President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Why? I could have told you that is where we are heading. The whole conversation about him -- the "infrastructure spending," the cuts in taxes, all of the military spending. ... has been a fantasy that has never had any relationship to obvious reality.

There is no way to cut taxes without increasing our debt. Period. Our spending has gone through the roof and more than 3/4 of it is locked in -- entitlements. Social security, Medicaid and Medicare. But nothing anyone ever proposes deals with reality. They won't deal with that reality until it is crisis time and there is no choice.

Trump has no plan with regard to the contradictory bulllshit he has thrown out there. Just like with Obamacare, he is leaving it to Paul Ryan. But Paul Ryan is a fraud, and he has the same problem with this nonsense that he had with health care. There is that same block of people in his coalition that won't play along. So they will play all kinds of dishonest games to try to make it "revenue neutral" to appease that group, but even with the sophistry they resort to, they won't be able to propose anything that doesn't deal with the entitlements that doesn't add in a BAT or VAT or a broad-based tariff or some other kind of goods / services-based tax that will shift the tax burden and make it more regressive. And getting that passed is going to be as easy as it was getting their health care mess passed. Even if they can get it passed, it will be as big of a mess as what we currently have. There is a reason we structure taxes the way we do -- when you tax a small group of people who have a lot of money at a high rate rather than spreading the taxes more equally across the masses, you don't end up with mobs with pitchforks.

If Trump was popular, he might be able to get something through with tariffs shifting the deck chairs around (which will bring out the pitchforks when people realize what has been done). But he's not popular. And even if he could get some kind of massive tariff through as the tradeoff to lower income tax rates, it leaves us exactly where we are or worse off. First, I can almost guarantee the Federal receipts will decline because the thing is not REALLY going to be "revenue neutral." Second, Americans will get killed by a BAT. Our deal-making-business-mogul-in-chief will destroy Wal-Mart in the process of sending the prices of consumer staples through the roof, helping to tank the economy further into the permadepression we are in because of the mess we have already created. And second, until they deal with the $4 + trillion and growing budgets (and that means dealing with social security and medicaid and medicare), this is the dumbest conversation ever anyhow. It's like watching a ship with a gaping hole sink, and having a discussion about how you are going to bail water from the deck. One side: We should get 50 small buckets. Other side: No, we need 1 big bucket.

Two other things: His treasury is out of money in two months. They need Congress to raise the debt ceiling again just to keep the spending going. And I am not sure he can get that done easily right now -- even though his party controls Congress. And the other thing people don't realize is that the only thing that has kept the mess that is our Federal government going is the Federal Reserve. Without them monetizing all of the debt creation, it is game over. But that has serious consequences for our future. They have borrowing costs suppressed hundreds of basis points (this is VERY significant historically) below the natural rate of interest, with a shell game they now play. What they do with the overnight rate to try to keep credit flowing is one thing, but they got into a dumb game in which our government has sold trillions of dollars of debt, and the Federal Reserve created money out of thing air to buy the debt (destroying liquidity in the debt markets in the process -- they have a huge balance sheet now) and has been paying the interest back to the Treasury. It's a scheme worthy of Bernie Madoff. ... but instead it has the backing of a bunch of clueless PhDs who have been given the keys to the bus driving us all around, and it has the imprimatur of our government on it. And most people are clueless about what is happening. A decade of them digging the hole deeper and deeper has unleashed massive amounts of misallocated capital across the economy in the form of debt and it is going to end disastrously. This is what people SHOULD have their eyes on -- it's a slow-motion trainwreck that ends with a credit crisis and a lot of pain (that should have been avoided) for people. Instead we are having fantasy discussions about the wrong things and everyone is focused on tee antics of a bullshit artist who somehow got elected president.