Hurricane Trump claims full of Trump alternative facts…Our hearts & prayers now go out to the residents in the Carolinas, now getting pummeled with incredible amounts of rain. The hurricane weakened before hitting land, but with the storm moving so slowly, the rain amounts are being measured in feet. While assuring us the feds are prepared for this storm, the bluster coming from hurricane Trump was gushing over the government response under his leadership to the major hurricane that made a direct hit on Puerto Rico last year, saying it was one of the best jobs ever done. That 3000 lives were lost must have been immaterial to him, which most of those lives lost came in the aftermath to the hurricane itself, so a more adequate & timely response would have saved many lives! Perhaps switching funds from FEMA to ICE was partly to blame along with the population of Puerto Rico being the wrong ethic group in the eyes of Trump & his base: jeffrey-toobin-trump-
So as for hurricane Trump & his braggadocious bloviations how successful the federal response was last year, I know what the irate reaction would be from us Cleveland Browns fans if our head coach tried to tell us his coaching job last year was one of the best jobs ever done. My son got a new cat at the start of this year he named Owen in honor of the Browns’ 2017 season, which stands for 0-16. That tragic football season we can take solace in the fact no lives were lost, but just try telling the families of those 3000 victims in Puerto Rico what a great job Trump did. How ignorant & callous does someone have to be to have blood on his hands & then boast about it? After hurricane Trump got blowback for taking credit on the botched response causing so many preventable deaths, yesterday the prez then did what he always does, he lied (in a tweet denying the facts about the 3000 deaths). As the Puerto Rican governor just pointed out, Hurricane Maria became the worst natural disaster for our country in modern history.
The fallout from Hurricane Maria (hear our song below) is Trump’s Katrina only far worse. Much like someday Mueller is likely to tell us about Trump’s Watergate which will also turn out far worse. The newsfeeds went crazy the past couple days over Trump’s self-congratulatory tone & denials over the Puerto Rico tragedy. The only excerpts I’ve posted here are from Rubin, since to limit the number of outbound links we’ve listed a substantial number of article titles & the news sources they came from, which you could peruse the titles & do a search for any you’d like to read. As Americans we should take the time to understand the train wreck we now have going on inside the White House, being fully aware of our leader’s lack of character, lack of empathy, narcissism & dishonesty. Hurricane Trump is full of hot air! This is part of Rubin’s article from what-we-learn-when-trump-
To put it mildly, this is bonkers. There is no plot. Democrats didn’t rig the studies. There is no basis for saying that they did. Democrats quickly denounced his outburst as rubbish, but so far Republicans are, as they are wont to do, hiding under their desks. When Trump makes palpably false statements, all the insider accounts — Michael Wolff’s book, Bob Woodward’s book, the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times — gain credibility. In fact, when insiders use sweeping generalities (“impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,” the anonymous insider wrote to describe Trump’s governing style), they fail to convey the depth of Trump’s capacity for self-delusion and his inability to recognize how crazy he sounds to others. (A paranoid but reality-based individual might think the death toll numbers were cooked, but he would recognize that he’d sound like a lunatic if he said so.) Trump’s outburst should remind us of several troubling facts. First, whether he is lying (or is simply a victim of his own self-delusion that he is incapable of error) is beside the point. He’s not functioning as a president or any other officeholder should. He cannot comprehend facts, process them and take appropriate action. He is, in a word, non-functional.
Tons of articles about Trump’s Puerto Rico comments
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Trump policies helping middle class?
I can’t say Trump’s economic policies are a total bust, since there are a few select areas I actually agree with him. Mostly I think his policies are inadequate & misguided. Only time will tell if increased capital investments sparked by the tax cuts can ultimately boost productivity & wages, which we’re seeing some limited signs of that happening, but don’t hold your breath thinking it’s going to make a major difference. And if this slight uptick we’ve seen in wage growth can be sustained or even increased, it’s tough to say whether that could mostly be attributed to the tax cuts or a naturally-occurring byproduct of finally hitting full employment. But don’t be taken in by the rosier numbers, as economic stats are much better than the reality on the ground, with the income boosts skewed toward the top helping mask the underlying struggles still experienced by many if not most in the working class.
There’s been too much of a fundamental change in how our system is working for the working class, where the pendulum has been swinging against them for decades & was only accelerated by the Great Recession. In our modern-day capitalist system, the common belief & unwritten contract that hard work will get a person ahead is being trampled on. Wealth has been growing geometrically in favor of investors, which half of Americans won’t/can’t avail themselves of the stock market: nearly-half-america-
The popularity of Trump & Bernie in the last election was a call to scrap the old system & try something new, as voters were (& still are) willing to take the risk anything could be an improvement over the old order. Let’s face it, both political parties are doing a miserable job coming up with viable ideas for the transformational restructuring that’s needed to restore dignity, respect & a livable wage to laborers, so they can once again enjoy their fair share of economic growth. In these excerpts from the-recovery-threw-the-
The most profound of these is that the uneven nature of the recovery compounded a long-term imbalance in the accumulation of wealth. As a consequence, what it means to be secure has changed. Wealth, real wealth, now comes from investment portfolios, not salaries. Fortunes are made through an initial public offering, a grant of stock options, a buyout or another form of what high-net-worth individuals call a liquidity event.
Data from the Federal Reserve show that over the last decade and a half, the proportion of family income from wages has dropped from nearly 70 percent to just under 61 percent. It’s an extraordinary shift, driven largely by the investment profits of the very wealthy. In short, the people who possess tradable assets, especially stocks, have enjoyed a recovery that Americans dependent on savings or income from their weekly paycheck have yet to see. Ten years after the financial crisis, getting ahead by going to work every day seems quaint, akin to using the phone book to find a number or renting a video at Blockbuster. The financial crisis didn’t just kill the dream of getting rich from your day job. It also put an end to a fundamental belief of the middle class: that owning a home was always a good idea because prices moved in only one direction — up. The bubble, while it lasted, gave millions in the middle class a sense of validation of their financial acumen, and made them feel as if they had done the Right Thing.
In theory, if you lost your job, or suffered some other kind of financial setback, you could always sell into a real estate market that was forever rising. Ever-higher home prices became a steam valve, and the “greater fool” theory substituted for any conventional measure of value. The kindling for the fire that consumed Wall Street and nearly the entire economy was mortgages that should never have been taken out in the first place. Homeowners figured the more house the better, whether or not their income could support the monthly payment, while greedy banks and middlemen were all too happy to encourage them. When the bubble burst, the bedrock investment for many families was wiped out by a combination of falling home values and too much debt. A decade after this debacle, the typical middle-class family’s net worth is still more than $40,000 below where it was in 2007, according to the Federal Reserve. The damage done to the middle-class psyche is impossible to price, of course, but no one doubts that it was vast.
In 2016, net worth among white middle-income families was 19 percent below 2007 levels, adjusted for inflation. But among blacks, it was down 40 percent, and Hispanics saw a drop of 46 percent. For many, old-fashioned hard work has simply not been a viable path out of this hole. After unemployment peaked in the fall of 2009, it took years for joblessness to return to pre-recession levels. Slack in the labor market left the employed and unemployed alike with little leverage to demand raises, even as corporate profits surged. Maybe it was inevitable that when half the population watches its wages stagnate while the other half gets rich in the market, the result is President Donald Trump and Brexit. “It peeled away the facade and revealed an anger that had been building for decades,” said Ms. Swonk, who is chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. “The crisis was horrific, but its legacy pushed us over the edge in terms of the discontent.”
It also made inequality and the One Percent an urgent topic, and made unlikely celebrities of wonky intellectuals such as the economist Thomas Piketty. His best seller, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” published in 2013, was 816 data-laden pages that laid out a grim diagnosis. Mr. Piketty argued that the decades after World War II, when the divisions between the classes narrowed and opportunities to move up the economic ladder expanded — that is, when the middle class as we knew it was formed — may actually have been an aberration. Society, Mr. Piketty wrote, risks a return to the historical norm of a yawning gap between rich and poor. Whether or not he is right, the concentration of wealth that is a legacy of the financial crisis will make itself felt far into the future. Younger Americans, in particular, will be marked by the experience of 2008 much as the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression haunted the generations who lived through it in the last century. Not only were they unable to accumulate assets in the lean years of the early recovery, but they also missed out on the recent stock market rally that benefited their older and richer peers. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that while all birth cohorts lost wealth during the Great Recession, Americans born in the 1980s were at the “greatest risk for becoming a lost generation for wealth accumulation.”
For those fortunate enough to still possess wealth after the crisis, the future looks very different. With the security provided by assets, rather than just income, they and especially their children are on a glide path for a gilded financial future. “Over and over, you see that family wealth is an important determinant of opportunity for the next generation, over and above income,” said Fabian T. Pfeffer, a sociologist at the University of Michigan. “Wealth serves as a private safety net that allows you to behave differently and plan differently.” A wealthy person who loses a job can afford to be more choosy and wait for an opportunity suited to his or her skills and experience. The risk of going to an expensive college and taking on debt is lower when there is parental wealth to fall back on. Timothy Smeeding, who teaches public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, put it more bluntly. “You can see dynasties starting to form,” he said. Ten years have passed since the trauma of 2008, the nerves are still raw, and the pain still has a way of flaring up.
Workers without the prerequisite education or skills being robbed
In an article that further explores that same basic theme of workers being shortchanged, these thoughts in the next article help shatter the age-old perceptions that here in America, if you work hard you’ll get ahead. Those who adhere to such a philosophy must still be living in a dreamland they recollect from over a half-century ago. That work hard & get paid well connection needs to be restored. Now I’m all for providing incentives for work, & even in many cases having work requirements to qualify for certain government benefit programs, but we must view this through a big-picture lens. The one overriding issue we need to fix in order to have a strong economy for everyone, is finding a multifaceted approach where even those without a certain education or skill level, are still able to find more productive jobs that pay better than the mere morsels millions of workers are making now. Read these pertinent disclosures in excerpts from americans-jobs-poverty-
These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on. In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate. The decline of unions is a big reason. During the 20th century, inequality in America decreased when unionization increased, but economic transformations and political attacks have crippled organized labor, emboldening corporate interests and disempowering the rank and file. This imbalanced economy explains why America’s poverty rate has remained consistent over the past several decades, even as per capita welfare spending has increased. It’s not that safety-net programs don’t help; on the contrary, they lift millions of families above the poverty line each year. But one of the most effective antipoverty solutions is a decent-paying job, and those have become scarce for people like Vanessa. Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines a “working poor” person as someone below the poverty line who spent at least half the year either working or looking for employment. In 2016, there were roughly 7.6 million Americans who fell into this category. Most working poor people are over 35, while fewer than five in 100 are between the ages of 16 and 19. In other words, the working poor are not primarily teenagers bagging groceries or scooping ice cream in paper hats. They are adults — and often parents — wiping down hotel showers and toilets, taking food orders and bussing tables, eviscerating chickens at meat-processing plants, minding children at 24-hour day care centers, picking berries, emptying trash cans, stacking grocery shelves atmidnight, driving taxis and Ubers, answering customer-service hotlines, smoothing hot asphalt on freeways, teaching community-college students as adjunct professors and, yes, bagging groceries and scooping ice cream in paper hats.
America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”
In America, if you work hard, you will succeed. So those who do not succeed have not worked hard. It’s an idea found deep in the marrow of the nation. William Byrd, an 18th-century Virginia planter, wrote of poor men who were “intolerable lazy” and “Sloathful in everything but getting of Children.” Thomas Jefferson advocated confinement in poorhouses for vagabonds who “waste their time in idle and dissolute courses.” Leap into the 20th century, and there’s Barry Goldwater saying that Americans with little education exhibit “low intelligence or low ambition” and Ronald Reagan disparaging “welfare queens.” In 2004, Bill O’Reilly said of poor people: “You gotta look people in the eye and tell ’em they’re irresponsible and lazy,” and then continued, “Because that’s what poverty is, ladies and gentlemen.”
Americans often assume that the poor do not work. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, nearly two-thirds of respondents did not think most poor people held a steady job; in reality, that year a majority of nondisabled working-age adults were part of the labor force. Slightly over one-third of respondents in the survey believed that most welfare recipients would prefer to stay on welfare rather than earn a living. These sorts of assumptions about the poor are an American phenomenon. A 2013 study by the sociologist Ofer Sharone found that unemployed workers in the United States blame themselves, while unemployed workers in Israel blame the hiring system. When Americans see a homeless man cocooned in blankets, we often wonder how he failed. When the French see the same man, they wonder how the state failed him.
If you believe that people are poor because they are not working, then the solution is not to make work pay but to make the poor work — to force them to clock in somewhere, anywhere, and log as many hours as they can. But consider Vanessa. Her story is emblematic of a larger problem: the fact that millions of Americans work with little hope of finding security and comfort. In recent decades, America has witnessed the rise of bad jobs offering low pay, no benefits and little certainty. When it comes to poverty, a willingness to work is not the problem, and work itself is no longer the solution. And if we respect hard work, then we should reward it, instead of deploying this value to shame the poor and justify our unconscionable and growing inequality. “I’ve worked hard to get where I am,” you might say. Well, sure. But Vanessa has worked hard to get where she is, too.
Male & Female Workers both being robbed
Yes, gender pay inequality is a reality. But don’t think the men have it easy. See inside this link the-grim-truth-about-the-
Here’s another chart for you if you want a better sense of just how well the economy has been working for everyone over the past couple of decades:
Generally speaking, household income peaked in 1999 and has gone up and down since then. But for some, it’s been more down than up. Even after 110 months of expansion, the lowest earners make nearly 10 percent less than they did during the last economic peak. The top fifth, by contrast, earns 11 percent more than they did during the dotcom peak. It’s been a tough 20 years. The poor have done abysmally; the middle class has stagnated; and even the affluent have only improved their earnings moderately. Meanwhile, real GDP per capita has increased a very nice 23 percent since 1999. So if GDP is up 23 percent, but even the affluent are up only 11 percent, where has all the money gone? The Census Bureau doesn’t tell us, but I’m sure you’ve already guessed: to the really, really rich. It’s a good time in America to be part of the top 1 percent.
Why Trump is not getting credit for economy
Maybe this idea has merit in that it could incentivize businesses to raise wages or pay a price: make-businesses-rather-
By all indications, no one is more vexed by this question than Trump himself. “The Economy is soooo good, perhaps the best in our country’s history,” he tweeted at one point. “The GDP Rate (4.2 percent) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9 percent) for the first time in over 100 years!” at another. And also: “If the Democrats had won the Election in 2016, GDP, which was about 1 percent and going down, would have been minus 4 percent instead of up 4.2 percent. I opened up our beautiful economic engine with Regulation and Tax Cuts.” A glance at national economic data makes short work of most of Trump’s assertions here. The growth rate of GDP has actually outpaced the unemployment rate multiple times over the last few decades. And that growth was closer to 2 percent than 1 percent going into the 2016 election. As for the notion that a victory for Trump’s presidential opponent would’ve pitched the economy into recession? I’m not even sure how to respond to that. None of this is to deny the impressive topline numbers coming out of the economy right now. But the president’s transparently ignorant attempt to oversell the matter smacks of desperation.
The economy has been slowly crawling back towards health ever since the end of the Great Recession. If that trend under Trump is indistinguishable from the trend under Obama, it raises the question of what voters got by putting Trump in the White House. In fact, Obama’s average approval on the economy specifically was 48.4 percent when he left office — virtually indistinguishable from the 49 percent CNN found for Trump. They both got similar credit for similar results. There’s a lesson in their relatively low ratings, beyond the usual points about partisanship — namely that a humming national aggregate economy does not necessarily translate into improved livelihoods for most workers. Since the recession, nominal wage growth has been anemic compared to past business cycle peaks. Health-care and education costs keep rising while job benefits disappear. Most households are still in rather precarious financial straits. And there’s still a large population of “shadow” unemployed the official unemployment rate isn’t catching. No wonder neither Obama nor Trump don’t get ticker tape parades down Main Street. As for Trump’s lower overall rating specifically, there’s also his avalanche of scandals — from immigration cruelty to the Russia probe — that have nothing to do with economics. At best, Trump has managed to avoid throwing the U.S. economy off course, whether from the continued recovery or the relentless growth of inequality. It’s unsurprising that Americans aren’t swooning.
Priming the Pump comes at a Price
Whether the tax cuts eventually lead to a sustainable increase in GDP & wages remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain are the higher deficits, as reported in deficit-expected-one-
On Monday, Kevin Hassett, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, got up in front of the press and a delivered a presentation full of easily debunked charts massaged to make it seem as if the U.S. economy turned around more or less the moment Donald Trump was elected president. It was not very convincing. At Vox, however, Matt Yglesias has offered a much better case for why Trump deserves some credit for our recent run of economic growth. Namely: He’s gone on a stimulus binge. (I made a similar point at the end of my piece earlier this week). The president signed a massive tax cut into law, as well as a budget that increased spending by almost $300 billion over two years, which most economists believe is giving our GDP a nice pop. While Hassett’s “arguments about a Trump-induced boom are overstated,” Yglesias writes, “it’s a mistake for Trump’s critics to overcorrect by pretending his policies have nothing to do with the good news we’ve seen this year.” In fact, moderate Democrats, who spent the Obama years fretting about deficits at the expense of slow growth, could learn a few lessons. “Fiscal stimulus when the labor market is short of full employment works — just ask Donald Trump.”
This brings us to an odd problem, though. The White House economic team does not actually want to admit that it has juiced growth through fiscal stimulus, because most dedicated conservatives still insist that stimulus doesn’t really work (the president himself, whose talked about needing to “prime the pump” economically, is a different story). Instead, it wants to credit deregulation and the effects of tax cuts on business investment rather than their impact on household spending. That’s why, even if the administration deserves some acknowledgement for its actual economic policies, it’s still important to debunk its economic arguments. Trump’s deficits are not responsible for all of the growth we’re now experiencing; much of that is still just an extension of the gradual, steady recovery that began under President Obama. But the combo of spending and tax cuts has contributed to the pace of growth. Last quarter, the U.S. economy expanded at a 4.2 percent annualized rate. According to one measure produced by the Brookings Institution, lower taxes and higher spending by the federal government added a 0.51 percentage point boost to that figure (state and local spending tacked on another 0.17 points).
Directing revenues to those who least need it
Check inside this link: trumps-economic-boom-is-
“Critics have said” that the GOP plan would benefit wealthy people, in the same way critics have said that 2+2=4 and dropping a bowling ball on your foot could produce a sensation of pain. Why would Republican do this? They aren’t going to vote on it before the November elections, and if those elections turn out the way most everyone expects, it’ll be moot once Democrats take over the House. So there are a number of reasons they might be offering this plan now. One is to lay down a marker so that if they do hold Congress, they can return to it next year. Another is that despite what the polls show about the tax cut they already passed, they believe in the power of tax cuts to win public support sooner or later. But the most important reason is this: It’s what they really want.
Sometimes politicians take positions or actions they don’t really believe in, out of political expediency or because the alternative is worse. This is not one of those times. Republicans truly, deeply, sincerely, passionately believe that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations are simply good. As far as they’re concerned, the taxing of corporations and the wealthy is just morally wrong, and anything they can do to ease the cruel burden under which our noble job creators suffer is an act of the utmost humanitarianism. It’s why they always refer to tax cuts as “tax relief.” Once they come through with more cuts, the put-upon plutocrats will sigh, “Ahhhhh — what a relief!” and Republicans will know they have done what they came to Washington to do. Tax cuts for the wealthy are the one thing that for Republicans is absolutely non-negotiable. When they assume power, there are certainly other things they want to do, but cutting taxes on the wealthy is the one thing they absolutely, positively will do. Nothing is more important.
Another tax cut for the wealthy?
So what does the GOP want to do now as an encore to their budget-busting tax cuts? Why naturally, they want more tax cuts for the rich as seen in budget-hawk-warns-tax-cuts-
The challenge for much of the working class is the bills often surpass the incomes. To bring budgets more into balance, we should not only evaluate ways to increase wages, but also decrease expenses. Much like health care, America’s cost of attending college is at least double that of other countries. Even if we are starting to see more wage growth, the middle class still won’t get ahead till we can rein in the overpriced costs of college & health care, which are wreaking havoc on personal family budgets. Aggregate student debt has exploded past $1 trillion, putting millions in a deep hole just as they’re embarking on their careers: why-is-college-so-
Misc economic issues
Here’s a variety of interesting articles pulled from the newsfeeds. Growing income inequality has also emerged between cities: how-struggling-dayton-
Midterms look blue
With Trump’s sinking approval numbers, GOP chances of retaining the House & even the Senate are sinking too. Rubin comments on some interesting poll numbers seen here from trumps-decline-creates-a-
CNN (36 percent), Quinnipiac (38 percent), and Gallup (40 percent) all recently reported lousy approval ratings for President Trump. We don’t yet know if this is statistical “noise,” or whether the combination of Bob Woodward’s book, the anonymous New York Times op-ed, the Paul Manafort conviction and the Michael Cohen guilty plea have cumulatively taken a toll on Trump’s support. Trump’s personal qualities rate poorly as well — be it on “cares about people like you” (36 percent say yes, while 62 percent say no); can bring the kind of change we need (40 percent to 57 percent); is honest and trustworthy (32 percent to 65 percent); effectively manages government (41 percent to 56 percent); is uniting the country (30 percent to 67 percent); and is someone respondents are proud to have as president (32 percent to 64 percent). Compared to other politicians in Washington, voters overwhelmingly find him less honest, more corrupt, less intelligent and less in touch. The guy who was supposed to change D.C. turned out to be a change for the worse — a lot worse. As other polls have shown, Trump polls terribly among women voters (29 percent approval, 65 percent disapproval), college graduates (31 percent, 65 percent), white college graduates (34 percent, 63 percent) and independents (31 percent, 59 percent). It is only because of his strong support among Republicans (82 percent), and a small margin of support among white, non-college-educated voters (50 percent approval to 45 percent disapproval) that the bottom hasn’t dropped out of his overall approval numbers.
In keeping with my pledge to limit outbound links, here’s a listing of articles you could do a search for on the midterms, which Trump is dramatically dragging down the GOP. Most of these come from the Washington Post if you can access those articles:
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the-anti-trump-backlash-is-
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How do you solve a problem like Maria?
As for the response to Hurricane Maria under Trump’s leadership, it was an unmitigated disaster. It’s far too late to make excuses, since he had no idea how to handle Maria once it hit Puerto Rico. Hear the song in this clip from The Sound of Music:
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