Official LRC President Donald J Trump Thread

I'm no expert on this so I am willing to be corrected... but a more recent news piece says tax revenue is up 7%, which is far more than inflation. So the nominal/real argument you made is false. For that month anyway.

agreed rev would have been much higher without the tax cut.

"Receipts totaled $252.7 billion last month, up 7 percent from a year earlier, while outlays climbed 18 percent to $353.2 billion, according to the department."

Hardloper wrote:

BTW, Bill Clinton's approval went as high as 73% after the failed impeachment attempt, so it appears you're in the minority there and most people thought it was unimportant.

look hardloper, I would guess that most people were pretty appalled with Clinton's behavior. It was an embarrassment. However, they were MORE APPALLED with the Republican behavior. A 7 year investigation that failed to find any goods on him related to Whitewater, just going on and on, digging further and further into his personal life, and then finally turning up an affair that....... had nothing to do with what they were supposed to be looking into. . Yes it was pathetic what he was doing, but really, was it any of the R's damn business to be exposing that, other than to humiliate him and try and destroy him? And yet it's your side that goes on and on and on about Dems always trying to personally destroy people? Too funny. Y'all spent Clinton's entire 8 years trying to destroy him, and yes you finally got him. Lying about whether or not he got a BJ is like busting him for lying about what his favorite color is. It's none of their damn business, and has nothing to do with their investigation.

Hey, if it came out that he had an affair, and he got humiliated over that, great, he would deserve it. But to try to connect it to whitewater, and then have a huge trial over it, and make a huge spectacle of it, and then to try and remove him from office over it......absurd and disgusting really. Especially when one considers that a number of the R's pushing to have Clinton removed were having affairs themselves! (like Gingrich). What a shock, huh?

So most people did not think Clinton's behavior was unimportant. They just thought that R actions concerning it were more despicable and damaging to the country.

agip wrote:

I'm no expert on this so I am willing to be corrected... but a more recent news piece says tax revenue is up 7%, which is far more than inflation. So the nominal/real argument you made is false. For that month anyway.

agreed rev would have been much higher without the tax cut.

"Receipts totaled $252.7 billion last month, up 7 percent from a year earlier, while outlays climbed 18 percent to $353.2 billion, according to the department."

I didn't check those #'s, however, that's for one month only.

Overall, they are down since the tax cut.

Hmmm . . . . "Revenues for the fiscal year, which ended on September 30, were up less than 1 percent on a year-over-year basis, CBO said, while spending was about 3 percent higher. The deficit rose to 3.9 percent of gross domestic product, up from 3.5 percent in 2017."

"The big drop: CBO said that individual tax receipts rose 4 percent in 2018, driven in large part by higher-than-expected payments received in April for the 2017 tax year. Corporate taxes, however, fell by 31 percent, with half of that drop occurring after June as the full effects of the corporate tax cuts kicked in."

42440

“Let that sink in. Trump's campaign chairman is GUILTY of CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.”

agip wrote:

I'm no expert on this so I am willing to be corrected... but a more recent news piece says tax revenue is up 7%, which is far more than inflation. So the nominal/real argument you made is false. For that month anyway.

agreed rev would have been much higher without the tax cut.

"Receipts totaled $252.7 billion last month, up 7 percent from a year earlier, while outlays climbed 18 percent to $353.2 billion, according to the department."

One month? You are looking at one month?!? WTF???

You're a finance guy and you are making claims about revenues being up or down based on ONE MONTH?!? Are you friggin' kidding me?

1100 wrote:

“Let that sink in. Trump's campaign chairman is GUILTY of CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES.”

Yeah but those emails.

Squirrel looking for luv wrote:

That guy doesn't matter anyway. We have the black vote and soon the Hispanic vote locked up. See ya idiot pubs!

Republicans under Trump are doing a good job of squeezing more out of the rurals, but that can survive only so long and all the meaningful trends are in the other direction. The most overlooked trend in politics right now is the steady uptick in voters who self-identify as liberals. It was 20% in the 2000 exit poll, then 21% in 2004, 22% in 2008, 25% in 2012, 26% in 2016, and now 27% in 2018.

That is an amazing number for a midterm, which normally are older and more conservative.

As I've mentioned many times, Republicans coming out of 2016 somehow ignored not only the steady uptick in liberals, but also that the party only managed 46% against Hillary Clinton. The handful of sharp conservatives I know from Las Vegas were focusing on those two areas all the time in the aftermath, knowing how ominous they were.

I always find it beyond hilarious to read the OP of this marathon thread, who somehow believed that Republicans owned the edge in argument. So no kidding that same genius has jumped in many times and said he is scared to read any of my posts. Guys like that don't want to believe in the demographic math. They listen to Fox News, which isn't telling them anything about that, as opposed to steady stream of lies and fear. Guys like that talk among their own kind, where a handful of simplistic sentences are more than enough. The 46% Party wants to believe it is fine and dandy to be the 46% Party. What could possibly go wrong.

Here is a link to an article from several months ago that contains some of the things I have emphasized many times, that ideology is based on generational imprint, and not age. The old scared conservatives are dying out and being replaced on voter roles by people who think of themselves as liberal:

Most telling of all are the final two paragraphs:

"It is hard to focus on this trend at a moment when Republicans have full control of government, and are heading into an election where gerrymandering gives them a large advantage in maintaining Congress. But this fact runs headlong against a much longer deterioration of the conservative position within the electorate. Many conservatives supported Trump precisely because they were panicked about this trend. So far, Trump is merely accelerating the demise they feared.

In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes quipped, “We are all dead.” But over the long run, the Republicans are especially dead."

It matters who's money it was. A felony? Sort of like the 2008 Obama campaign's hiding Wall Street donations? Nobody went to jail for that.

You didn't even read the link I presented you, did you? SAD. All your points below are refuted by that link-

funny maths wrote:

Hmmm . . . . "Revenues for the fiscal year, which ended on September 30, were up less than 1 percent on a year-over-year basis, CBO said

Yes, up a WHOPPING 0.4%. But...

1) well below the inflation rate, so in real $'s, revenues are DOWN over the fiscal year

2) The last fiscal year includes months under the old tax code. And your own link shows where a lot of the increased revenues came from: "non-withheld tax payments made in April (and March) to cover last year's taxes " -

(Your quote -"The big drop: CBO said that individual tax receipts rose 4 percent in 2018, driven in large part by higher-than-expected payments received in April for the 2017 tax year. Corporate taxes, however, fell by 31 percent, with half of that drop occurring after June as the full effects of the corporate tax cuts kicked in." )

WHOOPS!

So once again, under the new tax code, after filings for taxes under last year's code, revenues are definitely down, by all measurements. By the measurement of share of GDP ("a sensible way to measure because a steady tax system would be expected to capture roughly the same share of the economy each year "), they are down 8%.

But nice try!

Economics is definitely not my forte, but in this argument, wouldn't "share of GDP" be a bad measure?

A supply-side economist would say that lowering taxes increases GDP. So the whole point of lower taxes would be to get a smaller share of a bigger pie. Then you hope that real tax revenue goes up, but not in the same proportion of GDP. You don't care about proportion of GDP. You only care about total tax revenue in constant dollars.

As an aside, I recently talked about this with my conservative, economist brother. He agreed that supply-side economics only makes sense when capital is scarce. That's definitely not the case today. So tax cuts now are like throwing tissue paper on a roaring bonfire. It doesn't help much.

Subway Surfers wrote:

Flagpole wrote:

Making the payment was never the issue...other than the fact it went over the campaign in kind contribution limit. The PROBLEM was that they didn't report the payment (violation) and then made specific movements to try to hide the payment (that makes it a FELONY). Also, yes, normally Trump could have made any kind of payment to anyone, but there are very specific rules about payments during a campaign, and this has been determined to be an illegal in kind campaign finance payment. Doesn't matter if Cohen was involved or if Trump paid the money directly to the two women.

It matters who's money it was. A felony? Sort of like the 2008 Obama campaign's hiding Wall Street donations? Nobody went to jail for that.

You obviously do not know much about this.

I don't make the rules about what is a felony and what isn't, and your ignorance on the matter has no bearing on what justice will come down on Trump for this.

Obama's Campaign was fined $375,000 for its campaign finance violation, and it was deemed "a small, technical paperwork error that people who were trying to get it right might make". At the same time, they need to get it right and they didn't, so the fine was levied. The campaign did NOT do this willfully with an effort to deceive. Also, Obama was not personally involved...it was all his staff who were responsible.

Trump and Cohen (Cohen has already pleaded GUILTY to two counts of FELONY campaign finance law violation and said Trump told him to do it), did this willfully with an effort to deceive, AND Cohen has stated that both of them knew it was illegal.

You are trying to defend a person who is indefensible. You should stop that.

Learn more about things before you spout nonsense. I don't want to have to be educating you all the time.

"The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t...

...care how many lives the ruin. These are Angry People, including the highly conflicted Bob Mueller, who worked for Obama for 8 years. They won’t even look at all of the bad acts and crimes on the other side. A TOTAL WITCH HUNT LIKE NO OTHER IN AMERICAN HISTORY!

Universities will someday study what highly conflicted (and NOT Senate approved) Bob Mueller and his gang of Democrat thugs have done to destroy people. Why is he protecting Crooked Hillary, Comey, McCabe, Lisa Page & her lover, Peter S, and all of his friends on the other side?

The only “Collusion” is that of the Democrats with Russia and many others. Why didn’t the FBI take the Server from the DNC? They still don’t have it. Check out how biased Facebook, Google and Twitter are in favor of the Democrats. That’s the real Collusion!"

Somebody seems awfully scared of Mueller right now.

In case anyone asks - I didn't steal the cookies.

1) Not a court case. Democrats were allowed to bring any evidence from anyone to the committee. No restrictions. In addition, they were allowed to ask any questions they had whether it was their own questions or from others.

2) Proven to be a nothing-burger.

3) Yes you can. There were others who came forward and the committee interviewed them and investigated their story. They turned out to not be credible. That's why a couple of them could face prison time. Do you really think that anyone that comes forward automatically gets to go before a committee? If you do, you are very naive. As for Ramirez, the FBI interviewed two "eye witnesses" to the alleged incident. Nothing-burger. Ford- everyone who was allegedly at the party was interviewed - no corroboration.

4) As the other poster stated - do you really think it was going to change the minds of the majority on either side? No. There was enough time to read the report. Period. Did anyone complain that they were not allowed to read it? Dems sure did make a lot of claims about a report they didn't have time to read. And, of course, Dems were complaining there was not enough time to read it. They didn't want him confirmed. Reports did state that there was no corroborating evidence.

5) You do realize nothing would ever get done if there were not established limits put on. Hours upon hours of testimony, 6 FBI background checks. an FBI investigation into allegations, etc. It was complete.

6) Your other points have been refuted and are absurd.

7) Actually, research has found that not everyone learns best in the same manner or using the same medium. It looks like you haven't found your optimal learning method.

Subway Surfers wrote:

Flagpole wrote:

Making the payment was never the issue...other than the fact it went over the campaign in kind contribution limit. The PROBLEM was that they didn't report the payment (violation) and then made specific movements to try to hide the payment (that makes it a FELONY). Also, yes, normally Trump could have made any kind of payment to anyone, but there are very specific rules about payments during a campaign, and this has been determined to be an illegal in kind campaign finance payment. Doesn't matter if Cohen was involved or if Trump paid the money directly to the two women.

It matters who's money it was. A felony? Sort of like the 2008 Obama campaign's hiding Wall Street donations? Nobody went to jail for that.

Typical whataboutisms... 1) attempts at drawing equivalence between Trump the king shady businessman and any democratic politician fail miserably every time - he is the corruption king: nepotism; treasonous administration; filling the swamp; hidden payments to porn star; helping Russian oligarchs launder money; manipulating markets - all just appetizers. 2) nothing that any other person on this planet does or has done is going to absolve Trump. You fail

How's that winning going, trumpers?

Republicans, you want to maybe push back against Trumpism now?

Senate and WH go blue in two years.

I mean if Orange County is a dem stronghold now...

https://twitter.com/Morning_Joe/status/1063403776063741953?s=20

2016 marked a major inflection point for republicans. After failing to sell their draconian policies to a majority of the public for decades (and for good reason), the GOP was left exposed to Trump’s highjacking. He is still under the illusion that 46% is more like 99%, but credit to him for motivating all of the 46% to come out and vote. Lessons for Dems - produce better candidates and focus on few strong mission statements. Math and demographic shifts are both heavily against this new GOP into the foreseeable future. Look at the turnout rate trends - this midterm was massive. Look at the party preference accross most groups. I don’t know what will happen to the GOP once Trump is done mangling it, but I hope it will completely disintegrate.

RestTooMuch wrote:

I quit voting for the democratic party over the last 5 years or so as I can no longer stomach the hate and lies coming from them. You people make a guy like Trump look like a saint. If you can't see it, you can't correct it, you can't win.

I don't check the Democrat box either--never have--but it would appear that the Dems did a fair amount of winning a few days ago, no?

And if "hate and lies" truly bother you then I presume that, like me, you won't be giving votes to the GOP for the foreseeable future. (Hell, Trump has lied thousands of times since he was elected.) Even more than the hate, it's the plain meanspiritedness of so many Republicans that makes me sad.

I will consider any party that doesn't *welcome* autocrats, theocrats, kleptocrats, misogynists, and racists--at present, I'm sorry to say, that leaves the GOP out.