Monday, January 13, 2020

SWAMP KEEPER TRUMP CRITICIZES MIKE BLOOMBERG - BUT WASN'T TRUMP'S "BILLIONS" STOLEN?




Donald Trump Criticizes ‘Mini Mike Bloomberg’

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 21: Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg listens during the National Action Network Breakfast on January 21, 2019 in Washington, DC. Martin Luther King III was among the attendees. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)
Al Drago/Getty Images
2:02

President Donald Trump criticized Mike Bloomberg on Monday after the former mayor ran ads against the president for his record on health care.
“Mini Mike Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on False Advertising,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Bloomberg is spending millions running ads that attack Trump for wanting to repeal Obamacare:
Bloomberg is running the same tactics that helped Democrats successfully win the House of Representatives in 2018 — threatening that Republicans’ attempt to repeal Obamacare would remove healthcare coverage for preexisting conditions.
Republicans say, however, that if Obamacare were repealed, it would be replaced by a better plan that would still cover preexisting conditions.
President Trump claimed that he saved coverage for preexisting conditions while working to get rid of the individual mandate requiring all Americans to get health insurance or pay a fine.
The Senate’s attempt to pass a repeal of Obamacare blew up after late Sen. John McCain voted to prevent it from going to conference.
Trump has repeatedly pressed Republicans for a better healthcare plan but has so far promised a better plan if Republicans win big in 2020.
Obamacare itself faces a Supreme Court ruling on its constitutionality.
“If Republicans win in court and take back the House of Represenatives [sic], your healthcare, that I have now brought to the best place in many years, will become the best ever, by far,” he wrote.
Trump again vowed to protect preexisting conditions if reelected in 2020.
“I will always protect your Pre-Existing Conditions,” he wrote. “The Dems will not!”
Bloomberg told reporters Saturday that he will spend up to a billion dollars to defeat Trump in 2020, even if he does not win the Democrat primary.
“Number one priority is to get rid of Donald Trump. I’m spending all my money to get rid of Trump,” he said:


Mini Mike Bloomberg is spending a lot of money on False Advertising. I was the person who saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare, you have it now, while at the same time winning the fight to rid you of the expensive, unfair and very unpopular Individual Mandate.....
....and, if Republicans win in court and take back the House of Represenatives, your healthcare, that I have now brought to the best place in many years, will become the best ever, by far. I will always protect your Pre-Existing Conditions, the Dems will not!










THERE IS A REASON WHY ALL BILLIONAIRES ARE DEMOCRATS AND WANT WIDER OPEN BORDERS AMNESTY AND NO E-VERIY!


The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.


Tom Steyer: Americans Must Provide Cheap Housing to Illegal Immigrants

 13 Jan 20202,348
8:12
Tom Steyer, the billionaire investor and Democrat 2020 candidate, wants Americans to provide cheap housing to illegal immigrants.
“A Steyer Administration will … ensure that all undocumented communities have access to affordable and safe housing,” Steyer said in his immigration proposal.
Steyer’s offer of housing is combined with promises to provide illegals with free healthcare, plus workplace training and cultural celebrations:
A Steyer administration … [will] provide a safe platform for immigrants to share their culture and celebrate their heritage, foster opportunities for public service that support new Americans, and coordinate with Federal agencies and the private sector in order to build workforce training and fellowship opportunities for immigrants with professional qualifications from their home nation to help them leverage their specialized skills in the American marketplace.
Steyer made his promise of cheap housing to illegals even though housing costs for many Americans forces them to rent or buy cheaper housing far from work and friends, and are being forced to give up hopes for larger families.
But those housing costs are high partly because the federal government welcomes one million new legal immigrants into the nation’s cities, neighborhoods, and schools. That is a huge inflow — four million young Americans turn 18 each year.
But Steyer is a billionaire investor, so illegal migrants will not be moving into his very expensive and well policed neighborhood. The New Yorker magazine described his house in 2013:
President [barack Obama] flew to San Francisco on April 3rd for a series of fund-raisers. He stopped in first at a cocktail reception hosted by Tom Steyer, a fifty-six-year-old billionaire, former hedge-fund manager, and major donor to the Democratic Party. Steyer lives in the city’s Sea Cliff neighborhood, in a house overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

Any inflow of migrants will be a boon to Steyer’s fellow investors who gain from the extra workers, consumers, and renters. For example, one gauge of real estate investments shows a 50 percent gain since 2015, even as Americans’ wages and salaries rose by only about 15 percent.
Meanwhile, Steyer’s home state is experiencing record housing prices and record homelessness as today’s illegals enjoy the state government’s offer of sanctuary, jobs, and welfare. The federal housing agency reported January 7 the state has about 108,000 homeless:
This year’s report shows that there was a small increase in the one-night estimates of people experiencing homelessness across the nation between 2018 and 2019 (three percent), which reflects a 16 percent increase in California, and offsets a marked decrease across many other states.
In terms of absolute numbers, California has more than half of all unsheltered homeless people in the country (53 percent or 108,432), with nearly nine times as many unsheltered homeless as the state with the next highest number, Florida (six percent or 12,476), despite California’s population being only twice that of Florida.
In September Breitbart News reported the Census Bureau showed how the state’s housing costs are pushing Americans into poverty:
The September 10 study shows 18.2 percent of California’s population is poor, far above the 13 percent poverty rate in Arkansas, 16 percent in Mississippi, and the 14.6 percent in West Virginia.
By 2017, for example, the government’s pro-migration policies had added 11 million people to the state’s native population of 29 million people. The huge inflow means that one-in-four residents are immigrants.
Numerous studies have shown many millions of foreigners want to migrate into Americans’ society. For example, another five million Central American residents want to migrate into the United States, according to a Gallup survey published right after the 2018 midterm elections.
Gallup also noted “three percent of the world’s adults — or nearly 160 million people — say they would like to move to the U.S.”


California's poverty rate is worse than Alabama & Mississippi, says Census Bureau. The major cause of this huge change is immigration policy which spikes housing costs & shrinks wages -- and delivers huge gains for investors in real-estate & corp. shares. http://bit.ly/2mgvBlW 

California Has Highest Poverty Rate, with Housing Costs




Steyer’s promise to welcome illegals is echoed by the other investor billionaire in the Democrats’ primary, Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. In January, he promised to make illegals comfortable with Americans’ money, telling the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Well, it’s a no brainer. You give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people. We’re not going to deport them anyways, it’s outrageous. If you look in New York City, we make sure that people felt comfortable, regardless of their immigration status, to come and get city services. I was always determined that they would not be afraid to come. Somebody could need like life-threatening things and does not get medical care. This is not a game. You’ve got to make sure that they’re okay.
Housing costs in Bloomberg’s New York are very high because it has huge populations of illegal and legal immigrants. The result is that it has a homeless population of roughly 92,000, and also the nation’s highest rate of homelessness, at 46 homeless for every 10,000 people.
High housing costs also make it difficult for Americans to move into towns and cities that have better-paying jobs, according to a 2017 study about the rising wealth gap in the United States. Americans “are frozen where they live,” said Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at a January 9 meeting. 
But nearly all of the Democrats in the 2020 election have called for more migrants — without showing any concern for the impact on Americans’ housing costs.
“We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people,” Joe Biden told Democrats at an August event in Des Moines, Iowa. “The idea that a country of 330 million people is cannot absorb people who are in desperate need … is absolutely bizarre … I would also move to increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United States.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s immigration plan, for example, is titled “A Fair and Welcoming Immigration System.” It says:
We need expanded legal immigration that will grow our economy, reunite families, and meet our labor market demands … s president, I will immediately issue guidance to end criminal prosecutions for simple administrative immigration violations … As President, I’ll issue guidance ensuring that detention is only used where it is actually necessary because an individual poses a flight or safety risk … I’ll welcome 125,000 refugees in my first year, and ramping up to at least 175,000 refugees per year by the end of my first term.
The impact of federal immigration policy on Americans’ housing costs is taboo among establishment reporters. But those costs were touted by a group of investors lobbying Congress to raise housing prices by importing more immigrants. A booklet by the Economic Innovation Group says:
The relationship between population growth and housing demand is clear. More people means more demand for housing, and fewer people means less demand … As a result, a shrinking population will lead to falling prices and a deteriorating, vacancy-plagued housing stock that may take generations to clear
The potential for skilled immigrants to boost local housing markets is clear. Notably, economist Albert Saiz (2007) found a 1% increase in population from immigration causes housing rents and house prices in U.S. cities to rise commensurately, by 1%
On January 9, Donohue noted New Yorkers blocked the plan by Amazon and the city government to build a new corporate headquarters in the city. The residents protested the development plan partly because it would have driven up rents and housing costs, said Donohue. “It is a very potent issue,” he observed.


A lobbying group for investors admits mass migration helps investors in major coastal cities but 'fails' Americans in heartland & rural towns. So it urges less immigration? No - it urges more migration to spike family housing prices outside major cities! http://bit.ly/2VCZYUt 

NYT Boosts Investors' Campaign for More Immigrant Workers, Consumers









Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait




Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
According to a report in the Washington Times:
The plan would scrap Clinton-era 

regulations that allowed illegal 

immigrants to sign up for assistance 

without having to disclose their status.


Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.

Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years

 

In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According to Center for Immigration Studies, “The new law does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.

California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.

California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.

According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.

BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.


Mike Bloomberg: Employers Should Hire ‘the Best’ Foreigners Instead of Americans

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
7 Jan 20203,576
8:22
Investor, CEO, and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg says he would allow investors and employers to hire the “the best” workers from around the world instead of Americans.
“This country needs more immigrants and we should be out looking for immigrants,” Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune on January 5.:
For those who need an oboe player for a symphony, we want the best one. We need a striker for a soccer team, we want to get the best one. We want a farmworker, we want to get the best one. A computer programmer, we want to get the best one. So we should be out looking for more immigrants.
The reporter did not ask Bloomberg to define “best.” But for cost-conscious shareholders and executives, “best” is a synonym for ‘cheaper than Americans.’
“If business were able to hire without restrictions from anywhere in the world, pretty much every [American’s] occupation would be foreignized,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:
Americans would have to accept dramatically lower earnings, whether they object or not. Not just landscapers and tomato pickers, [because] Indians and Chinese by the millions can do nursing and accounting. There would not be any job that would not see its earnings fall to the global average.
Bloomberg — who has an estimated wealth of $55 billion — is trying to exempt investors and shareholders from the nation’s immigration rules, said Krikorian. For Bloomberg, “immigration laws are not one of those things that should be allowed to interfere in [the growth of] shareholders’ value,” he said.
“It is obviously unprecedented — but this is not obviously different from [President] George [W.] Bush’s ideal immigration plan … [and] he is expressing a pretty standard Republican plutocrat approach to immigration,” he added.
President Bush described his “any willing worker” cheap labor plan in 2004, saying:
Out of common sense and fairness, our laws should allow willing workers to enter our country and fill jobs that Americans have are not filling. (Applause.) We must make our immigration laws more rational, and more humane. And I believe we can do so without jeopardizing the livelihoods of American citizens.
Our reforms should be guided by a few basic principles. First, America must control its borders …
Second, new immigration laws should serve the economic needs of our country. If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job.
In December 2018, departing House Speaker Paul Ryan echoed Bush’s “any willing worker” goal, saying:
[Immigration reform needs] border security and interior enforcement for starters, but also a modernization of our visa system so that it makes sense for our economy and for our people so that anyone who wants to play by the rules, work hard and be part of American fabric can contribute.
This “any willing worker” idea encouraged Ryan to work closely — but behind the scenes — with pro-amnesty, pro-migration groups.
Many GOP legislators echo this “any willing worker” claim when they declare a “‘legal good, illegal bad,’ approach to migration,” said Krikorian. That mantra is “piously claiming that illegal immigration is bad, but is making [pro-American protections] moot by letting huge numbers of people in legally.”
In contrast, President Donald Trump won his 2016 election on a promise to shrink immigration. Since then, he has forced down illegal migration via Mexico and has largely blocked numerous efforts by business to expand the huge inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers. Trump’s curbs on the supply of foreign labor have helped to force up wages for blue-collar Americans — despite determined efforts by business and investment groups to prevent wage increases.


Almost 50% of U.S. employees got higher wages in 2019, up from almost 40% in 2018.
That's useful progress - but wage growth will likely rise faster if Congress stopped inflating the labor supply for the benefit of business.
http://bit.ly/2SyaLg7 

Pay Raises and Training Expand in Donald Trump's Tight Labor Market



Bloomberg’s “best worker” pitch is not a problem for the Democrats’ 2020 base of “woke” progressives, said Krikorian:
He is running in the Democratic primary and there is an overlap between the plutocrat assault on national borders and the leftist assault on national borders. They come at the issue from the different starting points but they have the same enemy, which is Americans’ sovereignty. It is not obvious that his [pro-employer] immigration stance is going to be a turn-off to Democratic primary votes.. How different are the specifics of his immigration proposal from [Joe] Biden, Sen. [Bernie] Sanders or [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren?
Biden, Sanders, and Warren endorse wide-open borders as a form of charity towards unlucky foreigners fleeing from home country persecution. For example, a January 5 tweet from Biden said:
Our Statue of Liberty invites in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Donald Trump has slammed the door in the face of families fleeing persecution and violence.
Bloomberg’s pro-employer view is coherent and likely sincere, said Krikorian.
Bloomberg aspires to a single global labor market, and everything else follows from that. A concern about improving the lot of less-skilled American workers is by definition contrary to that view because there is no such thing as an American labor market. There is only a global labor market. Domestic employers are not thinking about the consequences for people from Pennsylvania when they hire people from Tennessee, and Bloomberg wants that same approach across the entire world.
There is even an altruistic way of viewing that — which I assume guys like this have — that it improves the lot of Hondurans [and other migrants] who are coming here.
The issue is not that Bloomberg and his guys are factually incorrect. It is that their values are contrary to the values that most Americans hold – which is that we have a greater loyalty and obligation to our fellow countrymen than to foreigners. Guys like Bloomberg reject that [obligation] in principle.


A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by 2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants.
#S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE 

Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration



But Bloomberg also wraps his economic demand for more immigrants in a progressive-style cultural message.
Bloomberg told the San Diego Union-Tribune that amnesty “is a no-brainer — you give [a] pathway to citizenship to 11 million people.”
In December, Bloomberg said additional immigrants could “improve our culture, our cuisine, our religion, our dialogue, and certainly improve our economy” — but without being asked by reporters which American cultures, cuisines, religions, and dialogues do not meet his standards.
Bloomberg also echoes the Democrats’ claim that the U.S is a diverse “nation of immigrants,” instead of a country built by similar-minded settlers from Europe. “This country was built by immigrants,” Bloomberg said, without noting the role played by Americans and their children.
Bloomberg has long supported greater immigration. In 2013, he joined with the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, to create the Project for a New American Economy. The group of investors and politicians then pushed for passage of the failed Gang of Eight amnesty in 2013.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted the planned “Gang of Eight” amnesty would shift more of the nation’s new wealth from workers to investors.
The flood of roughly 30 million immigrants in ten years would cause Americans’ wages to shrink, the report said. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost the profits and the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
For Bloomberg, Krikorian said, U.S. “employers have no greater obligation to fellow Americans than to Hondurans [or other foreign workers] … what Bloomberg is saying is that immigration laws should not interfere with the pursuit of shareholder value [because] employers can hire anyone from anywhere at any wage, period.”


Estb. media and esp. WashPo journos cannot, or dare not, follow the $$$ in immigration politics.
For example, the WashPo article on
@SenMikeLee's @S368 bill to expand the outsourcing of U.S. grads' jobs.
Maybe b/c the money ends up in Jeff Bezos' pocket.
http://bit.ly/2tChhYt 

Munro: WashPost Message to U.S. Graduates -- Drop Dead






BLOOMBERG’S ECONOMY POLICY IS TO HAND 40 MILLION ILLEGALS AMNESTY SO THEY CAN BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY AND THEN CUT TAXES FOR THE RICH.

 

 

Mike Bloomberg: Don’t Believe Trump – Our Economy Is Broken


By 
Michael R. Bloomberg

Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg addresses a crowd in North Carolina. Photograph by Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
This article originally appeared on MarketWatch, a sister publication of Barron’s.

President Donald Trump says our economy is “the best it has ever been,” and he is planning to ride that false claim to a second term.
I won’t let him get away with it. I have the track record—in business and government—to show America what real economic leadership looks like.
Sure, the stock market is at an all-time high. But almost half the country doesn’t own any stocks. And yes, the unemployment rate is low. But nearly half of all workers are in jobs that earn $18,000 at the median. In fact, the share of national income going to workers—rather than investors—is near an all-time low.
Too much wealth is in too few hands. And while a handful of big cities are doing well, a lot of the country is struggling; our middle class is being hollowed out; and working Americans are being squeezed by higher prices on everything from health care to housing.
As a candidate, Trump promised to take on these issues. As president, he has been in the pockets of the special interests that dominate Washington.
Remember when candidate Trump promised to deliver for regular people—the forgotten Americans?
Well, President Trump pushed through the biggest tax cut for the wealthy in history, and nearly all the money goes to people like me, who don’t need it.
Remember when candidate Trump stood in front of the GM factory in Lordstown, Ohio and promised to keep it open?
In 2018, that plant closed down.
Remember when candidate Trump promised to “protect the farmers”?
Last year, farmers lost billions of dollars, and many lost their farms, as a direct result of his tariffs and trade wars.
Again and again, candidate Trump made economic promises to working people that he had no intention of keeping. And sure enough, he has broken all of them.
In fairness, we faced serious economic problems before President Trump took office. That’s one of the reasons he won. He promised to fix them.
Instead, he has made them worse.
We need to elect a leader who can actually deliver real change—not just talk about it—and create more good jobs, with good salaries, all across America.
And I know I can do that, because I’ve done it.
Coming from a middle-class home, where my father never made more than $6,000 in a year, I was lucky to get a good education and work my way up from an entry-level job. When I got laid off, I started a company from scratch that now employs 20,000 people. We pay good salaries and provide the best health benefits money can buy, including six months of parental leave—at full pay.
As mayor of New York, I helped create nearly 500,000 new jobs, most of them outside of Manhattan.
When I was first elected shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the question everyone asked us was: Can you rebuild Lower Manhattan?
Our answer was: Yes, but that’s not enough.
We set out to rebuild every area of the city, starting with those outside Manhattan that had faced decades of industrial abandonment and decay. We spread good jobs with good salaries to those communities. I know we can bring about that kind of progress all across America.
This week on the South Side of Chicago, I announced some of the core elements of the strategy I’ll take to create millions of good jobs where they are needed most, by investing in areas of the country that have been hurt by globalization and automation, and have been ignored by the federal government for too long.
To start, I will dramatically increase spending on research and development, by over $100 billion. Rather than sending that money to only a few places that already have massive research budgets, like Harvard and Stanford, we’ll spread it to places like Akron, Ohio, where I was today.
The way we’ll do it is by funding new “job factories” in Akron and around the country, with the goal of bringing opportunity to places that don’t have enough of it. We call them job factories because that’s what they’ll produce: jobs. They’ll do it by generating scientific breakthroughs in a wide variety of areas, which will generate millions of good jobs in everything from green energy and sustainable agriculture to advanced manufacturing and public health.
We’ll also make sure Americans have the skills they need to do the work—supporting community colleges, apprenticeships, and job-training programs all across our country.
In addition to preparing people for good jobs, we will modernize the social contract between employee and employer—so laborers are protected, no matter where they work.
We will do that by working to guarantee paid sick leave and paid family leave for all workers—just as we do at my company. We will support the right of all workers to organize and bargain collectively—including gig, contract, and franchise employees, many of whom have to work two or three jobs to put food on the table.
I know a lot of candidates say they’re going to create good jobs. But for me, creating good jobs is not something I just talk about. It’s what I’ve spent my whole career doing.
That’s a key part of the message we need to beat Trump. I’m ready to take it directly to him.
Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is the founder of Bloomberg LP.



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

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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.”



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