Sorry, Donald Trump. American workers won’t fall for your scam.

[applegrove]

Sorry, Donald Trump. American workers won’t fall for your scam.

By Greg Sargent at the Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/07/05/sorry-donald-trump-american-workers-wont-fall-for-your-scam/

"SNIP............


This gets at a crucial point: Unlike Trump, Clinton supports spending federal money and regulating the economy in ways designed to help workers who are dislocated by trade, facing joblessness or suffering from flat wages. Clinton would push for more spending on worker retraining, infrastructure, child care, and boosting domestic manufacturing. She supports raising the minimum wage and higher mandated overtime pay. And she is pushing proposals for family and medical leave and plans to boost the countervailing power of labor and incentivize corporate profit sharing. There is simply no meaningful indication that Trump would do anything like this.

Yes, Trump has vowed to spend on infrastructure and defend social insurance for the elderly. But his enormous tax cuts reveal his actual priorities. Trump likes to claim his tax plan would produce runaway growth. But if anything, this is additionally revealing of the shortcomings in his approach. All Trump really means is that, by manhandling other countries in trade deals and unshackling the private sector, he will magically make us all so rich again that we won’t have to bother figuring out how to pay for sustaining entitlements (since revenues will be rolling in) or what to do about workers’ wages (since business will be booming). When Trump says he wants wages to be higher, this is what he is really saying, not that he would support government action to raise them, as Clinton would in a variety of ways.


In fact, Trump gave away the whole game when, in his big speech on trade, he claimed a core problem we face is that businesses are over-regulated and overtaxed. As liberal economist Lawrence Mishel explains, this shows that Trump is sending key signals in support of the corporate agenda, not a pro-worker one. What workers really need, Cohn notes, is “stronger unions, spending on public works, more financial assistance with child care and other necessities — as well as better support for people who lose their jobs.”

Trump’s con game is simple. He is trying to win over working class whites with anti-China, anti-free-trade bluster and a vow to crush the dark hordes who make them feel threatened culturally and economically, while simultaneously retaining just enough good will (via his other proposals) from GOP-aligned elites to remain the nominee and be competitive. This is not ideological heterodoxy. It’s a smorgasbord of policy ignorance and indifference, opportunism, making-it-up-on-the-fly, and of course, good old fashioned flim-flammery.



.............SNIP"

[BobbyDrake]

1. It's almost worth thanking Sam Brownback for turning Kansas into an embarrassment of GOP ideas.

All HRC has to do is point to Kansas and say, "Do you think all of America deserves to end up like that?"