Donald Trump on falling wages: “People need to work really hard”
by digby
From the man who allegedly has the white working class enthralled a look back at the primary debates:
CAVUTO: Mr. Trump, as the leading presidential candidate on this stage and one whose tax plan exempts couples making up to $50,000 a year from paying any federal income taxes at all, are you sympathetic to the protesters cause since a $15 wage works out to about $31,000 a year?
TRUMP: I can’t be Neil. And the and the reason I can’t be is that we are a country that is being beaten on every front economically, militarily. There is nothing that we do now to win. We don’t win anymore.
Our taxes are too high. I’ve come up with a tax plan that many, many people like very much. It’s going to be a tremendous plan. I think it’ll make our country and our economy very dynamic.
But, taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world.
I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum.
But we can not do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.
I wrote a little bit about Trump’s economic “plan” for Salon a couple of weeks ago:
But while it’s obvious that the subtle and not-so-subtle racial messaging are among the primary attractions for Trump voters, they are also responding to an economic appeal, much of which stems from the misconception that because Trump himself is a successful businessman he must know what he’s doing. But as Dave Johnson of Campaign for America’s Future pointed out, many of the white working class folk who believe Trump’s promises to “bring back jobs” would be surprised to know what he actually means by that:
His “plan” is to compete by pitting states against each other to lower wages, particularly by encouraging businesses to move to low-wage anti-union states. Once the lay-offs start, workers will be willing to take big pay cuts to keep their jobs. Johnson shows how Trump believes “companies should continue this in a ‘rotation’ of wage cuts, state to state, until you go ‘full-circle,’ getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then the U.S. will be ‘competitive’ with China and Mexico.
Trump says the U.S. is not “competitive” with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be “competitive” with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won’t send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.
This is Trump’s plan for American workers. To make things worse. He will kill unions, and create a race to the bottom among the states to lower wages so “we” can be competitive with other countries like China and India.
When Trump says “we” by the way, he’s not talking about workers. He’s talking about some global contest in which America must be “rated” number one by arbitrary economic statistics and fear and loathing (what he calls “respect”) from other nations.