Monday, June 30, 2025
Phony Republican current policy baseline says Trump tax cuts will cost $0 going forward, Congressional Budget Office says $3.5 trillion
Graham claims sole authority to decide if GOP megabill complies with budget laws
... Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Budget Committee, immediately appealed the ruling of the chair.
He pointed to a letter he received from Congressional Budget Office Director Phillip Swagel asserting that the Finance portion of the bill would increase federal deficit by $3.5 trillion between 2025 and 2034 and increase deficits beyond the 10-year budget window, which ends in 2034.
“The ability of the chair to create a phony baseline has never been used in reconciliation, not ever,” Merkley argued.
“This breaks a 51-year tradition of the Senate for honest numbers,” he declared.
Merkley’s appeal of the chair’s ruling empowering Graham failed by a party-line vote. Senators rejected it by a vote of 53 to 47. ...
Every Republican in the U.S. Senate drank the koolaid this morning and voted for the current policy baseline, including Thom Tillis, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, you name 'em, they voted for it
I'm speechless.
The roll call vote is here.
Using their magic eraser, the Trump tax cuts will cost $0 going forward.
Words have a meaning, and Real Clear Politics wants you to think Donald Trump intimidated Senator Thom Tillis to disappear
Thom Tillis announces retirement from Senate after clash with Trump
The truth: ... The North Carolina Republican announced on Sunday that he would not seek reelection in the 2026 cycle. ...
Thom is still there, hopefully to vote Nay again today on Trump's big, ugly charade of a reconciliation bill, and will be there for eighteen more months, and there's not a damn thing Trump can do about it.
He will be a potent second potential Nay vote in the US Senate on everything with Rand Paul.
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Republicans are doing an end-run around the Senate parliamentarian to make novel use of the current policy baseline instead of current law, asserting a Democrat precedent from 2022
Senate GOP declines to meet with parliamentarian on whether Trump tax cuts add to deficit
... Republicans, however, say that the parliamentarian doesn’t have a role in judging how much the tax portion of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would add to the deficit within the bill’s 10-year budget window or whether it would add to deficits beyond 2034.
They argue that Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has authority under Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act “to determine baseline numbers of spending and revenue.”
Ryan Wrasse, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), pointed to a Budget Committee report published when Democrats were in the majority in 2022 stating that the Budget Committee, through its chair, makes the call on questions of numbers, not the parliamentarian.
Graham received a letter from Swagel [CBO Director] on Saturday stating that the Finance Committee’s tax text does not exceed its reconciliation instructions or add to deficits after 2034 when scored on the “current-policy” baseline that Graham wants the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and CBO to use.
Taylor Reidy, a spokesperson for the Budget panel, asserted on the social platform X that “there is no need to have a parliamentarian meeting with respect to current policy baseline because Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act gives Sen. Graham — as Chairman of the Budget Committee — the authority to set the baseline.” ...
All you really need to know is that whatever these yokels end up passing, the country will be $50-$60 trillion in debt ten years from now because they spend too much and tax too little.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis from North Carolina will not run again in 2026 after voting to stop Trump's reconciliation bill
Tillis won’t run for reelection in North Carolina
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) on Sunday announced he will not seek reelection to the Senate next year, firing a political shock wave into the midterm cycle after he said he would oppose President Trump’s mammoth tax package. ...
Good morning to all, except to those who cannot spell yesses and noes
Alexander Bolton at The Hill here:
... The vote to proceed to the sprawling budget reconciliation package remained open on the Senate floor for more than three and a half hours, stuck for a long time at 47 yes’s and 50 no’s. ...
Trump & Co. played up Fordow from the beginning because they knew they couldn't do anything about Isfahan
... The comment by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, which was described by three people who heard his remarks and a fourth who was briefed on them, is the first known explanation given for why the US military did not use the Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb against the Isfahan site in central Iran. US officials believe Isfahan’s underground structures house nearly 60% of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, which Iran would need in order to ever produce a nuclear weapon. ... Isfahan was only struck by Tomahawk missiles launched from a US submarine. ...
An early assessment produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency in the day after the US strikes said the attack did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program, including its enriched uranium, and likely only set the program back by months, CNN has reported. It also said Iran may have moved some of the enriched uranium out of the sites before they were attacked. ...
Caine and Hegseth on Thursday said the military operation against Fordow went exactly as planned but did not mention the impacts to Isfahan and Natanz.
The emphasis on Fordow from the beginning was intentional, because they knew they couldn't do anything about Isfahan.
You know, like "Look over there! A deer!"
Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin folds like a house of cards, switches his Nay vote to Yea to advance reconciliation bill to the Senate floor for debate
Trump megabill narrowly advances in Senate despite two GOP defections
Senate Republicans on Saturday narrowly voted to advance a sprawling 1,000-page bill to enact President Trump’s agenda, despite the opposition of two GOP lawmakers.
The vote was 51-49.
Two Republicans voted against advancing the package: Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who opposes a provision to raise the debt limit by $5 trillion and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who says the legislation would cost his state $38.9 trillion in federal Medicaid funding.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) changed his “no” vote to “aye,” and holdout Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) also voted yes to advance the bill.
The bill had suffered several significant setbacks in the days and hours before coming to the floor, at times appearing to be on shaky ground.
The vote itself was also full of drama. ...
Flashback to May 25 when Johnson said he had enough votes in the Senate to stop the bill:
GOP senator says resistance to Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' could stop it in the Senate
President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson are hopeful for minimal modifications in the Senate to the "One Big, Beautiful Bill" passed by the House last week, but one Republican senator said there's enough resistance to halt the bill unless there are significant changes.
"The first goal of our budget reconciliation process should be to reduce the deficit. This actually increases," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, urging deeper spending cuts than those in the bill to reset to a "reasonable, pre-pandemic level of spending."
"I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about spending reduction and reducing the deficit," Johnson said. ...
Didn't even have him!
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Trump administration fails to intimidate Canada, goes Galt and ends trade talks
... The first payments from Canada’s digital services tax, which was enacted
last year and applies retroactively to 2022, are set to be collected
Monday. The tax would hit both domestic and foreign tech companies,
including U.S. giants such as Amazon, Google and Meta.
Canadian officials said this month that they would not pause the digital services tax, despite ferocious opposition from the United States.
“Obviously, we think it’s patently unfair to do it retroactively,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said later Friday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.”
Bessent said the Trump administration was hoping that Carney’s government would “put a brake on” the tax “as a sign of goodwill.” ...
Trump's idea of good will is 50% tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, 25% tariffs on autos, an overall 10% tariff on most everything else, and a 25% "fentanyl" tariff.
Trump is the Uniparty, floats an Iran policy similar to Obama's
... The potential deal would mark a major reversal in policy for President
Trump, who pulled the U.S. out of the Obama administration’s nuclear
deal with Iran in 2018 arguing in part that the sanctions relief and
unfreezing of Iranian assets had provided a “lifeline of cash” to the Iranian regime to continue its malign activities. ...
Friday, June 27, 2025
The weekend help has arrived early at Drudge lol
Four trillion TRILLION dollars! Now that's a lot of money!
If anyone is stuck, it's Gen Xer Peter Thiel
... I’m always anti-boomer ...
In The New York Times, here.
Thursday, June 26, 2025
The consensus estimate for today's GDP report was indeed for -0.2, instead it surprised at -0.5
First-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth was revised lower Thursday in light of reduced consumer spending, surprising economists.
GDP contracted by 0.5 percent on an annualized basis, 0.3 percentage points lower than the last measurement from the Commerce Department.
Economists were expecting the number to stay the same at a 0.2 percent contraction. ...
More.
Average yields at Treasury Note auctions this week have been significantly lower than at the immediately preceding auctions, indicating there has been a flight to safety on souring economic growth expectations.
Trump may get his lower interest rates . . . the hard way, lol.
1Q2025 real GDP revised down 0.3 to -0.5 in third and final estimate on an increase in imports front-loaded into 1Q to avoid Trump's tariffs
Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 0.5 percent in the first quarter of 2025 (January, February, and March), according to the third estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2024, real GDP increased 2.4 percent.
The decrease in real GDP in the first quarter primarily reflected an increase in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, and a decrease in government spending. These movements were partly offset by increases in investment and consumer spending.
Real GDP was revised down 0.3 percentage point from the second estimate, primarily reflecting downward revisions to consumer spending and exports that were partly offset by a downward revision to imports. ...
More.
Sounds like Howard Lutnick gobbledygook at the end there. Paragraph two speaks of an increase in imports. Paragraph three of a downward revision to imports.
Which is it lol?
Nominal 1Q2025 GDP clocks in at $29.962 trillion in the third estimate. SPX was at 5612 on Mar 31, yielding a crazy high stock market valuation of 187.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which said Iran possessed 400kg of highly enriched uranium on June 12, says they'd have to go to the bomb sites to really know the extent of the damage caused by the U.S. attacks
Iran’s nuclear facilities “suffered enormous damage” from the U.S. airstrikes Saturday, but more extensive evaluation is needed, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Thursday.
“I think ‘annihilated’ is too much, but it has suffered enormous damage,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Rafael Grossi told French broadcaster RFI. “I know there’s a lot of debate about the degree of annihilation, total destruction, and so on, what I can tell you, and I think everyone agrees on this, is that very considerable damage has been done.”
“Obviously, you have to go to the site and that is not easy, there is debris and it is no longer an operational facility,” he added.
More.
Initial claims for unemployment in June 2025 were last higher in June 2023, but yikes continued claims were last higher in Dec 2021
4-week moving averages, initial claims monthly average, continued claims biweekly average:
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Federal Reserve floats proposal to ease bank capital requirements which were increased in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Fed Governors Kugler and Barr in opposition
... The Fed board put the proposal open for a 60-day public comment window.
In its draft form, the measure would call for reducing the top-tier capital big banks must hold by 1.4%, or some $13 billion, for holding companies. Subsidiaries would see a larger drop, of $210 billion, which would still be held by the parent bank. The standard applies the same rules to so-called globally systemic important banks as well as their subsidiaries.
The rule would lower capital requirements to range of 3.5% to 4.5% from the current 5%, with subsidiaries put in the same range from a previous level of 6%. ...
However, Governors Adriana Kugler and Michael Barr, the former vice chair of supervision, said they would oppose the move.
“Even if some further Treasury market intermediation were to occur in normal times, this proposal is unlikely to help in times of stress,” Barr said in a separate statement. “In short, firms will likely use the proposal to distribute capital to shareholders and engage in the highest return activities available to them, rather than to meaningfully increase Treasury intermediation.” ...
Methinks J. D. Vance doth protest too much about Jerome Powell
It backfired on Powell, though.
Yields climbed in response. 10Y went from 3.63 on Sep 16 to 4.37 by Nov 1. And core PCE inflation shot back up.
It's proof yet again that the Fed has next to no control over interest rates. It's one of the great myths of our time that it does, a myth Vance believes.
If Powell had cut and Kamala won, irrespective of what rates or inflation did, Vance might have an argument. He should quit complaining and take the win.
Meanwhile core PCE inflation was 2.66 in Sep 2024, same as it was in Mar 2025.
You'd think twice about trying that again, too, if you got burned like that, especially if you're being hectored by the tag-team wrestlers of the Oval Orifice.
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Food items making new all time high average prices in the United States in May 2025
All prices are FRED data from the St. Louis Fed in U.S. dollars.
Ground Chuck 6.018/lb
Coffee 7.931
White Sugar 1.054
Bananas 0.655
Potato Chips 6.731
Ice Cream 6.466/half gallon
100% Ground Beef 5.981/lb
All Uncooked Ground Beef 6.245
American Cheese 5.063
Beer 1.834/pint
Because the BBB is a GOP Christmas tree of policy-change goodies masquerading as a reconciliation bill
This was taken down pretty early this morning by the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics. I guess the bosses come in a little later than the help.
This is arguably one of the best discussions of what is really going on that you will find.
The estimate of the Senate Finance Committee’s tax provisions reflect
a cost of $441 billion over ten years, according to the Joint Committee
on Taxation’s estimate over the weekend.
How, you might ask, could the Finance Committee have extended all the
Trump tax cuts, expanded some of them, added a bunch of other new tax
cuts, made some temporary business tax cuts permanent, and still only
cost $441 billion? The trims to clean-energy tax credits and other
rollbacks, you would presume, weren’t SO costly that they would nearly
wipe out all of the costs!
The answer, friends, is a big gimmick known as the current policy baseline.
Senate Republicans are claiming that, because the Trump tax cuts are in
place now, as current policy, it costs $0 to extend them. An analogy
would be if Congress passed a bill to institute Medicare for All for one
day, at the cost of $4 to $8 billion,
depending on your estimate, and then the next day they passed a bill
extending M4A permanently, which would cost … nothing. The same
Republicans who would scream bloody murder at that dastardly maneuver
are the ones now employing this absurd maneuver.
The reality is that the Trump tax cuts, under a current law baseline
that compares the policy to the change to current law, really cost
$3.76 trillion over ten years. If you add that to the $441 billion
estimate, you have a tax section that costs over $4.2 trillion. This is
$400 billion higher than the House version that the Freedom Caucus
already found intolerable, and that some self-styled Republican budget
hawks in the Senate are grumbling about. ...
In most cases, the parliamentarian looks at whether provisions have a purely budgetary purpose, rather than policy dressed up as a budget item. (This is known as the Byrd Rule, after the longtime Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd; the process by which the parties debate the provisions and by which a ruling is made is known as the “Byrd bath.”) ...
For context, the House version costs $3.3 trillion over a decade, according to the latest estimates. We’re verging on $4 trillion for the Senate bill—unless the Republicans’ wish to have the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts entered as zero passes muster with the parliamentarian. ...
Update Wed Jun 25:
Real Clear Politics put this back up in the rotation this morning, lol.
Mark Levin is right, can't understand why Trump is throwing Iran's Nazi leader a lifeline
Because Trump is weak, Mark. It's a failure of nerve. He doesn't have the right stuff.
Iran should be forced to sign a surrender document. Unconditional surrender. They lost their nukes, they’ve lost their air force, they have no ground-to-air protection. China didn’t step in, Russia didn’t step in, not a single Arab country stepped in. The Supreme Nazi is hiding in a bunker much like Adolf Hitler did. Adolf Hitler wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He wasn’t thrown a lifeline. He was going to be killed, so he committed suicide.
More.
Yeah, what a hero Trump is, they should give him the Nobel Peace Prize
From the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics this morning:
Monday, June 23, 2025
Iran is now but a shadow of its former self
Iran's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Islamist suicide bombers kill at least 20 Christians, wound many more, during mass in Damascus church a day after the U.S. attacks on Iran's nuclear enrichment sites
 |
| At the Mar Elias Church in the Dweila neighborhood of Syria's capital Damascus on Sunday. |
Mouth-breather Marco: By the time we left we were already gone lol
He could be our Yogi Berra redivivus, but just hasn't got the C H A R M.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
The U.S. Senate parliamentarian still has not ruled on the GOP's wacky current policy vs. current law baseline
The current policy is the temporary Trump tax cuts from 2017.
The current law is the tax compromise worked out by Barack Obama and John Boehner.
I don't think this thing is going to be done by the Fourth of July.
GOP’s food stamp plan is found to violate Senate rules. It’s the latest setback for Trump’s big bill
... The parliamentarian’s office is tasked with scrutinizing the bill to ensure it complies with the so-called Byrd Rule, which is named after the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., and bars many policy matters in the budget reconciliation process now being used. ...
Some of the most critical rulings from parliamentarians are still to come. One will assess the GOP’s approach that relies on “current policy” rather than “current law” as the baseline for determining whether the bill will add to the nation’s deficits. ...
The truth is buried in the very last paragraph: Obama's war on coal did this to us
... certain facilities like old fossil-fuel powered plants have been decommissioned and new energy capacity to replace it has been relatively slow to come online ...
The example most detrimental to U.S. and U.S. presidential stature is Two Weeks Trump's ridiculous coddling of Vladimir Putin at the expense of Ukraine for two months
... Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.
On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: "You can ask that question in two weeks, and we'll see." He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.
Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, "I'd rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can't say yes or no."
Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.
"I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know within two weeks," Trump said. "We're going to find out whether or not he's tapping us along or not. And if he is, we'll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks." ...
Last Wednesday marked three weeks, and still bupkis from Trump.
It's been two months, not two weeks.
More.
Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is
... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
Friday, June 20, 2025
The more things change, the more the fascist U.S. system of corporate welfare does not
... In the race to attract large data centers, states are forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to a CNBC analysis. Among the beneficiaries of these exemptions are tech giants such as Amazon, Meta and Google, which all have market caps of over $1 trillion.
Tax breaks have long been a tool states use to compete for businesses. However, watchdog groups said that for data centers the tradeoffs are iffy, because the facilities don’t tend to create large numbers of jobs, while the amount of electricity required can be immense.
The growing number of tax breaks has sparked a debate about whether massive corporations should be receiving these generous incentives. ...
Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research group that tracks corporate subsidies and advocates for transparency and accountability in economic development, has spent more than a decade examining the impact of exemptions nationwide. He said the clear winners are the Big Tech companies.
“There was a giant transfer of wealth from taxpayers to shareholders,” LeRoy told CNBC. “Some states, like Virginia, are headed toward billion-dollar annual losses.” ...
LeRoy calls it a losing proposition for taxpayers.
“When tax breaks don’t pay for themselves, only two things can happen: Either public services are reduced in quality, or everybody’s taxes go up in other ways if you’re going to try to keep things the same in terms of quality of public services,” he said. ...
Meanwhile, known corporate welfare, in the form of tax abatements and subsidies by states and localities to attract businesses to come and bring jobs, is presently estimated at in excess of $417 billion. The real total is probably far higher given that local data is poor relative to state disclosures.
The data, incomplete as it may be, shows just ten states where we're talking about only "hundreds of millions" in lost tax revenue and tax loss expenditures. In the rest we're talking about billions, even tens of billions.
It ain't over, but 3 judge panel of Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals votes unanimously to let Trump keep control of California National Guard troops
Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles
... In its decision, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals unanimously concluded it was likely Trump lawfully exercised
his authority in federalizing control of the guard.
It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters. ...
Thursday, June 19, 2025
So, a White House official supposedly told FOX News that use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iranian nuke facilities is not off the table
The idiot who did this map didn't know that B-2 Spirit Bombers are based at Whiteman Airforce Base in Missouri.
Also, the idiot from the White House should be an ex-official.
These guys want to talk about the 802k foreign born who left in April, not about the 1.6m who arrived in January lol
That said, the January surge is probably more about the revisions of the data for the previous year than about anything else.
Elon Musk's hair sample for fentanyl, ketamine, etc. comes up negative
George Floyd wouldn't have died with such results.
Only five months in lol
To be fair, only Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Waltz worked in an official capacity, and they remain in official positions.
In 2017 seven people got the ax by June, eighteen by the end of the year.
This report sounds like there's wiggle room for Israel to take out Iran's Supreme Leader after missile strike on Israeli hospital
... Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to hit back even harder at Iran following the strike.
“We will exact the full price from the tyrants in Tehran,” he vowed in an X post.
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, backed up Netanyahu’s threat.
“These are war crimes of the most serious kind — and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei will be held accountable for his crimes,” he tweeted.
“The Prime Minister and I have instructed the IDF to increase the intensity of attacks against strategic targets in Iran and against government targets in Tehran in order to remove threats to the State of Israel and undermine the ayatollahs’ regime.” ...
And there it is:
Real Clear Politics runs post by a comedian telling us Iran never invaded anybody and Donald Trump would ruin his presidency by starting a war against it
In Rob Schneider's world Iran never funded Hamas which invaded Israel on October 7, 2023, never built and launched wave after wave of ballistic missiles at Israeli civilians, never enriched enough uranium to build over a dozen nuclear weapons, never promised over and over again death to Israel and death to America.
Truly hilarious.
The world's population of everyday normal millionaires heh since the year 2000 has more than quadrupled to 52 million
... There is not much data on individuals in the $50 million to $1 billion range, which distorts the picture, according to Mazeau. He also said the wealth growth among middle and lower wealth brackets is underappreciated. For instance, the number of individuals with $1 million to $5 million, whom UBS dubs “everyday millionaires,” has more than quadrupled since 2000 to about 52 million.
“They have more wealth collectively than all the billionaires in the world,” he said. “It is often overlooked how much wealth is rising and is going towards the middle of the pack.”
The middle of the pack. Yeah right.
It takes $33 million in 2025 to be a 1913 millionaire.
More in "The U.S. added a thousand new millionaires a day in 2024: Report".
Meanwhile . . .