Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin Risk Their Reputations

When Cohn joined the Trump administration, many corporate executives were relieved, seeing him as a steadying influence.

.. Now, unfortunately, both Cohn and Mnuchin are endangering their reputations in their attempts to sell a tax cut.

.. Within the administration, there are real differences among how top officials have behaved and how they are perceived. Several — Tom Price, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer and Rex Tillerson — have badly sullied their standing with virtually everyone outside the administration. After long careers, they have turned themselves into punch lines.

.. The clearest exception is Jim Mattis, the defense secretary. Mattis has done so partly by avoiding scandal and minimizing conflicts with Trump. But he has also been careful to set his own ethical boundaries. Can you recall a single time when Mattis has said something outright untrue? I can’t. That’s how he has retained his dignity in the eyes of so many people.

.. In the early stages of promoting Trump’s tax cut, they have made a series of statements that are blatantly false — not merely shadings of truth or questionable claims but outright up-is-down falsehoods mocked by various fact-checkers. The statements make the two look more like Trump press secretaries than serious business executives whom members of Congress can trust.

.. They fall into two main categories. The first is who benefits from the tax plan. “Wealthy Americans are not getting a tax cut,” Cohn said on “Good Morning America.” He was echoing a promise that Mnuchin had made before the inauguration: “Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions, so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.”

.. Want to guess how many families in New York State — population 20 million — are wealthy enough that they’re likely to pay any estate tax next year, according to an estimate based on I.R.S. data? Just 470. The number is so low in Montana, Vermont, West Virginia and four other states — likely fewer than 10 families in each — that the I.R.S. doesn’t provide details, to avoid privacy concerns.

.. Then there are the two men’s deficit claims. “This tax plan will cut down the deficits by a trillion dollars,” Mnuchin said. Cohn claimed that “we can pay for the entire tax cut through growth.”

.. The Harvard economist Greg Mankiw coined the phrase “charlatans and cranks” specifically to describe people who claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. And Mankiw is a conservative who’s worked for George W. Bush and Mitt Romney.

.. Neither one of them has yet turned 60 years old. These won’t be their last jobs.

Terrorism Financing: It’s Time to Take Care of Unfinished Business

The SAAR network is a web of over 100 purported charities, nonprofits, and financial firms, centered in northern Virginia, that were accused of laundering money for terrorism. The SAAR Foundation, the nucleus of the network, was set up in 1983 under the patronage of Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, a wealthy Saudi banking magnate who is strongly suspected of supporting al-Qaeda.

.. According to the federal affidavit filed by customs investigator David Kane, the SAAR network was funded with millions of dollars in Saudi cash and was then used to funnel money to terror organizations such as that of convicted terror financier Sami al-Arian, the North American representative of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

.. at least $26 million was routed to suspicious accounts in the Bahamas and the Isle of Man that may have been used to fund Hamas. In this way, wealthy Saudi backers of terrorism could use America’s own banking system to escape increasing financial scrutiny from the Saudi government.

.. One-time SAAR executive assistant Abdurahman Alamoudi (later convicted of a plot to assassinate Saudi crown prince Abdullah) boasted of his close ties to Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as to political fixers such as Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist.

.. In Virginia alone, SAAR-network companies have made over $265,000 in political donations, with special distinction going to Reston Investments ($96,550), Mar-Jac Investments ($64,950), and the think tank IIIT ($25,500).

.. the SAAR network bought influence with local Arab-American community groups, and through them gained access to vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine.

.. Now it seems that the SAAR network is interested in Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate for governor, recently received donations from at least two SAAR-network entities

G.O.P.’s $1.5 Trillion Tax Cut

Republicans claim that a $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years won’t further explode the deficit because it will pay for itself through increased economic growth.

.. The cumulative deficit

  • tripled under President Ronald Reagan and
  • doubled under George W. Bush,

while it grew more slowly under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, under whom some tax rates were increased.

.. And yet here they go again. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then either the Republican Party is insane or it believes that the American people are incurably gullible.

On Afghanistan, There’s No Way Out

When it comes to Afghanistan, we’ve tried everything. The lesson is: Nothing works.

.. We’ve tried “light footprint.”

.. We’ve tried big footprint.

.. We’ve tried nation building.

.. the United States had spent $104 billion on Afghan relief and reconstruction funds, most of it for security but also nearly $30 billion for “governance and development” and $7.5 billion on counternarcotics.

.. Result: As of 2015, more than three in five Afghans remained illiterate. Afghan security forces lost 4,000 members a month

.. The country ranks 169th out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, ahead of only Somalia, South Sudan, North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Libya. Opium

.. We’ve tried killing terrorists. Lots and lots of them. As many as 42,000 Taliban and other insurgents have been killed and another 19,000 wounded

.. Result: The Taliban’s numbers in 2005 were estimated at anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 fighters. Within a decade, those numbers had grown to an estimated 60,000 fighters.

.. We’ve tried carrots and sticks with Pakistan. In 2011, Washington gave $3.5 billion in aid to Islamabad.

.. American leverage with Pakistan has declined as Chinese investment in the country has surged, reaching $62 billion this year.

.. The group’s insistence that all foreign troops withdraw before it enters talks gives away its game, which isn’t to share power with the elected government, but to seize power from it.
.. What about two supposedly “untried” options: another surge, exceeding what Obama did in troop numbers but not limited by deadlines or restrictive rules of engagement; or, alternatively, a complete withdrawal of our troops?

But that’s been tried, too. Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s practiced a “bomb-the-stuff-out-of-them” approach to warfare, likely including the use of chemical weapons.

.. Between 1990 and 2000, tens of thousands of Afghans — as many as a million people, according to one estimate — died in three waves of civil war.

.. President Trump may think he’s trying something new with his Afghan policy. He isn’t. Obama killed a lot of terrorists. George W. Bush pursued what amounted to a “conditions-based” approach, without target dates for withdrawal. Both were often stern with Pakistan. Both conducted intensive policy reviews.

.. Even if we could kill every insurgent tomorrow, they would return, as long as they can draw on the religious fanaticism of the madrasas, the ethnic ambitions of the Pashtun, and the profits of the heroin trade.