Tag: jobs plan
Is Trump On the Verge of His Biggest Legislative Humiliation Yet?

Is Trump On the Verge of His Biggest Legislative Humiliation Yet?

President Trump’s plan for protecting and creating American jobs has taken three forms while he’s been in office.

First, he talks up American jobs and browbeats companies relocating to Mexico or overseas. While Trump exaggerates and takes credit when he doesn’t deserve it, he regularly ties his image and his presidency to the story of jobs in America, a politically astute move. But Trump needs more than rhetoric on jobs if he wants to protect Republican congressional majority in 2018 and have any chance of reelection in 2020. He needs to take measures that actually create jobs.

The second plank of Trump’s job program is the much touted and much delayed “trillion-dollar infrastructure jobs plan,” favored by White House adviser Steve Bannon. However, the plan has yet to be drawn up and is not scheduled for presentation until next year. It remains to be seen if Trump and Bannon can harmonize their infrastructure jobs program with that of Senate Democrats or the American Society of Civil Engineers. So far, Trump has made health care and tax reform a higher priority and shown little ability to work with anybody on passing legislation.

The third and most substantive part of Trump’s job plan is buried in current tax reform legislation: a border tax on imported goods that (Trump says) will favor U.S.-based manufacturers and exporters and thus create jobs in the United States. You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but with “tax reform” now trumpeted as the administration’s top legislative priority, Trump’s jobs agenda is up for approval on Capitol Hill for the first time.

Trump is already faltering, even in his messaging. To describe the administration’s top priority as “tax reform,” and not “job creation” reflects Paul Ryan’s priorities more than Trump’s. The label weakens the president’s ability to sell a radical change in corporate tax policy that is already proving as divisive as Trump’s failed health care bill.

Trump’s salesmanship is not particularly aggressive or compelling. In an interview with Reuters in February, Trump embraced the notion of an import tax, also known as a “border adjustment tax.”

“I certainly support a form of tax on the border,” Trump said. He argued the measure would encourage companies to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States, a critical component of his platform. Even when announcing his adminstration’s pivot to tax reform after the health care debacle, Trump didn’t talk much about the import border tax or jobs.

As with Obamacare repeal, the most right-wing factions on Capitol Hill are not buying into Trump’s vision.

Conservative Split Over Import Tax Imperils Trump’s Overhaul,” the New York Times reported last Sunday.

A month ago I asked, “Who Wins? Trump v. the Koch Brothers on Jobs.” So far the answer, according to the Times, is the Koch brothers. Supported by Walmart and other giants of the retail industry, Koch family political front groups are moving to stifle Trump’s tax plan before it ever gets out of the House Ways and Means committee.

What Trump touts as a jobs plan, one Koch-funded group defines as a tax increase on millennials.

Another Koch-funded organization, Americans for Prosperity, is running TV ads denouncing the border adjustment tax (or BAT) as a $1.2 trillion tax increase on seniors and the working poor.

The split over Trump’s tax and jobs plans, says the Times,“is exposing the broader ideological divide between nationalist policies embraced by Mr. Trump and the traditional small-government movement that his election ejected from the driver’s seat of Republican policy-making.”

Trump does have leverage in this negotiation. To enact a tax bill that does not increase the federal deficit but does deliver what Republicans want most—rate cuts for wealthy taxpayers and corporations—Congress needs to find some source of new revenue. Hence the import tax.

To prevail, Trump will have to convince a majority of the House Ways and Means committee that BAT is worth adopting because it will create American jobs and will not raise prices on imported goods, despite what the local retail business community is saying. And if the House approves the BAT, Trump will have to protect those provisions in the Senate, where opposition is likely to be even stiffer.

That would be a heavy lift for any White House. For a president as disengaged and disorganized as Trump, it seems highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Trump doesn’t have a strong relationship with Ryan, who cares more about tax cuts than job creation. Trump doesn’t have a White House staff capable of coaxing and threatening wavering congress members to come around to his point of view. And he doesn’t have the discipline or the intellect to explain and sell a radical policy change to Congress, much less to the country. It’s not something you can do in 140-character bursts.

So the only substantive measure in Trump’s much-touted jobs agenda is at risk of dying a slow and invisible death.

Writing tax legislation is one of the slowest and most complex of the lawmaking arts. Congressional leaders have talked about having a tax bill ready to send to the president by August. Whether it will contain any of Trump’s job stimulation measures is already very much in doubt.

One of Trump’s most effective lines on the campaign trail was that the Washington establishment was “all talk and no action.”

If Trump can’t defeat the Koch brothers, pass the border tax and claim a job creation victory this year, he is going to be vulnerable to the same charge on jobs.

 Jefferson Morley is Washington correspondent for Alternet. He is the author of  JFK and CIA: The Secret Assassination Files (Kindle) and Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.

Economists: Obama Plan Would Save At Least 250,000 Jobs

Bloomberg News surveyed a wide range of economists — many of whom work at Wall Street investment banks where the executives have flocked to donate to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign — and they generally seem to agree that the Obama jobs plan (don’t call it a stimulus!) would help stave off a “double-dip” recession:

President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan would help avoid a return to recession by maintaining growth and pushing down the unemployment rate next year, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The legislation, submitted to Congress this month, would increase gross domestic product by 0.6 percent next year and add or keep 275,000 workers on payrolls, the median estimates in the survey of 34 economists showed. The program would also lower the jobless rate by 0.2 percentage point in 2012, economists said.

Economists in the survey are less optimistic than Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who has cited estimates for a 1.5 percent boost to gross domestic product. Even so, the program may bolster Obama’s re-election prospects by lowering a jobless rate that has stayed near 9 percent or more since April 2009.

That’s not to say the economic climate forecast looks sunny for Obama. Even if the bill miraculously passes a Republican Congress that has come out against to the tax cut portions of the plan (specifically, a payroll tax cut that would mostly spur lower-income people to buy), businesses might still be scared to hire. And while the right may blame regulations or taxes, there’s an even simpler explanation: What kind of company wants to expand when the federal government is constantly on the brink of shutdown because the House can’t pass regular spending bills, and the European banking system is still teetering on the verge of collapse?

Congressional Approval Ratings Drop To Match Record Lows

New polling information shows that the approval of Congress has dipped near record lows, and voters might express their dissatisfaction in the next election cycle. As The New York Times writes,

Congress faces historically low approval ratings as it wades into the debate over the $447 billion jobs package proposed by President Obama, with just 12 percent of Americans now approving of the way Congress is handling its job, matching its all-time low, recorded in October 2008 at the height of the economic crisis, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Voters are slightly more disapproving of the Republicans in Congress than they are of the Democrats, with just 19 percent approving of Republicans, compared with 28 percent that approve of Democrats.

Republican voters are more dissatisfied with their party’s representatives than are Democrats. Half of Republican voters say they disapprove of Republicans in Congress, while 43 percent of Democratic voters say they disapprove of Democrats in Congress. Independents are slightly less approving of Congressional Republicans than Congressional Democrats.

Only 6 percent of registered voters say that most members of Congress have earned re-election, while 84 percent say it’s time to give someone new a chance, a historic low for the New York Times/CBS poll. Dissatisfaction with Congress runs deep across both parties, with more than 8 in 10 of both Republicans and Democrats saying it’s time to elect new representatives.

In follow-up interviews, partisanship and bickering were given as major reasons for respondents’ disapproval of Congress.

The poll, which was conducted through nationwide telephone interviews of 1,452 adults between Sept. 10-15, indicates the potential for massive electoral shake-ups.

The dismal approval ratings are not surprising when considering the debt ceiling debacle and general inefficiency of Congress this summer. Political squabbling has brought the nation to the brink of economic ruin, and the inability to reach agreement on even the most routine measures led to partial shutdowns of government agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration. The poll shows that the Republicans have been hurt more by the political chaos. However, Congressional Republicans have also succeeded in their goal of thwarting any progress, which might help them in both the Congressional and presidential races. E.J. Dionne calls this the “election paradox”: “Up to a point, Republicans in Congress can afford to let their own ratings fall well below the president’s, as long as they drag him further into negative territory. If the president’s ratings are poor next year, Democrats won’t be able to defeat enough Republicans to take back the House and hold the Senate. The GOP can win if the mood is terribly negative toward Washington because voters see Obama as the man in charge.”

In this way, the public’s general dissatisfaction with Congress might play into the Republicans’ belief that the federal government is bad. How these opinions will affect elections is yet to be seen.