No matter what you think or Reich, the Math never lies... and Trump’s Tax bill was a criminal Sham, sorry to inform.


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OCT 15, 2018
Robert Reich: The Economy Is in Much Worse Shape Than It Looks

I keep hearing that although Donald Trump is a scoundrel or worse, at least he’s presiding over a great economy.

As White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow recently put it, “The single biggest story this year is an economic boom that is durable and lasting.”

Really? Look closely at the living standards of most Americans, and you get a very different picture.

Yes, the stock market has boomed since Trump became president. But it’s looking increasingly wobbly as Trump’s trade wars take a toll.

Over 80 percent of the stock market is owned by the richest 10 percent of Americans anyway, so most Americans never got much out of Trump’s market boom to begin with.

The trade wars are about to take a toll on ordinary workers. Trump’s steel tariffs have cost Ford $1 billion so far, for example, forcing the automaker to plan mass layoffs.

What about economic growth? Data from the Commerce Department shows the economy at full speed, 4.2 percent growth for the second quarter.

But very little of that growth is trickling down to average Americans. Adjusted for inflation, hourly wages aren’t much higher now than they were forty years ago.

Trump slashed taxes on the wealthy and promised everyone else a $4,000 wage boost. But the boost never happened. That’s a big reason why Republicans aren’t campaigning on their tax cut, which is just about their only legislative accomplishment.

Trump and congressional Republicans refuse to raise the minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 an hour. Trump’s Labor Department is also repealing a rule that increased the number of workers entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime.

Yes, unemployment is down to 3.7 percent. But jobs are less secure than ever. Contract workers – who aren’t eligible for family or medical leave, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, or worker’s compensation – are now doing one out of every five jobs in America.

Trump’s Labor Department has invited more companies to reclassify employees as contract workers. Its new rule undoes the California Supreme Court’s recent decision requiring that most workers be presumed employees unless proven otherwise. (Given California’s size, that decision had nationwide effect.)

Meanwhile, housing costs are skyrocketing, with Americans now paying a third or more of their paychecks in rent or mortgages.

Trump’s response? Drastic cuts in low-income housing. His Secretary of Housing and Urban Development also wants to triple the rent paid by poor households in subsidized housing.

Healthcare costs continues to rise faster than inflation. Trump’s response? Undermine the Affordable Care Act. Over the past two years, some 4 million people have lost healthcare coverage, according to a survey by the Commonwealth Fund.

Pharmaceutical costs are also out of control. Trump’s response? Allow the biggest pharmacist, CVS, to merge with the one of the biggest health insurers, Aetna – creating a behemoth with the power to raise prices even further.

The cost of college continues to soar. Trump’s response? Make it easier for for-profit colleges to defraud students. His Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is eliminating regulations that had required for-profit colleges to prove they provide gainful employment to the students they enroll.

Commuting to and from work is becoming harder, as roads and bridges become more congested, and subways and trains older and less reliable. Trump’s response? Nothing. Although he promised to spend $1.5 trillion to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure, his $1.5 trillion tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy used up the money.

C*****e c****e is undermining the standard of living of ordinary Americans, as more are hit with floods, mudslides, tornados, draughts, and wildfires. Even those who have so far avoided direct hits will be paying more for insurance – or having a harder time getting it. People living on flood plains, or in trailers, or without home insurance, are paying the highest price.

Trump’s response? Allow more carbon into the atmosphere and make c*****e c****e even worse.

Too often, discussions about “the economy” focus on overall statistics about growth, the stock market, and unemployment.

But most Americans don’t live in that economy. They live in a personal economy that has more to do with wages, job security, commutes to and from work, and the costs of housing, healthcare, drugs, education, and home insurance.

These are the things that hit closest home. They comprise the typical American’s standard of living.

Instead of an “economic boom,” most Americans are experiencing declines in all these dimensions of their lives.

Trump isn’t solely responsible. Some of these trends predated his presidency. But he hasn’t done anything to reverse them.

If anything, he’s made them far worse.

If you are going to quote someone try and quote them correctly. I said That is a typical brainwashed Socialist Democrat for you.

"I didn't say anything about money making Democrats lie," although it has been proven that they will.

"I also did not say that Republicans have money also but they dont lie." I will agree there may be some that would for enough money.

The way you posted what I said is a typical brainwashed Socialist Democrat for you.

How can we get more black people and people of color to become republican in America? What stops people from wanting to side with the party's politics in the first place?

An opinion from blogger Adam Roach...

I am a white, Christian, middle aged, male, small business owner. I am the Republican Party.

They have a hard time getting me to v**e for them. It’s specifically because of the domestic policy. While I benefited from the recent tax bill, my employees didn’t. Most of them are white too.

So if they have a hard time getting me to v**e continuously for them, how are they going to get the not me?

The issue is that the Republican Party has become a party of social exclusionism. There is little difference between the duopoly on monetary policy, trade policy, fiscal discipline, subsidies, budgetary concerns etc. The only substantive differences are in regulatory policy, science funding and tax policy.

Its all about social conservatism today. I’m a fiscally conservative v**er but I don’t really care about gay marriage, or t*********r issues or kneeling during the anthem. In fact the amount of vitriol the GOP loads into these things actually makes me sympathetic to the other side because whenever I see someone pushing this level of exclusionism I recognize that the underlying prejudice is inherently Un-American.

There it is, Un-American.

How are the minorities supposed to choose the GOP when everything those minorities say or care about is dismissed as whining or laziness?

Too many extrajudicial k*****gs of black men by cops?.....Stop wearing hoodies.

The water system in my town is full of lead?.....Move you slacker.

I work two jobs and can’t pay the bills?.....Tough, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Get a third job.

Healthcare is too expensive!....Don’t buy an iPhone.

The iPhone comment came from a guy who said that his congressional salary of $174k wasn’t enough for him to afford his home in Utah and a place in Washington DC. A guy who hasn’t actually paid for healthcare in more than a decade.

I have watched republicans take a position that is pro-life for fetuses but wave off mass school shootings as part of “the price of freedom”. They can defend that fetus but then fight any program that would feed it, shelter it, give it healthcare.

I’ve watched them use the free speech argument to defend all manner of bad behaviour but then call down a guy for quietly taking a knee as an affront to America.

They want school choice but only as a direct way to further defund public schools.

They promised for a decade to give us better healthcare but at the cost of 10% of the population not having any at all, and what was left over wasn’t much better.

They accuse the other side of fiscal irresponsibility but then spend even more when they have control.

Yet the core problem that is germane to this question is the r****m.

Not all republicans are r****ts but if you are politically active and a r****t, you will be a republican.

Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, Colin Powell are gone. They’ve been replaced by weaker, c*********d men who lack moral vision.

I have known four local GOP chairmen scattered across the South, they were all r****ts and bad at hiding it. That’s local politics. In places with actual black v**ers that were Christian, conservative, hard working and largely gun owners. Lost opportunities.

The GOP as it exists today has become a party of meanness. They have no forward vision and they exist only to cache money for the wealthiest citizens. They have pioneered a new society of debt s***es and they’ve done it for a new society of masters.

B****s and Latinos are pretty good at sniffing out a r****t. It’s a necessary survival sk**l for a minority population that exists lower down the social ladder. Why would they v**e for people that they know will not listen to them? People that think they are less valuable to society? People who think they are superior by virtue of birth alone?

They shouldn’t and they don’t.

The democrats have faced this too but not because of r****m it’s just basic indifference and general malaise.

The GOP has become a pool of single issue v**ers but those issues are not really relevant to them.

School choice is meaningless for people without the means to afford even a subsidized private education.

A******n isn’t really an issue in black/brown America because their large, tight knit families provide the necessary support mechanisms that alleviate many of the socioeconomic pressures associated with the practice leaving only health related concerns as a primary driver.

Guns rights are so far down the list of concerns that they barely register for minority v**ers.

Tax cuts are always popular but eliminating capital gains is only popular with people who have them, that’s not the plurality of the population. Top end cuts don’t matter to poor people, heck low end cuts don’t matter that much when you are in the bottom 35%.

The gay wedding cake debacle is utterly meaningless to minorities, they know what it’s like to be discriminated against and should they have have the luxury of turning down paying business they would at least be civil about it.

New aircraft carriers are cool but Americans who can’t afford whole family healthcare aren’t going to v**e on that.

Then there is the Obama problem.

The GOP was utterly disrespectful to the first black president. They did that for 8 years and they did it in ways that came off as utterly r****t. That little bit of thinly veiled theater will cost them v**es for a generation. When we elect the first Latino it will be much the same and considering the last two weeks the first woman will likely find a similar reception, even if she’s a republican.

Misogyny has a price. The GOP knows this and that’s why their real crime is to disenfranchise as many actual potential v**ers as possible. Roster purges, gerrymandering (by both sides), a criminal justice system that seems almost designed to adversely impact minority communities, permanently yanking v****g access.

This Republican Party as it exists today isn’t even trying to get minority v**es. It’s going out of its way to prevent minority v****g. The minorities are catching on too. If they actually start v****g the GOP as it is currently constituted might just go extinct.

The problem is that the other option is seldom vastly better. The democrats have essentially adopted the moderate republican economic policy, which I’m personally fine with. That’s the problem though, there isn’t really a ton of difference on the one thing people reliably v**e on, their checkbooks.

It looks like with Kavanaugh they might have stepped on a landmine though. Women aren’t a minority, they are half the population. The tackiness that has insinuated itself into the body politic is not helping here and that’ll hurt more than the minority v**e in general because it’s minority women who take v****g more seriously in my experience and women talk to each other.

To answer the question after this long rant:

To attract minorities the GOP needs to fundamentally change its character. Not necessarily its core philosophy but its character. That’s going to be hard with its current members.