#2017 tax cuts for the wealthy

[filosofablogger]

Good Bye Mitch ... Hello WHO???

Yesterday Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he will be stepping down from his leadership position at the end of this year.  Note that he is not retiring from the Senate, only from his leadership role.  It is tempting, at first glance, to feel empathy for Mitch who has some obvious health problems as well as problems with his own cohorts in the Senate who seem to feel that…

[boreal-sea]

Biden’s 2025 would raise the child tax credits back to the levels they were at during the pandemic, an objectively good thing for literally everyone. Those benefits were slashed by Trump in 2017, and others trailed off after the pandemic “ended”. Biden is going to pay for it by undoing Trump’s tax cuts on wealthy corporations, aka by taxing them more.

You can bet your pants Trump won’t enact this budget if he wins the election.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Why they're smearing Lina Khan

My god, they sure hate Lina Khan. This once-in-a-generation, groundbreaking, brilliant legal scholar and fighter for the public interest, the slayer of Reaganomics, has attracted more vitriol, mockery, and dismissal than any of her predecessors in living memory.

She sure must be doing something right, huh?

A quick refresher. In 2017, Khan — then a law student — published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox in the Yale Law Journal. It was a brilliant, blistering analysis showing how the Reagan-era theory of antitrust (which celebrates monopolies as “efficient”) had failed on its own terms, using Amazon as Exhibit A of the ways in which post-Reagan antitrust had left Americans vulnerable to corporate abuse:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

The paper sent seismic shocks through both legal and economic circles, and goosed the neo-Brandeisian movement (sneeringly dismissed as “hipster antitrust”). This movement is a rebuke to Reaganomics, with its celebration of monopolies, trickle-down, offshoring, corporate dark money, revolving-door regulatory capture, and companies that are simultaneously too big to fail and too big to jail.

This movement has many proponents, of course — not just Khan — but Khan’s careful scholarship, combined with her encyclopedic knowledge of the long-dormant statutory powers that federal agencies had to make change, and a strategy for reviving those powers to protect Americans from corporate predators made her a powerful, inspirational figure.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he surprised everyone by appointing Khan to the FTC. It wasn’t just that she had such a radical vision — it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).

Even more surprising was that Khan was made chair of the FTC, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm

These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against “woke” Big Tech. For these senators, the problem wasn’t that tech had got too big and powerful — it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.

The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who’ll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.

But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the “Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold” narrative).

This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP’s crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is “woke.” Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.

Biden’s ceding of antitrust policy to the left wing of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy’s enemy, led to Khan’s historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including Jonathan Kanter at the DoJ Antitrust Division, Tim Wu at the White House, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like Alvaro Bedoya (FTC), Rebecca Slaughter (FTC), Rohit Chopra (CFPB), and many others.

Crucially, these new appointees weren’t just principled, they were good at their jobs. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act — with no further Congressional authorization — to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs’ abusive and extractive practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden administration have been fuckin’ ninjas, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working — for the first time since Reagan — to protect Americans from predatory businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems’ champions in the administration. People like Pete Buttigieg are heralded as competent technocrats, “realists” who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can’t cash. All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg’s far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They’re trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling

And by declaring noncompete “agreements” that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal

And naturally, this has really pissed off all the right people: America’s billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.

Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch’s head. Not only that, he’s given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn’t be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they’re coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC’s revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it’s a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.

Writing in The American Prospect, David Dayen runs the numbers:

Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/

Take Christine Wilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the WSJ published, presaging their concierge service for Samuel Alito:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-resigning-from-the-ftc-commissioner-ftc-lina-khan-regulation-rule-violation-antitrust-339f115d

For Wilson to question Khan’s ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html

Or take Wilson’s GOP FTC predecessor Josh Wright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he’s practically got a Habsburg jaw. Wright went from Google to the US government and back again four times. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright’s employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working “personally and substantially” while serving at the FTC.

George Mason’s Scalia center practically owns the revolving door, counting fourteen FTC officials among its affliates:

https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/

Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials — both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems — “worked directly for a company that has business before the agency”:

https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/

The majority of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014–21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they’d regulated just a few months before:

https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Revolving-Door-In-Federal-Antitrust-Enforcement.pdf

Take Deborah Feinstein, formerly the head of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where she’s represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest’s worth of pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. Michael Moiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at Weil Gotshal & Manges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.

There’s a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for Andrew Smith, Trump’s FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented 120 clients that had business before the Commission, including “nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders”:

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf

Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a “conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades.”

Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.

For these corporate lickspittles, Khan’s “conflict” is that she has a point of view. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.

This makes grifters like Jim Jordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official’s advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-16/ftc-rejected-ethics-advice-for-khan-recusal-on-meta-case

That ethics official, Lorielle Pankey, did not, in fact, make this recommendation. It’s simply untrue (she did say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did not say that it violated any ethical standard).

But there’s more to this story. Pankey herself has a gigantic conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock (Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ethics-official-owned-meta-stock-while-recommending-ftc-chair-recuse-herself-from-meta-case-8582a83b

Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/

Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she’s investigating OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans’ personal information:

https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74

Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like Matt Gaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire. Nobodies like Rep TomM assie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, greedflation-drunk national chains. Jeff Van Drew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC’s war on robocalls. Lance Gooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.

But Khan’s opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story. They also accused her of being 0–4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the huge number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated because M&A professionals now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.

These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley’s ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively very bad. Start with the fact that Corley’s son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.

But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley’s judgment and her remarks in court were inexcusably bad, as Matt Stoller writes:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn’t think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they’d gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft’s execs pinky-swore that they wouldn’t abuse that power.

Corely’s deference to Microsoft’s corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC’s motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.

This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation’s radical, massive merger shouldn’t be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That’s pretty convenient for future mega-mergers — just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can’t be investigated because the deadline is looming.

And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn’t exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending “dump trucks” of money buying games studios was to “spend Sony out of business.”

Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There’s plenty of good reason to hate both — they’re run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees. But if you think that Microsoft will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.

Microsoft made exactly the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax — and it broke every one of those promises.

Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a convicted monopolist. And its bad conduct didn’t end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its Office365 bossware product:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by “productivity” as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have “spent the competition out of business,” you’re a credulous sucker and you are gonna be so disappointed.

The enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in — in this case, it’s with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix’s — and then claw all that value back until all that’s left is a big pile of shit.

The Microsoft case is about the future. Judge Corely doesn’t take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, “All of this is for a shooter videogame.” The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn’t because it won’t be harmful — it’s because she doesn’t think those harms matter.

But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions. It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley’s ruling means that “deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today.”

Ronald Reagan’s antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. Don’t they know they’ve lost? the commentators said:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159

They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss Mike Ybarra: “Your tax dollars at work.”

https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440

But of course Khan is appealing. The only reason that’s surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.

The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don’t want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite. There is no measure so small that the corporate world won’t have a conniption over it. Take click to cancel, the FTC’s perfectly reasonable proposal that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.

The tooth-gnashing and garment-rending and scenery-chewing over this is wild. America’s biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money. In other words, they are currently making money not because people want their products, but because it’s too hard to stop paying for them!

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/

We shouldn’t have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they’ll protect us from these scams. Don’t let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end. We’re trying to reverse 40 years’ worth of Reagonmics here. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize — this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

[Image ID: A line drawing of pilgrims ducking a witch tied to a ducking stool. The pilgrims' clothes have been emblazoned with the logos for the WSJ, Microsoft, Activision and Blizzard. The witch's face has been replaced with that of FTC chair Lina M Khan.]

[robertreich]

Why Big Money Supports Trump 

Fascism backed by Big Money is one of the most dangerous of all political alliances.

We saw it in 1930s Germany, when industrial giants bailed out a cash-strapped Nazi party right before Hitler’s election, thinking that Hitler would protect their money and power.

We are seeing something similar now. Earlier this year, the GOP was running out of money. So Trump turned to his wealthy backers for help. Many super-rich donors who once criticized Trump for stoking the violence of January 6 have since had a change of heart, deciding their profits are worth more than our democracy.

Trump has promised them that if elected, he’ll extend his 2017 tax cuts that went mainly to the wealthy beyond 2025 when they’re scheduled to expire, and hinting at even more.

He promised oil executives he would scrap regulations favoring electric vehicles and wind energy if they would give his campaign one billion dollars.

The Trump White House is for sale, and the wealthy are buying. 50 billionaire families gave at least $600 million in political donations as of May, with over two thirds going to support GOP candidates and conservative causes.

Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, who also controls and manipulates one of the world’s largest communications platforms, has committed to spending millions of dollars to elect Trump.

In previous videos, I’ve highlighted alarming similarities between fascist regimes of the past and Trumpism. The alignment of American billionaires with Trump’s anti-democracy movement is one of the most dangerous parallels.

The billionaires want the rest of us to fight each other so we don’t look up and see where all the wealth and power have gone, so we don’t join together and raise taxes on the super-rich to finance childcare, better schools, our health care system, and everything else we need.

They fear democracy because there are far more of us than there are of them.

We need to see through their fear tactics and vote in overwhelming numbers this November.

We can learn from history and spot the danger. We are not doomed to repeat it.

[phoenixyfriend]

me, shaking people: the economy is more simple than economists make it out to be but it is still more complicated than you think, please stop thinking Trump will 'fix' prices. every proposal I've seen from his campaign will increase prices, with only the very slight possibility that gas might drop in response to Trump relaxing pressure on Russia and giving Putin the go-ahead to kill hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. Even that's unlikely, because Biden had all oil production in the US pushed to max in order to combat rising gas prices after Russia and the Middle East started trying to do a price squeeze on the rest of the world.

Deportation of migrants will increase food costs.

Increased tariffs will increase the costs of goods that we primarily get from the targeted countries.

Removal of further FDA regulations will result in higher rates of infection of the masses, meaning more healthcare bills, and every time a recall happens, any money the producer saved with cutting corners will be lost to the recall, meaning your prices still go up.

Deregulation of corporate mergers will result in monopolies that, again, raise your prices.

Continuation of the 2017 tax cuts to the wealthy will continue to incentivize higher taxes on the lower and middle class, as the tariffs will not be enough to cover that hole in the budget, even with the proposed budget cuts to things like Social Security and the EPA.

Trump is not good for the economy, unless you happen to be Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Warren Buffet.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Robert Reich:

Friends, I’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life. Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid. Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice.

But Medicaid covers far more Americans. Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year. How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it? First, by turning Medicaid into “block grants,” in which states get lump sums regardless of how many people sign up for the program. Republican senator and founding DOGE caucus member John Cornyn has already publicly stated that he favors this approach. As more poor children and needy families sign up, block grants will force states to increase their own spending on Medicaid or restrict who gets it. Given the strain on state budgets and the negligible political voice of Medicaid recipients, it will almost surely be the latter.

A second method for gutting Medicaid favored by Musk, Ramaswamy, Cornyn, and other DOGE caucus members is to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. They claim this would save the federal government at least $100 billion over the next decade. But the reason for the saving is that work requirements would cause an estimated 600,000 people — most of them unable to work — to lose coverage (according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office). The third idea DOGE is considering is to cut back on the expansion of Medicaid that came with the Affordable Care Act. That expansion enabled adults in families earning up to $43,000 a year to get health care coverage. (Under it, the federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.)

Step back for a moment and consider what’s being proposed. If the Affordable Care Act’s expanded Medicaid is cut back, hundreds of thousands of Americans in families earning up to $43,000 a year will lose their health care. If Medicaid is turned into block grants or if work is required of people unable to work, many hundreds of thousands more will lose their only access to health care, including large numbers of children.

[...] They may never discover that Trump is behind this because Trump won’t have his fingerprints on the Medicaid cuts. He’ll hide behind Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE and the newly formed DOGE caucus in Congress. Not even their fingerprints will be obvious because block grants to the states, work requirements, and elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will all do the dirty deed quietly. Nor will working Americans discover that big corporations and the wealthy are reaping most of the savings from the gutting of Medicaid in the form of lower taxes. Most working Americans haven’t yet discovered how skewed the 2017 Trump tax cut has been to the wealthy and big corporations, so why should they discover it in future years? One more thing. Employer-sponsored health insurance — available to most salaried workers in large corporations but rarely to hourly workers or contract workers — remains untaxed.

The Trump-Musk-Ramaswamy plutocratic trifecta are plotting to kill Medicaid as we know it. This is yet another moronic idea from DOGE.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 12, 2024

Yesterday, President Joe Biden spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he gave a major speech on the American economy. He contrasted his approach with the supply-side economics of the forty years before he took office, an approach the incoming administration of Donald Trump has said he would reinstate. Biden urged Trump and his team not to destroy the seeds of growth planted over the past four years. And he laid out the extraordinary successes of his administration as a benchmark going forward.

The president noted that Trump is inheriting a strong economy. Biden shifted the U.S. economy from 40 years of supply-side economics that had transferred about $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% and hollowed out the middle class.

By investing in the American people, the Biden team expanded the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” as Biden says, and created an economy that he rightfully called “the envy of the world.” Biden listed the numbers: more than 16 million new jobs, the most in any four-year presidential term in U.S. history; low unemployment; a record 20 million applications for the establishment of new businesses; the stock market hitting record highs.

Biden called out that in the two years since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, the private sector has jumped on the public investments to invest more than a trillion dollars in clean energy and advanced manufacturing.

Disruptions from the pandemic—especially the snarling of supply chains—and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine created a global spike in inflation; the administration brought those rates back to around the Fed’s target of 2%.

Biden pointed out that “[l]ike most…[great] economic developments, this one is neither red nor blue, and America’s progress is everyone’s progress.”

But voters’ election of Donald Trump last month threatens Biden’s reworking of the economy. Trump and his team embrace the supply-side economics Biden abandoned. They argue that the way to nurture the economy is to free up money at the top of the economy through deregulation and tax cuts. Investors will then establish new industries and jobs more efficiently than they could if the government intervened. Those new businesses, the theory goes, will raise wages for all Americans and everyone will thrive.

Trump and MAGA Republicans have made it clear they intend to restore supply-side economics.

The first priority of the incoming Republican majority is to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, many of which are due to expire in 2025. Those tax cuts added almost $2 trillion to budget deficits, but there is little evidence that they produced the economic growth their supporters promised. At the same time, the income tax cuts delivered an average tax cut of $252,300 to households in the top 0.1%, $61,090 to households in the top 1%, but just $457 to the bottom 60% of American households. The corporate tax cuts were even more skewed to the wealthy.

In the Washington Post yesterday, Catherine Rampell noted that Republicans’ claim that extending those cuts isn’t extraordinarily expensive means “getting rid of math.”

At a time when Republicans like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are leading the new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are clamoring for cuts of $2 trillion from the budget, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will add more than $4 trillion to the federal budget over the next ten years. Republicans who will chair the House and Senate finance committees, Representative Jason Smith (R-MO) and Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), say that extending the cuts shouldn’t count as adding to the deficit because they would simply be extending the status quo.

Trump has also indicated he plans to turn the country over to billionaires, both by putting them into government and by letting them act as they wish. Last night, on social media, President-elect Trump posted: “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”

Biden called out the contrast between these two economic visions, saying that the key question for the American people is “do we continue to grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all of America and Americans, supporting unions and working families as we have the past four years? Or do we…backslide to an economy that’s benefited those at the top, while working people and the middle class struggle…for a fair share of growth and [for an] economic theory that encouraged industries and…livelihoods to be shipped overseas?”

Biden explained that for decades Republicans had slashed taxes for the very wealthy and the biggest corporations while cutting public investment in infrastructure, education, and research and development. Jobs and factories moved overseas where labor was cheaper. To offset the costs of tax cuts, Biden said, ‘advocates of trickle-down economics ripped the social safety net by trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare, trying to deny access to affordable health care and prescription drugs.” He added, “Lifting the fortunes of the very wealthy often meant taking the rights of workers away to unionize and bargain collectively.”

This approach to the economy “meant rewarding short-termism in pursuit of short-term profits [and] extraordinary high executive pay, instead of making long-term investments…. As a consequence, our…infrastructure fell…behind. A flood of cheap imports hollowed out our factory towns.”

“Economic opportunity and innovation became more concentrated in [a] few major cities, while the heartland and communities were left behind. Scientific discoveries and inventions developed in America were commercialized in countries like China, bolstering their manufacturing investment and jobs instead of [our] economy. Even before the pandemic, this economic agenda was clearly failing. Working- and middle-class families were being hurt.”

“[W]hen the pandemic hit,” Biden said, “we found out how vulnerable America was.” Supply chains failed, and prices soared.

Biden told the audience that he “came into office with a different vision for America…: grow the economy from the middle out and the bottom up; invest in America and American products. And when that happens, everybody does…well…no matter where they lived, whether they went to college or not.”

“I was determined to restore U.S. leadership in industries of the future,” he said. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act “mark the most significant investment in America since the New Deal,” with new factories bringing good jobs that are rejuvenating towns that had been left behind in the past decades. Biden said he required that the government buy American goods as the country invested in “modernizing our roads; our bridges; our ports; our airports; our clean water system; affordable, high-speed Internet systems; and so much more.”

Eighty percent of working-age Americans have jobs, and the average after-tax income is up almost $4,000 since before the pandemic, significantly outpacing inflation.

Biden and his team worked to restore competition in the economy—just today, the huge grocery chain Albertsons gave up on its merger with another huge grocery chain, Kroger, after Biden’s Federal Trade Commission sued to block the merger because it would raise prices and lower workers’ wages by eliminating competition—and their negotiations with big pharma have dramatically cut the costs of prescription drugs for seniors. The administration cut junk fees, capping the cost of overdraft fees, for example, from an average of $35 a month to $5.

Biden quoted Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques in Time magazine a month ago, saying: “President-elect Trump is receiving the strongest economy in modern history, which is the envy of the world.”

In his speech, Biden noted that it would be “politically costly and economically unsound” to disrupt the decisions and investments the nation has made over the past four years, and he urged Trump to leave them in place. “Will the next president stop a new electric battery factory in Liberty, North Carolina, that will create thousands of jobs?” he asked. “[W]ill we deny seniors living in red states $35-a-month insulin?”

In their article, Sonnenfeld and Henriques noted: “President Trump will likely claim he waved a magic wand on January 20 and the economic clouds cleared,” and they urged people: “Don’t Give Trump Credit for the Success of the Biden Economy.”

Biden gave yesterday’s speech in part to put down benchmarks against which we should measure Trump’s economic policies. “During my presidency, we created [16] million new jobs in America” and saw “the lowest average unemployment rate of…any administration in 50 years.” Economic growth has been a strong 3% on average, and inflation is near 2 percent, he said.

“[T]hese are simple, well-established economic benchmarks used to measure the strength of any economy, the success or failure of any president’s four years in office. They’re not political, rhetorical opinions. They’re just facts,” Biden said, “simple facts. As President Reagan called them, ‘stubborn facts.’”

Biden is willing to bet that if the American people pay attention to those facts, they will recognize that his approach to the economy, rather than supply-side economics, works best for everyone.

Today the NASDAQ Composite index, which focuses on tech stocks, broke 20,000 for the first time.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[misfitwashere]

How the DOGE billionaires plan to kill Medicaid

ROBERT REICH

DEC 16

Friends,

I’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life. 

Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid. 

Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice. 

But Medicaid covers far more Americans. 

Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year. 

How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it? 

First, by turning Medicaid into “block grants,” in which states get lump sums regardless of how many people sign up for the program. Republican senator and founding DOGE caucus member John Cornyn has already publicly stated that he  favors this approach.

As more poor children and needy families sign up, block grants will force states to increase their own spending on Medicaid or restrict who gets it. Given the strain on state budgets and the negligible political voice of Medicaid recipients, it will almost surely be the latter. 

A second method for gutting Medicaid favored by Musk, Ramaswamy, Cornyn, and other DOGE caucus members is to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. They claim this would save the federal government at least $100 billion over the next decade. 

But the reason for the saving is that work requirements would cause an estimated 600,000 people — most of them unable to work — to lose coverage (according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office). 

The third idea DOGE is considering is to cut back on the expansion of Medicaid that came with the Affordable Care Act. That expansion enabled adults in families earning up to $43,000 a year to get health care coverage. (Under it, the federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.)

Step back for a moment and consider what’s being proposed. 

If the Affordable Care Act’s expanded Medicaid is cut back, hundreds of thousands of Americans in families earning up to $43,000 a year will lose their health care. 

If Medicaid is turned into block grants or if work is required of people unable to work, many hundreds of thousands more will lose their only access to health care, including large numbers of children.

The presumed goal of the DOGE exercise is to reduce the federal budget deficit. 

Yet Trump and his billionaires are planning to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately have benefited large corporations and wealthy people like themselves, along with additional tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy. 

The estimated cost of extending the Trump tax cuts is at least $5 trillion — more than twice the amount Musk has stated DOGE will cut in “wasteful” government spending. 

The richest man in the world and his billionaire colleagues are seeking to reduce money spent for the health care of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, at the same time they’re seeking to reduce taxes on themselves and others who are the richest and most privileged.

Anything wrong with this picture?

Many of the Americans who will be shafted by all this voted for Trump in 2024. 

They may never discover that Trump is behind this because Trump won’t have his fingerprints on the Medicaid cuts. He’ll hide behind Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE and the newly formed DOGE caucus in Congress. 

Not even their fingerprints will be obvious because block grants to the states, work requirements, and elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will all do the dirty deed quietly.

Nor will working Americans discover that big corporations and the wealthy are reaping most of the savings from the gutting of Medicaid in the form of lower taxes. Most working Americans haven’t yet discovered how skewed the 2017 Trump tax cut has been to the wealthy and big corporations, so why should they discover it in future years?

One more thing. 

Employer-sponsored health insurance — available to most salaried workers in large corporations but rarely to hourly workers or contract workers — remains untaxed. 

This is one of the largest tax expenditures in the federal government. 

As I said, Medicaid costs about $880 billion a year. The exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health insurance costs the federal government a very large fraction of that — the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated $299 billion in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office projects $641 billion by 2032.

It’s another well-disguised benefit for the privileged that’s underwritten by the non-privileged. Yet I’d be astonished if DOGE touched it. 

Why go after the costs of Medicaid and not the costs of employer-provided health insurance? For the same reason Trump’s billionaires will happily cut taxes on themselves even as they gut health care for millions of poor kids and working-class families. 

What’s considered “waste and fraud” often depends on whether one is looking downward or upward, and the billionaire DOGEs look only downward. But the biggest waste and fraud is found at the high rungs — in tax loopholes and tax expenditures used by wealthy individuals and big corporations. (Did I hear anyone say “carried interest?”) 

When Trump chose Dr. Mehmet Oz, the multimillion-dollar celebrity doctor (who infamously promoted hydroxychloroquine while holding over $615,000 in shares of the drug’s distributor) to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Trump said Oz will “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency.”

Believe that, and you should believe in hydroxychloroquine.

[comeonamericawakeup]

“For the billionaire donor class,” this election is about one thing, said Timothy Noah: “Keeping rich people’s taxes low.” Wall Street billionaires like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and investor Nelson Peltz condemned Donald Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, while hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin called the former president a “three-time loser” after the 2022 midterms. Yet “all four sing a different tune today.” They claim to support Trump because of inflation (which has dropped to 3.4 percent), the immigration crisis, or rising antisemitism on the Left, “but they’re all full of it.” These plutocrats are actually “drifting back to Trump” because “they want to keep the tax cuts” he gave them in 2017, which are due to expire in December 2025. President Biden plans to let the cuts for the wealthy and corporations run out, keeping them only for Americans earning under $400,000. Trump’s plan to extend them would increase the budget deficit by $4 trillion over a decade — which, along with his promised steep tariffs, would be highly inflationary. Nonetheless, they’re “holding their noses and rallying around Trump” simply because he’ll “make them richer.”

THE WEEK JUNE 14, 2024

[head-post]

France on verge of political crisis: Everyone wants Macron’s resignation

French President Emmanuel Macron will on Thursday seek a way out of France’s political crisis after Michel Barnier became the first prime minister to be removed from power by parliament in six decades.

Barnier’s resignation

Lawmakers voted on Wednesday to dismiss Barnier’s government after just three months in power, approving a vote of no confidence proposed by the left but backed by the right-wing led by Marine Le Pen.

President Emmanuel Macron will now be forced to accept Barnier’s resignation (albeit with the possibility of re-election) and France will once again be ruled by an interim government. New early parliamentary elections can only be called by the president, according to the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, one year after the last election, which was held in July. This is the second such case since 1962, when the government of Georges Pompidou was resigned.

The vote of no confidence was prompted by disagreements between the country’s political forces that arose during the negotiation of the 2025 budget. In order to reduce the budget deficit, Barnier’s cabinet proposed to cut spending by €40bn, as well as to raise taxes for large corporations and wealthy Frenchmen (this would bring the treasury another €20bn). However, a number of his proposals were opposed by the RN, which threatened a vote of no confidence.

Barnier’s record-breaking ouster came after snap parliamentary elections this summer, which left parliament in limbo, with no party gaining an overall majority and the right holding the key to the government’s survival. It was the first successful vote of no confidence since the defeat of Georges Pompidou’s government in 1962, when Charles de Gaulle was president.

Appeals to Macron

Macron flew to Paris just before the vote, having completed a three-day state visit to Saudi Arabia, and appeared to be far from a domestic crisis.

Earlier on Wednesday, he had walked the desert sands in the oasis of Al-Ula, marvelling at ancient sites. After landing in Paris, he headed straight for the Elysee Palace.

“We call on Macron to leave,” Mathilde Panot, head of the parliamentary faction of the left-wing France Unbowed (LFI) party, told reporters, calling for “early presidential elections” to resolve the deepening political crisis. But while trying not to exult over the government’s downfall, Le Pen said in a television interview that her party – after appointing a new prime minister – would “let them work” and help create a “budget acceptable to all.”

Laurent Wauquiez, the head of right-wing MPs in parliament, said the far right and extreme left were responsible for the vote of no confidence, which would “plunge the country into instability.”

Candidates for prime minister

There are few candidates for prime minister, but loyalist Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu and Macron’s centrist ally Francois Bayrou are possible contenders. On the left, Macron may turn to former prime minister and Socialist interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who was a contender in September.

Barnier became the fifth prime minister to serve under Macron since he took power in 2017, with each prime minister holding office for increasingly shorter periods. Given the turbulent environment, the new candidate risks lasting even less than Barnier, whose term was the shortest of any administration since the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958. Macron intends to appoint a new prime minister quickly, several sources told AFP.

A source close to Macron said the president, who has been slow to make appointments in the past, had “no choice” but to name a new prime minister within 24 hours. 

Crisis heats up

With markets nervous and France bracing for strikes by civil servants threatening cuts that will close schools and hit air and rail transport, there is a growing sense of crisis.

Unions called for civil servants, including teachers and air traffic controllers, to strike on Thursday over separate cost-cutting measures.

Meanwhile, Macron is due to host a major international event on Saturday – the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire. Among the guests will be Donald Trump, making his first foreign trip since being elected as the next US president.

The head of France’s National Rally party Marine Le Pen has demanded that French President Emmanuel Macron resign, French media reported. She said:

“He [Macron] will take responsibility and do what reason and conscience tell him to do. But there is no doubt that he bears primary responsibility for the situation.”

Petition against Macron

A petition demanding the resignation of the country’s president Emmanuel Macron has been launched in France after a vote of no confidence in the government.

“He has been doing incredible damage to the country for seven long years: dividing it, making it insecure, humiliating it internationally, throwing it into war, weakening its position worldwide, silencing its voice in the European Union and NATO, implementing disastrous policies demanded by the EU that are leading us to collapse in all sectors of the economy. He must go,” the text of the petition reads.

The petition was launched by the Patriots party and posted on its website. The party’s founder Florian Philippot also called for a demonstration demanding Macron’s resignation on Saturday.

According to an Elabe poll for BFMTV, 63 per cent of French people wanted Macron’s resignation in the event of a vote of no confidence in his government.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, leader of the right-wing Debout la France (France Arise), wrote on X:

“Censorship is good, Macron’s departure is even better. In the meantime, let’s hope that the new prime minister will actually respect the French.”

Read more HERE

[filosofablogger]

Say WHAT, Chuckie???

Isn’t it funny how easily Republicans slip up on their own hypocrisy???  They are all on about President Biden’s age, even though their own presumed nominee is only three years behind Biden and Biden is far more physically fit and mentally coherent.  But then there’s Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa who is 90 years of age!  And still just as obnoxious as ever!  Now, say what you will, but I…

[mariacallous]

The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act brought a major overhaul to U.S. tax code. The corporate tax rate was slashed to 21% from 35%, individual income tax rates were cut, and the standard deduction was increased.

Now, analysis in 2018 found that the cuts would boost the economy, but the effect would fizzle out quickly. And the price tag would be huge. The bill is expected to add nearly $2 trillion to the deficit by 2028.

Many of the household tax reforms included in the bill expire in 2025, meaning that whoever wins the election will have the opportunity to either fight to extend the legislation or let it lapse.

Trump has shown interest in making his tax rules permanent. Biden would likely preserve some of the tax cuts, namely those benefitting households making less than $400,000 a year.

The cuts have the largest benefits for the wealthy and for small business owners, but there are also provisions that benefit middle-income Americans like the increased standard deduction and Child Tax Credit.

An important effect of extending the 2017 tax cuts is that it’s estimated to cost an extra $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Without significantly cutting services, the federal debt would balloon to 211% of GDP by 2054, compared to about 100% of GDP right now.

Trump has actually pledged to make even more tax cuts – if that happens, obviously the deficit would grow even faster and the debt would be even larger.

Biden’s proposed alternatives include several programs to lower taxes for those making under $400,000 a year while also raising taxes on corporations and wealthier Americans. Efforts to target corporations include raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, increasing enforcement of tax avoidance by multinationals, and quadrupling the stock buyback tax.

His plan would also affect the highest-earning Americans, including a 25% minimum income tax on billionaires. All together, Biden’s policies would raise about $5 trillion in revenue by 2034.

While there is some overlap between the two candidate’s goals, the long-term effects on the federal debt and deficits couldn’t be more different.

[meandmybigmouth]

— Republicans have handed America’s wealth to the billionaires: where’s the outrage? Economist Gabriel Zucman published an extraordinary op-ed in The New York Times this week showing the impact of 40 years of Republicans transferring over $50 trillion from the pockets of the middle class into the money bins of the morbidly rich via changes in tax policy. Not only has this led to a $34.5 trillion national debt — 100% of which can be accounted for by massive tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations put into place by Ronald Reagan (1981), George W. Bush (2003), and Donald Trump (2017) — but it’s also gutted the middle class, reducing the percentage of Americans who can live comfortably in that realm from almost two-thirds of us in 1980 to around 43% of us today. (Those details are mine, not his.) Zucman explicitly calls for the entire world to take on the challenge of rescuing democracy and working class people by raising taxes on both billionaires and the corporations they use to shield themselves from taxation. It’s about damn time.

[robertreich]

Trump’s Tax Scam: Why Nothing Trickled Down 

The Trump tax cuts were a YUGE scam.

But this November we have a chance to end this trickle-down hoax once and for all.

Donald Trump’s biggest legislative achievement (if you want to even call it that) was the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

The law permanently slashed corporate taxes and temporarily cut income tax rates mostly for rich individuals through the year 2025. The results were worse than I could have imagined.

Trump and his officials claimed the tax cuts would lead to corporations hiring more workers and would “very conservatively” lead to a $4,000 boost in household incomes.

What actually happened in the years since?

In AT&T’s case, the company saw its overall federal tax bill drop by 81%. It spent 31 times more on dividends and stock buybacks to enrich wealthy shareholders than it paid it in taxes. Meanwhile, it slashed over 40,000 jobs.

That was par for the course with Trump’s tax cuts.

Like AT&T, America’s biggest corporations didn’t use their tax savings to increase productivity or reward workers. Instead, they increased their stock buybacks and dividends.

Many of them, including AT&T, even ended up paying their executives more in some years than what they paid Uncle Sam.    

Those executives (along with other high earners) then got to keep more of their earnings because Trump’s tax cuts for individuals were heavily skewed toward the rich. The lowest earners? They got squat.

And many middle-income families saw their taxes go up.

And those supposed $4,000 raises, did you get one?

The bottom line is that Trump’s tax law fueled a massive transfer of wealth into the hands of the rich and powerful. Corporate profits have skyrocketed. U.S. billionaire wealth has more than DOUBLED since 2018.

The tax cuts have also added $2 trillion to the national debt so far, but that hasn’t stopped Trump and the so-called “party of fiscal responsibility” from doubling down on renewing them.

If Trump is reelected and Republicans take control of Congress, they’re planning to renew the expiring tax cuts for individuals that primarily benefited the rich. This would cost $4.6 trillion over the next decade, more than double the cost of the original tax cuts.

Trump has also threatened to lower the corporate tax rate even further from 21% to 15% — which would cost another $1 trillion.

It’s trickle-down economics on steroids.

All of this would cause the federal deficit and debt to soar — which Republicans will then use as an excuse to cut spending on government programs the rest of us rely on.

But the Democrats have their own tax plan. We can make it a reality this November. What would it do? Just the opposite of Trump’s tax plan.

ONE: It would increase taxes on wealthy individuals with incomes in excess of $400,000 a year, while cutting taxes for lower-income Americans.

TWO: It would make billionaires pay at least 25 percent of their incomes in taxes, still leaving them with plenty left over.

THREE: It would raise the corporate income tax to 28 percent, which is about what it was in 1990.

LASTLY, it would quadruple the tax on stock buybacks to get corporations to invest more of their earnings in workers’ wages and productivity instead of windfalls for investors.

So the real choice is between the Republicans’ plan to make the rich much richer, and the Democrats’ plan to make the rich pay their fair share and provide what Americans need.

Which do you want?

[aromancy]

You know, a lot of companies have made HUGE changes lately; foolish changes, leading to long-term damage to their brands for short-term financial gains. Just this year, Warner Bros canceled multiple upcoming films already mostly finished just for tax breaks; Unity tried to take a cut of the profits from every person who downloaded their games; the Escapist fired the head of their video team; Wizards of the Coast had the Pinkertons scandal, the 5e OGL scandal, the controversies around One D&D...

This is unusual, right? For one company to shoot themselves in the foot is an accident; for several to do so in rapid succession seems to me like a strange new pattern.

But why? Why prioritize a short-term paycheck over long-term profits? The people in charge of these companies may be stupid, but they're not that stupid; they've been in charge of these companies for years (well, most of them; the Escapist was bought out by Gamurz last year, but Gamurz hasn't stepped it's foot in it this bad before, so my point still stands) and not done stupid shit on this level before.

I've seen others who recognize this pattern postulate that it's for investment purposes. Investors dom't care about what's best for the long-term survivability of a company; they care only for the signs of quarter-to quarter growth, and will pull their investments if they don't see a quarterly return. This does make some measure of sense, but I don't understand how it's only recently gotten this bad if this was always standard operating procedure? Have these businesses always been doing this, and only recently has it been noticed?

I have another potential explanation. In 2017, Douglas Rushkoff was invited to deliver a keynote speech to a huge group of exhorbitantly wealthy individuals. The purpose? To explore the future of technology. While he thought it would be a lighthearted exploration of exciting new technologies and what they could mean for society going forward, it quickly became clear that most of the attendees were more concerned with the threats technology posed.

Several of them referenced "The Event," a nonspecific apocalypse that might occur as a result of societal unrest, environmental destruction, nuclear war, et cetera. This seemed to be quite a pressing issue; the attendees grilled Rushkoff for over an hour on how one might thrive in a post-apocalyptic setting.

I think the wealthy elite of this world expect The Event to come soon. And I think that several wealthy people are trying to make a whole lot of money right now so that they'll be ready when The Event arrives.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Kerry Eleveld at Daily Kos:

Talking about tax policy is one of the best ways for President Joe Biden to create a contrast with Donald Trump on who will fight for average Americans. As Trump told a group of wealthy campaign donors earlier this month, one of his signature issues if elected president in November will be extending the tax cuts Republicans enacted during his term in 2017—which overwhelmingly benefited wealthy Americans. There's no audio of the statement, but it echoes comments Trump made last year during a private fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago for North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, an extremist Republican who is running for governor. Addressing the audience, Trump called some attendees “rich as hell” before promising, “We’re gonna give you tax cuts!” The Biden campaign spliced that proclamation into an ad where the president is joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. 

[...] Biden also worked Trump's tax plan into a recent press conference in the White House Rose Garden when he was asked whether he was concerned about inflation. “We have dramatically reduced inflation from 9 percent down to close to 3 percent,” Biden responded, noting that inflation was “skyrocketing” when he took office. “And we have a plan to deal with it, whereas the opposition—my opposition talks about two things. They just want to cut taxes for the wealthy and raise taxes on other people.” 

President Joe Biden is reminding the voters that Donald Trump is pro-tax cuts for the rich.