Tax Cut And Jobs Act Deregulation And National Debt
Even before the virus further exacerbated U.S. income inequality, some experts say Trumps economic policies favored the wealthy — and left the poor and middle class behind.
His Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017 provided major tax breaks to corporations and wealthy individuals. The policy, among other things, reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 21%.
Frankel called the policy “beyond ironic” for a president “who campaigned in 2016 on being the champion of the working man or working person and campaigned on ‘draining the swamp’ in Washington.”
Shierholz said this policy “absolutely increased inequality” and the “vast majority of the benefits of those tax cuts went to the already very wealthy.”
The economists also noted that the policy came at a time when unemployment was relatively low and the economy in good shape.
“That’s not the time to be giving away trillions of dollars to the wealthy,” Frankel said. “When you have a bad shock like the global financial crisis of 2008-09 or like the coronavirus crisis that we’re still going through — that’s the time to increase government spending and expansionary fiscal policy, but you lose the ability to do that if you gave it away.”
NYU’s Bowmaker noted that some “can make the case that the corporate tax rate was a little bit too high” and would welcome the tax cuts.
Despite his goal, the debt has ballooned under Trump. The total national debt has skyrocketed by more than $7 trillion during Trumps tenure.
Upending The Trade Debate
President Donald Trumps approach to trade weakened key alliances, destroyed jobs and damaged the U.S. economy. It was as if he had used a sledgehammer for heart surgery. But Trump also changed the debate about nonmarket behavior like state subsidies and that was long overdue.
Advanced economies have experienced massive surges in imports from low-wage countries in the past half-century. This is partly a natural result of nations integrating into the global economy under the relative peace maintained by American military might. Export-led growth helped eradicate poverty. But U.S. manufacturers became an open target, some argue, with cheap rival imports overwhelming aging marquee American industries.
Developing nations like China, India and Indonesia created a latecomers quandary for advanced economies. They entered the global trading system after the United States and its allies drastically lowered tariffs on manufactured goods for all members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization. This left rich countries with little leverage to entice newer members to let go of the production subsidies they still view as key to their miraculous rise from poverty.
No one has had a good solution. Some allies quietly let the problem slide. Trumps trade war made that impossible.
Remaking The Federal Judiciary
Appointed a historic number of Federal judges who will interpret the Constitution as written.
- Nominated and confirmed over 230 Federal judges.
- Confirmed 54 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, making up nearly a third of the entire appellate bench.
- Filled all Court of Appeals vacancies for the first time in four decades.
- Flipped the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits from Democrat-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. And dramatically reshaped the long-liberal Ninth Circuit.
Appointed three Supreme Court justices, expanding its conservative-appointed majority to 6-3.
- Appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
- Appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
- Appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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Colossal Rebuilding Of The Military
Rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force.
- Completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.
- Secured three pay raises for our service members and their families, including the largest raise in a decade.
- Established the Space Force, the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.
- Modernized and recapitalized our nuclear forces and missile defenses to ensure they continue to serve as a strong deterrent.
- Upgraded our cyber defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major warfighting command and by reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.
- Vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.
Defeated terrorists, held leaders accountable for malign actions, and bolstered peace around the world.
Addressed gaps in Americans defense-industrial base, providing much-needed updates to improve the safety of our country.
As A Result Of The Republican Tax Bill Small Businesses Will Have The Lowest Top Marginal Tax Rate In More Than 80 Years
Not really.According to the Tax Foundation, the lowest top marginal rate in the past 80 years was 28 percent in the 1980s, although a claw back provision in the 1980s increased the top marginal rate to 33 percent for taxpayers with incomes over certain thresholds. Under current law, the top marginal rate is 37 percent, but pass-through businesses can receive additional tax breaks to lower their top marginal rate to 29.6 percent.
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Trump Hasnt Done A Single Thing To Help Average Americans
Donald Trump has now been in office for a little over two years, but he has yet to enact a single policy that actually helps or otherwise benefits average Americans. Corporations are doing better than ever, but American workers are struggling, our taxes actually WENT UP, and his tariffs and immigration fights are harming our economy. He hasnt done anything to help us, and Democrats need to hammer that point every chance they get. Ring of Fires Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Im going to for a moment here, offer some free campaign advice for every single Democrat, not only running for president but running for Senate in 2020 running for the House of Representatives in 2020 running for local government in the next year and a half. And here is my free advice to you and its really just one line. This is one line that I want to hear every single Democratic candidate repeat from now really into eternity because it doesnt only apply for the 2020 election, but I hear it is name one single policy, the Donald Trump or the Republicans in the last five years, 10 years, and one policy that these folks have enacted that has made your life better. Okay.
Has Had Over A Dozen Us Hostages Freed Including Those Obama Could Not Get Freed
This is true. Mr. Obama amended a longstanding U.S. policy not to negotiate with hostage-takers, making it more flexible. Mr. Trump continued to push the envelope on what could be done to release hostages, earning praise from those who view his efforts as a major foreign policy success and criticism from others who accuse Mr. Trump of authorizing the payment of de facto ransoms, incentivizing terrorists to take more American hostages.
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Biden’s Promises To Undo What Trump Has Done
All of the above represent issues on which Trump or his administration have issued orders, reversed Obama-era rules, or taken legal and policy stands in ways that aim to protect Americans freedom to live in a culture they desire, not a culture imposed on them by progressive overlords. Some of the changes Trump has wrought during his four years in office are perhaps mostly symbolic: there arent that many nuns or transgender children. But they represent tens of millions of ordinary Americans values: their patriotism, their religious beliefs, their respect for fairness and equal treatment regardless of race or sex, their aspirations to live and raise their families in civil order. Its not surprising that a recent Gallup poll revealed that 51% of Americans supported the confirmation to the Supreme Court of Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, a deeply religious mother of seven.
Cynicism is healthy for democracy:Neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden deserve a honeymoon from cynicism
Yet, for a brief interlude four years, to be exact Trump will have given ordinary Americans a gift. It will have been the gift of being free of the yoke imposed on them by the ideological progressives who dominate and control all of Americas institutions: its universities, its schools, its media, its major corporations. And who knows? Perhaps, after Nov. 3, it will be eight years of freedom.
Charlotte Allen is a writer in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter
The Mechanism For Funding Hbcus Has Very Little To Do With Trump
Trump has also repeatedly mentioned how his administration has funded historically Black colleges and universities . They couldnt get funded. Nobody was funding them for years and years and decades, nobody was funding them, Trump said.
This is simply untrue: Under Obama, the federal government invested more than $4 billion in HBCUs over seven years.
And while federal funding for HBCUs has been renewed under Trumps presidency, Trump has not publicly acknowledged that the renewal is the result of congressional appropriations.
Congress does all this work and presents it to him in the budget, and he can choose to sign it. This year, he held off on signing some significant STEM funding, making HBCUs beg for it, Rutgers professor and leading HBCU authority Marybeth Gasman told the Washington Post. Trump has promised all kinds of things to HBCUs and has followed through on little. Under Trump, the White House Initiative for HBCUs was moved to the White House and is quite quiet compared to the work under President Obamas administration.
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Trump Signed A Law Ending The Gag Orders On Pharmacists That Prevented Them From Sharing Money
True. Mr. Trump tweeted in support of this law and deserves credit for using the bully pulpit of the presidency to demand transparency in drug prices. But Congress deserves most of the credit for the unanimous 2018 passage of this transparency law, which prohibits gag orders that prevent pharmacists from sharing prescription drug prices with customers.
Trump Eviscerates Joe Biden For Destroying America
OPINION: This article contains commentary which reflects the authors opinionReminder : The purpose of the articles that you will find on this website is to EDUCATE our opinions and not to disinform or grow hate and anger!
On Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump sat down with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to discuss the 2020 election and what he has been up to since then. During their discussion, Trump slammed Joe Biden for what he has done to America in the months since he took office.
Were not going to have a country in three years, Trump lamented. This guy did this in nine months. He destroyed our country. You know I say Make America Great Again. That was my theme, and it was going to be Keep America Great. I gave that away Americas not great now. America is a laughing stock all over the world.
One of the biggest things Trump takes issue with when it comes to Bidens presidency is how his administration has handled the border.
At first, I thought they were incompetent, and now I realize they want it open, he said.
Trump also went after the media, saying, They has one subject they dont want to talk about the 2020 Election scam. It all involves around that. He went on to say that the subject that his supporters want to talk about more than any is the 2020 presidential election, which he still firmly believes was stolen.
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Shaking The Foreign Policy Consensus
Donald Trump rejected the establishment consensus that the United States has the right and duty to guard international order by force.
The world contains a lot of killers, he noted soon after taking office. You think our countrys so innocent? Pundits howled in outrage. That they included champions of the war in Iraq and the global war on terrorism suggested that Trump had a point. After decades of massive and routinized killing sold as virtue, Trump at least recognized that U.S. warmaking looked like liberation principally to a small cadre in Washington.
This recognition produced a few genuine policy achievements. Doubting that U.S. military operations in Afghanistan were crucial to international stability, Trump made a deal with the Taliban to put Americas war there on a path to termination that his successor is now completing. He rightly embarked on diplomacy with North Korea, despite bungling negotiations. He did not start any new wars a low but significant bar that George W. Bush, invader of Iraq, and Barack Obama, bomber of Libya, failed to clear.
Trump stripped American power bare, shedding its cloak of piety. His successors must decide whether to dress it back up or scale it down. After Trump, the latter seems both more possible and more urgent.
Stephen Wertheim is senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy .
Potential Conflicts Of Interest
Trump’s presidency has been marked by significant public concern about conflict of interest stemming from his diverse business ventures. In the lead up to his inauguration, Trump promised to remove himself from the day-to-day operations of his businesses. Trump placed his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at the head of his businesses claiming they would not communicate with him regarding his interests. However, critics noted that this would not prevent him from having input into his businesses and knowing how to benefit himself, and Trump continued to receive quarterly updates on his businesses. As his presidency progressed, he failed to take steps or show interest in further distancing himself from his business interests resulting in numerous potential conflicts. Ethics experts found Trump’s plan to address conflicts of interest between his position as president and his private business interests to be entirely inadequate. Unlike every other president in the last 40 years, Trump did not put his business interests in a blind trust or equivalent arrangement “to cleanly sever himself from his business interests”. In January 2018, a year into his presidency, Trump owned stakes in hundreds of businesses.
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