Things For Working People Republicans Will Cut To Give Billionaires More Tax Cuts

"But hey! When they’re hungry or finding themselves without any health care, low-income Trump voters can take heart in knowing that they really stuck it to trans people, immigrants, and the concept of “woke” and definitely were not tricked into frothing at the mouth over these things in order to ensure they’d vote for people who would cut all of the programs they rely on in order to fund tax cuts for people too rich to even feel the impact of whatever small amount of taxes they won’t be paying anymore."

Robyn Pennacchia @ Wonkette

Grump voters and their relationship to Fox and conservative media is its own national dumpster fire all Americans, and the rest of the world influenced by our politics, will all now have to resist, dodge, and endure for the next four years. Pointing out the details of how republican voters, or other than the Billionaires, voted against their own interests is necessary but not new or surprising. Just like during the pandemic the redder the location the worse the health outcomes. If conservatives are not getting revenge against their avowed enemies, Dems, liberals, etc, they're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, usually both at the same time. This is how they roll, break stuff and then fall on their own sword. We've seen this movie before and, of course, the second installment is likely to be worse. 

But what about everybody else? Apparently, more eligible voters didn't vote than voted for either Grump or Harris. What about women, minorities, Muslim-Americans, families with LGBTQ+ loved ones, young people with college loans, health care workers and/or people who depend on health care services, and, really, any working class wage worker that did not see a clear and present threat to their interests in the election from Grump and the republicans or concluded Grump can't be worse than Biden or America isn't ready for a woman potus or whatthefuckever is a level of civic imbecility bordering on Darwin Awards stuff. Sorry. 

After all the postmortem allusions to the election results, and how various groups voted, I'm anxious to see the actual demographic breakdown, which I'm told should be out in February. I'm tired of the gloating about alleged 5-8% shifts in minority populations, women didn't show up, etc. 

Anyway, wrapping up my lament, so many eligible voters unable to recognize any important stakes or choice in the election is a crisis in civic education. Or looking at it a different way: to survive democracies have to win popular support, that's it or absolutely requisite to democracies' survival anyway.  And nearly 40% of the electorate decided democratic government wasn't worth their vote. What has democracy ever done for me, like that? Biden/Harris or Trump, what's the difference? I care about my community but national politics, Trump and all that, it's like a nightmare horror Hunger Games pro wrestling super grudge match. I'm not into the superhero stuff. Voting is just feeding the beast. 

But then amongst engaged voters, trigger warning, Grump won 49.5% to 48.5% over Harris because, testifies a Trump supporter on TV, "Because he knows how to deal with the "illegals" and he's easier on the pocket book." I'm taking this as suggestion that I need to read some more Jonathan Swift. 

Bothsidesing, With a Republican Slant--

 "I found a lot to agree with in Jonathan Weisman’s big piece [in NY Times] on how Democrats lost the working class, although he barely mentions the extent to which Republicans have followed anti-worker policies, including attempts to privatize Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act. Reagan, in particular, didn’t just do “trickle-down,” he did a lot to crush unions while cutting taxes on high incomes and raising them on most workers, and presided over trade deficits, deindustrialization and a huge surge in inequality.

Readers should know that the raw fact is that America didn’t have higher inflation than other advanced economies — yet Weisman not only doesn’t tell readers that, he slants the narrative by giving the last word to a Republican asserting that it was all Biden’s fault."

Krugman Wonks Out

The key distinction to me in the Dems "lost the working class" debate (in as much as they actually have, also debatable), which really only refers to the white working class anyway, is they were lost for cultural reasons not economic reasons long ago. 

When the voting rights act was passed in 1965, then potus LBJ is reported to have opined that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation. Turns out we're going on our third generation since the bigots began migrating to the Republican party and they're pretty much all there now, metastasizing into everywhere outside the major metropolitan areas. 

The racist and mainstream perspective, spread by Fox and conservative media, dictates an economic outlook in which everything is zero sum: If immigrants get ahead, natives must be falling behind; If minority civil rights are expanded, the majority population's rights will suffer decline and restriction. It's always a vicious Hobbesian all-against-all tug-o-war for the profiteering spoils of society, which conveniently reinforces corporate rule's "free market" austerity economics and political-economy.   

This take K describes as recent has been routine at the NY Times and WaPo pretty much since post-pandemic inflation first surged in 2021, and in a broader sense is much older. The media studiously keep the global and domestic inflation stories separate. They rarely mention that inflation after a disruption in global supply chains, a major war or global pandemic, is to be expected and to a degree inescapable. The more relevant question is how governing institutions respond to these economic pressures. And in the US, anyway, the Fed, and mainstream economics, responded by putting the onus for inflation entirely on common consumers, reflecting a blinding Wall Street and corporate rule bias in the Fed and mainstream economics. Larry Summers was blaming inflation on Biden for giving consumers too much spending money with his Covid relief bills before the universally expected major supply chain obstacles had even been identified, let alone addressed. 

Throughout the whole ordeal mainstream press accounts also studiously ignored the contributions of corporate price gouging to inflation and the cost of living surge, even though Warren was regularly quoting on the floor of the Senate CEO's promising their shareholders price and profit increases based on the favorable, for them, "inflationary environment." 

The goal in all this was to reduce the destabilizing extremes of inflation WITHOUT enabling any government interventions that might shift resources toward the laboring classes. Austerity economics, basically. 

The republican slant in the media is recognition that they can blunt the real economic interests of the bottom 50% by appealing to their racist bigotry and culture war stupidity. And they just succeeded in the last election, even if narrowly, spectacularly. That Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg will, reportedly, sit on the podium behind Grump at the inauguration isn't just an unprecedented clown show display of corporate greed but a crowning display of the neoliberal order and the catastrophically poor judgment of our new economic overlords and Big Tech broligarchy.  

Why "poor judgment" if they are only protecting their own class interests to freely accumulate capital and limit their labor costs? Isn't that what good capitalists are supposed to do? Because pursuing their own self-interests so single-mindedly increases poverty and homelessness, and more generally is always squeezing and lowballing the bottom 50% to inflate their margins, which is the Wall Street game pretty much running the economy. 

At this point it's fairly clear the Wall Street position isn't in any clear sense pro-growth so much as pro-Billionaire wealth hoarding. But, worse, it is spectacularly poor judgment because they have turned the government, and the largest and most influential economy in the world, into culture war reality tv with the constant threat of humanitarian crimes the dramatic click bait, meanwhile abandoning global leadership in the energy transition away from heavy carbon emissions and fossil fuels, burn baby burn. 

They are gambling that because fossil fuel energy won the 20th century it will win the 21st century. They are wrong but now we have to watch what terrible humiliations they will put the country through before some super majority surge in the electorate demands another course correction.

Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President, 1924-2024--

 

Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Niles Rodgers, and the Allman Brothers Band's favorite POTUS. And my first vote for a president, although I cannot say I paid too close attention to President Carter's term in office and the year I voted for him in 1980 he actually lost. In retrospect based mostly on the account in Walter Karp's Liberty Under Siege (1989), I've always understood Carter's presidency as this decent guy who wasn't up to the big money hardball politics going on in Washington. I believed the 1980 October Surprise theory from the first time I heard it. It was like a coup de grace to Carter's term in office, Reagan and Beltway insiders stealing his lunch money. The way Carter's humanitarian strengths and integrity blossomed and flourished after his presidency has only seemed to corroborate Karp's take. Carter's humility and honesty and generosity were his superpowers, and traits not tolerated much in the special interest meat grinder of the  halls of government. Carter lived a century but the timing of his passing might be a mercy in that he won't have to see what comes next for the country and maybe the loss of a politician and leader like him might raise the alarm a little about the peril the country is facing as the result of the recent election. Wonder how the Carter Center would have assessed the integrity of the US election as official observers, as they have done other elections all around the world? What might they have had to say about the Russian bomb scares and Musk's billions flooding the zone with disinformation down the stretch? I've never really thought much about Carter as the rock & roll POTUS, or until the documentary of the same name came out in 2020 anyway. But I do remember Hunter S. Thompson loved him. And I remember he was the first president to walk in an inaugural parade and he put solar panels on the roof of the Whitehouse. And I can't remember ever seeing any other president in a fan t-shirt for a rock & roll band like he appears in the doc in one for The Allman Bros. Also in the doc Carter says the first artists he thought of inviting to play at his inauguration were Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin; not exactly Elvis and Tina Turner but rock & roll-ish enough. By comparison, I think Reagan was still into the Rat Pack. The Bushies were into country music, reportedly. Clinton was into Fleetwood Mac and played the saxophone. Obama was always doing playlists like he was a rock critic. Biden tried to follow suit but his heart wasn't in it so his lists came off even cringier than Obama's. And before Carter, according to the internet, Gerald Ford was a jazz fan and Nixon only listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries with the volume set to 11, just kidding. And Grump appears to like all rock and pop music only once it's been played to death, bloated, and bad. So it is Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President. RIP.  

Addendum: Several of my favorite journalists are pointing out in the wake of Carter's passing that features of the neoliberal order, conventionally attributed to Reagan winning in 1980, actually got going under Carter. I've been aware of this case for awhile but always bristled at the argument. 

Deregulating the trucking industry isn't the same as making opposition to all regulations and taxes on wealth official admin policy or making regulations and taxes anti-growth curse words. Neolib boilerplate: Government interventions in the economy-- i.e., taxes and regulations-- are bad, always bad, and should always be scorned and condemned. The only thing equally bad is government spending that might require more taxes and regulations. 

Although, in historical fact, various gov regulations and taxes protecting labor, public health, and the environment have been around for over a hundred years and are essential to the general prosperity and peace of society. They are essential to keeping the food we eat and the air we breathe from poisoning and killing us. It's that basic. Sure, Carter was into Christian austerity but also into lots of Christian charity. Keep it simple: Milton Friedman, Mr. Neoliberal Austerity Economics, advised Reagan and dissed Carter.

Anyway, drives me crazy how people in politics can get so self-servingly binary about this stuff. Deregulating anything equals Neoliberalism. No it doesn't. Cutting any waste in government is austerity. No, cutting essential social safety net spending in the caring economy or cutting spending on public infrastructure is austerity. And, actually, regressive taxes on the bottom 50% of income earners ought to be cut and progressive taxes on exorbitant wealth hoarding ought to be increased. So I can get a little defensive about this argument that Carter was a Neolib. Still, have to concede some points on the matter to this passage from Tim Barker substack post @ Origins of Our Time: 

By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”

Who knows Eizenstat's intentions four years into the Reagan Revolution but point taken. As a heart breaking example of Carter's "fiscal moderation" and austerity turns out he recommended cutting social security. I know, a different time, stagflation, the gov had to do something. But by punishing the elderly poor? This doesn't taint his Habitat for Humanity home building work but it does put it possibly in a new light? Building homes for the poor as penance? 

Anyway, Carter's takes on the infamous 2010 Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling allowing billionaires and Big Business to spend literally as much as they want promoting austerity and sabotaging our democracy adds perspective. Compiled by Public Citizen:

Citizens United is an “erroneous ruling” and “the most stupid decision the Supreme Court ever made.”

Citizens United has turned America into an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”

Citizens United “violates the essence” of our democracy and represents “the biggest change in America” since I was elected in 1976.

Citizens United has left everyday Americans “cheated out of” the chance to make their lives better.

Citizens United has led to “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

To corporate rule neoliberalism means maximizing capital wealth accumulation for the oligarchy and austerity budgets for everyone else. Jimmy Carter was NOT a Neoliberal. His Christian austerity was an equal opportunity austerity. 

Is "Expansionary Fiscal Contraction" returning to America?

 "There is no evidence – and never has been – that austerity (cutting to grow) works in the fashion promised by those who support it so vehemently. Britain – used as a laboratory rat in order to prove that expansionary fiscal contraction works – is proof of that, as are the examples of Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

The UK experiment began three years ago [2010] when the coalition came to power. The timing could hardly have been better for the new breed of expansionary fiscal contractionists at the Treasury. The deficit was at a peacetime record, the economy appeared to be on the turn and, as an excellent new book by Mark Blyth shows, it was the time when the brief one-year dalliance with Keynesian economics had just hit the buffers."

Larry Elliott @ The Guardian

Meaning, by "buffers," hit the wall of the austerity police in banking and government in the aftermath of the debt crisis that followed the economic recession in Europe in the late '00s. I happen to be reading Blyth's austerity book right now: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. It's a brilliantly plainspoken and illuminating history of austerity economics for dummies like me; i.e., readers enthusiastic about economic history but don't want to deal with too much math. Austerity is the stock position of capital, or rich elites, whenever the demands of workers or the environment threaten bottom lines, or whenever the tenor of the times is such that governments are contemplating raising taxes or imposing more regulations on business. Austerity always says the same thing: it costs too much; it being wage and/or benefit increases, climate change reforms, public infrastructure, etc. Spending increases budget deficits. Spending depresses growth. To expand economic growth we need to cut spending and cut taxes and regulations and let the job creators create jobs. Which is almost precisely the path the new admin is about to embark us all on, if I'm not mistaken. Cutting social programs to expand Billionaire profits, or that's the threat anyway. Ack! 

I am not suggesting there isn't waste in government, or that efforts to reduce waste are always in bad faith, but I am saying conservative corporate rule efforts to reduce "waste" are almost always bad faith and really a now timeworn tactic to resist government or labor or environmental or any other claims on their wealth, no matter how legitimate or even economically pro-growth. 

Krugman says the US economy is basically a massive insurance organization with an army. So much of what the government does is pass through insurance payouts for stuff private industry cannot or will not produce or pay for. 

We know the military budget is where most the waste in the federal budget is but they'll cut more cancer research for children, as they've apparently already done, before even looking at the military budget. Or cut other absolutely necessary social safety net stuff: health care, social security, and other social programs and public infrastructure crucial to 70-80% of the population but wasteful "entitlement" spending to richies that can afford their own social insurance. 

Some inequality in a big complex society is inescapable but some inequality is so bad it discredits society and the whole economy and rule of law. It makes such norms appear as mere shams and dysfunctional rackets. Billionaires and homeless encampments juxtapose like that.