Josh Hoxie: GOP platform includes more tax breaks for the rich

Via OtherWords.org

It was easy to get caught up in the circus that was the Republican National Convention. Rousing speeches (plagiarized and original) and raucous floor votes make for great television and funny Internet memes.

Unfortunately, as we’ve come to expect from events organized by Donald Trump, the convention was decidedly light on substance. For an inkling of what a Trump administration might actually do, we have to look elsewhere.

Let’s start with Mike Pence, the newcomer to the ticket and a relative unknown to most voters.

The self-described Tea Partier served six terms in the House of Representatives and one term as governor of Indiana. He’s best known for his staunchly conservative stances on social issues, notably on reproductive health and LGBT rights.

But Pence also stands way outside the mainstream on economic issues, with a clear track record of coddling the wealthy. He’s an ardent supporter of trickle-down economics, the debunked idea that giving more money to the rich will somehow help the rest of us.

As a congressman in 2010, for instance, Pence made the bizarre claim that raising income taxes would decrease federal revenue. Unsurprisingly, Politifact — the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking group — rated that false.

More recently, Pence put his ideas into action in Indiana, enacting a major tax cut that helped give his state one of the most regressive tax structures in the country.

Indeed, on taxes, Pence is largely in line with Trump, who’s shown significant support for massive tax cuts for wealthy people like himself.

During the primary, Trump released a tax plan that would cost a whopping $24 trillion over the next two decades, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center calculates — most of it in cuts for high earners. Now in the general election, reports indicate he may be promoting a more modest package of cuts, but an unmistakably regressive one nonetheless.

Under the soaring subtitle “Restoring the American Dream,” page one of this year’s Republican Party platform dives straight into ideas around tax reform. The tax code, it claims, “has the greatest impact on our economy’s performance.”

“Getting our tax system right,” it goes on, “will be the most important factor in driving the entire economy back to prosperity.” What Trump and Pence consider “getting it right” is massive tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.

How do the American people feel about this?

I’m sure many see cutting their tax bill as a great thing — the adult equivalent of an elementary school class president promising to end homework or double the length of recess. But most see past this.

Cutting taxes means major cuts to programs that millions of families depend on. It means slashing budgets or perhaps completely eliminating child nutrition programs, senior prescription health plans, and early-childhood education programs. And the list goes on.

Perhaps that’s why for the third year in a row, an annual Gallup poll shows  that most Americans agree with the statement, “Our government should redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.”

Further, a recent poll from Pew Research showed 78 percent are either “very bothered” or “somewhat bothered” by the “feeling that some wealthy people don’t pay their fair share.”

Trump’s candidacy has been anything but predictable, and there’s a long way to go before Election Day in November. But with Pence on the ticket and the GOP platform in place, it’s clear tax cuts for the wealthy are part of the plan.

Josh Hoxie directs the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Robert Whitcomb: Open woods; the aim is merely fame; Art Deco challenge

A version of this first ran in the Digital Diary feature on GoLocalProv.com.

The other week, as I drove through miles of woodsin inland southern New England where caterpillars had consumed the leaves of so many trees, I thanked God that no one has suggested spraying to kill the creatures. You hear enough about massive spraying campaigns to kill mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus.

The trouble with these campaigns is that they kill a lot more than the targeted culprits. They kill, for example, bees, which we need for pollination of our crops,  as well as birds, fish and many other creatures.

The trees will come back without chemical bombing. For now, we can enjoy the eerie sight of midsummer woods looking like November’s.

xxx

In picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, Donald Trump has shown yet again that he really doesn’t have any “policies.’’ His only real apparent interest is maintaining himself as a “winner’’ and Mr. Pence might help.

Mr. Pence’s support for “free-trade’’ agreements that have helped kill jobs and lower wages in the U.S.; his backing for open immigration (which also cuts U.S. wages), and his evangelical  Christian views don’t jibe with Mr.  Trump’s rhetoric or behavior.

Mr. Trump has two main issues:  Crack down on “free trade’’ and on immigration. On the latter, he wants to kick out 11 million illegals, build a “wall’’ on the Mexican border and make it tough for Muslims to enter America. Operational details to come.

Maybe.

The governor has also been a loyal servant of the Koch Brothers and other very rich  people.  For a time, Mr. Trump made  vague populist noises about the need to reduce the power of  Wall Street big shots and Washington lobbyists but that has gone away as he realizes the Republican reality. The public has less and less patience with details anyway, and citizens rarely remember what a candidate said a few months back.

Judging by how he has conducted his business and much of his personal life, The Donald would rank high up on most metrics of, to be polite, ‘’amorality’’.

But that matters little in the Reality TV and Twitter age, even to the Boy Scouty Mr. Pence, who has decided to try to ride the Trumpmobile back to Washington, where he was an ineffective, if pleasant, congressman promoting the usual collection of Tea Party and supply-side nostrums that,  although having been tried for much of the past few decades, do not seem to have ushered in a golden age for the middle class.

Anyway, the aim is fame. Isuspect that Donald Trump originally ran for president  simply to keep himself and his businesses in the news. He may have been surprised that his incoherent, virtually detail-freebut entertainingly demagogic primary campaign did as well as it did. And this pathological liar and con man will get a lot of votes in November from people who won’t admit their choice to their neighbors. As for Mike Pence,  he knows that there’s a good chance that a vice president can become president.

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People tend not to like Hillary Clinton because she has told some self-protective lies; because she has a reputation for extreme secretiveness; because she seems to feel herself privileged to make her own rules (but not as much as Donald Trump), and because she and her husband have made a fortune by mingling/cross-self-promoting government work, “nonprofit’’ work and for-profit work (especially by being paid vast sums to speak to companies and other special-interest groups).  And, as unfair as it is, a lot of people find her voice grating.

Not surprisingly, she generally avoids press conferences. But she could do herself a big favor by holding a long press conference in which she takes any questions. She could, for example, elaborate more on why she used a private server to conduct top-secret discussions by email and  also explain the mysterious workings of the Clinton Foundation. Such a forum might help lance the boil of public distrust, if not dislike.

xxx

David Sweetser, whose High Rock Development owns the Industrial Trust Building,  in downtown Providence, is smart to have arranged for public tours of the Art Deco skyscraper to be offered over the next couple of months to, he hopes, get people excited/intrigued enough to rent there (or buy the whole place).

It’s a gorgeous structure, although, of course, fading. The model in New England of how to retrofit such a stepped-back Art Deco building is the gold-topped United Shoe Machinery Building, on Federal Street in downtown Boston, which is now fixed up and full. But it’s  usually a lot cheaper to tear down an old building and put in a cheap utilitarian replacement than to save it.  And there’s much more money in Boston than in Providence. But hang in there, Mr. Sweetser!

Robert Whitcomb is the overseer of New England Diary.