- President Trump is launching a series of executive orders that are theoretically designed to reduce the economic burden of the coronavirus pandemic for Americans.
- But the orders – from the meager impetus of unemployment to the tax cuts – do little for truly working Americans and mostly help the rich.
- Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit the Business Insider website for more stories.
The much-delayed plan by President Donald Trump to inflict the economic damage caused by COVID-19 did not do much to help the 50 million Americans due to work by coronavirus. And it’s clear that Trump’s “plan” uses the only tool in the GOP drawer: tax cuts for the rich.
Too late, too little
If you follow home, Trump promised voters a “great” plan to deal with the fallout from the COVID-19 crisis nearly five and a half months ago. Now, out of ideas and almost completely disconnected from the dire reality of this national pandemic, the White House is rolling out a set of dubious “relief” proposals in the form of executive orders that actually deliver less financial support to American families then they received from the bipartisan CARES Act in March.
The surreal centerpiece of Trump’s big business bailout is a 50% cut in weekly emergency room payments to regular people from the impulse $ 600 a week to just $ 300 a week. Yes, you read that right. Instead of passing a bill for a full-fledged, bilingual benefit designed to keep working-class and middle-class families fed and housed under the pandemic, Republicans simply rely on Trump and slaughter it.
The Trump plan not only cuts the payments of the needlessness for CARES law, but it also seeks to shift more of the funding tax to state money. The White House has since supported some of these demands, but even the revised edition is still fierce for state governments.
That while both red and blue states are struggling to keep their finances afloat amid an unusual strain on public health resources, the White House and Republicans in DC are ready to go down and lose more of the financial and logistical weight of handing over this crisis to states and small towns the least able to handle it.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told the U.S. people that it would probably only be “a few days” before states resume the now-stopped COVID-19 unemployment benefits, but weeks later, payments have not begun in many states and improved controls for the most people don’t go out for weeks anymore.
A nonsensical tax cut
That’s not the only problem for Trump’s crazy “recovery program”.
Social security benefits are paid to millions of Americans through Social Security trust funds, which in turn are largely funded through tax breaks. As economists and public policy experts have pointed out, paying the tax bill, as Trump has suggested, would be devastating to Social Security funds.
With Trump pursuing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by four points in senior-state states like Florida, it would seem like a tedious time for Trump to propose the transfer of Social Security trust funds to fund business backs.
And no one in the White House can explain how a tax cut helps the millions of Americans who are unemployed and therefore unable to benefit from a reduction in payroll tax rates.
But the move makes much more sense when you think about it in the context of the GOP’s endless war over programs like Social Security.
Trump gave the game away in a heated press conference, where he promised to “permanently eliminate” the payment tax in his second term, along with Social Security as we know it. It’s not hard to imagine one of Trump’s elite country club members whispering this half-baked idea in the president’s ear in a round of golf.
But the cheers of country club lounge lizards are not the same as votes in Congress, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the transparent greed of Trump’s tax scheme for Trump even haunts some Republicans in the Senate. Sen Sebr. Ben Sasse described Trump’s proposed giveaway as an “unconstitutional slop.” House Finance Minister Chuck Grassley warned that Social Security raiding to reward the ultra-rich “poses a public relations problem.”
Fails the Americans who need it most
Unfortunately, for millions of Americans in dire need, most of Trump’s “recovery plan” falls into place upon inspection.
Take the executive order that Trump claims will ban ‘eviction’ during the pandemic. 30 million Americans nationwide are on the verge of eviction in what NPR called a severe “pandemic for the homeless.” There’s only one problem: Trump’s executive order does not actually prohibit any eviction!
“Trump’s mandate does not yet prohibit redundancies, nor does it provide rental assistance,” an NPR report found. That’s because Trump cannot legally step on the toes of Congress – the only body empowered to pass laws on issues such as bans on dismissal or relief.
Like so much of Trumpism, the big reveal was simply a hollow floor designed to shrink the American people. But unlike the abstract social problems that Trump normally deals with, voters will notice when promised stimulus checks and support for eviction do not appear.
Signing Executive Orders may be mandatory programming for cable news, but it does not provide a single dollar to families who are forced to make difficult choices between paying rent or feeding their children.
Trump and Senate Republicans have abdicated their leadership role in fighting the coronavirus. Instead, Republicans are using an unusual unemployment crisis to advance their sought-after tax cuts agenda. That it falls to Joe Biden and Congress Democrats to offer a real way out of our national nightmare.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and senior contributor to Millennial Politics. He appears regularly on NBC News Now, Fox News, and Bloomberg Radio. Follow him on Twitter @TheMaxBurns
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author (s).
