The Point

Keeping an eye on the money.

Our Felon-President has idiosyncratic obsessions with which he is happy to bewitch his followers.

He promotes a false narrative of invading depraved immigrants (stage whisper: from the global South and darker colored), and sends anonymous official thugs to seize innocent unfortunates from the crowds gathered for casual construction work or regular immigration court dates. Thus does he harm the economic sectors that lean most heavily on the swept-up (construction, agriculture, hospitality, food service) and society at large via damage to communities and reductions in tax revenues, including to safety net programs that the undocumented cannot access, such as Social Security.

The Felon-President promotes an ignorant narrative that other countries are taking advantage of the US. Our citizens are spending more on, say, their inexpensive shoes, than those countries are spending on, say, our RVs: trade deficit! The US is maintaining military bases on their soil: ungrateful freeloaders! The US helping the underdeveloped, the starving, the diseased, and with no monetary return: this is not American Greatness! Thus the seesawing tariff policies; the extortionate demands to pay for protection; the end of foreign aid.

There are many losers in this maelstrom of atrocious administration actions. It is evident that the Felon President takes others’ miseries as his wins. Many of his followers (largely white, largely male) will take the same view of winning via misery. See, for example, the tee shirts that the Republicans sold from their booth at our recent County Fair: these were boldly printed Alligator Alcatraz. (Few were being worn at the Fair, held annually in my university town.)

The late University of Oregon economics professor Ed Whitelaw called the Pacific Northwest’s natural beauty a second paycheck. Let us apply the concept more widely to government expenditure for a variety of public goods available to all:

• Public libraries

• Public schools

• Public transportation

• Public parks

• Public recreation

• Public health support

Some others are available to those in need of them:

• Social Security (often a primary, not secondary, paycheck) for the elderly

• Medicare for the elderly

• Medicaid for those with low income

• Food assistance for those with low income

• Public housing

• Disaster assistance

The second paycheck of public expenditure formerly covered some higher education costs:

• Tuition at the University of California hasn’t been free since 1970.

• Tuition at the City University of New York hasn’t been free since 1976.

• Following welfare reform in 1998, states began discouraging welfare recipients from attending college. Recipients’ education had been underwritten by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA).

• Pell grants, which covered some educational costs for low-income students, have tightened some requirements.

Some formerly inexpensive costs for public use, like public transit, have risen quite a bit as public expenditure shrinks. Some public uses, like public housing, have not kept up with the public need, as seen in the explosion of an unhoused population that simply cannot afford housing.

These policy changes manifest an ongoing Republican project: move cash to the wealthiest Americans from everyone else. As Katrina Forrester, a Social Sciences professor at Harvard, puts it in her recent piece in the London Review of Books. Rather than

shrinking the state [i.e., the national government] … it is more accurate to say that neoliberalism has involved reconfiguring the state to empower markets and finance. The story of recent decades isn’t just one of increasing hardship for those who depend on wages and public services, but of state-sponsored extravagance for those who own assets.

You may recall decades-old rhetoric about “tax-and-spend liberals.” Vice President George Bush, then campaigning for the presidency, used it in a speech where he also repeated his Republican convention sound bite from the summer: “read my lips: no new taxes.” And Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) was still talking about “tax-and-spend Democrats” during the Biden administration.

The strategy of taxing and spending for the public good, a “second paycheck” for the vast majority of Americans, shifted dramatically during the Reagan presidency. I recall the characterization by Congressman Bill Alexander (D-Arkansas) of Reagan’s fiscal management: “Ronald Reagan is the Babe Ruth of [federal budget] deficits.” This meant a vast shift: from taxing and spending for the public good, to borrowing and spending for whatever purpose, including a huge military buildup. The second paycheck didn’t dry up; instead, the Republicans just shifted it, from the population at large to the far smaller population of wealthy creditors of ballooning federal debt.

Now we have a tariff regimen that promises to transfer wealth from US consumers to the federal government, which has instituted a massive tax cut pitched to the wealthiest Americans. The tariffs won’t come near covering the tax reductions. But as essentially a sales tax, they are another regressive tax, as those who buy inexpensive clothes and furniture and essential consumer goods will be spending an outsize portion of their incomes on the importers’ tariff payments, an inflationary pass-through dictated by the Felon President.

Who is made whole, or more than whole; who is patching the leaking pail with their sweat? This is something to watch as the Felon President advances another giant step in the ongoing Republican project of transferring wealth upward. It is their fundamental reason for being a political party. With white nationalist bigotry from the professed foes of antisemitism, displays of religious piety by arrant hypocrites, concern for fetal life before birth evaporating after the newborn’s birth – these hypocrisies are dangerous and destructive; but they are sideshows. Keep your eye on the money.