Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

TRUMP TAX SCAM
https://claytoonz.com/2019/02/09/trump-tax-scam/

If you voted for Donald Trump and you’re paying more in taxes this year than you did under Obama, it’s because you voted for Donald Trump. Welcome to MAGA.

Donald Trump’s biggest achievement in the two years since he started destroying America was giving himself a massive tax cut. It wasn’t a wall on our southern border paid for by Mexico. It wasn’t repealing Obamacare. It wasn’t even “locking her up.” It was giving himself a tax cut.

Trump claimed that the tax cut wouldn’t benefit him at all. Of course, like all things Trump has ever said, that was a lie. We knew it was a lie when he said it but that didn’t stop him from repeating it again and again. It didn’t stop Trump sycophants from saying “it won’t benefit him because he said so.” Tax experts estimate that Trump will personally save $15 million a year from these tax cuts. Jared Kushner will save around $12 million. Several members of his cabinet are expected to save $4.5 million each, including Betsy DeVos, Linda McMahon, Steve Baby Fishmouth Mnuchin, and Wilbur Ross, all rich assholes.

When I mentioned tax experts, I wasn’t talking about Ivanka Trump. When the tax legislation was being debated in late 2017, Ivanka went out and told everyone how they’ll see the gains in April 2018 and also be able to file their taxes on a postcard.

Ivanka Trump, Daddy’s little princess, has obviously never ever, ever, ever filed her own taxes in her entire ain’t-you-special sweet little life. You don’t need to be a tax expert to know that the taxes you file are for the previous year. Hence, 2018 filings would be for 2017. The tax cuts for assholes bill passed in December of 2017 (in case you’re a Republican, December is the last month of the year. It’s when you’re hearing all that Christmas music and eating all that ham). That means none of it would affect you until 2018. Thus, if you’re a Trump supporter, you won’t be horrified until you start filing in 2019, and most likely NOT on a postcard.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, horrified is exactly how many Trump supporters are reacting. Many have already filed their taxes to discover they’re actually paying back now when under Obama, they got refunds. My own horror won’t happen until April 14th, because I procrastine with everything.

The thing is, the Republicans removed a lot of deductions, like for state and local taxes for people like you and me. Why? Because they don’t care about people like you and me. If you’re a Trump supporter, you’re probably not a rich asshole. You’re just a regular asshole…who’s going to be paying more in taxes now.

A lot of MAGA hat shitheads went on Twitter to express their dismay and outrage. Who could have predicted that voting for a rich, selfish, narcissistic asshole would only work out for rich, selish, narcissistic assholes? For Trump to win them back, he’s going to have to do something extra racist. How about a talking border wall that screams racial epithets? “Well, I’m paying $4,000 more in taxes now, but the wall’s gonna scream ‘beaner,’ so I’m good. Trump 2020!”

In case racial insults don’t make the pain go away from paying these taxes, there are always payday loans, which Trump and the Republican Congress also removed restrictions from, so predatory lending can be even easier now.

In 2009 during his State of the Union address, President Obama was talking about healthcare reform and that it wouldn’t insure people in the nation illegally. It was kinda stupid that he even had to debunk a ridiculous right-wing rumor. Nevertheless, Republican Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie!” Of course, the only liar was Joe Wilson, who is still in Congress…lying about shit.

That’s exactly how Republicans are. They scream “liar” at the guy telling the truth and trying to help Americans, and applaud and worship the lying fucker who’s fucking them over.

That’s MAGA.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” — President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961.

This is a nice-sounding idea, but it is not fully fleshed out. There are scant details about how Kennedy proposes to actually achieve this, nor is there any evidence of widespread public demand for it. The time frame he outlines — 10 years! — sounds wildly over-optimistic, and arbitrary in any case. Even he admits that it will be expensive, but he doesn’t say exactly how expensive or how we will pay for it.

Nobody is arguing that landing a man on the moon would not be a stirring national achievement. But since when is inspiration a justification for national policy? Far more sensible would be to attempt to get a man a quarter of the way to the moon in 20 years, with a longer-term project to get a full three-quarters of the way there by the year 2000. In point of fact, the technology to get anyone to the moon and back simply does not exist, and there is no proof it will ever exist. Rocket science is incredibly complex, which is why everything else is now described as “it’s not rocket science.”

And what good would it do to get to the moon if America has to shoulder a disproportionate share of the cost? Arguments about leadership are just talk. Arguments about spinoff benefits such as communications satellites and whatnot are mere speculation.

“In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon — if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.” This sounds all well and good in theory, but as a concrete plan of action it is nothing more than grandiose talk, and frankly irresponsible in comparison with the more modest space goals on the table.

So there you have it. The only real difference between the moon landing and combating climate change is that the moon landing was optional. Stopping the runaway climate catastrophe is survival.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Washington told itself a comforting story that minimized the importance of this outbreak of kleptomania: These were criminal outliers and rogue profiteers rushing to exploit the weakness of the new state. This narrative infuriated Palmer. He wanted to shake Congress into recognizing that the thieves were the very elites who presided over every corner of the system. “For the U.S. to be like Russia is today,” he explained to the House committee, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of the members at Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshal Service, Border Patrol; state and local police officers; the Federal Reserve Bank; Supreme Court justices …” In his testimony, Palmer even mentioned Russia’s newly installed and little-known prime minister (whom he mistakenly referred to as Boris Putin), accusing him of “helping to loot Russia.”

The United States, Palmer made clear, had allowed itself to become an accomplice in this plunder. His assessment was unsparing. The West could have turned away this stolen cash; it could have stanched the outflow to shell companies and tax havens. Instead, Western banks waved Russian loot into their vaults. Palmer’s anger was intended to provoke a bout of introspection — and to fuel anxiety about the risk that rising kleptocracy posed to the West itself. After all, the Russians would have a strong interest in protecting their relocated assets.

They would want to shield this wealth from moralizing American politicians who might clamor to seize it. Eighteen years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into foreign interference in a U.S. election, Palmer warned Congress about Russian “political donations to U.S. politicians and political parties to obtain influence.” What was at stake could well be systemic contagion: Russian values might infect and then weaken the moral defense systems of American politics and business.

This unillusioned spook was a prophet, and he spoke out at a hinge moment in the history of global corruption. America could not afford to delude itself into assuming that it would serve as the virtuous model, much less emerge as an untainted bystander. Yet when Yegor Gaidar, a reformist Russian prime minister in the earliest postcommunist days, asked the United States for help hunting down the billions that the KGB had carted away, the White House refused.

“Capital flight is capital flight” was how one former CIA official summed up the American rationale for idly standing by. But this was capital flight on an unprecedented scale, and mere prologue to an era of rampant theft. When the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman studied the problem in 2015, he found that 52 percent of Russia’s wealth resided outside the country.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Washington told itself a comforting story that minimized the importance of this outbreak of kleptomania: These were criminal outliers and rogue profiteers rushing to exploit the weakness of the new state. This narrative infuriated Palmer. He wanted to shake Congress into recognizing that the thieves were the very elites who presided over every corner of the system. “For the U.S. to be like Russia is today,” he explained to the House committee, “it would be necessary to have massive corruption by the majority of the members at Congress as well as by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and agents of the FBI, CIA, DIA, IRS, Marshal Service, Border Patrol; state and local police officers; the Federal Reserve Bank; Supreme Court justices …” In his testimony, Palmer even mentioned Russia’s newly installed and little-known prime minister (whom he mistakenly referred to as Boris Putin), accusing him of “helping to loot Russia.”

The United States, Palmer made clear, had allowed itself to become an accomplice in this plunder. His assessment was unsparing. The West could have turned away this stolen cash; it could have stanched the outflow to shell companies and tax havens. Instead, Western banks waved Russian loot into their vaults. Palmer’s anger was intended to provoke a bout of introspection — and to fuel anxiety about the risk that rising kleptocracy posed to the West itself. After all, the Russians would have a strong interest in protecting their relocated assets.

They would want to shield this wealth from moralizing American politicians who might clamor to seize it. Eighteen years before Special Counsel Robert Mueller began his investigation into foreign interference in a U.S. election, Palmer warned Congress about Russian “political donations to U.S. politicians and political parties to obtain influence.” What was at stake could well be systemic contagion: Russian values might infect and then weaken the moral defense systems of American politics and business.

This unillusioned spook was a prophet, and he spoke out at a hinge moment in the history of global corruption. America could not afford to delude itself into assuming that it would serve as the virtuous model, much less emerge as an untainted bystander. Yet when Yegor Gaidar, a reformist Russian prime minister in the earliest postcommunist days, asked the United States for help hunting down the billions that the KGB had carted away, the White House refused.

“Capital flight is capital flight” was how one former CIA official summed up the American rationale for idly standing by. But this was capital flight on an unprecedented scale, and mere prologue to an era of rampant theft. When the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman studied the problem in 2015, he found that 52 percent of Russia’s wealth resided outside the country.

The defining document of our era is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The ruling didn’t just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of indifference — the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.

In other words, the United States has legitimized a political economy of shadows, and it has done so right in step with a global boom in people hoping to escape into the shadows.

American collusion with kleptocracy comes at a terrible cost for the rest of the world. All of the stolen money, all of those evaded tax dollars sunk into Central Park penthouses and Nevada shell companies, might otherwise fund health care and infrastructure. (A report from the anti-poverty group One has argued that 3.6 million deaths each year can be attributed to this sort of resource siphoning.) Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets and credible democracy. It fuels suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham: While the world is plundered, self-righteous Americans get rich off their complicity with the crooks.

The Founders were concerned that venality would become standard procedure, and it has. Long before suspicion mounted about the loyalties of Donald Trump, large swaths of the American elite — lawyers, lobbyists, real-estate brokers, politicians in state capitals who enabled the creation of shell companies — had already proved themselves to be reliable servants of a rapacious global plutocracy. Richard Palmer was right: The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from rogue profiteers. They augured a kleptocratic habit that would soon become widespread. One bitter truth about the Russia scandal is that by the time Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the shape of our country, it was already bending in the direction of his.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

With filing season officially under way, a growing number of taxpayers are realizing that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act might be a double-edged sword.

The White House said in October 2017 that the average family “would get a $4,000 raise” when it was pushing for passage of the law. Now that the new filing season has begun, some taxpayers are finding out that the tax man giveth — but also taketh away, especially as it pertains to their annual refund.

“Americans are obsessed with their refunds. What really matters is whether your taxes went up or down, not whether your refund went down,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. “It’s really important that people don’t confuse their refund with the taxes they pay,” he said.

But even as Gleckman pointed out that some people’s overall tax burdens might be smaller this year, he acknowledged that many people come to expect and even rely on that refund.

“The people who file early are the people who generally count on these refunds. They may have an expectation of higher refunds,” he said. These taxpayers, especially those who hold down multiple jobs, could be in for a rude awakening.

This was what happened to Jason Marques, a postal worker, pizza delivery driver and student in Massachusetts who said that, since his income didn’t change, he was expecting a similar refund to the roughly $6,000 he got last year — money he said would go towards his student loans or paying off credit card debt.

Marques said he was hurt by the cap on student loan interest deduction and the elimination of non-reimbursed business expenses, which he used to deduct the out-of-pocket costs he incurred as a delivery driver. “My jaw hit the floor,” he said, when he learned his 2018 refund would be under $500.

“I just started paying back my student loans. If I’d gotten the $6,000, I’d have paid off all my credit cards,” he said. “I could’ve really used that money to eliminate it all.”

Marques is not alone in his frustration. Early filers have been taking to social media to express their ire at finding that their refunds were a fraction of what they anticipated or — worse yet — that they would owe an unexpected bill to the IRS.

“That campaign promise was one of the only two reasons I voted for you,” wrote Twitter user Dee Nelson. “Rethinking that decision now.”

Facebook user Erin Boyd told of a similar unpleasant surprise in a comment on the social media platform. “I got screwed. Widow with two young children and I try to owe $100 or less, because who likes loaning money to the government. And this year I owe $1,000,” she said.

A top culprit for the confusion is the fact that the IRS made changes to withholding tables about a year ago. “People have fewer withholdings in most cases than they did last year, and they don’t realize it,” said Bob Charron, partner and head of the tax department at Friedman LLP.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth. Each day, the hero of George Orwell’s “https://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-Eighty-Four-George-Orwell/dp/0679417397/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1549567188&sr=1-1-spons&keywords=1984+by+george+orwell&psc=1 (1984)” “corrects” old newspapers to make sure that the information is in still accord with the current Party line. After rewriting history, he puts each “incorrect” story into a “memory hole” — a slit in the wall — and it is “whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.”

Orwell’s portrayal of censorship is fictional. But, until very recently, it wasn’t all that far off from the reality. “Censorship” was an activity carried out by authoritarian states, and sometimes by democracies, which used repressive mechanisms to control political speech. Policemen, or bureaucrats such as Smith, would mark up books and articles, remove offending passages, or prevent them from being published. They would rewrite history books, or retouch photographs, if they showed uncomfortable truths about the past. Sometimes they simply arrested people who spoke or wrote things deemed dangerous to the ruling party.

This isn’t how censorship works anymore, or at least not all of the time. Nowadays, many of the states (and lots of parties and groups) that want to censor political speech are doing so in an information environment that has been rapidly and massively transformed. Once, speech was scarce and it was possible to control the speakers. Now, the attention of listeners is scarce — and speakers and their words can simply be drowned out.

This idea was brilliantly articulated a couple of years ago by Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor, in an essay that asked “Is the First Amendment obsolete?” Wu pointed out that a state — or, indeed, anyone — that seeks to control information no longer needs bureaucrats or policemen: Instead, the opponents of free speech can drown out ideas and language they don’t like by using robotic tools, fake accounts, or teams of real people operating multiple accounts. They can flood the information space with false, distracting or irrelevant information so that people have trouble understanding what is real and what is fake.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, and owner of The Post, has elicited widespread sympathy and admiration for his unflinching response to American Media Inc. (AMI), which threatened to publish embarrassing photographs of him in the National Enquirer. Rather than give in, Bezos published emails from AMI officials. (So convenient of them to put their blackmail attempt in writing!) His action recalls what the Duke of Wellington did on a similar occasion in 1824 when a sleaze merchant demanded a payoff to prevent the publication of a book naming him as a client of a notorious courtesan. “Publish and be damned,” the victor of Waterloo growled. The allegations were indeed published but did not prevent Wellington from becoming prime minister of Britain four years later.

Much remains mysterious about the Enquirer’s actions, and in particular its connections, if any, with President Trump and the government of Saudi Arabia — a possibility that Bezos alluded to in his blog post. Both the Saudis and Trump are aggrieved at The Post, and Trump wrongly blames Bezos for the newspaper’s accurate but unflattering coverage of him. When the Enquirer’s initial article about Bezos’s extramarital relationship was published, the president gloated in a tweet: “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!”

...

I suspect David Pecker will rue the day that his friend Donald Trump became president — if he does not already. And he is not alone. Paul Manafort had a flourishing business as an international influence-peddler before he became Trump’s campaign chairman. He now faces a long stretch in prison after having been convicted of felony financial charges. Trump’s friend Roger Stone has now been indicted for the first time after a long career as a political dirty trickster. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, has gone from well-respected general to felon. Michael Cohen had a cushy career as Trump’s personal lawyer before his client became president. Now Cohen, too, is a felon. Numerous other Trump associates and family members are facing, at a minimum, hefty legal bills and, at worst, serious legal exposure.

Every organization Trump has been associated with — the Trump Organization, the Trump Foundation, the Trump campaign, the Trump administration — is being investigated by prosecutors and lawmakers. His name, long his biggest asset, has become so toxic that https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-trumps-big-city-hotels-business-dropped-as-his-political-star-rose-internal-documents-show/2018/10/03/bd26b1d6-b6d4-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html?utm_term=.d0676ee8cd1f (bookings are down) at his hotels. And Trump, a.k.a. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/individual-1-trump-emerges-as-a-central-subject-of-mueller-probe/2018/11/29/e3968994-f3f7-11e8-80d0-f7e1948d55f4_story.html?utm_term=.3185c8c0e785 (Individual 1), faces a serious threat of prosecution once he leaves office. Before it is all over, Trump himself may regret the day he became president. His unexpected and undeserved ascent is delivering long overdue accountability for him and his sleazy associates. We have gone from logrolling to having logs rolled over — and it’s about time.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

“This is my time. You don’t run this Committee, Mr Whitaker. You don’t run the Congress of the United States.”

 

[Michael Scally MD]