Only fools and toddlers care about contribution limits

My Sunday movie was The Piano Lesson, a screen adaptation of August Wilson’s play available on Netflix. This is not about someone sitting at the piano and learning to play it. The story, set mostly in Pittsburgh in 1936, is the conflict between Boy Willie and his sister Bernice. He wants to sell the piano to get enough money to buy the land where their ancestors were slaves. He’s quite intense in his demand. She refuses to sell because it is a family heirloom – one of their slave ancestors carved family portraits into the wood. Because of bad memories she also refuses to play it. There are questions why this land is now available. The descendant of the slave owner died by falling down his well. Was he pushed? Why does Bernice say she sees the landowner’s ghost in her house in Pittsburgh? I enjoyed it. I had held off on watching it because it didn’t get great reviews. I would have placed it higher than the Metacritic score of 69. It came out last year and I heard about it both because it is based on the August Wilson play and because it is a Washington family production. Boy Willie is played by John David. It’s directed by brother Malcolm who also co-wrote the screenplay. Don’t recognize those names? And one of the producers was father Denzel. I’m sure you recognize that one. In a minor role was Olivia and a bit of searching showed she is Malcolm’s twin. And the credits show Katia, John David’s older sister as another producer. Alex Samuels of Daily Kos discussed some of the recent surveys. One of interest is opinions of aspects of the nasty guy’s agenda. For example, opinions on various parts of his immigration policy show 39% of adults in support, 45% opposed, for a net difference of -6. The topics include DEI at net -14, executive power at -26, and at the bottom is health care at -31. At the top at net +10, and the only one positive, is LGBTQ rights. Scary that his policies are aimed at rolling back our rights, yet 10% more people support his position than don’t. Samuels wrote:

Why the outlier? It’s likely because Trump’s LGBTQ+ policies are really about attacking transgender people. For instance, rather than loudly going after same-sex marriage, which a strong majority of Americans want to remain legal, Trump is targeting a vulnerable minority. And unfortunately, discomfort with transgender people remains widespread, even among Democrats. As grim as that is, it explains why a lot of voters support Trump here.

Another survey of interest was about safety of air travel. Plane accidents for the last three months are down compared to last year, but public perception says safety is worse. Samuels says part of the answer is the media coverage of the big disasters. Another part is the nasty guy, in pushing to fire air traffic controllers, is not helping public confidence. Andrew Mangan of Kos says the nasty guy is waging war on our fridges. He’s doing it in two ways. First, the Food and Drug Administration is planning to end most routine food safety inspections. Some, but not all, inspections can be shifted to the state. 84% of voters oppose such a move, including 75% of Republicans. The second war on fridges is the plan to end the Energy Star program. This is the blue star logo that indicates how energy efficient an appliance is compared to similar products. It has saved more than a half trillion dollars in energy costs. Every $1 the Environmental Protection Agency spend on the program resulted in nearly $350 in energy savings and massively reduced greenhouse emissions driving he climate crisis. Yep, 55% of voters oppose killing it. 86% of Democrats want the EPA to keep funding the program, though only 22% of Republicans feel the same way. I had talked about the nasty guy boosting the value of his personal crypto currency by offering investors dinner with him. Yeah, that dinner has happened, and Emily Singer of Kos says it was as corrupt as one might think it would be. The dinner was held at his own golf club in Virginia and he used a military helicopter to get there (as in taxpayer-funded), yet the White House won’t release a guest list because the nasty guy attended on personal time. That detail is of interest because the Supreme Court said he immune from prosecution only for official acts. (So is someone going to prosecute?) The attendees said they spent millions on the coin to get access to the nasty guy. These are foreign nationals, people who are banned from contributing to his campaign. The top contributor was Chinese crypto magnate Justin Sun who spent $40 million. He’s been sued by the SEC for fraud. He got a gold watch for his troubles (plus face time with the nasty guy). Another investor praised the nasty for being good to his sponsors, who expect a return on investment. Singer wrote: “That's as blatant of a ‘pay-to-play’ scandal as it gets.” Lisa Needham of Kos has a weekly series titled Injustice For All to show the nasty guy is trying to weaponize the justice system and the people fighting back. In last Saturday’s edition Needham wrote vice nasty declared that Chief Justice John Roberts doesn’t understand the judiciary, saying the judiciary is supposed to allow the deportations the American people voted for. Needham wrote:

Good god, man. The Roberts court invented immunity for Donald Trump. The Roberts court is the reason you have a job. The Roberts court is wholly controlled by your allies. The executive is not exactly beleaguered here, you big baby. But aside from Vance’s usual whining about how oppressed the Trump administration is, this is also spectacularly wrongheaded in terms of how separation of powers works. Vance’s theory of governance seems to be the one that the administration as a whole has settled on: Because people elected Trump, they implicitly endorsed every future action Trump takes, so courts can’t rule otherwise. If they rule against the administration, goes the thinking, that violates the separation of powers. Such a theory, of course, makes courts entirely unnecessary, which may actually be Vance’s goal.

Needham also wrote about that crypto dinner.

What is the current price of dinner with the president? Well, it’s variable based on the price of his stupid crypto meme coin, but here’s how it breaks down: 220 people, many of whom are anonymous, bought $394 million of scammy crypto coins owned mainly by two Trump-affiliated private companies. Individual spend ranged from $55,000 to $37.7 million, averaging out at roughly $1.7 million per head. Federal per-person campaign contributions are capped at $3,500, but everyone knows that only fools and toddlers care about that. Savvy folks know the move is just to bribe the president directly by investing in whatever scam he’s got going. Never thought we’d long for the low-key days of everyone bribing Trump by spending a few thousand bucks at his D.C. hotel. Things used to be so innocent.

Walter Einenkel of Kos wrote that the Qatari jet has been delivered to the Department of Defense. This is the gift that is worth $400 million, but the DoD would need to spend a billion to make it usable as Air Force One. The necessary modifications probably won’t be done before the nasty guy’s term is up. That means the plane should go straight to the presidential library. That presidential library is becoming a corruption magnet. Missed out on donating to the inauguration? It broke records in pulling in money. So the next way to get time with the nasty guy is to donate to his library. Donating to him directly is supposed to be illegal because of the Constitution’s Emolument Clause. Mother Jones wrote that because of the nasty guy’s known shady handling of classified document and his lack of transparency we should not believe what anyone of his team says about how much is actually going to the library and how much to current pockets. Yeah, presidential libraries are expensive. The price tag for constructing Obama’s is about $830 million. But building his was not an invitation for bribes. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Crispin Sartwell of Splice Today, a person Kev is surprised he agrees with enough to quote.

Let me express my skepticism. I don’t think that Biden’s cognitive decline or his late withdrawal made a decisive difference in the outcome. And I think the direct claim that it did, as in Klein’s headline (the “cover-up” “re-elected Trump”) is self-serving in a familiar way. Also in a way that indicates that Democrats will find it difficult to absorb useful lessons from their 2024 disaster. [...] I don’t think that the Democrats would’ve won in 2024 if Kamala had had more time to run. I agreed with those commentators who at the time argued that the compressed schedule might be an advantage for her. I don’t think that there are good reasons to believe that if there had been a full-fledged or compressed primary and the Democrats had nominated Buttigieg or Shapiro or Whitmer that they would’ve done any better. Harris was as plausible a candidate as any, and ran a fairly competent campaign. The Democrats are fooling themselves if they stick to Biden’s dementia as their explanation, and that without a more honest assessment, they’re liable to lose again. Going into Election Day, everyone on both sides and in between seemed to agree that 2024 was “a referendum on Trump.” I think, by and large, that’s just what it was, and that a variety of factors had the whole country, essentially every region and every demographic group, trending to Trump by Election Day. I don’t see any reason to believe that it would’ve been any different with Gretchen Whitmer. Trump is an overwhelming personality who’d become even more overwhelming after his 2020 loss. It’s hard to focus on anything else while he’s there, yapping and thrashing away. Maybe there wasn’t even exactly a rightwards sing in 2024, but rather a swing to Trump, which isn’t ideologically defined except perhaps as a sort of screeching nationalism.

Peter Orszag is a former Office of Management and Budget Director and writes for The New York Times.

For years it was reasonable to tune out the worrywarts carping about deficits. With very low interest rates, a lack of particularly attractive alternatives to U.S. Treasuries for investors and a muted market reaction to serial Capitol Hill dramas over raising the debt limit, those who bemoaned the unsustainability of deficit spending and debt levels seemed to cry wolf — a lot. Even as a former White House budget director, I grew skeptical of their endless warnings. Not anymore. Two things have changed: First, the wolf is now lurking much closer to our door. Annual federal budget deficits are running at 6 percent of G.D.P. or higher, compared with well under 3 percent a decade ago. Interest rates on 10-year Treasuries have more than doubled — around 4.5 percent now versus just over 2 percent then — and in the current fiscal year the government is projected to spend more on interest payments than on defense, Medicaid or Medicare. That’s right: Our borrowing now costs us more each year than each of these big, essential budget items. Meanwhile, federal debt held by the public, excluding Federal Reserve holdings, as a share of G.D.P. has increased by about a third since 2015. The Congressional Budget Office, which I once led, projects that by 2029, our debt as a share of our economy will grow to levels unprecedented since the years after World War II. All of this is occurring against a backdrop of an even more polarized political system, increased tension with foreign debt holders and less confidence in American security protections that promoted the dollar as the world’s safe haven.

Back in mid May Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos honored George Carlin on what would have been his 88th birthday. One of the Carlin quotes:

To my way of thinking, men have only one real problem: other men. That's where all the trouble starts. A long time ago, men gave away their power. To other men: princes, kings, wizards, generals and high priests. They gave it away, because they believed what these other men told them. They bought into the okeydoke. The bulls---. Men always buy the okeydoke when it comes from other men.

Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos. It shows a man, woman, and child wearing life jackets and in the water. The man’s life jacket is labeled Medicaid. An elephant in a speedboat comes alongside and says, “You heard me. Billionaires need your life jackets...”

Two words: fraud and cruel

In the nasty guy’s State of the Union speech (which I didn’t listen to) he said he would protect Medicare and Social Security. How quickly he forgot (unless he was lying). He has released his budget. The two words that fit are fraud and cruel. Fraud because it is so completely contrary to what he promised and because of the unrealistic assumptions it makes to justify its numbers. Cruel because of the deep cuts it calls for in the social safety net – SNAP (formerly known as food stamps), Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. It also calls for cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (as a pandemic looms) and the Environmental Protection Agency. The nasty guy and the GOP didn’t run up those massive deficits for nothing.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reminds us about the “third rail” in American politics. This refers to the third rail in subway systems in New York and elsewhere that power the trains. Touch it and die. Social Security and Medicare are considered third rail topics.

But in the cult of personality surrounding the nasty guy there is no third rail. He can seriously damage their financial security and they’ll thank him.

This budget shows the nasty guy and the GOP aren’t interested in equality. They want to show how wonderful and superior their lives are by oppressing everyone else. Here are a few quotes of the day that say freedom and equality are intertwined and rebuke supremacy.

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
~~Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1994)

When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands amazed at their diversity. What a crew! … But the clue is really very simple. They are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system.
~~George Orwell, England Your England and Other Essays (1953)

Equality is the heart and essence of democracy, freedom, and justice, equality of opportunity in industry, in labor unions, schools and colleges, government, politics, and before the law. There must be no dual standards of justice, no dual rights, privileges, duties, or responsibilities of citizenship. No dual forms of freedom.
~~A. Philip Randolph, Autobiography of a People: Three Centuries of African American History Told by Those Who Lived It. (2000)

Savings for whom?

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports on the effect of work requirements on those who need food assistance.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has had a work requirement since 1996. The law says an able-bodied person must work or be in job training at least 20 hours a week. States have waived those restrictions for communities in economic distress.

The nasty guy administration says, in McCarter’s words, “force lazy good-for-nothings who could work but refuse to get jobs.” The GOP in West Virginia reinstated the restriction for nine poor counties and we can see the results. Forcing the poor into jobs is *not* what happened.

The change in policy did nothing to create jobs. Because of the poverty jobs don’t come to these areas. The poor residents can’t get to jobs outside these areas. Yeah, they’re able-bodied, but they can’t get to jobs 40 miles away. Employment growth in these counties slowed while it doubled elsewhere in West Virginia.

The result: People rely on charity or go hungry. Huntington City Mission went from serving 8,700 meals a month to 12,300.

GOP delegate Tom Fast says he wants to apply the restrictions to the whole state because the change has created a “significant savings.” Savings for whom? Certainly not the charities. Or the poor.



Lots of news in the last few days that the federal deficit for 2019 was $1.02 trillion dollars. Hunter of Daily Kos says that means the big 2017 tax law didn’t bring in close to the amount of money the GOP said it would – and that’s not an accident. Also no accident is that many news outlets reporting the story are not calling on the GOP to fix it.

Hunter says about this trillion dollar deficit:

It will be met, when Republicans next lose the presidency, with Republican demands that something is done about this outrage that somehow happened under Republican watch, according to the Republican plan, as a result of Republican legislation forced through via reconciliation measures so that Republicans could best steamroll over the other party. Conservatives will then demand we spend less on fixing the roads, and less on feeding the poor, and that Social Security is either gutted or at the very least given to Wall Street as seed money for whatever new gambling effort the markets will next invent.

And then they will propose another corporate tax cut. And again, the Paul Ryans of the party will lie, outright, to claim that the next one will fix all this up for sure.

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports on a new study that says money can buy happiness. Clawson summarized:

90% of people earning more than $500,000 a year say they are “completely” or “very” satisfied with their lives. By contrast, just 44% of people earning less than $35,000 a year are completely or very satisfied.

The rich …

don’t worry about paying medical bills or going hungry. They know that even if their kids screw up every which way, they’re more likely to go to college and get good jobs than poor kids who do everything right.

Lower-income people in the United States are deprived of a basic sense of hope that they and their loved ones can get ahead. High-income people have every reason to believe the world will be a kind place.

Commenters roundly criticized the study. They say the study grouped income of $35K – $99K. Which doesn’t make sense. $35K is close to the poverty line. $99K isn’t.

Doctor Grumpus adds:

This new study found nothing new: Poverty sucks, and being in a state of happiness in poverty is very difficult. Once one is out of poverty, the likelihood for happiness increases, but after that, more money doesn’t increase the likelihood for happiness. There is nothing in the presentation of this research that suggests otherwise. (Notice that the report just presents the extremes, and not the trajectory of the change...I am confident in saying that, based on the totality of the research, the relationship between happiness and income is not linear).

Emily Alford at Jezebel wrote that some teenage boys really like the nasty guy.

So with all the performative masculinity bullshit they’re wading through, it’s not exactly a shocker that boys have fallen for one of the worst performances of masculinity of all time—that of charlatan-in-chief Donald Trump.

Some boys are using the nasty guy as an example of how to bully the girls. One boy put it this way:

Just historically, when you think Republican, you think males, and when you think liberals, you think more female.

Hmm. I wonder why… It certainly can’t be because the GOP has, for at least the last decade, been modeling the worst of white male supremacy, which chases everyone else out of the party.

History’s greatest daylight robbery

Public Citizen tweeted:

Wealth of 400 richest Americans:

2009: $1.27T
10: $1.37T
11: $1.5T
12: $1.7T
13: $2T
14: $2.3T
15: $2.3T
16: $2.4T
17: $2.7T
18: $2.9T
19: $3T

Federal Minimum Wage:

2009: $7.25
10: $7.25
11: $7.25
12: $7.25
13: $7.25
14: $7.25
15: $7.25
16: $7.25
17: $7.25
18: $7.25
19: $7.25

Yeah, the wealth of the 400 richest families more than doubled in ten years. This isn’t about the rich amassing more money. This is about making sure the poor stay poor.

Kimberly Adams of NPR’s Marketplace and Jesse Drucker of the New York Times reported that the 2017 GOP tax cut law was so hastily written that it is full of holes. These aren’t necessarily loopholes that we frequently hear about. These are cases where the law didn’t specify everything and the IRS has to come up with rules and regulations to make it all work.

Not surprisingly, corporate lobbyists watched that rulemaking process closely and lobbied to shape them to corporations’ advantage. When the feedback on new rules is 99% from corporations it is hard not to bend to their desires, especially with the nasty guy is the boss. But it means collecting hundreds of billions of dollars less than the law projected.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about the effect of those 2017 GOP tax cuts and those IRS rules. He calls it “history’s greatest daylight robbery.”

The result is a budget deficit that has jumped over 50% since Trump took office—a deficit that will top $1 trillion in 2020.
…
It won’t be until after the election that Republican leaders will determine that, sadly, something must be done about America’s new sea of red ink. By destroying Social Security, Medicare, and every program intended to help the poor.

Everything is connected to hate

There is one more British Arrow commercial I want to mention. I didn’t mention it a couple days ago because it isn’t on the British Arrow website and I had forgotten about it. It was brought back to mind today. Since you can’t see it and I don’t remember a lot of details you will only get an overall description.

We see a face. It tells us right off it is computer generated, an avatar of the internet. It is asked what is connected to everything. The answer: Hate. The avatar proceeds to quickly go through a long list of things people describe as hating as images of those things are displayed over and around the avatar. A lot of people use social media to describe or promote their hatred. A lot of different kinds of things are hated by someone or another. So, yeah, hate is connected to everything.



Hunter of Daily Kos responds to a Washington Post article in which various GOP lawmakers whine about the federal deficit. The beginning, a bit of the middle, and end of Hunter’s message:

Can we please, please finally stop with this nonsense that Republicans are upset by deficits? At all? Even in the slightest?
…
The closest we come to the actual core point is from Senate Appropriations Committee chair Richard Shelby, who rather bluntly declares that we need to slash "entitlements" and if we can't do that, screw it, no point trying. Yes, there you go. We might as well have stopped there, that being the best encapsulation of the last fifty years of faked deficit nonsense from Republican big spenders. Take him at his word and go home; there’s no sense worrying about deficits at all if it’s not in the context of cutting aid to the poor.
…
Give it up. Just stop. Quit with this ever-gullible nonsense, this pamphleteering for a cause that self-promoting "deficit hawks" have never, when in power, used for any other purpose than to hurt children, seniors, and anyone else who dares ask for a bit of help that could instead be used by the ultra-rich to purchase private yacht-launched submarines or whatever the latest better-than-you trend is among the people who own their Republican lawmakers outright. Just stop already. We’ve had a long damn year and do not need to hear this nonsense.

Ben O’Keefe, in response to the stories about candidate Pete Buttigieg meeting with donors in a wine cave, tweeted:

There are 607 billionaires in America.

There are 328,000,000 people in America.

Right now those 607 people have more access and power in our democracy than the 328m combined.

This isn’t about the dollar amount that people donate; it’s about what they get in return.

Candidate Elizabeth Warren has challenged Mayor Pete. O’Keefe is on Warren’s side. In another tweet he shows an image from the Warren campaign that says, “Billionaires in wine caves should not pick the next president of the United States.” O’Keefe adds:

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. This isn’t about “purity tests.” This is about corruption. @ewarren is taking on corruption and you bet corrupt people are going to do everything they can to stop her—that’s how you know it’s working.

I understand privilege is something people high in the social hierarchy construct as something they are allowed to do and those lower in the hierarchy are not. It is a way of saying see how much better my life is compared to them! So when equality comes along and removes that privilege these people lose a way of oppressing others. To them that lack feels like they are being oppressed.

The next step in the GOP playbook

Congress passed a continuing budget resolution and the nasty guy signed it. That means a government shutdown didn’t happen today. But this isn’t a true 2020 federal budget. Congress gave itself until December 20 to make that happen. I’ll offer no predictions on how that will go. Or whether a raging nasty guy will sign it.

As part of the spending bill that got passed the Senate Budget Committee offered some budget reforms. They didn’t get into this bill because they weren’t in the House bill and some level-headed senators knew they didn’t have time for the reconciling process.

There are some provisions in the budget reform package that make sense and are long overdue (I haven’t read the details). But one provision is alarming to Hunter Blair of the *Economic Policy Institute*. Instead of a one year budget, Congress would create a two year budget (in itself not a bad thing). In the second year the Congressional Budget Office would report whether the debt-to-GDP target had been met (don’t fret over that detail) and, if not, special reconciliation instructions would be triggered. And (yes, now is the time to fret) that means cuts to major programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and just about every other part of the social safety net Republicans have been clamoring to eliminate over the last few decades.

Even worse, if that second year is part of a recession those cuts would mean both not assisting citizens affected by the recession and not allowing the government to help ease the recession itself. Both would make the recession worse. The CBO reports that it is in recessions are exactly when debt projections are most likely to be extremely off.

So yeah, something like this has been in the GOP playbook as the next step ever since they gave those huge tax cuts to the rich. This next step has been obvious to some of us since those tax cuts passed. Look for it to rear its ugly head again during December.

The budget through his eyes

The nasty guy has submitted his budget to Congress. Congress usually ignores this document and the Democrats in the House will continue that tradition. Even so, it is useful to see what the nasty guy has in mind. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos has the highlights (so you can skip this 200 page tweet to his base).

Trump’s budget would wildly inflate the military, plow billions into his “Space Force,” drastically cut many domestic programs, funnel huge amounts of money into an emergency-declaration friendly slush fund, and still leave the budget wildly out of balance for decades.

And that slush fund? The nasty guy wants $175 billion without any Congressional oversight.

What’s not in the budget:

Trump’s budget has a major target for cuts—poor people. Programs to fight poverty would see huge cuts under claims that they “discourage people from returning to work.” What would encourage them? Cuts to food assistance. Cuts to public housing. Cuts to Medicaid. Because nothing gets people up and working like being starving, sick, and homeless.

Programs that are supposed to guard the public health and environment would also see massive cuts—though since the last two years have seen a reduction in the number of criminal prosecution by the EPA to a level not seen since there has been an EPA, it’s not clear that these program cuts would make much difference under Trump.

Overall, Trump’s budget would do the same thing he’s already done—steal from the poor, give to the wealthy, inflate the military, and provide even more money that he could use as he wills, no matter what Congress says. Which is why, on this proposal at least, Congress will say no.

At least Trump wouldn’t have to fret another infrastructure week, because his budget also makes draconian cuts to transportation budgets.

That “disturbing” deficit

From a tweet of a bit of Bloomberg news:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the U.S. budget deficit is "disturbing" and spending on entitlement programs must be addressed by both Republicans and Democrats.

I’ve been one of many people who knew it was only a matter of time between passing tax cuts for the rich and calls to shred the last bits of the social safety net. That tax cut was a year ago. And in that year there have been several such calls. What prompted the latest call is the release of a report saying the federal deficit has jumped by a huge amount. Of course it has.

In a couple of tweets Ari Kohen notes that this call to shred the safety net comes three weeks before the election. Politicians are usually very quiet about taking away things people depend on just before an election. They usually act in the lame duck session or at the start of the next Congress, so that we forget about it by the next election. But they’re saying it thee weeks before. It’s like they believe – or have evidence – that the election cannot dislodge them from power.

In the response to Kohen’s tweet is:

A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with 20 cookies. The banker takes 19 cookies and warns the worker: “Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away.”

Sweet and secret financial rescue

Judd Legum on Twitter summarizes an article from Think Progress. Jared Kushner, the nasty guy’s son-in-law who works in the White House but can’t get security clearance, owns an office building in Manhattan. He supposedly “divested” it when he started working at the WH, but not really. The building is outdated, has a high vacancy rate, it is bleeding money, and a $1.2 billion mortgage comes due in 10 months. He bought it just before the Great Recession. The Chinese, Qataris, and a few others have refused to rescue Kushner’s investment. But somebody has! No idea who.

Big question: Who wants to, and can, spend $1.2 billion on a bad investment to receive the thanks of the son-in-law of the nasty guy?



A big spending bill was passed last month. Since the GOP wanted to boost military spending Democrats were able to get a boost to all the agencies to help the poor and working class. The nasty guy signed it, grumbling about Democrats all the way.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reports the nasty guy and the GOP are now working out how to undo all that spending that Dems bargained into the bill. They have a few options.

* The nasty guy could freeze spending on a budget line item. He can do that for 45 days in which Congress is working (which actually spreads it out over months).

* He could ask Congress to vote on these freezes. Those need only a majority to pass, no filibuster. But Republicans would have a hard time before voters if they vote for programs that help their constituents and then vote against them.

* Or he could simply not spend the money. He already has a record of doing that. And the GOP already has a record of ignoring him when he does it.



This is a curious dynamic…

Markos, the head of Daily Kos, explains: Among GOP voters the nasty guy’s approval rating is pretty steady at above 80%, currently at 88%. Yet the approval of the GOP Speaker of the House and GOP Majority Leader in the Senate has stayed pretty low. Both, according to GOP voters, are under 25%. How do Ryan and McConnell campaign to keep their jobs?

But if you’re a congressional Republican, with a demoralized and dejected base and nothing of substance to run on, what do you do? You can’t really talk about a tax law that has done nothing for rank-and-file voters. You can’t talk about repealing Obamacare, because oh yeah, that didn’t happen. You can’t talk about reining in deficits, because unified Republican control of Congress has now delivered trillion-dollar deficits through Trump’s entire term. You can’t even talk about competent governance, because every budget in the Trump era has needed Democratic votes to pass, hence giving the minority party outsized power!

The one thing they can run on: They put the nasty guy on the ballot by saying if you voters let Democrats take over Congress they’ll impeach the guy you love. Even though you hate Ryan and McConnell you had better vote for them.

So the one thing Dems are not campaigning on is impeachment. Why help the GOP base? With that out of the way there is a lot the Dems can campaign on – which is everything else.



Recently on the TV show Late Night with Seth Meyers political reporter McKay Coppins, who writes for The Atlantic, revealed that the nasty guy sometimes calls him and will say the next bit should be attributed to “a senior White House official.” And Coppins will print it.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville finds this alarming. That’s because the nasty guy is a compulsive liar. Which means Coppins and his fellow journalists are enabling those lies.

We’ve heard stories of the chronic chaos and incompetence in the White House with relentless leaking. Now consider that the leaks and stories of chaos are from the nasty guy. McEwan concludes:

We are vulnerable because we are being denied relevant information — namely that Donald Trump is feeding lies to the media who then report those lies as though they may be true.

We are vulnerable because we have an expectation of safety and security and normalcy, all of which Trump has undermined and continues to subvert with the assistance of the compliant cadre of stenographers who have abandoned all pretense of challenging power on behalf of the powerless.

We are vulnerable — and we are fucked. Because our president is a goddamned liar, and, instead of reporting that, the media endeavors to conceal it.

Inclusive playgrounds

Now that the GOP had blown up the deficit with that tax scam giveaway followed by a recent budget bill that gave Dems everything they wanted in exchange for a big boost to the defense budget, the next thing on the GOP agenda is … no big surprise here … a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

Hey guys, you’re in charge. You can balance the budget any time you want to.

There is rationale for proposing it now:

* Even though the GOP busted the budget, they can campaign on working towards balanced budget amendment.

* They can’t talk about protecting Medicare and Social Security, but they can talk about a silver bullet solution. And their base – which doesn’t understand how gov’t works (that also include the nasty guy) – will eat it up.

* All the talk of a balanced budget amendment has always been a dogwhistle because those who are for it know what has to happen if the budget is to balance. All those programs that help or protect anyone who isn’t a rich white male will be slashed.

* Such an amendment allows them to play innocent, “Gosh, I really want to fund Medicaid, but this darn amendment won’t let me!”

Fortunately, an amendment needs 66 senators and 290 representatives. The GOP has neither.



Back to that recent budget bill. Conservative Evangelical leaders have branded it as immoral. Their complaint is that it provides substantial funding for the nation’s largest abortion provider, significantly adds to the national debt, and fails to fund the border wall. They are also disappointed that it doesn’t protect the Dreamers (glad to hear this last point!).

Strange that this bill is seen as immoral, yet the way the nasty guy treats his wives and mistresses isn’t.



Stephon Clark has been in the news lately. Police responded to a report that someone was bashing in car windows, so they searched the neighborhood. They encountered Clark in the back yard of his grandmother’s house. Clark was holding a cell phone. Thinking the phone was a gun police commanded Clark to put his hands up, without identifying themselves as police. Before Clark had a chance to comply police opened fire, pumping 20 bullets into him.

Stephon’s older brother Stevante is now in the news, though he doesn’t want to be. Reporters want a soundbite or a comments on his brother’s jail time (irrelevant to this case). Stevante did have a few things to say:

They gunned him down like a dog. They executed him. Twenty times. That’s like stepping on a roach. … I shouldn’t have to defend my brother. They should be proving their innocence. … Why aren’t we talking about the police’s mistakes? My city is scared of the police. … I’m scared to live here. I don’t feel safe. … Where can you fucking go if you’re not safe at grandma’s house?

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville calls us to listen to Stevante, and pay attention. At least share his words. Then help dismantle the way policing is done in this country. It enforces white supremacy and is clearly broken.



Sarah Kendzior studies authoritarian regimes. She notes that in the past week there have been several infrastructure attacks: Atlanta city services, Baltimore 911 dispatch system, Boeing HQ in Chicago, and Denver city services. The nasty guy has been talking about infrastructure week. But this is the real infrastructure news.

This looks coordinated. Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver. Evanston might be next.



And something heartwarming. Seth Allen is 10 years old and has cerebral palsy. He can’t talk and is in a wheelchair. Friends from First Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas and the staff of a local park installed a wheelchair swing. Yes, a swing designed to roll a wheelchair onto it. Mother Trish recorded Seth’s first ride. The video went viral, now seen more than 2.5 million times.

Watch out for the onion ninjas who sneak up and make you cry.

I followed a link to learn that inclusive playgrounds are now being created. The first are in California.

Actually snake oil

Lynn Parramore, writing for Huffington Post Politics, interviewed Orsola Costantini, Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about the Cyclically Adjusted Budget used by many governments around the world. It is an imprecise statistical estimate that guides government officials when they decide what to spend money on and how much money to collect in taxes.

In the 1940s the CAB was a great thing. It helped convince business owners that policies to put Americans to work after the war were good for business. It allowed the economic experts and the budget wonks, not just politicians, to give blessings to these policies.

But because it is imprecise the CAB is easily manipulated. In these times of income inequality and power held by the 1% we know who is doing the manipulating and in whose favor. The use of the CAB allows politicians and businessmen to...

* Use language that is technical and obscure, giving a veneer of objectivity that is indisputable.

* Avoid taking responsibility of their decisions. The CAB and budget wonks made me do it.

* Make drastic cuts in social spending as well as personal pay and benefits in the name of economic science, the smooth running of capitalism, or to keep inflation low.

* Limit choices available to fix a budgetary situation. We can't raise taxes! We'll face economic doom!

Through the CAB governments are able suck money from the poor to give to the rich.

Costantini said:

I suppose this shows the limits of democracy when information, knowledge, and ultimately power are unequally distributed.

And...

Even the name of this tool, the “cyclically adjusted budget,” carries an aura of respect. It diverts our attention. We don’t question it. It creates a barrier between the individual and the political realm: it undermines democratic participation itself. This obscure theory validates, with its authority, a big economic mistake that sounds like common sense but is actually snake oil — the notion that the federal government budget is like a household budget. Actually, it isn’t. Your household doesn’t collect taxes. It doesn’t print money. It works very differently, yet the nonsense that it should behave exactly like a household budget gets repeated by politicians and policymakers who really just want to squeeze ordinary people.

Bill Moyers, also writing for Huffington Post Politics, takes a look at the budget bill recently passed by Congress and quickly signed by Obama. He lists many of the goodies for the 1% tucked in its 2000 pages. Did we expect anything else? The official spin, which news anchors uncritically amplified, was that it was a bipartisan bill that proved Washington can work. It isn't a perfect bill, but does a lot of good things.

Moyers asks the important questions: Washington works for whom? It does a lot of good things for whom? At what price?

Moyers wrote:

Can we at least face the truth? The plutocrats and oligarchs are winning. The vast inequality they are creating is a death sentence for government by consent of the people at large. Did any voter in any district or state in the last Congressional election vote to give that billion dollar loophole to a handful of billionaires? To allow corporations to hide their political contributions? To add $1.4 trillion to the national debt? Of course not. It is now the game: Candidates ask citizens for their votes, then go to Washington to do the bidding of their donors. And since one expectation is that they will cut the taxes of those donors, we now have a permanent class that is afforded representation without taxation.

Quite the bomb

Michigan has finally passed a road improvement bill! Gov. Rick Snyder started calling for it four years ago, pegging the price of good roads at $1.2 billion a year. But the legislature, with a good chunk of them supporting a no new taxes pledge, couldn't seem to get it done. Yeah, there was that crazy attempt at a package of bills, including new taxes, that went before the voters. But that was so convoluted with gimmies for everyone that the voters roundly rejected it. So the legislature – after a change in personnel (there's that term-limit thing here) – went back to the beginning and tried again.

What they came up with is a big budget bomb.

On the good side $0.6 billion will be raised through a gas tax and vehicle registration fees. Yes, new taxes. But that will be ramped up slowly, not raising the full annual amount until 2018.

The other $0.6 billion comes from unspecified cuts to other things in the General Budget. And that won't happen until 2019. Why not next year? The delay means that all the legislators who approved this mess will, because of term limits, be gone and not have to be accountable to the mess.

Michigan's General Budget has already been through the wringer. One of many reasons: A few years ago the business tax code was "simplified" (read: canceled). That severely cut the budget, which by state law must balance. And here comes another round of forced cuts.

The biggest parts of the state budget are education, revenue sharing for cities to pay for public safety, and healthcare. The rest of the budget is too small to absorb a cut of $0.6 billion. So the top three get cut again. And again.

Once again, it is the poor who will lose out. They get stuck with a bad primary education and can't afford college, even if they could get in. The availability and affordability of healthcare is cut. The police and fire departments cannot keep up with the crime.

Snyder crows that the state economy is growing, so there will be more revenue and the hole in the state budget won't be that big. It's still bad finances and education and healthcare will still be cut. But there is one more goodie in this plan. If tax revenue increases faster than inflation than income tax rollbacks go into effect. So even if the state economy grows, the state budget can't.

So, let's see. The state roads are a mess. The money to fix them won't get to half strength until three years from now. It won't rise above half strength until at least four years from now. And then there will be forced cuts to things that poor people depend on. In the meantime the roads will continue to be a mess. And the perpetrators will be long gone – safely transitioned into lobbying jobs.

Quite the bomb.

Reminding us who they really are

What better topic for tax day than the federal budget!

Paul Ryan, the guy nominated in 2012 to be Vice President, is touting his federal budget again. I think it got an endorsement from the House. It very clearly shows what the GOP will do if given enough power in Washington. Terrence Heath summarizes the major goals. We've seen these before.

* Repeal Obamacare but don't offer anything to replace it.

* Cut welfare. Cut food stamps and convert the rest to block grants to states with emphasis on "flexibility." That means if a state throws enough people off food stamps the state can do what it wants with the "overrun."

* Cut the Home Energy Assistance Program because several states are "abusing" it. They have linked that program to food stamps and food stamp usage has gone up.

* Cut Medicaid by turning it into a block grant (see above) and by indexing it to inflation even though medical expenses rise faster than inflation.

* Cut Medicare by changing it to "premium support" with the same inflation index.

* Cut aid to students and increase interest paid on student debt.

* Cut the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission, so the financial industry has less regulation. That will invite another financial mess (and we know who ends up profiting from those).

* Increase spending on the military as a patriotic way of sucking money out of the rest of the federal budget.

* All those cuts will result in a much smaller budget. Which means the deficit will be eliminated and the national debt will go down -- just like the GOP is calling for. No. Wait. I'm being silly. All that savings will give the 1% another tax cut to the tune of more than a quarter million dollars each. Deficit? Never heard of it.

This budget isn't going anywhere beyond the House. The Senate will only touch it long enough to toss it out. Even if the GOP takes the Senate in November the Dems will still be able to filibuster it. Besides, this prez. will veto it. Which means this annual exercise is a way for the GOP to remind us who they really are.

But the GOP and their backers are a patient bunch. And in 2017…

Lunch for the rich v. lunch for the poor

Patricia lives in Seattle and has worked for Walmart for 11 years. Her pay is now up to $13.10 an hour. She works 34 hours a week with a schedule that is so flexible she can't get a second job. She is one of the many working poor, working yet qualifying for food stamps. Her wages plus food stamps and child support are more than her routine expenses of rent, utilities, basic health needs and such. But not by much, leaving just a few hundred dollars to pay for food, doctor visits (she can't afford to properly manage her diabetes), school fees for her daughter, and debts from a recent hospital stay.

Wages are so skimpy at Walmart that higher wage employees -- those earning $12 an hour or more -- were asked to bring in canned goods to donate to those less fortunate -- fellow employees earning $8 an hour.

As desperate as Patricia's condition is, Congress, through the "sequester" last January cut $5 billion from food stamps. The debate this fall is whether to cut food stamps by another $4 billion (the Senate version of the Farm Bill) or $40 billion (the House version).

Terrence Heath reviews the benefits of food stamps. Food insecurity and poverty leads to health problems and obesity because the poor have worse choices for healthy food. Healthy and well-fed children learn more and are better able to stay out of poverty as adults. Food stamps are great at economic stimulus.

A better way to reduce the deficit by $4 billion: cancel the tax write-off for business entertainment expenses. Heath notes the richer one is the more that exemption is used. And a tax deduction for lunch means taxpayers are paying for that lunch. So. Stark choice: $4 billion of our money to pay for lunch for rich executives or $4 billion to pay for lunch for needy kids. Actually, it should be an easy choice.

Heath quotes Joseph Stiglitz:

Small, powerful interests [rent-seekers] — in this case, wealthy commercial farmers — help create market-skewing public policies that benefit only themselves, appropriating a larger slice of the nation’s economic pie. Their larger slice means everyone else gets a smaller one — the pie doesn’t get any bigger — though the rent-seekers are usually adept at taking little enough from individual Americans that they are hardly aware of the loss. While the money that they’ve picked from each individual American’s pocket is small, the aggregate is huge for the rent-seeker.

This proposed $40 billion cut in food stamps is just a nastier version of this effort.

Rent-seeking -- skewing policies in your favor -- isn't done just over food. Newsweek reports on how common it is for companies to soak us for a few more pennies. There are now small fees to prepare your monthly bill. There are regulatory fees because the company hired lobbyists to shape regulations in their favor and need to recoup the cost of the lobbyists. There are fees a corporation pays to the federal agency that regulates them but when the cost is passed to the customer it is just a few cents more. Or, perhaps, the fee to gov't used to be paid, but the item on your bill remains.

This may add up to a few cents per transaction per month, but for the corporation it quickly adds up to billions of dollars.

Marriage is cool again

Gays wanting to destroy straight marriage? Hardly. Lisa Mundy in the Atlantic (as summarized in Slate) says the opposite is happening. First, gay marriage is making straight marriage cool again. Second, without the hang-ups of gender roles the couple decides for themselves who does what, making the household more efficient and happier.

There is one little surprise. Gay dads are slightly more likely than straight couples to have a full time stay-at-home parent. It makes for a less stressful household.



Many people in Oklahoma are quite thankful of the National Weather Service these days. In some cases residents were given over 15 minutes of warning before tornados struck. Alas, with this spring's hefty federal budget cuts the NWS took a hit like all other agencies. That means: Advances in forecasting technology might not get implemented. There will be fewer employees to make sense of the new technology. Those existing employees will be a bit more frazzled and thus less accurate. So as tornados are being seen more frequently and more likely outside of "Tornado Alley" the amount of warning before one hits will go down.



Pew Research Global Attitudes Project asked the citizens of 39 countries whether society should accept homosexuality. Some of the things they found:

* The more affluent the country the more likely homosexuals are accepted. This refers to broad acceptance in USA, Canada, and Western Europe.

* The more religious a country is, the less likely homosexuals are accepted. There are a few notable outliers in this trend -- China and Russia aren't very religious but still see us as unacceptable and Philippines is religious and approves of us.

* There is strong rejection in the Middle East (except Israel, which is close to evenly divided) and in Africa. Even South Africa, which permits gay marriage in its constitution disapproves of us about 2 to 1.

* When there is a difference between the views of women and men, women are more accepting of us.

* The generation split in approval we see here in America also shows up in most other countries.

So much for the second term agenda

Yeah, a decent move that Obama has decided to give back 5% of his salary. The symbolism is nice. But a lot of people are quite unimpressed. His 5% is about half their salary. It would look -- and be -- a whole lot better if he fixed the budgetary mess.

As for that fixing… Terrence Heath sees that Obama still hasn't figured out who he's dealing with. The GOP has refused to negotiate (and are doing all they can to make Obama out to be the reason). That means Obama has recently signed a budget bill keeping all those budget cuts in place until the 2014 budget goes into effect (or at least is supposed to) next October. These budget cuts are the ones Obama described as "dumb."

Obama's inability to accurately assess the GOP, says Heath, will doom his second term agenda. This is not a "no-win" situation. It is a huge win for the GOP who are getting what they want even though Americans don't want that and didn't vote for it. They're winning in spite of losses at the ballot box and in the polls.

Stock loopholes v. modern schools

There are reports in the news about the Senate finally passing a budget after four years. I'm puzzled that many of these reports add that budgets are merely symbolic. All budgets? Only this one? Because the House won't pass it?

A link somewhere led me to the budget proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The site has the names of Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer on it so I assume this caucus is in the House. Yeah, I know it has little chance of going anywhere, but I like its features.

No more tax cuts for the rich. Instead, let's choose investment, especially in infrastructure. This budget will create 7 million jobs and reduce unemployment to 5%. In addition it will reduce the deficit by $4.4 trillion by closing loopholes and "asking the wealthy to pay a fair share."

The page offers a good comparison chart. Would you rather spend $112 billion on fossil fuel handouts or repair roads and bridges, with corresponding job gains? Perhaps spend $70 billion on corporate meals and entertainment or a three-year tax credit for working families? How about $25 billion on stock option loopholes or to modernize 35,000 public schools?

My choice is easy.

Tangible government

Here's a 6 1/2 minute video showing the current wealth inequality in America. It is much worse than most Americans think it is. It has a pretty good way of demonstrating the 1%.



Back in 2011 Jerry Brown, Governor of Calif, saw the state was going broke and enacted huge budget cuts. He was then able to lead a discussion about what gov't is all about. Citizens responded by resoundingly approving tax increases. David Sirota, writing in Salon, says the recent federal budget cuts offer Obama the same opportunity. The government soon won't be this abstract ideal that should be grown or shrunk at a politician's whim. It will become tangible -- long lines at airports, poorer local schools, perhaps food shortages due to absent inspectors, and lots of other inconveniences. Will Obama seize this opportunity?



Terrence Heath is keeping a list of the GOP members who are cheering for the just-enacted budget cuts. In case you want to know who to blame.

Cut federal spending in Texas

I had reported the House GOP had stripped lesbian (and other) protections out of the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act. Those protections are back in -- and the House passed it. Now on to Obama's desk.



The Washington Post reports that women now earn 80.9% of what men do. They also broke it down by type of job. In blue collar jobs, the pay tends to be comparable. That is in contrast to professional jobs where women do much worse. For example, women cafeteria workers are paid 97.9% as well as their male counterparts but women surgeons are only paid 67.6% of their male colleagues.



Newsweek has a report on an article by Daniele Fanelli in Nature about the lack of accuracy in scientific research. Why is so much research so wrong? The source of the mess is such things as sloppy research, misunderstood statistical methods, ignoring outlying data, a system that rewards statistical flukes and not findings that can be replicated, and journals that only want to publish positive results.

The solution is to expand academic misconduct from fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism to include "distorted reporting" -- failure to report all information that would allow someone else to reproduce the findings.



Peter Beinart, also in Newsweek pokes at the question: How much power should a president have? Depends on who you ask and the party affiliation of the guy in office. When Bush II was in power Democrats decried the "Imperial Presidency." Now that Obama is in office, Democrats like a strong president.



Paul Begala's turn in Newsweek. He lists why the budget cuts slated for tomorrow are entirely the fault of the GOP. Then he takes it one step further. Want to shut down the government, as Ted Cruz of Texas is willing to do? Let's start by shutting down federal spending in Texas, which is 32% of the state's budget. Why not move gigantic Fort Hood to a state that would appreciate it, such as Harry Reid's Nevada? Perhaps we should move the huge FAA center from Oklahoma to, say, San Francisco?

How about we enforce the budget cuts only for those states that refuse to support the taxes that pay for the spending they want in their own state?

Artificial crisis

Newsweek has now gone completely digital. I'm getting used to reading it on my computer and wondering if I should spend $70 on an in-house wi-fi for my netbook or $200 on a color nook or kindle so I can read at the kitchen table. The articles appear in my browser in its own display format with a table of contents and individual "pages" that require scrolling because they don't quite fit. I'm not sure what to make of the "Sign In" button that doesn't give any error message when I supply name and password, but also doesn't disappear or change to a "Welcome" message. Am I getting the extra subscriber content or not?

I'm still reading the first digital issue (dated Jan. 4), though the second is now available. Somehow I didn't get the notice of the first one and lost the link to the subscription page.

I'm not sure pages within the display can be linked by outsiders, so I tracked down the article through the public site.

David Frum, conservative commentator, looks at the recent fiscal bluff deal. Part of this comes from the (conservative? banking?) belief that some day the people who hold all those trillions of USA debt will suddenly realize it will never be paid off. We will reach a tipping point and the whole thing, economy and all, will crash. But this crisis keeps failing to happen. So Congress created an artificial crisis to impose the shock the markets refused to deliver.

But this artificial crisis and its artificial resolution (or delay) did nothing for America's real problems.

* Jobs and economic growth: The crisis was created under the assumption that the debt was America's most urgent problem. Try telling that to the millions who are un- and under-employed.

* Overspending (or federal deficit): Better to describe this as a health care spending problem because it is the amount going up most quickly. America pays much more per person on health care than other developed countries and buys too much of what isn't necessary. Capping spending won't change that problem.

* Low tax revenue: Squeezing more tax money out of the rich, Frum says, isn't going to close the deficit (I don't have any data to confirm or refute that). We need other streams of input: energy tax, carbon tax, or national sales tax.