Stampede into Roth IRAs expected after passage of Secure Act in massive spending bill signed by Trump limits "stretch IRAs"

People who have saved $1 million or more in an IRA and plan to pass it on to someone other than their spouses should consider doing Roth conversions, said Ed Slott, president of Ed Slott & Co., which specializes in IRA education and training. For instance, if their children inherit the IRAs, they would likely receive them and face the tax consequences during their prime earning years. "It's a big tax hit," Mr. Slott said. "Beneficiaries can let the money accumulate tax-free in a Roth." Investment advisers are going to put a premium on Roth conversions. ... 

Roth conversions also would benefit the government, which would get tax revenue more quickly than it would under IRA distributions. But the change in stretch IRA policy under the SECURE Act will upset many estate plans that were written based on children being able to hold onto IRAs for their lifetimes. "I call this section of the SECURE Act the broken promise," Mr. Slott said. "It's like they changed the rules in the ninth inning."

More here.

79 Republicans in the US House voted for this POS hidden in the bill entitled "National Law Enforcement Museum Commemorative Coin Act".

How would you even know?

 

By forcing the hands of millions of older Americans with estate plans in place for their non-spouse beneficiaries, the government obviously hopes to reap a windfall of tax revenue generated by their conversion of tax-protected traditional IRAs and 401k plans into taxable Roths, knowing the temporary umbrella provided by the lower Trump tax rates expiring in ten years will be an added incentive.

These bastards are wily. 

After passing NDAA whopper funding The Military Industrial Complex and The Swamp, US House passes another $1.4 trillion in spending in two bills to let Trump say he didn't sign another Omnibus spending bill

TRUMP IS WORKING WITH THEM AGAINST US YOU IDIOTS.

The House passed a $1.4 trillion federal spending package that averts a government shutdown and maintains some funding for a southern border wall. The measure passed Tuesday despite the objections of liberal Democrats and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who said they opposed the $1.375 billion allocated for the construction of a southern border wall as well as other border security provisions. The spending bill would provide funding through the rest of fiscal 2020. It passed in two different measures in order to avoid sending President Trump one “omnibus” package, which he had vowed to reject. 

More here.

Trump and Congress are spending us blind

There is no Great Financial Crisis as in 2008, but Trump & Co. are in the process of racking up trillion dollar deficits same as then as we speak.

Tax cuts for corporations, military-industrial complex spending and goodies for The Swamp are just some of the main reasons.

Trump has a veto pen, but refuses to use it.

Debt to the Penny is currently $23.091 trillion.

Revenues in col 1, spending in col 2, deficits in col 3

How quickly the liberators of Negroes made themselves slaves of the legislature

Trump today, bright and early: There is always plenty of time to cut

There's always plenty of time to cut spending, by definition, just not right now.

NEVER right now, always later. And when later comes, NEVER right now.

What a fool, and what fools we.

US House advances Bipartisan Budget Act to the Senate 284-149, sets discretionary spending at about $1.37 trillion for both of the next two fiscal years and suspends debt ceiling

65 Republicans voted for the damn thing, not that it mattered substantively. The thing otherwise would have passed 219-214 even if the 16 Democrats who voted "nay" still had done so. It's a 235-197-1 Democrat-controlled US House.

Roll call vote 511 is here.

The real crime is a Republican president is going to sign it, not using his greatest weapon, the veto, to get any number of things he claims he wants.

Obviously he doesn't really want what he says he wants.

 

By Trump's own logic he and Congress should be ineligible for office in 2020 for upcoming deficit spending orgy

10 years after Santelli's rant against Obama's proposed bailout of your neighbor's mortgage, National Review pretends it was about deficit spending

You will search in vain in this article for the word "mortgage".

If the Tea Party had been about any one thing, it was about the moral hazard of bailouts. A sizeable minority of the American people perceived that bailouts made them chumps, dutifully following the rules and accepting their obligations while bankrupt businesses and bankrupt homeowners did neither. 

By Brian Riedl, long-time research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the article illustrates better than anything how the interests of establishment conservatism co-opted the Tea Party movement in 2011, just as establishment Republicanism co-opted Trumpism in 2017.

"Let's steal this energy and make it about something else".

Every. Damn. Time. 

New Budget Deal Puts Final Nail in the Tea-Party Coffin:

Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats.

Yang Gang hates on math as Boomer math because math shows Universal Basic Income is a BFD, not "nothing"

Total cost of federal regulations in 2012 was $2.028 trillion (in 2014 dollars), according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

Federal departmental spending in 2014 was about $1.654 trillion ($3.777 trillion in total outlays minus outlays for Social Security, Medicare and Interest on the debt).

Total = $3.682 trillion for "hundreds of agencies, departments and laws".

Eliminate all that (a GARGANTUAN and variously highly INADVISABLE proposition, you know, like NO defense spending, NO environmental regulation spending, NO food and drug inspection spending, etc.), and you could easily give every man and woman 18 and over in 2014 $2.868 trillion, with money left over: Universal Basic Income of $12,000 a year to 2014's 239.049 million people 18 and over (on average) = $2.868 trillion under Andrew Yang's plan.

Ray Dallio's estimate of $3.8 trillion must include all the kids, too (319 million US population in 2014 x $12,000).

Or are we just going to add the $2.868 trillion to the outlays of $3.777 trillion?

Either way, ain't gonna happen, because this ain't "nothing".

Pie in the sky, bye . . . and bye, commie.

I remember when Trump promised a 10% spending cut in Jan 2017, now Kudlow announces a 5% cut after Republicans spend us blind: 100% politics, 0% serious

Trump to whack DC with 10% cut to discretionary spending, 20% cut to personnel

What a crock that turned out to be.

Federal employment is exactly in Feb 2019 where it was in Nov 2016: 2.799 million. 

And outlays? Look at the outlays!

Outlays in fiscal 2017 were up 3.3% from 2016, up another 4.8% in 2018, and up again in fiscal 2019 a whopping 5.6%.

Overall for fiscal 2019 spending is up 14.4% from 2016.

Just in time for the next election cycle, however, Larry Kudlow is out promising a spending cut of 5%.

Total BS.

Contra Dan Henninger of the WSJ, this is hardly the hottest job market in half a century when Obama's was actually better, which ain't sayin' much

Story of the Year:

This past weekend, The Wall Street Journal published a series of stories titled “Inside the Hottest Job Market in Half a Century.” As far as I’m concerned, this jobs record is the story of the year. The Journal’s articles transformed a year of economic data into the new daily reality of getting paid to work in America. ... It requires a remarkable degree of obtuseness to stare at the policy success of the past two years and pretend it hasn’t happened. Democrats are doing exactly that. Conservatives should pocket the Trump presidency’s Reaganesque policies for massively matching job producers with job seekers.

There's nothing obtuse about the facts, which show that the current job recovery is nothing out of the ordinary and simply continues the recovery which began despite Obama. The fact is that since the election of Trump in 2016 there's actually been a slow down in the rate of job growth compared with the immediately preceding, more robust period from 2013-2016.

Reaganesque policy under Trump hasn't produced a better outcome for job growth compared with that period, which was the immediate result of the John Boehner-Barack Obama deal to make the Bush tax cuts permanent starting in 2013.

For all the bluster by Trump-aligned organs in the media, especially at The Wall Street Journal, Fox and on talk radio, Trump's results so far also haven't come close to matching the pre-2000 era of job creation.

The economy shrank after the end of the 20th century, and we're still trying to recover to the former glory, nineteen years later.

So far, no one has a solution. Short of a giant spending cut and an actual structural commitment to onshoring instead of offshoring, there will not be one.

LA Times: No construction for Trump's wall has begun anywhere because he signed border deal

If Trump had been serious about building the wall, he wouldn't have signed a border deal which ties his hands. He would have vetoed it and proceeded with the national emergency.

Had he done so, legislators would have had little choice but to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government departments threatened with a shutdown at existing levels.

That's the art of the deal, Mr. Big Stuff, but Mr. Big Stuff is all bark and no bite.

Bulldozers sit idle at border amid legal confusion over Trump’s emergency:

No construction for Trump’s wall has begun anywhere, although officials have started or completed fence replacement projects in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Trump, who made building a border wall a central promise of his campaign, declared the emergency on Feb. 15 to bypass Congress and shift up to $6.6 billion, mostly from the Pentagon budget, to build — or rebuild — 234 miles of fencing.

Trump acted after Congress had appropriated only $1.375 billion for 55 miles of border barrier in the Rio Grande Valley, far less than he wanted.

But the 1,169-page appropriations bill Trump signed into law when he issued his emergency declaration also contained restrictions on construction in specific towns, parks and wildlife reserves along about 150 miles of the border in the Rio Grande Valley, which is the administration’s top priority for building new barriers. The restrictions have thwarted Trump’s efforts to build a wall there, at least for now.

An aide to Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), who helped negotiate the restrictions, said it’s not clear if the terms of the spending bill would override the emergency declaration, or vice versa, leaving landowners and town officials in limbo.

Donald Trump is a self-hating fool and a wimp, and so is Mr. Missing in Action, Rush Limbaugh

Only a self-hating fool and a wimp would have signed this bill, and only a self-hating fool and wimp would defend the self-hating fool and wimp who signed it. It's like Steve King voting to censure himself.

Donald Trump has proven himself over and over again to be unworthy of being our leader (repeal and replace Obamacare fizzled, tax cuts for corporations not for working stiffs, outrageous federal spending increases, and now a complete cave on immigration, all in two years!), and Rush Limbaugh has proven himself over and over again to be unworthy of being our spokesman for still defending the guy responsible for it, same as ever.

We need people in charge of our movement who have a killer instinct, instead of the lay down and die instinct on display in this disgusting episode of betrayal and talk radio sycophancy.

Terrible Budget Bill Will Be Used Against Trump in 2020:

I read enough of this [border bill] to know that the things in this bill are a giant middle finger to Donald Trump [By signing it Trump gave HIMSELF the finger]. ... This is an Obama-era policy that has been re-implemented in this budget bill [Obviously Trump was just kidding about promising to reverse the two DACA executive orders immediately ... tick tock tick tock 2+years says the clock]. ... And don’t forget, folks, there are a lot of Republicans in on this [Like Donald Trump!]. ... I went back and forth, too, on signing this or not and shutting down [says the lazy ass without principles who could have read everything being said on Twitter on the Thursday before by reliable people on our side calling for a veto of this pig of a bill but didn't and sat silent when he should have called for a veto like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter]. ... You can say goodbye to anything we or Trump wants coming out of Congress from the moment the Democrats win the House, over [Funny how Ronald Reagan got tax cuts passed without control of Congress]. ... But, you know, elections have consequences, and there are a lot of Republicans that retired [Still blaming less than 10 retirements which flipped for what was a 40+ seat catastrophe because Trump and Republicans failed to deliver on the campaign agenda]. ... Fifty-five Republicans quit! They resigned [total lie].

Yesterday showed us that Trump is in fact 25th Amendment material

He didn't remember he let the drug dealers out of prison by just recently signing the criminal justice reform bill when he was riffing on executing them in the Rose Garden yesterday.

That means even if he read what was in the border deal, it didn't penetrate, didn't register, and didn't matter to him. Nothing was going to get in the way of signing the bill.

This denial of reality is religious fanaticism level stuff, courtesy of Norman Vincent Peale but grown especially virulent in this unique DNA combination known as Donald Trump.

What he needs is deprogramming, but the best thing we can do is depend on the sturdiness of our institutions, the separation of powers and the ensuing gridlock to sequester him until the voters do the intervention in 2020.  This is the gift of the founders and we should embrace it and thank them for it.

Unfortunately, expect Democrats to have no mercy, but to press their advantage against crazy King Ludwig. If Republicans know what's good for them, they'll refrain from any more big compromises, but they should work with Democrats to give Trump some nice shiny objects to stroke his vanity in the meantime and keep him distracted.  

Trump gave away 75% of federal spending as a shutdown bargaining chip over immigration in Sept. 2018, so before Sept. 2019 his only other chip is the debt ceiling

Flashback to September 28, 2018:

Trump signs spending bill, preventing shutdown:

President Trump on Friday signed an $854 billion spending package that will avert a shutdown by keeping the federal government open into the new fiscal year, which begins Monday.

The measure fully funds most parts of the federal government through fiscal 2019, pushing off a deadline for a partial shutdown — and showdown over funding for Trump's proposed border wall — until early December. 

“The signing of this legislation marks a drastic turnaround in the way we have funded the government in recent years," said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in a statement announcing the signing. "As of today, 75 percent of the government is funded — on time and through an open, bipartisan process.” ...

As Shutdown Stretches on, Debt Ceiling Questions Loom:

[A]fter March 1, the government will need to take "extraordinary measures" to avoid defaulting, and those measures will last for a few months. Ordinary investors should be aware that in 2013, the last time it looked as though Congress might not raise the limit, the market avoided Treasury securities that matured around the dates when the government projected it would exhaust the extraordinary measures.

So, looking ahead, ordinary investors shouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in rates and a decline in liquidity if it looks like the debt ceiling fight is going to be dramatic again. The current state of the shutdown may presage such drama.