#Roosevelt Administration

[deadpresidents]

American Bonaparte: Napoléon's Great-Nephew in the President's Cabinet

In June 1815, Napoléon Bonaparte’s bid for continued military glory in Europe was crushed by allied British and Prussian troops at the Battle of Waterloo. Following his surrender, the former Emperor of France had hoped that the British might allow him to live the remainder of his life in exile in the United States. However, Napoléon had already escaped exile once before (from the Mediterranean island of Elba) and once again rallied the French around him in a last-ditch effort to conquer the European continent prior to Waterloo. Unwilling to risk another vanishing act, the British instead banished Napoléon to one of the most isolated places in the world – the remote island of Saint Helena, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, between Africa and South Africa – for the rest of his life.

Some of the Bonaparte family did eventually reach the United States, however. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1851-1921), the American-born grandson of Napoléon’s youngest brother, Jérôme, as the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. A year later, Roosevelt shifted Bonaparte from the Department of the Navy to the Justice Department. For the rest of Theodore Roosevelt’s Presidency, the great-nephew of the man responsible for the Napoléonic code was the United States Attorney General – America’s top law enforcement official – where he helped establish the Bureau of Investigation, better known today as the FBI.

[progressivemillennial]

A Brief Word on Mandates

In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt won 60.8% of the popular vote—the second highest percentage in modern America—and won 98% of the electoral votes. His party won 56% of the House seats and held 75% of the Senate. This was a clear mandate for the New Deal, a program meant to rescue Americans from the Great Depression.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson won 61.1% of the popular vote—the highest percentage in modern America—and won 90% of the electoral votes. His party won 68% of the House seats and held 68% of the Senate. This was a clear mandate for the Great Society, a program meant to expand the New Deal and civil rights.

In 2024, President Donald Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote—not even a majority—and won 58% of the electoral votes. His party won 51% of the House seats and held 53% of the Senate. These small majorities signify, at best, broad disappointment in both parties’ candidates and agendas.

There is no popular mandate here. If there were, Congress would have passed more than one bill already.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Image of Coit Tower painting of striking workers, taken while I was in San Francisco.]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

December 8, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

DEC 9, 2023

You all are in trouble, because I am home tonight from ten weeks on the road and am taking the night for myself, writing about one of the Very Cool Things I learned in my travels. I expect there will be more stories along these lines in the next several weeks.

Ninety years ago today, on Friday, December 8, 1933, in the first year of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration, the Advisory Committee to the Treasury on Fine Arts met for four hours in Washington, D.C., with museum directors from all over the country and leaders from the art world. For the past nine months, the administration had been building a “New Deal” for the American people, using the government to help ordinary Americans in the midst of the Great Depression. 

Together with the Democrats in Congress, the administration had launched the Civilian Conservation Corps that put young men to work planting trees, fighting fires, and maintaining wilderness trails. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided work and cash relief for unemployed workers; the Agricultural Adjustment Administration boosted farm prices by reducing agricultural surpluses, while the Farm Credit Act made it easier for farmers to borrow. The Civil Works Administration put more than 4 million unemployed Americans to work building 44,000 miles of new roads, 1,000 miles of new water mains, and building or improving 4,000 schools.

Now it was time to help artists. Inspired by the 1920s public art movement in Mexico in which young artists were paid to decorate public buildings, FDR’s former classmate George Biddle suggested to the president that artists could be hired to “paint murals depicting the social ideals of the new administration and contemporary life on the walls of public buildings.” 

This idea dovetailed with the goal of the administration to tap into the skills of ordinary Americans in rebuilding the country by making sure people had work. After all, FERA administrator Harry L. Hopkins said, artists needed “to eat just like other people.” He promised $1,039,000 to be disbursed by the Treasury “for the purpose of alleviating the distress of the American artists” while decorating public property with world-class art. 

At the Washington, D.C., meeting, the attendees discussed how to “carry…forward the world of encouraging the fine arts as a function of the Federal Government.” Their first speaker was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who “expressed her sympathy with the idea of the Government’s employing artists,” and all the other speakers followed suit. The following Monday, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) opened its doors, and artists lined up outside government offices to apply. By Saturday, December 16, artists were receiving checks. When the project ended four months later, 3,749 artists had been on the payroll, producing more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures, and public murals. 

The pilot project for the PWAP was Coit Tower in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood, located in the city’s Pioneer Park. The 210-foot Art Deco tower of unpainted concrete had been completed and dedicated in honor of volunteer firefighters on October 8, 1933 (perhaps not coincidentally, the date of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871). When the building was finished, it had 3,691 square feet of blank concrete wall space. 

By January 1934, thanks to the PWAP, twenty-six San Francisco artists and nineteen of their assistants were transforming that blank space into frescoes and murals depicting California life. Several of the artists had worked in Mexico with muralist Diego Rivera as part of the socially conscious mural movement of 1920s Mexico and adopted his techniques, creating frescoes in which the colors became part of the wall as they dried. To keep the colors at Coit Tower uniform, one artist-assistant ground the color pigments for all the different frescoes. 

But while they admired Rivera’s art, the New Deal artists, for the most part, focused not on revolution, as he did, but on the possibilities of the country’s new approach to government. Roosevelt was backing artists, and they backed him, painting not about revolution but about restoring healthy social and economic conditions in the United States. 

By the time the PWAP got under way, the exciting artistic experiments of the early twentieth century that had brought Picasso’s cubism, for example, had begun to seem foreign and alienating, and artists had begun to turn toward representational art in a national style. The government’s requirement that the public art be about the “American scene” in American style for American people built on that shift. Artists in the PWAP painted either as “Regionalists,” who painted rural America, or “Social Realists,” who painted the cities. The Regionalists tended to celebrate the nation, while Social Realists—most of whom came from New York City—tended to critique it, but both groups found intelligence, power, and beauty in the ordinary people and the ordinary scenes they painted. 

Coit Tower showed San Francisco’s people: striking workers, farmers, cowboys, travelers reading newspapers, news stenographers, chauffeurs, a rich man being held up at gunpoint, car accidents. People of color and women were underrepresented but not entirely ignored in this celebration of the possibilities of American life under the administration's new policies (one mural had an oil can in a corner to illustrate the government oiling the machinery of the economy for the mechanics in the next panel).  

The murals in Coit Tower, and the PWAP that supported them, were such a roaring success that the federal government would shortly launch four more projects to fund artists (including writers), most famously under the Works Progress Administration that operated from 1935 to 1942. Although to a modern eye, many of the fine artists’ depictions of Indigenous Americans and racial and gender minorities are eye-poppingly racist, these colorful presentations of the lives and histories of ordinary Americans that decorated libraries, schools, courthouses, bathhouses, and post offices, honoring community and hard work—and, in the edgier paintings, jabbing at stockbrokers, bankers, and industrialists—celebrated a hopeful, new, progressive America. 

For many Americans, who had never had access to fine art and were astonished to see fine art in local buildings, the medium was its own message: they realized their neighbors had talent they had never imagined. 

President Joe Biden has deliberately echoed FDR’s policies of the New Deal in his economic program, promising to build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, even as Republicans have insisted the only way to build the economy is to concentrate wealth on the “supply side” by cutting taxes. Today, there was more evidence that Biden’s policies are paying off for ordinary Americans. The November jobs report showed the economy added almost 200,000 more jobs in November, making the total since Biden took office more than 14 million, while the unemployment rate has stayed below 4% for 22 months in a row and wage growth is strong.

As Harvard professor Jason Furman notes, the U.S. is now 2 million jobs and 2 million employed above the pre-pandemic projections of the Congressional Budget Office. Dan Shafer of The Recombobulation Area observed, “If these numbers were happening during a Republican presidency, the usual business community folks would be celebrating in the streets. But when there’s a D next to the president’s name, it’s tumbleweeds.” Today, on the Fox News Channel, personality Maria Bartiromo noted that “the economy is a lot stronger than anyone understands.” 

The president also echoed the New Deal’s promotion of internal improvements today when he announced an investment of $8.2 billion in new funding for ten major passenger rail projects across the country to deliver the nation’s first high-speed rail projects. High-speed rail between California and Nevada, serving more than 11 million people annually; Los Angeles and San Francisco; and the Eastern Corridor, will create tens of thousands of union jobs, build communities, and promote climate-friendly transportation options. 

In a speech in Las Vegas, Nevada, announcing the rail plan, Biden called out his predecessor, who “always talked about infrastructure week. Four years of infrastructure week, but it failed. He failed,” Biden said. “On my watch, instead of having infrastructure week, America is having infrastructure decade.” 

“Trump just talks the talk. We walk the walk,” he said. “Look. He likes to say America is a failing nation. Frankly, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I see shovels in the ground, cranes in the sky, people hard at work rebuilding America together.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[stone-cold-groove]

WPA Workers Association membership card.

[hazardous-waste-containment]

american apathy toward jewish refugees ≠ tangible support for nazi germany

[kirbyddd]

Mario Teaches Typing (1992)

[cyarskj1899]

We will never have another FDR that can win because Black Americans won Civil Rights in the 1960’s that would require white folks to share social services by law. White Grievance drug users wont tell the truth about this country but I will.

FDR won because Black people were barred from benefiting from his “socialist” platform.

White folks love socialism as long as we can’t participate thats why economic anxiety doesn’t actually exist and anyone pushing that narrative is gaslighting you

[longlistshort]

Moses Soyer’s oil painting, Young Girl, is one of the works on view in A New Deal: Artists of the WPA from the CMA Collection at Canton Museum of Art. The exhibition is a reminder of one of the best social programs ever created by the US government and the positive impact it had on the country during one of its hardest periods.

From the museum about the exhibition-

Against the backdrop of severe economic strife caused by the Stock Market Crash of 1929, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which put roughly 8.5 million Americans, including more than 173,000 men and women in Ohio, to work building schools, hospitals, roads and more. Within the WPA was The Federal Art Project (FAP) which provided employment for artists to create art for municipal buildings and public spaces. The FAP had a non-discrimination clause that meant it attracted and hired artists of color and women, who previously received little attention in the art world. The only guidance the government offered about subject matter was to depict the “American scene” and stipulated no nudity or political issues. The goal was for artists to help the United States develop its own distinct American style of art, especially as artists in other parts of the world were forbidden freedom of expression and ordered to create artworks that projected the beliefs of their governments.

Though the WPA artists in the United States shared the common goal of capturing life in all its variety and promoting national pride, they each had different approaches, and many modified their typical subject matter to fit whatever project they were assigned. The arts before and after the New Deal relied on private patronage and the philanthropy of wealthy and elite institutions: galleries, museums, dealers. But during the WPA, art wasn’t a luxury good, it was seen as an essential part of our democracy. Artists were seen as professional workers who were making important and significant contributions to American life. The artworks made under the WPA became the collection of the American people and were put in public collections – hospitals, schools, post offices, housing projects, etc. – ensuring they were part of communities. The arts were seen as an important part of a democratic society and the American way of life, with a richness of experience and accessibility to culture.

While artists were offered opportunities through the WPA, they were far from immune to the distress caused by the Depression, and many still struggled to make a living. Will Barnet detailed a bleak scene he came across, saying:

“It was like a war going on. There were bread lines and men lined around three, four, five, six blocks waiting to get a bowl of soup. It was an extraordinary situation. And one felt this terrible dark cloud over the whole city.”

Moses Soyer also described the hardships artists experienced, saying,

“Depression–who can describe the hopelessness that its victims knew? Perhaps no one better than the artist taking his work to show the galleries. They were at a standstill. The misery of the artist was acute.”

The FAP supported the creation of thousands of works of art, including more than 2,500 murals that can still be seen in public buildings around the country. The FAP also supported art education and outreach efforts, including traveling exhibitions and art education programs for children. The WPA and FAP had a significant impact on the American art scene, and many of the artists who participated in the program went on to become important figures in the art world.

A New Deal: Artists of the WPA from the CMA Collection highlights the lives of artists from our Permanent Collection who worked for the WPA, and in doing so, fostered resilience for a struggling nation. You will learn about the projects they worked on, the subjects they were interested in, and how their own lives were affected by the Depression. Each of these artists helped to foster the nation’s spirit and prove that even in the darkest of times, art serves as a uniting force to collectively lead people into a brighter future.

And about Moses Soyer and his painting from the museum-

The Depression set the mood for most of Soyer’s art expression, and his portraits of people seem to be preoccupied with a sad secret. His portraits were often of solitary figures, using professional models or his friends, capturing in these paintings the spirit of his sitters, their dreams or disillusionment. He is best known for his introspective figure paintings of weary, melancholy women in muted colors, matching the mood of his sitters with the pigment in his paint. He was inspired by artist Edgar Degas, who used color expressively.

On the museum’s website you can find both the artwork on display for the exhibition and also a gallery of the museum’s entire collection organized into several categories.

[deadpresidents]

Is Mayor Cermak the Big Bopper of that day in the FDR life story?

You know, there are theories that Anton Cermak was the actual target of that assassination attempt in Miami in 1933. It's never been proven, but it's been suggested that Cermak, who was the Mayor of Chicago, was targeted by the Chicago Outfit -- the branch of the mafia that Al Capone ran before he was sent to prison.

It's much more likely that Giuseppe Zangara was really trying to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt (he said that Roosevelt was the target of his anger against capitalists) and he very nearly did that day. If a woman nearby hadn't grabbed his arm and deflected his aim, Zangara probably would have shot FDR, who was the President-elect at the time, and just 17 days away from being inaugurated in the midst of the Great Depression. FDR was very lucky that day. Cermak wasn't and died a few weeks later. And Zangara was tried and convicted in a lightning-fast trial where he pled guilty to Cermak's murder and attempted murder for the four other people wounded by his bullets and was promptly executed via Florida's electric chair less than three weeks after FDR was inaugurated. The entire process including the assassination attempt, FDR's inauguration, Cermak's death, Zangara's trial, conviction, and execution all happened in a matter of 33 days.

[reasonsforhope]

Holy crap, I didn't think Biden would be able to get the Climate Corps established without Congress. This is SUCH fantastic news.

--

"After being thwarted by Congress, President Joe Biden will use his executive authority to create a New Deal-style American Climate Corps that will serve as a major green jobs training program.

In an announcement Wednesday, the White House said the program will employ more than 20,000 young adults who will build trails, plant trees, help install solar panels and do other work to boost conservation and help prevent catastrophic wildfires.

The climate corps had been proposed in early versions of the sweeping climate law approved last year but was jettisoned amid strong opposition from Republicans and concerns about cost.

Democrats and environmental advocacy groups never gave up on the plan and pushed Biden in recent weeks to issue an executive order authorizing what the White House now calls the American Climate Corps.

“After years of demonstrating and fighting for a Climate Corps, we turned a generational rallying cry into a real jobs program that will put a new generation to work stopping the climate crisis,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, an environmental group that has led the push for a climate corps.

With the new corps “and the historic climate investments won by our broader movement, the path towards a Green New Deal is beginning to become visible,” Prakash said...

...Environmental activists hailed the new jobs program, which is modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the 1930s by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, as part of the New Deal...

Lawmakers Weigh In

More than 50 Democratic lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had also encouraged Biden to create a climate corps, saying in a letter on Monday that “the climate crisis demands a whole-of-government response at an unprecedented scale.”

The lawmakers cited deadly heat waves in the Southwest and across the nation, as well as dangerous floods in New England and devastating wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, among recent examples of climate-related disasters.

Democrats called creation of the climate corps “historic” and the first step toward fulfilling the vision of the Green New Deal.

“Today President Biden listened to the (environmental) movement, and he delivered with an American Climate Corps,” a beaming Markey said at a celebratory news conference outside the Capitol.

“We are starting to turn the green dream into a green reality,” added Ocasio-Cortez, who co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation with Markey four years ago.

“You all are changing the world,” she told young activists.

Program Details and Grant Deadlines

The initiative will provide job training and service opportunities to work on a wide range of projects, including restoring coastal wetlands to protect communities from storm surges and flooding; clean energy projects such as wind and solar power; managing forests to prevent catastrophic wildfires; and energy efficient solutions to cut energy bills for consumers, the White House said.

Creation of the climate corps comes as the Environmental Protection Agency launches a $4.6 billion grant competition for states, municipalities and tribes to cut climate pollution and advance environmental justice. The Climate Pollution Reduction Grants are funded by the 2022 climate law and are intended to drive community-driven solutions to slow climate change.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the grants will help “communities so they can chart their own paths toward the clean energy future.”

The deadline for states and municipalities to apply is April 1, with grants expected in late 2024. Tribes and territories must apply by May 1, with grants expected by early 2025."

-via Boston.com, September 21, 2023

[directactionforhope]

"Starting this month [June 2024], thousands of young people will begin doing climate-related work around the West as part of a new service-based federal jobs program, the American Climate Corps, or ACC. The jobs they do will vary, from wildland firefighters and “lawn busters” to urban farm fellows and traditional ecological knowledge stewards. Some will work on food security or energy conservation in cities, while others will tackle invasive species and stream restoration on public land. 

The Climate Corps was modeled on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, with the goal of eventually creating tens of thousands of jobs while simultaneously addressing the impacts of climate change. 

Applications were released on Earth Day, and Maggie Thomas, President Joe Biden’s special assistant on climate, told High Country News that the program’s website has already had hundreds of thousands of views. Since its launch, nearly 250 jobs across the West have been posted, accounting for more than half of all the listed ACC positions. 

“Obviously, the West is facing tremendous impacts of climate change,” Thomas said. “It’s changing faster than many other parts of the country. If you look at wildfire, if you look at extreme heat, there are so many impacts. I think that there’s a huge role for the American Climate Corps to be tackling those crises.”  

Most of the current positions are staffed through state or nonprofit entities, such as the Montana Conservation Corps or Great Basin Institute, many of which work in partnership with federal agencies that manage public lands across the West. In New Mexico, for example, members of Conservation Legacy’s Ecological Monitoring Crew will help the Bureau of Land Management collect soil and vegetation data. In Oregon, young people will join the U.S. Department of Agriculture, working in firefighting, fuel reduction and timber management in national forests. 

New jobs are being added regularly. Deadlines for summer positions have largely passed, but new postings for hundreds more positions are due later this year or on a rolling basis, such as the Working Lands Program, which is focused on “climate-smart agriculture.”  ...

On the ACC website, applicants can sort jobs by state, work environment and focus area, such as “Indigenous knowledge reclamation” or “food waste reduction.” Job descriptions include an hourly pay equivalent — some corps jobs pay weekly or term-based stipends instead of an hourly wage — and benefits. The site is fairly user-friendly, in part owing to suggestions made by the young people who participated in the ACC listening sessions earlier this year...

The sessions helped determine other priorities as well, Thomas said, including creating good-paying jobs that could lead to long-term careers, as well as alignment with the president’s Justice40 initiative, which mandates that at least 40% of federal climate funds must go to marginalized communities that are disproportionately impacted by climate change and pollution. 

High Country News found that 30% of jobs listed across the West have explicit justice and equity language, from affordable housing in low-income communities to Indigenous knowledge and cultural reclamation for Native youth...

While the administration aims for all positions to pay at least $15 an hour, the lowest-paid position in the West is currently listed at $11 an hour. Benefits also vary widely, though most include an education benefit, and, in some cases, health care, child care and housing. 

All corps members will have access to pre-apprenticeship curriculum through the North America’s Building Trades Union. Matthew Mayers, director of the Green Workers Alliance, called this an important step for young people who want to pursue union jobs in renewable energy. Some members will also be eligible for the federal pathways program, which was recently expanded to increase opportunities for permanent positions in the federal government...

 “To think that there will be young people in every community across the country working on climate solutions and really being equipped with the tools they need to succeed in the workforce of the future,” Thomas said, “to me, that is going to be an incredible thing to see.”"

-via High Country News, June 6, 2024

--

Note: You can browse Climate Corps job postings here, on the Climate Corps website. There are currently 314 jobs posted at time of writing!

Also, it says the goal is to pay at least $15 an hour for all jobs (not 100% meeting that goal rn), but lots of postings pay higher than that, including some over $20/hour!!

[saywhat-politics]

"Unfortunately tossing a scarf over the GDP numbers doesn't change the fact that their policies have us careening toward a downturn."

All signs are pointing to a coming recession as U.S. President Donald Trump imposes tariffs on close trading partners, oversees mass firings of civil servants, and pushes for cuts to public services—but by firing economists, advisers, and other experts tasked with advising federal agencies on economic shifts, the administration is working to ensure that the government and the public can't read those signs.

As Politico reported Friday, experts serving on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Technical Advisory Committee were informed this week that they were no longer needed, leaving the BLS without a panel that has long advised the Labor Department on how economic changes can impact data collection.

A page for the committee was removed from the Labor Department's website, along with one that had information about the Data Users Advisory Committee, which has advised on how businesses and policymakers can use the agency's economic reports.

"It would be a bad sign for a software company to cancel all beta testing if you expect to keep making better software," Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute who served on the data users committee, told Politico. "This feels like the same sort of thing."

[dinosaurwithablog]

This has never been as pertinent as it is right now!!

[zvaigzdelasas]

President Trump said this week that Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen have been “decimated by the relentless strikes” that he ordered beginning on March 15. But that’s not what Pentagon and military officials are privately telling Congress and allied countries. In closed briefings in recent days, Pentagon officials have acknowledged that there has been only limited success in destroying the Houthis’ vast, largely underground arsenal of missiles, drones and launchers, according to congressional aides and allies. The officials briefed on confidential damage assessments say the bombing is consistently heavier than strikes conducted by the Biden administration, and much bigger than what the Defense Department has publicly described.[...]

In just three weeks, the Pentagon has used $200 million worth of munitions, in addition to the immense operational and personnel costs to deploy two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses to the Middle East, the officials said.

The total cost could be well over $1 billion by next week, and the Pentagon might soon need to request supplemental funds from Congress, one U.S. official said.

So many precision munitions are being used, especially advanced long-range ones, that some Pentagon contingency planners are growing concerned about overall Navy stocks and implications for any situation in which the United States would have to ward off an attempted invasion of Taiwan by China. The U.S. strikes, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named Operation Rough Rider after the troops Theodore Roosevelt led in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, likely could continue for six months, officials said.[...]

The Biden administration carried out strikes against the Houthis, but at a smaller scale and mostly against infrastructure and military sites. Trump administration officials say the current strikes are also aimed at killing senior Houthi officials.[...]

Unlike President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump has delegated the authority to strike targets to regional and local commanders, allowing them to attack Houthi sites more quickly and efficiently, commanders say.

Houthi officials say the strikes have hit residential areas and buildings in the heart of Yemen’s capital, Sana, resulting in more than 60 civilian casualties.

According to a report released on Thursday by Airwars, a British organization that assesses claims of civilian harm in conflicts, a woman and four children were reported killed in one of the strikes on March 15.

Unlike President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump has delegated the authority to strike targets to regional and local commanders, allowing them to attack Houthi sites more quickly and efficiently, commanders say.

4 Apr 25

[robertreich]

The Truth About Trumponomics

Trump and Republicans want to wreck your bank account. Here are 5 things you need to know about Trumponomics.

1.Trump wants tax cuts for the rich, at your expense.

Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations added about $1.7 trillion to the national debt, with few benefits trickling down to the middle class — in fact, it raised taxes for more than 10 million American families.

Now Trump and Republicans want to make the tax cuts for the rich permanent, blowing up the debt even further. And then they’ll use that debt to justify this:

2. Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare — programs you’ve been paying into!

In every year of his presidency, Trump submitted a budget that tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. And he knows that’s the only way he can even begin to pay for extending his tax cuts for the rich.

3. Trump and his allies are pro-junk fee.

When the Biden administration issued a rule capping credit card late fees at $8, Sen. Tim Scott, a Trump surrogate, tried to overturn it in the Senate. And then a Trump-appointed judge issued a temporary injunction that blocked the rule from taking effect. Eliminating that rule would cost American families an estimated $10 billion a year.

And when the Biden administration required airlines to issue automatic refunds for canceled flights, Trump’s allies in Congress fought to block that too.

When Trump was in office, his administration fought against efforts to rein in airline junk fees.

Corporations nickel and diming us like this makes inflation worse. If Trump gets back in the White House, buckle up for more junk fees.

4. Trump would send health care costs soaring.

Republicans have committed to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, which would strip Medicare of the ability to negotiate drug prices, and let Big Pharma send the price of insulin and other life-saving medicines back through the roof.

And Trump is still fixated on repealing Obamacare, with no plan to replace it.

TRUMP: Obamacare is a disaster. We’re gonna do something about it.

That would strip coverage from tens of millions of Americans, drive up premiums, and let insurers charge more or deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions.

5, If you’ve got student debt, you’re out of luck with Trump.

In contrast to President Biden, who’s canceled more than $160 billion of student debt so far, Trump is against student debt relief. In his first term, he tried to eliminate the popular Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for people like teachers and nurses, and he’s called the idea of debt relief “unfair.”

What’s unfair, is how student debt hurts not just the roughly 40 million Americans burdened by it, but the entire economy, since Americans with debt have less money to spend, are less likely to start a business, less likely to buy a home, and more likely to rely on government assistance.

The MAGA agenda would make nearly every aspect of your life more expensive, while making the richest Americans even richer.

Teddy Roosevelt’s economic plan was called the Square Deal. Franklin Roosevelt’s was the New Deal.

What Trump is offering is simply a Raw Deal.

[political-us]

“The US economy has since World War II consistently done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. This fact is even less widely known, including among Democratic voters, than the truth about Biden’s term. Indeed, some poll results suggest that more Americans believe the reverse, that Republican presidents are better stewards of the economy than Democrats.

Since World War II, Democrats have seen job creation average 1.7 % per year when in office, versus 1.0 % under the GOP. US GDP has averaged a rate of growth of 4.23 percent per annum during Democratic administrations, versus 2.36 per cent under Republicans, a remarkable difference of 1.87 percentage points. This is postwar data, covering 19 presidential terms—from Truman through Biden. If one goes back further, to the Great Depression, to include Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, the difference in growth rates is even larger.”