— N R Mohanty —
President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” finally got the Congressional assent in the early hours today. The President, as promised, will sign the ‘historic’ Bill in a few hours from now at a momentous event, on July 4, that the US commemorates as its Independence Day.
Well, the Independence Day ought to be a day of patriotic fervour, a day when all Americans should celebrate their joys of freedom together. But this July 4, as the President signs the Bill into an Act, Americans will be a sharply divided house on class lines, rich and poor. The rich will welcome the new law as it forties their position; the poor will lament as the adverse consequences of Trump’s new legislation will impoverish them further.
As has been rightly said, It’s indeed Trump’s reverse Robin Hood budget. It will result in large fiscal transfer from America’s poorest to its richest. It will systematically strip millions of the most vulnerable population of America of its basic access to food, healthcare and life-saving medication. It would slash more than 930 billions dollars from Medicaid, Medicare and Affordable Care Act, while it would benefit the rich by cutting sharply even the meagre tax they pay.
A Yale University analysis tells us that this Act would reduce income of the poorest 20% households by about 700 dollars per year and increase the income of the top 20% by 5, 700 dollars per year.
The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan thinktank, conducted a more comprehensive analysis: it says that bottom 10% households would lose 1600 dollars a year (3.9% of their income) whereas the top 10% would gain 12,000 dollars a year (2.3% of their income). The CBO added that about 4 trillion dollars ( almost the same as India’s entire GDP) would be added to the US national debt in the course of the next few years, along with all its attendant scourge of inflation.
This is nothing but Trump’s plutocracy: a President who is ready to rob the poor to pay the rich; a leader who is willing to rob tomorrow to bankroll the already wealthy today.
How does it square with candidate Trump’s promise to blue-collar America that he would lower the prices and ensure higher income for them when he is actually delivering just the opposite?
Well, that’s where Pluto-Populism comes in. President Trump has clearly taken a cue from his good friend Modi.
Didn’t Candidate Modi promise Acche Din to India’s poor? But how is PM Modi still popular, after 11 years in office, even as thousands of farmers are committing suicide, unemployment is at a record high and multidimensional poverty is so deep that 80 crore Indians are being given free ration just to stave off starvation deaths? Compare it with the wealth concentration at the top; top 1% today commands over 40% national wealth and it
is growing at an unprecedentedly faster rate.
PM Modi is still popular, despite his plutocratic regime, because his administration has created an ecosystem in which the majoritarian sentiment has been kept alive on a war footing by sustaining a hate campaign against the minority Muslims. The fanatic would say: “I May have become poorer but I am happy that Bhagwan Modi has succeeded in placing the ‘betrayer Muslims’ under the jackboots of ‘patriotic Hindus’,“. That is the secret of Modi magic!
Rest assured, President Trump will unleash a fiercer campaign against the “poisonous immigrants” in the days to come to ensure that the poor MAGA crowd forgets its economic travails and remains his ardent follower!
That’s a useful lesson in Pluto-Populism that an American leader has learnt from his dear friend in India! Modi, the Vishwaguru, indeed!
