6 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Stock market drops 400 points, Trump says "D'oh!"

   The White House’s top trade official announced Tuesday the administration would delay new tariffs on a large number of Chinese imports until Dec. 15 instead of the beginning of September, pushing back large penalties on numerous consumer goods that include cellphones and footwear.

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   1. Saw yesterday that the monthly Treasury report shows increasing deficits (no surprise) through July. 

      Even the existing tariffs are making a "small" contribution to slowing the debt — $24.5 billion more than FY2018's same 10 month period.  If I handled the decimals correctly, that is an average of $75 for every one of the United States' 325 million inhabitants.  My spouse & I did a great deal of our part when we replaced a washing machine — almost exactly $100 more than the same model last year.

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      1. Here are the hard numbers, which even with the Trump administration's futile attempts to cut social program spending, the slowing of the economy will further reduce tax receipts, thus causing the upward explosion in the deficit to continue:

         The U.S. government’s budget deficit rose by $183 billion to $867 billion during the first 10 months of this budget year as spending grew more than twice as fast as tax collections.

         The Treasury Department say the deficit for the current fiscal year through July is up 27% from the same period a year earlier. Spending rose 8% to $3.73 trillion, and tax revenue rose 3% to $2.86 trillion.

         President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut and new spending agreed to last year have swelled the gap between what the federal government spends and what it takes in.

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         1. Nope

             

            I was listening to AM630 around 930 this morning

            And Rossputin made it clear deficits are meaningless and taxes like tariffs only matter if people understand them

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2. Harry Reid: The Filibuster Is Suffocating the Will of the American People: To save our country’s future, Democrats must abolish this arcane Senate rule.

   But what is happening today is a far cry from what the framers intended. They created the Senate as a majority-rule body, where both sides could have their say at length — but at the end of the day, bills would pass or fail on a simple majority vote. In their vision, debate was supposed to inform and enrich the process, not be exploited as a mechanism to grind it to a halt.

   The Senate today, after years of abusing an arcane procedural rule known as the filibuster, has become an unworkable legislative graveyard. Not part of the framers’ original vision, the modern filibuster was created in 1917. The recent use of the filibuster — an attempt by a minority of lawmakers to delay or block a vote on a bill or confirmation — has exploited this rule, forcing virtually all Senate business to require 60 of the 100 senators’ votes to proceed. This means a simple majority is not enough to advance even the most bipartisan legislation

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3. After the T***p crime family gets another 10 years to run the NAK (New American Kleptocracy), will it be our kids making New York look like Hong Kong? If we don't stop this Putin copycat, will our children have to fight him in the streets?

   Just remember…Vote Blue, no matter who.

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