Today In Biden Land

[Kirkland Laing]

The next Republican president might just start infringing on First Amendment rights. It turns out the last one did. I wonder how much coverage this story gets:

https://twitter.com/kpoulsen/status/1394344671761993731



Can't wait for this. It's been too long:

https://twitter.com/allahpundit/stat...73804755537924



Trump's last days in the bunker:


John McEntee, one of Donald Trump's most-favored aides, handed retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor a piece of paper with a few notes scribbled on it. He explained: "This is what the president wants you to do."
1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.
It was Nov. 9, 2020 — days after Trump lost his re-election bid, 10 weeks before the end of his presidency and just moments after Macgregor was offered a post as senior adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

[...]

Miller told associates he had three goals for the final weeks of the Trump administration: #1: No major war. #2: No military coup. #3: No troops fighting citizens on the streets.


https://www.axios.com/off-the-rails-...d5eb3c6e2.html



No shit. It's only the third fucking election in a row that this happened:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...tion-1.9813432



State of American democracy update:

https://twitter.com/CBSNewsPoll/stat...38110426275840


https://twitter.com/HeathMayo/status...10247087411204


https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/14/p...ntv/index.html


https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status...19626326151171



https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/...26759451664384



The party of the working classes. When taxes do eventually have to be increased you can see who is going to end up paying them:

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/st...45288970739715



In related and completely unsurprising news lobbyists apparently have enough votes in the House and Senate to block any Biden tax rises from happening. So people earning half a million a year won't have to tip over that extra sixty dollars a week to fund investments which would actually grow the economy for everybody. Guaranteed the next time there's a GOP prez and they control all three branches the top one percent will get another gigantic tax cut though.

[Kirkland Laing]

The party of the working classes update:

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/statu...98078512537602

relatedly:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...lies-plan.html

also relatedly:

https://twitter.com/dailyposter/stat...09760555360262


Arizona audit of the audits latest:

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/202...o-end-process/


More honest GOP officials heading off out of the door to be replaced by Trumpists:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/g...trump-grip-gop



This is what politicians should be doing. You'd only need a couple of hundred more like her in the House and sixty in the Senate and one in the White House and American politics could be doing useful things for Americans. Worth watching:

https://twitter.com/RepKatiePorter/s...24627566391297



Assorted stuff:

https://twitter.com/bryrsmith/status...70243544838151


https://twitter.com/pennstatetom/sta...82541130936324


https://twitter.com/CraigCaplan/stat...82962572615685

[SlimTrae]

The next Republican president might just start infringing on First Amendment rights. It turns out the last one did. I wonder how much coverage this story gets:
Trump's last days in the bunker:


John McEntee, one of Donald Trump's most-favored aides, handed retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor a piece of paper with a few notes scribbled on it. He explained: "This is what the president wants you to do."
1. Get us out of Afghanistan.
2. Get us out of Iraq and Syria.
3. Complete the withdrawal from Germany.
4. Get us out of Africa.
It was Nov. 9, 2020 — days after Trump lost his re-election bid, 10 weeks before the end of his presidency and just moments after Macgregor was offered a post as senior adviser to acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller.

[...]

Miller told associates he had three goals for the final weeks of the Trump administration: #1: No major war. #2: No military coup. #3: No troops fighting citizens on the streets.


https://www.axios.com/off-the-rails-...d5eb3c6e2.html



No shit. It's only the third fucking election in a row that this happened:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...tion-1.9813432

Do me, you, us a favor: break these down into a few more posts. Way too much to digest- considering these are various topics- relating to one individual.


example-
this link alone you gave: Miller told associates he had three goals for the final weeks of the Trump administration: #1: No major war. #2: No military coup. #3: No troops fighting citizens on the streets.


https://www.axios.com/off-the-rails-...d5eb3c6e2.html

Has 9 additional links related to that one- & they are all bomb-diggidy-bombshell news reports!!! Too easy to miss a link you may have- considering they are tweets- that lead to links with stats, data, quotes & then some!!! or give a subtopic to identify which links are related to a particular issue about Dondaldict.
It will take a while to go through all those tweets & their links...again! because just that one tweet/link alone led me to a goldmine of info.
Just a suggestion.

[SlimTrae]

The party of the working classes update:

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/statu...98078512537602

relatedly:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...lies-plan.html

also relatedly:

https://twitter.com/dailyposter/stat...09760555360262


Arizona audit of the audits latest:

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/202...o-end-process/


More honest GOP officials heading off out of the door to be replaced by Trumpists:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/g...trump-grip-gop



This is what politicians should be doing. You'd only need a couple of hundred more like her in the House and sixty in the Senate and one in the White House and American politics could be doing useful things for Americans. Worth watching:

https://twitter.com/RepKatiePorter/s...24627566391297



Assorted stuff:

https://twitter.com/bryrsmith/status...70243544838151


https://twitter.com/pennstatetom/sta...82541130936324


https://twitter.com/CraigCaplan/stat...82962572615685

Won't come close to looking at these for fear I will get distracted from the initial bombshell link I looked at!

This is definately worthy of 3 seperate posts, so you won't have to question- if anyone is looking at them (ALL)
I think like most? I pick up on the last post I left off at, but with yours-sometimes I can't make it thru that one post! Because of my level of interest in the topics you bring! If I tried to read all these links? It would take several hours, because they lead to additional info... SO I will always miss those last few...
Just a suggestion.

[SlimTrae]

I have a document in Word, I call saddo. One page states Kirkland's post.

It is when I see something interesting, but not the time to view it...well I added those links on to the word doc...and I am behind about 80-90 links/threads!

[Master]

I have a document in Word, I call saddo. One page states Kirkland's post.

It is when I see something interesting, but not the time to view it...well I added those links on to the word doc...and I am behind about 80-90 links/threads!

Catch up quick. Kirkland does not go slow.

[SlimTrae]

Blurred out for local news (shit) heads...State told complainers of the sign- there is a law stating "No Government can dictate language on any sign."


So kids, whoever is in a car can get a chance to see how the adult world deals with politicians they don't like: call them shit heads and post it on a highway.

The billboard says from us deplorables- a reference made by Hillary Clinton...rather than disprove and show they are christians, they decided to get me on board, yup this is the sign of a deplorable being(s).

What is gained with such a sign...

[Spicoli]

Blurred out for local news (shit) heads...State told complainers of the sign- there is a law stating "No Government can dictate language on any sign."


So kids, whoever is in a car can get a chance to see how the adult world deals with politicians they don't like: call them shit heads and post it on a highway.

The billboard says from us deplorables- a reference made by Hillary Clinton...rather than disprove and show they are christians, they decided to get me on board, yup this is the sign of a deplorable being(s).

What is gained with such a sign...

It really is like watching neglected toddlers in a nursery whip off their diapers and start waving them over head for attention. Again..no policy. I want a clear level headed Republican agenda at least offered for debate but at near every turn now what leadership "stands for" and proposes is by all means indefensible. McCarthy went from bootlicking and crack cleaning Trump to now adding being a kept tail tucked man to professional trolls and diaper wavers like Greene and Getz. Dudes a gimp and the GOP is unrecognizable.

[Kirkland Laing]

Meanwhile, on payfors: Sen. Jon Tester said that a Biden administration proposal to impose capital-gains taxes upon a person's death after a $1M per-decedent exemption was unacceptable to him. "We don't like that," Tester said on Monday night. "That's a non-starter."

https://twitter.com/siobhanehughes/s...36621095866371


For all the terror over Biden planning to put up taxes on wealthy people for it to happen he's going to need sixty votes in the Senate, fifty to do it temporarily. To get even fifty he needs to get moderate Democratic senators to vote for it and there's no chance that some of them will. Just shows you who these senators work for -- the median income in Montana is $28000.

Families still get six million from an estate on the death of the estate holder tax free. Potentially hundreds of millions more tax free if they plan their taxes correctly. This is an attempt to raise taxes on only capital gains from stocks over a million dollars, gains that currently attract a zero rate and it's a bridge too far for half a dozen senators even though it would benefit millions in their states with the new programmes it would fund.

It's also incredibly popular with voters. Even a majority of Republican voters support raising these taxes. Yet half the media smear it as far left and a handful of senators funded by a handful of very wealthy people in their respective states can block it.

Relatedly:


Insane stat via @atausanovitch
: 54 senators who voted for January 6 commission represent 87 MILLION more Americans than 35 GOP senators who blocked it


54 yes votes for 1/6 commission represent 191 million Americans (57% of population) 35 no votes represent 104 million Americans (31% of population) This is not how democracy supposed to work


https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status...43182790897664

[Kirkland Laing]

Blurred out for local news (shit) heads...State told complainers of the sign- there is a law stating "No Government can dictate language on any sign."


So kids, whoever is in a car can get a chance to see how the adult world deals with politicians they don't like: call them shit heads and post it on a highway.

The billboard says from us deplorables- a reference made by Hillary Clinton...rather than disprove and show they are christians, they decided to get me on board, yup this is the sign of a deplorable being(s).

What is gained with such a sign...

It really is like watching neglected toddlers in a nursery whip off their diapers and start waving them over head for attention. Again..no policy. I want a clear level headed Republican agenda at least offered for debate but at near every turn now what leadership "stands for" and proposes is by all means indefensible. McCarthy went from bootlicking and crack cleaning Trump to now adding being a kept tail tucked man to professional trolls and diaper wavers like Greene and Getz. Dudes a gimp and the GOP is unrecognizable.

https://twitter.com/stuartpstevens/s...51658909261824

[Kirkland Laing]

The outrageous, BS provision in the Texas bill that makes it illegal to transport more than 2 non-relatives to polls unmasks better than anything the motive here. This has nothing to do with "voter fraud" and everything to do with voter suppression. TX GOP= racist authoritarian.

https://twitter.com/NormOrnstein/sta...17590976552965



"In a last-minute addition, language was inserted in the bill making it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race."

https://twitter.com/marceelias/statu...92032311726084




If you think Republicans won’t *really* rig national elections so they never lose, consider that they’ve gerrymandered the state legislatures & Congressional maps of MI, PA, WI so that Dems may never win a majority again, no matter what, despite going Dem almost every year.



https://twitter.com/JesseCharlesLee/...86801028927492

[palmerq]

You have to be a bit suspicious of the geezers that want to make it more difficult to vote, hopefully this American nonsense stays down there....


Some big joe stuff

He did a speech today, was actually a pretty good one but jimeny Christmas the old git really needs to control his voice volume, I was listening at work and wearing earbuds and the git nearly deafened me at times with the volume changes. I was not aware of this tulsa stuff will have to look into it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57323200


Bidens guys defending some trump oil projects

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/c...-drilling.html

The he cancels some, I guess you have to balance it out
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north...anwr-1.6049081


Bidens budget


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57285970

Now national debt at the current time is obea major concern (:S), deficits are very bad....
("Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, also ran up the deficit each year he was in office, and his final annual spending proposal had a price tag of $4.8tn.") at certain times... I'm a self admitted dummy but I see quite a few well educated people claim that national debt really isn't as bad as it sounds, so why is that? For normal folks that seems like a really big thing, I'd guess that government bonds(my robo advisor on the rrsp seems to buy the etf form, he better be right or he's off to recycling) are pretty safe places for people to store money and there's a lot of money around? I don't know... My ears still hurt from Joe's shouting.

[Kirkland Laing]

You have to be a bit suspicious of the geezers that want to make it more difficult to vote, hopefully this American nonsense stays down there....


Some big joe stuff

He did a speech today, was actually a pretty good one but jimeny Christmas the old git really needs to control his voice volume, I was listening at work and wearing earbuds and the git nearly deafened me at times with the volume changes. I was not aware of this tulsa stuff will have to look into it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57323200


Bidens guys defending some trump oil projects

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/c...-drilling.html

The he cancels some, I guess you have to balance it out
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north...anwr-1.6049081


Bidens budget


https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57285970

Now national debt at the current time is obea major concern (:S), deficits are very bad....
("Former President Donald Trump, a Republican, also ran up the deficit each year he was in office, and his final annual spending proposal had a price tag of $4.8tn.") at certain times... I'm a self admitted dummy but I see quite a few well educated people claim that national debt really isn't as bad as it sounds, so why is that? For normal folks that seems like a really big thing, I'd guess that government bonds(my robo advisor on the rrsp seems to buy the etf form, he better be right or he's off to recycling) are pretty safe places for people to store money and there's a lot of money around? I don't know... My ears still hurt from Joe's shouting.

I'm trying and failing to find a debt clock that'll post here. You know what I mean. The clock ticking upwards with huge amounts of debt added every minute. Just imagine it.

https://www.worldometers.info/us-debt-clock/

There.

Now then, that debt doesn't matter at all. It's just a number. It means nothing by itself.

If you have a million dollars of debt and your income is ten thousand dollars you're fucked. You don't make enough money to ever be able to repay your bills. You're insolvent.

If you have a million dollars of debt and your income is ten million dollars the debt is less of a problem. You can pay off your debt and still have enough money left over to get the groceries in.

So it isn't the debt number that means anything, it's the amount of debt you have in relation to your income.

In sovereign/government/national debt scenarios the level of income is the GDP number, the total dollar/euro/loonie etc size of the economy. So how much a country owes isn't the issue, it's how much a country owes in relation to its income. The fancy term for this relationship is debt to GDP ratio.

Governments raise money to finance their deficits by borrowing from people with surplus cash. They do this by issuing and auctioning bonds every month. The amount of interest the government has to pay on these bonds depends on how much money is available for them to borrow and how much of a credit risk people with surplus cash think the government is. If there's a ton of surplus cash out there and very few promising investment opportunities then cashholders will be keen to lend at lower rates. If there isn't much cash out there and/or lots of different promising investment opportunities in other things (stocks, startups etc) then governments will have to offer higher rates of interest to attract enough cash to finance their deficits. Supply and demand*.

The last forty years have seen a huge redistribution of wealth up the income scale. The people at the top have a huge amount of surplus cash with few good investment opportunities due to the rest of the population not having much money to spend on new goods and services due to the people at the top hoovering all the cash up. So these cashholders are happy to lend it to governments at low rates of interest. There is such a gigantic ocean of money sitting in the hands of a handful of people that they'll even lend it to governments for free or pay a small fee in the form of less interest than inflation just to park their cash somewhere.

Let me explain.

Here is the rate governments have to pay to borrow money for a set number of years:

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-ce...spx?data=yield

Now here are the same number taking into account future inflation.

https://www.treasury.gov/resource-ce...data=realyield

When you subtract inflation away from the nominal rate, the actual rate of interest governments pay, people are paying governments 0.05% interest a year to look after their cash for them. An example. If the government borrows a hundred dollars from you on January first this year and agrees to pay you one percent interest. Inflation runs at two percent over the year so government revenues increase by two percent without the government doing anything due to inflation. They then pay you a hundred and one dollars leaving them a dollar up and you a dollar down in real terms over the year but you're a dollar up in nominal terms.


Another thing to consider. If you go to buy a house a bank will probably lend a borrower three plus times your income to buy one. Over the thirty or so years they pay that loan back anything could happen to them. They could become unable to work for some reason, whatever, and the loan becomes bad. Even so banks make lots of loans and the vast majority will pay off so they can offer loans at a low level of interest. Government showever will always be there. They don't have a retirement date, they go on forever and they have increasing millions of taxpayers paying tax revenues and increasing in size economies. Both of these things basically double over twenty years. So governments are a super safe bet for investors. US national debt is the safest investment on the planet.

Right now the US owes a hundred and something percent of its income. But a bank will lend some fucker three hundred percent of your income. The US all things considered is a much safer bet than some random fucker eh? They're there forever. I'll add more to this tomorrow, got to go.

[Kirkland Laing]

Just to add, America had a bigger debt to GDP ratio than it did now after WW2. By the 1960s it had dropped from about a hundred and thirty five percent of GDP to about thirty yet America ran a deficit in every single year. THe reason this happened was America grew faster every year than the debt went up. You don't cut your way out of debt when you're a government, cutting spending is actually self defeating as your're subtracting from both sides of the ratio and moreso on the growth side when you cut spending.

If you grow at three percent a year and inflation runs at two percent then your GDP nominal number grows by five percent. That means you can run a five percent deficit and your ratio doesn't get any worse, they're both going up by five percent.

*(from the first post). If you fuckers understood these two posts then you know more about debt dynamics and sovereign debt than I guarantee you ninety five plus percent** of Americans/Canadians/Brits etc. And it isn't difficult at all. No heavy duty maths. No Greek letters. All you need to understand finance and economics to a degree sophisticated enough to a. be able to put in context and evaluate issues like this that are consequential and have some import and b. know more than ninety five plus percent of your fellow citizens is just common sense.

** I have a friend who works for an investment bank. His job is to take prospective and existing clients --people who have money that his bank is or would like to invest for them -- out to a ballgame or a meal or whatever and basically work out how dumb the money is, work out how much shit the bank can pull with them and still keep the customer. And I can tell you that ninety five percent of even the people at the top of the tree won't know what's in these two posts. The vast majority will believe things that "everybody knows", that governments are like households and have to tighten their belts when recessions happen and so on. They basically have a negative levelof knowledge. They believe a bunch of stuff that isn't true.

[palmerq]

Good posting Kirkland, thanks for taking the time to try to explain it. So debt isn't ideal but as long as debt to gdp(I watched some beginner economics videos, so I I mostly know what that is :S) ratio isnt getting out of hand and gdp keeps growing everything is probably alright? So in the current environment/recession a smaller deficit or maybe even a balanced budget could make things worse because gdp could fall or grow slower so the debt to gsp ratio could get even worse or something along those lines? I assume that's what trudeau meant with his famous the budget will balance itself quote.


My pea brain doesn't quite understand the inflation bit, I'm probably missing something very obvious so feel free to make fun of me.

"If the government borrows a hundred dollars from you on January first this year and agrees to pay you one percent interest. Inflation runs at two percent over the year so government revenues increase by two percent without the government doing anything due to inflation. They then pay you a hundred and one dollars leaving them a dollar up and you a dollar down in real terms over the year but you're a dollar up in nominal terms."....

Why are government incomes up, I would still be paid the same and paying the same income tax so they still get the same amount of money that way, maybe I've got what inflation is all wrong, isn't it just the cost of things going up? Where do they the get the extra quid from? VaT maybe?