Thursday, September 05, 2019
Wednesday, September 04, 2019
He Won't Admit It, But Trump Is Losing The Trade War
Donald Trump is convinced that he's the smartest man in the country -- smarter than all the economists who spend their lives studying economic policy. That's why he started a trade war and told Americans that winning it would be very easy.
All he had to do was impose tariffs on some other countries (especially China), and they would submit to his will. He couldn't lose -- except that is exactly what is happening -- he's losing!
We know that the tariffs are not being paid by those other countries -- no matter how many times Trump says they are paying them. Those tariffs are just another tax on American consumers, as they have to pay higher prices for the goods subject to a tariff.
But it's even worse than that. The trade deficits with other countries are not decreasing. They are actually growing larger. As the chart above (from Axios.com) shows, the trade deficit with China has increased by 23.3%. And China is not the only one.
The deficit with the European Union has increased by 23.9%, with Mexico by 26.7%, with Germany by O.04%, with Japan by 2.6%, with Italy by 13.8%, and with France by 8.5%. The trade deficit with the entire world has increased by 24.8%.
It turns out that Trump is not nearly as smart as he claims to be, and trade wars are not easy to win. In fact, Trump is losing this trade war badly, and there's no indication that will change anytime soon.
Biden, Sanders, And Warren Are Still The Leading Democrats
This chart is from the Morning Consult Poll -- done between August 26th and September 1st of a national sample of 16,736 registered voters saying they will vote in a Democratic primary or caucus. The margin of error is 1 point.
The chart below used only the poll's 701 registered voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Its margin of error is 4 points.
GOP Tax Cuts Were A Scam To Funnel Money To The Rich
It was supposed to give everyone a tax cut. It didn't.
It was supposed to encourage businesses to give workers an average of $4000 more each year. It didn't.
And now we learn that even provisions in the bill that were touted as helping urban workers by creating "opportunity zones" was nothing more than a fraudulent way to funnel even more money to the rich.
Here's how economist Paul Krugman explains this tax cut fraud:
A few days ago The Times reported on widespread abuse of a provision in the 2017 Trump tax cut that was supposed to help struggling urban workers. The provision created a tax break for investment in so-called “opportunity zones,” which would supposedly help create jobs in low-income areas. In reality the tax break has been used to support high-end hotels and apartment buildings, warehouses that employ hardly any people and so on. And it has made a handful of wealthy, well-connected investors — including the family of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law — even wealthier.
It’s quite a story. But it should be seen in a broader context, as a symptom of the Republican Party’s unwillingness to perform the basic functions of government.
First of all, the opportunity-zone debacle isn’t the only example of abuse enabled by the Trump tax cut, which is full of destructive loopholes. That is, after all, what’s bound to happen when you ram a multitrillion-dollar bill through Congress without a single hearing, presumably out of fear that it would have been rejected if anyone had had time to figure out what was in it. The bill’s drafting was so rushed that many provisions were actually written in by hand at the last minute.
Among other things, the bum’s rush meant that much of the bill was drafted by lobbyists on behalf of their clients. Given that, it shouldn’t be a surprise that a provision sold as a policy to help the poor has actually ended up being a giveaway to hedge funds and real estate developers.
Beyond that, however, the opportunity-zone affair reflects the reality that Republicans are no longer willing to spend public money in the public interest.
I don’t mean that the G.O.P. is committed to limited government, which would at any rate be coherent. If Republicans were willing to say, “We don’t care about the poor,” or even, “We care about the poor, but don’t consider fighting poverty an appropriate role for government,” at least they’d have the virtue of intellectual consistency.
In fact, however, the modern G.O.P. pretends to share traditionally liberal goals, like poverty reduction or expanded health coverage. But it refuses to spend money on these goals, trying instead to bribe private investors into serving those goals by offering targeted tax breaks.
You can see this syndrome in many areas. Take, for example, the problem of America’s crumbling infrastructure, which Donald Trump claimed he would fix, and is one area in which he might have expected bipartisan support. Why hasn’t anything happened on that front? Why has “infrastructure week” become a punch line for political jokes?
A large part of the reason is that neither the Trump administration nor Republicans in Congress have been willing even to consider the idea of building infrastructure by, you know, building infrastructure.
You might think that right now there’s an overwhelming case for engaging in old-fashioned public works spending. After all, the need for new spending is obvious, and the government’s financing costs are extremely low. (Inflation-protected 10-year bonds are actually paying negative interest.) Why not just borrow some money and get to work on those bridges?
But that’s not how modern Republicans do things. The closest thing we’ve seen to an actual Trump infrastructure plan was a proposal, not for public spending, but for huge tax credits to private developers. And in practice the plan would have been more about privatizing public assets than about promoting new investment.
As far as I can tell, the last time Republicans were willing to spend serious amounts of public money for the public good was 1997, when they agreed to the creation of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was, by the way, highly successful. Since then it has all been about policy by tax break — which consistently fails, for at least three reasons.
First, such policies rarely “trickle down” to the people they’re supposedly intended to benefit. Opportunity zones aren’t the only part of the 2017 tax cut that is notably failing to deliver; remember how slashing corporate tax rates was going to lead to a surge in ordinary workers’ wages?
Second, the main beneficiaries of targeted tax cuts tend, consistently, to be a small group of wealthy individuals. Another provision of the 2017 law was a provision supposedly intended to help small businesses; in fact, 61 percent of the provision’s benefitsare flowing to the top 1 percent of households.
Finally, selective tax breaks often end up mainly providing new and improved ways to dodge taxes. Rich people with smart accountants don’t have a hard time pretending to be small-business owners, developers serving poor communities or whatever else the creators of those tax breaks are ostensibly trying to promote.
The point, again, is that you shouldn’t think of the opportunity-zone fiasco as an isolated mistake. Things like this are inevitable when one of our two major political parties has basically turned its back on the very idea of productive public spending.
Tuesday, September 03, 2019
Abortion Rights Supported By A Majority Of Americans
These charts come from a Pew Research Center survey done between July 22nd and August 4th of this year. They questioned 4,175 adults nationwide, and the survey has a margin of error of only 1.9 points.
Fundamentalist right-wingers (and congressional Republicans) continue to push to outlaw abortions in the United States. But that is against what a majority of the American public wants. About 61% wants abortion to be legal in all or most cases, while only 38% want it illegal in all or most cases -- that's a significant gap of 23 points in favor of legal abortion.
In addition, a whopping 70% of the public wants Roe vs. Wade to remain in effect, while only 28% want the Supreme Court to overturn it.
Once again, the Republicans are on the wrong side of history.
The Biggest Lies Corporations Tell About Labor Unions
One of the biggest lies that corporations tell Americans is that labor unions interfere with a worker's "right to work". As Eleanor Roosevelt told us, that is not true. It just allows corporations (and other businesses) to keep wages low and workplaces dangerous. It let's employers exploit their workers.
Here, from ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich, are other lies that corporations tell about unions. Don't believe them.
Wealthy corporations and their enablers have spread 5 big lies about unions in order to stop workers from organizing and to protect their own bottom-lines. Know the truth and spread the truth.
Lie #1: Labor unions are bad for workers. Wrong. Unions are good for all workers – even those who are not unionized. In the mid-1950s, when a third of all workers in the United States were unionized, wages grew in tandem with the economy. That’s because workers across America – even those who were not unionized – had significant power to demand and get better wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. Since then, as union membership has declined, the middle class has shrunk as well.
Lie #2: Unions hurt the economy. Wrong again. When workers are unionized they can negotiate better wages, which in turn spreads the economic gains more evenly and strengthens the middle class. This creates a virtuous cycle: Wages increase, workers have more to spend in their communities, businesses thrive, and the economy grows. Since the the 1970s, the decline in unionization accounts for one-third of the increase in income inequality. Without unions, wealth becomes concentrated at the top and the gains don’t trickle down to workers.
Lie #3: Labor unions are as powerful as big business. Now way. Labor union membership in 2018 accounted for 10.5 percent of the American workforce, while large corporations account for almost three-quarters of the entire American economy. And when it comes to political power, it’s big business and small labor. In the 2018 midterms, labor unions contributed less than 70 million dollars to parties and candidates, while big corporations and their political action committees contributed 1.6 billion dollars. This enormous gulf between business and labor is a huge problem. It explains why most economic gains have been going to executives and shareholders rather than workers. But this doesn’t have to be the case.
Lie #4: Most unionized workers are in industries like steel and auto manufacturing. Untrue. Although industrial unions are still vitally important to workers, the largest part of the unionized workforce is workers in the professional and service sectors – retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, teachers–which comprise 59% of all workers represented by a union. And these workers benefit from being in a union. In 2018, unionized service workers earned a median wage of 802 dollars a week. Non-unionized service workers made on average, $261 less. That’s almost a third less.
Lie #5: Most unionized workers are white, male, and middle-aged. Some unionized workers are, of course, but most newly-unionized workers are not. They’re women, they’re young, and a growing portion are black and brown. In fact, it’s through the power of unions that people who had been historically marginalized in the American economy because of their race, ethnicity, or gender are now gaining economic ground. In 2018, women who were in unions earned 21 percent more than non-unionized women. And African-Americans who were unionized earned nearly 20 percent more than African-Americans who were non-unionized.
Don’t believe the corporate lies. Today’s unions are growing, expanding, and boosting the wages and economic prospects of those who need them most. They’re good for workers and good for America.
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