Biden Is Planning an FDR-Size Presidency

Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux.

Driving from work this evening I heard part of an interview with  the director of a manufacturing association who discussed the harsh assessment of manufacturing CEO's who saw little demand - and therefore, hiring increases - through the end of 2020.  The other possible dead weight on the economy is that many pre-pandemic jobs may not come back or, if they do, will come back very slowly.  One of the things these CEO's thought would boost demand and employment was a major infrastructure initiative by the federal government, something Trump has bloviated about but which the Congressional Republicans have done nothing.  Now, with America's economy upended and the political game plan for November, 2020, similarly turned upside down, presumptive Democrat nominee, Joe Biden, has radically altered what he believes his presidency must do if he defeats Der Trumpenführer,  Rather than status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation, administration, Biden - correctly, in my view - believes that a FDR style presidency and policies and programs are needed to put America back on a solid economic footing. A very long piece in New York Magazine looks at Biden's evolution on what will need to be done.  Here are highlights:

[S]ometimes looking at the small lake abutting his backyard that bulges out from Little Mill Creek, {Joe Biden} the self-conscious man in the Democratic middle — mocked by the activist left throughout the primary campaign as hopelessly retrograde — considers the present calamity and plots a presidency that, by awful necessity, he believes must be more ambitious than FDR’s.
 The former vice-president carried the Democratic primary by relying on perceptions that he was an older, whiter, less world-historical (and less inspiring) Barack Obama — a steady hand who seemed more electable against a monstrous president than any of his competitors did. The heart of his pitch, when he delivered it clearly, was status quo ante, back to normal, restore the soul of the nation.
 But in the space of just a few months, COVID-19 and the disastrous White House response appeared to have dramatically widened Biden’s pathway to the presidency, making the matter of moderation and electability seem, at least for the time being, almost moot. They also changed his perception of what the country would need from a president in January 2021 — after not just four years of Trump but almost a full year of death and suffering. The pandemic is breaking the country much more deeply than the Great Recession did, Biden believes, and will require a much bigger response. No miraculous rebound is coming in the next six months.  Long before the pandemic, he described a range of actions he’d take on day one, from rejoining the Paris climate agreement to signing executive orders on ethics, and he cited other matters, like passing the Equality Act for LGBTQ protections, as top priorities. Already his recovery ambitions have grown to include plans that would flex the muscles of big government harder than any program in recent history. To date, the federal government has spent more than $2 trillion on the coronavirus stimulus — nearly three times what it approved in 2009. Biden wants more spending. “A hell of a lot bigger,” he’s said, “whatever it takes.” He has argued that, even if you’re inclined to worry about the deficit, massive public investment is the only thing capable of growing the economy enough “so the deficit doesn’t eat you alive.” He has talked about funding immense green enterprises and larger backstop proposals from cities and states and sending more relief checks to families. He has urged immediate increases in virus and serology testing, proposing the implementation of a Pandemic Testing Board in the style of FDR’s War Production Board and has called for investments in an “Apollo-like moonshot” for a vaccine and treatment. This is all only what he believes should be done now before he even ascends to the presidency; by then, he thinks, the country could be in a much darker hole than it is today, presumably requiring even more federal investment and intervention. David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and has been speaking with Biden regularly about the crisis, recently told me the former vice-president “understands that until we have a vaccine or a therapeutic entity that can be used as a preventative, the virus is still going to be with us and that we’re going to constantly be putting out mini-epidemics.” [W]hile 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. Trump accomplished one big-ticket priority: tax cuts. Obama managed two: the stimulus, with a filibusterproof 60-vote Senate majority, and, barely, Obama-care. While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people — desperate for relief — will have in January. Biden’s long platform has grown in recent months as the crisis has deepened. . . . Once he began talking about a coronavirus recovery, he also started signaling more immediate ambitions on climate, including in his multiple conversations with Washington governor Jay Inslee. “He’s totally understood the centrality of a clean-energy plan,” said Inslee. [O]ne morning in late April. . . . he said into the phone, it was time they expanded their thinking. Sure, massive gobs of federal financial help have already been approved — unlike in 2008, he pointed out — but that still won’t be enough. Not while the magnitude of this crisis dwarfs the last one. His advisers agreed: If they were going to talk about lessons from history, their future calls might as well dive into the Great Depression and World War II. Biden is also a lifelong Democrat who likes the view from the center of the party, enough to move rapidly to accommodate when it shifts, as it is doing now very quickly. He may look like a milquetoast moderate to the activist left and maybe even to you, but the party — and world — has changed so fast that even his primary platform puts him well to the left of Obama in 2008 and, in many ways, left of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Those close to him say he sees in the crisis an obvious window for action. “There is no denying that the challenges a President Biden would face in 2021 are different than anyone could have imagined six months ago given the economic and health consequences of the coronavirus,” Feldman, who has worked with Biden for nearly a decade, told me. “What I’ve heard the vice-president say over and over again is this crisis is shining a bright, bright light on so many systemic problems in our country, and so many inequities. It is exacerbating and shining a light on environmental-justice issues, racial inequalities, so many other problems.” Publicly, Biden has made no secret of his displeasure with Trump’s handling of the disaster, from his personal conduct — Biden has said the delay in distributing relief checks in order to print Trump’s name on them “bothered me the most” — to the administration’s failure to ensure small businesses access to relief funds while state unemployment systems were overwhelmed. The crisis, Biden believes, has expanded “the state of what is possible, now that the American people have seen both the role of government and the role of frontline workers,” said Sullivan. “He believes he has a more compelling case to make that this is the agenda that needs to get passed.” Outwardly, at least, Biden appears sensitive to the concerns of progressives. “He has said this is the second time in 12 years that the American taxpayers have bailed out American business,” Sullivan told me. The implication is that Biden has run out of patience. “That’s fine, we should do it and protect our economy — but he believes we have to ask our private sector to take on greater responsibility and accountability.”

Biden has talked openly, and seriously, about the notion of rolling out certain Cabinet picks before he is elected as a way of giving voters a sense of what to expect and to hit the ground running when he takes office. And he has already begun early-stage thoughts about not just top appointments but sub-Cabinet posts and the broader shape of his government. [H]e’s spent plenty of his time out of the spotlight weighing his vice-presidential options, conscious that he may effectively be picking his replacement and therefore sending an important signal about his wishes for Democrats’ future. His list of top contenders has long been thought to include Harris, Klobuchar, Whitmer, and Warren, as well as Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. As the lockdown has dragged on, Biden has insisted his pick be ideologically “simpatico” (once thought to be a point against Warren, though less so amid this crisis), and he has hardened his belief that she must be prepared to take over from their first day in office. That point — which Obama has echoed in their conversations — is read by some in Biden’s circles as a potential knock against Abrams, who has never held statewide elected office, and some members of Congress who’ve been floated.

With the pandemic likely lingering through the end of the year, the prospect of four more years of Trump's mismanagement and the GOP effort to restore the Gilded Age ought to terrify most Americans - or at least those not totally blinded by racism and religious extremism. 

America's Self-Destructive Pursuit of Global Dominance.

A carrier battle group.

One of the books that I am currently reading - I typically read several at a time and rotate what I read based on mood and available time - is "Mortal Republic" which traces the gradual fall of the Roman Republic into a autocracy under emperors.  Some of the political parallels to what is happening in America currently are chilling such as the refusal of some factions to compromise (mostly Republicans) and the increasing attacks on political and social policy opponents and efforts to stir hatred and even potential violence against political opponents.  The other stark parallel is America's pursuit of global dominance that directed disproportionate funding and resources to never ending wars. Yes, Rome brought back treasure from conquests (often shared only by the wealthy), but over time, the financial drain took a severe toll and pushed the common Roman to no longer feel that the empire offered them anything worthwhile to support.  A column in the New York Times looks at America's current financial mismanagement that neglects domestic spending and infrastructure while seeking to maintain a defacto modern day empire (note the amount of Middle East war costs and then think what $6 trillion invested in America's infrastructure and citizens could have done).  Here are highlights:

“We have got to put an end to endless war,” declared Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., during the Democratic presidential primary debate on Thursday. It was a surefire applause line: Many people consider “endless war” to be the central problem for American foreign policy.

But vowing to end America’s interminable military adventures doesn’t make it so. Four years ago, President Barack Obama denounced “the idea of endless war” even as he announced that ground troops would remain in Afghanistan. In his last year in office, the United States dropped an estimated 26,172 bombs on seven countries.

President Trump, despite criticizing Middle East wars, has intensified existing interventions and threatened to start new ones. He has abetted the Saudi-led war in Yemen, in defiance of Congress. He has put America perpetually on the brink with Iran. And he has lavished billions extra on a Pentagon that already outspends the world’s seven next largest militaries combined.

What would it mean to actually bring endless war to a close?

Like the demand to tame the 1 percent, or the insistence that black lives matter, ending endless war sounds commonsensical but its implications are transformational. It requires more than bringing ground troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do what they most resist: end America’s commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.

In theory, armed supremacy could foster peace. Facing overwhelming force, who would dare to defy American wishes? That was the hope of Pentagon planners in 1992; they reacted to the collapse of America’s Cold War adversary not by pulling back but by pursuing even greater military pre-eminence. But the quarter-century that followed showed the opposite to prevail in practice. Freed from one big enemy, the United States found many smaller enemies: It has launched far more military interventions since the Cold War than during the “twilight struggle” itself. Of all its interventions since 1946, roughly 80 percent have taken place after 1991.

The basic cause is America’s infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.

In the Middle East, endless war began when the United States first stationed troops permanently in the region after winning the Persian Gulf war in 1991. A circular logic took hold. The United States created its own dependence on allies that hosted and assisted American forces. It provoked states, terrorists and militias that opposed its presence. Among the results: The United States has bombed Iraq almost every year since 1991 and spent an estimated $6 trillion on post-9/11 wars.

An even deadlier phase may be dawning. Because the United States pursues armed dominance as a self-evident good, the establishment feels threatened by a rising China and an assertive Russia. . . . China’s rise invalidates primacy’s rationale of deterrence, and shows that other powers have ambitions of their own. Addressing the rise of China responsibly will require abandoning nostalgia for the pre-eminence that America enjoyed during the 1990s.

Despite Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that “our military dominance must be unquestioned” — even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in itself.

In the 21st century, finally rid of colonial empires and Cold War antagonism, America has the opportunity to practice responsible statecraft, directed toward the promotion of peace. Responsible statecraft will oppose the war-making of others, but it will make sure, first and foremost, that America is not fueling violence.

On its own initiative, the United States can proudly bring home many of its soldiers currently serving in 800 bases ringing the globe, leaving small forces to protect commercial sea lanes. It can reorient its military, prioritizing deterrence and defense over power projection. It can stop the obscenity that America sends more weapons into the world than does any other country. It can reserve armed intervention, and warlike sanctions, for purposes that are essential, legal and rare.

Shrinking the military’s footprint will deprive presidents of the temptation to answer every problem with a violent solution. It will enable genuine engagement in the world, making diplomacy more effective, not less.

Hawks will retort that lowering America’s military profile will plunge the world into a hostile power’s arms. They are projecting, assuming that one rival will covet and attain the kind of armed domination that has served America poorly. Russia, with an economy the size of Italy’s, cannot rule Europe, whatever it desires. China bears watching but has so far focused its military on denying access to its coasts and mainland. It is a long way from undertaking a costly bid for primacy in East Asia, let alone the world.

In any case, local states are likely to step up if the American military pulls back. The world conjured by the Washington establishment is an empty space, a “power vacuum,” waiting passively to be led. The real world is full of people ready to safeguard their freedom. Today a world with less American militarism is likely to have less militarism in general.

After decades of unilateral actions, crowned by the aggressive invasion of Iraq, it is U.S. military power that threatens international law and order. Rules should strengthen through cooperation, not wither through imposition.

In truth, the largest obstacle to ending endless war is self-imposed. Long told that the United States is the world’s “indispensable nation,” the American people have been denied a choice and have almost stopped demanding one. A global superpower — waging endless war — is just “who we are.”

America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” Secretary of State John Quincy Adams said in 1821. “She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

Two centuries later, in the age of Trump, endless war has come home. Cease this folly, and America can begin to take responsibility in the world and reclaim its civic peace.

John Quincy Adams was far more prescient than he perhaps ever realized.

More Storms and Rising Seas: Which U.S. Cities Should Be Saved First?

Flooding area in Norfolk, VA.

While the Trump/Pence regime continues to insist that climate change is not real and, worse yet, is undoing Obama era policies and regulations that sought to slow global warming, communities and those living on the coast can see first hand that the sea levels are rising. Here in Southeast Virginia, every community south/southeast of Williamsburg has areas threatened by rising sea levels and most have not seriously begun to face the financial burden that will be involved to build sea walls and other infrastructure modifications.  As the New York Times reports, the potential partial cost the Virginia Beach is $1.7 billion.  Meanwhile, the city of Norfolk (estimated to need 69 miles of sea walls) is devising a plan where neighborhoods could establish themselves as special tax districts to raise funds to make the needed improvements to face rising waters. The overall problem is staggering and Republicans sticking their heads in the sand is not a solution. Small communities could potentially cease to exist in the future.  For the city of Hampton, the price tag for 68 miles of sea walls is $642.9 million - the fourth most costly in Virginia (look up your city here).  Here are highlights from the Times article:

WASHINGTON — As disaster costs keep rising nationwide, a troubling new debate has become urgent: If there’s not enough money to protect every coastal community from the effects of human-caused global warming, how should we decide which ones to save first?

After three years of brutal flooding and hurricanes in the United States, there is growing consensus among policymakers and scientists that coastal areas will require significant spending to ride out future storms and rising sea levels — not in decades, but now and in the very near future. There is also a growing realization that some communities, even sizable ones, will be left behind.

By 2040, simply providing basic storm-surge protection in the form of sea walls for all coastal cities with more than 25,000 residents will require at least $42 billion, according to new estimates from the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy group. Expanding the list to include communities smaller than 25,000 people would increase that cost to more than $400 billion.

“Once you get into it, you realize we’re just not going to protect a lot of these places,” said Richard Wiles, executive director of the group, which wants oil and gas companies to pay some of the cost of climate adaptation. “This is the next wave of climate denial — denying the costs that we’re all facing.”

The research is limited in that it considers only sea walls, and not other methods for minimizing flood risk that may be more practical in some places, such as moving homes and shops away from the most flood-prone areas. The figures also don’t include the additional and costlier steps that will be required even with sea walls, such as revamping sewers, storm water and drinking water infrastructure.

Still, the data provides a powerful financial measuring stick for the tough decisions that countless communities — large and small — are starting to confront.

The cities that are quick to adapt to climate risks “are going to attract the jobs and the factories of the future,” said Eric Smith, president and chief executive officer for the Americas at Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. “There’s going to be communities that I think will be left way, way behind.”
 The new research identifies 241 cities of 25,000 people or more that will require at least $10 million worth of sea walls by 2040 just to protect against a typical annual storm.

Total cost of adding sea walls1. Jacksonville, Fla. $3.5 billion2. New York City $2.0 billion3. Virginia Beach $1.7 billion4. Galveston, Tex. $1.1 billion5. Charleston, S.C. $1.0 billion6. Tampa, Fla. $938.4 million7. Barnstable Town, Mass. $889.2 million8. Corpus Christi, Tex. $861.1 million9. St. Petersburg, Fla. $751.4 million10. New Orleans $725.1 million

Many cities, especially small ones, will not be able to meet the costs facing them.  Those that can’t will depend on federal funding. . . . So experts have proposed ways of focusing federal money where it can do the most good — even if that means some places are left out.

One approach would be for the federal government to spend the money based simply on where it would most reduce the future cost of damages, according to Craig Fugate, who ran FEMA during the Obama administration.

He acknowledged that Congress would probably object to that approach, since it would likely mean FEMA would concentrate its resilient-infrastructure funds in just a handful of states.
 Another option would be for the federal government to distribute climate protection money based on a city’s property value, its historical and cultural importance, and how much it contributes to the national economy, said Harriet Tregoning, who was in charge of the housing department’s Office of Community Planning and Development during the Obama administration.

Cities could increase their chances of getting money by reducing their exposure to disasters, perhaps by retrofitting their buildings, implementing aggressive building codes and zoning restrictions, and helping residents leave the most vulnerable neighborhoods, Ms. Tregoning said. And there could be extra points for cities that take in people forced to flee other parts of the country.

Mr. Smith, of Swiss Re, said that cities should take responsibility for protecting themselves from the rising toll of disasters, rather than waiting for the federal government.

In his view, the chief obstacle is the refusal by some local officials to acknowledge what is happening. “The challenge is, we’re fighting about whether or not there’s climate change,” Mr. Smith said. “They don’t want to embrace what’s right in front of us.”

Virginia Republicans have been denying for years what is actually happening choosing to use the euphemism "repetitive flooding" rather than admit sea level rise.

Mid-West Flooding: Climate Change Meets a Degraded Infrastructure

The Mid-West remains a bastion for Trump and the Republican Party yet now, the failed policies of the Trump/Pence regime and the GOP are coming home to roost.  Years of inadequate infrastructure spending and denial that climate change is real is colliding head on with some of the worse flooding ever and the aging and sporadically repaired levees are failing in record numbers. The GOP aversion for taxes ignores the reality that infrastructure such as roads and in this case levees, do not miraculously spring out of nowhere and that taxes are needed for the same. Go to France or the UK and you see far better maintained roads and public transit.  They pay more in taxes, but they get something in return (and that doesn't even consider their far better healthcare delivery for the majority of the population, not just the wealthy).  A piece in the New York Times looks at the ongoing disaster in large parts of the Mid-West. One can only wonder what botched disaster relief Trump/Pence will deliver and when voters will wake up to the reality that allowing their votes to be swayed bu appeals to racism and hate is actually against their own economic interest.  Here are article excerpts: 

On the river-specked Midwestern prairie, the thousands of miles of levees are an insurance policy against nature’s whims that, at their best, keep cropland and towns dry, floodwaters at bay and the agriculture-driven economy churning. But the levees are aging, subject to uneven regulation and, in many cases, never designed to withstand the river levels seen in the last decade. 

Many of the levees, usually earthen and topped with grass, were built by farmers decades ago and are now managed by a patchwork of local government agencies known as levee districts that often do not coordinate or even follow the same rules. With increased flooding in the past few years, the levees are being tested more frequently than ever before, straining the finances and expertise of some of those districts. The levee situation has become so grave that the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country’s levee system a D grade in 2017, suggesting $80 billion in investment over 10 years. According to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees infrastructure on the Missouri River and some of its tributaries, at least 62 levees had been breached or overtopped in the Midwest in March, and hundreds of miles of levees had sustained damage.

“Our levees are big and they’re good,” Mr. Ideker said, but they were no match for this new normal. “Every event seems like it’s higher. It’s higher water. You build the levee higher. And the next time you build it higher. You can’t keep up with it.”

The situation has been exacerbated by wetter rainstorms, which are expected to worsen over time and have been attributed to climate change.

“There are layers that come together when big events like this happen — it’s never just one thing,” said Barbara Mayes Boustead, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service who contributed to a 2018 federal report on climate change.

“We’re seeing more water in the river, but we haven’t improved the infrastructure,” said Mr. Waters, who farms along the Missouri River east of Kansas City, Mo. “Basically, when it comes to levees and flood control protection, we’re still driving on gravel roads and we’re trying to handle interstate traffic.”

But building ever-higher levees is not a panacea: Keeping water out of one area only means it will go somewhere else.

In the early 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers and towns along the Mississippi River followed a “levees only” policy that meant building higher and higher walls, leaving the river no way to release its power. That strategy failed spectacularly in the Great Flood of 1927, which inundated 27,000 square miles and displaced one million people. In the aftermath, officials built a more complex Mississippi River system that included a network of spillways and flood ways, as well as other tools, along with the levees.

In the areas hardest hit this past month, where levees are shredded and livelihoods shattered, many blame the Corps. In recent weeks, politicians from some of the flooded states have become vocal critics of the river management plan and called for the prioritization of flood control.

The devastation to the levees has left much of the Midwest with nothing to hold back the waters from even a relatively minor flood, which forecasters have warned is possible in the weeks ahead. As water recedes, at least for the moment, and the conversation shifts to recovery, many in the river bottom said they planned to stay and rebuild, hopeful that policies might change. Others said these levee breaks were probably their last.

“It’s not that I don’t want to be here,” said Rhonda Hunziger, the mayor of Craig, Mo., population 230, where residents piled sandbags through the night in a spirited but futile attempt to save their town from the Missouri River after surrounding levees burst.

Depending on what the insurance company decided, Ms. Hunziger said this could be the flood that forced her to higher ground. “I have lived with floods my whole life,” she said while staring out at the brown-hued water covering her nearly empty town. “And I am about ready to get off the bottom.”

Trump's Utterly Irresponsible Budget

For all eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, Republicans whined and moaned about budget deficits yet now between the Trump tax cuts and the budget deal put in place last week, the federal deficit will explode.  Now, making matters worse, Der Trumpenführer has proposed a budget and an infrastructure plan that would savage domestic programs that literally keep many alive, sell of federal properties to rapacious private interests, and cripple states with infrastructure spending.  Meanwhile, the wealthy get richer and richer.  And under public/private infrastructure programs, corporate interest rape much of the public. Locally, the Elizabeth River Tunnels project - a legacy of the McDonnell administration - has shown just how greedy private interests can be as the poor and working class find themselves burdened with crush tolls and penalties that they will never be able to payoff.  Making matters worse, the Commonwealth of Virginia is criminalizing these financially desperate people by refusing to renew auto registrations and subjecting the financially stressed to criminal fines.  One can only speculate the ugliness of such a program taken nationwide.  America seems headed toward a banana republic status save for having a huge military.  An editorial in the Washington Post looks at the troubling picture.  Here are excerpts:  

FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY is the hallmark of populist governance. Whether ideologically left-wing (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela), right-wing (Juan Perón of Argentina) or in between, populists promise prosperity, dismiss trade-offs as so much elitist naysaying and spend their nations’ savings to make FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY is the hallmark of populist governance. Whether ideologically left-wing (Hugo Chávez in Venezuela), right-wing (Juan Perón of Argentina) or in between, populists promise prosperity, dismiss trade-offs as so much elitist naysaying and spend their nations’ savings to make it happen — at least temporarily. The hangover, economic and political, is always painful.

President Trump’s fiscal record so far is very much in the reckless spirit of such erstwhile Latin American strongmen . . . . no nation can defy the laws of fiscal gravity forever; and the president’s own budget planfor fiscal 2019, issued Monday, demonstrates how the margin for financial error is rapidly diminishing.

Thanks to policies pursued by Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress — a massive tax cut, followed last week by legislation to increase federal spending by about $300 billion over the next two years — it has become impossible for the president to forecast a balanced budget by 2027, as he did last year. Instead, it is projected the deficit would still equal more than 1 percent of total economic output in that year, having swollen well above 4 percent in each year of Mr. Trump’s first term. Even those numbers are wildly optimistic, because his budget proposal assumes, unrealistically, that economic output will expand at about a 2.9 percent annual rate over the next decade and that Congress will reduce non-defense discretionary spending 40 percent in the same period, with programs for low-income people bearing most of the cuts.

[W]ith the economy running at or near full employment, a prudent government would stop priming the pump with tax cuts and spending increases and begin adopting long-term fixes to entitlement programs that drive long-term debt. Every dollar Mr. Trump adds to the debt amid today’s prosperity makes it that much more difficult for a future government to respond to future recessions, wars or natural disasters.

[W]hat we have is the antithesis of functional government, if functional government is defined as the establishment of clear public priorities, combined with reasonable measures to fund them. 

What is most telling to me is that the vast majority of evangelical Christians continue to support Trump even as his policies demonstrate that he views the poor and needy elderly as little more than disposable garbage that should be left to die.  What we are seeing is also the antithesis of the Gospel message that the Republican base bloviates about and then disregards.  

Vladimir Putin - Investor of the Year

Donald Trump - or Der Trumpenführer, if you prefer since I will never use the title "president" in conjunction with his name - continually boasts about the record high stock market and how well investors have done over the last eleven months.  He, of course, ignores the way the market had been soaring under Barack Obama and the role that Obama played in setting the stage for future market increases.  And as foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, points out, Forbes or some other financial publication will likely be naming an "investor of the year" for 2017.  But the man who has likely reaped the biggest return on his investment made in 2016 and into 2017 is likely Vladimir Putin.  Putin, who has an ego as big as Trump's, and who views himself as Russia's new Tsar, wants to return Russia to its lost glory days on the international arena and to check America's power.  For his investment in meddling in the 2016 presidential election (by some estimates it was a paltry investment of $500,000), Putin has seen America diminished on the global stage and torn asunder domestically by Trump and the GOP Congress who seem obsessed with plundering the nation environmentally and financially to benefit 1% of the population.  None of this will make America great again.  Here are highlights from Friedman's column:

At the end of this banner stock market year, you can bet that major business publications will be naming their investor of the year. You can stop now. I have the winner, and nobody is even close when it comes to his total return on investment: Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.

A recent report in The Washington Post, quoting intelligence sources, said Putin may have spent less than $500,000 to hack our last election and help (though Hillary helped much more) Donald Trump become president. And Putin’s payoff is Trump’s first year: a president who is simultaneously eroding some of our most basic norms, undermining some of our most cherished institutions and enacting a mammoth tax bill that will not make America great again.

If you assume, as I do, that Putin wants to see an America that is not an attractive model for his own people or others to emulate, and that he wants an America run by a chaos president who cannot lead the West, then Trump is his dream come true, whether or not there was any collusion between them.

Just do the math:

On norms, we’ve grown numb to a president who misleads or outright lies every day. Different newspapers measure this differently. The Washington Post says Trump has averaged 5.5 false or misleading claims every day in office, putting him on pace for 1,999 in his first year. According to The Times, Barack Obama told 18 “distinct falsehoods” over his entire eight-year presidency, while Trump, in his first 10 months in office, “has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly.”

[I]t’s chilling to imagine what four years and 8,000 lies or misleading statements from Trump will do to trust in government in America — and how deeply that will filter into society, giving permission to anyone and everyone to lie with impunity.

In terms of institutions, Trump has personally disparaged the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department. His head of the Environmental Protection Agency has turned the E.P.A. over to the fossil fuel industry. Ditto at Interior. His I.R.S. is being starved of funding to do its job. And his secretary of state is gutting the State Department, shedding our most experienced diplomats and replacing them with … no one.

The Treasury secretary’s economic “analysis” of the G.O.P. tax bill consisted of a one-page — fewer than 500 words — assessment, claiming that the $1.5 trillion plan would more than pay for itself, assuming a whole set of perfect circumstances come true. Your kid’s third-grade book report was longer than the Treasury’s analysis of our biggest tax overhaul in 30 years.

And then there’s the future: Putin never could have dreamed up this deformed Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, but it is precisely how you don’t make America great again. . . . .

First, we’ve always educated our citizens up to and beyond whatever the main technology of the day was — when it was the cotton gin, that meant universal primary education; when it was the factory, that meant universal high school; and now that it is the computer and artificial intelligence, it should be some form of postsecondary education for all — and then lifelong learning. . . . . Instead, this bill will spend money preserving unfair tax breaks for hedge fund billionaires and shrinking the inheritance tax on their heirs.

Second, we invested in the best infrastructure — roads, rail, ports, airports, telecom. This tax bill not only makes no provision for that, it actually erodes such investments in many states.

Third, we had the best rules to incentivize risk-taking and to prevent recklessness. I am all for cutting corporate taxes — and payroll taxes — but I’d offset them with a carbon tax that would simultaneously combat climate change and stimulate renewable energy, the next great global industry, to make us more resilient and innovative. It never occurred to Trump.  Trump and his allies actually tried to get rid of all the regulatory subsidies to stimulate wind, solar and electric car production . . . .

On health care regulations, though, the whole G.O.P. bought into Trump’s nonsense, eliminating the Obamacare requirement that all individuals buy health insurance. It means we are returning to socialized medicine. Now lots of healthy young people, and others, will forgo health care, and when they get sick, they’ll go to hospital emergency wards to get treated — and those of us with health insurance will pay for their care through higher premiums or higher hospital bills. That’s called socialism.

Fourth, we had, in the last century, the most open immigration policy to attract the most high-I.Q. risk-takers, the people who often start new business, as well as high-energy lower-skilled workers. I don’t have to tell you where Trump is on that.

Fifth, we had the most government-funded research to push out the boundaries of science so our companies could pluck the best ideas — witness the internet and GPS — to start new industries. The surge in the deficit created by this tax bill will curtail precisely such research.

So there you have it: a tax “reform” bill that defies all five principles that made us great for two and half centuries.

Even Putin surely could not have imagined that Trump would be this foolish and the G.O.P. this cynical. It’s just the extra dollop of caviar on Vladimir’s Christmas blini.

Oklahoma Tried the GOP’s Tax Plan. Now, It’s Electing Democrats.

Congressional Republicans are strive to pass on a national level what Oklahoma Republicans tried a few years ago with disastrous results (Kansas likewise used this template with equally horrific results).  Here in Virginia Ed Gillespie's attempt to do the same thing as in Oklahoma and Kansas went down in flames when he lost by 9% to Democrat Ralph Northam.  Apparently, Virginians are smarter than their countrymen/women in the Mid-West. What is telling about Congressional Republicans is that they care nothing about how the Oklahoma and Oklahoma tax cuts for the rich combined with slashing spending on education and social programs (i) nearly bankrupted the states and (ii) seems to have Oklahomans now electing Democrats.  It would seem that the only thing that counts with Republicans is giving huge tax cuts to the very wealthy and large corporations while they can.  The long term consequences be damned.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Oklahoma example.  Here are highlights:

The backlash to the Republican tax agenda is already getting Democrats elected — in Oklahoma. On Tuesday night, 26-year-old mental-health counselor Allison Ikley-Freeman won election to the Sooner State’s Senate, in a district that backed Donald Trump by 40 points last November.

Ikley-Freeman did not win on the strength of her fundraising or political experience. She boasted little of the former and none of the latter. But like the three other Oklahoma Democrats who have evicted Republicans from state-house seats this year, Ikley-Freeman enjoyed one decisive advantage: She bore no responsibility for the regressive tax policies that had left the state in fiscal ruin.

Oklahoma was a low-tax state even before the 2010 GOP wave crashed over it. But tea-party Republican governor Mary Fallin and her conservative allies weren’t content with the low baseline they’d inherited. Like President Trump and congressional Republicans, Fallin believed that cutting taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses was the way to grow an economy, no matter what level those taxes were currently at, or how novel circumstances might change the government’s budgetary needs.

So, when global oil prices crashed in 2014, and took Oklahoma’s budget down with them, Fallin was unfazed. Faced with giant, annual revenue shortfalls, the governor didn’t just refuse to raise taxes — she cut them even further. Last year, the Sooner State found itself with a $1.3 billion budget gap — and Fallin responded by implementing a $147 million tax cut for Oklahoma’s highest earners, and preserving a $470 million tax break for oil companies that start new horizontal wells.

Instead of asking wealthy citizens and businesses to pay a bit more (or, in the former case, to pay as much as they had been previously), Fallin decided to strip resources from the state’s beleaguered public-school system. Between 2008 and 2015, Oklahoma had slashed its per-student education spending by 23.6 percent, more than any other state in the country. But Republicans felt there was still more fat to cut: While rich Sooners collected their tax breaks, Oklahoma schools suffered a 16.5 percent funding cut in the latter half of 2016. Many of the state’s school districts now make due with four-day weeks. Others struggle to find competent teachers, as the state’s refusal to pay competitive salaries has chased talented educators out of state or into other professions. Oklahoma’s health-care and criminal-justice systems are plagued by similarly draconian cuts. Bridges in the state are literally crumbling. Potholes litter roads.

But even this austerity has not been nearly enough to plug the state’s budget holes. Fallin and the GOP have become reliant on raiding emergency reserves to make up the rest. This has left Oklahoma profoundly vulnerable to the next recession.

This week, Republicans in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives passed an emergency budget bill in a special session. The legislation does increase taxes on oil production. But instead of raising taxes on the wealthy, or ending the state’s exemption for capital gains — as Oklahoma Democrats had proposed — Republicans opted to cut $60 million from state agencies, and drain another few million dollars from the state’s rainy-day funds.

Oklahoma’s overwhelmingly Republican voters do not like this idea. As polling by the (left-leaning) Oklahoma Policy Institute demonstrates, there is no majoritarian support for gutting public schools, so as to let rich people pay low taxes, even in the heart of red America.

That poll also found 74 percent of Oklahomans saying that increasing teacher pay should be a major priority for their government — and 64 percent saying that expanding health-care access should be one — compared to just 38 percent who said the same about “lowering taxes.” This goes a ways toward explaining why Democrats keep winning special elections in the state. . . . Now, the discrepancy between the GOP’s fiscal priorities, and its voters’ material needs, has become stark enough to challenge partisan loyalties.

In Washington, Republicans are working hard to make Oklahoma’s experience a national one. On Thursday, the House passed multitrillion-dollar tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy, even as exigent circumstances — among them, increasingly frequent hurricanes, the decay of long-neglected infrastructure, a drug-overdose epidemic, and the retirement of the baby-boomers — are making it more expensive for the federal government to meet its basic obligations to the American people.

[L]ike Kansas and Louisiana before it, Oklahoma has demonstrated that the Republican Party’s prescription for prosperity is a snake-oil tonic with life-threatening side effects.

And when “conservative” voters see what the trade-offs of small government actually are — bigger McMansions for the elite, four-day school weeks for the rabble — they start longing for a new deal.

Congressional Republicans don’t seem the least bit concerned by the abject failure of their economic model in these states.  A Quinnipiac poll released this week found that only 16 percent of Americans believe President Trump’s tax plan will lower their taxes, while 59 percent say the plan will favor the wealthy over the middle class. These are shocking figures given how much money Republicans and conservative outside groups have devoted to propaganda for their bill.

Republican voters in deep-red states like Oklahoma may cling to their partisan identities tighter than most. But they also know the true costs of the GOP’s economic orthodoxy on a more visceral level than other Americans do. On Tuesday, that knowledge helped a 26-year-old, lesbian Democrat win a seat in the Oklahoma Senate. Someday, it just might turn large swathes of the American heartland purple — if Democratic donors decide to spend a bit less on pointless, pro-impeachment ad campaigns, and a lot more on liberating red states from reactionary rule.

Trumpism and the Ugliness of Today's GOP

As I have often noted, I was once a Republican back in the days before the ascendancy of the Christofascists and the white supremacists (the two generally go hand in hand) within the Republican Party.  Indeed, in May of 1999, near the end of my membership in the GOP, I even handled the incorporation of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach at the request of the then moderate City Committee chair who was later ousted by a coup by the hard right.  Since that time the Republican Party at both the state and national level has continued its descent into ugliness and misogyny.   The only true principles of the party now are trashing the environment, attacking the rights of those its base deems "other" - gays and Muslims being two favorite bogeymen - and concocting schemes to shift wealth from the poor and working/middle class to the most wealthy individuals and the nation's large corporations.  Things that were once too reprehensible to say in public discourse even if one thought them in private are now mainstream in the GOP and there seems to be no limit to how low things will go.  The election of Der  Trumpenführer is the culmination of years of malignancy and, despite the media's efforts to depict economic worry as  the motivating factor for Trump voters, the truth is something much uglier.  An op-ed in the New York Times describes the sickness and the party's leader well.  Here are excerpts:

This week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew that already.

In fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Mr. Trump’s defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about both the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his ramblings about infrastructure and trade.

First, however, here’s a question: How much difference has it made, really, that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the White House?

The Trump administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled; whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting. Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues in a sultan’s seraglio than policy formulation in a republic. And then there are those tweets.

Yet Mr. Trump’s first great policy and political debacle — the ignominious collapse of the effort to kill Obamacare — owed almost nothing to executive dysfunction. . . . . it failed because Republicans have been lying about health care for eight years. So when the time came to propose something real, all they could offer were various ways to package mass loss of coverage.

Similar considerations apply on other fronts. Tax reform looks like a bust, not because the Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing (although it doesn’t), but because nobody in the G.O.P. ever put in the hard work of figuring out what should change and how to sell those changes.

[G]iven what we heard in the interview — basically incoherent word salad mixed with random remarks about transportation in Queens — it’s clear that the administration has no actual infrastructure plan, and probably never will.

True, there are some places where Mr. Trump does seem likely to have a big impact — most notably, in crippling environmental policy. But that’s what any Republican would have done; climate change denialism and the belief that our air and water are too clean are mainstream positions in the modern G.O.P.

[W]hat Trumpism has brought is a new sense of empowerment to the ugliest aspects of American politics.

By now there’s a whole genre of media portraits of working-class Trump supporters (there are even parody versions). You know what I mean: interviews with down-on-their-luck rural whites who are troubled to learn that all those liberals who warned them that they would be hurt by Trump policies were right, but still support Mr. Trump, because they believe that liberal elites look down on them and think they’re stupid. Hmm.

Trump gives outright, unapologetic voice to racism, sexism, contempt for “losers” and so on — feelings that have always been an important source of conservative support, but have long been things you weren’t supposed to talk about openly. . . . Fox News in general, and Mr. O’Reilly in particular, is that they provide a safe space for people who want an affirmation that their uglier impulses are, in fact, justified and perfectly O.K. And one way to think about the Trump White House is that it’s attempting to expand that safe space to include the nation as a whole.

And the big question about Trumpism — bigger, arguably, than the legislative agenda — is whether unapologetic ugliness is a winning political strategy.

The Right Way to Resist Trump

Like many, I feel physically sickened at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency and the parade of horrors likely to be unleashed on the country and which will be disproportionately targeted at minorities, including the LGBT community.  So how does one resist other than simply adhering to the mantra of #NotMyPresident?  An op-ed in the New York Times suggests that non-stop obstruction by Democrats could well prove counter productive and looks at the experience of Italy and Silvio Berlusconi, a man cut out of the same cloth as Mr. Trump.  The piece suggest that Democrats need to work where possible with Trump - e.g., rebuilding infrastructure and/or Wall Street regulation - while opposing toxic policies based on principled positions rather than merely attacking Trump personally.  Like Berlusconi, Trump will quickly provide all kinds of scandals for the media to pounce on, but by making arguments on policies that will harm the working and middle classes is how to win over voters.  Here are column highlights:

Five years ago, I warned about the risk of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Most people laughed. They thought it inconceivable.

I was not particularly prescient; I come from Italy, and I had already seen this movie, starring Silvio Berlusconi, who led the Italian government as prime minister for a total of nine years between 1994 and 2011. I knew how it could unfold.

Now that Mr. Trump has been elected president, the Berlusconi parallel could offer an important lesson in how to avoid transforming a razor-thin victory into a two-decade affair. If you think presidential term limits and Mr. Trump’s age could save the country from that fate, think again. His tenure could easily turn into a Trump dynasty.

Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different.

Unfortunately, the dynamic has not ended with the election. Shortly after Mr. Trump gave his acceptance speech, protests sprang up all over America. What are these people protesting against? Whether we like it or not, Mr. Trump won legitimately.

These protests are also counterproductive. There will be plenty of reasons to complain during the Trump presidency, when really awful decisions are made. Why complain now, when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes the future protests and exposes the bias of the opposition.

Even the petition calling for members of the Electoral College to violate their mandate and not vote for Mr. Trump could play into the president-elect’s hands.

The Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.

The Democratic Party should learn this lesson. It should not do as the Republicans did after President Obama was elected. Their preconceived opposition to any of his initiatives poisoned the Washington well, fueling the anti-establishment reaction (even if it was a successful electoral strategy for the party). There are plenty of Trump proposals that Democrats can agree with, like new infrastructure investments.  . . . . Some details might be different from a Republican plan, but it will add credibility to the Democratic opposition if it tries to find the points in common, not just differences.

And an opposition focused on personality would crown Mr. Trump as the people’s leader of the fight against the Washington caste.

Democrats should also offer Mr. Trump help against the Republican establishment, an offer that would reveal whether his populism is empty language or a real position. For example, with Mr. Trump’s encouragement, the Republican platform called for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate investment and commercial banking. The Democrats should declare their support of this separation, a policy that many Republicans oppose.

Finally, the Democratic Party should also find a credible candidate among young leaders, one outside the party’s Brahmins. The news that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for office is the worst possible. If the Democratic Party is turning into a monarchy, how can it fight the autocratic tendencies in Mr. Trump?