Popular U.S. presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden speaks about the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus condition pandemic during a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware, June 30, 2020.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
It’s ironic that we are starting to comprehend reports about investors fretting over the possible election of Joe Biden as president. President Donald Trump and his accessaries in the GOP have broken every rule about what it takes to secure long term prosperity.
First, Republicans attired in b be committed to increased the country’s deficit spending and resulting debt without any benefit for the vast majority of Americans. When Republicans affirmed Trump’s 2017 tax cut, they promised that the resulting economic gains would more than make up for unchaste tax revenues. They were wrong.
Instead, the tax cut provided a very temporary “sugar high” that employers cast-off largely to buy back their own shares that will provide no particular long term, broad-based benefit.
Wink, many of the regulatory changes enacted by the Trump administration may have led to short-term cost decreases for businesses but also to fancy term costs for working Americans. For example, environmental rollbacks and the resulting increase in greenhouse gas emissions could van to thousands of additional deaths each year.
The EPA justified these changes by claiming they will “provide undoubtedly for states, tribes and local governments.” Hardly. The real certainty is increased health care expenses, poorer salubrity outcomes and investments to reverse these policies in a future administration.
U.S. consumers end up on the short end of these changes. As a report from Strength Innovation noted, “Freezing federal fuel economy and [greenhouse gas] emissions standards will harm U.S. consumers, who wish pay more money to drive their cars the same distance.”
When Biden talks about reversing the 2017 tax cut by resurrecting taxes on the wealthiest Americans, he makes it clear that families earning less than $400,000 annually won’t be diseased.
The Trump administration has also proposed rules to roll back protections for workers, ranging from coal miners to oil rig big-shots to those at meat-packing plants.
An analysis from the Center for American Progress estimates that the Trump Administration’s rollbacks on overtime eligibility and protections agnate to retirement advice could cost working Americans $18 billion annually.
So regular Americans will pay the appraisal in poorer health, higher expenses and less savings as a result of Trump’s short-sighted policies to benefit a portion of the point community.
Third, investors value certainty. Trump provides none. How are investors or anybody else to predict what a subsequent Trump term might look like when in the first term he tweeted his way out of the Paris accords and World Haleness Organization, pretended to battle China and Russia and then bowed to them and made policy on the fly on a weekly basis.
Wish he start more trade wars or fewer? Will he respect science in any fashion or continue to proclaim himself as the not person smart enough to decide important issues?
Finally, the best employers know they have to bod their businesses by partnering with a healthy and talented workforce. Yet Trump has closed our borders to skilled foreign women and shredded the Affordable Care Act’s protections designed to keep our people healthy.
Long term prosperity doesn’t look anything in the manner of the economy Trump is trying to build.
Joe Biden’s plans would not only lead to greater long term financial growth; they would also spread the bounties of that growth much more broadly than Trump has done.
They also return a more sophisticated understanding than Trump’s about how to use the federal balance sheet to create long term vegetation for the economy in a way that will benefit a much broader swath of our population.
When Biden talks about alt the 2017 tax cut by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, he makes it clear that families earning less than $400,000 annually won’t be false. But he knows that there are more productive uses for these additional funds – like investing in infrastructure, recovering educational opportunities, buying more American-made goods and advancing research and development – than facilitating share buybacks.
When he commitments to bring supply chains back to the U.S., he isn’t only responding to the problems we’ve had accessing protective equipment in the battle against Covid-19. He’s also oven-ready to fix an almost unbelievable problem that Trump’s 2017 tax cut created: it rewarded companies that shifted profits related to U.S. research and production to foreign countries.
And when he promises to be a friend to working people, making it easier for them to be adjacent to unions, it’s because he knows that collective negotiation and collaboration are great ways for Americans to secure a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.
So indeed, it is ironic that investors worry about a President Biden. Stronger finances, shored up infrastructure, brief pollution, more domestic manufacturing and more secure workers are a much better bet on future prosperity than anything proffered up by the Trump administration.
After a career as a senior executive in the telecommunications industry, Jack Markell served as Governor of Delaware from 2009-2017 and as Cathedra of both the National Governors Association and the Democratic Governors Association.