CSotD: Cracks in the Seems
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It is a truism that the deficit falls under Democratic administrations and rises under Republican administrations, and that the last three presidents to lower the deficit were Clinton, Obama and Biden.
It is also a truism that if you laid every economist in the country end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. It’s a discipline in which both intent and methodology play major roles, and for every economist who proves that X is true, there’s another who can prove Y is the correct answer.
Which sounds snide, but I was in television advertising for a time and could, justifiably, argue that even though “Little House on the Prairie” had far better ratings than “Meet the Press,” a business selling golf equipment or luxury cars would do better advertising on “Meet the Press,” for reasons that should be obvious to you but never seemed obvious to advertisers who craved big numbers.
Bagley is specific in clarifying Weyant’s point: Not only is the economic ship of state carelessly sailing into a minefield of debt — an apt variation on an age-old theme — but a great deal of profligate spending seems to be at the personal whim of the president, and, moreover, to his benefit and that of his most visible supporters.
Which always makes me think of Hamlet: “Seems,” madam? Nay, it “is”; I know not “seems.”
That, in turn, gets us back to intentions and those economists lying end to end, and raises the question of where all that money comes from and where it goes, which is less about theory than it is about oversight.
As Smith indicates, Trump has openly admitted that he’s not interested in the economic plight of working families, which indifference he exhibits by repeatedly advocating vanity projects that have no value either to those families or to the nation as a whole.
The ballroom and the arch, he promises, will be paid for by donations. But a well-trained economic bloodhound might track a connection between those generous gifts and the awarding of no-bid contracts, which indeed are financed with public funds.
Or he might not, depending on what he had been trained to do. To quote Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
In any case it does not “seem” but “is” an ethical, a logical and likely a legal contradiction for two elements of the executive branch to be locked in a lawsuit, and I qualify the legal part because it seems that the Justice Department has suddenly stopped being as politically neutral as it was a few years ago, and it seems a coin toss as to how the chips fall once a case gets to the Supreme Court.
And it all seems, Goris says, that Dear Leader is willing to drop his lawsuit before it gets in front of a judge in return for a payoff which he promises will be used to comfort and reward those convicted by juries of having attempted to violently overthrow the government.
Which is certainly more generous than letting defeated Confederate soldiers take home their horses and their squirrel guns, innit?
That part about never auditing the taxes of Dear Leader and his family may not have a huge impact on the deficit, but it sure seems like it undermines any remaining respect for the rule of law and the idea that America has no royalty.
But here’s another “seems” issue: Apparently, the $1.7 billion that Dear Leader is willing to settle for on behalf of those who attempted a coup is not new taxpayer money but from a fund that DOJ keeps under its mattress, or possibly in a cookie jar on the shelf. This raises the question of how much more money is stashed in hidey-holes throughout the government.
Which is a question I would be asking if I were the parent of a kid whose SNAP benefits had been cut off as too expensive and who used to at least get a good breakfast at school, but doesn’t anymore. And the suggested answer is that you should have beaten up a cop, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol and run through the halls of Congress vowing to lynch the vice-president.
Then you might have become a millionaire!
And, BTW, if that out-of-court settlement is reached, it won’t be reviewable.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The term is “self-dealing” and while it is often illegal, it is always most certainly unethical, and if Dear Leader himself can’t see that, certainly the Speaker of the House would be able to, if he weren’t perpetually, and willfully, keeping his head in the dark.
Don’t take my word for it, or that of Boris or Telnaes: Miles Taylor, who served in both the George W. Bush and Trump White Houses, has a solid, readable breakdown of how it all works, which includes this sentence:
The entire architecture of the appropriations power in Article I (the requirement that Congress, not the executive, decide how public money is spent) exists precisely to prevent a president from doing what Donald Trump is about to do.
Does that make it seem corrupt? Nay, it “is”; I know not “seems.”
Meanwhile, Dear Leader has fired off 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter of the year, including investments in companies with business before the government, while a video has surfaced of Mike Johnson speaking against a proposal to stop letting congresscritters trade stocks, because they don’t make enough money on their $174,000 annual salaries, free health care and allowance for travel.
It seems we’ve changed from condemning tax-and-spend Democrats to empowering grab-and-stash Republicans.
Despite the distance, First Dog is able to distinguish a difference in priorities, which he suggests would make a lovely trend.
He may be premature in making ongoing proposals look like deeds, but one of those tax-and-spend Democrats was fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw, who wrote:
There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Seems like a good question we still haven’t answered.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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