December 2017 Archives

Dear America,

Why does Donald Trump lie?  Does he know he is lying?  Doesn't he realize that everything he says is fact checked over and over again?  And if the answer to either of those last two questions is no, do we have something to fear in that he is out of touch with reality?

This president lying, usually about something trivial but involving his ego, has happened over and over again since at least the inauguration when he claimed that he had had the largest crowd for an inauguration ever while photographs comparing his inauguration and that of his immediate predecessor demonstrated that he barely had half the turnout that Barrack Obama had.  You may recall that when Chuck Todd of NBC asked Kelly Ann Conway, who is Trump's political advisor, to explain the disparity between the president's claim and the photographic evidence, she made reference to "alternative facts,"  which Todd promptly pointed out was nonsense...that if it's a fact, there is no alternative to it.  But there have been many other presidential claims of fact that have been discredited, the most recent being his self-congratulatory assertion that his presidency has been the most legislatively productive ever, that even his loyal staff have been unable to vindicate.  For example, it turns out that he has signed 96 bills into law (not merely the 88 he claimed in the moment), but his claim of productivity superior to that of the former number one, Harry Truman, is a bald-faced, self-serving lie.  Truman signed more than twice the number of bills that Trump did in the same length of incumbency, and in fact, Trump has signed fewer bills into law than any of his recent predecessors back to at least to the Eisenhower administration.  In fact, he is not first among lessers as he continually claims himself to be, he is next to last ahead only of George W. Bush, whose presidency may well go down in history as one of the worst of all time in many ways, that being one of them.  And when the office of the White House press secretary's office was asked to comment on this particular divergence from reality, it made no response...at least not to NPR, which made the inquiry, but no doubt there will be some kind of claim of "fake news" or stinting coverage of Trump's  accomplishments intended to vindicate the liar-in-chief.

And it was easy enough to confirm all of this on the internet through multiple sources.  It didn't even require a creative question; I just googled it, the point being that Trump's boast was virtually certain to be discredited almost instantly by a host of critics because everyone knows he lies.   There was no way for him to get away with this lie, just as there almost never is.  So why does he keep doing it? What does he think he gains, and more importantly, is he delusional in thinking so?  Do we have a delusional president?  Is he not just dumb, but dangerous as well?

The President is going to Walter Reed for a physical soon, and the doctor who administers it won't be some shill who is beholden to Trump for expansive fees paid in the past.  It will be a military doctor, and I'm wondering if psychological balance will be a part of the evaluation.  Presumably, the doctor will talk to Trump, and his delusions of grandeur are apparent in almost everything he says.  Will the doctor hear some claim from Trump that he won't be able to help googling like I did...like millions of others did no doubt.  And if he does and he discovers that The President is so far removed from reality that he actually believes these outlandish things he says...the outlandish thing he says to the medical doctor from Walter Reed, will that doctor feel compelled to report to whomever the report goes that Donald Trump is an unhinged real estate baron from New York and should never be near "the button" that could destroy us all.

Honestly, I hate to think about a President "Goody three shoes" taking power.  Mike Pence may not be a liar, but he is the next thing to a holy roller, and he thinks we should all be letting God be in charge.  The problem is that Pence thinks he knows what God wants us to do, and thus there are no limits to the regression that he might inflict.  Still, he's not likely to go Stragelove on us.  Trump? I'm not so sure.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

It's unfortunate, but you can paint a picture that is anything from rosy to swamp brown by emphasizing the statistics you want to use.  For example, consumer confidence and consumer spending have reached record highs this Christmas...quite rosy.  On the other hand, wages are still growing at a rate that is just above inflation, so the working person in this country isn't progressing, but rather is just breaking even, though production, and thus profits are up...closer to swamp brown.  Unemployment is at a low that matches levels from decades ago and is regarded as virtual full employment.  On the other hand, the rate of participation in the labor force among males in particular is at record lows, probably because a living wage is so hard to find despite record profits in business itself...pretty brown again.  But of course Republicans, Donald Trump in particular, choose to accentuate the positive by pointing out that jobs continue to be created as if they started a trend that is actually a few years old, dating back to the mid-Obama years, and the big Christmas at the big box stores and on the internet, they claim that those are reflections of Trump administration policies, though they really can't point to anything that was actually changed by them.  Of course this tax cut is something they will harp on, claiming all kinds of prospective changes--more jobs because businesses will invest their tax savings in capital projects and wages will increase out of the largess of the corporate ethos in America.  It's never happened with any tax cut before, but maybe this will be the first time, and though wages didn't go up when record profits piled into corporate bank accounts to the tune of trillions of dollars without wages going up, maybe the influx of a different kind of dollars...tax savings rather than say price gouging profits for example...will make the difference.  But with regard to how workers have managed to spend so much more money than last even though they aren't making more, no one seems to be asking why, and that may be the biggest issue of all.

The savings rate of American workers in the period from 1959 to the present was 8.28%.  People saved a lot of money over that period for their retirement, contingencies, big ticket purchases, college and new houses.  But in 2005, just prior to the housing bubble, savings were down to all time lows under 2%, and now, in November 2017, they are just 2.9%.  In other words, American workers are spending virtually everything they earn and dedicating only the meager gains they make at the rate of inflation to their futures.  So what's going to happen when all these Christmas present buyers retire?  If the Republicans have their way, entitlement programs, and they improperly include Social Security, we pay every week in our paychecks and which payments are by law excluded from general fund tax revenue and usable only to pay Social Security benefits, will be diminished, especially to pay for  this most recent tax cut benefiting business and the rich primarily.  To put it more cynically, the Republicans are giving average workers $20-$40 per week now so that they can take that and more away from them years from now when the link between the two things will seem far less obvious.  And combined with the low savings rate that has become the American norm, we'll be back where we were before the new deal, but who'll remember that either.

It's important to remember thinks like the diminished capacity of our working people to provide for their own retirement because the Republicans want to reduce the extent to which retirees can rely on Social Security and other social safety-net programs.  Because it they get away with allowing us to spend our future security now, we'll have no recourse when the future comes.  That's why 2018 is so important.  We are bleeding now, and the Republicans want to bleed us some more, though they're being very quiet about it right now.  If we let them stay in control next year, we'll pay farther down the road, and we'll pay massively.

So, remember the savings rate...remember how much you yourself save when you go to the polls in November.   The quality of your later life depends on it even if you are benefiting from a fraudulent tax revenue give-away today.  Remember the savings rate as if you were remembering The Maine.  Make no mistake about it.  This is war...class war.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Republicans have actually gotten away with a great deal lately, which gives me pause when I think that it will all catch up with them by November.  Some of it is just detail that no one much will notice.  For example, the first discussion of the tax bill in the House Ways and Means Committee that I, as a member of the public was aware of, was held a couple of days ago and it ran into the night (the Republicans had just released a copy of the bill the day before).  I watched some of it on C-span and there was one exchange in particular that roused my indignation.  The leading Democrat made the point that the bill adds $1.3 trillion to the deficit, and hence to the debt as well, and he remarked that he had run for congress to do something about the deficit.  He noted that we hadn't had a budget surplus, much less a balanced budget, since Bill Clinton's legacy budget in 2000, which was for the next fiscal year, the first of the George W. Bush administration.  The leading Republican, a good ol' smarmy back slapper from Texas named Sam Johnson, responded with the one of the most odiously demagogical remarks I have ever heard while watching congressional proceedings.  He said, gratuitously I might add, that the last balanced budget we had was on September 10, 2001...the day before the 9/11 attacks.  The Democrat pointed out that budgets don't run day to day, which was a diplomatic way of saying, you're trying to wrap a bad bill in the flag to sell it with insincerity, but the Republican was undeterred.  He repeated what was at best a deceitful, self-serving canard on too many levels, including common sense and knowledge of what congress, his own body, does to be enumerated here, and he did it shamelessly.  I might add, he did it without a word of rebuke from a member of either party.  Of course, no one saw that exchange, so the hypocrisy it embodied will never catch up to Representative Johnson of rural Texas. 

Then today, Ted Cruz stood up on the floor in The Senate and berated the Democrats for unanimously voting against the increase in the child tax credit, which he pointed out serves only the poor.  How callous the Democrats are, he fulminated in his best casuistic, bombastic, stentorian roar.  Of course Chuck Schumer responded, but by comparison, to Cruz's prosecutorial sanctimony, Schumer sounded tame, though rational as opposed to politically insincere ala Cruz.  But my guess is that unless you listen to NPR, you'll never hear that exchange either.

And of course there is the tax bill itself.  The Republicans insist that when Americans see less withholding in their pay checks and all the new jobs that the new "tax reform" will yield, they will see that claims that it is a boon to the rich, not the middle class or the poor have been put to rest.  There's no way to refute those claims, but they camouflage some of the core of the bill that definitely results in more debt, 13 million fewer people with health insurance in ten years, and the complete absence of funding for the CHIP program, which pays health insurance for poor children.  And people won't notice a 20% tax break for people with "pass through" businesses who now pay on their income like the rest of us, but who will get a 20% tax reduction next year on the bizarre theory that they will plow that money back into their businesses and create more jobs once it becomes personal income whereas they could do the same now before paying themselves their compensation...and they don't.  As to all these jobs that are supposed to be created with new corporate wealth from tax reductions that reduce the corporate tax burden by 45%, no such thing happened under Ronald Reagan, whose tax cut his vice-president had prophetically called "voo-doo economics" during the Republican primaries of 1980.  In fact, more jobs were created during the Clinton administration in which the last of the Reagan tax cuts were repealed than were created by the Reagan "supply side" plan.

My point is that the Democrats can't just sit around waiting for this tax cut to fail to produce what the Republicans promise it will.  They have to start asking the Republicans, how exactly is that going to work.  What inducements do big businesses have to spend their tax break when they are already sitting on at least $2 trillion in surpluses in their bank accounts now.  This merits some thought by Democratic leaders...this rhetorical refutation of the Republican canard.  Our only hope is that they realize it...and do it loudly, clearly, and every day.   

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

A couple of days ago, Donald Trump was complaining that the media give him no credit, even when it is obviously due.  He said that he had been criticized for accomplishing noting legislatively since he took office, but that he had signed 88 bills into law, which he said was more than any other president...and that by the way, Harry Truman was second.  However, when the facts were checked that night, it turned out that only George W. Bush had passed fewer than Trump since at least the Reagan administration.  Then he says things like, people are very, very (one angry is never enough for him) about the way in which the FBI has handled the Russia collusion investigation and the Clinton emails, which he can't seem to let go, and that the FBI and its reputation are in tatters.  Yet, the current director of the FBI had testified before congress just two days earlier that just the opposite was the case.  You can go back to the inauguration when photos showed that the national mall was half empty while when President Obama was inaugurated...both times...the mall was overflowing, but according to Trump, he had the biggest crowd ever--again, not one of the biggest, but the biggest.  That was the time when Kelly Ann Conway invented the concept of "alternative facts," which NBC's Chuck Todd famously pointed out was a euphemism for actual lies.  From thereon it was one canard after another being pawned off as nothing more offensive than a little hyperbole to the point that now, a Fox poll shows that Trump's approval rating even among Fox viewers, Trump's loyal base, has dropped from 90% to 58%.  But the implications of Donald Trump's lack of veracity won't be felt until the 2020 election as I fear that impeachment is too dramatic a fall even for him, but the Republican Party has 2018 to worry about.

First, there was the attempt to repeal and replace "Obamacare," the approval of which exceeded 50% for the first time once the Republicans introduced the several iterations of their alternative, even the last of which had to be abandoned because they didn't have enough votes in their own ranks to pass it.  And now, there is a tax plan that is so obviously skewed to the rich that it has a popularity rating with the public in the 30% range, which anyone would have to admit was low for a tax cut, and everyone likes getting his taxes cut, but still, there is no way to speculate on the way in which you American voters will turn next November.  It seems that the Republicans have some kind of invisibility shield that they can hide their insidiousness behind, and the result seems to be a kind of incongruous impunity, but now we have the Republican controlled FCC abolishing "net neutrality," and there's no cloak to hide that.

About two and a half years ago, my daughter bought me a "Roku" device for our television at home.  We set it up and we would start to watch, say, a movie on Netflix only to have it interrupted with that little spinning icon that said it was buffering.  Or the film would be interrupted and a notice would come up saying that the signal was lost and we should try again later.  It was annoying.  But then the following spring, that buffering and those interruptions stopped and reception was great.  That was about the time in February 2015 in which President Obama prevailed with the then-Democratic FCC to impose the net neutrality rules that kept internet service providers...ISP's they are called in the trade...from fast tracking what they liked--most often what the content provider had paid more to broadcast--and slowing down what they didn't...what the ISP didn't get the  vigorish payments for.  So now, everything is jake thanks to Obama era regulations, but those regulations became a think of the past two days ago when the Republican chairman of the FCC oversaw the ramming through of repeal despite millions of comments from the public protesting his efforts.  Apparently the regulatory process known as "notice and comment" doesn't mean much to Republicans if they don't like the public sentiment that the regulatory rules require them to solicit in the federal record.  So, starting any day now, net neutrality won't protect us anymore, and we'll see what happens.  The industry says there'll be no change, but did you ever see big business pass up a chance to gauge others when it arises?  Me neither, but here's the rub.

If in a couple of months that rotating icon begins to interrupt the television viewing of tens of millions of television viewers again, there are going to be a lot of pissed off American voters whose grievances will be directly attributable to the work of a Trump appointee, new FCC Republican Chairman, Ajit Pai.  He'll be the most hated man in America, and everyone will know that he's Trump's creature.  It comes to this. People won't really notice if their paycheck go up or down a few dollars--and there'll be plenty of both--every week.  And as for Obamacare, it's still here and tens of millions of you are benefiting from it, but how many of them does any one of us know.  But if you start interrupting peoples television programs, everyone is going to notice that, and if you don't think the Democrats are going to hang that albatross around the Republicans' necks, you are underestimating even them, which is hard to do.  I can't wait for November 2018.  See all you fellow television-watching Americans at the polls. 

Your friend,

Mike