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New Donald Trump thread


Muda69

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9 hours ago, Howe said:

“If Nancy Pelosi fears images of her ripping up the speech, perhaps she shouldn’t have ripped up the speech,” Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesman, said Saturday.

Similar sentiment may well apply with the President, his taxes, business dealings, and history with women.

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On 2/9/2020 at 1:15 PM, Howe said:

 

I guess take it how you would like to - another perspective on the edited Pelosi video from a friend of mine in the media.

Nancy Pelosi demands it be taken down.  BUT - Everything in it is the truth, just rearranged. She defended Adam Schiff for making up his own version of Trump's telephone transcript. But think of this - Nancy Pelosi has been declared a brilliant tactician when it comes to political prowess. Right? Then ask yourself this - why would she ever rip up a SOTU speech on national television with all those cameras on her and think that it would not be used against her for doing something so stupid? This one act could be a defining moment in the 2020 elections and she gave it no thought, just hate and revenge? You can't put this back in the bottle and a week later it is still all over the news and nobody can even tell you who delivered the Democrats response to the SOTU. So just how brilliant is Nancy Pelosi?

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17 hours ago, gonzoron said:

Wait.........What?????????????

Trump Cuts Scheduled Federal Pay Raise, Citing “Serious Economic Conditions” in the Country

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/trump-cuts-scheduled-federal-pay-raise-serious-economic-conditions.html?fbclid=IwAR0h7XwN3k4SayFzGCPxC1fsnVRmHAW6wCTfdmrGz74SY2JKp0V195aUG2c

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/02/13/trump-budget-presidents-1-raise-government-workers-fair/4742634002/

President Trump this week proposed a modest 1% pay increase and less generous retirement benefits for federal workers.

The proposal, included in Trump’s fiscal 2021 budget blueprint, is reigniting a longstanding debate over whether federal employees earn too much, or too little, compared to their private-sector counterparts. 

The president’s budget cites a 2017 Congressional Budget Office study that found federal workers’ total compensation on average is 17% higher than private-sector workers in similar jobs, chiefly because of their benefits.

“CBO found that, in comparison to the private sector, the federal government continues to offer a very generous package of retirement benefits,” the budget plan says.

Federal employee advocates disagreed.

“For an administration that has added $3 trillion to the federal debt, gouging federal employee pay and benefits in the name of deficit reduction is ridiculous,” Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement.

“For the fourth year in a row, President Trump’s budget proposal would starve federal agencies to the point of paralysis, pick the pockets of middle-class federal workers and their families, weaken our nation’s nonpartisan merit-based civil service, and deprive Americans of the basic services and protections that expect from their government.”

The Federal Salary Council – which includes experts in labor relations and pay policy, as well as labor union representatives – found last year that federal employees earn an average 27% less than their private-sector counterparts. That analysis, however, did not take benefits into account.

Here are the issues:

Is Trump’s proposal likely to be the final word on federal workers’ raises?

Probably not. Under legislation introduced by Democrats in both the House and Senate, federal employees would receive an average 3.5% raise in fiscal 2021. For the prior year, Trump recommended a pay freeze but eventually agreed to an average 3.1% pay increase after negotiating with Congress. That included a 2.6% across-the-board bump and a varying premium based on locality.

How does Trump’s proposed 1% increase compare with private-sector raises?

Hourly wage increases for private workers across the U.S. averaged 3.1% in January, according to the Labor Department. Pay gains averaged 3.1% in manufacturing, 2.9% in construction, 4.1% in retail, 3.7% in financial activities, 3.4% in leisure and hospitality and 1.5% in education and health services.

What’s the main argument in support of Trump’s slight pay increase and retirement benefit changes?

Chris Edwards, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, says a 1% raise is reasonable considering many federal workers get wage bumps as they periodically rise through 10 steps, as well as across-the-board raises. He also says the modest increase makes sense in light of the disparity in benefits between federal and private-sector workers.

Edwards also back’s Trump’s proposal to curtail federal retirement benefits and require workers to contribute more toward those benefits. He notes that federal workers receive both a defined contribution plan, like a 401(k), and a defined benefit plan, such as a pension.

“The administration’s proposals to trim the federal defined benefit plan are a modest step given that such plans have mainly disappeared in the private sector,” Edwards says.

What do opponents of Trump’s plan say?

Daniel Zhao, a senior economist at job posting site Glassdoor, notes that employers are struggling to attract workers amid historically low unemployment. “The federal government isn’t immune from today’s highly competitive labor market and must battle for the same qualified workers as their often higher-paying private sector counterparts,” Zhao says.

Sudarshan Sampath, director of research at PayScale, a compensation software and data firm, says federal salaries are significantly lower than private wages for high-skilled jobs in fields such as cybersecurity and intelligence, potentially putting the country at a disadvantage.

“You can’t just expect their desire to work for the country” to prompt skilled workers to accept lower pay, Sampath says.

The CBO has found that from 2011 to 2015, federal workers with a high school diploma or less earned 34% more on average than similar private-sector workers. But federal workers with professional degrees or doctorates earned 24% less than comparable employees at American businesses.

A cut?  FYI - it's a PROPOSAL he didn't "cut" squat.......most likely there will be a negotiated agreement between Congress and the President......BTW - How many of us already know what we are guaranteed to earn next year?  Also, don't fail to note that there was a 3.1% increase this year.......

 

 

Edited by swordfish
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If the only way to beat China is to become like China, then we've already lost.: https://reason.com/2020/02/12/corporate-socialism-bill-barr-suggests-the-u-s-should-counter-china-by-buying-nokia-or-ericsson/#comments

Quote

During his State of the Union address last week, President Donald Trump repeatedly invoked the specter of socialism—it "destroys nations," he warned.

But by the end of the week, one of the highest-ranking officials in the Trump administration was openly suggesting that America should engage in one of the hallmarks of socialism: a state takeover of a private company.

In a speech last Thursday, Attorney General Bill Barr floated the idea that the United States could purchase a majority stake in tech companies like Sweden-based Ericsson or Finland-based Nokia as a way to counter the growing prominence of China's Huawei as the world's leading provider of fifth generation (5G) mobile internet hardware.

"Putting our large market and financial muscle behind one or both of these firms would make it a more formidable competitor and eliminate concerns over its staying power," Barr said. "We and our closest allies certainly need to be actively considering this approach."

He even wrapped his idea in socialist language, saying that the United States must "act collectively" to stand up to China's rising economic power and technological developments. He might not have been calling for a Marxist-style seize-the-means-of-production uprising, but Barr's pitch for some kind of techno-corporate socialism is still shocking—even by the standards of an administration that has embraced central industrial planning as an anti-China strategy. It was all the more so because it came during in a prepared, formal speech, not as an off-the-cuff remark that later needed to be walked back.

But walked back it was. Vice President Mike Pence and Larry Kudlow, the White House's chief economic advisor, later denied that the Trump administration was considering the plan Barr had outlined. "U.S. government is not in the business of buying companies, whether they're domestic or foreign," Kudlow told Reuters on Friday.

That's a relief.

Still, Barr floating an idea that basically amounts to "in order to beat China, we must become like China" is an example of how the White House is straying into dangerous territory as it struggles to respond to the perceived threat posed by Huawei. The risk of overreaction seems high.

The Trump administration argues that Huawei represents a national security risk. In December, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that the Chinese government could co-opt Huawei to "steal private or proprietary information, or use 'kill switches' to disrupt critical future applications like electrical grids and telesurgery centers." Just this week, America's intelligence community sounded the alarm about potential "back doors" built into Huawei gear—though the warning comes with a heavy dose of irony, as Reason associate editor Scott Shackford noted earlier today.

But the Pentagon has pushed back against the White House's and Commerce Department's anti-Huawei actions, suggesting that those policies might have more to do with politics than legitimate national security worries.

When the British government announced late last month that it would not prohibit Huawei gear from being used in the country's mobile internet infrastructure, Trump "vented 'apoplectic" fury at [British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson in a tense phone call," according to a Financial Times report citing two administration officials familiar with the call.

Like last week's kerfuffle over potentially having the U.S. government buy Nokia or Ericsson—Huawei's biggest competitors on the global market for 5G equipment—that phone call and other anti-Huawei actions taken by the Trump administration demonstrate that the White House is struggling to develop a coherent 5G policy, writes Daniel Drezner, a Tufts University professor, Washington Post columnist, and Reason contributor. Current policies have not stopped Britain and other countries from buying Huawei gear, so the Trump administration may be signalling its intention to escalate tactics.

It may be tempting to dismiss Barr's trial balloon as nothing more than a policy misfire, but there is clearly a contingent of the current administration that favors state control and central planning as the only way to develop 5G networks faster than China.

How else to explain why different versions of this same bad idea keep resurfacing? In January 2018, a leaked memo from the National Security Council compared the development of 5G infrastructure to the building of the national interstate highway system, and suggested that the Trump administration should nationalize broadband service as a way to stay ahead of the Chinese government's development of similar tech. The idea was widely condemned by the tech industry, by members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, by the FCC, and by top White House policy advisers such as Larry Kudlow.

A variation on the same idea surfaced last year, and was promoted by Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who wrote an op-ed calling for the nationalization of 5G rollout. "Our own laissez-faire tendencies and preferences are being used to defeat us," he wrote.

Thankfully, those proposals have failed to take off, in part because Kudlow and Federal Communication Commission Chairman Ajit Pai have pushed for a hands-off approach that puts the private sector at the forefront of 5G deployment. Trump has endorsed that plan, but his tempestuous nature means a reversal is always possible.

And the idea of a government takeover of Ericcson or Nokia could resurface again in a different form. "It wouldn't be a surprise if an American telecom or a group of private equity firms bid for Nokia or Ericsson—with some kind of special subsidy or tax break provided by the White House," The New York Times reported last week, shortly after Barr's trial balloon came crashing down.

Because if straight-up socialism doesn't fly, try it with a side of cronyism, I guess.

There is little reason to think an American government takeover of one of the Nordic tech giants would reduce any of the security risks posed by Huawei. More likely, it would only serve as a way for America to put diplomatic pressure on other countries to use certain products in building their 5G networks.

There is certainly a role for the United States to play in ensuring that the next generation of mobile internet is free and open around the world. But having the American government buy its own tech company in an attempt to copy China's relationship with Huawei? That's not it.

 

 

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On 2/12/2020 at 3:31 PM, gonzoron said:

Wait.........What?????????????

Trump Cuts Scheduled Federal Pay Raise, Citing “Serious Economic Conditions” in the Country

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/trump-cuts-scheduled-federal-pay-raise-serious-economic-conditions.html?fbclid=IwAR0h7XwN3k4SayFzGCPxC1fsnVRmHAW6wCTfdmrGz74SY2JKp0V195aUG2c

Trump was right. Job creation dropping under his leadership.

Trump’s First 3 Years Created 1.5 Million Fewer Jobs Than Obama’s Last 3

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2019/09/20/trump-has-created-15-million-fewer-jobs-than-obama/#5d3310c127ce

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Democrat super hero Michael (I guarantee Trump will resign) Avenatti, who appeared on CNN and MSNBC 254 times in one year, convicted of Extortion in the Nike case and faces up to 42 years in prison. The GID forum had members predicting Avenatti might run for president in 2020.

 

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3 hours ago, Howe said:

Democrat super hero Michael (I guarantee Trump will resign) Avenatti, who appeared on CNN and MSNBC 254 times in one year, convicted of Extortion in the Nike case and faces up to 42 years in prison. The GID forum had members predicting Avenatti might run for president in 2020.

 

That's an interesting near coincidence ... not counting, potentially, today and tomorrow, it's been almost 250 days of golfing for Trump ... who famously claimed that there wouldn't be time for such as he attacked the former president.

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/trump-golf-mar-a-lago-taxpayers-001531310.html

FTA:

As he began his own run for the White House, candidate Trump repeatedly promised that golf would never make it onto a President Trump’s schedule. “I love golf, but if I were in the White House, I don’t think I’d ever see Turnberry again. I don’t think I’d ever see Doral again,” he told a rally audience in February 2016, referring to his courses in Scotland and Miami. “I don’t ever think I’d see anything. I just want to stay in the White House and work my ass off.”

Yet after three years in office, Trump has spent two-and-a-half times as many days on a golf course as Obama had done at the same point in his first term. If Trump plays golf both Saturday and Sunday, he will have played 248 times. Obama by his 1,123rd day in office had played 92 times.

And because Trump insists on playing at courses he owns, the cost to taxpayers has been nearly four times as high as it was for Obama. More than two-thirds of Trump’s golf outings involve seven-figure trips aboard Air Force One, mainly to Florida and New Jersey, but also to Los Angeles, Ireland and Scotland. Obama, in contrast, played most of his golf on courses at military bases within a short drive of the White House.

What’s more, Trump’s insistence on playing at courses he owns and profits from has put at least a few million taxpayer dollars into Trump’s cash registers in the form of hotel room and restaurant charges for the White House staff and Secret Service agents who accompany him.

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Anyone else find it peculiar that even though "stop and frisk" was started, implemented and promoted by Mayor Bloomberg in NYC, that Donald Trump, (mentioning it favorably in one of his speeches) was plastered all over multiple media outlets uttering "stop and frisk" this morning........

Did this just become DJT's fault?

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How Much More Should Trump Be Spending on You?: https://reason.com/2020/02/16/how-much-more-should-trump-be-spending-on-you/

Quote

Last week, The New York Times published an eye-opening tally of how much more the federal government is spending on each of us since Donald Trump was elected president. "Total federal spending has increased by $1,441 per person since 2016," reported Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui, to a grand total of $14,652 per person per year. They came to their numbers by looking at actual federal outlays "for the 2016 fiscal year, adjusting for inflation and population changes" and comparing them to the budgeted amounts for the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30.

This revelation—which has generated a scant 45 comments as of this writing on five days after publication—should discomfit both Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals/progressives. And it should absolutely enrage libertarians who believe in smaller government and the 42 percent of Americans who identify as politically independent and thus are less likely to buy into partisan spin. What exactly do we have to show for the $1,441 increase in spending per person since 2016? As important, given the massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse everyone agrees is rampant in government, do we really need to be shelling out $14,652 per person, per year? That figure will almost certainly go up next year.

No matter how partisans will try to parse the numbers, the plain truth is spending is basically up across the board. While Parlapiano and Quoctrung's calculations show spending on defense went up $171 per person under Trump, outlays on Social Security (+$210 per person) and Medicare (+$299) increased even more. Grants to states for Medicaid, which provides health coverage for low-income Americans, increased $33 per person, overall compensation for veterans went up $72, refundable tax credits for Obamacare premiums were goosed by an additional $39, and Head Start, which provides poor kids with extra help in preschool and early education, increased by $1.00 per person. Even spending on the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and Amtrak increased.

To be sure, per person spending on some things went down. Foreign aid took a hit, as did spending on the FBI, the IRS, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Food assistance (SNAP) went down by $68 per person, though the government will still spend $203 per person on the program this year. Pell Grants, which help fund college for many Americans, are down from where they were in 2016 and so is crop insurance, loans, and direct payouts to farmers. Do we really want to shed a tear that per person spending on the TSA is 98 cents less than it was in 2016? In the 10th year of an economic expansion that each party wants to take credit for, shouldn't welfare payments of all sorts be dropping unless we're committed to the idea that all of us should be getting more money from the government under all circumstances?

Despite all possible evidence, Republicans (conservatives) still like to insist that they are the adults in the room when it comes to the size, scope, and spending of the government. It's true that much in the hikes (and cuts) can't be attributed fully or even partly to Trump. Congress, after all, controls the purse strings, and the budget for 2017 was set before Trump assumed office. But such an increase with a nominal Republican in the White House is an embarrassment, especially since the GOP controlled the Senate and House of Representatives for many of the recent years in which spending jacked up. In the same way, the increased spending gives the lie to outcries by Democrats (liberals/progressives) that Trump and the Republicans are somehow starving the government of much-needed funds, especially for the poor and elderly.

None of that is true, as the Times' article makes clear. More to the point, the government is surely spending enough money in aggregate to achieve the putative goals of most programs. Whether we're talking about guns or butter (that is, defense expenditures or outlays for social programs), why shouldn't the government been able to achieve its goals with $13,211, or the total per person spending in 2016? Why exactly does defense spending go up, especially when we're supposedly out of the Middle East and drawing down our commitments in Afghanistan, two places in which billions of tax dollars have gone missing? Between 2002 and 2015, the Pentagon lost track of $45 billion worth of reconstruction funds in Afghanistan, or one-third of the total amount budgeted for that purpose. Back in 2009, a report from President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers concluded that "nearly 30 percent of Medicare's costs could be saved without adverse health consequences." More than a decade later, the national debate isn't about making the $2,250 per person we spend on Medicare less wasteful, it's about extending the program to everyone! In an era of trillion-dollar deficits, shouldn't we be trying to spend less money more wisely?

It's not just the fact that so much of the spending is misdirected or wasteful. Reason contributor and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy has argued convincingly that increased government spending has a negative impact on the economy, especially when it is financed by borrowing. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and a bipartisan return to Keynesian stimulus programs, she documented that most research demonstrated that government spending tended to have "multipliers" or less than one, meaning that each dollar of government spending stimulated less than a dollar of economic activity. "The median multiplier in relevant studies is 0.87," she wrote, "far lower than the [Obama] administration's claim that every stimulus dollar would produce $1.57 worth of activity." In a 2013 paper with Harvard's Robert J. Barro, she showed that hikes defense spending correlated with lower overall economic activity but that reductions in spending correlated with increases in private-sector commerce:

Existing studies found that a dollar increase in federal defense spending results in a less-than-a-dollar increase in GDP when the spending increase is deficit financed. Combining this with a tax multiplier that is negative and greater than one, the authors estimate that over five years each $1 in federal defense-spending cuts will increase private spending by roughly $1.30.

As Parlapiano and Bui mention in their Times article, virtually all of the new spending since 2016 is being financed through borrowed money. We're spending $1,441 more per person while federal revenues have increased by just $125 per person. That explains why, despite booking the highest per person revenues in over 50 years, the national debt continues to grow. One thing both right-wing and left-wing economists agree on is that persistent, high levels of debt correlate strongly with reduced economic growth, which helps explain sluggish growth for all of the 21st century in the United States.

As it happens, President Trump recently released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2021. The president's proposal isn't binding in any way. It's really just a suggestion to Congress and an announcement of his priorities. If he got his druthers, he would spend $4.83 trillion, up from an estimated $4.79 trillion this year and an actual $4.45 trillion in 2019 (see table S-1 in his proposal). As important, all of his Democratic challengers are promising even-bigger increases in spending over the coming years and it's likely that whoever ends up winning this fall, the federal budget for 2021 will be bigger than whatever exact amount we end up spending this year.

Especially in an election year, we really should be talking about increases in federal spending and national debt and their relationship to economic growth. At the very least, we should be acknowledging what the Times has discovered, hiding right there in plain sight: We are spending far more per person than we were in 2016. And we should be asking everybody who wants to be president: What do we have to show for that extra $1,441?

Personally I have nothing to show for that extra $.

 

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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/feb/17/alan-dershowitz-obama-sought-fbi-probe-behalf-geor/

In an interview with Breitbart News, Mr. Dershowitz said that President Trump’s leaning on the Justice Department might be imprudent or crude, but it both passes constitutional muster and is very far from unprecedented.

“There was a lot of White House control of the Justice Department during the Kennedy administration and I don’t think we saw very many liberal professors arguing against that,” the emeritus professor and longtime liberal champion said in the interview, which first aired on SiriusXM.

“I have some information … about how President Obama personally asked the FBI to investigate somebody on behalf of George Soros, who was a close ally of his,” he added without specifying who the target was.

But, he said, “I have in my possession the actual 302 [witness report] form which documents this issue and it will at the right time come out.”


A surprised Joel Pollak of Breitbart News pressed Mr. Dershowitz for details and whether he had heard him correctly about Mr. Soros and Mr. Obama.

“That’s going to come out in a lawsuit in the near future, yeah,” he said, continuing to parry his hosts on details and disclosure.

The case “will be disclosed in a lawsuit at some point, but I’m not prepared to disclose it now,” he said.

Mr. Dershowitz, a liberal who also has long been a supporter of presidential power and critic of prosecutorial abuse and broad conspiracy laws, did not actually defend Mr. Trump’s conduct on matters such as tweeting about active criminal cases such as that of Roger Stone.

The president’s tweeting, according to Attorney General William P. Barr, makes his job impossible.

“That is not unusual. People whisper to presidents all the time; presidents whisper to the Justice Department all the time. It’s very common; it’s wrong, whoever does it — but it’s common, and we shouldn’t think it’s unique to any particular president,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

The difference, he noted, is Mr. Trump’s overt manner.

“We’ve seen this kind of White House influence on the Justice Department virtually in every Justice Department. The difference: This president is much more overt about it, he tweets about it. President Obama whispered to the Justice Department about it,” he explained.

 

Yeahbut - Impeach the bad orange man......

 

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