The list of reasons not to vote for Donald Trump is longer than one of his ties. Credit: Shutterstock / Phil Mistry

“When Perseus hunted monsters, he needed a cap that made him invisible. We pull our own magic cap over our eyes and ears so that we can pretend monsters don’t exist.” — Karl Marx, Preface to the 1867 Edition of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume One

As we barrel toward Election Day, let’s forget fascism for a sec. Forget the America First nativism and the incessant trans-bashing. Forget that teenagers are now forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term. Forget that a Confederate battle-flag waved in the halls of Congress on Jan. 6 — a feat Gen. Robert Edward Lee himself could not accomplish.

Let’s just focus on the stupid economy. According to a nationwide poll conducted earlier this month by the nonpartisan NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, registered voters were about evenly split on which candidate, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, would do a better job of handling housing, jobs and unemployment along with the cost of groceries and gas. Any differences fell within the margin of sampling error.

What explains this ambivalence? The administration in which Harris serves passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Trump promised but never delivered. She cast the tie-breaking vote to send the Inflation Reduction Act to Joe Biden’s desk, an unprecedented boon for green industrial policy. For the first time in forever, we have a pro-union National Labor Relations Board and a trust-busting Federal Trade Commission. And Harris has laid out more than mere “concepts of a plan” to build back rural hospitals, subsidize affordable housing, boost child tax credits, expand Medicare at-home eldercare and crack down on price-gouging at supermarkets.

Perhaps we’ve passively accepted that ingratiating the upper class with tax break bonanzas — the GOP’s bread and butter — is key to getting anything worthwhile done in a society such as ours.

Founded in 1980, the nonprofit Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) aspires to be “a voice for working people in tax policy debates.” ITEP researchers ran the numbers on Trump’s economic to-do list for every income bracket.

“If these proposals were in effect in 2026, the richest 1% would receive an average tax cut of about $36,300 and the next richest 4% would receive an average tax cut of about $7,200,” according to ITEP’s calculations.

But what about the rest of us?

“All other groups would see a tax increase with the hike on the middle 20% at about $1,500 and the increase on the lowest-income Americans at about $800,” ITEP found.

How is that even possible?

Because, as Fox Business reminds us, “tariffs are taxes.” Trump’s called for an across-the-board 20% tariff on all imported goods. Odds are this will be “largely passed onto consumers as increased prices,” ITEP predicted, and “would more than offset those tax cuts for all income groups outside the richest 5%.”

If you thought inflation was bad under Biden, hang onto your wallet after a Trump victory-slash-coup.

And if you believe that the largest mass deportation in history, openly championed by the rank-and-file at the Republican National Convention, won’t end up raising prices, you probably believe Mexico paid for the completed border wall.

“Let’s put it in basic terms,” the late comedian Ralphie May said in his 2012 stand-up special. “If white people pick your fruits and vegetables, your salad is gonna cost $97.”

In a recent must-read Texas Monthly article, freelance journalist Jack Herrera explained just how devastating mass deportations would be across the economy.

“Since at least the ’80s, when Ronald Reagan led a crackdown on unions, firms have become addicted to cheap undocumented labor,” Herrera wrote. And for the past two decades, “the number of U.S.-born workers entering the construction trade has nosedived. Even if tomorrow all companies raised wages high enough to lure Texans away from their laptop jobs, it could take years of training to condition these newcomers to the rigors of building. Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers, then, would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings.”

“Beyond construction,” Francesca D’Annunzio reported for the Texas Observer last week, “heavily undocumented workforces labor in agriculture, food processing, house cleaning, and other industries.” She cited research from the American Immigration Council estimating a one-time migrant roundup of the scale vowed by Trump would cost at least $315 billion to carry out.

“There’s been a lot of talk about outsiders coming into rural communities, stealing our jobs, making life worse for the people who are living there,” Harris’ vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, said on the campaign trail this month. “Those outsiders have names: they’re Donald Trump and JD Vance. They told lies about the people living in these communities, people who are trying to do an honest day’s work, maybe buy some nice clothes for their kids so they can go to mass on Sunday. [Trump and Vance] don’t respect rural communities, and they take a hell of a lot of their voters for granted by the policies they put out that don’t do a damn thing for rural Pennsylvania or rural Minnesota or any place else in this country.

“Vance is a venture capitalist cosplaying like he’s a cowboy or something,” Walz said. “Folks who go to work everyday are saying, ‘What are you going to do with your policies to make my life a little better?’ These guys see your communities as commodities to trade and move around. They see your house as something to buy up and sell and make a profit on, not a place to raise your kids.”

The plain truth is we can ill afford reinstating the Trump tax — a liability that’s not reducible to economics. A larger war in the Middle East, another pandemic, a 9/11-style terrorist attack under the tempestuous reign of this carnival barker could spell ruin for our fragile experiment in self-government.

That’s too high a price “to own the libs.” Both for our nation and the world.

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