Tag: Donald Trump

Mr. Biden Has Effectively Rebutted His Own Campaign Warnings

Mr. Biden Has Effectively Rebutted His Own Campaign Warnings

In the days leading up to the November elections, Joe Biden told some whoppers on the subject of health care. Perhaps that’s to be expected in the heat of a political campaign.

Mr. Biden’s recent Covid-19 vaccination in Delaware proves he now understands that his consistent skepticism about the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed was misguided. This is probably excusable in an election as the words that come out of a politician’s mouth are rarely correlated to reality. Trump is responsible for his inability to convince the American public that he set up the apparatus to get us out of the global pandemic. That failure of communication is probably reason enough to lose an election.

Candidate Biden claimed that the president had no plan for addressing the virus and warned that Americans couldn’t trust Mr. Trump to oversee a quick and safe vaccine approval. This wasn’t true and Candidate Biden probably knew it, but it was the responsibility of Mr. Trump to make that case. Mr. Biden was not obligated to explain the effectiveness of the Trump administration if the Trump administration couldn’t explain their accomplishments in a convincing way.

With yesterday’s vaccination, Mr. Biden has effectively rebutted his own campaign warnings.

His acknowledgment of the vaccine and the public display of its use was designed to inspire Americans to trust the vaccine. The act is an admission that his candidate claims were made for purely political positioning and not based on scientific or logistical evidence. He lied on the campaign trail (or at least used Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt – FUD) to convince people that Mr. Trump was failing at this important task and therefore they should hire him. Admitting that Mr. Trump was doing a good job at getting the vaccine to the American public would not have been in Mr. Biden’s best interest at getting hired to run the country.

The outstanding work of the pharmaceutical industry, encouraged and enabled by President Trump, has already resulted in two approved vaccines, and yes, there is a distribution plan.

Drug distributor McKesson Corp. began picking up doses of the vaccine from manufacturing plants on Saturday for distribution around the country. United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. trucks started rolling out Sunday to deliver the doses to hospitals and other sites.

The federal government plans to distribute over the coming week a total of 7.9 million doses of vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer Inc., which developed the first Covid-19 shot authorized for use in the U.S.

Vaccinations will continue, without Mr. Biden having to do anything. And there are still more vaccines in the pipeline which could soon come to market, as long as he doesn’t get in the way. The J&J vaccine is a one-dose treatment and the preliminary results have been fantastic.

Yet despite his own vaccination experience, Mr. Biden is still talking as if there’s a huge problem he will be called upon to solve. According to a Bloomberg report on Washington’s latest massive goring of taxpayers, Mr. Biden seems to think there’s much more Covid spending to come.

The economy is awash in money; politicians just need to let people use it. Americans suffering economically are suffering from shutdowns, which never worked as intended, inflicted enormous collateral damage, and are now becoming untenable with the arrival of vaccines.

Washington’s work is over. Washington didn’t do enough to save many businesses as they were tied up in the politics of helping things that didn’t really get hurt. That was a shame, but that is the political reality of our country. Republicans and Democrats spent far too much time discussing how to not let a good tragedy go to waste. But now we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

By the time that Mr. Biden is inaugurated, 50-60M people will have been vaccinated (that is about 1/7 of the US population). Combined with the existing survivors of natural infections, this will now probably exceed 25% of the US population.

Within the first two months of Mr. Biden’s reign, we will have vaccinated or infected over 50% of the US population and may reach 60-70%. By the time of opening day of the MLB season, it is reasonable to assume that we will be at 80% which is effectively full herd immunity. We should still try to reach 90% and that should happen in early summer.

Due to Operation Warp Speed, we could have approximately a dozen manufacturers of vaccines for the COVID-19 in a few more months. All we need to do is wear masks and social distance for another couple of months and then the US participation in the global pandemic will be over. This has nothing to do with the leadership of Joe Biden, it is purely a function of the continuity of the efforts of the Trump administration.

Biden should simply sit back and enjoy the ride back to a fully functional economy. The Trump train will get him there without him having to do anything. All he can do now, is screw it up.

This analysis is based on the fine reporting of the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman.

Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy When It Comes To His Taxes

Trump Is His Own Worst Enemy When It Comes To His Taxes

The New York Times has written an article claiming that Donald Trump paid little or no income tax for many years. Mr. Trump denies paying so little but won’t release his returns. The NY Times will not release its data to protect its source.

Voters can decide whom to believe, but one fact to note is that the story doesn’t assert illegal behavior. The IRS presumably signed off on the Trump returns, except in one case in which it is disputing a $72.9 million deduction claimed by Mr. Trump. This is a fight rich people have with the IRS all the time, often ending in Tax Court.

The report makes much of a deduction Mr. Trump took for business consulting fees that match payments his daughter Ivanka reported in separate filings. There may be legitimate reasons for those fee payments, and Ms. Trump ought to clear the matter up. Paying your adult offspring is not illegal – in fact, it is a good practice. This point should probably be dropped on the social media hate frenzy.

Also, it appears to be a big scandal that Trump paid a hairstylist during his reality TV days. Give me a break. Have you seen this guy’s hair? It would take a wizard to make it look decent. BTW, if you are going to make fun of Trump’s hair, please be honest and make fun of “comb over” Joe Biden also – yes, I am old enough to remember him as being bald.

Is it a scandal if Mr. Trump legally exploited the tax code’s treatment of chronic business losses to pay little tax? Hardly. Mr. Trump admitted this himself in a 2016 debate so there is no news in the NYTimes article – he already told us that he didn’t pay much in personal income taxes. Congress littered the code with loopholes aimed at assisting real-estate businesses, among others. Democrat and Republican elected officials write a tax code to please their corporate donors and then selectively attack CEOs or businesses that use the loopholes.

Here is a hint: if you are a business leader that is going to run for office and challenge the elected elite then you are not allowed to use the tax code to your advantage. But it is okay if you are simply going to take that tax-advantaged and donate to the elected elite. This is especially okay if you are donating to Democrat elected officials.

The story also claims that Mr. Trump’s empire is under financial stress and rising debt. This may be true, but the reporters can’t seem to decide if Mr. Trump is a shark exploiting the White House for personal gain or a sap who is bleeding cash while in office. Brilliant or bumpkin? Make up your mind. Many of Trump’s supporters cite his lack of tax burden as part of the reason they support him saying that he has a brilliant business mind. His enemies would do best to stick to one narrative.

The Times says it will have more such stories in the coming days, and who can doubt it? The press and most of official Washington are all-in to defeat Mr. Trump. I wonder if the FBI is doing a repeat and trying to help the Democrats as well.

Trump has made it easier for his opponents, as he often does. He danced his way through the 2016 campaign with promises to release his returns followed by claims that he couldn’t do so because of an audit. Many of his supporters advised him to do it in the public interest, but there’s no legal obligation for a candidate to release his taxes.

Trump could have controlled the political narrative by releasing his tax returns on his terms and timetable. If he would have done it soon after his election, this story would have died a slow death a long time ago. Now his opponents will do it. As in the past, Trump is his own worst adviser.

Many of the ideas in this story were sourced from this WSJ opinion article.

To prepare for this pandemic, our liberal and conservative leaders failed us

To prepare for this pandemic, our liberal and conservative leaders failed us

A lot of liberals won’t like this post. Please don’t read it if you are a liberal because you will get mad. It hurts when facts smack you in the face, so you should avoid doing that. This article points out that liberals completely failed to help the US prepare for a pandemic.

To be fair, conservatives shouldn’t read this post either because that same brick wall of facts is going to hit you in the face as well. Don’t read it as conservatives haven’t prioritized preparing for a pandemic either.

This is an article from 2009. It is from NPR, so no one is going to say it right-wing bias. Conservatives will say that it is MSM, but the facts on the ground have proven this article to be very accurate. 

Here is another article by Sheri Fink that covers the various studies in 2006-2009 about how woefully prepared the US is in handling a pandemic.

In 2007 and 2006, the country did studies that showed that during a pandemic, NYC would be short 15,000 ventilators, and 150K people could die. Sound familiar? There were probably studies since the publication of these articles. So did Bush or Obama do anything? Not much, and I will suggest they did zero. Trump didn’t come into office with any insight and initiative to fix this known problem, so he is just as guilty as Bush and Obama.

There has been a total lack of leadership by Bush, Obama, and Trump on this issue.

And Governor Cuomo? Nope. He didn’t fight for it either—more lack of leadership.

And neither did Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, Ryan, Boehner, Schumer, or any other leader of our Congress. A complete lack of leadership for a situation that everyone knew would eventually happen.

BTW, the current candidates for POTUS in 2020: Biden, Sanders, and Trump – nope. None of them did anything when they were in positions that could have influenced this.

All of our government leaders failed us on both sides of the aisle. They taxed the hell out of us. They whined and complained about other stupid shit. They gave incentives for solar energy, oil production, buying stuff on the internet, buying health insurance, fighting bad guys in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria. But prepare the country for a pandemic? Nope. 

They all said, “Hopefully, that pandemic will happen when I am not in office, and the next person can worry about that.” Guess what, we are the next person. We are now worrying about it, and our bickering Federal government messed up big time.

The Federal government is really only good at two things

  1. the infrastructure that hundreds of thousands or millions of people rely on
  2. the defense of our country and people.

To be honest, the government isn’t all that good at those two things, but it is the only entity that can do them. The government shouldn’t be doing other things. It should focus on doing those two things and do them as well as possible, giving the inefficiencies of an organization that has no competition.

It is woefully incapable of doing anything else well. In just about every case other than the two cited, private industry that competes with others will do a better job. Will the private sector screw something up? Absolutely! But then that private enterprise will be displaced by a competitor that will perform better. 

Pandemic relief falls into both categories. It is the defense of our people, and it is the infrastructure to support that defense. We did both poorly for pandemic relief, and it is now costing us dearly.

What is the solution? Throw the bums out. Every damn one of them. They failed us. They screwed up. They should be rewarded with losing their jobs.

We need politicians that are focused on just doing the two things that only the federal government can do. We need politicians to look at a bill and say, “Is this something that ONLY the federal government can do and therefore is in the above two categories?” If the answer to that question is NO, then the politicians need to vote it down. If the answer to that question is YES, then the politicians need to approve it and give it the appropriate funding and oversight that it is done as well as possible.

Header Photo by Parentingupstream (Pixabay)
23 Minutes of Trump

23 Minutes of Trump

 

Does anyone remember why President Trump held a press conference on Tuesday?

I almost 100% agree with this editorial by James Freeman. Trump really needs to shut up and just work on stuff that helps people. He has these moments of brilliance but then for every moment of brilliance, he tends to surround it with about 100 moments of pure incompetence.

For the assembled members of President Trump’s economic team who stood behind him at Trump Tower on Tuesday, the first six minutes of his press conference must have seemed like a promising start. Here was the President describing a significant government-created problem and offering the beginning of a sensible solution.


In any case, Tuesday’s press conference became even more interesting over the next 17 minutes. That’s when Mr. Trump took questions from reporters and decided to largely abandon his hopeful message on liberating Americans from red tape. Many of his assembled advisors were suddenly fascinated by various spots on the floor of the Trump Tower lobby as the President offered further analysis of last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

As he had on Monday, the President condemned the white supremacists who organized a rally tied to the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee. Mr. Trump also condemned the man who allegedly drove his car into the crowd of counter-protesters as a “murderer.” Mr. Trump then annoyed the media by correctly pointing out that there were violent people on both sides.

But Mr. Trump also said that there were “very fine people on both sides.” Certainly there were very fine people on the side that was protesting the white supremacists, but this column has seen no evidence of very fine people on the other side. Some people who oppose statue removal do so for reasons of historical or artistic preservation. But would any of them have decided to make common cause with neo-Nazis and join in last week’s demonstration? It’s possible that some people showed up to oppose the removal of landmarks without realizing they had joined a parade of bigots. But if that were the case, they would likely have left immediately.

A source with knowledge of the Monument Fund, Inc., one of the plaintiffs which obtained a temporary injunction against removing monuments in Charlottesville, tells this column:

Nobody from our group attended the protests or counter-protests. We all stayed away. As everybody should have done. As President Sullivan of U Va urged people to do. Just stay home. But City Councillors and a coalition of leftist groups invited their followers to show up for counter protests. And show up they did, angry and spoiling for a fight.

If City Council had just said: let the Nazis shout idiot slogans at empty air, ignore them, stay home — no violence would have happened. The police are unfairly criticized for not stopping the fighting. How could they? These two groups wanted to fight. They found ways to get at each other. These are public streets, they could not all be locked down and cleared of belligerents.

This was a tragic event, it will scar the city. It will take a long time for the anger to subside.

Mr. Trump appears to have been peddling fake news here, and he’ll no doubt have the chance to amend his remarks yet again because it seems unlikely he can resist further comment and the issue is not going away.

Source: 23 Minutes of Trump

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump

In general, I question anyone that says something like “my Republican Party”. Really? Is it yours?

I have said for at least a decade that both of the big parties are actually smaller sub-parties that vie for control and typically band together for a common cause. The reality is that the majority trend of both parties was away from the American worker that has

  • 2-3 kids,
  • tries to remain faithful to his spouse,
  • shows up for work on a regular basis but probably doesn’t love his/her job,
  • tries to improve his/her home a little every year,
  • tries to keep those kids out of jail,
  • tries hard to get those kids through school and college,
  • enjoys a good movie now and then,
  • enjoys time with family and friends more than the movie though,
  • and expects to pay his way through life while getting treated fairly by those around him/her.

When you abandon that huge demographic, expect to lose to someone that didn’t. That demographic is not always the most active group in politics because they don’t love politics and they probably don’t love government (just keep the criminals away from the family and make sure my roads get paved every decade or so). However, that demographic has been ignored for so long that their sub-parties in the Democrat and Republican camps abandoned their old comrades to band together to elect a person that they thought couldn’t hurt them more than the typical politician.

If you don’t like Mr. Trump being elected, start paying attention to this core of American families.

Here are a few select quotes from the article but it would be better if you click through and read it for yourself.

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

But then the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?

So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president “plays to the base” in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.

Source: My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump – POLITICO Magazine

Trump’s White House Mess

Trump’s White House Mess

 

I couldn’t agree more with one of the recent editorials on the WSJ – especially the last part:
The new White House chief of staff can improve matters but it’s unlikely to be much of a change. And then there’s the question of how long any improvement will last. We’ve seen brief bouts of normalcy from this president before. Staff changes will only get Mr. Trump so far. The problem with his administration isn’t the administrators.

Source: Trump’s White House Mess