TWiA explores the intersection of policy and politics, and most importantly, how that intersection affects real people. It's dedicated to the proposition that good government is possible, it matters, and taxpayers deserve nothing less. Its starting point is that facts are facts, science is real, data are real, and we can and must learn from history. Below you'll find facts and opinions that derive from fact, informed by a close and careful study of these issues that began in 1968 and has never stopped. Note, when we discuss generic "Democrats" and "Republicans" or "conservatives" and "liberals," etc., we're generally talking about elected officials, unless otherwise noted. Also, bonus bear news and other awesomeness. We appreciate comments and arguments, so please chime in, and if you like it, spread the word.
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This Week in Infrastructure
Long-time readers know we here at TWiA World Headquarters are big fans of infrastructure projects. They create jobs--jobs that can't be shipped overseas, because a sweatshop worker in the Northern Mariana Islands can't fix a road in Wyoming or paint a school in Ohio. They improve productivity, because goods can be shipped faster and more safely on good roads and rails, businesses can work more efficiently with secure high-speed internet, and so on.
During the presidential campaign, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump announced major infrastructure improvement plans. Hers took advantage of the historically low rates at which the government can borrow money right now to put funding behind projects that woud have created lots of jobs and resulted in new infrastructure projects across the country.
His plan--not surprisingly, considering he just admitted to being a con man (yes, if you pay a $1 million fine to the state of New York for violating state laws in your Trump University scheme, you are a swindler; self-dealing by buying yourself presents with money donated to your "charity" is also against the law, and the Trump Foundation just admitted to that, too)--is a scam.
Here's how his plan works--he's not spending public money on infrastructure projects. He's spending it on tax rebates to private businesses working on infrastructure projects.
What's the difference? There are many. In the Washington Post, Ronald A. Klain describes some of them. Klain ran the White House's American Recovery and Renewal Act team from 2009-2011, and worked with Clinton on her infrastructure plan.
He writes: "First, Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports, as did Hillary Clinton’s 2016 infrastructure proposal. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. These projects (such as electrical grid modernization or energy pipeline expansion) might already be planned or even underway. There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for incremental or otherwise expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects."
Note: those projects aren't likely to be underway in the areas most in need of infrastructure projects--impoverished rural and urban areas (which are also, coincidentally enough, where new jobs are most needed). Government-funded infrastructure projects could be directed to those areas, but for-profit projects aren't going into those areas.
Klain continues:
Moreover, as others have noted, desperately needed infrastructure projects that are not attractive to private investors — municipal water-system overhauls, repairs of existing roads, replacement of bridges that do not charge tolls — get no help from Trump’s plan. And contractors? Well, they get a “10 percent pretax profit margin,” according to the plan. Combined with Trump’s sweeping business tax break, this would represent a stunning $85 billion after-tax profit for contractors — underwritten by the taxpayers.
Second, as a result of the above, Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either. Because the plan subsidizes investors, not projects; because it funds tax breaks, not bridges; because there’s no requirement that the projects be otherwise unfunded, there is simply no guarantee that the plan will produce any net new hiring. Investors may simply shift capital from unsubsidized projects to subsidized ones and pocket the tax breaks on projects they would have funded anyway. Contractors have no obligation to hire new workers, or expand workers’ hours, to collect their $85 billion.
To be sure, some of this spending might, incidentally, result in job creation. But that's not its primary purpose--nor is its purpose to improve infrastructure where it's most needed. Instead, it's an infrastructure plan as created by a developer who's used to abusing the tax system to make himself richer. In this case, he'll make some rich investors and contractors richer--at the cost of the taxpayers. It also, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explains, results in the privatization of public assets, so the public can't benefit from them in the long run.
Some congressional Democrats are looking for areas where they can compromised with a President Trump, because a) they need the votes of Trump voters in 2018, and b) Democrats, in general, are in office because they want to help the American people, and therefore aren't drawn to obstruction as a guiding principle, as congressional Republicans were during the eight years of the Obama administration. Democrats tend to react favorably to infrastructure projects, for the reasons mentioned above.
But they shouldn't look at Trump's plan as a jobs plan or an infrastructure plan. It's purely a redistribution-of-wealth plan, from the taxpaying public to the already wealthy. Its costs will drive up the deficit, which will give congressional Republicans yet another excuse to slash funding on the social safety net--because after all, making the rich richer is more important than securing Social Security and Medicare (which they want to destroy anyway).
What can you do? If you're lucky enough to live in a state or district represented by Democrats, call their offices and tell them to resist Trump's infrastructure plan. There are ways to do this right, to fix things that need fixing and create good jobs in the process. But this isn't one of those. This is the wrong plan, for the wrong reasons, and it needs to be stopped.
This Week in Memory
If Trump really does put together an actual infrastructure plan--one that involves the government directly spending money on needed projects--and can get it through a Congress that resisted all such efforts during the Obama administration, it will be good for jobs and for the economy. Even his plan as described might create some jobs, and some of the money spent will trickle down into the economy. But it's also important to remember--though Trump, and those congressional Republicans, have been lying about it for years--that the economy is already on an upswing. Republicans lie about "job-killing regulations" and "job-killing Obamacare" in the middle of the longest stretch of job creation in American history. They say the deficit is growing, when in fact it's been shrinking at a rate not seen since WWII (and all the Republican deficit hawks in Congress will suddenly change their tune as soon as Trump takes office, if not before--suddenly, deficit and a growing national debt will no longer be a problem). They say the economy's in a shambles, when in fact most Americans are making more money than they have at any point in the 21st Century and the stock market us booming.
It's not just the economy, of course. It's crime--violent crime is down nationwide, but Trump spent the last 18 months telling us that it's everywhere. It's terrorism--since 9/11, there hasn't been a major terror attack in the US, despite a few lesser ones like Boston and Orlando committed by people with little or no demonstrable connection to outside terror groups. ISIS is locked in a losing battle in Mosul and is under attack in Raqqa, and has lost most of the territory it's gained. But Trump and the Republicans claim Obama hasn't kept us safe and Islamic terrorists pose an existential threat. It's the border--illegal immigration is at 21st Century lows, but Trump and the Republicans claim people are flooding across the border, committing crimes and taking away jobs. It's energy--we've become a nation with so much that we can export it instead of importing all our fossil fuels, and we've made remarkable strides in green energy.
The point is, in these and many other areas, the Obama administration has been remarkably successful. All along, Republicans have denied that success. Now that they'll have control over all three branches of the federal government, how quickly will they announce that they've made "great strides" in undoing Obama's damaging legacy? They'll claim credit for breaking ISIS's back, they'll claim credit for lowering crime, they'll claim credit for restricting illegal immigration, and they'll claim credit for a strong economy. They'll be right that those things have all improved, but they've improved because they've been on an upward trajectory for years. The lesson is that if you refuse to acknowledge favorable reality during one administration, you can claim lots of progress early in the next one.
We'll need to remember that those claims are lies, just like their refusal to acknowledge the truth during Obama's years were lies.
This Week in Emoluments
What are emoluments? According to Merriam-Webster, "the returns arising from office or employment usually in the form of compensation or perquisites." In this particular case, though, we're discussing them as they relate to the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution (also called the Nobility Clause), which states, "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state."
According to a piece in Think Progress and the analysis of Richard Painter, the chief ethics counsel for President George W. Bush, Trump has already set himself to violate that clause on his first day in office:
Friday evening, the Washington Post reported that about 100 foreign diplomats gathered at President-elect Donald Trump’s hotel in Washington, DC to “to sip Trump-branded champagne, dine on sliders and hear a sales pitch about the U.S. president-elect’s newest hotel.” The tour included a look at the hotel’s $20,000 a night “town house” suite. The Post also quoted some of the diplomats saying they intended to stay at the hotel in order to ingratiate themselves to the incoming president.
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’” said one diplomat from an Asian nation. “Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’”
The incoming president, in other words, is actively soliciting business from agents of foreign governments. Many of these agents, in turn, said that they will accept the president-elect’s offer to do business because they want to win favor with the new leader of the United States.
According to Painter, Trump's “only good answer is to sell the hotel or give it to his kids (and pay the gift tax) by January 20.” If he still owns it then, he'll be profiting from foreign governments trying to curry his favor.
Trump, however, is making no pretense of trying to separate his business interests from his presidential duties. Most presidents with any real wealth place their financial affairs in a blind trust--assets are sold and replaced with ones of equal value, but the president doesn't know what those are, so can't design policy specifically to benefit himself financially. Trump has said, instead, that his family will run his business. But that same family is also deeply involved in his White House affairs. Daughter Ivanka attended his first meeting with an international head of state, and he's talking about giving her husband, Jared Kushner, an influential West Wing role. Where there's no wall between the Oval Office and the executive suite, the prospects of corruption are ever-present. Here, Paul Waldman runs through some other opportunities for self-enrichment, and the Washington Post took a deep dive into some of his business interests around the world.
And again, this is a president who's just admitted to being a con man. How can he be trusted? Answer: he can't.
This Week in Attorneys General
How racist is Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R/AL), Trump's pick for Attorney General? Remember, that person runs the Department of Justice, which is, among other things, responsible for protecting the civil rights of all Americans. The Atlantic runs down some of the reasons Sessions is entirely wrong for that job. Judging by his record and his stated beliefs, straight white people will have a protector, but everybody else is on their own.
Side Note: Here's a dissenting view by a writer who thinks Sessions probably isn't a racist, and he offers some examples of good works Sessions has done. That said, this writer is also concerned about the idea of Sessions as A.G.
This Week in Nazis
If these pictures aren't disturbing to you, you've lost your capacity to be disturbed. The first, from The Atlantic, shows audience members at a white nationalist conference celebrating Trump's victory with the Nazi salute. The second is a since-deleted tweet from a restaurant at which conference members held a dinner [much to the dismay of the restaurant's owners, who said the reservation was made under a name that didn't indicate who was booking the space. They've since donated all the proceeds from that night to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)]. For those of us born in the wake of WWII, to see Americans employing the Nazi salute is beyond the pale. )But at least now we know what Tila Tequila's been doing since MySpace imploded--polishing up her Iron Cross forr the new Reich).
(Daniel Lombroso/The Atlantic)
Side Note: Trump announced this week that he's not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, after all. Some elements of his base are outraged at this "cave," but we'd like to point out that presidents are not prosecutors. In the United States of America, prosecuting her would never have been his decision to make. In a dictatorship, sure, that happens all the time. For Trump to even announce (through a spokesperson) that he's decided not to prosecute is itself a sign of creeping fascism, because the clear implication is that it would have been his call, either way.
If America worked like that, President Obama could "prosecute" Trump today for his Trump University scam and Trump Foundation self-dealing, two crimes to which Trump has just admitted, and lock him up before he can even take office. But despite the absurd right-wing claims of Obama's "tyranny," he's not a would-be Fuhrer. Trump, however, keeps talking like the rule of law means nothing, the Rule of Trump everything.
Congress will certainly continue its endless "investigations" of Clinton, wasting tax dollars out of partisan rancor and spite. Whether Trump's DoJ will investigate her remains to be seen, but the call isn't the president's. Any confirmation hearings of Sen. Sessions should include questions about whether his DoJ will be appropriately independent of a president who clearly doesn't understand how our government works.
This Week in Humiliation
After losing to Trump in the primaries, then endorsing him, then being reduced to carrying Trump's luggage and making fast-food runs for him (and being implicated by former aides in the Bridgegate scandal), NJ Gov. Chris Christie has gone to Trump begging for a job. Here 's Trump demonstrating how the doorman at one of Trump's properties should hail a taxi, because doorman is Christie's best employment prospect at this point.
(photo by Mike Segar/Reuters)
This Week in Rural/Urban Inequality
Rural populations elected Donald Trump, despite the fact that more than 2 million more American voters chose Hillary Clinton instead. In the last 7 presidential cycles, Democrats have won the popular vote in 6, but twice now (once through the intercession of the Supreme Court), Republicans have won the White House. This imbalance also exists in the Congress, where Republicans continually win a greater percentage of congressional seats than their percentage of the vote. The message is clear--Americans prefer Democratic policies and candidates, but the rural preferences baked into the Constitution (written when 95 percent of the population was rural) give rural populations a far larger say in American politics than they're entitled to by the numbers. Here's the history behind that, and the numbers that show had bad it really is.
This Week in DAPL
This week, police used concussion grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons--despite outdoor temperatures of 26 degrees--on the mostly indigenous protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline. This is a continuing, slow-motion tragedy to which attention must be paid.
This Week in Bears
Here's an adorable video of a polar bear gently petting a sled dog. Later, some unidentified polar bear ate an unidentified dog, but there's not necessarily any connection between those two events. (Thanks to TWiA special ursine correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)