#estate tax repeal bill

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

#us politics #twitter #tweet #republicans #conservatives #gop policy #gop platform #gop #sen. bernie sanders #vermont #independent #2023 #estate tax repeal bill #national debt #tax the billionaires #tax the 1% #walton family #elon musk #jeff bezos

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The vast majority of the Senate Republican caucus united last week to introduce a bill that would permanently repeal the estate tax, targeting one of the few provisions in the U.S. tax code that solely affects the richest 0.1% of Americans.

Led by Sen. John Thune (South Dakota), the top Republican on the Senate Subcommittee on Taxation and Internal Revenue Service Oversight, 40 Republicans reintroduced their bill to ensure that ultra-rich individuals seeking to hand off tens of millions of dollars — or more — to their heirs can do so completely tax-free. The extremely regressive proposal has been a longtime goal of Republicans, who have already massively watered down the estate tax in past years.

Currently, the estate tax threshold is $12.9 million, and nearly $26 million for couples. Amounts under this are exempted from taxes. This is nearly triple the threshold from 2016 and earlier, as Republicans more than doubled the estate tax cutoff in their major tax overhaul in 2017. The threshold is now so high that it is estimated that less than 0.1% of Americans are subject to the tax.

Evidently, these tax cuts are still not enough for Republicans, who had tried to repeal the tax altogether in 2017. In a press release on the bill, Thune, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) attempted to couch their support of the repeal in efforts to supposedly support farmers — claims that reveal themselves to be a farce when more closely examined.

“For years I have fought to protect farm and ranch families from the onerous and unfair death tax,” Thune said. “Family-owned farms and ranches often bear the brunt of this tax, which makes it difficult and costly to pass these businesses down to future generations.”

Thune’s statement is a misrepresentation of the truth. The vast, vast majority of “family-owned farms” are not subject to the estate tax. In 2020, a mere 0.16% of farm estates owed the tax, according to data from the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is an exceedingly small number of farms. As the Tax Policy Center estimated, only 50 farms total paid any estate tax in 2017, and this research was done before lawmakers doubled the threshold.

The criticism of the estate tax in defense of farmers is disingenuous for another reason, as Inequality.org pointed out in a blog post this week. The tax code “already has provisions that protect the very few families with farms and businesses subject to estate tax,” wrote Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow and senior adviser for Patriotic Millionaires Bob Lord. “If the bill sponsors truly cared about family farms, ranches, and businesses, they could have proposed legislation to expand these protections but leave the estate tax intact.”

In reality, deep-pocketed lobbyists with the Farm Bureau have long been pushing a repeal of the estate tax — and the group’s deep ties to big business and Wall Street are well documented.

Perhaps not coincidentally, repealing the estate tax would complete the loop of tax avoidance for the wealthiest Americans. The bill targets the “die” part of “buy borrow die,” a common tax dodging scheme used by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes; it is part of the reason that the wealthiest Americans are able to pay little to no taxes year over year.

In the practice of buying, borrowing, and dying, the rich first pour their wealth into assets like stocks, building up a large portfolio. Those assets are then used as collateral for taking out large loans with low interest rates — lower than, say, the income tax rate — that become a wealthy person’s spending money. Then, they die, and hand off their wealth to the next generation, maintaining their dynasty for decades to come.

At very few points do taxes come into the buy, borrow, die equation. Buying and keeping stocks doesn’t incur a tax bill. Taking out loans allows the wealthy to claim very low incomes to skirt income taxes. The estate tax is essentially the only guarantee, and even then, the wealthy have come up with extreme loopholes to dodge the estate tax, too. Republicans, then, are hoping to make tax avoidance even easier by legalizing it entirely; Lord has pointedly labeled the bill the “Billionaires Pay Zero Tax Act.”

The proposal stands in sharp contrast to progressives’ views on taxation. Pointing to extreme and growing wealth inequality, progressives have been calling for increasing taxes on the rich and specifically targeting their wealth and stock portfolios, rather than endlessly allowing the “buy” and “borrow” portions of the cycle.

#us politics #news #us senate #senate republicans #truthout #2023 #taxes #tax code #estate taxes #republicans #conservatives #gop #gop policy #gop platform #sen. john thune #Senate Subcommittee on Taxation and Internal Revenue Service Oversight #tax the rich #tax the 1% #tax the wealthy #tax the billionaires #sen. mitch mcconnell #Sen. Mike Crapo #family-owned farms #department of agriculture #Tax Policy Center #Economic Research Service #Inequality.org #Patriotic Millionaires #Bob Lord #Farm Bureau

[nebris]

No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism

On a Friday night last month, I moderated a debate in Manhattan about whether we should scrap capitalism. It was organized by the socialist magazine Jacobin; defending capitalism were editors from the libertarian publication Reason. Tickets for all available 450 seats sold out in a day. So Jacobin moved it to a venue that holds around twice as many. The extra tickets sold out in eight hours.

When I arrived, people were lined up for blocks; walking to the door, I felt like I was on the guest list at an underground nightclub. Most attendees appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, part of a generation that is uniquely suspicious of capitalism, a system most of their elders take for granted.

The anti-Communist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was alarmed to find in a recent survey that 44 percent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, compared with 42 percent who want to live under capitalism. For older Americans, the collapse of Communism made it seem as though there was no possible alternative to capitalism. But given the increasingly oligarchic nature of our economy, it’s not surprising that for many young people, capitalism looks like the god that failed.

Nowhere is that clearer than in the wretched tax bill passed by the Senate in the early hours of Saturday morning, which would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the bill directs the largest tax cuts as a share of income to the top 5 percent of taxpayers. By 2027, taxes on the lowest earners would go up.

Millennials, a generation maligned as entitled whiners, would be particularly hard hit. As

Ronald Brownstein argued in The Atlantic, the rich people who would benefit from the measures passed by the House and the Senate tend to be older (and whiter) than the population at large. Younger people would foot the bill, either through higher taxes, diminished public services or both. They stand to inherit an even more stratified society than the one they were born into.

Here’s one example. The Senate bill offers a tax break for parents whose children attend private school. But it cuts deductions for state and local taxes, which could

make it harder to fund the public schools where the vast majority of millennials will send their kids.

There is no coherent economic rationale for what Republicans are doing. Academic economists are

basically unanimous that the Republican tax plan would increase America’s deficit, which Republicans used to pretend to care about. With unemployment low, many experts say the economy doesn’t need a stimulus. The tax cuts are likely to increase the trade deficit, which President Trump purportedly wants to reduce. Republicans often say they want to simplify the tax code, but as the accountant Tony Nitti argues in Forbes, the tax bill would make much of it more complex.

How to explain this smash-and-grab legislative looting, which violates all principles of economic prudence? Part of it is simple greed, but there’s also an ideology at work, one that sees the rich as more productive and deserving than others. Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, spelled it out on her Instagram feed in August, responding to an Oregon mother who had the audacity to criticize Linton’s use of a government plane: “Lololol. Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country?”

Lest you think that’s just the sputtering of a modern Marie-Antoinette with poor grammar, consider what Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told The Des Moines Register about the need to repeal the estate tax, which falls only on heirs of multimillionaires and billionaires. “I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies,” he said. By this logic, Linton, or Trump’s children, are more socially useful than anyone irresponsible enough to live paycheck to paycheck.

Not to be outdone, the next day, Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, argued that Congress still hasn’t reauthorized the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which he helped create and still claims to support, because “we don’t have money anymore.” He went on to rant against the poor: “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves — won’t lift a finger — and expect the federal government to do everything.” It was unclear whether he was talking about the nearly nine million children covered through CHIP or their parents.

After the fall of Communism, capitalism came to seem like the modern world’s natural state, like the absence of ideology rather than an ideology itself. The Trump era is radicalizing because it makes the rotten morality behind our inequalities so manifest. It’s not just the occult magic of the market that’s enriching Ivanka Trump’s children while health insurance premiums soar and public school budgets wither. It’s the raw exercise of power by a tiny unaccountable minority that believes in its own superiority. You don’t have to want to abolish capitalism to understand why the prospect is tempting to a generation that’s being robbed.

[reddancer1]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

January 18, 2023 (Wednesday)

One of the promises House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made to the extremist members of the Republican conference to win his position was that he would let them bring the so-called Fair Tax Act to the House floor for a vote. On January 8, Representative Earl “Buddy” Carter (R-GA) introduced the measure into Congress. 

The measure repeals all existing income taxes, payroll taxes, and estate and gift taxes, replacing them with a flat national sales tax of 30% on all purchased goods, rents, and services (which its advocates nonsensically call a 23% tax because, as Bloomberg opinion writer Matthew Yglesias explains their thinking: “if something sells for $100 plus $30 in tax, then it’s a 23% tax—because $30 is 23% of $130”). The measure abolishes the Internal Revenue Service, leaving it up to the states to administer the tax.

The bill says the measure will “promote freedom, fairness, and economic opportunity.” But a 30% sales tax on everything doesn’t seem to do much for fairness or economic opportunity for all, since it would, of course, hit Americans with less money to spend far harder than it would Americans with more money to spend. And the end of income, gift, and estate taxes would be a windfall for the wealthy. Such a bill is not going to pass this Congress, and if it did, President Biden would not sign it. 

Two days after Carter introduced the measure, Biden said to the press: “National sales tax, that’s a great idea. It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.” He promised he would never agree to any such legislation.

But the measure is illuminating. It explicitly rejects the position, and the principles, of the original Republican Party.

Members of the Republican Party invented the U.S. income tax during the Civil War, and they created the precursor to the IRS to collect it. To find money to fight the war, they raised tariffs on common products but immediately turned to the novel idea of an income tax, and a graduated one at that, to make sure that “the burdens will be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” as Senator William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) put it. Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT) agreed. “The weight [of] taxation must be distributed equally,” he said, “Not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.” 

The Republicans then quite deliberately constructed a national system for collecting the new taxes. In the midst of the Civil War, they urged their colleagues to imagine what would happen if a disloyal state were permitted to manage the collection itself. A Democratic legislature could simply refuse, and the government might perish for lack of funds to support the troops. The government had a right to “demand” 99 percent of a man’s property for an urgent necessity, Morrill said. When the public required it, “the property of the people…belongs to the Government.” 

Today’s Republicans are taking a position opposite to the one that the men who formed the Republican Party did during the Civil War. They want to get rid of the income tax and put state governments in charge of the nation’s revenue system. Wording in the measure suggests that this change is because state governments have expertise in sales taxes, but it is no accident that the plan dismantles the federal system that Civil War Republicans accurately noted gives Americans “a sense of personal responsibility in the safety and stability of the nation.”  

This radical tax bill strikes a blow for states' rights, much as the southern leaders the original Republicans stood against did in the 1860s. It is far easier for a minority to take over a state and impose its will on a majority there than it is to do the same at the national level. And Republicans are definitely working to cement their control in the states.

In The Nation yesterday, Joan Walsh pulled together some of the many stories of voter suppression that have come lately from Republican-dominated states. Former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler recently noted that her state’s 2021 law cutting way back on mail-in ballots helped elect Republicans: Walsh points out that mail-in ballots dropped by 81% between 2020 and 2022, and Black voter turnout dropped.

Robert Spindell, an election commissioner in Wisconsin who was one of Trump’s fake electors in 2020, wrote an email to about 1700 people saying that Republicans “can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.” Senator Ron Johnson won reelection in that race over Democratic candidate Mandela Barnes, who is from Milwaukee, by about 27,000 votes. 

In Florida, Missouri, and Ohio, Republican lawmakers are trying to make it harder for citizens to use ballot initiatives, as progressive policies like Medicaid expansion, the legalization of marijuana, hikes in the minimum wage, abortion rights, and redistricting by independent commissions have all turned out to be popular.

And on Monday, in New Mexico, Solomon Peña, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for the state legislature last year, was arrested for allegedly hiring men to shoot at the homes of four Democratic elected officials.By taking control of the states, Republicans can impose their will. Centering taxation there, rather than the federal government, is one more way to try to make people conform to their worldview.  

Tucked inside the proposed tax measure is broad government oversight of a state's poorer citizens. It provides an option for “qualified” families to get a rebate, but each member of the household must be registered annually with the state. Every member of the family over the age of 21 must certify in writing that all family members have been listed, that they are all legal residents of the U.S., and that none “were incarcerated on the family determination date.” Incarceration is defined as anyone “incarcerated in a local, State, or Federal jail, prison, mental hospital, or other institution.” 

This measure will not pass in this Congress, but it is striking proof that the modern Republican Party has abandoned not only its original principles, but even its more recent philosophy of “freedom” from an intrusive government.

[robertreich]

The Republican Rebrand, Exposed

The Republican Party is trying to rebrand itself as the party of the working class.

Rubbish. Republicans can spout off all the catchy slogans about blue jeans and beer they want, but actions speak louder than words. But let’s look at what they’re actually doing.

Did they vote for the American Rescue Plan? No. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for stimulus checks and extra unemployment benefits needed by millions of American workers.

So what have they voted for? Well, every single one of them voted for Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy and corporations, of which 83 percent of the benefits go to the richest 1 percent over a decade. 

They claimed corporations would use the savings from the tax cut to invest in their workers. In reality, corporations used their tax savings to buy back shares of their own stock in order to boost share values. And some corporations then fired large portions of their workforce. Not very pro-worker, if you ask me.

Have they voted for any taxes on the wealthy? No. Quite the opposite. Republicans refuse to tax the rich. They’ve even been trying to get rid of the estate tax, which only applies to estates worth at least $11.7 million for individuals and $23.4 million for married couples. Working class my foot.

Have they backed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which a majority of Americans favor? No. Republicans refuse to raise the minimum wage even though it would give 32 million workers a raise. That’s about a fifth of the entire U.S. workforce.

Do they support unions, which empower workers to get better pay and benefits? No again. To the contrary: Republicans have enacted right-to-work laws in 28 states, decimating unions’ bargaining power and enabling businesses to exploit their workers. 

And when it comes to strengthening labor laws, only five out of 211 Republicans voted for the PRO Act in the House -- the toughest labor law legislation in a generation. 

How about the historic union drive at the Bessemer, Alabama Amazon warehouse, which Joe Biden and almost all Democrats have strongly backed? Just one Republican spoke out in support. All others have been dead silent.

What about backing regulations that keep workers safe? Nope. In fact, they didn’t bat an eye when Trump rolled back child labor protections, undid worker safeguards from exposure to cancerous radiation, and gutted measures that shield workers from wage theft.

Do they support overtime? No. They allowed Trump to eliminate overtime for 8 million workers, and continue to repeat the corporate lie about “job-killing regulations.”

What about expanding access to healthcare to all working people? Not a chance. Republicans at the state level have blocked Medicaid expansion and enacted Medicaid work requirements, while Republicans in Congress have tried for years to repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. If they succeeded, they would have stripped healthcare away from more than 20 million working Americans.

So don’t fall for the Republican Party’s “working class” rebrand. It’s a cruel hoax. The GOP doesn’t give a fig about working people. It is, and always will be, the party of big business and billionaires.

#Republican Party #GOP #working class #labor unions #minimum wage #corporate tax #worker safety #overtime #healthcare #video #videos

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid

It’s been just over a year since the death of activist, writer and anthropologist Gavid Graeber — a brilliant speaker, writer and thinker who helped give us Occupy, “we are the 99%” and “Bullshit Jobs.”

On the anniversary of David’s death, his widow Nika Dubrovsky convened the first “Art Project” discussion, a fascinating debate between Thomas Piketty and Michael Hudson, a pair of political economists whose work is neatly bridged by Graeber’s own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWT0uvBLDbo

Piketty, of course, is the bestselling French economist whose 2013 Capital in the 21st Century was an unlikely, 700+ page viral hit, describing with rare lucidity the macroeconomics that drive capitalism towards cruel and destabilizing inequality

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Hudson, meanwhile, is the debt-historian and economist whose haunting phrase “Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” is a perfect and irrefutable summation of the inevitable downfall of any system that relies on household debt to drive consumption.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#jubilee

Like Hudson, Graeber was obsessed with the history and politics of debt. His 2012 book “Debt: The First 5,000 years” influenced not just Piketty’s work, but the work of many non-economists, including a large group of science fiction writers.

https://www.tor.com/2012/04/16/the-best-science-fiction-ideas-in-any-non-fiction-ever-david-graebers-debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/

Like Piketty, Graeber was capable of writing extremely long books that were so engaging that people actually read them, absorbing complex and nuanced subjects. DEBT clocked in at 534 pages, and not a dud among them.

And like both Hudson and Piketty, Graeber was obsessed with long timescales and the ways that history is pressed into service to assert that various political situations are inevitable products of human nature, meaning that there’s no point in asking for a fairer system.

In Debt, Graeber reaches back 5,000 years to question (among other things), the “money story” that money was created by individuals who wanted to make barter more efficient, settling on coins as a way to make change for someone who wants a cow but only has chickens to trade.

Graeber shows the “confluence of needs” theory of money to be a fairy tale, something that orthodox economists literally made up as the “most likely” source of money, without ever asking historians about what the record tells us about the origins of money.

Which is a pity, because historians know a lot about this stuff! For example, they can tell you about the Babylonian use of ledgers to record the issuance and redemption of debt in the largely agricultural economy of the day.

This early money would be recognizable to farmers today: during planting season, a share of the eventual harvest is promised in exchange for the inputs needed to plant, nurture and reap the crops.

Like Graeber, Hudson also treats Babylonian policy as key to economics — specifically, the Babylonian understanding that “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” which is why the state would periodically declare a jubilee in which all debts were declared void.

Without these periodic jubilees, the entire productive economy is swallowed up by debt service — every poor harvest or other unforseeable circumstance drives producers (who are also debtors) further into debt, whose interest creates an inescapable gravity.

Without some way to escape debt’s gravity, all productive labor becomes oriented toward debt-service, and the economy grinds to a halt. If this sounds familiar, you’re probably paying attention to today’s political economy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/19/zombie-debt/#damnation

Piketty also works in long timescales, though his historical analysis is an order of magnitude more recent that Hudston or Graeber’s. At Capital XXI’s core is a data-set, painstakingly assembled by Piketty and his grad students over more than a decade.

That data-set traces “capital flows” (the distribution of wealth and income) for 300+ years, rigorously traced and normalized, so that we can understand things like the relative degree of inequality in different societies over centuries.

Famously, Piketty concludes that no matter how fast an economy is growing — no matter how productive its makers are — that wealth grows faster, making the takers who financed growth even richer than the people whose work is propelling the economy.

This fundamental truth (expressed in economic notation as r > g, or “return on capital is greater than economic growth”) means that “meritocracy” is a lie: the richest people in a market economy aren’t the people who do the best work, it’s the people who started off rich.

Like Hudson, Piketty’s work looks at the relationship between inequality and instability: Piketty uses his data to show that inequality crises trigger political crises, and that high degrees of inequality precede upheavals like the French Revolution and the World Wars.

Given all that, a discussion between Piketty and Hudson, convened in Graeber’s memory, is bound to be fascinating, and they don’t disappoint (if you prefer text to video, check out Naked Capitalism’s transcript):

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/09/michael-hudson-and-thomas-piketty-debate-inequality-debt-and-reform.html

Here’s my highlight reel of the discussion, with commentary. Hudson opens with a skeptical take on Piketty’s conclusion to Capital XXI, in which he proposes a global wealth tax. Such a tax is nearly impossible to enforce, says Hudson — unlike a jubilee.

Hudson says the source of today’s global vast fortunes is not earnings or income — rather, it’s central banks’ subsidy of the value of stocks and bonds, through rock-bottom interest rates, bond guarantees, etc. These fuel speculative bear markets that run up asset prices.

These state-subsidized fortunes are pumped into the financial markets, becoming the loans that everyone else has to pay debt on, just to survive. As in ancient times, the finance sector eventually swallows the productive economy whole. Without jubilee, you get collapse.

This is true within rich economies, but it’s even more pronounced in the relations between poor debtor countries who were coerced into taking on massive debts by the IMF, who are going to pay an ever-larger share of their GDP to offshore creditors as the economy slows.

The only way for poor countries to service those debts is by imposing crushing austerity, which means starving domestic producers of investment, education and health services, reducing productivity, requiring more austerity — until the whole thing collapses.

Remember: debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. It’s an iron law, and cannot be repealed — not by austerity, not by “better management,” not by “living within your means.” Can’t be paid = won’t be paid.

Piketty doesn’t dispute any of this, saying that he’s reconsidered some of the solutions in Capital XXI in light of subsequent events, like the pathetically inadequate global minimum corporate tax of 15%, which only rich countries’ treasuries will get to participate in.

Piketty points to his followup to Capital XXI, the even weightier (and sadly less influential) Capital and Ideology for his more up-to-date thinking on the way to address inequality and instability.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/19/capital-and-ideology-by-thomas-piketty-review-if-inequality-is-illegitimate-why-not-reduce-it

He reiterates his thesis that inequality self-corrects, thanks to the instability it engenders. Left on their own, market economies collapse, torn apart by the bill for guards to defend lenders’ fortunes, the bill for interest payments that enrich lenders.

Impose sufficient austerity and brutality on a society and the cost of defending it exceeds the wealth its productive sector manages to produce, and boom — French Revolution, the World Wars, etc.

Piketty proposes that mounting “catastrophic climate change” might precipitate the next crisis, which is certainly a safe bet, though of course, the question is whether that crisis will come after the point of no return for a habitable planet.

Hudson has ideas about how we might hasten transformative change without risking civilizational collapse. He points out that Piketty’s work identifies inherited wealth as inequality’s wellspring and points out that estate taxes are much more enforceable than wealth taxes.

Certainly, inherited wealth is a live issue today. The latest installment of Propublica’s essential IRS Papers reporting shows how the richest Americans abuse a bizarre loophole to avoid ANY tax on indescribably vast estates:

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-than-half-of-americas-100-richest-people-exploit-special-trusts-to-avoid-estate-taxes

No one knows exactly how much tax avoidance grantor retained annuity trusts (GRATs) drive, because they are shrouded in secrecy. In 2013, the lawyer who created GRATs said they’d allowed the ultra-wealthy to evade $100b in taxes. Their use has increased since then.

Another lever for reducing inequality is political competition. Hudson points out that during the Cold War, capitalist states took steps to prevent runaway inequality in a bid to show that market economies were more stable than centralized, planned economies.

Hudson suggests that competition with China might serve that function today. Without forgiving China for its autocracy and human rights abuses, he gives favorable marks to its economic planners for reining in the finance sector.

It’s true that China intervened heavily in credit markets during the covid crisis, to prevent rentiers from destroying productive businesses that couldn’t service their debts during lockdown, preserving larges swathes of otherwise vulnerable productive firms.

He reminds us that the original meaning of “free market” was “a market free from rents,” where unproductive creditors were not allowed to lay a private tax on productive manufacturers.

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, the meaning has been reversed — a market is “free” if creditors face no limits on rent-extraction.

But there’s good reason to be skeptical of claims that China’s economy is being well-managed, as Anne Stevenson-Yang writes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annestevenson-yang/2021/09/25/chairman-xi-chinas-looming-crisis-and-the-myth-of-infallibility/

Stevenson-Yang paints a picture of chaotic state management of the Chinese economy, hidden by state-owned media and its rosy outlook. Watchwords like “common prosperity” are empty buzzwords, used to paper over self-interested, corrupt business practices.

State initiatives measure progress through short-term, easily gamed KPIs, something she says is documented in Red Roulette: “a new book written by a disaffected property developer named Desmond Shum.”

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Red-Roulette/Desmond-Shum/9781982156152

Now, I’m willing to stipulate that for investors and property developers “corruption” or “incompetence” might be indistinguishable from what the rest of us would call good governance, but some of Stevenson-Yang’s charges seem factual and well-made.

42I found the discussion between Piketty and Hudson fascinating, and if there was anything more that I’d add, it would be a dose of technopolitics (unsurprisingly). After all, technology has a huge bearing on the timing and nature of the shifts that both economists study.

For Piketty, inequality-driven instability collapses when the cost of guard-labor rises too high to bear — other words, eventually, a society gets so unequal that it costs more to stave off guillotines than even the ultrarich can afford.

For Hudson, debt-driven instability collapses when debtors begin to default because they have no ability to service their debts.

Technology changes the nature of both of these collapses. Take guard labor: mass surveillance and technological controls make it cheaper than at any time in history to isolate and neutralize political threats to elite rule.

How much cheaper? Well, in 1989, the Stasi employed one in sixty East Germans to spy on the whole nation.

Today, the NSA spies on the whole world, at a spy:subject ratio that’s more like 1:10,000 — two orders of magnitude more efficient than the spies of a generation ago. That’s a huge productivity gain, and it’s all thanks to digital technology.

When it comes to debtor default, the tension is between coercion and ability to pay. Yes, “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” but “can’t be aid” is not a hard limit — it turns on how much the debtor is willing to hurt themselves and their loved ones to make payments.

Every mafia armbreaker knows this. When someone can’t pay their debts, you can break their arm and they’ll cash in their kids’ college fund and secretly remortgage their house to make the next payment.

When that runs out, if you threaten to break their legs, the debtor will start breaking into cars. Eventually, this comes to an end, when the debtor goes to prison for 25 years. But in the meantime, coercive force can wring a fair amount of blood from the stone.

Debtor coercion has been transformed by digital technology, from an artisanal, retail handicraft to a scaled up, industrial practice.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

We don’t need the threat of repo men to keep you paying your car note — miss a Tesla payment and your car will phone home and lock its doors. When the tow arrives, it will flash its lights, honk its horn and back out of its parking space for repossession.

The ability to digitally repossess, or partially repossess (as in India, where loan-shark cellphone companies disable your most-used apps if you miss a payment) the tools you rely on for life and livelihood makes it cost-effective to apply coercion at scale.

Cheap guard-labor and cheap coercion mean that crisis can be deferred for ever-longer timescales. Thus, societies up the only kind of debt that really matters: policy debt. Lives are ruined, productive capacity tanked, the planet poisoned.

Add tech to Piketty or Hudson’s analysis and things start to look a lot less self-correcting, and the odds tilt against our civilization, our species and our planet. If a correction only comes after the point of no return, we’re in very deep shit indeed.

#pluralistic

[96thdayofrage]

It has taken 150 years for the reparations conversation to be given the seriousness it has always been due. Yet often overlooked in the discussion is that African-Americans, realizing the 40 acres was not forthcoming, worked to buy their own land after the war—land that served not only as a source of income, but as a bedrock of physical safety and familial stability over generations. That land has since been, in many cases, weaseled away from their heirs through dubious legal manoeuvres. And the weaseling continues today.

By the turn of the 20th century, former slaves and their descendants had amassed 14 million acres of land. Black agriculture was a powerhouse; per capita there were more black farmers than white farmers. But by the turn of the 21st century, 90 percent of that land was lost. Some of that can be chalked up to the Great Migration, when southern blacks fled to northern cities to escape the racist violence and systemic oppression of the South. Less known is the story of those who stayed in rural areas and their efforts to hold on to their land within a legal system that seemed designed to shift it — and the generational wealth it represented — to white ownership.

The legal avenues for finagling land from black farmers vary by state and the circumstances surrounding the property and its ownership. Here’s a sampling of how it works.

Heirs Property

Whether due to distrust of the legal system or lack of access to legal resources, freed slaves and their descendants often lacked a will transferring ownership of their property when they died. This means the property became “heirs property”—ownership is split equally among all known descendants; over time, the property is further split among the descendants of the descendants, creating over the course of generations a quagmire of ownership among hundreds, even thousands, of heirs. To use heirs property as collateral on a mortgage, to subdivide it, to develop it—and any number of other things of a legally binding nature—is difficult without first identifying and tracking down every heir, and gaining consent from each one.

Partition Sales

The descendants of slaves are by no means the only people dealing with the intractable issues associated with heirs property, but they deal with it in disproportionate numbers, at least in southern states (an estimated 40 percent of black-owned land is heirs property). For many Americans, property ownership is an unequivocal key to building and maintaining wealth across generations. But compared to property owners in possession of a clear title, heir’s property owners face tremendous practical and financial barriers to deriving wealth from their land. Oddly, one of the few things heir’s owners can do without the consent of all the other owners is to sell their portion of the property. The problem is that if just one owner sells, real estate laws in many places provide the new non-hereditary owner with a variety of means to obtain the entire property, often at below market rates—a process commonly referred to as a partition sale.

Torrens Acts

Historically, many states had what’s called a Torrens Act, which were originally intended to simplify title registry. But in a strange legal idiosyncrasy, these laws also serve as loopholes that allow third parties to force families off their land through partition sales. This is because when one owner/family member sells, Torrens rules help to shield them from recourse by other owners/family members, who in some instances may not even be notified of the sale until they are served an eviction notice.

Tax Sales

In high-demand areas where land value has skyrocketed (much black-owned heirs property lies in tourist areas along the coasts of North and South Carolina), property taxes go up accordingly. But if your goal is to stay on your land, rather than flip it, and you’re on a fixed income, chances are you at some point you’ll be unable to afford your annual property taxes. The county then has the right to put the property on the auction block—a common way for developers to access land from families who don’t want to sell.

Progress?

Some states have repealed Torrens legislation, but it is still a common means of dispossession within southern US. There is also a movement afoot to reform regulations governing partition sales, with a law called the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, which according to ProPublica has now been adopted in 14 states. Another small sign of progress is a measure in last years Farm Bill that allows owners of heirs property to apply for various USDA programs, such as loans and crop insurance, for the first time.

CORRECTION, May 14, 2020: An earlier version of this story stated that the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act had not been adopted in many southern states. At the time, five southern states had adopted it. We apologize for the error.

[tinyshe]

I wanted to snip this because I believe the incoming administration will try to erase and change facts/history to suit them so here is a hot link and one in the title. I hope the copy traveled well because it was so large!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/trump-administration-accomplishments/

As of January 2021

Trump Administration Accomplishments

Unprecedented Economic Boom

Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.

America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.

Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.

The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.

Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.

More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.

Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.

The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.

Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.

Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.

Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows.

Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.

Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.

Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.

Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.

The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.

Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.

African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent.

Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA.

Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs.

Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas.

Small business optimism broke a 35-year old record in 2018.

Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks.

The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020.

The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs.

Rebuilding and investing in rural America.

Signed an Executive Order on Modernizing the Regulatory Framework for Agricultural Biotechnology Products, which is bringing innovative new technologies to market in American farming and agriculture.

Strengthened America’s rural economy by investing over $1.3 billion through the Agriculture Department’s ReConnect Program to bring high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America.

Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns.

An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off during a pandemic than four years prior.

During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent – the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded.

Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost.

Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery.

Unemployment fell to 6.7 percent in December, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April – beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the end of 2020.

Under the previous administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from 10 percent to under 7 percent compared to just 3 months for the Trump Administration.

Since April, the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen by 9.6 percent, Asian-American unemployment by 8.6 percent, and Black American unemployment by 6.8 percent.

80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April.

Small business confidence hit a new high.

Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006.

Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled.

Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high.

Home prices hit an all-time record high.

The United States rejected crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public health harms and instead safely reopened its economy.

Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country.

Stabilized America’s financial markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department supported facilities at the Federal Reserve.

Tax Relief for the Middle Class

Passed $3.2 trillion in historic tax relief and reformed the tax code.

Signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – the largest tax reform package in history.

More than 6 million American workers received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to the tax cuts.

A typical family of four earning $75,000 received an income tax cut of more than $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half.

Doubled the standard deduction – making the first $24,000 earned by a married couple completely tax-free.

Doubled the child tax credit.

Virtually eliminated the unfair Estate Tax, or Death Tax.

Cut the business tax rate from 35 percent – the highest in the developed world – all the way down to 21 percent.

Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.

Businesses can now deduct 100 percent of the cost of their capital investments in the year the investment is made.

Since the passage of tax cuts, the share of total wealth held by the bottom half of households has increased, while the share held by the top 1 percent has decreased.

Over 400 companies have announced bonuses, wage increases, new hires, or new investments in the United States.

Over $1.5 trillion was repatriated into the United States from overseas.

Lower investment cost and higher capital returns led to faster growth in the middle class, real wages, and international competitiveness.

Jobs and investments are pouring into Opportunity Zones.

Created nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones where capital gains on long-term investments are taxed at zero.

Opportunity Zone designations have increased property values within them by 1.1 percent, creating an estimated $11 billion in wealth for the nearly half of Opportunity Zone residents who own their own home.

Opportunity Zones have attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment in economically distressed communities, creating at least 500,000 new jobs.

Approximately 1 million Americans will be lifted from poverty as a result of these new investments.

Private equity investments into businesses in Opportunity Zones were nearly 30 percent higher than investments into businesses in similar areas that were not designated Opportunity Zones.

Massive Deregulation

Ended the regulatory assault on American Businesses and Workers.

Instead of 2-for-1, we eliminated 8 old regulations for every 1 new regulation adopted.

Provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year.

Reduced the direct cost of regulatory compliance by $50 billion, and will reduce costs by an additional $50 billion in FY 2020 alone.

Removed nearly 25,000 pages from the Federal Register – more than any other president. The previous administration added over 16,000 pages.

Established the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation to reduce outdated regulations at the state, local, and tribal levels.

Signed an executive order to make it easier for businesses to offer retirement plans.

Signed two executive orders to increase transparency in Federal agencies and protect Americans and their small businesses from administrative abuse.

Modernized the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for the first time in over 40 years.

Reduced approval times for major infrastructure projects from 10 or more years down to 2 years or less.

Helped community banks by signing legislation that rolled back costly provisions of Dodd-Frank.

Established the White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing to bring down housing costs.

Removed regulations that threatened the development of a strong and stable internet.

Eased and simplified restrictions on rocket launches, helping to spur commercial investment in space projects.

Published a whole-of-government strategy focused on ensuring American leadership in automated vehicle technology.

Streamlined energy efficiency regulations for American families and businesses, including preserving affordable lightbulbs, enhancing the utility of showerheads, and enabling greater time savings with dishwashers.

Removed unnecessary regulations that restrict the seafood industry and impede job creation.

Modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology regulations to put America in the lead to develop new technologies.

Took action to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to COVID-19, including lifting restrictions on manufacturers to more quickly produce ventilators.

Successfully rolled back burdensome regulatory overreach.

Rescinded the previous administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which would have abolished zoning for single-family housing to build low-income, federally subsidized apartments.

Issued a final rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard.

Eliminated the Waters of the United States Rule and replaced it with the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, providing relief and certainty for farmers and property owners.

Repealed the previous administration’s costly fuel economy regulations by finalizing the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, which will make cars more affordable, and lower the price of new vehicles by an estimated $2,200.

Americans now have more money in their pockets.

Deregulation had an especially beneficial impact on low-income Americans who pay a much higher share of their incomes for overregulation.

Cut red tape in the healthcare industry, providing Americans with more affordable healthcare and saving Americans nearly 10 percent on prescription drugs.

Deregulatory efforts yielded savings to the medical community an estimated $6.6 billion – with a reduction of 42 million hours of regulatory compliance work through 2021.

Removed government barriers to personal freedom and consumer choice in healthcare.

Once fully in effect, 20 major deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump Administration are expected to save American consumers and businesses over $220 billion per year.

Signed 16 pieces of deregulatory legislation that will result in a $40 billion increase in annual real incomes.

Fair and Reciprocal Trade

Secured historic trade deals to defend American workers.

Immediately withdrew from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Ended the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and replaced it with the brand new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

The USMCA contains powerful new protections for American manufacturers, auto-makers, farmers, dairy producers, and workers.

The USMCA is expected to generate over $68 billion in economic activity and potentially create over 550,000 new jobs over ten years.

Signed an executive order making it government policy to Buy American and Hire American, and took action to stop the outsourcing of jobs overseas.

Negotiated with Japan to slash tariffs and open its market to $7 billion in American agricultural products and ended its ban on potatoes and lamb.

Over 90 percent of American agricultural exports to Japan now receive preferential treatment, and most are duty-free.

Negotiated another deal with Japan to boost $40 billion worth of digital trade.

Renegotiated the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement, doubling the cap on imports of American vehicles and extending the American light truck tariff.

Reached a written, fully-enforceable Phase One trade agreement with China on confronting pirated and counterfeit goods, and the protection of American ideas, trade secrets, patents, and trademarks.

China agreed to purchase an additional $200 billion worth of United States exports and opened market access for over 4,000 American facilities to exports while all tariffs remained in effect.

Achieved a mutual agreement with the European Union (EU) that addresses unfair trade practices and increases duty-free exports by 180 percent to $420 million.

Secured a pledge from the EU to eliminate tariffs on American lobster – the first United States-European Union negotiated tariff reduction in over 20 years.

Scored a historic victory by overhauling the Universal Postal Union, whose outdated policies were undermining American workers and interests.

Engaged extensively with trade partners like the EU and Japan to advance reforms to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Issued a first-ever comprehensive report on the WTO Appellate Body’s failures to comply with WTO rules and interpret WTO agreements as written.

Blocked nominees to the WTO’s Appellate Body until WTO Members recognize and address longstanding issues with Appellate Body activism.

Submitted 5 papers to the WTO Committee on Agriculture to improve Members’ understanding of how trade policies are implemented, highlight areas for improved transparency, and encourage members to maintain up-to-date notifications on market access and domestic support.

Took strong actions to confront unfair trade practices and put America First.

Imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions worth of Chinese goods to protect American jobs and stop China’s abuses under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Directed an all-of-government effort to halt and punish efforts by the Communist Party of China to steal and profit from American innovations and intellectual property.

Imposed tariffs on foreign aluminum and foreign steel to protect our vital industries and support our national security.

Approved tariffs on $1.8 billion in imports of washing machines and $8.5 billion in imports of solar panels.

Blocked illegal timber imports from Peru.

Took action against France for its digital services tax that unfairly targets American technology companies.

Launched investigations into digital services taxes that have been proposed or adopted by 10 other countries.

Historic support for American farmers.

Successfully negotiated more than 50 agreements with countries around the world to increase foreign market access and boost exports of American agriculture products, supporting more than 1 million American jobs.

Authorized $28 billion in aid for farmers who have been subjected to unfair trade practices – fully funded by the tariffs paid by China.

China lifted its ban on poultry, opened its market to beef, and agreed to purchase at least $80 billion of American agricultural products in the next two years.

The European Union agreed to increase beef imports by 180 percent and opened up its market to more imports of soybeans.

South Korea lifted its ban on American poultry and eggs, and agreed to provide market access for record exports of American rice.

Argentina lifted its ban on American pork.

Brazil agreed to increase wheat imports by $180 million a year and raised its quotas for purchases of United States ethanol.

Guatemala and Tunisia opened up their markets to American eggs.

Won tariff exemptions in Ecuador for wheat and soybeans.

Suspended $817 million in trade preferences for Thailand under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program due to its failure to adequately provide reasonable market access for American pork products.

The amount of food stamps redeemed at farmers markets increased from $1.4 million in May 2020 to $1.75 million in September 2020 – a 50 percent increase over last year.

Rapidly deployed the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided $30 billion in support to farmers and ranchers facing decreased prices and market disruption when COVID-19 impacted the food supply chain.

Authorized more than $6 billion for the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which delivered over 128 million boxes of locally sourced, produce, meat, and dairy products to charity and faith-based organizations nationwide.

Delegated authorities via the Defense Production Act to protect breaks in the American food supply chain as a result of COVID-19.

American Energy Independence

Unleashed America’s oil and natural gas potential.

For the first time in nearly 70 years, the United States has become a net energy exporter.

The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

Natural gas production reached a record-high of 34.9 quads in 2019, following record high production in 2018 and in 2017.

The United States has been a net natural gas exporter for three consecutive years and has an export capacity of nearly 10 billion cubic feet per day.

Withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris Climate Agreement.

Canceled the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with the new Affordable Clean Energy rule.

Approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.

Opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil and gas leasing.

Repealed the last administration’s Federal Coal Leasing Moratorium, which prohibited coal leasing on Federal lands.

Reformed permitting rules to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and speed approval for mines.

Fixed the New Source Review permitting program, which punished companies for upgrading or repairing coal power plants.

Fixed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) steam electric and coal ash rules.

The average American family saved $2,500 a year in lower electric bills and lower prices at the gas pump.

Signed legislation repealing the harmful Stream Protection Rule.

Reduced the time to approve drilling permits on public lands by half, increasing permit applications to drill on public lands by 300 percent.

Expedited approval of the NuStar’s New Burgos pipeline to export American gasoline to Mexico.

Streamlined Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal permitting and allowed long-term LNG export authorizations to be extended through 2050.

The United States is now among the top three LNG exporters in the world.

Increased LNG exports five-fold since January 2017, reaching an all-time high in January 2020.

LNG exports are expected to reduce the American trade deficit by over $10 billion.

Granted more than 20 new long-term approvals for LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries.

The development of natural gas and LNG infrastructure in the United States is providing tens of thousands of jobs, and has led to the investment of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure.

There are now 6 LNG export facilities operating in the United States, with 2 additional export projects under construction.

The amount of nuclear energy production in 2019 was the highest on record, through a combination of increased capacity from power plant upgrades and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles.

Prevented Russian energy coercion across Europe through various lines of effort, including the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, civil nuclear deals with Romania and Poland, and opposition to Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Issued the Presidential Permit for the A2A railroad between Canada and Alaska, providing energy resources to emerging markets.

Increased access to our country’s abundant natural resources in order to achieve energy independence.

Renewable energy production and consumption both reached record highs in 2019.

Enacted policies that helped double the amount of electricity generated by solar and helped increase the amount of wind generation by 32 percent from 2016 through 2019.

Accelerated construction of energy infrastructure to ensure American energy producers can deliver their products to the market.

Cut red tape holding back the construction of new energy infrastructure.

Authorized ethanol producers to sell E15 year-round and allowed higher-ethanol gasoline to be distributed from existing pumps at filling stations.

Ensured greater transparency and certainty in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program.

Negotiated leasing capacity in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Australia, providing American taxpayers a return on this infrastructure investment.

Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.

Reformed Section 401 of the Clean Water Act regulation to allow for the curation of interstate infrastructure.

Resolved the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis during COVID-19 by getting OPEC, Russia, and others to cut nearly 10 million barrels of production a day, stabilizing world oil prices.

Directed the Department of Energy to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate market volatility caused by COVID-19.

Investing in America’s Workers and Families

Affordable and high-quality Child Care for American workers and their families.

Doubled the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and expanded the eligibility for receiving the credit.

Nearly 40 million families benefitted from the child tax credit (CTC), receiving an average benefit of $2,200 – totaling credits of approximately $88 billion.

Signed the largest-ever increase in Child Care and Development Block Grants – expanding access to quality, affordable child care for more than 800,000 low-income families.

Secured an additional $3.5 billion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to help families and first responders with child care needs.

Created the first-ever paid family leave tax credit for employees earning $72,000 or less.

Signed into law 12-weeks of paid parental leave for Federal workers.

Signed into law a provision that enables new parents to withdraw up to $5,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty when they give birth to or adopt a child.

Advanced apprenticeship career pathways to good-paying jobs.

Expanded apprenticeships to more than 850,000 and established the new Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship programs in new and emerging fields.

Established the National Council for the American Worker and the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.

Over 460 companies have signed the Pledge to America’s Workers, committing to provide more than 16 million job and training opportunities.

Signed an executive order that directs the Federal government to replace outdated degree-based hiring with skills-based hiring.

Advanced women’s economic empowerment.

Included women’s empowerment for the first time in the President’s 2017 National Security Strategy.

Signed into law key pieces of legislation, including the Women, Peace, and Security Act and the Women Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act.

Launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative – the first-ever whole-of-government approach to women’s economic empowerment that has reached 24 million women worldwide.

Established an innovative new W-GDP Fund at USAID.

Launched the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) with 13 other nations.

Announced a $50 million donation on behalf of the United States to We-Fi providing more capital to women-owned businesses around the world.

Released the first-ever Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security, which focused on increasing women’s participation to prevent and resolve conflicts.

Launched the W-GDP 2x Global Women’s Initiative with the Development Finance Corporation, which has mobilized more than $3 billion in private sector investments over three years.

Ensured American leadership in technology and innovation.

First administration to name artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and 5G communications as national research and development priorities.

Launched the American Broadband Initiative to promote the rapid deployment of broadband internet across rural America.

Made 100 megahertz of crucial mid-band spectrum available for commercial operations, a key factor to driving widespread 5G access across rural America.

Launched the American AI Initiative to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), and established the National AI Initiative Office at the White House.

Established the first-ever principles for Federal agency adoption of AI to improve services for the American people.

Signed the National Quantum Initiative Act establishing the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House to drive breakthroughs in quantum information science.

Signed the Secure 5G and Beyond Act to ensure America leads the world in 5G.

Launched a groundbreaking program to test safe and innovative commercial drone operations nationwide.

Issued new rulemaking to accelerate the return of American civil supersonic aviation.

Committed to doubling investments in AI and quantum information science (QIS) research and development.

Announced the establishment of $1 billion AI and quantum research institutes across America.

Established the largest dual-use 5G test sites in the world to advance 5G commercial and military innovation.

Signed landmark Prague Principles with America’s allies to advance the deployment of secure 5G telecommunications networks.

Signed first-ever bilateral AI cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom.

Built collation among allies to ban Chinese Telecom Company Huawei from their 5G infrastructure.

Preserved American jobs for American workers and rejected the importation of cheap foreign labor.

Pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to reverse their decision to lay off over 200 American workers and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.

Removed the TVA Chairman of the Board and a TVA Board Member.

Life-Saving Response to the China Virus

Restricted travel to the United States from infected regions of the world.

Suspended all travel from China, saving thousands of lives.

Required all American citizens returning home from designated outbreak countries to return through designated airports with enhanced screening measures, and to undergo a self-quarantine.

Announced further travel restrictions on Iran, the Schengen Area of Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil.

Issued travel advisory warnings recommending that American citizens avoid all international travel.

Reached bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada to suspend non-essential travel and expeditiously return illegal aliens.

Repatriated over 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad on more than 1,140 flights from 136 countries and territories.

Safely transported, evacuated, treated, and returned home trapped passengers on cruise ships.

Took action to authorize visa sanctions on foreign governments who impede our efforts to protect American citizens by refusing or unreasonably delaying the return of their own citizens, subjects, or residents from the United States.

Acted early to combat the China Virus in the United States.

Established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with leading experts on infectious diseases, to manage the Administration’s efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and to keep workplaces safe.

Pledged in the State of the Union address to “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the Virus,” while the Democrats’ response made not a single mention of COVID-19 or even the threat of China.

Declared COVID-19 a National Emergency under the Stafford Act.

Established the 24/7 FEMA National Response Coordination Center.

Released guidance recommending containment measures critical to slowing the spread of the Virus, decompressing peak burden on hospitals and infrastructure, and diminishing health impacts.

Implemented strong community mitigation strategies to sharply reduce the number of lives lost in the United States down from experts’ projection of up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States without mitigation.

Halted American funding to the World Health Organization to counter its egregious bias towards China that jeopardized the safety of Americans.

Announced plans for withdrawal from the World Health Organization and redirected contribution funds to help meet global public health needs.

Called on the United Nations to hold China accountable for their handling of the virus, including refusing to be transparent and failing to contain the virus before it spread.

Re-purposed domestic manufacturing facilities to ensure frontline workers had critical supplies.

Distributed billions of pieces of Personal Protective Equipment, including gloves, masks, gowns, and face shields.

Invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to accelerate the development and manufacturing of essential material in the USA.

Made historic investments of more than $3 billion into the industrial base.

Contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce ventilators.

Contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M Halyard, Moldex, and Lydall to increase our Nation’s production of N-95 masks.

The Army Corps of Engineers built 11,000 beds, distributed 10,000 ventilators, and surged personnel to hospitals.

Converted the Javits Center in New York into a 3,000-bed hospital, and opened medical facilities in Seattle and New Orleans.

Dispatched the USNS Comfort to New York City, and the USNS Mercy to Los Angeles.

Deployed thousands of FEMA employees, National Guard members, and military forces to help in the response.

Provided support to states facing new emergences of the virus, including surging testing sites, deploying medical personnel, and advising on mitigation strategies.

Announced Federal support to governors for use of the National Guard with 100 percent cost-share.

Established the Supply Chain Task Force as a “control tower” to strategically allocate high-demand medical supplies and PPE to areas of greatest need.

Requested critical data elements from states about the status of hospital capacity, ventilators, and PPE.

Executed nearly 250 flights through Project Air Bridge to transport hundreds of millions of surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves, and gowns from around the world to hospitals and facilities throughout the United States.

Signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that Americans have a reliable supply of products like beef, pork, and poultry.

Stabilized the food supply chain restoring the Nation’s protein processing capacity through a collaborative approach with Federal, state, and local officials and industry partners.

The continued movement of food and other critical items of daily life distributed to stores and to American homes went unaffected.

Replenished the depleted Strategic National Stockpile.

Increased the number of ventilators nearly ten-fold to more than 153,000.

Despite the grim projections from the media and governors, no American who has needed a ventilator has been denied a ventilator.

Increased the number of N95 masks fourteen-fold to more than 176 million.

Issued an executive order ensuring critical medical supplies are produced in the United States.

Created the largest, most advanced, and most innovative testing system in the world.

Built the world’s leading testing system from scratch, conducting over 200 million tests – more than all of the European Union combined.

Engaged more than 400 test developers to increase testing capacity from less than 100 tests per day to more than 2 million tests per day.

Slashed red tape and approved Emergency Use Authorizations for more than 300 different tests, including 235 molecular tests, 63 antibody tests, and 11 antigen tests.

Delivered state-of-the-art testing devices and millions of tests to every certified nursing home in the country.

Announced more flexibility to Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to waive cost-sharing for tests.

Over 2,000 retail pharmacy stores, including CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens, are providing testing using new regulatory and reimbursement options.

Deployed tens of millions of tests to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribes, disaster relief operations, Home Health/Hospice organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration.

Began shipping 150 million BinaxNOW rapid tests to states, long-term care facilities, the IHS, HBCUs, and other key partners.

Pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent, saving over 2 million lives.

The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates in the entire world.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program to expedite the regulatory review process for therapeutics in clinical trials, accelerate the development and publication of industry guidance on developing treatments, and utilize regulatory flexibility to help facilitate the scaling-up of manufacturing capacity.

More than 370 therapies are in clinical trials and another 560 are in the planning stages.

Announced $450 million in available funds to support the manufacturing of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail.

Shipped tens of thousands of doses of the Regeneron drug.

Authorized an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma.

Treated around 100,000 patients with convalescent plasma, which may reduce mortality by 50 percent.

Provided $48 million to fund the Mayo Clinic study that tested the efficacy of convalescent plasma for patients with COVID-19.

Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies.

Approved Remdesivir as the first COVID-19 treatment, which could reduce hospitalization time by nearly a third.

Secured more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Remdesivir, enough to treat over 850,000 high-risk patients.

Granted an EUA to Eli Lilly for its anti-body treatments.

Finalized an agreement with Eli Lilly to purchase the first doses of the company’s investigational antibody therapeutic.

Provided up to $270 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers to support the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma.

Launched a nationwide campaign to ask patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma.

Announced Phase 3 clinical trials for varying types of blood thinners to treat adults diagnosed with COVID-19.

Issued an EUA for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab.

FDA issued an EUA for casirivimab and imdevimab to be administered together.

Launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with private sector and academic leaders unleashing America’s supercomputers to accelerate coronavirus research.

Brought the full power of American medicine and government to produce a safe and effective vaccine in record time.

Launched Operation Warp Speed to initiate an unprecedented drive to develop and make available an effective vaccine by January 2021.

Pfizer and Moderna developed two vaccines in just nine months, five times faster than the fastest prior vaccine development in American history.

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are approximately 95 effective – far exceeding all expectations.

AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson also both have promising candidates in the final stage of clinical trials.

The vaccines will be administered within 24 hours of FDA-approval.

Made millions of vaccine doses available before the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions more to quickly follow.

FedEx and UPS will ship doses from warehouses directly to local pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers.

Finalized a partnership with CVS and Walgreens to deliver vaccines directly to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities as soon as a state requests it, at no cost to America’s seniors.

Signed an executive order to ensure that the United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations.

Provided approximately $13 billion to accelerate vaccine development and to manufacture all of the top candidates in advance.

Provided critical investments of $4.1 billion to Moderna to support the development, manufacturing, and distribution of their vaccines.

Moderna announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.

Provided Pfizer up to $1.95 billion to support the mass-manufacturing and nationwide distribution of their vaccine candidate.

Pfizer announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.

Provided approximately $1 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.

Made up to $1.2 billion available to support AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.

Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate with 100 million doses expected.

Partnered with Sanofi and GSK to support large-scale manufacturing of a COVID-19 investigational vaccine.

Awarded $200 million in funding to support vaccine preparedness and plans for the immediate distribution and administration of vaccines.

Provided $31 million to Cytvia for vaccine-related consumable products.

Under the PREP Act, issued guidance authorizing qualified pharmacy technicians to administer vaccines.

Announced that McKesson Corporation will produce store, and distribute vaccine ancillary supply kits on behalf of the Strategic National Stockpile to help healthcare workers who will administer vaccines.

Announced partnership with large-chain, independent, and regional pharmacies to deliver vaccines.

Prioritized resources for the most vulnerable Americans, including nursing home residents.

Quickly established guidelines for nursing homes and expanded telehealth opportunities to protect vulnerable seniors.

Increased surveillance, oversight, and transparency of all 15,417 Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes by requiring them to report cases of COVID-19 to all residents, their families, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Required that all nursing homes test staff regularly.

Launched an unprecedented national nursing home training curriculum to equip nursing home staff with the knowledge they need to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Delivered $81 million for increased inspections and funded 35,000 members of the Nation Guard to deliver critical supplies to every Medicare-certified nursing homes.

Deployed Federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks.

Distributed tens of billions of dollars in Provider Relief Funds to protect nursing homes, long-term care facilities, safety-net hospitals, rural hospitals, and communities hardest hit by the virus.

Released 1.5 million N95 respirators from the Strategic National Stockpile for distribution to over 3,000 nursing home facilities.

Directed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to refocus on underserved communities impacted by the coronavirus.

Required that testing results reported include data on race, gender, ethnicity, and ZIP code, to ensure that resources were directed to communities disproportionately harmed by the virus.

Ensured testing was offered at 95 percent of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve over 29 million patients in 12,000 communities across the Nation.

Invested an unprecedented $8 billion in tribal communities.

Maintained safe access for Veterans to VA healthcare throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic and supported non-VA hospital systems and private and state-run nursing homes with VA clinical teams.

Signed legislation ensuring no reduction of VA education benefits under the GI Bill for online distance learning.

Supported Americans as they safely return to school and work.

Issued the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, a detailed blueprint to help governors as they began reopening the country. Focused on protecting the most vulnerable and mitigating the risk of any resurgence, while restarting the economy and allowing Americans to safely return to their jobs.

Helped Americans return to work by providing extensive guidance on workplace-safety measures to protect against COVID-19, and investigating over 10,000 coronavirus-related complaints and referrals.

Provided over $31 billion to support elementary and secondary schools.

Distributed 125 million face masks to school districts.

Provided comprehensive guidelines to schools on how to protect and identify high-risk individuals, prevent the spread of COVID-19, and conduct safe in-person teaching.

Brought back the safe return of college athletics, including Big Ten and Pac-12 football.

Rescued the American economy with nearly $3.4 trillion in relief, the largest financial aid package in history.

Secured an initial $8.3 billion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Act, supporting the development of treatments and vaccines, and to procure critical medical supplies and equipment.

Signed the $100 billion Families First Coronavirus Relief Act, guaranteeing free coronavirus testing, emergency paid sick leave and family leave, Medicaid funding, and food assistance.

Signed the $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, providing unprecedented and immediate relief to American families, workers, and businesses.

Signed additional legislation providing nearly $900 billion in support for coronavirus emergency response and relief, including critically needed funds to continue the Paycheck Protection Program.

Signed the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act, adding an additional $310 billion to replenish the program.

Delivered approximately 160 million relief payments to hardworking Americans.

Through the Paycheck Protection Program, approved over $525 billion in forgivable loans to more than 5.2 million small businesses, supporting more than 51 million American jobs.

The Treasury Department approved the establishment of the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to provide liquidity to the financial system.

The Treasury Department, working with the Federal Reserve, was able to leverage approximately $4 trillion in emergency lending facilities.

Signed an executive order extending expanded unemployment benefits.

Signed an executive order to temporarily suspend student loan payments, evictions, and collection of payroll taxes.

Small Business Administration expanded access to emergency economic assistance for small businesses, faith-based, and religious entities.

Protected jobs for American workers impacted by COVID-19 by temporarily suspending several job-related nonimmigrant visas, including H-1B’s, H-2B’s without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4’s, as well as L’s and certain J’s.

Great Healthcare for Americans

Empowered American patients by greatly expanding healthcare choice, transparency, and affordability.

Eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate – a financial relief to low and middle-income households that made up nearly 80 percent of the families who paid the penalty for not wanting to purchase health insurance.

Increased choice for consumers by promoting competition in the individual health insurance market leading to lower premiums for three years in a row.

Under the Trump Administration, more than 90 percent of the counties have multiple options on the individual insurance market to choose from.

Offered Association Health Plans, which allow employers to pool together and offer more affordable, quality health coverage to their employees at up to 30 percent lower cost.

Increased availability of short-term, limited-duration health plans, which can cost up to 60 percent less than traditional plans, giving Americans more flexibility to choose plans that suit their needs.

Expanded Health Reimbursement Arrangements, allowing millions of Americans to be able to shop for a plan of their choice on the individual market, and then have their employer cover the cost.

Added 2,100 new Medicare Advantage plan options since 2017, a 76 percent increase.

Lowered Medicare Advantage premiums by 34 percent nationwide to the lowest level in 14 years. Medicare health plan premium savings for beneficiaries have totaled $nearly 1.5 billion since 2017.

Improved access to tax-free health savings accounts for individuals with chronic conditions.

Eliminated costly Obamacare taxes, including the health insurance tax, the medical device tax, and the “Cadillac tax.”

Worked with states to create more flexibility and relief from oppressive Obamacare regulations, including reinsurance waivers to help lower premiums.

Released legislative principles to end surprise medical billing.

Finalized requirements for unprecedented price transparency from hospitals and insurance companies so patients know what the cost is before they receive care.

Took action to require that hospitals make the prices they negotiate with insurers publicly available and easily accessible online.

Improved patients access to their health data by penalizing hospitals and causing clinicians to lose their incentive payments if they do not comply.

Expanded access to telehealth, especially in rural and underserved communities.

Increased Medicare payments to rural hospitals to stem a decade of rising closures and deliver enhanced access to care in rural areas.

Issued unprecedented reforms that dramatically lowered the price of prescription drugs.

Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years.

Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market.

Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada.

Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone.

Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients.

Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need.

Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals.

Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a month’s supply of each type of insulin.

Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017.

Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs.

Promoted research and innovation in healthcare to ensure that American patients have access to the best treatment in the world.

Signed first-ever executive order to affirm that it is the official policy of the United States Government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

Passed Right To Try to give terminally ill patients access to lifesaving cures.

Signed an executive order to fight kidney disease with more transplants and better treatment.

Signed into law a $1 billion increase in funding for critical Alzheimer’s research.

Accelerated medical breakthroughs in genetic treatments for Sickle Cell disease.

Finalized the interoperability rules that will give American patients access to their electronic health records on their phones.

Initiated an effort to provide $500 million over the next decade to improve pediatric cancer research.

Launched a campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America in the next decade.

Started a program to provide the HIV prevention drug PrEP to uninsured patients for free.

Signed an executive order and awarded new development contracts to modernize the influenza vaccine.

Protected our Nation’s seniors by safeguarding and strengthening Medicare.

Updated the way Medicare pays for innovative medical products to ensure beneficiaries have access to the latest innovation and treatment.

Reduced improper payments for Medicare an estimated $15 billion since 2016 protecting taxpayer dollars and leading to less fraud, waste, and abuse.

Took rapid action to combat antimicrobial resistance and secure access to life-saving new antibiotic drugs for American seniors, by removing several financial disincentives and setting policies to reduce inappropriate use.

Launched new online tools, including eMedicare, Blue Button 2.0, and Care Compare, to help seniors see what is covered, compare costs, streamline data, and compare tools available on Medicare.gov.

Provided new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, including modifications to help keep seniors safe in their homes, respite care for caregivers, non-opioid pain management alternatives like therapeutic massages, transportation, and more in-home support services and assistance.

Protected Medicare beneficiaries by removing Social Security numbers from all Medicare cards, a project completed ahead of schedule.

Unleashed unprecedented transparency in Medicare and Medicaid data to spur research and innovation.

Remaking the Federal Judiciary

Appointed a historic number of Federal judges who will interpret the Constitution as written.

Nominated and confirmed over 230 Federal judges.

Confirmed 54 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, making up nearly a third of the entire appellate bench.

Filled all Court of Appeals vacancies for the first time in four decades.

Flipped the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits from Democrat-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. And dramatically reshaped the long-liberal Ninth Circuit.

Appointed three Supreme Court justices, expanding its conservative-appointed majority to 6-3.

Appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

Appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Achieving a Secure Border

Secured the Southern Border of the United States.

Built over 400 miles of the world’s most robust and advanced border wall.

Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed.

Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border.

Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries.

Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications.

Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States.

Fully enforced the immigration laws of the United States.

Signed an executive order to strip discretionary Federal grant funding from deadly sanctuary cities.

Fully enforced and implemented statutorily authorized “expedited removal” of illegal aliens.

The Department of Justice prosecuted a record-breaking number of immigration-related crimes.

Used Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to reduce the number of aliens coming from countries whose governments refuse to accept their nationals who were ordered removed from the United States.

Ended asylum fraud, shut down human smuggling traffickers, and solved the humanitarian crisis across the Western Hemisphere.

Suspended, via regulation, asylum for aliens who had skipped previous countries where they were eligible for asylum but opted to “forum shop” and continue to the United States.

Safeguarded migrant families, and protected migrant safety, by promulgating new regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement.

Proposed regulations to end the practice of giving free work permits to illegal aliens lodging meritless asylum claims.

Issued “internal relocation” guidance.

Cross-trained United States Border Patrol agents to conduct credible fear screenings alongside USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) adjudication personnel to reduce massive backlogs.

Streamlined and expedited the asylum hearing process through both the Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP).

Launched the Family Fraud Initiative to identify hundreds of individuals who were fraudulently presenting themselves as family units at the border, oftentimes with trafficking children, in order to ensure child welfare.

Improved screening in countries with high overstay rates and reduced visa overstay rates in many of these countries.

Removed bureaucratic constraints on United States consular officers that reduced their ability to appropriately vet visa applicants.

Worked with Mexico and other regional partners to dismantle the human smuggling networks in our hemisphere that profit from human misery and fuel the border crisis by exploiting vulnerable populations.

Secured our Nation’s immigration system against criminals and terrorists.

Instituted national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists, and implemented a uniform security and information-sharing baseline all nations must meet in order for their nationals to be able to travel to, and emigrate to, the United States.

Suspended refugee resettlement from the world’s most dangerous and terror-afflicted regions.

Rebalanced refugee assistance to focus on overseas resettlement and burden-sharing.

85 percent reduction in refugee resettlement.

Overhauled badly-broken refugee security screening process.

Required the Department of State to consult with states and localities as part of the Federal government’s refugee resettlement process.

Issued strict sanctions on countries that have failed to take back their own nationals.

Established the National Vetting Center, which is the most advanced and comprehensive visa screening system anywhere in the world.

Protected American workers and taxpayers.

Issued a comprehensive “public charge” regulation to ensure newcomers to the United States are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare.

Created an enforcement mechanism for sponsor repayment and deeming, to ensure that people who are presenting themselves as sponsors are actually responsible for sponsor obligations.

Issued regulations to combat the horrendous practice of “birth tourism.”

Issued a rule with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make illegal aliens ineligible for public housing.

Issued directives requiring Federal agencies to hire United States workers first and prioritizing the hiring of United States workers wherever possible.

Suspended the entry of low-wage workers that threaten American jobs.

Finalized new H-1B regulations to permanently end the displacement of United States workers and modify the administrative tools that are required for H-1B visa issuance.

Defended United States sovereignty by withdrawing from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration.

Suspended Employment Authorization Documents for aliens who arrive illegally between ports of entry and are ordered removed from the United States.

Restored integrity to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by strictly adhering to the statutory conditions required for TPS.

Restoring American Leadership Abroad

Restored America’s leadership in the world and successfully negotiated to ensure our allies pay their fair share for our military protection.

Secured a $400 billion increase in defense spending from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies by 2024, and the number of members meeting their minimum obligations more than doubled.

Credited by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for strengthening NATO.

Worked to reform and streamline the United Nations (UN) and reduced spending by $1.3 billion.

Allies, including Japan and the Republic of Korea, committed to increase burden-sharing.

Protected our Second Amendment rights by announcing the United States will never ratify the UN Arms Trade Treaty.

Returned 56 hostages and detainees from more than 24 countries.

Worked to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific region, promoting new investments and expanding American partnerships.

Advanced peace through strength.

Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Nuclear Deal and imposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian Regime.

Conducted vigorous enforcement on all sanctions to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero and deny the regime its principal source of revenue.

First president to meet with a leader of North Korea and the first sitting president to cross the demilitarized zone into North Korea.

Maintained a maximum pressure campaign and enforced tough sanctions on North Korea while negotiating de-nuclearization, the release of American hostages, and the return of the remains of American heroes.

Brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, bolstering peace in the Balkans.

Signed the Honk Kong Autonomy Act and ended the United States’ preferential treatment with Hong Kong to hold China accountable for its infringement on the autonomy of Hong Kong.

Led allied efforts to defeat the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the international telecommunications system.

Renewed our cherished friendship and alliance with Israel and took historic action to promote peace in the Middle East.

Recognized Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel and quickly moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declared that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not inconsistent with international law.

Removed the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the group’s blatant anti-Israel bias.

Brokered historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab-Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and Sudan.

In addition, the United States negotiated a normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, and recognized Moroccan Sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara, a position with long standing bipartisan support.

Brokered a deal for Kosovo to normalize ties and establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Announced that Serbia would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

First American president to address an assembly of leaders from more than 50 Muslim nations, and reach an agreement to fight terrorism in all its forms.

Established the Etidal Center to combat terrorism in the Middle East in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Government.

Announced the Vision for Peace Political Plan – a two-state solution that resolves the risks of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security, and the first time Israel has agreed to a map and a Palestinian state.

Released an economic plan to empower the Palestinian people and enhance Palestinian governance through historic private investment.

Stood up against Communism and Socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

Reversed the previous Administration’s disastrous Cuba policy, canceling the sellout deal with the Communist Castro dictatorship.

Pledged not to lift sanctions until all political prisoners are freed; freedoms of assembly and expression are respected; all political parties are legalized; and free elections are scheduled.

Enacted a new policy aimed at preventing American dollars from funding the Cuban regime, including stricter travel restrictions and restrictions on the importation of Cuban alcohol and tobacco.

Implemented a cap on remittances to Cuba.

Enabled Americans to file lawsuits against persons and entities that traffic in property confiscated by the Cuban regime.

First world leader to recognize Juan Guaido as the Interim President of Venezuela and led a diplomatic coalition against the Socialist Dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.

Blocked all property of the Venezuelan Government in the jurisdiction of the United States.

Cut off the financial resources of the Maduro regime and sanctioned key sectors of the Venezuelan economy exploited by the regime.

Brought criminal charges against Nicolas Maduro for his narco-terrorism.

Imposed stiff sanctions on the Ortega regime in Nicaragua.

Joined together with Mexico and Canada in a successful bid to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with 60 matches to be held in the United States.

Won bid to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.

Colossal Rebuilding of the Military

Rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force.

Completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.

Secured three pay raises for our service members and their families, including the largest raise in a decade.

Established the Space Force, the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.

Modernized and recapitalized our nuclear forces and missile defenses to ensure they continue to serve as a strong deterrent.

Upgraded our cyber defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major warfighting command and by reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.

Vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.

Defeated terrorists, held leaders accountable for malign actions, and bolstered peace around the world.

Defeated 100 percent of ISIS’ territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Freed nearly 8 million civilians from ISIS’ bloodthirsty control, and liberated Mosul, Raqqa, and the final ISIS foothold of Baghuz.

Killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.

Created the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center (TFTC) in partnership between the United States and its Gulf partners to combat extremist ideology and threats, and target terrorist financial networks, including over 60 terrorist individuals and entities spanning the globe.

Twice took decisive military action against the Assad regime in Syria for the barbaric use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians, including a successful 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles strike.

Authorized sanctions against bad actors tied to Syria’s chemical weapons program.

Negotiated an extended ceasefire with Turkey in northeast Syria.

Addressed gaps in American’s defense-industrial base, providing much-needed updates to improve the safety of our country.

Protected America’s defense-industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of our manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.

Took decisive steps to secure our information and communications technology and services supply chain, including unsafe mobile applications.

Completed several multi-year nuclear material removal campaigns, securing over 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and significantly reducing global nuclear threats.

Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.

Established a whole-of-government strategy addressing the threat posed by China’s malign efforts targeting the United States taxpayer-funded research and development ecosystem.

Advanced missile defense capabilities and regional alliances.

Bolstered the ability of our allies and partners to defend themselves through the sale of aid and military equipment.

Signed the largest arms deal ever, worth nearly $110 billion, with Saudi Arabia.

Serving and Protecting Our Veterans

Reformed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve care, choice, and employee accountability.

Signed and implemented the VA Mission Act, which made permanent Veterans CHOICE, revolutionized the VA community care system, and delivered quality care closer to home for Veterans.

The number of Veterans who say they trust VA services has increased 19 percent to a record 91 percent, an all-time high.

Offered same-day emergency mental health care at every VA medical facility, and secured $9.5 billion for mental health services in 2020.

Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017, which ensured that veterans could continue to see the doctor of their choice and wouldn’t have to wait for care.

During the Trump Administration, millions of veterans have been able to choose a private doctor in their communities.

Expanded Veterans’ ability to access telehealth services, including through the “Anywhere to Anywhere” VA healthcare initiative leading to a 1000 percent increase in usage during COVID-19.

Signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and removed thousands of VA workers who failed to give our Vets the care they have so richly deserve.

Signed the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 and improved the efficiency of the VA, setting record numbers of appeals decisions.

Modernized medical records to begin a seamless transition from the Department of Defense to the VA.

Launched a new tool that provides Veterans with online access to average wait times and quality-of-care data.

The promised White House VA Hotline has fielded hundreds of thousands of calls.

Formed the PREVENTS Task Force to fight the tragedy of Veteran suicide.

Decreased veteran homelessness, improved education benefits, and achieved record-low veteran unemployment.

Signed and implemented the Forever GI Bill, allowing Veterans to use their benefits to get an education at any point in their lives.

Eliminated every penny of Federal student loan debt owed by American veterans who are completely and permanently disabled.

Compared to 2009, 49 percent fewer veterans experienced homelessness nationwide during 2019.

Signed and implemented the HAVEN Act to ensure that Veterans who’ve declared bankruptcy don’t lose their disability payments.

Helped hundreds of thousands of military service members make the transition from the military to the civilian workforce, and developed programs to support the employment of military spouses.

Placed nearly 40,000 homeless veterans into employment through the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program.

Placed over 600,000 veterans into employment through American Job Center services.

Enrolled over 500,000 transitioning service members in over 20,000 Department of Labor employment workshops.

Signed an executive order to help Veterans transition seamlessly into the United States Merchant Marine.

Making Communities Safer

Signed into law landmark criminal justice reform.

Signed the bipartisan First Step Act into law, the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.

Promoted second chance hiring to give former inmates the opportunity to live crime-free lives and find meaningful employment.

Launched a new “Ready to Work” initiative to help connect employers directly with former prisoners.

Awarded $2.2 million to states to expand the use of fidelity bonds, which underwrite companies that hire former prisoners.

Reversed decades-old ban on Second Chance Pell programs to provide postsecondary education to individuals who are incarcerated expand their skills and better succeed in the workforce upon re-entry.

Awarded over $333 million in Department of Labor grants to nonprofits and local and state governments for reentry projects focused on career development services for justice-involved youth and adults who were formerly incarcerated.

Unprecedented support for law-enforcement.

In 2019, violent crime fell for the third consecutive year.

Since 2016, the violent crime rate has declined over 5 percent and the murder rate has decreased by over 7 percent.

Launched Operation Legend to combat a surge of violent crime in cities, resulting in more than 5,500 arrests.

Deployed the National Guard and Federal law enforcement to Kenosha to stop violence and restore public safety.

Provided $1 million to Kenosha law enforcement, nearly $4 million to support small businesses in Kenosha, and provided over $41 million to support law enforcement to the state of Wisconsin.

Deployed Federal agents to save the courthouse in Portland from rioters.

Signed an executive order outlining ten-year prison sentences for destroying Federal property and monuments.

Directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute Federal offenses related to ongoing violence.

DOJ provided nearly $400 million for new law enforcement hiring.

Endorsed by the 355,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Revitalized Project Safe Neighborhoods, which brings together Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials to develop solutions to violent crime.

Improved first-responder communications by deploying the FirstNet National Public Safety Broadband Network, which serves more than 12,000 public safety agencies across the Nation.

Established a new commission to evaluate best practices for recruiting, training, and supporting law enforcement officers.

Signed the Safe Policing for Safe Communities executive order to incentive local police department reforms in line with law and order.

Made hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement.

Signed an executive order to help prevent violence against law enforcement officers.

Secured permanent funding for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for first responders.

Implemented strong measures to stem hate crimes, gun violence, and human trafficking.

Signed an executive order making clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism.

Launched a centralized website to educate the public about hate crimes and encourage reporting.

Signed the Fix NICS Act to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.

Signed the STOP School Violence Act and created a Commission on School Safety to examine ways to make our schools safer.

Launched the Foster Youth to Independence initiative to prevent and end homelessness among young adults under the age of 25 who are in, or have recently left, the foster care system.

Signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which tightened criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking.

Established a task force to help combat the tragedy of missing or murdered Native American women and girls.

Prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation, through a whole of government back by legislation, executive action, and engagement with key industries.

Created the first-ever White House position focused solely on combating human trafficking.

Cherishing Life and Religious Liberty

Steadfastly supported the sanctity of every human life and worked tirelessly to prevent government funding of abortion.

Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, ensuring that taxpayer money is not used to fund abortion globally.

Issued a rule preventing Title X taxpayer funding from subsiding the abortion industry.

Supported legislation to end late-term abortions.

Cut all funding to the United Nations population fund due to the fund’s support for coercive abortion and forced sterilization.

Signed legislation overturning the previous administration’s regulation that prohibited states from defunding abortion facilities as part of their family planning programs.

Fully enforced the requirement that taxpayer dollars do not support abortion coverage in Obamacare exchange plans.

Stopped the Federal funding of fetal tissue research.

Worked to protect healthcare entities and individuals’ conscience rights – ensuring that no medical professional is forced to participate in an abortion in violation of their beliefs.

Issued an executive order reinforcing requirement that all hospitals in the United States provide medical treatment or an emergency transfer for infants who are in need of emergency medical care—regardless of prematurity or disability.

Led a coalition of countries to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, declaring that there is no international right to abortion and committing to protecting women’s health.

First president in history to attend the March for Life.

Stood up for religious liberty in the United States and around the world.

Protected the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, teachers, and groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

First president to convene a meeting at the United Nations to end religious persecution.

Established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

Stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with pastors’ right to speak their minds.

Reversed the previous administration’s policy that prevented the government from providing disaster relief to religious organizations.

Protected faith-based adoption and foster care providers, ensuring they can continue to serve their communities while following the teachings of their faith.

Reduced burdensome barriers to ensure Native Americans are free to keep spiritually and culturally significant eagle feathers found on their tribal lands.

Took action to ensure Federal employees can take paid time off work to observe religious holy days.

Signed legislation to assist religious and ethnic groups targeted by ISIS for mass murder and genocide in Syria and Iraq.

Directed American assistance toward persecuted communities, including through faith-based programs.

Launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance – the first-ever alliance devoted to confronting religious persecution around the world.

Appointed a Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.

Imposed restrictions on certain Chinese officials, internal security units, and companies for their complicity in the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.

Issued an executive order to protect and promote religious freedom around the world.

Safeguarding the Environment

Took strong action to protect the environment and ensure clean air and clean water.

Took action to protect vulnerable Americans from being exposed to lead and copper in drinking water and finalized a rule protecting children from lead-based paint hazards.

Invested over $38 billion in clean water infrastructure.

In 2019, America achieved the largest decline in carbon emissions of any country on earth. Since withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States has reduced carbon emissions more than any nation.

American levels of particulate matter – one of the main measures of air pollution – are approximately five times lower than the global average.

Between 2017 and 2019, the air became 7 percent cleaner – indicated by a steep drop in the combined emissions of criteria pollutants.

Led the world in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, having cut energy-related CO2 emissions by 12 percent from 2005 to 2018 while the rest of the world increased emissions by 24 percent.

In FY 2019 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleaned up more major pollution sites than any year in nearly two decades.

The EPA delivered $300 million in Brownfields grants directly to communities most in need including investment in 118 Opportunity Zones.

Placed a moratorium on offshore drilling off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.

Restored public access to Federal land at Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Recovered more endangered or threatened species than any other administration in its first term.

Secured agreements and signed legislation to protect the environment and preserve our Nation’s abundant national resources.

The USMCA guarantees the strongest environmental protections of any trade agreement in history.

Signed the Save Our Seas Act to protect our environment from foreign nations that litter our oceans with debris and developed the first-ever Federal strategic plan to address marine litter.

Signed the Great American Outdoors Act, securing the single largest investment in America’s National Parks and public lands in history.

Signed the largest public lands legislation in a decade, designating 1.3 million new acres of wilderness.

Signed a historic executive order promoting much more active forest management to prevent catastrophic wildfires.

Opened and expanded access to over 4 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing.

Joined the One Trillion Trees Initiative to plant, conserve, and restore trees in America and around the world.

Delivered infrastructure upgrades and investments for numerous projects, including over half a billion dollars to fix the Herbert Hoover Dike and expanding funding for Everglades restoration by 55 percent.

Expanding Educational Opportunity

Fought tirelessly to give every American access to the best possible education.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded School Choice, allowing parents to use up to $10,000 from a 529 education savings account to cover K-12 tuition costs at the public, private, or religious school of their choice.

Launched a new pro-American lesson plan for students called the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education.

Prohibited the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Federal government.

Established the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.

Called on Congress to pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act to expand education options for 1 million students of all economic backgrounds.

Signed legislation reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.

Issued updated guidance making clear that the First Amendment right to Free Exercise of Religion does not end at the door to a public school.

Took action to promote technical education.

Signed into law the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, which provides over 13 million students with high-quality vocational education and extends more than $1.3 billion each year to states for critical workforce development programs.

Signed the INSPIRE Act which encouraged NASA to have more women and girls participate in STEM and seek careers in aerospace.

Allocated no less than $200 million each year in grants to prioritize women and minorities in STEM and computer science education.

Drastically reformed and modernized our educational system to restore local control and promote fairness.

Restored state and local control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Signed an executive order that ensures public universities protect First Amendment rights or they will risk losing funding, addresses student debt by requiring colleges to share a portion of the financial risk, and increases transparency by requiring universities to disclose information about the value of potential educational programs.

Issued a rule strengthening Title IX protections for survivors of sexual misconduct in schools, and that – for the first time in history – codifies that sexual harassment is prohibited under Title IX.

Negotiated historic bipartisan agreement on new higher education rules to increase innovation and lower costs by reforming accreditation, state authorization, distance education, competency-based education, credit hour, religious liberty, and TEACH Grants.

Prioritized support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Moved the Federal Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative back to the White House.

Signed into law the FUTURE Act, making permanent $255 million in annual funding for HBCUs and increasing funding for the Federal Pell Grant program.

Signed legislation that included more than $100 million for scholarships, research, and centers of excellence at HBCU land-grant institutions.

Fully forgave $322 million in disaster loans to four HBCUs in 2018, so they could fully focus on educating their students.

Enabled faith-based HBCUs to enjoy equal access to Federal support.

Combatting the Opioid Crisis

Brought unprecedented attention and support to combat the opioid crisis.

Declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.

Secured a record $6 billion in new funding to combat the opioid epidemic.

Signed the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, the largest-ever legislative effort to address a drug crisis in our Nation’s history.

Launched the Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand in order to confront the many causes fueling the drug crisis.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a record $9 billion in grants to expand access to prevention, treatment, and recovery services to States and local communities.

Passed the CRIB Act, allowing Medicaid to help mothers and their babies who are born physically dependent on opioids by covering their care in residential pediatric recovery facilities.

Distributed $1 billion in grants for addiction prevention and treatment.

Announced a Safer Prescriber Plan that seeks to decrease the amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America by one third within three years.

Reduced the total amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America.

Expanded access to medication-assisted treatment and life-saving Naloxone.

Launched FindTreatment.gov, a tool to find help for substance abuse.

Drug overdose deaths fell nationwide in 2018 for the first time in nearly three decades.

Launched the Drug-Impaired Driving Initiative to work with local law enforcement and the driving public at large to increase awareness.

Launched a nationwide public ad campaign on youth opioid abuse that reached 58 percent of young adults in America.

Since 2016, there has been a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving medication-assisted treatment.

Approved 29 state Medicaid demonstrations to improve access to opioid use disorder treatment, including new flexibility to cover inpatient and residential treatment.

Approved nearly $200 million in grants to address the opioid crisis in severely affected communities and to reintegrate workers in recovery back into the workforce.

Took action to seize illegal drugs and punish those preying on innocent Americans.

In FY 2019, ICE HSI seized 12,466 pounds of opioids including 3,688 pounds of fentanyl, an increase of 35 percent from FY 2018.

Seized tens of thousands of kilograms of heroin and thousands of kilograms of fentanyl since 2017.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted more fentanyl traffickers than ever before, dismantled 3,000 drug trafficking organizations, and seized enough fentanyl to kill 105,000 Americans.

DOJ charged more than 65 defendants collectively responsible for distributing over 45 million opioid pills.

Brought kingpin designations against traffickers operating in China, India, Mexico, and more who have played a role in the epidemic in America.

Indicted major Chinese drug traffickers for distributing fentanyl in the U.S for the first time ever, and convinced China to enact strict regulations to control the production and sale of fentanyl.

[drewgaither6]

Annotated Timeline of Period 9

Drew Gaither

2nd APUSH

11-27-18

Mr Johnson

A. Ronald Reagan’s victory in the presidential election of 1980 represented an important milestone, allowing conservatives to enact significant tax cuts and continue the deregulation of many industries.

As Reagan began his first term in office, the country was suffering through several years of stagflation, in which high inflation was accompanied by high unemployment. To fight high inflation, the Federal Reserve Board was increasing the short-term interest rate, which was near its peak in 1981. Reagan proposed a four-pronged economic policy (Reaganomics ~ supply side) that was intended to reduce inflation and stimulate economic and job growth: 1) reduce government spending on domestic programs; 2) reduce taxes for individuals, businesses and investments; 3) reduce the burden of regulations on business, and 4) support slower money growth in the economy.

In Congress, Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, and Senator Bill Roth, Republican of Delaware, had long supported the supply-side principles behind the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA) (1981), which would also be known as the Kemp-Roth act. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in Congress, represented a significant change in the course of federal income tax policy, which until then was believed by most people to work best when used to affect the demand during times of recession. The ERTA included a 25 per cent reduction in marginal tax rates for individuals, phased in over three years, and indexed for inflation from that point on. The marginal tax rate, or the tax rate on the last dollar earned, was considered more important to economic activity than the average tax rate (total tax paid as a percentage of income earned), as it affected income earned through “extra” activities such as education, entrepreneurship or investment. Reducing marginal tax rates, the theory went, would help the economy grow faster through such extra efforts by individuals and businesses. The 1981 Act, combined with another major tax reform act in 1986, cut marginal tax rates on high-income taxpayers from 70 per cent to around 30 per cent. Reagan's 1981 cut in the top regular tax rate on unearned income reduced the maximum capital gains rate to only 20% – its lowest level since the Hoover administration.

In April 1980, the federal government enacted the crude oil windfall profit tax on the U.S. oil industry. The main purpose of the tax was to recoup the federal government's revenue that would have otherwise gone to the oil industry as a result of the decontrol of oil prices. Supporters of the tax viewed this revenue as an unearned and unanticipated windfall caused by high oil prices, which were determined by the OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) cartel. Despite its name, the windfall profit tax (WPT) was actually an excise tax, not a profits tax, imposed on the difference between the market price of oil and an adjusted base price. The tax was repealed in 1988 because (1) it was an administrative burden to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), (2) it was a compliance burden to the oil industry, (3) due to low oil prices, the tax was generating little or no revenues in 1987 and 1988, and (4) it made the United States more dependent on foreign oil. The depressed state of the U.S. oil industry after 1986 also contributed to the repeal decision.

Part of Reagan’s deregulation overall was massive deregulation of the FDR New Deal Bank Regulations. Federal requirements that set maximum interest rates on savings accounts were phased out. This eliminated the advantage previously held by savings banks. Checking accounts could now be offered by any type of bank. All depository institutions could now borrow from the Fed in a time of need, a privilege that had been reserved for commercial banks. In return, ALL banks had to place a certain percentage of their deposits in the Fed. This gave the FED more control and stabilized state banks. Garn - St. Germain Act of 1982 allowed savings banks to now issue credit cards to make non-residential real estate loans and commercial loans and facilitated actions previously only allowed to commercial banks. Deregulation practically eliminated the distinction between commercial and savings banks. Deregulation caused a rapid growth of savings banks and saving and loans (S&L’s) that now made all types of non-homeowner related loans. Now that S&L's could tap into the huge profit centres of commercial real estate investments, many credit-card issuing entrepreneurs looked to the loosely regulated S&Ls like a profit-making centre. As the '80s wore on the economy appeared to grow. Interest rates continued to go up as well as real estate speculation. The real estate market was in what was known as a "boom" mode. Many S&L's took advantage of the lack of supervision and regulations to make highly speculative investments, in many cases loaning more money than they really should. When the real estate market crashed, and it did so in a dramatic fashion, the S&L's were crushed. They now owned properties that they had paid enormous amounts of money for but weren't worth a fraction of what they paid. Many went bankrupt, losing their depositor's money. This was known as the S&L Crisis. In 1980 the US had 4,600 thrifts, by 1988 mergers and bankruptcies left 3,000. By the mid-1990's less than 2,000 survived. The S&L Crisis cost about $600 Billion USD in "bailouts." This is $1,500 USD dollars for every man, woman, and child in the United States. In summary, the S&L crisis was caused by deregulation which led to high-interest rates that then collapsed. Other causes included inadequate capital and defrauding shorthanded government regulatory agencies (fewer regulators and inspectors).

On August 3rd, 1981 almost 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike after negotiations with the federal government to raise their pay and shorten their workweek, but their efforts were fruitless. The controllers complained of difficult working conditions and a lack of recognition of the pressures they faced. Across the country, some 7,000 flights were cancelled. The same day, President Reagan called the strike illegal and threatened to fire any controller who had not returned to work within 48 hours. Robert Poli, president of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO), was found in contempt by a federal judge and ordered to pay $1,000 USD a day in fines. This is comparable to Teddy Roosevelt’s interference in the Anthracite Coal Strike, banking on it being a “national emergency” if Americans did not get coal in the middle of the winter. He used a “bully pulpit” as he had no real power. Unlike Roosevelt, Reagan did have power and on August 5, 1981, President Ronald Wilson Reagan begins firing 11,359 air-traffic controllers striking in violation of his order for them to return to work. The executive action, regarded as extreme by many, significantly slowed air travel for months. In addition, he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On August 17th (ironically a day after my sister Angel's birthday), the FAA began accepting applications for new air traffic controllers, and on October 22nd the Federal Labour Relations Authority decertified PATCO. This for many conservatives was a major milestone as it dealt harsh blows to the already much-depleted labour union system that had been so prevalent during the Progressive Era and the Gilded Age.

In 1994, under the Clinton administration, the Contract with America was signed on the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C., by members of the Republican minority before the Republican Party gained control of Congress in 1994. The “Contract with America” outlined legislation to be enacted by the House of Representatives within the first 100 days of the 104th Congressional Convention (1995–96). Among the proposals were tax cuts, a permanent line-item veto, measures to reduce crime and provide middle-class tax relief, and constitutional amendments requiring term limits and a balanced budget. With the exception of the constitutional amendment for term limits, all parts of the “Contract with America” were passed by the House, under the leadership of the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Under George W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama two major changes to the tax code were made: (1) the EGTRRA and the JGTRRA. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) is an income tax cut enacted on June 7th, 2001. The Bush administration designed the tax cuts to stimulate the economy and end the 2001 Recession. Families would spend the extra money, increasing the demand. It, out of many things, increased the tax-deductible contributions people could make to their IRA accounts, doubled the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000, expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, provided greater tax deductions for education expenses and savings, reduced the gift tax, and provided relief from the Alternative Minimum Tax.

The EITC phased out the estate and generation-skipping transfer taxes so that they were eliminated in 2010. The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) is an investment tax-cut that was enacted by the Bush Administration on May 28th, 2003. Its goal was to end the 2001 Recession. It reduced the long-term capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 15 percent. For taxpayers who were already in the 10-15th per cent income tax bracket, it reduced the rate to 5 per cent and then to zero in 2008. It changed the dividend tax rate to the same as the long-term capital gains rate. Prior to that, dividends were taxed as regular income. Increased tax deductions for small businesses, accelerated many of the provisions in the EGTRRA, which were supposed to be phased in more gradually, raising the exemption for the Alternative Minimum Tax.

B. Conservatives argued that liberal programs were counterproductive in fighting poverty and stimulating economic growth. Some of their efforts to reduce the size and scope of government met with inertia and liberal opposition, as many programs remained popular with voters.

Reagan stated in his 1987 State of the Union Address that he would “finally break the poverty trap” and in 1988 he signed the Family Support Act in October. The Family Support Act was the culmination of a major 1987 congressional debate on welfare. The act provided for an extensive state-managed education and training program with transitional medical assistance, child-care benefits, and stronger child support enforcement. Under the act, educators are provided opportunities to form linkages with other agencies to strengthen families and help them move toward self-sufficiency. Education is the pivotal goal of the FSA, to help families avoid long-term dependence on public assistance, and the act requires states to make educational services available to participants under the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) training program. Training and employment personnel and vocational and adult educators may join human services staff in providing education and training programs to JOBS clients. Heralded as an “end of welfare,” critics viewed the FSA as a failure. However, the act generated the expectation among voters that welfare recipients would and should be required to work. Despite the goals of the Family Support Act, the nationwide Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) caseload remained constant in the late 1980s, and then grew by more than a third between 1990 and 1994. Reagan also helped save Social Security by passing the Social Security Reform Act of 1983. It provided extra revenue dedicated to securing the solvent future of Social Security.

President Reagan signed legislation expanding Medicaid on several occasions. From 1982 to 1988, Reagan signed legislation mandating coverage for children and pregnant women receiving cash assistance, mandating emergency treatment of illegal immigrants who would otherwise be ineligible for Medicaid and expanding the low-income populations that states could choose to cover, among other expansions. Reagan also signed into law the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 (MCCA), a health care bill to expand Medicare and increase taxes to pay for it which passed in both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate by wide margins. Most people thought for good or ill, this expansion of government would be permanent. It provided full coverage for hospital stays after deductibles of $560 USD (for hospitals) and $1,370 USD (doctor bills, 80% of drug costs covered after a $600 deductible, 150 days of coverage for skilled nursing care, and 38 days of coverage for home health care). To pay for this coverage, the bill included a $400 USD a year surcharge (tax) for seniors making $40,000 USD per year and an $800 USD surcharge for those in the top tax brackets. It was political backlash against those surcharges that caused the bill to be repealed during the George H. W. Bush administration.

Reagan believed that widespread freeloading plagued welfare and social programs. As Reagan slashed spending in his first term on programs, the poverty rate climbed from 12% to 15% and unemployment rose from 7% to 11%. Within seven months of Reagan's inauguration, Congress had enacted the largest spending and tax cuts in its history, slashing fiscal 1982 spending $35 billion USD below projected levels and reducing personal and corporate income taxes by $37.7 billion USD. The biggest change was to reduce benefits for the working poor and focus federal welfare assistance primarily on the non-working poor. Congress, for example, amended the major cash benefit program -- Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) -- to eliminate most payments to working parents. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “Of the 450,000 to 500,000 families with earnings estimated to be receiving AFDC at the time of the [1981 program] changes, about one-half are estimated to have lost eligibility because of [those changes]. Another 40 per cent are estimated to have had their AFDC benefits reduced, and the remaining 10 per cent to have received unchanged or higher benefits. The other changes, which affect primarily non-income earners, are estimated to have made at least another 100,000 families ineligible and reduced benefits significantly for another 100,000.” Congress in 1981 and 1982 made changes in the Food Stamp program that, according to the CBO, eliminated about 4 per cent -- or one million people -- from the rolls. Deferrals in adjustments for inflation affected most people still receiving benefits. Although Congress refused Reagan's request to put a cap on the federal contribution on Medicaid (the state-run health care program for the poor) it did reduce federal Medicaid grants to the states and allowed the states to require Medicaid recipients to pay for part of the cost of their care. In addition, since AFDC recipients are automatically eligible for Medicaid, many of those eliminated from the AFDC rolls lost their medical benefits as well.

Congress abolished altogether the Public Service Employment (PSE) program, which provided jobs for the unemployed in state and local governments and in non-profit agencies. PSE was one of the most controversial of the low-income-targeted programs. Its advocates said PSE provided many poor individuals with work experience that eventually helped them move completely into the unsubsidised job market. However, opponents said the program provided dead-end, make-work jobs; news reports on mismanagement and provision of jobs to non-needy individuals further tarnished the program's image. The administration also targeted the Work Incentive Program (WIN) for cutbacks. The program, which provides job search and training assistance, has been mandatory for AFDC recipients without children under the age of 6 since its inception in 1967. However, Reagan's budgeters claimed the program was neither successful nor cost-effective in reducing welfare dependency. Although Congress rejected requests to eliminate the program, the number of registrants dropped from 1.6 million in 1981 to 1 million in 1982. Other major spending cuts affecting the poor were made in federal housing assistance programs, social services, and community services; school lunch programs, compensatory education and emergency energy assistance.

Counteractive measures during time include the Family and Medical Leave Act that was drafted by Donna Lenhoff of the Women’s Legal Defence Fund and a staffer for California’s Congressman Howard Berman in 1984. In 1985, the first version of the law introduced in the House of Representatives allowed for 18 weeks over a two-year period for unpaid parental leave for the birth, adoption, or serious illness of a child, and 26 weeks of unpaid medical leave for the employee’s own serious health condition. The law applies to employers with 50 or more employees. Nine years transpired between the initial draft of the bill and the actual passage of the FMLA in 1993 due to heavy political resistance. Over time, a coalition was formed from organisations representing diverse groups, including workers and unions, women, children and parents, the elderly, health professionals, and religious organizations. Many compromises were made to increase the bill’s political viability, including reducing the length of allowed leave and increasing the minimum employer size for employers covered by the law. The FMLA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The final version of the bill allowed for 12 weeks of unpaid parental and medical leave and applied to employers with at least 50 employees. It allowed employees to take leave to care for family members, but only if the family members are spouses, children or parents.

C. Policy debates continued over free-trade agreements, the scope of the government social safety net, and calls to reform the U.S. financial system.

Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative prompted a major increase in US food aid to Haiti. In 1984, Haiti received $11 million USD in food aid; from 1985-1988, Haiti received $54 million USD in food aid. The Caribbean Basin Initiative called for integrating Haiti into the global market by redirecting 30% of Haiti’s domestic food production towards export crops, a plan that USAID experts systematically carried out. The United States fully recognised that this would lead to widespread hunger in rural Haiti, as peasant land was converted to grow food for foreigners. At the time, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of Haiti’s infamous dictator, Francois Duvalier, ruled Haiti. Like his father, the younger Duvalier held onto power by controlling Haiti’s repressive security forces. He received millions in US aid intended to maintain US influence in the Caribbean as a bulwark against Cuba. The Reagan administration conditioned US aid on Duvalier’s support for the plan to restructure Haiti’s economy. Thus began the most massive foreign intervention in Haiti since the 1915-1934 American occupation.

By 1990, the year Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide was elected President in Haiti’s first democratic election, US rice imports outpaced domestic production. Aristide was the candidate of Haiti’s popular movement Lavalas. He won with 67% of the vote. His February 1991 inauguration marked a victory for Haiti’s poor majority after decades of Duvalier family dictatorships and military rule, signalling the participation of the poor in a new social order. The Aristide government met with a large coalition of farmers’ associations and unions and proposed buying all Haitian-grown rice in order to stabilize the price, limiting rice imports during periods between harvests. Just seven months after his inauguration, President Aristide and the democratic government were overthrown in a bloody military coup led by General Raoul Cedras. Trained in the United States and funded by the CIA, Cedras commanded the Haitian Army. His regime unleashed the collective violence of Haiti’s repressive forces against its own people. From 1991-1994, nearly 5,000 Lavalas activists and supporters of the constitutional government were massacred; many others were savagely tortured and imprisoned. Rape as a political weapon was widespread. Three hundred thousand Haitians were driven into hiding, while tens of thousands fled the country.

In 1985, the US imposed import quotas on Japanese cars. Japan flooded the U.S. market with high-quality cars that sold far below the price at which the Big Three could afford to build, sell, and survive. In 1985, the dollar, at 220 to the yen, was still too high to arrest the rising U.S. trade deficit. The Big Three were at death's door. Refusing to let any of them go under, Reagan intervened to save the industry by imposing import quotas on Japanese cars. Free traders denounced Reagan as a heretic. The death of Ford and Chrysler were of far less concern to them than fidelity to the free-trade gospel of David Ricardo and Adam Smith. It was Reagan, after all, who first articulated a goal of free trade in the Western Hemisphere. America's first free trade agreement with Israel, implemented in 1985, was a Reagan achievement. A US-Canada agreement followed. In 1986, Reagan launched the Uruguay Round, a series of talks aimed at the reduction of trade barriers among more than 60 nations.

Back in 1984, President Ronald Reagan passed the Trade and Tariff Act, which allowed the president special authority to negotiate free trade agreements more quickly. Going off of Reagan's initiative, Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney supported the president and the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was eventually signed in 1988; it went into effect one year after. When George H. W. Bush became president, he began to negotiate with Mexican President Salinas to generate a trade agreement between Mexico and the United States. The trade agreement was part of President Bush's three-part plan called the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, which also included debt relief programs. After Mexico lobbied for a trilateral trade (Triangular Trade - Concept Originating from Mercantilist Slave Trades in the 1500-the 1800s) agreement in 1991, NAFTA was created as a way to open up free trade between the three, not just two, superpowers in North America. President H.W. Bush signed the NAFTA agreement in 1992, which was also signed by Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Salinas. The agreement went into effect under Bush's successor President Bill Clinton, who signed the agreement himself on December 8th, 1993. By January of 1994, the trade agreement was in effect.

The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is an expansion of NAFTA to five Central American nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Nicaragua), and the Dominican Republic. It was signed May 28th, 2004, and passed through the U.S. House of Representatives by one vote in the middle of the night on July 27th, 2005. After more than a decade of CAFTA, countries in the region have faced hardships for workers and farmers, corporate attacks on health and environmental laws, political instability, and deplorable human rights conditions. CAFTA is based on the failed neoliberal NAFTA model, which has displaced family farmers in trade partner countries, exacerbated the "race to the bottom" in labour and environmental standards, and promoted privatization and deregulation of key public services.

Now a look at the domestic side. Under Governor Mitt Romney’s administration, with his support and advocacy, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed a health care reform law in 2006 with the aim of providing health insurance to nearly all of its residents. The law mandated that nearly every resident of Massachusetts obtain a minimum level of insurance coverage, provided free health care insurance for residents earning less than 150% of the federal poverty level (FPL) and mandated employers with more than 10 "full-time" employees to provide healthcare insurance. The law was adopted by senators Barrack Obama and Ted Kennedy into the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Obama campaigned on it and after winning the 2008 election, set to work on passing it. The ACA was signed into law by President Obama in March 2010. Its major provisions go into effect on January 1st, 2014, although significant changes went into effect before that date and will continue in years to come. The Act extended insurance to more than 30 million uninsured people, primarily by expanding Medicaid and providing federal subsidies to help lower-and middle-income Americans buy private coverage. Twenty-six states and the National Federation of Independent Business had brought suit in federal court challenging the mandate that individuals carry insurance or pay penalties, as well as the expansion of Medicaid. The Supreme Court ruled that states could not be forced into cooperating with the Medicaid expansion, but left most of the other provisions intact. Much of the Obamacare political action came in 2009, the first year of the presidency. On July 14th, House Democrats introduced a 1,000-page plan for overhauling the US health care system. The debate raged throughout the summer and beyond.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a massive piece of financial reform legislation passed by the Obama administration in 2010 as a response to the Geroge Bush's financial crisis of 2008. Named after sponsors U.S. Senator Christopher J. Dodd and U.S. Representative Barney Frank, the act's numerous provisions -- spelt out over roughly 2,300 pages -- are being implemented over a period of several years and intended to decrease various risks in the U.S. financial system. The act established a number of new government agencies tasked with overseeing various components of the act and by extension various aspects of the banking system. Dodd-Frank put regulations on the financial industry and created programs to stop mortgage companies and lenders from taking advantage of consumers. This dense, complex law continues to be a hot topic in American politics. Supporters of it say it places much-needed restrictions on Wall Street, but critics charge that Dodd-Frank burdens investors with "too many rules" that "slow economic growth." An additional provision of the Dodd-Frank Act is known as the Volcker Rule, named after Paul Volcker. Volcker was chairman of the Federal Reserve under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Obama (AKA, dude forgot to retire). The Volcker Rule forbids banks from making certain investments with their own accounts. For example, banks can’t invest, own or sponsor any proprietary trading operations or hedge funds for their own profit, with some exceptions. Banks like Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Chase ALL broke this rule. Dodd-Frank is viewed as one of the most stringent regulations on banks since the FDR era, which was prompted after the Great Depression of 1929.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a United States Supreme Court case involving Citizens United, a 501(c)(4) non-profit organisation, and whether the group's film critical of a political candidate could be defined as an electioneering communication under the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act. Decided in 2010, in a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts in candidate elections cannot be limited because doing so would "violate" the First Amendment. The Court's decision struck down a provision of the McCain-Feingold Act that banned for-profit and not-for-profit corporations and unions from broadcasting electioneering communications in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general elections. The decision overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and partially overruled McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003). The decision upheld, however, the requirements for disclaimer and disclosure by sponsors of advertisements, and the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates. The overall precedent set, however, was that “money is speech,” and thus any limitation on money transactions would be considered "suppression of free speech" (I call bullshit). However, this ruling was flawed, as you cannot argue that prostitution or the payment of drugs is “speech.” Nevertheless, the Reagan and Bush stacked Supreme Court upheld such a ruling under the guise of the first amendment.

POL-1.0: Explain how and why political ideas, beliefs, institutions, party systems, and alignments have developed and changed.

Imagine a pendulum oscillating back and forth. Due to the laws of physics, the amount of energy applied to one end of the pendulum will match the other side equally. However, there is energy lost due to friction which inevitably stops the pendulum altogether, dead centre, and in line with the force due to gravity. Politics in any given society act in a pendulum manner. Key events, such as a war, a depression, a recession, or among other things act as the energy supplied to that pendulum. When the economy is bad and social issues are at a major crossroads, energy is applied to the right of the pendulum swaying it to the left. When the economy is good, energy is applied in the other direction, i.e. social welfare programs in the former like under FDR following the Great Depression of 1929, or during the Progressive Era and the Republican Normalcy preceding the crash in the latter, or the Conservative resurgence. The election of 1980 represents a shift in the ideology of the nation. After suffering from the Vietnam War, and the Carter administration bearing the brunt of military debt and major crises inherited from the Ford and Nixon presidencies, the United States citizens felt that they could "no longer trust a Democratic," welfare-friendly administration. In 1980, actor, republican and California governor Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency by all but three US states (because EVERYONE LIKED HIS MOVIES, and were BLINDED by his DONOR'S POLICY OBJECTIVES). With Reagan came a return to conservative values, that, although two “Democratic” presidents followed him, the United States still operates with. In other words, we swung so far back to the right, that it TRUMPED Herbert Hoover's or even Andrew Johnson's failed legacies). The “Neo-Liberal” philosophy that Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush AND Barack Obama ALL HAVE championed keeps that pendulum ever to the right, with an ANGRY populace BEGGING for a HARD-LEFT TURN AGAIN, something that goes EVEN FURTHER than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt or President John F. Kennedy!

The Republican and Democratic parties have amalgamated into one, corporate elite business party, where one must be subservient to corporate donors (Bill Moyers talks about this in his dissection of the Deep State). Tax cuts under the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well bank deregulations, the repeal of Glass-Steagall under Clinton, and the major increase in defence spending have contributed to a massive debt-deficit driven economy. And lest we forget the major increases in illegal wars under the second Bush administration. Artificial inflation, stagflation, and depreciating wages have led to a rise in homelessness, deaths, health care loss, starvation and overall poverty in America. Major slashes to public funding have only added to this loss. And the grossly misguided theory that cutting taxes for the TOP moneymakers, while potentially raising lower-income taxers will someone “trickle-down” wealth for those at the bottom has led to decades of congressional tax cuts that have only lead to corporations buying back their own stocks, artificially boosting the Gross Domestic Product while leaving workers without a dollar more to their name. All of this resulted in the election of a demagogue in 2016; a living embodiment of the SYSTEM of neoliberalism sparked by Reagan. Donald Jay Trump was a mere product of the years of wreckage to the American economy and political institutions paved by his predecessors. In this way, Washington D.C. has become a mere artifice, or "political theatre," that OLIGARCHS in Wall Street and Capitol Hill have successfully orchestrated, as individuals like Jeff Bezos, the Walton Family, Rothchild, the Koch Brothers, and Warren Buffet get filthy rich off the work that THEIR EMPLOYEES put in. And all they do is sit on their fat, rich, lazy white asses and SIT ALL day scheming their next corporate takeover for VALUELESS US Dollars AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR WORKERS HEALTHS & FAMILIES because OUR COUNTRY is 28 TRILLION DOLLARS in DEBT to THEM and THEIR SWISS BANK ACCOUNTS. That, combined with the bought corporate media that spews economic propaganda about “how well the economy is doing,” which seeps into the minds of Americans as we educate the future generation on what is right and wrong, is a recipe for a disaster. And the failure to properly address these issues has only further cemented their legacies in the inevitable, irreversible, and fast-approaching demise of the American Empire. Through this demise, may we FINALLY become A TRUE DEMOCRATIC NATION that works TOGETHER with ALL COUNTRIES, rather than LORD OVER THEM like PUPPETS on our DEMONIC STRINGS.

C. Employment increased in service sectors and decreased in manufacturing, and union membership declined.

Between 1970 and 2000, manufacturing employment was relatively stable, ranging from 16.8 to 19.6 million workers, and generally remaining between 17 and 18 million. However, this relationship broke down in the early 2000s, a period of rapidly growing trade deficits. At that time, manufacturing employment began a prolonged collapse, falling to a low of 11.5 million workers in February 2010, and recovering by December 2014 to 12.3 million workers, where it has remained. Overall, manufacturing lost 5 million jobs between January 2000 and December 2014. Between 2000 and 2007, growing trade deficits in manufactured goods led to the loss of 3.6 million manufacturing jobs in that period. Between 2007 and 2009, the massive collapse in overall U.S. output hit manufacturing particularly hard (real manufacturing output fell 10.3 per cent between 2007 and 2009). This collapse was followed by the slowest recovery in domestic manufacturing output in more than 60 years. Reasonably strong GDP growth over the past five years has not been sufficient to counter these trends; only about 900,000 of the 2.3 million manufacturing jobs lost during the Great Recession have been recovered.

In addition, the resurgence of the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods since 2009 has hurt the recovery of manufacturing output and employment. As more free-trade policies like NAFTA, CAFTA, and the TPP (Trans-Pacific Pact) have taken root and have gotten more aggressively laissez-faire, more and more jobs have been outsourced to lower-wages and less regulated countries such as Mexico with the automobile industry; China has virtually every industry, and India practically owns the customer support industry. Without regulations, US manufacturer labourers have no way to compete with countries that have non-union, slave-labour like, and in some cases actual slave labour conditions. This all has lead to the continuance of manufacturing jobs being outsourced. The emphasis on labour cuts, especially unions, was fuelled by Reagan’s bold policy of strike-breaking by firing 11,359 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored his order to return to work, causing a significant impact on labour-management relations in the private sector.

Over the past decade, the oil and gas industry has fused two technologies—hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—in a highly polluting effort to unlock oil and gas in underground rock formations across the United States. As fracking expands rapidly across the country, there is a growing number of documented cases of drinking water contamination and illnesses among nearby residents. Yet it has often been difficult for the public to grasp the scale and scope of these and other fracking threats. Fracking is already underway in 17 states, with more than 80,000 wells drilled or permitted since 2005. Moreover, the oil and gas industry is aggressively seeking to expand fracking to new states—from New York to California to North Carolina—and to areas that provide drinking water to millions of Americans. In the same aspect, fights over the dying and heftily cost (to the environment and miners health) of the coal industry have been waged as people lose their jobs in the mines and “coal towns” become desert towns.

Furthermore, as technology becomes more and more innovated, more jobs are being outsourced to robots, i.e. automation. So as more and more jobs become depleted, more people are finding it difficult to find work, and the owners of more automated industries rake more profit in without having to pay wages, which in turn invests itself back into the economy. More people turn to service sector jobs, i.e. plumbers, technicians, mechanics, construction, etc., because these jobs, at least as of now, demand ACTUAL people to provide labour. All of this is evidence of structural changes in employment due to many of the policies of the administrations including and following President Reagan.

D. Real wages stagnated for the working and middle class amid growing economic inequality.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that for the 1979-2007 period, the after-tax income of households in the top 1 per cent of earners grew by 275%, compared to 65% for the next 19 per cent, just under 40% for the next 60 per cent, and 18% for the bottom fifth of households. This trend of a rising income gap is evidentiary of not only the furtherment of money accumulation for the top earners but also the failures of the tax cuts for the top earners to generate more wealth for the bottom earner (supply-side economics). This issue was exacerbated with the Great Recession of 2007.

The Great Recession—which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009—began with the bursting of an 8 trillion-dollar housing bubble. The resulting loss of wealth led to sharp cutbacks in consumer spending. This loss of consumption, combined with the financial market chaos triggered by the bursting of the bubble, also led to a collapse in business investment. As consumer spending and business investment dried up, massive job loss followed. In 2008 and 2009, the U.S. labour market lost 8.4 million jobs or 6.1% of all payroll employment. This was the most dramatic employment contraction (by far) of any recession since the Great Depression. By comparison, in the deep recession that began in 1981, job loss was 3.1%, or only about half as severe. The job loss during the Great Recession has meant that family incomes have dropped, poverty has risen, and adults, as well as children, have lost health insurance. The bursting of the housing bubble and the drop in the stock market has meant that family wealth has dropped dramatically, as well. This feature highlights the impact of the Great Recession on the labour market and on working families.

The Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act (EESA) (2008) was one of the bailout measures taken by Congress in 2008 to help repair the damage from the subprime mortgage crisis. The act gave the Treasury Secretary the authority to buy up to $700 billion USD of troubled assets and to restore liquidity in financial markets. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) was originally created and proposed by Henry Paulson. The original form of the EESA was rejected by the House of Representatives in September of 2008 and was therefore revised. A revised version was passed the following month. Proponents of the plan believed that it was vital to minimise the damage done to the economy by the mortgage meltdown, while detractors contended that the cost amounted to a bailout for Wall Street and the banks. A central part of the response to the financial crisis was the implementation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Another law passed by Congress in response to the Great Recession of 2008 was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009). It is more commonly known as the stimulus package of 2009, or the "Obama stimulus." The package included a series of federal government expenditures aimed at countering the job losses associated with the 2008 recession. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) called for a massive round of federal spending designed to create new jobs and recover jobs lost in the Great Recession of 2008. This government spending was intended to compensate for a slowdown in private investment in that year. It was intended to provide tax relief for families, including withholding reductions up to $800 USD per family and a $70 billion USD extension of the alternative minimum tax. It also was intended to provide over $80 billion USD in infrastructure projects, expand healthcare including $87 billion USD in aid to states to help cover additional recession-related Medicare costs, and provided over $100 billion USD in education spending, including teacher salary support and Head Start programs.

In a response to the legislative bailouts and the risky and overly greedy business practices of Wall Street, a movement was started known as Occupy Wall Street. Occupy is a progressive protest movement that began on September 17th, 2011, receiving global attention and spawning a surge in the movement against economic inequality worldwide. The main issues raised by Occupy Wall Street were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The Occupy slogan, "We are the 99%", refers to income inequality and wealth distribution in the United States between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters acted on consensus-based decisions made in general assemblies which emphasized redress through direct action over the petitioning to authorities. The protesters were forced out of Zuccotti Park (where they had been assembled) on November 15th, 2011. Protesters turned their focus to occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, foreclosed homes, and college and university campuses.

WXT-3.0: Analyse how technological innovation has affected economic development and society.

As mentioned earlier, automation and the ever-moving feats of technology have affected jobs, wealth accumulation, and how Americans interact with one another and with those around the globe. In 1975, IBM released its first portable computer. In 1983, TCP/IP protocols replaced NCP on the ARPANET, marking the beginning of the modern internet. In 1985 the first version of Microsoft was released. And technological feats continued. On June 29th, 2007, the first iPhone was released. With the access to computers, DVR technologies, expanding TV networks, countless websites and online records, human capacity has expanded and the ability to research and articulate such matters has grown. This affects society tremendously when it comes to the changing tides on social issues, the ability to question more of religion and previously inaccessible doctrine, the greater acceptance of sexuality, and a growing consumer culture based on the immediate gratification of buying things. These new technologies and attitudes have led to the further automation of U.S. sector jobs and the growing collapse of the economy.

New innovations in the manufacturing industry, especially in say coal, have left people without a job. More and more labour is being replaced with machines that only accumulate profit for the owner of those machines, who then buy back into their own companies. Unlike a paid employee who would have to invest in the economy by buying goods and participating in the market, or who get small "shares" in their company like at Home Depot or Publix, these owners of machines, corporations, and PEOPLE make up to 300x A YEAR what their average employee does, but CONTRIBUTE the LEAST AMOUNT of WORK in THE ENTIRE COMPANY. Hell, they probably didn't even design the machines they profit from, rather some college student in an unpaid internship at say Georgia Tech did. In this way, technology does help the overall GDP of the nation and increases profitability, but it undercuts wages and leaves more Americans less off than ever before. With tax cuts and supply-side theories, these greater profit margins are left unchecked and the consumer is the one to suffer. Larger businesses who have established themselves while also having the ability to adapt, like Amazon, begin to crush smaller competitors and without regulations begin to monopolise several industries simultaneously. With new robotic technologies, Amazon hires fewer and fewer workers, even having workerless stores and eventually driverless delivery trucks. At the same time, they have made their competitors go out of business, cutting jobs from not only their company but other companies in that field. Then, they make a profit from all of the cut jobs, sucking most of the wealth to just be invested back into the company to raise stock prices which goes MOSTLY into Jeff Bezos’ pocket.

B. Increased U.S. military spending, Reagan’s diplomatic initiatives, and political changes and economic problems in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were all important in ending the Cold War.

Reagan increased defence spending to achieve "peace through strength" in his opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union. Reagan wound up increasing the defence budget by 35 per cent. Under Reagan, government spending increased 2.5 per cent annually. Reagan's first budget was for the fiscal year 1982. He incurred substantial deficits for each year of his presidency. As a result, the debt each year also increased. By the end of Reagan's two terms, the national debt had more than doubled. At the end of his two terms, Reagan had incurred a national debt of $1.86 trillion USD, a 186% per cent increase from the $998 billion USD debt at the end of Carter's last budget, FY 1981.

One of Reagan’s budgetary priorities was the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), by the name "Star Wars," which proposed the US strategic defensive system against potential nuclear attacks—as originally conceived, from the Soviet Union. The SDI was first proposed by President Ronald Reagan in a nationwide television address on March 23rd, 1983. Because parts of the defensive system that Reagan advocated would be based in space, the proposed system was dubbed “Star Wars,” after the space weaponry of a popular motion picture of the same name (cause Reagan was an ACTOR and LIKED HOLLYWOOD). The SDI was intended to defend the United States from attack from Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by intercepting the missiles at various phases of their flight. Though initial funding for the SDI had been approved by the U.S. Congress by the mid-1980s, the program aroused a heated debate among both arms experts and public officials over its military and political implications and its technical feasibility. Proponents of the SDI asserted that the overwhelming technological obstacles to its implementation could eventually be overcome and that an effective defensive system would deter potential Soviet attacks. Critics of the program argued variously that the scheme was unworkable, that it encouraged a further arms race, and that it undermined established arms-control agreements and weakened the prospects for further arms-control agreements. Testing continued on a number of SDI-related devices, but the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 changed the conditions of such defence.

START I inevitably acted as one of the dampers of the Star Wars program. In 1982, Ronald Reagan renamed disarmament talks with the USSR START and proposed radical reductions, rather than merely limitations, in each superpower’s existing stocks of missiles and warheads. In 1983 the Soviet Union abandoned arms control talks in protest against the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in western Europe (see Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty). In 1985 START resumed, and the talks culminated in July 1991 with a comprehensive strategic-arms-reduction agreement signed by U.S. Pres. George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. During the negotiations on START I, one of the most controversial issues had been how to handle limits on nuclear-armed cruise missiles, as verification would be difficult to implement. The issue was finally handled by means of separate political declarations by which the two sides agreed to announce annually their planned cruise missile deployments, which were not to exceed 880.

For the first time in eight years, the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States held a summit conference. Meeting in Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev produced no earth-shattering agreements. However, the meeting boded well for the future, as the two men engaged in long, personal talks and seemed to develop a sincere and close relationship. The meeting came as somewhat of a surprise to some in the United States, considering Reagan’s often incendiary rhetoric concerning "communism" and the Soviet Union, but it was in keeping with the president’s often-stated desire to bring the nuclear arms race under control. For Gorbachev, the meeting was another clear signal of his desire to obtain better relations with the United States so that he could better pursue his domestic reforms. Little of substance was accomplished. Six agreements were reached, ranging from cultural and scientific exchanges to environmental issues. Both Reagan and Gorbachev, however, expressed satisfaction with the summit, which ended on November 21st. The next summit was held in October 1986 in Reykjavik and ended somewhat disastrously, with Reagan’s commitment to the Strategic Defence Initiative (the so-called “Star Wars” missile defence system) providing a major obstacle to progress on arms control talks. However, by the time of their third summit in Washington, D.C. in 1987, both sides made concessions in order to achieve agreement on a wide range of arms control issues.

When Gorbachev became head of the Communist Party in 1985, he launched Perestroika (“restructuring”). His team was more heavily Russian than that of his predecessors. It seems that initially, even Gorbachev believed that the basic economic structure of the U.S.S.R. was sound and therefore only minor reforms were needed. He thus pursued an economic policy that aimed to increase economic growth while increasing capital investment. Capital investment was to improve the technological basis of the Soviet economy as well as promote certain structural economic changes. His goal was quite plain: to bring the Soviet Union up to par economically with the West. Gorbachev launched Glasnost (“openness”) as the second vital plank of his reform efforts. He believed that the opening up of the political system—essentially, democratizing it—was the only way to overcome inertia in the political and bureaucratic apparatus, which had a big interest in maintaining the status quo. In addition, he believed that the path to economic and social recovery required the inclusion of people in the political process. Glasnost also allowed the media more freedom of expression, and editorials complaining of depressed conditions and of the government’s inability to correct them began to appear.

Solidarity, officially Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity,” was a Polish trade union that in the early 1980s became the first independent labour union in a country belonging to the Soviet bloc. Solidarity was founded in September 1980, was forcibly suppressed by the Polish government in December 1981, and reemerged in 1989 to become the first opposition movement to participate in free elections in a Soviet-bloc nation since the 1940s. Solidarity subsequently formed a coalition government with Poland’s United Workers’ Party (PUWP), after which its leaders dominated the national government. During a growing wave of new strikes in 1980 protesting rising food prices, Gdańsk became a hotbed of resistance to government decrees. Some 17,000 workers at the Lenin Shipyards there staged a strike and barricaded themselves within the plant under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa, an electrician by trade. In mid-August 1980 an Interfactory Strike Committee was established in Gdańsk to coordinate rapidly spreading strikes there and elsewhere; within a week it presented the Polish government with a list of demands that were based largely on KOR’s Charter of Workers’ Rights. On August 31, accords reached between the government and the Gdańsk strikers sanctioned free and independent unions with the right to strike, together with greater freedom of religious and political expression.

C) The end of the Cold War led to new diplomatic relationships but also new U.S. military and peacekeeping interventions, as well as continued debates over the appropriate use of American power in the world.

The Persian Gulf War also called Gulf War, (1990–91), was an international conflict that was triggered by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2nd, 1990. Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, ordered the invasion and occupation of Kuwait with the apparent aim of acquiring that nation’s large oil reserves, cancelling a large debt Iraq owed Kuwait and expanding Iraqi power in the region. On August 3rd the United Nations Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and on August 6th the council imposed a worldwide ban on trade with Iraq. (The Iraqi government responded by formally annexing Kuwait on August 8th.) Iraq’s invasion and the potential threat it then posed to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer and exporter, prompted the United States and its western European NATO allies to rush troops to Saudi Arabia to deter a possible attack. Egypt and several other Arab nations joined the anti-Iraq coalition and contributed forces to the military build-up, known as Operation Desert Shield. Iraq meanwhile built up its occupying army in Kuwait to about 300,000 troops.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War was, according to President Bush, about "more than one small country; it is a big idea; a new world order," with "new ways of working with other nations . . . peaceful settlement of disputes, solidarity against aggression, reduced and controlled arsenals and just treatment of all peoples." Not long after the war, however, the flow of White House words about a new world order slowed to a trickle. Like Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points or Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, George Bush’s grand rhetoric expressed the larger goals important for public support when a liberal democratic state goes to war. But after the war, when reality intruded, grand schemes turned into a liability. People were led to compare the war’s imperfect outcome with an impossible ideal. The proper standard for judgment should have been what the world would look like if Saddam Hussein had been left in possession of Kuwait. The victory lost its lustre because of an unfair comparison that the president inadvertently encouraged, and recession shifted the political agenda to the domestic economy. The White House thus decided to lower the rhetorical volume.

In the 1980s, Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, a once U.S.-supportive leader who was later accused of spying for Fidel Castro and using Panama to traffic drugs into the United States, was one of the most recognizable names in America and was constantly in the press. The struggle to remove him from power began in the Reagan administration when economic sanctions were imposed on the country; this included prohibiting American companies and governments from making payments to Panama and freezing $56 million USD in Panamanian funds in American banks. Reagan sent more than 2,000 American troops to Panama as well. Unlike Reagan, Bush was able to remove Noriega from power, but his administration's unsuccessful post-invasion planning hindered the needs of Panama during the establishment of the young democratic government. In May 1989, Panama held democratic elections, in which Guillermo Endara was elected president; the results were then annulled by Noriega's government. In response, Bush sent 2,000 more US troops to the country, where they began conducting regular military exercises in Panamanian territory (in violation of prior treaties). Bush then removed an embassy and ambassador from the country and dispatched additional troops to Panama to prepare the way for an upcoming invasion. On December 18th, Bush admitted he believed the current Panama situation was very concerning and that it had been "an enormous frustration to me" but declined to state what intent the US had toward it during an Oval Office interview with wire service reporters. R. W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times observed the invasion as placing Bush among other post-World War II American presidents that had "felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest."

Faced with a humanitarian disaster in Somalia, exacerbated by a complete breakdown in the civil order, the United Nations had created the UNOSOM I mission in April 1992 to aid the situation through humanitarian efforts, though the mission failed. The Bush administration proposed American aid to the region by assisting in creating a secure environment for humanitarian efforts and UN Resolution 794 was unanimously adopted by the Security Council on December 3rd, 1992. A lame-duck president, Bush launched Operation Restore Hope the following day under which the United States would assume command in accordance with Resolution 794. Fearing chaos resulting in the starvation of Somalia's civilians and to help U.S. Forces defend themselves, Clinton increased troop presence in the country. Demands for withdrawal, however, grew louder and Clinton ordered troops out of the country in March 1994. This left Somalia in a state of chaos, with warlords battling for control.

Much of the focus of Clinton's foreign policy during his first term was the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation in southeastern Europe that had declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. This declaration was the catalyst of a war between Bosnian Serbs, who wanted Bosnia to remain in the Yugoslav federation, and Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The Bosnian Serbs, who were supported by Serbia, were better equipped than the Muslims and the Croats; as a result, they populated and controlled much of the countryside in ways including besieging cities, such as the capital of Sarajevo. This caused widespread suffering, and in response, Clinton proposed bombing Serb supply lines and lifting an embargo preventing the shipment of military arms to the former Yugoslavia (a policy known as lift and strike - LITERALLY PLAYING WITH PEOPLES LIVELIHOODS, FAMILIES, AND HOMES like "BOARDS ON A CHESSBOARD"). European nations, however, were opposed to these moves. In 1994, Clinton opposed an effort by the Republicans in Congress to lift the arms embargo, as it were because American allies in Western Europe were still resistant to that policy. Clinton continued to pressure western European countries throughout 1994 to take strong measures against the Serbs. But in November, as the Serbs seemed on the verge of defeating the Muslims and Croats in several strongholds, Clinton changed course and called for conciliation with the Serbs. After the 2nd Markale massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces reportedly shelled a crowded marketplace in Sarajevo, NATO, led by the United States launched Operation Deliberate Force with a series of airstrikes against Bosnian Serb targets. The air campaign, along with a counter-offensive by better-equipped Muslim and Croatian forces, succeeded in pressuring the Bosnian Serbs into participating in negotiations. In November 1995, Clinton hosted peace talks between the warring parties in Dayton, Ohio. The parties reached a peace agreement known as the Dayton Agreement, leaving Bosnia as a single state made up of two separate entities with a central government. In the spring of 1998, ethnic tension in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia–the state formed from the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro–heightened when the military forces responded in the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija. More than 90 per cent of the residents of Kosovo were Muslim and ethnic Albanians, many of whom wanted independence from the country. Yugoslav forces were mobilized into provinces to quell Albanian rebels. Through attempting to impose the Rambouillet Agreement, Clinton, who strongly supported the Albanians, threatened the Yugoslav administration with military strikes. On the 24th of March 1999, NATO, led by the United States, launched the two-month bombardment of Yugoslavia. The strikes were not limited to military installations and NATO targets included civilian targets such as factories, oil refineries, television stations and various infrastructure. The intervention, which devastated Yugoslavia, was not approved by the United Nations, the UN General Assembly or the UN Security Council, and was strongly opposed by both Russia and China. It was the first time in NATO's history that its forces had attacked a sovereign country and the first time in which airpower alone won a battle. In June 1999, NATO and Yugoslav military leaders approved an international peace plan for Kosovo, and attacks were suspended after Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo.

In May 1989, nearly a million Chinese, mostly young students, crowded into central Beijing to protest for greater democracy and call for the resignations of Chinese Communist Party leaders deemed too repressive. For nearly three weeks, the protesters kept up daily vigils and marched and chanted. Western reporters captured much of the drama for television and newspaper audiences in the United States and Europe. On June 4th, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters (Note System of a Down's B.Y.O.B., why DON'T the PRESIDENTS ever FIGHT THE WARS???). Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats on the scene estimated that at least 300, and perhaps thousands, of the protesters, had been killed and as many as 10,000 were arrested. In the aftermath, President George H.W. Bush denounced the actions in Tiananmen Square and suspended military sales as well as high-level exchanges with Chinese officials. Many members of the U.S. Congress, the American public, and international leaders advocated broader economic sanctions, some of which were implemented. U.S. leaders met with Chinese nationals studying in the United States as a symbolic gesture of commitment. Questions of relations with China, in particular the granting of Most-Favored-Nation trading status, were controversial questions for the remainder of President Bush’s term and into the term of President Bill Clinton.

WOR-2.0: Analyse the reasons for, and results of, U.S. diplomatic, economic, and military initiatives in North America and overseas.

After many feats in US power history, including the naval expansion under Teddy Roosevelt, the increase in military spending under Reagan, and the escalation of conflict under several presidents, including Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as a steady trend starting back in the days of Washington of money growth and growth in US representation around the world, the United States has blossomed as a GLOBAL SUPERPOWER, ever much so in the Conservative Resurgence. If one examines history in the world during any given time, one will find the ever-lingering ideologies of imperialism. One such example of this would be the British Empire and its stronghold on countries all across the globe during the 16th and through the 20th centuries (Note Netflix's "The Crown"). The United States is the largest and most frankly, important nation in global geopolitics. For this reason, the country finds a need to act as a sort of “global policeman”; at least, that is what we have been told. In reality, the United States has always gotten involved in matters that best benefit ITS OWN NATION as a whole whether it be financially, politically, or in other regards. The United States has no great moral cause to crusade around saving other countries for the greater good. Some may even say, with good reason, that the United States put up a façade when claiming that communism was the greatest threat to American democracy and that it must be stopped up at all costs, even if that meant destabilizing democracies across the world and stripping away civil liberties in the United States. That façade seems much more realistic when evaluating the great profit made off such wars as the Vietnam War, Korean War, and Cold War, and at the expense of American and foreign blood. President Eisenhower himself warned against the Military-Industrial Complex in his Farewell Address. This complex feeds off war, so inevitably, it survives at the cost of making war - a skill that US presidents seem to be pretty good at.

Diplomacy works for the US when it can benefit the most financially to do so. In such a case as the START I treaty and disarmament talks between the USSR and the US, the United States understood that more profit could be made by opening up trade with the Union rather than waging a never-ending Cold War. If the financial profits of the Cold War had exceeded the trade route, such diplomatic talks may never have occurred. In this way, the US can also block trade like with Cuba or with China after Tiananmen Square. The US will also support dictatorships across the world, and coups of democratic governments if it best serves the Country to do that, while at the same time waging wars against dictatorships and striving to “spread democracy.” It hides its money holds under the guise of "moral justice." Initiatives are incentivised by profit and by power.

A. In the wake of attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the United States launched military efforts against terrorism and lengthy, controversial conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Afghanistan War was an international conflict in Afghanistan beginning in 2001 that was triggered by the September 11th attacks and consisted of three phases. The first phase—toppling the Taliban (the ultraconservative political and religious faction that ruled Afghanistan and provided sanctuary for al-Qaeda, perpetrators of the September 11th attacks)—was brief, lasting just two months. The second phase, from 2002 until 2008, was marked by a U.S. strategy of defeating the Taliban militarily and rebuilding the core institutions of the Afghan state. The third phase, a turn to classic counterinsurgency doctrine, began in 2008 and accelerated with U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to temporarily increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan. The larger force was used to implement a strategy of protecting the population from Taliban attacks and supporting efforts to reintegrate insurgents into Afghan society. The strategy came coupled with a timetable for the withdrawal of the foreign forces from Afghanistan; beginning in 2011, security responsibilities would be gradually handed over to the Afghan military and police. The new approach largely failed to achieve its aims. Insurgent attacks and civilian casualties remained stubbornly high, while many of the Afghan military and police units taking over security duties appeared to be ill-prepared to hold off the Taliban. By the time the U.S. and NATO combat mission formally ended in December 2014, the 13-YEAR Afghanistan War had become the longest war ever fought by the United States.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War (also called Operation Iraqi Freedom). The invasion phase began on the 20th March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 21 days of major combat operations, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq. This early stage of the war formally ended on the 1st of May 2003 when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations," after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.

In 2003, a secret compound, known as Strawberry Fields, was constructed near the main Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. It was not until August 2010 that reporters found that it had been constructed to hold CIA detainees classified as "high value.” These were among the many men known as ghost detainees, as they were ultimately held for years for interrogation by the CIA in its secret prisons known as black sites at various places in Europe, the Mideast, and Asia, including Afghanistan (LIKE JULAIN ASSANGE'S TORTURE IN BELMARSH PRISON). Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, in an exclusive report on August 7th, 2010, for the Associated Press, reported that the "high-value detainees" Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had first been transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay on September 24th, 2003. They reported that CIA agents thought they had learned most of the information to be extracted from these individuals. At the time, the CIA thought the men could be held securely and secretly at Guantanamo, without any prospect of the public learning that they had been SUBJECTED to what the United States courts have determined is TORTURE, including waterboarding, one of the euphemistically termed "enhanced interrogation techniques." These techniques had been specifically authorized by political appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice (DOJ), in the Bush administration, in August 2002 (MONTH & YEAR DREW WAS BORN), in what came to be known as the Torture Memos. David Johnston and Mark Mazetti, writing in the New York Times in August 2009 also described the camp. They quoted CIA officials, who said that the camp's nickname in 2003 was a reference to the Beatles' song "Strawberry Fields Forever," because the detainees would be held there "forever" (THEY COOPTED POPULAR AMERICAN SONGS to SELL THEIR HEINOUS BULLLSHIT POLICES. THEY LIED TO THE AMERICAN PUBLIC). As the Habeas Corpus petitions collectively known as Rasul v. Bush made their way to the United States Supreme Court for its ruling in 2004, the CIA took the four men back into their custody. Apuzzo and Goldman report that the Bush government returned the men to CIA custody three months before the Supreme Court's ruling, to avoid the possibility of having to release any information about them. The Supreme Court held that detainees had the right of Habeas Corpus to challenge their detention before an impartial forum, and NONE had seen counsel. Up until that time, no detainees had been able to challenge the grounds of their detention. The Supreme Court's ruling would have compelled at least some information about the four detainees to be publicly revealed. The CIA violated State Law, Federal Law, and International Law in VIRTUALLY EVERY COUNTRY and GOT AWAY WITH IT BECAUSE OF US NUCLEAR STOCKPLIES (aka the "threat" of the RED BUTTON being used against FOREIGN "enemies" - aka XENOPHOBIA).

Since 2004, the United States government has attacked thousands of targets in Northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) operated by the United States Air Force under the operational control of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division. Most of these attacks are on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border in Northwest Pakistan. These strikes began during the administration of United States President George W. Bush and increased substantially under his successor Barack Obama. Some in the media have referred to the attacks as a "drone war.” The George W. Bush administration officially denied the extent of its policy; in May 2013, the Obama administration acknowledged for the first time that four US citizens had been killed in the strikes. THIS is what Chelsea Manning released and was imprisoned for, and what Megan McCain, daughter of WAR CRIMINAL, said was "justified" for "international security" on the asinine, politically-dumb ABC show "The View," that FOCUSES TOO MUCH ON PERSONAL ISSUES within HOMES and NOT ENOUGH on GLOBAL ATROCITIES. BUT Manning's distribution of this information SAVED future CITIZENS of the WAR-TORN regions, thus making CHELSEA MANNING a WAR-HERO, NOT a CRIMINAL, like her PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH and VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY.

B. The war on terrorism sought to improve security within the United States but also raised questions about the protection of civil liberties and human rights.

The USA Patriot Act was a law passed shortly after the September 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. It gave law enforcement agencies broad powers to investigate, indict and bring "terrorists" to justice. It also led to increased penalties for committing and supporting terrorist crimes. An acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism,” this "anti-terror" measure was chiefly designed to lower the probable cause threshold for obtaining intelligence warrants against suspected spies, terrorists, and other enemies of the United States. The USA Patriot Act deters and punishes terrorist attacks in the United States and abroad through enhanced law enforcement and strengthened money laundering prevention. It also allows the use of investigative tools designed for organized crime and drug trafficking prevention for terrorist investigations. For example, federal agents can use court orders to obtain business records from hardware stores or chemical plants to determine who may be buying materials to make bombs, or bank records to determine who is sending money to terrorists or suspect organizations. Police officers, FBI agents, federal prosecutors and intelligence officials are better able to share information and evidence on individuals and plots, thus enhancing their protection of communities. Opponents of the Act argue it effectively lets the U.S. government investigate ANYONE it wants to, colliding directly with one of the U.S.' most cherished values: a citizens’ right to privacy.

My Freshman Biology teacher Mr Alan Curtis told me that one time when being pulled over for a speeding ticket, he made a wise-assed remark to the police officer and he WAS THREATENED with the PATRIOT ACT in PAULDING COUNTY GEORGIA by one of their EVIL SHERIFFS. A CLEAR abuse of AN ALREADY unconstitutional law. Imagine how many innocent teachers, black, brown, and even poor-white people have been arbitrarily detained for 24-hrs against their will., causing them to lose job opportunities, miss school, and sometimes DIE in prison cells due to government overreach. Questions of misusing government funds arise when limited resources are used in tracking American citizens, especially those moving overseas. It is unclear what federal authorities intend to do with information discovered through tracking public records, raising concerns about the government’s autonomy and power. Suspected terrorists have been imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay without always explaining why or allowing legal representation, violating their RIGHT to due process. Some prisoners have been proven, subsequently, to not even have any ties to terrorism. Officials in the Federal government have OFTEN abused this power, even as far as imprisoning their OWN SPOUSES that cheated on them (this is known in the CIA as LOVESPYING). The business, finance and investment communities are more likely to be affected by heightened documentation requirements and due diligence responsibilities. Though the impact is more on institutions than individual investors, anyone who conducts international business is likely to experience added costs and greater hassles with something as mundane as opening a simple foreign checking account. Basically, rich oligarchs can open bank accounts and get away with it because THEY OWN THE GOVERNMENT, but a lowly grandma trying to get her child into a better country might spend DECADES in prison. This is UNJUST, UNBALANCED, ANTIQUATED, and news to be ADDRESSED IMMEDIATELY!

The Homeland Security Act was a piece of U.S. legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 25th, 2002, that established the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a new department in the executive branch of the government and established a number of measures aimed at protecting the "national security" of the United States. The act was drafted in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in 2001, when defending the United States against terrorist attacks and responding to large-scale emergencies which had rapidly emerged as top priorities for the government. Until the passage of the Homeland Security Act, the U.S. security apparatus had been dispersed across a wide range of federal agencies and the military. In addition to creating an entirely new federal government organization with its own mandate, a cabinet-level secretary, and more than 180,000 employees at the time of its founding, the Homeland Security Act placed a number of existing agencies beneath the larger umbrella of the DHS, which took on responsibilities ranging from infrastructure protection and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and related countermeasures to border and transportation security, emergency preparedness and response, and coordination with other parts of the federal government, with state and local governments, and with the private sector.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is a U.S. agency created following the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks that are mandated with developing and implementing policies to ensure the safety of the nation’s transportation systems. It was established by the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on November 19th, 2001. Originally part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 2003 the TSA became part of the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Airport security and preventing aircraft hijacking are important concerns of the TSA and arguably the most well-known to the public. Uniformed transportation security officers at airports examine passengers and luggage, looking for any prohibited materials. Others work behind the scenes, for example, by reviewing passenger lists and comparing them with lists of individuals deemed to be a security threat or at risk for being a security threat. NOTE, this power is OFTEN ABUSED and RACIALISED. For example, I have always been "randomly" selected for more "IN-DEPTH" and UNCOMFORTABLE screenings as a CHILD. My PawPaw was put on hold because my YaYa forgot to put A SOUVENIR KNIFE in their main cargo and he was a Native American-Man with SLIGHTLY darker than normal skin and a granddaughter that was Lilly-white. This was a RACIALISED incident in the 21ST CENTURY.

They then identify anyone who requires additional screening or who should not be allowed to board a plane. The TSA also has a public presence with its VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams), members of which are easily identifiable as security officers and who patrol railways and mass transit systems. Other modes of transportation that are also under the purview of the TSA include freight carriers moving across the nation’s highways, cargo entering U.S. ports and travelling on U.S. waterways, and freight being transported via pipelines. In addition to the transportation security officers and VIPR members mentioned above, the TSA also employs other specialists, including behaviour detection officers, federal air marshals, explosives specialists, and canine teams as part of its mandate to "keep the country’s transportation systems safe" from THE COUNTRY'S OWN MESS of TERRORISM which was CAUSED by US OFFICIALS IN THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX who WANT WAR! (Note: Ozzy Osbourne's "War Pigs")

The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11th, 2001, attacks. "The program, which enabled the United States to secretly track billions of phone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens over a period of decades, was A BLUEPRINT for the NSA surveillance that would come after it, with similarities too close to be coincidental." It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications that were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, describe how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country." The program was named the Terrorist Surveillance Program by the George W. Bush administration in response to the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy following disclosure of the program. It is claimed that this program operated without the judicial oversight mandated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and legal challenges to the program are currently undergoing judicial review. Because the technical specifics of the program have not been disclosed, it is unclear if the program is subject to FISA. It is unknown if this is the original name of the program; the term was first used publicly by President Bush in a speech on January 23rd, 2006. On August 17th, 2006, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled the program unconstitutional and illegal. On appeal, the decision was overturned on procedural grounds and the lawsuit was dismissed without addressing the merits of the claims, although one further challenge is still pending in the courts. On January 17th, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders by letter that the program would not be reauthorized by the president but would be subjected to judicial oversight. "Any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," according to his letter. On June 6th, 2013, it was revealed that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was replaced by a new NSA program, referred to by its codeword, PRISM.

Edward Snowden, former American intelligence contractor, now whistle-blower, who in 2013 revealed the existence of secret wide-ranging information-gathering programs conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden left the CIA for the NSA in 2009. There he worked as a private contractor for the companies Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. During this time, he began gathering information on a number of NSA activities—most notably, secret surveillance programs that he believed were OVERLY BROAD in size and scope - A DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE ORIGINAL UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. In May 2013, Snowden requested a medical leave of absence and flew to Hong Kong, where during the following month he conducted a series of interviews with journalists from the newspaper The Guardian. Footage filmed during that period was featured in the documentary Citizenfour (2014). Among the NSA secrets leaked by Snowden was a court order that compelled telecommunications company VERIZON (my grandparents Jessica, Rex, and boyfriend's family ALL USED VERIZON while around ME, A DIRECT TARGET OF THE US GOVERNMENT as a RADICAL) to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialled and duration of calls) for MILLIONS of its subscribers.

Snowden ALSO disclosed the existence of PRISM, a data-mining program that reportedly gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters—Britain’s NSA equivalent—“direct access” to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. YOUR GOVERNMENT WAS WATCHING YOU! On June 9th, 2013, days after stories were initially published in The Guardian and The Washington Post without revealing the identity of their source (FOR OBVIOUS SECURITY REASONS), Snowden came forward, stating that he felt no need to hide because he had done nothing wrong. In a subsequent interview with the South China Morning Post, he claimed that the NSA had been hacking into Chinese computers since 2009 and that he had taken a job with Booz Allen Hamilton expressly to obtain information about secret NSA activities. The U.S. charged Snowden with espionage on June 14th, and Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, began negotiating with authorities in Hong Kong in an attempt to initiate extradition procedures. The Hong Kong government declined to act, and Snowden, with the assistance of the media organization WikiLeaks (ASSANGE'S LIFE-LAVING AUSTRALIA AGENCY), flew to Moscow, where his exact whereabouts became the source of intense speculation (SNOWDEN WENT OFF THE GRID). Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed that Snowden, whose passport had been revoked by the United States, has remained within the confines of the international transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport ever since. HE WANTS TO GO BACK TO HIS FAMILY IN HIS HOME COUNTRY! THAT HE TRIED TO HELP SHARE THE TRUTH WITH! And dammit, he's FAMILY in my BOOK and I ALWAYS look after MY FAMILY!

NAT-2.0: Explain how interpretations of the Constitution and debates over rights, liberties, and definitions of citizenship have affected American values, politics, and society.

America HAS ALWAYS had a problem respecting the civil liberties of EVERYONE on its soil. Whether it be the natives, or African Americans, or any person other than a white, landholding, protestant man, ALL Americans have been deprived of BASIC civil liberties and HUMAN RIGHTS at one point or another. Presidents for centuries have made constitutionally iffy decisions, like the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Espionage Act under President John Adams. It is at times of war or perceived threat that the American government ACTS THE MOST CARELESSLY in this regard. During WWI and throughout WWI and the Cold War, the Red Scare (fear of a "Communist" takeover in the United States) led to the forming of such committees like the House Un-American Committee and more legislative actions that went after any semblance of left-wing ideology. As seen in this section, these practices of encroaching on constitutionality did not stop during the Conservative Resurgence, if anything IT GREW since the years of Ronal Reagan. With the cultivation of new technologies, the government expanded its practices. After 9/11, the Bush administration could successfully market such legislation as the “Patriot” Act which greatly deprived civilian liberties, but if you advocated against it, you could and were perceived as “unpatriotic," like Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh often yelled over and over again. THEY WERE LIARS AND IN IT FOR THEIR OWN PROFITS WITH THEIR OLD, OUTDATED, BASE LISTENERS. (note: What's the problem with Texas radio!!!!). At the same time, he also used the terrorist attack to wage a massive military campaign coined the “War on Terrorism.” As seen throughout Supreme Court cases like Rasul v. Bush, citizens tried to challenge the government’s decisions on a constitutional basis. In this particular example, it was a petition of Habeas Corpus for those being illegally detained in the “Strawberry Fields,” a secretive CIA compound located in the US military base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After 9/11, the government thought it best suited that it should have a way to detain people indefinitely without the “burden” of going through the legal sentence (a UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHT established in part by ELEANOR ROOSEVELT in the 1940s). The problem is that there have been multiple cases of wrongful imprisonment and abuse of such already abusive powers.

As a response to these threats of civil liberties, organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have acted vigilantly in waging lawsuits against both the Federal and State governments. It was actually during the Red Scare that the ACLU was formed as a combative force to the rampant violations of liberties at the time. The act of whistleblowing -- leaking classified government documents --also has been used to try and protect the interest of citizens and democracy. Famous examples of this would be people such as Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning - ALL dear friends AND family of MINE. All saw threats to civilian liberties or abuses of power on the federal level and acting accordingly with their conscious to try and inform the citizens of the United States of America. While some have criticised them as being traitors, MANY others have HERALDED them as heroes across the globe. In fact, the act of whistleblowing itself brings up a heated debate over the constitutionality and whether leaking is considered part of the first amendment or not. Probably most important of all is the fact that not everyone agrees on what is or is not constitutional. Justices like Antonin Scalia had very different ideas on the constitution rather than say a Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In some ways, that’s the beauty of the American court system and legislative body is that there are variations of thought. However, some take it too far for the sake of “security” or PROFIT that THEIR BUSINESSES stand to lose, and they lose sight of what is RIGHT.

#my family is the best #edward snowden #chelsea manning #julian assange #Thoreau #King #The lost socialist dream #FreeAmerica #The Truth #I AM BLOWING THE WHISTLE #Time'sUpUS #Send In The United Nations #Let's End this Mess #i want freedom

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

When Kevin McCarthy was just a handful of votes from becoming House Speaker, he promised a lot of wacky stuff to right-wing holdouts, from investigatory rabbit holes to rules changes to votes on legislation so bad or unpopular it would normally never see the light of day. In that last category, McCarthy promised Georgia congressman Earl “Buddy” Carter that he would hold a floor vote on a version of the “Fair Tax” proposal that has been kicking around the conservative fever swamps since the early aughts, when Atlanta talk-show host Neal Boortz popularized the concept and talked some politicians into promoting it. Carter loyally backed McCarthy, and all of the Speaker-vote holdouts joined in his call for a floor vote on his bill, reflecting its popularity in the House Freedom Caucus.

The basic idea is to replace today’s federal taxes — income taxes, estate taxes, Social Security payroll taxes, corporate taxes, even gift taxes — with a single federal sales tax. It would obviously have to be set at very high rates, at least 30%, by most estimates, to offset the revenue lost from ending the other taxes. Carter’s proposal would include “prebates,” i.e. federal payments to low-income households, to reduce the impact of a high tax on living essentials. But there’s no way to make this sort of tax system anything other than a large boon to people with income and wealth far beyond what they need to live on, which if saved or invested would remain tax free. That’s why the Fair Tax has a perpetual fan base among consumers of right-wing talk and grassroots conservative activists. Because of Boortz’s role in promoting the scheme, it has become something of a Pet Rock for Georgia Republicans in the House, where Carter has picked up the torch originally carried by veteran conservative lawmaker John Linder.

Proponents of the Fair Tax boast that it would lead to the abolition of most of the federal tax code and of the Internal Revenue Service, making April 15 just another day (albeit another day of very high taxes on sales). But there’s another wrinkle that makes the Fair Tax not just wildly regressive but extremely risky in the unlikely event it were ever enacted, as The Bulwark’s Jim Swift explains:

“To ensure that the legislation actually replaces rather than adds to existing taxes, [Carter’s] bill includes a provision that the new tax would expire in seven years if the Sixteenth Amendment, which allows for federal income taxes, is not repealed. (Keen-eyed readers will notice that this creates the bizarre possibility of federal tax revenue going down to zero after seven years, if income taxes are not collected but the Sixteenth Amendment remains on the books.)”

Anyone familiar with how hard it is to enact constitutional amendments will be alarmed at this provision. Then again, for all its popularity among regular folks who think of themselves as virtuous tightwads, the Fair Tax has never been taken very seriously in Washington, even among conservatives. Yes, 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee campaigned on it, and it has always hung around the margins of public policy like a recurring nightmare. But the more moderate Republicans hate it as a seductive but unworkable scheme that would brand the GOP as the party of high sales taxes rather than the party that wants to keep all taxes as low as possible.

Democrats, of course, are eager to hear a lot more about Republican support for the Fair Tax, as Joseph Zeballos-Roig of Semafor observes:

“Outside the deepest trenches of conservatism, a 30% sales tax is mostly seen as an obvious political loser. Democrats, for their part, can hardly seem to believe their luck that their opponents might attach themselves to it.

‘Great idea,’ Biden deadpanned during a speech Monday. ‘It would raise taxes on the middle class by taxing thousands of everyday items from groceries to gas, while cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.’”

You’d normally figure the Fair Tax chestnut would get buried in the Ways and Means Committee with a lot of other tax-policy proposals that won’t see the light of day in the Senate. But McCarthy promised Carter and his friends a floor vote. The question is how long he can delay the fulfillment of that promise and whether putting it on the back burner risks a grassroots rebellion from the kind of people who consider progressive taxation deeply immoral. It’s one of many calculations McCarthy will have to make to get through the next two years without losing his gavel to a motion to vacate the chair and without creating too much campaign fodder for Democrats.

#us politics #news #intelligencer #rep. Earl Carter #georgia #fair tax #Neal Boortz #house freedom caucus #conservatives #republicans #gop #taxes #federal taxes #sales tax #John Linder #prebates #Internal Revenue Service #federal tax codes #The Bulwark #jim swift #16th amendment #Mike Huckabee #semafor #Joseph Zeballos-Roig #Ways and Means Committee #118th congress #us house of representatives #rep. kevin mccarthy #speaker of the house #2023

[phroyd]

Trump’s Promises in 2016!

While Trump is laying it on good and thick at the RNC Trump Fest 2020, I'd like to remind you of some of his great accomplishments.* *beside all the environmental protections he has diminished, dismantled and done away with outright - that is a whole list by itself.(copied from another post, I didn't write this list)1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his 2017 tax law has done the opposite. By 2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent will have received 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in taxes. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.” 2. He promised that the average family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of the tax law. You bought it. But real wages for most Americans are lower today than they were before the tax law went into effect.   3. He promised to close special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers, especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law kept the “carried interest” loophole.4. He promised to bring an end to Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear program. You bought it. Kim Jong-Un hasn’t denuclearized. 5. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful,” including “insurance for everybody.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 24 million Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. According to the Commonwealth Fund, about 4 million Americans have lost health insurance in the last two years.6. He told you he wouldn’t “cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But now he’s planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich. 7. He promised to protect anyone with pre-existing conditions. You bought it. But in June, his Justice Department told a federal court it would no longer defend provisions of Obamacare that protect patients with pre-existing conditions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the decision was made with Trump’s approval.8. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border. You believed him. But there’s no wall.9. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure. 10. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.11. He promised to re-institute a five-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for five years after they leave government.” You bought it. But the five-year ban he signed applies only to lobbying one’s former agency, not the government as a whole, and it doesn’t stop former officials from becoming lobbyists.12. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants that people there barely know who’s in charge of what. 13. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by negotiating “like crazy” with drug companies. You bought it. But he hasn’t.14. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections. 15. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this. 16. He said he’d create tax-free dependent care savings accounts for younger and elderly dependents, and have the government match contributions low-income families put into their savings accounts. You bought it. He’s done neither.17. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he declared China is not a currency manipulator.18. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.19. After pulling out of the Paris accord, he said he’d negotiate a better deal on the environment. You bought it. There have been no negotiations.20. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.21. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and criticized Barack Obama for taking too many vacations. You bought it. But since becoming President, he has spent a quarter of his days at one of his golf properties.22. He vowed to “push colleges to cut the skyrocketing cost of tuition.” You believed him. But he hasn’t. Instead, he’s made it easier for for-profit college to defraud students. 23. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be consequences for companies that shipped jobs abroad, especially government contractors. You believed him. Never before in U.S. history have federal contractors sent so many jobs overseas. There have been no consequences. 24. He promised to end DACA. Then in January 2018 promised that “DACA recipients should not to be concerned… We’re going to solve the problem,” then he reversed himself again and vowed to end the program by March, 2018. Currently, the federal courts have stayed any action on it. 25. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back lost coal mining jobs. You bought it. But coal is still losing customers as utilities turn to natural gas and renewable power. 26. He promised to protect American steel jobs. You bought it. His tariffs on steel have protected some steel jobs. But industries that use steel – like automakers and construction – now have to pay more for the steel they use, with the result that their jobs are threatened. The Trade Partnership projects that 400,000 jobs will be lost among steel and aluminum users.27. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But mass shootings keep rising, and Trump has failed to pass effective gun control legislation. After 17 died in Parkland, Florida, Trump promised “immediate action” on gun safety in schools, but has done nothing.28. He promised to make two- and four-year colleges more affordable. You bought it. But Trump’s most recent budget contains deep cuts in aid for low-income and first-generation college students, reduces Federal Work Study, and eliminates the 50-year-old Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, which goes to more than a million poor college kids each year.29. He promised to eliminate the federal deficit and bring down the debt. You bought it. Yet due to his massive tax cut mostly for corporations and the rich, and his military spending, the deficit is set to rise to $1 trillion, and the debt has ballooned to more than $21 trillion.30. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,” he promised during the campaign. You bought it. He still hasn’t released his taxes.

Trump Lied!

Phroyd

#trump #lies

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 10, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Today was a big day for the United States of America.

The House of Representatives passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, accepting the changes to the measure that the Senate had added. This bill marks a sea change in our government. Rather than focusing on dismantling the federal government and turning individuals loose to act as they wish, Congress has returned to the principles of the nation before 1981, using the federal government to support ordinary Americans. With its expansion of the child tax credit, the bill is projected to reach about 27 million children and to cut child poverty in half.

The bill, which President Biden is expected to sign Friday, is a landmark piece of legislation, reversing the trend of American government since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Rather than funneling money upward in the belief that those at the top will invest in the economy and thus create jobs for poorer Americans, the Democrats are returning to the idea that using the government to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans will rebuild the economy from the bottom up. This was the argument for the very first expansion of the American government—during Abraham Lincoln’s administration—and it was the belief on which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal.

Unlike the previous implementations of this theory, though, Biden’s version, embodied in the American Rescue Plan, does not privilege white men (who in Lincoln and Roosevelt’s day were presumed to be family breadwinners). It moves money to low-wage earners generally, especially to women and to people of color. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the child tax credit “a new lifeline to the middle class.”  “Franklin Roosevelt lifted seniors out of poverty, 90 percent of them with Social Security, and with the stroke of a pen,” she said. “President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country.”

Republican lawmakers all voted against the bill despite the fact that 76% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, like the measure. Still, the disjunction between the bill’s popularity and their opposition to it put them in a difficult spot. Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) tweeted positively about the bill this evening, leaving the impression he had voted for it. Twitter users wanted no part of the deception, immediately calling him out for touting a bill he had opposed (although he had been a Republican co-sponsor of the amendment about which he was boasting).

Wicker’s public embrace of the measure after voting no suggests that Republicans might recognize that, without the power to stop popular legislation as they could previously, they need to consider getting on board with it.

For right now, though, Republicans are continuing to push tax cuts. Senators John Thune (R-SD) and Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are leading an effort to repeal the estate tax. According to Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, this tax falls on estates over $11.7 million, about a fifth of which are worth $50 million or more. The average estate affected by the tax is worth $30 million, and it affects about 2,500 people a year. It is enacted on capital gains that have not been taxed during the original owner’s lifetime, and usually involves stock. While Crapo calls the tax “the most unfair tax on the books,” Hiltzik calls the attempt to eliminate it “a massive handout to rich families.”

It was not just finance in the news today. This afternoon, the Senate voted 70-30 to confirm Merrick Garland as the attorney general. He will be sworn in tomorrow. Biden chose Garland to rebuild faith in the independence of the Department of Justice, whose credibility was sorely battered over the past four years when it appeared to be operating in the interest of the president rather than the American people. Garland has a reputation as a fair-minded, centrist judge, but Republicans who voted against his confirmation—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example—seem already to be trying to undercut Garland’s investigations, suggesting that he will embrace a “radical agenda” as attorney general.

As soon as Garland is sworn in tomorrow, he will be briefed by FBI Director Christopher Wray and others on the Capitol attack.

Garland’s was not the only nomination to go through today. Former representative Marcia Fudge (D-OH) is now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Michael Regan is the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, charged both with addressing environmental racism and with helping the nation fight climate change. With their addition, 6 of 24 Cabinet positions will be held by Black Americans, the most in U.S. history.

Amidst all the excitement about the Biden administration’s achievements today, the former president was also in the news. The Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of a phone call Trump made in December 2020 to Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. Watson was in the process of looking for fraud in an audit of mail-in ballots in Cobb County after the election. Trump urged her to look at Fulton County, as well, where he insisted she would “find things that are going to be unbelievable.”

Watson had little to say as Trump went on for about six minutes, and seemed to be trying to put him off. He didn’t seem to notice. “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” the former president told her.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American #political #Democratic Party #Partisanship #American Rescue Plan #Child Poverty

[go-redgirl]

Biden Tax Hike Plan Faces GOP Fight: 'This Is About Their Social Agenda'

President Joe Biden's plan for the first major tax hike in nearly 30 years is facing stiff opposition from Republicans who say the proposal is carved from the ideology of wealth redistribution and would seriously stunt any post-COVID economic recovery.

Biden and congressional Democrats intend to push a new major bill that could potentially be aimed at infrastructure, jobs, or climate, the Hill reported. News of the legislation comes on the heels of the passage last week of the $1.9 trillion COVID -19 package that ensured stimulus checks for many Americans and funding for a host of other non-pandemic Democrat priorities.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, told Newsmax TV’s 'Spicer & Co.' on Monday that Biden’s coming tax plan is all about Democrats’ social agenda.

"This is not about revenue," Turner said. "This is about their social agenda. You know, when you look at our economy, where we’re just recovering, and we may be coming out of the COVID lockdown, this is not the time to raise taxes. You don’t stimulate the economy then take money from the economy … That’s because this is not about revenue. This is about their philosophy that companies have too much money."

As part of the coming bill, Biden is planning the first major tax hike since 1993, a boost that could include an increase in the corporate tax rate and the individual rate for individuals earning over $400,000 per year.

The changes would likely include the repeal of parts of former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation and could include a 7-point percentage increase in the corporate tax rate, from 21% to 28%, an expansion of the estate tax, and a raise in the capital gains tax for people earning more than $1 million per year.

___________________________________________

OPINION:  Joe Biden really does not know what he is doing. But, the Democrats dose not  care about this country only their own agenda.  But that’s not a surprise!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dems want to give $600b to the one percent

Remember when a group of establishment Congressional Democrats vowed that they would add means-testing to the emergency relief checks so that "the money wouldn't go to people who didn't need it?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/03/biden-stimulus-checks-what-you-need-to-know/

The argument that federal relief should target the 99% and not the 1% is a familiar - and defensible - one. The Trump #taxscam handed trillions to the richest Americans, triggering stock buybacks:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/23/business/investment-boom-tax-cuts-economy/index.html

and a superyacht bubble:

https://www.propublica.org/article/superyacht-marina-west-palm-beach-opportunity-zone-trump-tax-break-to-help-the-poor-went-to-a-rich-gop-donor

But it delivered no meaningful benefit to everyday Americans.

Now, that said, there *was* one area of the Trump tax bill that targeted the wealthy: the State and Local Tax (SALT) Cap, which capped SALT deductions at $10,000.

That meant that taxpayers could only write off the first $10k of their state and local tax. In practice, this affected very wealthy Americans, predominantly those living in large, high-property-value cities, which has substantial overlap with rich Democratic donors.

That's the only reason for Trump's SALT Cap, and it's a stupid and spiteful reason: passing a tax that targets the wealthy because of partisanship is bad.

But taxing the wealthy is, in fact, good. Trump set out to do something bad and did something good, in other words.

Now, a group of Dems - many of the same Dems who held up the stimulus because they didn't want to send $1600 to the underserving wealthy - are holding the $2t infrastructure plan hostage and demanding that the SALT Cap be repealed.

And while they claim a SALT Cap repeal would benefit the middle class, it disproportionately and vastly benefits the ultra-rich: 86% of the benefit of the repeal would go to the top 5% of US earners.

https://itep.org/salt-cap-repeal-has-no-place-in-covid-19-legislation-national-and-state-by-state-data/

Under a SALT Cap repeal, households earning more than $1m/year getting $48k in extra cash:

Meanwhile, 98% of middle-class households with incomes of $50-75k would get *nothing*. The 2% who got something would average *$250*.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/salt-cap-repeal-would-overwhelmingly-benefit-high-income-households

Lifting the SALT Cap is a powerfully regressive move. It is *three times more regressive* than the Trump tax plan - that is 300% more tilted in favor of the wealthy.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/09/04/the-salt-tax-deduction-is-a-handout-to-the-rich-it-should-be-eliminated-not-expanded/

Lifting the SALT Cap has nothing to do with the middle class. For starters, the SALT deduction only applies to people who itemize expenses, rather than taking the standard deduction. 92% of the top 1% of earners do that (it's only 5% of the 40th-60th earning percentile).

It's possible that there are people in especially expensive cities in "blue states" for whom the SALT Cap is a burden - people at the lowest threshold of beneficiaries of a repeal who really are financially stretched.

If that's our concern, there's an easy, non-regressive fix - *raise*, but don't repeal, the cap. If $10k is too low, make it $15k, or even $20k. But by making the cap unlimited, we ensure that the wildly disproportionate beneficiaries of the change are the ultra-*ultra* rich.

As David Sirota points out, this maneuver - claiming that a tax-break for the super-rich is really about the middle class - comes straight out of the GOP playbook. It's how Republicans sold cuts to the estate tax:

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/dems-somehow-pretend-this-mostly

That move - like the ones Dems are making now - made it much easier for the ultra-wealthy to make vast, tax-advantaged intergenerational wealth transfers, creating the rentier dynasties that now crouch on the political system's chest, sucking up all the oxygen.

Just to be clear: "there is no state where this is a primarily middle-class issue."

https://itep.org/dems-dont-repeal-the-salt-cap-do-this-instead/

The cuts will transfer $600b, primarily to the highest earners, over the next 9 years:

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model-estimates/repeal-10000-state-and-local-tax-salt-deduction-limitation-sep-2018/repeal-10000

That's $600b worth of giveaways to the rich from the party that couldn't muster the political will to include a $15 minimum wage and that fretted endlessly about whether the $1400 stimulus (down from $2000) might go to someone in the middle class.

And while the "SALT Caucus" of Dems who are holding the infrastructure bill hostage to the super rich are a rogues' gallery of establishment, corporate Dems from high-tax states (Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, etc), the roster includes some otherwise progressive heroes.

Progressive Californian lawmakers like Ro Khanna and Katie Porter have both called on Biden to lift the cap entirely (though they've stopped short of promising to hold up the infrastructure bill), as have NY Democratic "insurgents" like Jamaal Bowman and Mondaire Jones.

Some progressives, though, have kept the faith. Even as the entire NY Democratic caucus signed a letter calling for a SALT Cap repeal, AOC and Kathleen Rice refused.

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/28/key-democrats-want-to-keep-most-of-trumps-corporate-tax-cut--and-slash-more-taxes-for-the-rich/

Trump's tax cuts supercharged inequality and created a destructive, speculative finance-bubble by handing permanent tax gifts to the people who needed them the least. A full repeal of the SALT Cap is even more plute-friendly than Trump's plan.

The fact that Trump passed a SALT Cap out of spite is irrelevant. America's inequality crisis demands an end to regressive measures, including the special treatment of capital gains and carried interest, which gives tax advantages to speculators and punishes wage-earners.

Democrats will not win elections or change our political conversation with business-as-usual handouts to the super-rich in the hopes of winning campaign contributions. They have the money, we have the people.

Dems cannot win by being the party of the wealthy. The Republicans have that one on lock.

Image: Andrey Korchagin (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/peer_gynt/34760026411

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic

[ocasio2018]

i missed this one ya’ll, sorry!

AOC, the squad, and several other lawmakers held a live press conference to ensure housing as a human right on january 29, 2020.

The seven planks of the platform include:

New York Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s already-introduced “A Place to Prosper Act,” which would reform existing housing laws and regulations to expand assistance, strengthen tenant rights, invest $10 billion in lead abatement, and tie highway funding to equitable development practices

A proposal by Massachusetts Rep. Pressley that would create a massive investment in the public housing stock through the Housing Trust Fund, increase tenant input through strengthened resident councils, and link transit and infrastructure spending to a reform of exclusionary zoning policies (municipalities must get rid of height restrictions, for instance, to qualify for funding)

Minneapolis Rep. Ilhan Omar’s previously introduced Homes for All Act, which would allocate new funding for the construction of 10 million new public housing units and create a $200 billion community control and anti-displacement fund to fight gentrification; it has an estimated $1 trillion price tag

Michigan Rep. Tlaib’s proposal to replace the Opportunity Zone program with a Community Benefits Fund that would provide grants for community land trusts, land banks, and nonprofits working in underinvested communities, all funded by the repeal of Opportunity Zones (in other words, arguing that the tax revenue that was expected to be lost from that program could be redirected to other spending)

Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s proposal to combat homelessness, the Housing is a Human Right Act, by increasing funding for a range of support services including medical and mental health treatment, and aims to ensure homelessness services are available to all who need them

Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s proposal to offer a refundable monthly tax credit for renters and tax credits to help potential first-time homebuyers

A bill fighting real estate speculation that Illinois Rep. Chuy Garcia is currently finalizing (details will be released later this year)

read more about the legislation here:

https://www.curbed.com/2020/1/29/21112405/aoc-squad-peoples-housing-platform-congress-legislation-housing

#housing for all #AOC #Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez #alexandria ocasio cortez #alexandriaocasiocortez #AlexandriaOcasio-Cortez #AOCarchive #AOCstanclub #the rent is too damn high

[robertreich]

TRUMP’S 30 BROKEN PROMISES

Trump voters: Two years in, here’s an updated list of Trump’s 30 biggest broken promises.

1. He told you he’d cut your taxes, and that the super-rich like him would pay more. You bought it. But his 2017 tax law has done the opposite. By 2027, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the richest 1 percent will have received 83 percent of the tax cut and the richest 0.1 percent, 60 percent of it. But more than half of all Americans — 53 percent — will pay more in taxes. As Trump told his wealthy friends at Mar-a-Lago just days after the tax bill became law, “You all just got a lot richer.” 

2. He promised that the average family would see a $4,000 pay raise because of the tax law. You bought it. But real wages for most Americans are lower today than they were before the tax law went into effect.   

3. He promised to close special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors but unfair to American workers, especially the notorious “carried interest” loophole for private-equity, hedge fund, and real estate partners. You bought it. But the new tax law kept the “carried interest” loophole.

4. He promised to bring an end to Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear program. You bought it. Kim Jong-Un hasn’t denuclearized. 

5. He told you he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “beautiful,” including “insurance for everybody.” You bought it. But he didn’t repeal and he didn’t replace. (Just as well: His plan would have knocked at least 24 million Americans off health insurance, including many of you.) Instead, he’s doing what he can to cut it back and replace it with nothing. According to the Commonwealth Fund, about 4 million Americans have lost health insurance in the last two years.

6. He told you he wouldn’t “cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” You bought it. But now he’s planning such cuts in order to deal with the ballooning deficit created, in part, by the new tax law for corporations and the rich. 

7. He promised to protect anyone with pre-existing conditions. You bought it. But in June, his Justice Department told a federal court it would no longer defend provisions of Obamacare that protect patients with pre-existing conditions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the decision was made with Trump’s approval.

8. He said he’d build a “wall” across the southern border.You believed him. But there’s no wall.

9. He told you he’d invest $1 trillion in our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. You bought it. But after his giant tax cut for corporations and millionaires, there’s no money left for infrastructure. 

10. He said he’d drain the Washington swamp. You bought it. But he’s brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses, and he’s filled departments and agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who are crafting new policies for the same industries they recently worked for.

11. He promised to re-institute a five-year ban on all executive branch officials lobbying the government for five years after they leave government.” You bought it. But the five-year ban he signed applies only to lobbying one’s former agency, not the government as a whole, and it doesn’t stop former officials from becoming lobbyists.

12. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. But he has created the most dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, and has already fired and replaced so many assistants that people there barely know who’s in charge of what. 

13. He told you he’d “bring down drug prices” by negotiating “like crazy” with drug companies. You bought it. But he hasn’t.

14. He told you he’d “stop foreign lobbyists from raising money for American elections.” You bought it. But foreign lobbyists are still raising money for American elections. 

15. He promised “six weeks of paid maternity leave to any mother with a newborn child whose employer does not provide the benefit.” You bought it. But the giant tax cut for corporations and the rich doesn’t leave any money for this. 

16. He said he’d create tax-free dependent care savings accounts for younger and elderly dependents, and have the government match contributions low-income families put into their savings accounts. You bought it. He’s done neither.

17. He said that on Day One he’d label China a “currency manipulator.” You bought it. But then he declared China is not a currency manipulator.

18. He said he “won’t bomb Syria.” You bought it. Then he bombed Syria.

19. After pulling out of the Paris accord, he said he’d negotiate a better deal on the environment. You bought it. There have been no negotiations.

20. He promised that the many women who accused him of sexual misconduct “will be sued after the election is over.” You bought it. He hasn’t sued them, presumably because he doesn’t want the truth to come out.

21. He said he would not be a president who took vacations, and criticized Barack Obama for taking too many vacations. You bought it. But since becoming President, he has spent a quarter of his days at one of his golf properties.

22. He vowed to “push colleges to cut the skyrocketing cost of tuition.” You believed him. But he hasn't. Instead, he's made it easier for for-profit college to defraud students. 

23. He said he’d force companies to keep jobs in America, and that there would be consequences for companies that shipped jobs abroad, especially government contractors. You believed him. Never before in U.S. history have federal contractors sent so many jobs overseas. There have been no consequences. 

24. He promised to end DACA. Then in January 2018 promised that "DACA recipients should not to be concerned... We're going to solve the problem,” then he reversed himself again and vowed to end the program by March, 2018. Currently, the federal courts have stayed any action on it. 

25. He promised to revive the struggling coal industry and bring back lost coal mining jobs. You bought it. But coal is still losing customers as utilities turn to natural gas and renewable power. 

26. He promised to protect American steel jobs. You bought it. His tariffs on steel have protected some steel jobs. But industries that use steel -- like automakers and construction -- now have to pay more for the steel they use, with the result that their jobs are threatened. The Trade Partnership projects that 400,000 jobs will be lost among steel and aluminum users.

27. He said he’d make America safer. You believed him. But mass shootings keep rising, and Trump has failed to pass effective gun control legislation. After 17 died in Parkland, Florida, Trump promised “immediate action” on gun safety in schools, but has done nothing.

28. He promised to make two- and four-year colleges more affordable. You bought it. But Trump's most recent budget contains deep cuts in aid for low-income and first-generation college students, reduces Federal Work Study, and eliminates the 50-year-old Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, which goes to more than a million poor college kids each year.

29. He promised to eliminate the federal deficit and bring down the debt. You bought it. Yet due to his massive tax cut mostly for corporations and the rich, and his military spending, the deficit is set to rise to $1 trillion, and the debt has ballooned to more than $21 trillion.

30. He said he’d release his taxes. “I’m under a routine audit and it’ll be released, and as soon as the audit is finished it will be released,” he promised during the campaign. You bought it. He still hasn’t released his taxes.

#video #videos