 377 mass shootings so far
in the Trump administration, including 58 people killed and hundreds injured at
a concert in Las Vegas, and 26 churchgoers killed and 20 injured at a church in
Texas. Trump refuses to consider any gun control legislation.
20.
He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be
released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,“ he
promised during the campaign. He hasn’t released his taxes.
January 30, 2018
THE NEXT BIG FIGHTFresh off passing massive tax cuts...
THE NEXT BIG FIGHT
Fresh off passing massive tax cuts for
corporations and the wealthy, Trump and congressional Republicans want to use
the deficit they’ve created to justify huge cuts to Social Security, Medicare,
and Medicaid.
As House Speaker Paul Ryan says “We’re going to have to get…
at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit.”
Don’t let them get away with it.
Social Security and Medicare are critical safety-nets for
working and middle-class families.
Before they existed, Americans faced
grim prospects. In 1935, the year Social Security was enacted, roughly half of
America’s seniors lived in poverty. By the 1960s poverty among seniors
had dropped significantly, but medical costs were still a major financial
burden and only half of Americans aged 65 and over had health insurance.
Medicare fixed that, guaranteeing health care for older Americans.
Today less than 10 percent of seniors live in poverty and almost
all have access to health care. According to an analysis of census data, Social
Security payments keep an estimated 22 million Americans from slipping into
poverty.
Medicaid is also a vital lifeline for America’s elderly and the
poor. Yet the Trump administration has already started whittling it away by
encouraging states to impose work requirements on Medicaid
recipients.
Republicans like to call these programs
“entitlements,” as if they’re some kind of giveaway. But
Americans pay into Social Security and Medicare throughout their entire working
lives. It’s Americans’ own money they’re getting back through these
programs.
These vital safety nets should be strengthened, not weakened.
How?
1. Lift the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security
tax. Currently, top earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first
$120,000 of their yearly income. So the rich end up, in effect, paying a
lower Social Security tax rate than everyone else. Lifting the ceiling on what
wealthy Americans contribute would help pay for the Baby Boomers retirements
and leave Social Security in good shape for Millennials.
2. Allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower
prescription drug prices. As the nation’s largest insurer, Medicare has
tremendous bargaining power. Why should Americans pay far more for drugs than
people in any other country?
3. Finally, reduce overall health costs and create a stronger
workforce by making Medicare available to all. There’s no excuse for the
richest nation in the world to have 28 million Americans still uninsured.
We
need to not just secure, but revitalize Social Security and these other
programs for our children, and for our children’s children. Millennials
just overtook Baby Boomers as our nation’s largest demographic. For them
— for all of us — we need to say loud and clear to all of our members of
congress: Hands off Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Expand and
improve these programs: don’t cut them.
January 28, 2018
Trump’s America: Open to Global Capital, Not People
to global CEOs and financiers in Davos, Switzerland: “America is open for
business.” We’re now...
January 21, 2018
How Trump is Destroying the GOP
January 18, 2018
Trump’s Shareholder Bonanza
Trump-Republican tax plan are shareholders....
January 12, 2018
Straight Talk About Trump
time the media called his behavior for...
January 6, 2018
Seriously, How Dumb is Trump?
now, I’ve been hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington...
December 28, 2017
New Year’s Update for Trump Voters
December 25, 2017
A YEAR WITH TRUMPLast week, Utah
Senator Orrin Hatch stood on...
A YEAR WITH TRUMP
Last week, Utah
Senator Orrin Hatch stood on the White House lawn, opining that Donald Trump’s
presidency could be “the greatest presidency that we’ve seen, not
only in generations, but maybe ever.”
I beg to differ.
America has had its share
of crooks (Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon), bigots (Andrew Jackson, James
Buchanan), and incompetents (Andrew Johnson, George W. Bush). But never before Donald
Trump have we had a president who combined all these nefarious qualities.
America’s great good fortune was to
begin with the opposite – a superb moral leader. By June of 1775, when
Congress appointed George Washington to command the nation’s army, he had already
“become a moral rallying post,” as his biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, described
him, “the embodiment of the
purpose, the patience, and the determination necessary for the triumph of the revolutionary
cause.”
Washington won the war and then led the fledgling nation “by
directness, by deference, and by manifest dedication to duty.”
Some two
hundred forty years later, in the presidential campaign of
2016, candidate Trump was accused of failing to pay his income taxes. His
response was “that makes me smart” – thereby signaling to millions of Americans
that paying taxes in full is not an obligation of citizenship.
Trump also boasted about giving money to politicians so they
would do whatever he wanted. “When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from them
two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.” In other words, it’s perfectly okay for business leaders to pay
off politicians, regardless of the effect on our democracy.
Trump sent another message by refusing to reveal his tax returns during the campaign
or even after he took office, or to put his businesses into a blind trust to
avoid conflicts of interest, and by his overt willingness to make money off his
presidency by having foreign diplomats stay at his Washington hotel, and promoting
his various golf clubs.
These were not just ethical lapses. They directly
undermined the common good by reducing the public’s trust in the office of the
president. As the New
York Times editorial board put it in June 2017, “for Mr. Trump and his
circle, what matters is not what’s right but what you can get away with. In his
White House, if you’re avoiding the appearance of impropriety, you’re not
pushing the boundaries hard enough.”
A president’s most fundamental legal
and moral responsibility is to uphold and protect our system of government. Trump
has degraded that system.
When as a presidential nominee Trump said that a particular federal judge shouldn’t be hearing a case against him because
the judge’s parents were Mexican, Trump did more than insult a member of the
judiciary. He attacked the impartiality of America’s legal system.
When Trump threatened to “loosen” federal
libel laws so he could sue news organizations that were critical of him and,
later, to revoke the licenses of networks critical of him, he wasn’t just
bullying the media. He was threatening the freedom and integrity of the press.
When, as president, he equated Neo-Nazis
and Ku Klux Klan members with counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville,
Virginia, by blaming “both sides” for the violence, he wasn’t being neutral. He
was condoning white supremacists, thereby undermining the Constitution’s
guarantee of equal rights.
When he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the
former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, for a criminal contempt conviction,
he wasn’t just signaling it’s okay for the police to engage in violations of
civil rights. He was also subverting the rule of law by impairing the
judiciary’s power to force public officials to abide by court decisions.
When he criticized NFL players for
kneeling during the national anthem, he wasn’t just asking that they
demonstrate their patriotism. He was disrespecting their – and, indirectly,
everyone’s – freedom of speech.
When he berated the intelligence
agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he wasn’t just questioning
their competence. He was suggesting they were engaged in a giant conspiracy to
remove him from office – potentially inviting his most ardent supporters to engage
in a new civil war.
America has had its share of good and bad presidents, but Donald Trump falls far below anything
this nation has ever before experienced. In less than a year, he has degraded the
core institutions and values of our democracy.
We have never before had a
president whose character was so contrary to the ideals of the republic. That Senator Orrin Hatch and other
Republicans don’t seem to recognize this is itself frightening.
December 21, 2017
THE BIG PICTURE OF HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS (OF TRUMP) AND HOW...
THE BIG PICTURE OF HOW WE GOT INTO THIS MESS (OF TRUMP) AND HOW WE GET OUT OF IT
There’s too much yelling these days, so we made this a silent video. (The only casualty was my arm, which ached for days afterward.) Hope you find it helpful. Best wishes for a 2018 that’s better for America than 2017 was.
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