Robert Reich - National Debt

Click here for an article by Robert Reich entitled "Yikes! More drivel over the national debt!" Subtitle:

"How the hell can we expect Americans to understand what the national debt means if the media doesn't report it accurately?"

Robert Reich was Labor Secretary for Bill Clinton, and he writes a daily article from a leftist position. He criticizes The New York Times for scaremongering with its lead story:  

The Congressional Budget Office’s report that the U.S. is on track to add nearly $19 trillion to the national debt over the next decade — $3 trillion more than previously forecast.

The NYT then offers context for that line:

“To put those numbers in context,” intoned the Times, “the total amount of debt held by the public will equal the total annual output of the U.S. economy in 2024, rising to 118 percent of the economy in 2033.”

If the Times believes this gives its readers context, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d love to sell the Gray Lady.

Reich says there are three reasons why the national debt is going to rise as a percentage of the total overall economy:

1.  The Federal Reserve is busily slowing the economy and causing interest rates to rise.

2.  The giant baby-boom generation will soon collect Social Security and Medicare (or has already started to). 

3. Republicans have slashed taxes on the wealthy, resulting in less federal revenue.  

 To remedy the situation, Reich proposes that the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy be restored (they're temporary because they sunset, but Republicans are trying to make them permanent). They also want to repeal funding increases for the IRS. They say jackbooted IRS thugs will be kicking down the doors of single mothers who have made a mistake on their tax return; Biden's administration insists hiring new agents will result in better auditing of the wealthy, who will cheat if they're not properly policed.

He finishes his criticism of the Times article:

Economic illiteracy is dangerous for a democracy, especially when exacerbated by mainstream media that should know better.

Leadership! (and eloquence)

(The original tweet says: "This will never stop being funny."

This is how I’ve always seen Trump. He has the vocabulary of a 3rd grader. https://t.co/qK00MJWtPq

— MJ (@mj_effect) February 16, 2023

Morons. I've got morons on my team!

That's a line by Strother Martin in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch and Sundance have taken an honest job, signed on as guards for Percy, who is going down the mountain to collect a mining payroll. On the way down the mountain from the mine, Butch and Sundance are being hypervigilant, surveilling the rocks and bushes, looking for an ambush. Percy says:

Morons. I've got morons on my team! Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain.

Here's a tweet from the Moron in Chief, Donald Trump, after the Super Bowl:

Congratulations to the Kansas City Chiefs on a great game, and a fantastic comeback, under immense pressure. You represented the Great State of Kansas and, in fact, the entire USA, so very well. Our Country is PROUD OF YOU!

Nice, right? No twisted bitterness,no pumped-up braggadocio, no expressions of hatred for Democrats, no juvenile nicknames or name-calling.

Once again, though, he has shown his profound ignorance about the country he professes to love so much:  The Kansas City Chiefs are not located in Kansas, and they do not play their games in Kansas. The Chiefs are from Kansas City, Missouri.

Dummy.

 

Jokes

 A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

How many people here have telekenetic powers? Raise my hand.

I got some new underwear the other day. Well, new to me.

My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.

When I was ten, my family moved to Downers Grove, Illinois. When I was twelve, I found them.

I ran three miles the other day. Finally I said, “Lady, keep your purse."

John Maynard Keynes

 Click here for a Substack article by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor minister and leftist economist, entitled "Why America forgot about economic power," subtitled "We adopted Kenesianism -- which worked for a time."

Several of you have asked me why America went so quietly from democratic capitalism — the economic organization that dominated American life from 1933 through the late 1970s — to the corporate capitalism that has dominated it since the Reagan administration and that Joe Biden is starting to reverse.

The answer has a lot to do with Keynesianism. It removed the issue of economic power from American politics, along with the struggle between capital and labor.

Click here for a Google search of "expat communites in Mexico."

 (from Quora): WOULD YOU LIVE IN MEXICO, AND WHY?

Not only would I live in Mexico, I do live in Mexico; and I love it here. Some of the reasons are:

• The cost of living in Mexico is way lower than the U.S. A monthly income that would barely be subsistence wages in the U.S. affords an upper middle-class lifestyle in Mexico.
• The weather is fantastic, at least in most parts of the country. There are places where it can get really cold and there are other places where it can be brutally hot. But, for a large part of the country, the combination of tropical latitude and high altitude make for Spring like weather all year round.
• The food is incredible. Actual Mexican food that you find in Mexico is not the same as the Tex-Mex variety served in most “Mexican” food restaurants in the U.S. There are no yellow cheeses, very little use of ground beef, and refried beans and rice are not the only side dishes. What you will find here are dishes prepared with incredibly fresh ingredients, very balanced seasonings and a wide variety of salsas.
• The people are some of the kindest, most polite and most generous people you will ever meet. This may be the absolute best thing about living in Mexico; how welcoming the people are. Virtually everyone I have met since moving here has made an effort to make me feel welcome. It almost makes me ashamed to think how these same people would be treated if they visited my birth country.
• The culture and history of Mexico is truly amazing. There are so many incredible archaeological sites, museums, and cultural events and activities that one could spend a lifetime and never see them all. But, there is never a reason to be bored here. There is always something interesting to see or do.
• The beaches and beach resorts are truly world-class. Cancun, Cabo San Lucas, Playa del Carmen, Cozumal, Mazatlan, Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta; and these are just the best known. And if you live in Mexico, most of these are easy to get to via plane, car or even bus.

Those are just a few of the reasons why I love living in Mexico. I know I have advantages here that most people don’t. My wife is a Mexican citizen and that helps a great deal. Also, I work on-line for a U.S. company so I did not need to find a job here in Mexico. But, I know both U.S. and Canadian expats here who don’t have the advantages I have and they love living in Mexico as much as I do.

I think people often make judgments about a place based on things they have heard without any first-hand experience. Or, in the case of Mexico, they look at the areas along the U.S. border and judge the whole country based on the border towns. I would encourage any and everyone in the U.S. and elsewhere to spend some time in the real Mexico and experience this country for yourself before you make any judgments about it.

Overturning Roe v. Wade Was Just The Beginning

Click here for an article at Slate.com By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern entitled "Dobbs was Always just the Beginning," subtitled "A single judge could outlaw the abortion pill nationwide."

Judge-shopping -- the practice of searching for a district where you stand a good chance of having a friendly radical judge who will hear your case -- has led plaintiffs -- anti-abortion medical associations joined by anti-abortion doctors -- to bring a case in the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas, where they will be guaranteed to be heard by a federal judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed by Donald Trump in 2019.

Over the past 50 years, reproductive health care has undergone a dramatic shift: A majority of American patients now terminate their pregnancies with pills rather than by undergoing a procedure at a clinic. This makes good sense, as medication abortions are 18 times safer than childbirth, very reliable, and easy to access. In the 23 years since the FDA first approved the “abortion pill,” the agency has slowly loosened restrictions on prescriptions (though regulations remain irrationally stringent for the minimal risks of these pills). Meanwhile, a booming gray market for the medication has sprung up online following the end of Roe. Today, virtually anyone anywhere in the United States can order pills to their door, legally or otherwise. This infuriates anti-abortion activists who wanted to see this issue settled with the clinic closures and vigilante laws that followed S.B. 8 and Dobbs.

A two-drug abortion protocol was approved by the FDA in 2000.  The lawsuit seeks to roll back FDA approval of one of the two drugs, called mifeprostone. Many legal experts consider the case to be extremely weak, but that doesn't matter if the decision is made by a partisan judge determined to end abortion.

Lower courts have gone rogue in the past, but the likelihood of approval by SCOTUS has always been slim -- until the present 6-3 conservative court. Now there is no guarantee that an antiabortion case will be tossed by the Supremes, no matter how weak the case.

That brings us to the biggest problem of all. We will see more and more of these scandalously frivolous claims succeed precisely because the Supreme Court has changed so much, so quickly. Lower courts are racing to push the limits of law and daring the conservative justices to stop them. It is now obvious to all that five justices will gladly rewrite precedent without any warning or justification in a way that will upend long-settled expectations. That opens the door to a kind of nihilistic and perverse ingenuity that used to be scorned by the third branch.

The very weakness of this litigation—the lack of real standing, the blunderbuss attack on federal agencies, the extraordinary scope of the relief sought—are the seeds that have been planted by this newly constituted Supreme Court supermajority coming to fruition. The conservative justices have already brushed away standing requirements in order to weaken civil rights laws; severely weakened the EPA and the CDC; and let rogue judges seize power from the Biden administration. This conservative supermajority has used the shockwaves of recent reversal of precedent and dismantling of existing tests to lay the tracks for the next shocker.

Overturning Roe was not the terminal point in the decades-long journey to limit reproductive rights; it’s barely even the start. Maybe this is the moment in which we ask ourselves why so many of us are still surprised; why we are still caught off guard when a court arms alleged domestic abusers, or limits access to birth control, or—stay tuned—criminalizes medication abortion everywhere. The crisis here is not just that a federal judge could imminently ban an abortion drug that’s been used safely for 23 years. It’s that the chaos wrought by Dobbs means anything is possible, and no one—not even in the deepest blue states—can go to bed with any certainty that they will wake up with their rights intact. That is the legacy of today’s Supreme Court: No one can ever really know what new nightmares tomorrow will bring.

Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell have  poisoned the American judicial system for decades to come.