Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Chris Lu and Harin Contractor at The Washington Monthly write—Donald Trump’s Economic Record Isn’t What He Says It Is:
[...] The speech was full of audacious—and characteristically inaccurate—claims: “our economy is the best it has ever been”; the “average unemployment rate … is lower than any administration in the history of our country”; and “wages are rising fast.”
The reality, however, doesn’t match Trump’s rhetoric. [...]
In 2019, for instance, the gap between the richest and poorest households in the United States reached its highest point in more than 50 years. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to climb following years of declines since the passage and implementation of Obamacare. And household debt is now in excess of $14 trillion, exceeding the pre-recession high.
Even with low unemployment, wage growth is lagging. The most recent employment report reported wages increasing by just 2.9 percent over the last year. With inflation at 2.1 percent, that’s not much of a pay raise. To the extent that wage growth has picked up in recent months, a major contributor has been increases in state and local minimum wages that Republicans and the president opposed.
Trump’s signature legislative accomplishment, the 2017 tax cut, has produced none of its promised benefits, including the $4,000 pay raise that he and his allies promised to American workers. In fact, as a result of the tax cut, 91 companies in the Fortune 500 paid no federal taxes last year. The country’s six biggest banks saved $32 billion at the same time that they laid off more than 1,000 employees. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
~~Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2012—Komen's hypocrisy: Let us count the ways:
When an organization adopts a purportedly blanket policy as cover for undertaking a biased action, the natural laws of the universe (at least of the PR universe) mandate that said policy wrap tightly back on an organization like a pink straitjacket woven with threads of hypocrisy and gall.
That the Susan G. Komen Foundation thought it could get away with stripping funding for Planned Parenthood is not surprising. One of the nation's biggest charities is likely to have some hubris in that regard. That they hired Ari Fleisher to manage the policy rollout and got, well, Ari Fleisher'd is not terribly remarkable either. That the media bought the Komen half-hearted, quasi-sorta reversal as some complete 180 that guaranteed Planned Parenthood funding was also to be expected.
What I didn't expect was that this scandal would still, days later, be a never-ending black hole filled with excuses, contradictions and confusion. It's a marathon of a scandal, and Komen doesn't look to be in any shape to finish strong. […]
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin joins us for another day in the swirling vortex (or toilet bowl) of the Iowa caucuses, impeachment, and the State of the Reality TV address (SORTA). Ever wonder what was behind the whole Burisma angle? They never talk about that.
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