The entire Democrat and media establishment, but I repeat myself, has been lying to the nation to protect one man, Joe Biden, and they trot out Obama with this liberal projection to gaslight the voters one more time

Biden Fights for Ordinary People While Trump Is Out for Himself -- Barack Obama, X

This hopium peddler sat idly by while hopeless ordinary people had to join the greatest exodus from the labor force in the history of the post-war.

 

Now millions of illegals have been brought in under Joe Biden to take their place at much lower wages.

 

Democrats to ordinary people: You're chumps!

 

 

Pocahonky has told a chump who actually paid off student loans that he can't have his money back, so he stomped off down the warpath

Bernie's brilliant strategy to win in 2020 is to make a chump out of every voter who ever repaid a student loan

Go Bernie!

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.

P. J. O'Rourke: Capitalism Gets Rid Of Things That Don't Work [You Know, Like Babies]

About 56 million are aborted annually worldwide at the zenith of global capitalism.

[C]apitalism ... gets rid of stuff that doesn’t work. ... [T]here are other systems… that spend money in strange and silly ways. Of these systems, the biggest is big government, with its ethos of “If it works, tax it… If it doesn’t work, subsidize it.”

And of these other systems which spend money in strange and silly ways the smallest is the heterosexual nuclear family, with its ethos of never requiring work of children commensurate with the cost of subsidizing them, strange and silly as it may sound, nor of the elderly commensurate with the cost of subsidizing them.

Because some things are more important than working.

Forgiving student loans makes chumps of all borrowers who dutifully paid theirs off, screws lenders and does nothing to stop the unholy alliance between The Academy and The State

This fake Indian theocrat should be sent packing. Forgiveness has become the American disease.

The Christopher Wylie story is fascinating but isn't really bombshell news: Ted Cruz used the same firm Wylie worked for

We reported on the story about Cruz from WaPo here already in December 2015.

The really hysterically funny thing about it all, once again, is how Facebook and its millions of idiot users are the real chumps. 

From the story here:

. . . Wylie offers a unique, worm’s-eye view of the events of 2016. Of how Facebook was hijacked, repurposed to become a theatre of war: how it became a launchpad for what seems to be an extraordinary attack on the US’s democratic process.

Wylie oversaw what may have been the first critical breach. Aged 24, while studying for a PhD in fashion trend forecasting, he came up with a plan to harvest the Facebook profiles of millions of people in the US, and to use their private and personal information to create sophisticated psychological and political profiles. And then target them with political ads designed to work on their particular psychological makeup.

“We ‘broke’ Facebook,” he says.

And he did it on behalf of his new boss, Steve Bannon.

“Is it fair to say you ‘hacked’ Facebook?” I ask him one night.

He hesitates. “I’ll point out that I assumed it was entirely legal and above board.”

The new giant sucking sound of your jobs going abroad: Republican territorial tax "reform"

Phyliss Schlafly was rightly against a territorial system long ago, and most recently opposed it when the doofus from Texas, Rick Perry, proposed it as a candidate for president in 2015. Schlafly understood that it was anti-American, but she's dead, her voice gone silent. Only some lonely leftists remain who understand how wrong this is. No voices on the right are speaking out against this travesty.

Trump on the other hand thinks this is great, but obviously understands this as little as any other policy issue. He has become the Republicans' biggest chump, with the rest of us in tow.

From the story here:

Today, the United States has what’s known as a worldwide tax system in which all profits—foreign and domestic—are subject to a 35 percent corporate income tax. If a US company wants to return foreign profits to the United States, it pays the 35 percent rate minus what it’s paid to foreign governments. The House and Senate tax bills replace this with a “territorial” system that drops the tax rate to 20 percent for domestic profits and nothing for foreign profits.

The territorial model that the GOP is pushing would create an additional incentive to invest in countries like Ireland where the corporate rate is significantly lower than the United States. Republicans believe the differences won’t be big enough to drive investment abroad. Steve Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, disagrees, saying that’s still “plenty of juice” to encourage companies to shift production to countries with lower tax rates. Kimberly Clausing, an expert in international taxation at Reed College, writes that the shift to a territorial system “makes explicit, and permanent, the preference for foreign income over domestic income.” She estimates that profit shifting already costs the US government more than $100 billion per year. 

Large multinational companies can already play games to avoid paying the full rate, such as transferring intellectual property to tax havens and then stashing those profits abroad to indefinitely put off paying US taxes. Apple, for example, transfers patents and other intangible assets abroad, and then further reduces its tax burden with additional sub-licensing. Through tax schemes with names like the “Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich,” Apple has been able to amass more more than $128 billion in profits abroad that haven’t been touched by the IRS.

Republicans are proposing a series of guardrails to try to prevent companies shifting intangible assets—such as patents and trademarks—to tax havens. But Rosenthal says those protections are mostly ineffective and in fact create a set of new incentives to invest more abroad. He adds that it’s unclear whether the new status quo would be worse than the current system.

The main guardrail in the tax bills would impose a 10 percent tax on foreign profits that exceed a company’s “routine” return on tangible assets abroad. (Rosenthal’s blog post provides a more detailed explanation of how that works.) In theory, the guardrail would lead to companies paying a 10 percent tax when they shift profits to tax havens, but not when they actually make things abroad. In practice, the guardrail allows companies to shelter more money in tax havens when they build factories and other physical assets abroad—offering new tax incentives for companies to ship jobs overseas.

Either way, 10 percent is still half of what they would have paid if they hadn’t tried to game the system. Clausing argues that’s a clear sign Republicans are favoring foreign profits. Another is that Republicans’ aren’t using a territorial tax model that requires companies to pay a minimum rate in every country they operate in. Instead, the bill only considers whether they pay 10 percent abroad, on average. That’s an easy loophole to exploit. If Ford has a factory in Japan, it pays a corporate tax rate of about 30 percent. Ford could then shift intangible assets from the United States to a tax haven like Bermuda and still be paying more than 10 percent on a global basis. Clausing tells Mother Jones that it’s “well-known that a per-country minimum tax would be more effective and I think that’s why they didn’t do it.” 

Krauthammer thinks Trump might go for single payer in the end, in which case Americans should get it, good and hard

Think of it as socialism with Republican characteristics.

Krauthammer, here:

Obamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage.

Acceptance of its major premise — that no one be denied health care — is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that “our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care,” making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any Obamacare repeal. ...

As Obamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all.

Simplicity? Draco's laws were simple. The penalty for every crime was death.

I wonder if Krauthammer has a clue what he's talking about.

Total Medicare outlays in 2015 came to $632 billion.

Total Medicaid outlays in 2015 came to $552 billion country wide (read the Notes).

Total Social Security and Disability outlays in 2015 came to $897.1 billion.

That is a total of $2.0811 trillion from 2015 total net compensation of $7.4158 trillion, or 28%, without even talking about "universal coverage" yet.

Yet all your typical American pays now for this is 10.63%:

6.2% in Social Security tax and 1.45% for Medicare, plus whatever taxes are paid at the state and local level toward Medicaid, which federal law mandates must account for at least 40% of program revenues. So $221 billion from 160.8 million wage earners across the country in 2015 represents another 2.98% paid by them at the state level.

The status quo therefore is funded only 38% by its beneficiaries, at best. I say "at best" because many beneficiaries pay NOTHING because they don't work and never have. But I digress.

So bring about Krauthammer's revolution, for that is what he's talking about, and reset the table as follows.

Total healthcare outlays in the United States in 2015 came to $3.2 trillion. Add in $897.1 billion for Social Security and Disability, and you now have a "universal" obligation bloated to $4.097 trillion, which represents 55% of net compensation that year.

That's your tax.

You've become France, Germany, Denmark or some other Western European paradise which depends on the United States for its defense.

And that's before even talking about funding the $1.2 trillion part of the federal budget which is discretionary, like defending ourselves against that little fat kid playing with hydrogen bombs in North Korea.

Of course there's another chunk of money out there being made in the United States apart from net compensation, about $8 trillion in 2015. The recipients of this income typically pay the lower capital gains tax rates, not the payroll and income tax rates which are for the chumps.

It's a nice little system which isn't paying its fair share for socialism in the United States, even though it is rich guys who typically shout the loudest on behalf of it. They do this because they know it will keep the little guy down, from whom they don't want the competition some day. But tax that system equally to net compensation and you cut that 55% tax in half, to say 27.5%. That, however, means a big fat tax increase on the rich, and on everybody else. I doubt they'll stand for that any more than they open their checkbooks now to make patriotic voluntary donations to the US Treasury.

We live in a fantasy land where no one wants to pay what it costs for anything.

We think we can have our cake and eat it too.

We want infrastructure spending, and a tax cut dammit.

The answer: CHUMPS

Hillary, here.

Trump has captured the real American spirit, the spirit of the true born sons of liberty who dumped the cheaper taxed tea into Boston harbor.

Four Republican Chump Senators Vote To Confirm Hagel

Story here:

The vote was 58-41, with four Republicans joining the Democrats in backing the contentious choice. Hagel's only GOP support came from former colleagues

Thad Cochran of Mississippi,

Dick Shelby of Alabama ...

Mike Johanns of Nebraska ... 

and Rand Paul of Kentucky. ...

[Other] Republicans ... challenged Hagel about a May 2012 study that he co-authored for the advocacy group Global Zero, which called for an 80 percent reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons and the eventual elimination of all the world's nuclear arms.

These men just voted to let a Republican take the blame for dismantling the American military.

They are not on our side.

John Tamny Exposes National Review's Conservatism As Monetarist Currency Devaluation

For Forbes.com, here:

Beckworth and Ponnuru . . . seek money creation to achieve economic growth, or to quote them directly, “central banks would be required to try to keep nominal spending growing at a certain rate” through 5% annual money growth. They bemoan “nominal spending” that “is currently far below the pre-crisis trend”, and remarkably they believe the Fed can remedy this by virtue of gunning the money supply.

Of course missed by the writers is that all demand in any economy results from the provision of supply first (Say’s Law, as one would expect, merits no mention in their manifesto), so to boost the demand, you don’t devalue the currency as they would like to; instead you stabilize the currency so that liquid investors feel comfortable offering up capital to producers. Schumpeter understood that there are no entrepreneurs (and no production) without capital, but if the desire is to devalue the currency then investable capital is naturally going to dry up; that or migrate toward the inflation hedges of yesterday as it did in the ‘70s and since 2001.

Yeah, Thanks Bernanke

"Interest rates are amazingly low and that, thanks to Ben Bernanke, is driving everything."

"We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it."

"We have many, many homeowners that are totally underwater here and cannot get out from under. The technology frontier is limited right now. We definitely have an innovation slowdown and the economy’s gonna suffer."

"Any bears out there better be careful because the dividend yields on these stocks look awesome relative to all the other investment vehicles out there. So bears are going to have to find a new way to express their discontent with the U.S. economy."

-- Peter Yastrow, market strategist, quoted here

These guys keep talking their book, which is the Fed's book, which is the politicians' book, until, you know, we vote them out of office. "Don't fight the Fed" is their number one rule.

Why do we have to find a new way to express our discontent? What's wrong with expressing our discontent in the usual way, like we've been doing? You don't want us to march in the streets again, do you? We aren't buying anything, we aren't traveling anywhere, eating out, investing, or working for a paycheck. In short, we're on strike. Howdoyalikethemapples, chump?

The only thing we can do is plant. And wait. And vote. And we're really looking forward to voting again.

Or have you forgotten last November?

Income Taxes are for Chumps, Capital Gains Taxes are for the Rich

[Bruce] Bartlett, a former member of the Reagan White House, isn’t against the wealthy paying higher taxes. He’s that rare conservative who thinks higher taxes need to be part of the deficit debate. His beef? It’s a hollow gesture to say the federal government should raise the tax rate on the country’s top wage earners when the likes of Zuckerberg have most of their wealth tied up in stock. Many of the super-rich see virtually all their income as capital gains, and capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate—15 percent—than ordinary income.

More here!

Rush's Brain Goes on Vacation Early

Today he's said the SPENDING in the $857 billion bill extending the Bush TAX rates for two years was minimal, and that the majority of it, $700 some billion, had to do only with the tax rates.

Pure rubbish.

A lazy, over-generalized point showing yet again lack of show prep, and an effort to co-opt the outrage and the influence of the Tea Party, which Rush is trying to steer toward establishment politics to prevent it from exploding into a genuine third party movement.

The tax rates, extended for two years, will cost just over $207 billion, not $700+ billion. The rest is all tax credits, fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax yet once again, and a host of other goodies handed out via the tax code in order to mask what's really going on: the rich and the poor getting special favors through the tax code at the expense of the chumps in the middle who must pay and pay and pay.

Wake up Rush, you dunderhead.

Here's a table breaking it all down.

The Latest Load Of BS From John McCain Is A Steaming Pile

Reported in Newsweek, April 3:

"I never considered myself a maverick," he told me. "I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities." Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.

And now Sarah Palin is a first class chump who cannot be taken seriously by anyone except a fanatic.