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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Trump’s Inaccurate Claims About Highways, Immigration and Beyoncé From a Pennsylvania Rally


By LINDA QIU 3 hrs ago

President Trump said his campaign rallies drew larger crowds than concerts for Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen. That was one of 15 inaccurate claims he made.
WHAT WAS SAID
“Highways would take 21 years to get approved. We have it down to two years, and it’s going to be one year very shortly.”
— President Trump, at a campaign rally on Thursday night in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
THE FACTS
This is exaggerated.
Mr. Trump has doubled a previously exaggerated claim about the permitting process for roads and infrastructure taking a decade. Average wait times for a permit ranged from three to six years from the fiscal years 1999 to 2016, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

In the 2017 fiscal year, the average wait time was three years and 10 months, almost double Mr. Trump’s claim of a two-year period. (Data for the 2018 fiscal year, which ends in September, is not yet available.)
WHAT WAS SAID
“Our first lottery winner — let’s see, he has seven convictions for theft. He’s killed nine people. And we’re getting him the hell out of our country and giving them to the stupid politicians that have been running the United States for many years.’”
THE FACTS
False.
Mr. Trump has previously said that other countries were not “giving us their best” through the diversity visa lottery program. He has now escalated that unsubstantiated — and vague — claim into a false one by suggesting that foreign governments are sending murderers through the program.
As The New York Times has previously explained, millions of individuals enter the lottery of their own volition, not because they were selected by a foreign government. A computer picks winners at random and, before receiving a visa, the people chosen must undergo a screening process that bars criminals.
WHAT WAS SAID
“Chain migration. And this was a Schumer deal. Schumer wanted this.”
THE FACTS
False.
Mr. Trump is likely confusing the diversity lottery program with “chain migration” or family-based immigration. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the Senate minority leader, sponsored what became the diversity visa lottery in 1990, but family-based immigration has been a facet of American immigration policy long before Mr. Schumer’s political career began.
Family relationships have been a basis for admitting new immigrants since the 1920s, according to the Congressional Research Service, and the United States began promoting family reunification in 1952, which established a hierarchy that prioritized family members like spouses and children over siblings.
WHAT WAS SAID
Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Bruce Springsteen “were drawing crowds smaller than my crowds.”
THE FACTS
False.
This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has compared crowd size to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s, though it appears to be the first time he has brought the Boss into the mix.
Mr. Trump has claimed 20,000 to 49,000 people attended his biggest rallies during the 2016 presidential campaign. Even taking Mr. Trump at his word, those figures pale in comparison to audiences that have assembled to hear Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Mr. Springsteen perform.
For example, Mr. Springsteen sold out a two-night show in May 2016 in Dublin, drawing an average of 80,000 people to each show. This June, Beyoncé and Jay-Z performed for a crowd of over 57,000 in Berlin. (In addition, it should be noted that fans purchase tickets to hear the musicians in question, while Mr. Trump’s rallies are free.)
OTHER CLAIMS
Mr. Trump also repeated several other claims The Times has previously debunked:
■ He falsely claimed the United States Steel Corporation “is opening up seven plants.” (It has not announced a single new plant.)
■ He falsely claimed “Russia is very unhappy that Trump won.” (Intelligence agencies have said — and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has confirmed — that he preferred Mr. Trump to Hillary Clinton.)
■ He mischaracterized NATO members as “delinquent” on payments to the alliance. (He is referring to a pledge each member set for spending on its own military.)
■ He falsely claimed “NATO funding was going down” before he raised the issue. (Military spending from members has been increasing since 2015.)
■ He claimed, with no evidence, that the man charged in the Manhattan truck attack in October brought in “22 relatives.” (This is not possible.)
■ He hyperbolically said immigrants arrested on suspicion of crossing the border illegally “never come back” for court dates. (Most do.)
■ He exaggerated the number of jobs the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines would bring, estimating 48,000 jobs. (A vast majority are temporary.)
■ He misleadingly claimed that “nobody would have believed” how many jobs have been added since his election. (The number added in a comparable period before his election was larger.)
■ He falsely claimed to have signed the “biggest tax cuts in the history of our country.” (Several were larger,)
■ He misleadingly claimed to have “saved our family farms from the estate tax.” (About 80 family farms and small businesses were affected.)
■ He took credit for passing the Veterans Choice Act, which he said other presidents had been trying to pass for 40 years. (It passed in 2014, though he did sign new overhauls,)
Source: Federal Highway Administration, Congressional Research Service, Billboard, The New York Times.

My take on other Trumpisms aka lies

Promise: “Build the wall and Mexico will pay for it”

Reality:  Wall will cost (or what is asked for) 20 Billion dollars- better use for that money Nationwide infrastructure repair. The wall would not do what he thinks it will do. There are no open borders and yes there are still some people coming across illegally but not getting beyond the border in the huge numbers touted.

Promise: Repeal and Replace Obamacare:

Reality: ACA (aka Obamacare) prices have risen pricing neediest out of the market due to insurance companies losing subsidies that were designed to assist these folks. Result is more of the needy have no or little medical care, this puts more of the financial weight on the people who pay for healthcare as no one can be denied medical assistance by law.

Promise: Tax Reform-will benefit the lowest earners:

Tax cuts for Corporations and High earners did not create jobs but provided a way to pay dividends to stock holders-this does not trickle down or create jobs. Essentially if you already are wealthy , you are now wealthier.

Pardons: Pardoning convicted criminals:

A distraction to bring focus on himself as a good administrator.

Jumps on any bandwagon that elevates him e.g. NFL Kneeling, immigration (separating parents from children), bringing coal back (unless natural gas is depleted, or the sun and wind cease to exist) this won’t happen especially since many mines have closed.

Collusion: much talked about but issue really is whether or not information was  received or given to foreign entities regarding our elections.

Lies to cover the lies that he lies about.

White house staff follow the lies ala Hitler and Goebbels. Currently National Conspirator and lie monger Steve Bannon planning a disruptive campaign in the midterm. We must be aware of these assaults on our Democracy from within and without.

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Kuttner on TAP: About that Capital Gains Scam


 

Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect <info@prospect.org>

AUGUST 1, 2018
Kuttner on TAP
About that Capital Gains Scam. The Trump administration has come up with a shameless and probably illegal way to deliver hundreds of billions in further tax cuts to the richest Americans. Allow taxpayers to adjust capital gains for inflation, and thereby pay a far lower tax.
They plan to do this by administrative fiat if they can’t get Congress to bite.
The move was discussed by the Bush administration, and was rejected as probably illegal. Only Congress can revise the tax code. But with the current Supreme Court, you never know. Anything goes.
Here is a dirty little secret for progressives to consider. As we demonstrated in our special issue on the tax cut, virtually all of the provisions of that cut, which Republicans jammed through Congress on a straight party-line vote, are unpopular. Republicans simply got too greedy and delivered nearly all of the benefits to the rich.
But as much as I hate to say it, this capital gains scam might be popular with the upper middle class, including many Democrats. Why? Because your typical $100,000 income family has most of its net worth in the family house.
And because of the inadequacy of pension plans in this country, the typical retirement plan includes selling the family home and downsizing. Do the arithmetic. You bought a house in 1988 for $150,000. Thanks partly to the run-up in housing prices, it’s now worth $650,000. So you are stuck paying a capital gain on $500,000.
But adjust that for inflation, and the taxable gain is more like $200,000. Pretty tempting. Lots of $100,000 families are far from “rich,” and many are Democrats. The Republicans may have backed into something politically clever.
Here’s a better way. Before recent rounds of tax “reform,” the system used to provide that you only paid capital gains tax in the case of a house on the difference between the value of the old house and the value of the new one, if the new one was worth less. That’s far better policy.
It would provide even more of a break to downsizing longtime homeowners. It also has the virtue of just targeting housing, as opposed to giving the same inflation break to owners of stocks and bonds, the vast majority of whom really are rich.
Democrats take notice. Let’s hope the courts find the administration’s gambit illegal, but it’s a seductive idea that may come before Congress, and it might even peel off some Democratic votes unless Democrats have a better alternative. You can’t beat something with nothing. ~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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When Electing Minority Leaders Makes the Right Go Crazy.


JULY 31, 2018
Meyerson on TAP
In a characteristically well-argued essay that ran yesterday on Vox, Prospect alum (and, OK, also Vox’s founding editor) Ezra Klein demonstrated how the nation’s growing racial diversity, and the declining share of its white population, has been a major factor fueling the rise of white nationalism, racism, and backlash. He noted that Barack Obama’s election as president, far from signaling the triumph of a post-racial America, actually had the effect of spurring a more alarmed, alarmist, and virulent racism among sectors of the white population.
I’ve long argued that it was Obama’s misfortune to come to power at a time when the nation’s racial composition was in the flux that it was in. His election would have driven white racists crazy at any time, of course, but if we look at the politics of American cities, we can discern particular periods when it’s easier for minorities to govern. The first African Americans elected mayors of major cities came to power under two specific sets of circumstances. One group—Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes in Cleveland, who were elected in 1967 and 1968, respectively—won their office in cities where, for the first time, a clear majority of the electorate was black. The second group—personified by Tom Bradley, who was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1973—came to power in cities where blacks were a relatively small share of the population and clearly not destined to displace what was then a white majority. In 1973, LA was roughly 17 percent black, and it was Bradley’s ability to forge a coalition across racial lines, in which blacks and Jews were the largest constituencies, that led to his victory (and his four subsequent re-elections).
In other words, blacks broke through electorally when they had the numbers to constitute a majority unto themselves, or when they were a vibrant but small share of the overall population and thus didn’t threaten to displace the existing, white, majority. (Of course, if LA’s whites, and more particularly LA’s Jews, hadn’t been disproportionately liberal, Bradley would never have been elected.)
Obama came to power in a different set of circumstances—at a time when many whites’ fears of the erosion of white hegemony, of what they saw as the looming transformation of a normatively white, and just plain white, America into a (normatively and just plain) multiracial America were already rising. Like Bradley, of course, Obama could not have been elected and re-elected had there not been a major share of the white population that didn’t hold such views. But among many of the white Americans who did, his election was just one more sign that the nation was headed where they didn’t want it to go, and for many of them, their racist views became only more virulent and vicious.
The thought recently occurred to me that in this, Obama may have been following in the footsteps of Léon Blum—or more accurately, in moving from Obama to Trump, America may be following in the footsteps of France when it moved from Blum to Marshal Pétain. Following elections in 1936, in which all the French parties of the left and center-left, from the Communists to the Socialists to the Republicans, joined forces in the face of rising fascism to elect France’s first left-wing government, Socialist Léon Blum became the nation’s prime minister. During the year his coalition governed, Blum put through the landmark legislation establishing France’s welfare state, which exists to this day.
But Blum wasn’t merely France’s first socialist prime minister; he was also its first Jewish prime minister, in a nation where anti-Semitism was the very linchpin of the sizable far-right, in a nation that had almost split in two 30 years earlier over the Dreyfus affair, which had been fueled by the savage anti-Semitism of both the right and the military. That Blum, a Jew, could become prime minister was almost too much for the French right to bear (indeed, Blum was dragged out of a car and beaten by anti-Semites a few weeks before his election). The newly reinforced anti-Semitism festered until the Germans took France’s surrender in 1940, and then burst forth in the Vichy regime that the Nazis authorized. Headed by World War I hero Petain, Vichy willingly collaborated with the Nazis in sending French Jews to the death camps. Blum had refused to flee France when it fell; he was tried by Vichy on charges of treason, which he so convincingly refuted that the trial was abruptly stopped before reaching completion—though Vichy sent Blum to a German concentration camp anyway. The Nazis ordered his execution just days before they surrendered to the Allies; fortunately, local officials refused to carry it out.
So did Obama’s presidency, in fueling an intensified white racism, follow in the footsteps of Blum’s year in power, which raised the French right’s anti-Semitism to a boil? Seems that way. ~ HAROLD

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