Bernie Sanders to Fund ‘Major’ Multitrillion-Dollar Plans with Military Cuts, Taxes, Lawsuits
6:12
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Monday released a fact sheet explaining how he will fund his “major” multitrillion-dollar campaign proposals — the Green New Deal, free college, housing for all, etc. — and revealed that he will pay for them through a combination of cutting military spending, creating new taxes, and enacting penalties on the fossil fuel industry in the form of lawsuits.
While Sanders has released a suite of lofty plans with the promise to improve the lives of middle class and low income Americans, critics have repeatedly asked the socialist senator to explain how his administration will pay for his grandiose proposals.
His campaign released a fact sheet on Monday listing each of his “major plans” and providing a line on how he will make it a reality.
His $16.3 trillion Green New Deal plan, perhaps one of his most prolific proposals, will be paid for, he claims, through a variety of methods including slashes in military spending and lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry.
He is calling to reduce defense spending by $1.215 trillion “by scaling back military operations on protecting the global oil supply.” His campaign claims he will raise $3.085 trillion by “making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies.” He expects to garner another $6.4 trillion “from the wholesale of energy produced by the regional Power Marketing Administrations.”
“This revenue will be collected from 2023-2035, and after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs,” his website states.
Sanders also claims his Green New Deal plan will create 20 million jobs, which will effectively create a new tax base and eliminate the need for $1.31 trillion in “federal and state safety net spending due to the creation of millions of good-paying, unionized jobs.”
His campaign actually argues that enacting his multitrillion-dollar climate change proposal will save the United States $2.9 trillion in the next decade, $21 trillion over the next 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over the next 80 years.
“If we do not act, the U.S. will lose $34.5 trillion by the end of the century in economic productivity,” he claims.
That is far from Sanders’ only proposal. Offering free college and cancelation of student debt will cost, according to his estimates, $2.2 trillion. Sanders claims the plan is “fully paid” for with a “modest tax on Wall Street speculation,” contending that it will raise more than enough — $2.4 million over the next decade.
Sanders says his $1.5 trillion housing for all plan and $1.5 trillion universal child care/pre-K plan will be paid for with “a wealth tax on the top one-tenth of one percent – those who have a net worth of at least $32 million.” He claims it will raise “a total of $4.35 trillion.”
His other plans rely almost entirely on new taxes on the wealthy. His vow to erase $81 billion past-due medical debt will be “fully paid for by establishing an income inequality tax on large corporations that pay CEOs at least 50 times more than average workers.” Additionally, Social Security expansion will be paid for, he says, with a tax on Americans with incomes over $250,000.
Instead of explicitly stating how Sanders will fund his Medicare for All plan, which some experts say could cost over $60 trillion over the next decade, the fact sheet simply touts a “menu of financing options that would more than pay for the Medicare for All legislation he has introduced,” which includes raising taxes on the middle class.
Per the fact sheet, those options include:
- Creating a 4 percent income-based premium paid by employees, exempting the first $29,000 in income for a family of four.
- Imposing a 7.5 percent income-based premium paid by employers, exempting the first $1 million in payroll to protect small businesses.
- Eliminating health tax expenditures, which would no longer be needed under Medicare for All.
- Raising the top marginal income tax rate to 52% on income over $10 million.
- Replacing the cap on the state and local tax deduction with an overall dollar cap of $50,000 for a married couple on all itemized deductions.
- Taxing capital gains at the same rates as income from wages and cracking down on gaming through derivatives, like-kind exchanges, and the zero tax rate on capital gains passed on through bequests.
- Enacting the For the 99.8% Act, which returns the estate tax exemption to the 2009 level of $3.5 million, closes egregious loopholes, and increases rates progressively including by adding a top tax rate of 77% on estate values in excess of $1 billion.
- Enacting corporate tax reform including restoring the top federal corporate income tax rate to 35 percent.
- Using $350 billion of the amount raised from the tax on extreme wealth to help finance Medicare for All.
The release of the fact sheet follows Sanders growing frustration over the mounting questions over the costs of his massive proposals.
Anderson Cooper grilled Sanders on the costs of his various proposals during the presidential hopeful’s recent sit-down interview with 60 Minutes.
“But you say you don’t know what the total price is, but you know how it’s going to be paid for. How do you know it’s going to be paid for if you don’t know how much the price is?” Cooper asked.
“I can’t rattle off to you every nickel and every dime,” Sanders said. “But we have accounted for — you talked about Medicare for All — we have options out there that will pay for it.”
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
TRUMPERNOMICS:
Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019
28
December 2019
Rep. Mo Brooks
(R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the
United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and
middle-class families.
A new Gilded Age
has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The
wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle
class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector,
for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance
between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem
and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World
Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The
report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich
and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That increasing
worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic
research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
TRUMPERNOMICS:
Billionaires’ wealth surged in 2019
28
December 2019
As the second decade of the 21st century comes to a close, its
most salient feature—the plundering of humanity by a global financial
oligarchy—continues unabated.
Amidst trade war and the growth of militarism and authoritarianism
on the one side, and an eruption of international strikes and protests by the
working class against social inequality on the other, the stock market is
hitting record highs and the fortunes of the world’s billionaires are
continuing to surge.
On Friday, one day after all three major US stock indexes set
new records, Bloomberg issued its end-of-year survey of the world’s 500 richest
people. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index reported that the oligarchs’ fortunes
increased by a combined total of $1.2 trillion, a 25 percent rise over 2018.
Their collective net worth now comes to $5.9 trillion.
To place this figure in some perspective, these 500 individuals
control more wealth than the gross domestic product of the United States at the
end of the third quarter of 2019, which was $5.4 trillion.
The year’s biggest gains went to France’s Bernard Arnault, who
added $36.5 billion to his fortune, bringing it above the rarified $100 billion
level to $105 billion. He knocked speculator Warren Buffett, at $89.3 billion,
down to fourth place. Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lost nearly $9 billion due to a
divorce settlement, but maintained the top position, with a net worth of $116
billion. Microsoft founder Bill Gates gained $22.7 billion for the year and
held on to second place at $113 billion.
The 172 American billionaires on the Bloomberg list added $500
billion, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recording the year’s biggest US gain
at $27.3 billion, placing him in fifth place worldwide with a net worth of
$79.3 billion.
It is difficult to comprehend the true significance of such
stratospheric sums. In his 2016 book Global Inequality, economist
Branko Milanovic wrote:
"A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience
of practically everyone on earth that the very quantity it implies is not
easily understood… Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1
billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three
years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700
years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to
blow your inheritance in the second case."
The vast redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top of
society is the outcome of a decades-long process, which was accelerated following
the 2008 Wall Street crash. It is not the result of impersonal and simply
self-activating processes. Rather, the policies of capitalist governments and
parties around the world, nominally “left” as well as right, have been
dedicated to the ever greater impoverishment of the working class and
enrichment of the ruling elite.
In the US, the top one percent has captured all of the increase
in national income over the past two decades, and all of the increase in
national wealth since the 2008 crash.
The main mechanism for this transfer of wealth has been the
stock market, and the policies of the US Federal Reserve and central banks
internationally have been geared to providing cheap money to drive up stock
prices. The cost of this massive subsidy to the financial markets and the
oligarchs has been paid by the working class, in the form of social cuts, mass
layoffs, the destruction of pensions and health benefits, and the replacement
of relatively secure and decent-paying jobs with part-time, temporary and contingent
“gig” positions.
Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, pledging to
slash corporate taxes, lift regulations on big business and dramatically
increase the military budget, the Dow has surged by 9,000 points. This year,
Trump and the financial markets applied massive pressure on the Fed to reverse
its efforts to “normalize” interest rates. The Fed complied, carrying out three
rate cuts and repeatedly assuring the markets it had no plans to raise rates in
2020.
This windfall for the banks and hedge funds was supported by the
Democrats no less than the Republicans. In fact, Trump’s economic policy has
been given de facto support by the Democratic Party all down the line—from his
tax cuts for corporations and the rich to his attack on virtually all
regulations on business. Even in the midst of impeachment—carried out entirely
on the grounds of “national security” and Trump’s supposed “softness” toward
Russia—the Democrats have voted by wide margins for Trump’s budget, his
anti-Chinese US-Mexico-Canada trade pact and his record $738 billion Pentagon
war budget.
This has included giving Trump all the money he wants to build
his border wall and carry out the mass incarceration and persecution of
immigrants.
Trump’s pro-corporate policies are an extension and expansion of
those pursued by the Obama administration. It allocated trillions in taxpayer
money to bail out the banks and flooded the financial markets with cheap
credit, driving up stock prices, while imposing a 50 percent across-the-board
cut in pay for newly hired autoworkers in its bailout of General Motors and
Chrysler. Obama oversaw the closure of thousands of schools and the layoff of
hundreds of thousands of teachers, and enacted austerity budgets that slashed
social programs.
Two of those running for the 2020 Democratic presidential
nomination are billionaires—Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. The latter, with
a net worth of $56 billion, is the ninth richest person in the US. He entered
the race as the spokesman for oligarchs outraged over talk from Bernie Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren of token tax increases on the super-rich.
The oligarchs are not frightened by Sanders and Warren—two
longstanding defenders of the American ruling class, who seek to mask their
subservience to capital with talk of making the oligarchs pay “their fair
share,” a euphemism for defending their right to pillage the population. The
billionaires are frightened by the growth of mass opposition to capitalism that
finds a distorted expression in support for the phony “progressives” in the
Democratic fold.
Between them, Bloomberg and Steyer have already spent $200
million of their own money in an effort to buy the election outright.
The impact of the policy of social plunder is seen in the
deepening of a malignant social crisis in country after country. In the US,
society is marching backwards, as the crying need for schools, hospitals,
affordable housing, pensions, the rebuilding of decrepit roads, bridges,
transportation, flood control, water and sewage, fire control and electricity
grids is met with the official response: “There is no money.”
The result? Three straight years of declining life expectancy,
record addiction and suicide rates, devastating wildfires and floods,
electricity cut-offs by profiteering utility companies. And a climate crisis
that cannot be addressed within the framework of a system dominated by a
money-mad plutocracy.
Not a single serious social problem can be addressed under
conditions where the ruling elite—through its bribed parties and politicians,
aided by its pro-capitalist trade unions and backed up by its courts, police
and troops—diverts resources from society to the accumulation of ever more
luxurious yachts, mansions, private islands and personal jets.
Where social reform is impossible, social revolution is
inevitable. The solution to the impasse is to be found in the growth of the
class struggle. The movement of workers and youth all over the world—from mass
strikes in France to strikes by autoworkers and teachers in the US, protests in
Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador and Brazil, strikes and mass demonstrations in Lebanon,
Iran, Iraq and India—reveals the social force that can and will put an end to
capitalism.
The watchword must be—in opposition to the Corbyns, the Sanders,
the Tsiprases and their pseudo-left promoters—“Expropriate the super-rich!”
Exclusive–Mo
Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of
Americans’
Bob Gathany / AL.com via AP
3:19
Rep. Mo Brooks
(R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” want more legal immigration to the
United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and
middle-class families.
In an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Brooks said
recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to
compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations
to deplete the earnings of Americans.
Brooks said:
I’m not a part of the Masters of the Universe crowd who thinks we
ought to be bringing in all this foreign labor and the reason for it is pure economics. This is the chance for Americans and lawful immigrants who are already here who are working
in the blue-collar trades, who are working in the places where
wages are not as high they ought to be, this is their chance to prosper. [Emphasis added]
And to the extent you import a lot of foreign labor, then you are
artificially increasing the labor supply which in turn means that you’re
artificially suppressing the wages of American families who are often hard-pressed to make ends meet So I
respectfully disagree that we need more foreign labor, to the contrary, I would like to see us reduce the foreign labor that comes into
America so that American families who are struggling to make ends meet, particularly those of us who are earning the least
amounts, would be better to take care of their own families and less likely
to be dependent on the welfare. [Emphasis added]
Brooks said Democrats support for mass legal immigration is
centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the
U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and
becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a
permanent dependent class of Democrat voters.
“Don’t get me wrong, [Democrats] want to decrease the incomes of
Americans so that they’re dependent on welfare,” Brooks said.
That makes them in turn likely Democrat voters and the best way to
do that is to have a huge surge in the labor supply, particularly illegal
aliens, that will depress their wages therefore creating more Democrats who are dependent on welfare at the same time as they
bring in illegal aliens who also under Democrat doctrine will be allowed to
vote and those types of voters, they’re also dependent on welfare. [Emphasis
added]
“About 70 percent of illegal alien households are on welfare …
plus this is a bloc of voters that seems unusually susceptible to the racial
divisions that the Democrats advance,” Brooks said. “You have to look at the
big picture in all of this, and to me, we should not be importing as much
foreign labor as we are. We should be helping the least among us earn more and
importing foreign labor that suppresses wages is not the way to do that.”
Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.2 legal immigrants
annually, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration, whereby newly
naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the
country. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million.
The U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next
two decades should current legal immigration levels continue. Those 15
million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in
the country through chain migration, where newly naturalized citizens can bring
an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125
from 9:00 p.m. to Midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m. Pacific).
More Americans Are Going on Strike
For decades, the
decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major
strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or
BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who
are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the
left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity
“surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers
involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked
“the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers
since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible
to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers
themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the
strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some
flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment
becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or
organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal
labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for
participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway,
and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board
disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason
undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president
points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the
economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform.
People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the
costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household
budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate
concepts.
Without a union,
exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their
concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage
some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job,
and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage
growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work
advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they
bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include
just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily
fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set
process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens,
but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are
designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill
intent.
The new BLS data
reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are
exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought
to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the
economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds
their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages
stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re
playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.
Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about
the economy, says Nobel Prize-
winner Joseph Stiglitz
the economy, says Nobel Prize-
winner Joseph Stiglitz
President Donald Trump told business and political
leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has
lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview,
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s
characterization is “just wrong.”
“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and
misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the
annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”
In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a
“blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging
wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.
“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than
ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle
class.”
Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel
Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic
policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans
over each of the past three years.
“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide,
drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”
The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not
Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.
“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since
the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that
at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.
“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the
economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion
deficit.”
As the presidential race inches closer to the general election
in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in
broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.
BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED
DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME
“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting
crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic
presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the
economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how
they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate
and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies
that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business
investment.
“To every business looking for a place where they are free to
invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth
than the United States,” he said in Davos.
Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on
European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may
continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America
and China.
“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.
Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi
No comments:
Post a Comment