Post-Trump priorities: Invert Trump's tax changes (5)

The fifth of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is:

Invert Trump’s tax changes, to increase taxes on the rich and lower them on the middle class.

Because the Democrats are currently so beholden to wealthy donors and have been addicted to neoliberal thinking on economic policy, including the chronic austerity economics symbolized by Maggie Thatcher’s famous TINA motto: There Is No Altervatuve.

But there are alternatives to austerity economics. And there is no law of nature, and little if any actual experience, to show that simply freeing the wealthiest segment of society from any obligation to pay taxes to support their country produces optimal economic results.

Even putting it in terms of little evidence is giving too much credit to the notion. It may optimize the desires of the One Percent. But societies just don’t work that way.

By contrast, the historical record tells us clearly that the state can wield its power to discipline capital and meet existential threats. As talk of a Green New Deal evokes, the state successfully redirected the productive capacity of the U.S. economy under FDR [1933-1945]. During World War II, the state engaged in even more direct economic planning, using instruments such as price controls and rationing. And the U.S. state has a long and creditable—though sometimes underappreciated—history of nationalizing politically obstructive capital interests. Similar moves were achieved in Britain under Clement Attlee, with steel and coal nationalization as well as the creation of the National Health Service. The point is that democratic governments have exercised sufficient power in the face of grand challenges in the past, and they can do so again. [my emphasis] (2)

No billionaire TechBro that I know of is likely to admit to seeing things that way.

But the biggest is not metaphysical but political. Guinan and O’Neill look at the problem from a progressive perspective:

So what’s the path forward? The electoral defeats of [Jeremy] Corbyn [in Britain] and [Bernie] Sanders [in the US]—and the intense hostility that they encountered from the political center—show that it is not enough to articulate a viable economic strategy when the balance of political forces is so solidly arrayed against it. Large chunks of the liberal, centrist camp are simply not willing to work as junior partners in a left-led political alliance, even if the cost is electoral losses to the neopopulist right. The left must face this fact head on as it builds a strategy to win. The task constitutes a generational challenge, but it must be done. [my emphasis]

And in this context, the political center in the US is not some bipartisan blob. The Republican Party is thoroughly Trumpified and completely in thrall to the sort of corrupt kleptocracy that Trump 2.0 represents. The Democratic centrists, or ConservaDems as they are sometimes called, will have to be willing to wrench themselves away from austerity economics and get behind a new edition of New Deal/Great Society economics.

In conjunction with embracing a more social-democratic or welfare-state approach, the next Democratic Administration has to stop playing dumb games that pay homage to austerity-economics notions. Like passing programs that go into effect immediately and yield visible result to large portions of the public, rather than backload the benefits to meet the Democrats’ self-imposed pay-as-you-go requirement that no actual voters care about or understand – nor should they understand anything about pay-go except that it’s a public-relations scam. We’re seeing that now with Biden’s successful Build Back Better program, whose benefits was backloaded over just that PR schtick. Now Trump 2.0 is sequestering the funds and lots of people will have the impression that Build Back Better was just a big bad flop.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025.

(2) Joe Guinan, Joe & O’Neill, Martin (2024): No Substitute for State Power. Boston Review Spring 2024. <https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/climate-state-and-utopia/no-substitute-for-state-power/> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).