“during Trump’s first term, he displayed the same proclivity to jack up spending as his Republicans predecessors. The data shows that Trump increased defense spending in real terms by 18 percent, with an overall spending growth rate of 10 percent. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush increased defense spending by 28 percent and 36 percent, respectively (and overall spending by 9 percent and 24 percent). Compared with their Republican counterparts, Democratic presidents Obama and Bill Clinton look frugal.
Unlike Bush or Reagan, however, Trump has had a booming economy, no new wars, and no terrorist attacks since his term began. This context makes the massive increase in spending, along with the $1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2020, even more shocking. With no serious changes, the Congressional Budget Office projects that these annual budget deficits will stay well above $1 trillion in the next 10 years.
To be fair, the president does plan to balance the budget eventually—in 2035. To achieve this goal, Trump proposes some $4.4 trillion in savings over 10 years, which is a step in the right direction. For instance, according to Marc Goldwein at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this the budget would save Medicare $600 billion, reducing national health expenditures by almost $1 trillion. As Goldwein noted on Twitter, “That means lower premiums and out of pocket costs—don’t demagogue these policies!” Unfortunately, judging by the news headlines and reactions by Democrats in Congress, these savings are likely dead on arrival.
To achieve such savings, some very unrealistic assumptions would need to materialize. For instance, while the economy grew 2.4 percent in 2017, 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.3 percent in 2019, the White House projects that the economy will grow at about 2.8 percent annually for a decade straight. The budget also counts on interest rates staying low, so as to not massively increase the amount of interest payments that will have to be made. The low interest rate, paired with the planned savings, would lower interest costs by $300 billion. Unfortunately, this is a mirage. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Using more realistic economic assumptions, the budget deficit would be about $1.2 trillion (3.7 percent of GDP) in 2030,” as opposed to the $261 billion projected by the White House.”
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“The plan is to cut projected spending on domestic programs by roughly $2 trillion. These “cuts” are mostly to the projected growth of spending increases, not reductions in the actual amount of spending. Still, to make the savings politically viable, the burden should be distributed enough to inspire a sense of shared sacrifice. Instead, the budget plans to extend the 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $1.4 trillion and increases military spending, making the cuts harder to stomach for some.
At the end of the day, and after much spilled ink analyzing the budget proposal, we can count on one thing: This actual budget won’t see the light of day. Instead, Congress and the administration will continue in the footsteps of those who came before them and increase the debt while pretending to be fiscally responsible.”
“the president has made it clear that those who speak out against him are at risk of losing their jobs — and that Trump knows he’s unlikely to be punished for it.”
“the deficit in exports versus imports from China shrank to $345.6 billion, down about 18 percent from a record high level of $419.5 billion in 2018.
But the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods with all countries was relatively unchanged in 2019 at close to $1.048 trillion because importers turned to other nations after Trump hit China with tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 25 percent.
Some of the beneficiaries of that shift included Mexico, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and members of the EU.
The trade deficit with the EU hit a record $177.9 billion in 2019, while the gap with Mexico was a record $101.8 billion”
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“tariffs Trump has imposed on approximately $370 billion worth of Chinese goods have increased costs for U.S. manufacturers”
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“That helps explain both the slowdown in U.S. manufacturing output and slight decline in the manufactured goods trade deficit in 2019”
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“The U.S. usually runs a surplus in agricultural trade. However, that surplus shrank to $23 billion in 2019, from $26.5 billion in 2018, at least partly because of the retaliation that China and other countries on American exports imposed in response to Trump’s tariffs.”
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“One bright spot in the trade report is the sharp drop in the oil and gas trade deficit, which fell to $29 billion in 2019, from $69.5 billion in 2018, because of increased U.S. production and exports.
The oil and gas trade deficit reached as high as $317 billion in 2008, but has fallen steadily over the past decade because of new production techniques.”
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“Trump still is mistaken to believe that the trade deficit is driven primarily by unfair foreign trade practices or bad trade deals, economists point out. Instead, other factors, such as the size of the U.S. budget deficit and the strength of the U.S. economy play a much bigger role in dictating trade flows.
“The irony is the stronger the U.S. economy is compared to our major trading partners, like the European Union and China, the more likely it is the trade deficit will go up because we will have stronger demand,” Griswold said. “The vast majority of economists would say that’s perfectly fine, but it does put this administration in an awkward spot.””
“The bad news for people with preexisting conditions is that this “ironclad pledge” is a lie. Trump and his administration have fought hard — in all three branches of government — to strip people with preexisting health conditions of the protections they enjoy under the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, if Trump has his way, those protections will cease to exist.”
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” In 2018, for example, it handed down a rule expanding the use of short term insurance plans to that do not cover many services, and that may exclude people with preexisting conditions.
The mere existence of these plans can drive up premiums for people with expensive preexisting conditions, because these skimpy plans will lure healthy consumers away from more generous plans.”
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“In Congress, meanwhile, Trump supported legislation seeking to repeal Obamacare or drastically water down its protections. One bill backed by Trump, the American Health Care Act, would have allowed many insurers to charge higher premiums — potentially prohibitively high premiums — to patients with preexisting conditions.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is currently asking the courts to repeal Obamacare almost in its entirety. If the courts ultimately embrace the administration’s position, that will mean that all of Obamacare’s protections for people with preexisting conditions will be struck down.”
“The House bill — H.R.3 — has a few mechanisms for reducing prescription drug prices, but most notably, it would allow the US health department to directly negotiate the prices it will pay for up to 250 drugs every year. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated the bill would save Medicare up to $450 billion over 10 years because of those new negotiating powers. CBO has also projected about eight fewer drugs (out of an expected 300 over 10 years) would come to the market in the next decade because of the decrease in revenues for drug makers.
Despite Trump’s promises on the 2016 campaign trail that he would support proposals allowing Medicare drug negotiations, the White House threatened to veto the House plan. They called it a plan to institute government “price controls,” and said it would limit access to medicine, a favored talking point of the pharmaceutical lobby.
Even without this veto threat, H.R.3 is expected to be dead-on-arrival in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown no interest in taking up the bill.”
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“Instead, Trump has aligned himself more with Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, who has advanced a narrower set of reforms from his perch as the Senate Finance Committee chair. (Grassley has also accused McConnell of sabotaging his bill, which moved out of Grassley’s committee with bipartisan support.)
His committee sent a bill to the full Senate in the fall, though it has languished there in the months since. It’s unclear if Trump’s quasi-endorsement — he did not call out Grassley’s bill directly Tuesday night, instead praising the senator generally for his individual work on the issue — will provide any new momentum for the plan. Grassley’s bill, as the Brookings Institution documented, achieves pricing reform through a mix of technical changes to the rebates that drug makers pay under Medicare and Medicaid as well as provisions to cap out-of-pocket drug costs for seniors.
Right now, neither of the bills seems on a fast track to anywhere. Part of this is because Trump’s interest in drug pricing has been scattershot at best, and many Republicans are reluctant to place too many new regulations on an innovation industry.”
“If you didn’t know American politics had been turned upside down by Trump’s election win, nothing in the macroeconomic data would suggest that anything at all happened in January 2017”
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“That’s not to deny Trump any credit. He made a sensible selection for Federal Reserve chair and has presided over a healthy dose of fiscal stimulus, and his trade policies haven’t been as disruptive as the most alarmist critics warn. But at the same time, his tax cuts haven’t delivered the kind of investment boom he promised, and in general, all his record-setting economic numbers are continuations of previous trends.”
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“Under Trump, we have seen a sharp slowdown in net immigration that has helped reduce US population growth to a trickle. The foreign-born share of the population, however, is not falling despite the immigration crackdown because American women are also having fewer babies.”
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“The number of babies women say they’d ideally like to have isn’t declining; we are just seeing the gap between ideal fertility and actual fertility get bigger and bigger each year. According to surveys, the main reason is the high (and growing) cost of child care — a problem that a “good economy” alone doesn’t fix, since child care is so labor-intensive.”
“President Donald Trump has spent three years molding America’s immigration system to primarily be concerned with keeping people out.
He built, layer by layer, impediments in Central America, at the border, in detention centers, and in the immigration courts that have made obtaining asylum nearly impossible.
He swept aside former President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement priorities in favor of vastly expanding immigration detention and prosecuting every immigrant who crosses the border without authorization. The result is a punitive system that treats immigrants as criminals and places them in prolonged detention even if they don’t pose any danger to the public.
And he waged a quiet and effective campaign to reduce legal immigration — including expanding his travel ban to block immigration from Nigeria, the largest country in Africa. Under Trump, the legal immigration system increasingly rewards skills and wealth over family ties to the US, while shutting out a growing number of people from low-income countries.
When Trump lays out the start of his reelection-year argument in the State of the Union address on Tuesday night, his guests will include a senior Border Patrol official and the brother of a man who was killed by an unauthorized immigrant. His immigration record is likely to be one of his top talking points.
It’s true that Trump has run into some roadblocks: He’s behind schedule on construction of the southern border wall, a key messaging tool for his base. He hasn’t been able to appoint his preferred candidates to lead the immigration agencies. His attempts to pass immigration-related legislation in Congress have failed. And his policies have faced so much opposition in the courts that his administration has appeared to pursue a strategy of rapidly churning out new policies and hoping that at least some of them survive judicial review.
But while he might not have succeeded at building an actual wall to keep immigrants out, his policies have achieved the same end.”
“about 130 feet of newly constructed border wall “fell on the Mexico side of the border, landing on several trees.” Evidently, the sections had not yet been set in a concrete foundation.”
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“other sections of the border wall have huge holes, by design, to prevent flash floods from damaging it. Sources familiar with the wall designs tell the Post that the structure will act like a giant sewer gate during those periodic downpours, allowing water to pass through but causing rocks, trees, and other debris carried by the water to slam into it. To avoid potential damage, there 30-foot floodgates will be built into the wall, and the floodgates will be left open for months at a time during the rainy season.
John Ladd, a cattle rancher who has one such floodgate on his property—built into an older section of border wall constructed in 2008—tells the Post that he’s seen smugglers drive pick-up trucks through the openings.”
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“Smugglers have already been spotted cutting holes in new sections of the wall, and there’s a long history of people gaining access to the United States by tunneling or catapulting their way in. More than 200 such tunnels discovered since 1990, and another one was found just this week near San Diego, California.”
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“Most illegal immigrants to the United States don’t hop the border; they land at airports and then overstay their visas.”
“That clear abuse of power for Trump’s own political gain led the Democratic-majority House to impeach the president. Afterward, the Republican-held Senate chose not to investigate further by declining to call any witnesses in its trial of the president and is expected to acquit him.
This means that, ultimately, the impeachment system designed to keep the top levels of the US government from descending into lawlessness has failed.
That, as former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and others say, will make it harder for the US to tell other nations to follow America’s lead.”
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“In an ideal America, Trump would receive a severe reprimand for abusing his power and his corrupt practices, like using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Even if short of impeachment, Republicans could’ve placed severe political pressure on Trump by showing him their support has limits.
That’s not what happened. Instead, Trump’s party will be responsible for letting him get away with the Ukraine scandal basically unpunished.
He has been formally impeached, and that in itself is significant regardless of whether or not he’s removed from office, but given that no House Republicans voted for impeachment, Trump and his allies can argue (and have) that it was merely a partisan political ploy and not the serious rebuke for his behavior it is supposed to be.
It’s worse when considering one of the arguments Trump’s legal team has made: that a president can basically do whatever he wants in order to get reelected if he believes his reelection is good for the country.”
“Following a speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday in which she announced she’ll vote to acquit, Collins told Norah O’Donnell of CBS that she believes Trump “has learned from this case” and “will be much more cautious in the future.”
Getting impeached “is a pretty big lesson,” Collins said — the implication being that Trump will be chastened going forward from trying to pervert diplomacy into an opposition research opportunity, as he did with the Ukrainian government.”
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“Trump has spent five months insisting that a phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that’s at the heart of his impeachment — one in which Trump implicitly linked military aid to Ukraine with the country helping him with investigations of his political rivals — is “perfect.””
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“look at the circumstances surrounding the Zelensky call. It happened on July 25 — one day after special counsel Robert Mueller wound down his investigation of Trump by testifying to Congress and saying Trump could be indicted after his term for obstructing justice because of his interference with the Russia investigation.
But instead of responding to the end of the Russia investigation by cooling his jets, Trump was on the phone with the Ukrainian president the very next day trying to solicit political favors — the very same conduct that fueled suspicions about his Russia dealings in the first place.”
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“Trump told reporters during an off-the-record lunch on Tuesday that, indeed, he doesn’t feel he has any lessons to learn from getting impeached.”