Showing posts with label Trump. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump. Show all posts

Sunday, November 1, 2020

STATE RACES, RED TO BLUE | Heidi's Picks

Sunday, November 1—As Election Day (Tuesday) approaches, the Battleground States are getting special attention. See two takes on a Biden or Trump victory in these states.  (More recently: CNN's guess on the likely range in the Electoral College vote and the American Prospect's "Unsanitized" roundup.)

The following summary of key down-ballot state races was sent to me by Heidi Fiske, who asked me to post it on her behalf, as I have done before:

Nothing is more important than winning the Presidency and taking back the Senate.


But those races are attracting huge sums of money. Not so the state races, which both require and attract less money. 


We will realize in January just how important these overlooked races are, because thats when governors, state AGs, state Secretaries of State, state judges and state legislatures will determine the district lines that will hold for a decade, through 2030, based on this year's foreshortened census. 


The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), the Democratic body that concerns itself with state races, says that if the 48 state legislative candidates in the links below are elected, they will flip 10 chambers in seven critical states from Red to Blue. Of these seats, 34 are in chambers that will rule on district lines for one-third of all House seats (144 of 435).

  • Heidi's Picks incorporates recommendations of the DLCC, Future Now, and some other individuals and groups.
  • Arizona, 5 legislative candidates
  • Iowa, 4 legislative candidates
  • Michigan, 4 legislative candidates
  • Minnesota, 2 legislative candidates
  • North Carolina, 11 legislative  + Attorney General + Secretary of State + 2 Supreme Court candidates  [NCs superb governor is not included only because he is well-funded and almost certain to win]
  • Pennsylvania, 13 legislative candidates [PAs outstanding Attorney General is not included only because he is considered sure to win]
  • Texas, 9 legislative + 4 Supreme Court

Saturday, October 31, 2020

STATE BATTLEGROUNDS | Polling Update


The chart shows states that Trump won in 2016 where Biden is tied or has the edge as of September 28. The following synoptic summary of polling in battleground states as of Friday, October 30, is by Dana Chasin of 20/20Vision:

Vice President Biden leads national polls by 9 points and turnout rates favor Democrats by more than 17 points, pointing to a potential blue wave. Battleground states this year, ordered from most to least electoral votes, include: 

  • Texas (38 Electoral Votes): Trump is up by 1.2 points in Texas. This year, Texas limited mail-in voting only to those unable to come to the polls. More than nine million Texans cast votes this week, surpassing 2016 turnout. And more than 16.9 million voters are registered in Texas, an increase of 3 million from 2016.

  • Florida (29 EVs):  Both Biden and Trump are campaigning in Florida this week. Since Labor Day, Biden has outspent Trump three-to-one in Florida, and he is leading by 2.2 points in polls. Roughly 474,000 more registered Republicans have voted in-person in Florida than Democrats, but Democrats are leading mail-in voting by 637,000 votes. Republicans will likely continue to vote in-person, but total votes cast have already surpassed 2016 totals.

  • Pennsylvania (20 EVs): Biden currently leads in Pennsylvania by 5.2 points. Since 2016, Democratic voter registration has declined by 10,000 while Republicans registered 205,000 voters. But Democrats hold a 700,000 voter registration edge statewide. So far, 2.1 million people, majority Democrat, have mailed in their ballots.

  • Ohio (18 EVs): In the polls, Trump currently leads Biden by 0.9 in Ohio. Ohio offers in-person early voting and the ability to request an absentee ballot up to three days before Election Day. More than 2.5 million Ohioans have already cast their ballots. But unlike other states, fewer Ohio Democrats and more Republicans are voting early and absentee compared to the same point in 2016.

  • Other states to watch: Other battleground states include Michigan (16 EVs), Georgia (16 EVs), North Carolina (15 EVs), Arizona (11 EVs), and Iowa (6 EVs), with polls showing Biden leading in Michigan by 9.1 points, Arizona by 3.1, North Carolina by 2.3, Georgia by 1.7, and Iowa by 0.3. While Trump is looking to flip Minnesota, which Clinton won by less than 2 points in 2016, Biden is leading the state by 8.2 points. NC, MN, and GA, along with Wisconsin, will likely report unofficial results by noon on Thursday, providing an indication of pre-election poll accuracy and the degree of red-to-blue shift in crucial swing states.

Saturday, October 24, 2020

TAXES | What Trump's Returns Show about Tax Laws

Gene Steuerle of the Urban Institute this week has posted a fine summary of lessons from Trump's tax returns as reported by The New York Times. 

Trump's returns show how U.S. tax laws can break the link between wealth and income, increasing wealth concentration. 

His  returns illustrate many ways individuals and businesses with large  accumulated assets can shelter income that would otherwise generate tax liabilities. Steuerle says tax policies since the early 1990s have hiked the ratio of household wealth to income, generating $25 trillion of nominal wealth above normal growth. The Fed's recent buying of debt has further protected wealth holders.

Examples: 

  • Underreported capital gains. Income from appreciated property is not included in taxable income until the underlying asset is sold. Steuerle found in the 1980s less than one-third of net income from capital reported.
  • Tax exemptions for real estate owners. Large real estate investors typically use a pass-through business and are thereby able to claim exemptions from corporate and individual taxation. If property is held until death, no income tax is owed on accrued but unrealized gains. Gains can be deferred or excluded from tax at death, but property owners can immediately deduct almost all expenses on their tax returns. Investors in real estate can swap real estate properties with another owner and defer recognition of capital gains income.
  • Incentives for risky lending. Lending officers at an institution like Deutsche Bank make big money on loans even if their loans go sour. They earn bonuses by boosting the bank's cash flow. By the time the loan sours, it is usually too late to claw back bonuses.
  • Incentives for risky borrowing.  Borrowers can write off nominal interest costs that are a multiple of the real cost of borrowing. Near-zero-interest federal fund rates, while taxpayers deduct their nominal interest costs, mean that in real terms some investors are being paid to borrow money.
  • Tax incentives to declare bankruptcy.  An owner of two companies where #1 earns $5 million and #2 loses $6 million has an incentive to declare bankruptcy on #2 and avoid taxes on #1. Others bear the bankruptcy cost.

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

TRUMP | "Fitness" for the Presidency

Former Defense Secretary
James Mattis.
September 9, 2020—Today we learned that Donald Trump was described as totally “unfit” to serve as President by Former Defense Secretary James Mattis. 

This label appears in Bob Woodward’s soon-to-be-released book, Rage. Mattis was talking with then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, says  Woodward (https://bit.ly/32f6XVd). 

Mattis resigned his position in late 2018 because of disagreements with the president on defense policies. He told Coats that the President was “dangerous” and “there may come a time when we have to take collective action” against Trump, according to excerpts from the Woodward book reported on by The Washington Post this morning (https://bit.ly/35qM8rV). 


The “collective action” Mattis is referring to is presumably Article 25 of (25th Amendment to) the Constitution, which provides for either (1) a President declaring himself/herself incapable of carrying out his/her duties or (2) those around the President, i.e., the Cabinet, so declaring (https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxxv).


However, Article 25 was designed for addressing a disability rather than a mental or temperamental disorder. 


What Makes a President Fit or Unfit?


Two key factors make someone fit to be President, apart from general sanity. They are experience (including education) and temperament. 


Going back to the ten presidents before Trump, all had either legislative (four as Senators— Barack Obama, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Jack Kennedy—and one as a Representative, George H. W. Bush) or government executive (five Governors: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon). 


Trump had neither legislative nor government executive experience. He had some business experience, but one that viewed government as the enemy, an environment with little connection to the constraints of government administration and leadership.


Historically—The Best Presidents


C-Span has an interesting list of qualifications that make for the best presidents. It has an ongoing tabulation of the best ones ever, updated to 2017. In first place, consistently since 2000, is Abraham Lincoln. (If George Washington's presidencies created the nation, Lincoln's preserved it.) 


George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt take the next two spots (they traded places between 2000 and 2009). Theodore Roosevelt comes in fourth. See https://www.c-span.org/presidentsurvey2017/.


George Washington and Lincoln get respect for creating and preserving the United States. But the two Roosevelts had challenges more like the ones we have today. They needed a lead a team to address problems that the private marketplace was facing to address.


Franklin Delano Roosevelt


FDR in particular inherited a country that was in a deep Depression, with bank failures panicking depositors and unemployment at 25 percent. It required political savvy and administrative skill to steer the country through that era and then through a World War.


FDR was well prepared to take on these challenges because he had both the experience and the temperament to do so. He had two terms as Governor of New York State, during which time he led the country in innovative responses to the Depression.


He gained important experience operating in Washington from his eight years as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson. He was appointed by the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who had been editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. He learned to work with members of Congress. He helped reorganize the Navy Department. He mastered the facts of the Navy Department and stuck to them at Congressional hearings. He learned to work with his party in Washington and in New York.


When the United States went to war with Germany on April 6, 1917, FDR got a taste of wartime decision-making. He presided over a four-fold increase in the Navy's strength in six months, involving the building of new ships and stockpiling of supplies.


Donald Trump did not have anything like this kind of preparation for his presidency.

Friday, May 8, 2020

JOBS | Trump Compared with Obama, GW Bush, Clinton

May 8, 2020, 8:45 am—Three and a half years ago, in December 2016, this blogpost reviewed two numbers important for working-age Americans, the unemployment rate and the employment-population ratio, for the prior three administrations. These are seasonally adjusted monthly numbers. This post updates the records of the last four presidents.

1. UNEMPLOYMENT RATE



Bill Clinton 1993-2001
G. W. Bush 2001-2009
Barack Obama 2009-2017
Donald Trump 2017-April 2020
Unemployment Rate, last prior full month, percent, s.a.
7.4
3.9
7.3
4.7
Unemployment Rate, last full month, percent, s.a.
3.9
7.3
4.7
14.7
Change, percentage points (– = rise)
3.5
-3.4
2.6
-10.0

In December 2016, the last full month of President Obama's administration, the unemployment rate was 4.7 percent. The unemployment rate is the number of unemployed, 7.5 million, divided by the labor force (employed + unemployed), i.e., 159.6 million—4.7 percent.

The unemployment rate rose under President Trump to 14.7 percent in April 2020, an increase of 10 percentage points. The New York City Comptroller earlier this week projected an unemployment rate for NY City of 22 percent in June.

President Obama's last full-month 4.7 percent unemployment rate compares with 7.3 percent in December 2009, the last month of President George W. Bush's administration. That is a reduction of 2.6 percentage points.

This is turn compares with an increase in the unemployment rate of 3.4 percentage points during President G.W. Bush's administration and a decrease of 3.5 percentage points during President Clinton's administration. 

2. THE EMPLOYMENT-POPULATION RATIO



Bill Clinton 1993-2001
G. W. Bush 2001-2009
Barack Obama 2009-2017
Donald Trump 2017-April 2020
Employment-Population Ratio, last prior full month, percent, s.a.
61.4
64.4
61.0
59.8
Employment-Population Ratio, last full month, percent, s.a.
64.4
61.0
59.8
51.3
Change during administration, percentage points (– = decline)
3.0
-3.4
-1.2
-8.5

The December 2016 Employment-Population Ratio was 59.8 percent. It fell to 51.3 percent in April, a decline of 8.5 percentage points from March. This is the lowest rate and largest over-the-month decline in the history of the series, which dates back to 1948. The employment-population ratio is defined by the BLS as the number of employed people, 152.1 million, divided by the civilian noninstitutional population, 254.5 million.

Trump visits Obama, 2016  
The Employment-Population Ratio has certain advantages as a labor market measure over the unemployment rate. It is a more reliable indicator over time because it is unaffected by variations in interviews, sampling, telecommunications preferences or definitions of the unemployed. 

In December 1992 when President Clinton came to office, the employment-population rate had been falling and was at 61.4 percent. It rose during his administration to 64.3 percent, an increase of 2.9 percentage points. Under President G. W. Bush, the rate fell by 3.3 percentage points to 61.0 percent. Under President Obama the rate fell further to 59.7 percent, a drop of 1.3 percentage points. 
    On both measures, as of April 2020 the last two Democratic administrations outperformed both the Bush 43 and Trump administrations. 

    Monday, April 27, 2020

    IRELAND | USA More to Be Pitied than Scorned

    Fintan O'Toole
    The following is by Fintan O’Toole, published as "THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT," The Irish Times, April 25, 2020.
    Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
    However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful. 
    Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic. 
    Columbia Pictures' first film (1922). 
    As the American writer George Packer puts it in [the June 2020 issue ofThe Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” 
    It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence. 
    The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV. 
    If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated. 
    Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas? 
    It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
    Abject surrender 
    What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety. 
    Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order. 
    In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”. 
    Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.” 
    This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus. 
    It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
    Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted. 
    The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence. 
    Fertile ground 
    But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it. 
    There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection. 
    Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
    And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here. 
    That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. 
    And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element. 
    As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. 
    Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

    Sunday, April 26, 2020

    CITYECONOMIST VIEWS | 465K. Top Ten Posts.

    This CityEconomist blog has passed 465,000 page views.

    Thank you for reading!

    Here are the top ten most-read CityEconomist posts during April.

    Entry
    IRELAND | USA More to Be Pitied than Scorned
    Apr 27, 2020
    COVID-19 STATUS | U.S. Summary in One Table
    Apr 5, 2020, 1 comment
    GERMAN ELECTIONS, 1933 | How a Democracy Was Destr...
    Mar 5, 2017
    WW2 | 9. Resistance Banker–Wally van Hall
    Feb 19, 2015
    TRUMP'S TRADE WAR | How the Détente Magnified the ...
    Apr 27, 2020
    MEDICAL SUPPLIES | Maloney, Axne Call for Lifting ...
    Apr 2, 2020
    METRO DEATHS | NY area likely to pass 10,000 death...
    Apr 3, 2020
    OVERSEEING $2.2 TRILLION | Donna Shalala
    Apr 19, 2020
    PANDEMIC | Global to Local Data
    Apr 23, 2020
    BIRTH | Marjory Stoneman Douglas, 1890
    Apr 7, 2020

    Please comment below any post, or send a note to your blogger at john[at]CityEconomist.com.

    Saturday, April 25, 2020

    PANDEMIC AID | Need for Both Speed & Transparency

    April 25, 2020—In the context of the Trump Administration's history of resisting oversight and the need for it, a letter from John Detrixhe of Quartz (hi@qz.com) says some wise things. I have excerpted below: 
    President Donald Trump signed a bill to funnel an additional $310 billion into a fund for small businesses, after the first $350 billion flew out the door… In a crisis like this one, most experts say getting the money out quickly is more important than just about anything else. Even so, transparency matters. …
    It’s easy to see how this bailout could go wrong. Shake Shack, the $2 billion burger chain, is giving back US money meant for small enterprises. … The Small Business Administration signaled that listed firms likely won’t be eligible for its next slug of money...
    The fallout of these programs will outlive the loans. A decade ago, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program sparked widespread political upheaval: It was seen as a bailout for banks... This time around, the Federal Reserve, which resisted disclosing some borrowers during the financial crisis, say it will name names …
    “This is more comparable to America’s response to World War II,” said Ben Koltun at Beacon Policy Advisors. “If this is poorly executed with a lack of transparency and fraud, it could create a serious backlash in the years to come.” These are choices every government is making, and transparency is barely an afterthought in some places. That could be dangerous.

    Monday, July 16, 2018

    MCCAIN | Trump "Abased" before Putin "Tyrant"

    Senator John McCain, Chairman,
    Senate Armed Services Committee
    Washington, D.C.  July 6, 2018 – U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released the following statement today on President Trump’s meeting and press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki:
    “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.
    “President Trump proved not only unable, but unwilling to stand up to Putin. He and Putin seemed to be speaking from the same script as the president made a conscious choice to defend a tyrant against the fair questions of a free press, and to grant Putin an uncontested platform to spew propaganda and lies to the world.
    “It is tempting to describe the press conference as a pathetic rout – as an illustration of the perils of under-preparation and inexperience. But these were not the errant tweets of a novice politician. These were the deliberate choices of a president who seems determined to realize his delusions of a warm relationship with Putin’s regime without any regard for the true nature of his rule, his violent disregard for the sovereignty of his neighbors, his complicity in the slaughter of the Syrian people, his violation of international treaties, and his assault on democratic institutions throughout the world. 
    “Coming close on the heels of President Trump’s bombastic and erratic conduct towards our closest friends and allies in Brussels and Britain, today’s press conference marks a recent low point in the history of the American Presidency. That the president was attended in Helsinki by a team of competent and patriotic advisors makes his blunders and capitulations all the more painful and inexplicable.
    “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant. Not only did President Trump fail to speak the truth about an adversary; but speaking for America to the world, our president failed to defend all that makes us who we are—a republic of free people dedicated to the cause of liberty at home and abroad. American presidents must be the champions of that cause if it is to succeed. Americans are waiting and hoping for President Trump to embrace that sacred responsibility. One can only hope they are not waiting totally in vain.”
    ###

    Saturday, July 14, 2018

    GERMANY | Trump Ambassador Doing What Putin Did

    Angela Merkel addresses Donald Trump,
    as John Bolton, his hawkish National
    Security Advisor, stands over him.
    Ottawa, Canada July 14 – Today, Bastille Day, we got more news about Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 more Russians (running total: 25), for interfering in U.S. elections.

    Here is the WaPo coverage:
    https://bit.ly/2zDIwVn.

    What the Russians did was reprehensible.

    It is also what U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell is doing, according to a thoughtful two-part analysis of the damage Trump is doing to the U.S.-German ties in Der Spiegelhttps://bit.ly/2NRZBhd.

    Tuesday, April 24, 2018

    VIEWS | 400K – Top Posts in April

    This blog just passed 400,000 Page Views.
    Thank you for reading!
    The most-viewed posts in April 2018 are listed below.

    Top Ten Posts in April 2018
    WW2 | D-Day+70 Data May 10, 2014