U.S. Politics

[Rick Plant]

GOPer insists he made 'the conservative vote' by impeaching 'narcissist' Trump
https://www.rawstory.com/tom-rice-impeachment/

[Rick Plant]

The key difference is that President Biden's American Rescue Plan has generated a world-beating economic recovery for the US, allowing us to face this global challenge from a unique position of strength. And don't forget that every single Republican voted AGAINST The American Rescue Plan!   

[Rick Plant]

In April under President Biden, the United States had the largest monthly budget SURPLUS ever recorded since the Treasury Department began keeping records.

This follows Trump, who ran up the largest deficit in American history.

U.S. Treasury reports record budget surplus in April as revenues soar
The U.S. government posted a $308 billion surplus in April - a record for any month - as receipts nearly doubled from a year earlier amid a strong economic recovery
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-treasury-posts-record-budget-surplus-april-revenues-soar-2022-05-11/

[Rick Plant]

Trump Added More to the National Debt Than Obama and Bush

The fiscally irresponsible 45th president somehow bloated deficits more in four years than his predecessors did in eight.



Donald Trump's final tab is in. Legislation and executive actions signed by former President Trump added $7.8 trillion in ten-year budget deficits. When accounting for non-legislative budget savings, the total projected budget deficits expanded by $3.9 trillion over the decade.

These figures appear in my new report, “Trump’s Fiscal Legacy: A Comprehensive Overview of Spending, Taxes, and Deficits” which analyzes Congressional Budget Office data.

It begins with the ten-year (2017-2027) budget baseline that Trump inherited in January 2017, and then measures all subsequent changes to those ten-year estimates that occurred during his presidency. This includes aggregating every line-item of every bill he signed, as well as the deficit shifts driven by economic changes and the Congressional Budget Office’s technical re-estimates of existing tax-and-spending policies.

Rather than just look at the deficit totals, this accounting method separates out the inherited deficit baseline from the actual policies that a president can control.

When President Trump was inaugurated, the CBO projected $10 trillion in deficits over the 2017-2027 decade. By the time Trump left office, CBO’s estimate had grown to $13.9 trillion.

Reducing deficits from the $10 trillion projection should have been easy. During Trump’s presidency, faster-than-expected economic growth raised the ten-year revenue projections by $1.3 trillion, and lower-than-expected interest rates shaved the ten-year interest cost projections by $2.6 trillion. That’s $3.9 trillion in automatic budget savings without lifting a finger.

Instead of building on those savings, the president helped enact $7.8 trillion in new initiatives, flipping his total fiscal imprint to a $3.9 trillion net cost. The largest drivers were pandemic-relief legislation ($3.9 trillion), the 2017 tax cuts ($2 trillion), and legislation raising the discretionary spending caps ($1.6 trillion). Other costs included disaster aid and other discretionary spending ($493 billion), repeal of several Affordable Care Act-related taxes ($299 billion), and hundreds of small policies ($201 billion).

On the savings side, the president’s tariffs saved $367 billion, and the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate and independent payment review board saved $317 billion.

From a fiscal responsibility point of view, President Trump’s record compares poorly to his predecessors.

Using the same methodology, former President Barack Obama added $5 trillion in legislative costs over a decade, while former President George W. Bush added $6.9 trillion. Not only did Trump sign more ten-year debt into law than his immediate predecessors, he also did it in just a single four-year presidential term, compared to his predecessors’ eight years in the Oval Office.

Congressional Democrats have understandably decried the Trump deficits, yet they share much of the responsibility. The $3.9 trillion in pandemic spending was drafted and passed by a split-control Congress, with a higher percentage of Democratic votes than Republicans. The $1.6 trillion cost of raising the discretionary spending caps reflected a bipartisan compromise to hike both defense and social spending by roughly equal amounts. Disaster aid and the repeal of the ACA taxes were also bipartisan. In many instances, congressional Democrats had wanted to spend even more than the final legislation included.

Of course, Trump owns the 2017 tax cuts, tariffs, and ACA individual mandate reforms. Overall, the $7.8 trillion in new initiatives resulted from $1.3 trillion in purely Republican policies, and $6.5 trillion in (often overwhelmingly) bipartisan legislation.

Similar deficit bipartisanship also occurred under President Obama, when four-fifths of the $5 trillion legislative costs arose from bipartisan votes to cancel scheduled tax increases, and just one-fifth came from party-line Democratic legislation, such as the 2009 stimulus. Few actions unite Democrats and Republicans like adding red ink.

My purpose here is not to relitigate the necessity of the pandemic-response spending, or the wisdom of the tax cuts or discretionary spending hikes. Rather, it is to inform that debate by accounting for their steep costs.

However, there is no dispute that President Trump left the federal budget outlook in poor shape. He departed the White House with the largest peacetime budget deficit in American history, and a national debt exceeding 100 percent of the economy for the first time since World War II.

The Trump administration’s failure to address unsustainable Social Security and Medicare shortfalls leaves a CBO-projected 30-year baseline deficit of $112 trillion. And now, rising interest rates threaten to drive the cost of servicing these deficits to unsustainable levels. These past several years suggest that Washington is ill-prepared to address these ominous trends.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-added-more-to-the-national-debt-than-obama-and-bush

[Rick Plant]

The record job growth by President Biden is simply historic.

[Rick Plant]

Court documents shed light on secretive Christian sect tied to Amy Coney Barrett
https://www.rawstory.com/people-of-praise-2657462391/

[Rick Plant]

GOP committee has second 'embarrassing' ad in three weeks pulled off the air: report



In the space of three weeks, the National Republican Senatorial Committee overseen by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has watched two ads attacking Democrats that were blatantly misleading pulled off the air, according to a report from MSNBC.

According to Steve Benen of MSNBC, complaints about misrepresentation in attack ads are common, but what is less common is the offending ads being yanked from public view by local TV stations.

"It can be frustrating, but the vast majority of the time, stations don’t want to be in the business of deciding which commercials are so brazenly dishonest that they’re ultimately unsupportable," but that there are exceptions which Scott's committee found out the hard way in less than a month.

The first ad claimed that gas prices under Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) increased 23 percent during her prior tenure as governor -- which turned out to not only be false, but prices actually decreased according to the report the GOP cited.

The second ad went after North Carolina’s Cheri Beasley and accused her of setting free a "child p*rn offender,” when she served as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

As the New York Times reported, "On Friday, five TV stations in Raleigh and Charlotte said they would pull the ad or that they had 'paused' it pending an examination of its claims, according to emails from the stations to Courtney Weisman, a lawyer working for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which were reviewed by The New York Times. On Thursday, two Charlotte stations took the ad off the air."

According to Benen, who called the two ads an "embarrassing" black eye for Republicans, "For those keeping score, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has now had two television ads pulled over the course of three weeks. Election Day 2022 is still 22 weeks away, and I don’t imagine anyone would be too surprised if that total grows."

https://www.rawstory.com/gop-ads-misinformation/