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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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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.]

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phoenixyfriend · 2 months ago

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I think that one of the things I find most frustrating about the tariffs conversation (and I find a lot of it frustrating) is... well, okay, it's two things, which are related:

ONE: MAGA are stealing leftist talking points

TWO: That's not how protectionist tariffs work. (This is probably the more important one.)

So.

ONE: The rhetoric of 'temporary hardship to reach eventual greater collective stability' is something that the left generally says with a little more sincerity, oftentimes with things like taxes for public infrastructure or welfare.

It also generally means that everyone experiences a touch of hardship, but the wealth is reinvested into the economy to boost the collective good; the sincerity is low with centrists, but higher with the far left.

The hardship is also more likely to not be moving money to the wealthy, something that is very much happening here. There are some massive shortfalls in tax income these past few years, some of which have been going on for decades, like the subsidization of the fossil fuel industry or unusually high investment in the military, but a big one recently has been the 2017 tax cuts that Trump introduced for the wealthy in his first term. They are, from articles I've seen, responsible for trillions in lost revenue per year sine their introduction, and while they expire in 2025, Trump and this Republican Congress have made it clear that they intend to extend those tax cuts as long as they can. The tariffs are to cover that gap in the budget, meaning that everyone is paying more in taxes, on goods that are disproportionately consumed by the lower and middle classes, in order to cover the tax breaks that billionaires got.

Very much stealing from the poor to give to the rich! That's what the tariffs are about!

e.g. yes you're paying a few extra dollars in taxes this year, but it's being invested in developing a free and reduced school lunch program; while you won't see any immediate benefits, and you'll be a little strapped for cash for month or two if you're living paycheck to paycheck, but you'll see a huge load off your mind come September. Could also be a few extra dollars for an infrastructure project, which takes ten years to build... but once it's built, your commute is cut in half because of the new bridge, or the electricity is subsidized by some new wind farms, or the landfill has been assessed and built over to be a safe, clean park. This second example about infrastructure is Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which fed money into infrastructure work and other major projects across the country; in many cases, state Senators, congresspeople, and governors who had voted or campaigned against the IRA would then take credit for the benefits their constituents saw.

TWO: You can't use protectionist tariffs to revive local industry without investing in it. High tariffs can minimize damage to the economy if the industry hasn't already left.

If the factories are still around, and the employees are still there and knowledgeable, and the resources haven't been left to diminish on their own, then you protect them with tariffs in the immediate aftermath of a shift in the status quo. You prevent the 'theft of business' with the tariffs, and since it all just seems to be business as usual domestically, it's a blip in the radar for consumers. A bit more complicated if the domestic market has also been exporting the product, as markets abroad will shift to the cheaper product you are protecting against, but you now have a bit more time to innovate a reason to keep market share.

If the industry has been allowed to diminish, or never really existed in the first place (we can't grow coffee or bananas or avocado or mangos at an industry scale, we do not have the weather for it), then a sudden implementation of protectionist tariffs will pass costs along to the consumer until the industry is up and running again.

You know how you fix that? Subsidize the industry you're trying to revive.

In 1910, there were 144,607 people employed in clothing factories in the US (1910 census, employment). This doesn't include people working in shoe factories (181,010), tanneries (33,553), dressmakers and seamstresses (449,342; presumably separated from the first statistic by not being in a factory), dyers (14,050), sewers and sewing machine operatives (291,209), shoemakers and cobblers not in factories (69,570), and the hundreds of thousands of people in the textiles alone (I'm not doing the math, but it's over a million). So we're looking at several million people in the garment industry in the US, in 1910.

In 2020, the combined category of Textile, Apparel, and Furnishing employment contained a total of 16,510 people.

You cannot bring an industry like that back to the US without heavily, heavily subsidizing it to

A. Keep the costs down to where the public can still buy clothing without making it so the people suddenly in this industry are paid pennies on the hour.

B. Train this new generation of people in an industry that barely exists anymore.

C. Build the infrastructure to support the industry, from cotton gins to sewing factories.

You can't bring back an industry that was in the millions in 1910 when there are less than 20,000 people doing it now, in a population that has more than tripled (92mill in 1910, 331mill in 2020).

I just. You have to feed those tariffs into rebuilding the industry. You can't feed them into tax breaks for the wealthy if your stated goal is to rebuild industry. I know that feeding money to his rich friends is the goal for Trump, but I'm so incredibly frustrated that people don't seem to get the basic functions of protectionist tariff application.

Almost forgot to advertize myself since this was just me venting about current events, inspired by a LegalEagle video, but:

Prompt me on ko-fi! I’m trying to move out of my parents’ house.

#economics #tariffs #united states #politics #history #protectionism (trade)#industry #phoenix talks #phoenix politics

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 5 months ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 16, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 17, 2025

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was "the single most important economic issue of the day." But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#President Joe Biden #warning #political #oligarchy #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #income inequality #history #American History #FDR #Theodore Roosevelt #Robber Barrons

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taylorscottbarnett · 8 days ago

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House Republicans are looking for a nearly $4.5 trillion dollar permanent hand out to the top 2% richest households in America including exempting the first $15 million dollars of a wealthy estate from any tax at all.

Adding trillions of dollars to the federal deficit each year

while gutting:

- Food assistance to needy families

- cutting the child tax credit

- cutting middle-class tax credits out after 2028 (right after the presidential election)

- gutting 700 billion from medicaid funding

- restricts a federal judge's ability to hold government officials in contempt for ignoring court orders

Republicans pass this "Big Bullshit Bill" they'll lose the House in 2026 in a wave that will make 2018 seem laughable by comparison.

Democrats lost 63 seats in 2010 because of a bill they passed that became so popular that with a decade to work on it and Republicans couldn't repeal, replace, or cut anything from it in 2017. A durability that Republicans have never been able to replicate in congress.

Trying to just replace said bill cost Republicans 41 seats in 2018, giving Democrats a 8.6% margin of victory. Republicans haven't had a red wave in the House since. Winning just 9 seats in 2022 and losing 2 of those gains in 2024.

Nevermind the outrage over cuts that'll fuel Senate seat wins in North Carolina, Michigan, and maybe even Maine, and Alaska, and with the right candidates: Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina, Montana, and Iowa.

Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will be tied around the neck of every Republican in office before throwing them into the sea of voter discontent.

#politics #us politics #trump #republicans #conservative #gop

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azspot · 4 months ago

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Republicans identify the rapidly growing federal deficit as a crisis for which Democrats are to blame, but in fact, President Bill Clinton—with an assist from Republican president George H.W. Bush—eliminated the federal deficit in the 1990s. What threw the deficit into the red was the tax cuts and unfunded wars under George W. Bush, along with Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy and corporations. The U.S. Treasury estimates that extending the TCJA as is—Trump has mused on deeper cuts—would cost $4.2 trillion over the next ten years.

Heather Cox Richardson

#democrats #gop #federaldeficit

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misfitwashere · 3 months ago

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March 10, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 11

Last week’s dramatically dropping stock market prompted Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo to ask Trump in an interview that aired yesterday if he was expecting a recession. Trump answered: “I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big.”

Yesterday evening, on Air Force One, a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he is worried about a recession. “Who knows?” the president answered. “All I know is this: We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re going to become so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money. I’m telling you, you just watch. We’re going to have jobs. We’re going to have open factories. It’s going to be great.”

Today the stock market plunged.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average of 30 prominent companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges fell by 890 points, more than 2%. The S&P 500, which tracks the stocks of 500 of the largest companies listed in the U.S., fell by 2.7%. The Nasdaq Composite, which tracks tech stocks, fell by 4%. Shares of Elon Musk’s Tesla closed down more than 15%, dropping more than 45% this year. Tonight, as the Asian markets opened on the other side of the world, the slide continued.

According to MarketWatch, this is the worst start to a presidential term since 2009, when the country was in the subprime mortgage crisis. Trump did not inherit an economy mired in crisis, of course; he inherited what was, at the time, the strongest economy in the world. That booming economy is no more: Goldman is now predicting higher inflation and slower growth than it had previously forecast, while its forecast for Europe is now stronger than it had been.

Trump has always been a dodgy salesman more than anything, telling supporters what they want to hear. He insisted that the strong economy under former president Joe Biden was, in fact, a disaster that only he could fix. In October, Trump told attendees at a rally: “We will begin a new era of soaring incomes. Skyrocketing wealth. Millions and millions of new jobs and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.”

That sales pitch got Trump away from the criminal cases against him and back into the White House. Now, though, he needs to make the sales pitch fit into a reality that it doesn’t match. Trump is “steering the country toward a downturn with his tariffs and cuts to spending and the federal workforce—for no logical reason,” Washington Post economic reporter Heather Long wrote on March 6. “Trump’s whipsaw actions have put businesses and consumers on edge,” she noted. If they stop spending at the same time that the government slashes jobs and spending, a downward spiral could lead to a recession. “Trump is inciting an economic storm,” Long wrote. “The big question is why he’s doing this.”

One answer might be that Trump’s top priority is the extension of the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, at the same time that he has also promised to cut the deficit. Those two things are utterly at odds: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending the tax cuts will cost the country more than $4 trillion over the next ten years.

Tariffs appear to have been Trump’s workaround for that incompatibility. He claimed that tariffs would shift the burden of funding the U.S. government to foreign countries. When economists reiterated that tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers and would drive up prices and slow growth, he insisted they were wrong. Increasingly, tariffs seem to have become for him not just the solution to his economic dilemma, but also a symbol of American strength.

“[T]ariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump told Congress last week. “They are about protecting the soul of our country. Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again, and it is happening and it will happen rather quickly. There will be a little disturbance, but we are OK with that.”

After watching Trump talk to Fox News Channel host Bret Baier in mid-February, Will Saletan of The Bulwark noted that Trump seemed truly to believe that tariffs would bring in “tremendous amounts of money.” For that, as well as his apparent conviction that Palestinians should evacuate Gaza so the U.S. could “take over” and develop the real estate there, and that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, and so on, Saletan concluded “Donald Trump is Delusional.”

Another reason for Trump’s dogged determination to impose tariffs despite the pain they are inflicting on Americans might lie in James Fallows’s observation in Breaking the News after the president’s speech to Congress that Trump’s mental acuity is slipping. Fallows noted that Trump’s vocabulary has shrunk markedly since his first term and he appears to be falling back on “more primitive and predictable” phrases. Tonight the president appeared to be moving back in time, as well, advertising the availability of the first season of “the Emmy nominated ORIGINAL APPRENTICE STARRING PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP.”

The White House said today in a statement: “Since President Trump was elected, industry leaders have responded to President Trump’s America First economic agenda of tariffs, deregulation, and the unleashing of American energy with trillions in investment commitments that will create thousands of new jobs. President Trump delivered historic job, wage, and investment growth in his first term, and is set to do so again in his second term.”

As the administration’s economic policies are rocking the economy, the administration’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Syrian-born Palestinian activist who figured prominently in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University last April, seems designed to rock society. According to Democracy Now, Khalil is an Algerian citizen, but he holds a U.S. green card and is married to a U.S. citizen who is 8 months pregnant.

Shortly after he took office, Trump issued an executive order saying he would revoke the student visas of anyone he claimed sympathized with Hamas. On Saturday, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Khalil. Khalil’s lawyer said that ICE agents claimed they were acting on the orders of the State Department to revoke Khalil’s student visa, apparently unaware that Khalil, who graduated from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December 2024, is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. When his wife showed officers documents proving that status, the lawyer said, an officer said they were revoking his green card instead. He is apparently being held in Louisiana.

The revocation of a green card is very rare. The Associated Press noted that the Department of Homeland Security can begin the process of deportation for lawful permanent residents who are connected to alleged criminal activity. But Khalil hasn’t been charged with a crime. Nik Popli of Time magazine notes that a green card holder can be deported for supporting terrorist groups, but in that case the government must have material evidence. A Homeland Security spokesperson did not offer any such evidence, saying simply that Khalil’s arrest was “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” and that Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.”

That is, the Trump administration has arrested and detained a legal resident for expressing an opinion that Trump officials don’t like, likely using Khalil to launch this extraordinary attack on the First Amendment because they don’t expect Americans to care deeply about his fate. Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters, though, officials will use it to silence opposition broadly. “This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted just after noon. “We know there are more students at Columbia who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Representative Greg Casar (D-TX) posted: “This is illegal, and it endangers the rights of all Americans. In this country, people must be free to express their views—left or right, popular or unpopular—without being detained or punished by the government.” On this basic principle, Americans across the political spectrum appear to agree. Right-wing pundit Ann Coulter was one of those who stepped back from the idea of arrests and deportations of those expressing opinions. “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” she posted, “but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”

Today, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman ordered that Khalil “shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court orders otherwise,” and ordered a hearing on Wednesday.

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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mariacallous · 3 months ago

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Republicans in Congress this week staggered a step forward to passing a brutal budget that would strip healthcare from those most in need, in exchange for (another) massive tax cut for the wealthy. But it could be a Pyrrhic victory for MAGA.

One bright spot is that Democrats in the House — who have struggled to figure out how to respond to a second Trump term — remained totally united in voting against the budget framework. As Trump’s approval sinks, the opposition appears to be organized and more willing to fight.

Republicans are nervous, and Democrats may have a real chance to derail their grim priorities — especially if they can connect the unpopular Republican billionaire budget to Elon Musk, the unpopular billionaire illegally and unconstitutionally rampaging through the federal government at Trump’s behest.

2017 all over again

The budget process is complicated in large part because of the filibuster in the Senate. Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the chamber, but that is not enough to reach the 60 vote threshold needed to pass legislation through normal procedures. So the GOP is planning to pass a budget through reconciliation — an expedited process that allows certain vital bills to pass without a filibuster.

Before they can vote on reconciliation, the Senate and House first need to pass budget resolutions that set out priorities and determine which committees will be responsible for expenditures, and cuts. The Senate passed a two-track budget resolution earlier this month that separates extending Trump’s tax cuts from most other spending measures. This week, the House passed its own budget resolution with only one vote to spare. Unlike the Senate bill, the House plan would roll tax cuts and all other spending into “one big beautiful bill,” as Trump calls it.

Senate and House Republicans need to agree on the same budget resolution before they can move forward on reconciliation. But the House bill sets out some terrifying priorities. In order to pass $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, the resolution orders $2 trillion in spending cuts.

The resolution instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee to slash $880 billion from the budget. Most of that money is going to come from Medicaid which, along with the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), covers healthcare for low-income people, people with disabilities, pregnant people, and seniors — a total of one in four Americans.

If the House budget is enacted, some 15.9 million people could lose healthcare coverage. Each congressional district would lose around $2 billion in federal funds for Medicaid coverage. It’s 2017 all over again — and it’s worth remembering how poorly that effort to take away healthcare from tens of millions of people in the first year of Trump’s first term worked out for Republicans the next year, when they were waxed in the midterms and lost control of the House.

Democrats in array

In January, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized his willingness to seek bipartisan compromise and work with Republicans. That stance infuriated the Democratic base, which deluged House members with calls demanding stronger opposition to the new Trump administration.

Those calls, and the extreme cruelty of the Republican House budget, have stiffened Democratic spines. Before the budget resolution battle on the floor, Jeffries declared Tuesday that “they will not get a single Democratic vote.”

Jeffries was true to his word. Every Democrat voted against the bill.

Only one Republican, the deficit-obsessed Thomas Massie, voted against the resolution on the grounds that it would massively increase debt (which it would). That gave Johnson an extremely narrow 217-215 win. But there are plenty of other fault lines in the GOP which could open up as the process grinds on.

Republican House members from purple districts like Nicole Malliotakis (New York) and Jeff Van Drew (New Jersey) have expressed concerns about Medicaid cuts. Johnson has papered over those concerns in part by mendaciously suggesting that the cuts he’s proposing won’t come from Medicaid, even though everyone knows they will.

It’s unclear whether Malliotakis, Van Drew, and other members in potentially vulnerable districts will vote for Medicaid cuts when they can no longer pretend that’s not what they’re doing. As political scientist Jonathan Bernstein notes, “The long-term history of the less extreme conservatives is that they regularly fold.”

On the other hand, Republicans are already facing substantial resistance and blowback from constituents angered by chaotic spending cuts and federal worker firings instituted by Trump and his sugar daddy Musk. Musk’s unilateral austerity measures included 1,000 layoffs at Veteran’s Affairs — layoffs so indiscriminate that the VA had to stumble over itself to rehire many of those fired as it realized it could not function adequately without them.

Ruthlessly stripping healthcare from veterans is popular with basically no one, and Musk’s other measures have inspired pushback as well. Belligerent constituents in Glenn Grothman’s solidly conservative Wisconsin district caught him flatfooted at his town hall, booing and jeering as he tried to tout Trump’s achievements and demanding he oppose Social Security and Medicaid cuts. Alaska’s Nick Begich hosted a virtual town hall which was flooded with constituent comments demanding he address federal job losses and illegal executive actions.

One rattled Republican, speaking anonymously, told Axios, “It would be more helpful if some of those DOGE folks showed more sensitivity to the people who are being terminated this way ... who didn't do anything wrong."

The honeymoon is already over

The anger at the town halls is showing up in polling.

Musk, who has been boasting about the cuts made by DOGE, is extremely unpopular. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found him with 34 percent approval to 49 percent disapproval — a net 15 point deficit. Musk did have 70 percent approval among Republicans. But even there, only 56 percent said they approved of him (illegally) shutting down government programs that he decided are unnecessary.

Musk’s unpopularity seems to be undermining the president as well. Most presidents get a honeymoon bump at the start of their term, and Trump entered office on January 24 with 49.7 percent approval and 41.5 disapproval, or 8.2 points above water. A month later, his numbers in 538’s poll aggregator are sinking fast; he’s now less than one point above water.

Put it all together, and Democrats have a prime opportunity to make Musk the face of the budget deal and of the Republican Party.

Flailing House Republicans are already doing much of the work for Democrats. In a CNN interview yesterday, for example, Montana’s Ryan Zinke tried his best to avoid admitting he was willing to cut Medicaid, and ended his bumbling display of disingenuousness by citing the authority of … Elon Musk.

“Elon Musk has said there could be a trillion dollars — a trillion with a T — a trillion dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Zinke burbled. (Musk himself admitted Wednesday that he’ll “make mistakes” and “won’t be perfect.”)

Again, Musk’s approval is 15 points underwater, and even Republicans are extremely skeptical that this unelected billionaire should be the one in charge of deciding whether poor people receive healthcare. Yet Republicans like Zinke are touting Musk as a guru leading the way on spending cuts, even while others like the aforementioned Malliotakis try to publicly distance themselves from DOGE’s “rash decisions.”

Democrats should take Zinke at his word and staple Musk to his shiny forehead. A great opportunity to do that is the government funding deadline, which is March 14. Congress needs to pass legislation to fund the government by then or there will be a shutdown.

Since far-right House members love any opportunity to vote against spending, Republicans in the past have relied on Democratic votes to keep government open. But Jeffries in early February told his caucus that the illegal executive assault on government programs “must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill.” For the sake of our democracy, hopefully that means Dems will provide no votes unless there are enforceable provisions to curtail Musk’s lawless rampage.

Democrats are in the minority in the House and the Senate. As a result, they don’t have the ability to prevent budget deals from moving forward on their own. But Musk is increasingly unpopular, Trump is increasingly unpopular, and the GOP coalition is wavering. Democrats have a chance to tie every Republican to Musk’s ugly regime — and maybe even to derail Trump’s grotesque and illegal power grab.

The unified vote in the House earlier this week was a good first step. If Democrats stay united, maybe they can make March a worse month for Musk, and a better month for the country, than this miserable month of February has been.

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robertreich · 8 months ago

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youtube

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?

#youtube #videos #video #trump #taxes #scam #economics #election

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months ago

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Tim Eagan, Cagle Cartoons

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 10, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 11, 2025

Today the stock market plunged.

Today, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman ordered that Khalil “shall not be removed from the United States unless and until the Court orders otherwise,” and ordered a hearing on Wednesday.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #delusional #stock market #the economy #up is down #jobs #deportation #wrecking ball #destruction #business #the US Constitution #corruption #Tim Eagan #the Kool-Ade

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darkmaga-returns · 1 month ago

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The bold pledge comes as public anxiety grows over the economic fallout from Trump’s aggressive trade policies, which have rattled global markets and fueled fears of higher prices at home.

In the weeks since Trump slapped so-called reciprocal tariffs on dozens of countries - including a staggering 145% levy on Chinese goods, economists have sounded the alarm that the tariffs could backfire, hurting American consumers more than foreign rivals.

That said - not everyone's excited after Trump told TIME Magazine in the April 25 edition that he “love[s] the concept” of raising taxes on millionaires as a means of paying for an extension of the 2017 tax cuts.

“I certainly don’t mind having a tax increase,” Trump told TIME. “I would be honored to pay more, but I don’t want to be in a position where we lose an election because I was generous, but me, as a rich person, would not mind paying and you know, we’re talking about very little.”

He said it would involve raising taxes on the wealthy to “take care of [the] middle class.”

“But I don’t want it to be used against me politically, because I’ve seen people lose elections for less, especially with the fake news.”

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon told News Nation’s “CUOMO” on Friday that he supported the idea.

“This is being fought behind closed doors right now, and I’m telling you, with the massive tax cut, in addition, he’s going to give the working class and the middle class, the math only works out if you actually increase taxes on the wealthy,” Bannon said.

The former White House strategist said it could help Trump politically if he decided to run again in 2028, despite the Constitution preventing a third term in the Oval Office.

However, on April 23, the day after he sat down with TIME, Trump told reporters at the White House that raising taxes on the wealthy could be “very disruptive” and could lead to a loss of money for the United States.

House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the idea in an interview with Fox News.

“I’m not in favor of raising the tax rates because our party is the party that stands against that,” Johnson said on April 23.

He acknowledged that the proposal had been discussed as one of many possible ways to permanently implement personal income tax cuts in the Republicans’ final funding package.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 6 months ago

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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.

#DOGE #Medicaid #Robert Reich #Elon Musk #Vivek Ramaswamy #DOGE Caucus #Congressional Budget Office #John Cornyn

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democracyunderground · 4 months ago

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For weeks, House Republicans have been circulating proposals that would take health coverage and food assistance away from millions of people and raise the cost of student loans to offset part of the cost of extending the expiring 2017 tax cuts. Based on various proposals, 36 million people or more could be at risk of losing their health coverage through Medicaid, and more than 40 million people could receive less help from SNAP to buy groceries, millions of them potentially losing their food assistance altogether. About 5 million undergraduate students a year use federal student loans to pay for college, and many are at risk of higher costs to go to college given the cuts assigned to the Education and Workforce Committee. Millions of borrowers no longer in school could also be at risk for higher loan costs.

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misfitwashere · 20 days ago

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May 18, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 19

READ IN APP

Tonight, late on a Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what Republicans are calling their “Big, Beautiful Bill” to enact Trump’s agenda although it had failed on Friday when far-right Republicans voted against it, complaining it did not make deep enough cuts to social programs.

The vote tonight was a strict party line vote, with 16 Democrats voting against the measure, 17 Republicans voting for it, and 4 far right Republicans voting “present.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said there would be “minor modifications” to the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote on X that those changes include new work requirements for Medicaid and cuts to green energy subsidies.

And so the bill moves forward.

In The Bulwark today, Jonathan Cohn noted that Republicans are in a tearing hurry to push that Big, Beautiful Bill through Congress before most of us can get a handle on what’s in it. Just a week ago, Cohn notes, there was still no specific language in the measure. Republican leaders didn’t release the piece of the massive bill that would cut Medicaid until last Sunday night and then announced the Committee on Energy and Commerce would take it up not even a full two days later, on Tuesday, before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office could produce a detailed analysis of the cost of the proposals. The committee markup happened in a 26-hour marathon in which the parts about Medicaid happened in the middle of the night. And now, the bill moves forward in an unusual meeting late on a Sunday night.

Cohn recalls that in 2009, when the Democrats were pushing the Affordable Care Act, more popularly known as Obamacare, that measure had months of public debate before it went to the Committee on Energy and Commerce. That committee held eight separate hearings about healthcare reform, and it was just one of three committees working on the issue. The ACA markup took a full two weeks.

Cohn explains that Medicaid cuts are extremely unpopular, and the Republicans hope to jam those cuts through by claiming they are cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse” without leaving enough time for scrutiny. Cohn points out that if they are truly interested in savings, they could turn instead to the privatized part of Medicare, Medicare Part D. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that cutting overpayments to Medicare Part D when private insurers “upcode” care to place patients in a higher risk bracket, could save more than $1 trillion over the next decade.

Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that those extensions would cost at least $4.6 trillion over the next ten years. And while the tax cuts would go into effect immediately, the cuts to Medicaid are currently scheduled not to hit until 2029, enabling the Republicans to avoid voter fury over them in the midterms and the 2028 election.

The prospect of that debt explosion led Moody’s on Friday to downgrade U.S. credit for the first time since 1917, following Fitch, which downgraded the U.S. rating in 2023, and Standard & Poor’s, which did so back in 2011. “If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended, which is our base case,” Moody’s explained, “it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade. As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9% of GDP by 2035, up from 6.4% in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending and relatively low revenue generation.”

On the Sunday talk shows this morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the downgrade, saying it reflected conditions already in the market (although Moody’s explicitly said it was concerned about the potential passage of the Republicans’ Big, Beautiful Bill). House speaker Mike Johnson said that the credit downgrade just proved the need for the measure with its “historic spending cuts” to pass (although Moody’s named that bill as its reason for the downgrade).

The continuing Republican insistence that spending is out of control does not reflect reality. In fact, discretionary spending has fallen more than 40% in the past 50 years as a percentage of gross domestic product, from 11% to 6.3%. What has driven rising deficits are the George W. Bush and Donald Trump tax cuts, which had added $8 trillion and $1.7 trillion, respectively, to the debt by the end of the 2023 fiscal year.

But rather than permit those tax cuts to expire— or even to roll them back— the Republicans continue to insist Americans are overtaxed. In fact, the U.S. is far below the average of the 37 other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an intergovernmental forum of democracies with market economies, in its tax levies. According to a report by the Center for American Progress in 2023, if the U.S. taxed at the average OECD level, over ten years it would have an additional $26 trillion in revenue. If the U.S. taxed at the average of European Union nations, it would have an additional $36 trillion.

But instead of considering taxes to address the deficit, in the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that foreign countries would pay for further tax cuts through tariffs, no matter how often economists said that tariffs are passed on to consumers.

In October 2024, when editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News John Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work in an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump replied: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know?... They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

Walmart’s suggestion that it will have to raise prices because of tariffs is forcing the administration to try to manage reality. “We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” Walmart's chief financial officer John David Rainey during an interview with CNBC on Thursday. Rainey predicted higher prices by June.

In response Trump appeared to agree that tariffs are paid by consumers, posting that Walmart should “‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Today, Bessent reassured Americans that he had spoken to the CEO of Walmart, Doug McMillon, who had agreed that Walmart would, in fact, eat some of the tariffs.

So with the current Big, Beautiful Bill, we are looking at a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Americans to those at the top of American society. The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”

Lest there be any confusion about who will benefit from this Big, Beautiful Bill, one of the many pieces tucked into it is a prohibition on any state laws to regulate artificial intelligence for the next ten years.

Despite its gargantuan energy demands, harm to the environment, and threats to privacy, the administration is pushing AI hard, and the country’s leading AI entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Ruth Porat of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Andy Jassy of Amazon all traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia last week. The Saudis are looking to diversify their oil-dependent economy and are now the world’s largest investors in artificial intelligence.

Speaker Johnson hopes to pass the bill through the House of Representatives by this Friday, before Memorial Day weekend.

In other news today, the office of former president Joe Biden announced he is battling an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As vice president and president, Biden was a fierce advocate for cancer research, with the goal of reducing the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent by 2047, preventing more than 4 million deaths from cancer, and improving the experience of individuals and families living with and surviving cancer.

And in international news, Romanian voters today rejected a far-right nationalist who deliberately styled his behavior after Trump and whose victory, until recently, was being treated as a foregone conclusion. Instead, voters elected the centrist mayor of Bucharest, Nicușor Dan. Even before the election, Dan’s opponent insisted the election was illegitimate, claimed that he was the new leader, and called for his supporters to protest in favor of his election. But in the end, Dan’s 8-point victory was too much to overcome and he conceded.

“This is your victory,” Dan told his supporters. “It’s the victory of thousands and thousands of people who campaigned [and] believed that Romania can change in the correct direction.”

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#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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