President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Mighty hard to prove quid pro quo.

Candidate BTExpress might be pretty disgusted with our foreign policy and want to change it anyway (hard to imagine, I know). But I can't change it unless I get into office.

Hardly any different than "proving" that accepting NRA money (or any lobbying money) makes an elected official change his policy regarding such domestic positions. And to us, it's just an accepted practice, anyway. That's just how we're conditioned.

"Change domestic policy because of outside help" = accepted.
"Change foreign policy because of outside help" = treason!!!!!

 

Whatabout(tm) this hypothetical situation I just made up?

 

Not quite. The former, while often deplorable, is legal. The latter is not. It's not treason legally (a very narrow statute), but it is a federal crime.

 

One thing I loathe about the "if this had happened it woulda come out sooner" bullshit is how much it undermines the patience and empathy and trust required to be a good reporter. Gawker people have been doing mini victory laps since the Louis CK stuff came out, talking about how "Gawker had this first and what a loss it is that Gawker isn't around..."

No, I'm sorry, but get fucked. The reason you didn't have that story is because no woman would ever trust you to get it right. You had rumors, which is totally different. And when you had Brett Favre sending his dick to a Jets employee, you burned that woman after agreeing to not use her name because using her name got more clicks. Look at what the Times and Post did. It wasn't magic. It wasn't bribery. It was empathy and patience. You don't get to brag because you had neither and half-assed the story.

 

Putin rolls Trump under the bus.

 

CAN I HEAR AN AMEN

 

If you can prove quid pro quo.

We removed our missiles from Turkey because it was the only way to get the Soviets' missiles out of Cuba and prevent war. But we insisted that our missiles would remain there several months to mask the quid pro quo agreement.

 

Whoops.

 

That settles that. I mean this administration has a sterling reputation for telling the truth.

 

What ... she doesn’t deserve to be believed?

 

How Congress made tax reform impossible

"If the sheer number of interest groups might seem to make ambitious tax reform impossible, there’s a very simple reason, and the blame lies with Congress: As the 1977 law suggests, Congress for decades has been using the tax code to stash subsidies that could never get in through the front door of the budget process. Thanks to both Democrats and Republicans worried about being tagged as spendthrifts, the U.S. tax code has grown into a vast shadow budget, a massive law stacked with social programs, incentives for economic growth, and even special subsidies for sports stadiums and rum manufacturers.

Since the early 1990s, such shadow spending – known to budget wonks as “tax expenditures”— have grown from around $600 billion to $1.2 trillion, after adjusting for inflation. Much of this growth has come from large, well-known tax breaks, like the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance and the mortgage interest deduction, which would be limited under the GOP bill. But the sheer number of tax expenditures has also grown by more than half during that period as well.

Since these social programs are buried in the tax code and don’t look like spending, they are politically popular and make tax reform devilishly difficult, said Michael Strain, director of economic studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “It shows up as a decrease in their tax bill rather than an increase in the amount of government spending they receive,” he said. “But it is government spending.” He added about the huge number of tax expenditures, “It’s so big and comprehensive. How do you get arms around it?”