Trump steaks, Trump wine, Trump gold visa

 Trump’s ‘bargain’ $1m Gold Card backfires with just 338 applications 

... The Trump Gold Card, which offers purchasers an expedited route to American residency, was unveiled with great fanfare in February 2025. ... 

Real GDP for 4Q2025 was revised lower to 0.5% from 0.7% last month in today's final estimate, and CNBC buried the story of a stalling economy

 The 0.5% estimate is the annual rate of real GDP growth in 4Q, and the figure doesn't sound like much of a revision until you remember that the estimated annual rate in 3Q was 4.4%.

That's one hell of a drop, whether it's to 0.7% or to 0.5%.

In other words, the economy nearly stalled in 4Q. 

Meanwhile real GDP for full year 2025 increased at a measly 2.1% rate. 

CNBC buried the bad news in a different story, seven paragraphs down:

Inflation held sticky at 3% as U.S. headed into war with Iran, key Fed gauge shows

... Separately, the Commerce Department reported that economic growth was even slower than previously reported for the fourth quarter of 2025. 

Gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced, rose just 0.5% on a seasonally adjusted annualized rate, down from the prior reading of 0.7% and the initial estimate of 1.4%. The full-year growth rate held at 2.1%.

The department said the downward revision came primarily to lower investment than previously indicated. ...

Gee, I thought Trump said $18 trillion in investment was flowing into the economy?

Golden Age, my foot. 

Meanwhile the initial estimate was cut in half by the second estimate, and the final estimate cut that by nearly 29% more. They were off by only 64% in the end. 

Remember, this is all pre-Iran-War-induced oil crisis, too.

It's going to be ugly. 

 

 

48.66% worked full time in March 2026

 When does the Golden Age start?

 

 

Some Golden Age: The 10-year trend for percent change for ADP private payrolls is down

 

100% ground beef averaged a record $6.089 in year one of Trump 2.0, and hit a record high $6.687 in Dec 2025 to celebrate the New Golden Age for them, not for you

 Like many other such graphs, the graph for 100% Ground Beef won't show the 2025 average because the government shutdown meant no figure for October in the data.

The average $6.089 in 2025 is for eleven months without October, with October obviously a high figure, too, which means the annual average is no doubt higher than $6.089.

 

 

Hey Look! Labor's Share of Business Income has never been LOWER than under our lord and saviour, king and high muckety muck, Uniparty Poopulist President Donald J. Trump

 The Golden Age . . . for business, not for you.

 3Q2025, updated Jan 8, 2026:

Not the Golden Age AT ALL: The percentage of Americans working full time in November 2025 collapsed to 48.82%

 Eight Novembers under Bush 43 saw 51.6% working full-time on average, and under Bill Clinton 52.0% which today would mean 8.7 million more working full time than do.

 

Trump's Golden Age of ADP Payroll losses: Biden had only one month of losses, but Trump already has four! MAGA!

 

What he said

 

The Golden Age isn't AAA

 

The Golden Age of authoritarianism: Confrontation, corruption, contraction, con-jobs, and contempt

 

Trump again calls for Fed to cut rates, says Powell’s ‘termination cannot come fast enough’

 

Trump’s tariffs are ‘inviting corruption,’ Democrats tell Bessent, Lutnick

 

China targets U.S. services and other areas as it decries ‘meaningless’ tariff hikes on goods 

 

Trade war fallout: Cancellations of Chinese freight ships begin as bookings plummet

European Central Bank cuts interest rates, warns of ‘deteriorated’ growth outlook on trade tensions

 

Italy’s ‘Trump whisperer’ Giorgia Meloni to meet U.S. president amid trade standoff with Europe

 

CBP says latest tariffs have generated $500 million, well below Trump’s estimate

 

Judge finds cause to hold Trump administration in criminal contempt in deportation flights case

 

 

In the age of everything that is good is awesome, everything bad must be an emergency

 The Zeitgeist is epitomized by a general hysteria, incapable of proportional thinking and hostile to reason, and so it should come as no surprise that our new leadership is exploiting that for its own ends, mostly to distract you while they make money hand over fist.

Everything is awesome. Everyone is great.

But everything is also a disaster, and the worst ever.

COVID was going to kill us all. The vaccines were going to save us all.

Biden was going to cure cancer. RFK Jr is going to solve the mystery of autism by September.

All those people streaming across the border during the Biden administration were seeking asylum. Now under Trump they were an invading enemy army.

The recession of 2008 had to be The Great Recession, or The Great Financial Crisis, as if 10.7% unemployment in 4Q1982 was the golden age of Ronald Reagan, and over 3,000 savings and loans didn't go belly up during that decade and part of the next.

Heat waves and cold waves are unprecedented, unless you talk to an old person. We have 12 years left before global warming kills us all.

Putin is going to launch a thermonuclear WWIII, same as Saddam Hussein.

So of course trade deficits are suddenly an emergency.

U.S. businesses sue to block Trump tariffs, say trade deficits are not an emergency

 

Stocks tank to inaugurate Trump's golden age of tariffs

 

In the Golden Age of Trump, will all ships be arisen in the rising of the tide, or all voices undesired simply drown without goodbye?

 

Yeah right, media in the 1980s was a golden age

America was so innocent in the 1950s.

The Greatest Generation was like no other.

The American Founding was a miracle.

We have to get back to the authentic Christianity of the first century.

Oh the glory that was Greece and Rome.

Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism

"The Gig Economy Increasingly Defines Late-Stage Capitalism

Annie Lowrey, Atlantic" 

 

is how Real Clear Markets links to:

The Truth About the Gig Economy

Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.

 

Real Clear Markets' libertarian headline writer completely missed the point of the article, which is that the gig economy is as much as 80% smaller than we first thought. A capitalism disintegrating into a chaos of millions of small holders in risky circumstances, careening into the ditch, is a complete myth. The leftists who still long for this resemble no one so much as the Christian millenarians.

Clearly Marxism-light thoroughly infects economic thinking at the popular level in more places than just The Atlantic, blinding us to where we really are, which is in the golden age of fascism. Here tax reform for the individual is an afterthought, a necessary piece of propaganda in the big scheme of things having to do with state capitalism and its myriad forms of corporate welfare. What really matters is the relationship between government and business, protecting their mutual interests.

The West's version is little different from China's. China exercises top down control through the corrupt Communist Party, but we increasingly have the same thing from the bottom up through the unjust hand of Political Correctness, populated through the right schools and the revolving door of Washington where the regulators become the richly rewarded regulated.

The extension and consolidation of control by this globalist fascist system since the Reagan Revolution is responsible for all the failure lately attributed to capitalism by the coddled generations of children of the post-war Baby Boom. It couldn't be otherwise in a world where everything has been organized to feed the corporation through the glorification of the job. You must go to school, you must get good grades, you must get a college degree in order to get hired, you'll need loans to make this happen, and for the car to get to work, and good credit, and . . .. And then they've got you. It's called preying on human nature.

The declarations of independence of our former youth often used to take the form of getting out of Dodge as soon as they turned eighteen. Now those declarations are a mere shadow of their former selves, taking the form of tattoos on that creature that still lives in your basement in his twenties . . . or thirties.

The risk-taking of capitalism has been expunged, and the consequences of rebelling against the new rigidity have been amplified. Stenosis has set in, and if the barbarians finally do overtake us they will find that the bones break easily.     

How to tax the rich and only the rich as originally intended in 1913, and solve a lot of problems

In 1913 when the average Joe made about $800 a year, the first income tax under the 16th Amendment didn't worry him because he didn't pay it and probably thought he never would. The personal exemption for a married couple in the original tax code was $4,000.

Today that $4,000 personal exemption adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index amounts to about $100,000.

Even in 2016 that kind of income is made by fewer than 10% of individual wage earners. Under the original income tax of 1913, 90% today wouldn't have to worry about paying the dreaded income tax either.

Is there a way to return to this golden age of taxation?

I'm here to tell you that I think so, and I say that as a conservative. We could easily simplify the tax code by returning to the status quo which prevailed before the First World War, pay all the bills, abolish Social Security and Medicare taxes, the corporate income tax and all the other little irritating taxes and reduce income inequality in the process. We'd also save a lot of time and money wasted in complying with the tax code's myriad baroque features.

Here's the math.

In 2016 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income in the United States was $15.9287 trillion.

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary tells us that in 2016 there were 163.5 million individual wage earners. If you exempt the first $100,000 of everybody's individual wage income in 2016, including from the rich, you're talking about $6.213 trillion of individual wage income which would be tax-free.

That leaves $9.7157 trillion of personal income left in 2016 to tax, to pay all the bills.

According to The Tax Policy Center, the bills were the total estimated federal outlays of $3.9513 trillion in 2016.

So, the tax is 40.67% (9.7157 X .4067 = 3.9513) on all personal income in excess of $100,000 a year, no itemized deductions, no credits of any kind (this is where they all came from in the first place, because the rich pissed, moaned and complained and bribed the politicians to carve out privileges for them to escape paying).

The rich, all 14.9 million of them, will still have $7.2544 trillion to play with ($1.49 trillion from their first $100K tax-free, just like everybody else, and $5.7644 trillion left over after taxes from the income in excess of $100K).

The rest of us, 148.6 million, won't pay any federal income tax, Social Security or Medicare tax, gasoline tax, or any other kind of federal tax on our $4.723 trillion. The only taxes we'll have to pay will be State and Local Income Taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and the like. Of course rich people will have to pay those too, but that's a problem for all of us and for a different level of politics.

I summarize:

$15.9287 trillion personal income 2016 (BEA)

-  3.9513 trillion federal taxes, all from those making $100,000+ per year @40.67%

-  7.2544 trillion left over for the 14.9 million making $100,000+ per year (top 10%)

-  4.7230 trillion left over for the 148.6 million making less than $100,000 per year (bottom 90%)

___________________________________________________________________

0

And the budget balances.   

Governments often raised funds with lotteries in the past, but how about $7 trillion in FY2017?

I don't think so.

Lotteries started to fall out of favor after 1830, according to the story here, mostly due to corruption. The guys running the things would run off with the dough. So much for the golden age of the past.

Government at all levels in the US will shell out $7.04 trillion in fiscal 2017, 36.5% of GDP.

In 1817 the number was in the neighborhood of $23 million, about 3% of GDP.

The problem with raising revenues today is only a problem because government is too damn big. Spending 3% of GDP today on government at all levels compared with current outlays means they are twelve times the size they should be, $7 trillion instead of $0.6 trillion.

Besides, you couldn't possibly raise enough using lotteries. In fiscal 2014 lottery revenues countrywide barely totaled $70 billion, just 1% of current total outlays.

Every man, woman and child in this country would have to purchase at least $21,757 in lotto tickets this fiscal year in order to fund government at all levels. And that's before any jackpots are paid out, or lottery workers paid.

Or we could just tax everyone that much.

It would be easier and fairer, right?

After all, we're all "equal".

Except 60 million Americans don't make even that much. If government took it all what would they live on?

Hope, no doubt.

Rush Limbaugh can't remember shit about taxes under Reagan: Why do we listen to this guy?

Here yesterday, wrong on both years, and forgetting that G. H. W. Bush raised taxes by adding a 31% bracket in 1991, getting himself defeated by Clinton in 1992:

"What did Ronald Reagan do? When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 the top marginal tax rate was 90%. And the amount of money raised by the tax code was about $500 billion back then. When Reagan left office in 1989, there were three tax rates, essentially two, but there was a 31% bubble in there. But the top 90%, that marginal rate of 90% had been dropped to 28%. And the amount of money generated by the tax code had doubled, almost a billion dollars, by reducing tax rates."

Revenues in 1981 were $599.3 billion nominal, in 1989 $991.1 billion, up 65%, not 100%. Revenues did not double until 1993-1994, after Bush and then Clinton raised marginal rates as high as 39.6%. Revenues did not double again until 2006. The record shows that whether marginal rates were higher or lower, revenues took twelve to thirteen years to double.

What Rush Limbaugh means by "doubled, almost a billion dollars" is anybody's guess. Only his pharmacist knows for sure.

The facts are that Ronald Reagan persuaded Democrats to bring the top marginal rate down from 70% in 1981 to 50% 1982-1986. After the tax reform of 1986 the top marginal rate dropped to 38.5% in 1987. For three years 1988 through 1990 there were just two marginal rates: 15% and 28%. That was the brief golden age of taxation under Reagan, which his successor totally screwed up.

Reagan had NOTHING to do with the introduction of a 31% bracket. That was all on George Herbert Walker Bush, for which the Democrats recently gave him the Profiles in Courage Award.

Can Liberals Count? Can Liberals Remember?

George Bush won Ohio in 2004 by 118,000 votes, but Andrew Sullivan remembers it differently, here:

"At this point in 2004, one recalls, George W. Bush was about to see a near eight-point lead shrivel to a one-state nail-biter by Election Day."

The real nail-biters were in Iowa, where Bush won by just 10,000 popular votes (7 electoral college votes), and in New Mexico, where Bush won by just 6,000 popular votes (5 electoral college votes), neither of which separately or together would have given victory to Democrat John Kerry.

Be that as it may, the real point of Sullivan's story is this:

"If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan."

Ah, no, he'll become the Democrats' W, or maybe their George H. W. Bush. Or if he's really really lucky maybe their Richard Nixon.

Obama's economic performance in the next four years would have to improve by 40 percent in seven key categories of economic measurement in comparison with all previous presidents to achieve the fair-to-poor record achieved by Ronald Reagan, whom I have shown elsewhere scored a lousy 42, just like Jimmy Carter.

President Obama's current score after 4 years is already 2 points worse than George Bush's score of 51 after 8 years, the worst two records in the post-war period. That means Obama would have to pull out  of his hat a veritable golden age to make him look as good as Reagan, which as I've said isn't saying much. To do it Obama would have to score a 32 in the next four years just to average out to a 42.

Can you imagine an Obama second term turning in an overall performance roughly close to that of JFK/LBJ, who rank 4th best out of 10 since WWII? Because that is what it would take.

Obama would have to go from worst for unemployment to 4th (think Clinton and W), starting tomorrow. He would have to go from worst to 4th for GDP (think Reagan and Eisenhower), for the next four years. He would have to go from worst to 4th for housing values (think Harry Truman). Only George Bush has been worse for the increase in Americans' total household net worth than Obama has been. To address that Obama would have to restore at least 1960s levels of prosperity to the country, if not Clinton era levels.

Fat chance.

Despite all the ruin which one man can rain down on a country through sheer incompetence and arrogance, the American people are a resilient lot and things will improve no matter who gets elected. The economy adjusts and moves on, and in many respects there is only one way to go but up. But if it's Obama who is elected again, I don't expect him to finish much better than a 48 after 8 years overall, because the first 4 have been such a disaster.