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GOP’s Newest Pitchman
(Name: Ima Scumbag)
Super Op-ed
from a very smart man, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize for Economics, here
from the NY Times in total.
Truly an excellent read (my emphasis added
on five key points from the article that I believe are most-critical):
First Key
Impact Statement: There’s
no mystery about the Republican agenda.
For at least the past 40 years, the GOP’s central policy goal
has been upward redistribution of income: lower taxes for the wealthy, big cuts
in programs that help the poor and the middle class.
We’ve seen
that agenda at work in the policies of every Republican president from Reagan
to Trump, every budget proposal from party stars like Paul Ryan, the speaker of
the House.
This policy
agenda is, however, deeply unpopular. Only small minorities of voters
favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations; even smaller
minorities favor cuts in major social programs. So how does the GOP stay
politically competitive? The answer is that the party has mastered the tactics
of bait and switch: pretending to stand for one thing, then doing something
quite different in office.
But if
special elections in the Trump era are any indication, voters are wising up.
Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate in a deep-red Pennsylvania congressional
district that Trump won by almost 20 points, tried not one, not two, but three
different bait-and-switch strategies.
At first,
Republicans tried to sell their candidate by touting the 2017 tax cuts, which
they portrayed as a boon to the middle class. This was classic Bush-era
strategy: The Trump tax cuts, like the Bush tax cuts, did indeed offer some
temporary relief to middle-class families, although they offered far more to
the wealthy.
Second Key
Impact Statement: What
makes this a bait and switch is the hard truth that tax cuts must, eventually,
be paid for — in fact, people like Ryan barely waited for the ink on the tax bill to
dry before proclaiming that social programs must be cut to reduce the budget
deficit the tax cuts will do so much to inflate.
And under any plausible allocation of the spending
cuts needed to offset lost revenue, the tax cuts will leave most Americans
worse off (while, of course, benefiting the top 1 percent).
The thing
is, voters seem to have realized this. Republican groups pretty
much stopped running ads about the tax cuts weeks before the election,
apparently concluding that they weren’t gaining much traction.
And election night polling suggests that health care — specifically,
opposition to GOP efforts to repeal the ACA (AKA: Obama-care) — was a
key issue in PA-18.
If tax cuts
won’t sell, how about tariffs? In 2016 Trump portrayed himself as a different
kind of Republican, an economic populist who would stand up for the little guy.
In practice, he has been utterly orthodox except for one thing, his willingness
to break with free trade. And it’s possible that he announced steel tariffs
partly in an effort to swing a district in what used to be steel country. Or he
may have been trying to steal Stormy Daniels’s thunder. With Trump, you never
know.
Anyway, it
didn’t work, perhaps because many Pennsylvania voters realize that steel
country isn’t what it used to be, and the old days aren’t coming back. These
days there are about 10 times as many hospital workers as steel
workers in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area — and surely at least some voters
realize that GOP efforts to slash health care threaten their jobs as well as
their coverage.
Finally, Republicans
pulled out their old standby: trying to distract voters from their economic
agenda by appealing to racial, cultural and religious enmity. That’s what Ed
Gillespie tried in the VA gubernatorial race, and in this latest campaign
Saccone proclaimed that DEMS are motivated by “hatred for our country” and “hatred
of God.” But it didn’t work either time.
Third Key
Impact Statement: Why not?
One answer may be that despite the eruptions of racism and anti-Semitism under
Trump, America is on the whole a far more tolerant country than it used to be.
But there are also Trump-specific issues.
It’s hard for Republicans to pose as the party of patriotism
while slavishly defending a man who holds office in part thanks to
Russian intervention, and seems almost eager to demonstrate that he really
is Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
And despite
receiving overwhelming support from white evangelicals — which tells you something
about the state of conservative Christianity —
Trump is surely the least godly man ever to occupy the White House.
Fourth Key Impact Statement: So the upset in PA wasn’t just a
harbinger of likely Democratic gains to come.
It also showed the bankruptcy of
all the political strategies Republicans have used to distract voters from an
unpopular agenda.
Fifth Key
Impact Statement: Yet I
have to admit that while the wising-up of American voters is deeply
encouraging, it also makes me nervous. History says that Republicans won’t
change course, because they never do.
They’ll just look for bigger distractions.
And with
everyone who showed even an occasional sense of responsibility leaving the
Trump administration, you have to wonder what comes next. In particular, regimes
in trouble — like, say, the Argentine junta in the 1980s — often try
to rally the public with dangerous foreign policy adventurism. Are you sure that
Trump won’t go that route? Really sure?
My 2 cents: This last part is very key – what
would Trump Empire, Inc. do to survive – think hard and realistically about
that question.
It’s Trump's nature to survive with smoke and mirrors and tons of
lies on top of tons of lies – well documented BS.
So, stay tuned for more of the same, and for goodness sake, tell everyone to wake up.
Seriously, this is not hyperbole, or me crying wolf, or pulling a “Chicken
Little – The Sky is Falling” routine, either. It is real and happening right
now right in front of our eyes.
Thanks for stopping by.
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