Michael1942's Blog

Marcus Bensasson

5 hours ago

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary ,Jacob J. Lew said the Trump administration’s decision to add a significant amount of debt through last year’s tax legislation is leaving the country broke.
“It’s a ticking time bomb in terms of the debt,” Lew said in a Bloomberg Radio interview with Tom Keene and Jonathan Ferro. “You cannot run a fiscal policy by spending trillions of dollars you don’t have at a time that the economy is doing well.”
Having chosen to make tax policy without including Democrats in any of the conversation, now the administration probably can’t rally Republicans in Congress to do the basic business of government, such as making sure the country doesn’t default on debt and children don’t get thrown off health insurance, he said.
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“The next shoe to drop is going to be an attack on the most vulnerable in our society,” Lew said. “How are we going to pay for the deficit caused by the tax cut? We are going to see proposals to cut health insurance for poor people, to take basic food support away from poor people, to attack Medicare and Social Security. One could not have made up a more cynical strategy.”
“What we’ve seen is a tax cut that spends money we don’t have to have very concentrated benefits for global corporations and the top 1 percent, and it’s leaving us broke,” according to Lew.

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CBS News
A leading climate scientist is responding to President Trump’s tweet that seemed to mock the idea of man-made climate change amid frigid temperatures in most of the eastern United States. Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientist and Columbia University professor, says the president’s remark suggested an “often debunked” misstatement about what climate change really means for the planet.
Sobel joined CBSN on Friday to discuss the president’s tweet, which said that areas expecting “the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record” perhaps “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.”

“The tweet seemed to imply that the cold weather in the Eastern United States somehow contradicts the notion that the climate is warming — or warming due to human influence — which of course is not true. This is a very tired and often debunked assertion,” Sobel said.
Sobel explained that winter will not cease to exist and that cold weather can still happen despite global warming.
“If you look at the temperature map for the climate as a whole right now, the entire rest of the planet is warmer than the historical average with the exception of the Eastern United States and Canada, and the last three years — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — have been consecutively the warmest years on record,” Sobel said.
He added, “So the notion that ‘there’s cold weather happening somewhere so global warming is not happening’ is well understood by people who take the issue seriously to be false.”
Sobel said the most important thing people can do to combat climate change is to vote.
“I think that’s the number one most important thing, because we can all take individual actions to reduce our carbon footprint, and we all should, but the problem is too big for individual action,” he said.
“It’s going to be solved by collective action at the government, national and international, level. The United States has the capacity to lead this issue; we were for a little while. Now this administration has made the problem worse rather than helping.”

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