Republicans specialize in spending money on putting Americans out of work, by importing cheap foreign labor and giving tax breaks to job-exporting corporations

Shameless Sen. Alan Simpson can talk of Bush 41's no new taxes betrayal and his loyalty in the same breath without blinking an eye

Yeah, Bush 41 was loyal to everyone but the taxpayer.

Today's fake news discourtesy of Reuters and CNBC: Republican proposes taxes on retirement plans

Top US House tax writer floats a tax bill on retirement plans and the IRS

The article says no such thing.

I'm sick of headlines from Democrats claiming to defend the republic when they're out to destroy it

Like this one from the prince of liars Andrew Sullivan, the spokesman for the freak zone of democracy, not republicanism: Can the Republic Strike Back?

They don't care about the republic. If Democrats had their way, all the bulwarks of the republic would be gone already: the electoral college, the US Senate, the Supreme Court, borders, citizen-only-voting, law and order, the presumption of innocence, and on and on. They'd replace it all with a two-headed monster of populism, a country led only by the US House and a popularly-elected president, creatures of the mob. 

The rest of the republic has to go, and its defender, Donald Trump:

Congress has real power. The press can’t get his tax returns. Congress can. The press can’t truly discover the depth of the corruption in his administration. Congress can. The press can’t publicly cross-examine Cabinet members, order functionaries to answer questions, kill proposed legislation, and air everything where it should be aired — on Capitol Hill. ...

One-party rule has strained this democracy. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and demographics have given us a government actively indifferent and even hostile to half the country. That single party has now taken firm control of the Supreme Court as well. It will very likely retain control of the Senate in January. Capturing the House is the only way the republic can strike back.

Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg's angry political attack taints the impartiality of the Supreme Court: She should resign

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg calls Trump a 'faker,' he says she should resign:

"He is a faker," she said of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, going point by point, as if presenting a legal brief. "He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. ... How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that."

Investors Business Daily thinks no one noticed Obama's recent public embrace of Bernie's radical socialism

Here.

We noticed. We just didn't mention it because we've been pointing out Obama's socialism for nine years already. Yawn.

But Obama was only a fair weather friend of socialism for most of that time because most of the Democrat Party remained neoliberal. Nothing points up his lackluster leadership and servile character throughout that time better than his constant fear of a backlash from the neoliberal wing of a party he supposedly led. Actually it led him. Obama was relieved to wash his hands of the economic crisis and delegated fixing it to Bill Clinton's neoliberal retreads. The guy couldn't even take the socialist baton of Pelosi's single payer plan for crying out loud, or embrace a Paul Krugman approved properly sized stimulus spending bill. And making the Bush tax cuts permanent? That was hardly the work of the leader (in his head) of world socialism.

Freed from the strictures of politics, Obama is now free to advance his fanciful sympathies without consequences, as long as the wind is blowing in that direction. My guess is the left wing of his party sees this as nothing more than his feeble attempt to be relevant again when to them he had already become an object of contempt by the end of 2009.

The author of Dreams from My Father is just dreamin', that's all. All he ever did.

My latest utility bill: "We are pleased to pass along the savings from federal tax reform"

$4.99-

What oh what will I do with this unexpected windfall?

Like just about everyone else on the left, Joel Kotkin continues to twist himself in pretzels to avoid calling our system what it already is

State capitalism.

It is the socialism of the right, despite what names people may give it. The fascist model in which business and government cooperate now more, now less was not defeated in World War II. The superior American version simply defeated the German one, and eventually also the left's inherently weaker version in Russia.

It has triumphed globally, brought to the fore in America by the libertarian resurgence under Ronald Reagan, imitated by the jealous Euro project, and notably exported to China, where it was eagerly embraced as no threat to Marxism. To the genuine Marxist, remember, free-trade is welcome because it hastens the global revolution. Belt and Road participants, take note.

The experiential groundwork for global state capitalism was laid long ago by the King and Bank of England in their joint enterprise known as the Thirteen Colonies. Everyone imitates this now in principle if not always in particulars. But everywhere it flourishes it is facilitated by the same thing, the central banking systems which coordinate their activities through rules administered under Basel III. The contemporary exemplars of state capitalism fancy that they are substantively a world away from Hitler's Germany, because, well, the Jews. We don't kill Jews, insist these experts at mass abortion and Uyghur mass re-education. 

It's the historical resonances which bother the left in using the phrase, but the underlying facts aren't different in substance. Materialism today means not having to say you're sorry for treating people like depreciated or unappreciated assets. Older workers in the West are routinely tossed aside for being too costly. Potential younger competitors are hamstrung by a culture of costly credentialing prerequisites. When such people become worthless enough, it isn't unlikely that in some places they could stop being considered people altogether (typically where atheism reigns) so that they could be slaughtered wholesale with the same relative efficiency already applied to the unborn. The tech already exists to do this. The only question is when will the people exist who are possessed of enough nerve.   

Here's Kotkin on this so-called "new, innovative approach" which looks like nothing so much as the old Soviet Union, with its hostility centered on the middle class, its dreary blocks of drab apartment buildings, the dim pall of surveillance and conformity lurking everywhere, complete with its own privileged new class in service to the party .01 percent:

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support. ... [T]he tech oligarchy — the people who run the five most capitalized firms on Wall Street — have [sic] a far less egalitarian vision. ... [T]hey see government spending as a means of keeping the populist pitchforks away. ... Handouts, including housing subsidies, could guarantee for the next generation a future not of owned houses, but rented small, modest apartments. ...  They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views . . .. Faced with limited future prospects, more millennials already prefer socialism to capitalism and generally renounce constitutionally sanctioned free speech . . .. [I]ncreased income guarantees, nationalized health care, housing subsidies, rent control and free education could also help firms maintain a gig-oriented [slave] economy since these employers do not provide the basic benefits often offered by more traditional “evil” corporations . . ..  [T]he oligarchy, representing basically the top .01 percent of the population, are primarily interested not in lower taxes but in protecting their market shares and capital. ... The losers here will be our once-protean middle class. Unlike the owners of corporations in the past, oligarchs have no interest in their workers become homeowners or moving up the class ladder. Their agenda instead is forever-denser, super-expensive rental housing for their primarily young, and often short-term, employees. ... The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

As long as South Africa legalizes theft of farm land owned by whites, the IMF and the UK's Theresa May are all for it

Reuters reports here.

South Africa was ruled by Britain for a hundred years between 1806 and 1910. White Europeans swelled population through immigration, peaking above 5 million in the mid 1990s. They carved civilization out of a savage environment, for which they get no thanks now because savagery is all the fashion again.

Legalized theft takes different forms in different places at different times, for example through government exercise of eminent domain, or through imposition of an income tax.

In South Africa the plan is to take without compensation, but perhaps with murder thrown in for good measure if Julius Malema gets his way. 

Noah Smith embraces the Trump narrative: "There’s no doubt that the U.S. economy is in a boom"

Here for Bloomberg.

After examining several indicators, which, however, are not unequivocal for their interpretation despite saying "no doubt", Noah Smith comes down on the side of improved sentiment as the cause of the current "boom".

On that we agree. There's a boom in sentiment.

The problem is, too many people are importing that improved sentiment into their reading of the data, and into their choice of the data.

For example, Smith focuses on job openings to unemployed, which is a tiny measure (6.66 million in June) of what's really going on in the labor market. But the broadest measures of unemployment still show 15.9 million unemployed, underemployed, and no longer counted in the labor force. There is still huge slack in the labor market, which is one reason why wages for the vast majority of workers are not rising like they would in a real economic boom (2.7% y/y in July vs. in the 4s in 2006/7).

Similarly Smith discusses the percent of population employed aged 25-54, but clearly misses that it's most definitely not "back to 2006 levels" as he claims (H1 2018 is at 79.2%, still below the 2006 average of 79.8% and also below the average of either half of 2006). The broadest measure of the percent employed, on the other hand, still shows a huge gap between now and the pre-Great Recession average when over 6 million more were employed than are at present (60.5% now vs. 62.9% then, on average).

The case is similar with domestic investment.

Smith chooses to highlight "Shares of gross domestic product: Gross private domestic investment: Fixed investment: Nonresidential (A008RE1Q156NBEA)" to show that "investment as a percentage of the economy is at about the level of the mid-2000s boom". But the current level in H1 2018 at 13.7% is also identical to H2 2014. Was that indicative of a boom? Did we blink and miss it? How about in H1 2008 when it was again at 13.7%? Was that indicative of a boom? If so, why did the economy then promptly crash in H2 2008?

A broader measure of domestic investment, however, "Shares of gross domestic product: Gross private domestic investment (A006RE1Q156NBEA)", shows us well off the 2006 peak and even the more recent 2015 level. Whatever we call what we have right now, the current 17.7% is still far below the 19.8% level of H1 2006, which itself failed to equal the boom level of the year 2000 (19.9%).

With all that cash unleashed by the tax reforms and sloshing around in the economy, one would think things would look a lot better than this, which simply shows that most of that money indeed went elsewhere.

GDP has been temporarily goosed by the tax reforms in concert with a fresh gusher of federal deficit spending. But those are one-offs. They will not, and cannot, be repeated over and over again in short succession.

We know what comes next.

Priceless: Yale historian Timothy Snyder blames Democrats for Hillary's loss

Here, on May 1, 2017, in Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy:

 '"On Tyranny" is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. ... [T]he other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016.' 

Funny how he lets that little slap slip at the end of an interview about his fears. It is the great, unacknowledged truth of Election 2016.

The rest of it reminded me of myself in 2009.

When I saw how leftists started trashing Obama one year in to his presidency it dawned on me that the tyranny I had feared from an Obama presidency had been a misplaced fear. Then the stories of Obama's laziness started to surface, and the personal details about his penchant for watching sports on TV, traveling, fine dining and playing golf. The guy got captured by the trappings of the office. Only then was it clear that there was nothing existential to fear. And then the guy punted on Obamacare, letting the House and Senate duke it out, creating a grotesque. And after reelection, he actually made the Bush tax cuts permanent and fixed the AMT.

Wow. What a revolutionary!

If Snyder breathed into a paper bag for a minute or two, he might realize that Trump's first midterms are upon us and only now is Trump starting to realize what presidential power is all about. The thing is, it's way too late. He has already squandered his political capital in year one, failing at job one, which is to get the order of the agenda correct. This was partly the result of making lousy appointments across the board in the first place, many of whom have gone on to blow up like so many Clinton bimbo eruptions but without the sex. By generally being incompetent like any true outsider would be in Washington Trump was at a huge disadvantage from the start anyway. But the people who could have helped him didn't because Trump got elected in part by insulting them.

This presidency is already much like Obama's, a creation of the House and Senate, not of the president. Recourse to executive orders to get what you want but can't get the ordinary way is a sign of weakness, not strength. It shows that the master is the slave. 

Few presidents get three important things done. Trump has one major accomplishment but it wasn't the one people remember the fearless leader championing at every venue of 2015 and 2016. So far the corporate tax cut is not translating into unequivocal results for the people. As a percentage of civilian population, employment remains over 6 million behind the pre-Great Recession average.

"Hillary isn't president" is something to be truly grateful for, but sooner or later it will dawn on the Trumpists that Trump isn't either.

Frank Rich slams Gary Cohn in NY Mag, Cohn fires back in Bloomberg

Frank Rich on the 5th, here:

The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. ... But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Gary Cohn here on the 6th:

In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull. ... In Washington nothing’s perfect, so I’m not thinking it’s perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. But the fact that we got something really important done, which is corporate tax reform, which made us competitive with the rest of the world, is good.

Good comparison of the presidents on GDP by Justin Fox at Bloomberg

Guess Which Presidents Really Oversaw Economic Booms

Fox well reminds his readers that GDP is an inadequate measure in many respects, and gives credit where credit is due even when the numbers don't seem to show it.

His second chart is the better chart since it is a political comparison, which is what this is all about, pegging beginning and end of analysis to fourth quarters when presidents are elected or eclipsed.

He has Kennedy and Johnson first and second (5.5% and 5%), followed by Clinton (3.8%), Reagan 3.6%), Carter (3.2%) and Nixon 3.0%), then IKE (2.5%), then Ford and Bush 41 tied (2.2%), with Obama (1.9%) and Bush 43 (1.8%) bringing up the rear. (Trump so far is seventh, ahead of IKE but behind Nixon, at 2.7%).

A few quibbles.

The data is plenty fine for Truman 1948-1952. He should be included. His performance is the best of them all on a full term basis (5.54%), using the same compound annual growth rate Fox uses. The secret to Truman's success? He slashed government spending in the wind-down from World War II. No one seems to get that. By cutting taxes and not slashing spending, Republicans since Truman only defeat themselves and discredit what works.

Secondly, JFK didn't serve out his first term, Nixon his second. Therefore it makes more sense to view JFK coterminous with LBJ (5.19% together), and Ford with Nixon (2.73%), evaluating them together in two eight year periods of Democrat and Republican political administration respectively, which is what it was.

Third, Fox rounds his numbers, which obscures how close Bush and Obama were in their terrible records (1.83% and 1.88% respectively). 

All in all, though, we come up with similar results: Truman is first (5.54), followed by JFK/LBJ (5.19), Clinton (3.81), Reagan (3.55), Carter (3.19), Nixon/Ford (2.73), IKE (2.52), Bush 41 (2.21), Obama (1.88), and Bush 43 (1.83).

Trump's first year through 4Q2017 is 2.47%. Measured 2Q2017 on 2Q2018 just completed he's at 2.85%.

Only by comparison with the previous sixteen years is this anything to cheer about, but thankfully we have that.

The Republican corporate tax cuts Christmas 2017 have produced no surge in private investment in 2018 H1

Did Trump voters in 2016 vote for a huge corporate tax cut, war with North Korea, and a DACA amnesty?

I watched all the rallies and never heard about these things.

The enthusiasm was all for The Wall, a symbol of the out of control immigration problems facing the country, of which we haven't gotten one inch 19 months later. We could have had 2000 miles of razor-wire by now, but for that you'll need Hungarians apparently, not Americans.

The secondary enthusiasms were for jobs and an end to Obamacare, which have been half-heartedly addressed, not in the least because rank and file Republicans are about business as usual, i.e. keeping their jobs. We still have 16.1 million total unemployed in May 2018, and (unusable) privately purchased health insurance premiums going through the roof.

They don't give a damn about us or what we need, except at election time.

I'm voting in the primaries against incumbents where possible, and third party (but no libertarians) in the general. Otherwise it'll be for Mickey Mouse, Dopey and Goofy, but never again for these fools. The cartoon variety would be an improvement.

Republican corporate tax cuts = record stock buybacks in May 2018 = corporate insiders selling to profit BIGLY

From the story, "Corporate executives are using stock buybacks to pad their own compensation, according to the SEC", here:

Indeed, buybacks totaled $178 billion during the first quarter, hit a record $171.3 billion in May alone and have seen $51.1 billion announced so far in June, according to market data firm TrimTabs. At the same time, insider selling has totaled $23.6 billion.

Meanwhile Challenger, Gray & Christmas reports total hirings in the first five months of 2018 are down 48% from the first five months of 2017.

The Republican tax cuts are working out as predicted: Failing to provide jobs while enriching elites.

Slate takes The Atlantic to task for not taking the 1% seriously enough

Here in "Actually, the 1 Percent Are Still The Problem".

Actually, the Reagan 1986 tax reform was the problem, but Jordan Weissmann never mentions it.

This despite his wonderful graph of the top 10% over time showing the 1% take-off after the reform. When it becomes easier for the already rich to take high incomes the ordinary way, like everyone else, because of low top marginal rates, less money ends up getting plowed back into productive purposes like it used to before 1986.

We keep believing the myth that "the rich are different than you and me", but they're not. They're as indolent, undisciplined and blinkered as any middle class family leveraged to the hilt which believes it deserves a house a little larger than it can afford, two car payments, the weekly fine dinner out and the expensive annual winter vacation.

The 1% aren't the problem. You will have them always with you, by definition. The problem is human nature, and government's failure to correct for it.

Say what you will about "Christian" belief, previously it at least curbed the 1%'s enthusiasm, with the stick of high marginal income tax rates and the carrot of low long term capital gains taxes.

A Massachusetts liberal for The Atlantic vaguely realizes that the wealthy have withdrawn their money from productive purposes

In other words, they've behaved like ordinary people behave, as in badly.

This was first made possible in America broadly by the Kennedy and then the Reagan tax cuts (Irish anyone?), which took away the high-taxation-goad that prodded income into productive investments which in turn benefited more people, but this never occurs to the author, here:

[A]round the world and throughout history, the wealthy have advanced the crystallization process in a straightforward way. They have taken their money out of productive activities and put it into walls.

The whole point of conservatism has been that human nature is mixed, so that "class" is mostly irrelevant. The author, however, is preoccupied with it, especially the "New American Aristocracy", which means he's a liberal who is (mostly) convinced some people are more equal than others for various reasons, which he goes to great, and sometimes convincing, lengths to demonstrate, and criticize.

That's a start.

Conservatives answer that good people and bad people populate the whole at every level, and that everyone has a little bit of each in them at the same time. Conservatives also believe that good government is government which encourages the good in everyone and discourages the evil. Bad government denies that this is government's responsibility at all, or it denies that one of these two irreducible facts of life is a fact so that you get liberal government which lets people run amok or tyrannical government which is too restrictive.

The author's answer is more equality when understanding how we all already are equally good and evil would be better. It's the peculiar blind spot of liberalism, the analogue of which in conservatism is failing to see the good in people:

But we do have a blind spot, and it is located right in the center of the mirror: We seem to be the last to notice just how rapidly we’ve morphed, or what we’ve morphed into. The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.

TrimTabs: 1Q2018 pace of corporate stock buybacks and deals outstrips pace of wage increases by 85%

For the five years previous to the Trump corporate tax cuts, buybacks and deals outstripped wage increases $4.9 trillion to $2.3 trillion. The pace increased in the first quarter to a projected five-year level of $6.1 trillion to $2.6 trillion, meaning the pace of stock buybacks and deals is up 24% but only 13% for wage increases. The difference between those two rates of increase is nearly 85%.

The CNBC story, "Tax cut riches have gone to execs and investors over workers by nearly 3-to-1 margin", is here. The headline exaggerates the 1Q2018 ratio of buybacks of $305 billion to wage increases of $131 billion, which is actually 2.3:1.

Liberal math, but still. The Trump tax cuts are going to top managers and stockholders overwhelmingly compared with the masses of ordinary wage earners.

This explains the resilience of the stock market indices near their record highs. The tax cut cash is flowing into stocks, boosting and supporting prices.

Spending bill is a giant FU to Trump, prevents him from using any of the new border wall prototypes

Reported here:

But, crucially, the bill specifically prevents the Trump administration from using any of the new wall designs it commissioned and tested in California last year. All money has to be spent on “operationally effective designs deployed as of the date of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017” — a bill Trump signed on May 5, 2017.

If President Trump cared less about his wall than about a wall, this wouldn’t be an issue. But everything we know about the president indicates that’s not the case, and that this is a blow to his ego — he reportedly upbraided congressional Republicans this week for not supporting it, claiming they “owed” him for his support for the tax bill and his nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. The bullying tactics do not appear to have worked. ...

Trump wanted 1,000 new ICE agents; he’s getting barely 100, and none of them are the field agents responsible for arresting unauthorized immigrants. (Instead, ICE is getting more staff for investigations and mission support.)

And when it comes to immigration detention, Congress isn’t just refusing to give the White House the 20 percent increase in detention Trump asked for — it’s rebuking ICE for overspending and expecting Congress to bail it out. 

h/t Mickey Kaus