Prickly City by Scott Stantis for April 02, 2021

Maybe PayPal.

Only if you’re Matt Gaetz…..

https://www.rawstory.com/matt-gaetz-2651326023/

Stantis, shouldn’t you be pushing for more tax cuts for the rich?

How else are we going to achieve herd mentality?

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Republicans* are so precious when they ’splain economics.

We SHOULD be taxing the top 5% and corporations….

In the 4 years of the (cough) presidency of the egregious orange imbecile, deficits were the last thing the repukes were interested in!

Now they are front and centre!

Surprised? No!

Expected? Yes!

Predictable? Oh Yes!

Even if everybody could pay their share, the politicians would have a hell of a party before they divide it up and spend it.

We may be broke, but we’re armed and dangerous. Thanks, Republicans.

This is not like the joked-about ambitions of the previous administration’s many “infrastructure weeks.” In fact, although it provides for major new improvements to highways, mass transit, electric vehicle charging systems, water systems, the electric grid, research and development and key parts of our health system, it’s not just an infrastructure plan.

As Biden made clear through the name he gave this initiative, it is at its core a jobs plan. In his Pittsburgh speech unveiling it, he said Wall Street economists have estimated the program could generate up to 18 million new jobs.

It is not however, just a jobs plan. It is also a growth plan. Investing in infrastructure increases productivity and attracts additional investment. Economists with S&P estimated that Biden’s plans (including a $1 trillion American Families Plan he said he’d announce in a few weeks) could inject $5.7 trillion into the U.S. economy and raise per capita income by $2,400.Canceling out GOP tax cuts

The “American Jobs Plan” plan is very different from the big recent emergency relief packages we have seen, like the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. It spreads outlays over eight years, so annual spending associated with the program is under $300 billion a year.

An even more important difference is that Biden calls for his plan to be fully paid for with new tax revenues. He wants to raise corporate taxes to 28% from 21% and require companies to pay higher rates on earnings from overseas. He’d also end tax breaks for fossil fuel companies and intensify efforts to collect corporate taxes.

Further, the cost of many of the projects themselves will be defrayed by revenues from those projects.

Surprising no one, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already warned the president not to turn the program into “a massive effort to raise taxes on business ✁

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/04/01/biden-american-jobs-plan-infrastructure-week-no-joke-column/4820010001/

Once again…

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Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh admitted that Republican fear-mongering over the federal deficit under President Obama was “bogus,” while defending the deficit’s explosive rise to $1 trillion under President Trump.

During Limbaugh’s show on Tuesday, a caller suggested that Republicans should nominate a young fiscal conservative instead of Trump, citing the rising deficit. Limbaugh dismissed the concerns, declaring that fiscal conservatism was basically a sham all along.

“Republicans can nominate a young, potentially two-term president, one that believes in fiscal conservatism,” the caller told Limbaugh. “We’re gonna have — in 2019, there’s gonna be a $1 trillion deficit.

Trump doesn’t really care about that. He’s not really a fiscal conservative. We don’t, we have to acknowledge that Trump has been cruelly used.”

“Nobody is a fiscal conservative anymore,” Limbaugh shot back. “All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it’s been around.”

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https://www.salon.com/2019/07/19/rush-limbaugh-admits-gops-fiscal-attacks-on-obama-were-bogus-defends-trumps-deficit/

Now is this something only the government can do…?

Or is there a ‘business case’ to be made for eliminating unsecured weapons-grade uranium?

in Kazakhstan?

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✁ So you might have missed a news item from Kazakhstan: the elimination of the last weapons-grade uranium in that country. In a program jointly operated with the United States, Kazakh scientists ground 2.9 kilograms of highly enriched uranium into a fine powder.

They then mixed that powder with enough low-enriched uranium powder to render the whole batch useless for bomb-making.

And with that operation, Kazakhstan’s career as a nuclear state came to an end.

Your taxes covered the cost of much of that transition.

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The crack-up of the Soviet Union left behind a grim legacy of nuclear danger. The former Soviet arsenal was shared among four post-Soviet successor states: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.

Even before the Soviet collapse, the security of the arsenal had been poor by U.S. standards, for reasons explained by David Hoffman in his Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Soviet nuclear aftermath, The Dead Hand:

In Soviet times, the nuclear security system depended upon closed fences, closed borders, a closed society, as well as the surveillance and intimidation of everyone by the secret police …

People were under stricter control than the fissile materials. When the material was weighed or moved, it was tracked in handwritten entries in ledger books.

If material was lost, it was just left off the books, no one wanted to get in trouble for it. And factories would often deliberately keep some nuclear materials off the books, to make up for unforeseen shortfalls.

When the surveillance and intimidation stopped, much of that off-the-books material was stashed in tumbledown buildings sealed by padlocks that could be snipped by ordinary bolt cutters. ✁ ✁

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/the-quiet-end-of-kazakhstans-denuclearization-program/618424/

I can vaguely remember a college economics professor talking about the national debt in 1966/1970. His basic point was that it’s money we owe ourselves so don’t worry about it. I wasn’t even aware that I should have been worrying about it then and I really don’t give a short s@!t about it now.

Hey Scott, how much do each of. your kids owe on the home mortgage? You’re deficit spending them into the pour house.

We’ve covered this ad nauseum, but zombies need brains…

Krugman: Bidenomics Is as American as Apple Pie — Big spending on infrastructure goes back to the Erie Canal. There’s a reason Biden’s people put “made in America” in the title of their tax plan… the Trump tax cut wasn’t just a huge money-loser, it was badly designed in ways that actually encouraged corporations to invest abroad… In its broad outline, however, the plan represents a turn away from the free-market extremism that has ruled U.S. policy in recent years, back to an older tradition — the tradition that prevailed during America’s years of greatest economic success. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/opinion/biden-infrastructure.html

Clinton eliminated the deficit, then Bush 2.0 blew it up, Obama got it back under control, then Trump cut corporate taxes and the debt exploded, then he ignored covid and it got worse, Biden’s plan will invest in infrastructure that will make America more efficient and profitable, I am unconcerned with the debt as long as Democrats are in control, Republicans care nothing about paying our bills.

Huge national debt.

And yet, would be immigrants apparently prefer our situation to what they’re fleeing.

Anybody here want to trade your situation in the US for the situation they’re fleeing?

We’ve been crying about the national debt for at least since the 1970s, but we never do anything to back our crying… that includes several administrations from both major political parties – they both contributed to the size of this debt. I’m tired of Democrats who largely ignore the debt problem, but I am even more tired of Republicans who pretend that they never contribute to it while not paying it down when they have the White House and control of Congress.

The numbers being tossed around are mind boggling I am 89 yo and on my 15th President and I have survived all of them. I don’t know if I will hit number 16 but it has been one helluva ride. Absent Friends.

And most of our debt is used to loan out to folks all across America and around the world.

We borrow at insanely low rates, and then turn around and relend it to banks and other financial institutions who, in turn, relend it at ever increasing rates.

The US makes a TON of money off of our “debt”.

And we got nothing for it when the republicans gave billionaires 2 trillion in tax breaks.