'How Trump Has Betrayed The Working Class,' R. Reich

'How Trump has betrayed the working class.' Robert Reich. Trump’s corporate giveaways and failure to improve the lives of ordinary working Americans are becoming clearer by the day. The Guardian, Dec. 22, 2019.

Trump is remaking the Republican party into … what? For a century the GOP has been bankrolled by big business and Wall Street. Trump wants to keep the money rolling in. His signature tax cut, two years old last Sunday, has helped US corporations score record profits and the stock market reach all-time highs.
To spur even more corporate generosity for the 2020 election, Trump is suggesting more giveaways. Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney recently told an assemblage of CEOs that Trump wants to “go beyond” his 2017 tax cut. Trump also wants to expand his working-class base. In rallies and countless tweets he claims to be restoring the American working class by holding back immigration and trade. Most incumbent Republicans and GOP candidates are mimicking Trump’s economic nationalism. As Trump consigliere Stephen Bannon boasted recently: “We’ve turned the Republican party into a working-class party.”

Keeping the GOP the Party of Big Money while making it over into the Party of the Working Class is a tricky maneuver, especially at a time when capital and labor are engaged in the most intense economic contest in more than a century because so much wealth and power are going to the top. Armed with deductions and loopholes, America’s largest companies paid an average federal tax rate of only 11.3% on their profits last year, roughly half the official rate under the new tax law – the lowest effective corporate tax rate in more than eighty years.

Yet almost nothing has trickled down to ordinary workers. Corporations have used most of their tax savings to buy back their shares, giving the stock market a sugar high. The typical American household remains poorer today than it was before the financial crisis began in 2007. Trump’s tax cut has also caused the federal budget deficit to balloon. Even as pre-tax corporate profits have reached record highs, corporate tax revenues have dropped about a third under projected levels. This requires more federal dollars for interest on the debt, leaving fewer dollars for public services workers need.

The Trump administration has already announced a $45bn cut in food stamp benefits that would affect an estimated 10,000 families, many at the lower end of the working class. The administration is also proposing to reduce Social Security disability benefits, a potential blow to hundreds of thousands of workers.. Trump probably figures he can cover up this massive redistribution from the working class to the corporate elite by pushing the same economic nationalism, tinged with xenophobia and racism, he used in 2016. As Steve Bannon has noted, the formula seems to have worked for Britain’s Conservative party...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/22/trump-wants-to-be-champion-of-the-working-class-but-with-tax-cuts-for-the-rich-it-doesnt-add-up