Trump's Big CON: He Loves Welfare, For Corporations (The Wisconsin Foxconn Jobs CON, CONt.)

UPDATE:  "Before the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn pledged to spend $10 billion and create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, the company made a similar promise in Brazil.

At a news conference in Brazil, Foxconn officials unveiled plans to invest billions of dollars and build one of the world’s biggest manufacturing hubs in the state of São Paulo. The government had high expectations that the project would yield 100,000 jobs.

Six years later, Brazil is still waiting for most of those jobs to materialize.

'The area where Foxconn said it would build a plant is totally abandoned,' said Guilherme Gazzola, the mayor of Itu, one of the cities that hoped to benefit from the project. 'They haven’t even expressed an interest in meeting us.' . .

Today, Foxconn employs only about 2,800 workers in Brazil.

Foxconn does the 'big song and dance, bringing out the Chinese dragon dancers, ribbon cuttings, toasts and signature of the usual boilerplate agreements,' said Alberto Moel, an investor and adviser to early-stage tech companies who until recently was a technology analyst at the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. 'Then, when it gets down to brass tacks, something way smaller materializes.' . .

Foxconn’s plans also fizzled in Pennsylvania. In 2013, the company, which has a small office in Harrisburg, said it intended to build a $30 million factory in the state that could employ 500 workers. The plant has yet to be built. . .

After the election, Foxconn joined a parade of global companies bearing promises.

Jack Ma, the executive chairman of the Chinese internet giant Alibaba, arrived at Trump Tower in New York and pledged to create one million jobs in America. Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank of Japan, said his company would invest $50 billion in the United States. And at around the same time, Foxconn said it was planning to build production facilities in the United States."

Read The New York Times, Before Wisconsin, Foxconn Vowed Big Spending in Brazil. Few Jobs Have Come.

"President Donald Trump’s quest to open more factories and corporate headquarters in the U.S. scored a major win Thursday as Wisconsin lawmakers approved the biggest corporate subsidy package ever awarded to a foreign company.

But if Trump’s policies -- including his call to slash the corporate income-tax rate to 15 percent -- succeed in spurring more U.S. plant openings, the $3 billion in state aid that Wisconsin ponied up for Foxconn Technology Group may be only the beginning. Some analysts foresee a rush of new state-level subsidies and tax breaks as governors compete for any new facilities built by companies suddenly flush with newfound tax savings.

Call it tax reform in reverse".

Read Bloomberg, Trump’s Push for U.S. Jobs May Spur Boom in ‘Corporate Welfare’.

Read also Trump's Big CON: The Wisconsin Foxconn Jobs CON.

Trump's Big CON: Happy Labor Day Suckers!

"[A]s a candidate, Trump correctly identified the anger and disappointment so many people feel about the contemporary U.S. economy, where the vast bulk of the benefits goes to those who are already wealthy and millions struggle to get by. The system, he told them, was “rigged” by those who already have wealth and power, and they believed him because of what they saw in their own lives and communities.

As Trump went around the country in 2016, he promised to turn back the clock to the days when factories were humming and factory towns were growing — and said he’d bring back all the coal jobs to boot. It was a cynical hoax, because the economy of the 1950s and 1960s for which he had such praise was made possible not only by a technological era that is far behind us, but by U.S. labor unions — unions that are under relentless assault from Trump’s party. Those old-fashioned factory jobs, where you could start without much in the way of education or experience and earn good wages and strong benefits, negotiated for you by the union, are largely gone. If you can find a manufacturing job today, chances are you won’t be represented by a union, and your employer will say, 'This is what you’ll get. Take it or leave it.' . .

You can see it in this extraordinary New York Times article by Neil Irwin profiling two women who started as janitors at companies that defined innovation in their respective heydays. Gail Evans began working at Eastman Kodak in the early 1980s, in a janitorial position with vacation benefits and support for workers wanting more education to improve their skills. She got her college degree and eventually rose to become chief technology officer of the entire company. Marta Ramos cleans floors at Apple today, but she’s employed by a contractor and has virtually no chance of getting any permanent position at Apple, let alone rising up in the company.

That difference is the result of enormous and complex changes that range across the entire economy, changes that one president can’t reverse. But what has Trump done to help ease the burden on workers and expand opportunity? Here are a few things:

Tried to take health coverage away from millions of low-income workers

Revoked an order by Obama requiring large federal contracts to go only to companies that weren’t guilty of violating labor laws

Nominated to be labor secretary the head of a fast-food company notorious for its abuse and exploitation of low-wage workers (the nominee later withdrew)

Appointed anti-labor nominees to the National Labor Relations Board

Moved to undo the Obama administration’s regulation expanding overtime pay for millions of workers

Proposed to cut the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health by 40 percent

Pushed back regulations forcing companies to protect worker safety and inform workers of hazards

Argued in court that employers should be able to force workers to give up their right to file class-action lawsuits

Reversed the Obama administration’s crackdown on for-profit education scams that saddle people with worthless degrees and huge debt

Promoted “right to work” laws that hamper unions’ ability to organize

And now we get to the centerpiece of the Trump administration economic plan: A gigantic tax cut for the wealthy and corporations! Of course." [Link in original.]

Read the Washington Post, Trump told workers that the system is rigged. Now he’s showing them just how much.

Trump's Big CON: The Same Old Trickle-Down Economics

UPDATE II:  "Having failed in their attempt to strip millions of health insurance by repealing Obamacare, President Trump and the Republican Congress are moving to their biggest priority: tax cuts for corporations and the rich. The plan is still being written, but Trump has already begun his push for it. And every part of the administration’s tax pitch is divorced from reality (a gentle way of saying it is a lie and a fraud). . .

There are sensible tax reforms that could be passed. Raise rates on the rich and use the money to fund a massive rebuilding of America’s infrastructure, starting with accelerating the move to renewable energy. That would create jobs, reduce inequality, invest in research and new technology, help capture a lead in growing global markets and begin to address climate change. Tax income from investments at the same rate as income from work. Require global corporations to pay taxes at the same rates as domestic companies by ending deferral. Tax financial speculation to raise revenue and at least slow the destabilizing financial casino.

These and other common-sense ideas would raise revenue and support badly needed public investments that would create real jobs and growth while not fueling greater inequality. It won’t surprise you that none of them are on the table in the back room where Republicans are struggling to come up with a tax plan.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there may be no words in the English language more scary than 'a Republican president and Congress announce it is time for tax reform.'"

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s tax-reform pitch is entirely divorced from reality.

UPDATE:  "Republicans have one idea and one idea only: That we should cut taxes for the rich. The only thing that changes is the sales pitch.

And the latest pitch, offered by President Trump on Wednesday, is a bit of a doozy."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans have only one idea. And Trump’s pitch for it is a doozy.

Trump yet unreleased tax reform plan will be sold as a 'made in America tax to 'un-rig the economy' by ending special interest loopholes and benefit workers, leveling the playing field with the rest of the world.

It will include few details, but "we already know that the most recent version of his plan would shower most of their benefits on the wealthy and corporations. . .

[And] it is expected to slash the top rate and corporate rate and repeal the estate tax. . .

But the broad strokes of that formulation, despite its packaging in the rhetoric of economic nationalism, actually constitute trickle-down economics. . .

The Tax Policy Center analyzed his final plan during the campaign, by estimating the combined distributive impacts of both the individual and business tax cuts on households. The results were summed up by TPC’s Howard Gleckman in an email to me:

'The Tax Policy Center estimates that half the benefit of Trump’s final campaign tax plan, including both the business and individual tax cuts, would go to the top 1 percent, who make $700,000 or more. Middle-income households would get about 6 percent of the benefits. To put it another way, the average tax cut for the top 1 percent would be $214,000 or 13 percent of their after-tax income while the average tax cut for a middle-income household would be about $1,000 or 2 percent of their after-tax income.'

An analysis of the most recent White House plan yielded similar findings. . .

Now, if Trump wants to make the case that huge high-end tax cuts will actually help workers, fine — let’s have that debate. But the point is that Trump is revealing once again that his populist economic nationalism — as he himself defined it — was largely a scam all along."

Read the Washington Post, Today you will hear the death rattle of Trump’s economic populism.

Happy Labor Day Suckers!

Trump's Big CON: The Wisconsin Foxconn Jobs CON

UPDATE:  Some think Wisconsin rubber-stamped the bundle of perks with with "no guarantee Foxconn will hold up its side of the bargain.

Kathleen Gallagher, executive director of the Milwaukee Institute, a technology-focused not-for-profit, pointed out that the company has previously pledged to open factories elsewhere that never materialized.

In 2013, Foxconn’s chairman said the firm would build a $30-million factory and hire 500 workers in central Pennsylvania — a promise that has not come to fruition. "

Read the Washington Post, Trump is celebrating the Foxconn deal. The people paying for it aren’t so sure.

"The deal President Trump called “incredible” and Gov. Scott Walker hailed as a “once-in-a-century” opportunity to bring the electronic manufacturing giant Foxconn to Wisconsin wouldn’t generate profits for the state until 2042, a new legislative analysis projects.

The state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a nonpartisan agency that analyzes proposed economic investments, looked at Walker’s bid last month to bring a new flat-screen-display factory to the state in exchange for a roughly $3 billion-incentives package.

Foxconn said it would break ground in southeastern Wisconsin and hire 3,000 workers there over the next four years, with the “potential” to create 13,000 jobs.

If the company hits that growth target, Wisconsin would break even after 25 years, said Rob Reinhardt, a program manager who worked on the report. If 13,000 jobs never materialize, it could take decades longer. . .

Wisconsin [already] has an unusually low unemployment rate (3.2 percent), which is significantly lower than the country’s 4.3 percent. Employers there already complain about having trouble finding workers. . .

If Foxconn fills jobs with workers from neighboring Illinois, where the unemployment rate is 4.7 percent, analysts predict the deal won’t start making money for Wisconsin until 2045."

Read the Washington Post, The Foxconn deal Trump championed won’t make Wisconsin money for 25 years, report says.

Trump's Big CON: 'I Saved Us', The Economy Edition

UPDATE III:  After just seven months in office, The Donald is claiming credit "record low" unemployment.

(You might remember that when he took office America was a 'rotten place, a decimated, destroyed and weak country'.)

"The short answer is that this is false. The unemployment rate in July was 4.3 percent. It was 4.8 percent in January, when Trump took office, so it was already rather low.

Moreover, six of the past 12 presidents could brag of an unemployment rate lower than 4.3 percent. It was as low as 4.2 percent under George W. Bush, 3.9 percent under Bill Clinton, 4.2 percent under Richard Nixon, 3.4 percent under Lyndon B. Johnson, 2.5 percent under Dwight D. Eisenhower and 2.7 percent under Harry Truman."

Read the Washington Post, President Trump’s claim that ‘unemployment is at a record low’.

Now repeat after me:  He's so pretty!

UPDATE II:  On Sunday, the Republican National Committee tweeted:

"GOP
@GOP

UNPRECEDENTED ECONOMIC GROWTH UNDER @POTUS!
7:07 PM - Aug 6, 2017

To be clear: 'unprecedented' means it has never happened before. This tweet strongly suggests that '1 million new jobs in six months' never happened before Trump took office. And that suggestion would be wrong — very wrong.

In fact, President Barack Obama actually saw slightly more jobs created in his final six months — 1.08 million — than Trump has in his first six — 1.07 million. And Obama also saw more jobs created than Trump:

    In the first six months of 2016 (1.08 million)
    In the last six months of 2015 (1.34 million)
    In the first six months of 2015 (1.37 million)
    In the last six months of 2014 (1.5 million)
    In the first six months of 2014 (1.5 million)
    In the last six months of 2013 (1.09 million)

Indeed, no matter how you slice it and what months you choose, there isn't even one six-month period after mid-2013 during which Obama didn't see at least 1 million jobs created. One million jobs in six months is not unprecedented -- it has become the norm since the recovery from the Great Recession really kicked in.

Which got me thinking: Maybe the RNC tweet meant the first six months of a presidency? Even then, though, Bill Clinton saw more jobs created -- 1.25 million — in his first six months in 1993. None other than Jimmy Carter saw twice as many created as Trump — 2.14 million — in 1977. And if you adjusted for today's population size, George H.W. Bush (about 900,000 jobs created in 1989) would also beat Trump's vaunted 1 million standard.

So three of Trump's six immediate predecessors had at least his jobs numbers in their first six months (again, population-adjusted in one of those cases). Two others — Obama and George W. Bush — began their presidencies in recessions."

Read the Washington Post, The RNC says Trump’s jobs numbers are ‘unprecedented,’ because words don’t matter anymore.

UPDATE:  "Trump hasn't actually done anything other than cut a few regulations, but he's made it sound like he's passed a new New Deal. ('No administration has accomplished more in the first 90 days,' he rather ludicrously claimed.) He brags about a 'surging economy and jobs,' despite the fact that the economy and jobs are growing at exactly the same rate as before he took office. And, after disparaging the official unemployment rate as being 'fake' and 'phony' and 'totally fiction' while Obama was president, he has apparently decided that it's 'very real now.' In other words, Trump has done nothing and has congratulated himself for the economy Obama left behind.

Well, it's not just him doing the praising. Trump's new propaganda channel is, too. "

Read the Washington Post, For the last time, Trump hasn’t made the economy any better., which included this graph:

"Every president talks up the economy. It's part of a president's job to be America's cheerleader-in-chief. But half a year into Trump's presidency, the reality is the economy is solid. It's not booming. And there's no 'Trump bump' -- yet.

'On balance, it’s hard to see a Trump bump,' says Doug Holtz-Eakin, head of the right-leaning American Action Forum and an economic adviser to many Republicans. 'The economy is solid. It’s not spectacular.'

To see how the Trump economy is really doing, look at growth, jobs, wages and business spending. All of those factors are showing no change since the days of President Obama.

Yes, more Americans are getting jobs. Hiring in July was stronger than experts expected, with a net gain of 209,000 jobs. That's good news, but the pace of hiring is a tad worse than under President Obama. The economy has added 1,074,000 jobs since Trump took office. During the same stretch last year, the economy gained 1,246,000 jobs under Obama. The fastest growing job category last month was low-paying retail jobs. Trump used to slam Obama for only creating crummy jobs. Now that's part of the Trump story, too.

'On the jobs metric, there's no Trump bump,' says Chirs Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG bank in New York. 'It's pretty consistent with the final year of Obama’s administration.'

As for stocks: The market is going up. It gained more than 20 percent since Trump won the election. But Wall Street is not Main Street, and about half of America has $0 in the market. Numerous studies have shown that better stock returns don't mean a turbocharged economy is on the way with more growth and higher wages for the middle class.

The stock market may be going up, but wages are not. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently decried how middle class incomes were lower now than in 2000. He promised to change that, yet the jobs report that Trump called 'excellent' showed that wages only increased 2.5 percent in the past year. That's below America's historic average and the same pace that Obama achieved."

Read the Washington Post, America’s economy is solid, but there’s no ‘Trump bump’.

Trump's Big CON: He's Really a Crony Capitalist, CONt.

"Republican senator Jeff Flake's new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” bashes President Trump for just about everything, but some of the harshest criticism in the book's 160 scathing pages is reserved for Trump's economic “plan.”

In Flake's eyes, Trumponomics is huge mistake. It shows the GOP has “abandoned its core principles” of free trade and free enterprise. “Seemingly overnight, we became willing to roll back the ideas on the global economy that have given America the highest standard of living in history,” Flake wrote.

The senator calls Trump a “crony capitalist” who is “incoherent” and “doing irreparable damage.” He even compares Trump to a liberal, saying all the president does is offer “easy answers and free stuff without worrying about the details.

[For] a rundown of Flake’s attacks on Trumponomics . . ."

Read the Washington Post, Trump is a ‘crony capitalist,’ says GOP Senator Flake., which notes that the "GOP is deeply divided. The rifts have been on display all summer, especially during the health-care fight. Flake’s book only adds to the tug-of-war between traditional Republicans who want to cut taxes and expand free trade, and Trump Republicans, who want to restrict trade and resurrect coal and manufacturing jobs."

Read also the Washington Post, Jeff Flake delivers the most courageous conservative rebuttal of Trumpism yet.

And read Trump's Big CON: He's Really a Crony Capitalist.

Trump's Big CON: 'I'll Grow the Economy & Balance the Budget'

UPDATE: Obama's was bigger than Trump's, GDP growth that is!

"President Trump received his first official estimate Thursday of how his proposals would affect the economy. The results were mediocre — especially compared with the numbers for President Barack Obama while he was in office.

Trump's proposals so far would only add about 0.1 percentage points to growth in gross domestic product, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). That would increase the pace of GDP growth to just 1.9 percent a year, much slower than the 3 percent administration officials have promised.

After a decade, GDP would only be about 0.7 percent greater if Trump's proposals were enacted, the CBO predicted. Obama's plans would have expanded GDP by substantially more. For instance, the budget he put forward in 2014 would have increased overall economic activity by 2.1 percent after a decade, the CBO said at the time."

Read the Washington Post, Let’s take a look at how the CBO thinks Trump’s proposals stack up against Obama’s.

It's easy to make false promises using rosy scenarios.

"The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that President Trump’s first budget plan would not eliminate the deficit over 10 years or expand the economy at all by 2021, casting doubt on the administration's controversial economic assumptions that were supposed to bolster key arguments for the White House’s agenda over the next year.

The CBO projected that the sweeping spending reductions on anti-poverty programs, housing, environmental protection and a number of other initiatives that the White House wants to cull back would still not be enough to eliminate the deficit by 2027.

In that year, the deficit would be $720 billion under the White House's budget, the CBO said. The White House asserted the government would have a budget surplus in 2027 if its policies were enacted, bringing in more money through revenue than it spent. That's a gap of more than $700 billion in just one year between the CBO and White House.

This contrasts sharply with the White House’s internal estimates, which argued that cutting taxes would create an economic boom that solved many of the country’s budget problems.

The White House also estimated that its budget changes would lead the economy to grow by 3 percent per year. The CBO found, however, that economic growth would average only 1.9 percent per year under the White House's plan."

Read the Washington Post, White House budget wouldn’t eliminate deficit or do much to expand economy, CBO says.

Trump doesn't read much, so it is helpful to him that the article included two graphs:

Trump's Big CON: "More Coal Jobs"

UPDATE IV:  "In terms of raw numbers, though, there’s another industry that has fared even worse. Compared to January 2009, there are 35,600 fewer coal miners. But over that period there are also 198,400 fewer department store employees. . .

Far less of Trump’s core base of support is negatively affected by a stumbling coal industry than a crumbling department store chain. But department stores don’t carry the cultural weight that coal mining does, particularly to Trump and his base of support. As with so many other aspects of the United States these days, the political utility of the people who are negatively affected makes an enormous difference in how much political leaders care."

Read the Washington Post, Why is Trump more worried about coal miners than department store employees?

UPDATE III:  "The coal-mining jobs that President Trump thinks were destroyed by government regulation — adopted to combat air pollution and global warming — were actually lost to old-fashioned competition from other American firms and workers. Eastern coal mines lost market share to Western coal, which was cheaper. And natural gas grew at coal’s expense because it had low costs and lower greenhouse-gas emissions.

[So those 50,000 jobs Trump promised, it will be] closer to 1,000."

Read the Washington Post, What really happened to coal?

UPDATE II:  Read the Washington Post, The entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby’s, which notes that:

"The point isn't that coal jobs don't matter — they matter to the people who have them and to the communities they support, especially as they typically pay far more than do jobs in the retail and service industries, But if you're looking to make a meaningful increase in the number of jobs available to U.S. workers, bringing back coal jobs isn't going to do it.

Of course, part of the fixation on coal is because mining has always loomed large in the American imagination. There's something mysterious and ennobling about the dangerous endeavor to extract valuable commodities from deep within the earth, something that's missing from, say, used-car sales or ski-lift operation."

 

UPDATE:  "[T]he number of miners began a steep decline after World War II, and especially after 1980, even though coal production continued to rise. This was mainly because modern extraction techniques — like blowing the tops off mountains — require far less labor than old-fashioned pick-and-shovel mining. The decline accelerated about a decade ago as the rise of fracking led to competition from cheap natural gas.

So coal-mining jobs have been disappearing for a long time. Even in West Virginia, the most coal-oriented state, it has been a quarter century since they accounted for as much as 5 percent of total employment.

What, then, do West Virginians actually do for a living these days? Well, many of them work in health care: Almost one in six workers is employed in the category “health care and social assistance.”

Oh, and where does the money for those health care jobs come from? Actually, a lot of it comes from Washington.

West Virginia has a relatively old population, so 22 percent of its residents are on Medicare, versus 16.7 percent for the nation as a whole. It’s also a state that has benefited hugely from Obamacare, with the percentage of the population lacking health insurance falling from 14 percent in 2013 to 6 percent in 2015; these gains came mainly from a big expansion of Medicaid. . .

Now think about what Trumpism means for a state like this. Killing environmental rules might bring back a few mining jobs, but not many, and mining isn’t really central to the economy in any case. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and its allies just tried to replace the Affordable Care Act. If they had succeeded, the effect would have been catastrophic for West Virginia, slashing Medicaid and sending insurance premiums for lower-income, older residents soaring. . .

It’s almost certain that the job losses from Trumpcare cuts would have greatly exceeded any possible gains in coal.

So West Virginia voted overwhelmingly against its own interests. And it wasn’t just because its citizens failed to understand the numbers, the reality of the trade-off between coal and health care jobs.

For the striking thing, as I said, is that coal isn’t even the state’s dominant industry these days. “Coal country” residents weren’t voting to preserve what they have, or had until recently; they were voting on behalf of a story their region tells about itself, a story that hasn’t been true for a generation or more.

Their Trump votes weren’t even about the region’s interests; they were about cultural symbolism. . .

So it’s incredible, and terrifying, to think that we may really be about to do all of that because Donald Trump successfully pandered to cultural nostalgia, to a longing for a vanished past when men were men and miners dug deep."

Read The New York Times, Coal Country Is a State of Mind.

"With coal miners gathered around him, Trump signed an executive order rolling back a temporary ban on mining coal and a stream protection rule imposed by the Obama administration. The order follows the president’s campaign promise to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back thousands of lost mining jobs in rural America.

'I made them this promise,' Trump said, 'we will put our miners back to work.'

But industry experts say coal mining jobs will continue to be lost, not because of blocked access to coal, but because power plant owners are turning to natural gas. . .

Paul Bledsoe, a lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy, an Interior official under President Bill Clinton, called Trump’s attempt at job creation 'sheer nonsense.' Coal’s decline is too steep.

'No company will bid on new leases when there’s already a glut of unwanted coal on the market,' Bledsoe said. 'Trump’s false promise that he can bring back coal is really exposed as so much coal dust and mirrors by this executive order, since utilities will continue to use natural gas instead of coal.'"
Read the Washington Post, Trump promised to bring back coal jobs. That promise 'will not be kept,' experts say. 


Read also Trump's Big CON: "More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs"

Trump's Big CON: 'I'm the Jobs President'

UPDATE III:  "Mr. Trump himself declared upon taking office that his policies would produce 4 percent annual growth, and just this week said on Twitter to affirm that 'things are starting to kick in now.' . .

But the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s widely followed GDP Now expects the second-quarter growth figure to come in at 2.7 percent, more than a full percentage point below where it was in May, and a decline even since the beginning of the week. The New York Fed’s Nowcast is even more bearish, with an estimate of 1.9 percent for the quarter just ended and 1.6 percent for the current quarter."

Read The New York Times, Hopes of ‘Trump Bump’ for U.S. Economy Shrink as Growth Forecasts Fade.

UPDATE II:  "President Trump is touting data on the economy, telling his supporters that things are getting better for American workers. Not all professional forecasters share that enthusiasm, though, and many of them believe that this is about as good as it is going to get.

According to the average forecast among analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News, U.S. employers combined will add 165,000 workers to their payrolls a month this year, on net. That would be the slowest pace for hiring since 2010. Under President Barack Obama last year, the economy produced an average of 187,000 jobs a month.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes its monthly report on hiring Friday morning with figures for June, data on the labor market will be available for the first half of the year. Through May, the average pace was 162,000 new employees a month.

That is slower than not only last year, but also the year before, when the economy added 226,000 jobs a month on average. In 2015, the monthly pace averaged 250,000."

Read the Washington Post, Trump’s job growth nightmare: His first year could be slower than Obama’s last.

UPDATE:  AS A candidate for the White House, Donald Trump blasted the Ford Motor Company for planning to shift production of its leading compact car, the Focus, to Mexico. He even went so far as to threaten a huge tariff on any and all U.S. cars formerly produced in this country that might be exported from Mexico back into the United States. After Mr. Trump’s election, Ford seemed to cave by announcing it would not be building the cars in Mexico after all.

So what are we to make of the surprising facts that Ford now plans to make the Focus in President Trump’s other trade nemesis — China — and that the Trump administration’s response is, essentially, “whatever”? Ford’s move just “shows how flexible multinational companies are in terms of geography,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross observed. You don’t say! . .

Is it too much to hope that the federal government will stop purporting to micromanage specific business-location decisions using either threats or bribes?"

Read the Washington Post, Ford’s shift to China offers the Trump administration a lesson in economics.

"Five months ago at a Boeing factory in South Carolina, President Trump proclaimed, 'We are going to fight for every last American job.'

On Thursday, workers at the North Charleston plant learned they’d soon face layoffs."

Read the Washington Post, Trump visited this Boeing factory to celebrate jobs. It just announced layoffs.

Read also:

Trump's Big CON: "More Coal Jobs", and

Trump's Big CON: Trump Lied About Stopping Jobs From Moving Overseas.

Trump's Big CON: Trump Lied About Stopping Jobs From Moving Overseas

UPDATE:  Read CBNC, Trump's Carrier deal is not living up to the hype — jobs still going to Mexico, which states:

"More than 600 employees at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis are bracing for layoffs beginning next month, despite being told by President Trump that nearly all the jobs at the plant had been saved"

Remember those jobs that Trump said wouldn't go to Mexico.

They are going to Mexico.

"Carrier, the company President Trump pledged to keep on American soil, informed the state of Indiana this week that it will soon begin cutting 632 workers from an Indianapolis factory. The manufacturing jobs will move to Monterrey, Mexico, where the minimum wage is $3.90.

That was never supposed to happen, according to Trump's campaign promises. He told Indiana residents at a rally last year there was a '100 percent chance' he would save the jobs at the heating and air-conditioning manufacturer."

Read the Washington Post, Trump said he would save jobs at Carrier. The layoffs start July 20.

It was all just a con.

Read also Trump's Big CON: He's Really a Crony Capitalist.

Trump's Big CON: No Balanced Budget

UPDATE II:  "It’s curious to hear Republicans suddenly talking about the urgent need for fiscal stimulus. For the past eight years, including the darkest days of the Great Recession, they tried to convince us that fiscal stimulus doesn’t work, and that the only way to really boost economic growth is to cut the budget deficit. But now that they are about to get their hands on the federal checkbook, Republicans have decided that we are all Keynesians once again.

To anyone serious about economic analysis, it should be obvious that we don’t need Keynesian stimulus at the moment. The unemployment rate is at 4.6 percent, which is about as close to full employment as it gets. The economy is producing more than 175,000 jobs each month, with many industries complaining they could add more if there were trained workers to hire. Wages are rising faster than they have in a decade, and faster than productivity is rising. Corporate profits and share prices are at record levels. And thanks to aggressive bond buying (and bond holding) by the Federal Reserve, monetary policy is still extraordinarily accommodative. Keynes himself would never have suggested that this is an appropriate time to use the government’s taxing and spending powers to boost the economy. In fact, seeing the developing bubble in stock and real estate markets, Keynes probably would be recommending a budget surplus right about now."

Read the Washington Post, Republicans are finally willing to spend on the economy — at the exact wrong time.

UPDATE: "For the last 35 years, Republicans haven't worried about deficits when they've been in power—in fact, former vice president Dick Cheney said that 'Reagan proved' they 'don't matter'—and treated them like the greatest threat to the republic when they've been out of it. So the fact that this would add a lot of red ink wouldn't be a dealbreaker. Republicans are going to resume not caring about the deficit the moment the calendar flips to Jan. 20, 2017."

Read the Washington Post, How Obama’s unaffordable socialism could become Trump’s smart conservatism.  

Read also the Washington Post, How to pay for Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar agenda? Congressional Republicans aren’t saying.

"President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday made his first stamp on Congress as House Republicans bowed to his wishes and announced plans to extend government funding through March . . .

Read the Washington Post, Trump camp calls for short-term spending bill despite Senate concerns.

Balancing the budget is a long-time Republi-CON.

A 2009 Told Ya So: Remortgage America

Remember in 2009 I promoted an economic stimulus program like Remortgage America.

Read the Washington Post, How President Obama might have stopped Donald Trump.

The Repbli-CON Plan to Destroy the Economy, Kansas Edition

UPDATE VI:  "In 2012, voters in California approved a measure to raise taxes on millionaires, bringing their top state income tax rate to 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. Conservative economists predicted calamity, or at least a big slowdown in growth. Also that year, the governor of Kansas signed a series of changes to the state's tax code, including reducing income and sales tax rates. Conservative economists predicted a boom.

Neither of those predictions came true. . .

California's economy grew by 4.1 percent in 2015, according to new numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, tying it with Oregon for the fastest state growth of the year. That was up from 3.1 percent growth for the Golden State in 2014, which was near the top of the national pack.

The Kansas economy, on the other hand, grew 0.2 percent in 2015. That's down from 1.2 percent in 2014, and below neighboring states such as Nebraska (2.1 percent) and Missouri (1.2 percent). Kansas ended the year with two consecutive quarters of negative growth -- a shrinking economy. By a common definition of the term, the state entered 2016 in recession.

Other effects of the Kansas tax cuts, which were meant to spur entrepreneurship, are well-documented.

While state officials anticipated that the reductions would create a shortfall in the state budget, tax revenues have been consistently below even those expectations. Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service have signaled that they could reduce Kansas’s credit rating, indicating there is a chance the state cannot pay its bills."

Read the Washington Post, The interesting thing that happened when Kansas cut taxes and California hiked them.

UPDATE V:  The Republi-con modus operandi:  tax cuts for the rich, deficits and budget crisis, tax increases on the poor, repeat.

Read the Washington Post, Kansas lawmakers want the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

UPDATE IV:  "What's the matter with Kansas now? Oh, you know, just a small budget crisis brought on by its Republican governor's radical tax cuts. This week, the state discovered it would have to cut $279 million by June in order to balance its books, then slash another $436 million during the following fiscal year. For Kansas, this is a hefty amount of money. The entire state budget legislators approved in May was just $6.3 billion.

Back in 2012, the state's recently re-elected Republican governor, Sam Brownback, turned Kansas into a petri dish for conservative fiscal policy after he signed into law a massive tax cut that dropped rates for top earners and eliminated taxes entirely for some businesses. Brownback and conservative tax guru Arthur Laffer promised that the cuts would bring "enormous prosperity" to the state by making it more competitive. But jobs growth has lagged in Kansas, and this summer, the state government found itself nearly $300 million short on revenue. To cope, it began burning through its reserve funds, and Moody's in turn downgraded the state's credit rating."

Read Slate, Thanks to Massive Republican Tax Cuts, Kansas Is Facing a Budget Crisis.

UPDATE III:  "There might be a worse idea than cutting spending during a depression, but I doubt it. . .

That's right: cutting spending in a slump might actually make debt problems worse."

Read the Washington Post, Austerity has been an even bigger disaster than we thought.

So much for the Republi-con myth of expansionary austerity.

UPDATE II:  "In 2010, after two and a half terms in the Senate, Brownback made a bid for the governor’s mansion. Riding the Tea Party wave, he swept his opponent in a landslide, promising a new age for Kansas politics.

Brownback didn’t just keep his promise, he embarked on a radical 'real live experiment' in conservative governance. As he later explained to the Wall Street Journal, 'My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, 'See, we’ve got a different way, and it works.' '

With advice from Arthur Laffer—the long-discredited guru for supply-side economics—and support from a new band of conservative lawmakers in the Kansas statehouse, the newly minted governor pursued a path of rigid orthodoxy. His signature move was a massive tax cut: He eliminated the top income bracket of 6.45 percent, reduced the middle bracket from 6.25 percent to 4.9 percent, reduced the lowest bracket from 3.5 percent to 3 percent, and ended taxes on certain kinds of small-business income. This, he promised, would increase disposable income and create thousands of jobs.

In reality, however, Kansas’ job growth stagnated in 2012 and income growth fell. Far from a stimulus plan, Brownback’s tax cuts were a massive program of redistribution for the rich. . .

In 2013 he proposed another round of tax cuts that would eliminate income taxes and maintain a high sales tax. Critics blasted the plan, noting the extent to which it was a massive tax increase on the poorest Kansans: For instance, replacing 50 percent of income tax losses with a sales tax would raise taxes on the lowest earners by 2.5 percent. But Brownback promised new revenue ($777 million in state earnings) and broad prosperity. 'We’re on a path of growth and job creation, so I say, 'Come to Kansas,' ' he said. 'We’re paving the way to make Kansas the best place in America to raise a family and run a business.'

A year later Kansas is among the most dysfunctional states in the country. Even after cuts in schools, colleges, libraries, and social services, Kansas can’t keep up with expenses. This year, it faced a huge shortfall in personal income tax receipts, and had to end tax rebates for food and child care to help fill the hole. And overall, it faces a $900 million budget shortfall by 2019, even as the top income tax rate is scheduled to decline to 3.9 percent by 2018. Both Moody’s and S&P have downgraded the state’s bond rating, and economic growth has been poor. Far from giving Kansas a bright new future, Brownback plunged it into chaos."

Read Slate, The Kansas Miracle.

In Kansas they drank the kool-aid.

UPDATE:  "[R]ecently, Kansas went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes on the affluent in the belief that this would spark a huge boom; the boom didn’t happen, but the budget deficit exploded, offering an object lesson to those willing to learn from experience. . .

In 2012, however, Democratic dominance finally became strong enough to overcome the paralysis, and Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare. . .

Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. . .

What has actually happened? There is, I’m sorry to say, no sign of the promised catastrophe.

If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels. . .

And, yes, the budget is back in surplus. . .

So what do we learn from the California comeback? Mainly, that you should take anti-government propaganda with large helpings of salt. Tax increases aren’t economic suicide; sometimes they’re a useful way to pay for things we need. Government programs, like Obamacare, can work if the people running them want them to work, and if they aren’t sabotaged from the right. In other words, California’s success is a demonstration that the extremist ideology still dominating much of American politics is nonsense."

Read The New York Times, Left Coast Rising.   

I've often suggested that Obama should just call the Republi-con bluff -- implement some of their wacky ideas and watch CONservative ideas implode.  Well in Kansas they drank the kool-aid. 

"Governor Sam Brownback is facing an organized revolt from centrist Republicans, over 100 of whom just endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, so disgruntled are they with the effects of Brownback’s rule.

In many ways, Brownback’s term has been a perfect experiment in Republican governance. Take a crusading conservative governor, give him a legislature with Republican super-majorities so he can do pretty much whatever he wants, and let him implement the right’s wish list. The result was supposed to be a nirvana of economic growth and budgetary stability. But the opposite happened.

The disastrous results of Brownback’s economic and fiscal policies demonstrate that it’s one thing for your average Republican to go around saying things like 'cutting taxes raises revenue!' even if nearly every economist agrees that the idea is absurd (Greg Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, famously called the purveyors of this idea 'charlatans and cranks'). It’ll never really be tested, at least not in a context where there aren’t so many other variables at play that any inconvenient results can be explained away. Republicans know that it’s bogus, but they like the way it sounds; after all, who wouldn’t love a free lunch? But if you bet a single state’s future on the idea — and you have the power to take it to an extreme — you’re going farther than anyone in Washington ever has to go.

That’s what Sam Brownback did. In 2012 and 2013, Brownback and Republicans in the legislature cut income taxes twice, eliminated taxes on corporate profits that are “passed through” to individuals (making it the only state that does this), and since they’re Republicans, made changes to the tax code that had the effect of raising taxes on the poor (the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a good explanation of the tax changes and their effects). The governor has said his goal is to eventually eliminate the income tax completely.

And what happened? At a time when most states are seeing higher revenues as the country recovers economically, Kansas’ revenues have plummeted. The result has been cuts to schools, cuts to higher education, cuts to libraries, and cuts to local health centers. Kansas’ job growth and income growth are lagging the nation’s. In response to the fiscal difficulties, Moody’s recently lowered the state’s bond rating. . ."

When he was elected governor, some Washington conservatives touted Sam Brownback as a future presidential contender. Once he implemented the conservative economic agenda and showed what a dynamic economy and pleasing government balance sheet it produced, he’d be able to take the message nationwide as a demonstration of the power of conservative ideas. Nobody’s saying that anymore. Brownback is trailing his probable Democratic opponent. In a state as conservative as Kansas (where Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by 22 points), you have to screw up pretty badly to be in that position. And saying, 'hey, didn’t we all agree that tax cuts raise revenue?' probably won’t bail him out."

Read the Washington Post, GOP governor implements GOP economics, disaster ensues. 

The Repbli-CON Plan to Destroy the Economy, Louisiana Edition

Kansas is not the only state where the Republi-con economic experiment has been a disaster. 

Read The Advocate, 'Out of tricks:' How Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has driven state to $1.6B budget deficit. 

Proving again that the economy does better under Democrats. 

The "Republi-CONs Are Better for the Economy" Myth

UPDATE:  "Since the Second World War, the economy has done better when Democrats are in the White House . . .

Read the Washington Post, Hillary Clinton was right: The economy has done better under Democrats.

The chart below shows that the economy under Carter did better than under any Republi-con president since WWII, even better than under Reagan.

Trump is right when he says that "the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. . .

Here's a chart showing the average rate of economic growth under each president since the Second World War, taken from a recent paper by Princeton University economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson. They note that when a Democrat was in the Oval Office, the average rate of growth was 4.4 percent. Under Republicans, the average rate was just 2.5 percent.

It's not just broad measures of economic growth, either, Blinder and Watson observe. Industrial production increased at an average rate of 5.6 percent under Democrats, compared to 1.8 percent under Republicans. The unemployment rate under Republicans averaged 6 percent, compared to just 5.6 percent under Democrats. The average return on the stock market has been 8.1 percent under Democrats, and 2.7 percent under Republicans.

Inflation is only measure by which the economy's performance under Democratic and Republican presidents is more or less equal. Prices have increased an average rate of 3 percent under Democrats, compared to 3.3 percent under Republicans — not a significant difference.

You might be thinking that even if the economy as a whole does worse under Republican presidents, the wealthy do better, since Republicans tend to favor low-tax policies on the wealthy. That's not true either, though.  As the political scientist Larry Bartels shows in this chart, things have been better for Americans under Democrats, now matter how much money you make.

"

Read the Washington Post, Rand Paul is attacking Donald Trump for making a 100% true statement about the economy. 

And the Banksters Lived Happily Ever After (Screwing You)

"What's the problem with having banks that are "too big to fail"?

You could answer this question with a long and technical history of how governments and taxpayers bailed out financial institutions during the Great Recession to ensure that their frailties didn't wreck the economy for everyone else. And how the financial crisis led to financial mergers and acquisitions that, in the end, just made these banks bigger.

Or you could read this eight-frame comic by Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which gives a pretty accurate description."

See the cartoon at the Washington Post, A hilarious cartoon captures what went wrong with Wall Street.

Be Very Very Afraid of 'The Invisible [Republi-CON] Bond Vigilantes'

UPDATE XII:  What ever happened to those preditions of hyperinflation?

Read the Washington Post, And now let us remember the worst economic prediction ever.

UPDATE XI: "When it comes to views on economics, Republicans have been consistent, clear and wrong."

Read The New York Times, G.O.P. Monetary Madness, which notes "that hard-money doctrine and paranoia about inflation have taken over the party, even as the predicted inflation keeps failing to materialize. For example, in February, Representative Paul Ryan, who is somewhat inexplicably regarded as the party’s deep thinker on matters economic, harangued Mr. Bernanke on how terrible it is to “debase” a currency and pointed to a rise in commodity prices in late 2010 and early 2011 as evidence that inflation was finally coming. Commodity prices have plunged since then, but there is no sign that Mr. Ryan or anyone else is having second thoughts."


UPDATE X: How about those invisible Republi-CON bond vigilantes. Read the Washington Post, Average rate on 30-year fixed mortgage ties low of 3.94 pct.; 15-year also hits record.


UPDATE IX: For all the anti-Keynesian folks out there, please explain:




UPDATE VIII: A told ya so by the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, in The New York Times, One Point Seven Seven:

"That’s the current interest rate on 10-year US bonds.

Remember, back in 2009 there was a big debate between people like me, who said that we were in a liquidity trap and that interest rates would stay low as long as the economy was depressed, and people like the WSJ editorial page and Niall Ferguson, who said that government borrowing would bring on the bond vigilantes and send rates soaring.

How’s it going?

And just to be clear: this isn’t just about I-told-you-so. We’re talking about different models, different visions of how the economy works. Their vision led to calls for austerity now now now; mine said that the overwhelming danger was that we wouldn’t provide enough stimulus, and that we would pull back too soon. Sure enough, we didn’t and we did. And now catastrophe looms."

Republi-cons continue to sacrifice workers to appease their imaginary inflation gods.


UPDATE VII: It has been several weeks since the so-called downgrade. So how are those bond vigilantes doing? Read The New York Times, Mortgage Rates Hit 50-Year Low.


UPDATE VI: "Fitch Ratings said Tuesday it will keep its rating on U.S. debt at the highest grade, AAA, and issued a 'stable' outlook, meaning it expects the rating to stay there." Read The New York Times, Fitch Ratings Keeps U.S. at Top Credit Rating.


UPDATE V: "Thirty years ago, it became clear that defeating inflation was crucial, even if the means needed to accomplish that would cause a deep recession. . . . [But i]t is time for a new lesson to be learned. Sometimes we need inflation, and now is such a time. " Read The New York Times, Sometimes, Inflation Is Not Evil.


UPDATE IV: "Behold the power of a stupid narrative, which seems impervious to evidence." Read The New York Times, The Downgrade Doom Loop.


UPDATE III: More from that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

"[T]here is no reason to take Friday's downgrade of America seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.

And yet America does have big problems.

These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability.

No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.

The truth is that as far as the straight economics goes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix. It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.

So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerful political movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to use Medicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even a penny in additional revenues.

The real question facing America, even in purely fiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there from deficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsible policy can be defeated and marginalized. "

Read The New York Times, Credibility, Chutzpah And Debt.


UPDATE II: "Virtually unnoticed last week was that [another ratings agency] kept a Triple A rating on the United States." Read The New York Times, Moody’s: Why the U.S. Is Still AAA.


UPDATE: So much for the inflation fear-mongers.

Today the Bank of New York began charging a fee on large deposits. Read the Wall Street Journal, BNY Mellon Deposit Fee: Life in the Liquidity Trap.

BTW, a liquidity trap, "in Keynesian economics, is a situation where monetary policy is unable to stimulate an economy, either through lowering interest rates or increasing the money supply. Liquidity traps typically occur when expectations of adverse events (e.g., deflation, insufficient aggregate demand, or civil or international war) make persons with liquid assets unwilling to invest."

I guess John Maynard Keynes was right after all.

Of course, one 'liberal' commentator has been scoffing at inflation concerns for years.

From more than two years ago, read The New York Times, The Big Inflation Scare, where he speculates that "inflation fear-mongering [was] partly political, coming largely from economists who had no problem with deficits caused by tax cuts but suddenly became fiscal scolds when the government started spending money to rescue the economy. And their goal [seemed] to be to bully the Obama administration into abandoning those rescue efforts."

I guess that's why that 'liberal' commentator won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

I wonder what the Hedgehog News prize winning economist would says now.

(Warning, that is a satirical comment.

Hedgehog News doesn't have any prize winning economist on the payroll.

But Hedgehog News does have many Republi-con candidates on the payroll.)

"S&P has triggered another invisible attack by the invisible bond vigilantes." Read The New York Times, What If They Announced A Downgrade And Nobody Cared?

BTW, a bond vigilante "is a bond market investor who protests monetary or fiscal policies they consider inflationary by selling bonds, thus increasing yields."

If you don't understand this post, you should refrain from debating fiscal policy issues.

Capitalisn, As Explained By 'Pharma Bro' (and Volkswagen and Bad Peanut Butter)

Why "raise the price of a life-saving drug by more than 4,000 percent, from $1,130 to $63,000"?

Because that's the "unabashed pursuit of profit", AKA capitalism.

Read the Washington Post, Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli and the very American debate over maximizing profit, which notes that "[w]ith job creation, employment and corporate profits all up, yet wages stubbornly stagnant, many Americans feel that the system is flawed."

The article also references Volkswagen’s admission that it cheated on emission tests . . . "'both [stories] show the danger of a corporate culture that eschews basic morality in the pursuit of profit.'"

Read also Mother Jones, You Can't Go to Prison for Destroying the Economy, But Bad Peanut Butter Is Another Story.

Religious CONservatives

"[C]onservatives lament that Francis has de-emphasized the church’s traditional fear and loathing of women and sex. How a church governed by male celibates should have come to view its areas of core competency as gender relations and reproduction is a good question. By returning to the kind of issues that St. Francis and the Nazarene focused on — stewardship of the Earth, championing of the have-nots — Francis has been a great disappointment to those Catholics nostalgic for the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inquisition.

A pope infused by the spirit of St.Francis of Assisi and Jesus poses a threat to the current economic order. Conservatives are right to fear and despise him, as they would be right to fear and despise his role models."

Read  the Washington Post, Pope Francis poses a threat to the current economic order. 

Did You Know That Early Christians Were Communists?

In "a practice of early Christians, reported in the Book of Acts in the New Testament . . . people in a community handed the church ownership of all their possessions. The church then gave each member of the community the use of enough property to provide for the needs of their families.

It was, in effect, a religious form of communism."

Read the Washington Post, Someone once tried Ben Carson’s Biblical tax plan.