DT said the following on 7/26/24: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore…. [For in] four more years it will be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore…” In other words, vote for me now, and you’ll never be able to vote again?
He said of V.P. Kamala Harris “She was Indian all the way, and then she became black.” And “She is a DEI hire.” As if a woman, or someone black just isn’t talented enough to earn on her own merit any important position, for example as a prosecutor, Senator, Vice President or President?
He even told his own nephew, whose son has a physical disability, “these people (with disabilities), all the expenses…they should just die.” And a few years later he literally told his nephew he should just let HIS OWN SON die because of his physical disabilities. Would this person care at all about the majority of us except to get our votes?
Commentator Brian Tyler Cohen added⎼ DT threw his own VP candidate under the bus by saying: You’re not voting for a VP candidate—you’re voting for me. This reminds me of how he treated his former VP, when he stood by watching the Jan. 6 insurrectionist mob chant “hang Mike Pence”? Only I am important. And maybe DT’s right to dismiss his new VP choice, who said in 2021, the nation is run by a bunch of “childless cat ladies,” who have no stake in America and are miserable at their own lives. America must go to war against the idea that women don’t have to have children. And: people without children are “psychotic,” “deranged.”
Over the last 5 years, many people have had to face awful choices due to high prices for purchasing a home, food, or other goods. But: Will a person who cares only for himself improve the economic situation for most of us if he ever became President again? Or: Would we be better off now if he had lost his influence once he had lost the 2020 election?
DT boasts about his great economy. From the distance of 4 years, the past might seem better than the present. We might forget the harmful chaos of the DT administration. And who really benefitted, especially in the long run, from his economic policies? Did his economy help cause the pain many of us now feel?
The only big economic legislation he helped pass was the 2017 tax act, which heavily favored the rich. “As a share of after-tax income, tax cuts at the top — for both households in the top 1 percent and the top 5 percent — are more than triple the total value of the tax cuts received for people with incomes in the bottom 60 percent.[2]” Most of us had a temporary tax cut; corporations (and thus rich executives) had a permanent one, from 35% to 21%. As a result, government income was greatly reduced, and a heavily increasing debt was created.
In testimony to The Senate Committee on Budget and Policy Priorities, Samantha Jacoby, a tax and legal analyst, said:
Cutting corporate taxes costs significant revenue, and evidence is sorely lacking that the benefits have trickled down. Executives, disproportionately wealthy corporate shareholders, and highly paid employees have reaped virtually all the economic gains from the corporate rate cuts, research suggests.
With less money going from the rich to the government, the rest of us pay more, for schooling, to maintain infrastructure, to finance health and science organizations, for the military, etc. By 2019, DT was leading the nation into a total downfall that had begun even before the pandemic.
And if we look at Project 2025, created by the Heritage Foundation as a game plan for a DT/GOP administration, we can see his plan for our future if there’s a 2nd DT Presidency. Once reports revealed the harm this Project presented, he denied he even knew about it. But his campaign adviser, Stephen More, co-authored it. Former DT administration officials worked on it. His VP has obvious connections to the project and its authors.
The Project calls for raising taxes on the middle class by creating just 2 tax brackets and decreasing taxes even more on corporations. It would eliminate most deductions and credits, like the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Tax Credit that mostly benefit low and middle income families. It would create a national consumption tax, that would hike the cost of essentials like gas, groceries, for example, about 30%.
Or recently DT proposed eliminating the income tax and replacing it with new tariffs. Sound good? Not for the great majority of us. The income tax not only raises more revenue than the tariffs do, but shifting the revenue source would redirect the burden to those of middle and lower incomes. The Tax Foundation said, “Rather than constituting a fiscally responsible and coherent tax reform plan to boost growth and competitiveness, the latest ideas lack seriousness and merit. If pursued, they would fall well short of fundamental tax reform while hurting American workers and businesses.”
Economists estimate this would cost most of us at least $5,000 a year more than what we pay now in income taxes.
A further illustration of who DT favors and how he operates is his quid pro quo with “Big Oil”⎼ He told them, give me a billion dollars and I’ll end President Biden’s green policies and the EPA’s enforcement of relevant environmental laws. He would work to increase their profits at the expense of the environment and most taxpayers, namely us.
He, and Project 2025, called for ending or limiting funding of governmental scientific research and oversight organizations, like NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration. This would assist their attempts to hide research exposing the dangerous situation we face from climate change. It would also lead to an end of simple things we depend on every day, like free weather reports.
Just imagine what would happen to our nation’s ability to innovate, or to meet the climate, health, and other challenges in the future if scientific research was cut. And how much do we pay each year for the increasing weather emergencies and other environmental destruction caused by climate change? The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago estimates that if we don’t do more to limit human caused climate change the cost will rise to $38 trillion a year by 2049. How could DT do anything to save us from these financial and human costs when he pretends the threat doesn’t exist?
DT promised infrastructure legislation to serve our needs⎼ it never happened. It didn’t happen until Biden made it happen with his Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. The benefits of this and other recent legislation hasn’t been heard enough in the corporate news media, partly because the effect takes years to be felt. The comparison between what the Democrats did to better the lives of most Americans compared to what the GOP do to undermine us is striking, for example Biden lowering prescription drug and other health care costs.
Tom Redburn in the D. C. Report writes, “From growth and jobs to investment and business creation, the economy has performed substantially better under Biden than it did under Trump. Biden’s superior record holds even if we set aside the pandemic’s impact in 2020. But just as the COVID-19 pandemic led to the collapse in Gross Domestic Product and employment during Trump’s last year in office, it was also the main reason prices rose so much for a time here and globally, according to new analysis from the Federal Reserve. . .”
“On employment — on top of growth, investment, and consumer spending — Biden puts Trump’s record to shame. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that since Biden became president, the number of Americans with jobs has increased by 14.3 million—versus a net loss of 2.7 million over Trump’s term, the first decline since Herbert Hoover…”
Regarding inflation, under Biden “…America has fared better than other advanced countries. In 2023, while U.S. consumer prices rose 3.3 percent, they increased 4.1 percent in France, 3.9 percent in Great Britain, and 3.7 percent in Germany….”
If someone knew the above facts and allowed themselves to see the man behind DT’s resentment and bluster, how could anyone other than a billionaire think their lives might be better with him ruling the nation? He’s just so incoherent, racist, misogynist ⎼ and weird.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Flickr
