Tuesday, May 21, 2024
Comparing The Records Of Presidents Biden And Trump
In most elections, voters have to compare what a president has done with what his opponent claims he would do. This election is different, since both candidates have served a term in the White House - and that means they both have a record which voters can compare and judge. That hasn't happened in more than a century (since Teddy Roosevelt ran against William Howard Taft).
In the following, Robert Reich compares the records of Biden and Trump:
THE FACTS:
Under Trump the economy lost 2.9 million jobs. Under Biden, it has gained 15 million,so far.
Under Trump, the unemployment rate rose by 1.6 percentage points to 6.3 percent. Under Biden, unemployment has remained under 4 percent for the longest stretch in over 50 years. Working-age women are being employed at a record rate, and wages are rising for American workers.
In 2016, candidate Trump campaigned against the trade deficit with China. He called it “theft” and even used the term “rape” to describe it. In 2016, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the China was near $350 billion. In the first three years of the Trump administration (before COVID-19), it worsened, averaging almost $379 billion per year.
Under Biden, America’s trade deficit with China has improved dramatically — falling by $103 billion, or 27 percent, to $279 billion. It’s the lowest bilateral deficit in goods since 2010.
Under Biden, the stock market has soared. On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 40,000 for the first time in history, exceeding the market’s annualized return under Trump.
Under Trump, the national debt rose from about $19.9 trillion to about $27.8 trillion, an increase of about 39 percent, and more than in any other four-year presidential term. It happened mainly because of Trump’s enormous tax cuts for wealthy Americans and big corporations.
The Trump and George W. Bush tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001. They’re responsible for more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID and the Great Recession are excluded.
Under Biden, the national debt has grown at a far slower pace.
Under Trump, the number of Americans lacking health insurance rose by 3 million. Under Biden, it’s been just the opposite. Enrollment in Obamacare has surged from 12 million in 2021 to 21.3 million today. To address consumer prices, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) signed by President Biden expanded and extended the refundable tax credits that help Americans purchase health insurance.
Meanwhile, the actual prices of goods and services is lower today than it was four years ago under Trump, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s because incomes have grown faster than prices over that four-year period.
Biden’s investments in infrastructure, semiconductors, and green technologies are rebuilding the middle class. While Biden is making the biggest investment in infrastructure in sixty years, Trump talked about investing in infrastructure (his “infrastructure weeks” became a late-night TV joke), but he never did.
Spending on new factories has almost tripled over the past three years, as companies rush to locate in the U.S. market. Construction employment in April hit an all-time high of 8.2 million workers.
The CHIPs Act is creating large numbers of manufacturing jobs. It also activates the Davis Bacon Act, requiring that contractors and subcontractors pay the prevailing wage. It commits companies receiving grants to allow workers to unionize. It builds new plants in areas that have suffered job losses and decline. And it commits companies getting grants to include daycare facilities in their new plants.
Trump and other Republicans pretend to be on the side of average working Americans, while promising their big corporate backers even more tax cuts. Trump cut taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. He reduced the threshold salary for overtime pay.
By contrast, Biden has said he will not extend Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations. Biden raised the threshold salary for overtime pay and made it easier to unionize. He was the first president in history to walk a picket line.
Trump’s record on antitrust enforcement was abysmal. By contrast, Biden has been the most activist trust-buster in a half century.
In terms of the core goal of rebuilding the middle class, Biden’s administration has been the most successful of any administration over the past forty years. Trump’s was the least successful.
Oh, and let’s not forget: Trump mounted an attempted coup against the United States government, seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election and encouraging his followers to riot at the Capitol.
Monday, May 20, 2024
Trump Was Always Corrupt And He's Corrupted The GOP
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton.
The remarkable thing about this last, grotesque chapter of Donald Trump’s presidency is how much he has proved Acton both wrong and right.
Few axioms are more popular among earnest pundits and politicians than Lord Acton’s line about power, even though the point of the letter in which the quote appeared focused on the institutions and people who protect the wielders of power. He decried those who exempted the powerful from the rules that bind the rest of us. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it,” Acton wrote.
In one sense Trump proved Acton wrong. Power didn’t corrupt Trump. It merely gave his corruption room to run, like handing an inveterate drunk driver a bottle of Jack Daniels and a monster truck to play with.
The phone call to the president of Ukraine that got him impeached was simply Trump being Trump only on a global scale instead of in the more fetid backwaters of real estate, entertainment and general hucksterism where he made his name. And the sore loser — already the greatest sore loser in American history — who called Georgia election officials on Saturday is the same man we saw descend the escalator five years ago.
“I do whine,” Trump said on CNN in August 2015, “because I want to win and I’m not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.” His postelection whining spree is a testament to his consistency.
So while power didn’t corrupt Trump, Trump has vindicated Acton’s larger point about how power invites corruption in others. Corruption means more than bribery and self-aggrandizement; it means rot, decay, the erosion of standards and principles and their replacement with baser motives.
And in this sense, Trump’s corruption has been infectious. Conservatives who once prided themselves on old-fashioned notions of good character now think whining and deceit are manly while graciousness and honesty are for “cucks.”
Worse, conservatives, who not long ago all but defined conservatism as fidelity to the Constitution, now think constitutionalism is whatever allows a losing president to steal an election.
I’ve no doubt some fraction of the politicians supporting Trump actually believe the lies and conspiracy theories he has peddled. Some probably even think their constitutional schemes are legitimate: Of course, the Founding Fathers intended for the vice president to be able to unilaterally void the election results and install the loser!
But sincere belief in transparent lies is even more a symptom of the Trumpian rot. Five years ago, no one who knew, say, Sens. Ron Johnson, Josh Hawley or even Ted Cruz would believe they’d go along with such assaults on the Constitution, democracy or common sense. Such is the extent of the corruption, it is somehow more reassuring to think they’re simply lying. Lies are a concession that the truth matters.
But truth is no longer defined by the factual. Trump has set the truth free to mean whatever delivers a win.
This rot extends far outside of Washington. How could it not, for the politicians are merely responding to market incentives, the way weather vanes respond to the wind (even if they helped manufacture the very gales they are responding too)? The consumers — i.e. the voters, viewers, donors and subscribers — want the lies.
A whole industry has grown up around the idea that what is good for Trump — or simply what Trump thinks is good for him — is the premise and conclusion of every argument. From pastors and “constitutional scholars” to journalists and conservative activists, all the conservative yardsticks — of good character, decency, statesmanship, constitutionalism — have been shaved down and bent to fit the crooked timber of the man.
These are the people Trump surrounds himself with. Some were already corrupt, which is why they fluttered, moth-like to his flame in the first place. But others were not always this way. The American right is now littered with Actonian cautionary tales, people trading their reputations for one last bit of relevance.
No wonder Trump’s consternation with the uncorrupted Georgia officials who would not ratify his lies. He pleaded for investigators who “want to find” the evidence he needs, because for Trump and his apologists the truth is defined by his wants and needs.
He won’t stop whining until he gets what he wants, which means he’ll be whining for the rest of his life, and some will call it leadership.
Sunday, May 19, 2024
What If Trump Gets Convicted?
The following post is by Dan Rather:
We should step back, take a deep breath, and consider the seriousness of Donald Trump’s criminal trial, as much as the defendant would like us not to.
Trying to follow the proceedings closely can be alternately painful and shameful. It can make you long for a shower or an adult beverage. We’ve read accounts of planting news stories, paying to have stories shelved, propositioning a porn star, a sexual encounter, a sleeping defendant, and constantly bickering attorneys. It became even more of a circus when the speaker of the House and several Republican United States senators showed up in New York to “support” Trump by attending the trial. They were actually on hand to help the defendant circumnavigate the judge’s gag order by publicly trashing the proceedings. One would think these elected officials would have better things to do than kiss the ring.
But something is missing from the daily coverage — a really big what if. What if Trump is convicted?
Pundits, the press, and much of the public are ignoring or underplaying the real possibility that the Republican nominee for president could soon be a convicted felon.
The presidential campaign must go on, debates and conventions planned, rallies organized. But until the jury renders a verdict, every future campaign event should appear with an asterisk and a footnote that reads “This event could be affected by the conviction and possible prison sentence of the Republican nominee.”
Donald Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree. Each count carries the possibility of more than a year in prison. Since it would be Trump’s first felony conviction and it wasn’t a violent crime, legal experts have written that he may not face jail time, but it is a possibility. He can and will likely try to appeal.
The New York Times reviewed the outcomes of thousands of similar cases and reports: “If Mr. Trump is found guilty, incarceration is an actual possibility. It’s not certain, of course, but it is plausible.” The Times analysis found that approximately 1 in 10 cases of falsifying business records results in imprisonment. If Trump doesn’t receive a prison sentence, he will probably be assessed a fine, assigned probation, and perhaps ordered to a rehabilitation program (good luck with that).
If Trump is convicted and spared a trip to Sing Sing, he will, of course, blame everyone but himself and spin it as a victory. However, he might not be able to vote in the presidential election. Florida law states that a felon is disenfranchised until his fines are paid and his sentence is fulfilled, including probation or parole.
Will voters care?
The former president’s MAGA base is not likely to desert him, but what about the true independents and the undecided? Many millions of advertising dollars would be spent attempting to convince voters that a recently convicted felon and someone possibly convicted of election interference should be nowhere near the White House. It should be noted that Trump remains innocent unless convicted. If he is convicted, it should matter. A lot. But will it?
Regardless of the outcome of this trial, or other cases where he faces even more serious charges, how have we arrived at this point? That a man with this much baggage is a viable candidate for president of the United States? Why are so many willing to risk the demise of our great experiment in democracy for the sake of one man?
Saturday, May 18, 2024
It's Been 70 Years And The Struggle Still Continues
The following is part of an article by Assistant Professor Nicholas Mitchell (University of Kansas) at MSNBC.com:
Linda Carol Brown, because she was Black, was made to walk past the all-white Sumner Elementary School to catch the bus to Monroe Elementary School, which was all Black.
But one of the hard facts that we must confront is that in the 70 years since Brown, the social and legal resistance to desegregation has never stopped. Segregationists employed a variety of tactics whose legacies have made American education an enterprise that’s endemically segregated by race and classtoday. Whether it’s the all-white private schools that were created in response to Brown, the white flight out of cities that was inspired by the same ruling, a subsequent Supreme Court ruling that there’s no right to an equally funded education, or the growing popularity of publicly funded vouchers for private schools, the promise of the 1954 decision hasn’t translated into reality for today’s Linda Carol Browns.
According to a 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office, “During the 2020-21 school year, more than a third of students (about 18.5 million) attended schools where 75% or more students were of a single race or ethnicity” and “14 percent of students attended schools where 90 percent or more of the students were of a single race/ethnicity.”. . .
The two biggest blows to Brown came in 1973 and 1974 with the Supreme Court rulings in San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez and Milliken v. Bradley, respectively. In the first case, parents in the majority Mexican American Edgewood school district said funding schools using the local tax base denied their children the right to an equal education, but the Supreme Court held that there was no constitutional right to an equally funded education. In the next year’s Milliken case, the court upheld an absurd distinction between segregation by law and segregation by custom (de jure versus de facto segregation) as if segregation by custom were not created by law.
Justice William O. Douglas pointed out that absurdity in his dissenting opinion. “There is, so far as the school cases go, no constitutional difference between de facto and de jure segregation,” he wrote. “Restrictive covenants maintained by state action or inaction build black ghettos. It is state action when public funds are dispensed by housing agencies to build racial ghettos.”. . .
When we recognize that America is still having the same debate over desegregation that began on May 17, 1954, then today’s culture war fights — over the consideration of race as part of holistic admissions at highly selective schools, the inclusion of non-white history and literature into the standard curriculum, and the rise of charter schools — become more understandable.
Some argue that the Brown decision is irrelevant today or that it failed. I disagree. For all the scheming of men and women dedicated to rolling back the tide of integration, they have only been successful in slowing it. Jim Crow’s insane racial caste system was overthrown in an attempt to create a multiracial democracy in a world where none had previously existed. This grand project is a work in progress, and the setbacks have rocked the country to its foundations because the clash between integration and segregation has existed as long as the country has.
Most critically, the Brown decision reminds us that equality and segregation are fundamentally incompatible concepts in law and society and that if diversity is America’s strength, then an integrated America is an America at its strongest.
Friday, May 17, 2024
About 222,000 Workers Filed For Unemployment Last Week
The Labor Department released its weekly unemployment report on Thursday. It showed that about 222,000 workers filed for unemployment benefits in the week ending on May 11th. Here is the official Labor Department statement:
In the week ending May 11, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 222,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 231,000 to 232,000. The 4-week moving average was 217,750, an increase of 2,500 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 215,000 to 215,250.
The Hypocrisy Of GOP Politicians In Labeling Cohen A Liar
And Trump's attorney is not the only one whining that Cohen is a liar. Republican politicians, especially those committed to Trump and his lies, are doing the same.
There is more than a little bit of hypocrisy in their claims though.
Michael Cohen is a liar. They are right about that. But what did he lie about? He lied when questioned by the government about Trump's secret payments to keep the tryst with Stormy Daniels from becoming public knowledge before the 2016 election.
He lied to protect Donald Trump. The Republican politicians didn't have a problem with those lies. After all, many of them also regularly lie to protect Trump.
It was not until Cohen was convicted and punished with imprisonment that his story changed. After serving his sentence and promising to testify truthfully that the GOP politicians began to attack Cohen for being a liar. It's not the lies that bothered them. It's the truth that he's now telling.
For today's Republicans, telling the truth about Trump is a sin. One is supposed to go to the grave telling lies to cover for Trump. Evidently, truth is no longer a Republican value.
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