File Under: Another Major Campaign Promise Broken

If the Trump Regime were running up mega-deficits by improving the country's healthcare system or educational system or by improving the infrastructure-- all promises he made during his campaign and then tossed away as soon as he got into the White House in favor of massive tax cuts for the wealthy (another campaign promise broken)-- I wouldn't mind the nearly trillion dollar deficit this year. But that's not how he ran up the gargantuan deficit. He ran it up by slashing revenues with a tax cut for the super-wealthy and by wasting money on personal projects that enriched himself and his cronies. The Associated Press reported that "The $984 billion deficit tally for 2019 came in more than $200 billion more than last year's, despite very low unemployment and continuing economic growth." Conservative economists "have long taken the position that deficits and the nation's $22 trillion national debt are unsustainable. CBO noted that deficits have been growing faster than the size of the economy for four years in a row, ending 2019 at 4.7 percent of gross domestic product."

There's no appetite in Washington to try politically painful medicine to deal with the deficit. Democrats have noted the spike in deficits since President Donald Trump's tax cut plan was passed in 2017, while Trump has promised not to touch popular retirement benefits like Social Security and Medicare.

Trump has already proposed a budget that violently slashes Social Security, Medicare and other parts of the tattered social safety net. So that was stupid reporting from AP. They should have shown examples of how Trump is misappropriating funds. Major Danny Sjursen did at Truthdig this week. He's a retired U.S. Army officer and former history instructor at West Point. He served tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and his piece for Truthdig, Secretary of Defense, Incorporated, is completely typical of how the entire Trumpist Regime functions. "Trump," Sjursen points out, "has installed faceless bureaucrats to run the most powerful national security state in human history. And the rest of us hardly notice. Trump’s appointment of Mark Esper as head of the largest and most active Cabinet department, and the new Defense Secretary’s near unanimous approval by the U.S. Senate, is no less of a scandal than Trump’s apparent efforts to seek foreign interference in the 2020 elections. Only it isn’t. Still, the nomination of Esper, a recent lobbyist for the defense contracting corporation Raytheon, ranks as one of the most egregious illustrations of the 'revolving door' between lobbyists and the Defense Department. It’s crony capitalism in fatigues, and while nothing new, a clear indication that things have only worsened under our reality-show-mogul-president." Bernie was out of town that day but he opposed Esper's confirmation, as did the other senators running for president, other than the Republican pretending to be a Democrat, Michael Bennet (CO).

Of course, seen through the rose-colored glasses of American empire, Esper is highly qualified to head the Defense Department. He’s a West Point graduate, former Army infantry officer, recipient of a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard and a doctorate in public policy from George Washington University, and has past experience working in the Pentagon.

If one digs further, however, Esper is wildly problematic-- loaded with conflicts of interest, a veteran of the (should be) discredited neoconservative Bush-era DOD, and little more than a corporate “company man.” He didn’t just work for Raytheon, he lobbied on the defense contractor’s behalf only recently. Under rather sharp questioning by Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation hearings, Esper refused to recuse himself from participating in government business involving Raytheon. In typically lifeless language, Esper replied that “On the advice of my ethics folks at the Pentagon, the career professionals: No, their recommendation is not to.” How’s that for accepting responsibility? No matter, he was swiftly and quietly confirmed by a vote of 90-8 in the Senate.

Expect another banner year for Raytheon. It’s already the third-largest U.S. defense contractor, and produces, among other tools of destruction, Paveway precision-guided missiles-- the very weapons that Congress recently sought to stop shipping to Saudi Arabia due to (rather tardy) concerns about the heads of Yemeni civilians upon which they’re dropped.

I predict more deals and more taxpayer billions for Raytheon with Esper at the Defense helm. Not that the company has done poorly during the Trump years. In 2018, Raytheon CEO Thomas Kennedy candidly quipped that “It’s the best time that we’ve ever seen for the defense industry.” Not for indebted taxpayers, bombed-out Middle Easterners or U.S. soldiers still dying in endless wars, it’s not. But sure, it truly is the best of times for what prominent American leaders-- once upon a time-- labeled the “merchants of death.”





Conflicts of interest, sliding seamlessly between defense contracting boards and the Pentagon, and securing post-government largesse on corporate boards, that’s an old story indeed. Looking back to 2001, most Defense Secretaries have troublesome private sector connections. Donald Rumsfeld entered the Pentagon after a 24-year business career; Robert Gates was on the board of directors of Fidelity Investments and the Parker Drilling Company; Chuck Hagel served on the boards of Chevron and Deutsche Bank; Ash Carter-- an exception-- was mostly an academic and a bureaucratic wonk, but still consulted for Goldman Sachs. All made millions.

That covers the Bush and Obama years. What we’ve seen in the Trump administration, is, however, something far more brazen. His three Secretaries of Defense (one of whom, Patrick Shanahan, was only acting head) have been unapologetically ensconced in the world of defense contracting and corporate lobbying.

“Saint” Jim Mattis had, while still a general, encouraged the military to buy the blood test products of Theranos, then dropped the service and joined its corporate board. But Theranos’ products did not work, the deal described by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud.” Mattis also served, both before and after his Pentagon stint, on the board of General Dynamics, the nation’s fifth largest defense contractor. Nonetheless, Mattis easily slid through his confirmation and was praised by all types of mainstream media as the administration’s “adult in the room.”

After Mattis resigned, he being unable to countenance even Trump’s hints at modest withdrawal from the wars in Syria and Afghanistan, Patrick Shanahan stepped in as interim defense chief. Unlike his predecessor, Shanahan didn’t emerge from the military, but rather from yet another defense contractor, Boeing, for which he’s worked some 30 years. Trump thought that was dandy and nominated him to officially replace Mattis, but Shanahan decided to withdraw due to alleged personal scandals. Enter Mark Esper, Raytheon lobbyist extraordinaire.

Esper’s in good company in Washington’s military-industrial swamp. Recent reports by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO)-- a vital organization that hardly any American has heard of-- identified “645 instances in the past 10 years in which a retired senior official, member of Congress or senior legislative staff member became employed as a registered lobbyist, board member or business executive at a major government contractor.” POGO also noted that “those walking through the revolving door included 25 generals, nine admirals, 43 lieutenant generals and 23 vice admirals.”

All of which begs some questions and provides some disturbing answers. Perhaps we ought to ditch the myth that the Defense Secretary simply heads the Pentagon, and admit that Esper is really the emperor of a far grander military-industrial complex that includes a veritable army of K-Street lobbyists and venal arms dealers. Maybe it’s time to concede that unelected national security czars, and not a stalemated bought-and-sold Congress, run national defense and set the gigantic Pentagon budget. Perhaps we should confess to ourselves that the nation’s vaunted soldiers are little more than political pawns in a game that’s far bigger, far more Kafkaesque, than those troopers could begin to fathom. And, finally, let’s admit one last thing: Few of us care.

At Blue America we care very much and we look for candidates who we feel will never sell out to the military industrial complex and who will, in fact, push back against it in the strongest possible ways. Progressive Nebraska congressional candidate Kara Eastman told us today that "You'd expect that Rep. Don Bacon would apply his military background to maintain a patina of oversight over this brazen wholesaling of the defense budget. However, and despite his tenure on the House Armed Services Committee, Bacon has traded oversight and review for campaign cash and ignorance. Case in point are the cost overruns at Offut Airforce Base, which used to be under his purview. Costs for repairing the base from climate change-induced flooding has gone through the roof and Bacon has signed off on diverting key funds supporting the 55th Wing to the Southern Border Wall."

Eva Putzova, a progressive Democrat from Flagstaff running for an Arizona congressional seat held by Republican-turned-Blue Dog Tom O'Halleran, one of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress, told us that " The appointment of Mark Esper, the former lobbyist for Raytheon, as Secretary of Defense, demonstrates the total corruption of our military-industrial complex. Raytheon receives billions of dollars from the Pentagon and nations like Saudi Arabia to manufacture weapons used to kill civilians in Yemen and elsewhere. My opponent, the incumbent blue dog "Democrat," takes campaign contributions from Raytheon and is silent on the influence of arms dealers in the Pentagon budgeting process.  Besides the enormous waste of taxpayers money which adds to our deficit in an unproductive manner the waste in human lives is even greater. When I am in Congress I will endorse legislation to outlaw the revolving door between private contractors and government service. I will also oppose all wars of choice and our role in the arms trade that fuels wars in which we are not directly involved."

Why Haven't Democratic Candidates Been Referring To Trump As "Deficit Don?"

The "Freedom Caucus" is screaming its collective head off about growing deficits again, threatening to Boehnerize GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and threatening to kill the budget deal agreed to by Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, Schumer and McCarthy. The "Freedom Caucus" statement: "The House Freedom Caucus has grave concerns about this budget agreement and will oppose it on the House floor. Our country is undeniably headed down a path of fiscal insolvency and rapidly approaching $23 trillion in debt. This is completely unsustainable, and we owe taxpayers and future generations better. We should be working together on a bipartisan basis to cut spending and balance our budget-- or, at bare minimum, holding to the existing spending caps to prevent a significant problem from becoming even worse. All sides should go back to the drawing board and work around the clock, canceling recess if necessary, on a responsible budget agreement that serves American taxpayers better-- not a $323 billion spending frenzy with no serious offsets."

As you can easily see in the graph above. George W Bush left President Obama a humongous budget deficit which Trump worked for 8 years to bring down-- even at the expense of his own agenda for the country. He left Trump with a relatively modest deficit which Trump and the Republican Party are well on schedule to double, wiping out all the efforts of Obama in bringing it down. While bringing the deficit up, Trump has accomplished virtually nothing for the American people-- no infrastructure advances whatsoever, nothing to help in the fields of healthcare, education, or moderating economic inequality.

The new Morning Consult poll asked how important of a priority several issues should be for Congress? One was "reducing the federal budget deficit." Most registered voters think that is important. 46% said it should be a "top priority" and 34% said it should be important but a lower priority. Just 10% said it either was not too important or shouldn't be done at all.

This week, the Washington Post published a piece by Bob Costa and Mike DeBonis, 'We're Like Thelma And Louise': Republicans Shrug At Deficits Under Trump. "In 2011," they wrote, "with the nation still climbing back from the Great Recession, Republicans threatened global markets by refusing to raise the federal debt limit unless President Barack Obama and the Democrats agreed to steep across-the-board spending cuts for years to come. Eight years later-- and $7.7 trillion more in debt-- President Trump and GOP lawmakers have agreed this week to lift the debt ceiling again without a fuss, and with hundreds of billions in new spending on top of it."

The deal marks a significant capitulation to Trump after years of brinkmanship from Republicans claiming the mantle of fiscal responsibility, underscoring the president’s far-reaching hold over his party and a disregard for the budget-cutting and debt reduction that conservatives long claimed as priorities.

John Avlon, reporting for CNN.com, wrote, "It's official: Conservatives only care about deficits when a Democrat is president. Under Donald Trump the deficit is on a path to more than a trillion dollars per year and discretionary government spending is growing faster than it was under Barack Obama, when he was working to stimulate our way out of the Great Recession."

But what was angrily portrayed as generational theft and galloping socialism under President Obama is now accepted with all the outrage of a cow chewing its cud.

Everyone in Washington seems to suddenly accept the economic and political benefits of government spending, as the GOP hopes to keep the stock market goosed past Trump's reelection. While it's great that Washington appears to have avoided another truly stupid, self-inflicted government shutdown, Congress is whistling past the graveyard. That's because deficits are growing while the economy is booming-- up 23% in the first nine months of the fiscal year alone. That's not supposed to happen. And there will be hell to pay when the remorseless math of rapidly falling tax revenue kicks in during the next downturn.

That is very bad news for those of us who will be left to clean up the mess after Donald Trump has left DC. Because there is no way that Democrats are ever going to fall for the inevitable Lucy and the Football moment that will come when conservatives say that it's time to rein in spending.

No less than Rush Limbaugh just admitted the whole thing was a conservative con job, telling a caller: "All this talk about concern for the deficit and the budget has been bogus for as long as it's been around."

That's quite a slap in the face after the Obama-era bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission tried to implement the warnings of fiscal conservatives with a balanced plan that was rejected by party leaders-- including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who called for its creation in no less than six floor speeches but then whipped votes against it when the rhetoric threatened to become reality.

In Trump's Washington, deficit hawks are an endangered species. The alleged fiscal principles of the Tea Party have been sold for scrap, leaving only its nativist impulses intact. And there's no obvious way out of the escalating deficits and debt that will compromise our fiscal independence in the next downturn.

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to eliminate America's then-$19 trillion-dollar debt in eight years. Anyone who believed that fell for the Don's Con-- after all, this was the self-styled "King of Debt" talking. Under Trump, the national debt just passed $22 trillion for the first time in history.

The danger is that the political benefit of breezy lies seems to have been codified. And it's too much to expect that yet another Democratic president is going to be more fiscally responsible than the Republicans who constantly talk about fiscal discipline and then deliver increased deficits and debt.

It's a story we've seen repeatedly since Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton was famously the last president to preside over a budget surplus and by 2014 Barack Obama had gotten our deficits to half of what they are today under Donald Trump, despite the Great Recession. Because of the sequestration deal that was just taken off the books in this latest budget deal, Obama presided over a reduction in discretionary government spending of nearly 2% per year in his second term.

During the last Republican presidency of George W. Bush, a group of conservatives bitterly criticized its drift on deficits and debt. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence slammed the "profound loss of credibility on issues of fiscal discipline," saying that "big government conservatism is a failed experiment." Now that he is Vice President, Pence has been not so much muted as neutered on the issue. But no doubt, he'll find a way to blame Democrats when we reap the whirlwind for the actions taken in his administration's name.

Remember, when Trump was a candidate, he promised he would completely end the budget deficit. Now Trump is running the finances of the country as though deficits don't matter, perhaps hearing the first part of a Stephanie Kelton lecture on MMT but nodding off and missing the second part-- the part talking about how deficit-inducing spending needs to be spent (to benefit the general good, something the Trump Regime hasn't done).

Trump In The White House Absolutely Predicts A Recession-- The Question Is Just How Soon

The Obama administration worked hard to turn the economy around after Trump inherited an economy that would have been a dream for any president. He immediately set out to sabotage it and, unfortunately, his policies are finally kicking in strongly enough to wreck everything that Obama did to right the economy Bush left him-- and us. But before we get into Trump's disastrous policies, one little note: his utter and complete lack of leadership abilities are working hand in hand with bad policy to bring down the economy. Take this insane tweet from yesterday announcing that the Treasury Department had slapped additional sanctions on North Korea and that just hours later Trump was countermanding them. How does something like that even happen? Was there a gnome working at Treasury and doing whatever he wanted to do with no supervision?

Worse yet, Trump announced that he is nominating another entirely unfit ideologue to a position where he will undoubtably harm everything he touches. Trumponomics author Stephen Moore, like Trump, a harsh critic of Trump-appointed Fed chair Jerome Powell, will soon be serving on the Fed. "Moore’s primary area of pseudo-expertise-- he is not an economist-- is fiscal policy," wrote Jonathan Chait. "He is a dedicated advocate of supply-side economics, relentlessly promoting his fanatical hatred of redistribution and belief that lower taxes for the rich can and will unleash wondrous prosperity. Like nearly all supply-siders, he has clung to this dogma in the face of repeated, spectacular failures."

OK, tuck all that away for a moment while we consider two dire reports from Bloomberg News Friday morning, on just after sunrise and one at 11AM. First was the announcement of a curve inversion, an event that usually signals a recession is on the horizon.

The Treasury yield curve inverted for the first time since the last crisis Friday, triggering the first reliable market signal of an impending recession and rate-cutting cycle.

The gap between the three-month and 10-year yields vanished as a surge of buying pushed the latter to a 14-month low of 2.416 percent. Inversion is considered a reliable harbinger of recession in the U.S., within roughly the next 18 months.

Demand for government bonds gained momentum Wednesday, when U.S. central bank policy makers lowered both their growth projections and their interest-rate outlook. The majority of officials now envisages no hikes this year, down from a median call of two at their December meeting. Traders took that dovish shift as their cue to dig into positions for a Fed easing cycle, pricing in a cut by the end of 2020 and a one-in-two chance of a reduction as soon as this year.

“It looks like the global slowdown worries have been confirmed and the market is beginning to price in Fed easing, potential recession down the road,” said Kathy Jones, chief fixed-income strategist at Charles Schwab & Co. “It’s clearly a sign that the market is worried about growth and moving into Treasuries from riskier asset classes.”

Too abstract? How about U.S. Posts Largest-Ever Monthly Budget Deficit in February? Will Trump call a market crash "fake news?" Largest monthly budget deficit ever-- key word "ever"-- seem like a big deal, no? And that duet deficit is obviously a result, at least in part, of falling tax revenues because of the catastrophic GOP tax bill of last year, and increased spending as Trump attempts, entirely unsuccessfully, to buy his way into some kind of popularity.

The budget gap widened to $234 billion in February, compared with a fiscal gap of $215.2 billion a year earlier. That gap surpassed the previous monthly record of $231.7 billion set seven years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

February’s shortfall helped push the deficit for the first five months of the government’s fiscal year to $544.2 billion, up almost 40 percent from the same period the previous year, the Treasury Department said in its monthly budget report Friday. The release was delayed a week by the government shutdown earlier this year.

Receipts dipped less than 1 percent to $1.3 trillion in the October-February period from the previous year, while spending accelerated 9 percent to $1.8 trillion.

The fiscal shortfall is widening following President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax-cuts package that’s weighing on receipts and raising concerns about the national debt load, which topped a record $22 trillion last month.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell reiterated his concern over the government deficit in a press conference Wednesday, saying that the nation’s growing debt pile needs to be addressed. At the same time, there’s a shift among some economists-- led by proponents of Modern Monetary Theory-- on the dangers of a growing deficit, with low inflation and cheap borrowing costs suggesting there’s room for additional spending.

The Treasury data show tax receipts declined for both corporations and individuals in the five-month period, while revenue from customs duties almost doubled, boosted by income from tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

The 2017 tax law slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Corporations have so far this fiscal year paid $59.2 billion, compared to $73.5 billion in 2018, when the tax law was only partially in effect for some corporations. In 2017, however, the year before the law was enacted, corporations had paid $87.4 billion at this point in the year.

Individual income tax receipts dropped slightly from this point last year, but have risen compared to some years before the tax law. Despite the law cutting tax rates for most people, rising wages and lower unemployment have spurred higher tax revenue.

Now think again about Trump's newest appointment to the Fed. "Stephen Moore’s career as an economic analyst has been a decades-long continuous procession of error and hackery. It is not despite but precisely because of these errors that Moore now finds himself in the astonishing position of having been offered a position on the Federal Reserve board by President Trump," was how Chait put it. "[F]or all their extravagant ignorance, Moore’s beliefs on fiscal policy are actually more sophisticated and well-developed than his views on monetary policy. It is the latter that he would be in a position to influence as a Federal Reserve governor... While the internal workings of his mind remain a matter of speculation, I doubt he is consciously venal enough to tailor his thinking explicitly to partisan goals. Rather, Moore has extremely strong partisan instincts and extremely limited analytical skills. The combination results inevitably in the latter giving way to the former. He should not be permitted any position of serious responsibility, in government or anything else."

Trump's A Congenital Liar-- And There IS A Smocking Gun! Even Better Than Pants On Fire

Trump says his base will believe anything he tells them and I'm sure he's right-- but the other 65% of the country knows he's a liar and don't believe anything he says. Trump's reflexive lying didn't especially work than well for him in business-- and, as a strategy, it's working even worse in the Oval Office.


From Greg Sargent's new book, An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics, he points out, helpfully (at least for posterity) that Señor T "isn’t trying to persuade anyone to believe his lies as much as he’s trying to render factual reality irrelevant-- thus reducing the pursuit of agreement on it to just another part of the media circus in which he thrives… There is a reason Trump regularly tells lies that are very easy to debunk: The whole point of them is to assert the power to say what the truth is, even when-- or especially when-- easily verifiable facts, ones that are right in front of our noses, dictate the contrary. The brazenness and shamelessness of his lying is not just a by-product of an effort to mislead voters that Trump is merely taking to new levels. Rather, the brazenness and shamelessness of the lying is central to his broader project of declaring for himself the power to say what reality is."

One of the Washington Post's Trumpanzee fact checkers, Glenn Kessler, reported this morning that his paper has a new category of compulsive lies: the bottomless Pinocchio. "Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims," he wrote, "has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging. Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation. To accurately reflect this phenomenon, the Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category-- the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation."

The bar for the Bottomless Pinocchio is high: The claims must have received three or four Pinocchios from The Fact Checker, and they must have been repeated at least 20 times. Twenty is a sufficiently robust number that there can be no question the politician is aware that his or her facts are wrong. The list of Bottomless Pinocchios will be maintained on its own landing page.

The Fact Checker has not identified statements from any other current elected official who meets the standard other than Trump. In fact, 14 statements made by the president immediately qualify for the list.

The president’s most-repeated falsehoods fall into a handful of broad categories-- claiming credit for promises he has not fulfilled; false assertions that provide a rationale for his agenda; and political weaponry against perceived enemies such as Democrats or special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Some of Trump’s regular deceptions date from the start of his administration, such as his claim that the United States has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East (36 times) or that the United States pays for most of the cost of NATO (87 times). These were both statements that he made repeatedly when he campaigned for president and continues to make, despite having access to official budget data.

Another campaign claim that has carried into his presidency is the assertion that Democrats colluded with Russia during the election (48 times). This is obviously false, as the Democrats were the target of hacking by Russian entities, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. (The assertion, also spread widely by Trump allies in the conservative media, largely rests on the fact that the firm hired by Democrats to examine Trump’s Russia ties was also working to defend a Russian company in U.S. court.)

On 30 separate occasions, Trump has also falsely accused special counsel Mueller of having conflicts of interest and the staff led by the longtime Republican of being “angry Democrats.”

A good example of how objective reality does not appear to matter to the president is how he has framed his tax cut. When the administration’s tax plan was still in the planning stages, Trump spoke to the Independent Community Bankers Association on May 1, 2017, and made this claim, to applause: “We’re proposing one of the largest tax cuts in history, even larger than that of President Ronald Reagan. Our tax cut is bigger.”

He reinforced that statement later that day, with similar wording, in an interview with Bloomberg News. From the start, it was a falsehood, as Reagan’s 1981 tax cut amounted to 2.9 percent of the overall U.S. economy-- and nothing under consideration by Trump came close to that level. Trump’s tax cut was eventually crafted to be just under 1 percent of the economy, making it the eighth-largest tax cut in the past century.

Yet Trump has been undeterred by pesky fact checks showing he is wrong. He kept making the claim-- 123 times before the midterm elections-- and still says it. “We got the biggest tax cuts in history,” he told Chris Wallace of Fox News in his Nov. 18 interview.

Similarly, in June, the president hit upon a new label for the U.S. economy: It was the greatest, the best or the strongest in U.S. history. He liked the phrasing so much that he repeated a version of it every 1.5 days until the midterm elections, for a total of 99 times. The president can certainly brag about the state of the economy, but he runs into trouble when he repeatedly makes a play for the history books. By just about any important measure, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Bill Clinton-- not to mention Ulysses S. Grant.

Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border-- a claim that is contradicted the by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside other legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Meanwhile, Fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.

Some of Trump’s most repeated claims verge on the edge of fantasy. Thirty-seven times, he has asserted that U.S. Steel has announced that it is building new plants in response to his decision to impose steel tariffs. Depending on his mood, the number has ranged from six to nine plants, suggesting a bounty of jobs. But U.S. Steel made no such announcement. It merely stated that it would restart two blast furnaces at the company’s Granite City Works integrated plant in Illinois, creating 800 jobs. The company in August also said it would upgrade a plant in Gary, Ind., but without creating any new jobs.

Similarly, Trump has repeatedly inflated the gains from his 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia, upping the amount from $350 billion to $450 billion when he came under fire for defending the crown prince believed to have ordered the killing of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

Separately, he also inflates the jobs said to be created, at one point offering a fanciful figure of 1 million. The Fact Checker obtained detailed spreadsheets of both the military and commercial agreements that showed a total of $267 billion in agreements; we determined that many were simply aspirational. Many of the purported investments are in Saudi Arabia, indicating few jobs would be created for Americans.

Other claims on the list include:

• that the administration has removed thousands and thousands of MS-13 members from the streets, either through deportation or prison. (The group is estimated to have only about 10,000 members).
• that he came just one vote short of repealing Obamacare. (Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) blocked a trimmed-down version, but the full plan was soundly defeated, and there was little consensus on a compromise version.)
• that the United States has “lost” billions of dollars on trade deficits. No economist would agree with that statement, but Trump has said some version of it 131 times.
• that the United States has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out. That’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive immigration laws.

One other Four-Pinocchio claim by Trump may soon make the list. Fifteen times, the president has claimed to audiences that the Uzbekistan-born man who in 2017 allegedly killed eight people with a pickup truck in New York brought in two dozen relatives to the United States through so-called “chain migration.” But Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov is not even a U.S. citizen, so the actual number is zero.

The only problem with this kind of fact checking, is that it works best for crazy tweets and wild statements but doesn't play as well into long and complicated schemes, like the one Ezra Klein recounted this morning for Vox readers about Paul Ryan's long con. "Ryan's legacy," he wrote, "can be summed up in just one number: $343 billion. That’s the increase between the deficit for fiscal year 2015 and fiscal year 2018-- that is, the difference between the fiscal year before Ryan became speaker of the House and the fiscal year in which he retired. If the economy had fallen into recession between 2015 and 2018, Ryan’s record would be understandable. But it didn’t. In fact, growth quickened and the labor market tightened-- which means deficits should’ve fallen. Indeed, that’s exactly what happened in each of the five years preceding Ryan’s speakership; from 2011 to 2015, annual deficits fell each year."

Even more important, if the spending had been used to improve America-- says by funding free state universities or funding Medicare-For-All, two reasonable examples-- instead of for wasteful tax cuts for billionaires, it would be something positive, rather than something negative enough to mar Ryan's place in history forever.

As he prepares to leave office, Ryan says that debt reduction is one of those things “I wish we could have gotten done.” Ryan, the man with the single most power over the federal budget in recent years, sounds like a bystander, as if he watched laws happen rather than made them happen.

To understand the irony and duplicity of that statement, you need to understand Ryan’s career. After the profligacy of the George W. Bush years and the rise of the Tea Party, Ryan rocketed to the top ranks of his party by warning that mounting deficits under President Obama threatened the “most predictable economic crisis we have ever had in this country.” Absent the fiscal responsibility that would accompany Republican rule, we were facing nothing less than “the end of the American dream.”

Ryan’s reputation was built on the back of his budgets: draconian documents that gutted social spending, privatized Medicare, and showed the Republican Party had embraced the kinds of hard fiscal choices that Bush had sloughed off. And Ryan presented himself as the wonkish apostle of this new GOP, rolling up his sleeves and running through the charts, graphs, and tables that made his case.

“I admit that in recent years Republicans abandoned these principles,” Ryan wrote in the book Young Guns, the 2010 GOP manifesto he co-authored with Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor. “We lost the true path and suffered electoral defeats. But we have not returned from this experience empty handed.”

What Republicans had returned with, according to Ryan, was a willingness to make hard choices. “It’s time politicians in Washington stopped patronizing the American people as if they were children,” he wrote. “It’s time we stop deferring tough decisions and promising fiscal fantasies.”

For this, Ryan was feted in Washington society; the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget gave him a “Fiscy” award for budget bravery; he was a member of the Simpson-Bowles commission (which he ultimately voted against); he became Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate. His reputation was so towering that when John Boehner stepped down as speaker, he told Ryan, “You’ve got to do this job.”

...[T]o critics like the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, Ryan was an obvious con man weaponizing the deficit to hamstring Obama’s presidency, weaken the recovery, and snooker Beltway centrists eager to champion a reasonable-seeming Republican. Ryan, after all, had voted for Bush’s deficits-- he was a yes on the tax cuts, on the wars, on Medicare Part D. He proposed a Social Security privatization scheme so pricey that even the Bush administration dismissed it as “irresponsible.”

And his budgets, for all the hard choices, didn’t actually add up. They included massive tax cuts with underestimated costs and unspecified financing-- which is what led Krugman to call him a charlatan back in 2010. Ryan waved this away as nitpicking. ”If needed,” his office said, “adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets.” But his critics predicted he would lose his appetite for hard choices the moment his party returned to power. He hadn’t changed; he had merely rebranded.

The numbers proved them right. Ryan was elected speaker of the House on October 29, 2015. Over the next three years, annual deficits increased by almost 80 percent. The added debt is Ryan’s legacy, not his circumstance. It is entirely attributable to policy choices he made.

...Three bills in particular stand out in assessing Ryan’s record.

The first is the 2017 tax cut Ryan passed but didn’t pay for. His defenders note that early drafts of the tax cut bill included a border adjustment tax that would’ve made the package revenue-neutral, fulfilling Ryan’s promises. But that policy fell out of the legislation early on, and rather than replace it, Ryan pushed a plan that added $1.5 trillion to the national debt over 10 years, and used accounting gimmicks to hide vastly larger increases tucked into the legislation’s long-term design. Now House Republicans, still under Ryan’s leadership, are agitating to make the tax cuts permanent, with a 20-year cost estimated at $4 trillion.

This is particularly galling given that Ryan’s initial star turn in Republican politics came through a misleading presentation accusing the Obama administration of using gimmickry to hide Obamacare’s true cost. (In reality, Obamacare was paid for and its costs have been even lower than promised.)

The second is the spending Ryan passed but didn’t pay for. Years of fiscal irresponsibility have sometimes permitted Republicans to be graded on a curve, where tax cuts can be charged to the national credit card and spending cuts are the true measure of policy steel. But even on this diminished measure, Ryan’s record betrayed his promises.

In March, Ryan pushed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill through the House, which included almost $300 billion in spending increases. New spending, it turned out, only had to be paid for so long as it was a Democratic president proposing or signing it.

“When you have power and need to make choices, those choices do reveal something about you,” says Yuval Levin, editor of the conservative policy journal National Affairs. “I think what they reveal is where the least common denominator is in the Republican Party. I think there’s no question that what Republicans do when we get power is supply-side tax cuts. That’s the wall I and others have been banging our heads into for years now.”

The third is the expansion of the earned income tax credit Ryan proposed but never even tried to pass. After the 2010 election, he went on a much-vaunted tour of American poverty, racking up positive press for expanding the boundaries of the possible under conservatism, and arguing for an enlarged EITC that would help childless adults.

The Obama administration quickly spied a possible compromise with Ryan, and sought to capitalize on it. But Ryan proved more interested in the praise than the policy.

“When we tried to get it into a negotiation, he refused,” says Jason Furman, who served as Obama’s chief economist. “It wasn’t in his tax plan. In $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, he somehow couldn’t find space for this $60 billion item. It’s just amazing.”

Ryan’s defenders portray him as a principled legislator trapped by the coalition he managed.

“Donald Trump was president of the United States, and that circumscribed Paul Ryan’s choices,” says Brooks. “You can dispute what he did, but he got as much of the loaf as he thought he could get given the factions of his caucus and Trump’s peculiarities. Did he like being speaker of the House? The results speak for themselves: He’s leaving.”

In this telling, Ryan’s principled vision was foiled by Trump’s ascendancy. Faced with a Republican president he had never expected, and managing a restive majority that mostly agreed on being disagreeable, Ryan defaulted to the lowest common denominator of Republican Party policy: unpaid-for tax cuts for the rich, increases in defense spending, and failed attempts to repeal Obamacare.

This is more or less the defense Ryan has offered of his tenure. “I think some people would like me to start a civil war in our party and achieve nothing,” he told the New York Times. Trump had no appetite for cutting entitlements, so Ryan got what he could, and he got out.

But would it have started a civil war in the Republican Party if the most publicly anti-deficit politician of his generation had simply refused to pass laws that increased the deficit? And even if it had, isn’t that the war Ryan had promised?

The question here is not why Ryan didn’t live up to a liberal philosophy of government; it’s why he didn’t live up to his own philosophy of government.

What’s more, Trump was clearly flexible when it came to policy. On the campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he wouldn’t cut Medicaid; as president, he endorsed legislation Ryan wrote that did exactly that. After winning the election, Trump promised he’d replace Obamacare with a plan that offered “insurance for everybody” with “much lower deductibles,” but he ultimately backed Ryan’s bill to take Obamacare away from millions and push the system toward higher-deductible plans. For Ryan to claim he was not driving the policy agenda in the Trump years is ridiculous.

Ryan proved himself and his party to be exactly what the critics said: monomaniacally focused on taking health insurance from the poor, cutting taxes for the rich, and spending more on the Pentagon. And he proved that Republicans were willing to betray their promises and, in their embrace of Trump, violate basic decency to achieve those goals.

Ryan clearly wishes Donald Trump had lost the primary, and his early exit from the speakership reflects it. As such, a lot of the narrative around Ryan’s retirement has emphasized his discontinuities with Trump, and whether he did enough to voice them. In the New York Times, for instance, Mark Leibovich wrote:

As has been strenuously noted, Trump and Ryan are stylistic and philosophical opposites: Trump the blunt-force agitator vs. Ryan the think-tank conservative. Trump lashes out while Ryan treads carefully. Ryan still fashions himself a “policy guy” and a man of ideas: In high school, he read the conservative philosopher Ayn Rand and was captivated by her signature work, “Atlas Shrugged.” He bills himself as a guardian of the free-trading, debt-shrinking notions that Republican-led governments used to stand for before Trump crashed the tent.

But more important than the differences between Ryan and Trump are the similarities. Yes, Ryan is decorous and polite where Trump is confrontational and uncouth, but the say-anything brand of politics that so outrages Trump’s critics is no less present in Ryan’s recent history. How else can we read a politician who rose to power promising to reduce deficits only to increase them at every turn? Or a politician who raked in good press for promising anti-poverty policies that he subsequently refused to pass?

And as ridiculous as some of Trump’s claims have been, his baldfaced lies that his inauguration was better-attended than Obama’s was a less consequential violation of the truth than what Ryan said when asked about the tax bill: “I don’t think it will increase the deficit.” Note that the tax bill is already increasing the deficit.

Ryan’s campaign for his failed Obamacare repeal bill was thick with similarly brazen deceptions, like that the legislation would strengthen protections for preexisting conditions, when in fact it would gut them.

“What made Ryan attractive to analysts and journalists across the spectrum was that he’d engage in a thoughtful dialogue with you,” says Bob Greenstein, president of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “but that didn’t mean that 10 minutes later, in front of the cameras, he wouldn’t say something that was at best misleading and at worst invalid.”

In important ways, Trump is not a break from the Republican Party’s recent past but an acceleration of it. A party that acculturates itself, its base, and its media sphere to constant nonsense can hardly complain when other political entrepreneurs notice that nonsense sells and decide to begin marketing their own brand of flimflam.

Ultimately, Ryan put himself forward as a test of a simple, but important, proposition: Is fiscal responsibility something Republicans believe in or something they simply weaponize against Democrats to win back power so they can pass tax cuts and defense spending? Over the past three years, he provided a clear answer. That is his legacy, and it will haunt his successors.

Sooner or later, Trump’s presidency will end, and there will come a new generation of Republicans who want to separate themselves from the embarrassments of their party’s record. As Ryan did, they will present themselves as appalled by both their party’s past and the Democrats’ present, and they will promise to lead into a more responsible future. The first question they will face, and the hardest one to answer, will be: Why should anyone believe they’re not just another Paul Ryan?

Is there any doubt-- can there be any doubt-- that Ryan deserves the new Post Bottomless Pinocchio rating category every bit as much as Trump does? Or almost as much.

Now Trump Is Actually Chasing Billionaires Away From The Republican Party

A few days ago, we saw how Ohio's top Republican donor, Leslie Wexner, has grown so fed up with the GOP-- primarily Trump but also the congressional enablers-- that all it took was hearing an Obama speech for him to quit the GOP!

Yesterday Heather Long, in a report for the Washington Post, ‘I support higher taxes’: The billionaire behind the National Debt Clock has had it with Trump Post, wrote that NYC real estate billionaire Douglas Durst is also bidding the GOP a not so fine adieu. He takes the national debt seriously and-- even though I know his brother Bobby, who's in enough trouble of his own-- I can't reach out to him to go to a Stephanie Kelton lecture on MMT. Doug is the name behind the actual National Debt clock. "U.S. government debt per household is now $127,000 (and rising)," wrote Long. "When U.S. government debt topped a trillion dollars for the first time in the early 1980s, New York real estate magnate Seymour Durst sent every member of Congress a holiday card that said: 'Happy New Year! Your share of the federal debt is $5,000.' When lawmakers refused to act, Durst went further, putting up the National Debt Clock in 1989 on a building he owned just off New York City’s bustling Times Square. Three decades later, the clock is still running, yet U.S. debt has skyrocketed and most in Congress ignore it. Republicans, including President Donald Trump, campaigned on balancing the budget, yet they have added more than $1.5 trillion to the debt in the past year."

Pelosi and Hoyer are probably on the phone with the Dursts right now-- asking them how much PAY-GO would be worth to them.

The result is that by the end of 2018, the nation will hit milestone: The federal government’s total debt owed to outsiders (known as “debt held by the public”) will exceed all debt that U.S. households have for mortgages, credit cards, cars, student loans and other personal loans for the first time in modern history, according to JPMorgan.

Seymour’s normally private son, Douglas Durst, manages the National Debt Clock and the family’s real estate empire now. He felt compelled to speak out after what he calls the “worst months” he’s ever seen for fiscal policy.

Douglas has a message for Congress: Tax the rich more.

“I support higher taxes on people like me,” said Douglas in an interview from his office in midtown Manhattan with sweeping views of the city. “I think America has more of a revenue problem than a spending problem.”

When his father put up the National Debt Clock, total gross U.S. debt was just shy of $3 trillion-- or about $12,000 a person. Today it is over $21 trillion, or about $65,000 a person.

Economists typically focus on debt held by the public, which is currently about $16 trillion, because that is the amount the government truly owes creditors (the rest of the debt is money one government agency owes another). Debt held by the public will top $127,000 per household by the end of the year, according to JPMorgan. Personal debt per household will average about $126,000.

“This is an astonishing statistic,” said David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds. “Americans have a lot of debt. I always feel nervous signing a mortgage or a car loan. I think, can I afford all this debt? Then you realize the government is busy borrowing even more money on your behalf.”

The United States hasn’t had this high of a debt level as a percent of GDP since the World War II era, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It’s expected to grow quickly as Social Security, Medicare and interest payments balloon.

In good economic times, the government is usually able to shrink the deficit, but the latest data out last week shows the federal government is on track to spend about $900 billion more this year than the revenue it is bringing in. The last time the unemployment rate was this low, the government ran a surplus.

Durst's campaign contribution pattern seems to indicate he's a Republican since he gives thousands of dollars to Republican Party organizations, but when it comes to individual candidates, he gives to Republicans and to Democrats, though generally establishment Dems who favor the status quo.

“We’re mortgaging our children’s future. It’s one thing to borrow money for infrastructure investment, but this …” Douglas said. He makes an exasperated face and his eyebrows shoot up over his circular glasses. “The tax cut was an overall step in the wrong direction. Nobody who has any background in economics thought the tax bill was a good idea." Douglas says he will pay less in taxes now, although he declined to say how much he will save. Forbes estimates the Durst Organization is worth more than $5 billion.

“Fix the debt” has long been a Republican rallying cry and many GOP leaders have seized on the debt clock as a useful prop. Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan brought a mock debt clock to campaign stops on the 2012 presidential election trail, and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) has projected a debt clock on the House Financial Services Committee room since he became committee chair several years ago.

The National Debt Clock helped propel Congress to enact balanced budgets from 1998 to 2001, but the fiscal soundness was short-lived. The federal government has spent more money than it brings in every year since then. Debt shot up under George W Bush because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then it surged under Barack Obama during the Great Recession. Trump campaigned on shrinking-- or even eliminating-- the debt, but so far he has added substantially to it as well from the tax cuts and more military spending.

When debt gets this high, the government spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on interest to creditors. That is money that must be paid and can mean that there are fewer funds available for education, infrastructure, the military and other priorities. Douglas is particularly concerned about the environment.

In recent years, the U.S. government has been borrowing additional money to continue funding programs. Some economists like Dean Baker of the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, argue U.S. debt is highly desirable and the U.S. Treasury can continue borrowing without any issues.

“We have had no problem selling our debt, as shown by the low market interest rate on long-term bonds,” Baker said. “But suppose that for some reason in the next downturn no one wanted to buy our debt. In this highly unlikely scenario, the Federal Reserve could simply buy the debt.”

But most on the left and right warn there is probably a limit to how much borrowing can occur. At some point, the government will have to make hard choices about programs to scale back or cut or ways to raise revenue, especially as Social Security, Medicare and interest payments jump in the coming years. Republicans tend to favor cutting programs while Democrats tend to favor raising taxes on the rich. Many fiscal policy experts say Congress will probably have to do both.

Prominent Americans as varied as GOP senate candidate Romney, conservative Washington Post commentator George Will, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Obama’s former defense secretary Leon Panetta have all warned recently the debt is leaving the country vulnerable to “economic collapse” (Will’s words), but their respective parties show little sign of restoring fiscal discipline.

Last week Republicans introduced a “tax bill 2.0” that would add another $2 trillion to the debt, and Democrats have numerous education and health care programs they would like to pass if they regain power that would probably increase costs.

The late Seymour Durst walked to work for most of his life and was famous for never wearing a winter coat because he thought it a waste of money. He couldn’t understand why top U.S. government officials didn’t have the same frugal mentality. He was part of a generation of Americans that came of age during the Great Depression and never lost a sense of valuing each penny and dime, but that generation is passing away.

Even the National Debt Clock no longer gets quite the attention it once did. The clock has been moved to an alley off West 43rd Street where few pedestrians stop to look at it. On a recent summer evening, several Chinese tourists were the only ones taking photos of it (China is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt).

It's lovely that Seymour scrimped on taxis and clothing but personal budgets have nothing to do with governmental debt. When Stephanie Kelton-- Bernie Sanders' top economic advisor-- was asked recently about deficits she explained that she doesn't just worry "about the magnitude but about the purpose. We could add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, as we just did with tax cuts that go disproportionately to people in the top-income distribution, and we could have done, for instance, student debt cancellation at virtually the same price tag. We could have done massive infrastructure investment, or R&D investment."

You can have the same budgetary outcome, but very different economic outcomes, in terms of the potential to boost long-term growth and productivity, impacts on the distribution of income, and so forth. Every economy has its own internal speed limit. You can only absorb so much additional spending at any point in time, given the slack that the economy has at that moment. So can the deficit be too big? Of course! But can it be too small? Yes. And that’s something you rarely hear people say. Or complain about it."

Government debt is just the money the government spent into the economy and didn’t tax back. That’s all the national debt is. It’s a historical record of all of the times that they made a net deposit, spent more than they taxed out, and the bonds are the difference between those. One of the greatest cons ever perpetrated on the American people is this notion that the national debt belongs to us, that we are responsible in our individual capacity for a share of it."

When asked if the debt crises in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Argentina worry her, she told the interviewer that "it’s not a lesson for America. You know, back in 2010, at the height of the European debt crisis, I can remember standing in my kitchen with the TV on, and turning on the news, cooking dinner, and seeing the opening to the nightly news. And it goes, dah, dah, dah, the debt crisis in America. And I go, what debt crisis in America? But that is really what the narrative started to become: This is a warning for America. We need to get our fiscal house in order.

What’s different? Look, Italy in 1995 had a debt-to-GDP ratio of around 120%. Spain in 1995 had a debt ratio of 62%. Greek debt-to-GDP over 100% before joining the euro. These countries were borrowing and spending in a currency that they created. Who remembers the debt crisis in Europe in ’95? There was no debt crisis in ’95, because Italy could always meet every obligation that came due, on time, in full, because it was paying in lira. Where and how else is the lira going to come from but the Italian government?

The Tent Is Too Big-- It Makes The Democratic Party Meaningless And Damages The Brand... Stands For Nothing

Yesterday, after her astounding victory Tuesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was interviewed on CNN, which had ignored her race until now. She said that she is "absolutely proud to be a Democrat but it also means that the Democratic Party is a big tent and there are so many ways to be a Democrat." Like Bernie, she calls herself a Democratic socialist. Remember there are congressional Democrats who are anti-gay, anti-Choice, who don't believe in Medicare-for-All, free public college, or Job Guarantee... some of the most important issues she campaigned on. Let's be real, what does Alexandria have in common with crap DCCC candidates like, for example, Jeff Van Drew (Blue Dog-NJ), Max Rose (Blue Dog, NY), or Anthony Brindisi (Blue Dog-NY) or with members of Congress from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party like Colin Peterson, Kyrsten Sinema, Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ), Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL) or Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA). She just finished a campaign against Joe Crowley based, in part, about how terrible he was. There are dozens of Democrats in Congress far more terrible-- and the DCCC is bringing in lots more just as bad.

Beltway pundits look at the moment and can't get beyond imagining more crap. "In the biggest surprise of 2018 so far," wrote Dave Wasserman the morning after the big earthquake, "House Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley (NY-14) lost his primary to 28-year-old former Bernie Sanders organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 58 percent to 42 percent. Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who favors abolishing ICE, is now a lock to represent the Queens and Bronx seat. But more broadly, Crowley's loss reshuffles the next generation of House Democratic leadership... Ocasio-Cortez's insurgency from the left had impeccable timing: her grassroots push got her coverage in outlets like Splinter News and The Nation and allowed her to build appeal with a tiny, very liberal primary electorate (barely five percent of the 14th CD's eligible voters cast ballots). But it was late enough to avoid setting off alarm bells among groups who might have rallied to aid Crowley, who once headed the centrist New Democrat Coalition... Because the primary featured so many unique contrasts, don't expect the upset to set off a tsunami of Bernie-crats toppling House Democrats." God forbid.

It's no secret that Crowley had been angling for the Speaker's gavel in the event Democrats took back the House but Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi couldn't wrangle 218 commitments. However, the case for Crowley was already shaky. If Democrats took back the House by the margin of their female victors, could they have justified tossing the first female House Speaker and embracing two white New York men as their House and Senate leaders?

Crowley's exit begins the conversation about the next generation of House Democratic leadership anew. Less senior members likely to receive more attention include Reps. Cheri Bustos (IL-17), Joe Kennedy III (MA-04), Linda Sanchez (CA-38), Katherine Clark (MA-05), Seth Moulton (MA-06), Ruben Gallego (AZ-07) and others. And, any aspirants will need to be on good terms with the party's increasingly dominant progressive base.

Where does he get these names? Bustos in a virulent Blue Dog with a horrible voting record-- much worse than Crowley's. His ProgressivePunch lifetime vote score is 85.75, a "C." Hers is a big fat "F" (50.80), worse than Illinois Blue Dogs' Dan Lipinski's and Brad Schneider's. Just what we need, a rotten right=wing Blue Dog-- and one in a district that is very vulnerable to GOP attack. Trump, in fact, won the district 47.4% to 46.7%. She would be constantly pulling the House Democrats right in order to save her own skin. TERRIBLE idea-- and something only a Beltway pundit could entertain. And all those junior members he also suggests... no one them are realistic. Kennedy is angling for Elizabeth Warren's Senate seat when she runs for vice president under Bernie. Moulton is too right-wing and no one likes him. Linda Sanchez is a joke, Ruben Gallego is probably going to run for McCain's Senate seat and Katherine Clark... interesting, but maybe she should do something first. Ted Lieu is a far better idea than any of them but Beltway pundits have probably never heard of him. This morning one asked me how to spell his name.

Might be difficult but worth the fight

The Washington Post's James Hohmann: was closer to the mark when he wrote about "the Democratic civil war" on Wednesday. "In many ways, Crowley’s defeat is analogous to then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s unexpected fall in a Virginia GOP primary four years ago this month. Republicans fared well in the midterms that year, just as Democrats almost certainly will this November, but Cantor’s downfall was a clear harbinger of the mass disruption to come, including Trump’s takeover of the GOP. Just like loathing of Barack Obama kept Republicans united in 2014, disgust with the president will keep Democrats together going into the fall elections. But make no mistake: The party’s identity crisis will be front and center after November, especially if Nancy Pelosi steps down or gets dislodged as the leader of House Democrats. The internecine conflict could become all-consuming in the free-for-all nominating contest to take on Trump in 2020 and cause a leftward lurch that helps the president win reelection." Or a leftward lurch that helps defeat Trump and clean out even more Republicans in Congress, especially in the Senate. This cycle gives the GOP every advantage. 2020 gives the GOP only one realistic Democratic target-- Doug Jones in Alabama-- but there are plenty of Republican targets: Cory Gardner (CO), Joni Ernst (IA), Mitch McConnell (KY), Susan Collins (ME), and Thom Tillis (NC) for starters.

Bernie/Warren v Trump/Pence may get Beltway pundits' bloomers all in a twist but it's exactly the kind real choice Americans are yearning for. Bernie will kick his ass in states where Hillary came up empty, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Florida, maybe even red bastions like Alaska and Montana. By then headline like this: U.S. cruises toward record-breaking debt on Trump's watchwill have sunk in no matter how many times Trumpanzee yells "socialist" and "Pocahontas."

The nation’s fiscal outlook looks ever bleaker, thanks in part to deficit spending during President Donald Trump’s first term, Congress’ nonpartisan budget scorekeeper projected Tuesday.

Within 16 years, the federal deficit is expected to be the largest in history, outpacing even the fiscal shortfalls that followed World War II, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

Congress’ recent tax and spending laws-- along with ballooning costs of programs like Social Security and Medicare-- also are driving up the amount the government pays in interest on money borrowed to make up for the gap in cash coming in and going out.

Indeed, those interest payments will exceed the cost of all Social Security spending within decades, CBO predicts. Interest costs also will be higher than discretionary spending, which amounts to all federal dollars Congress controls.

Debt is projected to reach 78 percent of gross domestic product by the end of this year-- the highest level since about 1950.

At this rate, that debt would actually exceed the size of the economy within a decade, breaking the historic record of 106 percent by 2034.

In drumming up support for their tax overhaul, congressional Republicans have said the new law would spur enough economic growth to offset a loss in revenue over the next decade.

They're lying. That's what they do. Voters are going to be pissed off-- and they'll know who to take it out on... if we still have a democratic form of government. And by the way, which Beltway pundit mentioned Alexandria Ocasio's campaign before Tuesday night? Right, none. Just ignore them.