November 25, 2024
Today, President Joe Biden laid out very clearly the argument behind the economic policies his administration has put into place. “When I took office, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” he wrote. “From Day One, I was determined to not only deliver economic relief, but to invest in America and grow the economy from the middle out and bottom up, not the top down.”
“Over the last four years, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” he wrote. “We passed legislation to rebuild our infrastructure, build a clean energy economy, and bring manufacturing back to the United States after decades of offshoring.” Investing in America included the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that is rebuilding our roads, bridges, water systems, ports, and airports, as well as making high-speed broadband available in underserved areas; the CHIPS and Science Act that invested in bringing the manufacture of silicon chips back to the U.S. and promoting research; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in technologies to combat climate change.
Today the White House announced that this federal investment has attracted more than $1 trillion in private-sector investments. “These investments in industries of the future,” Biden wrote, “are ensuring the future is made in America, by American workers.”
He noted that more than 1.6 million construction and manufacturing jobs have been created over the last four years and that “our investments are making America a leader in clean energy and semiconductor technologies that will protect our economic and national security, while expanding opportunities in red states and blue states.”
In a White House memo, White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian wrote: “The progress we've made...represents only a fraction of the full impact of this agenda. If future Administrations continue to implement at the pace we have, people across the country will enjoy the benefits of safer water, cleaner air, faster internet, and smoother commutes.”
But the incoming Trump administration will advance a different economic vision. Instead of trying to expand the economy through investment in infrastructure and manufacturing, Trump’s team has emphasized cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations and slashing regulations.
The argument behind this approach to the economy is that concentrating wealth in the hands of investors will spur more investment, while creating an environment that’s “friendly” to business will create jobs. Jack Brook of the Associated Press reported that earlier this month, the state of Louisiana illustrated what this policy looks like to ordinary people when it cut income taxes to a flat 3% rate, reducing revenue by about $1.3 billion. They made up that revenue by increasing the sales tax to 5%, thus shifting the burden of taxation to lower- and middle-class families. “Louisiana just became a much more attractive place to do business,” Louisiana economic development secretary Susan Bourgeois told Brook.
It is becoming clear what Trump’s economic policy will look like at the national level. Super wealthy donors funded Trump’s 2024 campaign, and in a departure from every previous incoming president, Trump is refusing to sign the documents required as part of a presidential transition at least in part because those documents mandate that he disclose who is funding his transition and limit those donations to $5,000 per donor. Without that disclosure, it is impossible to see who is funding him. For all we know, that list could include foreign governments.
As activist Melanie D’Arrigo put it on Bluesky: “‘Secret donations’ are bribes. The hundreds of millions he received from Elon Musk and other billionaires are also bribes. There’s a reason Donald Trump isn’t signing ethics pledges.” Indeed, after his first term, the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington concluded that “there is absolutely no doubt that Trump tried at every turn to use the presidency to benefit his bottom line,” and noted that those who spent money at Trump’s properties often received favorable policy decisions from the administration.
During the campaign, Trump promised to fight for ordinary Americans, but many of Trump’s picks to fill offices in his administration are notable for their extreme wealth. His pick for treasury secretary is billionaire Scott Bessent, a hedge fund executive who invested money for philanthropist George Soros for more than ten years. To head the Commerce Department, Trump has tapped billionaire Howard Lutnick, the chief executive officer of financial giant Cantor Fitzgerald.
Trump’s choice for education secretary, Linda McMahon, and his choice for Interior Secretary, North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, are both billionaires. And then there are the two men Trump tapped for his Department of Government Efficiency. Former pharmaceutical executive Vivek Ramaswamy is worth around a billion dollars, but Elon Musk is usually at the top of the list of the richest people in the world. He’s worth about $332.6 billion.
Laura Mannweiler of U.S. News and World Report today estimated the worth of Trump’s current roster of appointees to be at least $344.4 billion, more than the gross domestic product of 169 countries. That number does not include Bessent, whose net worth is hard to find. In comparison, Mannweiler notes, the total net worth of the officials in Biden’s Cabinet was about $118 million.
Economist Robert Reich noted yesterday that the wealth of America’s 815 billionaires grew by nearly $280 billion after Trump’s reelection, and the president-elect is promising to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025. Now, after all their complaints about the budget deficits under Biden as he invested in the country, Republicans are, according to Andrew Duehren of the New York Times, considering rejiggering the government’s accounting so that extending the tax cuts, which will create about $4 trillion in deficits, shows up as not costing anything.
Deregulation, too, is on the agenda. It’s a cause close to the heart of Elon Musk, who frequently complains that unnecessary regulations are making it impossible for visionary entrepreneurs to develop the technological sector as quickly and efficiently as they could otherwise.
In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Susan Pulliam, Emily Glazer, and Becky Peterson noted that although Musk says his goal is to “protect life on Earth,” his companies “show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again.” The authors report that Tesla’s facility in Fremont, California, has received “more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California,” 112 of them. Federal regulators recently fined SpaceX for dumping about 262,000 gallons of wastewater into protected wetlands in Texas. Tesla, too, has dumped contaminated water into public sewer systems.
One staffer for environmental compliance told the Environmental Protection Agency that ““Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls.”
People who have worked with Musk “for years” told Pulliam, Glazer, and Peterson that they expect Musk will try to cut environmental regulations, especially the ones that affect his companies. After Trump announced that he was creating DOGE and putting Musk in charge of it, Musk posted: “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
Musk’s companies have brought in at least $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the past decade, and his companies have been targeted in at least 20 government investigations recently. Eric Lipton, David A. Fahrenthold, Aaron Krolik, and Kristen Grind of the New York Times note that Trump’s victory and his appointment of Musk to an oversight role in the government “essentially give[s] the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.”
Today, Sara Murray, Kristen Holmes, and Kate Sullivan of CNN reported that Trump’s lawyers have conducted an investigation into whether top Trump advisor Boris Epshteyn has been selling access to Trump. Payments for his promotion of candidates for administration positions or access to administration officials were as much as $100,000 a month. The lawyers recommended that the Trump team should jettison Epshteyn, but it has apparently decided not to.
“I am honored to work for President Trump and with his team,” Epshteyn said in a statement to CNN. “These fake claims are false and defamatory and will not distract us from Making America Great Again.”
Today, special prosecutor Jack Smith moved to drop both federal cases against Trump: the federal election case for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and the case concerning Trump’s retention of highly classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump had said he would break the usual norms around special counsels when he returns to office—Biden retained the special counsel investigating his son, Hunter—and fire Smith.
But Smith pointed to the position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted as a reason for the cases’ dismissal. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant,” he wrote. “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed.” Smith left open the possibility that the charges could be brought again in the future after Trump leaves office.
Trump’s approach to the cases was to delay and delay and delay in hopes voters would return him to the White House, and it appears his strategy worked. As democracy lawyer Marc Elias wrote: “Justice delayed was justice denied.”
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Notes:
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/25/biden-agenda-trump-manufacturing
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-refuses-disclose-funding-transition-165029331.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/24/us/politics/donald-trump-2024-campaign-transition.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/23/us/politics/trump-tax-cuts-republicans-deficit.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/25/business/ceos-react-bessent-trump-treasury-pick/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/22/scott-bessent-trump-treasury
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-tesla-environment-1263cd60
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/25/politics/trump-special-counsel-jack-smith/index.html
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca11.87822/gov.uscourts.ca11.87822.79.0_1.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-federal-agencies-contracts.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/us/politics/boris-epshteyn-trump.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/rockbridge-trump-vance-wiles.html
X:
rbreich/status/1860760328369308082
Bluesky:
Incredibly sickening and infuriating that Teflon Don aka tffg will evade the consequences of his crimes. How frustrating for Jack Smith. How sad for the American people. "Justice delayed is justice denied."
Why is the transition going forward? Documents must be signed. Don’t let the schoolyard bully Trump bulldoze the laws. Hold him accountable. No signing, no transition. Require all prospective cabinet members to be investigated. Trump is a citizen and must obey the laws & norms like the rest of us. More people voted against Trump than for him. In both percentage & raw votes, Trump’s margin is on pace to be less than half of what Biden achieved four years earlier. No mandate.