fed deficit debt

===

see pjt 2025 vought

see debt ceiling hostage

see trump 2017 voodoo tax cut

see 2 santas austerity

see social safety net

see pentagon

voodoo tax cuts supply side BS

paul ryan

hypocrisy

===

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AN 11 26

Russell Vought, President Donald Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of his Project 2025 agenda, has been one of the most powerful people in Washington since the Republican started his second term. Yet according to a new report, Vought is about to find his job in danger.

"Congressional Democrats obviously have lots of things on their to-do list for next year, starting with cost-of-living issues and cracking down on corruption," wrote The Bulwark's Catherine Ramnpell on Thursday. "But there’s another key priority that has gotten less attention but is no less important: restoring the constitutional separation of powers so that Congress actually controls the power of the purse again."

She added, "Or to put it in more colorful terms: Congress is about to reclaim its cojones, and then go after the low-profile cabinet member who sliced them off in the first place."

After breaking down the details of how Vought has stymied Congress and allegedly behaved illegally, Rampell added, "Once back in the majority, Democratic lawmakers have some tools at their disposal to reclaim the power of the purse. Or at the very least, make it harder for Trump and Vought to keep violating the Constitution."

She continued, "A lot of the tools involve more careful writing of appropriations bills, and taking away any plausible claim Trump has for exercising discretion in spending decisions. For example, lawmakers could be more specific in how they lay out the criteria for awards, so Trump has no effective way to favor friends and disfavor perceived enemies (e.g., by specifying that any state that has had landfall of a storm blowing with hurricane-force winds must be treated as eligible for Stafford Act funding, thereby preventing Trump from withholding those funds from blue states). Congress could also make it easier for private parties to bring a lawsuit when funding gets illegally frozen."

Rampell added, "That’ll help prevent future illegal impoundments. But what about damage already done? Democrats could start by subpoenaing documentation of all the ways Vought has helped the administration break the law."

In August, economist Dr. Robert J. Shapiro — who advised President Bill Clinton during his balanced budgets and four surpluses — told AlterNet that the current $40 trillion deficit is largely Trump's fault.

"Deficits equal to six or seven percent of GDP, which is unprecedented in the postwar era," Shapiro told AlterNet at the time. "It's a real outlier. And that's driven entirely by his tax changes, which carry enormous budgetary costs, plus a wholesale, large-scale increase in defense spending. So how much of this is Trump? A majority of it — not all of it, but a majority."

On Thursday Shapiro told AlterNet that the deficits have also compounded the economic problems facing ordinary Americans, the same ones that played a large role in them turning against Republicans during the midterm elections on Tuesday.

"The debt does have effects that have exacerbated the economic squeeze on people," Shapiro told AlterNet. "Most clearly, financing the debt absorbs so much available savings that other forms of credit, like mortgages and credit card debt, become more expensive. It's supply and demand. There's less savings left over, because when you have a $40 trillion debt, it's not simply that you have to finance an additional $2 trillion each year, because that's the annual deficit now: $2 trillion. In addition, $10 trillion each year comes up for refinancing. That is, the Treasury securities mature, and so you have to float new Treasury securities to refinance the debt that has now matured. You buy a 10-year bond, or you buy a five-year note. Five years later, it matures. You've got to pay it off, and in order to pay it off, you've got to borrow the money."

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AN 8 26

An extreme position does not become less extreme just because someone can put forward one that’s even more extreme. Massacring 100 children doesn’t become a moderate position just because someone is advocating killing 200 children.

This is how we should view the line being pushed by “moderate” voices that we have to deal with the $40 trillion debt with both spending cuts and tax hikes. The reality is that, apart from the military and Homeland Security, there is little fat in spending to be cut, as even Elon Musk inadvertently acknowledged.

Insofar as we have a deficit problem, the issue is on the tax side, as can be easily shown. The rich have been taking an ever-larger share of national income over the last half-century, and they don’t feel like paying taxes on their winnings.The major media outlets, which are all controlled by rich people, are pretending to be moderate by saying that we need to both raise taxes and cut spending. But there is nothing moderate about saying that we have to cut programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid because Republicans have given big tax breaks to their campaign contributors.

Republicans pushed these tax cuts, knowing they would increase the deficit, but did not make any corresponding cuts in spending because the cuts would be incredibly unpopular. Now they are using their control over the media to insist that these cuts are now absolutely necessary to offset all the lost tax revenue from tax cuts put in place by Reagan, Bush II, and Trump.

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post gave us a great example of this fake moderate position in its editorial, “To get the national debt under control, start with the retirement state.” The piece makes its case by taking the example of a two-earner couple, with average earnings of $100,000 a year. It shows that the couple, turning 65 in 2025, can expect lifetime Social Security benefits of $739k compared with tax contributions of just $597k. A couple with the same income retiring in 2045 can expect lifetime benefits of $987k compared to tax contributions of $735k.

After laying out this disparity for Social Security (it has a similar story for Medicare, which I’ll come to), it then makes an argument for reducing Social Security for high-income people. This is three-card Monte level deception.

If the idea is that we should reduce the benefits of high-income workers, honest people would look at the relative taxes and benefits for high-income workers. Social Security is explicitly designed to have a progressive payback structure, which means that relatively moderate-income workers, like the ones highlighted in the WaPo editorial, have higher paybacks relative to their taxes.

If the editors were interested in doing an apples- to-apples comparison, here’s what the picture would look like. (This is taken from the exact same source.)

As can be seen, high-income people pay considerably more in taxes than they get back in benefits. For a high-income woman retiring in 2025, the gap is $263k. For a high-income man, the gap is $336k. (The gap is larger for men than women because their life expectancy is shorter.) For a high-income woman retiring in 2045, the gap is $259k. For a high-income man, the gap is $346k.

If the point is to make an argument for reducing the benefits of high-income retirees, then show the taxes and benefits for high-income retirees. No one disputes that Social Security looks like a pretty good deal for more moderate-income retirees, but these people don’t typically have much income in retirement. I guess Jeff Bezos’ paper would have been too embarrassed to argue that we have to reduce the average monthly Social Security benefit of $2,071.

The Post’s editorial makes the push that while cutting Social Security, we should expect people to be more reliant on private 401(k)s. In addition to increasing risk, this is also enormously inefficient. Private 401(k)s cost more than 40 times as much to administer per dollar of benefits as Social Security. It is understandable that Mr. Bezos would be happy to see more money going to his rich friends in the financial industry, but most of us would rather see the money going to ordinary workers.

Medicare Benefits: Big Bucks to Hospitals and Drug Companies Are Not Benefits to Workers

The Post’s graphs do show a huge imbalance between the taxes paid out for Medicare and the cost of the benefits received. This is also deceptive.

In the United States, we pay almost twice as much per person for healthcare as the average for other wealthy countries. This is not because we get more or better healthcare. Our life expectancy ranks near the bottom for wealthy countries.

The big bucks for healthcare go to the income of drug companies, insurers, hospitals, medical equipment makers, and doctors. In each case, we pay two times as much, or more, than people in other wealthy countries.

A paper that was not answerable to one of the richest people in the world would suggest bringing our payments in line with the rest of the world. But instead, the WaPo wants to beat up on the country’s retirees.

No one should be confused: cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits to reduce the deficit is not a moderate position. It’s one that attacks hundreds of millions of ordinary workers to avoid taxing the rich or reducing waste in our health care system. That is extreme, but the rich media owners pushing this position will do everything they can to convince us they are being fair and balanced.

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AN 2 26

President Donald Trump is costing US taxpayers “billions” with his various military ventures, an expert wrote on Tuesday, even though both he and his critics have been strangely silent on the subject.

From his quite real military action in Venezuela to his threatened activities in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Gaza, Iran and Greenland, Trump is repeatedly actually or potentially engaging in multibillion dollar military campaigns all over the globe, according to a report by Bloomberg. For example Operation Southern Sphere in January, during which Trump captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, cost $31 million per day, according to an analysis by the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

“That comes to more than $11 billion a year if the US maintains its current level there,” reported Bloomberg’s Wes Kosova. If Trump successfully pushes US oil companies to spend $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s energy industry, “that means you’re bringing in some kind of occupation,” explained Heidi Peltier, director of programs at Brown University’s Costs of War project. “US taxpayers would be rebuilding the oil industry and paying for a military presence there to stabilize the country and make it a safe enough investment.”

Similarly Trump’s threatened attacks against Iran, which he said would be “far worse” than the B-2 bomber attacks from last year, would cost $8 million daily or $2.9 billion annually.

“That’s on top of the at least $2 billion the US spent on military action against Iran and its proxies in 2025, according to calculations by the Costs of War project,” Bloomberg wrote. “Needless to say, those numbers will climb dramatically if Trump orders further strikes.” And that doesn’t include the cost of Trump’s threatened occupation of Greenland (roughly $700 billion).

“No matter how compelling a president’s argument may be for missile strikes or troop deployments, the current practice of heaping war costs atop the nation’s already staggering pile of debt can last only so long,” Bloomberg reported. “At the start of the Iraq War, US debt held by the public was $3.7 trillion, or 33 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Today it’s more than $30 trillion, equal to 97 percent of GDP.”

Bloomberg is not alone within the business world in looking askance at Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné told reporters that he quit the country in 2022 and Trump’s invasion has not changed that.

"It was too expensive and too polluting," Pouyanné said, "and that is still the case.”

Similarly Exxon CEO Darren Woods has described the Venezuelan market as “uninvestable.” Trump replied by threatening to sideline the Exxon leader by “playing too cute.” Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton also observed in January that oil companies might not feel comfortable investing in Venezuela because of the instability injected by Trump’s policies.

“If I were an oil company executive being pressured by Trump to invest billions of dollars of capital expenditures to revive Venezuela's oil infrastructure, I would want a regime in place committed to the rule of law,” Bolton said.

Overall the economic risk involved in Venezuela stems from the uncertainty baked into the military operation’s future, said one expert.

"Tactically, it was executed with precision," retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling said for the conservative publication The Bulwark. "But the immediate aftermath revealed a strategic uncertainty. Even in the (Trump) Administration's first press briefings, it was unclear who was in charge in Caracas, what authority Washington claimed to exercise, and what political end state the United States was pursuing. That ambiguity has not improved with time."

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an 11 25

I learned basic arithmetic skills in third grade. I wasn’t exceptional; everyone in my public school third grade class learned them. Of course, we all can now use computers to have calculations done for us in a fraction of a second. But still, somehow we have major national debates that show zero understanding of even the most basic arithmetic.

The latest example is the $2,000 tariff dividend check that Trump is promising us. The arithmetic here is about as simple as it gets. We have roughly 340 million people in the country. Let’s say 10 percent don’t get the check because they meet Trump’s category of “high-income.”

That leaves over 300 million people getting Trump’s $2,000 checks. That comes to more than $600 billion. Trump’s tariffs are raising around $270 billion. That means we will be paying out $330 billion more in Trump tariff dividend checks than he is raising in tariff revenue. That would add $270 billion to the deficit—this coming from the same guy who is making an obsession of paying down our national debt.

And just to be clear, we were already looking at a budget deficit for 2026 of $1.8 trillion. If we add $330 billion, the deficit for the fiscal year will be $2.1 trillion. To put this in simple language that even a reporter for a major national news outlet can understand, Trump is proposing to add $2.1 trillion to the debt in 2026; he is not paying it down.

I acknowledge not being a deficit hawk and am not terrified by a deficit of this size, which is roughly 7 percent of GDP. But I suspect most of the politicians in Washington are, and certainly anyone who thinks we need to be paying down the debt should be screaming bloody murder.

But watching the reaction in major media outlets, there seems almost no appreciation of the fact that Trump was floating what would ordinarily be considered a very large increase in the deficit. In fact, if Trump were to give this tariff dividend check every year over the next decade, it would add close to $4 trillion to the debt (counting interest payments), almost as much as the big tax cut Congress approved earlier this year.

It’s also worth comparing Trump’s tariff dividends to other items in the news. The government shutdown was in large part over the $35 billion in annual payments for enhanced subsidies for people buying insurance in Obamacare exchanges. Trump and Republicans in Congress claimed that we didn’t have the money to pay for these subsidies. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 17 times as much as the enhanced insurance subsidies.

To make another comparison, Trump saved us around $6 billion a year by shutting down PEPFAR, the program that has saved tens of millions of lives by treating people in Africa for AIDS. This means that Trump’s tariff dividend checks will cost us 100 times as much as the AIDS program that he said we couldn’t afford.

And just to throw in one more comparison, the annual appropriation for public broadcasting was $550 million. Trump’s tariff dividend checks would cost more than 1,000 times as much as the government’s payments for public broadcasting.

People can differ in their views on how important it is to save lives in Africa or provide people here with healthcare. They may also differ in their assessments of how important deficits are. But it really would be good if media outlets could make knowledge of third grade arithmetic a job requirement for reporters who deal with budget issues. It should be their job to provide meaningful information to the public on the topic. Letting someone talk about $2,000 dividend checks, and also about paying down the debt, is a sick joke.

combo of uncertain tariff BS and voodoo2 b b bill BS

an 5 25

'Debt bomb': Morning Joe explains why Moody’s downgrade is 'siren going off' for US economy

MMA SEE BIG B BILL FOR ANNO

Even Fox & Friends can't completely deny that the GOP's “Big, Beautiful Bill” is set to blow up the deficit

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 06/02/25

Reality crept into Fox News’ coverage of the Republican tax bill on Monday when a Fox & Friends co-host acknowledged that the legislation will increase the budget deficit because the GOP Congress is prioritizing President Donald Trump’s tax cut agenda.

The White House and House Republican leaders seem to have adopted a strategy of flatly lying about the deficit implications of their “Big, Beautiful Bill.” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought falsely claimed that the bill “doesn’t increase the deficit or hurt the debt” while House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) falsely claimed it is “not going to add to the debt” in June 1 appearances on Sunday morning political talk shows.

But Fox & Friends' Ainsley Earhardt acknowledged the following morning that the bill will cause the deficit to increase due to its tax cuts — though she minimized by how much.

“I don't think anyone wants the deficit to go up,” Earhardt said. “But more importantly, it was the permanent tax cuts, it was no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, that’s more important to the American people than seeing the deficit go up a little bit.”

“No one wants that, but they prefer to have these other things,” she added....

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an 12 24

Trump and his GOP allies are determined to extend the corporate tax cuts that were enacted in2017 during his first term.

Many Republicans have been downplaying the effect that doing so would have on the United States' federal deficit.

But according to Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell, they are ignoring the math involved.

Rampell, in her December 10 column, argues, "The GOP's first order of business: getting rid of math. The fractious Republican Party can agree on few things these days. But one of them is near-unanimous frustration with the pesky laws of arithmetic. That cutting future taxes would reduce future tax revenue, for instance, perpetually aggrieves them."

Republicans who favor extending the corporate tax cuts, according to Rampell, are ignoring how much it will increase the federal deficit.

"A large chunk of the 2017 Trump tax cuts expires next year, and extending these provisions will be extremely expensive," Rampell explains. "That's why Republicans scheduled them to sunset in the first place: to lower the price tag. The Congressional Budget Office, the legislature’s official scorekeeper, estimates a full extension would add more than $4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade."

The Post columnist adds, "That's true even after considering any potential growth effects on the U.S. economy. It might also understate the full cost of GOP tax plans, since it doesn't include Trump's other pricey promises: slashing corporate taxes, eliminating taxes on Social Security, overtime and tips. Those would add trillions more in red ink — awkward for a party that fancies itself fiscally responsible."

*Catherine Rampell's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required)

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an 12 24

Republicans are already revealing their eagerness to cut earned benefits for millions of Americans, if one House Republican is to be believed.

In a recent interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) said that he aims to convince his fellow lawmakers that "hard decisions" need to be made about Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if his party is to succeed in its goal of making sweeping budget cuts.

"75 percent of the budget is nondiscretionary," McCormick said, referencing the three programs that provide income and health insurance to retirees, low-income Americans and the disabled. "There’s hundreds of billions of dollars to be saved and we know how to do it. We just have to have the stomach to actually take those challenges on."

New Republic writer Hafiz Rashid highlighted McCormick's interview to make the point that Republicans are "chomping at the bit at some of their favorite targets" in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's victory. And he noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has also mentioned the possibility of making cuts to those three programs in order to fatten the Pentagon budget, along with "the infamous conservative manifesto Project 2025."

"While McCormick pledges to talk to the Democrats about such cuts, the GOP is unlikely to get much traction with the opposing party, especially since Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House where a single vote or two could tank their legislative agenda.," Rashid wrote. "Even if the GOP manages to win over a couple of Democrats, any plans to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid will get pushback from powerful organizations such as the AARP. Older voters who rely on the programs also make up the base of the Republican Party, and politicians from both parties should be wary of provoking them."

Notably, McCormick didn't mention one of his party's more costly goals: Extending Trump's 2017 tax cut package that overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the rich. Politico estimated that an extension would require roughly $4.6 trillion over 10 years, which even some Republicans were worried about.

Watch the video of McCormick's comments below, or by**clicking this link.**

READ MORE:['Biggest challenge': Even Republicans are nervous about Trump's new $4.6 trillion tax cut

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an 10 24

One pillar of Vice President Kamala Harris' economic platform is to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans, calling on billionaires to "pay their fair share" of federal taxes. Now, the chairman of the House of Representatives committee overseeing taxes is crying foul.

On Wednesday, Rep. Jason Smith (R-Missouri), who chairs the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, complained about Harris' plan to Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo. In the clip journalist Aaron Rupar posted to X (formerly Twitter), Smith defended the historically low tax rates of the richest Americans and called the vice president "ridiculous" for suggesting they should be increased.

"What's so ridiculous is for her statement to say that the rich should pay their fair share," Smith said. "It's just a talking point that she throws out there... Her policies are absolutely atrocious."

However, Harris' argument that U.S. billionaires aren't paying historically low tax rates is backed up by hard data. Earlier this year, French economist Gabriel Zucman wrote in the New York Times that the wealthiest Americans paid just 23% of their income in taxes in 2018. Previously, the top 1% of Americans paid more than 56% of their income in taxes in 1960, and taxes still took up 52.7% of their incomes in 1970.

After Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981, the richest saw their tax rates drop precipitously, paying just over 35% of their incomes by the time Reagan left office in 1989. This trend continued after George W. Bush signed new tax cuts benefiting the rich into law in the early 2000s. Barack Obama extended those tax cuts in 2010, and Donald Trump signed even larger tax cuts into law in 2017. By 2018, the bottom half of U.S. income earners paid approximately 24% of their income in taxes, while billionaires paid an even lower rate. Zucman explained that the primary reason for this is that in the United States, work is taxed at a higher rate than assets.

"[W]hile most of us live off our salaries, tycoons like Jeff Bezos live off their wealth," Zucman wrote. "In 2019, when Mr. Bezos was still Amazon’s chief executive, he took home an annual salary of just $81,840. But he owns roughly 10percent of the company, which made a profit of $30 billion in 2023."

"If Amazon gave its profits back to shareholders as dividends, which are subject to income tax, Mr. [Jeff] Bezos would face a hefty tax bill. But Amazon does not pay dividends to its shareholders... Instead, the companies keep their profits and reinvest them, making their shareholders even wealthier," he continued. "Unless Mr. Bezos, Warren Buffett or Elon Musk sell their stock, their taxable income is relatively minuscule. But they can still make eye-popping purchases by borrowing against their assets. Mr. Musk, for example, used his shares in Tesla as collateral to rustle up around $13 billion in tax-free loans to put toward his acquisition of Twitter."

This is where the tax plans of the two major parties' presidential nominees come into focus. While Harris is aiming for generating more revenue from assets held by the richest in her call for higher taxes on unrealized capital gains over $100 million, Trump is campaigning on renewing his tax cuts from 2017, which overwhelmingly benefited the rich.

If Trump were to succeed in renewing the tax cuts — which are due to sunset next year — it would amount to a cost of roughly $10 trillion over the next decade. CNN reports that Harris' plan to tax unrealized capital gains on the roughly 10,660 Americans who have net worths of nine figures or more "could be used to pay for social spending programs, like helping families pay for child care or down-payment help for first-time homebuyers."

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AN 4 24 COMMON DREAms

as House Republicans prepare for Donald Trump's possible White House return by plotting to expand the billionaire and corporate tax cuts that were the cornerstone of the former president's first administration, congressional Democrats and advocates for working Americans warned Thursday that a second Trump term would bring more of the same inequality-exacerbating policies.

The GOP-controlled House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing Thursday on "expanding the success" of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—widely derided by opponents as the "GOP Tax Scam." Republican committee members couched a policy that the Center for Popular Democracy said "delivered big benefits to the rich and corporations but nearly none for working families" as "relief to help hardworking American families."

Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the committee's ranking member, pushed back during Thursday's hearing, noting that "in the last three decades, Republicans have skyrocketed the deficit with trillions in tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations, always with the same result: the top 1% benefits while nothing trickles down for workers."

Neal continued:

In 2017, Ways and Means Democrats saw the GOP corporate tax giveaway for what it was: a scam. We knew that their Tax Scam would disproportionately benefit the wealthy and well-connected. We knew that it wouldn't pay for itself. We knew that big corporations, not their workers, would feel the most benefit. Six years since the GOP Tax Scam was signed into law, we've been proven right on every count. It didn't pay for itself, it didn't increase revenue, and it didn't increase wages.

A recent study whose authors included [Joint Committee on Taxation] economists—let that sink in—found that ALL of the corporate gains from TCJA went to shareholders and high-paid executives, with absolutely nothing flowing to workers. Fifty-six percent of the tax cuts enriched shareholders, and the remaining 44% lined the pockets of execs. Zero percent went to workers. ZERO!

"There are 20 years of data showing trickle-down economics doesn't work, yet today will still be a whole lot of revisionist history and wishful thinking on the singular largest failure of fiscal policy in recent memory," Neal added. "If workers and the middle class are actually your priorities, putting them ahead of big corporations and billionaires is the only way."

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.)—who also sits on the committee—agreed, asserting on social media that "the Trump tax cuts were a huge 'success' if you were a billionaire or an executive at a large corporation. They made out like bandits, with a huge amount of the benefits from the GOP tax law going to the wealthiest. Now Republicans want to give the superrich even more tax cuts."

Trump is open about this. At an exclusive fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last week, he shouted out his "rich as hell" supporters, telling them, "We're gonna give you tax cuts, we're gonna pay off our debt."

That's the same debt that soared by around $8 trillion during Trump's term—largely as a result of his tax cuts. Meanwhile, U.S. billionaires have collectively gotten $2.2 trillion richer since the GOP tax cuts took effect.

With many provisions of the TCJA set to expire at the end of 2025, progressives are underscoring what's at stake in this November's elections.

"Today the American people got a preview of what's in store for them next year if the Trump Tax Scam expires under conservative leadership," Groundwork Collaborative executive director Lindsay Owens said following the House hearing. "The conservative playbook for the 2025 tax fight is coming into focus, and we can be sure it includes more giveaways for the wealthy and corporations."

an 8 23 $

no lnx

For the next time some idiot tries to tell you the GOP is 'The Party of Business'

Nikki Haley is ‘whitewashing’ her record on Putin while hypocritically attacking Democrats: conservative

Thom Hartmann

August 30, 2023

As predictably as the sun rises and sets, every Sunday sees a commentator or politician on one of the Sunday political talk shows say — without being challenged — words to the effect that the Republican Party understands and supports business better than Democrats. This weekend, as I recall, it was CNN‘s turn.

All my life, in fact, I’ve been told by the media that the GOP is the “party of business.”

It may have once been true when I was a very young child, but today it’s a lie — and has been so in a huge way since the neoliberal Reagan Revolution.

Between 1933 and 2020 there were 14 American presidents, 7 Democratic and 7 Republican.

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The economy during this time grew at an average rate of 4.6% under the Democratic presidents, but only an anemic 2.4% under Republican presidents. For example, the economy has grown three times faster under Biden than under Trump.

Ten of the past 11 recessions began under Republican presidents,although lifelong Republican and Trump Fed appointee Jerome Powell seems hell-bent on producing one for Joe Biden, just in time for the 2024 election.

Republican presidents have exploded the national debt,while the only balanced budgets out of the past 60 years have been presented by Democratic presidents Carter, Clinton, and Obama.

Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a $128 billion surplus (after 4 consecutive years of budget surpluses): Bush immediately squandered it with a massive tax cut for billionaires and two criminal wars.

Just last year, President Biden decreased federal spending by $550 billion and reduced the deficit by $1.4 trillion — the largest one-year deficit drop in American history — all while creating five times more jobs in 2 years than the last three Republican presidents combined.

If not for the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts for billionaires and the two wars George W. Bush lied us into, our national debt would today be zero instead of over $30 trillion.

The core of American business and thus the livelihood of American communities before Reagan was small- and medium-sized companies.

We enforced anti-trust lawsso aggressively that when Buster Brown and Kinney shoe companies wanted to merge in the 1960s the Supreme Court blocked the merger because the combined company would control about 5 percent of the US shoe market.Nike alone today controls around 20 percent of that market.

Small- and medium-sized companies built America and brought us the American middle class, the first and largest middle class in the world. But in 1983, when Reagan ordered the DOJ, FTC, and SEC to stop enforcing anti-trust laws dating back to the Sherman Act of 1890, giant corporations began a relentless campaign to destroy locally-owned companies.

Strip malls and small-town downtowns that were once mostly home to local retailers are now dominated by giant monopolistic national chains. Big Box stores, spreading across the country unconstrained since Reagan, have been wiping out small towns and rural communities.

One study found, as Reuters reported:

“[T]he closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.”

For most American businesses and the communities they serve, Republican governance has been a disaster since the Reagan 1980s.

In the 1950s, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower championed building tens of thousands of new public schools all across America, an effort supported by the business community because an educated workforce is a productive workforce.

From the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Americans were proud that we had one of the best-educated workforces in the world, and that itself was a huge boost to business.

In 2010, though, when fossil fuel billionaires bankrolled the Tea Party and were looking for an issue to beat up on Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 elections, they seized on the national standards for education program conceived and legislatively initiated by both Republicans and Democrats called “Common Core.”

Although it had been endorsed by the US Chamber of Commerce and GOP presidential front-runner Jeb Bush (among others) and was in place in 45 states, word went out that it was an effort to “indoctrinate” American students.

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The story ran day after day on Fox “News” and rightwing hate radio. Hysteria followed, and Red state after Red state outlawed these new high standards for high-school graduation. Republican grandstanding for political gain actually dumbed down America.

The 2020 version of this was Critical Race Theory, another equally bogus attack on public education. Between this, “Don’t Say Gay,” and banning thousands of books, the Republican war on public education has blossomed into full flower.

Now, Republican states are trying to shut down their public schools altogether via state-wide voucher programs, replacing Eisenhower’s AAA+ education system with state-funded religious and rightwing for-profit schools that refuse to teach actual science, civics, or American history.

Arizona was the first to go statewide with vouchers, and Republican legislators in Texas, Florida, Kansas, and a dozen other GOP-run states are considering the same.It’s quite simply an all-out effort to destroy public education and subsidize religious schools and private all-white academies for upper-middle-class people who can take advantage of a voucher that only covers part of the cost of tuition.

The only option left for the very poorest people will be the few remaining public schools, essentially turning them into ghettos.

Republican President Dwight Eisenhower ran for re-election in the 1956 election by bragging that he’d expanded Social Security across America, and his 1952 election was mostly powered by his enthusiastic endorsement of unionization.

:{:{}:

At a speech before the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1952, Eisenhower noted that the first national legalization of unions in America was signed by Republican President Calvin Coolidge, the 1926 Railway Labor Act.

:{:{}:

“Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions,” he told the union group now known as the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest. “Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

:{:{}:

Similarly, in September of 1970 President Richard Nixon hosted labor leaders from across America, praising the movement. As The New York Times noted on September 8, 1970:

“When the ‘great issue’ has been whether to support the President and to meet the nation’s responsibilities ‘for defending and protecting the forces of freedom in the world,’ he said, ‘American labor has never been found wanting. It has always been the first in war and in peace.’”

As a result of combined Democratic and Republican support of unions, by Reagan’s election in 1980 about two-thirds of all American workers had a union job or it’s equivalent,with great pay, benefits, and retirement plans, because a third of workers were union members and that set the pay and benefits floor for the non-union employers to compete for another third of workers.

But, following Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court in 1971, the GOP began to adopt the positions in thePowell Memo, which included gutting labor unions so the morbidly rich could become even richer.

Their rationale was that workers having a say in the workplace had “destabilized” America, a point first made in 1951 by Russell Kirkin his book The Conservative Mind that I detailed two years ago here.

President Reagan, however, declared war on organized labor with his attack on the PATCO union. Ever since, the GOP has been fighting efforts to expand unionization.

Combined with Reagan’s massive tax cuts for billionaires and giant corporations, this loss of union representation has led to a$50 trillion transfer of wealthfrom the homes and retirement accounts of working-class people straight into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

Instead of two-thirds of Americans having a middle-class lifestyle like in 1980, today that number is down to around 45 percent of us. As a result, both poverty and homelessness have exploded across the land. And poor and homeless people can’t afford to support a strong economy — and thus American business — the way a prosperous middle class can.

Dwight Eisenhower created the Small Business Administration to “aid, counsel, assist, and protect insofar as is possible the interests of small-business concerns.”

He signed a massive expansion of Social Security to take the pension/retirement onus off small- and medium-sized employers, increased the minimum wage so a prospering working class could purchase the products of American manufacturers, and built low-income housing across the nation to end the homeless “hobo” problem left over from the Republican Great Depression.

Eisenhower created from scratch the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to build a healthy and well-educated workforce, while Richard Nixon signed the Environmental Protection Agency into law to save the lives of American workers being killed by toxic pesticides and other chemicals (the agency’s creation was provoked by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring).

Today’s GOP opposes all of these programs and agencies. They only support the largest American companies and the richest citizens.

When Trump was president, he rolled back regulation of toxic pesticides known to cause brain damage to children, and one of his first official acts in office was to end the prohibition of coal mines dumping their toxic waste and tailings into America’s rivers, polluting downstream water supplies with cancer-causing chemicals.

Arguably, the best policy possible for American businesses of all sizes is the Medicare For All program promoted for decades by progressive Democrats.

Back in 2004, Toyota announced they’d be opening a new factory in North America. Three southern US states offered them billions in tax advantages and free land, with the Republican governor of Alabama openly bragging about how cheaply his citizens would work for the company.

But in the end, in 2005, Toyota announced they’d be building the factory in Ontario, Canada because US healthcare costs are nearly twice those of Canada, which has had a successful Medicare For All system in place for more than a half-century (as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich).

Since then, as Republicans (and a few bought-off Democrats) continue to fight any effort to establish a national healthcare or health insurance system, the company has built two more North American factories in Canada.

If it wasn’t for Republican obstruction, they would’ve been built here and the jobs would be here.

The simple reality is that Republicans have no coherent plans for the American economy beyond more tax cuts for their morbidly rich donors and more deregulation of the very largest and most polluting corporations.

:{:{}:

To compensate for this deficiency, they push hate against queer people, public school teachers, women, and dark-skinned immigrants. DeSantis has gone so far as to attack Disney, Florida’s largest employer and source of tax revenues, because they had the temerity to respect their gay, lesbian, and trans employees and customers.

Republicans have banned hundreds of books from public schools and libraries, saturated our towns and cities with weapons of war, banned women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and packed our courts with judges who’d be comfortable with the American Nazi movement, the Federalist Society, and the John Birch Society.

Not only are these policies and positions bad for America, they’re also destructive of most American businesses.

So, the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the GOP is “the party of business,” let them know the real facts.

The only businesses Republicans actually support are gun sellers, megachurches, corrupt defense contractors, and giant monopolies. And none of those are good for average Americans, locally-owned businesses, or the US economy.

===

an 3 23 new rep

During former President Donald Trump's four years in the White House, most Republicans didn't have a lot to say about the United States' federal deficit. But after President Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predicted that the GOP would magically rediscover fiscal conservatism. Sure enough, many Republicans have attacked Biden as a tax-and-spend Democrat, overlooking the effect that the GOP-sponsoredTax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 — a major tax cut for the wealthy and large corporations — had on the federal deficit.

Critics of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act have argued that while it dramatically reduced corporate taxes and made the rich richer, it didn't help the middle class — and that in some states, it became, in effect, a tax hike for the middle class by taking away various deductions that middle class taxpayers had been relying on.

One of Biden's Republican critics has been Grover Norquist, the 66-year-old founder of Americans for Tax Reform. Journalist Michael Tomasky examines Norquist's influence on GOP tax policy in an article published by The New Republic on March 13, emphasizing that he has been a key contributor to higher federal deficits in the U.S.

"Grover Norquist has been running Americans for Tax Reform since the Reagan era," Tomasky explains. "It was back then, in 1986, that he came up with what I must confess has been an effective — if ruinous — idea: the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that his organization asks political candidates to sign…. Norquist's pledge has done more to destroy policymaking and derail the normal horse-trading of the legislative process than any other single development of the era."

Tomasky notes that since 1990, Republicans in Congress "have not voted for a single tax increase." But the journalist stresses that Republicans in state legislatures are less likely to sign Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge because they "live in the real world."

"It’s only in the fantasyland of Washington that Republicans can be so insanely irresponsible," Tomasky argues. "And make no mistake: It is the Republicans who are fiscally irresponsible. Consider these deficit numbers. Jimmy Carter left office with a deficit of $74 billion, which made conservatives apoplectic. Reagan doubled it. (President George) Bush, Sr. nearly doubled it again. (President Bill) Clinton wiped it all away and left the country with a $236 billion surplus."

Tomasky continues, "(President George W.) Bush, Jr. wiped out the surplus and tacked on $460 billion in deficits — that is, adding those two figures, he finished nearly $700 billion in the red. (President Barack) Obama increased the deficit by about $125 billion after inheriting the biggest financial crisis in 80 years, helped along, again, by Republican-led deregulation. Trump increased the deficit by — wanna guess? Try $2.6 trillion. In sum, in the last half-century, Democratic presidents have actually reduced the deficit, because of the numbers under Clinton, while Republican presidents have increased it by something greater than $3.5 trillion. It’s not even close as to which party is more fiscally sound."

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an 1 23

Countless economists have warned that if the United States were to default on its debt obligations, a major financial crisis could result — one with international implications. But if members of Congress don’t come to some type of agreement on the debt ceiling, that could happen.

Journalist Russell Berman discusses that possibility in an article published by The Atlantic on January 27. Berman warns that the situation is dire, and that Democrats are hoping that the less extreme House Republicans can have a positive effect.

“Early this summer,” Berman writes, “the federal government will, in all likelihood, exhaust the ‘extraordinary measures' it is now employing to keep paying the nation’s bills. As the country careens toward that fiscal abyss, Congress will face a now-familiar stalemate: Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to cut spending. Democrats will balk. Markets will slide — perhaps precipitously — and the economy will swiftly turn south."

Berman continues, “When that moment arrives, the most important people in Washington won’t be those who work in the White House, or even the party leaders who occupy the Capitol’s most palatial offices. They will be the House Republicans who sit closest to the political center: the so-called moderates. The GOP’s majority is narrow enough that any five Republicans could dash Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s plan to demand a ransom for the debt ceiling. They will have to decide whether to stand with him or join with Democrats to avert a first-ever default on the nation’s debt.”

The “so-called” part is important. The “moderates” that Berman is referring to are conservatives, but they are moderate compared to far-right MAGA members of the House like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. They are moderate conservatives and aren’t ultra-MAGA.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania said of such House Republicans, “Those guys will be called on to save the day.”

“Dent is talking about Republicans such as Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, whose Omaha district voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020,” Berman explains. “Bacon is a leader of the faction of Republicans hoping to serve as a counterweight to the House Freedom Caucus and the far-right hardliners.”

Read The Atlantic’sfull article at this link.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/budget-deficit-projected-to-shrink/

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/chris-wallace-rick-scott/

~ BBB but voodoo

===

an 12 22

no lnx tet

'No justification': Peace advocates explode after House approves gigantic $858 billion Pentagon budget

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams December 09, 2022

Peace advocates on Thursday slammed the House of Representatives' passage of a mammoth $858 billion military spending billas an early holiday gift for the Pentagon and the weapons corporations who benefit from the United States' ongoing—but largely forgotten—War on Terror.

House lawmakers voted 350-80 in favor of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), with 45 Democrats and 35 Republicans voting "no."

The new NDAA authorizes an $80 billion military spending increase over the 2022 bill, and $118 billion more than when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. The 2023 allocation is more than the combined military budgets of China, India, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea, according to the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). It's also more than the annual gross domestic product of countries including Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey, based on United Nations figures.

The $858 billion figure does not include additional spending on the U.S. nuclear arsenal, contributions to Ukraine's defense, or veterans' benefits.

Progressives including Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Jesús "Chuy" García (D-Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Marc Pocan (D-Wis.), Katie Porter (D-Calif.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were among those who rejected the bill.

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"While working families are being crushed by inflation, we shouldn't be spending $45 billion MORE than the president requested in the NDAA," tweeted Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.), who opposed the bill. "Certainly not on top of an already bloated $800+ billion Pentagon budget full of lobbyist giveaways. I voted NO."

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Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), another "no" vote, said he could not support a bill whose "topline remains billions of dollars above the president's request, adding to an already bloated Pentagon budget."

Calling the bill an "absolute disgrace," the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen tweeted that "increasing the budget for inflation is a lousy excuse. The minimum wage has been $7.25 for over a decade. Why is there always money for the military-industrial complex, but a livable wage is somehow 'too expensive'?"

"There is no justification to throw... $858 billion at the Pentagon when we're told we can't afford child tax credit expansion, universal paid leave, or other basic human necessities," the group added. "End of story."

Cole Harrison, executive director of Massachusetts Peace Action (MPA), said in a statement that "Waltham-based Raytheon and its fellow merchant of death, Lockheed, are celebrating Christmas early."

"Bring our war dollars home," Harrison added, noting that the fight for the bill is not over. "We don't need more weapons and more war. We need international respect and cooperation. We urge senators to vote 'no' on this disgraceful misappropriation of taxpayers' money."

MPA further noted that "the Pentagon recently failed its fifth consecutive annual audit, yet House members were quick to shower the unaccountable agency with taxpayers' money," and that "2.9 million children in the United States were lifted out of poverty in 2021 by the child tax credit, but that program expired after a year, and now our elected officials have decided to spend an equivalent amount on increasing the war budget."

Anti-war activists call on people to contact their senators and urge them to vote "no" on the NDAA—even while acknowledging that the mammoth package is all but sure to pass in the upper chamber.

Writing for the Qunicy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, National Taxpayers Union director of federal policy Andrew Lautz said that "Congress is rushing to pass the NDAA over the next week or two, before they go home for the holidays."

"Lawmakers will all but certainly pass a massive increase to the defense budget approved by members of both parties in both chambers of the legislature—at least $80 billion in total above 2022 levels, and that doesn't include tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has received to combat Russia's invasion of Ukraine," he said.

"If so," Lautz added, "then Christmas will come early for the nation's military brass, who often get to spend without consequences from lawmakers who control their purse strings, and defense contractors, who benefit mightily from the taxpayer-funded largesse."

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an 5 22

sixteen months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Republican strategists are doing something they did during Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House: promoting the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility. But those Republican deficit hawks didn’t do a lot of complaining when Donald Trump was president and the United States’ federal deficit was rapidly increasing. And according to a new report by conservative economist Brian Riedl, Trump did more to increase the deficit than either Obama or the U.S. president who preceded him, George W. Bush.

Riedl’s report, titled “Trump’s Fiscal Legacy: A Comprehensive Overview of Spending, Taxes, and Deficits,” was released on May 12. And he discusses his findings in an op-ed published by the Daily Beast over Memorial Day Weekend on Sunday, May 29.

“Donald Trump’s final tab is in,” explains Riedl, who served as lead research fellow on federal budget and spending policy for the Heritage Foundation from 2001-2011. “Legislation and executive actions signed by former President Trump added $7.8 trillion in ten-year budget deficits. When accounting for non-legislative budget savings, the total projected budget deficits expanded by $3.9 trillion over the decade. These figures appear in my new report, ‘Trump’s Fiscal Legacy: A Comprehensive Overview of Spending, Taxes, and Deficits,’ which analyzes Congressional Budget Office data.”

Riedl notes that his report “begins with the ten-year, 2017-2027, budget baseline that Trump inherited in January 2017” and “then measures all subsequent changes to those ten-year estimates that occurred during his presidency.”

“When President Trump was inaugurated, the CBO projected $10 trillion in deficits over the 2017-2027 decade,” Riedl explains. “By the time Trump left office, CBO’s estimate had grown to $13.9 trillion. Reducing deficits from the $10 trillion projection should have been easy. During Trump’s presidency, faster-than-expected economic growth raised the ten-year revenue projections by $1.3 trillion, and lower-than-expected interest rates shaved the ten-year interest cost projections by $2.6 trillion.”

Riedl continues, “That’s $3.9 trillion in automatic budget savings without lifting a finger. Instead of building on those savings, the president helped enact $7.8 trillion in new initiatives, flipping his total fiscal imprint to a $3.9 trillion net cost.”

Riedl also criticizes Democratic lawmakers in his op-ed, writing that although they “understandably decried the Trump deficits,” they “share much of the responsibility.” But when Riedl makes a Trump/Obama/Bush comparison, he emphasizes that Trump did the most to increase the United States’ federal deficit.

“From a fiscal responsibility point of view, President Trump’s record compares poorly to his predecessors,” the former Heritage Foundation researcher writes.“Using the same methodology, former President Barack Obama added $5 trillion in legislative costs over a decade, while former President George W. Bush added $6.9 trillion.”

Riedl continues, “Not only did Trump sign more ten-year debt into law than his immediate predecessors, he also did it in just a single four-year presidential term, compared to his predecessors’ eight years in the Oval Office…. There is no dispute that President Trump left the federal budget outlook in poor shape. He departed the White House with the largest peacetime budget deficit in American history, and a national debt exceeding 100% of the economy for the first time since World War II.”

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12121

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/tax-cuts/

===

2 santas comes early

Right now an estimated 12.6 million Americans are out of work and many more are struggling as the worsening COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered numerous businesses and industries. The last time Congress provided $1,200 economic stimulus checks to individual Americans was in March. Nine months have passed since then.

But as President Donald Trump, Democratic Congress members and 11 Republican Senators have all signaled their readiness to provide a new round of $1,200 checks to 382 million Americans, one Republican senator has voted down the measure twice: Senator Ron Johnson of Minnesota.

On Friday, Johnson voted twice to block a measure that would've issue the checks to every U.S. resident.

"I'm not heartless," Johnson said, defending his votes. "I want to help people. I voted to help people. I voted for the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, but I also am concerned about our children's future."

Johnson said he's concerned that the costs of issuing checks would inflate the national debt, nevermind that alleviating economic worries would help heal the increases in drug use, depression and domestic abuse that have increased during the nearly year-long economic downturn.

On December 10, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Independent Senator and former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of Vermont pushed colleagues to vote for a second round of stimulus checks. In separate speeches, both senators said the checks should mirror those issued early in the pandemic which gave $1,200 to adults and $500 for each child. The first checks were passed with bipartisan and presidential approval at a point when the pandemic was less severe than it is now.

As of Thursday, however, Politico reported that the latest $908 billion economic stimulus package being negotiated in Congress only allotted for $600 stimulus checks.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Heather Digby Parton / SalonDecember 24, 2018

So long, Republican Congress, and good riddance.

no lnx

Two years of Republican government has been an incompetent circus — and even worse than we expected

Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon December 24, 2018

Poor Paul Ryan. The golden boy of the Ayn Rand crowd was once assumed to be a future president, or at least one of the great statesmen of the Republican Party. He was considered a rarity among Republican pols — a policy wonk with the polish and personality of Ronald Reagan. (I know that sounds crazy, but people really did think that.)

When Barack Obama came into office he saw Ryan as a partner in reducing the federal deficit and the White House went out of its way to feature him prominently in various domestic policy "summits" that were held in the early months of that administration. Obama's opinion changed after he tried to negotiate with Ryan and his cohorts in the House Republican leadership, but it took years for the political media to see Ryan for what he really was: a callow ideologue without much character when the chips were down.

Paul Krugman had his number back in 2010:

Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his "Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”

But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.

But oh, did they love those blue, blue eyes of his.

Ryan never wanted to be House speaker. He wanted to be president. But when John Boehner was finally forced out by the Freedom Caucus and his heir apparent, Kevin McCarthy, tanked his chances with loose talk about using the Benghazi hearings to hurt Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, Ryan was the only person all Republicans could agree on. He reluctantly signed on. And in doing that he ended up signing his political death warrant.

Ryan's performance as speaker showed him to be feckless, hypocritical and weak in just about every way. He couldn't control his crazies on the one hand and couldn't deal effectively with the crazy in the White House on the other. He ended up being a yes-man for an unfit president who didn't even understand how the three branches of government work. Krugman nailed it again this year upon word of Ryan's retirement. Commenting on the media's surprise, even now, that Ryan and his cohorts have blown the deficit up to unprecedented proportions and happily enabled Donald Trump, Krugman wrote:

[T]he principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

And if you ask why Ryan never took a stand against Trumpian corruption, why he never showed any concern about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, what ever made you think he would take such a stand? Again, if you look at Ryan’s actions, not the character he played to gullible audiences, he has never shown himself willing to sacrifice anything he wants — not one dime — on behalf of his professed principles. Why on earth would you expect him to stick his neck out to defend the rule of law?

Surprise. Paul Ryan is just another partisan hack. Still, I don't think even I expected him to be as terrible at the job as he has been. As he takes his farewell tour, which President Trump generously stepped all over with his silly government shutdown, it pays to recall just what a disaster he has been and the rubble he leaves in his wake.

First, let's recall that when Boehner saw the writing on the wall, he at least made a deal to keep the government open and raise the spending limit for two years as a parting gift to the American people. Granted, he wasn't negotiating with an insane president, but he did have the insane Freedom Caucus in the House, allied with the meddling Ted Cruz in the Senate at the time. He spent every last chit trying to calm things down on his way out the door. Ryan's just rolled along with all of Trump's lurching about on the budget and the wall and is leaving in the midst of total chaos.

We have finally reached the end of this two-year period of total Republican control of the government. It's important to look at what they did when they had it. They managed to pack the courts with unfit, inexperienced extremists in the mold of the man who nominated them. No matter how few people agree with their agenda or vote for them in the future, they will have a strong influence through the extremist right-wing judiciary they have installed in lifetime positions. That's one mission they actually accomplished. Of course, that had nothing to do with Paul Ryan.

They managed to get tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, their Holy Grail, enacted. That was just a generous gift to their big donors, no strings attached and no expectation that it would benefit average Americans. It hasn't.

They just passed a criminal justice reform package that was backed by the Koch brothers and other big-money libertarian types, one suspects just in time to help a spate of rich white guys heading off to jail. (Presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed this through having lived through his father's incarceration for fraud. What a family.)

They couldn't get Obamacare repealed, although Trump's minions have been working overtime to sabotage it from within. They didn't get Trump's wall. The national debt has exploded and the president is on the verge of being impeached. That's quite a record.

But don't worry. This will work out just fine for them. It's just a more extreme version of what they always do. They wreck the economy and destroy all faith in government. Then when the Democrats win as a result of their malfeasance, they stand on the sidelines and wail about fiscal responsibility and demand that Democrats cut services for average people. Like clockwork, rich media celebrities will undoubtedly stroke their chins and sagely advise the people to "grow up" and "take their medicine" by giving up things like health care and retirement security.

Look for Paul Ryan to be batting those baby blues and wringing his hands on TV over debt and deficits any day now. It's a beautiful scam and it's been working for decades. If you didn't know better you'd almost think they planned it this way.

===

hypocrisy

AN cody f

When the Tea Party movement arose in response to President Barack Obama’s presidency, it represented a loose coalition of activists, conservative leaders, and Republicans who voiced furious opposition to the federal government and the Democratic Party for a variety of reasons. But as the movement coalesced into a group with actual power, it promoted politicians to Congress who primarily committed themselves to cutting government spending and reducing deficits as their primary raison d’être.

But now, as conservative writer Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner wrote, President Donald Trump has thoroughly given up on that central tenet of the movement.

“President Trump once vowed to drain the swamp, but by joining with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the latest budget deal, he has merely drained it of the Tea Party,” Klain wrote.

The new deal doesn’t cut spending at all, and puts the country on track for a trillion-dollar deficit, as Politico reported. There were previous signs, of course, that Trump had no real interest in reducing deficits, despite his contrary promises. The 2017 GOP tax cut was itself a deficit-buster, and its Republican defenders only made half-hearted efforts to pretend that it would create so much growth that it would pay for itself. But the hypocrisy of not counting tax cuts toward the deficit was actually a feature of the Tea Party’s double-talk, too. By agreeing to a budget with a large spending increase, Trump is forcing the Republican Party to give up even this thinnest of pretenses.

This is particularly ironic, given that Trump’s Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was a prominent member of the Tea Party and opponent of spending in the House of Representatives. Politico suggests that Mulvaney pushed back against the increase in spending, but his views didn’t prevail. The fact reveals that, as many have argued, the “Tea Party” as it was conceived of by the rank and file — who never really care about deficits — was quite different from the way politicians in Congress portrayed it.

And ultimately, almost no one but handwringing D.C. pundits will care. There’s little sign that the deficit poses a major burden to the country at the moment.

Klein wrote that “Trump’s Republican Party may want to dismiss the importance of the debt, but the numbers don’t lie.” But the “numbers” he cites are just the high debt and deficit, which in themselves don’t prove that there’s anything worth worrying about. It’s possible at some point that interest rates will spike and the American debt burden will get drastically more serious, but deficit hawks have been screaming about this risk for a decade, and it hasn’t happened yet.

The biggest worry, though, is that Republican hypocrisy hasn’t gone away for good. As soon as a Democrat is in control of the White House again, deficit paranoia is certain to overcome the GOP once again. They’ll fight tooth and nail about every minor spending increase the Democratic Party wants, to say nothing of how they’ll react to ambitious spending programs like a Medicare for All proposal. Worst of all, if the next Democratic presidency happens to coincide with another recession, Republicans are guaranteed to point to the deficits that Trump himself expanded as a reason to do nothing to ameliorate the harm. They’ll likely even call for austerity, which would exacerbate the crisis.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/white-house-officials-are-trying-to-sabotage-a-deal-that-would-ward-off-financial-market-chaos-report/

sep node for debt ceiling (game of chicken TP freedom caucus shut down?

asn 916

Congressional Budget Office warns national debt could hit ‘unprecedented levels’ as deficit soars under GOP

Kerry Eleveld / Daily KosJune 26, 2019

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a new report Tuesday warning that the federal debt could reach “unprecedented levels,” sparking what it frames as a “fiscal crisis” unless laws are changed to change…

AN 11/18

In the final days of the midterm campaign President Donald Trump's camo clown car has all eyes on the southern border as 15,000 American troops are assembled to prepare for the onslaught of a ragtag caravan of refugees.He’s been visualizing a kind of Gaza-like scenario where American troops will get to fire on rock throwing migrants.

We look where he points no matter what. We can’t help it. He’s the ‘entertainer-in-chief’. His skilled misdirection has the effect of obscuring his disastrous misrule. You have to always ask what are the things he’s not attending to, or leaving on automatic pilot, that could come crashing down on his watch or somebody else’s later on down the line.

So, we should not be surprised that there was scant attention paid last week when the U.S. Treasury Department disclosed that it was going to issue $425 billion in new debt for this quarter, bringing our grand total for 2018 to an eye popping $1.3 trillion in debt. As the Fiscal Times pointed out, that reflects “a 145 percent increase from the $546 billion issued in 2017.” That’s the biggest annual issuance of federal public debt since 2010 when Uncle Sam issued $1.586 trillion in debt.

Back then the Obama Administration at least had the rationale that they were grappling with a real crisis brought on by the Great Recession and close to nine million Americans losing their jobs. Does Trump’s presidency, in and of itself, meet the “crisis” standard? Perhaps.

Of course, this latest explosion in debt is linked to the GOP’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, skewed for the corporations and individuals that have already been doing so well, as the levels of wealth concentration and inequality hit historic highs. Working at the behest of their wealthy friends, Trump and the GOP reduced the amount of tax revenue coming into the government and gifted that flow to their already wealthy donors, leaving future generations to deal with the mountain of public debt left behind.

By 2028, the Congressional Budget Officepredicts the amount of the government’s debt will be equal to the size of the U.S. economy, swelling to 96 percent of the GDP, blowing past the post-World War II record set in 1946, when it was equal to 104 percent of the GDP.

Similarly, back in September there were no reporters present when President Trump signed a $854 billion-dollar spending bill that included an obscene $674 billion defense budget.

The Pentagon budget included Lockheed Martin Corporation’s troubled F-35 which Popular Mechanics described as a “trillion-dollar” albatross. “For over two decades, the F-35 has been the symbol of everything that's wrong with mammoth defense contracts: behind schedule, over budget, and initially, over-sold,” reported the magazine.

“In development for nearly 17 years and seven years behind schedule, total acquisition costs now exceed $406 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion,” according to a report from Citizens Against Government Waste, a non-profit government accountability group. “An April 2015 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report noted that the lifetime operation and maintenance costs of the most expensive weapon system in history will total approximately $1 trillion.”

And also under reported was that just a few weeks after the President doubled down on funding the F-35, the U.S. military grounded all the F-35s on the planet, after one crashed near Beaufort, S.C. The aviation press reported "suspect fuel tubes.”

A week after that in Afghanistan, where there are people still shooting at American troops, U.S. Army General Austin Scott Miller, the 17th commander to lead U.S. forces in Afghanistan, barely escaped an attack that left Kandahar’s police and intelligence chiefs dead. The deadly attack came in the run-up to parliamentary elections that were marred by violence.

The spectacular attack underscored the reality that conditions on the ground continue to deteriorate. As the Special Inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reported last month “the Afghan government control or influence of its districts reached the lowest level (55.5%) since SIGAR began tracking district control in November 2015.”

Over those four years “Afghan government control and influence over its districts has declined by about 16 percentage points; contested districts have increased by about 11 points; and insurgent control or influence has risen by 5.5 points,” according to the latest SIGAR report to Congress.

Meanwhile, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan reported 649 civilian casualties (313 deaths and 336 injuries) “due to aerial operations by pro-government forces from January 1 to September 30, 2018, a 39% increase in from the same period in 2017 and a record number of civilian casualties caused by air strikes since UNAMA began recording civilian-casualty data in 2009.”

SIGAR reports that Afghanistan’s Attorney General continues to resist cooperation with U.S. anti-corruption efforts “by pursuing a number of low-level, rather than high-level, corruption cases.”

And as the Afghan government’s control on the ground continues to slip, its defense force is struggling to maintain troop strength now hitting its “lowest level recorded in the third quarter of the year since 2012…. decreased by 1,914 personnel since last quarter and by 8,827 personnel since the same period last year.” That leaves the ANDSF roughly 40,000 soldiers short of their 352,000 troop target.

But have no fear, POTUS has us covered with a surge bearing down on Mexico.

https://www.alternet.org/credit-card-republicans-just-dug-us-900-billion-hole

The first of two official government reports that will be released this month showing that the federal budget deficit is soaring was issued on Monday when the Congressional Budget Office published it’s Monthly Budget Review for August.

According to CBO, the deficit through the first 11 months of fiscal 2018 was $895 billion, a $222 billion (32.8%) increase over the same period in 2017.

Some of the increase was the result of timing shifts, that is, spending that was made at the end of August because the first two days of September were on weekend. The deficit for the 11-month period would have been only$154 billion larger than 2017 had it not been for that.

The federal government typically runs a budget surplus in September so the final deficit for 2018 may be somewhat lower than the results through August. CBO said that the total deficit for the year will be close to the $793 billion estimate it made in its analysis of the Trump 2019 budget that it updated last month. That would make the year-over-year increase only 19.3%.

But put the number crunching wonkery aside and look at the big picture. Donald Trump, who as a candidate virtually guaranteed he would eliminate not just the budget deficit but the national debt, is doing neither.

It’s anything but fake news to say that just the opposite is true. Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget, whose primary responsibility is to protect the president’s behind on budget issues, agrees with CBO that the deficit will come close to or exceed $1 trillion a year through at least 2022.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t include spending for a space force, an infrastructure plan or a wall between the United States and Mexico. It also doesn’t include the projected $200 billion a year revenue loss from the new GOP tax billthe House will debate before the election or the additional spending that will be needed because of Hurricane Florence. And it certainly doesn’t include the lower revenues and higher spending that will happen if the economy slows below current expectations.

A combination of these things could easily cause the U.S. deficit to approach $2 trillion annually.

The next Trump deficit shoe to drop will occur next week when Trump’s own Treasury issues its own monthly report that is expected to agree with and confirm what CBO said this week.

dcreport

https://www.dcreport.org/2018/07/20/the-federal-deficit-mulvaney-says-the-congressional-budget-office-was-right-after-all/

The Federal Deficit: Mulvaney Says The Congressional Budget Office Was Right After All CBO Comes In Lower than the White House—Still, Both Numbers Are Really, Really Big ...Since becoming Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director, Mick Mulvaney has viciously attacked the Congressional Budget Office as a highly partisan and substantively inept organization. He has repeatedly questioned its economic assumptions, its budget analyses and the politics of its analysts.

[chart]

CBO said in its Long-Term Budget Outlook report released last month that the 2018 deficit will be $793 billion; OMB said in its just-released Mid-Session Review of the president’s budget that it will be $890 billion. For 2019, CBO said the deficit will be $973 billion while OMB said it will be $1.085 trillion. For 2020, CBO said $1.003 trillion compared to OMB’s $1.076 trillion.And that makes it more than a little newsworthy that OMB, the federal agency Mulvaney himself directs and in his mind is a paragon of bipartisanship and objectivity, released a report last Friday that not only shows that CBO’s numbers were substantively good, it also shows that the organization Mulvaney had attacked for being too partisan was more optimistic about where the federal deficit is headed the next few years than Trump’s own budget director.

It’s important to note that OMB’s numbers are based on what we already know is a complete myth: that the spending cuts included in the Trump fiscal 2019 budget sent to Congress earlier this year will be enacted. For the second year in a row, the GOP Congress has shown no interest whatsoever in adopting the spending cuts the president proposed.

As a result, the disparity between CBO’s relatively optimistic deficit estimates and OMB’s comparatively pessimistic projections is most likely to get larger.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney owes the Congressional Budget Office a huge apology.

To be fair, CBO and OMB diverge in the opposite direction from 2022 through 2028. But, also to be fair, everyone’s budget forecast beyond three years is far more guesswork than substantive analysis given that its multiple congressional and presidential elections and countless natural and man-made disasters will occur, and long-term forecasts of how fast the economy will grow (or not) are often just wishful thinking or straight-line extrapolations.

In the meantime, however, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney owes the Congressional Budget Office a huge apology.

Stan Collender is one of the leading experts on the federal budget, federal spending and revenues, the deficit, the national debt and the congressional budget process. He blogs thebudgetguy

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https://www.alternet.org/debtor-republicans-president-trump-gop-once-again-party-massive-federal-deficits

...talk radio to the National Review, Townhall and the Weekly Standard—is that Republicans are the party of low taxes, small government and fiscal responsibility while Democrats are the party of “tax-and-spend liberals.” But that argument is bogus for a number of reasons. First, the modern-day Democratic Party on the whole is much more centrist than liberal or progressive (apart from liberal/progressive champions like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Florida Rep. Alan Grayson and various allies of the independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders). And second, fiscal responsibility is practically nonexistent in today’s Republican Party. The GOP, in recent decades, has been the party of huge deficits and corporate welfare—and thanks to President Trump and the Republicans who presently dominate both houses of Congress, the U.S.’ federal deficit will be growing by leaps and bounds in the not-so-distant future.

The fact that Republicans are great at cutting taxes for the 1% while butchering social programs for the poor doesn’t mean that they don’t spend tax dollars like crazy. Rather than the pay-as-you-go approach that characterized some Republican residents prior to President Ronald Reagan—including Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s—modern-day Republicans believe in using Uncle Sam’s credit card. And that is certainly true of the Trump administration, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan.

In an annual budget review this month, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reported that the U.S.’ federal 2019 budget would be even higher than originally thought. According to the OMB, various Trump-era spending since the release of the February budget will be adding $101 billion more to the 2019 deficit and pushing it beyond $1 trillion. Some of the blame lies with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed by Republicans in both houses of Congress and signed into law by Trump last year. Economist Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor in President Bill Clinton’s administration in the 1990s, has been vehemently critical of the law—which he characterized as a massive tax break for the 1% that will occur on the backs of the poor and the middle class. Reich has been warning that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, will send federal deficits through the roof. And the OMB’s projections for 2019 bear that out.

But beyond 2019, the federal deficit could be even higher if Trump gets his way and a giant wall along the U.S./Mexico border becomes a reality.According to an internal report from the Department of Homeland Security last year, Trump’s border wall could cost about $21.6 billion—and that isn’t even including the cost of maintenance. Maintaining a four-state wall that goes all the way from San Diego County to Texas and passes through Arizona and New Mexico along the way would cost a fortune to build and maintain.

Trump has been assuring Americans that taxpayers in Mexico, not the U.S., will be paying for the wall. But Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico’s new left-wing president, disagrees. Obrador considers the idea of a border wall racist and xenophobic—not to mention insulting to his country—and he has made it abundantly clearly that on his watch, Mexican taxpayers won’t be funding something they don’t want. And Obrador has also stressed that while he wants to have a friendly, warm relationship with Mexico’s neighbor to the north, it won’t be one of subordination.

If Trump’s border wall comes about, it won’t be financed by taxpayers in Mexico City, Acapulco, Cancun or Guadalajara. It will be paid for on the backs of the U.S.’ middle class whether they like it or not.

When Barack Obama was president, Republicans repeatedly claimed that he was a tax-and-spend president and promised that when they regained the White House, the days of large federal deficits would be ending. And that promise is truly laughable in light of not only Trump’s spending patterns, but also, the huge federal deficits that President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and President George W. Bush in the 2000s left the U.S. with. President Bill Clinton, in contrast, left the U.S. with a balanced budget and a $63 billion surplus when he left office in January 2000—and that surplus vanished under the Bush administration, which increased the federal deficit by 57%.

Reagan, unlike Nixon, brought trickle-down economics and voodoo economics to the forefront, claiming that if the super-rich receive generous tax cuts, their gains would trickle down to the middle class and even the poor. Under Reagan, the top marginal tax rate went from 70% to 28%. But as Reich has pointed out in 2011, the notion that “tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else” is “baloney” because “Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich, and what happened? Most Americans’ wages, measured by the real median wage, began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.”The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 marked a departure from the tax policies of Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican President Nixon. Although Nixon was considered an arch-conservative in his day and was detested by many liberals and progressives of the 1960s and 1970s, he supported elements of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Nixon expanded Medicare and Social Security, favored universal healthcare via the private sector and believed that the ultra-rich should pay their fair share of the taxes—all of which would be deal-breakers in today’s GOP. Left-wing author Noam Chomsky has even gone so far as to characterize Nixon as “America’s last liberal president.”

As president, Reagan favored draconian cuts to social programs while almost doubling the national debt. President George W. Bush, similarly, favored huge tax cuts for the rich while spending lavishly.

The Obama era saw large federal deficits as well, and Obama—like Reagan and Bush—was a war hawk who wasn’t shy about generously funding the U.S. military budget. But Obama favored more social spending than either Reagan or Bush and didn’t promote the discredited theory of trickle-down economics. While Obama was never a genuine liberal on economics the way that FDR and LBJ were, he was very much a centrist and not a student of Reaganomics.

Trump’s economic policy, however, has been one of tickle-down economics on steroids—and the end result will be exploding federal deficits, the rich getting much richer and a very bad deal for America’s poor and middle class.

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