“After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously:” Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.
Historians will puzzle over the results of our latest presidential election for decades. A majority of Americans have just voted in a con artist and sexual predator for the second time who has failed in most of his business ventures and left investors holding the tab.
One conclusion will be that identity politics won, after all. Enough white women chose Donald Trump over the East-Asian/Black Kamala Harris who advocated more rights for women, while enough Hispanic and Black males put their faith in a misogynist who has sexually assaulted women.
Identity politics has moved much of the Democratic Party to the left with the Black Lives Matter and LBDGQ movements. But most exit polls said it was the economy that decided the vote—everything became too expensive after COVID-19.
My conclusion is that it has taken very special presidents to lead such a diverse populace that will defend the constitution. In modern times it was Roosevelt creating the New Deal to bring America out of the Great Depression and win World War 2.
But post-WWII generations eventually forgot what the New Deal had accomplished and voted in a Republican Party that by 1980 had begun to drain the federal budget by continually cutting taxes for their wealthy supporters creating massive federal deficits; Reagan (-$400 billion), GW Bush (-$1 trillion), and Donald Trump (-$5 trillion).
Democratic presidents wanted government programs that benefited more Americans, so President Clinton created actual budget surpluses in his last four years, President Obama brought America out of the Great Recession spawned by the GW Bush administration’s fiscal mismanagement and created Obamacare.
President Biden created a second New, New Deal to bail us out of the COVID-19 pandemic and begin to pay down Trump’s massive deficits, thereby creating the fastest economic recovery from the pandemic among developed countries. It is designed to protect Americans from climate change and modernize the economy for decades to come.
And now a peculiar American form of amnesia has set in once again; a majority of Americans have voted in Donald Trump for a repeat performance with the hope he will cure their economic malaise, even with his record of multiple bankruptcies. And Republicans will surely run up massive deficits in their quest to siphon even more of the federal budget as they did in his first term.
His stated policies will also endanger us because Trump not only wants to weaken America militarily by weakening military alliances such as NATO, but weaken environment protections as well by gutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency once again for the fossil fuel industry in the face of more frequent and greater hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.
We know this because one of Trump’s first actions when elected in 2017 was to leave the Paris Accord. He has called climate change a hoax.
We currently have the second highest carbon emissions per capita after China, but would become the highest emitter among developed countries if Republicans succeed in rolling back 30 years of environmental regulation.
Why did he leave the Paris Accord I in 2017 when it is a voluntary accord to reduce carbon emissions? It was to help the coal industry, where Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is heavily invested in coal and has already made $millions with the 50 percent bump up in coal stocks since Trump took office.
And the Koch Brothers $millions that were spent to elect Tea Party candidates paid off as Trump initiated an immediate review of President Obama/s Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.
Surrounded by coal miners at the time, the president described the Paris Accord as a “crushing attack” on workers and vowed to nix “job-killing regulations. “We’re going to have safety, we’re going to have clean water, we’re going to have clean air, but so many [regulations] are unnecessary, so many are job-killing,” he said.
And Trump now says he wants Elon Musk to become the efficiency czar, which will cause even more economic damage, since Musk has promised to cut as much as $2 trillion “of waste”—the amount of the current budget deficit—from the next federal budget, at the same time that Trump and Republicans have promised more tax cuts for their wealthy supporters.
But in the words of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in Project-Syndicate, “After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously.”
The next four years of Republican rule will be a measure of how much many Americans have fooled themselves once again, as they did in 2017. For a second time Americans will have the chance to learn from that experience, especially the young who may not have been of voting age, to see how Trump and the Republicans mishandled the economy that mostly profited themselves.
And it will be another bitter lesson for our women, minorities, the poor and even many in the middle class, as well as those that will suffer from the effects of a warming atmosphere.
Harlan Green © 2024
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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