Project 2025 & the Rusty Pick-up Truck
Project 2025 would decimate the American economy - for everyone, even MAGA faithfuls.
About a month ago, I was depositing a check at the drive-up window at my bank. Alongside me at the ATM was a pickup truck I could literally see through. The right quarter panel was gone and rust pock-marked most of the remaining metal, like lesions. A piece of rotting plywood occupied where the missing tailgate used to be. On it was a “Let’s Go Brandon!” bumper sticker next to “TRUMP 2024”.
I thought to myself, “If that isn’t symbolic of the Trump presidency and its necrotic vision for America, I don’t know what is.”
The mainstream media has, fortunately, been paying attention lately to the Heritage Foundation’s dystopian “Project 2025,” the autocrats’ playbook for a republican agenda should the fallen party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower regain the White House.
While reproductive rights, government efficiency, immigration, racial equity, and social safety nets have all been appropriate subjects of media scrutiny of the plan, some sometimes dismiss them as wonky issues energizing merely Democrats to which the average American voter not paying much attention to politics has trouble relating.
But there is one area to which everyone can relate and republicans consistently exploit to feed their agenda — the economy.
Despite the convicted felon trying to get his old job back claiming his administration “had the best economy in history,” by every reliable metric, the economy is the strongest it has been in decades, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) President Biden signed two years ago and the American Rescue Plan Biden signed upon taking office in 2021.
But if this election currently underway goes south, republicans — the so-called party of “fiscal responsibility” — get to implement Project 2025.
Here’s what people should know about how that is projected to impact the economy — for republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated alike.
The nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently conducted detailed analysis on Project 2025's economic impact states the plan would increase poverty and hardship for millions by going far beyond eliminating health coverage, driving up the uninsured rate, and eliminating food assistance programs.
Forbes Contributor Jeff Raikes described the report as a “blueprint for business disaster,” warning “the policies it advocates will very likely plunge the American economy into a death spiral.”
The US Senate’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released its own report in which it explains how the republicans’ plans delineated in Project 2025 would significantly raise taxes on average working Americans and further decrease taxes on the morbidly rich, going far beyond the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” the adjudicated rapist and former host of Celebrity Apprentice signed into law at the end of his first year in office.
The JEC report explains:
Shifting taxes from the wealthy to the middle-class by moving to just two income tax rates: a 15% tax rate for people earning up to about $168,000 and a 30% tax rate for people earning above that (see page 696). This would force many middle-class families to pay thousands of dollars more in tax payments. It would also take away “most deductions, credits, and exclusions” (see page 696), and does not specify that it would keep provisions like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or the Child Tax Credit (CTC) that overwhelmingly benefit low- and middle-class families.
Workers now eligible for overtime pay would, under Project 2025, see their eligibility reduced.
Child labor protections would go bye-bye, as would collective bargaining rights.
The republican party has nothing — literally nothing — to offer average working class Americans anything other than umbrage and outrage intended to divide people along class, racial, and economic lines. Because when we are fighting amongst ourselves over how much more “those people,” those “takers,” have than we might have, we’re not paying attention to how much the wealthy tax cheats continue to rip us off, compliments of the GOP.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ progressive economic policy, on the other hand, promises to continue to build and expand on the IRA and other Biden administration progress.
You can read about it here.
Even that guy in the dilapidated pick-up at the ATM line would benefit from it. Clearly he’s voting for the the other guy, though, because he’s “making America great again”.