Five months later, everything liberals said about the tax bill turned out to be true. Contrary to Republican claims, wage growth has been anemic. Instead of sharing the wealth with employees, companies have spent record amounts of money buying back their own stock. The tax cuts are creating larger deficits than Republicans predicted, and those deficits are now being cited as a pretext for cutting spending on the poor.
.. has signaled that he wants the summit meeting too much,” David Sanger reported in The New York Times. The U.S. government has even issued a commemorative coin about the summit featuring Trump and “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un face-to-face, signaling to the world that it’s now the American president who craves legitimation from the North Korean dictator.
.. Even a casual newspaper reader — which, of course, Trump is not — knows that when North Korea talks about “denuclearization,” it doesn’t mean unilaterally giving up all its nuclear weapons. A hastily arranged meeting between two bellicose egomaniacs, premised on a basic misunderstanding, is unlikely to resolve one of the world’s most intractable geopolitical conflicts; a flimsy agreement that roughly preserves the status quo seems like a best-case scenario.
.. We all want to be open-minded, but con men should never be given the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, wages are growing. But they should be growing faster.
hourly wage growth is stalled at a yearly rate of 2.5 percent. Now, inflation is running around 2 percent
.. Probably, worker bargaining power has just taken such a hit over the last few decades — trade deficits, deunionization, technology, austere (stingy) fiscal policy, and “secular stagnation” (persistently weak demand — that even at low unemployment, we’re not seeing the wage gains we should.
.. ’re going to need a lot more months of job gains like November to generate the high-pressure labor market that workers depend on if they are to claim anything like their fair share of the growth they’re helping to produce
Obama calls President Trump’s decision to end DACA ‘wrong,’ ‘self-defeating’ and ‘cruel’
“Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us. … Kicking them out won’t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone’s taxes, or raise anybody’s wages.”
.. “[For] years while I was president, I asked Congress to send me such a bill. That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country,” Obama said in his statement. “We did so based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm. Deportations of criminals went up.
.. “To target these young people is wrong — because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating — because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. What if our kid’s science teacher, or our friendly neighbor turns out to be a ‘dreamer?’ Where are we supposed to send her? To a country she doesn’t know or remember, with a language she may not even speak?”
Minnesota Federal Reserve President: If You Aren’t Raising Wages, Don’t Complain About Labor Shortages
“Are any of you planning to raise wages in the next year or two?” he asked. “Or are you just complaining that you can’t find workers and you’re not going to raise wages? I can tell you something. If you look at North Dakota in the oil boom, if you raise wages, people respond, and you can find workers.”
“If you aren’t raising wages, it just sounds like whining,” he concluded.