National (in)security What a Trump presidency really means for Americans at the edge
Donald Trump�s supporters believe that his election will end business as usual in Washington.
The self-glorifying Trump agrees and indeed his has, so far, been the most unorthodox
presidency of our era, if not any era. It�s a chaotic and tweet-driven administration
that makes headlines daily thanks to scandals, acts of stunning incompetence, rants, accusations,
wild claims, and conspiracy theories. On one crucial issue, however, Trump has been a complete
conformist. Despite the headline-grabbing uproar over Muslim bans and the like, his
stance on national security couldn�t be more recognizable. His list of major threats
� terrorism, Iran, North Korea and China � features the usual suspects that Republicans,
Democrats, and the foreign policy establishment have long deemed dangerous.
Trump�s conception of security not only doesn�t break the mold of recent administrations
� it�s a remarkably fine fit for it. That�s because his focus is on protecting Americans
from foreign groups or governments that could threaten us or destroy physical objects (buildings,
bridges, and the like) in the homeland. In doing so, he, like his predecessors, steers
clear of a definition of �security� that would include the workaday difficulties that
actually make Americans insecure. These include poverty, joblessness or underemployment, wages
too meager to enable even full-time workers to make ends meet, and a wealth-based public
school system that hampers the economic and professional prospects, as well as futures,
of startling numbers of American children. To this list must be added the radical dangers
climate change poses to the health and safety of future citizens.
Trump may present himself as a maverick, but on security he never wavers from an all-too-familiar
externally focused and militarized narrative.
Conjurer-in-chief
Barack Obama wrote a bestselling book titled �The Audacity of Hope.� Perhaps Donald
Trump should write one titled �The Audacity of Wealth.� During the presidential campaign
of 2016 he morphed unashamedly from plutocrat to populist, assuring millions of people struggling
with unemployment, debt and inadequate incomes that he would solve their problems. The shtick
worked. Many Americans believed him. Fifty-two percent of voters who did not have a college
degree chose him. Among whites with that same educational profile, he did even better, winning
67 percent of their votes.
Unemployment, underemployment, stagnant wages and the outsourcing of production (and so
jobs) have hit those who lack a college degree especially hard. Yet many of them were convinced
by Trump�s populist message. It made no difference that he belonged to the wealthiest
0.00004 percent of Americans, if his net worth is the widely reported $3.5 billion, and the
top 0.00002 percent if, as he claims, it�s actually $10 billion.
Former Louisiana Governor Huey Long, perhaps the country�s best-known populist historically
speaking, was born and raised in Winn Parish, a poor part of Louisiana. In the 1930s, his
origins and his far-reaching ideas for redistributing wealth gave him credibility. By contrast,
Trump wasn�t cut from humble cloth; nor in his present reincarnation has he even claimed
to stand for the reallocation of wealth (except possibly to his wealthy compatriots). His
father, Fred Trump, was a multimillionaire who, at the time of his death in 1999, had
a net worth of $250 million, which was divided among his four surviving children. The proportional
allocations are not publicly known, though it�s safe to assume that Donald did well.
He also got his start in business � and it wasn�t even an impressive one � thanks
to lavish help from Fred to the tune of millions of dollars. When he subsequently hit rough
patches, Dad�s connections and loan guarantees helped set things right.
A man who himself benefited handsomely from globalization, outsourcing and a designed-for-the-wealthy
tax code nonetheless managed to convince coal miners in West Virginia and workers in Ohio
that all of these were terrible things that enriched a �financial elite� that had
made itself wealthy at the expense of American workers and that electing him would end the
swindle.
He also persuaded millions of voters that foreign enemies were the biggest threat to
their security and that he�d crush them by �rebuilding� America�s military machine.
Worried about ISIS? Don�t be. Trump would �bomb the shit out of them.� Concerned
about the nuclear arms race? Not to worry. �We�ll outmatch them at every pass and
outlast them all.�
Yet few if any Americans lie awake at night fearing invasion by another country or the
outbreak of nuclear war. Fifteen years after 9/11, terrorism still ranks high on the American
list of concerns (especially, the polls tell us, among Republicans). But that danger is
not nearly as dire as Trump and the U.S. national security state insist it is. A litany of statistics
shows that deaths from car crashes leave death-by-terrorist in the dust, while since 2002 even bee, hornet
and wasp stings have killed more Americans annually in the United States than �Islamic
terrorists.�
Since 9/11, only 95 Americans � 95 too many, let it be said � have been killed in terrorist
attacks in the United States. Not one of the perpetrators was a tourist or someone on another
type of temporary visa, and several were non-Muslims. Nor were any of them refugees, or connected
to any of the countries in Trump�s two Muslim bans. Indeed, as the journalist Nick Gillespie
notes, since the adoption of the 1980 Refugee Act no refugee has been involved in a terrorist
attack that killed Americans.
Still, Trump�s hyperbole has persuaded many in this country that terrorism poses a major,
imminent threat to them and that measures like a 90-day ban on travel to the United
States by the citizens of certain Muslim countries will protect them. (A recent poll shows that
54 percent of the public supports this policy.) As for terrorist plots, successful or not,
by white far-right extremists, the president simply hasn�t felt the urge to say much
about them.
In other words, President Trump, like candidate Trump, embraces the standard take on national
security. He, too, is focused on war and terrorism. Here, on the other hand, are some threats
� a suggestive, not inclusive, list � that genuinely make, or threaten to make, millions
of Americans insecure and vulnerable.
Poverty: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2015, 43 million Americans, 13.5 percent
of the population, lived below the poverty line ($11,700 for an individual and $20,090
for a three-person household) � an increase of 1 percent since 2007, the year before the
Great Recession. For children under 18, the 2015 poverty rate was 19.7 percent. While
that was an improvement on the 21.1 percent of 2014, it still meant that nearly a fifth
of American children were poor.
The working poor: Yes, you can have a job and still be poor if your wages are low or
stagnant or have fallen. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) uses a conservative definition
for these individuals: �People who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force during
the year � either working or looking for work � but whose incomes were below the
poverty level.� Though some studies use a more expansive definition, even by the BLS�s
criteria, there were 9.5 million working poor in 2014.
Even if you work and bring in wages above the poverty line, you may still barely be
getting by. Oxfam reports that 58 million American workers make less than $15 an hour
and 44 million make less than $12 an hour. Congress last raised the minimum hourly wage
to $7.25 in 2007 (and even then included exceptions that applied to several types of workers).
That sum has since lost nearly 10 percent of its purchasing power thanks to inflation.
Wage stagnation and economic inequality: These two conditions explain a large part of the
working-but-barely-making-it phenomenon. Let�s start with those stagnant wages. According
to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), for about three decades after World War II, hourly
wage increases for workers in non-supervisory roles kept pace with productivity increases:
at 91.3 percent and 96.7 percent, respectively. Then things changed dramatically. Between
1973 and 2013, productivity increased by 74.4 percent and wages by only 9.2 percent. In
other words, with wages adjusted for inflation, the average American worker made no more in
2013 than in 1973.
As for economic inequality, the EPI reports that from 1980 to 2013 the income of the top
1 percent of wage earners increased by 138 percent compared to 15 percent for the bottom
90 percent. For those at the lowest end of the wage scale it was even worse. In those
years, their hourly pay actually dropped by 5 percent.
When was the last time you heard Donald Trump talk about stagnant wages or growing economic
inequality, both of which make his most fervent supporters insecure? In reality, the defunding
of federal programs that provide energy subsidies, employment assistance and legal services to
people with low incomes will only hurt many Trump voters who are already struggling economically.
Climate change: There is a scientific consensus on this problem, which already contributes
to droughts and floods that reduce food production, damages property, and threatens lives, not
to speak of increasing the range of forest fires and lengthening the global fire season,
as well as helping spread diseases like cholera, malaria and dengue fever. Trump once infamously
described climate change as a Chinese-fabricated �hoax� meant to reduce the competitiveness
of American companies. No matter that, in recent years, the Chinese government has taken
serious steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, President Trump is gearing up to take the United States out of the climate change
sweepstakes entirely. For instance, he remains determined to withdraw the country from the
2015 Paris Agreement (signed by 197 countries and so far ratified by 134 of them) aimed
at limiting the increase in global temperature to a maximum of two degrees Celsius during
this century. Scott Pruitt, his appointee to run the Environmental Protection Agency,
denies that climate change is significantly connected to �human activity� and is stocking
his agency with climate change deniers of like mind. Needless to say Pruitt didn�t
balk at Trump�s decision to cut the EPA�s budget by 31 percent.
Nor do Trump and his team favor promoting alternative sources of energy or reducing
carbon emissions, even though the United States is second only to China in total emissions
and among the globe�s largest emitters on a per-capita basis. Trump seems poised to
scale back President Obama�s plan to increase the Corporate Annual Fuel Efficiency Standard
� created by the government to reduce average automobile gas consumption � from the present
35.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, end the 2015 freeze on leases for
coal mining on federal land, and ease power plant emission limits. Worse yet, Trump�s
America First Energy Plan calls for producing more oil and gas but contains nary a word
about climate change or a green energy strategy. If you want a failsafe formula for future
environment-related insecurity, this, of course, is it.
Bogus remedies
Candidate Trump certainly did tap into a deepening sense of insecurity about wage stagnation,
the disappearance of good working-class jobs and increasing economic inequality. But in
the classic national security mode, he has artfully framed these problems, too, as examples
of the economic hardship that foreign countries have inflicted on America. And the four remedies
he offers, all rooted in a nationalistic economic outlook, won�t actually help American workers,
could hurt them or are at best cosmetic.
First, he favors renegotiating multilateral trade deals like NAFTA and wasted no time
withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, accords which he believes hurt
American workers. Second, he wants to impose tariffs of 35 percent to 45 percent on imports
from countries such as Mexico and China that he accuses of unfair trade practices. Third,
at least on the campaign trail he pledged to punish countries like China, Japan and
Germany for supposedly devaluing their currencies in order to boost their exports unfairly at
America�s expense. Fourth, he�s high on slapping a border tax on companies that import
from their branches or subcontractors abroad the components needed to make products to
be sold in the United States, as well as on firms that simply import finished products
and sell them locally.
Some of these punitive moves, if actually pursued, will only provoke retaliation from
other countries, harming American exporters and consequently the workers they employ.
Tariffs will, of course, also increase the cost of imported goods, hurting consumers
with low incomes the most, just as taxing U.S. corporations for importing from their
subsidiaries abroad will increase the prices of locally made goods, possibly reducing demand
and so jobs.
Even the nullification of trade pacts, whatever positives might be involved, won�t bring
industries like steel, textiles and basic machine-making that once provided good jobs
for the working class back to the United States. Trump blames China for the decline in manufacturing
employment, as does one of his top economists, Peter Navarro. (Despite holding a Harvard
Ph.D. in economics, Navarro evidently doesn�t grasp that trade deficits don�t have a major
effect on employment and that protectionism doesn�t cut trade deficits.)
What�s really required are policies that help displaced manufacturing workers to get
decent jobs now, while addressing wage stagnancy, which has been significantly aided and abetted
by a sharp decline in union membership in recent decades. According to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, between 1983 and 2015 membership in public-sector unions held reasonably steady.
Not so for private-sector union membership, which plunged from 12 million in 1983 to 7.6
million in 2015. As a result, workers have been increasingly incapable of combatting
wage stagnation through collective bargaining. Tellingly enough, however, as of 2015, the
median weekly paycheck of unionized workers was still 21 percent larger than that of workers
who did not belong to a union.
Consider Trump�s business history when it comes to labor (including the hiring and stiffing
of undocumented workers), as well as the make up of his immensely wealthy, Goldman Sachs-ified
economic team, and the Republican Party�s attitude toward unions. Then ask yourself:
How likely is it that this administration will be well disposed toward unionization
or collective bargaining?
And don�t forget automation, a subject Donald Trump has essentially been mum about. It has
contributed decisively to job loss and wage stagnancy by reducing or even eliminating
the need for labor in certain economic sectors. As economists Michael Hicks and Srikant Devraj
have demonstrated, increased productivity through automation has been far more crucial
in reducing the need for human labor in U.S. manufacturing than outsourced jobs and imports.
Thanks to labor-displacing technologies, U.S. manufacturing output actually increased in
value by 17.6 percent between 2006 and 2013 while the workforce continued to shrink.
Another source of wage stagnancy is rising economic inequality, which stems partly from
the fierce corporate focus since the 1980s on boosting quarterly earnings and paying
dividends that will keep shareholders happy, even if that requires incurring debt, rather
than increasing workers� wages.
Alternative policies
Trump claims that he will create more jobs by lowering the corporate tax rate. At 35
percent � 38.9 percent including the average state tax � the American corporate tax rate
is significantly higher than the global average (29.5 percent). Nonetheless, the familiar
high-corporate-taxes-kill-jobs narrative that Trump trumpets is simplistic. More than 60
percent of American companies are so-called S corporations. They pay no corporate tax:
They pass their profits on to stockholders who then report the gains when filing income
tax returns. And even the corporations that do pay taxes manage to reduce the burden significantly
through such steps as claiming accelerated depreciation on equipment and establishing
offshore companies whose books reflect their profits. As a result, their true tax rate
isn�t anything like 38.9 percent. High corporate taxes aren�t what stops companies from creating
jobs or paying workers more, which means that changing that rate won�t fix any problems,
not for American workers anyway.
There are other solutions to low wages and unemployment, even if President Trump will
never favor them.
Investing more in public education, for example. Local property taxes and state monies still
count heavily in funding public schools. (Federal support is less than 15 percent.) So the quality
of a school can depend greatly on the zip code in which it�s located, especially because
parents in wealthy neighborhoods normally raise more money to help their schools than
their non-affluent counterparts can. School quality can also depend on how wealthy your
state is.
Though other factors doubtless play a role, in general, the better the quality of the
school, the greater the likelihood that a child will go to college and the stronger
his or her income and prospects will be. Increasing federal funding to schools that lack adequate
resources could improve matters. But if you expect President Trump and Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos to consider such a proposition, think again.
Raising the minimum wage significantly could also help reduce income inequality and the
number of working poor. Democrats have favored raising the minimum wage to $10.10, which,
it is believed, would reduce the number of people living in poverty by an estimated 4.6
million. That�s hardly an outlandish proposal. Some experts, like former Labor Secretary
Robert Reich, have called for a minimum wage of $15 an hour, though they are in the minority.
But even certain mainstream economists, like Princeton�s Alan Krueger, support a $12
rate and reject the right-wing claim that it would kill jobs.
Don�t expect the Trump administration (or the GOP) to push for any form of such a policy.
Take a look at the members of the president�s Strategic and Policy Forum (SPF), whose duties
include providing advice on job creation, and you�ll realize that such a relatively
modest goal will be off the table for at least the next four years. You�ll find representatives
from the Blackstone Group, Walmart, IBM, General Motors, Boeing and General Electric in the
SPF, but not one labor advocate. Case closed.
Prepare for business as usual
The net worth of Trump�s cabinet (the president excluded) is $5 billion, and that�s a conservative
estimate (no pun intended). By some calculations, it may be $13 billion. According to Politifact�s
Tom Kertscher, that �modest� $5 billion figure exceeds the net worth of the bottom
one-third of all American families. Now, what likelihood do you think there is that Trump
would ever implement policies that threatened to transform the distribution of wealth and
power in America to the detriment of the economic class from which he and his cabinet hail?
(In that spirit, remember that candidate Trump proposed a tax plan that would focus on the
wealthiest Americans by cutting the top tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent and eliminating
the estate tax, 90 percent of which is paid by the country�s wealthiest 10 percent.)
It�s much easier to scapegoat outsiders, whether China, Japan, Mexico and Germany (whose
government Trump trade adviser Navarro has also accused of currency manipulation), or
undocumented workers who generally hold jobs in the United States that require lower skills,
pay less and that most American citizens avoid. It�s also easier to stick with the standard
militarized conception of national security and, for good measure, hype the perils posed
by Islam, which for Steve Bannon, Trump�s chief political strategist and Stephen Miller,
his senior adviser on policy, amounts to a synonym for extremism and violence, even if
Islamic terrorists pose the most minuscule of threats to most Americans.
Not surprisingly, Trump proposes to increase the country�s already staggering defense
spending for next year by another $54 billion. To put that increment in perspective, consider
that Russia�s total defense spending in 2015 was $66 billion and Britain�s $56 billion,
while the United States already spends more on defense than at least the next seven countries
combined. (In fairness to Trump, Senators John McCain and Mac Thornberry, respectively
the chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee,
want to bulk up the defense budget even more.)
Trump also seems determined to stay the course on America�s forever wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Neither he nor his generals show any sign of abandoning the Obama-era strategy
of whack-a-mole drone strikes and raids by Special Operations forces against terrorist
redoubts around the world (as witness a recent failed special ops raid in Yemen and 24 drone
strikes � half of the maximum number that the United States launched against that country
in any preceding year). Trump has already deployed 400 Marines as well as Army Rangers
to fight ISIS in Raqqa, Syria, and another thousand troops may soon be heading that way.
And General John Nicholson, commander of the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan,
has called for �a few thousand� additional troops for that country.
So expect President Trump to dwell obsessively on threats that have a low probability of
harming Americans, while offering no effective solutions for the quotidian hardships that
actually do make so many citizens feel insecure. Expect, as well, that the more he proves unable
to deliver on his economic promises to the working class, the more he�ll harp on the
standard threats and engage in saber rattling, hoping that a continual atmosphere of emergency
and vulnerability will disarm critics and divert attention from his failures.
In the end, count on one thing: Voters who were drawn to Trump because they believed
he would rein in interventionism abroad and deal with festering problems at home are in
for a disappointment.
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