More from Robert Reich:

The True Path to Prosperity

It’s often thought that Democrats care about fairness and not economic growth, while Republicans care about growth even at the cost of some fairness.

Rubbish. Growth and fairness aren’t opposites. In reality, Democrats are the party of economic growth and fairness. Republicans are the party of neither.

The only way to grow the economy is by investing in the education, healthcare, and infrastructure that average Americans need in order to be more productive. Growth doesn’t “trickle down.” It rises up.

Consider the two biggest legislative initiatives over past decade – the Affordable Care Act, achieved without a single Republican vote, and the current Trump-Republican tax overhaul, speeding ahead without a

Robert Reich:

The next time you hear Trump or Republicans in Congress claim they are for American workers remember this vote. Their tax plan is one of the biggest bait-and-switches in modern American politics.

UPDATE: Democrats just offered an amendment to ensure corporations use their tax savings to raise employee wages at the same rate they increase executive pay, stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Every single Republican voting, voted NO. #GOPTaxPlan

— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) November 30, 2017

Sen Dianne Feinstein‏
@SenFeinstein
Nov 30

UPDATE: Democrats just offered an amendment to ensure corporations use their tax savings to raise employee wages at the same rate they increase executive pay, stock buybacks and dividends to shareholders. Every single

The Republicans are doing tax deform so that they can shunt more money to the rich, because…what, the rich aren’t rich enough? The poor aren’t poor enough? We don’t have an extreme enough gap between the richest 1% and everyone else? Is that how things are?

Fortune interviewed Richard Florida on the subject last summer.

When did this wealth gap problem start?
Basically, this wealth gap that we see today is something that has really skyrocketed since about the 1980s and certainly in the past decade, decade and a half.

How bad is the wealth inequality we’re seeing in the United States?
The income inequality in the United States, according to the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality where 0

Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker looks at Tillerson’s demolition of the State Department.

In only ten months, Tillerson, the former C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, has presided over the near-dismantling of America’s diplomatic corps, chasing out hundreds of State Department employees and scaling back the country’s engagement with the world. Most alarming has been the departure of dozens of the foreign service’s most senior officials—men and women who had spent their careers living and working abroad, who speak several languages, and who are experts in their fields. As I detailed in my recent Profile of Tillerson, he came into the job proposing to cut the State Department’s budget by a third, with plans to eliminate more than a thousand

Stan Collender at Forbes:

If it’s enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.

There’s no economic justification whatsoever for a tax cut at this time. U.S. GDP is growing, unemployment is close to 4 percent (below what is commonly considered “full employment“), corporate profits are at record levels and stock markets are soaring. It makes no sense to add any federal government-induced stimulus to all this private sector-caused economic activity, let alone a tax cut as big as this one.

But they’re not doing it as stimulus, they’re doing it to make very rich people … Read the rest