MESO-Rx
Anabolic Steroids
Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
- Start date
The new U.S. normal of $1 trillion or more annual federal budget deficits will officially begin this week when the Congressional Budget Office releases its economic and budget outlook report showing that the deficit will be at least that high every year Donald Trump is president.
Although there have been private sector projections for months (including my post from last October) that the government's red ink will hit and exceed a trillion dollars for years to come, this will be the first report by Congress's official budget watchdog since last year's big tax cut and this year's spending deal were enacted that will show the deficit rising precipitously and staying at that very high level through the next 10 years.
The official CBO projections are likely to be lower than the budget deficits that actually occur. CBO's report is based on current law and makes no political judgements about what Congress and the president will do in the future. That means the deficit projections will be based on the presumption that the tax cuts enacted last year that currently phase out will in fact end. That means the CBO forecast will assume that future revenues will be higher and the deficit lower compared to what is likely to occur.
The same is true for spending. For this report, the Congressional Budget Office doesn't presume that any of the reductions proposed in the Trump 2019 budget will be enacted. That will increase the deficit outlook compared to what the White House will say it will be.
For the record (and before the trolls come out to play), there were indeed four consecutive trillion dollar federal deficits during the Obama administration from fiscal 2009-2012. Those deficits were primarily caused by the Great Recession and were temporary. By contrast, the trillion dollar Trump deficits are permanent changes to the federal budget outlook caused by enacted reductions in revenues and increases in spending.
The Trump deficits assume a relatively high-level of economic growth. If the economic outlook doesn't turn out to be as rosy as the White House is promising, the very high Trump era federal budget deficits will be even higher.
But a new report released Monday by a Washington-based think tanksuggests that Trump's dire warnings about those who seek asylum in the United States may be unfounded. In fact, the report indicates, they're helping make America great.
The nonpartisan Urban Institute crunched Census and refugee survey data and complied recent academic studies, among other sources, to show that over time refugees integrate into nearly all aspects of American life. And the longer refugees remain in the U.S., the report says, the more likely they are to embrace tenets of the traditional American dream — buying homes and starting their own businesses.
According to the report, labor force participation rates of refugees on average exceed native-born rates. That's typically because 77 percent of refugees are likely to be of working age compared to 50 percent of the native-born population. This also allows them to contribute economically, with their income rising the longer they stay in the U.S.
No Comment Needed ...
It was far from the first time President Donald Trump’s eldest son dabbled in online conspiracy theories, using his 2.7 million Twitter followers to promote questionable or outright false information that, in many cases, even his father had refrained from spreading.
The 40-year-old Trump Jr. has emerged as one of his father’s key ambassadors to the fringe, promoting theories that added drama and visceral energy to the grass-roots right: in this case, the fast-growing theory that tech giants are arrayed against conservatives.
President Trump made a host of dubious claims during two recent public appearances, jumping from taxes to trade, from Iraqi oil to Canadian immigration laws, from promoting voter-fraud conspiracy theories to suggesting a California mayor should be charged with obstruction of justice.
We counted 24 false or misleading statements in Trump’s infrastructure speech in Ohio on March 29 and his roundtable on taxes in West Virginia on Thursday. This is not an exhaustive list, however, and some of Trump’s claims include multiple inaccuracies.
In what was undoubtedly a painful moment on Fox News this morning, media analyst Howard Kurtz frantically implored his producer to take down a graphic that showed Fox is the least trusted of the big three cable networks.
Speaking with pollster Frank Luntz about Donald Trump’s Twitter habits, with Luntz calling the president’s use of “fake news” detrimental to his cause, Kurtz brought up a recent poll from Monmouth University on the trustworthiness of news outlets compared to Donald Trump.
That is when things took a hilarious turn.
“Speaking of fake news, there is a new poll out from Monmouth University. ‘Do the media report fake news regularly or occasionally?’ 77 percent say yes,” Kurtz exclaimed before noticing the graphic instead showed “Who do you trust more?” with CNN at 48 percent, MSNBC at 45 percent and Fox News bring up the rear at 30 percent.
“That is not the graphic we are looking for. Hold off,” the Fox News host protested before pleading, “Take that down, please.”
Kurtz later came back to the graphic, to put it in context, but Fox News still came up short in credibility behind CNN and MSNBC as the numbers showed.
A lot of people wonder why we are doing so little to prevent the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change. One theory is that it’s https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-have-we-done-so-little-to-tackle-climate-change/2018/04/06/d62710dc-2baf-11e8-8688-e053ba58f1e4_story.html?utm_term=.51ec79b9aae5 (too big a subject to understand).
It’s a big subject, all right. And a difficult one to address. But too big to understand it isn’t. Quantum physics is too big to understand. Climate change is simple. I’ll put it in one sentence: There are known heat-trapping gasses, and if we add too much of them to the atmosphere, it will cause large, foreseeable damage to humans and natural environments. That is not too big to understand.
And a majority of people understand it just fine. They are making the assumption that the political process will work normally and that the government will take the steps necessary to deal with it. Like government did with smog, and with polluted water, and with acid rain, and with ozone depletion. The thing that is hard to understand is how people in positions to do something about it do nothing. Or rather, do everything in their power to stop action.
And even this isn’t impossible to understand. People with a large financial stake in emitting heat-trapping gasses have been protecting their financial interests. People in government have allowed themselves to be swayed to inaction by these powerful financial interests.
The biggest, hardest thing to understand is how we have come to such worship of wealth that it has completely overwhelmed and paralyzed our government’s ability to do its necessary work. This is what ordinary people fail to grasp. It is this gigantic failure of ethics in the face of money that is too big to understand, because it violates everything we were taught about how government and American society work.
It is not the role of individuals to solve climate change. It is a collective-action problem, the kind of problem that governments are designed to solve. Even so, a lot of individual people have been working very hard on the climate issue. Their government has been worse than unresponsive. And now in the Trump era, government is not merely paralyzed; it is actively https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-sec-is-blunting-investor-activism-over-climate-k-cups-and-gay-rights/2018/04/06/5d5c1d16-38e1-11e8-acd5-35eac230e514_story.html?utm_term=.cdb526a08e1c (making it even harder) for people to take action on the climate.
And government officials know full well what they are doing. Climate change is not too big to understand. Oil companies have https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/04/05/documents-show-shell-foresaw-climate-change-three-decades-ago-and-knew-how-big-its-own-contribution-was/?utm_term=.f06dd6118861 (understood it for decades). Government officials understand it, too. They. Don’t. Care. They have put short-term personal interests first. They have sold their share of Earth to the highest bidder. And your share, too.
That’s the unbelievable thing that is hard to understand.
Former FBI director James Comey is about to return to the national spotlight with the release of his memoir next week — but the White House is doing little to prepare for the onslaught, according to two officials.
These officials said it’s understood within the West Wing that laying out an advance media strategy is largely a futile exercise since President Donald Trump could blow up any prepared talking points with a single tweet.
Instead, senior aides are hoping that Trump’s trip to South America and subsequent summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago will provide distraction, as well as an opportunity for the president to appear above the fray.
Mister Sandman
New Member
- nukes don’t kill people. People kill people
-second amendment guarantees us right to our nukes
- the only thing that can stop a bad guy with nukes is a good guy with nukes.
- nuke control laws infringe upon the right to self-defense and deny people a sense of safety.
- More nuke control is unnecessary because relatively few people are killed by nukes
- nuke control laws would prevent citizens from protecting themselves from foreign invaders.
Kim Jong-un
[emoji848]
-second amendment guarantees us right to our nukes
- the only thing that can stop a bad guy with nukes is a good guy with nukes.
- nuke control laws infringe upon the right to self-defense and deny people a sense of safety.
- More nuke control is unnecessary because relatively few people are killed by nukes
- nuke control laws would prevent citizens from protecting themselves from foreign invaders.
Kim Jong-un
[emoji848]
A 79-year-old Holocaust survivor says in a new interview that the U.S. under President Trump feels like Germany did just before the Nazis took over.
Stephen Jacobs told Newsweek that the rise of the far-right under Trump “feels like 1929 or 1930 Berlin.”
“Things just go from bad to worse every day,” he said. “There’s a real problem growing.”
