As Donald Trump’s campaign finances dwindle, noted economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in a New York Times op-ed delved into the lack of support for him among donors.
Trump Woos Right-Wing Donors: Both small-dollar and large-dollar donors are drying up for Trump, with the latter fearing their money would be siphoned off to meet the former president’s legal expenses, Krugman said.
Trump is therefore falling back on right-wing billionaires and at least some of them will likely provide him with substantial money, the economist said. This is a possibility despite resentment piling up against the former president due to his role in 2020 election interference, his overt authoritarian intentions, including going after the Justice Department, his political opponents, and putting undocumented immigrants into detention camps, he said.
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Trump’s Pulling Points: Delving into why some billionaires would back Trump “who more or less promises to unleash social and political chaos,” Krugman said it could be probably because under him, the wealthy will almost certainly pay lower taxes and corporations will be less regulated.
Unlike some leftists’ view that the Republicans and Democrats were the same when it comes to their treating of the wealthy, the modern Democratic party has a track record of raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs, the economist said. To make his case, he referred to the Affordable Care Act using new taxes on high-income individuals to pay for health care subsidies.
The new taxes led to a jump in the effective federal tax rate on the higher-income 0.01% of the population, he said. Trump, however, passed a big tax cut that “favored the wealthy and largely reversed the Obama-era rise in their effective tax rate,” he added.
Biden, if retaking the rein, needn’t even pass legislation to increase taxes on the corporations and wealthy, as most provisions in the Trump tax cut will expire at the end of 2025 unless Congress renews it, Krugman said.
Veiled Threat: The economist also underlined something the billionaires need to take cognizance of. “And a Trump return to power would make America a scarier place, which should matter much more even to billionaires than a few percentage points on their tax rate,” he said.
“I'd also speculate that even billionaires who recognize Trump's authoritarian leanings probably imagine, if they think about it at all, that their wealth will protect them from arbitrary exercises of power.”
Krugman noted that the Russian billionaires, who helped put Vladimir Putin to power eventually realized that “once you've installed a dictator, your wealth isn't the shield you might have thought it was and you may still find yourself sent to Siberia.”
“And before you say that such worst-case-scenario thinking can't possibly apply in America, bear in mind that the Trump alarmists have mostly been right and the apologists have mostly been wrong.”
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