Liberal Forum

Misty » 01 Aug 2017 4:47 pm » wrote:

Misty » 01 Aug 2017 3:57 pm » wrote:So this is big.

‘I will not break faith’: Coast Guard admiral defies Trump order to ban transgender service members.

TRUMP CLAIMS HE HAS A SECRET PLAN TO TAX THE RICH—BUT DEMOCRATS WON’T LET HIM

If only the “obstructionists” would let Trump live his liberal fantasy.

Earlier this month, the Tax Policy Center released its analysis of Donald Trump’s proposed plan for tax reform.

If you are rich, you were probably pretty thrilled with the findings.

According to the T.P.C., based on the details revealed by National Economic Council director Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in April, the Trump plan would give those earning more than $3.4 million an average tax cut of $937,700, while the average family earning less than $25,000 would receive a cut of $40.

Put another way, the plan would be 23,500 times better for the ultra-rich than the poor.

Which is why you could be forgiven if, upon reading Trump’s interview with Wall Street Journal yesterday, you found yourself surprised to learn that Trump actually cares more about the middle class than the wealthy and is prepared to raise taxes on the latter.

According to the president, whose preference for the wealthy is well known (you wouldn’t put a “poor person” in charge of the economy, after all), it’s actually the non-rich who he’s looking to help, all statements and actions to the contrary.

“The truth is,” he told reporters Gerard Baker, Peter Nicholas, and Michael C. Bender, “the people I care most about are the middle-income people in this country who have gotten screwed.

And if there’s upward revision it’s going to be on high-income people.”

Then he told a story about how he had dinner with his friend Bob Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, and Bob told him Donald, don’t worry about the rich people.

Tax the rich people.

You got to take care of the people in this country, and Trump thought that was “a very interesting statement” and feels the same way.

The only problem, of course, is that the tax plan Team Trump unveiled in April doesn’t do that at all.

In fact, it does—what’s the word?—the opposite.

In addition to bringing the top tax rate down to 35 percent, Trump’s most recent tax proposal would allow people like hedge-fund managers and owners of the Trump Organization to set up their businesses so that their income is taxed at the corporate rate, which Trump wants to slash to 15 percent (although “political and fiscal realities” may prevent it from falling below 25 percent).

It would also eliminate the inheritance tax, which only applies to estates worth over $5.49 million for individuals and $10.98 million for married couples.

Although Cohn and Mnuchin insisted, with straight faces, that getting rid of the inheritance tax was all about “American farmers” as opposed to people like the five children of a multi-billionaire who just turned 71 in June, it’s difficult to see how that’s the case.

As the Tax Policy Center’s Mark Mazur told Bloomberg, “If you’re serious about not cutting taxes for higher-income people you probably wouldn’t repeal the estate tax.

The benefits largely flow to the top.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has claimed he’s going to tax the rich, before releasing proposals that lower taxes on the rich, which in some cultures might be called lying.

As Vox’s Jim Tankersley recalls, in August 2015, candidate Trump told Bloomberg “I do very well.

I don't mind paying a little more in taxes.

The middle class is getting clobbered in this country.”

Then he unveiled a tax plan that called for bringing the top rate down to 25 percent and eliminating the death tax.

The best part of the Journal interview, though, was not Trump’s claims, against all evidence to the contrary, that he’s going to raise taxes on the rich, but that the one problem with this plan is that Democrats won’t help him.



(read more at link in title)

Putin expels 755 US diplomats from Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered 755 U.S. diplomatic mission staff to leave the country in a Sunday interview with a Russian television station.

The expulsion comes in response to legislation overwhelmingly passed by Congress last week that would increase sanctions against Russia and blocks President Trump from being able to lift the measures.

Boy Scouts Refute Trump’s Claim That They Told Him He Made ‘Greatest Speech’ Ever

President Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal that after his controversial speech at the Boy Scouts National Jamboree in West Virginia, the head of the Boy Scouts called him and told him it was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them."

But the organization told TIME they are unaware of any call from national leadership placed to the White House.

“The Chief Scout Executive’s message to the Scouting community speaks for itself,” the organization said, referring to a July 27 statement from Michael Surbaugh, the Chief Scout Executive for the Boy Scouts of America, who apologized to anyone in the scouting community who could have been offended or alarmed by the political rhetoric in the speech.

"For years, people have called upon us to take a position on political issues, and we have steadfastly remained non-partisan and refused to comment on political matters.

We sincerely regret that politics were inserted into the Scouting program," Surbaugh wrote.

Misty » 01 Aug 2017 11:51 pm » wrote:
Sir Tweets A Lot Tweets about everything, but not one single word about this.

Misty » 02 Aug 2017 12:11 am » wrote:
The lying just never stops.

Termin8tor » 02 Aug 2017 8:13 am » wrote:
Oh my gosh, we agree on something.

You've filled this thread with lies.

Termin8tor » 02 Aug 2017 8:13 am » wrote:
Oh my gosh, we agree on something.

You've filled this thread with lies.

Misty » 01 Aug 2017 11:51 pm » wrote:Sir Tweets A Lot Tweets about everything, but not one single word about this.

Trump Has Quietly Accomplished More Than It Appears

The chaos, legislative fumbling, and legal jeopardy should not obscure the ways that the administration is remaking federal policy in consequential ways.
DAVID A. GRAHAM

...With the Trump administration’s chaos sucking up all the attention, it’s been able to move forward on a range of its priorities, which tend to be more focused on regulatory matters anyway. It is remaking the justice system, rewriting environmental rules, overhauling public-lands administration, and greenlighting major infrastructure projects. It is appointing figures who will guarantee the triumph of its ideological vision for decades to come.


The trick here is that the administration and this shadow government are one in the same. Even as the public government sputters, other elements of the Trump administration are quietly remaking the nation’s regulatory landscape, especially on the environment and criminal justice....

“Let me put it this way,” the secretary of housing and urban development told the Washington Examiner. “I'm glad that Trump is drawing all the fire so I can get stuff done.”


.....EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.....intends to establish a “red team-blue team” exercise to investigate whether climate change is actually happening...


the EPA is moving on other fronts as well. It’s working to dismantle Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a signature policy aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. In June, following a February executive order from Trump, the EPA began the process of rescinding the 2015 Waters of the United States rule, which aimed at protecting smaller bodies of waters and streams in the same way that larger ones had been. In December, in the closing weeks of his administration, Obama banned drilling in the Arctic and parts of the Atlantic Ocean; the Trump administration promptly set about undoing that ban. (How interested oil companies will be remains to be seen.)


The New York Times found in June that Pruitt’s EPA “has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history.” And it might have done more if not for constraints imposed by judges. EPA tried to abandon an Obama-era rule on methane emissions, but a court on Monday forced it to continue enforcing the rule.


Other agencies are also in on the environmental deregulation act. The State Department reversed an Obama-era decision, clearing the way for the Keystone XL pipeline to begin construction. The Interior Department is considering reversing a rule on fracking on public lands, and might also reverse some equipment regulations on offshore drilling equipment implemented after the 2010 Gulf oil spill. The department has rolled back a ban on coal mining on public lands....


Although the Justice Department had staunchly opposed a Texas voting law that has repeatedly been smacked down by courts as discriminatory, Sessions switched the department’s position, and it has now told courts the law ought to be allowed to remain. The attorney general has also sought to cut off funding to so-called sanctuary cities...


The administration has sought to loosen business regulations in several respects, however, attempting to peel back parts of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law and undermine the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

These less heralded, less noticed, and sometimes obscure changes to federal policy are more fragile than major legislation; just notice how many of them involve reversing Obama-era decisions that were implemented solely through the executive branch. But their effects are no less real, and in many cases are drastic.

....chief strategist Steve Bannon vowed to bring the “destruction of the administrative state,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ng/535458/

Misty » 01 Aug 2017 3:57 pm » wrote:So this is big.

roadkill » 02 Aug 2017 1:36 pm » wrote:"MS-13 doesn't fear Trump....

roadkill » 02 Aug 2017 8:00 am » wrote:Misty has no message.
We win.

Misty » 02 Aug 2017 2:48 pm » wrote:WTF do you think you won?

We all lost thanks to this asshole you put in the White House.