Bingo For Billionaires

Today's Belle

At this point, who still believes he even has "concepts of a plan"? On anything.

Today's Belle

So Trump loses one in the Senate, and I worry that people will think the guardrails have held, so we can all relax and slip back into our default apathetic haze.

But standing up and torpedoing one nomination does not a rebellion make.

For one thing, Trump turned around and nominated Pam Bondi for USAG. You may remember that Bondi (Florida AG at the time) declined to charge Trump with anything over his "Trump University" flimflam, and it was learned not too much afterward that she had taken a $25,000 "donation" from the Trump Foundation.

So the improvement here is that we've gone from "Dude-What-The-Actual-Fuck?" to "Wow-Really?"

The Senate gets up on its hind legs for a change and strikes the heroic pose, but there's a real possibility that "winning" this one could turn out to be cover for a less egregious-looking capitulation later.

BTW, Matt Gaetz could be right back in the House in January. It's pretty murky, but I keep hearing that having resigned from the 118th Congress, he could be sworn in to the 119th because he won re-election for it.

So, I think we may be in store for a whole new fucked up side show as Gaetz tries to sue his way back into his seat.

Today's Belle

What's to stop him?

If he does what he says he intends to do (admittedly, always a big if), and it stands to trigger the kinda of global shit storm they say it will, who's there to stop him this time?

And if it gets to be as bad as they say it's bound to get, how fast can the Republicans move to finish totally fucking up the elections process so 'we the people' can't do anything about it either?

The explainers from Impartial Points:

Today's Belle

So, if I'm expecting the federal education dollars to dry up, how do I go about securing what few dollars will come my way?

Maybe I could issue a Request For Proposal to provide thousands of bibles to Oklahoma schools that almost absolutely guarantees that Trump gets a cut?

Of course, first, we have to get around a few roadblocks.

Today's Belle

Blue state resistance builds against Trump

A week after the election, Democratic governors and attorneys general are sharpening plans to become the de facto blue state resistance to a second Trump term.

Why it matters:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced Tuesday the creation of the Governors Safeguarding Democracy organization as a leading voice against President-elect Trump's policies — and to provide a playbook for other governors seeking to push back.

Driving the news:

The effort will counter threats on state democratic institutions — including independent judiciary, executive agencies and electoral system — largely through legal action.

"What we are doing is pushing back against increasing threats of autocracy fortifying the institutions of democracy that our country and our states depend upon," Pritzker said.
The rollback of environmental regulations, immigration politics, attacks on reproductive rights and "any threats to our democracy that come from any president or from foreign powers" are foremost in mind, Polis added.

The big picture:

Democratic state officials across the nation are wary of another Trump presidency and pledged to play an adversarial role, just as they did in his first term.

• In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special legislative session for Dec. 2 to "safeguard California values and fundamental rights" before Trump takes office.
• In Washington state, Attorney General Bob Ferguson's team has studied Trump's campaign promises and Project 2025 to prepare lawsuits to block federal actions.
• In Colorado, Polis promised to protect the "Free State of Colorado."
• In Arizona, Attorney General Kris Mayes said she "can't imagine a single Democratic attorney general in this country that won't be involved in fighting unconstitutional behavior."
• In Minnesota, Attorney General Keith Ellison said if Trump "violates the rights of people, we're gonna sue. It's simple as that."

The other side:

The Trump campaign has repeatedly suggested such moves would thwart the will of the American people who support his agenda.

Between the lines:

The organization is modeled on the Reproductive Freedom Alliance, created by Newsom. Both claim to be nonpartisan but are led by Democratic governors.

Pritzker said he has contacted Republican governors about collaborating but declined to name them.

The nonprofit Governors Action Alliance, led by former Newsom adviser Julia Spiegel, is spearheading the effort.

Here's Belle On 2028

It's bound to feel like a long hard slog. Take breaks. Rest. Recharge.

The Dems were outflanked by bad information and low voter enthusiasm.

So don't do the other guys' work for them.

Today's Belle

On Press Poodles, and how delicately they handle Trump's shitty fascist tendencies.

"I can't think of 14 reasons why he'd say that." 😁

Umberto Eco’s 14 Characteristics Of Fascism

(Ur-Fascism - or Eternal Fascism - is Eco's generic form, as opposed to a particular type of fascism, ie: the Nazis, Mussolini, etc)

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Today's Belle

Trump is telegraphing his disdain for how the transfer of power is supposed to work - even if he wins. He had an extremely chaotic transition in 2016, and now it seems he intends to ignore it altogether.

We have to figure his plan is simply to shit-can everything the US government is, and has been since 1789 - to tear it all down and remake the whole thing from the very beginning of his reign.

Today's Belle

From the comments: "If Trump wants me to believe he's tough on crime, he should stop committing them."

Today's Belle

If it ever comes down to it, and I seem at all confused, I hope somebody will remind me not to get on the wrong side of this woman.

"This might surprise the out-of-touch billionaire, but normal fast food workers don't have domestic servants to dress them."

Today's Belle

Some good messaging here.

(paraphrasing)

You don't have to keep getting those weird looks from family and friends.

You don't have to follow somebody who treats you like you're stupid.

MAGA devotees are adamant about taking Trump's abuse and gaslighting - and turning it around - pretending that "liberals" are the ones mistreating them.

Today's Belle

Trump knows nothing.

Who's Your Guy?

If we're talkin' about MAGA's bullshit measures of maniless, I'm with Belle - I gotta ask, between Trump and Walz:

• Which one knows how to change the oil in his car?
• Which one knows how to clean a fish? Or a deer? Or dress a hog?
• Which one knows about building a fire and where to pitch the tent?
• Which one knows how to clean a shotgun?

And one more:

Which one knows that you don't lust after

your own goddamned daughter? 

Today's Belle

When you stop and think about it, which candidate is more likely to have somebody like that guy at their rally?

And there's something about that sheriff that rings a bell - like he put up a rant or an ad or something that showed him to be a radical "sheriffs are everything" kinda guy.

I'll try to find that out.

edit: and there it is

Today's Belle

How much Trump would Trumper Trump if a Trumper could Trump Trump?

Today's Belle

Comparing economic plans.

The Trump Plan:

• With Yacht-Buyer tax cuts, and tariffs, and whatever other magical thing he pulls out of Kevin Roberts's ass, the average amount he'd add to the debt is $7.5T
• It could be as low as $1.5T
• Or as high as $15.2T

The Harris Plan:

• Middle class tax cuts, tax hike on >$450K, small business help, home-buyer help, etc, the average average amount she'd add to the debt is $3.5T
• It could be as low as $0
• Or as high as $8.1T

Here's the ProPublica piece she mentioned (from Jan 2021):

Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years

The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.

One of President Donald Trump’s lesser known but profoundly damaging legacies will be the explosive rise in the national debt that occurred on his watch. The financial burden that he’s inflicted on our government will wreak havoc for decades, saddling our kids and grandkids with debt.

The national debt has risen by almost $7.8 trillion during Trump’s time in office. That’s nearly twice as much as what Americans owe on student loans, car loans, credit cards and every other type of debt other than mortgages, combined, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It amounts to about $23,500 in new federal debt for every person in the country.

The growth in the annual deficit under Trump ranks as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration, according to a calculation by a leading Washington budget maven, Eugene Steuerle, co-founder of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. And unlike George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the larger relative increases in deficits, Trump did not launch two foreign conflicts or have to pay for a civil war.

Economists agree that we needed massive deficit spending during the COVID-19 crisis to ward off an economic cataclysm, but federal finances under Trump had become dire even before the pandemic. That happened even though the economy was booming and unemployment was at historically low levels. By the Trump administration’s own description, the pre-pandemic national debt level was already a “crisis” and a “grave threat.”

The combination of Trump’s 2017 tax cut and the lack of any serious spending restraint helped both the deficit and the debt soar. So when the once-in-a-lifetime viral disaster slammed our country and we threw more than $3 trillion into COVID-19-related stimulus, there was no longer any margin for error.

Our national debt has reached immense levels relative to our economy, nearly as high as it was at the end of World War II. But unlike 75 years ago, the massive financial overhang from Medicare and Social Security will make it dramatically more difficult to dig ourselves out of the debt ditch.

Falling deeper into the red is the opposite of what Trump, the self-styled “King of Debt,” said would happen if he became president. In a March 31, 2016, interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post, Trump said he could pay down the national debt, then about $19 trillion, “over a period of eight years” by renegotiating trade deals and spurring economic growth.

After he took office, Trump predicted that economic growth created by the 2017 tax cut, combined with the proceeds from the tariffs he imposed on a wide range of goods from numerous countries, would help eliminate the budget deficit and let the U.S. begin to pay down its debt. On July 27, 2018, he told Sean Hannity of Fox News: “We have $21 trillion in debt. When this [the 2017 tax cut] really kicks in, we’ll start paying off that debt like it’s water.”

Nine days later, he tweeted, “Because of Tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the $21 trillion in debt that has been accumulated, much by the Obama Administration.”

That’s not how it played out. When Trump took office in January 2017, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office was projecting that federal budget deficits would be 2% to 3% of our gross domestic product during Trump’s term. Instead, the deficit reached nearly 4% of gross domestic product in 2018 and 4.6% in 2019.

There were multiple culprits. Trump’s tax cuts, especially the sharp reduction in the corporate tax rate to 21% from 35%, took a big bite out of federal revenue. The CBO estimated in 2018 that the tax cut would increase deficits by about $1.9 trillion over 11 years.

Meanwhile, Trump’s claim that increased revenue from the tariffs would help eliminate (or at least reduce) our national debt hasn’t panned out. In 2018, Trump’s administration began hiking tariffs on aluminum, steel and many other products, launching what became a global trade war with China, the European Union and other countries.

The tariffs did bring in additional revenue. In fiscal 2019, they netted about $71 billion, up about $36 billion from President Barack Obama’s last year in office. But although $36 billion is a lot of money, it’s less than 1/750th of the national debt. That $36 billion could have covered a bit more than three weeks of interest on the national debt — that is, had Trump not unilaterally decided to send a chunk of the tariff revenue to farmers affected by his trade wars. Businesses that struggled as a result of the tariffs also paid fewer taxes, offsetting some of the increased tariff revenue.

By early 2019, the national debt had climbed to $22 trillion. Trump’s budget proposal for 2020 called it a “grave threat to our economic and societal prosperity” and asserted that the U.S. was experiencing a “national debt crisis.” However, that same budget proposal included substantial growth in the national debt.

By the end of 2019, the debt had risen to $23.2 trillion and more federal officials were sounding the alarm. “Not since World War II has the country seen deficits during times of low unemployment that are as large as those that we project — nor, in the past century, has it experienced large deficits for as long as we project,” Phillip Swagel, director of the CBO, said in January 2020.

Weeks later, COVID-19 erupted and made the financial situation far worse. As of Dec. 31, 2020, the national debt had jumped to $27.75 trillion, up 39% from $19.95 trillion when Trump was sworn in. The government ended its 2020 fiscal year with the portion of the national debt owed to investors, the metric favored by the CBO, at around 100% of GDP. The CBO had predicted less than a year earlier that it would take until 2030 to reach that approximate level of debt. Including the trillions owed to various governmental trust funds, the total debt is now about 130% of GDP.

Normally, this is where we’d give you Trump’s version of events. But we couldn’t get anyone to give us Trump’s side. Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, referred us to the Office of Management and Budget, which is a branch of the White House.

OMB didn’t respond to our requests. The Treasury directed us to comments made by OMB director Russell Vought in October, in which he predicted that as the pandemic eases and economic growth rebounds, the “fiscal picture” will improve. The OMB blamed legislators for deficits when Trump submitted his proposed 2021 budget: “Unfortunately, the Congress continues to reject any efforts to restrain spending. Instead, they have greatly contributed to the continued ballooning of Federal debt and deficits, putting the Nation’s fiscal future at risk.”

Still, the deficit growth under Trump has been historic. Steuerle, of the Tax Policy Center, has done a comparison of every American president using a metric called the “primary deficit.” It’s defined as the deficit minus interest costs, because interest is the only budget expense that presidents and Congress can’t control unless they want to do the unthinkable and default on the debt. Steuerle examined the records of 45 presidents to see how the primary deficit had shrunk or grown relative to the size of the economy between the first and final years of each president’s administration.

Trump had the third-biggest primary deficit growth, 5.2% of GDP, behind only George W. Bush (11.7%) and Abraham Lincoln (9.4%). Bush, of course, not only passed a big tax cut, as Trump has, but also launched two wars, which greatly inflated the defense budget. Lincoln had to pay for the Civil War. By contrast, Trump’s wars have been almost entirely of the political variety.

Our national debt is now at its highest level relative to our economy since the end of World War II. After the war ended, the extraordinary military expenses disappeared, a postwar recovery began and the debt began to fall rapidly relative to the size of the economy.

But that’s not going to happen this time. When World War II ended 75 years ago, Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare didn’t exist. Today, many of our biggest and most rapidly growing expenses, especially Social Security and Medicare, are baked into the budget because of our nation’s aging population. These outlays are slated to rise sharply. Steuerle recently calculated that Social Security, health care and interest costs are projected to absorb 122% of the total growth in federal revenues from 2019 to 2030.


What’s more, our investment in the future — things like research and development, education, infrastructure, workforce training and such — is declining as a proportion of the budget. OMB data shows that in 1970, mandatory spending (such as Social Security and Medicare, but not including interest on the debt) and investment each made up around 30% of total federal spending. But as of 2019, the most recent available year, mandatory spending had doubled to around 61% of total federal spending while investment fell by more than half, to around 12.5%.

Spending more and more on past promises and shrinking the proportion of spending for the future doesn’t bode well for our kids and grandkids. Had Trump done what he said he’d do and paid off part of the national debt before COVID-19 struck rather than adding significantly to the debt, the situation would be considerably less dire. And had Trump done a better job of coping with COVID-19, the economic and human costs would’ve been greatly reduced.

In addition to forcing us to reduce the proportion of the budget spent on the future to help pay for the past, there’s a second reason that huge and growing budget deficits matter: interest costs.

Bigger debt ultimately means bigger interest costs, even in an era when the Federal Reserve has forced down Treasury rates to ultralow levels. The government’s interest cost (including interest paid to government trust funds) was around $523 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. That outstrips all spending on education, employment training, research and social services, Treasury data shows.

Interest costs are way below where they’d be if the Fed hadn’t forced rates down to try to stimulate the economy and mitigate the impact of the pandemic. One-year Treasury securities cost taxpayers a minuscule 0.10% in interest at year-end, down from 1.59% at the end of 2019. The 10-year Treasury rate was 0.93%, down from 1.92%.

In late December, the Fed reported boosting its Treasury holdings by more than $2 trillion from a year earlier. The increase is primarily in longer-term securities. That has kept the federal government from having to raise trillions of dollars in the capital markets, and therefore has kept longer-term interest rates way below where they would otherwise be.

But unless something changes, even the Fed’s promise to keep interest rates near current levels for several years won’t fend off future problems. Most of the government’s borrowing to fund pandemic relief has been shorter-term borrowing that will have to be refinanced in the coming years. If rates rise, so will the government’s interest expense.

Even with rates where they are, interest on the debt is already going to be the fastest-growing budget category this decade, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which tracks the issue. Annual net interest costs are projected to double in 10 years and grow so large beyond 2030 that interest will become a driving factor in annual deficit growth, according to Peterson estimates.

Listen to what CBO Director Swagel had to say on the subject in a report to congressional Republicans in December: “Although the current low interest rates indicate that the debt is manageable for now and that the United States is not facing an immediate fiscal crisis, in which interest rates abruptly escalated or other disruptions occurred, the risk and potential budgetary consequences of such a crisis become greater over time.”

To deter violence, research suggests the best strategy is not harsh punishment for threats but a different tactic, one based on decades of interviews with mass shooters, political assassins and people who survived attacks: threat assessments.

Trump was asked about this risk during a virtual discussion with the Economic Club of New York last October. “If we have another stimulus bill out of Congress, are you worried that the entire amount of federal debt will be too large for us to pay off in a sensible way?” asked David Rubenstein, a private equity executive.

Trump answered by falsely claiming that the U.S. was starting to pay off the national debt before the pandemic, and he claimed that future economic growth would let it do so. “I think you’re going to see tremendous growth, David, and the growth is going to get it done,” Trump said.

Two months later, when Congress finally approved $900 billion of economic stimulus that is being financed with debt, Trump challenged Congress to spend — and borrow — even more. Then he went golfing.

Today's Belle

When Belle gets a bit snarky, I know things are bad. And when she doesn't give that sweet reassuring smile at the end, I know I'm right to be really really really pissed off.

Today's Belle

On the Veep Debate.

If Walz can bring his Coach game - "C'mon JD, you can do better'n that" - he can draw the kind of contrast that sinks a phony like Vance - who's already 11 points underwater on 'favorability".

Today's Belle

He wants one rough day.