For 70 Million Americans The Presidents Bid To End The Payroll Tax Could Be The Most Important Election Issue Of All
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One way U.S. voters are being played during this presidential election campaign is the deceitful manner in which key issues are being framed for their consumption. Arguably the biggest and most important of these concerns the so-called third rail of American politics: Social Security.
President Donald Trump has vowed to kill funding for this critical, gargantuan program that nearly 70 million Americans depend on.
What? You havent heard Trump say he wants to kill Social Securitys funding? Actually, you have. Trump says he wants to kill the payroll tax which is how Social Security is funded.
Perhaps like many Americans, youre unaware of how Social Security is financed. It comes from payroll taxes that are paid by you and your employer. The past four years have convinced me that there are many other things that Trumps supporters dont seem to understand either but I digress.
If victorious on November 3rd, the president said on Aug. 8th, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax. He then added: Im going to make them all permanent.
So when Trump talks of a payroll tax cut, you might think that sounds great. A tax cut! But this is deceptive election year politics, designed to take advantage of voter ignorance. Anyone in the media thats going along with Trumps framing of this as a mere tax cut is also being played.
Former Democrat Jeff Van Drew Explains Why He Switched To Gop
Meanwhile, scores of former Republican administration officials have endorsed Bidens campaign, including dozens of former George W. Bush staffers who announced their intent to back Biden this week.
Theres also a small group of former Trump administration officials who worked in the Department of Homeland Security who have chosen to back Biden.
But Van Drews speech provides Trump a lane to show the opposite effect of his presidency on some Democrats. Trump made a big show of Van Drew switching parties during the impeachment process and hosted him at the White House for a meeting.
Rudy Giuliani, who has served as Donald Trumps lawyer and a top confidant, in his speech Thursday night will attack Joe Biden over violence in U.S. cities over the summer.
Giulianis speech will fall in line with what has been the main theme of Trumps convention hammering Biden over protests against police brutality, some of which have led to violence or vandalism. Just this week, a pro-police sympathizer allegedly shot and killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin after a Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot seven times by police.
Their silence was so deafening that it reveals an acceptance of this violence because they will accept anything they hope will defeat President Donald Trump, he added.
Big Changes Are Underway For America’s Most Important Social Program
But therein lies the rub: This guaranteed payout is in some serious trouble. While Social Security is in absolutely no danger of going bankrupt — which means current and future generations will receive a retired worker, disability, or survivor benefit, should they qualify — it is on the brink of a major transformation.
The latest annual report from the Social Security Board of Trustees finds that America’s most important social program will begin paying out more in benefits than it collects in revenue this year. In each year thereafter, with the exception of 2019, the net cash outflow from the Social Security is expected to increase. By 2034, the $2.9 trillion in excess cash that has been built up since the reforms of 1983 were passed are expected to be completely gone.
What happens then, you ask? Again, it doesn’t mean the program is bankrupt. But it does clearly demonstrate that the existing payout schedule isn’t sustainable. Assuming no additional revenue is generated above and beyond the intermediate-cost model projections from the Trustees report, an across-the-board cut in benefits of up to 21% may be necessary to sustain payouts until the year 2092.
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His Tax Cut Isnt Helping The Economy But It Did Blow A Hole In The Budget That Hed Fill By Gutting Entitlement Programs
Health-care activists rally in front of the Capitol in March 2017 to highlight the changes then being sought in Medicaid in the Republican American Health Care Act.
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Later this evening, Donald Trump delivers his third State of the Union address. If past speeches are any indicator, we know tonights speech will be filled with a number of exaggerations and outright falsehoods especially when it comes to the economy.
Since he signed the bill two years ago, Trump has heralded the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as this administrations greatest accomplishment, declaring that it is helping everybody so much.
But this couldnt be further from the truth. While the law gave giant tax breaks to the wealthy and big corporations, the rest of us were left with crumbs at best. The wage growth that Trump promised hasnt materialized, and 100 million Americans are going to be left paying higher taxes.
Another opinion:Trump should offer a new deal for the middle class in his State of the Union speech
Now, Trump is using his tax cuts, which he promised would be a boon to the economy, as an excuse to threaten cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs Americans have been paying into with every paycheck, and programs the federal government is required, by law, to offer to every single eligible person.
Turns out everyones predictions were right: Republicans are targeting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. No surprise there.
Trump Mocks Some Undocumented Immigrants As Having Low Iqs
Dartunorro Clark
During the segment on immigration policy, Trump said the only undocumented immigrants who show up for court hearings are those with the lowest IQ.
He was referring to the practice of catch and release, which allows migrants to stay in the country while they wait for hearings on their immigration cases.
The comment drew immediate backlash on Twitter. Trump has questioned the IQs of others in the past, many of whom were people of color.
Adam Edelman and Ben Kamisar
Trump said Thursday, “We have 180 million people out there that have great private health care far more than what were talking about with Obamacare.”
“Joe Biden is going to terminate all of those policies,” he added.
“Under what he wants to do, which will basically be socialized medicine, he wont even have a choice, they want to terminate 180 million plans,” Trump added.
Trump has made this claim repeatedly, and NBC News has fact checked it repeatedly. This claim is false. It conflates Biden’s plan with those of other Democrats pushing “Medicare for All.”
While estimates vary about how many Americans have private insurance, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services estimates that 180 million people have private insurance.
Many Republicans have sought to tie the proposals for “Medicare for All” to all Democrats and it is true that many Democratic members of Congress are sponsoring the bill . But Biden has criticized “Medicare for All” throughout his campaign.
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Sen Tom Cotton: ‘joe Biden Would Return Us To A Weak Dangerous Past’
Five months later, he told NBC News Meet the Press that hed privately told Obama after that meeting had ended to, Follow your instincts, Mr. President and that Biden had wanted him to take one more day to do one more test to see if he was there.
He further leaned into that version in a 2015 interview, saying that I thought he should go, but follow his own instincts. Biden then contradicted his initial claims, saying, imagine if I had said in front of everyone, ‘Don’t go,’ or ‘Go,’ and his decision was a different decision. It undercuts that relationship.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, in her 2014 book Hard Choices, wrote that Biden remained skeptical about the raid, while Gates in his 2014 book, wrote that he and Biden were both skeptics.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., leveled several accusations against Joe Biden, mostly regarding his views and actions as vice president on foreign policy. This one, about what a former defense secretary had to say about Biden’s judgment, is accurate.
Cotton said that Barack Obama’s own secretary of defense said Joe Biden has been wrong on nearly every major national security decision over the past four decades.
This is true. Robert Gates, who served as President Obamas secretary of defense for more than two years, wrote in his 2014 memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary At War, that Biden had been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
Fact Check: ‘record’ Job Gains Still Leave The Us Labor Market In Worse Shape Than Great Recession
On the last night of his partys convention, President Trump bragged about record job gains in recent months, but the 9.1 million jobs he touts come with some qualifiers.
“Over the past three months, we have gained over nine million jobs, and thats a record in the history of our country,” Trump said Thursday.
The recent job gains are still less than half the number of jobs the economy shed in March and April at the height of pandemic-ordered lockdowns. From March through July, the economy lost a net 12.9 million jobs, the most in American history.
The nearly 2 million jobs added in July also represent a sharp slowdown from the almost 5 million jobs added in June.
And several major groups of workers are at greater risk of falling behind. Black unemployment, at 14.6 percent in July, registered less than a percentage point of improvement. Among Hispanics, the rate of unemployment also remained elevated at nearly 13 percent, compared to just nearly 9 percent for white workers.
It still has a long way to go, and risks falling back in as the pandemic continues to rage and causes more layoffs and curtails hiring, he said.
President Trump spoke for roughly 70 minutes on Thursday, one of the longest convention speeches in modern history.
The president is known to insert new material into his speeches on the trail. It just wasnt the case in one of the biggest speeches of his presidency.
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Nypd Union Boss Pat Lynch Underscores Trumps Law And Order Message
Dartunorro Clark
Pat Lynch is the president of the Police Benevolent Association, a union with 50,000 active and retired NYPD officers. While it is unusual for him to speak at a political convention, he has been a bullhorn for law enforcement in New York City and around the country, particularly as officers violently clashed with protesters calling for defunding the police.
Lynch has been at loggerheads with the citys mayor, Bill de Blasio, and has generated controversy over the years, such as fiercely opposing the firing of the officer who killed Eric Garner.
His RNC speech was similar to Trumps rhetoric about Democratic-run cities.
Trump Hits Biden Over Trade Manufacturing
Job losses resulting from NAFTA tend to be overstated but one major study found that more than 850,000 jobs were displaced by the pact.
Robert E. Scott of the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute found that about 851,700 U.S. jobs were displaced by the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico from 1993 to 2014.
When it comes to normalizing trade relations with China a status President George W. Bush formally granted in 2001 after China entered the World Trade Organization U.S. job losses have been larger, according to studies.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service wrote in 2018, citing a 2014 study by the Economic Policy Institute, that growth in the U.S. goods trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2013 eliminated or displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs .
If you add the 851,700 figure with the 3.2 million figure, you would see a figure that approximates 4 million, which is roughly 25 percent of the estimated 17 million manufacturing jobs that existed in 1994.
Experts have pointed out, however, that technology and automation has likely had at least as much of an effect on these losses in manufacturing jobs, with many noting that the losses would have occurred even without NAFTA.
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Things To Watch For On Night 4 Of The Rnc
Shannon Pettypiece
President Trump has had nearly four years in office to sell his performance to the American people. So far, polls suggest he has yet to make the sale: A majority of Americans disapprove of the job he’s done, and he has consistently trailed Joe Biden in general election surveys this year.
So what can he say on the final night of the Republican National Convention to change those attitudes and convince Americans he deserves four more years in office? Republican strategists say they are looking for him to give a vision of what he would do in a second term an area he has struggled to define and how that would contrast with a Biden presidency.
Whatever message Trump delivers on the final night of the gathering, he will be competing for attention with a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall Thursday morning.
President Trump will focus his Republican National Convention speech Thursday on attacking Joe Biden, according to excerpts of his address.
At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas,” Trump will say, according to excerpts of the speech from his campaign.
Meadows Called Fauci About Plexiglass Barriers
Shannon Pettypiece
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows called Dr. Anthony Fauci during the debate walkthrough on Thursday and put Fauci on the phone with an individual from the Commission on Presidential Debates to discuss the merits of having physical plexiglass barriers on stage during the faceoff, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Fauci told that person that all the barriers would do was provide a false sense of security.
The CPD didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.
As NBC News reported earlier Thursday, the two plexiglass barriers that were initially positioned between the candidates lecterns were removed after the debate commissions medical adviser consulted with Fauci.
Some of the same people who pushed a false conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton that first emerged in 2016 are now targeting Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, with similar falsehoods. Their online posts are garnering astronomical numbers of shares on social media.
The fantastical rumors, which NBC News is declining to repeat verbatim, echo specific plot points central to “pizzagate,” a viral disinformation campaign that predates QAnon but also falsely alleges a vast conspiracy of child abuse.
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