8:20
Perhaps this headline speaks to you: “Americans are ready for a comeback. Congress must help unleash it.” This header is from an op-ed by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), appearing in the Washington Post on April 8.
As Hawley puts it:
America is experiencing a moment of crisis, but it need not be a period of decline. From our great cities to our rural towns, Americans everywhere are making enormous sacrifices for the sake of their fellow citizens. It is clear from these selfless acts—nurses and physicians working long into the night; delivery workers bringing essential goods to their neighbors’ doors; church groups assembling care packages for the ill—that Americans’ love of country is undimmed and American courage is unshaken.
We can pause to observe that this is the sort of Can Do rhetoric that Americans are yearning to hear. And yet in addition to visionary goal-setting, Hawley added a specific action plan:
Here is what I propose: Because the government has taken the step of closing the economy to protect public health, Congress should in turn protect every single job in this country for the duration of this crisis. And Congress should help our businesses rehire every worker who has already lost a job because of the coronavirus.
At a time when unemployment is already in double digits, and is thought by the Federal Reserve to be at risk of rising to as high as 32 percent, this is exactly the tonic we need. Hawley continues:
Beginning immediately, the federal government should cover 80 percent of wages for workers at any U.S. business, up to the national median wage, until this emergency is over. Further, it should offer businesses a bonus for rehiring workers laid off over the past month. The goal must be to get unemployment down—now—to secure American workers and their families, and to help businesses get ready to restart as soon as possible.
In other words, Hawley has a worker-first plan. That is, he wants to get money directly to workers, as opposed to bureaucracies or corporations. (His plan was first announced on his official website on April 3.)
Of course, there has been opposition to Hawley, especially from libertarians. For instance, on April 9, Freedom Works tweeted, “The Missouri Republican has repeatedly attempted to cast aside the @GOP’s commitment to limit government.”
In response, Samuel Hammond of the Niskanen Institute tweeted, “Mass unemployment and job destruction aren’t conservative values.” In fact, as a conservative, Hawley wants to conserve the economy so that it can work for people—and so, too, save our country.
Today, America is in a kind of deep economic hibernation, and it’s at risk of sleeping even deeper; a new analysis by University of Chicago economists finds that 40 percent of firms hiring hourly workers have closed since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. How long can this economic deep-freeze last if our republic is to survive?
A solid rebuke to ideologically-based do-too-little-ism came on April 10 in the form of an editorial from the Reaganite conservatives at the Washington Examiner. In a piece headlined, “No, it isn’t hypocritical for small government conservatives to back coronavirus relief,” the Examiner explained, “This current crisis is not economic in nature—it is more akin to a defensive war or humanitarian disaster.”
The Examiner has it right: This virus crisis is a severe test of the nation, and as such, it requires a strong national response.
In fact, the Examiner went further, drawing a bright-line distinction between the needed economic intervention of 2020 and the dubious Wall Street bailouts of a decade ago. The current effort, the newspaper continued, “Is in no way morally comparable to what the government did in 2009, bailing out corporations whose irresponsible management and lending decisions created a national crisis.”
Moreover, the Examiner recalled, “The Bush and Obama administrations conspired malevolently to socialize the losses of some of the nation’s biggest and worst-run corporations.”
Exactly. We need national activism right now, but we want to make sure we’re active on behalf of Main Street, not Wall Street. (Wall Street will do fine; it always does.)
In that Washington Post op-ed, Hawley goes beyond addressing the immediate needs of the moment; he’s also thinking ahead, determined to stave off future crises stemming from our dangerous dependence on China:
We must also move decisively to secure our critical supply chains and bring production back to this country. The present crisis has revealed just how vital domestic production is to our national life. And yet, for decades, an alliance of big government and big business conspired to outsource the manufacturing of our most crucial supplies and equipment to China and other overseas sites.
In his concern about China, Hawley is joined by other smart lawmakers, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who last month jointly proposed the same repatriation idea for our wayward pharmaceutical industry.
We might also add that Hawley, Cotton, Gallagher, and other anti-globalists, such as Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), have the wind at their back, public-opinion-wise. A new Harris Poll, first reported in the Washington Post, finds that 77 percent of Americans blame China for the coronavirus. Indeed, 71 percent say American companies should pull back manufacturing from China, and 69 percent support President Trump’s tougher trade policies with China. In the words of Harris Poll chief Mark Penn:
It’s as much of a consensus issue as you can get in today’s divided world. Overall, there’s very little trust for anything that the Chinese government says or does, especially its premier. Xi Jinping has less than half the credibility of President Trump in this poll.
Indeed, as the Post reporter, Josh Rogin, noted, concern about China is so broad that it has brought in Democrats, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Of course, some on the right might blanch at the prospect of working with these and other Democrats, and yet they should know that it’s only from bipartisanship that we can hope to achieve a sturdy coalition in favor of de-coupling from China.
Indeed, this author, a veteran of the Reagan White House, recalls that the 40th president excelled at making deals with the opposition party, even as he stayed true to his own core convictions—and in fact, all of our great presidents have had that skill.
And oh yes, Hawley had one more thing to say in that op-ed, addressing the danger that private equity firms—such as Bain Capital, the outfit that made Mitt Romney rich—will use this crisis as an opportunity to scoop up small- and medium-sized businesses at bargain-basement prices:
Finally, in an effort to protect our small businesses from a feeding frenzy by bigger firms, Congress must crack down on crisis profiteering by Wall Street. Strong antitrust enforcement and stiffer corporate transparency rules will help to ensure that, when our economy gets moving, we don’t have a wave of mergers and liquidations that set our workers back yet again.
Once again, Hawley has it right: If Bain, BlackRock, Blackstone, and all the other private-equity sharpies get their way, they’ll end up owning even more of the economy. And yet as we should have learned by now, what’s good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for Main Street. Yes, the two “streets” can work together in harmony, but it takes a proper federal umpire to guarantee fair play.
So we can see: Hawley offers a comprehensive conservative vision of not only economic recovery, but also of economic renewal.
To be sure, his is not the only constructive voice in this crisis; many, in fact, are rethinking the Clinton-Bush 43-Obama conventional wisdom that helped bring us to these dire straits.
Indeed, Americans who have grown weary of globalism might wish to spend more time considering an emerging new center-right alternative to failure: Hawleynomics.
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
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!”
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