Our To Do List — And His January 21, 2025January 20, 2025 OUR LIST “Authoritarians thrive on fear and hopelessness,” write George Lakoff and Gil Durán. “Here are 17 things you can do to not give into negativity:” 1. Be Brave Avoid helpless/hopeless talk. Authoritarians want you to feel powerless because it makes their work easier. Courage, faith, and optimism are essential. Fascism feeds on cynicism and pessimism. Starve it. No regime lasts forever. Resolve to do your part to ensure the survival of democracy. Choose to believe that we will find a way to come out stronger. 2. . . . To which I’d add an 18th: Watch Rachel Maddow every night for the first 100 days of his presidency. Last night — after I’d written the rest of this post — I learned the details of Trump’s pardons and commutations of all the convicted insurrectionists, including those who attacked and injured police officers. Republicans are the “law and order” party, tough on crime, unless that crime is committed on behalf of the Dear Leader. Now that’s officially okay. Indeed, those 1,500 Proud Boys and Oath Keepers may become the core of his own private paramilitary force, as Rachel and her guests explained. That’s how autocrats do it. And it began yesterday. HIS LIST That said, I think it’s important, for the good of the country and to maximize our chances of winning the mid-terms, to applaud — and surely not resist — any good things he tries to do. His speeches yesterday were horrible. (And by the way? China does not run the Panama Canal, and our ships are not charged more than anyone else’s.) But look: If he finds a way, with the approval of their governments, to destroy the Mexican and Central American gangs and drug cartels . . . and find ways to help spur those countries’ economic development . . . that would be great. > Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, by contrast, is what a bully, not a good neighbor, would do. And there are two reasons not to be a bully: one, it’s a terrible thing to be; two, everyone hates bullies and will, in the long run, find ways to do them in. And look: If he and Musk can find ways to make the government run more efficiently . . . and/or to remove needless red tape that impedes our economic productivity . . . that would be great, too. > Eliminating the Department of Education or firing competent civil servants because they are not loyal to Trump — let alone shrinking the IRS — are examples of really bad ideas that should be resisted like crazy. Likewise: His vow to extend his 2017 tax cuts, expiring in 2027, would be fine if it applied only to almost all Americans — namely, those whose taxable income does not exceed $400,000 a year. Maybe even go ahead and raise that ceiling to $500,000. Or $1 million! Let’s support that. > But extending the tax cut on income above $1 million? Above $50 million? Above $1 billion? When we’re running huge deficits and the gap between rich and poor grows ever more corrosive? Over that, we should be crying bloody murder. There will be lots more examples — e.g., I can see ways a very narrow exception to birthright citizenship might be something we should support — but let me end with one of my favorites: Social Security Reform. If he proposes to make the kind of modest adjustments to Social Security that people have been suggesting for decades, we should applaud, or at least not resist. It would be a meaningful step in shoring up our national balance sheet and reassuring the bond market that, no, we don’t plan to go bankrupt. Here’s what I wrote 20 years ago: . . . You would just take a little from column a, column b, and column c: (a) Right now, the age at which you can retire with full benefits inches up to 67 by 2027. What if it kept rising one month per year, to age 68 in 2039? You could still take partial benefits as early as age 62; for full benefits, you’d have to wait one more year. But you would have 30 or 40 years (if you started now) to save a little extra to keep this from being a hardship. (b) Few advocate raising the already hefty payroll tax RATE, currently 6.2% each from you and your employer (plus a further 1.45% each for Medicare). But what if, instead of having that 6.2% drop to zero on income above $90,000, as it does now, it dropped to 1% instead? Annoying, but not a killer; and worth paying so that grandma – much as we love her – doesn’t have to move in. (c) Once you start receiving benefits, they rise with inflation, as they should. And in calculating your initial benefits, your prior years’ contributions are adjusted for inflation as well. If we made those adjustments based on ‘price inflation’ rather than ‘wage inflation,’ the system would save a fortune. Indeed, we probably wouldn’t need to do (a) and (b) – just (c). But some combination of the three is likely to go down easiest. So that’s it. As I wrote in PARADE a year or so ago: ‘A bit of pain around the edges, with plenty of time to prepare for it – and the Social Security problem is solved.’ . . . The numbers could be easily updated for 2025 (this first appeared in 2003). And in the years to come, AI and other tech advances might have made us so productive and prosperous that Congress could responsibly repeal some of these changes before they even kicked in! I.e., before they actually affected retirees. But in the meantime, with a better a balance sheet and a reassured bond market, our borrowing costs would have been lower. Bottom line: Tuning out is not constructive. Staying engaged will be hard; but surely not as raising a family working two or three jobs at $12 an hour, let alone the $7.25 federal minimum wage the Republican oligarchy refuses to raise. Onward to the midterms!