Trompe l’oeil economics*
The headline in El Nuevo Herald screamed: “Trump promises a fiscal revolution.”
Rule of thumb: To get at the truth, take the El Nuevo Herald headline and reverse the sign. Yes, after months of trafficking in insults and obnoxious rhetoric, Donald Trump focused on policy, unveiled a plan, an economic one.
It is a fiscal counter-revolution. It amounts to the same type of top-down class warfare Republicans have been carrying out for decades. To those who have much, much more will be given. To those who don’t, nothing or the unemployment line. Only Trump, being Trump, is proposing an even more radical counter-revolution than that that has been under way since the Reagan administration.
Yes, Trump has made a plan, and what a wonderful plan it is – for business and the rich, that is. Trump’s economic plan, announced in a long speech delivered August 8 to the Detroit Economic Club, would slash corporate taxes by more than half, from 35 to 15 percent. No tax cut for the middle class.
Trump also wants to abolish the estate tax. That’s a tax paid only by the very rich. Often, the very wealthy transfer most their assets to children and other relatives. Thus, relatively few even among the one percenters pay the full freight at the time of death. You and I, our net worth is way below the level when the estate tax kicks. So forget about a tax break for your kids.
But don’t feel so bad. You are not going to get any help from Trump but at least you probably won’t get it on the chin. About three million public servants are at risk of doing just that.
In his Detroit speech, Trump’s said he plans to “remove bureaucrats who only know how to kill jobs [and] replace them with experts who know how to create jobs.”
There are 2.7 million federal employees, most of whom have ordinary jobs, perform necessary functions, and have middle class incomes.
But Trump figures he won’t need many “bureaucrats. Bureaucrats like those at the FDA who ensure that the flood of new medications constantly coming on the market are safe and effective. Bureaucrats like employees at the CDC who are the first line of defense against new diseases like Zika.
Trump won’t need all those bureaucrats because he is going to call a “moratorium on all new federal regulations.”
What a great scheme for creating jobs: eliminating the jobs of the people who protect our threatened national parks, monitor the skies to ensure airline safety, and deliver our mail rain or shine. What a great plan for dealing with technology that changes at warp speed. Freeze the regulatory process. Trump is a genius!
Trump supporters had hoped that the economic plan would allow him, Trump, to reinvent his campaign with a focus on policy proposals. The problem is that many months of outlandish comments are now coming back to bite him, disrupting the attempt to reshape his image.
Case in point, Trump’s past comments on Putin and Ukraine. At a time when the Trump campaign hoped the economic plan would dominate the news, members of Washington’s “intelligence community,” usually circumspect, were all over the media unloading on Trump. Remarkably, Michael J. Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, told ABC News that Trump is an “unwitting agent” of Russia and that Putin, a former top KGB officer, “has manipulated people much smarter than Donald Trump,” Morell said.
Comments like those from people like that draw more media attention than economic plans. And Trump continuously finds ways to step on his own new policy-based strategy. Invoking the Second Amendment as a way to stop Hillary Clinton from winning a “fixed election.” In one breath, he makes a not-so-veiled allusion to assassination and questions the legitimacy of the nation’s electoral system. But what topped it all is Trump’s repeated claim that Obama and Clinton founded ISIS.
ISIS was founded in 2004 and Obama elected in 2008. Such blatant lies and such claims bordering on lunacy blow any reinvention of Trump as a serious candidate out of the water.
Trump’s fate, his almost inevitable defeat in November, is not in his stars but in himself. But sometimes it seems the stars are not on his side either. Shortly after Trump announced his plan, the government released the economic data report for July. The numbers were the best in years. This time, the improvement was across the board, including a jump in workers’ pay, which had been stagnant for a long time. When the economy is good, the candidate from the party in power wins.
There is an air of concealed desperation in Trump’s ever wilder rhetoric. The kooky conspiracy theory about a “fixed election” is especially telling. Trump is going to lose, and deep in his dark heart, he knows it. He is already laying the groundwork for claiming that he was cheated out of a victory.
* Tromp l’oeil: “Something that misleads or deceives the senses; illusion;” [Merriam Webster dictionary]
