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The Largest Upward Transfer of Wealth in American History

I have long said that today's Republican Party seeks to create a new Gilded Age and has pursued a relentless reverse Robin Hood agenda to take from the poor and give to the very wealthy.  This effort is combined with an agenda of slashing safety regulations to allow corporations to further enrich themselves at the expense of the health and lives of everyday Americans.  Now, with an occupant of the White House who views himself as a monarch, the many of the super wealthy are displaying an attitude akin to that of the French and Russian nobility prior to their nation's respective revolutions. All of this is wrapped up in the GOP bill that just cleared the House - it would explode the federal deficit while causing millions to lose heath care coverage  and food assistance - that now moves to the Senate where it hopefully can be stopped. Should it pass the Senate, the big question is whether the devastation visited on many red states and red regions in states like Virginia (and rural hospitals) will be enough to belatedly  make working class Republican voters to stop being blinded by GOP appeals to racism and "god, guns and gays" and realize the GOP is their enemy.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the situation:

House Republicans worked through the night to advance a massive piece of legislation that might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

That is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose. The “big, beautiful bill” would pair huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, warned that the bill’s passage, by a 215–214 margin, would mark the moment the Republicans ensured the loss of their majority in the midterm elections. That may be so. But the Republicans have not pursued this bill for political reasons. They are employing a majority that they suspect is temporary to enact deep changes to the social compact.

The House cemented the bill’s majority support with a series of last-minute changes whose effects have not been digested. The Congressional Budget Office has not even had time to calculate how many millions of Americans would lose health insurance, nor by how many trillions of dollars the deficit would increase.

The heedlessness of the process is an indication of its underlying fanaticism. The members of the Republican majority are behaving not like traditional conservatives but like revolutionaries who, having seized power, believe they must smash up the old order as quickly as possible before the country recognizes what is happening.

House Republicans are fully aware of the political and economic risks of this endeavor. Cutting taxes for the affluent is unpopular, and cutting Medicaid is even more so. That is why, instead of proudly proclaiming what the bill will accomplish, they are pretending it will do neither. House Republicans spent months warning of the political dangers of cutting Medicaid, a program that many of their own constituents rely on. The party’s response is to fall back on wordplay, pretending that their scheme of imposing complex work requirements, which are designed to cull eligible recipients who cannot navigate the paperwork burden, will not throw people off the program—when that is precisely the effect they are counting on to produce the necessary savings.

The bill spikes the deficit, largely because it devotes more money to lining the pockets of lawyers and CEOs than it saves by immiserating fast-food employees and ride-share drivers. Massive deficit spending is not always bad, and in some circumstances (emergencies, or recessions) it can be smart and responsible. In the middle of an economic expansion, with a large structural deficit already built into the budget, it is deeply irresponsible.

Higher deficits oblige Washington to borrow more money, which can force it to pay investors higher interest rates to take on its debt, which in turn increases the deficit even more, as interest payments (now approaching $1 trillion a year) swell.

House Republicans have made clear they are aware of both the political and the economic dangers of their plan, because in the recent past, they have repeatedly warned about both. Their willingness to take them on is a measure of their profound commitment.

And while the content of their beliefs can be questioned, the seriousness of their purpose cannot. Congressional Republicans are willing to endanger their hold on power to enact policy changes they believe in. And what they believe—what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades—is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.

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MAGA Is Waging War on the Future

At times people wonder how the advances and knowledge of the Roman Empire were lost and Europe descended into the Dark Ages.  True Roman was invaded by hostile "barbarian" tribes but much of the destruction came from internal forces ranging from growing wealth disparities and the pauperization of the masses and the erasure of knowledge that conflicted with the dogma of the increasingly powerful Christian Church.  All of this was a war on what could have been a very different future.   Fast forward to 2025 and we see an in some ways similar war against the future by the Felon and MAGA supporters that will ultimately leave America poorer, sicker, less democratic, less educated and more backward that what otherwise be the case.  If one looks at Project 2025, the blueprint for much of what is being done it is a white "Christian" nationalist/supremacy agenda that puts the rights of the minority over the wellbeing of the many.  Social programs and benefits for the many are targeted for draconian funding cuts while ever more tax cuts are showered on the super wealthy.  One has to wonder how bad things will need to get before the MAGA working class base realizes their bigotry and prejudice has cost them and their children dearly. A column in the New York Times looks at this war on the future:

It’s fitting that a political movement whose slogan is the backward looking “Make America Great Again” — and whose tribune, Donald Trump, appears to live in an eternal 1990 of his own mind — is waging war on the American future.

This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will. Should the president win his campaign against self-government, future Americans won’t be citizens of a republic as much as subjects of a personalist autocracy.

In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. . . . . “This is the new model,” the secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, said in an interview with CNBC last month, “where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” The reality is that this particular campaign — this effort to de-skill the working population of the United States — is more likely to immiserate the country and impoverish its residents than it is to inaugurate a golden age of prosperity.

. . . [T]he White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.  In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth. Theirs, instead, is an agenda of unlimited resource extraction, with little regard for the consequences. . . . Trump is aiming to open national forests to logging and has issued an executive order that would expedite efforts to engage in deep-sea mining, despite the risks it poses to critical ecosystems. He is also openly hostile to renewable energy, despite its growing efficiency and declining cost.

The White House wants to wipe out a large part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — slashing its budget by a quarter and shuttering programs in climate research — as well as obliterate a third of the budget of U.S. Geological Survey, an agency whose work is vital, notes Science magazine, “to efforts such as monitoring water quality, protecting endangered species, and predicting landscape impacts from climate change.”

The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.

Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts, disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences. In the first three months of the year, according to a minority report of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion from the National Institutes of Health, including funds for biomedical research and experimental cancer treatments.

In addition, the White House wants to cut spending in the Department of Energy’s research wing — the nation’s single largest funder of the physical sciences, which supports efforts to translate basic research into new technologies and applications — and seeks to defund or eliminate global disease monitoring and health-tracking systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is the wanton, pointless destruction of a MAGA cultural revolution. It serves no obvious purpose other than to “shrink” the government in the most arbitrary and capricious way imaginable. The federal government is the leading source of funding for science and technology research in the United States. How does one make America great again by destroying its capacity to develop advanced technology?

Even the most venal and shortsighted billionaire captains of industry should recognize how much their fortunes and influence rest on the work of countless researchers whose efforts often yield results that pay dividends for years. We can’t know, for certain, what technologies and treatments Americans will miss out on because the Trump administration either decided it was too expensive to maintain the American science establishment or thought that science was too liberal, too “woke.” But there’s no doubt that we’ll be worse off. And this is to say nothing of the potential brain drain of scientists who will leave this country for greener pastures, or those from abroad who will choose to remain in their home countries, where they live under governments that are at least a little less eager to give themselves lobotomies.

Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and in particular on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.

It is a future in which the United States abandons its Enlightenment heritage and liberal aspirations in favor of a closed society made up of supposedly native people — recall JD Vance’s paean to the soil of eastern Kentucky in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination last year — and rooted in notions of dominance and zero-sum competition.

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Tornado Devastation Is a Warning Against NOAA and NWS Cuts

As I write this post, millions of Americans are under the threat of severe weather.  This after tornados have ravaged a number of states, including Missouri and Kentucky. The significant number of deaths from these storms in the last week have caused many to worry that the chainsaw taken to the National Weather Service and NOAA by Elon Musk and the Felon are needlessly endangering lives.  One must not forget that the real reasons for the devastation done to numerous federal agencies is NOT rooting out fraud and abuse as claimed, but rather first and foremost to fund huge tax cuts for the super wealthy. Average Americans are also being endangered by severe cut backs - or total cessation - of safety regulations surrounding food inspections, funding for cancer and other medical research, and the repealing clean air and water regulations.  All so that those who already have more money than they can ever spend can have even more money even as the national debt surges. A piece at The Atlantic looks at the warning the recent spat of tornados is sending.  Here are highlights:

The tornadoes that swept through Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia resulted in a horrifying total of 42 deaths this weekend. Unlike hurricanes, which form steadily and are relatively easy to track, tornadoes are generally hard to predict. Because they appear very quickly, giving populations and emergency services little time to prepare, tornadoes can be particularly deadly.

This is why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) are so crucial for the nation’s emergency-response system. . . . . If we didn’t have that capacity, then we wouldn’t get the warning, and we wouldn’t have time to prepare.

Providing tornado notifications is one of these agencies’ most important tasks. The hierarchy of these alerts—watch, warning, emergency—is not an advisory about a tornado’s intensity but one about its likelihood and imminence. It’s all about time: A tornado watch means, in effect, that you may want to start to get ready if something bad happens; a warning means prepare for imminent danger because tornadoes have been identified in your area; the emergency declaration, though rare, means that you have no more time, and should take cover immediately.

Preparing for emergencies is always difficult; extreme climate events can overwhelm even the best-laid plans. But this challenge has been exacerbated by major staffing cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s and President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Today, about 40 percent of the 122 local forecasting offices of the NWS have significant staffing gaps. More than 10 percent of its 4,800 employees have left in recent months—either dismissed, retired, or bought out. Some of the usual predictive measures, such as the deployment of weather balloons and Doppler radar, many of whose experts and technicians have been fired or laid off, are now not available.

DOGE’s full impact on the nation’s disaster preparedness remains to be seen, but with hurricane season beginning on June 1, many observers are warning of fallout from serious staff shortages. . . .  Problems of staffing, capacity, and cuts demand more study as we enter another season of extreme weather. But what we already know is this: When we face the risk of a mass-casualty disaster, time is our most precious commodity. In this age, unfortunately, we can expect mayhem from all sorts of sources: cyberattacks, terrorism, active shooters, weather events, overburdened aviation systems, deadly viruses. A nation best prepares for a crisis not by ignoring it and hoping it never happens, but by anticipating it and planning for it.

The scientists at NWS and NOAA are in this time-management business. Their job is to measure how changes in the temperature of the air or the ocean interact with wind speed, and to recognize the patterns that signal potential danger—all to give first responders and communities more time to get ready for powerful storms, possible flash floods, damaging winds. That not only gives first responders the ability to know how and where to deploy resources; it also enables citizens to protect themselves, their family, and their property. This is where the precision of the alert matters . . . . Some of the most consequential recent changes to emergency management have been in this crucial capacity to buy more time.

These tech innovations and the NOAA project point to an essential fact: The private sector always has a part to play, but it cannot pick up the slack created by DOGE’s indiscriminate cuts, because these new developments still depend on data from government climate, seismic, and atmospheric programs. The dismantling of our nation’s early-alert and notification system is a dangerous gamble that is already affecting America’s citizens. Ultimately, this loss of capacity deprives us of vital time to seek safety from a catastrophic weather event that may be only seconds away.

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Tariffs Aren’t Producing a Surge of Foreign Investment

On the campaign trail, the Felon promised the MAGA base that he would lower consumer prices on "day one" and rebuild America's manufacturing base (ignoring, of course the work the Biden administration had done on the latter issue).  Indeed, one of the supposed reasons for the Felon's on again, off again tariffs and attacks of foreign trading partners is that the Felon has wrongfully claimed the tariffs will supposedly cause foreign investment in the USA to surge and, in the process, help  restore the nation's diminished manufacturing base.  As a piece in Politico lays out, so far the promised surge in investment is not happening and/or much of the new investment was under way before the Felon took office.  Why?   Largely because of (i) the economic uncertainty created by back and forth changes to tariff levels, (ii) the prospect of continued high interest rates, and (ii) and, I suspect, the unsettling fall out from the Felon's rants on Truth Social (a totally misnamed platform) that underscores the reality that "policy" under the regime depends on the shifting whims of the Felon.   Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump has claimed his surge of new tariffs will produce trillions of dollars of foreign investments in the U.S. economy. But some of the people working to lure those investments to U.S. cities and states say they’re not seeing the investment boom, at least not so far.

To the contrary, economic development officials and lawmakers from several states say that the uncertainty fueled by Trump’s on-again, off-again trade wars is keeping many foreign businesses from pouring money into the U.S. market right now. And it signals the uneven impact the tariffs are having on reshoring American manufacturing — Trump’s stated goal for raising rates to the highest levels in a century.

Buffeted by news of companies raising prices as a result of the president’s dramatic tariff increases, the Trump administration has made economic development pledges a centerpiece of its messaging strategy. As businesses across the country fret over the administration’s global trade war, the White House has responded by releasing a running list of billion-dollar commitments from major companies, a sign, the president and his aides argue, that his economic strategy is working by forcing more companies to build their products in the U.S.

The White House, however, is indiscriminate about what announcements it claims come from “the Trump effect.” Some have been in the works for years before they are announced. Others are in line with what the company would have invested, regardless of the tariffs. Some are inflated, adding previous investments to new pledges.

The reality for economic developers is more complicated. Officials work for years building relationships that can one day, hopefully, translate into hundreds, or even thousands, of well-paying jobs. . . . . “These are large investments that businesses are making and they’re going to do them thoughtfully and they’re going to take time,” said Barbara Coffee, the director of economic initiatives for the City of Tucson, Arizona. “When they’re doing site searches, just to determine the location, it takes years, two and three years.”

While a favorite benchmark for both Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike, economic development pledges are notoriously difficult to pin down. Companies sometimes fail to follow through with the plan, or spread out the investment over a longer period of time depending on economic circumstances. Congress even passed a law in 1995 that encourages businesses to put a disclaimer on news releases about investment decisions, saying that they are subject to change.

The Trump administration has been so eager to show signs of economic growth that it has celebrated companies that are merely “considering” increasing production in the United States. . . . . But those announcements may conceal the economic reality. Even as the administration has touted decisions from auto companies like Honda and Stellantis to move production to the U.S., auto manufacturing jobs are down 20.8 percent from 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Auto manufacturing jobs fell 4.7 percent between March and April, when Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on foreign auto imports went into effect.

Other industries are watching the domestic economic and political climate as well. Despite a $50 billion investment pledge, Roche, a pharmaceutical company, said it was evaluating that pledge after Trump issued an executive order aimed at driving down drug prices. . . . . should the EO go into effect, the business reality is that the pharma industry would need to review its expenses, including investments.”

The sense of economic uncertainty has unsettled lawmakers from both political parties. While Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) has thus far been unwilling to sign onto legislation to remove Trump’s power to impose tariffs or implement trade deals unilaterally, Johnson said Wednesday at a POLITICO Live event that he’s concerned about how uncertainty surrounding tariffs is affecting businesses in his state.

“What I’m hearing from Wisconsin businesses, manufacturers, the National Association of Manufacturers, The Business Roundtable, is right now investment is on hold,” said Johnson. “Again. I come from the private sector. You want as much certainty and stability” as possible.

Still, investments are projected to slow in 2025, according to industry analysts. The consulting firm Deloitte projected that investments would slow slightly from 3.7 percent 2024, before picking up significantly once the upheaval produced by the administration’s trade and tax policy fades.

That’s a hopeful sign for local officials like Lilley, who’s eager to bring more jobs to North Carolina’s growing population.

Don't expect certainty to return anytime soon. 

 

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Trump Is Destroying America's "Soft Power"

Since taking office in January, the Felon has trashed America's reputation abroad through insane - and likely illegal - tariffs that have alienated longtime allies and trading partners, the slashing of foreign humanitarian aid that has left desperately needed food rotting in warehouse (see the image), attacks on NATO and Europe in general, cozying up to dictators and tyrants as on his recent Middle East trip, and  gutting agencies that have promoted American values for decades.  All of this has severely damaged, if not destroyed, America's so-called soft power abroad and even resulted in America being seen as a negative influence by citizens of former long time allies.  The biggest winner in all of this has been China which is stepping into the void left by American withdrawal and abandonment of millions of desperate men, women and children across the globe, but particularly in Africa.  Also benefiting is Russia which can now point to the unreliability of America as an ally and protector. The MAGA base cheers on the misogyny and congressional Republicans do nothing to assert their authority and insist that funding by Congress be used as designed.  Felon has made it crystal clear that democracy and human rights, anti-corruption, and basic decency no longer matter in America's foreign policy. A column in the New York Times looks at this depressing and dangerous situation:

In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world.

Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.

But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.

That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.

First, under the guise of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls streamlining, the administration plans to eliminate two offices, one that oversees grants, the other focused on promoting internet freedom in closed societies and on championing human rights in corporate conduct and international bodies like the United Nations. . . . . While modest streamlining might make sense, these sweeping cuts will severely compromise Democracy, Human Rights and Labor’s ability to act as a counterweight to regional State Department bureaus and U.S. embassies, which by design give precedence to diplomatic relationships over human rights. . . . It will also undermine the government’s ability to act when opportunities for human rights progress arise.

Second, the Trump administration’s plan will significantly narrow the scope of the annual human rights reports. This year’s reports will no longer include sections on freedom of assembly, free and fair elections, gender-based violence, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, or violent crimes targeting vulnerable populations. The administration has not offered any justification for deleting these sections, which will deprive the entire world of important information about human rights abuses.

Finally, the Trump administration’s proposed restructuring will eliminate the Human Rights and Democracy Fund, the primary funding source for the bureau’s democracy promotion programs, which provide a lifeline to embattled human rights defenders worldwide.

. . . . . Mr. Rubio is slated to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lawmakers from both parties need to stand up to him and demand that the State Department continue to support the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which is an essential engine of soft power in U.S. foreign policy. It is in our long-term national interest that they stop it from burning out.

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