Enormous Wildfires Are Spreading in Siberia

Dry, warm weather has primed Siberia for wildfires this spring. After a moderate outbreak in April, the countryside has lit up in a major way in May. The fires are the latest in a litany of changes taking place in the northern part of the world.

Wildfires lit up last week in Russia’s Far East around Komsomolsk-on-Amur, a city of nearly 264,000. The Siberian Times published images of flames engulfing roads, fields, forests, and anything else in their path. In harrowing video published by RT, a conductor took his train right through the flaming countryside.

“We live and work in such complicated circumstances,” he said in his narration, which could also double as metaphor for life in 2018.

Satellite images captured late last week show active fires spanning an area nearly 290 km (180 miles) wide, according to remote sensing expert Pierre Markuse, who has been tracking the fires. Local news outlet Amurskaya Pravda reports that 671 firefighters are currently helping battle multiple blazes.

Beyond the wild flames, noxious smoke has engulfed the region. Residents in Komsomolsk-on-Amur described the conditions to the Siberian Times as a “smoky hell.” Their hell is visible from a million miles above the Earth’s surface. Mark Parrington, a wildfire researcher at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, noted on Twitter that the smoke plumes were so large last week that they were visible on images snapped by the DSCOVR satellite.

The fires have been fueled by abnormally warm, dry weather. While the heat remains, rains have helped tamp down fire activity to start the week.

“Depending on the weather the next days might show more activity again,” Markuse told Earther via Twitter DM.

In Siberia, local farmers will often light fires to help clear cropland and replenish soil nutrients. Those fires can sometime burn out of control if winds sweep them up.

Natural spring and early summer fires are also commonplace in Siberia and elsewhere in the boreal forest that runs in a ring around the world, through Alaska, Canada and Scandinavia. But those fires are becoming more commonplace due to climate change and other human activities like farming.

The northern part of the world is warming faster than the planet as a whole. That heat is drying out forests and making them more susceptible to burn. A recent study found Earth’s boreal forests are now burning rate unseen in at least 10,000 years. This was evidenced last year, when smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted over the North Pole, and the year before when Fort McMurray was devastated by wildfires (and don’t forget Siberia then, too), and the year before, when it was Alaska’s turn to burn, and well, you get the point.

Those fires all release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, creating a dangerous feedback loop of increasing temperatures and worsening wildfire conditions. They’re a reminder we need to get ready for super fires fueled by climate change now. And that we need to cut carbon pollution before they get worse.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/enormous-wi ... 1826040230

<

Republicans happy to let Treasury pursue $100 billion tax cut

Congressional Republicans are rallying behind potential executive action by the Treasury Department to reduce capital gains unilaterally.

With Congress unlikely to pass related legislation anytime soon, GOP lawmakers expressed interest in having the Treasury Department take the lead, a day after The New York Times reported that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he’s considering doing so.

“There’s no question it’s good policy economically,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who has co-sponsored legislation on the topic.

Implementing the cut would reduce the amount of money subject to capital gains taxes and result in an estimated $100 billion tax cut, mostly for wealthy individuals.

“If it can’t get done through a legislation process, we will look at what tools at Treasury we have to do it on our own and we’ll consider that,” Mnuchin told the Times. “We are studying that internally, and we are also studying the economic costs and the impact on growth.”

GOP lawmakers, as well as prominent outside conservatives, have said it’s important to end capital gains taxes on inflation because the current formula leads to people paying taxes on investment gains they didn’t really receive.

“If [the administration has] got the authority to do it, they ought to do it, because I’m an advocate for indexing,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who serves on the Senate Finance Committee. “Otherwise, you’re taxing inflation and that’s phantom income. You only want to tax real income.”

Republicans also argue that the change would make it easier for people to sell investments and incentivize people to make new investments.

“It is a policy that would encourage economic growth and increase jobs,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters Tuesday, adding that he’s “encouraged the administration to go forward with it.”

Legislative proposals have been offered in recent months to index capital gains — in the Senate by Toomey, Cruz and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), and in the House by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

Lawmakers are also discussing adding legislation to index capital gains as part of a second round of tax cuts the House plans to vote on this year, though no such provision was included in a document about “tax cuts 2.0” released last week.

The chances of capital-gains cuts becoming law through legislation in the coming months are slim since Republicans would need the support of some Senate Democrats, who are opposed to the effort. That leaves executive action as the more likely vehicle for any change in the short-term.

A spokesman for Nunes said Tuesday that the California Republican supports Treasury indexing capital gains through executive action, and that the congressman thinks Treasury has the authority to do so.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) told reporters last week that he hasn’t fully researched the issue of whether Treasury can unilaterally implement a capital gains tax cut, but said he thinks “we ought to look at not penalizing Americans for inflation.”

One of the biggest challenges to Treasury acting on its own is the debate over whether the department has the legal authority to index capital gains.

“My understanding is there’s serious legal analysis supporting their ability to act unilaterally,” Cruz told reporters.

Some conservatives say Treasury’s authority stems from a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that found that the term “cost” is ambiguous. Democrats have pointed to opinions from Treasury and the Justice Department from 1992 that indicate executive action cannot be used to index capital gains.

Republicans could also face political challenges if Treasury institutes the tax cut ahead of the midterm elections; indexing capital gains is estimated by the Penn-Wharton Budget Model to largely benefit the wealthy and lower federal revenues by $100 billion over a decade.

Democrats argue that it would exacerbate the deficit impact of the tax-cut law Trump signed last year.

“The idea that they would consider doing this after they put $2 trillion on the national credit card, largely to help folks at the top, is slap-your-forehead kind of stuff,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Finance Committee.

Ways and Means Committee ranking member Richard Neal (D-Mass.) said in a statement Tuesday that “such a move would be irresponsible, legally dubious, and add to the mountain of debt created by the first Republican tax cut.”

Republicans counter that Democrats will attack the GOP as supporting tax cuts for the rich regardless.

“The Democrats are going to say that every day of the week, several times a day, every week of the year, no matter what we do or don’t do,” Toomey said. “So I say, let’s do what’s great for the economy.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) agreed that indexing capital gains would help the economy.

“It actually would be a good thing to do. It helps promote more capital formation,” said Johnson, who favors ending capital gains taxes on inflation and then taxing capital gains at the same rates as ordinary income.

Some conservative groups argue that a capital gains cut wouldn’t add to the deficit, at least not in the short run, because it would boost the economy and cause more people to sell investments that they’ve held for years. People pay capital gains taxes only when they sell investments.

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist predicted that Treasury would issue executive action to index capital gains before the midterm elections because of the economic benefits.

“This is a huge strengthening of the American economy,” he said.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/39980 ... on-tax-cut

<

Private payrolls boom in July

Fred Imbert - CNBC

Private payrolls in the U.S. increased by more than expected last month as companies get a boost from lower corporate taxes, ADP and Moody's Analytics said Wednesday.

Jobs in the U.S. increased by 219,000 in July, while economists polled by Reuters expected a gain of 185,000. July's job gains were the best since February, when 241,000 jobs were added. Jobs growth for the previous month was also revised up to 181,000 from 177,000.

... "The labor market is on a roll with no signs of a slowdown in sight," said Ahu Yildirmaz, vice president and co-head of the ADP Research Institute. "Nearly every industry posted strong gains and small business hiring picked up."

The job gains come as Corporate America enjoys lower taxes compared to last year. In December, the Trump administration slashed the federal corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/adp-pri ... imate.html

Economics

Trump’s Tax Cut Hasn’t Done Anything for Workers

Wages were supposed to rise. Instead, they’ve fallen.

A few months ago, I cautioned that Americans should be patient before deciding what effect President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have had on the economy. It takes a while for companies to make investment decisions, more time for those decisions to be implemented and even more time for the resulting changes in labor demand to bid up workers’ wages. It therefore takes months or even years before the full impact of the tax bill will be known.

But it’s also important to evaluate policies like Trump’s tax reform as quickly as possible. Not only is this critical for deciding whether to change course, but as more time goes on, the effects of a policy can become harder to assess. Two years from now, plenty of other things will have had time to affect the economy, including Trump’s trade war and natural economic forces. And now that the tax cut has been in effect for a half-year, the results are starting to trickle in.

First, the tax reform hasn’t yet resulted in appreciably higher wages for American workers. Real average hourly compensation actually fell in the first quarter after the tax reform was passed:

Not Very Convincing
Real average hourly compensation*
SEE CHART

Official data for the second quarter isn’t available yet, but private data isn’t looking encouraging. PayScale’s index of real wages shows a dramatic deterioration in the period:

That's Not Very Pretty
Changes in real wages since 2006
SEE CHART

But perhaps two quarters is too early to expect results in this area. A better gauge might be business investment — if the tax reform is spurring businesses to increase capital expenditure, as it was supposed to do, then wage increases will probably follow in due course.

Some have expressed dismay that stock buybacks seem to have taken precedence over boosting capital investment. Since the tax cuts passed, companies have been using buybacks to return record amounts of cash to shareholders — more than $700 billion in the first two quarters. That naturally raises the possibility that companies don’t have good projects to invest in. If companies pass their tax windfall on to shareholders, those investors can choose to react by increasing consumption — meaning more of society’s resources go to the wealthy. They can also choose to invest the money in other companies with better growth prospects — but if those companies are also reacting by returning the money to their shareholders, rather than making capital expenditures, not much is getting accomplished.

So is any of the tax-cut windfall being used to finance the capital expenditure that the economy needs? Private nonresidential fixed investment did increase as a share of the economy in the first two quarters since the reform was passed:

One Promising Sign
Private nonresidential fixed investment as a share of gross domestic product
SEE CHART

But the level still remains below the high set back in 2015.

Huge, immediate gains for wealthy shareholders combined with tepid increases in business investment and decreases in real wages don’t paint a flattering picture of the tax cut’s impact so far. There is, however, a possibility that the tax cut has acted as a Keynesian fiscal stimulus, helping to push down unemployment.

But that’s not exactly the long-term structural improvement that the bill’s supporters advertised. And as a recent research note from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco points out, fiscal stimulus in good economic times is less effective than in recessions. And growth hasn’t really sped up either — real per capita gross domestic product growth was only 1.34 percent in the first quarter, below 2017’s pace, and considerably less than in 2014 and 2015:

Very Meh
Real gross domestic product growth per capita
SEE CHART

This tepid rate of growth means that the tax cut is unlikely to pay for itself. By this point, almost all economists recognize that income tax cuts no longer stimulate the economy enough to reduce deficits, as supply-siders thought they would back in the 1980s. But economists still held out some hope that lowering the corporate tax, which is believed to be more harmful than the personal income tax, would have a more salutary effect on the budget. Unfortunately, that hope appears to be fading, as fiscal deficits increase rapidly.

There’s still the possibility that Trump’s tax reform will bear fruit in the long term. But early results are pointing to another possibility — that tax cuts have run their course as an economic policy.

In the postwar period, with top marginal income tax rates at more than 90 percent, it made sense to cut taxes as a way of improving the economy’s long-term health. A series of big tax cuts, under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, might have boosted economic activity in their day. But the later tax cuts by George W. Bush were followed by years of underwhelming growth, implying that income taxes were no longer doing much damage to economic efficiency.

Corporate taxes were really the last hope for the tax-cutting strategy. But if even that doesn’t provide more than a small momentary fiscal stimulus, then we’ve reached the end of that approach’s usefulness.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... or-workers

<

1. WOW

Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer Put on Leave as School Opens Investigation

Urban Meyer, the head coach of Ohio State University’s football team, was put on paid leave as the school investigates accusations that he knew about domestic-abuse allegations against his longtime assistant, Zach Smith, since 2015. “During the inquiry, Urban Meyer will be on paid administrative leave. Ryan Day will serve as acting head football coach during the investigation,” the university wrote in a statement. Meyer, in his own statement, said he was leaving so the football team could “conduct training camp with minimal distraction,” adding that he “eagerly looks forward to the resolution of this matter.” Meyer has said that he had no knowledge of abuse allegations against Smith, who was fired last week and served a domestic-violence civil protection order from his ex-wife, Courtney Smith. Meyer later conceded that he knew about a 2009 accusation involving Smith and his then-pregnant wife. This comes after college football reporter Brett McMurphy obtained screenshots of text conversations between Courtney Smith and spouses of other Ohio State coaches. Urban’s wife, Shelly, told the others that she would notify her husband of the incident and was reportedly supportive of Courtney Smith over the years.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ohio-stat ... n?ref=home

<

Trump’s losing fight against Obamacare

The health care law is proving surprisingly resilient to the administration’s efforts to tear it down.

President Donald Trump can’t kill Obamacare, no matter how hard he tries.

His administration’s latest threat to the law, unveiled Wednesday, expands the availability of short-term health plans that critics deride as “junk” insurance. However, despite the administration’s unrelenting efforts to sideline Obamacare, more insurers are signing up to sell 2019 coverage, and premium increases will be the lowest in years.

“The rate shocks have kind of run their course,” said Chris Sloan, a director with consulting firm Avalere Health. “The administration has basically done everything it can around this market. … They kind of shot all their bullets.”

The Trump administration, in addition to boosting short-term plans, has expanded alternative coverage options for small businesses, halted payments to insurers for low-income customers and slashed Obamacare outreach. The markets’ resiliency to these efforts has turned out to be a surprise — if a welcome one — for Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are trying to convert Obamacare’s newfound popularity into electoral success in November.

“They’re going to keep launching attacks,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said of the Trump administration. “They’re determined to take away coverage.”

Public support for Obamacare has skyrocketed since congressional Republicans made ill-fated repeal attempts last year. The Trump administration itself has struggled to land a clear knockout blow, despite advancing a series of policies designed to create new competition outside the Obamacare markets and siphon off healthier, low-cost enrollees.

“I think the law has proven to be more resilient than both its opponents and proponents had anticipated,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “And that’s an economic observation as well as a political one.”

Trump administration health officials said the moves are designed to expand coverage options for people priced out of Obamacare coverage, particularly middle-income customers who aren’t eligible for federal insurance subsidies. Enrollment among unsubsidized customers in the individual market plummeted nearly 30 percent between 2015 and 2017 as premiums rose, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“There are individuals today who have been priced out of coverage because of the way that the Affordable Care Act has been implemented and the effects it has had on the market,” said Jim Parker, HHS senior adviser for health reform.

Obamacare insurers criticized the expansion of short-term plans, which cover far less than Obamacare and typically refuse coverage for pre-existing medical conditions. They warned the move could destabilize the exchanges, driving up costs for the sicker population left behind. The health care industry broadly warned that the skinny plans will leave customers with big medical bills they weren’t expecting.

Still, there are no signs the Trump administration’s latest move would scare any insurers away from the Affordable Care Act markets. Obamacare enrollment among subsidized customers is actually up by 6 percent this year, demonstrating the strength of the heath care law’s financial assistance.

“We don’t believe they will have a big impact on our ACA population,” Tami Hibbitts, vice president of individual markets at Michigan’s Priority Health, said of short-term plans. “We see more people who were going uncovered before perhaps picking up a short-term plan.”

Where Obamacare is expanding
After years of turbulence, insurers are entering and expanding in the Obamacare marketplace. Three states — Iowa, New Mexico and Oklahoma — have new carriers entering statewide. An additional 275 counties expect health plans to either enter or expand, as well.

More than a dozen states are seeing an increase in insurer competition in at least some counties. That includes the tech-focused startup Oscar Health, which is expanding into three new states while enlarging its footprint in three others. Another insurance startup, Bright Health, is entering Arizona and Tennessee for the first time. And two of the largest players in the exchanges — Centene and Molina Healthcare — are entering additional markets.

The boosted competition is a stark reversal from last year, when dozens of counties were at risk of not having a single insurer willing to sell Obamacare coverage.

There are promising signs across the country that Obamacare rate hikes for the 2019 enrollment season won’t approach the eye-popping increases of the last two years, though rates won’t be finalized until the fall. Enrollment reopens Nov. 1, days before the midterm elections.

For example, one year after Tennessee’s market seemed on the verge of collapse, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee plans to decrease rates by 10 percent and Cigna wants to lower rates by 5 percent. In Minnesota, all four of the state’s insurers are looking to lower premiums. And in several other states — including the key political battlegrounds of Indiana, Nevada, Michigan and Pennsylvania — proposed rate increases are 5 percent or less.

“The market is starting to stabilize,” said Nate Clark, CEO of Minnesota’s marketplace. “Insurers are figuring out how to make money.”

Those surprisingly positive signs may also complicate Democratic talking points ahead of November’s elections, given their eagerness to attack Republicans for “sabotaging” the marketplaces and driving up premiums. It’s a reversal of roles from the last eight years, when Republicans pilloried Obamacare on their way to winning total control of the federal government.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake doesn’t believe the Obamacare markets’ surprising performance will neutralize the issue as a campaign cudgel, pointing out that Democrats enjoy a huge advantage — 16 points, according to a Pew Research Center poll — over Republicans on health care issues.

“Almost every candidate we have is running on health care,” Lake said. “It’s a lot simpler than it used to be. We just basically argue that you shouldn’t be taking away health care from people.”

While Democrats continue to savage Republicans for rate hikes, they are also highlighting what many see as an existential threat to Obamacare and a potential election-year gift: the Trump administration’s argument for tossing out popular protections for pre-existing conditions in a new anti-Obamacare lawsuit.

“That’s the No. 1: the protections for pre-existing conditions,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), whose opponent, Josh Hawley, is one of 19 state attorneys general backing the lawsuit. “They couldn’t prevail in Congress, so they’re taking the activist role and trying to use the courts to do what Congress refuses to do.”

The Obamacare markets’ resiliency is also complicating the GOP’s yearslong anti-Obamacare messaging.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar in a Wednesday gathering with reporters touted steps the agency has taken to stabilize the law, taking credit for Obamacare premiums that have so far come in lower than anticipated. Yet he also emphasized that HHS still views the law as fatally flawed.

“I don’t want to overpromise here,” Azar said. “The Affordable Care Act is sabotaging itself by its own structure.”

Republicans in Congress are still adapting to the more stable landscape, after years of warning that Obamacare was on the brink of failure.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who last year lamented that “Obamacare continues to collapse” in his failed push for a replacement plan, told reporters this week that Obamacare is in fact a well-crafted handout for insurance companies.

“The system was never going to collapse,” he said. “Obamacare protected the insurance companies. They won either way, coming and going.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/ ... nce-719300

<

Fact Checker

Analysis

President Trump has made 4,229 false or misleading claims in 558 days

In his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has almost doubled that total.

Because of summer vacation schedules, we had fallen a month behind in updating The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.

It turns out that’s when the president decided to turn on the spigots of false and misleading claims. As of day 558, he’s made 4,229 Trumpian claims — an increase of 978 in just two months.

That’s an overall average of nearly 7.6 claims a day.

When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing the longer Trump stays in office. In fact, in June and July, the president averaged 16 claims a day.

Put another way: In his first year as president, Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has almost doubled that total.

Our award-winning interactive graphic, created with the help of Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Washington Post’s graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. We have updated the graphic to allow readers to see the number of claims on a daily or monthly basis.

On July 5, the president reached a new daily high of 79 false and misleading claims. On a monthly basis, June and July rank in first and second place, with 532 and 446 claims, respectively.

Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading statements. We’ve counted nearly 150 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency.

Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 1,293 — relate to economic issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created before he became president or company decisions with which he had no role. He cites his “incredible success” in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Barack Obama’s term.

Just on trade, the president has made 432 false or misleading claims. He frequently gets the size of trade deficits wrong or presents the numbers in a misleading fashion.

He also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. In June and July, more than 20 times the president said some variation of the claim that the United States “lost” money on trade deficits. Just about every economist would give a student an “F” for making such a statement.

A trade deficit simply means people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as the relative strength of currencies, economic growth rates, and savings and investment rates.

Not surprisingly, immigration is the top single source of Trump’s misleading claims, now totaling 538. Thirty times just in the past five months, for instance, the president has falsely claimed his long-promised border wall with Mexico is being built, even though Congress has denied funding for it.

Just on trade, the president has made 432 false or misleading claims. He frequently gets the size of trade deficits wrong or presents the numbers in a misleading fashion.

He also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. In June and July, more than 20 times the president said some variation of the claim that the United States “lost” money on trade deficits. Just about every economist would give a student an “F” for making such a statement.

A trade deficit simply means people in one country are buying more goods from another country than people in the second country are buying from the first. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as the relative strength of currencies, economic growth rates, and savings and investment rates.

Not surprisingly, immigration is the top single source of Trump’s misleading claims, now totaling 538. Thirty times just in the past five months, for instance, the president has falsely claimed his long-promised border wall with Mexico is being built, even though Congress has denied funding for it.

We also have catalogued the president’s many flip-flops, since those earn Upside-Down Pinocchios if a politician shifts position on an issue without acknowledging that he or she did so.

Given that the president has been in office more than 18 months, we decided to begin phasing out the listing of his astonishing flip-flop on the accuracy of the unemployment rate. During the campaign, he repeatedly claimed that it was a phony number and the real unemployment rate was really many times higher. Now, he regularly touts unemployment statistics as proof of his economic agenda’s success, though he does not always get them right. His refusal to acknowledge this shift has been frustrating, but even flip-flops have a statute of limitations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fac ... 9649d7ac2d

<

Why Trump’s economy could be downhill from here

President Donald Trump has already hit his high-water mark on the economy and probably faces a significant slowdown heading into his reelection campaign, according to a leading economist.

“It’s probably as good as it gets,” Megan Greene, chief economist at Manulife said on the latest edition of the POLITICO Money podcast, regarding the robust second-quarter growth rate of 4.1 percent.

“I think Q2 is the peak,” she said. “We will probably decelerate and return to our potential GDP growth, or around our potential GDP growth, from here on out, which is going to be around 2 percent. We won’t go straight to 2 percent, it will take a while. But unless we fundamentally boost productivity growth or our labor force, I don’t see any other way of really boosting our potential GDP.”

Greene said Trump deserves some credit for boosting the economy through tax cuts and deregulation, but perhaps not as much as he gives himself. “We’ve had a couple of quarters of growth above 4 percent since the global financial crisis, over which Donald Trump has presided over one,” she said. “He can’t take full credit for this. On the other hand, some of the reason that we’ve got such growth is because we’ve got so much fiscal stimulus coming down the line, and we do have Trump to thank for that, although I’m not sure we should really be thanking him for that.”

Greene added that the Trump economy is not fundamentally different from the President Barack Obama economy, which also enjoyed several quarters of growth over 4 percent.

“It isn’t fundamentally different. The picture for productivity growth or the labor supply looks the same; none of that has changed,” she said. The difference is we’ve had a ton of fiscal stimulus come down the line."

To keep up the current pace, Greene said, Trump and Congress would have to enact yet another set of tax cuts and spending hikes. And that could cause its own problems with surging federal debt.

“It will be interesting to see what the administration does going into 2020 because most of this fiscal stimulus will peter out by then and it’s an election year,” she said. “So there is a chance that the administration will re-up on fiscal stimulus and make this deficit and debt burden problem even worse."

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/ ... ast-754590

<

Uh oh, fifty and rising.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Forty-nine percent (49%) disapprove.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_ ... rack_aug02

Before Trump arrived at the Tampa rally the other night a local Florida politician spoke and he said something that stuck with me. That he doesn't always agree with Trump's form but he will take results over form any day.

You simply cannot argue with the results he's getting.

And as Sarah Sanders says, at some point democrats (and RINO's for that matter) are just going to have to decide whether they hate Trump more than they love America. Because the President's policies are absolutely working. And more & more Americans are seeing and feeling that.

Liberal Group Blasts GOP Candidate for Silence on Jim Jordan’s OSU Scandal

A new ad in Ohio’s special election asks whether GOP candidate Troy Balderson stands with the OSU victims who allege that Rep. Jim Jordan ignored their sexual abuse while coaching.

Republicans have tried to make House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) an issue in Tuesday’s special congressional election in Ohio. And now one Democratic group wants to do the same with embattled Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal PAC, on Thursday launched a five-figure digital ad bashing Republican candidate Troy Balderson for remaining mum on whether he supports Jordan’s intended run for Speaker of the House.

The ad, titled “Does Troy Balderson Stand with the Victims, or with Jim Jordan?,” references the mounting accusations that the conservative lawmaker turned a blind eye to sexual abuse that took place at Ohio State University during his tenure as assistant wrestling coach. Jordan has denied those claims.

This tactic reflects one employed by Republican groups like the Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC closely aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who have sought to portray Democratic candidate Danny O’Connor—Balderson’s rival—as a kind of liberal stooge for Pelosi. Jordan does not have the same high name identification as Pelosi but perhaps is more widely known in Ohio.

O’Connor, like many Democratic candidates, has distanced himself from Pelosi. But during a recent MSNBC interview, when pressed continuously on the matter, O’Connor conceded he would “support whoever the Democratic Party puts forward.” That tepid soundbite was used in a subsequent CLF ad labelling the candidate “Dishonest Danny O’Connor.”

Days later, the Democratic candidate released his own ad calling for new leadership in both parties in Washington, once again distancing himself from Pelosi’s leadership.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jim-jorda ... n?ref=wrap

<

Opinion

Another Gift for a Putin Buddy

Even as new evidence surfaces that someone, probably in Russia, is meddling with another American election, we can forget about strict punishment from sanctions for at least one of the Russian oligarchs closest to President Vladimir Putin.

This week, the Trump administration further eased its pressure on Rusal, Russia’s largest aluminum company, less than four months after sanctions on it and its notorious leader were imposed. Even as the White House seems willing to inflict pain on American farmers and consumers with its trade wars, Russian aluminum workers are apparently worthy of special protection.
Rusal is controlled by Oleg Deripaska, a member of Mr. Putin’s inner circle. As the Treasury Department acknowledges, he has been investigated for money laundering and accused of threatening the lives of business rivals, illegally wiretapping a government official and taking part in extortion and racketeering. There are also allegations, made public by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, that Mr. Deripaska bribed a government official, ordered the murder of a businessman and had links to a Russian organized crime group. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Paul Manafort, then Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, tried to offer Mr. Deripaska private briefings about the campaign. On Tuesday, Mr. Manafort went on trial on charges of bank and tax fraud not directly related to the campaign.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said he is considering lifting the sanctions altogether because they are punishing the “hardworking people of Rusal.” But Mr. Mnuchin has it backward. If he was truly concerned about Rusal’s 61,000 employees, he would not relent until the company fully washed its hands of Mr. Deripaska and the corrupt regime the aluminum giant serves.

Behind Mr. Deripaska’s estimated fortune of as much as $5.3 billion, there stands a great crime. During the “aluminum wars” of the 1990s, when that economic sector was consolidating in the chaotic privatization that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the young metals trader was suspected of ties to gangsters as he seized control of huge Siberian smelters. According to testimony by a gang member in Stuttgart, Germany, part of Mr. Deripaska’s value to the group were his links to Russia’s security services. While his rivals were killed off or fled Russia, Mr. Deripaska somehow emerged as the director general of Rusal, a company that reported revenues last year of nearly $10 billion. But suspicions that the oligarch has had links to organized crime have denied him a visa to enter the United States.

Mr. Deripaska is little more than a trustee for his aluminum concern. In Russia, oligarchs like him owe their wealth and status to the Kremlin. In return, they must do its bidding, which in Mr. Deripaska’s case meant spending more than $1 billion, through his holding company, on new infrastructure for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. Mr. Deripaska has embraced his role, stating that he does not separate himself from the Russian state. In line with that conceit, a memo obtained by The Associated Press showed that Mr. Manafort tried to pitch him a plan for an influence campaign to “greatly benefit the Putin government.”

Mr. Deripaska was sanctioned on April 6 by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for “having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior official of the government of the Russian Federation.” Also sanctioned were Rusal and the publicly traded holding company that controls it, En+. The sanctions caused Rusal’s share price to plummet by 50 percent and roiled the global aluminum market. Mr. Deripaska soon announced that he would relinquish control of Rusal and resigned from the boards of En+ and Rusal.

This was the strongest signal yet that oligarchs like Mr. Deripaska should not be allowed to do business with the United States while supporting a government that has rearranged the borders of its neighbors, poisoned dissident Russian citizens on foreign soil and assisted the Assad regime in Syria in bombing its own citizens. Citing a Harvard researcher’s finding, a parliamentary committee in the United Kingdom reported in May that “Rusal’s own website says that it supplied military material to the Russian military that was potentially used in Syria.”
Almost immediately, however, the Treasury Department eased the pressure on Rusal. Deadlines were extended more than once. In May, Lord Gregory Barker of Battle, the chairman of Mr. Deripaska’s holding company, hired a $108,500-a-month lobbyist to continue to negotiate with the Treasury Department. The firm he chose, Mercury Public Affairs, is the firm Mr. Manafort paid $1.1 million to lobby members of Congress on behalf of Ukraine and its then-president, Viktor Yanukovych before 2014. Led by David Vitter, a former Republican senator from Louisiana, Mercury has sought to enlist support from ambassadors of France, Germany and Australia, among others.

Mercury, which describes its approach as “high-stakes public strategy,” turned up the heat on the Treasury Department last week, demanding more time to reduce the oligarch’s ownership stake in En+ from 70 percent to below 50 percent. In a July 24 filing with the Justice Department, Mercury outlined a host of calamities that might be unleashed if sanctions aren’t eased: The global aluminum market might suffer significant disruptions with “severe collateral damage to United States interests, allies”; En+ might have to entertain a potential acquisition by “Chinese and/or other potentially hostile interests”; or Mr. Deripaska might just hang on to his majority stake. Contradictory as these dire predictions seem — Mr. Deripaska can’t both sell his company off to China and retain a majority stake — they appear to have been enough to make the Treasury grant Rusal yet another extension on July 31, giving Mr. Deripaska more time to divest his stake in En+.

The specter of a fellow traveler with gangsters dictating terms to the United States government is yet another sign of the Trump administration’s inexplicable capitulation to Russia. And the timing of this latest surrender follows the July 16 summit in Helsinki, at which President Trump and President Putin met privately for more than two hours.

We don’t know what they discussed, but given the stakes on both sides, there’s a good chance that the discussion touched on the subject of the sanctions the United States has imposed on Russia’s biggest aluminum company.

Seth Hettena, now a freelance journalist, is the author of “Trump/Russia: A Definitive History.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/opin ... afort.html

<

A recent Harvard/Harris poll shows one of the reasons Trump's approval is rising. The number of Hispanics approving of the job Trump is doing has spiked.

I have always said, I'm not so sure the democrats plan of open borders and allowing illegal Hispanics to vote may come back to bite them. I think Hispanics have more in common with conservatives than they do democrats.

First, they are a religious people. Which means pro life. And have to roll their eyes at all this one gender one bathroom nonsense you hear about. As well as the folks who won't say Christmas and crap like that.

Secondly, they are a hard working people. And the GOP obviously has a better plan for the economy and jobs.

Matter of fact, a recent study showed that 30% of the construction work force in America were Hispanic. Which I was surprised at. But they approve of Trump's work on the economy, Hispanic unemployment is at the lowest rate ever. And Trump wants an infrastructure bill which will help out all those Hispanic Construction workers.

And also, polls show that our Hispanic population (Legal) are actually very supportive of police, military, want a strong national defense and a WALL.

Last election Trump got 30% of Hispanic vote. Reagan and WBush got 40%. I could see Trump getting that number or even better in 2020.

People believe con men and bullshit artists. Stupid bastards vote against their financial interests.

155,965,000 Employed in June: 11th Record-Setter Under Trump

By Susan Jones | August 3, 2018 | 8:40 AM EDT

(CNSNews.com) – Following last month’s strong employment report, the numbers released on Friday were even better in some respects.

The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics says a record 155,965,000 people were employed in July, the 11th record-breaker since President Trump took office 19 months ago.

"Our economy is soaring. Our jobs are booming. Factories are pouring back into our country, they coming from all over the world. We are defending our workers," President Trump told a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Thursday.

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/su ... nder-trump

Hispanic unemployment again hits new record low in July

by Joseph Lawler | August 03, 2018 08:35 AM

Unemployment for Hispanic workers again plumbed a new record low in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

The unemployment rate for Hispanic or Latino workers fell to 4.5 percent in the month, lower than the previous record of 4.6 percent that was set just the month before.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/poli ... ow-in-july