All Things Trump

[Tero]

”Stop acting like hysterical children, FFS, the world isn't ending and some things are actually looking up. Count your blessings, we could have Jimbo Carter in office and no petrol in the stations.”

It was an oil cartel thing all thru the 70s.

There are no blessings in the Trump era. ”Foreigners” and guns babies and Jesus are real. If we have 8 years of Trump, every federal judge willbe a white guy over 50.

[laklak]

This is why I don't participate in most of the political discussions here, or anywhere else for that matter. "No blessings" is a pretty broad statement, as broad as "Trump has made America Great Again!". Seems it's all or nothing in the political arena these days, there's no nuance, compromise, logic, or honesty. I can't talk to conservatives because I cannot agree with their entire agenda, and I can't talk to liberals for the same reason. You're either for them or against them, you're a whining SJW or a Nazi. Moderation and centrism are dead. I don't fit into either camp, so I usually just STFU and post pictures of puppies and tits.

[laklak]

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Donald Trump’s lawyers sent a private 20-page letter to the special counsel Robert Mueller to assert that he cannot be forced to testify in the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, according to a report.

They also argue that Trump could not have committed obstruction because he has absolute authority over all federal investigations.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... _clipboard

All hail the infallible supreme leader.

They've been pushing the 'cannot commit obstruction' line since at least December of last year.

[Seabass]

All those stats are just relative measures. They're calculated the same way whether it's under Obama or Trump. It doesn't matter if the actual percentage is 3.2 or 5.7, what does is two years ago is was sitting at 10.

Nope. Unemployment hit 9.6 during Bushy's recession, and it was at 4.8 when Drumpf took office.

Comparing the 'Trump economy’ to the ‘Obama economy’

As Trump marks his first year in office, he’s made America’s economy the same again—the same as Obama’s, that is.

The same is true for GDP estimates and any other figure they put out.

Trump hasn't done jack squat for the economy. The best that can be said about him is that he hasn't really screwed anything up... yet. How this trade war of his plays out long term, remains to be seen.

People actually say, with a straight face, that so many are 'suffering' under Trump. Suffering? Where? Point them out.

4600 dead Puerto Ricans.
Undocumented immigrants and refugees.
Kids and parents being separated from each other by ICE.
Tranny soldiers.
Victims of hate crimes, which have vastly increased since Trump took office.
The rule of law.
The ecosystem.

The Kremlin's having a blast though. Duterte and Erdogan seem to like Trump too. As do the KKK, neo-nazis, white nationalists, and all those batshit evangelicals. And I'm sure Lil' Kim is just tickled that Trump let DPRK's head spy into the Oval.

The Handmaid's Tale is still fiction.

Give them time. The ONLY thing stopping the Republicans from turning the US into a middle-eastern style theocracy but with Christianity instead of Islam, is the Democrats.

[pErvinalia]

@lak, I don't disagree with you that Obama didn't particularly do anything good, but that doesn't all of sudden mean that Trump is doing much either. The real issues the US and the western world face are - totally out of control debt, technological unemployment, out of control global warming, and a loss of democracy to moneyed interests. Getting the meaningless stat of unemployment below 5%, or annual GDP over 4%, is just tinkering at the margins (or to live up to the hyperbolic left tag, shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic), regardless of who is president. Until we get systemic change in our political systems, a few percent here or there on any measure is totally meaningless.

[laklak]

[Forty Two]

Congressional Budget Office said April was the best month in history for the US budget. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... us-budget/

Economy booming under Trump: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-j ... l-you-that

Household income hits all-time high under Trump: https://www.investors.com/politics/edit ... -optimism/

We're not quite at a sustained elevated growth rate of 3 percent yet, but the latest economy snapshot tells us we are knocking on the door. The growth rate over the last four quarters came in at 2.9 percent, which was higher than any of the eight years of Barack Obama's presidency. Halfway through this current quarter, which began on April 1, the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates growth at 4 percent. If that persists through the end of June, we will have reached an average growth rate of 3 percent under Donald Trump. d Feedback
Not bad, given that nearly every liberal critic trashed the president's campaign forecast of 3 percent to 4 percent growth as an impossible dream. Economists such as Larry Summers, Obama's first chief economist, gloomily declared that we were mired in a new era of "secular stagnation" and that 3 percent growth was unachievable. Paul Krugman of The New York Times said it was more likely we would see flying cars than 3 percent to 4 percent growth.

Now for the even-better news. We are already starting to see a fiscal dividend from President Trump's tax, energy and pro-business policies. The Congressional Budget Office reports that tax revenues in April — by far the biggest month of the year for tax collections because of the April 15 filing deadline — totaled $515 billion, which was a robust 13 percent rise in receipts over last year. https://www.creators.com/read/stephen-moore

Why the left is so wrong about the economic boom under Trump -- https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... -the-left/

Time Magazine’s cover this week is a classic. It blares: “The Wrecking Crew: How Trump’s Cabinet Is Dismantling Government.” Also last week The New York Times ran a lead editorial complaining that team Trump is shrinking at an “unprecedented” pace the regulatory state that was erected to new heights under President Obama. These and other media reports have had all the subtlety of a primal scream.

Meanwhile, last week the stock market raced to new all-time highs, we had another blockbuster jobs report with another fall in the unemployment rate, and housing sales soared to their highest level in a decade.

Are the editors at the Times or at Time so ideologically blinded that they are incapable of connecting the dots.

The U.S. economic revival has defied the predictions of almost every Donald Trump critic. I vividly remember on the campaign debating Hillary Clinton’s economic gurus who accused Mr. Trump and his advisers like me of “lying” when we said pro-growth policies would speed up the economy to 3 to 4 percent growth.

Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under Mr. Obama, told reporters earlier this year that the chances of reaching 3 percent growth over a decade were about 1-in-25 — which is what the political experts said was Mr. Trump’s chance of winning the election. Another Obama economist Alan Krueger called the 3 percent growth forecast “extremely rosy.”

Larry Summers, who was the Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton and a top economic adviser to Mr. Obama challenged the “standards of integrity” of the Trump economic team forecast of 3 percent plus growth. “I do not see how any examination of U.S. history could possibly support the Trump forecast as a reasonable expectation,” he wrote in The Washington Post.

Salon, another liberal publication parodied the Trump GDP forecast saying “Trump’s Growth Forecasts Are the Budgetary Equivalent of Putting Your Fingers in Your Ears and Yelling, ‘Na Na Na Na Na.’”

Congress weighed in too. “This budget relies on absurd economic projections and pretend revenues that no credible economist would validate,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Washington Democrat, announced at a House budget hearing.

Investment guru Bill Gross of Janus Capital declared earlier this year in response to the Trump growth forecast: “High rates of growth, and the productivity that drives it, are likely distant memories from a bygone era.”

The sharp-penned Paul Krugman of The New York Times declared the 3 percent Trump growth forecast as an act of “economic arrogance.” He mocked the Trump forecast saying that the productivity improvement necessary for faster growth was as likely as “driverless flying cars arriving en masse.”

An L.A. Times business article from earlier this year was titled: “If Trump thinks he can get more than 3 percent economic growth, he’s dreaming.”

Admittedly, we shouldn’t read too much into six months of very good economic data — including six months of 3 percent-plus economic growth — or the booming stock market. This is short-term data and these trends can always reverse course quickly. President Trump’s more restrictive policies on trade and immigration could harm growth potential.

But so far the Trump haters have missed the call on the trajectory of the economy. Their lousy track record is relevant to the debate over the tax bill, because Mr. Trump’s critics are still accusing the White House of predicting wild-eyed rates of growth — egads, 3 percent — over the next decade to camouflage the fiscal effects of the tax cut.

Doubly ironic is that the same Obama-era economists — Mr. Summers, Mr. Kruger and Mr. Furman — who are trashing Mr. Trump’s increasingly realistic forecast of 3 percent growth — are the ones who predicted 4 percent plus growth from the Obama budgets. Mr. Obama never came anywhere near 4 percent growth and at the end of his term growth was trickling down at a pitiful 1.6 percent.

So the same people who accused Mr. Trump’s team of “low standards of integrity” for predicting 3 percent growth were the ones who forecast much faster growth from Mr. Obama — while he was raising taxes. Amazing.

I

t’s very simple what is going on here. The Obama administration threw every page of its Keynesian economic playbook at the 2008-09 recession. Three tax hikes, zero interest rate monetary policies, $8 trillion of deficit spending, three minimum wage increases, stimulus spending plans, tax increases on the rich, Obamacare, tight financial regulations, a war against fossil fuels, and even more, were somehow going to get us to 4 percent growth.

Free enterprise and pro-business policies were thrown out the window. What was delivered was the weakest recovery from a recession since the 1930s. Middle America felt it, which is why Mr. Trump won these forgotten Americans. The economy’s meager growth rate of 2 percent left a $2 trillion growth deficit by 2016.

One reason that economist Larry Kudlow and I and others assured Donald Trump that 3 to 4 percent growth is achievable was that Mr. Trump could capitalize on the underperformance of the Obama years. Business investment fell almost two-thirds below the long term trend line under Mr. Obama — thanks to higher taxes on investment. Now, partly in anticipation of the tax cut, business spending keeps climbing.

If they really cared about workers and the country, maybe the liberal economists and their shills in the media should show some humility. They should acknowledge they have been dead wrong about how much Obamanomics was going to grow the economy and about how Trumponomics would crash the economy and the stock market. They should just shut up. Or better yet, maybe the rest of us should all just stop listening to them.

[Forty Two]

Economists agree, Trump's economy is booming - http://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3689 ... or-economy

[Svartalf]

yeah, but bizzarely, not the sectors he announced he'd make go boom.

[pErvinalia]

Congressional Budget Office said April was the best month in history for the US budget. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/20 ... us-budget/

Economy booming under Trump: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-j ... l-you-that

Household income hits all-time high under Trump: https://www.investors.com/politics/edit ... -optimism/

We're not quite at a sustained elevated growth rate of 3 percent yet, but the latest economy snapshot tells us we are knocking on the door. The growth rate over the last four quarters came in at 2.9 percent, which was higher than any of the eight years of Barack Obama's presidency. Halfway through this current quarter, which began on April 1, the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates growth at 4 percent. If that persists through the end of June, we will have reached an average growth rate of 3 percent under Donald Trump. d Feedback
Not bad, given that nearly every liberal critic trashed the president's campaign forecast of 3 percent to 4 percent growth as an impossible dream. Economists such as Larry Summers, Obama's first chief economist, gloomily declared that we were mired in a new era of "secular stagnation" and that 3 percent growth was unachievable. Paul Krugman of The New York Times said it was more likely we would see flying cars than 3 percent to 4 percent growth.

Now for the even-better news. We are already starting to see a fiscal dividend from President Trump's tax, energy and pro-business policies. The Congressional Budget Office reports that tax revenues in April — by far the biggest month of the year for tax collections because of the April 15 filing deadline — totaled $515 billion, which was a robust 13 percent rise in receipts over last year. https://www.creators.com/read/stephen-moore

You should really enclose the above in quotes, as it's taken straight from the article.

[Forty Two]

Blue collar jobs booming - http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/05/investi ... index.html

Manufacturers hiring right and left - https://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-job ... 1520636313 Investors are cheering Friday’s report that the economy added 313,000 jobs in February while the labor force gained 806,000 entrants. This is remarkable for a recovery long in the tooth and shows that deregulation and tax reform are flowing into business confidence and hiring.

Greatest manufacturing boom in 20 years. http://observer.com/2017/10/how-donald- ... an-a-year/ Real GDP growth rate is up more than 50% over the average for the 8 Obama years.

Unemployment is at a 50-year low. 50-year low.

[Scot Dutchy]

Who is producing the propaganda? They are all estimates. Congressional Budget Office! Publishing what trump tells them. Any independent data?

[pErvinalia]

Unemployment is at a 50-year low. 50-year low.

A meaningless stat is at a 50 year low? Wow!

How about addressing the real issues? How is private and public debt going? How is inequality going? How is climate change action going? What is Trump's plan for the future of large technological unemployment? And that swamp.. it must be drained by now, yeah?

[Scot Dutchy]

Define unemployment? Define growth? Growth for whom? The 1%? The USA and the UK are alike when it comes to data. Guestimates. It says nothing.

How many people actually live in America? Nobody can tell you because no one knows. How many unemployed? Make a wild guess and why not that is what Congressional Budget Office does. Data in America is a mess. No two states collect data the same way.