How little Trump cares for workers — and how much he values corporate swamp monsters — is now on full display

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The Trump pandemic response stimulus plan, shown first to Senate Republicans, proposes $100 billion for workers. The thin gruel Trump’s team proposes recalls famous 1980 Boston Globe headline mocking President Jimmy Carter: More Mush from the Wimp.
Donald Trump may have finally realized the coronavirus pandemic is real, but he hasn’t a clue about the price in lost wages, not to mention lost lives, that Americans workers will pay for his lethargic incompetence.
Workers would get maybe $100 billion, corporations $850 billion. Airlines would get $50 billion, half as much as workers, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told Senate Republicans.
While $100 billion sounds like a big number, its bupkis compared to the scope of the job loss problem.
American workers gross about $150 billion per week, IRS Table 1.4 shows.
Distribute $100 billion equally to the 168 million or so people who earn from $1 to more than $100 million in annual wages and it’s not enough to replace a week’s wages.
Restricting help to the bottom half of workers, who made just under $33,000 in 2018, wouldn’t be much better. Trump’s plan would not even replace two weeks of pay to the more than 83 million low-paid workers.
Trump said Monday that he expected the pandemic to continue into July and August. That would be 24 weeks, not two.
We’ve already seen the Federal Reserve jump in with help for Wall Street, where the large spoons with which bankers used to take in welfare have been replaced with giant buckets.
The Fed slashed bank borrowing rates to as little as zero while offering to trade as much as $700 billion in cash for other securities to ensure financial firms can cover their obligations. Heaven forbid the bankers set aside enough reserves to cover a rainy day or a pandemic.
Bankers first, American workers last is not a Trump era creation. But it is promoted with gusto. And it contradicts the core promise on which Trump beguiled almost 63 million people into casting ballots for him.
Trump was all about “the forgotten men and women” of America, both as a candidate and in his inaugural address.
In accepting the Republican nomination for president in July 2016 Trump declared, “The forgotten men and women of our country — people who work hard but no longer have a voice: I am your voice.”
That promise died as soon as he left the Capitol for the White House.
The man who tried to con us with his absurd claim that coronavirus was a hoax, a “foreign virus,” and that the initial first 15 coronavirus cases in America would soon be zero, and who insisted over the weekend that virus was “under tremendous control” doesn’t have a clue.
Many Americans will die because of his incompetence and denial of reality.
For the majority who survive, even with state jobless benefits, which most workers don’t qualify for, Trump’s economic stimulus is itself a hoax.
Its money aplenty for the swamp monsters Trump promised to slay and starvation wage replacement for their prey.
So maybe instead of “More Mush from the Wimp,” the smart headline would be: Trump Feeds Workers to the Swamp Monsters.