Shaun Thompson and I had a rollicking chat today on Chicago’s The Answer AM 560, thrashing politicians across the board. No prisoners were taken. Shaun mentioned that politicians don’t bother reading the thick legislative bills they enact. I quoted Milton Berle’s great line – “You can send a man to Congress but you can’t make […]
New York Post, June 16, 2022 Debunking 10 of Joe Biden’s lies about the state of the US economy By James Bovard “Inflation is the bane of our existence,” President Biden lamented last week to talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Unfortunately, he was referring to inflation’s effect on presidential approval ratings, not the plight of […]
The post New York Post: Debunking 10 of Biden’s Lies appeared first on James Bovard.
This morning Carolyn Maloney,vice chair of the Joint Economic Committee released a report, Retirement Insecurity, meant to coincide with the 84th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act. The report shows that, while Social Security has been successful in preventing millions of Americans from falling into poverty, the two other pillars of America's retirement system are in crisis: personal savings and pensions.
Obama left Trump a powerful, healthy and expanding economy. In 2021 Trump— even without a recession— will be leaving Bernie or whoever wins the presidency, something very different. As it does every year, the CBO just released a report presenting its budget projections for the next 30 years reflecting current law.
The day after April Fool's Day, 2016, Trump was still playing us for fools. He was bellowing about how he and only he could get rid of the national debt. Instead his deficits have ballooned into the stratosphere, primarily because of tax cuts for corporations and for the super-wealthy and because of an attitude-- which he even expressed aloud-- akin to Louis XIV's Après moi, le déluge.
Have you known many people like Trump? Hustlers and grifters like him are a dime a dozen in New York. I once worked for one who was a firm believer that if you went around hissing your poison in enough peoples' ears, you would create a new reality of your own. Trump tried it Tuesday with his China trade-war bullshit (above)-- but all he created was the 4th biggest stock market collapse in U.S.
A Washington Post headline-- The Deficit Hawks Are Dead-- And Few In Washington Muster Any Outrage-- points a finger at Washington's most dedicated Ayn Rand disciple, Speaker Ryan and his GOP zombies "who had, wrote Paul Kane, railed against deficits in the first years of the Obama administration pushed through a massive tax cut despite CBO projections of a surge in federal borrowing." But what the Post isn't counting
I was speaking to a congressional campaign manager yesterday who had just finished a poll of which issues were resonating in his rural district. Some of the issues were what you'd expect: Medicare expansion and Social Security being the top two. But two I didn't see coming-- at least so high up on the list: the trade deficit and the budget deficit.
Goldman Sachs expressed its concern over the matter of the continuing huge budget overruns the United States Government amasses every year. CNBC reported that Jan Hatzius the chief economist at Goldman, predicted the annual budget deficit rising to over $2 TRILLION by 2018, an amount that is projected to be about seven percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for that year.
He further noted:
In early October one of the brightest economists in the country, Stephanie Kelton-- who had served as the Democrats’ chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee and as Bernie’s chief economics adviser during his presidential campaign-- penned an especially instructive OpEd for the NY Times, How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong. At the time, it helped open the eyes of dozens of members of Congress and congressional staffers.
