At the conclusion of his “Here’s my take” on his Sunday, February 19, 2017 GPS program, Fareed Zakaria referenced how Roman leaders maintained control over the masses. Their strategy was to give them bread to eat and a circus to watch and then the people would be happy enough to not rebel.

Zakaria suggested that Donald Trump is utilizing the same strategy with the American people, or at least with his political base. The problem, according to Zakaria, is that while Trump is providing plenty of circus, he’s very short on the bread. To Zakaria, this could provide the death knell of the Trump administration.

As wise and scholarly as Zakaria is, I suggest that he read (or likely re-read) Thomas Frank’s 2007 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas. The subtitle to Frank’s book is “How conservatives won the heart of America” and that tells us a lot. Frank does not say that conservatives addressed the economic needs of the bottom 50%. In other words, conservatives did not give modern Americans the equivalent of the Roman bread that the emperors gave to their subjects.

Wikipedia summarizes “What’s the Matter with Kansas”:

According to the book, the political discourse of recent decades has dramatically shifted from social and economic equality to the use of “explosive” cultural issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, which are used to redirect anger toward “liberal elites.”

Against this backdrop, Frank describes the rise of political conservatism in the social and political landscape of Kansas, which he says espouses economic policies that do not benefit the majority of people in the state.

Another foreshadowing of what Trump is doing was offered a year later by candidate Barack Obama at a San Francisco fundraiser:

And it’s not surprising then they [blue collar workers in small-town America, and elsewhere] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Today marks one month since Donald Trump was inaugurated. He is following the insight of Thomas Frank (Kansas book) and challenging Zakaria’s interpretation of Roman rule. Trump is long on giving his base the “guns and God” for which they yearn. He has really done little to provide economic benefit to blue collar workers, who almost by definition, do not profit by whatever gains the stock market is making to further please Trump’s wealthy friends.

Reaching as far back as Ronald Reagan, Republicans have done little to generate economic benefits for the “forgotten Americans.” On the other hand, during Republican rule, the economic condition of the 50% has not gotten significantly worse – except for one instance. At the end of George W. Bush’s term, forgotten Americans were taking a bite when as much as 700,000 jobs were being lost a month. Bush was paying the price of fighting two wars without paying for them, all the while letting Wall Street operate without necessary regulations. The great recession of 2007-2009 was one time when what went wrong on Wall Street definitely impacted those living or working on Main Street.

During the first month of the Trump administration, Wall Street has continued to soar as it did through the Obama presidency. The January unemployment figures were good. But one month does not make a presidency.

Trump’s clown show / circus continues to entertain his base. While liberals abhor Trump’s bullying of the press, most Trump supporters are either amused or indifferent. Regardless of what he says, he puts on a good show for those who like low-brow entertainment.

Based on recent history, no matter how much Trump pisses off the media and progressive to moderate Democrats, he will stand in good stead, so long as the economy does not tank. But he is challenging international trade order and seems to be oblivious to what technology and artificial intelligence are doing to the fabric of our economy. The economic stimulus that he promised as he spoke of the numerous infrastructure problems in America is not seeing the light of day, and if it did, Congressional Republicans would be unlikely to accept.

Because most progressives actually care about the well-being of the American people, they face a problem that Republicans rarely do. Faced with a Faustian bargain, would progressive like to see the standard of living for the bottom 50% improve, even if it would keep Trump’s popularity high within his base? With Mitch McConnell as the prime cheerleader, we know that Republicans easily foreswear the well-being of the people for their political gain.

What we do know is that life is complicated and does not lend itself to easy answers. As the Trump circus featuring God and guns continues, there is economic uncertainty. Maybe the Romans were right, maybe Fareed Zakaria was right, maybe Thomas Frank was right. One thing is clear. Progressive should worry, whether the economy sustains or tanks.

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It’s a familiar script:

1. The Senate fails to pass a bill because even despite near uniform support from Democrats, the proposal does not come close to the 60 votes necessary to block a filibuster.

2. The bill has no chance in the House because, if the bill might help those in need, the Republicans have no interest in it.

3. The original bill addressed the issue in a watered-down manner, and even if it passed, the problem would only be half-addressed.

Once again this was the case earlier in April 2012 with the so-called Buffett Rule, a proposal to reform the United States tax code. The rule was the brainchild of Warren Buffett, the world’s third wealthiest individual. It was quickly adopted by President Barack Obama and others, including former President William Clinton.

Buffett, an investor based in Omaha, was appalled when he learned several years ago that his secretary was paying a higher income tax rate than he was. While he did not reveal his secretary’s income, we know that Buffett’s net wealth is well over $40 billion and has been known to increase (or fall) as much as eight to ten billion dollars a year.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put the Buffett rule to a vote. It “passed,” 51-45, with one Democrat, Senator David Prior of Arkansas who is up for re-election later this year, voting against it. One Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, voted for the bill. But even with the dynamics of this 2% bi-partisanship, the vote came nine votes short of the necessary 60 votes to stave off a filibuster.

The Buffett Rule, as proposed by the Harry Reid and supported by President Obama, would have put a 30 percent minimum tax on millionaires. The idea behind the tax was fairness, not significantly reducing the federal deficit. The bill would have been estimated to raise $47 billion over the next ten years, which is approximately one-tenth of one percent of the anticipated  $45 trillion federal spending increase over the next decade.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, who is as brilliant an economist as he is an expert of foreign affairs thought that the Buffett bill would have had limited benefits. He said:

My problem with it is that what we really need is comprehensive tax reform. We have what I would describe as the world’s worst tax code. It is the longest, the most complicated, riddled with loopholes, exceptions and deductions – all of which are fundamentally institutionalized corruption. They are a way that Congress is able to reward powerful constituents by giving them what seem to be small giveaways in the tax code but which are, of course, government grants often amounting to hundreds and millions and billions of dollars in perpetuity (because unlike appropriations, these do not come up for review every year; once you put in a tax exemption or preferential tax treatment, it exists forever).

Zakaria goes on to say, “I would be much more comfortable with the Buffett Rule if it were part of a larger tax reform strategy.

One of the largest loopholes in the proposed bill is one that has widespread popular support. Unlike the regulations of today’s tax code, under the Buffett Rule, wealthy people would be able to deduct an unlimited amount of money for charitable purposes. There would be no limitations on tax deductions. This would mean that Mitt Romney could give an unlimited amount of money to the Mormon Church without any tax penalty. Similarly, a donor to health clinics for the poor distributed across the United States could donate billions without any tax restrictions.

The fact that the three wealthiest individuals in the world (Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Buffett) are all progressives and supportive of the Democrats’ plans to reform the tax code, is of little or no consequence to Republicans. GOP members of Congress and other powerful individuals in the Republican Party have plenty of other sources of money including the infamous Koch Brothers. But perhaps more importantly, and a factor that may be to the credit of Republicans, many on the extreme right are willing to fall on the sword for principle. It may not matter that the principles are based on protecting the wealthy and undermining the needs of the poor. If there is an opportunity to be insensitive to those most in need, they are often willing to seize the moment and sacrifice efforts to even share in the wealth of the world’s wealthiest individuals (still one of the great mysteries of the world). Kudos to the Republicans who stand up for principle, but an ‘F’ to them when it comes to exercising a social conscience. The combination may work for many Republicans, but not for those most in need. This is not only odd; it’s most unfortunate.

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Fully understanding economics is definitely above my pay grade, but I have plenty of company with that, including the best of our economists, the ones who are humble. So as another fallible observer of the American economy, I’ll try to make a little sense of three recent additions to our body of economic knowledge.

1. On June 2, we learned that the recent trend of creating approximately 175,000 private sector jobs in the American economy was broken when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 54,000 new jobs in May. To put that in perspective, if one company, McDonald’s, had not hired 60,000 in May, we would have had negative job growth.

2. The Washington Post, with Bloomberg Business, reported a new study on where the jobs are four- and-a-half years after the recent (or current) recession began in December 2006.

3. Fareed Zakaria, a gentleman who has a remarkable ability to make sense of both foreign affairs and economics, has penned an article in TIME Magazine called, “The Future of Innovation: Can America Keep Pace?”

The United States seems to live in a duality of the 24-hour news cycle and the four-year presidential cycle. In the case of the poor job figures for May 2011, the emphasis turned to presidential politics. Had the political strength that Barack Obama had built since the beginning of last year’s Lame Duck session of Congress hit a bump on the road? Republican geniuses like Mitt “I Believe in America, and I’m Running for President” Romney asserted the America is “inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” Maybe he’s Kenyan, learned the metric system first, and has difficulty converting to the British system of measurement that is commonly used in the United States. He seems to be blind to the damage that Wall Street has done to the American economy. Their mischief ratcheted up when the government loosened the reins of oversight and allowed the financial moguls to drift so many miles further into unfettered capitalism that they had traveled well over the horizon and were no longer in sight.

The dip in employment growth may be caused by something as benign as inexplicable cycles, to structural problems that have been created with bi-partisan failure to consider jobs as the key issue facing Americans. Republicans continue to grasp the misbegotten idea that if the wealthy have more money, they will use it to hire more American workers. Their failure to do so is why the stock market is benefitting them by being close to pre-recession figures, where employment has plateaued at a level well below December 2006 figures. Since this recession began, five college classes have graduated, each facing a job market far more daunting that what existed when their parents entered the job market.

Upon taking office, President Barack Obama worked with Congress to fashion a $700 billion stimulus package. Assessments of it range from the utterly absurd position of many Republicans, “The stimulus has created no new jobs” to the timidity of most Democrats, “We cannot afford another stimulus.”

As Tulane Professor Melissa Harris-Perry stated, the stimulus was very effective when money went directly from the federal government to individual Americans. One of the prime examples was the “cash for clunkers” program, which provided real economic benefits to individuals who traded in gas-guzzling cars for newer, more fuel efficient ones. The stimulus has been ineffective when states such as Florida simply refuse the money out of some arcane principle, or when states take the money and embed it in their entrenched bureaucracies. What is needed is another stimulus, perhaps two, that have the federal government directly creating jobs, as was the case in Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”

The Washington Post with Bloomberg Business piece analyzes job changes in a variety of sectors since the recession began. Perhaps the sector that is truest to free-market capitalism is mining and logging, where employment has almost directly followed oil prices. There have also been increases in education and health service, but it is not clear whether the newly hired are truly teachers or medical practitioners, as opposed to bureaucrats. Manufacturing is way down and clearly will not recover without New Deal-type remedies. Jobs in construction are down nearly 30%, a reflection of our housing crisis and the lack of investment by businesses. Recovery will not occur without more engagement from the visible hand of government stimulus.

Fareed Zakaria is deeply concerned about America’s decline in innovation. He points out that a recent study of innovation in forty countries from the period of 1999 to 2009, the U.S. came in last. This is a far greater concern than month-by-month employment figures.

Let’s hope that the employment figures for June skyrocket. Whether they do or don’t, the bottom line remains, we have serious structural problems that are unlikely to be solved until we have dramatic action. George Bush showed with gratuitous tax cuts and two unnecessary wars that the federal government was big enough to create many of our current problems. Now is the time to show, as FDR did, that the federal government is the only entity big enough to solve these problems. As citizens, we must give the federal government that mandate.

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