Domestic terrorism is when all the credit card companies move to Kristi Noem's South Dakota so they can charge you 20-30%

 

ICE Minneapolis shooting: Noem calls Good’s actions ‘domestic terrorism’

 

 

 

If Trump had any true populist balls, he'd push for permanent 10% credit card interest rate caps

 

Trump calls for one-year cap on credit card interest rates at 10%

 

... Independent U.S. Sen Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a fierce Trump critic, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, have previously introduced bipartisan legislation to cap credit card interest rates at 10% for five years. This bill explicitly directs credit card companies to limit rates as part of broader consumer relief legislation. 

Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida have also introduced a bill in the House to cap credit card interest rates at 10%, reflecting cross-aisle interest in addressing high rates. ...

Elon Musk's phony Doge spending cut math was basically like positing there was a $20,000 credit limit when there wasn't, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000'

 

... DOGE’s savings calculations are based on faulty math. The group uses the maximum spending possible under each contract as its baseline — meaning all money an agency could spend in future fiscal years. That amount can far exceed what the government has actually committed to pay out.

Counting this “ceiling value” gives a false picture of savings for taxpayers.

“That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, ‘I’ve just saved $20,000,’” said Jessica Tillipman, associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School. “Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.” ...

More. 

Clueless Ed Kilgore today post-mid-March thinks angry Democrats are in the minority based on a Gallup poll from late January

But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.

Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.

Republicans are angry, too.

Has Ed been living under a rock?

Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":

... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:

Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.

I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in. 

The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.

I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.

The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.

No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.

Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.

And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.

461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.

Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.

People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.

Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.

American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.

Who knows what's next?

Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.

 

If you thought the GOP pretending that Ukraine started the war with Russia was nuts, behold Senator Mike Crapo of Idaho who wants to pretend that Trump's 2017 tax law wasn't passed under reconciliation rules

 

 Honest to God, these people are clowns.

Republicans consider major budget change to obscure deficit impact of extending Trump’s tax cuts

... Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which Trump signed into law in 2017, would cost $4.6 trillion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the official nonpartisan scorekeeper.

That’s under the “current law” metric that has traditionally been used, as the tax cuts are slated to expire at the end of this year. But Senate Republicans want to use a different scoring method called the “current policy” baseline, which would assume that extending tax cuts costs $0 because they’re already law.

The chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, endorsed the “current policy” approach, telling reporters that it “recognizes that extending current law does not change the tax policy, does not reduce tax revenue.”

Congressional GOP aides say the idea could have a huge impact on what they’re able to pass in the budget bill. If they use the current accounting process, they have no chance of making the 2017 tax cuts permanent, because that would require paying for it. And this process would also be key to unlocking Trump’s other tax proposals, like slashing taxes on tips and overtime pay. ...

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said it would set a “terrible” precedent if Republicans adopt that budgeting approach.

He said it would be a backdoor way to nuke the filibuster and take an anything-goes approach to the reconciliation process, which Congress can use once per fiscal year to evade the 60-vote rule in the Senate for changes to spending and taxes. The process imposes significant constraints, like needing to pay for long-term laws that add to the U.S. debt.

“My advice is: If they adopt that policy, we should advise the American people to forget about their credit card debt,” Neal said. “You wouldn’t have to analyze revenue and expenditure.” ...

The budget framework passed this week by the GOP House is guaranteed to raise the national debt by $19 trillion in 10 years, which means we'll be $60 trillion in the hole by 2035. 

All the shenanigans and pretending and make believe used over the years to get us to the current point of $36 trillion in debt, trotted out yet one more time aren't going to stop us from a date with $60 trillion in debt.

 

WE ARE NOT A SERIOUS COUNTRY.

A Democrat with multiple credit card balances owed, including one for $1.2 million, should fit right in as a cabinet secretary overseeing spending of money we don't have

 

RFK Jr. had up to $1.2 million in credit card debt — what experts say on tackling high balances

Kennedy’s credit card balances range between $610,000 to $1.2 million in accounts that carry interest rates of 23.24% to 23.49%, the filing shows.

Financial experts interviewed by CNBC said balances that high are unusual.

“That’s a truly massive amount of credit card debt,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.

Maybe he can borrow some fashion money at lower rates from Kash Ap Patel at the FBI, if they ever confirm him.

 

I'm gonna call my credit card company and extend my own line of credit to make me great again

 

Last week's terrible Thursday was Joe Biden's, this week's belonged to Fani Willis

 

A Terrible Day in Court for Trump Prosecutor Fani Willis

Charles Lipson, Spectator :

 

As DA, Willis has full authority to hire outside attorneys and pay them generously. The problem arises only if she received personal (corrupt) benefits from her decision. That’s what makes Thursday’s testimony such a problem for Willis, regardless of when she began the affair. After Wade began work for her, the two went on expensive trips together and cannot prove they split the costs. The question whether Willis acted corruptly is underscored by her decision to hire an attorney who spent his career dealing with small cases.  

Most of the damaging information that came out Thursday stems from a nasty, ongoing divorce case between Nathan Wade and his wife of twenty-six years, Joycelyn. When Nathan began his romantic relationship with Fani Willis, he was separated but still married. That’s how Joycelyn managed to get hold of the credit card statements showing the expenses for Nathan and Fani’s jaunts together. Joycelyn has said she was nearly penniless while Nathan was spending lavishly and hiding their joint income.

Ha, not me: Whenever mine gets that high I pay it off so there's no interest charge

 Credit card balances above $1 trillion for first time!

59% still pay in cash because the drug dealers don't take credit cards

 

The cashless economy trend is not necessarily new, but it is gaining momentum, according to new research from the Pew Research Center.

The nonpartisan fact think tank found 41% of Americans say none of their purchases in a typical week are paid for in cash. That’s up from 29% in 2018 and 24% in 2015.

In contrast, 59% of respondents say they still pay for at least some of their typical weekly purchases in cash.

More. 

 

 

How to get the most out of your credit cards to save money this holiday season

 Don't use them.

Seems Hunter Biden was making $100k a year from MBNA while Joe Biden pushed legislation favorable to credit card companies, per Tom Brokaw 2008

Video.

Great VP pick, Mr. No Scandals Obama!

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

How about no VOTE under 21, and no car, no job, no credit card and no COLLEGE LOANS either?

Grow up already you bunch of babies.

HELOC interest deduction goes away under Republican tax "reform": Expect loan consolidation

You know the one, the one you take to help buy a car, fund tuition, or actually fix up the house.

When the credit card interest deduction went away under Ronald Reagan, consumers opened up Home Equity Lines of Credit in response, the interest on which was deductible. Now that HELOC interest deductibility is going away, expect those HELOCs to be refinanced under new first mortgages to recapture that.

Also expect this to impact consumer spending, negatively.

Reported here:

Individuals who take out home equity loans will no longer be able to deduct that interest under the new bill.

Mr. Money Mustache: Obsessive compulsive, and a bunch of other enthusiasms

From the story in The New Yorker, here:

The blog, which he started five years ago, is really an attack on consumerism and waste—a theology of conservation—disguised as a personal-finance advice column. The prospect of retirement is in some respects just a lure—the carrot, as opposed to the stick of his relentless polemical thrashing of anyone who thinks it’s O.K. to buy lattes at Starbucks or drive “a gigantic piece of shit that can barely navigate a parking lot.” He told me, “I’m really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet.” ... [A]t one point I realized that he was almost angry at me for my half-witting participation in the destruction of the world. ... When you play devil’s advocate—for instance, if you suggest that if everyone lived the way he does the economy would shrivel up—he can get riled . . .. [Peter] Adeney has the behavioral-economics view that we should set our policies to encourage sensible behavior—the obvious example being a carbon tax. “It’s libertarian paternalism, or maybe it’s paternalistic libertarianism,” he said. “I am trying to improve the commons.” On his blog, he dispenses deep thoughts, product recommendations (credit cards, brokerages, laser printers), and D.I.Y. work-arounds (“How to Carry Major Appliances on Your Bike”—“It is absolutely ridiculous to buy even your first bottle of wine or restaurant meal if you do not yet have a good bicycle and a bike trailer”).

Obama is using the Justice Dept. and FDIC member banking system to choke the gun industry

Just like he has used the IRS to stop his political opposition in the Tea Party.

From the top of the story here:

Gun retailers say the Obama administration is trying to put them out of business with regulations and investigations that bypass Congress and choke off their lines of credit, freeze their assets and prohibit online sales.

Since 2011, regulators have increased scrutiny on banks’ customers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in 2011 urged banks to better manage the risks of their merchant customers who employ payment processors, such as PayPal, for credit card transactions. The FDIC listed gun retailers as “high risk” along with porn stores and drug paraphernalia shops.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has launched Operation Choke Point, a credit card fraud probe focusing on banks and payment processors. The threat of enforcement has prompted some banks to cut ties with online gun retailers, even if those companies have valid licenses and good credit histories.

Spineless Republicans Cave On Cordray Nomination, CFPB Spying On Citizens

Republican Sens. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), Susan Collins (Maine), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), John McCain (Ariz.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Roger Wicker (Miss.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) voted with Democrats to confirm Cordray. ... Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee ... pointed out that Republicans want to replace Cordray's director position with a bipartisan “board of directors with staggered terms.” He also expressed concern over recent reports that the bureau is conducting “unprecedented data collection.” “The CFPB [Consumer Protection Financial Bureau] is collecting credit card data, bank account data, mortgage data and student loan data,” Crapo said ahead of the vote. “This ultimately allows the CFPB to monitor a consumer’s monthly spending habits.”

More here, if you need to puke.

Sen. Harry Reid wins.

First They Came For Your Silver . . .

First they came for your silver (1964, last year minted).

Then they came for your dollar (1971, final year of dollar convertibility to gold).

Then they came for your tax deductions (1986 Tax "Reform" repealed deductibility of credit card interest).

Then they came for your mortgages (1997, introduction of two year rule to get you to borrow and churn).

Then they came for your banks (1999, allowed commercial banks to act like investment banks but with FDIC backstop).

Now they are coming for your bank deposits (2013, Cyprus), and not coincidentally, your guns.

Next it will be your 401ks and IRAs.

And then?

Of course there were other firsts before 1964, but these will do for now.

AP Story On Auto Delinquencies Gets Peak Wrong, TransUnion Doesn't Seem To Care

The AP story here, "Late Auto Payment Rose in the Fourth Quarter: TransUnion", was picked up and dutifully reproduced at at least 900 websites containing the error "The national late-payment rate on auto loans peaked in the first three months of 2000 at 2.39 percent, the firm said":

The rate of auto loans with payments late by 60 days or more was 0.41 percent in the last three months of 2012. That's up from 0.38 percent in the previous quarter, but down from 0.46 percent a year earlier, TransUnion said.

Turek noted that the company always sees a slight uptick in the auto loan delinquency rate during the fourth quarter. The financial pressures of holiday shopping can lead some borrowers to delay or skip a loan payment — a dynamic that also leads to higher late-payment rates for credit cards and home loans.

Even so, the fourth quarter's late-payment rate remained near the lowest rate on TransUnion's records going back to 1999. That record-low rate, 0.33 percent, was recorded in the second quarter of last year.

The national late-payment rate on auto loans peaked in the first three months of 2000 at 2.39 percent, the firm said.

If the firm said that, I'd be very surprised.

Turek in 2010 previously stated, here, that the peak was in late 2008, at 0.86%, which is 160% higher than the all time low on TransUnion's scale:

"The good news is that TransUnion expects national auto delinquency rates to continue to be well below the peak of 0.86 percent -- a rate experienced during the heart of the recession in the fourth quarter of 2008."

TransUnion's own graphic shows that the scale of the national rate is measured in tenths and hundreths of a percent, while the scale measuring the worst delinquencies in the worst of times in the worst states doesn't even reach as high as 1.80%:

So something is really amiss with the AP story.

Separately, a story here from March 2011 indicates that auto loan delinquencies, measured using a different scale but with a similar difference between highs and lows in the neighborhood of 160%, were never higher than in 2008-2009, which rules out the year 2000 for worst year in modern times for auto loan delinquencies:

From late 2008 through 2009, dealers and consumers found themselves in the midst of the worst credit crisis in modern US history. Lending activity froze, thus limiting dealers’ ability to finance their inventories and provide consumers access to auto loans. With unemployment rising and home foreclosures breaking records during this time, auto loan delinquencies peaked as well. Normally, seriously delinquent (90-plus days past due) auto loans represent between 4% and 7% of outstanding auto loans. In the fourth quarter of 2008, however, such loans totaled $8.5 billion and 13.9% of outstanding auto loans. In the first quarter of 2009 that share climbed to a historic high of 15.9%. Fortunately for the auto-sales industry, delinquencies, in value and percentage terms, rapidly declined during the second half of 2010.

Messages left with two different individuals in TransUnion's media relations department in Chicago yesterday seeking confirmation of the AP story remain unanswered at this hour.