TAKE THE POLL: HOW LONG BEFORE TRUMP GETS IMPEACHED
- Thread starter BigBlackBull76
- Start date
Just remeber that the democrats started the KKK the democrats started gun control to prevent freed slaves from owning guns. Stop this non sense. The democrats perpetrate the issue by holding down minorities depressing their communities. Look at every ******* hole state I.E. California new York look at every ******* hole city I.E. LA,Chicago Baltimore D.C. they are over taxed have failing schools have failing societies and all run by tax and spend democrats. Yet the progressive and liberal democrats hold them on a pedestal. Then blame the republicans for it,calling them racist. Both parties suck. Obama wasn't any better. He did nothing for the minorities. It's time to take a look at what is going on and who is to blame. Fyi we didn't vote for Trump. We wanted Ben Carson who was black.
Hold it right there.
I live in NYC.. I like it here
Wanna know why I like it?
2 blocks to the subway
1.5 blocks to the supermarket
5 blocks to the doctors office
11 blocks to the hospital
6 blocks to best pizza in the city
14 mins to Columbia University
And my zip code had 2 murders in the last 10 years.
1 was a guy who couldn't accept his wife wanted to fuck someone else
2nd was a homeless guy who got his face kicked in.
So I'd rather live here than any other ******* hole in this shithole country and I don't mind taxes being a bit high, they're much lower than Nassau or Suffolk county which are run by Republicans.
P.S. Ben Carson is a clown just like all the rest. The only one that was reasonably terrible but acceptable was Kasich
you need to check your history for one thing....the dems or dixiecrats or whatever were for slavery....that was before the civil war....you need a little "upgrade"
why is it that the 10 poorest states in the US are all in the south and republican controlled?
I could go on and and on about just how full of ******* you are..instead just let me post this.....but with the republican cuts to education you probably can't read or lack the attention span to read!
Democrats Are Better Than Republicans
1. Historical data from up to 70 years
1. Debt and Deficit. In the past 17 Presidential terms , nine were GOP led and eight Democratic. Of nine GOP Presidents, six added to debt/GDP and deficit/GDP as a percent. The only three that did not, had a Democratic House and Senate. Of eight Democrats, each one, reduced deficit/GDP and debt/GDP as a percent. That is 66 years of rhetoric of fiscal responsibility with zero net results for GOP. What makes matters even worse, is the fact that the president who added a historical 20.7% to the debt has one unique aspect of his presidency – President G. W. Bush had a GOP majority House and Senate.
2. Spending. The Republican Party often talks about financial responsibility, but did you know that since 1978-2011, spending has gone up 9.9% under Democrats versus 12.1% under GOP .
3. Federal Debt. Republicans love to tell us how they will not close tax loopholes on millionaires and billionaires, yet never bring to our attention that from 1978-2011 debt went up 4.2% under Democrats versus 36.4% under the GOP.
4. GDP. The only thing that the Democrats have a higher numerical yield than the GOP led administrations, is the GDP. It’s a good thing to have it at 12.6% versus a GOP 10.7%. From 1960 to 2005 the gross domestic product measured in year-2000 dollars rose an average of $165 billion a year under Republican presidents and $212 billion a year under Democrats.
5. Big Government. Federal spending (aka “big government”): It has gone up an average of about $50 billion a year under presidents of both parties. But that breaks down as $35 billion a year under Democratic presidents and $60 billion under Republicans. If you assume that it takes a year for a president’s policies to take effect, Democrats have raised spending by $40 billion a year and Republicans by $55 billion.
6. Federal Deficit. Under Republican presidents since 1960, the federal deficit has averaged $131 billion a year. Under Democrats, that figure is $30 billion. In an average Republican year, the deficit has grown by $36 billion. In the average Democratic year it has shrunk by $25 billion.
7. National Debt. The national debt has gone up more than $200 billion a year under Republican presidents and less than $100 billion a year under Democrats.
8. Inflation and Unemployment. Democratic presidents have a better record on inflation (averaging 3.13 percent compared with 3.89 percent for Republicans) and on unemployment (5.33 percent versus 6.38 percent). Unemployment went down in the average Democratic year, up in the average Republican one.
Outcome: Based on the data, Democrats have had a much more successful run when it comes to economy, job creation, debt and deficit, and shockingly, even spending.
Plain facts, but what about the qualitative data. Let’s look at some of the best aspects of economy, and drill-down to specific presidencies to see which one added what to the economy. I look at the pivotal economic factors and researched which president added:
1. Greatest gross domestic product (GDP) growth?
2. Biggest jobs increase?
3. Best after-tax personal disposable income rise?
4. Highest industrial production growth?
5. The lowest Misery Index, which is inflation plus unemployment?
6. The lowest inflation?
7. The largest federal budget deficit reduction?
There answers are, if you are done guessing? Okay , here are the answers: 1. Clinton; 2. Truman; 3. Carter; 4. Johnson; 5. Kennedy; 6. Truman; 7. Truman; 8. Clinton.
Outcome: It is also a Democratic sweep.
So, now you are thinking two things. One, this does not mean too much because it takes time for a President’s policies to come into effect and two, what about Obama since this is all in the past?
To address our first question, I gathered this information: First, the analyses presented above took into account the transition time to for policies to kick-in and factored in relative adjustments. Plus, I find it hard to believe that it was just a fluke a that six of nine GOP Presidents failed in terms of GDP and Debt, and not even one of eight Democrats did. So I wanted to look at GOP Presidents that followed at least two GOP terms and Democratic Presidents that followed at least two Democratic terms. Here is the verdict: Truman, who followed two Democratic terms and still succeeded in all areas of economy, while Bush senior, who followed two Republican terms still added to debt and deficit through excessive spending.
Outcome: This highlights an interesting point that somehow Democrats who follow Democrats still outperform economically, and Republicans who followed GOP presidents somehow still failed to perform in absence of policies of the other party impacting them anymore.
Now, the second part, Obama. So, some people who supported him in 2008 are fed up a little. He shows no leadership in the face of stiff tea party politics. But here is the truth about the man who promised you to pass the health care reform, who promised you to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, who promised you that, while it will take time, he will slow down economic failure and he promised you that he will do everything to keep manufacturing jobs in the US. In his defense, he did all of that and then some.
He passed the Health Care Reform Act. He repealed the discriminatory DADT policy. Since he has become president, he has already created more net jobs in his first two years than Bush administration did in 8 years altogether. While GDP growth is slow, it has been positive now for 8 straight quarters since the stimulus was passed, which also worked. Not to mention, Obama inherited an economy in a wreck where the GDP had fallen to over 8.8 percent, the banking industry has just collapsed, two wars were going on for about seven years, and above all, he took over from a President who had raised the debt ceiling a historic, record six times while taking a 53% debt at the beginning of his first term and transforming it into an 84% by the end. According to my research, the Obama administration added more jobs to the economy than eight years of the former President Bush did. The GDP has now been positive for 8 straight quarters bouncing from a negative 8.8%.
Obama extended Bush bailouts and bailed out the auto industry because many US jobs were at risk and our auto industry was soon to become foreign at the hands of global buy outs. Well, this past May, Chrysler paid off its loans . The American auto industry is still American, those jobs in the Mid West still exist. Obama, despite the roughest opposition that any president has faced, still did all he promised. But, here is an eye-opening compilation on more: See what else Obama has done. Also, I must include the fact that we have half as many troops in Iraq, a 2014 plan to be out of Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden is dead. You don’t need a hyperlink for that, do you? Oh, and he also became the first president ever to have to deal with a distraction of proving, through his birth certificate, that he is an American.
I would like to make one more really important point here because a lot of Republicans often cite their desire to vote for GOP candidates despite their stiff opposition to social and civil freedoms in exchange of offering small government. It is a fact that as Americans we are living in the time of the smallest government in half a century. We are paying the lowest taxes, some of the largest free-trade agreements, and a proposal to pay even lower corporate taxes, small business reliefs, and to lower income taxes down from 6.2% offered by President Bush to 3.2% proposed by Obama and the democrats. It is even mentioned in a post at FOX News.
Outcome: The Obama administration has done everything they promised to do when elected, socially and economically. Democrats have failed to improve the economy but have been very successful in creating jobs and avoiding further economic slip. Actually, this administration has now added over three million jobs in 23 straight months of positive employment gains. 2010 and 2011 also mark the first years since 1997 to see positive gains in manufacturing jobs, as shown in this interactive graph. Additionally, March 2012 marks the month in which the Nasdaq hit 3,000 mark for the first time since dot-com bubble. The Dow Jones hit 13,000 for the first time, growing at 63% under Obama which is the fifth best for any president, and the S&P 500 hit 1,400 for the first time since 2008 showing a remarkable economic recovery on the free-floating capital indexes.
Living standard review of GOP vs. Democratic states
Finally, it’s not fair to highlight just money issues. How about the living standards? None of us desire to live in poverty, food scarcity, without health insurance or earn below a minimum wage. Here is an eye-opening part of my analysis that truly shook me.
The worst standards of living are in states that have Republican legislatures. One can argue that it is just that the poor in the deep South that vote a GOP heavy legislature, but when coupled with all the economic statistics listed above, that argument starts to appear very vulnerable. These conservative states have highest poverty levels despite having all GOP fiscal policies in place, for example:
Poverty. Not even one liberal state has over an 18% poverty rate – six GOP states including Texas do.
Labor Abuse. Not even one liberal state has over 8% of its population being abused through earning lower than minimum wage, but nine GOP states do including Texas.
Food Insecurity. Not even one liberal state has over 17% of its population living “food insecure.” Four conservative states do, including Texas.
Healthcare Access. Not even one liberal state has over 20% of population living without health insurance but four GOP states do, again, including Texas.
This study highlights how a huge population of Texans live under an extreme poverty-stricken climate earning below minimum wage, without health insurance access, and without access to daily food while being abused as workers.
Outcome: While GOP policies seem exciting in rhetoric, when given full liberty to implement them through a Republican controlled legislature like the one in the southern states, they are very ineffective. When Democratic financial policies are given full freedom of being implemented, like in the liberal states, they have been much more effective.
I already explained the GOP vs Democrats on social issues in my other post , through which we understand some fundamental differences such as democrats wanting to legalize gay marriage while GOP candidates run clinics to cure gays, GOP candidates working on legislation to criminalize gays and ban gay marriage, GOP legislation to outlaw Islam, and so on and so forth. But, about economic report, here is a recap and conclusion.
1. GOP Presidents have failed, Democrats have not. Historically over last six decades, Democrats have been consistently successful economically, while six of nine Republicans have failed. Keeping in mind the argument that policies of previous administrations haunt the following, the Democrat Truman that followed two Democratic terms still reduced debt and deficit, the Republican, Bush senior, that followed two Republican terms, still added to both.
2. GOP States have lowest living standards, Democratic states do not.
3. Obama has done what he promised and the economy is getting better. It is just hard to climb out of a financial black hole overnight. He still created more jobs than lost, delivered eight straight positive GDP quarters, and the debt that was growing at $3.65 trillion over four years, is now slowed down to about $1.6 trillion. You were not expecting him to change the economy overnight; I know I was not.
4. The GOP offers rhetoric, Democrats offer plans. I will really back this one for you through solid examples. Remember the debt crisis? Democrats took into account an earlier GOP report in which the GOP stated that the most optimum for economic growth is a deficit reduction plan that has an 85-15 split between cuts and revenues. Democrats offered an 83-17 with $6 in cuts for just $1 in return in tax loophole expiration on millionaires and billionaires. It was a mammoth $4 trillion debt reduction offer. The GOP walked away from it, and failed to offer an alternative. Similarly, remember Heathcare reform? Democrats took a major step by offering a plan under which most Americans would be covered, people would be allowed to stay on parents’ insurance after college graduation, insurance companies will no longer be able to increase cost or drop people after an illness, neither will they be able to refuse insurance to people with a preexisting condition. The GOP is currently running on an agenda to repeal that. The GOP alternative? It does not exist.
5. Democrats are willing to sacrifice, the GOP has evolved into a party of “Always No”. The shared Retirement Sacrifice Act of 2011 , which would require lawmakers to wait until the age of 66 to collect their pensions and take a pay cut has been introduced by an Ohio Democrat. Her logic is that congress should also take a pay cut and delayed retirement like other Americans do. Do you know why her simple bill is not passing? The GOP has it blocked. Additionally, as the Democrats fight to raise the age and reduce benefits for themselves and their GOP peers, Rep. John Fleming (LA), a republican responded to a proposed tax loophole expiration on millionaires and billionaires by saying that “by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.” Thus, fighting against another democratic plan.
6. Democrats reform, GOP wants to take a step back without reform. Last election Democrats offered ideas that would alter the future such as Healthcare reform, the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, creation of anti-discriminatory laws, Postal Services Reform which is happening right now, lower taxes on small businesses, tax write-offs on first 104K paid in employee salary for large businesses, and increase education funding to keep America’s edge. Have you notices the GOP platform this year? It has been: Repeal Healthcare reform, repeal the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, ban gay marriage, ban building of Islamic religious institutions, block tax reform on millionaires and billionaires, block the jobs act, block deficit reduction plans, abolish the Department of Education, and abolish the EPA. Do you notice a trend? It’s a step back through repeal without alternatives or abolishing of institutions without an alternative plan.
Certainly, I understand these are politics, and all GOP donations come from big businesses but to letting America’s credit rating fall to protect millionaires and billionaires just because the 2012 election is on the horizon is probably not the best approach for America. While a Democratic donation averages $69 and comes from every day Americans, GOP donations average large sums from huge lobby groups and in order to be competitive the GOP has to protect its interests. But at the end of the day, we hire politicians not to win but to make America succeed. I want you to take these facts into account, remember, you are the CEO and you have a choice to make. I exhort you to make that choice keeping our social freedoms and financial facts into account.
I exhort you to educate yourself. When the GOP tells you that they want to lower taxes on millionaires and billionaires and cut education funding and corporate regulations to help the economy grow, understand that capitalism is not pro-business, it is pro-consumer. Businesses thrive with regulation and demand it. Understand that the GOP wants to cut educational funding because we see a direct link between higher education and an increase in more liberal voting patterns. Please understand that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires do not funnel into an economic spur, as one of the best investors Warren Buffet, who saved GE, Goldman Sachs, and now the Bank of America from a colossal collapse explains
I have presented you past data, current policies, poverty statistics, and current party agendas. I wanted to just ask myself one last litmus test question. What have GOP and Democratic states added to America to see what kind of societies GOP versus Democratic governments create? If GOP economics really work, then we should see them work in states where we vote GOP legislatures and vice versa for Democratic states.
From the entertainment industry based in California to IT in Silicon Valley, each one of the Ivy League schools to Health Care and Life Sciences industry based in Philadelphia-NJ area, from banking based in NYC to the services hub in Boston, and all the way down to high-tech in Seattle, almost all of America’s progress comes from liberal states. But what is even more shocking is that a lot of southern progress happened in places like Atlanta, with large telecommunications’ industry development post 1996 Olympics, where about majority of Atlanta’s population is liberal and ascends from the north east. The truth is, this alone is a litmus test. Democrats have financially outperformed GOP governments economically and are offering actual plans as opposed to simple repeal ideas. Republicans have carved societies that are drastically behind in economic, living standards, or academic progress.
1. Historical data from up to 70 years
1. Debt and Deficit. In the past 17 Presidential terms , nine were GOP led and eight Democratic. Of nine GOP Presidents, six added to debt/GDP and deficit/GDP as a percent. The only three that did not, had a Democratic House and Senate. Of eight Democrats, each one, reduced deficit/GDP and debt/GDP as a percent. That is 66 years of rhetoric of fiscal responsibility with zero net results for GOP. What makes matters even worse, is the fact that the president who added a historical 20.7% to the debt has one unique aspect of his presidency – President G. W. Bush had a GOP majority House and Senate.
2. Spending. The Republican Party often talks about financial responsibility, but did you know that since 1978-2011, spending has gone up 9.9% under Democrats versus 12.1% under GOP .
3. Federal Debt. Republicans love to tell us how they will not close tax loopholes on millionaires and billionaires, yet never bring to our attention that from 1978-2011 debt went up 4.2% under Democrats versus 36.4% under the GOP.
4. GDP. The only thing that the Democrats have a higher numerical yield than the GOP led administrations, is the GDP. It’s a good thing to have it at 12.6% versus a GOP 10.7%. From 1960 to 2005 the gross domestic product measured in year-2000 dollars rose an average of $165 billion a year under Republican presidents and $212 billion a year under Democrats.
5. Big Government. Federal spending (aka “big government”): It has gone up an average of about $50 billion a year under presidents of both parties. But that breaks down as $35 billion a year under Democratic presidents and $60 billion under Republicans. If you assume that it takes a year for a president’s policies to take effect, Democrats have raised spending by $40 billion a year and Republicans by $55 billion.
6. Federal Deficit. Under Republican presidents since 1960, the federal deficit has averaged $131 billion a year. Under Democrats, that figure is $30 billion. In an average Republican year, the deficit has grown by $36 billion. In the average Democratic year it has shrunk by $25 billion.
7. National Debt. The national debt has gone up more than $200 billion a year under Republican presidents and less than $100 billion a year under Democrats.
8. Inflation and Unemployment. Democratic presidents have a better record on inflation (averaging 3.13 percent compared with 3.89 percent for Republicans) and on unemployment (5.33 percent versus 6.38 percent). Unemployment went down in the average Democratic year, up in the average Republican one.
Outcome: Based on the data, Democrats have had a much more successful run when it comes to economy, job creation, debt and deficit, and shockingly, even spending.
Plain facts, but what about the qualitative data. Let’s look at some of the best aspects of economy, and drill-down to specific presidencies to see which one added what to the economy. I look at the pivotal economic factors and researched which president added:
1. Greatest gross domestic product (GDP) growth?
2. Biggest jobs increase?
3. Best after-tax personal disposable income rise?
4. Highest industrial production growth?
5. The lowest Misery Index, which is inflation plus unemployment?
6. The lowest inflation?
7. The largest federal budget deficit reduction?
There answers are, if you are done guessing? Okay , here are the answers: 1. Clinton; 2. Truman; 3. Carter; 4. Johnson; 5. Kennedy; 6. Truman; 7. Truman; 8. Clinton.
Outcome: It is also a Democratic sweep.
So, now you are thinking two things. One, this does not mean too much because it takes time for a President’s policies to come into effect and two, what about Obama since this is all in the past?
To address our first question, I gathered this information: First, the analyses presented above took into account the transition time to for policies to kick-in and factored in relative adjustments. Plus, I find it hard to believe that it was just a fluke a that six of nine GOP Presidents failed in terms of GDP and Debt, and not even one of eight Democrats did. So I wanted to look at GOP Presidents that followed at least two GOP terms and Democratic Presidents that followed at least two Democratic terms. Here is the verdict: Truman, who followed two Democratic terms and still succeeded in all areas of economy, while Bush senior, who followed two Republican terms still added to debt and deficit through excessive spending.
Outcome: This highlights an interesting point that somehow Democrats who follow Democrats still outperform economically, and Republicans who followed GOP presidents somehow still failed to perform in absence of policies of the other party impacting them anymore.
Now, the second part, Obama. So, some people who supported him in 2008 are fed up a little. He shows no leadership in the face of stiff tea party politics. But here is the truth about the man who promised you to pass the health care reform, who promised you to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, who promised you that, while it will take time, he will slow down economic failure and he promised you that he will do everything to keep manufacturing jobs in the US. In his defense, he did all of that and then some.
He passed the Health Care Reform Act. He repealed the discriminatory DADT policy. Since he has become president, he has already created more net jobs in his first two years than Bush administration did in 8 years altogether. While GDP growth is slow, it has been positive now for 8 straight quarters since the stimulus was passed, which also worked. Not to mention, Obama inherited an economy in a wreck where the GDP had fallen to over 8.8 percent, the banking industry has just collapsed, two wars were going on for about seven years, and above all, he took over from a President who had raised the debt ceiling a historic, record six times while taking a 53% debt at the beginning of his first term and transforming it into an 84% by the end. According to my research, the Obama administration added more jobs to the economy than eight years of the former President Bush did. The GDP has now been positive for 8 straight quarters bouncing from a negative 8.8%.
Obama extended Bush bailouts and bailed out the auto industry because many US jobs were at risk and our auto industry was soon to become foreign at the hands of global buy outs. Well, this past May, Chrysler paid off its loans . The American auto industry is still American, those jobs in the Mid West still exist. Obama, despite the roughest opposition that any president has faced, still did all he promised. But, here is an eye-opening compilation on more: See what else Obama has done. Also, I must include the fact that we have half as many troops in Iraq, a 2014 plan to be out of Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden is dead. You don’t need a hyperlink for that, do you? Oh, and he also became the first president ever to have to deal with a distraction of proving, through his birth certificate, that he is an American.
I would like to make one more really important point here because a lot of Republicans often cite their desire to vote for GOP candidates despite their stiff opposition to social and civil freedoms in exchange of offering small government. It is a fact that as Americans we are living in the time of the smallest government in half a century. We are paying the lowest taxes, some of the largest free-trade agreements, and a proposal to pay even lower corporate taxes, small business reliefs, and to lower income taxes down from 6.2% offered by President Bush to 3.2% proposed by Obama and the democrats. It is even mentioned in a post at FOX News.
Outcome: The Obama administration has done everything they promised to do when elected, socially and economically. Democrats have failed to improve the economy but have been very successful in creating jobs and avoiding further economic slip. Actually, this administration has now added over three million jobs in 23 straight months of positive employment gains. 2010 and 2011 also mark the first years since 1997 to see positive gains in manufacturing jobs, as shown in this interactive graph. Additionally, March 2012 marks the month in which the Nasdaq hit 3,000 mark for the first time since dot-com bubble. The Dow Jones hit 13,000 for the first time, growing at 63% under Obama which is the fifth best for any president, and the S&P 500 hit 1,400 for the first time since 2008 showing a remarkable economic recovery on the free-floating capital indexes.
Living standard review of GOP vs. Democratic states
Finally, it’s not fair to highlight just money issues. How about the living standards? None of us desire to live in poverty, food scarcity, without health insurance or earn below a minimum wage. Here is an eye-opening part of my analysis that truly shook me.
The worst standards of living are in states that have Republican legislatures. One can argue that it is just that the poor in the deep South that vote a GOP heavy legislature, but when coupled with all the economic statistics listed above, that argument starts to appear very vulnerable. These conservative states have highest poverty levels despite having all GOP fiscal policies in place, for example:
Poverty. Not even one liberal state has over an 18% poverty rate – six GOP states including Texas do. Labor Abuse. Not even one liberal state has over 8% of its population being abused through earning lower than minimum wage, but nine GOP states do including Texas. Food Insecurity. Not even one liberal state has over 17% of its population living “food insecure.” Four conservative states do, including Texas. Healthcare Access. Not even one liberal state has over 20% of population living without health insurance but four GOP states do, again, including Texas.This study highlights how a huge population of Texans live under an extreme poverty-stricken climate earning below minimum wage, without health insurance access, and without access to daily food while being abused as workers.
Outcome: While GOP policies seem exciting in rhetoric, when given full liberty to implement them through a Republican controlled legislature like the one in the southern states, they are very ineffective. When Democratic financial policies are given full freedom of being implemented, like in the liberal states, they have been much more effective.
I already explained the GOP vs Democrats on social issues in my other post , through which we understand some fundamental differences such as democrats wanting to legalize gay marriage while GOP candidates run clinics to cure gays, GOP candidates working on legislation to criminalize gays and ban gay marriage, GOP legislation to outlaw Islam, and so on and so forth. But, about economic report, here is a recap and conclusion.
1. GOP Presidents have failed, Democrats have not. Historically over last six decades, Democrats have been consistently successful economically, while six of nine Republicans have failed. Keeping in mind the argument that policies of previous administrations haunt the following, the Democrat Truman that followed two Democratic terms still reduced debt and deficit, the Republican, Bush senior, that followed two Republican terms, still added to both.
2. GOP States have lowest living standards, Democratic states do not.
3. Obama has done what he promised and the economy is getting better. It is just hard to climb out of a financial black hole overnight. He still created more jobs than lost, delivered eight straight positive GDP quarters, and the debt that was growing at $3.65 trillion over four years, is now slowed down to about $1.6 trillion. You were not expecting him to change the economy overnight; I know I was not.
4. The GOP offers rhetoric, Democrats offer plans. I will really back this one for you through solid examples. Remember the debt crisis? Democrats took into account an earlier GOP report in which the GOP stated that the most optimum for economic growth is a deficit reduction plan that has an 85-15 split between cuts and revenues. Democrats offered an 83-17 with $6 in cuts for just $1 in return in tax loophole expiration on millionaires and billionaires. It was a mammoth $4 trillion debt reduction offer. The GOP walked away from it, and failed to offer an alternative. Similarly, remember Heathcare reform? Democrats took a major step by offering a plan under which most Americans would be covered, people would be allowed to stay on parents’ insurance after college graduation, insurance companies will no longer be able to increase cost or drop people after an illness, neither will they be able to refuse insurance to people with a preexisting condition. The GOP is currently running on an agenda to repeal that. The GOP alternative? It does not exist.
5. Democrats are willing to sacrifice, the GOP has evolved into a party of “Always No”. The shared Retirement Sacrifice Act of 2011 , which would require lawmakers to wait until the age of 66 to collect their pensions and take a pay cut has been introduced by an Ohio Democrat. Her logic is that congress should also take a pay cut and delayed retirement like other Americans do. Do you know why her simple bill is not passing? The GOP has it blocked. Additionally, as the Democrats fight to raise the age and reduce benefits for themselves and their GOP peers, Rep. John Fleming (LA), a republican responded to a proposed tax loophole expiration on millionaires and billionaires by saying that “by the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over.” Thus, fighting against another democratic plan.
6. Democrats reform, GOP wants to take a step back without reform. Last election Democrats offered ideas that would alter the future such as Healthcare reform, the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, creation of anti-discriminatory laws, Postal Services Reform which is happening right now, lower taxes on small businesses, tax write-offs on first 104K paid in employee salary for large businesses, and increase education funding to keep America’s edge. Have you notices the GOP platform this year? It has been: Repeal Healthcare reform, repeal the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, ban gay marriage, ban building of Islamic religious institutions, block tax reform on millionaires and billionaires, block the jobs act, block deficit reduction plans, abolish the Department of Education, and abolish the EPA. Do you notice a trend? It’s a step back through repeal without alternatives or abolishing of institutions without an alternative plan.
Certainly, I understand these are politics, and all GOP donations come from big businesses but to letting America’s credit rating fall to protect millionaires and billionaires just because the 2012 election is on the horizon is probably not the best approach for America. While a Democratic donation averages $69 and comes from every day Americans, GOP donations average large sums from huge lobby groups and in order to be competitive the GOP has to protect its interests. But at the end of the day, we hire politicians not to win but to make America succeed. I want you to take these facts into account, remember, you are the CEO and you have a choice to make. I exhort you to make that choice keeping our social freedoms and financial facts into account.
I exhort you to educate yourself. When the GOP tells you that they want to lower taxes on millionaires and billionaires and cut education funding and corporate regulations to help the economy grow, understand that capitalism is not pro-business, it is pro-consumer. Businesses thrive with regulation and demand it. Understand that the GOP wants to cut educational funding because we see a direct link between higher education and an increase in more liberal voting patterns. Please understand that tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires do not funnel into an economic spur, as one of the best investors Warren Buffet, who saved GE, Goldman Sachs, and now the Bank of America from a colossal collapse explains
I have presented you past data, current policies, poverty statistics, and current party agendas. I wanted to just ask myself one last litmus test question. What have GOP and Democratic states added to America to see what kind of societies GOP versus Democratic governments create? If GOP economics really work, then we should see them work in states where we vote GOP legislatures and vice versa for Democratic states.
From the entertainment industry based in California to IT in Silicon Valley, each one of the Ivy League schools to Health Care and Life Sciences industry based in Philadelphia-NJ area, from banking based in NYC to the services hub in Boston, and all the way down to high-tech in Seattle, almost all of America’s progress comes from liberal states. But what is even more shocking is that a lot of southern progress happened in places like Atlanta, with large telecommunications’ industry development post 1996 Olympics, where about majority of Atlanta’s population is liberal and ascends from the north east. The truth is, this alone is a litmus test. Democrats have financially outperformed GOP governments economically and are offering actual plans as opposed to simple repeal ideas. Republicans have carved societies that are drastically behind in economic, living standards, or academic progress.
probably way to much for your narrow mind to understand...get help if you need to understand it all
Goodbye, Middle Class—Hello, Donald Trump?
A study finding a drop in the percentage of Americans in the middle class has political elites anxious.
The image of the United States as a broadly prosperous middle-class nation is a core tenet of American exceptionalism: the certainty that we provide for our citizens better than other countries, where a sclerotic class system stifles mobility. Last week’s Pew Research Center study on the decline of the middle class—its members no longer make up a majority of Americans; there’s now an equal share of us in the top and the bottom tiers combined—seemed to confirm the warnings about rising income inequality.
There was a little bit of good news in the study that mostly got ignored: Almost twice as many people rose up and out of the middle class as fell downward into the lower tier. African Americans were among those gaining most ground, though they’re still disproportionately concentrated in the lower tier. And even if the share of people in the middle-class group fell, by 11 points, half the country is still there, while 29 percent are in the upper income tier, and 21 percent in the bottom tier.
The most disturbing finding, is not that the middle class shrunk as a percent of the country. It’s that the group lost even more wealth than it lost members. The share of Americans in the middle class dropped from 61 to 50 percent, but their share of wealth dropped more. In 1970, they had 62 percent of income. That dropped to 43 percent in 2014, while the share going to the upper tier rose from 29 percent to 49 percent.
The Pew study also resonated because it’s long been believed that the myth—and by some measures, the reality—of the United States as largely a middle-class nation contributed to its political stability and dampened the appetite for radical politics, on either end of the political spectrum.
The creation of a relatively vast American middle class was partly a political judgment, in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, that broader prosperity could thwart the appeal of fascism and communism. Elites made decisions to flatten inequality by investing in education and development, strengthening labor protections, subsidizing home mortgages, opening up new land by building roads and infrastructure, all financed by rising tax rates. Those benefits disproportionately went to white people, but all boats began to rise. The Pew study doesn’t talk about the public policy factors behind the decline of the middle class since 1970, but it’s clear that a GOP backlash and the rise of austerity politics played a role.
On the one hand, it’s a good thing to shed the mythology and see the country’s economic stratification clearly. For a long time, more Americans have believed they were middle class than actually are—at both the top of the economic ladder, and at the bottom. The myth of the United States as a vast middle-class nation downplayed the numbers, and the struggles, of those left out.
the Pew poll inspired concern at first, and provided a new excuse for Obama-bashing. “The middle class in America is declining and no longer constitutes a majority under President Barack Obama,” wrote the loons at Breitbart, even though the trends Pew identified long predate the current president. Now there’s a bit of a backlash, with National Review noticing the good news about the larger number of Americans moving into the top tier, and crowing about the overall rise in income share to every group (while not noticing, or caring, about the much larger share of income now going to the upper tier).
Behind all the numbers, and the definitional quibbling, a few long-term trends are clear: Income inequality is higher in the United States than any wealthy nation; it’s growing; the gap between the top of the bottom is widening; and it’s dangerous. In a study released this month that got much less attention, the Forbes 400—America’s richest 400 individuals—hold more wealth than the entire African-American, or Latino, US populations. The New York Times found that 158 families have given half of all donations in the 2016 cycle.
Goodbye, Middle Class—Hello, Donald Trump?
A study finding a drop in the percentage of Americans in the middle class has political elites anxious.
The image of the United States as a broadly prosperous middle-class nation is a core tenet of American exceptionalism: the certainty that we provide for our citizens better than other countries, where a sclerotic class system stifles mobility. Last week’s Pew Research Center study on the decline of the middle class—its members no longer make up a majority of Americans; there’s now an equal share of us in the top and the bottom tiers combined—seemed to confirm the warnings about rising income inequality.
There was a little bit of good news in the study that mostly got ignored: Almost twice as many people rose up and out of the middle class as fell downward into the lower tier. African Americans were among those gaining most ground, though they’re still disproportionately concentrated in the lower tier. And even if the share of people in the middle-class group fell, by 11 points, half the country is still there, while 29 percent are in the upper income tier, and 21 percent in the bottom tier.
The most disturbing finding, is not that the middle class shrunk as a percent of the country. It’s that the group lost even more wealth than it lost members. The share of Americans in the middle class dropped from 61 to 50 percent, but their share of wealth dropped more. In 1970, they had 62 percent of income. That dropped to 43 percent in 2014, while the share going to the upper tier rose from 29 percent to 49 percent.
The Pew study also resonated because it’s long been believed that the myth—and by some measures, the reality—of the United States as largely a middle-class nation contributed to its political stability and dampened the appetite for radical politics, on either end of the political spectrum.
The creation of a relatively vast American middle class was partly a political judgment, in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, that broader prosperity could thwart the appeal of fascism and communism. Elites made decisions to flatten inequality by investing in education and development, strengthening labor protections, subsidizing home mortgages, opening up new land by building roads and infrastructure, all financed by rising tax rates. Those benefits disproportionately went to white people, but all boats began to rise. The Pew study doesn’t talk about the public policy factors behind the decline of the middle class since 1970, but it’s clear that a GOP backlash and the rise of austerity politics played a role.
On the one hand, it’s a good thing to shed the mythology and see the country’s economic stratification clearly. For a long time, more Americans have believed they were middle class than actually are—at both the top of the economic ladder, and at the bottom. The myth of the United States as a vast middle-class nation downplayed the numbers, and the struggles, of those left out.
the Pew poll inspired concern at first, and provided a new excuse for Obama-bashing. “The middle class in America is declining and no longer constitutes a majority under President Barack Obama,” wrote the loons at Breitbart, even though the trends Pew identified long predate the current president. Now there’s a bit of a backlash, with National Review noticing the good news about the larger number of Americans moving into the top tier, and crowing about the overall rise in income share to every group (while not noticing, or caring, about the much larger share of income now going to the upper tier).
Behind all the numbers, and the definitional quibbling, a few long-term trends are clear: Income inequality is higher in the United States than any wealthy nation; it’s growing; the gap between the top of the bottom is widening; and it’s dangerous. In a study released this month that got much less attention, the Forbes 400—America’s richest 400 individuals—hold more wealth than the entire African-American, or Latino, US populations. The New York Times found that 158 families have given half of all donations in the 2016 cycle.
How Reagan Destroyed America & The Middle Class
Reagan is directly responsible for destroying the Middle Class of America, and I am not the only one who thinks so. A number of political analysts have written on this very subject.
James Joiner on allvoices.com calls him "the destroyer of main street" and "the ******* of this nightmare we are living.
He goes on to state of the Republicans: "They call themselves the party of Ronald Reagan! That scares the hell out of me because Reagan was the ******* of the war mongering high Deficit compassionate Conservatives that gave Birth to much war present and future unless Obama can turn around the disaster they created around the world with their war mongering!" (http://www.allvoices.com/contribute...in-street-and-a-ronald-reagan-jr-i-agree-with).
Pablo Mayhew, a columnist on rawstory.com goes so far as to refer to Reagan as a criminal no better than his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. He relates Reagan's role in the Iran-Contra affair in which Reagan pled "forgetfulness" when pressed about it.
Mayhew concludes with these words: " as one great writer has contended, that Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream, then Reagan broke its back Now.... the American Dream is clearly down for the count." (http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/mayhew/reagan_destroyed_american_dream.htm)
And listen to what Thom Hartmann, prominent television and radio talk show host and commentator, had to say about the devastation today on our economy that was the direct result, he reports, of Reaganomics when he appeared as a guest on Dateline just prior to Obama taking office.
when Reagan came into office we were the largest exporter of manufacturing goods and the largest importer of raw materials on the planet. And, the largest creditor--more people owed us money than anybody else in the world. Now, just 28 years later, we're the largest importer of finished goods, manufactured goods; the largest exporter of raw materials--which is kind of the definition of a third-world nation -- and we're the most in-debt of any country in the world. This is the absolute consequence of Reaganomics." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/thom-hartmann-defends-the_b_150964.html)
These graphs bear out exactly what all these people have been saying about Reagan being directly responsible for destroying America and the Middle Class. In looking at these pay particulular attention to 1981, the year Reagan took office.
Obviously, George H. Bush, Clinton, and Gorge W could have reversed this trend; instead, they, for the most part became keepers and harbingers of it.
pics1-5
"Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then: " So avows the author who researched the subject and collected the graphs. (http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010062415/reagan-revolution-home-roost-charts)
You can find all kinds of books and articles praising Reagan, but what I have presented are the cold, hard facts about what the man did to our economy with his Reaganomics. For those who would like to read more on this subject, go to:
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America Drowning In Debt
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America IsCrumbling
Finance, Mine, Oil & Debt Disasters: THIS Is Deregulation
Reaganomics killed America’s middle class
This country’s fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980
There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.
Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.
At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.
So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "normal" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.
You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.
This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.
The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.
French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.
According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.
Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?
This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.
Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.
History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.
If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.
You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.
Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
Coincidence? I think not.
Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics." And we're still in the era of Reaganomics - as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.
This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.
And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement - social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era's middle class - these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.
We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we've been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can't have both.
And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.
The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.
Trump Administration: The Most Corrupt and Unethical in American History?
Newsweek Alexander Nazaryan,Newsweek
The plane is very much an extension of the Trump brand,” Donald Trump told The New York Times of the Boeing 757 he took to calling “Trump ******* One” during the 2016 presidential campaign. It was an outdated model, and, as the Times drily noted, “an odd choice for a man who put his net worth at $11 billion.” But the plane was huge, and lined with gold on the inside, communicating to his supporters both might and prestige. It was a jalopy, but it did the trick.
Given Trump’s goofy fixation on private jets as a symbol of luxury, it should come as no surprise that an astonishing number of his cabinet members are ensnared in scandals involving air travel, whether on private or civilian planes: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is in the mix, too, though for slightly different reasons.
Reagan is directly responsible for destroying the Middle Class of America, and I am not the only one who thinks so. A number of political analysts have written on this very subject.
James Joiner on allvoices.com calls him "the destroyer of main street" and "the ******* of this nightmare we are living.
He goes on to state of the Republicans: "They call themselves the party of Ronald Reagan! That scares the hell out of me because Reagan was the ******* of the war mongering high Deficit compassionate Conservatives that gave Birth to much war present and future unless Obama can turn around the disaster they created around the world with their war mongering!" (http://www.allvoices.com/contribute...in-street-and-a-ronald-reagan-jr-i-agree-with).
Pablo Mayhew, a columnist on rawstory.com goes so far as to refer to Reagan as a criminal no better than his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. He relates Reagan's role in the Iran-Contra affair in which Reagan pled "forgetfulness" when pressed about it.
Mayhew concludes with these words: " as one great writer has contended, that Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream, then Reagan broke its back Now.... the American Dream is clearly down for the count." (http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/mayhew/reagan_destroyed_american_dream.htm)
And listen to what Thom Hartmann, prominent television and radio talk show host and commentator, had to say about the devastation today on our economy that was the direct result, he reports, of Reaganomics when he appeared as a guest on Dateline just prior to Obama taking office.
when Reagan came into office we were the largest exporter of manufacturing goods and the largest importer of raw materials on the planet. And, the largest creditor--more people owed us money than anybody else in the world. Now, just 28 years later, we're the largest importer of finished goods, manufactured goods; the largest exporter of raw materials--which is kind of the definition of a third-world nation -- and we're the most in-debt of any country in the world. This is the absolute consequence of Reaganomics." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thom-hartmann/thom-hartmann-defends-the_b_150964.html)
These graphs bear out exactly what all these people have been saying about Reagan being directly responsible for destroying America and the Middle Class. In looking at these pay particulular attention to 1981, the year Reagan took office.
Obviously, George H. Bush, Clinton, and Gorge W could have reversed this trend; instead, they, for the most part became keepers and harbingers of it.
pics1-5
"Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then: " So avows the author who researched the subject and collected the graphs. (http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010062415/reagan-revolution-home-roost-charts)
You can find all kinds of books and articles praising Reagan, but what I have presented are the cold, hard facts about what the man did to our economy with his Reaganomics. For those who would like to read more on this subject, go to:
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America Drowning In Debt
Reagan Revolution Home To Roost: America IsCrumbling
Finance, Mine, Oil & Debt Disasters: THIS Is Deregulation
Reaganomics killed America’s middle class
This country’s fate was sealed when our government slashed taxes on the rich back in 1980
There's nothing "normal" about having a middle class. Having a middle class is a choice that a society has to make, and it's a choice we need to make again in this generation, if we want to stop the destruction of the remnants of the last generation's middle class.
Despite what you might read in the Wall Street Journal or see on Fox News, capitalism is not an economic system that produces a middle class. In fact, if left to its own devices, capitalism tends towards vast levels of inequality and monopoly. The natural and most stable state of capitalism actually looks a lot like the Victorian England depicted in Charles Dickens' novels.
At the top there is a very small class of superrich. Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very small, "middle" class of professionals and mercantilists - doctor, lawyers, shop-owners - who help keep things running for the superrich and supply the working poor with their needs. And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people - typically over 90 percent of the population - who make up the working poor. They have no wealth - in fact they're typically in debt most of their lives - and can barely survive on what little money they make.
So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in "normal" capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option.
You can see this trend today in America. When we had heavily regulated and taxed capitalism in the post-war era, the largest employer in America was General Motors, and they paid working people what would be, in today's dollars, about $50 an hour with benefits. Reagan began deregulating and cutting taxes on capitalism in 1981, and today, with more classical "raw capitalism," what we call "Reaganomics," or "supply side economics," our nation's largest employer is WalMart and they pay around $10 an hour.
This is how quickly capitalism reorients itself when the brakes of regulation and taxes are removed - this huge change was done in less than 35 years.
The only ways a working-class "middle class" can come about in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval - a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14th century - or by heavily taxing the rich.
French economist Thomas Piketty has talked about this at great length in his groundbreaking new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He argues that the middle class that came about in Western Europe and the United States during the mid-twentieth was the direct result of a peculiar set of historical events.
According to Piketty, the post-World War II middle class was created by two major things: the destruction of European inherited wealth during the war and higher taxes on the rich, most of which were rationalized by the war. This brought wealth and income at the top down, and raised working people up into a middle class.
Piketty is right, especially about the importance of high marginal tax rates and inheritance taxes being necessary for the creation of a middle class that includes working-class people. Progressive taxation, when done correctly, pushes wages down to working people and reduces the incentives for the very rich to pillage their companies or rip off their workers. After all, why take another billion when 91 percent of it just going to be paid in taxes?
This is the main reason why, when GM was our largest employer and our working class were also in the middle class, CEOs only took home 30 times what working people did. The top tax rate for all the time America's middle class was created was between 74 and 91 percent. Until, of course, Reagan dropped it to 28 percent and working people moved from the middle class to becoming the working poor.
Other policies, like protective tariffs and strong labor laws also help build a middle class, but progressive taxation is the most important because it is the most direct way to transfer money from the rich to the working poor, and to create a disincentive to theft or monopoly by those at the top.
History shows how important high taxes on the rich are for creating a strong middle class.
If you compare a chart showing the historical top income tax rate over the course of the twentieth century with a chart of income inequality in the United States over roughly the same time period, you'll see that the period with the highest taxes on the rich - the period between the Roosevelt and Reagan administrations - was also the period with the lowest levels of economic inequality.
You'll also notice that since marginal tax rates started to plummet during the Reagan years, income inequality has skyrocketed.
Even more striking, during those same 33 years since Reagan took office and started cutting taxes on the rich, income levels for the top 1 percent have ballooned while income levels for everyone else have stayed pretty much flat.
Coincidence? I think not.
Creating a middle class is always a choice, and by embracing Reaganomics and cutting taxes on the rich, we decided back in 1980 not to have a middle class within a generation or two. George H.W. Bush saw this, and correctly called it "Voodoo Economics." And we're still in the era of Reaganomics - as President Obama recently pointed out, Reagan was a successful revolutionary.
This, of course, is exactly what conservatives always push for. When wealth is spread more equally among all parts of society, people start to expect more from society and start demanding more rights. That leads to social instability, which is feared and hated by conservatives, even though revolutionaries and liberals like Thomas Jefferson welcome it.
And, as Kirk and Buckley predicted back in the 1950s, this is exactly what happened in the 1960s and '70s when taxes on the rich were at their highest. The Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the consumer movement, the anti-war movement, and the environmental movement - social movements that grew out of the wealth and rising expectations of the post-World War II era's middle class - these all terrified conservatives. Which is why ever since they took power in 1980, they've made gutting working people out of the middle class their number one goal.
We now have a choice in this country. We can either continue going down the road to oligarchy, the road we've been on since the Reagan years, or we can choose to go on the road to a more pluralistic society with working class people able to make it into the middle class. We can't have both.
And if we want to go down the road to letting working people back into the middle class, it all starts with taxing the rich.
The time is long past due for us to roll back the Reagan tax cuts.
Trump Administration: The Most Corrupt and Unethical in American History?
Newsweek Alexander Nazaryan,Newsweek
The plane is very much an extension of the Trump brand,” Donald Trump told The New York Times of the Boeing 757 he took to calling “Trump ******* One” during the 2016 presidential campaign. It was an outdated model, and, as the Times drily noted, “an odd choice for a man who put his net worth at $11 billion.” But the plane was huge, and lined with gold on the inside, communicating to his supporters both might and prestige. It was a jalopy, but it did the trick.
Given Trump’s goofy fixation on private jets as a symbol of luxury, it should come as no surprise that an astonishing number of his cabinet members are ensnared in scandals involving air travel, whether on private or civilian planes: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is in the mix, too, though for slightly different reasons.
What we have is a private jet presidency, a low-class orgy of first-class kleptocrats. Remember when people thought Trump would usher in an era of American totalitarianism? Remember when credible, serious people compared Trump to some of the 20th century’s worst dictators? They, like the people who voted for Trump, believed what he said. How foolish. Even if Trump does yearn to become our Dear Leader, realizing that vision would take immense dedication, something neither Trump nor his minions have. The president obsesses over ratings, while his underlings grab what they can before Bobby Three Sticks (Robert S. Mueller III to you and me) starts handing out indictments like parking tickets
This administration includes some obviously decent, highly capable people, foremost among them Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, Chief of Staff General John Kelly and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Hope Hicks, the new communications director, is also well regarded by the journalists who work with her. But they are the exception.
Too many of Trump’s cabinet members have taken to behaving like middle managers let loose in the supply closet for the first time, stuffing their pockets with notepads and pens, hoping the
stern secretary doesn’t notice. Oh, but she has. Inspector generals for federal agencies seem to be especially busy these days. Ethics lawyers, too.
Trump’s gang of imitation moguls seems to have forgotten that it was supposed to be working for the “forgotten Americans.” It’s hard to make that claim when you use a private jet 24 times, as Price did, according to Politico. This cost a total of $300,000, and we paid for it. An HHS spokeswoman actually tried to defend Price’s abuse of the public purse, telling The Washington Post that the flights were Price’s way of “making sure he is connected with the real American people.” But of course. Real Americans must delight in learning they paid $7,000 to have Price drop in on the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual conclave for the type of elites Trump supposedly disdains.
Then there’s Mnuchin, a financier known as “the foreclosure king.” He’s worth an estimated $300 million. You’d think the guy could afford a Mint upgrade on JetBlue, if not a Learjet of his own. And he probably can, but why pay when you can get something for free? We recently learned that Mnuchin wanted to use a government airplane to shuttle him and his wife Louise Linton around Europe during their honeymoon. This would cost taxpayers $25,000 per hour. Some sane person denied the request, but months later, Mnuchin and Linton managed to finagle a government jet to view the solar eclipse in Lexington, Kentucky. Details of that trip would have perhaps remained secret, except Linton bragged about her luxurious lifestyle on Instagram, then lashed out at a mom from Portland, Oregon, who criticized the former actress for her ostentation. The spat attracted predictable attention and outrage. What were they doing in Lexington, anyway? That question, we’ll leave to the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who is investigating the matter.
“You don’t see any shame here,” says E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist and co-author of the new book One Nation After Trump, an urgent wartime dispatch that explains how civility, decency and dignity were expunged from modern American politics. “And that’s really disturbing.”
Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, is a zealous foe of the environment, but at least he isn’t all that committed to his job. Observers see Pruitt making moves for a gubernatorial run in his native Oklahoma. It’s hard to otherwise justify his apparent longing for the Sooner State. As of August, he had spent more than 40 days in Oklahoma, which cost you and me $12,000.
People do not like Pruitt, at least judging by the number of threats he has received. That’s wrong, no matter how much people may hate his policies. But it’s also wrong to use high-ranking EPA investigators who are supposed to be delving into environmental crimes, for your personal security detail. Pruitt has done just that, padding his own security while also vitiating the agency he runs.
This never happened with prior administrators,” a former official of the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division told The Washington Post, which first reported the news. “These guys signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail.” The Post report suggested that the EPA would spend $800,000 for “the security detail’s travel expenses” this fiscal year.
DeVos, the Education Secretary, is a billionaire who uses her own private jet. That’s progress on the ethical front, I suppose. But the U.S. Marshals who provide her constant protection send their bill to the same Americans who are paying for Price, Pruitt and Mnuchin to live out their fabulous fantasies of federal employment. So far, protecting Betsy DeVos has cost Americans $8 million.
That sum, already enormous, seems even greater when you consider all the Republican preaching about fiscal responsibility. Trump’s budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, wanted Meals-on-Wheels eliminated. We don’t have money for health care, we certainly don’t have money for foreign aid or public housing. That would make us socialists. But, my God, we can’t have Tom Price taking a train Philadelphia!
Is this the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States? Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, and the author of the new book, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, seems to think so. Runners up in that ignominious category, he told me, were Ulysses S. Grant, who presided over the widespread financial collusion that came to be known as the Whiskey Ring scandal, and Warren G. Harding, whose administration was marred by bribery over oil reserves, in what came to be known as the Teapot Dome Scandal.
Dionne, The Washington Post columnist, isn’t surprised by the incompetence or corruption of the Trump administration, pointing to the president’s refusal to genuinely cede control of his golf resorts or hotels, which have predictably come to function as cesspools of influence peddling.
“When, philosophically, you don’t have a lot of respect for government as an institution,” Dionne says, you aren’t likely to show a lot of “respect or deference” for the rules and norms that limit the power of the presidency. So we are stuck with Trump and his hapless thieves, chased by inspector generals as if this were all some screwball comedy of the 1950s.
I almost miss former chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, and his ferocious nationalist convictions borrowed from obscure Italian philosophers. His vision of an isolated America was terrifying to many, but at least you knew he wasn’t in the White House to pad his Vanguard account. At least he would have understood the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of men like Price, who’ve discovered that the swamp they promised to drain can be a pleasant place to live. Likely, they’ve known that all along. Now, they no longer have to pretend
This administration includes some obviously decent, highly capable people, foremost among them Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, Chief of Staff General John Kelly and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Hope Hicks, the new communications director, is also well regarded by the journalists who work with her. But they are the exception.
Too many of Trump’s cabinet members have taken to behaving like middle managers let loose in the supply closet for the first time, stuffing their pockets with notepads and pens, hoping the
stern secretary doesn’t notice. Oh, but she has. Inspector generals for federal agencies seem to be especially busy these days. Ethics lawyers, too.
Trump’s gang of imitation moguls seems to have forgotten that it was supposed to be working for the “forgotten Americans.” It’s hard to make that claim when you use a private jet 24 times, as Price did, according to Politico. This cost a total of $300,000, and we paid for it. An HHS spokeswoman actually tried to defend Price’s abuse of the public purse, telling The Washington Post that the flights were Price’s way of “making sure he is connected with the real American people.” But of course. Real Americans must delight in learning they paid $7,000 to have Price drop in on the Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual conclave for the type of elites Trump supposedly disdains.
Then there’s Mnuchin, a financier known as “the foreclosure king.” He’s worth an estimated $300 million. You’d think the guy could afford a Mint upgrade on JetBlue, if not a Learjet of his own. And he probably can, but why pay when you can get something for free? We recently learned that Mnuchin wanted to use a government airplane to shuttle him and his wife Louise Linton around Europe during their honeymoon. This would cost taxpayers $25,000 per hour. Some sane person denied the request, but months later, Mnuchin and Linton managed to finagle a government jet to view the solar eclipse in Lexington, Kentucky. Details of that trip would have perhaps remained secret, except Linton bragged about her luxurious lifestyle on Instagram, then lashed out at a mom from Portland, Oregon, who criticized the former actress for her ostentation. The spat attracted predictable attention and outrage. What were they doing in Lexington, anyway? That question, we’ll leave to the Treasury Department’s inspector general, who is investigating the matter.
“You don’t see any shame here,” says E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post columnist and co-author of the new book One Nation After Trump, an urgent wartime dispatch that explains how civility, decency and dignity were expunged from modern American politics. “And that’s really disturbing.”
Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, is a zealous foe of the environment, but at least he isn’t all that committed to his job. Observers see Pruitt making moves for a gubernatorial run in his native Oklahoma. It’s hard to otherwise justify his apparent longing for the Sooner State. As of August, he had spent more than 40 days in Oklahoma, which cost you and me $12,000.
People do not like Pruitt, at least judging by the number of threats he has received. That’s wrong, no matter how much people may hate his policies. But it’s also wrong to use high-ranking EPA investigators who are supposed to be delving into environmental crimes, for your personal security detail. Pruitt has done just that, padding his own security while also vitiating the agency he runs.
This never happened with prior administrators,” a former official of the agency’s Criminal Investigations Division told The Washington Post, which first reported the news. “These guys signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail.” The Post report suggested that the EPA would spend $800,000 for “the security detail’s travel expenses” this fiscal year.
DeVos, the Education Secretary, is a billionaire who uses her own private jet. That’s progress on the ethical front, I suppose. But the U.S. Marshals who provide her constant protection send their bill to the same Americans who are paying for Price, Pruitt and Mnuchin to live out their fabulous fantasies of federal employment. So far, protecting Betsy DeVos has cost Americans $8 million.
That sum, already enormous, seems even greater when you consider all the Republican preaching about fiscal responsibility. Trump’s budget chief, Mick Mulvaney, wanted Meals-on-Wheels eliminated. We don’t have money for health care, we certainly don’t have money for foreign aid or public housing. That would make us socialists. But, my God, we can’t have Tom Price taking a train Philadelphia!
Is this the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States? Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, and the author of the new book, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life, seems to think so. Runners up in that ignominious category, he told me, were Ulysses S. Grant, who presided over the widespread financial collusion that came to be known as the Whiskey Ring scandal, and Warren G. Harding, whose administration was marred by bribery over oil reserves, in what came to be known as the Teapot Dome Scandal.
Dionne, The Washington Post columnist, isn’t surprised by the incompetence or corruption of the Trump administration, pointing to the president’s refusal to genuinely cede control of his golf resorts or hotels, which have predictably come to function as cesspools of influence peddling.
“When, philosophically, you don’t have a lot of respect for government as an institution,” Dionne says, you aren’t likely to show a lot of “respect or deference” for the rules and norms that limit the power of the presidency. So we are stuck with Trump and his hapless thieves, chased by inspector generals as if this were all some screwball comedy of the 1950s.
I almost miss former chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, and his ferocious nationalist convictions borrowed from obscure Italian philosophers. His vision of an isolated America was terrifying to many, but at least you knew he wasn’t in the White House to pad his Vanguard account. At least he would have understood the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of men like Price, who’ve discovered that the swamp they promised to drain can be a pleasant place to live. Likely, they’ve known that all along. Now, they no longer have to pretend
Trump says his tax plan is 'not good for me' — here are the 3 ways it could benefit him
President Donald Trump stands to be a big beneficiary of his new tax plan, should it enter into law.
While little is known about Trump's prior taxes, as he has broken with recent tradition and refused to make them public, a handful of proposals in the plan appear as if they would greatly help Trump's bottom line.
Trump's businesses — under the umbrella of the Trump Organization — are currently being run by his two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and another senior Trump Organization official.
Trump did not made as serious a severance with his business ventures as most ethics experts insisted prior to taking office.
During an Indiana speech announcing his tax plan Wednesday, Trump insisted that the proposal was "not good for me."
Here are the proposals in Wednesday's release that could provide a substantial benefit to Trump:
A 25% rate for pass-through businesses
Trump's tax plan includes a new 25% rate for pass-through businesses — which include sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S-corporations. Pass through income, which only gets taxed when it is a profit, is currently taxed at individual levels up to the very top rate of 39.6%, which is higher than the current top corporate tax rate of 35%.
Authors of the plan say they will consider rules to prevent "personal income" from getting taxed at the 25% rate. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has suggested that the rate may only apply to goods producers and not service-oriented companies — something that could play into how beneficial this change would be for Trump, as most of his businesses are service oriented.
Trump, as was revealed during the campaign, said in a deposition that he set up a number of development projects with single-use S-corporations, working through them instead of the Trump Organization. It was also during the campaign that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton dubbed Trump's idea for pass-through income the "Trump loophole," arguing that it was one of the most beneficial tax proposals to Trump personally.
The phrase pass-through income means simply that the income "passes through" the business and into the individual returns of the business owner. Last year, prior to the election, CNBC's Robert Frank cast the loophole as the biggest tax break for the wealthy in Trump's campaign plan.
And as multiple outlets reported last year, a large portion of Trump's earnings appear to be the result of pass-through income.
Repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax
Trump's plan proposes to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax — which, as known from the limited 2005 returns leaked earlier this year, once cost the president $31 million. It accounted for most of the $38.5 million in taxes Trump paid that year.
The AMT, which is aimed at ensuring that the wealthy pay a fair share of taxes has plenty of opponents, some of whom believe it does not accomplish that goal.
As is, the tax serves as a sort of secondary tax code that only applies to specific high-income earners, trusts, corporations, and estates.
Elimination of the Estate Tax
A longtime Republican rallying cry, Trump's tax plan seeks to eliminate what is more commonly known as the death tax. In 2017, it only applies to inherited assets that total $5.49 million or more, meaning very few Americans are faced with paying it.
If the estate tax were repealed permanently, it could save Trump's estate $564 million based on an estimated net worth of $3 billion, as Bloomberg reported last year. Trump has said he is worth $10 billion, meaning he would be dealt even bigger savings.
Trump’s Tax Plan Is A Con That Benefits Corporations And The Wealthiest Americans
Donald Trump unveiled a tax plan that is a massive con job. The plan doesn’t benefit the poor and middle class. Trump’s vision for taxes is a windfall for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
Politico’s Danny Vinik summed up who the big winners are under Trump’s plan, “Who would be the winners of the Trump tax plan? The rich. The top tax rate falling from 39.6 percent to 25 percent will give them a huge windfall, as will eliminating the AMT, the estate tax for their heirs, and the Obamacare surtax on capital gains and dividends. The huge cut in the corporate income tax will also benefit the well-off. Even worse: Trump doesn’t say what we will do with the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a financial lifeline for low-income Americans. Eliminating it would cause significant hardship for the poor—while also going against the current political agreement around the effectiveness of the EITC. (The campaign didn’t return an email asking for more information.)”
Trump’s plan, like every other Republican tax cut for the rich, blows a hole in the deficit to the tune of $2.3 trillion.
The Republican candidate claims that people earning less than $25,000 won’t pay any federal income taxes, but according to the IRS, 76% of people who are earning $25,000 or less already pay no federal income taxes. In reality, Trump isn’t giving anything to people who earn $25,000 or less that they don’t already have. Eighty-three percent of people who earn less than $30,000 are already not paying federal income taxes.
Donald Trump is trying to disguise a plan that gives the rich a big tax break as having something for everyone. What Trump left out of his press conference is what he will do with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
The chart below shows that Trump’s plan would take money away from low and middle income people:
pic t1
In 2014,people earning up to $47,300 paid a net negative percentage in federal income taxes. By bringing them up to zero as Trump proposes, his tax plan will cost them money. It is likely that Trump's plan reduces the federal income tax rate to zero for lower income Americans, but also takes away their tax refunds. Trumps plan would leave lower income workers with less money, while giving the wealthy and corporation a wave of tax breaks.
The media is helping con voters by running with headlines about raising taxes on the wealthy. However Trump's plan is designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
9 ways Trump’s tax plan is a gift to the rich, including himself
President Trump and congressional Republicans keep saying their tax plan doesn't help the rich. But that's not true.
The nine-page outline released Wednesday is full of goodies that will make millionaires and billionaires happy. Republicans say it's a starting point, but it would have to be turned on its head to be anything other than a windfall for the wealthy. In fact, in nine pages, The Washington Post counts at least nine ways the wealthy benefit, including Trump himself. Here's our list:
1) A straight-up tax cut for the rich. The top tax rate in the United States is 39.6 percent. Trump and GOP leaders propose lowering that to 35 percent. It's also worth noting the 39.6 percent tax rate applies only to income above $418,400 for singles and $470,700 for married couples. The outline doesn't specify what income level the new 35 percent rate would kick in at. It's possible the rich will get an every bigger tax cut if the final plan raises that threshold.
2) The estate tax goes bye-bye. Trump likes to call the estate tax the “death tax.” At the moment, Americans who pass money, homes or other assets on to heirs when they die pay a 40 percent tax. But here's the important part Trump leaves out: The only people who have to pay this tax are those passing on more than $5.49 million. (And a married couple can inherit nearly $11 million without paying the tax.)
Trump frequently claims the estate tax hurts farmers and small-business owners. But as The Post's Fact Checker team points out, only 5,500 estates will pay any estate tax at all in 2017 (out of about 3 million estates). And of those 5,500 hit with the tax, only 80 (yes, you read that right) are farms or small businesses.
3) Hedge funds and lawyers get a special tax break. The plan calls for the tax rate on “pass-through entities” to fall from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. Republicans claim this is a tax break for small-business owners because “pass-through entities” is an umbrella term that covers the ways most people set up businesses: sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations. But the reality is, most small-business owners (more than 85 percent) already pay a tax rate of 25 percent or less, according to the Brookings Institution.
Only 3 percent pay a rate greater than 30 percent. That 3 percent includes doctors, lawyers, hedge fund managers and other really well-off people. Instead of paying a 35 percent income tax, these rich business owners would be able to pass off their income as business income and pay only a 25 percent tax rate. (The tax outline released Wednesday “contemplates” that Congress “will adopt measures to prevent” this kind of tax dodging. But there's no guarantee that will happen).
4) The AMT is over. Republicans want to ******* the alternative minimum tax, a measure put in place in 1969 to ensure the wealthy aren't using a bunch of loopholes and credits to lower their tax bills to paltry sums. The AMT starts to phase in for people with earnings of about $130,000, but the vast majority of people subject to the AMT earn over $500,000, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Trump himself would benefit from repealing the AMT. As The Post's Fact Checker team notes, Trump's leaked tax return from 2005 shows that the AMT increased his tax bill from about $5.3 million to $36.5 million. In 2005 alone, he potentially could have saved $31 million.
5) The wealthy get to keep deducting mortgage interest. Only about 1 in 4 taxpayers claims the mortgage interest deduction, the Brookings Institution says. “Upper-income households primarily benefit from the subsidy,” wrote Brookings scholar Bruce Katz in a report last year. In fact, the wealthy can deduct interest payments on mortgages worth up to $1 million. There have been many calls over the years to lower that threshold, but the Trump tax plan is keeping it in place.
The GOP is doing this even though the tax cuts would add to the United States' debt, since it doesn't raise enough revenue to offset all the money lost from the new tax breaks. The outline also calls for the charitable deduction to stay, another deduction used heavily by the top 1 percent.
6) Stockholders are going to be very happy. Trump is calling for a super-low tax rate on the money big businesses such as Apple and Microsoft bring back to the United States from overseas, a process known as “repatriation.” Trump argues companies will use all this money coming home to build new U.S. factories. But the last time the United States did this, in the early 2000s, it ended up being a big win for people who own stocks. Companies simply took most of the money and gave it to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks.
Guess what? Just about everyone (outside the White House) predicts the same thing will happen again. Corporations are even admitting it.
7) The favorite tax break of hedge fund billionaires is still safe. There's no mention in the tax-overhaul rubric of “carried interest.” Those two words make most people's eyes glaze over, but they are a well-known tax-dodging trick for millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street. Hedge fund and private-equity managers earn most of their money from their investments doing well. But instead of paying income taxes on all that money at a rate of 39.6 percent, the managers are able to claim it as “carried interest” so they can pay tax at the low capital gains rate of 20 percent.
Trump called this totally unfair on the campaign trail. During the primaries, he said he would eliminate this loophole because hedge fund managers were “getting away with *******.” But that change didn't end up in the GOP plan.
8) Capital gains taxes stay low. The nine-page document also says nothing about capital gains, the tax rate people pay when they finally sell a stock or asset after holding on to it for many years. At the moment, the wealthiest Americans pay a 20 percent capital gains rate. Trump and Republican leaders aren't proposing any changes to that, even though it is a popular way for millionaires to lower their tax bill.
9) The Obamacare investment tax goes away. The Affordable Care Act put in place a 3.8 percent surcharge on investment income (known formally as the Net Investment Income Tax). It applies only to individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and married couples earning more than $250,000. There's no mention of this tax in the outline released this week, but Republicans clearly want to get rid of it. Repealing it was part of the GOP health-care bills that failed to pass Congress in recent weeks. One way or another, Republicans are likely to roll back this tax.
When reporters asked Trump whether the tax plan would help him personally, he quickly said no.
“No, I don’t benefit. I don’t benefit,” Trump said. “In fact, very, very strongly, as you see, I think there’s very little benefit for people of wealth.”
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), who was part of the team that worked with the White House to craft the tax-overhaul outline, was asked a similar question on Fox News. He, too, said this plan does little to help the rich.
“I think those who benefit most are middle-class families struggling to keep every dollar they earn,” Brady told Fox News.
But one look at this plan tells a very different story. It gives an outright tax cut to the wealthiest Americans and it preserves almost all of the most popular loopholes they use to reduce their tax bills.
Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), a strong proponent of tax cuts, was more straightforward this week. He told reporters, “This is a supply-side approach,” another way of saying trickle-down economics.
No middle class, no republic: GOP plans to destroy America’s safety net will also ******* democracy
Democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans
Newt Gingrich openly bragged recently at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.” That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and towards billionaires and transnational corporations.
In July of last year, discussing SCOTUS’s 5/4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
As Princeton researchers Gilens and Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.
They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.
For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Picketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal by-product of raw, unregulated capitalism — what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”
Instead, unregulated markets — particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes — invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: They produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.
With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a ******* epidemic. This further polarizes the nation, both economically and politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the oligarchs.
While there’s a clear moral dimension to this — pointed out by Adam Smith in his classic "Theory of Moral Sentiments" — there’s also a vital political dimension.
Smith noted, in 1759, that, “All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.”
Jefferson was acutely aware of this: The Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should be protected and promoted by government.
That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising tide lifts all boats” metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.
Far more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our nation’s Founders), however, was Aristotle’s observation that when a nation pursues economic or political activities that destroy its middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or oligarchy. As he noted in "The Politics":
Now in all states there are three elements: One class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean. . . . But a [government] ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes.
“Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.”
This is how America was for the Boomer generation: A 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70-percent drop in “social mobility” — the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.
So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?
History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.
As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”
Similarly, Thomas Paine, proposing in "Agrarian Justice" (1797) what we today call Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its people, “ee before them the certainty of escaping the miseries that under other governments accompany old age.” Such a strong social safety net, Paine argued, “will have an advocate and an ally in the heart of all nations.”
Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.
Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans are proposing multi-million-dollar tax breaks for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.
Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work.
As Ian Milheiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20 to 50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”
If Gingrich, Ryan, et al succeed in destroying FDR’s legacy programs, not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate, and history suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy.
Hang on tight — the ride could get rough.
Donald Trump's Economic Plans Would Destroy the U.S. EconomyMake America have a recession again.
Donald Trump’s tweet about tacos was only the second-most alarming message he sent to potential voters. Less open to humorous interpretation was his threat to default on U.S. debt in the event of a recession.
“I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts,” he told CNBC. “I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”
This policy would be so disastrous that even its suggestion is dangerous. In the event of a recession, Trump would treat the full faith and credit of the United States to a capricious hair cut. As Josh Barro explained, this wouldn’t just represent a historic default, putting the U.S. in the position of a country like Greece or Argentina; it could also spark an international financial crisis, as “investors would cease to see Treasuries as a safe asset and demand higher interest rates in exchange for risk.”
Trump has promised to make America great again. But a closer look his policy proposals, such as they are, suggests that within his first few years as president, he would more likely make American recessionary again.
The problem begins with his outspoken approach to Mexican immigration. His “plan” to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants would shrink the economy by about 2 percent, according to American Action Forum (AAF), a conservative and pro-business think tank. The sudden subtraction of 7 million workers would cause an immediate shock to thousands of businesses, triggering a GDP collapse ranging from $400 billion to $600 billion in production, AAF’s analysis found, with the worst of the slump occurring in industries like construction and hospitality. “The things Donald Trump has said are utterly unworkable,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and the forum's president, told Reuters.
Trump’s plan for a border wall could cost several billion dollars more. But as a financial matter, the wall is one of the least troubling aspects of his policy fantasies. By contrast, his tax plan would cut federal revenue by almost $10 trillion in the next decade, according to the Tax Policy Center. Meanwhile, he has no plans to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid, benefits for veterans, defense, or Social Security, which, along with mandatory payments on the debt, collectively account for more than two-thirds of government spending. In fact, several of his proposals suggest he would raise spending on some of these measures, such as Social Security and veterans benefits. The deficit would, in short order, reach unprecedented peacetime, non-recession levels. (That’s not counting the revenue collapse from manufacturing a recession with mass deportations.)
Here is Trumponomics, in a sentence: Create an unnecessary economic downturn by deporting 7 million workers while cutting taxes for the rich and requiring the United States to borrow trillions of dollars from creditors, whom Trump has now threatened to stiff, if he feels like it. It would be the greatest, dumbest recession in American history.
Trump’s abandonment of economic common sense is, like so much of his appeal, not an outlier position in the GOP so much as an extrapolation of his party’s recent commitment to fiscal insanity. Republicans elites have responded to widening income inequality by proposing a series of escalating tax cuts for the rich. Paul Ryan, nominally the adult-elect of the party, rose to fame with tax-cut promises and draconian proposals to shrink the safety net. When interest rates were historically low and infrastructure spending was attractive, Republicans called for deficit reductions. When the recovery was still fragile, they played chicken with the debt ceiling by threatening a default until the president caved to their budget demands.
Trump’s economic ideas are so haphazard that, by their own merits, they scarcely deserve to be taken seriously or considered alongside each other. But those ideas are a joke—one that the country is civically obligated to take seriously.
President Donald Trump stands to be a big beneficiary of his new tax plan, should it enter into law.
While little is known about Trump's prior taxes, as he has broken with recent tradition and refused to make them public, a handful of proposals in the plan appear as if they would greatly help Trump's bottom line.
Trump's businesses — under the umbrella of the Trump Organization — are currently being run by his two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and another senior Trump Organization official.
Trump did not made as serious a severance with his business ventures as most ethics experts insisted prior to taking office.
During an Indiana speech announcing his tax plan Wednesday, Trump insisted that the proposal was "not good for me."
Here are the proposals in Wednesday's release that could provide a substantial benefit to Trump:
A 25% rate for pass-through businesses
Trump's tax plan includes a new 25% rate for pass-through businesses — which include sole proprietorships, partnerships, and S-corporations. Pass through income, which only gets taxed when it is a profit, is currently taxed at individual levels up to the very top rate of 39.6%, which is higher than the current top corporate tax rate of 35%.
Authors of the plan say they will consider rules to prevent "personal income" from getting taxed at the 25% rate. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has suggested that the rate may only apply to goods producers and not service-oriented companies — something that could play into how beneficial this change would be for Trump, as most of his businesses are service oriented.
Trump, as was revealed during the campaign, said in a deposition that he set up a number of development projects with single-use S-corporations, working through them instead of the Trump Organization. It was also during the campaign that Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton dubbed Trump's idea for pass-through income the "Trump loophole," arguing that it was one of the most beneficial tax proposals to Trump personally.
The phrase pass-through income means simply that the income "passes through" the business and into the individual returns of the business owner. Last year, prior to the election, CNBC's Robert Frank cast the loophole as the biggest tax break for the wealthy in Trump's campaign plan.
And as multiple outlets reported last year, a large portion of Trump's earnings appear to be the result of pass-through income.
Repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax
Trump's plan proposes to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax — which, as known from the limited 2005 returns leaked earlier this year, once cost the president $31 million. It accounted for most of the $38.5 million in taxes Trump paid that year.
The AMT, which is aimed at ensuring that the wealthy pay a fair share of taxes has plenty of opponents, some of whom believe it does not accomplish that goal.
As is, the tax serves as a sort of secondary tax code that only applies to specific high-income earners, trusts, corporations, and estates.
Elimination of the Estate Tax
A longtime Republican rallying cry, Trump's tax plan seeks to eliminate what is more commonly known as the death tax. In 2017, it only applies to inherited assets that total $5.49 million or more, meaning very few Americans are faced with paying it.
If the estate tax were repealed permanently, it could save Trump's estate $564 million based on an estimated net worth of $3 billion, as Bloomberg reported last year. Trump has said he is worth $10 billion, meaning he would be dealt even bigger savings.
Trump’s Tax Plan Is A Con That Benefits Corporations And The Wealthiest Americans
Donald Trump unveiled a tax plan that is a massive con job. The plan doesn’t benefit the poor and middle class. Trump’s vision for taxes is a windfall for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.
Politico’s Danny Vinik summed up who the big winners are under Trump’s plan, “Who would be the winners of the Trump tax plan? The rich. The top tax rate falling from 39.6 percent to 25 percent will give them a huge windfall, as will eliminating the AMT, the estate tax for their heirs, and the Obamacare surtax on capital gains and dividends. The huge cut in the corporate income tax will also benefit the well-off. Even worse: Trump doesn’t say what we will do with the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a financial lifeline for low-income Americans. Eliminating it would cause significant hardship for the poor—while also going against the current political agreement around the effectiveness of the EITC. (The campaign didn’t return an email asking for more information.)”
Trump’s plan, like every other Republican tax cut for the rich, blows a hole in the deficit to the tune of $2.3 trillion.
The Republican candidate claims that people earning less than $25,000 won’t pay any federal income taxes, but according to the IRS, 76% of people who are earning $25,000 or less already pay no federal income taxes. In reality, Trump isn’t giving anything to people who earn $25,000 or less that they don’t already have. Eighty-three percent of people who earn less than $30,000 are already not paying federal income taxes.
Donald Trump is trying to disguise a plan that gives the rich a big tax break as having something for everyone. What Trump left out of his press conference is what he will do with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).
The chart below shows that Trump’s plan would take money away from low and middle income people:
pic t1
In 2014,people earning up to $47,300 paid a net negative percentage in federal income taxes. By bringing them up to zero as Trump proposes, his tax plan will cost them money. It is likely that Trump's plan reduces the federal income tax rate to zero for lower income Americans, but also takes away their tax refunds. Trumps plan would leave lower income workers with less money, while giving the wealthy and corporation a wave of tax breaks.
The media is helping con voters by running with headlines about raising taxes on the wealthy. However Trump's plan is designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
9 ways Trump’s tax plan is a gift to the rich, including himself
President Trump and congressional Republicans keep saying their tax plan doesn't help the rich. But that's not true.
The nine-page outline released Wednesday is full of goodies that will make millionaires and billionaires happy. Republicans say it's a starting point, but it would have to be turned on its head to be anything other than a windfall for the wealthy. In fact, in nine pages, The Washington Post counts at least nine ways the wealthy benefit, including Trump himself. Here's our list:
1) A straight-up tax cut for the rich. The top tax rate in the United States is 39.6 percent. Trump and GOP leaders propose lowering that to 35 percent. It's also worth noting the 39.6 percent tax rate applies only to income above $418,400 for singles and $470,700 for married couples. The outline doesn't specify what income level the new 35 percent rate would kick in at. It's possible the rich will get an every bigger tax cut if the final plan raises that threshold.
2) The estate tax goes bye-bye. Trump likes to call the estate tax the “death tax.” At the moment, Americans who pass money, homes or other assets on to heirs when they die pay a 40 percent tax. But here's the important part Trump leaves out: The only people who have to pay this tax are those passing on more than $5.49 million. (And a married couple can inherit nearly $11 million without paying the tax.)
Trump frequently claims the estate tax hurts farmers and small-business owners. But as The Post's Fact Checker team points out, only 5,500 estates will pay any estate tax at all in 2017 (out of about 3 million estates). And of those 5,500 hit with the tax, only 80 (yes, you read that right) are farms or small businesses.
3) Hedge funds and lawyers get a special tax break. The plan calls for the tax rate on “pass-through entities” to fall from 39.6 percent to 25 percent. Republicans claim this is a tax break for small-business owners because “pass-through entities” is an umbrella term that covers the ways most people set up businesses: sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations. But the reality is, most small-business owners (more than 85 percent) already pay a tax rate of 25 percent or less, according to the Brookings Institution.
Only 3 percent pay a rate greater than 30 percent. That 3 percent includes doctors, lawyers, hedge fund managers and other really well-off people. Instead of paying a 35 percent income tax, these rich business owners would be able to pass off their income as business income and pay only a 25 percent tax rate. (The tax outline released Wednesday “contemplates” that Congress “will adopt measures to prevent” this kind of tax dodging. But there's no guarantee that will happen).
4) The AMT is over. Republicans want to ******* the alternative minimum tax, a measure put in place in 1969 to ensure the wealthy aren't using a bunch of loopholes and credits to lower their tax bills to paltry sums. The AMT starts to phase in for people with earnings of about $130,000, but the vast majority of people subject to the AMT earn over $500,000, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
Trump himself would benefit from repealing the AMT. As The Post's Fact Checker team notes, Trump's leaked tax return from 2005 shows that the AMT increased his tax bill from about $5.3 million to $36.5 million. In 2005 alone, he potentially could have saved $31 million.
5) The wealthy get to keep deducting mortgage interest. Only about 1 in 4 taxpayers claims the mortgage interest deduction, the Brookings Institution says. “Upper-income households primarily benefit from the subsidy,” wrote Brookings scholar Bruce Katz in a report last year. In fact, the wealthy can deduct interest payments on mortgages worth up to $1 million. There have been many calls over the years to lower that threshold, but the Trump tax plan is keeping it in place.
The GOP is doing this even though the tax cuts would add to the United States' debt, since it doesn't raise enough revenue to offset all the money lost from the new tax breaks. The outline also calls for the charitable deduction to stay, another deduction used heavily by the top 1 percent.
6) Stockholders are going to be very happy. Trump is calling for a super-low tax rate on the money big businesses such as Apple and Microsoft bring back to the United States from overseas, a process known as “repatriation.” Trump argues companies will use all this money coming home to build new U.S. factories. But the last time the United States did this, in the early 2000s, it ended up being a big win for people who own stocks. Companies simply took most of the money and gave it to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks.
Guess what? Just about everyone (outside the White House) predicts the same thing will happen again. Corporations are even admitting it.
7) The favorite tax break of hedge fund billionaires is still safe. There's no mention in the tax-overhaul rubric of “carried interest.” Those two words make most people's eyes glaze over, but they are a well-known tax-dodging trick for millionaires and billionaires on Wall Street. Hedge fund and private-equity managers earn most of their money from their investments doing well. But instead of paying income taxes on all that money at a rate of 39.6 percent, the managers are able to claim it as “carried interest” so they can pay tax at the low capital gains rate of 20 percent.
Trump called this totally unfair on the campaign trail. During the primaries, he said he would eliminate this loophole because hedge fund managers were “getting away with *******.” But that change didn't end up in the GOP plan.
8) Capital gains taxes stay low. The nine-page document also says nothing about capital gains, the tax rate people pay when they finally sell a stock or asset after holding on to it for many years. At the moment, the wealthiest Americans pay a 20 percent capital gains rate. Trump and Republican leaders aren't proposing any changes to that, even though it is a popular way for millionaires to lower their tax bill.
9) The Obamacare investment tax goes away. The Affordable Care Act put in place a 3.8 percent surcharge on investment income (known formally as the Net Investment Income Tax). It applies only to individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and married couples earning more than $250,000. There's no mention of this tax in the outline released this week, but Republicans clearly want to get rid of it. Repealing it was part of the GOP health-care bills that failed to pass Congress in recent weeks. One way or another, Republicans are likely to roll back this tax.
When reporters asked Trump whether the tax plan would help him personally, he quickly said no.
“No, I don’t benefit. I don’t benefit,” Trump said. “In fact, very, very strongly, as you see, I think there’s very little benefit for people of wealth.”
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), who was part of the team that worked with the White House to craft the tax-overhaul outline, was asked a similar question on Fox News. He, too, said this plan does little to help the rich.
“I think those who benefit most are middle-class families struggling to keep every dollar they earn,” Brady told Fox News.
But one look at this plan tells a very different story. It gives an outright tax cut to the wealthiest Americans and it preserves almost all of the most popular loopholes they use to reduce their tax bills.
Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), a strong proponent of tax cuts, was more straightforward this week. He told reporters, “This is a supply-side approach,” another way of saying trickle-down economics.
No middle class, no republic: GOP plans to destroy America’s safety net will also ******* democracy
Democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans
Newt Gingrich openly bragged recently at the Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were going to “break out of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt model.” That “model,” of course, created what we today refer to as “the middle class.”
Ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been working overtime to kneecap institutions that support the American middle class. And, as any working-class family can tell you, the GOP has had some substantial successes, particularly in shifting both income and political power away from voters and towards billionaires and transnational corporations.
In July of last year, discussing SCOTUS’s 5/4 conservative vote on Citizens United, President Jimmy Carter told me: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” He added: “[W]e’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
As Princeton researchers Gilens and Page demonstrated in an exhaustive analysis of the difference between what most Americans want their politicians to do legislatively, versus what American politicians actually do, it’s pretty clear that President Carter was right.
They found that while the legislative priorities of the top 10 percent of Americans are consistently made into law, things the bottom 90 percent want are ignored. In other words, today in America, democracy only “works” for the top 10 percent of Americans.
For thousands of years, economists and economic observers from Aristotle to Adam Smith to Thomas Picketty have told us that a “middle class” is not a normal by-product of raw, unregulated capitalism — what right-wing ideologues call “the free market.”
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Instead, unregulated markets — particularly markets not regulated by significant taxation on predatory incomes — invariably lead to the opposite of a healthy middle class: They produce extremes of inequality, which are as dangerous to democracy as cancer is to a living being.
With so-called “unregulated free markets,” the rich become super-rich, while grinding poverty spreads among working people like a ******* epidemic. This further polarizes the nation, both economically and politically, which, perversely, further cements the power of the oligarchs.
While there’s a clear moral dimension to this — pointed out by Adam Smith in his classic "Theory of Moral Sentiments" — there’s also a vital political dimension.
Smith noted, in 1759, that, “All constitutions of government are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end.”
Jefferson was acutely aware of this: The Declaration of Independence was the first founding document of any nation in the history of the world that explicitly declared “happiness” as a “right” that should be protected and promoted by government.
That was not at all, however, a consideration for the architects of supply-side Reaganomics, although they appropriated JFK’s “rising tide lifts all boats” metaphor to sell their hustle to (boatless) working people.
Far more troubling (and well-known to both Smith and virtually all of our nation’s Founders), however, was Aristotle’s observation that when a nation pursues economic or political activities that destroy its middle class, it will inevitably devolve either into mob rule or oligarchy. As he noted in "The Politics":
Now in all states there are three elements: One class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean. . . . But a [government] ought to be composed, as far as possible, of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes.
“Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; for the addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant.”
This is how America was for the Boomer generation: A 30-year-old in the 1970s had a 90 percent chance of having or attaining a higher standard of living than his or her parents. But, since the 1980s introduction of Reaganomics, there’s been more than a 70-percent drop in “social mobility” — the ability to move from one economic station of life into a better one.
So, if our democratic republic is to return to democracy and what’s left of our middle class is to survive (or even grow), how do we do that?
History shows that the two primary regulators within a capitalist system that provide for the emergence of a middle class are progressive taxation and a healthy social safety net.
As Jefferson noted in a 1785 letter to Madison, “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”
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Similarly, Thomas Paine, proposing in "Agrarian Justice" (1797) what we today call Social Security, said that a democracy can only survive when its people, “
Tragically, Republicans are today planning to destroy both our nation’s progressive taxation system and our social safety net, in obsequious service to their billionaire paymasters.
Flipping Jefferson and FDR on their heads, Republicans are proposing multi-million-dollar tax breaks for the rich, with a few-hundred-dollars bone tossed in for working people.
Meanwhile, Republicans are already hard at work.
As Ian Milheiser notes, “Republicans in the House hope to cut Social Security benefits by 20 to 50 percent. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to voucherize Medicare would drive up out-of-pocket costs for seniors by about 40 percent. Then he’d cut Medicaid by between a third and a half.”
If Gingrich, Ryan, et al succeed in destroying FDR’s legacy programs, not only will the bottom 90 percent of Americans suffer, but what little democracy we have left in this republic will evaporate, and history suggests it will probably be replaced by a violent, kleptocratic oligarchy.
Hang on tight — the ride could get rough.
Donald Trump's Economic Plans Would Destroy the U.S. EconomyMake America have a recession again.
Donald Trump’s tweet about tacos was only the second-most alarming message he sent to potential voters. Less open to humorous interpretation was his threat to default on U.S. debt in the event of a recession.
“I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts,” he told CNBC. “I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”
This policy would be so disastrous that even its suggestion is dangerous. In the event of a recession, Trump would treat the full faith and credit of the United States to a capricious hair cut. As Josh Barro explained, this wouldn’t just represent a historic default, putting the U.S. in the position of a country like Greece or Argentina; it could also spark an international financial crisis, as “investors would cease to see Treasuries as a safe asset and demand higher interest rates in exchange for risk.”
Trump has promised to make America great again. But a closer look his policy proposals, such as they are, suggests that within his first few years as president, he would more likely make American recessionary again.
The problem begins with his outspoken approach to Mexican immigration. His “plan” to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants would shrink the economy by about 2 percent, according to American Action Forum (AAF), a conservative and pro-business think tank. The sudden subtraction of 7 million workers would cause an immediate shock to thousands of businesses, triggering a GDP collapse ranging from $400 billion to $600 billion in production, AAF’s analysis found, with the worst of the slump occurring in industries like construction and hospitality. “The things Donald Trump has said are utterly unworkable,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economic adviser to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign and the forum's president, told Reuters.
Trump’s plan for a border wall could cost several billion dollars more. But as a financial matter, the wall is one of the least troubling aspects of his policy fantasies. By contrast, his tax plan would cut federal revenue by almost $10 trillion in the next decade, according to the Tax Policy Center. Meanwhile, he has no plans to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid, benefits for veterans, defense, or Social Security, which, along with mandatory payments on the debt, collectively account for more than two-thirds of government spending. In fact, several of his proposals suggest he would raise spending on some of these measures, such as Social Security and veterans benefits. The deficit would, in short order, reach unprecedented peacetime, non-recession levels. (That’s not counting the revenue collapse from manufacturing a recession with mass deportations.)
Here is Trumponomics, in a sentence: Create an unnecessary economic downturn by deporting 7 million workers while cutting taxes for the rich and requiring the United States to borrow trillions of dollars from creditors, whom Trump has now threatened to stiff, if he feels like it. It would be the greatest, dumbest recession in American history.
Trump’s abandonment of economic common sense is, like so much of his appeal, not an outlier position in the GOP so much as an extrapolation of his party’s recent commitment to fiscal insanity. Republicans elites have responded to widening income inequality by proposing a series of escalating tax cuts for the rich. Paul Ryan, nominally the adult-elect of the party, rose to fame with tax-cut promises and draconian proposals to shrink the safety net. When interest rates were historically low and infrastructure spending was attractive, Republicans called for deficit reductions. When the recovery was still fragile, they played chicken with the debt ceiling by threatening a default until the president caved to their budget demands.
Trump’s economic ideas are so haphazard that, by their own merits, they scarcely deserve to be taken seriously or considered alongside each other. But those ideas are a joke—one that the country is civically obligated to take seriously.
I could go on with a lot more....but really doubt you read any of this or even attempt to understand the truth
besides....this is an impeachment thread.....you want to cry about your right wing falsehoods take it to the political thread!
Not a right winger. We are more independent libertarians them right wingers. Damn leftist. He's not gonna get impeached stop crying over it really. I've never seen so many cry babies in my life.
Let me guess you are a socialist. Mmm mmm Nazis were socialist
Oh really? Did they pass universal income? Did they pass universal healthcare? Did they pass universal housing?
You're basing your entire argument on a misnomer.
Here's another.. they called themselves Aryans when they're not. Guess who the Aryans are? The Indians of fair skin who believe in the caste system and won't marry outside of it.
Attachments
* * * F A C T S * * *
Key Moments in Trump’s Interview on ‘Fox and Friends,’ With Fact Checks
On James Comey, the F.B.I. and the inspector general’s reportKey Moments in Trump’s Interview on ‘Fox and Friends,’ With Fact Checks
‘The I.G. report totally exonerates’
“It is a very unfair situation, but the I.G. report totally exonerates. I mean, if you look at the results, if you look at the head investigator, is saying we have to stop Trump from becoming president. Well, Trump became president.”
Fact Check: False. The internal report released by the Justice Department’s inspector general on Thursday did not “exonerate” Mr. Trump. In fact, the 500-page report did not examine or make conclusions about the special counsel’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Texts released by the inspector general reveal that a top F.B.I. agent overseeing the investigation into the Trump campaign had said “we’ll stop” Mr. Trump from becoming president. But the report concluded that there was no evidence that the political views of the agent factored into the inquiry.
‘What he did was criminal’ [Comey]
REPORTER: “From what you’ve seen so far, should James Comey be locked up?”
TRUMP: “I would never want to get involved in that. Certainly he, they just seemed like criminal acts to me. What he did was criminal. What he did was a terrible thing to the people. What he did was so bad in terms of our Constitution, in terms of the well-being of our country. What he did was horrible. Should he be locked up? Let somebody make a determination.”
‘a den of thieves’
“They all work for Comey. And Comey knew everything that was going on. You think McCabe didn't tell him everything? McCabe told him everything. McCabe is up for criminal right now. He is now suing; it is a total mess. They're all going against each other. No, I think Comey was the ringleader of this whole den of thieves, it was a den of thieves.”
[Read more of our coverage on Mr. Trump’s reaction to the inspector general’s report.]
On the Russia probe
‘Manafort had nothing to do with our campaign’
“Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign. I feel a little badly about it. They went back 12 years to get things that he did 12 years ago. Paul Manafort worked for me for a very short period of time. He worked for Ronald Reagan, he worked for Bob Dole, he worked for John McCain or his firm did, he worked for many other Republicans. He worked for me, what, for 49 days or something?”
Fact Check: False. Paul Manafort was very much a part of the Trump campaign. He joined the campaign on March 28, 2016, was promoted to campaign chairman in May 2016 and resigned on August 19, 2016. That’s a total of 144 days, not 49 days.
Also contrary to the president’s claims, the charges brought against Mr. Manafort by the special counsel also span the time he worked for the Trump campaign. The indictment against Mr. Manafort and his protégé, Rick Gates, accuses them of serving as unregistered agents of Ukraine from at least 2006 to 2016 and laundered payments through American and foreign entities “from approximately 2006 through at least 2016.” They also made false and misleading statements to the Justice Department between Nov. 23, 2016, and Feb. 10, 2017.
Mr. Manafort on Friday was sent to jail to await trial after prosecutors accused him of witness tampering.
‘It’s a very unfair situation’
“Look, you have 13 angry democrats. There are — I call them 13 angry Democrats and others worked for Obama for eight years. I mean they have no Republicans, you have no — it’s a very unfair situation.”
Fact Check: False. Mr. Trump is wrong that there are no Republicans working on the special counsel’s Russia investigation. Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel himself, is a registered Republican.
On families’ being ****** apart at the border and supporting — or not — an immigration plan
‘I hate the children being taken away’
REPORTER: “Mr. President, do you agree with children being taken away —”
TRUMP: “No, I hate it. I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law. Quiet, quiet. That’s the Democrats’ law. We can change it tonight. We can change it right now. I will leave here — no, no. You need their votes. You need their votes. The Democrats, all they have to do —”
REPORTER: “You control both chambers of Congress, the Republicans do.”
TRUMP: “Excuse me, by one vote? We don’t need it. You need 60 votes.”
REPORTER: “You control the House.”
TRUMP: “Excuse me, we have a one-vote edge. We need 60. So we need 10 votes. We can’t get them from the Democrats. Wait, wait, we can’t do it through an executive order.”
He added, “The children, the children can be taken care of quickly, beautifully and immediately. The Democrats ****** that law upon our nation. I hate it.”
Fact Check: False. No party has enacted any law that forces immigration officials to separate immigrant children from parents who illegally cross the border. The practice is the result of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy favoring the prosecution of anyone who crosses the border illegally. White House officials and Republican lawmakers have previously cited a 1997 settlement of a class-action lawsuit, in which the government agreed to detain children under humane conditions and release them promptly. But that settlement does not mandate the detainment of parents.
‘I wouldn’t sign the moderate bill’
REPORTER: “Sounds like they’re going to take a vote on a couple different bills on immigration, probably next week. One of them, the Goodlatte bill, the other is something more moderate. Would you sign either one of those?”
TRUMP: “I’m looking at both of them. I certainly wouldn’t sign the more moderate one. I need a bill that gives this country tremendous border security. I have to have that. We have to get rid of catch-and-release. We have to have the wall. If we don’t have the wall, there is no bill.”
On Barack Obama
‘How come he never gets blamed’
“President Obama didn't like him [Vladimir Putin], even though they gave advanced notice about the election to Obama, people forget about that. You know, Obama was told by the C.I.A. or somebody, F.B.I., about Russia. He didn't do anything about it. How come he never gets blamed?”
Fact Check: False. Mr. Trump is free to argue that Mr. Obama did not do enough in response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, as some Democrats have. But he is wrong that Mr. Obama did nothing at all.
Privately, Obama administration officials warned Russia against meddling and Mr. Obama confronted President Vladimir V. Putin directly at a Group of 20 summit meeting in China before the November 2016 vote. Publicly, intelligence agencies issued a joint statement in October 2016 that blamed Russia for hacked emails released on WikiLeaks and other websites.
After the election, Mr. Obama imposed sanctions on Russia and ejected from the United States 35 people who were suspected of being Russian intelligence operatives.
REF: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck/key-moments-in-trump’s-interview-on-‘fox-and-friends’-with-fact-checks/ar-AAyHuOV?ocid=ientp
- Paul Manafort, the former chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, most likely has one question on his mind after being jailed while he awaits trial: Should he flip?
- "It's one thing to be a stand-up guy and not cooperate with prosecutors when you're out and about," one Justice Department veteran said. "That dynamic changes once the cell door locks and you spend your first night in prison."
- One important factor that could stand in the way of Manafort's striking a plea deal is Trump's pardon power.
- Trump said Friday that he felt bad for Manafort and believes he is being treated unfairly. He later wrote on Twitter that Manafort got a "tough sentence."
"It's one thing to be a stand-up guy and not cooperate with prosecutors when you're out and about," said Jeffrey Cramer, a longtime former federal prosecutor who spent 12 years at the Justice Department. "That dynamic changes once the cell door locks and you spend your first night in prison."
Manafort was on supervised release since being indicted by the special counsel Robert Mueller's office in October. He has pleaded not guilty to nearly two dozen charges related to tax and bank fraud, money laundering, making false statements, and failure to register as a foreign agent.
Most recently, he and his associate Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence operative, were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice after Mueller's office accused them of attempting to tamper with potential witnesses.
Prosecutors last week asked US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson to revoke Manafort's bail, arguing that he had violated the terms of his release. He is now in jail while he awaits trial.
This is not the first time prosecutors have made such a request. In December, Mueller's team asked the court to revise the terms of Manafort's release after it learned that, while out on bail, he was ghostwriting an op-ed article about his lobbying work for Ukraine. Jackson issued a warning to Manafort at the time and did not penalize him.
But a witness-tampering charge bears far more weight with judges, legal experts say, because it could show a defendant's willingness to interfere with the administration of justice. Jackson indicated as much during Friday's hearing.
"This is not about politics," she said. "It is not about the conduct of the Office of Special Counsel. It is about the defendant's alleged conduct."
"Manafort did this to himself," Cramer said. "And now he's caught between a rock and a hard place, because he's going to be in jail for months."
He added: "This is a 70-year-old guy who has never seen the inside of prison. It's one thing to intellectually wrap your mind around going to jail for a decade. It's another thing to stare that square in the eye, which is what Manafort's doing tonight."
The shadow looming over Manafort's case
One important factor, however, could stand in the way of prosecutors' sealing a cooperation deal with the former Trump campaign chairman.
"What makes the Manafort case unique is that there is a shadow hanging over it, which is the presidential pardon power," said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who has worked with members of Mueller's team in the past. "A normal defendant might have no reason to believe there was any chance they were going to be pardoned anytime soon, and they would feel tremendous pressure to cut a deal."
Cotter added that Manafort "has reasons to believe he might be pardoned by the president at some point."
"And that may make him feel less inclined to cooperate," Cotter said.
The court's decision to jail Manafort ahead of his trial also poses a dilemma for Trump. When Manafort was out on supervised release, Trump might have been faced with whether to pardon him following his trial. That timeline has now moved up.
"Trump doesn't have the luxury of waiting to see what happens with Manafort's trial, because Manafort is likely weighing whether to flip as we speak," Cramer said.
Trump has vacillated between distancing himself from Manafort and sympathizing with him.
Hours before Manafort was jailed, Trump said he felt "badly" for him. Shortly after, he tweeted that Manafort had gotten a "tough sentence."
Trump's lead defense lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also suggested Friday that "things might get cleaned up" if Trump issued "some presidential pardons" in the investigation.
There's also no guarantee that pardoning Manafort would prevent prosecutors from learning what information he knows.
When a defendant is pardoned, they lose their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. That means Mueller's team could serve Manafort with a grand-jury subpoena after a pardon, forsing him to be a witness against a bigger target.
ref: http://www.businessinsider.com/paul...ainst-trump-just-went-through-the-roof-2018-6
* * * F A C T S * * *
This is the biggest loser and cry-baby of them all...
This is the biggest loser and cry-baby of them all...
AND JUST FOR THE RECORD LETS RECAP WHERE WE ARE AT WITH THE NO CRIME COMMITTED, NO LAW BROKEN, NOR TREASON BY COMRADE MOSCOVIAN CANDIDATE-KREMLIN GATE TRUMPSKY.
* * * ALL FACTS * * *
* * * ALL FACTS * * *
The following men from Trump's team have ALL plead guilty to charges related to the Russian (Kremlin-gate) investigation.
1.George Papadopoulos plead Guilty for lying to the FBI related to the Russian Investigation WHILE SERVING IN THE TRUMP ELECTION CAMPAIGN
2. Michael Flynn plead Guilty for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian Ambassador WHILE SERVING IN THE TRUMP ELECTION CAMPAIGN
3. Paul Manafort's right-hand man Rick Gates plead guilty to federal conspiracy charges and failing to register as Foreign Agents WHILE SERVING IN THE TRUMP ELECTION CAMPAIGN4. Roger Stone WHILE SERVING IN THE TRUMP ELECTION CAMPAIGN is under investigation for his correspondence with WikiLeaks who was in coordination with 23 indicted Russians who worked for the Internet Research Agency which flooded US Facebook, and twitter social media networks with false election stories.
5. Michael Cohen accepted millions of dollars from Russians WHILE SERVING IN THE TRUMP ELECTION CAMPAIGN guilty plead is coming soon, and then very, very soon ...
LOOK WHO IS GOING TO BE LEFT STANDING IN THE CENTER OF THE BULLS-EYE WITH EVERYONE ELSE COOPERATING WITH THE FEDS:
THE
THE
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You are pathetic this man won fair and square over lying cheating socialist that hate this country and cannot deal with it he won
All left wing mindless sheep that listen to all this fake
See Trump was not suppose to win but he did because America is sick of lying no good politicians
Like Hildog and Worst President ever Big Ears Ah ah ah ah uh uh watch without TelePrompter
When Trump they to find way to get him out so they create this fake crap which goes back to Poseda call Clinton lost DNC does not let FBI lol at their e mails
They have found nothing at all on Trump
Manafort charges are from 2004 has nothing to do with Trump
Clinton destroys 33,000 e mails smashes blackberry phones bleach pit hard drives and Trump is the criminal
Time will tell and cannot wait for these left wings to be jail
Six more of Donald then 8 with Mike Pence
Cheer up you can still follow Hillary on her Blame tour naturally Democrats are party of Blame
All left wing mindless sheep that listen to all this fake
See Trump was not suppose to win but he did because America is sick of lying no good politicians
Like Hildog and Worst President ever Big Ears Ah ah ah ah uh uh watch without TelePrompter
When Trump they to find way to get him out so they create this fake crap which goes back to Poseda call Clinton lost DNC does not let FBI lol at their e mails
They have found nothing at all on Trump
Manafort charges are from 2004 has nothing to do with Trump
Clinton destroys 33,000 e mails smashes blackberry phones bleach pit hard drives and Trump is the criminal
Time will tell and cannot wait for these left wings to be jail
Six more of Donald then 8 with Mike Pence
Cheer up you can still follow Hillary on her Blame tour naturally Democrats are party of Blame
Didn't trump deny he'd been fucking that porn star just after his kid was born? That's a lie.
Then, didn't he deny that she had been paid to keep her mouth shut? Lie.
Then, didn't he deny he'd asked his lawyer to pay her? Lie.
He basically lied all the way through this affair. Shouldn't the leader of the U.S. be an honest person first and foremost?
Aren't people worried that he's basically dishonest and shouldn't hold any kind of government post, nevermind President?
Then, didn't he deny that she had been paid to keep her mouth shut? Lie.
Then, didn't he deny he'd asked his lawyer to pay her? Lie.
He basically lied all the way through this affair. Shouldn't the leader of the U.S. be an honest person first and foremost?
Aren't people worried that he's basically dishonest and shouldn't hold any kind of government post, nevermind President?
