Friday, November 22, 2024
About 213,000 Workers Filed For Unemployment Last Week
In the week ending November 16, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 213,000, a decrease of 6,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 2,000 from 217,000 to 219,000. The 4-week moving average was 217,750, a decrease of 3,750 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 500 from 221,000 to 221,500.
Will GOP Senators Do The Vetting Of Nominees That Trump Failed To Do?
It is obvious that Trump, unlike past presidents, is bypassing the vetting process in picking his governmental nominees. If the nominees had been vetted by the FBI, we wouldn't have had the likes of Matt Gaetz (sex abuser and congressional bomb-thrower), Pete Hegseth (sex abuser with white supremacy and christian nationalist leanings), Tulsi Gabbard (Russian sympathizer and possible Russian mole), and Robert Kennedy (who prefers conspiracy theories to actual science).
Matt Gaetz has now withdrawn his name from consideration. Trump will still nominate a sycophantic yes-man to be Attorney General, but at least it won't be someone with the ugly baggage that Gaetz had.
The question now is what will GOP senators do about the other three incompetents nominated by Trump? Will they properly vet them? Do they have the political courage to oppose any of them? Or will they bend to Trump's will and approve all of them?
I suspect they will approve them all - trying to use the Gaetz withdrawal as cover. It seems that some senators had told Gaetz that his troublesome past would be exposed.
But Gaetz is not the only problem. None of the other three should be approved either - especially Tulsi Gabbard, who would endanger U.S. intelligence activities (and those of other countries who share their intelligence with this country).
GOP senators now have a choice. They can uphold their constitutional duty of oversight and reject one or more of these three nominees. Or they can bend the knee to Trump and approve them. If they do the latter, it will give Trump the authoritarian power he is seeking. It will mean Trump has the power to do what he wants, no matter how ridiculous, without any effective congressional oversight.
I hope I'm wrong, but I don't see four GOP senators with the backbone to oppose Trump - even a little bit. Even the few who have done some grumbling in the past have wound up supporting him.
Trump thinks he owns both houses of Congress right now. I think he's probably right.
Thursday, November 21, 2024
Public Disapproves Of Trump Prosecuting His Political Enemies
This chart reflects the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 17th and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,595 adults (including 1,435 registered voters). The margin of error for adults is 3.4 points, and for registered voters is 3.3 points.
Public Approval Of Trump Nominees: Gaetz / Hegseth / Gabbard
The charts above reflect the results of the Economist / YouGov Poll -- done between November 17th and 19th of a nationwide sample of 1,595 adults (including 1,435 registered voters). The margin of error is 3.4 points for adults, and 3.3 points for registered voters.
These Two Trump Picks Are Totally Unacceptable (Even To Many Right-Wingers)
If I said I approved of Trump's picks for his cabinet, I would be lying. I think he's made a lot of bad picks - picks that will damage the country. Pete Hegseth will damage our military, Lee Zeldin with damage our environment. Linda McMahon will damage our education system. Howard Lutnick is a tariff supporter, which will increase inflation. Robert Kennedy, Jr. will do harm to this nation'a health. And Marco Rubio will happily go along with Trump's denigration of our allies and kowtowing to dictators.
Having said that, I do believe any president has the right to make his own nominations - even a narcissistic right-wing radical. And he has the right to pick nominees who agree with him.
But Trump has made two picks that are unacceptable even to many right-wingers - Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard. Note in the image above that The New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns Fox News) is opposed to both of these picks.
Gaetz is a known sex abuser (including under-age girls) with the morals of an alley cat. He is far more interested in retribution (for both Trump and himself) than in justice. It would be a national embarrassment to install him as Attorney General.
Gabbard is well known for being a Russian sympathizer and for passing on Russian propaganda. The whole world should shudder at the thought of her heading the U.S. intelligence network.
The Senate has an advice and consent responsibility to approve or disapprove of presidential picks. They should deny these two picks!
It will not hurt Trump to deny him these two picks. He will just nominate others with his political bent, and they will be approved. But hopefully, they will not be immoral sex abusers or a danger to our intelligence agencies.
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Most Undocumented Immigrants Are Not "Illegals" Or "Criminals"
Donald Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, and he has appointed people willing to do that (Miller, Homan, Noem). That massive deportation will have serious consequences for our economy, inflation, businesses (who need those workers), and tax revenue (since these immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes).
Some on the right have said Trump will just be deporting criminals. They are both wrong and right. They are wrong because Trump wants to deport millions who have committed no crime. They are right because Trump and his cohorts consider all undocumented immigrants to be "illegal" and therefore "criminals".
The idea that undocumented immigrants are criminals is a popular idea in this country, but it is wrong! Most undocumented immigrants are neither illegal nor criminal, because they have violated no federal criminal law.
Trump Is Giving His Middle Finger To America
From Robert Reich on the nomination of RFK, Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services:
Nominating conspiracist and fabulist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the nation’s leading health job — overseeing the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health, among other sensitive positions — is an act of utter hubris.
At a time when the truth is a precious common good, and the public’s health is already precarious, RFK Junior has made a name for himself spreading dangerous health lies.
He claimed that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” and that “the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” And that “the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. They’re collecting Russian DNA. They’re collecting Chinese DNA so we can target people by race.”
He has promoted the baseless claim linking vaccines to autism. He’s been a leading proponent of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, erroneously suggesting the vaccine has killed more people than it has saved.
In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, he alleged, without plausible evidence, that Dr. Fauci performed “genocidal experiments, sabotaged treatments for AIDS, and conspired with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID-19.”
All nonsense.
Friends, I knew Robert F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy Junior is no Robert F. Kennedy. If not for his lustrous name, RFK Junior would be just another crackpot in the ever-growing pool of bottom-feeding fringe characters encircling Trump like ravenous slugs.
So why nominate this collection of bozos?
If Trump wants to smoke out the Senate Republicans who aren’t fully behind him, he has easier ways of doing so than putting an entire Star Wars cantina of idiots up for Senate confirmation.
I can see why Trump might want total loyalists in key positions that would enable him to turn America into a police state — more on this tomorrow — but why nominate a nut job to run America’s health system?
What possible point is there to subjecting Americans to poisonous food or drugs? Why undermine the Centers for Disease Control when Americans and their children need the protections vaccines provide?
Or is all this just another manifestation of Trump becoming deranged?
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Americans Want Stricter Gum Laws (But Did Not Vote For That)
This chart is from the Gallup Poll - done between October 1st and 12th of a nationwide sample of 1,023 adults, with a 4 point margin of error.
A Government Of Billionaires, By Billionaires, And For Billionaires
The following is just part of a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich:
Trump wants to deflect our attention while he and his fellow billionaires loot America.
As he consolidates power, Trump is on his way to creating a government of billionaires, by billionaires, for billionaires.
Trump intuitively knows that the most powerful and insidious of all alliances is between rich oligarchs and authoritarian strongmen.
Two billionaires are leading his transition team. The richest person in the world and another billionaire will run a new department of “efficiency.” Other billionaires are waiting in the wings to be anointed to various positions.
America is now home to 813 billionaires whose cumulative wealth has grown a staggering 50 percent since before the pandemic.
Apologists for these mind-boggling amounts argue they’re not a zero-sum game where the rest of us must lose ground in order for billionaires to prosper. Quite the contrary, they say: The billionaire’s achievements expand the economic pie for everyone.
But the apologists overlook one important thing. Power is a zero-sum game. The more power in billionaire hands, the less power in everyone else’s. And power cannot be separated from wealth, or wealth from power.
The shameless feeding frenzy that has already begun at the troughs of Trump — planning for more tax cuts for the wealthy, regulatory rollbacks to make the wealthy and their corporations even wealthier, subsidies for the wealthy and their enterprises — constitute a zero-sum power game that will hurt average Americans.
The pending tax cuts will explode the national debt. As a result, the rest of America will have to pay more in interest payments to the holders of that debt — who, not incidentally, are wealthy Americans.
This will require that the middle and working classes either pay higher taxes or sacrifice some benefits they rely on (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act).
Meanwhile, regulatory rollbacks will make workplaces less safe, products more dangerous, our air and water more polluted, national parks less welcoming, travel more hazardous, and financial transactions riskier for average people.
Monday, November 18, 2024
Christian Nationalists Got The President They Wanted - But Most Oppose That Belief
The charts above are from a survey done by the Public Religion Research Institute between March and December of 2023. They surveyed 22,465 adults nationwide, and the survey has an 0.82 point margin of error.
The founders of our democracy did not want an official religion. They saw how that had resulted in discrimination, violence, and even wars in other countries. That's why they included freedom of religion in the Constitution's Bill of Rights. They wanted all citizens to be free to worship in any religion they want (or to not be a part of any religion).
But there is a small minority in this country that don't like that. They think the freedom of religion should only apply to their version of the christian religion. And they wanted all laws passed by the government to be based on their religious beliefs - not the Constitution. They are "christian nationalists".
For them, the outcome of the election was a huge success. They got the president they wanted. Trump is friendly to the christian nationalists - even to the point of telling them the country would be better off if they were in charge.
We can only hope that Trump was just pandering to them and just lying to get their votes, and doesn't really want to give them the power they are seeking.
Most Americans agree with the nation's founders. They do not want any religion in charge of the government.
Bad Picks: Negotiating Ploy or A Demand For Absolute Power?
Trump has made some picks that show he is serious about fulfilling his campaigns promises. His appointment of Homan, Miller, and Noem show he will try to deport many millions of immigrants. And his consideration of only Wall Streeters for Treasury Secretary show he wants to give the super-rich more tax breaks and remove regulations on Corporations and financial institutions. While those may not be good for the country, they were to be expected.
But Trump has also made some nominations that shock even many Republicans. The nominations of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services were far from normal and rational picks, and none of them have the competence or experience for those jobs. Why did he make these picks?
Some have said that these are not serious picks. They are sacrificial lambs. If one or all of these picks were denied by the Senate, it would make it easier for Trump to get the rest of his appointments approved - no matter how bad they might be.
I don't believe that. Trump is a narcissist - not a negotiator. He believes he owns the current Republican Party (and there is some justification for that belief). He knows he can demonize and ostracize any Republican that opposes or criticizes him, and they will be rejected by the GOP base.
Trump is serious about these crazy nominations, and he is daring the Senate to oppose them. He has already demanded that the Senate approve of his right to recess nominations (just in case there is some opposition), and Senate majority leader candidates all acquiesced. A recess appointment would give him the candidates he wants, and they could serve for the term of the Congress (until a new Congress starts in January of 2026).
The only qualification that Gaetz, Gabbard, and Kennedy have is their willingness to do anything Trump wants them to do - no matter how ridiculous or illegal. And the Supreme Court has already granted him immunity for all presidential actions. Those facts together would grant Trump what he has always desired - absolute power (with no checks and balances).
These picks are not a negotiating ploy. They are a power grab.
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Musk Wants To Take A Wrecking Ball To The Budget - But What Can He Cut?
Elon Musk has been bragging about all the money he will save the government. But where's he going to find areas to cut? The following a look at this question by Axios.com:
Elon Musk has persuaded President-elect Trump that government has grown so big, bloated, slow and sclerotic ... only a wrecking ball can fix it.
- Soon, that ball will slam into hard reality: Politicians like to giveth, not taketh away.
Why it matters: Trump is more fixated on a "deep state" blocking his ambitions, than cost savings, advisers tell us. But he has bought into the Musk concept of using AI and lean-business thinking to try to dramatically shrink a government he helped grow, they say.
The wrecking-ball theory holds that only a massive shock to the system will break a lifetime of build-up.
- Musk wants to be Trump's wrecking ball. Musk has vowed to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget — about 30% of annual government spending. But as this column will show you, that may be harder than Musk's signature mission of planting human life on Mars.
How it works: Trump announced this week that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump primary opponent, will head a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE — like the cryptocurrency).
- Sources tell us Musk wants to use AI and crowd-sourcing to hunt for waste, fraud and abuse. But DOGE isn't actually a government department: We're told Musk and Ramaswamy plan to set up a nongovernmental entity to try to pull off the entrepreneurial approach to government that Trump envisions.
- Trump aides are looking for ways the White House could bypass Congress and unilaterally adopt DOGE proposals, which "could trigger a constitutional showdown over a bedrock aspect of the federal government, the power of the purse," The Washington Post's Jeff Stein reports.
- Behind the scenes: We're told Musk has been free-associating with Trump at Mar-a-Lago at just how deep the fat in the federal workforce runs. (Remember, this is the guy who vowed to cut 80% of Twitter employees.)
- DOGE already has its own X handle, with 1.5 million followers. A DOGE tweet seeks "super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. ... Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants."
- The big picture: Talk to anyone in government, and they'll bemoan how process, habit, special interests and innate human fear of change have left us with a wildly inefficient bureaucracy.
- In an era of AI, a race for space and growingly complex cyber fears, the inefficiencies become threats.
- But changing it is so hard that both parties stopped trying years ago. During the campaign, Trump and Vice President Harris didn't even pretend they wanted to shrink it, if you take their policy proposals seriously.
- Mandatory spending programs — Social Security Medicare, Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — are governed by laws laying out formulas for how benefits are paid, Axios chief economic correspondent Neil Irwin pointed out to us.
- Legally, Elon can't just stop cutting checks. Trump would have to get changes through Congress in which he is going to have only a modest majority in the Senate and a minuscule majority in the House.
- Plus Trump, attentive to his huge base of older voters, opposes entitlement reform.
- So DOGE will have few viable targets. The biggest will be so-called "nondefense discretionary" programs — money Congress approves annually for programs not mandated by existing laws, including Social Security.
- The easiest money to cut is the discretionary spending we mentioned above. But it's less than 30% of the total budget — and half of it goes to defense, which members of Congress would rush to protect.
- Lots of people over the years have identified absurd spending or bureaucratic walls — but presidents and Congress simply let them stand. AI might help. But reality is the biggest obstacle. The vast majority of spending goes to:
- Social Security: This popular program eats up 20-25% of total federal spending. It supports retirees, disabled individuals, and survivors. Trump has promised to never cut it. In fact, he wants to eliminate taxes on benefits, which would increase the deficit.
- Health care: Think Medicare (for seniors) and Medicaid (for low-income individuals). This is another 25% of the budget. Trump has promised to protect Medicare and a lot of his working-class base benefits from these programs.
- Defense: The Defense Department and related military spending constitute about 13-15% of the federal budget. Republicans typically want more defense spending, not less. And it's hard to see the shift to space-based warfare costing less.
- Interest on the national debt: This one sucks the most for America because you get nothing in return. Interest payments are growing rapidly, now around 8-10% of federal spending. The only way to save money here is to radically cut the debt. Trump's agenda does the opposite.
- Safety-net programs: Programs like food benefits (SNAP), unemployment insurance and housing assistance collectively make up about 10%. Trump won with the support of people who get these benefits, so cuts could be a hard sell.
- So even if somehow you magically cut that in half, you've only cut $3.6 billion in spending — trivial in the context of the federal budget.
- And if that streamlining resulted in even a few seniors not getting their monthly benefits, there'd be holy hell to pay politically.
- Krueger, a Washington expert for TD Cowen, warns lobbyists: "This will require attention & focus — and compete with the Appropriations Committees. Every budgetary sacred cow will now likely hire an additional lobbyist."
- Even on the discretionary side, Congress has the power of the purse. Each of the agencies and functions that survive year after year have important constituencies — many of them part of the Trump coalition. Farm interests won't be too happy if you slash the USDA, and its many subsidies, for example.
Case in point: The expense for entitlement programs goes almost entirely to the benefits themselves, not any administrative bloat involved in issuing checks. For example, the administrative cost of Social Security is only about 0.5% of outlays, $7.2 billion last year, Neil Irwin points out.
What to watch: The aspiration of trillions of dollars of savings will run headlong into the unspoken governing theory of both parties: It's easier and more popular to give than to take away.
By the numbers: Stare at the budget numbers and you see how little room Musk has to maneuver.
- In fiscal year 2023, the federal government spent just over $6 trillion, equating to $18,406 per person.
- This spending was 38% higher than the revenue collected, resulting in a once-unfathomable $1.7 trillion deficit. The budget covers the pay for roughly 5 million federal employees, including civilian jobs, military personnel and postal workers.
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