Monday, September 11, 2017

Trump's Big CON: It's a Family Business (AKA Like Father, Like Daughter, CONt.)

"Ivanka Trump is for working women the way her father is for the working class: In both cases, the Trumps really just want their money.

President Trump’s daughter built her brand around women’s 'empowerment,' by which I mean monetizing the anxieties and insecurities of stressed-out moms. . .

At best [her focus] “women’s issues” are hollow marketing, at worst a con. The game is to say whatever needs to be said to part a mark from her money, and then move on.

It’s a trick Ivanka Trump learned well from her father.

Papa Trump, after all, ran on a platform of helping the fabled Forgotten Man through promises to plump his paycheck, revive his obsoleted jobs, discount his health care and otherwise return him to his former economic and cultural glory.

None of this is happening, of course. It was all a scheme to take the Forgotten Man’s money.

I don’t just mean through the usual chintzy merchandizing route, by selling a spot on a brass plaque in Trump Tower for a $49 donation or hawking the $40 USA hats he wore during his recent Texas photo ops.

I mean the big money: the Forgotten Man’s entitlements.

Trump is hellbent on passing a massive tax cut for the rich. Right now the tax cut looks to be unfunded. Just because it isn’t being paid for now, though, doesn’t mean it will go unpaid-for forever.

Rosy scenario notwithstanding, at some point the U.S. government will have to make good on its accumulating debts, through some combination of future tax hikes and spending cuts. Already congressional Republicans are licking their chops at the prospect of using entitlement and other social-safety-net cuts to pay for lower tax rates for the wealthy, just as they attempted multiple times in (failed) Obamacare repeal bills.

In other words, a Trump is advertising empowerment but delivering its opposite. Like father, like daughter, as they say."

Read the Washington Post, Ivanka Trump has learned well from her father’s cons.

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