Another Republican President, Another Recession.

[hanimmal]

https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-donald-trump-archive-economy-27e0605143f2698dc570b927443c5e3d

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve officials expressed concern at their most-recent meeting that the U.S. economy recovery could falter if Congress failed to approve another round of pandemic relief.

The Fed on Wednesday released minutes of its most recent meeting, showing that officials believed the economy was growing faster than expected.

But they based their forecasts of a further steady recovery on expectations that Democrats and Republicans would resolve their differences and provide further economic aid, including expanded unemployment benefits and help for small businesses.

The minutes said that “most forecasters were assuming that an additional pandemic-related fiscal package would be approved this year, and noted that, absent a new package, growth could decelerate at a faster-than-expected pace in the fourth quarter.”

Economists noted the minutes delivered a dual message of satisfaction that so far the recovery is progressing better than expected but also continued concerns that the outlook could quickly darken without further government support.

Curt Long, chief economist for the National Association of Federally Insured Credit Unions, said the minutes showed Fed officials have “serious concerns over cuts to fiscal support.”

The prospects for approval of a new congressional package being passed before the Nov. 3 elections, however, have significantly diminished with President Donald Trump’s decision to cut off negotiations with Democrats. Trump has instead proposed that Democrats approve individual rescue items, such as money for ailing airlines and another round of $1,200 checks for most adults, rather than a comprehensive aid package.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned in a speech Tuesday of potentially tragic consequences if Congress and the White House do not provide further assistance, saying “the expansion is far from complete.”

The minutes covered the Fed’s Sept. 15-16 meeting in which officials left their key policy rate unchanged at a record low near zero and signaled that they expected to keep rates at ultra-low levels at least through 2023.

The Fed’s statement incorporated a policy change the central bank announced in August in which it will allow inflation to rise above its 2% target for a period of time to make up for the extended period over the past decade that annual inflation has been below the 2% target. That change is seen as allowing to keep interest rates lower for a longer period.

The September statement was approved on a 10-2 vote, with Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan dissenting because he favored less precise policy guidance in terms of inflation. Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari dissented because he wanted the Fed to make a bolder statement about the change in operations regarding inflation.

The minutes recognized large problems in trying to forecast the future path of the economy.

“Participants continued to see the uncertainty surrounding the economic outlook as very elevated with the path of the economy highly dependent on the course of the virus, on how individuals and businesses and public officials responded to it and on the effectiveness of public health measures to address it,” the minutes said.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPC1/?utm_source=fred-glance-widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=fred-glance-widget

 

[hanimmal]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/10/18/trump-biden-infrastructure-2020/

MILWAUKEE — Gerry Winkleman points across the Milwaukee River at the former tannery where he worked for almost two decades as a union welder, repairing blow pipes and net machines that produced thousands of leather shoes and handbags every year.

Winkleman, 74, drives through a stretch of downtown Milwaukee that once served as a hub of U.S. manufacturing, pausing occasionally to note the factories that have either shuttered or moved their production to China over the past three decades: the Pabst and Schlitz breweries; the Allis-Chalmers manufacturing giant; several different tanneries; the Briggs & Stratton foundry; and Kearney & Trecker, which produced milling machines.

Winkleman voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in his life in 2016, largely due to Donald Trump’s promise to bring back manufacturing jobs and invest $1 trillion to rebuild U.S. infrastructure in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin. This year, Winkleman will vote for former vice president Joe Biden, a decision sealed in part by Trump’s decision to pursue tax cuts — which Winkleman says primarily benefited the rich — over infrastructure investments. Winkleman said he and other members of the building trades were “snookered” by Trump’s 2016 promises to rebuild the country.

“He was giving this golden chariot of all that he was going to do. I was hoping my kids and grandkids would see what a prosperous country could look like,” said Winkleman, stopping to point to the aluminum siding he fitted for a hotel skybridge in downtown Milwaukee. “The way [Trump] was talking — it was like he was backing us. It’s been a complete farce ever since.”

Trump can claim credit for pursuing and at least partially fulfilling many of his key 2016 economic campaign pledges, such as cutting taxes, slashing government regulations and revamping America’s international trade deals. But on one central part of his economic pledge — a massive infrastructure package — the president has much less to boast of on the campaign trail.

Over 700 cash-strapped cities halt plans to repair roads, water systems or make other key investments

After repeatedly touting infrastructure during his 2016 campaign, Trump has through four years in office failed to advance infrastructure legislation through Congress. Under his administration, federal investments on roads and bridges as a share of the economy have remained stagnant, while federal spending on water infrastructure projects have fallen to a 30-year low. Unable to boost infrastructure projects with federal dollars, Trump has also proved unable to meet his 2016 promises to update and upgrade parts of the United States, including roads, ports and airports.

The president’s unfulfilled pledges on infrastructure highlight the disconnect between his populist campaign message in 2016 and the results of four years in office governing in partnership with congressional Republicans who partially redefined his economic agenda. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has tried exploiting the issue, repeatedly highlighting infrastructure on the campaign trail in Midwestern states and vowing swift action on the issue if elected.

Mnuchin and top Democrat step up infrastructure talks, but some White House officials are skeptical

“We were told and promised Trump would ‘Build America;’ it was supposed to be a lot of money in there, almost $1 trillion. He talked about it before he got elected, after he got elected, and nothing’s happened. They won’t vote for him because of that,” Kenneth E. Rigmaiden, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said of his members. “Workers can see things are slowing down. Our members are losing work. Infrastructure is a big piece of the business we tend to.”




“The president talked a lot about infrastructure, and nothing’s really come of it yet,” said Vandersteen, who added he is still undecided about whom to support in the 2020 presidential election. “This could really be catastrophic.”

Even many of the White, blue-collar supporters of the president still hope he comes through with a deal. Don Iverson, 50, a logger in western Wisconsin, has for three decades used County Route K and Pray Road to haul red pine trees, white pine trees and oak trees to nearby sawmills. For the past five years, both Route K and Pray Road have been closed to Iverson’s trucks. New weight limits have also been imposed on a nearby bridge, on Highway 54. That means Iverson has to cut down his shipments and add another 30 miles’ drive each way to the sawmills.

Four of Jackson County’s nine loggers have quit or gone out of business, Iverson said, in part because of their struggles with the shoddy town roads. Trucks are now forced to reroute through the city of Black River Falls, which is both more expensive and more dangerous due to more congested traffic. Without federal support, a half-dozen Wisconsin town managers say they have no means of repairing the roads or bridges.

“It is a huge added burden on our business. It never used to be like this,” said Iverson, 50, gesturing from his blue Dodge truck to the patchy and uneven splotches of blacktop applied to the town road. “They really need to get it fixed. I have no idea how they expect us to do this.”

The White House needed votes in Congress to approve an infrastructure plan. In the early days of his administration, the president and GOP prioritized repealing the Affordable Care Act and implementing a large tax cut instead of an infrastructure plan. Three former senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said there was never a serious discussion at the White House of putting infrastructure at the top of the GOP’s legislative to-do list. “Paul Ryan and these guys had waited 30 years for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to cut taxes. They were not going to let that go,” one of them said.

Trump’s aides did work for months on an infrastructure package, eventually producing a package in 2018 with only $200 billion in new government spending stretched out over 10 years that relied heavily on leveraging additional private financing through “public-private partnerships.” Trump was ambivalent about the plan for private-public partnerships and even criticized it in front of the aides who developed it. Advisers believed that such a large package would be not acceptable to Congressional Republicans as they and the White House struggled to agree on how to pay for an infrastructure bill.

In 2018, White House officials believed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was willing to reach a bipartisan agreement on infrastructure, but talks collapsed amid partisan arguments over the impeachment inquiry. White House officials also did not believe Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) was willing to give the president a victory on infrastructure spending. Congressional Democrats have said they were willing to make a deal as early as 2017 with Trump on infrastructure.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, you have every Democrat and every Republican prepared to devote a significant amount of money to an infrastructure program’ … I told Trump and his whole economic team in several meetings, ‘We have it all teed up for you,’ ” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. “It will go down in history as legislative malpractice that Donald Trump did not come out with a major infrastructure effort.”

Peter Navarro, the most populist of the president’s senior economic advisers, said over the summer that the president supported a $1 trillion infrastructure package to help the United States build back from the pandemic. The message was privately ridiculed by other senior administration officials, and Navarro’s proposal never materialized.

The president and some of his senior advisers remain committed to the idea of infrastructure. Trump has continued to muse to advisers in recent weeks that he would do infrastructure in the second term.

D.J. Gribbin, the president’s former adviser on infrastructure, left the administration in 2018 before the midterm elections when he saw little momentum to get a package through Congress. “One of the big head winds that any federal infrastructure runs into, there is a lack of understanding that the federal government cannot just create new money,” Gribbin said.

Infrastructure eventually became a standing joke in the Capitol and even the White House, with West Wing staffers joining jokes about “infrastructure week” as the issue was drowned out by impeachment and other serial Trump controversies, according to two former senior administration officials.

 

[dandyrandy]

Borrowing money to make the economy boom is dangerous.....

 

[hanimmal]

Borrowing money to make the economy boom is dangerous.....

Especially if it is not used in actual investments in our nation that return more than the interest takes away.

 

[Wattzzup]

Borrowing money to make the economy boom is dangerous.....

Especially if it is not used in actual investments in our nation that return more than the interest takes away.

All that money was pumped in to save businesses and jobs. The money is all gone and the economy hasn’t recovered. PPP money is being stolen, and given out to people or corporations that didn’t even need the money. Large corporations with shareholders got accepted and got money. What a shitty program from the start.

Corporate Welfare Program

got to hand it to Republicans. They have figured out how to tank the economy and still get rich.

 

[hanimmal]

All that money was pumped in to save businesses and jobs. The money is all gone and the economy hasn’t recovered. PPP money is being stolen, and given out to people or corporations that didn’t even need the money. Large corporations with shareholders got accepted and got money. What a shitty program from the start.

Corporate Welfare Program

got to hand it to Republicans. They have figured out how to tank the economy and still get rich.

As soon as Trump decided to say screw the law as it was written and signed by him with the oversight portion of the PPP, it was going to get ugly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/06/15/inspector-general-oversight-mnuchin-cares-act/




The Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to block oversight of its coronavirus-related rescue programs are raising new alarms with government watchdogs and lawmakers from both parties amid concerns about the anonymity of companies receiving unprecedented levels of taxpayer funds.

Government watchdogs warned members of Congress last week that previously unknown Trump administration legal decisions could substantially block their ability to oversee more than $1 trillion in spending related to the coronavirus pandemic.
In a letter to four congressional committee chairs Thursday, two officials in charge of a new government watchdog entity revealed that the Trump administration had issued legal rulings curtailing independent oversight of Cares Act funding.

The letter surfaced amid growing bipartisan frustration over the administration’s decision not to disclose how it is spending hundreds of billions in aid for businesses. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appeared to bow to that pressure, saying he would work with Congress on new oversight measures. But some Democrats have said the White House is not taking disclosure requests seriously enough.

“They seem to be saying one thing while doing exactly the opposite,” said Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee. “If the Trump administration is committed to full cooperation and transparency with taxpayer dollars, it is unclear why it is manufacturing legal loopholes to avoid responding to legitimate oversight requests.”

According to the previously undisclosed letter, Treasury Department attorneys concluded that the administration is not required to provide the watchdogs with information about the beneficiaries of programs created by the Cares Act’s “Division A.” That section includes some of the most controversial and expensive programs in the coronavirus response efforts, including the administration’s massive bailout for small businesses and nearly $500 billion in loans for corporations.

Mnuchin surprised many lawmakers last week when he announced he would not allow the names of Paycheck Protection Program recipients to become public after the Trump administration had said for months that the data would eventually be disclosed.

The letter from the inspectors general and Mnuchin’s insistence that the PPP data will not be released come after the White House has repeatedly rebuffed efforts to scrutinize where the taxpayer funding is going.

In their letter, the inspectors general leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), an independent panel created to oversee implementation of the Cares Act, expressed concern about the administration’s legal opinions and their impact on oversight.

“If this interpretation of the CARES Act were correct, it would raise questions about PRAC’s authority to conduct oversight of Division A funds,” Michael E. Horowitz and Robert Westbrooks, the acting chair and executive director of the PRAC, said in a letter obtained by The Washington Post. “This would present potentially significant transparency and oversight issues because Division A of the CARES Act includes over $1 trillion in funding.”

The Treasury Department did not comment on the legal rulings but said the administration was being fully transparent. In a statement, department spokeswoman Monica Crowley said Cares Act spending would be subject to “comprehensive oversight,” including multiple inspectors general, a new congressional panel and the independent Government Accountability Office. The Treasury Department is also briefing congressional lawmakers and updating the government-wide reporting site USASpending.gov.

“The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee’s scope under the CARES Act covers other programs that are not already reviewed by these overlapping oversight bodies,” Crowley said. “Further duplication of these oversight functions by the PRAC would not increase transparency or oversight. Treasury is fully complying with all of the substantial oversight, transparency, and reporting requirements of the CARES Act.”

The new obstacles to the watchdogs’ efforts surface as the administration faces a bipartisan backlash on Capitol Hill over its decision not to disclose which businesses are receiving funding under the PPP, the bailout program for small businesses.

The rulings could limit the watchdogs’ ability to review massive new federal programs, government transparency experts say. If not addressed in new legislation by Congress, the opinions could curtail the watchdogs’ ability to collect information about who is receiving the funding, they say.

It is unclear whether the law gives the administration the ability to withhold the information.

“This is a devastating blow to oversight,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, which tracks government transparency. “It is a contorted analysis of the law and clearly counter to what Congress intended.”

Trump administration won’t say who got $511 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus loans

A key congressional Republican also expressed concern about the Treasury Department’s interpretation of the law and its impact on transparency. “American taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent,” said Blair Taylor, a spokeswoman for Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.). “Neither the letter nor the spirit of the law limit the accountability committee’s purview in that regard. Chairman Shelby is supportive of clarifying that in subsequent legislation, if necessary.”

The oversight bodies referenced by the Treasury Department, including the congressional commission and the GAO, have different mandates and are less likely to identify individual instances of fraud than the inspectors general curtailed by the department’s ruling, according to Brian. The administration has updated the government spending website with only a small fraction of Cares Act spending, Brian said.

In addition to the PPP and loans for corporations, Division A of the Cares Act includes billions for state and tribal governments and airline bailouts. The Trump administration has faced criticism over its allocation of money to tribal governments as well, with a group of Native American tribes suing.

Trump removes inspector general who was to oversee $2 trillion stimulus spending

The Trump administration has defended its handling of the bailout program. Mnuchin has said releasing the names of PPP recipients could compromise proprietary and sensitive business information. In the past, however, Trump administration officials had said they would be disclosing the information. And on Monday, Mnuchin said on Twitter he will be discussing adding “proper oversight” of the PPP, but it is unclear what he envisions.

I will be having discussions with the Senate @SmallBizCmte and others on a bipartisan basis to strike the appropriate balance for proper oversight of #ppploans and appropriate protection of small business information. @SBAgov
— Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) June 15, 2020

Recently, SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza has been encouraging disadvantaged businesses to apply. She issued a statement to lenders Monday asking that they “redouble your efforts to assist eligible borrowers in under-served and disadvantaged communities” before the program’s June 30 deadline.

 

[Wattzzup]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/10/ppp-fraud-charges/?outputType=amp

Those charged include individuals who allegedly received money on behalf of fake companies; legitimate business owners accused of spending the funds on luxury items for themselves rather than paying employees; people who allegedly knew they weren’t eligible but applied anyway; businesses that allegedly double-dipped in a program meant to provide one loan per business; a former NFL player who allegedly submitted falsified documents; doctors accused of stealing from patients; suburban homeowners allegedly pretended to be farmers; and elaborate rings of people accused of trying to steal tens of millions of dollars.

 

[hanimmal]

@hanimmal - are you serious?

none of that is opinion. Not mine, not yours, just actual facts. Show me your verifiable facts. Give me a link that says anything I posted was false. Show me Obama’s record and if it’s better, I’ll buy you an internet beer lol.

You can’t. Keep your head in the sand Or come with facts not feelings.

It is not about feelings on my part. It is not even about cherry picked timelines and statistics you posted in your post on my part. I like to stick to all the facts. And things like 'more people working' is just a ridiculous statement, because there are more people in America, Trump loves these nonsensical type statistics that really are not meaningful.

And I apologize for not going through line by line your sweet cut and paste, but you just started here, and it is late. If you don't turn out to be one of the endless line of sock puppet Trump trolls (foreign or domestic), and are an actual American I really hope that you stick around. Because if you can take a breath between trolling for Dear Leader you might just see information that is not part of the information bubbles they work so hard to keep Trump's cult members in.

And here is a look at some of the ways Trump was not as successful with the economy as Obama.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2020/02/07/obamas-last-three-years-of-job-growth-all-beat-trumps-best-year/#2d73cdf36ba6


The U.S. Department of Labor released the January jobs report that showed better than expected growth of 225,000 new jobs vs. the consensus of 158,000. However, there were detailed updates with a major revision to 2018’s employment numbers, which substantially decreased job growth under President Trump.

Far from being the “Best economy ever”

Trump continually says that, “the U.S. is experiencing the best economy ever.” This is obvious gaslighting since the new results show that President Trump’s best year of job growth was 2.314 million in 2018 (the first year of the tax cut) but it falls short of any of Obama’s last three years. His boasts also don’t stand up when you peel the onion on GDP growth and realize that the Federal deficits during his Presidency will exceed any that were not impacted by a recession.



The previous and updated job growth yearly totals for Obama’s last six years in office after the Great Recession and Trump’s first three years, along with the revisions, are:

• 2011: 2.075 million fell to 2.074 million, down 1,000 jobs
• 2012: 2.174 million fell to 2.176 million, up 2,000 jobs
• 2013: 2.302 million fell to 2.301 million, down 1,000 jobs
• 2014: 3.006 million fell to 3.004 million, down 2,000 jobs
• 2015: 2.729 million fell to 2.72 million, down 9,000 jobs
• 2016: 2.318 million increased to 2.345 million, up 27,000 jobs
• 2017: 2.153 million fell to 2.109 million, down 44,000 jobs
• 2018: 2.679 million fell to 2.314 million, down 365,000 jobs (Trump’s best year)
• 2019: 2.115 million fell to 2.096 million, down 19,000 jobs

 

[Brudog]

@hanimmal - nothing cherry picked.

that’s all you got? I appreciate your effort.

 

[hanimmal]

@hanimmal - nothing cherry picked.

that’s all you got? I appreciate your effort.

Really?
From your copy/pasted list:

• Almost 4 million jobs created since 2016 election.
• Created more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs since 2016 election.

Cherry picked dates that start the clock during Obama's presidency. Because Trump's first three years were not as good as Obama's last three. Even with his bullshit trolls he put into important offices cooking the books.

• Manufacturing jobs grew at the fastest rate in more than three decades.

For a couple months maybe in 2018, but it is easy to see that it was tapering off prior to the pandemic and Trump's horrible response to it.

• Economic growth has been as high as 4.2 percent.

'as high as 4.2' sounds wonderful, Obama still did better as you can see in the above chart. GDP grew more under Obama's last three years than Trump's first three. I haven't crunched the numbers, and Trump's cult with cry 'pandemic' but I would bet that we can just go ahead and round that up to Obama's last 4 were now far better than Trump's first 4.

• New unemployment claims hit a 49-year low.

• Median household income hit highest level ever recorded.

That is how inflation works, you can pretty much look at any period of time and say 'there is more money in American's hands than ever before'. Just like you can say there are more people on the planet now, more in America, etc. It's just a nonsense statement.

• The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Morath and Jeffrey Sparshott report: “Pay for the bottom 25% of wage earners rose 4.5% in November from a year earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Wages for the top 25% of earners rose 2.9%. Similarly, the Atlanta Fed found wages for low-skilled workers have accelerated since early 2018, and last month matched the pace of high-skill workers for the first time since 2010.”

• African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, women and youth unemployment were the lowest rates ever recorded.

Welcome to 2020, it might feel like the 1960's with the rhetoric, but the 60 years of hard work to get all of our communities

Also you can clearly see that the decline in the unemployment rate was slowing under Trump's presidency.

• Lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for Americans without a high school diploma.

Same as above chart I am guessing.

Yep, I was right.

• Veterans’ unemployment recently reached its lowest rate in nearly 20 years.

Slowed it's decline in the rate under Trump too.

• More Americans are now employed than ever recorded before in our history.

Again nonsense statistic because there are also more Americans now than ever before.




Trump is a liar and uses all the stupid tricks to try to keep his cult snowballed into believing he is better than he has been.

 

[JoeBlow5823]

Trump is a liar and uses all the stupid tricks to try to keep his cult snowballed into believing he is better than he has been.

Data from 2020 cant really be used for anything useful comparison wise. The modern world has never seen a pandemic. Every nation on the planet is struggling. It wouldnt have mattered who was in charge, COVID would have taken hold and fucked us no matter what. America is all about travel and fast pace. We knew the risks of this happening. Plenty of documentaries. I remember watching them in school. This shit was no surprise to me.

 

[hanimmal]

Data from 2020 cant really be used for anything useful comparison wise. The modern world has never seen a pandemic. Every nation on the planet is struggling. It wouldnt have mattered who was in charge, COVID would have taken hold and fucked us no matter what. America is all about travel and fast pace. We knew the risks of this happening. Plenty of documentaries. I remember watching them in school. This shit was no surprise to me.

It doesn't change the fact that Trump's economy was still slumping and nothing like the way he is selling it as being. It was already slowing due to the strains that he was putting on it.

Also I would have liked to live in an America that Trump did not tear up our national pandemic response and fire the teams looking out for the very pandemic that is hammering up about 2 years after his bonehead move to erase Obama's good work.

https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a

WASHINGTON (AP) — Public health and national security experts shake their heads when President Donald Trump says the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.”

They’ve been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.

“It would be nice if the office was still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health, told Congress this week. “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as a mistake (to eliminate the unit). I would say we worked very well with that office.”

The NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense survived the transition from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2017.

Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.

“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.

She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”

It’s impossible to assess the impact of the 2018 decision to disband the unit, she said. Cameron noted that biological experts remain at the White House, but she says it’s clear that eliminating the office contributed to what she called a “sluggish domestic response.” She said that shortly before Trump took office, the unit was watching a rising number of cases in China of a deadly strain of the flu and a yellow fever outbreak in Angola.

“It’s unclear whether the decision to disband the directorate, which was made in May 2018, after John Bolton became national security adviser, was a tactical move to downgrade the issue or whether it was part of the White House’s interest in simplifying and shrinking the National Security Council staff,” Cameron says.

The NSC during the Obama administration grew to about 250 professionals, according to Trump’s current national security adviser, Robert O’Brien. The staff has been cut to about 110 or 115 staffers, he said.

When Trump was asked on Friday whether closing the NSC global health unit slowed the U.S. response, the president called it a “nasty” question because his administration had acted quickly and saved lives.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said.

Earlier, when asked about it, he said: “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.”

On Saturday, John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser, dismissed claims that “streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false.″ In a tweet, he said global health “remained a top NSC priority, and its expert team was critical to effectively handling the 2018-19 Africa Ebola crisis. The angry Left just can’t stop attacking, even in a crisis.″

For many years, the national intelligence director’s worldwide threat assessment has warned that a flu pandemic or other large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease could lead to massive rates of death and disability that would severely affect the world economy. Public health experts have been blowing whistles too.

Back in mid-2018, Fauci told Congress: “When you have a respiratory virus that can be spread by droplets and aerosol and ... there’s a degree of morbidity associated with that, you can have a catastrophe. ... The one that we always talk about is the 1918 pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. ... Influenza first, or something like influenza, is the one that keeps me up at night.”

The White House says the NSC remains involved in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

A senior administration official said Friday that the NSC’s global health security directorate was absorbed into another division where similar responsibilities still exist, but under different titles. The work of coordinating policy and making sure that decisions made by Trump’s coronavirus task force are implemented is still the job of the NSC.

Some lawmakers aren’t convinced.

Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, have introduced a bill that would require future administrations to have experts always in place to prepare for new pandemics.

“Two years ago, the administration dismantled the apparatus that had been put in place five years before in the face of the Ebola crisis,” Connolly said. “I think, in retrospect, that was an unwise move. This bill would restore that and institutionalize it.”

Connolly said the bill is not meant to be critical of the Trump administration. He said it’s a recognition that Trump had to name a coronavirus responder just like Obama had to name one for Ebola in 2014. “We can’t go from pandemic to pandemic,” Connolly said.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 4 passed the measure, which is co-sponsored by 37 Democrats and five Republicans. The full House has not yet voted on the bill.

Chabot said one of the bill’s main goals is to would require personnel to be permanently in place preparing for pandemics.

“Specifically, we need someone, preferable at the NSC, to quarterback the U.S. government’s response since that response inevitably involves several agencies across the government,” Chabot said. “Our bill would make this position permanent.”

Former Obama administration officials insist that the Trump White House would have been able to act more quickly had the office still been intact.

“I think if we’d had a unit and dedicated professionals looking at this issue, gaming out scenarios well before ... we might have identified some of these testing issues,” says Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s homeland security adviser, said at a recent forum on coronavirus. “There would have been folks sounding the alarm in December when we saw this coming out of China, saying ’Hey, what do we need to be doing here in this country to address it?”

Ron Klain, who managed the government response to contain and mitigate the spread of Ebola in 2014, agreed.

“If I were back in my old job at the White House ... I’d be pushing to have us do 30 million tests — to test people in nursing homes, to test people with unexplained respiratory ailments, to test the people who regularly visit nursing homes, to test healthcare workers,” Klain said recently at the event hosted by the Center for American Progress in Washington.

BTW, if I was you, I would question how a sock puppet Trump troll posted that copy/paste here before you did.

 

[JoeBlow5823]

It was already slowing due to the strains that he was putting on it.

Yes putting proper trade taxes in place in order to keep jobs in America is a strain that will ultimately pay off better than GG4, DoSiDos, and Runtz combined.

 

[hanimmal]

Yes putting proper trade taxes in place in order to keep jobs in America is a strain that will ultimately pay off better than GG4, DoSiDos, and Runtz combined.

Shame he failed to do that and just flopped us back to square 1 minus all the allies we would have had to help us negotiate with China.

 

[hanimmal]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-market-is-a-rather-limp-balloon-just-look-at-history/2020/10/23/6e319082-154b-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html

Eleven days before the 2020 election, the Dow Jones industrial average, the venerable index of U.S. stock market performance, opened at 28,409.65. This number looms large in the argument for reelecting President Trump. In the final debate of the election season, challenger Joe Biden directly addressed the Trump market: “The idea that the stock market is booming is his only measure of what’s happening.” And Trump was happy to agree, saying:“401(k)s are through the roof.”

But as a closing argument for reelection, the Trump market is a rather limp balloon. Yes, stocks are up during the Trump years — by about 43 percent over the past 45 months. By the standards of the past 100 years, this is a good, but hardly great, performance.

Great would be Franklin D. Roosevelt, who inherited a moribund market in the depths of the Great Depression and, with fiscal and rhetorical jolts, stimulated the Dow to a 225-percent rise in his first 45 months. Of course, FDR had the advantage of following an underperformer: His predecessor Herbert Hoover watched the market plunge by 80 percent in value during the same period of his first (and only) term.

If you set Roosevelt apart in his own league, you have Calvin Coolidge in front — the quiet conservative who put the roar in the Roaring ’20s. At this same point in his presidential service, Silent Cal presided over a stock market up 85 percent. That’s Trump times two, with none of the melodrama. Nearly as impressive (and, alas, far more dramatic): Bill Clinton, at 82 percent.

Then there’s Dwight D. Eisenhower. The market was up nearly 66 percent during his first 45 months. Barack Obama’s 45-month scorecard showed a nearly 64 percent rise. Then it’s a steep step down to Trump, with his 43 percent, a number much closer to the economically ho-hum George H.W. Bush, at 38 percent, than to the leaders of the pack.

This is a century of cold, hard data — simple numbers, not fake news. The index is recorded at the end of every daily trading session — and has been, without fail, through booms and busts, through war and peace, through Republican eras and Democratic eras. You can look it up for yourself. Of the past 14 presidencies lasting at least 45 months, Trump ranks sixth for stock market performance, right in the middle of the pack. Anyone who votes to reelect him based on the Dow is embracing a man of low character in exchange for an average economic return.

Oh, but the “China virus,” Trump will say! But for that unfortunate interruption, his economy would surely be ranked the best in history.

Our Democracy in Peril: A series on the damage Trump has caused — and the danger he would pose in a second term

Not according to the stock market. Trump’s favorite metric, those “booming” 401(k)s, tells us that nothing was changed by the virus. Trump was in exactly the same spot last January, after 36 months in office: number six out of 14 presidents, far behind his loathed predecessors Clinton and Obama at the same point in their service. As I said: You can look it up.

Obviously, the stock market is not the whole economy. But Trump the candidate surely wishes that it were, because larger measures of economic performance have indeed been battered by the pandemic. They make the case for reelection look even worse. The moderate growth in gross domestic product during Trump’s first three years turned to a crash and is struggling to recover. The pleasing job gains of those three years have been wiped out, and Trump may prove to be one of the very rare presidents to end a full term with fewer Americans in jobs than when he started.

Trump came into office complaining about trade deficits. But we’re deeper in the hole than when he started. He boasts of low gasoline prices — the United States has always had low gas prices by world standards — but pre-pandemic, before demand cratered, gasoline got slightly more expensive under Trump. He points to farm incomes, but if you strip away the government subsidies, farmers are struggling with persistent low prices for their crops.

Again, these are the facts, not spin. At the end of the game, the scoreboard tells the story. And the story of the Trump economy is long on flimflammery but short on results. Every conceivable stimulus has been deployed, even before the pandemic. The federal deficit was over $1 trillion before the first covid-19 case emerged in the United States. A huge tax cut juiced the bottom lines of cash-rich corporations and wealthy individuals. The burden of federal regulations was slashed by an army of libertarian scofflaws at the helms of government agencies. Every dial cranked, every pedal stomped — yet the results have ranged from average to poor.

He comes from the casino business, where they dangle illusions of wealth while emptying wallets. Voting for Trump in 2016 was a gamble. Now, it’s gullibility.

 

[Wattzzup]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-market-is-a-rather-limp-balloon-just-look-at-history/2020/10/23/6e319082-154b-11eb-ba42-ec6a580836ed_story.html
View attachment 4723644

Trump drew a line in the sand. He’s clearly only interested in helping businesses. Not people. Businesses. The PPP was all smoke and mirrors and only delayed the layoffs a few months and gave execs billions of dollars to buy planes and stock buy backs etc.

 

[schuylaar]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/09/10/ppp-fraud-charges/?outputType=amp

Those charged include individuals who allegedly received money on behalf of fake companies; legitimate business owners accused of spending the funds on luxury items for themselves rather than paying employees; people who allegedly knew they weren’t eligible but applied anyway; businesses that allegedly double-dipped in a program meant to provide one loan per business; a former NFL player who allegedly submitted falsified documents; doctors accused of stealing from patients; suburban homeowners allegedly pretended to be farmers; and elaborate rings of people accused of trying to steal tens of millions of dollars.

the oversight was: no oversight- so what did you/we expect? but now this is where you say to yourself 'am i better off with or without my SS/SSDI?' because he will steal our SS Trust Fund if he's re-elected, remember this is the family that is no longer allowed to run a charity..why they're not in jail i'll never know.

there will be no going back.

 

[Wattzzup]

the oversight was: no oversight- so what did you/we expect? but now this is where you say to yourself 'am i better off with or without my SS/SSDI?' because he will steal our SS Trust Fund if he's re-elected, remember this is the family that is no longer allowed to run a charity..why they're not in jail i'll never know.

there will be no going back.

Too bad it’s up to 5 or so states to decided. Some “United” states. More like divided states of America.

 

[schuylaar]

Too bad it’s up to 5 or so states to decided. Some “United” states. More like divided states of America.

it's always that way and it freaks me out that the tradition is 'florida, florida, florida', where there is a corrupt republican governor. you heard the moron say last week that he was going to replace desantis (not sure how) to put pressure on for him to deliver the state.

florida is one state he must have or no road to 270.

 

[hanimmal]