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Re: Completely Unwoven: Business, Economics, and Tax Policy 4.0
Somebody gets it.
Somebody gets it.
We can confidently expect the Trump administration and its Republican Congressional allies to cut taxes on corporations; to slash taxes on the highest earners; and to roll back the financial regulations that improved the overall safety of our financial system, in part by restraining Wall Street’s ability to speculate. All of Donald Trump’s primary economic policies will have the effect of increasing, not decreasing, inequality. These policies will make the rich richer. They will give the government less tax revenue that could be distributed to the poor and middle class. And they will justify it with the old promise of “unleashing economic growth,” which most respected economists believe is a canard. Trump, a billionaire who reportedly plans to hold on to his business while he is in office, has assembled the wealthiest cabinet in American history. The administration’s tax cuts could personally enrich the Trump family and his cabinet by hundreds of millions of dollars or more, assuming they do not provoke another financial crisis before he leaves office. Larry Kudlow, the CNBC talking head who is reportedly the leading contender to head Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a longtime advocate of tax cuts on high earners, corporations, and capital gains, all policies that will benefit the rich and not the poor or middle class. Kudlow has even advocated a 15% flat tax, a policy that would amount to gift-wrapping tens of millions of dollars and handing it to Donald Trump’s cabinet members each year. It is safe to say that in the annual economic report that Kudlow publishes four years from now, the chapter on reducing inequality will be much different, if it even exists.
I state all of this simply to encourage us all to look at Trump’s policies through a specific lens. It was the grotesque rise in inequality that made Americans angry enough to elect a man like Donald Trump, and in exchange they will get a set of policies that will make that inequality much, much worse. It is akin in many ways to the fight against climate change: what we need is a radical departure from the norm; what we are getting is a determined plan to do more of what created the problem in the first place.
I state all of this simply to encourage us all to look at Trump’s policies through a specific lens. It was the grotesque rise in inequality that made Americans angry enough to elect a man like Donald Trump, and in exchange they will get a set of policies that will make that inequality much, much worse. It is akin in many ways to the fight against climate change: what we need is a radical departure from the norm; what we are getting is a determined plan to do more of what created the problem in the first place.
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