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Justin Miller

 Justin Miller is a senior writing fellow for The American Prospect.

Recent Articles

On Monuments and Minimum Wages

Conservative lawmakers’ defense of Confederate monuments in the South is part of a larger subterfuge to undercut the power of liberal black cities.  

Justin MillerAug 22, 2017
(Photo: AP/Steve Helber) The statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va. A t 9 p.m. last Tuesday night, city workers began to enclose in plywood the Confederate monument that sits in Birmingham’s Linn Park. By the following afternoon, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall had announced that he was suing the city for violating state law. Activists in Birmingham first began calling for the removal of the 52-foot Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church. That, in turn, prompted Gerald Allen, a state senator from Tuscaloosa, to introduce the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act to prohibit cities from removing or altering historic monuments more than 40 years old without the approval of a state committee. The predominantly (if not entirely) white Republicans who control the legislature passed the bill along party lines. Republican Governor...

Paying for Trump’s Tax Cuts Would Devastate the Poor

When you consider how the GOP will finance their steep tax cuts, things look even grimmer for low- and middle-income Americans. 

Justin MillerAug 18, 2017
In this Jan. 28, 2016 photo, Joe Heflin, left, of Jefferson City, waits with others for his turn to receive free groceries from the Samaritan Center food pantry in Jefferson City, Mo. Heflin, 33, also receives federally funded food stamp benefits. S ince Republicans failed to deregulate the health-care industry last month, they’ve moved on to something bigger and better: tax reform. So far, though, the Trump administration has only put forward a series of regressive, revenue-losing tax cuts: halving the corporate tax rate; slashing rates for pass-through entities like LLCs; trimming the top marginal income rate; eliminating the estate tax—the list goes on. Trump and his team are trying hard to pitch this as a plan that, for one, actually exists, and two, will benefit every one across the board. However, as those who’ve analyzed Trump’s barebones proposal have concluded, the benefits of the cuts would be highly skewed toward the top 1percent, with that group pocketing about half the...

Trump, Walker, and the Foxconn Con

Republicans amp up their race-to-the-bottom approach to economic development. 

Justin MillerAug 16, 2017
(Photo: Chris Kelopnis via AP Images) Governor Scott Walker (Republican of Wisconsin) makes remarks during the announcement of the creation of a Foxconn Factory to be built in Wisconsin to build LCD flat screen monitors at The White House in Washington, DC, July 26, 2017. I n late July, President Donald Trump joined with Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and Foxconn CEO Terry Gou at the White House in a bid to validate Trump’s economic stewardship. Gou’s company, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, best known as an iPhone supplier for Apple, was entering into an agreement with Walker’s state to invest $10 billion in a gigantic 20 million-square-foot LCD television factory in southeastern Wisconsin. With promises of as many as 13,000 new middle-class jobs, the event was supposed to be seen as proof that Trump and the Republicans were making good on their promise to resurrect American manufacturing. “This is a great day for America, a...

No, a Fair Wage Is Not a ‘Free Lunch’

A liberal Washington Post columnist drinks the trickle-down Kool-Aid about raising the minimum wage. 

Justin MillerAug 09, 2017
(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) In this July 24, 2017 photograph, Otibehia Allen, a single mother of five, peers outside her rented mobile home in the same isolated, low-income community of Jonestown, Miss., where she grew up among the cotton and soybean fields of the Mississippi Delta. She works 30 hours a week at barely over minimum wage. trickle-downers.jpg T he U.S. Chamber of Commerce has long used its ample power and influence to convince economists, politicians, and influencers that raising the minimum wage—and enacting any other policies that benefit workers—will be an unequivocal job-killing, robot-creating catastrophe that devastates the very people those bleeding-heart liberals are trying to help. They’ve done a very good job of turning that threat into mainstream economic gospel (though the Milton Friedman wing of the economics profession didn’t require any persuading). That increasing the minimum wage will create untenable levels of job loss, leaving workers on the margins of...

Nissan Union Loss Underscores Labor’s Big Dilemma

Justin MillerAug 08, 2017
(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) Nissan employee Morris Mock, left, consoles colleague Antonio Hoover as he expresses his disappointment at losing their bid to form a union at the Nissan vehicle assembly plant in Canton, Miss., Friday, Aug. 4, 2017. L ate Friday night, the American labor movement was dealt yet another body blow—an increasingly common occurrence in the Trump era—as it became clear that the United Auto Workers had lost its long-shot bid to establish a union at a Nissan manufacturing plant in Canton, Mississippi. Workers at the factory voted 2,244 to 1,307 against unionization, a devastating landslide defeat for the Detroit-based union and worker activists who had been trying to organize since the plant first opened nearly 15 years ago. “We’re disappointed but not surprised by the outcome in Canton,” said Gary Casteel, secretary-treasurer of the UAW, in a statement. “Despite claiming for years to be neutral on the question of a union, Nissan waged one of the most illegal and...

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