TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE
RICH…. and his parasitic family!
Report:
Trump Says He Doesn't Care About the National Debt Because the Crisis Will Hit
After He's Gone
"Trump's
alleged comment is maddening and disheartening,
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
but at least he's being straightforward about his indefensible
and self-serving neglect. I'll leave you with this reminder of the scope of the problem, not that anyone in power is going to do a damn thing about it."
TRUMPERNOMICS:
THE SUPER RICH APPLAUD
TWITTER’S TRUMP’S TAX CUTS FOR THE SUPER RICH!
"The tax overhaul would mean an unprecedented windfall for the
super-rich, on top
of the fact that virtually all income gains during the period of
the supposed
recovery from the financial crash of 2008 have gone to the top 1
percent income
bracket."
Trump Is Surrounded by Criminals
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-fall-of-donald-trump-final-days.html
“The legal ring surrounding him is collectively producing a historic indictment of his endemic corruption and criminality.” JONATHAN CHAIT
Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin attends a meeting to discuss a potential economic bill in response to the CCP virus, in Washington on March 20, 2019. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
CCP Virus Exploding Federal Deficit Even as Comptroller General Warns of ‘Urgent’ Need for Debt Reduction
WASHINGTON—There were only rumors of a possible $1 trillion economic stimulus package on March 12 when U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro urgently warned the Senate Budget Committee that federal spending and debt are on an “unsustainable” path.
Dodaro got right to the point at the outset of his testimony:
“I am concerned because our debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio as of the end of the last fiscal year was 79 percent. That’s the highest it’s been since World War II, when we hit the historic high of 106 percent,” Dodaro said.
“So we are very heavily leveraged in debt at a time when we are going to be facing a steady annual deficit of a trillion dollars a year for as far as the eye can see.”
He was referring to the fact the national debt now exceeds $23 trillion ($122 trillion if unfunded obligations such as those of Social Security and Medicare are included).
That $23 trillion currently equals 109 percent of the 2019 GDP of $21.4 trillion. But interest costs more each year as the national debt goes up and the Government Accountability Office projects those costs to exceed total non-defense discretionary federal spending by 2024, go beyond defense spending the next year, and blow past Medicare in 2042 and Social Security in 2046.
“This is why we believe the current path is unsustainable,” Dodaro said.
Five days later, amid an intensifying worldwide crisis occasioned by the CCP virus, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed that President Donald Trump wants Congress to pass an economic stimulus package that will cost at least $1 trillion.
“It is a big number. This is a very unique situation in this economy,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. “We put a proposal on the table that would inject $1 trillion into the economy. That is on top of the $300 billion from the IRS deferrals.
“Now let me just say, this is a combination of loans, this a combination of direct checks to individuals, this is a combination of creating liquidity for small businesses.
“You can think of this as business interruption money. The president is determined to put money back into this economy to protect hard-working Americans and small businesses.”
About half of the funds will go to individuals and families based on reported income from 2018, with most of the other half being loans made available to corporations and small businesses primarily for the purpose of keeping payrolls as intact as possible during the crisis.
Details are still being worked out in negotiations between the Trump White House and congressional leaders from both parties.
Asked by a reporter if Congress should be concerned about rising deficits, Mnuchin demurred, saying: “I think Congress right now should be concerned about American workers and small businesses. You know interest rates are incredibly low right now, so there’s very little cost of borrowing this money, and, as I’ve said, in different times, we’ll fix the deficit, but this is not the time to worry about it.”
Even so, the $1 trillion stimulus package raised eyebrows, especially as more details became known. The budget committee has asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for an assessment of the package’s impact on the government’s financial health, according to a senior Senate aide who asked not to be identified.
The conservative Heritage Foundation released an analysis warning that “any action that Congress takes should be targeted, temporary, and linked directly to the coronavirus epidemic in order to address the source of the economic shock, while limiting any political abuse that can develop in a moment of crisis.”
“Unfortunately, the Senate’s coronavirus bill, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, misses this mark by including special benefits to specific industries that will exceed $200 billion,” it said.
Truth in Accounting President Sheila Weinberg told The Epoch Times that it appears “the federal government is going to cover trillions of dollars of other losses and costs, including those for business interruption, personal income loss, and health care costs.”
“This type of coverage is what insurance companies do, but not at this scale,” Weinberg said.
“The federal government requires insurance companies to have reserves to meet their customers’ benefits. Since the federal government has become a multitrillion-dollar insurance company, it should have reserves to cover the costs of crisis. Instead, the government is $23 trillion in debt (plus another $100 trillion for unfunded Social Security and Medicare benefits).”
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
Contact Mark Tapscott at Mark.Tapscott@epochtimes.nyc
More Americans Are Going on Strike
For decades, the
decline of the American labor movement corresponded to a decline in major
strike activity. But new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or
BLS, indicates a recent and significant increase in the number of Americans who
are participating in strikes or work stoppages. As a report from the
left-leaning Economic Policy Institute explained on Tuesday, strike activity
“surged” in 2018 and 2019, “marking a 35-year high for the number of workers
involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period.” 2019 alone marked
“the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers
since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible
to track work stoppages by size.” Union membership is declining, but workers
themselves are in fighting shape.
EPI credits the
strike surge to several factors. Unemployment is low, which bestows some
flexibility on workers depending on their industry. If a work environment
becomes intolerable or an employer penalizes workers for striking or
organizing, a worker could find better employment elsewhere. (Though federal
labor law does prohibit employers from retaliating against workers for
participating in protected organizing activity, employers often do so anyway,
and under Trump, the conservative makeup of the National Labor Relations Board
disadvantages unions when they try to seek legal remedies for the behavior.)
The other reason
undermines one of Donald Trump’s central economic claims. Though the president
points to low unemployment as proof that his policies are successful, the
economy isn’t booming for everyone. Wage growth continues to underperform.
People can find jobs, in other words, but those jobs often don’t pay well. As the
costs of private health insurance rise, adding another strain on household
budgets, Americans are finding that employment and prosperity are two separate
concepts.
Without a union,
exploited workers have few options at their disposal. They can take their
concerns to management, and hope someone in power feels pity. They can stage
some kind of protest, and risk the consequences. Or they can find another job,
and hope their new workplace is more equitable than the last. Lackluster wage
growth suggests that this last option is not as viable as some right-to-work
advocates claim. Unions afford workers more protection. Not only do they
bargain for better wages and benefits, union contracts typically include
just-cause provisions, which make it more difficult for managers to arbitrarily
fire people for staging any sort of protest at work. Discipline follows a set
process, which gives a worker chances to improve. Retaliation still happens,
but would likely happen more often were it not for union contracts, which are
designed to act as a layer of insulation between workers and managers with ill
intent.
The new BLS data
reveals that despite their relatively small numbers, unionized workers are
exercising the power afforded them by their contracts. Elected officials ought
to listen to what this activity tells them. A strike wave is a symptom that the
economy is actually not as healthy as it superficially looks. Nobody withholds
their labor unless they’ve exhausted all other options. Strikes and stoppages
stem from exasperation, sometimes even desperation. Workers know they’re
playing a rigged game, and they’re running out of patience.
“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
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
Why do Republicans want to bail out a top
Democrat funder? BECAUSE
BILLIONAIRES AND BANKSTERS ARE ALL
DEMOCRAT BRIBESTERS!
A $50 Billion Airline Bailout for Warren Buffett
Why do Republicans want to bail out a top
Democrat funder? BECAUSE
BILLIONAIRES AND BANKSTERS ARE ALL
DEMOCRAT BRIBESTERS!
A $50 Billion Airline Bailout for Warren Buffett
Why do Republicans want to bail out a top Democrat funder?
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
In March, as the Wuhan Flu was taking off in America, the Oracle of Omaha began buying airline stocks. Specifically, one of the wealthiest men in the country increased his stake in Delta Airlines to 11%.
Warren Buffett wasn’t oblivious to the coronavirus. The University of Nebraska Medical Center, not far from the black gated mansion of the billionaire, was on the front lines of fighting the outbreak. Passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship were being treated 5 minutes from his house.
What was Warren Buffett thinking when he shoved $45 million more in good money after bad?
Berkshire Hathaway now owns 11% of Delta Airlines, and between 8% and 10% of United Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and American Airlines. When you’re squeezed into a 17-inch airline seat, it’s because a major funder of Democrat political causes is extracting maximum value from his investment.
And now Airlines for America, whose major members include American, Delta, United, and Southwest, along with lesser airlines, want a $50 billion bailout. That includes $25 billion in grants and $25 billion in loans and tax relief. While the airlines warn about an economic catastrophe, Buffett isn’t worried.
The airlines made up 4% of Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio and amounted to $3.7 billion in losses.
Warren Buffett is no stranger to bailouts. In 2010, he penned a fake folksy New York Times op-ed thanking “Uncle Sam” from his nephew “Warren”. Later that year, he became a key propaganda figure in Obama’s push to raise taxes. By the winter of the year, Obama had placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of the man who had fundraised for him and acted as his financial adviser.
As Peter Schweitzer noted, “It was only on September 23 that he became a highly visible player in the drama, investing $5 billion in Goldman Sachs, which was overleveraged and short on cash… Berkshire Hathaway received preferred stock with a 10 percent dividend yield and an attractive option to buy another $5 billion in stock at $115 a share… As he admitted on CNBC at the time, ‘If I didn't think the government was going to act, I wouldn't be doing anything this week.’”
Buffett seems to think that the government will act and bail out the airlines. Again. And this time for a lot more than the $15 billion price tag of the airline bailout that passed after September 11.
By 2009, Berkshire Hathaway had invested $26 billion in eight financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America, which benefited from around $100 billion in TARP money.
By 2011, Buffett was buying $5.9 billion in Goldman Sachs stock for $5 billion.
There’s no question that the Democrat billionaire is a very sharp investor. But there’s no reason for taxpayers to keep subsidizing his investments. As small businesses are forced to shut down and millions of people are put out of work, should they really be helping Warren Buffett get even richer?
Just as during the bailout, Buffett is betting that the government is going to back his investment.
If the major airlines were really about to go down, Buffett would be trying to get everything out, instead of getting in deeper. The billionaire is betting that Berkshire Hathaway will emerge in a stronger position after the bailouts and the surge of optimism that will follow the lifting of the coronavirus curfews.
He’s almost certainly right.
But if he wants to profit from the turnaround and the potential takeover of an airline, he should do the heavy lifting on his own. Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on $125 billion in cash. But why cash out his treasury bills when the D.C. swamp will be happy enough to do most of the heavy lifting for him.
Where will those taxpayer-funded profits go?
In 2014, the Oracle of Omaha predicted that Hillary Clinton will win. “I will bet money on it, and I don’t do that easily,” he boasted.
And maxed out his contribution to the Ready for Hillary PAC. He also shoveled money into the DNC.
In this election cycle, he poured $245,000 into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Republicans lobbying for an airline bailout are literally fighting to secure taxpayer money that will then be used to fund their political opponents. It’s an insane act of fiscal political suicide.
Beyond political donations, Buffett has spent millions covertly funding abortion activism. Due to his obsessive secrecy, the full scope of his abortion funding is unknown, but the Buffett Foundation donated almost $4 billion to abortion causes, including $674.5 million to Planned Parenthood.
Arguably, the Oracle of Omaha has done the most to promote abortion of anyone in America.
It’s a revelation that clashes with his folksy image and invocation of small-town values. But behind the Garrison Keillor routine, Buffett is just another version of George Soros with an American accent.
That’s not just rhetoric.
At the heart of Soros' power over American politics is the Democracy Alliance, a club of powerful organizations funneling money into transforming this country. The Democracy Alliance's core partners include the NoVo Foundation, run by Buffett’s son and daughter-in-law, and funded by $150 million from the Oracle of Omaha.
NoVo funds hate groups like Van Jones' Color of Change, which plotted to defund the David Horowitz Freedom Center, along with the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Tides Foundation, and the National People’s Action.
That last donation is especially interesting considering NPA’s role in creating the Community Reinvestment Act which forced banks to dispense mortgages to insolvent borrowers. This, as the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks notes, “ranks high among the primary causes of the 2008 financial crisis.” That’s both fascinating and disturbing considering Buffett’s links to that crisis.
Buffett avoided the subprime crisis while profiting massively from the resulting disaster.
Putting money in Buffett’s pocket will mean more cash for Biden, it will mean more Democrats in the House and the Senate, more abortions, and more power for George Soros’ Democracy Alliance.
So why are Republicans ready to make concessions to Democrats in exchange for the privilege of electing more Democrats with a Buffett bailout? Even if one were to argue that a bailout of the airline industry may be necessary, why would Republicans lobby to cut their own throats?
When the wall isn’t funded, how can the GOP justify a second billion-dollar bailout of an industry that will then just turn around and cut another 2 inches from the cramped seats of the taxpayers who bailed them out?
Donald Trump’s Economic Record Isn’t What He Says It Is
Donald Trump is ‘just wrong’ about the economy, says Nobel
Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz
“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’s Economic Record Isn’t What He Says It Is
He claims
the economy is “the best it has ever been.” A closer look at the data tells a
different story.
February 5, 2020
U.S. Department of Agriculture/Flickr
Donald
Trump has been on a mission this week to distract from his impeachment by
touting his administration’s economic record. First, he launched a 30-second ad
after the Super Bowl promising that “the best is yet to come.” Then, in his
State of the Union address Tuesday night, Trump highlighted the “American
Comeback.” The speech was full of audacious—and characteristically
inaccurate—claims: “our economy is the best it has ever been”; the “average
unemployment rate … is lower than any administration in the history of our
country”; and “wages are rising fast.”
The
reality, however, doesn’t match Trump’s
rhetoric.
In fact, it would take much longer than a
30-second
commercial to highlight the many
ways that
the U.S. economy isn’t working for all.
Still,
the moment provides an opening for Democratic presidential candidates to
challenge the president’s record.
In
2019, for instance, the gap between the richest and poorest households in the
United States reached its highest point in more than 50 years. The number of Americans
without health insurance continues to climb following years of declines since the
passage and implementation of Obamacare. And household debt is now in excess
of $14 trillion, exceeding the pre-recession high.
Even
with low unemployment, wage growth is lagging. The most recent employment
report reported wages increasing by just 2.9 percent over the last year. With
inflation at 2.1 percent, that’s not much of a pay raise. To the
extent that wage growth has picked up in recent months, a major contributor has been increases in state and local
minimum wages that Republicans and the president opposed.
Trump’s
signature legislative accomplishment, the 2017 tax cut, has produced none of its promised benefits, including the $4,000
pay raise that he and his allies promised to American workers.
In fact,
as a result of the tax cut, 91 companies in the Fortune 500 paid no federal taxes last year. The country’s six
biggest banks saved $32 billion at the same time that they laid off more
than 1,000 employees.
The
tax cut has also failed to produce the “four, five and even six percent” economic growth
that Trump promised. In the fourth quarter of 2019, the GDP growth of 2.1
percent was lower than both the growth rate before the tax cut was passed in
2017 and the average of Obama’s second term (2.4 percent). Instead, the tax
cuts have produced annual budget deficits of $1 trillion, which Trump has signaled may lead to cuts in Social Security and Medicare, in
addition to his ongoing efforts to erode the social safety net.
Ironically,
despite the president’s pledge to help the “forgotten men and women,”
blue-collar job growth—which includes construction, manufacturing, and
mining—remains anemic, only growing at 0.8 percent in 2019 compared to 2 percent in
Obama’s final term.
What’s
more, the ongoing trade war plunged the manufacturing sector into recession
last year, which has stunted economic growth in states like Wisconsin and
Michigan. Tensions with China produced a 24 percent increase in farm bankruptcies last year, with the most coming
from Wisconsin. The Congressional Budget Office estimated recently that Trump’s trade policies will cost
American households an average of $1,277 this year.
of
layoffs in four years. For workers who are able
percent
less than before. That gap is even greater
for
workers who were at the same job for three
years
or more.
But
while the economic reality under Trump is troubling for most Americans overall,
it’s even more daunting for African-American workers, who have an unemployment
rate almost twice as high as white workers. Displaced African Americans earn 13 percent less
in their new jobs. Those who were employed for three or more years earned 31
percent less in their new jobs.
Despite
the headlines, too many workers are not feeling the economic boom Trump
describes. Instead of making investments to provide Americans with the
world-class education and training needed for 21st-century jobs, the president
and the Republican Congress chose stock buybacks to benefit the wealthy and a
temporary sugar high for the economy that has now worn off.
Democrats
can and should challenge Trump on the economy in 2020. Millions of workers are
looking for good jobs and a pay raise. Policies to build an economy for all
should be central to any campaign’s message. But it’s more than just good
politics. Building an economy that works for the 90 percent instead of just the
top 10 percent is sound economic policy.
“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
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
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