Let's take a look at his most recent endeavor:
By now, it’s almost a commonplace to say that Trump has systematically betrayed the white working class voters who put him over the top.I guess if by commonplace, he means that his statement is the first time I have actually heard this, then I guess it's commonplace. I am also very curious if Paul Krugman is aware that Trump holds the highest rating with his Party of any President since George W Bush in the aftermath of 9-11. If he has betrayed his voters, then I guess those voters don't seem very aware of the betrayal.
He ran as a populist; he’s governed as an orthodox Republican.Love him or hate him, most everyone will agree that Trump has actually governed as close to how he campaigned as any President we have seen. Trump has kept an amazing amount of promises, including (the very important promise of) selecting two Supreme Court Justices from his campaign issued list of Justices (no Judge Judy as some critics suggested). He also promised tariffs (go figure), he promised to leave the Paris agreement, he promised to leave TTP, as well as slashing federal regulations. Ironically, many of the things he is criticized for by the media as bad political moves are specifically things he campaigned on.
Many people have made this point with respect to the Trump tax cut, which is so useless to ordinary workers that Republican candidates are trying to avoid talking about it.
Uh huh... according to actual real world statistics GOP groups and candidates had run nearly 18,000 spots as of April of 2018 (according to a USA Today analysis). Millions have been spent already specifically on the tax cuts, and the mid-term campaigns have hardly started.What appears to be the second most popular GOP ad will feature Nancy Pelosi and her ridiculous comments about tax-cut "crumbs" as well as her support for MS-13 gangs.
Make no mistake, the tax cuts will be a big part of the 2018 midterms, and the GOP will specifically aim to put the recent GDP and wage growth and tax cuts into the same advertising every chance they get.
But I think we should be seeing more attention devoted to the way Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court fits into this picture. The Times had a good editorial on Kavanaugh’s anti-worker agenda, but by and large the news analyses I’ve seen focus on his apparently expansive views of presidential authority and privilege.Again, how can any one person miss the point so often and by so far? People (such as myself) who want "conservative" Judges, are not interested in that Judge pushing a "conservative agenda". We don't care about specific individual issues or demand that a Judge meet a particular litmus test. That's how liberals think and that's how liberals react. What most conservatives want are Justices who do not legislate from the bench, do not feel that the constitution changes to the whims and desires of those who wear the robes, and who are willing to rule objectively on issues, relying on the Constitution, stares decisis, and common sense. We are willing to accept that they will sometimes rule against what we might "want" to see, if what we "want" to see doesn't fit into what the law and the constitution states.
And this betrayal matters much more for workers than, say, Trump’s trade bluster. There’s growing evidence that wage stagnation in America — the very stagnation that angers Trump voters — isn’t being driven by impersonal forces like technological change; to an important extent it’s the result of political changes that have weakened workers’ bargaining power.Ironically, there was a hardly publicized article that came out today in Market Watch, that reported that wage and benefit growth as at the highest percentage it has seen in ten years.
The numbers: American workers are finally reaping the benefits of the lowest unemployment rate and best jobs market in decades: Wages and benefits are rising at the fastest pace in a decade. The employment cost index rose 0.6% in the second quarter, a tick below the MarketWatch estimate of 0.7%. More important, the cost of worker compensation in the form of pay and benefits edged up to 2.8% to mark the biggest yearly gain since mid-2008.
So I guess poor Paul is a day late and a dollar short on that criticism. But he is a Nobel Peace Prize winner in economics for predicting an economic future that never happened... so I guess he will always have that going for him.
