Wednesday, September 13, 2023

Bits: Radical right pro-elite econ policy; GOP moderates?

The New York Magazine Intelligencer column writes about policy plans the authoritarian radical right is toying with:
The discourse of the Trump era has been dominated by a conceit that the two major parties have swapped economic identities. The Democrats have supposedly abandoned their historical role as spokespeople for the working class to represent the neoliberal global elite, ....

[However] the two parties remain stubbornly attached to their traditional distributive goals. The Democrats still want to tax the rich and spend on the non-rich. Republicans still want very badly to do the opposite.

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s campaign brain trust is working on a new economic plan to anchor his campaign. The leading idea is to pass another huge tax cut for the wealthy (a cut in corporate tax rates), paired with a tax increase on the middle class (a 10 percent tariff).

Trump’s brain trust believes current economic conditions indicate the U.S. economy is being harmed by excessively progressive taxes. To be sure, they have consistently believed this for more than 30 years through every conceivable combination of economic circumstances: high inflation, low inflation, recession, boom, war and peace,

Supply-side economics is a religion masquerading as an economic theory, and Trump’s brain trust, as it were, is a collection of the high priests of the supply-side cult: Arthur Laffer (who first began promoting supply-side economics nearly 50 years ago), Stephen Moore, Lawrence Kudlow, and Newt Gingrich.
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America's dismal, for-profit mainstream media continues to (i) fail to understand the extremism and hostile intent of America's aggressive, corrupt radical right authoritarian (RRA) wealth and power movement, (ii) is incompetent and clueless about the RRA, (iii) most likely knows the situation, but cannot speak it because the profit motive has poisoned and killed professional journalism in the US, or (iv) some combination of the foregoing. An article The Hill published exemplifies the shocking uselessness (or worse, complicity) of the MSM:
GOP moderates line up behind McCarthy 
opening Biden impeachment inquiry

House GOP moderates are lining up behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, downplaying the political risks it poses for them even as they benefit from not having to vote on the matter.

A handful of centrist Republicans said Tuesday that opening an official probe gives GOP-led committees greater latitude in their investigations, and argued that launching a probe does not guarantee articles of impeachment will be brought to the floor.  
Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who’s embroiled in a House Ethics Committee investigation and separately faces federal charges regarding his financial disclosures and for his representation of campaign fund allocations to donors, said on Wednesday that McCarthy’s move was “a step in the right direction.”
There are no moderate or centrist Republicans in the House who support the GOP's witch hunt. It is neither moderate nor centrist to support an impeachment inquiry of Biden when there is no solid evidence he committed any impeachable offense. The Republican cowards do not even have to vote on it. This is a blatant act of moral cowardice. 

Including the lying crook Santos in with moderate and centrist Republicans makes perfect sense. Santos exemplifies what the morally rotted RRA Republican Party has degenerated into. The open question is whether there are any  real moderates left in the GOP in congress? Probably not if one defines RRA to include silent complicity in evil.

The political math: RRA ≠ moderate or centrist

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