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Will Trump Tax Cuts for the Rich Blow a Hole in the 'Rock-Solid Labor Market' Left by Biden?
"If he pursues trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy and implements the proposals to slash public investments that people like Musk have championed, the labor market will surely deteriorate and workers will suffer."
Dec 06, 2024
Job figures released Friday showed that the U.S. labor market rebounded strongly last month following a storm-ravaged October, with the economy adding 227,000 jobs and average hourly earnings rising by a higher-than-expected 0.4%.
But observers warned that the economic agenda of President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming Republican Congress—particularly the massive tax cut package they plan to ram through early next year—could undermine job market progress made under the Biden administration in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis.
"The Biden administration is handing off a rock-solid labor market after their strategic investments strengthened our economy and ushered in the fastest recession recovery on record," said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. "President-elect Trump would do well to continue to invest in the workers and communities that have powered this resilience."
"But if he pursues trillions in tax cuts for the wealthy and implements the proposals to slash public investments that people like [Elon] Musk have championed," Owens added, "the labor market will surely deteriorate and workers will suffer the consequences of these choices."
Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, similarly warned Friday that "while Democrats delivered a historic recovery with millions of new jobs under President Biden, Donald Trump and his far-right allies want to take us backward."
"Trump's promises are nothing but a con," said Boyle. "He's pushing middle-class tax hikes while handing massive breaks to his billionaire donors, just like he's done before. Families like mine know the truth: Trump would sell out millions of workers in a heartbeat to line the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. House Democrats won't stand by while Trump sabotages our economy. We'll fight to protect the progress we've made and ensure working families continue to come first."
"Don't let them fool you. His plan of vengeance to deport millions of undocumented workers and impose tariffs will not create jobs."
The U.S. economy has added an average of 173,000 jobs monthly over the past three months, Economic Policy Institute senior economist Elise Gould noted in an analysis of the new Labor Department figures.
"Nominal wage growth held steady at 4.0% over the year," Gould observed. "This rate is in line with the pace of productivity improvement over the last year and a stubborn low labor share of corporate sector income. Importantly, it means that real average wages continue to rise as they have the last 18 months."
The new data came as congressional Republicans and Trump's billionaire-dominated transition team and Cabinet choices continued to map out their agenda for the coming year, with tax cuts at the center.
"Their top objective is to extend the 2017 Trump tax law and prevent $3.3 trillion in tax breaks from expiring at the end of 2025," NBC Newsreported earlier this week, detailing GOP plans to pass a "huge party-line bill" via the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.
A Congressional Budget Office analysis published Wednesday detailed how an extension of soon-to-expire provisions of the 2017 tax law—a measure that disproportionately benefited the rich—would shrink the U.S. economy, bolstering concerns about the potentially damaging impacts of the Trump-GOP agenda.
Prior to the November election, the research firm Moody's Analytics warned that a Republican sweep would likely mean "the economy suffers a recession beginning in mid-2025," resulting in 3.2 million fewer jobs and a higher unemployment rate by the end of Trump's four-year term.
Moody's argued that Trump's push for tariffs, corporate tax cuts, and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants would broadly harm the economy, driving up inflation and pushing down Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and job growth.
While corporations would likely "navigate things reasonably well" under a Republican-dominated government, Moody's said, ordinary households would "do less well financially."
"The typical American household's real after-tax income is approximately $2,000, or 1.4%, lower by the end of Trump’s term in this scenario than in the baseline," the firm projected.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said in a statement Friday that Trump "was the first president since World War II to leave office with fewer jobs than when his administration started."
"And his disastrous policies will hurt our economy once again," said Heinrich. "Don't let them fool you. His plan of vengeance to deport millions of undocumented workers and impose tariffs will not create jobs. It will not support our manufacturers, farmers, or small businesses. And it certainly will not grow our economy. It will only create an unmitigated disaster for everyday Americans who will struggle to make ends meet."
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How We Can Keep the Green New Deal Alive Despite Trump’s Fossil Fuel Authoritarianism
The Green New Deal is being created right now by flesh-and- blood people under real-life conditions. It is being created in communities, cities, states, and regions—from below.
Nov 21, 2024
To resist and eventually overcome the looming authoritarian national government, we need to create bastions of what the Polish activists who overthrew their country’s dictatorship called “social self-defense.” That will involve many methods, including mutual aid, on-the-ground protection of those under attack, intelligence sharing, and many other forms of solidarity. For the past five years, I have been studying initiatives that are realizing the principles and policies of the Green New Deal—what I have called “The Green New Deal from Below.” I believe these Green New Deal from Below initiatives can be a critical component of our social self-defense.
The Green New Deal is a visionary program designed to protect the Earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to unite the necessity for climate protection with the goals of full employment and social justice.
The Green New Deal erupted into public attention as a proposal for national legislation. But there has also emerged a little-noticed wave of initiatives from community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other nonfederal actors designed to contribute to the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez (AOC), who helped initiate the campaign for a Green New Deal, has called it “a Green New Deal from Below.”'
The Green New Deal from Below is showing that it is possible to challenge the powers that are imposing climate change, inequality, and oppression.
The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of Green New Deal from Below initiatives in many different arenas and locations. These initiatives encompass a broad range of the programs already under way and in development. The projects of Green New Dealers recounted here should provide inspiration for thousands more that can create the foundation for local, national, and even global mobilization—and reconstruction.
The Green New Deal is happening, and whatever happens is possible. The Green New Deal is not an impossible leftist fantasy, or something that could never win popular support, or a dream that couldn’t possibly be realized in practice, or something that would bring disaster if it were realized. The Green New Deal is being created right now by flesh-and- blood people under real-life conditions. It is being created in communities, cities, states, and regions—from below.
Of course, only a limited proportion of U.S. geographies and institutions have fully developed Green New Deals. But efforts to create Green New Deals are ubiquitous; an article in Popular Science magazine soon after the first Green New Deal proposal in Congress found that plans and first steps to realize Green New Deals were happening in every state in the union. Today the Green New Deal from Below, dispersed throughout the United States, is transforming the realities where it is—and creating models for broader transformation everywhere.
Green New Deals in cities like Boston and Los Angeles are reducing the greenhouse gases that are destroying our climate. They are creating jobs that protect the climate and training workers to fill them. They are mobilizing city resources to reduce poverty. They are investing in climate- protecting buildings and technologies in low-income neighborhoods. They are expanding cheap or free public transit to reconnect isolated neighborhoods, provide people who lack cars with access to jobs, and reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
In states like Illinois, California, and New York, Green New Deal-style programs are shifting major resources to climate-safe energy development. They are setting targets for greenhouse gas reduction and schedules for shutting down fossil fuel-producing and using facilities—and implementing them. They are reducing fossil fuel use by increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, transportation, agriculture, and other energy users. They are investing in infrastructure to correct historical injustices like polluting facilities concentrated in poor communities. They are creating jobs in the green economy with high labor rights and standards and providing job training, jobs, and job ladders for people who have been marginalized in the labor market.
Unions like the IBEW are promoting programs to expand renewable energy production, building coalitions to support them, training the workers needed to realize them, and monitoring the results to ensure that they produce good union jobs. Unions of educators and nurses are fighting for—and winning—green schools and hospitals.
The Green New Deal from Below is showing that it is possible to challenge the powers that are imposing climate change, inequality, and oppression. That it is possible to formulate realistic alternatives. And that those alternatives can actually be implemented.
Perhaps someone could look at the diverse projects, programs, and initiatives of the Green New Deal from Below and see them as simply scattered, unconnected, one-off phenomena. But that would be like saying, I see the students, the classrooms, and the football field, but where is the university? The Green New Deal from Below is indeed composed of many parts, but that does not prevent it from being a real entity as a whole.
The Green New Deal transformed America’s political imagination. It transgressed the neoliberal, market-only assumptions that dominated public discourse for four decades. It proposed the long-disparaged notion of using government to solve problems. It refused to accept the growing inequality that had reshaped American society. It advocated tackling rather than ignoring the climate emergency. To paraphrase Green New Deal mayor Michelle Wu of Boston, it shifted “the sense of what was possible.” It thereby expanded the limits of what was possible.
This transformation flows from the core concepts of the Green New Deal. These core concepts integrate multiple concerns rather than addressing them in separate “silos” or adding them together in “laundry lists.” They unite the urgent and universal need for climate protection with the economic and social needs of disadvantaged groups and of working people. They do so by articulating a strategy for rapid greenhouse gas reduction that prioritizes programs that create jobs and reduce injustice. This strategy provides a new way of integrating the interests of previously disconnected or antagonistic constituencies.
The Green New Deal is not just a slogan, a list of demands, or a menu of policies. The Green New Deal provides a framework for moving beyond piecemeal policies to a set of integrated strategies. Like the original New Deal, it makes seemingly antagonistic policies and constituencies complementary by transcending the limitations of established assumptions. It pro-poses a set of changes in the social framework that meet both the common and the distinct needs of those affected. It thereby constructs a common interest that incorporates the particular interests of different groups. This allows needs and interests that may currently appear incompatible—for example, between jobs and environment—to become compatible or even synergistic.
The Green New Deal integrates such distinct elements in two ways. First, it integrates different kinds of needs and their solutions. Front and center is its integration of the need for climate protection, the need for good jobs, and the need for greater equality. But it integrates other needs as well. For example, it combines policies that attack entrenched forms of discrimination and injustice with ones that increase the power of workers on the job by strengthening their right to organize and engage in concerted action. Legislation in Connecticut and other states exemplifies this by requiring that offshore wind clean energy projects provide both project labor agreements ensuring union wage standards and conditions and community benefit agreements providing access to jobs for communities and demographics often deprived of that access.
Second, the Green New Deal integrates the needs of different constituencies. For example, two separate coalitions backing different bills developed in Illinois to shape climate legislation. One, the Illinois Clean Jobs coalition, was rooted in the environmental movement and local social justice organizations. The other, the Climate Jobs Illinois coalition, was based in the state’s labor unions. After considerable tension and extended negotiations, the two united on a common program that included the demands of each—laying the basis for the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, described by one journalist as a “Green New Deal” for Illinois.
Integrating programs and integrating people go hand in hand. For example, the Green New Deal tames the purported conflict between employment and climate protection. It challenges the “jobs vs. environment” frame. At a local and state level, the Green New Deal from Below has therefore been able to unite often-divided labor, environmental, and climate justice advocates.
The Green New Deal is driven by a sense of urgency. There is the urgency of the climate emergency. There is also the urgency of people who are suffering and even dying as a result of injustice. The original Green New Deal proposal responded to this urgency by calling for a 10-year mobilization that would reconstruct American society and economy as dramatically as the New Deal and mobilization for World War II.
The Green New Deal arose in a sea of hopelessness and despair. It pointed the way toward viable alternatives to realities that evoked that hopelessness and despair. The Green New Deal from Below provides people a way to start building those alternatives day by day where they live and work.
The world historian Arnold Toynbee once delineated how great civilizational changes occur. Existing leaders of existing institutions face new challenges—but fail to change to meet them. Their civilizations thereby become vulnerable to collapse. In such a setting, however, a creative minority may arise that proposes—and begins to implement—new solutions. Surely climate change represents such a civilizational challenge, and just as surely our existing institutions and their leaders are failing to make the changes it requires. But at the grassroots a creative minority is at work establishing new solutions that are reconstructing society on new principles. Their work is manifested in the Green New Deal from Below.
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EV Charger Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
A Rubio-sponsored bill would have effectively removed requirements to source EV chargers from U.S. manufacturers—though Rubio would have you believe otherwise.
Mar 02, 2024
Recently, the U.S. Congress passed a wildly misrepresented measure related to making electric vehicle, or EV, chargers in the United States. While the bill’s sponsors and supporters pitched the measure as protecting manufacturing workers in the United States, the effort would have effectively removed requirements that EV chargers purchased with federal dollars be made here.
The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and the other members of the GOP who backed this effort hoped that misleading rhetoric and outright lies would trick U.S. auto workers and their supporters. But the measure was never about supporting auto workers, it was about jeopardizing and slowing the transition to clean vehicles at their expense. Workers deserve more respect than that.
President Joe Biden cut through this façade and put workers first by quickly vetoing the bill. But this isn’t the first—and won’t be the last—time that the GOP tries to co-opt the fight for workers’ rights to advance its own agenda.
Many of these lies to workers are based on the same premise: Investing in the clean economy somehow means sending all our jobs and money to China—no matter how we do it.
We live in strange times. Politicians gleefully vote against bills that will lift up their communities to satisfy their big money donors, while happily cheering clean economy projects funded by the bills they voted against and bragging about investments in the electric vehicle technologies they have fought tooth and nail to derail. They defend U.S. auto manufacturing workers from one side of their mouth, while fighting against the policies that will keep our auto industry competitive in the global market from the other side.
Across the nation, working people are joining together—supported by allies in the environmental movement—to stand up for a better world for themselves, their communities, and for future generations. During its historic Stand Up Strike, the United Auto Workers (UAW) refused to fall for former President Donald Trump’s insincere attempts to court the union, seeing right through his “rally” at a non-union facility. Meanwhile, the UAW concentrated on getting the best deal for their workers and they were able to do just that—right in the face of Trump’s attempts to distract and divide.
Many of these lies to workers are based on the same premise: Investing in the clean economy somehow means sending all our jobs and money to China—no matter how we do it. We know that the opposite is true. Investing in a clean economy is our only shot at keeping jobs here.
The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress have carefully written infrastructure, manufacturing, and clean energy laws that create jobs and investments here in the United States—particularly in low-income and underserved communities. That means these laws will greatly benefit blue AND red states, which is why you see a lot of Republicans running to embrace the very projects they voted against.
Requirements in laws enacted by the Biden administration specifically call for sourcing materials from U.S. manufacturers and building out the U.S. supply chain, which will create good, union jobs across the nation. And yet, the GOP rails against these investment and laws, even voting to repeal them. For example, the Rubio bill mentioned above would have effectively removed requirements to source EV chargers from U.S. manufacturers—though Rubio would have you believe otherwise.
This sort of dishonest rhetoric is only going to ramp up throughout this election year. We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it far into the future, but workers in the United States are sick and tired of this dog and pony show. There are real-world impacts from the damaging policies the Republicans are hawking. Politicians should give workers in the United States the respect they deserve and stop with the lies.
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