The Potemkin Policies of Donald Trump

There are many who have stated that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, decided to withdraw America from the Paris climate accord for purely domestic political purposes: he has failed to deliver so far on any of his campaign promises and, therefore, was desperate to throw a political bone to his base of Christofascists and xenophobes.  With his plans for health care reform - using the term "reform" very loosely - and an overhaul of the tax code going nowhere in Congress, trashing the Paris accord was the easiest way to convince his less than intellectually brilliant and non-analytical base a bone.  Indeed, it is part and parcel with Trump's effort to construct a Potemkin village if you will for his base - for Fox News viewers, a "Potemkin village is is any construction (literal or figurative) built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is - so that they will believe he is actually doing something for them as promised even when he is failing to do so in fact. A piece in The Atlantic looks at Trump's failing policies and his efforts to continue to dupe the gullible in the GOP base.  Here are excerpts:

It’s “Infrastructure Week” at the White House. Theoretically.

On Monday, the administration announced a plan to spend $200 billion on infrastructure and overhaul U.S. air traffic control. There was a high-profile signing in the East Wing before dozens of cheering lawmakers and industry titans. It was supposed to be the beginning of a weeklong push to fix America’s roads, bridges, and airports.

But in the next two days, Trump spent more energy burning metaphorical bridges than trying to build literal ones. He could have stayed on message for several hours, gathered Democrats and Republicans to discuss a bipartisan agreement, and announced a timeframe. Instead he quickly turned his attention to Twitter to accuse media companies of “Fake News” while undermining an alliance with Qatar based on what may be, fittingly, a fake news story.

It’s a microcosm of this administration’s approach to public policy. A high-profile announcement, coupled with an ambitious promise, subsumed by an unrelated, self-inflicted public-relations crisis, followed by … nothing.

The secret of the Trump infrastructure plan is: There is no infrastructure plan. Just like there is no White House tax plan. Just like there was no White House health care plan. More than 120 days into Trump’s term in a unified Republican government, Trump’s policy accomplishments have been more in the subtraction category (e.g., stripping away environmental regulations) than addition. The president has signed no major legislation and left significant portions of federal agencies unstaffed, as U.S. courts have blocked what would be his most significant policy achievement, the legally dubious immigration ban.

The simplest summary of White House economic policy to date is four words long: There is no policy.

Consider the purported focus of this week. An infrastructure plan ought to include actual proposals, like revenue-and-spending details and timetables. The Trump infrastructure plan has little of that. Even the president’s speech on Monday was devoid of specifics. . . . . The ceremonial signing on Monday was pure theater. . . . Meanwhile, Congress isn’t working on infrastructure at all, according to Politico, and Republicans have shown no interest in a $200 billion spending bill.

In short, this “plan” is not a plan, so much as a Potemkin policy, a presentation devised to show the press and the public that the president has an economic agenda. The show continued on Wednesday, as the president delivered an infrastructure speech in Cincinnati that criticized Obamacare, hailed his Middle East trip, and offered no new details on how his plan would work. Infrastructure Week is a series of scheduled performances to make it look as if the president is hard at work on a domestic agenda that cannot move forward because it does not exist.

Journalists are beginning to catch on.  The administration’s policy drought has so far been obscured by a formulaic bait-and-switch strategy one could call the Two-Week Two-Step. Bloomberg has compiled several examples of the president promising major proposals or decisions on everything from climate-change policy to infrastructure “in two weeks.” He has missed the fortnight deadline almost every time.

The starkest false promise has been taxes. . . . . . the simplest summary of White House tax policy is: There is no plan. There isn’t even a complete staff to compose one.

The story is slightly different for the White House budget, but no more favorable. The budget suffers, not from a lack of details, but from a failure of numeracy that speaks to the administration’s indifference toward serious public policy.

Trump and his party are alike—united in their antagonism toward Obama-era policies and united in their inability to articulate what should come next. Republicans are trapped by campaign promises that they cannot fulfill. The White House is trapped inside of the president’s perpetual campaign, a cavalcade of economic promises divorced from any effort to detail, advocate, or enact major economic legislation. With an administration that uses public policy as little more than a photo op, get ready for many sequels to this summer’s Infrastructure Week.

The only good news is that since Trump's and the GOP's policies would likely be so bad for the country that it is a benefit that nothing is actually happening. 

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Racism: Why Many Whites Give Trump/the GOP a Pass on Giveaways to the Rich

As noted in prior posts, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer's "tax plan" is based on fairy tale assumptions and will result in huge new deficits if passed and throw the vast majority of the tax cuts to the very wealthy and large corporations.  But one example is the elimination of the estate tax that currently only impacts married couples with a net estate of over $11 million.  Average Americans simply get no benefit from a repeal of the estate tax, yet many foolishly support its elimination.  Similarly, many working class whites voted for Trump and Republican candidates even though for the last 37 years most of the GOP's policies have worked against the working class. So why the support for those who are behind the economic destruction of these people?  In a word, racism.  The GOP for decades now has played off of white racial animosities.   For an added bonus, the GOP and now Trump have also played to Christian extremists, LGBT rights being but one of the favored whipping boys to get out the GOP base on election day.  A piece in Slate looks at this disturbing phenomenon which has no sign of abating.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump wants to give himself a tax cut.

His new tax plan, a one-page summary unveiled on Wednesday in the last-minute scramble for an accomplishment before the end of his first 100 days, would cut the business rate down to 15 percent. Now, Trump isn’t a business, but he owns one, and it’s not structured like a typical one. Instead, it’s a “pass-through” corporation, meaning its earnings are passed through to the owners’ individual returns and then taxed at the appropriate marginal rate. Trump’s tax cut is structured to slash rates on pass-throughs as well other corporate forms. In other words, if passed, the president will save himself a nice chunk of change, on the order of tens of millions of dollars.

Trump’s plan would slash individual and business rates, repeal the estate tax, and end the alternative minimum tax (which hits a number of affluent households, in addition to the highest income earners). What’s more, Trump would eliminate the 3.8 percent investment surtax found in the Affordable Care Act, another break for the wealthiest households and estates.

Together, these tax cuts would cost an estimated $5.5 trillion over the next 10 years, according to a preliminary analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.  . . . with $20 trillion added to the national debt by 2036.

This is just gravy for the rich: The large bulk of these cuts will go to the highest earners and wealthiest Americans. More than 30 percent of income gains accrue to those with annual incomes more than $200,000, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, with 14.3 percent accruing to those with incomes above $1 million.

His budget would slash tens of billions of dollars from anti-poverty programs; his health care plan would leave tens of millions of Americans without health insurance; and his tax proposals would blow a hole in the federal budget, starving the government of revenue and leaving future Americans the burden of attempting to re-knit the social safety net.

At first glance, it’s an odd populism that takes from the many to give to the few, that abandons the anxious and suffering in favor of the wealthy and comfortable. But remember, Trump’s populism wasn’t just an appeal to jobs and economic interest—it was a racial appeal.  Trump cast blame on Muslims, Hispanic immigrants, and foreign others; he pledged to reopen the mines, recover the factories, and restore the white male industrial wage-earner to his perceived place at the top of the material and social hierarchy.

If nothing else, the racial interests of white Americans have always been at the forefront of white politics, a powerful force across class and social lines. The collapse of support for all kinds of public goods, from robust schools to neighborhood pools, is tied to the perceived beneficiaries. When the majority of white Americans believed those beneficiaries looked like themselves, they backed those investments. When they didn’t, they rejected them, either explicitly or eventually under the guise of “color blind” ideologies.

[N]ow would not be the first time that millions of white Americans backed racial demagogues in the destruction of public goods as a means to restore white hegemony over a smaller, more limited public. We would, in a way, be reverting to form, extending to the country what has defined those regions where race hierarchy was most rigid.

 Yes, many Americans are just plain stupid - and bigots to boot.

Obama to Dare Republicans on Tax Populism

On Tuesday Barack Obama will deliver the State of the Union message and it is expected that he will throw down the gauntlet to Republicans on tax reform and tax policy.  The Republicans talk about  tax reform, but the beneficiaries of their proposals are the wealthy who would receive tax cuts, the GOP answer to everything.  Meanwhile, our infrastructure would crumble further and education would see more cuts.  As Huffington Post and Politico are reporting, Obama's proposals would bring aid to the beleaguered middle class and tax increases for the most wealthy Americans and corporations.  The goal?  To push for needed reforms and at the same time to force the GOP to show the party's pro-wealthy agenda.  Here are highlights from Huffington Post:

During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Barack Obama will lay out a plan to extend tax credits to the middle class by hiking taxes on wealthier Americans and big banks, according to senior administration officials.

Under the plan, the capital gains tax for couples with income over $500,000 per year would be raised from its current level of 23.8 percent up to 28. The plan would also strip a tax break, known as a "step-up," that allows heirs to avoid capital gains taxes on large inheritances.

In addition, the plan would institute a new tax on the biggest financial institutions, basing the fee on liabilities in order to discourage risky borrowing. The administration says the fee would hit the roughly 100 banks that have assets of $50 billion or more.

The president's plan would use revenues from those tax code changes to finance credits aimed at the middle class, officials said. That includes extending the earned income tax credits to families without children, which would benefit an estimated 13 million low-income workers, while also tripling the maximum tax credits for child care in low- and middle-income homes.

"This proposal is probably the most impactful way we can address the manifest unfairness in our tax system," an administration official said.

According to officials, the capital gains tax reforms would impact "almost exclusively" the top 1 percent of earners, carving out the majority of middle-income families from the hikes.

 Here are highlights from Politico's take on Obama's proposals:

President Barack Obama will use his State of the Union address to stake out a populist vision of tax reform and new middle-class benefits — and practically dare Republicans to say no.

The message: Wage stagnation? Obama’s on it. And if Republicans say no — especially to catchy-sounding ideas like getting rid of the “trust fund loophole” — they can explain it to voters in 2016.

Altogether, the new tax benefits for middle-class families would cost $175 billion over 10 years, according to senior administration officials — in addition to the $60 billion price tag for the proposal Obama has already announced to make community college tuition free for two years.

But not to worry, administration officials say — steeper capital gains taxes and new financial fees would more than pay for it. They’d raise $320 billion over 10 years, according to White House estimates — $210 billion from the new capital gains tax revenues and $110 billion from the bank fees.

It’s a way for Obama to position himself as a defender of the middle class and a fighter against stagnant wages, as an opening bid in any negotiations with Republicans on revamping the tax code — one of the few areas where GOP leaders say there could be the potential for a deal with Obama during his final two years in office.

Despite all of the signs that the economy is doing better, “the middle class has yet to experience the prosperity shown in the recovery,” a senior administration official said in a conference call with reporters Saturday. Obama’s speech, the official said, will be about “the choices he thinks we need to make to make sure that that extends to the middle class.”

The bottom line, though, is that Obama is betting it will be politically awkward for Republicans to explain why they would resist goodies like a $3,000 per child tax credit — three times the maximum amount that’s available now — especially when prominent Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential presidential candidate, have pitched their own ideas for boosting the child tax credit.

Jon Huntsman: Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause

Echoing a theme that Andrew Sullivan voiced years ago and which more recently the Tory Party leadership in Britain has embraced, Jon Huntsman has come out for gay marriage and said that the Republican Party needs to shed its anti-gay mindset.  Lest we forget, Huntsman is a Mormon with a conservative although his record when he was governor of Utah sought moderation on gay issues.  Huntsman also argues that the GOP needs to rethink its positions on numerous others, including tax reform and immigration.  Obviously, to the Christofascists and white supremacists in the GOP base, Huntsman is a heretic.  Personally,  I believe that Huntsman is a pragmatist who sees the GOP's homophobia as harming the Republican Party's long term viability.  So long as religious denominations are free to recognize or not recognize same sex marriage, civil marriage should be open to all committed loving couples, gay or straight.  Here are highlights from a piece in The American Conservative written by Huntsman:

The party of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan has now lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The marketplace of ideas will render us irrelevant, and soon, if we are not honest about our time and place in history. Unfortunately, much of the discussion has focused on cosmetic solutions to, say, our underperformance among ethnic and young voters. This is a mistake: we cannot cross this river by feeling for stones. Instead, we need to take a hard look at what today’s conservatism stands for.

Conservatives can start by examining how Republicans working with Democrats have governed in several successful states, including Utah; free-market-based healthcare reform, tax reform that eliminated deductions and closed loopholes to bring down rates, and practical education reforms that spoke to 21st-century realities.

Instead of using immigration reform as a wedge issue, like many leaders in Washington, Utah passed legislation to help manage immigration based on our real economic needs.  .  .  .  .  Building a winning coalition to tackle the looming fiscal and trust deficits will be impossible if we continue to alienate broad segments of the population. We must be happy warriors who refuse to tolerate those who want Hispanic votes but not Hispanic neighbors.

And, consistent with the Republican Party’s origins, we must demand equality under the law for all Americans.

While serving as governor of Utah, I pushed for civil unions and expanded reciprocal benefits for gay citizens. I did so not because of political pressure—indeed, at the time 70 percent of Utahns were opposed—but because as governor my role was to work for everybody, even those who didn’t have access to a powerful lobby. Civil unions, I believed, were a practical step that would bring all citizens more fully into the fabric of a state they already were—and always had been—a part of.

That was four years ago. Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry.

All Americans should be treated equally by the law, whether they marry in a church, another religious institution, or a town hall. This does not mean that any religious group would be forced by the state to recognize relationships that run counter to their conscience. Civil equality is compatible with, and indeed promotes, freedom of conscience.

Marriage is not an issue that people rationalize through the abstract lens of the law; rather it is something understood emotionally through one’s own experience with family, neighbors, and friends. The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans.

We are at a crossroads. I believe the American people will vote for free markets under equal rules of the game—because there is no opportunity or job growth any other way. But the American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty.

I have always liked Huntsman and believe that the GOP threw away its chance of winning in 2012 by kicking Huntsman to the curb.  Huntsman's only crime, if you will, was that he wasn't a nutcase and wasn't willing to prostitute himself to the worse elements of the GOP base.  He sees the future while the gay haters and racists in the GOP are trying to recapture a past that will never again exist - if it ever even existed as they like to think it did.  Will the GOP listen to his wisdom?  Probably not.  I can just image the spittle flying at FRC and other hater groups that control far too many of the GOP's policies.

When Will Obama and Congress Be Honest With the Public

Far to many politicians on both sides of the aisle would rather tell Americans what they think they want to hear as opposed to the honest truth.  Of course on the Republican side of the aisle the situation is compounded by the fact that far too many in the GOP, including many Republican members of Congress, lost touch with objective reality years ago and have been living in a fantasy world ever since.  But that doesn't mean the objective truth isn't the truth.  A piece in the New York Times looks at America's future economic prospects and the reality is that just doing for the most part more of the same is not going to address the urgent problems facing the nation.   Here are some highlights:

[T]he only way to break out of this deadly cycle is with extraordinary leadership. Republicans and Democrats would have to govern in just the opposite way they ran their campaigns — by offering bold plans that not only challenge the other’s base but their own and thereby mobilizes the center, a big majority, behind their agenda, to break the deadlock. If either party does that, not only will it win the day but the country will win as well. 

What would that look like? If the Republican Party had a brain it would give up on its debt-ceiling gambit and announce instead that it wants to open negotiations immediately with President Obama on the basis of his own deficit commission, the Simpson-Bowles plan. That would at least make the G.O.P. a serious opposition party again — with a platform that might actually appeal outside its base and challenge the president in a healthy way. But the G.O.P. would have to embrace the tax reforms and spending cuts in Simpson-Bowles first. Fat chance. And that’s a pity. 

As for Obama, if he really wants to lead, he will have to finally trust the American people with the truth. I’d love to see him use his Jan. 21 Inaugural Address and his Feb. 12 State of the Union Message as a one-two punch to do just that — offer a detailed, honest diagnosis and then a detailed, honest prescription. 

On the diagnosis side, Obama needs to explain to Americans the world in which they’re now living. It’s a world in which the increasing velocity of globalization and the Information Technology revolution are reshaping every job, workplace and industry. As a result, the mantra that if you “just work hard and play by the rules” you should expect a middle-class lifestyle is no longer operable. Today you need to work harder and smarter, learn and re-learn faster and longer to be in the middle class. The high-wage, middle-skilled job is a thing of the past. Today’s high-wage or decent-wage jobs all require higher skills, passion or curiosity. Government’s job is to help provide citizens with as many lifelong learning opportunities as possible to hone such skills. 

In the State of the Union, I’d love to see Obama lay out a detailed plan for tax reform, spending cuts and investments — to meet the real scale of our problem and spur economic growth. We’ll get much more bang for our buck by deciding now what we’re going to do in all three areas, and signaling markets that we are putting in place a truly balanced approach, but gradually phasing it in. If you tell investors and savers that we’re going to put our fiscal house in order with a credible plan, but one that is gradually phased in, all the money now sitting on the sidelines paralyzed by uncertainty will get off the sidelines and we’ll have a real stimulus.

 
I still believe that America’s rich and the middle classes would pay more taxes and trim entitlements if they thought it was for a plan that was fair, would truly address our long-term fiscal imbalances and set America on a journey of renewal that would ensure our kids have a crack at the American dream.

If only we had a second-term president, unencumbered by ever having to run again, who was ready to test what really bold leadership might produce.

 Sadly, I am not holding my breath.