Made America Great Again Hat Obama

By NICK BUFFIE

During the 2016 presidential entrada, Donald Trump ran nether the slogan "Brand America Slap-up Again". Although the outset three words of the slogan were uncontroversial, the last one – "Over again" – led many observers to wonder what foretime era Trump was referencing. His harshest critics claimed that he was referring to a time when racism was rampant and African-Americans didn't have the correct to vote. His supporters said that his message was more economic than racial: Trump was harkening back to an era when blue-neckband jobs were plentiful, opioids were scarce, wages were growing, houses were cheap, and parents could assume that their children would lead better lives than they did. But fifty-fifty if we accept the beneficial estimation of #MAGA, it'due south hard non to find that Trump's rhetoric is just that – rhetoric. When it comes to actually making America great again, the superlative of success is Barack Obama, not Donald Trump.

When discussing the origins of the slogan, the president has emphasized the economic statement more than than the racial one. "I felt that jobs were hurting," he said. "[Make America Great Again] meant jobs. It meant industry. And it meant military strength. It meant taking intendance of our veterans. Information technology meant and then much."

Trump has argued that the U.S. struck the right residual on these issues in the "late '40s and '50s" – a time when African-Americans and other minorities were strongly discriminated against, but also when the economy was booming, manufacturing jobs were plentiful and growing, disparities in both income and wealth were declining among Blackness and White Americans though gaps still existed, and nearly all men of prime working age held jobs.

After the tardily 1960s, the U.Due south. entered an era of ascension inequality and slowing growth. Politicians cut taxes for the wealthy, outset those revenue enhancement cuts with higher taxes on poor and working-course Americans, attacked labor unions, deregulated Wall Street, sat idly by every bit ascent healthcare costs chipped away at workers' earnings, refused to increase the minimum wage in line with aggrandizement or rising worker productivity, and kept the tipped minimum wage at $2.xiii/hour for most thirty years.

This trend of pain the vulnerable while enriching the affluent continued unabated for decades. Then one singular President broke with that trend past enacting a series of businesslike, intelligent reforms which greatly improved the lives of America's most vulnerable citizens.

That President's proper noun was Barack Obama.

By the fourth dimension Obama left function, lower- and center-class Americans were experiencing faster income growth than the rich for the first time in decades. But subsequently Donald Trump arrived at the White House, household income growth shifted away from the poor back into the hands of the wealthy:

This shouldn't come up as much of a surprise. For all the give-and-take of how impersonal forces such every bit technological advancement, globalization, and more have contributed to ascent inequality, information technology's clear that the distribution of income growth has always had a somewhat partisan flavor:

Obama and Trump illustrate this dissimilarity perfectly. Obama expanded tax credits for depression- and middle-income Americans; Trump cut taxes for the rich. Obama enhanced financial regulation to hold bankers (rather than taxpayers) accountable for fiscal crises; Trump made it easier for financial advisers to lie to their customers. When it comes to economic populism, Trump has the rhetoric, but Obama has the results.

The unmarried issue which all-time highlights this divide is healthcare reform. In order to make healthcare more affordable for disadvantaged Americans, Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (also known equally "Obamacare") into law in 2010. The ACA had two aims: commencement, it would give insurance coverage to poor Americans struggling with the cost of private insurance; and second, it would deadening the rate of healthcare cost growth.

Obamacare succeeded in both of its aims. Through its success, it besides boosted the incomes of the poor. The ACA subsidized healthcare coverage for uninsured Americans with incomes below 400% of the federal poverty line and paid for these subsidies with tax increases on investment income (which goes disproportionately to the wealthy) and earnings above $250,000.[i] The Brookings Institution, when analyzing the directly redistributionary effects of the ACA, found that the law significantly increased after-taxation incomes for Americans in the bottom fifth of the income distribution:

The ACA also boosted the incomes of the poor in a more subtle fashion. By reining in the ever-ascent costs of health insurance, the ACA actually increased wages at the lesser of the income distribution. From an employer's perspective, $1 in wellness insurance premiums costs merely as much as $1 in wages, so rising premiums tend to crowd out wage growth. Just when premiums autumn, more of the money employers prepare aside for labor goes to wages. Furthermore, since the fixed cost of wellness insurance represents a greater share of compensation for depression-wage workers than for high-wage ones, falling premiums atomic number 82 to stronger relative wage gains for the poor than for the rich.

Employer spending on health insurance had been ascension as a share of total labor costs for over seven decades before the ACA's toll-containment provisions took effect in 2010. Merely when Obamacare was enacted, that trend reversed itself. From 2010 to 2016, employers began shifting compensation away from health insurance towards higher wages. Encouragingly, earnings grew the fastest for low-wage employees.

Just in 2017, Trump stuck a pocketknife in this progress. His assistants halted the ACA's "price-sharing reduction" (CSR) payments to depression-income Americans saddled with high out-of-pocket costs, which had the two-fold effect of diminishing the government subsidy to the poor and increasing wellness insurance premiums. This outcome simply "makes America peachy once again" if y'all believe that wage stagnation for the poor is an American virtue.

Donald Trump claims that he wanted to make the economic system work for poor and middle-grade Americans – the same people who had been hurt by changes in the economy after the late 1950s. There is but i problem with that theory: Donald Trump didn't demand to Make America Great Once more. Barack Obama already did.

[i] The revenue enhancement increment applies to annual family earnings above $250,000 and almanac individual earnings above $200,000.

Nick Buffie is a get-go-year Master's in Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). Before coming to HKS, Nick spent 3 years working at ii economic policy think tanks in Washington, DC. His research on health intendance reform, tax policy, labor markets, and other topics has been cited in theNew York Times,theWashington Post, Meet the Press, National Public Radio, and other nationally syndicated media outlets.

Edited by Nusheen Ameenuddin

murphycomenclater.blogspot.com

Source: https://ksr.hkspublications.org/2019/03/22/barack-obama-made-america-great-again/

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