Bernie Sanders Is The Man Who Gives Me Hope

Balls by Nancy Ohanian

Yesterday, I wrote that Trump is the best-equipped candidate to go up against Trump when the GOP barrage of lies about how great the economy is doing gets puked out across every media outlet in the land. At the same time I was explaining my assertion, Bernie-- as Senate Budget Committee ranking member-- shared his thoughts on Trump's toxic budget. It's worth reading, especially if you haven't decided who tp vote for in November, or if you're considering one of the conservative candidates.

“The Trump Budget for 2021 is a budget of, by, and for the 1 percent. It reflects profoundly unethical priorities and shows that the president is-- and it gives me no great pleasure to say this-- a liar. Just last week, President Trump told the American people in his State of the Union that he would ‘always protect your Medicare’ and ‘always protect your Social Security. Always.’

“Today, President Trump released a budget that cuts Medicare by half a trillion dollars. It cuts Social Security by $24 billion, including an $11 billion cut in Social Security Disability benefits.

“Last week, President Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid chief wrote, ‘No, the Trump administration is not cutting Medicaid.’ But this budget shows the administration’s actual priorities: cutting Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars.

“Three days ago, Vice President Pence said higher deficits were necessary for boosting economic growth. Now Trump’s budget uses that same deficit-- which he ran up to cut taxes for the wealthy and inflate a bloated, wasteful Pentagon budget-- as an excuse to cut programs for the most vulnerable people in America.

“The old cliché is that a budget is a moral document. What kind of unbelievable moral framework allowed this White House to propose $182 billion in cuts to nutrition assistance from needy families, when nearly one in seven households with children are food insecure?  The Trump Budget, outrageously, even cuts billions from a program that provides nutrition assistance for pregnant women, new moms, and their babies.

“At a time when 43 million Americans hold a collective $1.5 trillion in student debt, the Trump Budget cuts $170 billion from college affordability programs. At a time when our roads, bridges, public transit, and electrical grid need major upgrading, the Trump Budget somehow cuts infrastructure spending. And at a time when we face an existential threat from climate change, the Trump Budget maintains billions in subsidies for fossil fuel corporations while slashing the EPA by over 26 percent next year.

“The Trump Budget does not see a problem in this country it cannot somehow make worse. Unless, of course, the problem is that the wealthiest families and largest corporations in this country haven’t gotten enough tax cuts, or that the military-industrial complex isn’t raking in profits that are obscene enough.

“The Trump Budget is an immoral document. It is a budget that takes our collective resources and hands them to the wealthiest families and largest corporations in this country and ignores the needs of the most vulnerable among us. It is proof that this president did not care about the ‘forgotten men and women’ he said he would help-- it appears he is too busy enriching his billionaire friends.

“It also seems that the Trump Budget is so shameful that the Senate Budget Committee is refusing to even hold a hearing with Trump’s budget director about it, the second time in this committee’s history to do so. I can only assume that the Chairman had nothing nice to say about this disastrous Trump Budget, so he’s saying nothing at all.

“As Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee, I will do what I can to ensure that Trump’s Budget is rejected by Congress. This is not what our priorities as a country are about.”

Without a more like-minded Congress, Bernie is not going to be able to pass some of the most attractive parts of his agenda. That's why Blue America has a page called Bernie Congress. The candidates on the page-- which you can find by clicking the thermometer on the right-- and campaigning on the same issues Bernie is campaigning on: Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, College for All, Housing for All, Workplace Democracy, Fair Taxation, Jobs for All, Racial Justice, and so on. I asked Arizona congressional candidate Eva Putzova how she feels about the Trumpist budget. "Trump's budget," she told me, "can only be described as cruel and fraudulent. How else can we describe cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? Taxpayers have been putting their own money into these programs to be there for them when needed. These are earned benefits. Trump is simply stealing from the American people."

I also asked the progressive running in Monroe County, NY, Robin Wilt. "A wise man," she said, "once said, 'Don’t tell me what your priorities are; show me your budget.' Trump’s budget represents the kind of moral depravity that has resulted in endless war, rampant and unsustainable wealth inequality, crushing student debt, a crumbling and carbon-intensive infrastructure, and a shrinking middle class. It is not so much a budget, as it is an enemies list. In its crosshairs are working families, our seniors, our students, and our most vulnerable. The beneficiaries are those who need it the least: billionaires who already enjoy too many entitlements at the government’s largesse. Bernie Sanders needs a Congress that will reflect the priorities of the American people, and budget accordingly. That’s why I am running on a platform that reflects our collective values in support of Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, Housing Justice, Educational Equity, Workplace Democracy, Fair Taxation, and Racial Justice. For too long, the needs of people have been neglected in favor of boosting corporate profits. I reject that as immoral."

How's Your Buying Power Lately?

The stock market continues to soar. My financial advisor ignores me when I wring my hands and tell her to change my asset allocation so that I have less stock. By ignoring me, she's brought me a lot more money. But I would just feel so much safer in more bonds and real estate and less sticks. Because, everyone knows this asshole is going to crash the market at some point. And that comes fast and hard and it's too late when that death spiral begins. Every time I can get her to put even a small amount more into bonds, I feel a sense of accomplishment. I'm having dinner with her in a week or two and I'll tell her to lighten up on the stocks some more. Meanwhile, though, I'm certain she's not as big a Bernie fan as I am. Although she loathes Trump.

This morning, the Financial Times reported that 56% of all equities (in terms of value) in this country are owned by just 1% of Americans... and yet Trump's whole campaign is going to eventually come down to "the economy, the economy, the economy." Without a doubt Bernie is best equipped to go toe to toe him on that, not Steyer and not the more venal billionaire Bloomberg, let alone clowns and empty suits like Mayo, Status Quo Joe or Klobuchar. Presidents don't react jobs by Trump's policies and administration created 1.5 million fewer jobs in his first three years in office than predecessor Barack Obama did in his final three. Newly revised figures from Trump’s own Department of Labor show that 6.6 million new jobs were created in the first 36 months of Trump’s tenure, compared with 8.1 million in the final 36 months of Obama’s-- a decline of 19% under Trump. During the SOTU address, when Trump said "If we hadn’t reversed the failed economic policies of the previous administration, the world would not now be witnessing this great economic success," he was-- as he does constantly-- lying and gaslighting.

Last week, writing for The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey noted that "in one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry: The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America. "In the 2010s," she wrote, "the national unemployment rate dropped from a high of 9.9 percent to its current rate of just 3.5 percent. The economy expanded each and every year. Wages picked up for high-income workers as soon as the Great Recession ended, and picked up for lower-income workers in the second half of the decade. Americans’ confidence in the economy hit its highest point since 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst. The headline economic numbers looked good, if not great. But beyond the headline economic numbers, a multifarious and strangely invisible economic crisis metastasized: Let’s call it the Great Affordability Crisis. This crisis involved not just what families earned but the other half of the ledger, too-- how they spent their earnings. In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible."

Viewing the economy through a cost-of-living paradigm helps explain why roughly two in five American adults would struggle to come up with $400 in an emergency so many years after the Great Recession ended. It helps explain why one in five adults is unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. It demonstrates why a surprise furnace-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many American families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. Fully one in three households is classified as “financially fragile.”

Along with the rise of inequality, the slowdown in productivity growth, and the shrinking of the middle class, the spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life. It is a crisis amenable to policy solutions at the state, local, and federal levels-- with all of the 2020 candidates, President Donald Trump included, teasing or pushing sweeping solutions for the problem. But absent those solutions, it looks certain to get worse for the foreseeable future-- leaving households fragile, exacerbating the country’s inequality, slowing down growth, smothering productivity, and putting families’ dreams of security out of reach.

The price of housing represents the most acute part of this crisis. In metro areas such as the Bay Area, Seattle, and Boston, severe supply shortages have led to soaring prices—millions of low- and middle-income families are no longer able to purchase centrally located homes. The median asking price for a single-family home in San Francisco has reached $1.6 million; even with today’s low interest rates, that would require a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $6,000, assuming that a family puts down the standard 20 percent. In Manhattan, listings for sale now ask an average of nearly $1,800 per square foot.

The housing cost crises in the Bay Area and New York might be the country’s most obscene. But the problem is national, driven by a combination of stagnant wages, restrictive building codes, and underinvestment in construction, among other trends. Home prices are rising faster than wages in roughly 80 percent of American metro regions. In 2018, housing affordability declined in every one of the 160-some urban areas analyzed by the National Association of Realtors, save for Decatur, Illinois. Rising prices and housing shortages are squeezing families in Reno, Minneapolis, and Phoenix.

The problem now even extends to rural areas, where income growth has lagged in the post-recession period. A recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts found “sizable” increases in the number of households spending half or more of their income on housing in rural counties across the country. The housing crisis is hitting Bertie County, North Carolina, and Irion County, Texas, too.

One central effect of the housing-cost crisis has been to turn the United States into a country of renters. The homeownership rate has fallen from a peak of nearly 70 percent in the mid-aughts to under 65 percent today; the numbers are more acute for Millennials, whose homeownership rate is 8 percentage points lower than that of their parents at the same age. Unable to buy, roughly 3.5 million younger families have kept renting-- delaying the Millennial and Gen X cohorts’ wealth accumulation, thus consigning them to worse net-worth trajectories for the rest of their lives. And renting, for many families, is not affordable, either: Nearly half of renters are facing uncomfortable monthly bills, and the cost of renting has risen faster than renters’ incomes for a full 20 years now.

The cost-of-living crisis extends beyond housing. Health-care costs are exorbitant, too: Americans pay roughly twice as much for insurance and medical services as do citizens of other wealthy countries, but they don’t have better outcomes. In the post-recession period, premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs in general just kept rising, eating away at families’ budgets, casting millions into debt, and consigning millions more to bankruptcy.

Shan Chowdhury, the progressive candidate running in southeast Queens has made affordable housing his top campaign issue, along with affordable healthcare. "The cost of living is way too high and wages have remained stagnant," he told us today. "We have to ask ourselves who this country is changing for? The wealth disparities are greater today than it was 50 years ago. With crumbling student debt, low wages, inaccessible healthcare, jobs and opportunities-- we have to tip the power back to working families and out of the hands of billionaires who profit off our backs."

Spokane area progressive Chris Armitage is running hard on Medicare-for-All. "Here in eastern Washington, folks share plenty of stories about their healthcare situations," he told me. "While in a local farming community, a woman told me about how her family of five. Three have diabetes, but they share a single insulin prescription each month. I wish this horrible situation was unique, or even uncommon, but the truth is many families in our rural communities lack the basic healthcare all humans need to live a full, productive life. Inaction in DC is killing people in our district. Our rural families deserve better. We are ready for Medicare for All because, as my former Commander said 'the best answer is the right answer, the second best answer is the wrong answer, and the worst answer is no answer."

Rachel Ventura, a progressive candidate for Congress in the Chicagoland suburbs sits on the modern housing solutions committee in Will County and she told me they too have a housing crisis. "We just don’t have enough housing period. Affordable housing, transitional housing, starter homes, mid size, or high market homes are all on high demand. As our area grows the incomes are definitely not keeping up which is pushing more Chicago residents to move to our area furthering the problem. Our committee is looking at cargo homes, tiny homes, vertical building, and other solutions outside the box. Unfortunately the trade war and the race to the bottom labor practices have complicated the issue even more. It is no longer profitable to build homes in our area because they can’t buy quality products or hire qualified labor for the price people can afford. Instead our area builds more warehouses. Creating millions of living wage jobs is just the beginning. Just one more reason why we must pass the Green New Deal. I look forward to applying my knowledge from the local level to the federal level to create policies that help communities build and retrofit homes for the future."

Young Turks founder and host Cenk Uygur is a first-time congressional candidate in the suburbs north of Los Angeles. "This current barbaric system," he told us this morning, "is crushing us on a daily basis. In some ways, I view my election as a rescue mission-- 45,000 people a year die because they don't have health insurance. We have to save their lives! We also have to save families from being financially ruined and out on the streets even if they have insurance. Every other developed country covers everyone and pays less!"

Montana state Rep. Tom Winter is running for the Montana open congressional seat this year. There are both a conservative Republican and a conservative Democrat who believe in Austerity. Tom backs single payer Medicare-for-All and is campaigning on it. "The whole reason I'm running for Congress," he told me "is because our broken political system is failing working Montanans. Working families all across this state are struggling to afford to live in an economy that seems to be rigged against them every step of the way. Healthcare is unaffordable. Housing is unaffordable. Childcare is unaffordable. 'Full employment' used to mean everyone had a job-- now it means many of us have two. Montanans shouldn't be priced out of being able to live in the state they built simply because they don't have the power to buy politicians and pay lobbyists to cater each and every law towards their best interest. We must rebuild an American economy that rewards work rather than wealth, and doesn't make living unaffordable. He was just getting warmed up:

Montana's hospitals charge patients nearly three times more than what the federal government sets as a 'fair' cost for care under Medicare. Prescriptions are being left unfilled. Life-saving drugs are being rationed. Working families are being saddled with medical debt, and in some cases across the country they are being imprisoned for it. People are being charged hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars a month for insulin costs-- while it costs $39 just 15 minutes north of Eureka, MT over the border. Montana's critical access and rural hospitals are at constant risk of closure.

Montana’s cities rank as some of the most unaffordable in the nation. The rest of the country thinks this is only a problem in cities like Seattle and San Francisco. But ask anyone working a 9-to-5 in Bozeman or Missoula if they have a realistic chance of owning a home. For the same price you would have paid 5 years ago you get half the square footage, bedrooms, and bathrooms for a median house now.

Every day, families across Montana wake up to our ongoing childcare crisis. Over 45,000 children under the age of 6 need childcare in Montana while childcare facilities in the state only have capacity for 20,000. Childcare costs ($34k for 4 years) families more than in-state college tuition ($29,900 for 4 years) in Montana. Over 42% of single mothers with children under the age of 5 are living in poverty. Single Parents earning minimum wage pay 54% of their income towards childcare.

"If I'm painting a dire picture," Winter concluded, "it's because this is how the other half of the country lives. Politicians always claim to support families, but when it comes right down to it working families are left in the lurch. Montana is running out of time. We could care less how well the Dow is doing or how low the unemployment rate is. We need healthcare. We need housing. We need childcare. We need to be able to afford to live."

The “cost burden” of health coverage climbed through the 2010s; just from 2010 to 2016, family private-insurance premiums jumped 28 percent to $17,710, while median household incomes rose less than 20 percent. That meant less take-home pay for workers. Deductibles-- what a family has to fork over before insurance kicks in-- also soared. From 2010 to 2016, the share of employees in health plans with a deductible jumped from 78 percent to 85 percent. And the average annual deductible went from less than $2,000 to more than $3,000.

The country’s insurance premiums and out-of-pocket health-cost burdens are just very, very high-- including for people with publicly subsidized or public coverage. The average person on Medicare spends $5,460 on health care beyond what they pay for insurance every year. The average person with Medicaid forks over nearly half that. No wonder two in three bankruptcies are related to medical issues, and nearly 140 million American adults report “medical financial hardship” each and every year.

Next up is student-loan debt, a trillion-dollar stone placed on young adults’ backs. Or, to be more accurate, the $1.4 trillion stone, up 6 percent year over year and 116 percent in a decade; student-loan debt is now a bigger burden for households than car loans or credit-card debt. Half of students now take on loans of one kind or another to try for a higher-ed degree, and outstanding debts typically total $20,000 to $25,000, requiring monthly payments of $200 to $300-- though of course many students owe much more. Now nearly 50 million adults are stuck working off their educational debt loads, including one in three adults in their 20s, erasing the college wealth premium for younger Americans and eroding the college earnings premium.

The Rochester, NY congressional district is safely blue but with a useless middle-of-the road backbencher as their Representative. Robin Wilt is running for that seat on a full-bore progressive platform. "The sharp increase in student loan debt is negatively impacting the U.S. economy by delaying the timeline for young people to buy houses and start families. Simply speaking, Boomers are less likely to be able to sell their homes because Millennials aren't in a financial position to buy them. We see this stagnation across the board, but this burden disproportionately affects borrowers of marginalized racial, gender and socioeconomic groups." She had a lot more to say about it:

"More and more, student borrowers have to dedicate ever-increasing portions of their income to student loan repayment, rather than spending on goods or services, traveling, getting married or buying a house. Moreover, many within marginalized communities are paying student loans with additional financial challenges stacked against them. This is particularly true in Rochester and Monroe County, which is plagued by the highest rates of segregation in the country. Not only are students of color more likely to borrow more for a degree and borrow in higher amounts for the same degree, but they’re more likely to struggle to repay student loans than their white counterparts. Meanwhile, the wage gap exacerbates the burden of student debt for women borrowers, since at all levels of educational attainment, women earn, on average, 25% less than men. Not only is the crushing burden of student debt weighing down potential growth in the U.S. economy, it is fundamentally altering our culture-- with people getting married and starting families later in life, and some questioning the value of higher education. Debt forgiveness is a positive way forward, with estimates that over the course of 10 years, student debt cancellation would create $943 billion in GDP, adjusted for inflation. Student debt cancellation results in economic growth by increasing the average households’ net worth and disposable income. This net increase in wealth drives consumption and investment spending. I wholeheartedly support student debt cancellation from a social justice standpoint, as well as from an economic sustainability standpoint."
 

Finally, child care. Spending on daycare, nannies, and other direct-care services for kids has increased by 2,000 percent in the past four decades, and families now commonly spend $15,000 to $26,000 a year to have someone watch their kid. Such care is grossly unaffordable for low-income parents in metro areas across the country, causing many people to drop out of the labor force. But one in four American mothers returns to work within two weeks of giving birth, so heavy are the other cost burdens of living in this country. The whole system is broken.

I spoke to three experienced candidates, Audrey Denney (CA), Brianna Wu and Marie Newman (IL) who came close in 2018 and plan to finish the job against their reactionary opponents, respectively Trumpist Doug LaMalfa, New Dem Stephen Lynch, and Blue Dog Dan Lipinski, this year. Audrey has watched her "friends struggle to afford to deliver their babies, miss work to care for their newborns, and provide childcare when they go back to work. I’ve watched as my close friends drop out of the workforce once they’ve had a second child-- not because they wanted to-- but because they could afford it. These are women who are teachers, manage restaurant chains, and who had management roles at non-profits. Celebrating our mothers on Mother’s Day is not enough, we must pass legislation to support maternity leave, women’s health, and affordable childcare options. Not only do we have the highest maternal mortality in the developed world, we are the only developed country that is seeing increases in maternal mortality. We are also experiencing shocking rates of postpartum depression (as high as 1 in 5 in some states!). We have to be better at creating conditions where new moms can care for their physical and mental well-being and that starts with paid maternity leave."

Everything that motivates and propels Brianna Wu's campaign has been about greater equality. And when it comes to the high cost of educational loans, she told us that "Higher education has become big business in this country, and the burden is placed on the backs of nearly 50 million Americans who just want an education for a chance of success at life. I know people in their 40s who are still paying off student loans 20 years after they graduated from college. Higher education, whether it's a college or university or a trade school, should not have the potential to bankrupt any American, or place an incredible burden on students right out of the gate. I fully support tuition-free public college for all.  It's the right thing to do, and it can be done. We need leaders in our government with the political will to do it. My opponent, Rep. Stephen Lynch, is silent on it, as he is most every initiative that will better the lives of Americans. When I get to Congress, tuition-free public college will be a priority for me."

Marie Newman had similar experiences and told me "The cost and lack of affordabilty of our daily lives, Is why I have an affordable solutions set in platform. Among these solutions in this platform is universal childcare where we would leverage existing assets like schools, libraries and community centers to offer 12 hr care to our kids. We cannot expect parents to continue to work 2 and three jobs round the clock."

The federal government has set as a benchmark that low-income families should not spend more than 7 percent of their income on child care. But child care is generally the single biggest line item on young families’ budgets, bigger even than rent or mortgage payments: Putting a kid in daycare costs 18 percent of annual income in California; home-based options equal 14 percent of family income in Nebraska; having an infant in professional care in the District of Columbia costs more than most poor families earn.

It all adds up, and it all subtracts from families’ well-being. The price tags for tuition and fees at colleges and universities have risen twice as fast as wages, if not more, in recent years. Rental costs are outpacing wage gains by a percentage point or more a year. Health-care costs have grown twice as fast as workers’ wages. And child-care costs have exploded. These cost pressures are particularly acute on young Americans who have seen worse employment prospects and smaller raises than their older counterparts.

The effects are wide-ranging. High costs are preventing workers from moving to high-productivity cities, thus smothering the country’s economic vibrancy and putting a drag on its GDP; economists have estimated that GDP would be as much as 10 percent bigger if more workers could afford to live in places like San Jose and Boston. High costs are forcing families to delay getting married and to have fewer children, and putting the dream of owning a home out of reach.

What is perhaps most frustrating is that the Great Affordability Crisis is amenable to policy solutions-- ones most other rich countries adopted decades ago. In other developed economies, child care, early education, and higher education are public goods, and do not require high-interest-rate debts or endless scrambling by exhausted young parents to procure. Other wealthy countries have public-health systems that cover everybody at far lower cost, whether through socialized or private models. And numerous proposals would transform residential construction in this country, including one that just failed in California’s legislature.

But the Great Affordability Crisis hides in plain sight, obvious to households but unmentioned in the country’s headline economic numbers. It persists even as President Donald Trump rightly praises the country’s growth, low unemployment rate, and rising household incomes. And though there are many nationwide policies that could end the crisis, they all seem unlikely to pass through the country’s broken Congress; the brightest glimmer of hope lies in housing and health-care policy by individual states. But it is still a dim glimmer. This crisis looks sure to stay with us for the coming decade, whatever recessions or expansions it may hold.

Jennifer Christie is a first time candidate, running for a seat north of Indianapolis. She knows quite a bit about the costs of child care. "I left a 'good job' when we adopted four children," she told me today. "In three years, we tripled our family size and had four children under four years old. My job required travel several times per month and often overseas. Childcare was not only complicated, but it was expensive. It would have cost well over 30,000 per year with so many littles. It just didn’t seem worth it to be away from my children so much and to give that much of my paycheck away.  So I started a home-based business and began teaching. My business was very successful; we were profitable, I had several employees, and was able to have a flexible schedule. I was so passionate about giving families freedom and a living wage that I mentored hundreds of other women entrepreneurs on starting their own business too. What I found was that childcare was the biggest challenge that women faced to start a business or to work at all, especially single moms who are some of the hardest working people on the planet. Childcare needs to be safe and affordable while paying childcare workers a living wage too (most childcare workers are also moms). We need the skills that moms bring to the table. I have worked in the sciences most of my career, but the toughest job around is Mom: it requires patience and strength, compassion and determination, selflessness and grit and so much more. Now more than ever we need a mom’s voice in Congress. I am running to be that voice to lift up families by guaranteeing universal healthcare, a livable planet, a living wage, education for all and universal childcare."

Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus went over the Trump budget and told her Seattle constituents that his "budget proposal leaves no question: His Administration does not care one bit about poor, middle-class and working Americans, nor about the future of our country, global relationships or planet. On every level, this budget neglects the health of our people, planet and democracy. Trump’s budget slashes funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, leaving our water, air and communities vulnerable to pollution, toxins and climate change. It recklessly destroys infrastructure investments that our communities badly need, completely zeroing out federal funds that the 7th congressional district relies on to make our highways and bridges safer, maintain and expand our port and public transit systems and build more affordable housing."

Trump’s budget also destroys critical programs that have supported vulnerable Americans and helped lift millions out of poverty. It cuts $6.2 billion in federal funding for education programs, jeopardizing our children and their future, and proposes changes to Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security that will hurt millions of Americans. It also slashes funding for important programs that help workers stay safe on the job and protect seniors in the workforce.

Instead of investing in education, health care, affordable housing, public health and other important priorities, the Trump budget floods money into more cruel attacks on immigrants and people of color. Trump wants to steal money from vital programs to fund his vanity wall and flood billions in immigration enforcement activities that promote racial profiling and mistreatment of communities of color. President Trump does not understand the values and investments that have made America and our people strong-- and it is no surprise his budget fails to reflect them as well.

President Trump’s national security budget is completely out of touch with reality. For the fourth year in a row, Trump’s budget also cuts funding for the State Department and international development-- the deep and disproportionate 22% cut to these programs will undermine our diplomatic efforts around the world. Meanwhile the budget includes $740.5 billion in defense spending for an unaccountable Pentagon plagued with corruption. Funneling more and more money to the Pentagon, which has been unable to even pass an audit, does not make us more secure.

What's Worse-- Biden's Sincere Belief In Austerity Or Trump's Belief In Nothing But Personal Corruption?

Trump's a monster, no doubt about it. He's a grifter who has not an ounce of patriotism nor the will towards public service in his bloated orange body or his misshapen shriveled soul. That said, unlike Joe Biden, Trump is not driven-- the way his party is-- to destroy Social Security and Medicare. And it isn't just the Republican Party that is eager to destroy the social safety net; it is also the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, faction of the party that has largely rallied behind Biden, one of the worst pro-Austerity warriors in our lifetimes, worse on that count than Trump, who doesn't care enough about it to want to stir up the ultimate hornets nest.

Over the weekend, Washington Post reporters Jeff Stein and Erica Werner looked at how Trump's proposed budget "is expected to lay bare how much he has adjusted to the political and practical limits of Washington, with some of his biggest campaign promises from 2016 cast aside and replaced with more limited policy ambitions. On immigration, health care, infrastructure and the deficit, the final budget pitch of Trump’s first term will look much different from the campaign platform he offered four years ago."

Those advising Trump are as eager to cut Social Security and Medicare as Biden and his faction are. If Trump was interested in issues beyond his own prospects of emptying the treasury into his own pockets, he might be as bad, or even worse, than Biden on the social safety net. So far, though, he has only let the Austerity hawks chip away around the edges. His campaign promises to protect Medicaid from cuts, wrote Stein and Werner have "been repeatedly ignored, as he has sought to slash some $800 billion over a decade from the health program for low-income Americans. The latest evidence of this came on Saturday, when he wrote on Twitter that the budget proposal 'will not be touching your Social Security or Medicare.' He made no mention of protecting Medicaid, even though he had vowed to guard it during his first presidential campaign. He is also seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act through the courts despite pledging to safeguard one of its key tenets: insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions."

Biden, who has advocated deep cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for his entire career, would be much less likely to beat around the bush. Trump is reticent because of the political blowback. Biden would ignore the blowback and see himself as the ultimate political martyr who only has one term anyway. He sees Austerity as an ultimate good. Trump only sees graft and corruption as ultimate goods.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to deliver a major infrastructure plan, but there has been virtually no progress on this issue.

And the president’s promise to eliminate the government’s roughly $20 trillion debt within eight years has also gone unfulfilled. Instead, Trump has added almost $3 trillion to the debt in three years, and that number is only expected to balloon, according to nonpartisan estimates. Proposals to cut domestic programs have evaporated in massive year-end budget deals with Congress that have actually raised spending limits.

Trump’s first budget proposal relied on questionable math when it sought to eliminate the budget deficit after 10 years, but even that goal has slipped out of reach.

Trump has scored a string of victories in recent months, including securing a bipartisan revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement and being acquitted by Republicans in the Senate on impeachment charges. He signed a partial trade deal with China and marshaled through a massive tax-cut package in 2017.

But Monday’s budget proposal will demonstrate that a number of the president’s loftiest campaign promises from four years ago have largely been abandoned, because of political realities as well as simple budget math.

“I have no idea how he can live up to his campaign promises to reduce the deficit, not address entitlement programs, and at the same time cut taxes,” said Bill Hoagland, a Republican who served as staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. “I have not figured out how to square this circle, and neither have they.”

...[E]ven more so than under prior administrations, Trump’s budget proposals have been largely rejected by lawmakers who’ve agreed on a bipartisan basis to restore and even increase spending for agencies and programs that the administration has tried to cut, including health and education programs and foreign aid.

Trump in the past few years has sought to backpedal on some of the proposed budget cuts, facing blowback after seeking to cut funding in states central to his reelection campaign, such as Michigan.

That has led to some dejection among career officials at agencies and within the White House Office of Management and Budget, who are forced to devote enormous time and attention to developing a budget document they know Congress will largely reject, according to several people with knowledge of internal administration dynamics who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them.

In prior years, Trump’s budgets have reflected the irreconcilable contradictions of his campaign promises in part by relying on overly rosy economic forecasts and glossing over how he would achieve big cuts.

In 2017, Trump’s budget predicted that economic growth would surge to an annual rate of 3 percent by 2021 and stay at that healthy rate indefinitely. This goal has proved elusive. The economy grew 2.9 percent in 2018 but slowed to 2.3 percent in 2019, and is projected to slow even more this year. Relying on rosy economic estimates in the budget plans allows the White House to assume that prospering families and companies will generate high levels of tax revenue as a way to offset the widening deficit. Instead, the deficit estimates have proved faulty.

Trump’s budgets have also proposed enormous cuts to domestic spending programs as a way to try to bring the deficit down. But nondefense domestic spending, aside from what are considered mandatory programs, makes up just a sliver of the overall $4.6 trillion federal budget. Mandatory programs, including the domestic programs Medicare and Social Security, make up more than 60 percent of federal spending. And since Trump has promised repeatedly to wall off Medicare and Social Security from cuts, while also increasing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security budgets, he has fewer agencies available for cuts if he wants to seek reductions.

Rep. Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann (R-TN), a member of the Appropriations Committee, said the deficit cannot be addressed until Congress and the administration take on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security. But he noted that Trump has promised to protect those programs, “and I will certainly respect that.”

“So I think right now, this year, is probably not the year to deal with the mandatory side of the equation,” Fleischmann said. “But perhaps that’s something that President Trump will look at with the Congress in his second term.”

Ironically, Fleischmann's bloodthirsty instincts would undoubtably better-served by a Biden (or, likely, a Bloomberg) administration that would go right in for the kill. "Although," wrote Stein and Werner, "Trump has talked publicly about wanting to cut spending, he has also signaled an indifference toward the federal budget... [and] rarely speaks of it. Leaked audio from a dinner the president attended in January with donors at Mar-a-Lago, his private resort in Florida, captured the president brushing aside those who are critical of rising defense and federal spending as part of the growing national debt. 'Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country,' the president said."





Biden and the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- the Blue Dogs, New Dems, so-called "Problem Solvers"-- care. Which is why the 2020 primary is the ultimate crossroads for the Democratic Party. Bernie wants to lead a party that embraces the philosophy of governance espoused by FDR. The B-Team embrace, albeit never openly, Rockefeller, Eisenhower and Nixon Republicanism.

Trump Gives Bernie A Present-- His New Anti-Family Budget

Writing for Fox New, Tom Del Beccaro, noted what Democratic journalists seem to be glossing over: "Joe Biden has always been a better prospective candidate than an actual candidate. He will gaffe himself to the finish lines." Del Beccaro wrote that Bernie will be the Democratic nominee. Acknowledging that the hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly conservative Democratic establishment "will side with almost anyone over Sanders, he thinks that "in the end that could well be to Sanders’ benefit in this Anti-establishment, divided era." He lays out 5 reasons why he thinks Bernie will win and anti-establishment sentiment ranks first on his list: "Sanders' supporters remember how he was unfairly denied the nomination in 2016. Of all the Democrats running right now, it is likely that Sanders has the most supporters and the largest number of committed voters. If you add all of that up, there is little to no doubt that Sanders-- who lost Iowa in 2016 to Hillary by a margin of 49.84 percent to 49.59 percent-- will finish in the top two in Iowa. He could well win. Sanders won New Hampshire in 2016 and-- in a crowded field-- he is more than likely to win it again in 2020. That will make him a front runner if not the front runner after the first two primaries."

Did you watch the video up top. Del Beccaro might as well be reviewing it: "Voters want answers and they like politicians who have clarity. You can argue that Sanders’ message and programs would be very bad for America-- but he is clear and focused. New candidates have to sort out their messages.

Meanwhile, Bernie couldn't have asked for a better foil than the one Trump provided him with by releasing his new budget-- which Bernie termed "a budget for corporate CEOs, who already make over 300 times what their workers make, this is a budget for Wall Street, this is a budget for the billionaire class. This is a budget that must and will be defeated. We need a budget that works for Americans, not just Donald Trump and the 1 percent." The Act Blue thermometer on the right is where you can contribute to Bernie's campaign. Obviously whatever you feel comfortable giving will be accepted with thanks. One suggestion would be a donation of $20.20, an acknowledgment that next year is a crucial, even existential, crossroads for our country.

In the new video below, Tim Black laughs in the faces of the pathetic establishment Democrats and the corporate media which keep shrilly insisting that Bernie and his populist policy agenda aren't popular with African-American voters.

Ice Pick Donald's Budget Proposal, "Designed By Robber Barons"

Narcissistic Psychopath by Nancy Ohanian

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

Attending as press, alas, not as a member, I first crossed paths with the Patriotic Millionaires several years ago at one of their events in Washington. At a dinner they hosted afterwards, I had the added treat of Alan Grayson at my table, and was mighty impressed with both the group and with Grayson’s witty comments about naked influence-peddling on the Hill and Congressional hypocrisy. I can’t speak on the whole roster of the group, but those I met were not better-heeled because they started out as trust-funders. They’d combined their abilities with hard work and the businesses they ran represented a wide cross-section of the economy. Many started out as small business entrepreneurs. Usually not glamorous businesses, but clever ideas that bed-rocked well-run operations that after considerable effort had turned out decently well for them. Perhaps that fires their alarm at a deck stacked evermore against the little guy by the big money and complicit politicians taking in what in any sane society would be labeled as bribes. The group knows that as the playing field tilts, the opportunities they enjoyed diminish for others, and that bodes ill for America's economic future.

The group relishes the label “traitors to their class.” The three-legged stool on which the group sits is formed of equal political representation, a guaranteed living wage for all working citizens and a fair tax system.

Trump’s outrageous budget proposal motivated this essay by Morris Pearl, a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc. and chair of the Patriotic Millionaires.

Budget for a Nightmare America
-By Morris Pearl

On Monday, President Trump released his 2019 budget proposal, a plan that outlines a series of massive cuts to vital public programs in the ludicrously titled “A Budget for a Better America.”

While this is just a list of funding ideas that mean nothing without Congressional approval, it outlines Trump’s vision for our economic future-- one that allows us already wealthy people to get even richer, at the expense of everyone else. The chief targets of the budget are a proposed $845 billion cut from Medicare over the next decade, reductions to welfare programs and Social Security, and sharp cuts to agencies that keep us safe like the Environmental Protection Agency and State Department.

Strangely, while the President can’t seem to find the money to fund these programs, he thinks the government coffers have more than enough to fund $8.6 billion in border wall funding and a nearly 5 percent increase to the Pentagon’s budget.

It’s no secret that Republicans have been trying to gut public services for years, so what makes this new plan particularly heinous? It’s not just the immediate spikes in healthcare costs or the loss of crucial welfare assistance. It’s not even the fact that slashing those vital public services that will leave the majority of our most vulnerable citizens in an even more precarious position long-term.

It’s the shameless hypocrisy that comes from the President claiming we don’t have the money to fund all these services when he just gave his friends (and himself) a massive $1.5 trillion tax cut barely over a year ago. You would be hard pressed to find anyone outside of the White House who believes that the country is better off with more tax cuts for millionaires and less funding for Medicare.

To add further insult to injury, Trump’s budget proposal is the largest in federal history, at a total budget of $4.75 trillion. There was clearly no real attempt to limit federal spending, and this budget is going to be dead on arrival in Congress, which leads to the question: what’s the point?

With no chance of this budget becoming law anytime soon, it’s likely, then, that this serves as a blueprint for Trump’s re-election promises. That future is the true danger of Trump’s budget. Even if this is just a posturing plan right now, one that’s completely unrooted in reality, it serves as the economic vision that Republicans will propose to voters in 2020, and one they will try to deliver if elected.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. If Trump and his Republican counterparts in Congress say they want to cut Medicare, believe them. If they tell you that they want to continue giving tax breaks to the wealthy while that happens, believe them. And you should believe me when I say this vision is bad economics – bad for business, bad for workers, and even bad for us millionaire investors and business people, who depend on healthy and happy consumers and workers to drive growth.

Conservatives rely on the constant refrain that spending is out of control and that cuts are needed to rein it in and balance the budget. But as this budget shows, the cuts come from everywhere except the people and corporations that have the most to give back to the system that allowed us to rise in the first place. It exacerbates our existing inequality by slashing these services and giving us millionaires even more opportunity to avoid paying our fair share. A better America is one that invests its dollars in its own citizens and ensures an equality of opportunity that benefits us all. A budget designed by robber barons to benefit the few, at the expense of everyone else, will not deliver that dream.

Revolving Door by Nancy Ohanian

While I can’t imagine Trump’s budget flying much faster than a lead balloon, it’s a gift to opponents seeking Exhibit A on the hypocrisy of Trump’s campaign claims of helping those in the country who are hurting. How rotten the proposal is was underscored by Pulitzer-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, editor of DCReport.org. Interviewed on Democracy Now!

…this budget is budget lessons I learned, as Donald Trump learned, from dictator Kim. So, the first thing you do is you take care of your military. You pour every dollar you can into a military that is bigger than you need. And that’s your number one goal, to make sure that you have loyalty and stay in power.

Then what you do is you take the disabled and the poor on Medicare, and you cut close to a trillion dollars over the next 10 years out of care for them. You take SNAP, which provides nutrition to pregnant women, children and elderly people and the disabled. “Hey, let’s slash that!”

Education. There were all these students who were ripped off by for-profit colleges that cost four or five times what a community college did, and gave you a lousy education, and some of them went broke. “Make them pay every penny!” They, in fact, say it isn’t fair unless these students pay it back. So they’re taking the side of the bankers against the students.

Housing. Let’s cut money for housing, people who are disabled, people who are on aids, people who are poor. We’re going to cut that. And to New York and New Jersey, by saying, “We are not going to fund the replacement of the 110-year-old tunnel,” through which thousands of commuters and people traveling up and down the East Coast travel every day, tunnels owned by the federal government’s Amtrak—

…what’s important here…is a budget is a statement of values. And Donald Trump has revealed his values. He has the values of a dictator. That’s why I said budget lessons from dictator Kim. And all of his claims about “I love the cops,” and then he took away their ability to take as a tax deduction buying uniforms and guns and dry cleaning and paying union dues; “I love the students,” and he wants to take away the subsidized loans and make people who got for-profit college educations that failed—colleges that failed—to make them pay. Donald Trump has no regard for anyone but himself. And so long as we treat him as if he’s a serious person who has real policies, we’re going to get nowhere. What we need to do is mock him and make fun of him. He’s not very smart, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

The Emperor by Nancy Ohanian

Johnston also mentioned some of the disturbing reality of Trump’s tax cut:

"…the economy is already slowing down. And 10 years into this market, which began under President Obama, you would expect it, at this point, to begin to slow down. So, we only saw 20,000 jobs last month. You know, Trump goes around talking about “I have the biggest employment in American history.” That’s not the measure. Job growth is a good measure. Job growth has been about 20 percent lower under Trump than under Obama since the economy turned around. Tax revenues in the last 90-day period were 2 percent lower, which goes right to the heart of how this tax cut for the rich is not paying for itself. And, you know, little-known fact: Donald Trump’s tax law gave 8-year loans at zero interest to all the multinational companies that had siphoned profits out of the country, and it also gave them a discount. So, I’ve written about how Apple alone-- just Apple-- will turn a $120 billion profit off the Trump tax law, $120 billion."

If the Democrats play their cards right, they can use Ice Pick Donald’s budget to help sink him in 2020, and to take the Republican Senate down with him. Consider how this budget will play in the critical counties in the states Trump flipped, where exasperated voters who voted for Obama twice, hardly racist deplorables, stood Trump up as their default middle finger to the Washington establishment. These are voters in areas where, in the immortal words of Wall Street’s Manchurian Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, people “foamed the runway for the banks.” These are areas where good jobs rusted out, leaving people scrambling in futile efforts to stay even, where affordable educational opportunities for their children faded away. These are communities where families shoulder disproportionate tragedies from America’s endless wars, and from the pharmaceutical assaults of opioids.

In many of these communities Bernie outperformed both Hillary and Trump in the 2016 primaries. For these citizens, Bernie’s well-articulated and steady message will continue to resonate.

Democrats Can Pile On About What A Nightmare Trump's Budget Is-- But Can't Come Up With One Of Their Own?

If the budget is a statement of values, the Democrats' presumed inability to unite behind one, speaks volumes about a party whose tent is too big to be functional. Trump's DOA budget will never get a vote but his intention of a high increase for the Pentagon and paying for his vanity wall by cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is all anyone needs to know about his values and his party's values. Trump's obscene $4.7 trillion budget would cut $845 billion from Medicare-- didn't he say he was the only Republican who would never cut that?-- $241 billion from Medicaid and slash Social Security by $25 billion over 10 years-- not to mention drastic cuts to food stamps and a $207 billion cut to student loans including the outright elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Democrats will have a field day demonizing his budget-- and rightly so. But what about their own?

Yesterday Sarah Ferris and Heather Caygle, reporting for Politico, wrote that though the Democrats have finally gained back control of the House "they’re likely to skip one of their most fundamental responsibilities: passing a budget. Eager to steer clear of another public intraparty battle, House Democrats are expected to avoid a vote on a budget this year."

House Democrats are still drafting a budget, which would offer their first chance as a new majority to formally outline their broader agenda. But the resolution-- which is purely a political messaging document and is not signed into law-- would also stoke major ideological clashes within the caucus over “Medicare for All,” the “Green New Deal” and defense spending.

“We’re still proceeding as if we’re going to do one, but we’re also considering other options because we don’t know if we can get 218 votes for anything,” House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY) said in an interview Monday.

Indeed, in a worst-case scenario for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party, the budget could be an embarrassing flop on the House floor.

Most Democrats say publicly they want a chance to vote on their party’s fiscal blueprint after eight years of rejecting GOP budgets.

Privately, however, lawmakers and aides say that a budget is unlikely to come for a final vote. It’s an acknowledgment of the divisions within the caucus even on key principles, and a sign of how difficult it will be to craft actual legislation in the months to come.

Democratic leaders have made no formal decision, though Yarmuth met Monday with Pelosi and other top Democratic leaders, including House Appropriations Chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-NY), as they discussed skipping a floor vote. That meeting comes after Yarmuth has spent weeks huddling with dozens of committee and caucus leaders as he strives to bring it to the floor despite the daunting odds.

Several senior Democratic aides said it makes little political sense to spend weeks perfecting a messaging document when there are other items with far greater partywide appeal on their to-do list, like an upcoming vote to address the gender pay gap.

That’s particularly true, they added, after the caucus’ factions openly warred last week over how to handle Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments criticizing pro-Israel advocates.

“I hope we can work through a budget process, but it will not be easy, and I get the idea that it may be impossible to arrive at consensus on that document,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

“It’s ultimately a political decision whether to bring a budget to the floor,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) added. “And so a pragmatic decision often gets made: Where do you want to put your political capital?”

Yarmuth said his budget won’t include some of the most iconic ideas championed by progressives, like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, which have been panned by moderates.

But he acknowledged in a separate interview last week that the decision could cost him votes from the party’s progressives: “The complicating factor is that there are members who probably would have a hard time voting for a budget that didn’t in some way anticipate the Green New Deal. Same thing with Medicare for All.”

House Democrats still plan to release their budget draft this month, which will be their counteroffer to the newly unveiled White House budget. Unlike spending bills to fund the government, Congress doesn’t need to pass a budget on the floor. The House and Senate rarely find agreement during divided government.

With a tricky electoral map for Republicans in 2020, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is unlikely to put his members through a budget vote on the floor, though his budget chairman, Mike Enzi (R-WY), has said he plans to draft one.

But failing to pass a budget would be an embarrassment for Democratic leaders, who hammered Republicans when they were in power for consistently struggling to unite over a party blueprint-- and failing to put one on the floor at all last year. House Republicans skipped a floor vote amid an ugly intraparty fight over how deeply to cut assistance programs for the poor.

It also wouldn’t be the first time Pelosi punted; her previous majority skipped a budget in 2010, even when Democrats controlled both chambers.

Still, Democrats had been expected to pass a budget this year after their decisive win in November, with their members eager to define their political brand and show progress to their base after two years in a GOP-controlled Washington.

This year’s historic freshman class, however, heightens the challenges for Democratic budget writers. Forty-three of the party’s new members come from previously Republican-held districts, and GOP operatives are watching closely for controversial votes.

Even with the rise of progressive lawmakers like high-profile freshman Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, there are more Democrats in the centrist Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions than in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Every major caucus and committee is in talks with Yarmuth and other top Democrats to craft this year’s blueprint. And every corner of the caucus will need to back the budget, because Democrats can afford to lose few votes on the floor.

Some moderates [Note: when Politico uses the term "moderate" to describe the far right of the Democratic Party, they are doing so help make the Republican-lite policies that wing espouses seem attractive to the casual reader] say they have little interest in squabbling over the fine print of a budget this year. Instead, they say Democrats should focus on the looming threat of another budget sequester, which would impose billions of dollars in cuts if Congress can’t reach a deal this fall.

“What matters is the numbers. A lot of the budget resolution ends up being sort of a messaging document, which I think most people here have less interest in,” said Rep. Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA), co-chair of the New Democrat Coalition. “My hope is that we can thread that needle in a careful way.”

Rep. Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), a co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, said his group has only occasionally voted to support Democratic budgets on the floor in the past. This year, the group has worked behind the scenes to push for a budget proposal that wouldn’t add to the deficit, along with other demands, but hasn’t committed to supporting it.

“Maybe there’s an opportunity to have a paid-for budget that makes sense and we can get behind,” Schrader told reporters when asked about the budget’s prospects.

A deficit-neutral proposal, however, would force Democrats to make tough sacrifices when writing the budget. The outcome could anger defense hawks who want to see massive Pentagon budgets or progressives who want bigger investments in education and anti-poverty programs.

“The job he has to do, I wouldn’t want to do it,” Rep. Tom O’Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), another co-chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, said of Yarmuth. “The American people expect us to do a budget, that’s our job. It’s one of the core responsibilities of Congress, especially the House.”

Democrats say they fear drafting a budget resolution would harden battle lines among the various factions, particularly defense hawks and doves as they’re forced to settle on a total dollar amount for the Pentagon.

“Obviously, we would love to be able to have a Democratic Caucus unity budget, but it’s going to be a line to walk to get there,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview. One of their group’s key requests involves more accountability for Pentagon spending.

Yesterday, in an e-mail, Bernie told his supporters that "It was not long ago that the idea of Medicare for All was dismissed and ridiculed by the corporate media and political establishment of this country. Too radical, they said. Fringe. Crazy. Pie in the sky. Well, they are not saying that anymore. Because today, not only do a strong majority of Americans believe health care should be a right in this country, but it is also a mainstream Democratic Party position... How can we call this a civilized society when some Americans have access to the best medical care in the world and others are unable to walk into a doctor’s office because they lack money? How can we tolerate a situation where the children or parents of the rich get the medical attention they need in order to stay alive, while members of working-class families, who lack health insurance, have to die or needlessly suffer or go hopelessly into debt to get the care they need?"

I hope he asks Pelosi and the reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems she's coddling. And particularly Blue Dog Cheri Bustos, the DCCC Chair who is busy recruiting more Blue Dogs and more New Dems to further pollute the Democratic Party's values and turn it into another neo-liberal institution owned and operated by the plutocracy.

In the context of a battle over fundamental economic theory, William K. Black noted on Monday that "polls showing enormous public support for the key progressive initiatives terrify the neoliberals. Sanders’ 2016 policy initiatives have transformed the Democratic Party candidates’ policy proposals for 2020. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Warren’s policy proposals are having a similar effect. Polls show broad support for the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a jobs guaranty program, a tax system that would reverse the current race to plutocracy, a campaign to reduce gun slaughter and massacres, the restoration of the rule of law (including antitrust laws) to business (particularly banking and Silicon Valley), and a meaningful minimum wage."

The massive, coordinated assault on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) scholars by the most elite forces of orthodoxy represents a watershed moment in economics, but we must not lose sight that the real attack is actually on progressives, particularly the newly elected progressive members of Congress plus Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. Even that statement is incomplete, for it is the combination of the rise of these progressive elected officials, the 2020 presidential election (and nomination battle), and the exceptional embrace of progressive policies by the general public and Democratic Party candidates for the presidential nomination that prompted the coordinated and personalized assault of overwhelmingly neoliberal economists on MMT scholars. This first column in a series provides an overview of why the progressives’ embrace of MMT spurred the terrified assault on MMT by orthodox economists.

...The emerging progressive policy core enjoys far stronger public support than do the neoliberal policies of the self-described Democratic Party ‘moderates.’ That professed ‘moderation,’ has become code for extreme opposition to the policies that the public overwhelmingly supports. The progressive policy core is centrist in terms of the electorate’s preferences. The progressive policy core is not “socialist,” “extreme,” or “left.”

The Democratic Party “moderates,” on two key economic issues, their embrace of austerity and willingness to cut the safety net, are to the right of Republican conservatives. Republicans only pretend to embrace austerity when there is a Democratic president. The New Democrats, Blue Dogs, and “Problem Solver” Democrats actually believe in inflicting self-destructive austerity and cuts to the safety net regardless of the President’s party. Neoliberal Democrats’ big club to bash progressive policies is the typically mythical catastrophic effects of federal budget deficits. MMT scholarship disarms neoliberals, removing the legitimacy of their deficit hysteria ‘club’ in the vast bulk of circumstances where federal deficits do not cause significant shortages of real resources.

Fox News, President Trump, and neoliberal economists mounted a desperate attack on the progressive policy core precisely because the public overwhelmingly supports it. Their attack makes three claims. First, the policy core represents bad economics. Second, the policy core represents ‘socialism.’ Third, even if the policies are desirable, the world cannot afford to adopt them. These three points form the all-encompassing neoliberal meme that the government cannot and should not act to protect the public. They think the government should serve and fund the plutocrats, kleptocrats, and the “chicken hawks’” massive military expenditures and wars.  Neoliberals try desperately to convince the public to adopt their ideology that democratic government is fundamentally illegitimate while the reality of a rigged kleptocracy represents the fiction of ‘capitalism.’

Since the Blue Dog Eva Putzova is competing with for the AZ-01 seat, Tom O'Halleran, is a member of the Budget Committee who is so very fond of austerity-- and since he quoted above-- I asked Eva where she comes down on these budgetary questions. She told us she supports "the request of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to include more accountability for Pentagon spending that would include a rigorous audit. Money that is wasted in defense spending can be reallocated to needed investments in veteran care, healthcare, green energy, education, and other areas without harming our national security. In fact, if we are serious about national security and defense we turn our attention to the real vulnerabilities of our communities: electrical grid, clean water supply, and digital security."

The virulent attacks by conservatives against the progressive agenda are not swaying candidates like Mike Siegel in Texas. In fact-- just the opposite. Last night he told us that "The 2020 election will be the moment when Americans can decide, once and for all, that we want universal healthcare. The public sentiment is there. It is up to candidates and elected officials to honor the will of the people. Here in Central and Gulf Coast Texas, we have at least four national battleground Congressional districts for the 2020 election, in TX-10, TX-21, TX-22, and TX-31, and several more contested races. In TX-10, I will be running strong on Medicare for All, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because this legislation will save thousands upon thousands of lives, but also because we must draw a line in the sand for every Democratic candidate, and push every candidate to support universal healthcare. We only have these opportunities once every 20 or 40 years, to reform the national healthcare system. If we don't push for Medicare for All now, we might lose our chance for a generation or more. The people are counting us to show a little courage; to resist the moneyed interests; and to fight for their health and lives."