“I’m really looking forward to doing a lot of traveling in April when people realize the effect that this has … The vast majority will be [doing their taxes] on a single postcard.” Thunk. There’s no postcard. That was a prop. And the filing for the first year under the new tax code will be in 2019.
She also declared of Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who decided to vote for the final tax bill after voting no on the Senate version: “He really believes that tax relief, coupled with the administration’s deregulatory actions, will create the growth that will start to erode and ultimately eliminate the national debt that has been accrued over the last several decades.”
I’m confident Corker believes no such thing because that would be preposterous, unsupported by any reputable economic analysis. (Corker voted for the final bill upon concluding it was flawed but helpful in promoting economic growth.
.. If Trump cared to do her homework, she wouldn’t say objectively false things. She wouldn’t treat the pittance that Republicans gave to poor families as a grand accomplishment. Then again, perhaps she has learned at her father’s knee to be a flim-flam artist, a con woman and an entitled child of wealth who looks out for herself and only herself. Those who thought that she’d bring smarts, empathy and reason to the White House sure missed the mark.
Trent Franks, Accused of Offering $5 Million to Aide for Surrogacy, Resigns
Representative Trent Franks announced Friday that he would resign from Congress immediately after accusations emerged that he had offered $5 million to a female employee to be a surrogate mother for his children, and that she and another female employee worried that the lawmaker wanted to have sex as a means of impregnating them.
.. Mr. Franks’s net worth sits at nearly $30 million
.. Franks’s wealth derives primarily from stock in Trinity Petroleum, where he was chief executive
.. Mr. Franks and his wife have two children, twins born by a surrogate.
.. Mr. Franks was best known as one of the most socially conservative members of the House. In 2013, he came under harsh criticismfor remarking that “the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low”
.. He also founded the Arizona Family Research Institute, a nonprofit associated with Focus on the Family, a socially conservative religious organization.
Trump says he has nothing to fear from Flynn, then stokes new controversy with tweet
Trump’s lawyers have begged him not to tweet about Russia or the investigation, but the president said repeatedly Friday that he wanted to respond to the Flynn news, associates said.
Cobb has told others that he has been more successful than others at limiting Trump’s tweets because he talks to him frequently and reassures him
Meanwhile, an email written by a Flynn deputy that came to light Saturday suggests that many of Trump’s closest aides were informed that Flynn planned to discuss sanctions with the Russian ambassador before Flynn made a December phone call to Kislyak.
.. Burck said that Priebus “confronted General Flynn several times, including in front of others, on whether he had talked to Kislyak about sanctions and was consistently told he had not.”
.. Trump was in a buoyant mood as he crossed Manhattan on Saturday, bragging about his election win in Rust Belt states and the improving economy.
At several stops, he touted the Senate’s passage of the GOP tax bill and predicted that Democrats who voted against it would lose their next elections.
Trump’s stops included the palatial Upper East Side apartment of Steve Schwarzman, chairman of a global private-equity firm.
.. Trump also told the wealthy donors at the event that the legislation was for the middle class
An 11th-Hour Raid by the Wealthiest Baby Boomers
The baby boom is being evicted from the penthouse of American politics. And on the way out, it has decided to trash the place.
.. In that way, the bills would intensify the generational inequity in how Washington allocates resources between the country’s increasingly diverse youthful generations and its predominantly white older population, groups I’ve called “the brown and the gray.” At a moment when political influence is inexorably shifting to the brown, the tax bill represents an 11th hour raid by the wealthiest of the gray.
.. The baby-boom generation, which has voted reliably Republican in recent years, has been the largest generation of eligible voters since 1978. But in 2018, for the first time, slightly more Millennials than baby boomers will be eligible to vote
.. Higher turnout rates among baby boomers will preserve their advantage among actual voters for a while. But sometime around 2024, Millennials will likely surpass them.
.. While about 80 percent of the baby boom is white, over two-fifths of Millennials and nearly half of the post-Millennials are not.
.. Washington today is spending nearly the lowest amount ever recorded on the domestic discretionary programs that invest in the productivity of future generations, such as education and advanced scientific research.
.. One of 21st-century America’s central dynamics is that an increasingly non-white workforce will be funding Social Security and Medicare for a rapidly growing number of white seniors as the baby boomers retire.
.. Tellingly, though, the “Better Way” budget blueprint House Republicans released last year proposed delaying changes in Medicare until 2024, when almost all of the baby boom has already retired. That would leave younger generations, starting with Generation X, to bear most of any future cutbacks—even as they shoulder the costs for the boomers’ more generous retirement.
.. Young people will also pay the tax plans’ most direct cost: the interest on that $1.5 trillion in additional federal debt. More debt could benefit younger generations if it’s spent on investments in their futures. But this tax cut will bury younger generations in debt to fund the current consumption of their elders.
.. the irony is that older, white America needs more of younger, diverse America to ascend into the middle class so it can generate the tax revenue to support the baby boom’s retirement. Yet with these tax bills, the old are strapping a boulder onto the backs of the young as they attempt that climb.