Current CBO policy is to examine the tax cuts as a policy that is expiring and being reimplemented — which is exactly what is happening. The cuts would cost around $4.6 trillion over the next decade under this kind of examination, which is called the “current law” metric.

What Republicans are proposing instead, however, is to employ what is called the “current policy” metric, changing long-standing precedent for how the CBO does its accounting. Under this metric, the tax cuts for the wealthy wouldn’t be seen as creating new debt in the budget, but rather as a renewal of already existing policy, allowing the GOP to claim they cost $0 over the next decade, as they are not a change from the policy that’s been in place since 2017.

https://truthout.org/articles/republicans-plan-to-use-budgeting-trick-to-hide-deficit-from-trump-tax-cuts/

"As illustrated in the Lever’s investigative audio series, Master Plan, the American right has for decades constructed a vast media infrastructure outside of — and pressuring — the Republican Party to embrace conservatives’ ideological agenda.

By contrast, America’s center-left has mostly funded the Democratic Party, its politicians, and its array of Washington-based nonprofits — while relying on billionaire- and corporate-owned elite media outlets as its information conduit


Meanwhile, progressives are relegated to trumpeting crowd sizes at rallies for Bernie Sanders, who is certainly delivering a much-needed message about oligarchy but whose political apparatus has never succeeded in (or shown sustained commitment to) channeling his celebrity and fundraising power into building lasting institutions beyond the Vermont senator’s personal brand. Of course, unlike other Democratic luminaries signing Hollywood deals, feigning helplessness, and preemptively retreating, Sanders is at least trying to do something to catalyze a real opposition to the broligarchy and the Trump-Musk rampage. Like a rock star playing the hits on a last reunion tour, he’s generating some of the old energy, which is mildly encouraging — and far more than anything his sedated peers are doing.

Sanders could still end up being to center-left populism what Barry Goldwater was to conservatism — a prickly senator-turned-presidential-candidate who lacked the political and organizational skills to win a national election, but who nonetheless inspired a larger movement. But in Goldwater’s case, the movement was fueled not just by ephemeral rallies, but also by conservative institution-building outside both parties."

"The fix is something much more difficult and nonpartisan: doing the hard work of creating information conduits that provide better, more accurate reporting about what’s really happening in America; that identify who in either party is responsible for the decisions enriching the rich and harming the rest of us; that orient coverage toward a working-class audience rather than an affluent audience; and that convey news to normies rather than only to already-converted, already-dialed-in political junkies."

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/information-war-right-independent-media/

That’s one estimate. Yale University economists go further. They modelled the effect of the planned 25% Canada and Mexico tariffs and the 10% China tariffs, as well as the 10% China tariffs already in effect. They reckoned these tariffs would take the effective average tariff rate to its highest since 1943. Domestic prices would rise by over 1% pt from the current inflation rate, the equivalent of an average per household consumer loss of $1,600–2,000 in 2024$. They would lower US real GDP growth by 0.6% pt this year and take 03-0.4% pt off future annual growth rates, wiping out expected gains in productivity from AI infusion.

In a matter of weeks, the narrative over the US economy has shifted from the “exceptionalism” of the US economy to alarm about a sudden downturn in growth. Retail sales, manufacturing production, real consumer spending, home sales and consumer confidence indicators, are all down in the past month or two. Consensus forecasts for real GDP growth for Q1 2025 are now only an annualised 1.2%.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/03/05/trumps-little-disturbance/

"‘We’re going to focus on two, maximum three topics: rent, jobs, and taxing the rich. We’re only going to talk about these.’ And for the first time in, I think ten years, we actually stuck to it."

“Door-knocking is a very new innovation in German politics,” said Loren Balhorn, editor of Jacobin Germany and a Die Linke member. “It’s not something most parties do. We were the only party that was really visible on the streets, knocking on people’s doors, asking people what their problems are.”

The Dutch Social Democrats, for example, initially won popular support on an anti-migration platform, only to watch helplessly as their voters drifted to far-right parties, which spent every waking moment attacking them.

Left parties can try to adopt such a platform where a far-right party either doesn’t exist or is completely ineffectual — as in Denmark. But over the long run it’s likely that this strategy will produce the same results as it did in the Netherlands.

The issue is that people are simply not convinced by left-wing arguments on the economy if they blame migrants for poverty and inequality. This is precisely why the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet — from Elon Musk to the Koch brothers — spend so much time trying to scapegoat migrants.

Luckily, the German left didn’t fall into this trap. Schwerdtner, along with Heidi Reichinnek, the party’s leader in the Bundestag, staunchly opposed giving in to the Right on migration.

Schwerdtner is being advised by the PTB’s Mertens and Reichinnek made headlines during the campaign with an impassioned speech in the Bundestag, in which she railed against the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) for working with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) to crackdown on asylum seekers. The speech went viral on social media and led to a dramatic influx of new members.

“I think it’s the most-watched political speech on social media ever in German politics,” said Martin Niese, one of the party’s strategists. “Heidi was the only one expressing people’s rage.”

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/die-linke-resurgence-germany-left/

"The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empathy-doge

Since 2012, the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) has compiled rankings for nine major manufacturing economies – including China and the US – in terms of scale, quality, structural optimisation, innovation and sustainability. In 2012, China scored 89 points, lagging the US (156), Japan (126) and Germany (119). In 2023, China was still in fourth place but had significantly narrowed the gap; the US, Germany, Japan and China scored a respective 189, 136, 128 and 125.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2025/03/08/two-sessions-china/

A new analysis has found that nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90 percent of Americans to the richest 1 percent over the past 50 years, as neoliberal policies have come to roost and billionaires are poised to use their vast power to worsen wealth inequality in the coming years.

In 2023 alone, $3.9 trillion was redistributed from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent — enough to give every worker a raise of $32,000 per year, per the office of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who highlighted the new analysis in a release this week.

In 1975, RAND found in its most recent report, the bottom 90 percent of Americans received about a third of all taxable income in the U.S. That share dropped to 47 percent by 2019, with over half of income going instead to the top 10 percent.

Indeed, analyses show that Trump’s policies are set to widen the wealth gap even further. According to a recent analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, President Donald Trump’s tax proposals, like the extension of Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts and reducing the corporate tax rate, would provide $36,320 yearly in tax savings to the richest 1 percent, or people with incomes of over $914,900 a year. Meanwhile, the bottom 95 percent of Americans would see a tax increase.

https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-1-percent-has-sapped-79t-in-wealth-from-bottom-90-percent-since-1975/

Last year, seven large banks reaped more than a quarter trillion dollars by using higher Federal Reserve rates to jack up interest rates on mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards — all while those same banks paid low interest to depositors, according to new letters from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Jack Reed (D-RI). One of many examples the lawmakers document: the Fed pays JPMorgan Chase 4.4 percent interest on its deposits, but “customers continue to earn a negligible .01 [percent] on their savings” at JPMorgan Chase.

In all, banks have used this scheme to reap more than $1 trillion in new revenue over a two-and-a-half-year period, according to the Financial Times — and new federal data show net interest income is rising.

The process of switching banks to get better rates is often an annoying rigmarole (by design). When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last year finalized a rule to simplify switching banks, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon vowed a “knife fight” against regulators and deployed his lobbying group to file a lawsuit against the rule.

Donald Trump’s administration stalled that rule, tried to dismantle the CFPB, and dropped the agency’s lawsuit alleging that Capital One cheated depositors out of $2 billion in interest payments. Trump’s regulators also repealed guidelines aiming to slow bank mergers (like Capital One’s), which tend to reduce competition to offer better interest rates. One recent study found “a 35 percent reduction in deposit interest rates” in counties that experienced such mergers.

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/federal-reserve-banks-interest-rates/

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has promised to establish AI factories within the first 100 days of her term. AI factories will give companies and researchers access to the EU's supercomputers, tailored to AI needs. AI factories bring together three essential components: supercomputers, data and human capital. The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking plays a pivotal role in this initiative, providing the necessary supercomputing infrastructure and covering half of the acquisition and operation costs of AI-optimised supercomputers as well as half of the cost of the services provided by AI factories. Seven consortia across the EU were selected to establish these factories, in Finland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Spain and Greece.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2025)769492

While the Left has a vibrant sphere of publications, Substacks, and niche podcasts, these overwhelmingly cater to an already highly engaged, college-educated audience. The Right, meanwhile, has dedicated much more effort to reaching working-class communities and audiences beyond conservative elites.

Left politics must be presented in ways that make working-class experiences central, using storytelling that is dynamic, accessible, and engaging. This media can’t be boring or overly wonky — it must speak in popular vernaculars with style and panache. More than just informing, it should create pathways for weak partisans and nonideologues pathways to feel connected to a broader left community. This is a media-movement strategy that is fundamentally oriented toward democratic persuasion.

As the Right’s best propagandists intuitively understand, much of the real persuasion happens before the policy debates even occur.

It is a game of creating long-term cultural and emotional bonds between media and audiences. This can happen through a political talk radio program, a Fox News morning show, or even ostensibly nonpolitical spaces. After all, some of those who appear to have been Trump’s most potent messengers this past election came from outside traditional news media — video game streamers, YouTube pranksters, anti-woke comedians, and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters. When the moment for arguing Trump’s case arrived, vast portions of the online public were already pulling for the Right to win the exchange of ideas. The goal wasn’t just to win debates; it was to position Trump as the champion of pink- and blue-collar workers, farmers, multiracial small business owners, Christians, young men, and any other group the Right could claim to represent.

The most successful right-wing media outlets —Limbaugh, Fox, Breitbart — did more than push ideology. They blended tabloid aesthetics, populist narratives, and “authentic” personalities to cultivate a loyal audience. More than just a news source, they presented themselves as champions of their viewers’ dignity, the only voices that truly respected their communities.

This was not a claim rooted in objective reality, but it was compelling because it largely went unchallenged. Beginning in the 1970s, mainstream media moved away from working-class audiences.

Yes, vibes are important. But what makes the conservative media ecosystem influential in a sticky, durable way is not just virality or contagious affect. What really matters is when partisan media are able to influence common sense, speaking to inchoate frustrations and desires and offering overarching “deep stories” that frame the ongoing conflicts at the heart of political life.

Consider a conservative podcaster who draws in listeners with an approachable style. Emotionally gripping stories depict the people as under siege by them — elites who condescend and see the audience as trash. A curated set of claims and information (whether true or false) reinforces conservative positions as obvious, logical conclusions. Political loyalties and preferences take shape through these relationships.

Casting left values as the natural end point of rational thought and human empathy might be flattering to our self-image, but we know that’s not the way it works. We all exercise moral agency of course, but not in conditions of our making. We all need help. We all depend on social networks and media sources to help make sense of the world around us. Right now, most Americans won’t encounter the stories and arguments that might inspire commitment to left projects.

https://jacobin.com/2025/03/left-media-working-class-right/