Over the past couple of months Republicans have passed or proposed three big budget initiatives.
- First, they enacted a springtime-for-plutocrats tax cut that will shower huge benefits on the wealthy while offering a few crumbs for ordinary families — crumbs that will be snatched away after a few years, so that it ends up becoming a middle-class tax hike.
- Then they signed on to a what-me-worry budget deal that will blow up the budget deficit to levels never before seen except during wars or severe recessions.
- Finally, the Trump administration released a surpassingly vicious budget proposal that would punish not just the vulnerable but also most working families.
.. Washington is full of professional centrists, whose public personas are built around a carefully cultivated image of standing above the partisan fray, which means that they can’t admit that while there are dishonest politicians everywhere, one party basically lies about everything.
News organizations are intimidated by accusations of liberal bias, which means that they try desperately to show “balance” by blaming both parties equally for all problems.
Select the Worst Trump Minion
Just this week we had a top aide with multiple domestic abuse allegations, plus a chief of staff who never seemed to bother to pursue the matter. And a communications director — third one in a little over a year — who helped write the statement defending said aide, whom she happened to also be dating.
.. Tenure is irrelevant. Kirstjen Nielsen has only been secretary of homeland security for a couple of months, but we already know her as the woman who tried to support her boss by claiming she wasn’t sure whether Norway was a predominately white country.
.. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar .. Azar’s mission is supposed to be bringing down prescription prices, and his main qualification is having run the American division of a drug company during the five years when the price of its insulin rose from $122 to $274 a vial.
.. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos .. “The bureaucracy is much more formidable and difficult than I had anticipated,” she complained.
.. Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency
.. “Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100? … That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”
.. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is busy pushing the federal death penalty and trying to prosecute the marijuana industry in states where grass is legal.
.. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer is trying to dismember the World Trade Organization. Smaller minds are fascinated by reports that Lighthizer has a life-size portrait of himself hanging on the wall at home.
.. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is in charge of the upcoming census, which is underfunded, and rumors are that the chief candidate for deputy director is a highly partisan Texas professor whose book on reapportionment is subtitled “Why Competitive Elections Are Bad for America.”
..Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin .. The new Trump nominee to lead the I.R.S. is a tax lawyer who specializes in defending wealthy clients against — yes! — the I.R.S. To cheer things up, we can go back to recalling the time Mnuchin posed with his wife, dressed in black opera gloves and a come-hither hairdo, admiring his signature on bills at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is well known for his enthusiasm for fossil fuel drilling. But even some of his fans were a little perplexed when he announced a policy for expanding offshore oil and gas drilling, and then abruptly added that there would be an exception for … Florida. Think it was all about Mar-a-Lago?
.. taxpayers paid $6,000 to helicopter Zinke to a critical appointment going horseback riding with Mike Pence.
Fraudulence of the Fiscal Hawks
In 2011, House Republicans, led by Paul Ryan, issued a report full of dire warnings about the dangers of budget deficits.
.. Citing the horrors of big deficits, Republicans refused to raise the federal debt ceiling
.. How big were these horrifying deficits? In the 2012 fiscal year the federal deficit was $1.09 trillion. Much of this deficit, however, was a direct result of a depressed economy
.. If anything, we should be using this time of relatively full employment to pay down debt, or at least reduce it relative to G.D.P.
.. They are providing more stimulus to an economy with 4 percent unemployment than they were willing to allow an economy with 8 percent unemployment.
.. Republicans weren’t just vehemently opposed to fiscal stimulus; they were also vehemently opposed to monetary stimulus. Basically, they were against anything that might help the economy on President Obama’s watch... imposing austerity in a depressed economy, then running up the deficit when we’re already near full employment
Average America vs the One Percent
Americans have increased productivity by 80 percent since 1979; unfortunately, their income hasn’t risen accordingly, if at all.
.. all Americans pay an average of a third of their incomes for housing. The second highest expense of top earners in America is transportation; the rich spend about 17 percent of their income traveling for business and pleasure. On the other hand, the lower classes spend about 17 percent of their income on feeding their families... Rich people are also more likely to pay for private education for their children. The majority of the 1 percent have attended college, and it’s only natural that they want the same for their kids. Higher-income families are able to pay for education expenses, whereas poor kids must rely on academics and hope to earn a scholarship or other financial aid. This means that while it’s not impossible for a child from a poor family to attend Harvard, it will be substantially more difficult for him to get accepted than if his family had better connections and more money... While money often works its way to the upper classes, it very rarely flows back the other way... If the average person’s wages had kept pace with the economy since the 70s, most people would be making $92,000 per year... Inside of the 1 percent, however, the people who make the most money actually pay the least taxes... the top 400 highest earners in the country pay only 18 percent personal income tax... People in the 15 percent tax bracket pay roughly 30 percent of the total tax gathered in the country, and their income tax accounts for more revenue for the government than any other bracket... 57 members of Congress, or roughly 11 percent, are members of the financial elite. Overall, 250 members of Congress are millionaires, and their median net worth accounts for roughly $891,000, or nine times that of the average American.