How to Do Nothing but Make It Look Like Something

There are all kinds of nasties in Donald Trump’s proposed $4.4 trillion budget proposal, but there is also a lot of noise for a bill that, as they always say at budget time, is dead on arrival in Congress. Kiss art’s programs goodbye, for example. And Trump’s inane billion dollar plus infrastructure bill – $200 billion from taxpayers – pretty much moves government assets into the private sector (sale or lease, including some of this nation’s major airports) to fund the rest. So what’s best for the public would fall down into how to make a profit (charge the most and spend the least). Given the level of deficit spending, this bill is particularly unlikely to advance.

But the deficit looms large, a huge hypocritical direction for the once fiscally conservative GOP. So what gets cut? Trump’s proposals also chip away at food stamps, Medicaid/Medicare (roughly $554 billion in cuts to Medicare and $250 billion in cuts to Medicaid spending over 10 years), and other social legislation which, oddly enough, benefit his base disproportionately, including a proposed, highly-labor intensive “Blue Apron” suggestion of directly sending food packages to the poor as a significant replacement for those food stamps. Retail grocery chains are throwing their bodies across that one.

But today, I am going to focus on the one arena where Trump has railed in the past, one where ordinary taxpayers not blessed with one percent incomes, would benefit the most: the cost of prescription drugs. Everyone knows Americans pay significantly more for prescription drugs than any other nation on earth. Legislation to reduce prices there and allow those groups who pay for prescription drugs (particularly healthcare exchanges and direct government programs) to negotiate almost always fails as the pharmaceutical industry is among best-funded and most completely organized lobby in Washington.

David Lazarus, writing for the February 13th Los Angeles Times, explains the title of this blog exceptionally well: “Trump’s plan calls for capping how much seniors pay annually for prescription drugs, making generic meds free for low-income seniors and allowing Medicare beneficiaries to share in any rebates offered by drug companies to the middlemen that negotiate costs on behalf of insurers and pharmacies.

“Most of these ideas would require acts of Congress, so that kind of ends the conversation right there. In the 2016 election cycle, the pharmaceutical industry contributed nearly $63 million to candidates on both sides of the aisle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics… Trump’s plan also sidesteps the most obvious and effective measure for tackling sky-high drug prices: allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with drugmakers.

“Republican politicians have consistently shot down any such move, believing, correctly, this would significantly impinge on the drug industry’s ability to rake in profits by fleecing the sick…. Nor does the plan allow for ‘reimportation’ of drugs manufactured in the United States and then sold for far less abroad than to Americans. Republicans also have resisted Democratic proposals to allow Americans to legally buy meds from abroad…

“So his healthcare policy seems to be: Don’t get sick… ‘This is not an ambitious plan for lowering drug prices,’ said Geoffrey Joyce, a pharmaceutical economist at USC… ‘The White House doesn’t want to take on the drug industry,’ he told me. ‘They just want to be able to say that they’re doing something.’... Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters last week that lowering drug prices is ‘a top, top priority for the president.’”

But clearly, this reality is going to hurt Trump’s base more than the average voter. Why do they still maintain unwaveringly support Donald Trump, a lying, promiscuous violator of their religious precepts? Some like to point out their minor tax cuts that clearly obliterate high-tax rich states by severely limiting deducting state and local taxes on their federal return. Others tout the stock market, which has had its share of hiccups of late. Many more point out the fall in the unemployment rate and 2.9% rise in wages, but most of that increase has gone to supervisorial level workers while the average Joe has had flat earning power, uninterrupted, for 30 years.

No, the Germans have a word that describes the base’s underlying motivation for that undying support: schadenfreude. Taking pleasure in the misery and misfortune of others. That mass of low income earners in the base have long since felt abandoned by the rest of society. They seem to sense that their time is past, that irreversible modernity, globalization, automation and complexity have forever passed them by, marginalized their value to society as they watch the rich get richer and Washington continue to ignore them. Basically, it’s over, and they have nothing to lose. So if they cannot have it, they have finally found a subversive force – Donald Trump – who will make life miserable for their “oppressors.”

That Donald Trump is willing to give lip service to their social agenda while consistently benefitting the rich corporate class is tolerable as long as he makes all those non-white, non-evangelical Christians squirm in discomfort. As long as the Great Disruptor makes their oppressors miserable, defies their science, immigration reform, aversion to guns and their elitist educational priorities, they will support him. They revel in the destruction, the swamp draining, noting that Make America Great Again is nothing more than a buzz-phrase for making their enemies miserable. That Trump might be taking down the entire system? So what… as I said they have nothing to lose.

Until the rest of America understands this underlying motivation, one that clearly threatens the survivability of the nation as a whole, Donald Trump absolutely will continue to make his followers religiously loyal no matter the substance of what he is doing… with the GOP as the “great enablers.”