Tag: TAXPAYERS

GOP/Dem Deal Spends 40X as Much on Foreign Countries as Border Wall

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By John Binder

A Republican-Democrat spending bill being offered to President Trump spends nearly 40 times as much on foreign aid as it does on a wall to secure the United States-Mexico border.

Though Trump requested about $5.7 billion to fund a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a spending package written by elected Republicans and Democrats funds just $1.3 billion for 55 miles of wall at the border.

Meanwhile, the deal spends nearly 40 times as much American taxpayer money on foreign aid as it does on a border wall. In total, about $50 billion is spent on foreign aid, including:

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  • $9.15 billion for international security assistance
  • $1.9 billion for foreign food and hunger programs
  • $3.1 billion for global health programs
  • $3 billion for international development assistance
  • $3.7 billion to support the economies of foreign countries
  • $4.4 billion for international disaster assistance
  • $3.8 billion for assistance for foreign refugees

The $1.3 billion for a border wall in the spending bill is a fraction of the total $14.9 billion budget that is awarded to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. The bulk of funding in the CBP budget goes towards funding “border security technology.”

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Democrats Push for Hidden Deportation Freeze in Border Wall Talks

By Neil Munro

LOS ANGELES, CA - MAY 1: Marchers rally under the Chinatown Gateway before marching to the Metropolitan Detention Center during one a several May Day immigration-themed events on May 1, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. Demonstrators are calling for immigration reform and an end to deportations of undocumented residents. (Photo …

Congressional talks over border security and the wall have stalled because Democrats are trying to sharply limit the deportation of economic migrants.

President Donald Trump posted a tweet on Sunday about the partisan divide over deportation rules which have split the 17 legislators drafting the 2019 budget for the Department of Homeland Security:

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The “cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention” likely refers to the Democrats’ push to shrink the number of detention spaces needed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to hold migrants during the legal deportation process.

The Washington Post reports:

Democrats were trying to limit the number of detention beds that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency would have access to. Democrats want to cap detention beds as a way to limit aggressive detention activities by ICE.

The cap on detention beds would not “Abolish ICE,” as sought by some Democratic legislators, but would shackle ICE to the establishment’s pro-migration policies.

ICE needs many detention beds because judges and migrants’ lawyers try to stretch out the time needed to deport each migrant. Many of the lawyers are progressive ideologues who oppose any deportations. So if the progressive lawyers double the time needed to deport each migrant, they also halve the number of migrants who get deported.

If the Democrats can shrink the number of detention beds, then enforcement officials would be unable to deport many lower-priority economic migrants. That would create a hidden amnesty for economic migrants who do not commit violent crimes.

Officials normally put a higher priority on deporting violent criminals illegals, and illegals caught driving while drunk. But many of the criminal migrants are aided by lawyers eager to slow deportations.

Also, without enough beds, border agencies would be forced to catch-and-release the wave of Central American migrants seeking jobs in Democrat-run cities.

Currently, officials do not have the enforcement agents and bed spaces needed to catch, detain, and deport migrants crossing the border, or even the one million migrants already ordered home by judges.

Trump requested funding for 50,000 beds in 2019. Democrats want to push the number down below 30,000, and add rules to reduce the detention of migrants already living in the United States and of migrants who bring children into the United States.

There are at least 11 million migrants in the United States, including roughly 8 million who are working. That illegal population is a huge benefit to business because the migrants force down wages, boost rental costs, and raise consumer sales. The population is also a huge problem for the many millions of Americans who earn less at their jobs and pay more for apartments.

Investors, employers, and Democratic political candidates already get huge benefits from the huge population of 45 million legal immigrants.

The disagreement over deportations comes as the Gallup polling company reported that 5 million people to the south of Texas are considering whether to migrate this year into the United States:

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Budget talks are taking place behind closed doors, but each side is leaking claims about the disagreements. The Wall Street Journal reported:

A Democratic aide said that if Democrats agree to a number above that, they will want concessions on their priorities, such as the number of detention beds and asylum rules.

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Lawmakers haven’t agreed on the number of detention beds for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Democrats are pushing for a lower number, believing that it would limit how many people that ICE could detain, while Republicans want a higher number, saying it is for humanitarian reasons to process asylum claims.

“I think the talks are stalled right now,” said GOP Sen. Richard Shelby, who is a member of the 17-person panel which is supposed to draft a 2019 spending plan for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “I’m not confident we’re going to get there.” The plan was supposed to be completed by February 11, before a February 15 vote.

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The Republicans on the DHS panel include Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, Texas Rep. Kay Granger, Tennesee Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, and Mississippi Rep. Steven Palazzo.

The Democrats are Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, Montana Sen. Jon Tester, New York Rep. Nita Lowey, California Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, North Carolina Rep. David Price, California Rep. Barbara Lee, Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, and California Rep. Pete Aguilar.

The establishment’s economic policy of using legal and illegal migration to boost economic growth shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

That annual flood of roughly one million legal immigrants — as well as visa workers and illegal immigrants — spikes profits and Wall Street values by shrinking salaries for 150 million blue-collar and white-collar employees and especially wages for the four million young Americans who join the labor force each year.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in Heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that coastal investment flow drives up coastal real estate prices and pushes poor U.S. Americans, including Latinos and blacks, out of prosperous cities such as Berkeley and Oakland, California.

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ILHAN OMAR CALLS FOR TAX ON THE WEALTHY OF ‘UP TO 90 PER CENT’

Ilhan Omar calls for tax on the wealthy of 'up to 90 per cent'

Omar said taxes had been as high as 90 per cent before and could be once more

By George Martin

  • Omar said taxes had been as high as 90 per cent before and could be once more 

  • It comes after freshman congresswoman Cortez called for a 70 per cent tax 

  • The tax reforms being proposed will fund several radical new policy initiatives 

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar has called for an income tax of up to 90 per cent on America’s multimillionaires.

Speaking to ’60 Minutes’, Omar argued that tax rates of previous years had risen to the 90 per cent mark for top earners as she doubled down on fellow freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s calls for a 70 per cent rate.

‘There are a few things that we can do,’ Rep. Omar said.

‘One of them, is that we can increase the taxes that people are paying who are the extremely wealthy in our communities. So, 70 percent, 80 percent, we’ve had it as high as 90 percent. So, that’s a place we can start.’ 

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The one percent must pay their fair share,’ she continued.

Omar claimed her radical tax plan would act as a catalyst for programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal being proposed by Ocasio-Cortez.

Ocasio-Cortez called for zero carbon emissions within 12 years, in an interview with ’60 Minutes’ on her first day as a member of Congress.

Omar also said she wants to slash the national defense budget in order to pay for the sweeping policy changes.

‘I’m also one that really looks at the defense budget that we have, Rep. Omar said.

‘That has increased nearly 50% since 9/11. And so, most of the money that we have in there is much more than with we spend on education, on healthcare.’ 

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Omar proposed the radical tax reforms as a way of funding other policy initiatives such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal

 

In 1960, before the Kennedy tax cuts, the top rate was 91 per cent for those earning more than $200,000. According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 per cent earned 9 per cent of all income at that time, compared to 20 per cent in 2008.

‘You look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 per cent,’ she said, in a clip that aired on CBS ‘This Morning.’ 

‘But once you get to, like, the tippy tops – on your 10 millionth dollar – sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent,’ she said.

‘That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.’ 

I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country. Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

‘Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security. That is radical,’ she said.

President Trump took a swipe at Cortez immediately after she proposed the tax hike, saying a 70 per cent rate would bring the turmoil of Venezuela to the US.

“We’re looking at Venezuela, it’s a very sad situation,” Trump told reporters.

“That was the richest state in all of that area, that’s a big beautiful area, and by far the richest – and now it’s one of the poorest places in the world. That’s what socialism gets you, when they want to raise your taxes to 70 percent.” 

 

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Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Confiscation Tax Would “Redistribute” 2.75 Trillion Dollars Over 10 Years

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Elizabeth Warren is making it exceedingly clear that she is a socialist, and that is quite frightening considering the fact that she could potentially become our next president. 

Unless some really big name unexpectedly enters the race, there is a decent chance that Elizabeth Warren could win the Democratic nomination in 2020.  And if she ultimately won the general election, the Democrats would likely have control of both the House and the Senate during her first two years in the White House as well.  So that means that the proposal that you are about to read about could actually become law in the not too distant future.

After AOC’s proposal to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent received so much favorable attention, it was just a matter of time before Democratic presidential candidates started jumping on the “soak the rich” bandwagon, and the first one to strike was Elizabeth Warren.

When she announced her new proposal on Twitter, she dubbed it the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax”…

We need structural change. That’s why I’m proposing something brand new – an annual tax on the wealth of the richest Americans. I’m calling it the “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” & it applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50M.

It would be bad enough if this was just a one-time tax on wealth.

But it isn’t.

Please note the use of the word “annual” in Warren’s tweet.  That means that the rich would keep getting hit with this tax year after year after year.

Those with more than 50 million dollars in assets would pay a 2 percent tax each year, and those with more than a billion dollars in assets would pay 3 percent each year…

The Post reported that Warren has been advised by Saez and Gabriel Zucman, left-leaning economists affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, on a deal that would levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with $50 million-plus in assets. For Americans with assets above $1 billion, that tax rate would increase to 3 percent.

The newspaper, citing a person familiar with the plan, reported that Warren’s plan would try to counter tax evasion by boosting funding for the IRS, and by levying a one-time tax penalty on people with more than $50 million who try to renounce their U.S. citizenship. It would also require that a certain number of people who pay the wealth tax be subject to annual audits, the Post reported.

3 percent may not sound like a lot to many of you.  But over the course of a couple of decades many families could have their fortunes almost completely wiped out by this wealth confiscation tax.

According to economist Emmanuel Saez, this new tax would be imposed upon approximately 75,000 families and would raise 2.75 trillion dollars over 10 years.

Clearly this is a move by Warren to appeal to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  I really like how Zero Hedge made this point…

Elizabeth Warren has never been a friend to the wealthy. But in the age of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, merely advocating for “holding the rich accountable” simply doesn’t penetrate like it did back in 2008. And that’s because, on the left flank of the Democratic Party, you’re not really a progressive unless you believe that the existence of billionaires is a policy error.

And surprisingly, there is actually a lot of public support for such a proposal.  In fact, a recent Fox News poll found that Americans overwhelmingly support soaking the rich…

Voters support tax increases on families making over $10 million annually by a 46-point margin (70 percent favor-24 percent oppose), and support a hike on those making over $1 million by 36 points (65-29 percent).

There is less support for a broader tax increase: 44 percent favor raising rates on those with income over $250,000, and a small minority, 13 percent, approves of an increase on all Americans.

Of course so much depends on how a survey is worded.  For example, I would be willing to bet that a survey would show that well over 50 percent of all Americans would back my proposal to abolish the income tax completely.

Over the coming months, Democratic presidential contenders are going to be continuously trying to one up each other with their promises to tax the rich and give out free stuff.  By the end, someone out there may even be promising to give free rides to the Moon to everyone.

But if Elizabeth Warren really wants to be considered a serious contender, she needs to eliminate the ridiculous gaffes that have plagued her in the past.  For instance, she recently claimed that we have “two co-equal branches of government”…

Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., already has declared that the government has “three chambers of Congress,” the House, the Senate and the presidency.

Now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has claimed on Twitter that the government has “two co-equal branches of government, the president of the United States and Congress.”

“The Notorious RBG (Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg) is gonna be ticked off that she’s been forgotten again,” said a post on the Twitter news-aggregating site Twitchy.

And there is certainly no excuse for such a gaffe, because she used to be a law professor.

In the end, it is difficult to understand why so many Americans seem to want to march down the road toward socialism.  Because as President Trump has noted, Venezuela has shown us where that road leads…

“We’re looking at Venezuela, it’s a very sad situation,” Trump told reporters. “That was the richest state in all of that area, that’s a big beautiful area, and by far the richest — and now it’s one of the poorest places in the world. That’s what socialism gets you, when they want to raise your taxes to 70 percent.”

He added: “You know, it’s interesting, I’ve been watching our opponents — our future opponents talk about 70 percent. No. 1, they can’t do it for 70 percent, it’s got to be probably twice that number. But, maybe more importantly what happens is you really have to study what’s happened to Venezuela. It’s a very, very sad situation.”

Unfortunately, political proposals don’t have to actually make sense, and right now Elizabeth Warren is doing all that she can to win the progressive vote.

 

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Grooming Gang Gets Taxpayer Money to Fight Deportation

By RONOC R. 23 January 2019

A grooming gang in Britain has received over 1 million pounds in taxpayer funds to fight their deportation.

The Rochdale grooming gang, so loving referred to as “Asian” by the British government, has been charged with grooming and raping girls as young as 13 years old. All four men come from Pakistan.

Since Britain is still a part of the EU, the “Asian” gang gets to use Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 8 is used to protect families against traumatic experiences such as separation.

David Spencer of the Crime Prevention Think Tank weighed in on the matter: “These men have been convicted of some truly shocking offenses, and it beggars belief that they are now able to run up even bigger taxpayer-funded bills making spurious appeals to extend their stay in the UK.”

The four men have run up a bill on the taxpayer dime, estimated to be 1,009,645 pounds.

Their taxpayer funded lawyers are working very hard to stop their eminent deportations and most of them are already out of prison for these heinous crimes.

This event outlines the extreme detriment of the EU laws that Britain has to live under because Prime Minister May can’t seem to get her act together and deliver on the referendum vote.

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OCASIO-CORTEZ: Set To Party With Hollywood At Sundance… Medicare, free tuition for all! And she’s just getting started…

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(Bloomberg Businessweek) — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might not have seen eye to eye with Joseph Overton, the late free-market advocate. But she has a firm grasp of the concept for which he is best known: the Overton Window. The term refers to the range of ideas that are at any given time considered worthy of public discussion. Thanks largely to her, the Overton Window on tax rates has just been moved significantly to the left.

Ocasio-Cortez, the mediagenic 29-year-old from the Bronx, N.Y., is the youngest woman ever elected to the House of Representatives. In an appearance on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper that aired on Jan. 6, she was talking up the Green New Deal, a plan to move the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Cooper challenged her by saying the program would require raising taxes. “There’s an element, yeah, where people are going to have to start paying their fair share,” she replied. Asked for specifics, she said, “Once you get to the tippy tops, on your 10 millionth dollar, sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent.”

 

Seventy percent! For perspective, the top rate under the tax law that passed in December 2017 is 37 percent. And now, suddenly, a number so extreme that no one in polite society dared utter it became a focal point of debate. Ocasio-Cortez’s fans—she has 2.4 million followers on Twitter alone—loved it. Some pundits dug up economic research defending rates in the 70 percent range. Others pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez was actually lowballing the historical comparison: Top rates were 90 percent or higher as recently as the 1960s. Defenders of low tax rates heaped abuse on her, which backfired on them by inflaming her supporters.

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What Ocasio-Cortez understands is that getting an idea talked about, even unfavorably, is a necessary, if insufficient, step on the path to adoption. (President Trump also gets this.) “It’s the easiest thing to say, ‘No, we can’t change anything,’ ” says Eric Foner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who recently retired from Columbia University. “Most of the big ideas in American history started among radical groups who were told, ‘No, you’re never going to be able to achieve that.’ ” Foner sees parallels between the strategies of today’s left-leaning Democrats and the radical Republicans who fought slavery before the Civil War, “which was put out an agenda, be aware that you can’t just accomplish it all at once, obviously, but change the political discourse by pushing your agenda and then work with those who are willing to do some of it.”

 

Ocasio-Cortez was actually less radical than she could have been on 60 Minutes. She passed up the opportunity to move the Overton Window on another of her pet issues: budget deficits. She adheres to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory that’s catching on among young, left-leaning politicians and older policymakers alike.

Its counterintuitive core idea is that deficits don’t matter if you borrow in your own currency, just as long as they don’t cause inflation. Unless the economy is at risk of overheating, MMTers say, paying for a new government program doesn’t require cutting another or raising taxes.

 

Ocasio-Cortez could have said, “No, Anderson, we wouldn’t need to raise taxes to pay for the Green New Deal. But I want to raise taxes anyway, because I believe in redistributing money from the rich to the poor.” That really would have lit up the internet. Randall Wray, an MMT theorist who’s a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, wrote in an email that he was “a bit disappointed” that Ocasio-Cortez connected tax hikes to the Green New Deal. Stephanie Kelton, another MMT theorist and Bernie Sanders’s economic adviser during his race for the Democratic nomination in 2016, says she thinks reducing inequality is the real reason Ocasio-Cortez favors higher rates on the rich: “It’s kind of a recognition that levels of income and wealth inequality parallel those of the 1920s.”

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Whatever the particulars, Ocasio-Cortez wants to raise tax rates—by a lot. Since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, Democrats have been almost as allergic as Republicans to raising taxes. Hillary Clinton didn’t advocate increasing rates on top incomes at all during her 2016 presidential campaign. Even Sanders, that wild socialist from Vermont, dared propose a top rate of only 52 percent when he ran for president.

But with Ocasio-Cortez, antitax conservatives immediately sensed that a taboo was being broken, that a crack has opened up in the dam they’d spent decades building and reinforcing. Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, who in 1986 devised the famous Taxpayer Protection Pledge that commits signers to vote against any net increases in taxes, on Twitter likened her proposal to slavery. “Slavery is when your owner takes 100% of your production. Democrat congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez wants 70% (according to CNN) What is the word for 70% expropriation?” he tweeted.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is the Darling of the Left, Nightmare of the Right

Norquist now says he remains confident that tax rates won’t rise to 70 percent, because “it’s such a bad idea.” In fact, he says he thinks Democrats are hurting only themselves by entertaining it. Ocasio-Cortez, he says, is a “pied piper” leading her party to its demise. It’s not at all clear, though, that higher taxes on the rich are a losing issue for Democrats. A Hill-HarrisX poll conducted on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13 found that 59 percent of registered voters supported the idea of raising the top rate to 70 percent. That included 45 percent of Republican voters. Thanks perhaps to the presidential campaign of Sanders, who like Ocasio-Cortez calls himself a democratic socialist, even “socialism” is no longer a dirty word: Gallup reported in August that 57 percent of Democrats and those leaning Democratic had a positive view of socialism, while only 47 percent had a positive view of capitalism.

 

What would a 70 percent top tax rate do to the U.S. economy and businesses? The rap on high rates is that they discourage work and promote wasteful tax-sheltering. Even many economists who think the rich pay too little say the better solution is to eliminate loopholes—subjecting more income to taxation rather than taxing a narrow base at a high rate.

 

Norquist argues that a 70 percent top rate would trigger an exodus of high-earning individuals from the U.S., saying that the last time U.S. rates were that high, they were also high in other nations, reducing the incentive to move. The Tax Foundation, a right-of-center think tank, said on Jan. 14 that a 70 percent top rate on ordinary income (not capital gains) exceeding $10 million “would not raise much revenue.” “Not much revenue” in this case means an estimated $189 billion in total over 10 years—or $292 billion before accounting for the likelihood that people in that tax bracket would work less and invest less in their noncorporate businesses.

 

On the other hand, economists supportive of Ocasio-Cortez were quick to point out that Denmark has among the world’s highest living standards despite a 56.5 percent tax rate on incomes above about $80,000 a year, a far lower threshold than her $10 million. A 2011 paper by Nobel laureate Peter Diamond of MIT and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley advocated top total tax rates (federal plus state) for the richest Americans of 73 percent on ordinary income (again, not capital gains). They assumed that an extra dollar of income for someone in that bracket has very little value in comparison to a dollar received by a lower-income person. Critics of their research have said Diamond and Saez treat the rich as sheep to be shorn and underestimate how much high tax rates would discourage people from getting advanced degrees or starting businesses. Diamond rejects the criticism, cites the need for more public investment, and says, “I’m perfectly comfortable” with Ocasio-Cortez’s 70 percent rate.

One thing that most people don’t know about Ocasio-Cortez is that she was a science nerd in high school in Westchester County, N.Y. In 2007, out of almost 1,500 students from 46 countries competing in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, she was one of four second-place winners in the microbiology category. (Her research was on the effect of antioxidants on roundworms.) It’s a biographical detail that adds another dimension to the story of a young woman born in the Bronx to parents of Puerto Rican descent who became the first in her family to attend college. While she was away at school her father died, pushing the family to the brink of financial ruin. “When you come from a working-class background, it often feels like you’re just one disaster away from everything falling apart,” she said in an Instagram video about a year ago.

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Like former President Barack Obama, Ocasio-Cortez became a community organizer after graduating from college, in 2011, and supported herself as a waitress and bartender. She worked for Sanders’s campaign in 2016. After that, things happened fast. She ran for the Democratic nomination in her Bronx-Queens congressional district and upset Joe Crowley. Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Crowley had been seen as a candidate to succeed Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. He outspent Ocasio-Cortez 18 to 1 and had endorsements from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and both New York senators. She won huge.

 

No one shifts the Overton Window on any subject without strong communications skills, and Ocasio-Cortez is ninja-level in that department. She thrills supporters by going after critics hard on social media, which she uses the way an older generation used street rallies. “I’m a firm believer that organizing never stops,” she told Cooper in the 60 Minutes interview. One of her first acts after her election was to visit the office of Pelosi—not to seek her blessing but to support climate change activists who were occupying the soon-to-be speaker’s office. Now Ocasio-Cortez works two doors away from Pelosi—but not for her. She’s floated the idea of creating a progressive caucus among the Democrats, modeling it on the powerful Freedom Caucus on the right. Among her allies are new members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the first Somali-American elected to Congress; New Mexico’s Deb Haaland, one of the first American Indian women elected to Congress; and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian-American in Congress.

“This is a movement; this is not me,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram video last year.

Both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump are social media virtuosos. They excel at turning back attacks on their credibility. Attempts to challenge them on facts come across to their supporters as mean-spirited and unfair—the knee-jerk reaction of an establishment trying to suppress outside voices. So it was when Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly said on social media last year that the Pentagon had lost track of $21 trillion in funds, a figure that was about 30 times the Department of Defense’s annual budget. Unlike Trump, she corrects her mistakes. “The thing that’s hard is that you’re supposed to be perfect all the time on every issue and every thing,” she said on Instagram last year.

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Implicit in that statement: Ocasio-Cortez has plenty more Overton Windows to shift and no intention of slowing down for the critics. Aside from the Green New Deal and higher taxes on the rich, she favors Medicare for all, a federal guarantee of a job, abolition of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, and tuition-free college or trade school. She also wants to slash military spending, ban assault weapons, and bring back Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks.

 

That may all sound like tail risk to American businesses, which have been enjoying deregulation under Trump. Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, says, “This is the kind of plan where you can’t go to Wall Street executives first to try to get them to buy into it. You gotta show ’em.”

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The question is whether she’ll be able to show them, or anyone. A week after Ocasio-Cortez came to Washington, fellow Democrats complained that she was disruptive and not a team player. Chief among her sins: threatening to back the primary opponents of members of Congress who aren’t liberal enough for her. “I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Missouri Democrat, told Politico. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic Caucus.”

To pass any of their initiatives, Ocasio-Cortez and her allies will have to defeat the proven Republican strategy of using budget deficits as a justification for opposing new spending. That’s where Modern Monetary Theory comes in. It says a government can spend money without raising taxes—indeed, without even borrowing from the public via bonds. The government simply creates new money to pay its bills. The only constraint on spending under MMT is that the government could use up too much of the nation’s productive capacity, which would result in high inflation. As long as inflation remains low, as it is now, deficits are no problem. The usual reply from other economists is that even a nation that owes debt in its own currency can suffer a crisis if investors lose faith in its ability to service the debt without resorting to the printing press.

 

One precinct where deficits still matter, and MMT most certainly does not, is the office of House Speaker Pelosi. On Jan. 3, under Pelosi’s direction, the House passed a set of rules including pay-as-you-go, which requires legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts. PAYGO, as it’s known, is contrary to the spirit of MMT and hamstrings liberal Democrats by making most of their spending initiatives impossible. Ocasio-Cortez was one of only three Democrats to oppose the provision, along with Ro Khanna of California and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

 

Ocasio-Cortez had another setback when she was passed over for a coveted seat on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes, Social Security, and Medicare. But she recovered nicely by getting a seat along with other progressives on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, headed by Maxine Waters of California. Carolyn Maloney, a fellow New York Democrat, says, “I was once that young woman who others tried to rein in. I certainly don’t believe in doing that to anyone else. Representative Ocasio-Cortez is bringing new energy and a new approach, and we should all embrace that.”

 

Ocasio-Cortez’s disregard for political niceties is both her strongest quality as an activist and potentially her Achilles’ heel as a representative. She shows no sign of dialing back. One way or another, says Kelton, the economic adviser, “the conversation is shifting. The space is opening up.” —With Allison McCartney

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THE SWAMP – Nancy Pelosi’s House FAILS To Re-Open Government

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Democrats failed to get the two-thirds vote needed to re-open the federal government through February 1 without funding President Donald Trump’s border wall on one of their attempts Tuesday.

House members favored the measure — which was under suspension — by a 237-187 vote, but that was not enough votes to pass.

The House is trying to get their mission accomplished through a different continuing resolution Tuesday.

Democrats’ failure to even get the H.J. Res 27 bill to the Senate further underscores how President Trump has all the leverage in these negotiations.

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President Donald Trump could save enough money to pay for his entire southern border wall with change to spare if he chooses not to sign a bill guaranteeing back pay for furloughed government workers. It would only take three pay periods over six weeks for the government to save more than $6 billion, more than the $5.7 billion Trump is asking for to build the Wall.

The mainstream media is reporting that Trump is prepared to sign the back-pay bill that went to his desk days ago, but Trump has not signed anything, and to do so would knock out some of his leverage over Schumer and Pelosi — which does not seem like it would be in line with “Art of the Deal” policy.

The shutdown — in which 800,000 workers are not working– is saving taxpayers more than two billion dollars for every two-week pay period, but the savings will only count if Trump chooses not to give them back pay.

Here is a chart on the savings, courtesy of the Center for American Progress:

 

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LEFT MOCKS TRUMP FAST FOOD FEAST — BUT OBAMA SPENT $65,000 ON HOT DOGS!

Left Mocks Trump Fast Food Feast -- But Obama Spent $65,000 on Hot Dogs!

WikiLeaks emails reveal Obama used TAXPAYER CASH for private party — Trump paid for burgers himself!

 | Infowars.com – JANUARY 15, 2019

The left is mocking President Trump for providing a fast food buffet to a college football team, but emails obtained by WikiLeaks show that former President Obama flew in $65,000 worth of hotdogs from Chicago – using taxpayer funds – for a private party in 2009.

The haters spared no expense denigrating Trump on social media for serving hearty fast food to the Clemson University football team on Monday.

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However, emails from global intelligence firm Stratfor, released by WikiLeaks in 2012, show that the Obama administration spent $65,000 of taxpayer money to fly “hot dogs” to a private dinner party at the White House in 2009.

“RE: Get ready for ‘Chicago Hot Dog Friday,’” said the email’s subject headline sent by Chief Innovation Officer Aaric S. Eisenstein.

“If we get the same ‘waitresses,’ I’m all for it!!!”

Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton replied, asking if they would be “using the same channels.”

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“I think Obama spent about $65,000 of the tax-payers money flying in pizza/dogs from Chicago for a private party at the White House not long ago, assume we are using the same channels?” he said.

The corporate media completely ignored WikiLeaks’ bombshell Global Intelligence Files release highlighting government waste and corruption, but they have time to fact-check every aspect of Trump’s fast food feast, including the true height of the pile of burgers.

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