Many voters who voted for Obama turned around and voted for Trump. The dynamics for that switch is more complicated than some are willing to concede. One thing is clear; many thought they would do better under Trump despite the warnings. This report details what they won’t want to hear but need to know.
Unfortunately for the Trump voter, they were duped based on all substantive policies he has supported thus far which will materially hurt them.
CNN produced an excellent article that perfectly illustrates that those who voted for Trump on his economic message were duped. The article points out that,
Trump came into office promising to shrink government. And his proposals would do that. But more often than not, the consequences of specific language he has endorsed would be felt disproportionately in the Rust Belt. This is not a phenomenon isolated to one bill or a partisan twisting of the facts, but rather something that repeats in data and projections for a number of proposals he supports.
All of the proposed health care bills thus far hurt the Rust Belt more so than anywhere else.
A lot of people in the Rust Belt have pre-existing conditions. But ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions can get health care, or care at the same cost as other people, has not been a requirement of most of all of the health care legislation Trump has pushed. This has caused such an uproar that the “Jimmy Kimmel test” turned into one of the biggest points of debate over proposals in the Senate.
The Republican bills could also be hard on Medicaid enrollees in the Rust Belt. With the exception of Wisconsin, which did not expand Medicaid, the Rust Belt has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan are ranked numbers third, fourth, fifth and sixth in the US in how many people they have added to their Medicaid rolls due to the Obamacare expansion, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The proposed tax reform framework benefits mostly high earners and thus high earning states. These states are mostly the Blue States.
As the Trump administration doubles down on tax reform this week, analysts have pointed out that those at the very top of the income spectrum will fare the best in the proposed framework, with the top 0.1% of earners seeing after-tax income jump more than 10%. The plan’s mixture of estate, individual and corporate tax rate changes are projected to be most generous to high earners.
Rust Belt states Ohio, Michigan and Indiana are not home to large populations of $1 million household income earners. Rather, they’re in the middle or bottom of the pack, according a summary from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. States with a higher percentage of millionaire earners voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election and are near Washington, DC. Only 0.2% of Michigan’s households are expected to earn more than $1 million in 2018, putting it next to last behind West Virginia. In Ohio, the number is 0.5%. In Indiana, it’s 0.4%. Compare that with New Jersey, at 1.2%, the District of Columbia at 0.9% or Maryland at 0.8%.
What’s worse is that the new bill may disallow deductions that are more middle-class centric that these states take advantage of more so than others.
The so-called travel ban hurt rural areas in many ways. Foreign-born born Muslim doctors who are prevalent in the Rust Belt were impacted. And of course, America’s heightened xenophobia has left many farmers without the help needed to tend their crops.