AMERICA NEEDS TO LEARN THE NEGATIVE LESSONS FROM ELECTING TRUMP

…Bridge Builders: The classic example of the “American Working Class”

The Trump administration has not focused on the welfare of the American worker.

Why is it that as we head toward the third year of Trump’s presidency, we never hear that much about the nation’s “working class”?

When Trump was first elected, we heard over and over about all those workers that take a shower after they have spent their 8 hours at work.  The commentary back then was non-stop about how those hard working Americans had been forgotten and left behind.

Today, we don’t hear much about that “working class”.

The reality is that the Trump years have, so far at least, done little for hourly wage earners. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), real hourly wages overall dropped between July 2017 and July 2018, and they dropped for mid-wage workers, too. This is not at all the “winning” that Trump promised.

The Trump tax cut was mostly for the super wealthy and those corporations that were “supposed to take those cuts and increase wages”.  They have instead, as expected, used that tax cut to buy back their stock or to pay out dividends to their stock holders.

Oh sure, there were a few companies that gave one-time bonuses and some did give some wage increases.  However, the same BLS has stated that the nation’s inflation rate was higher than those few wage increases, so the average worker actually lost some purchasing power.

Therefore, even though the president is falsely touting gains in wages, wages overall didn’t start increasing after Trump was elected.

What has become evident is that the Trump administration has not focused on the real welfare of the American worker.

One op-ed writer correctly wrote: “Trump’s politics is that he talks like a labor leader but governs like a corporate lobbyist. His tax cut showered benefits on the wealthiest segments of society and produced deficits so massive that Republicans are now offering cuts in social benefits that go in significant part to, yes, the working class.”

That one statement is completely accurate.

One exception may be Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico. We all await the final details, including whatever its enforcement mechanisms will be. But Trump’s freezing Canada out during the initial round of discussions would undermine any potential good in the deal and it won’t work.

The reality is that the president cannot unilaterally drop Canada out of the NAFTA agreement.  Trump said he was going to call the new deal with Mexico an “agreement between the US and Mexico” and he would drop the name NAFTA.  But only Congress can remove Canada from the North American Free Trade Agreement, i.e.: NAFTA.  Legally, Canada cannot be removed from the negotiations, unless the US Congress agrees.

The tentative provisions regarding wages in the Mexico deal do appear to be real improvements from the perspective of the workers.  Perhaps only a Republican president could get away with this as it appears that if a Democratic president tried to do this, they would be called a “Socialist” based on what has been proposed so far.

There has always been a false element in Trump’s so called: common-man appeal.  And the gender reference in that sentence is not an accident, as Trump has a different approach toward women labor workers.  We also can’t forget that with Trump, we must also admit that his working class uses the adjective “white” as being the largest part of it.

The typical Trump stump speech will feature a fear-mongering that smothers any uplifting to the total working class.  Trump's falsehoods about immigrants will outnumber all the real truths about the many challenges to America’s middle-class living standards.

Trump’s ideology, such as it is, has never been about the classes.  His passion has always been about race, culture and immigration.  Most post-election studies have suggested that Trump’s actual supporters were much more energized by these issues than by the national economics.

The reality is that all politicians need to look at the working class as a whole.  That means they must include the many wage earners that are African-American and Latino.  They have been hit the hardest by automation and industrialization, but President Trump doesn’t want to hear that truth.

Yes, it is true that white workers have had their living standards stagnated and worsened.  As David Cooper noted in an analysis for the Economic Policy Institute, that 8.6% of white workers were paid poverty wages in 2017.  But the figures were 19.2% for Hispanic workers and 14.3% for African American workers.

Broadly shared economic growth will not cure our nation’s social tensions.  Yes, it would ease them, but that growth needs to reach across the lines of both class and race.

The truth is that Trump’s claims that his campaign promises were kept, and that is a false claim.  He is not solving this major problem and we need to learn the lessons we have experienced from Trump’s election.

Today, there is wide imbalance in regional growth, not only between the states but also within them, and they aggravate the already profound divisions that ail us all.

These radical, uneven economic fortunes are damaging individuals and families. But they also destroy whole communities, engulfing them in vicious cycles as local institutions, from churches to unions to civic groups, are decimated.

Labor Day celebrates the power of the working class in support of their efforts for the dignity of work.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump has made such efforts much more difficult, not less.

Copyright G.Ater 2018