JOE SCARBOROUGH CLAIMS JIMMY CARTER'S ECONOMY WAS BETTER THAN TRUMPS - BUT LOOK WHAT TRUMPER HAS DONE FOR THE RICH AND HIS PARASITE FAMILY!

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

 

Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz

Max Zahn 

President Donald Trump told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland last week that the economy under his tenure has lifted up working- and middle-class Americans. In a newly released interview, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s characterization is “just wrong.” 

“The Washington Post has kept a tab of how many lies and misrepresentations he does a day,” Stiglitz said of Trump last Friday at the annual World Economic Forum. “I think he outdid himself.”

In Davos last Tuesday, Trump said he has presided over a “blue-collar boom,” citing a historically low unemployment rate and surging wage growth among workers at the bottom of the pay scale.

“The American Dream is back — bigger, better, and stronger than ever before,” Trump said. “No one is benefitting more than America’s middle class.”

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize in 2001, refuted the claim, saying the failure of Trump’s economic policies is evident in the decline in average life expectancy among Americans over each of the past three years.

“A lot of it is what they call deaths of despair,” he says. “Suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism — it’s not a pretty picture.”

The uptick in wage growth is a result of the economic cycle, not Trump’s policies, Stiglitz said.

“At this point in an economic recovery, it’s been 10 years since the great recession, labor markets get tight, unemployment gets lower, and that at last starts having wages go up,” Stiglitz says.

“The remarkable thing is how weak wages are, how weak the economy is, given that as a result of the tax bill we have a $1 trillion deficit.”

As the presidential race inches closer to the general election in November, Trump’s record on economic growth — and whether it has resulted in broad-based gains — is likely to draw increased attention.

BLOG: THE GREATEST TRANSFER OF WEALTH TO THE RICH OCCURRED DURING THE OBAMA-BIDEN BANKSTER REGIME

“The middle class is getting killed; the middle class is getting crushed," former Vice President Joe Biden said in a Democratic presidential debate last month. "Where I live, folks aren't measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they're measuring the economy by how they're doing," added Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate and former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

Trump has criticized Democrats for tax and regulatory policies that he says will make the U.S. less competitive in attracting business investment.

“To every business looking for a place where they are free to invest, build, thrive, innovate, and succeed, there is no better place on Earth than the United States,” he said in Davos.

Stiglitz pointed to Trump’s threats last week of tariffs on European cars to demonstrate that turmoil in U.S. trade relationships may continue, despite the recent completion of U.S. trade deals in North America and China.

“He can’t help but bully somebody,” Stiglitz said.

Max Zahn is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Find hi

Fact Check: Joe Scarborough Claims Jimmy 

Carter’s Economy Was Better Than Donald 

Trump’s

(Screenshot/MSNBC)

JOHN CARNEY

31 Jan 20202,045

4:33

Joe Scarborough wants you to believe that the economy of Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” era was greater than the Trump economy.

I swear I am not making this up.

The Morning Joe host was set off by Trump’s repeated claims that this is the greatest economy in U.S. history.

Mediate reports:

Before introducing Trump’s former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci,  Scarborough revealed that he was “obsessed” with a graphic that compared economic growth under Trump to that under Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter at the same time in their administration. That graphic:

“All we hear, on repeat is what Donald Trump says about the economy,” Scarborough mocked. “Greatest economy ever, strongest economy ever.” After lauding Barack Obama for never talking about “how strong the economy was on the rebound” after he inherited the Great Recession, Scarborough turned to praise Jimmy Carter.

“Look at Jimmy Carter in ‘79. This was supposed to be the year of malaise,” Scarborough said. “The year of malaise, and during Jimmy Carter’s so-called year of malaise, he was doing — his economy doing a lot better than Donald Trump. So why is it that there’s such a disconnect between, not only Donald Trump’s reality but also the talking points that the press regurgitates without thinking twice?”

So what did Scarborough get wrong? Just about everything.

While it is true that the economy grew faster under President Carter, the economy’s rate of growth is not a full measure of the economy’s strength. For one thing, growth should be measured against potential growth–the long term growth rate of the economy. For another, any measure of the economy should also take into account the unemployment rate, inflation, and interest rates.

Carter’s 3.16 percent GDP growth in 1979 was burdened by 5.9 percent unemployment and an eye-popping 11.25 percent rate of inflation. Donald Trump’s 2.3 percent growth in 2019 was achieved with just 3.7 percent unemployment and 1.8 percent rate of inflation.

There is a more formal way to compare the economic periods called a “misery index.”  Ironically, it was popularized Carter himself, who used it to relentlessly attack Gerald Ford. It was invented by economist Arthur Okun, an adviser to Lyndon Johnson. In its simplest form, the misery index ads unemployment to inflation to take the measure of the economy. The highest the score, the more the misery and the worse the economy.

So how do Carter and Trump fare on the misery index test?

• Carter Misery Index 1979:  5.9 + 11.25 = 17.15
• Trump Misery Index 2019:  3.7 + 1.8 =  5.5

The index was later modified by Harvard economist Robert Barro to create the Barro Misery Index. In addition to the original misery index, the BMI includes both long-term interest rates as well as the deviation of growth from long-run potential. Its meant to be a more comprehensive view of the economy. Barro originally wanted to use it to show change over a multiyear period to compare how a president performed given the situation when he came into office but we can also use it to compare presidents between years.

So take Carter’s unemployment rate (5.9) plus inflation (11.25) plus the 30-year Treasury rate (9.28) minus GDP growth (3.1) plus long-term potential growth in 1979 (3.1). That gives us a Carter modified misery index of 26.43.

Now to Trump. Unemployment (3.7) plus inflation (1.8) plus 30-year Treasury rate (2.58) minus GDP growth (2.3) plus longterm potential in 2019 (1.75). That gives us Trump modified misery index of 7.53.

In other words, Trump’s economy is much, much better than Carter’s by this measure.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And in many ways, so is the strength of the economy. Scarborough can, if he wants, claim that growth is all that matters when judging a president. But for most people, growth is just one part of what makes up a great economy.

Bloomberg and his fellow oligarchs lay down the law: Not a penny more in taxes 

Many of the billionaires who own America and consider it their fiefdom have rallied behind one of their own, Michael Bloomberg, who last week announced a potential run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Bloomberg, the three-time former mayor of New York and founder of Bloomberg News, is himself worth an estimated $53 billion, placing him ninth on the list of wealthiest Americans. He let it be known that he was taking steps to enter the race pending a final decision to run, reversing his announcement last March that he would not run because he believed former Vice President Joe Biden had a lock on the nomination.

The immediate developments that triggered his announcement were the rise in the polls of Elizabeth Warren at the expense of Biden, the right-winger favored by the Democratic Party establishment and Wall Street among the current field of candidates. Polls show Warren leading in the first two primary states, Iowa and New Hampshire, while Biden has dropped into fourth place behind Buttigieg and Sanders.

The second event was Warren’s announcement November 1 of a six percent tax on wealth holdings above $1 billion as part of her “Medicare for All” plan. That tax is on top of a previous proposal to tax holdings above $50 million at two percent.

Neither of these taxes would be passed by either of the two big business parties, and Warren knows it. The same is true for Bernie Sanders and his similar plan to finance “Medicare for All” in part by increasing taxes on the rich. The two candidates are engaging in populist demagogy in order to divert growing working-class resistance and anti-capitalist sentiment behind the Democratic Party, where it can be dissipated and suppressed.

But the modern-day lords and ladies who inhabit the world of the super-rich are indignant over any possibility of having to give up a part of their fortune to pay for things such as health care, education, housing and a livable environment. And they are petrified at the prospect of popular anger against the staggering levels of social inequality erupting into revolutionary upheavals.

They do not fear Warren, a self-described “capitalist to my bones,” or Sanders, a long-standing Democratic Party operative, so much as the possibility of reform proposals encouraging social opposition. They want to block their candidacies so as to exclude the issue of social inequality from the 2020 election.

The levels of wealth wasted on this parasitic elite are almost beyond comprehension. Here is how economist Branko Milanovic put it in his 2016 book Global Inequality:

It is very difficult to comprehend what a number such as one billion really means. A billion dollars is so far outside the usual experience of practically everybody on earth that the very quantity it implies is not easily understood—other than that it is a very large amount indeed... Suppose now that you inherited either $1 million or $1 billion, and that you spent $1,000 every day. It would take you less than three years to run through your inheritance in the first case, and more than 2,700 years (that is, the time that separates us from Homer’s Iliad) to blow your inheritance in the second case.

And yet, there are 607 people in the United 

States with a net worth of over a billion 

dollars.

Bloomberg, a liberal on so-called social issues such as abortion, gun control and the environment, is a vicious enemy of the working class. As New York mayor from 2002 to 2014, he attacked city workers, laid off thousands of teachers, cut social programs and presided over the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to Wall Street in the history of the city. He expanded the hated “stop and frisk” policy that encouraged police to brutalize working class youth.

Last January he denounced Warren’s proposal to tax wealth above $50 million as “probably unconstitutional.” Echoing Trump’s anti-socialist propaganda, he warned that seriously pursuing the plan could “wreck the country’s prosperity” and pointed to Venezuela as an example of the supposed failure of “socialism.”

Over the past several months, at least 16 billionaires have gone on record opposing proposals for a wealth tax. This chorus has grown more shrill since the release of Warren’s Medicare plan.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, declaring that “freedom and free enterprise are interchangeable,” complained on CNBC last week that Warren “vilifies successful people.”

Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose personal fortune of $108 billion places him second in the US behind Jeff Bezos (whose Washington Post has run a string of editorials denouncing wealth taxes, the Green New Deal and other proposed reforms), said last week, “I do think if you tax too much you do risk the capital formation, innovation, the US as the desirable place to do innovative companies.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban tweeted that Warren was “selling shiny objects to divert attention from reality” and accused her of “misleading” voters on the cost of her program.

Hedge fund owner Leon Cooperman, worth a “mere” $3.2 billion, appeared on CNBC and said, “I don’t need Elizabeth Warren or the government giving away my money. [Warren] and Bernie Sanders are presenting a lot of ideas to the public that are morally and socially bankrupt.” A few days later he announced his support for Bloomberg’s potential candidacy.

The New York Times, the voice of the Democratic Party establishment, has run a number of op-ed pieces denouncing Warren’s wealth tax proposal, including one by Wall Street financier Steven Rattner, who headed up Obama’s 2009 bailout of GM and Chrysler until he was forced off of the Auto Task Force because of corruption charges laid by the Securities and Exchange Commission. While he was on the panel, he imposed a 50 percent across-the-board cut on the pay of newly hired GM and Chrysler workers.

But for fawning toward the oligarchs, viciousness toward the working class and yearning for an authoritarian savior from social unrest, it is hard to beat this week’s column by the Times ’ Thomas Friedman, headlined “Why I Like Mike.”

Calling for “celebrating and growing entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship,” he writes: “I want a Democratic candidate who is ready to promote all these goals, not one who tries to rile up the base by demonizing our most successful entrepreneurs… Increasingly the Democratic left sound hostile to that whole constituency of job-creators. They sound like an anti-business party… The Democrats also need a candidate who can project strength. When people are stressed and frightened, they want a strong leader.”

This is under conditions of record stock prices on Wall Street and ever rising levels of social inequality. A recent study by economist Gabriel Zucman showed that the richest 400 Americans now own more of the country’s wealth than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent of the wealth distribution. The oligarchs’ share has tripled since the 1980s.

In their new book, The Triumph of Injustice, Zucman and Saez show that in 2018, for the first time in US history, the wealthiest households paid a lower tax rate—in federal, state and local taxes—than every other income group. Since 1980, the overall tax rate on the wealthy in America has been cut in half, dropping from 47 percent to 23 percent today.

The United States is not a democracy in any true sense. It is an oligarchic society, economically and politically dominated by a slim but fabulously wealthy elite.

The ferocious response of the oligarchs to the half-hearted proposals of Sanders and Warren to cut into their fortunes underscores the bankruptcy of their talk of enacting serious reforms within the framework of capitalism. The same goes for the pseudo-left organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America and Socialist Alternative that have jumped with both feet onto the Sanders bandwagon, and will no doubt shift over to Warren should she win the nomination.

There is no way to address the urgent problems of health care, education, housing, the environment and war without directly attacking the stranglehold over society exercised by the corporate-financial aristocracy. Their wealth must be expropriated and put toward the satisfaction of the social needs of the working class, the vast majority of the population.

The corporations and banks must be taken out of private hands and turned into publicly owned utilities under the democratic control of the working class, so that the production and distribution of goods can be rationally and humanely organized to meet human needs, not private profit.

This is a revolutionary task. The key to its achievement lies in the growing upsurge of class struggle in the US and internationally. This movement will expand, but it needs a conscious political leadership.

Trump: Open Borders Threatens the Wage Gains of America’s Lowest-Income Workers

Getty Images

JOHN CARNEY

 12 Nov 2019382

2:32

President Donald Trump touted the wage gains for Americans in the lowest income brackets, adding that that the open borders policies of the Democratic Party threaten those gains.

“Since the election, real wages have gone up 3.2 percent for the median American worker,” Trump said in a speech Tuesday to the Economic Club of New York. “But for the bottom income group, real wages are soaring. A number that has never happened before. Nine percent.”

Wage gains for those near the bottom of America’s economic ladder have been particularly strong this year. The lowest-paid Americans saw weekly earnings rise by more than 5 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to a quarterly survey of households produced by the Labor Department. Workers with less than a high-school diploma saw their wages grow nearly 6 percent.

“That may mean you make a couple of bucks less in your companies,” Trump said. “And you know what? That’s okay. This is a great thing for our country. When you talk about equality. This is a great thing for our country.”

The so-called “poverty gap”–which measures the heightened poverty rate among blacks and Hispanics compared to poverty overall–shrank to its lowest level on record last year. The racial gap in unemployment has also contracted as unemployment rates hit record lows this year. Black unemployment hit its lowest level on record in November.

Trump gave credit to the tight labor market for the improvement in wages and employment. But opening the countries borders to new workers from abroad would threaten those gains, he added.

“Our tight labor market is helping them the most,” Trump said. “Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans. And driving crime through the roof.”

Economic studies have shown that when the supply of workers goes up, the price that companies have to pay to hire workers goes down.

“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent,” Harvard economist George Borjas has written. “But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip.”