“Despite the lack of accomplishments in this first year, it’s important to always remember how intertwined much of Congress is with the gun lobby, making the advancement of NRA legislation a constant threat while anti-gun safety members hold a majority. … While the NRA failed to secure several victories it surely thought it would achieve in its first year serving as a de facto media arm for the Trump White House, its luck could change in a moment’s notice. 2018’s nationwide elections are on the horizon — and the NRA’s divisive messaging operations require continued vigilance.” – Timothy Johnson in The National Rifle Association’s first year as Trump propagandists [via salon.com]
Salon.com is a propaganda outlet that would give Goebbels a run for his money. Pure unadulterated garbage.
Good observation.
Feel free to fact check me, but I believe they were the “news” website that ran a story called “I”m a Pedophile, not a Monster”. I’ve also heard they are nearly broke. I checked in on them a couple months after the election, and everything was awash in Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Seeing his future intellectual progeny in a dream is why he shot himself;-)
Salon.com, where every day is Opposite Day.
“anti-gun safety members”
wwwhhhuuuuh?
What newspeak bullhockey is this?
Yeah, I liked that one, too. Listen, there are literally millions of us. If we were actually opposed to gun safety, you’d know it, and I don’t mean by reading the Congressional Record.
It’s modern-day slang term for “abolitionist”. Its meant to sound derogatory, just as calling someone an abolitionist before the emancipation of the slaves was meant to sound derogatory.
In the immortal words of Roger Waters, ‘Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying.’
‘This article originally appeared on Media Matters.’
Tim, now that O’Bama is gone, the economy is doing pretty well. Perhaps it’s time to consider finding a job and moving out of your parents’ basement.
The actual economy is not doing well at all. The current president and congress have done nothing to change the general trends, and they never will.
Ask yourself some of these questions:
Is debt an asset? The politicians love to think so. What is the “national debt” now, by the way? Most businesses think they can’t survive without an ever increasing load of debt. And many don’t survive, of course. Personal debt? Has been growing for a long time now. A great many people are ONE paycheck away from homelessness.
So many other things… but that would be enough to put the lie to the idea that the economy is improved. What is needed, of course, is individual liberty, the real free market, nobody working around the clock to control the lives and property of others.
‘The actual economy is not doing well at all. The current president and congress have done nothing to change the general trends, and they never will.’
While I agree about your opinion on debt, here you are wrong. Consumer and business confidence is at levels we haven’t seen since 9/11. While the unemployment rate went down under O’Bama (after it originally soared) it was mostly because people were dropping out of the workforce. Now people are rejoining the workforce (like Tim should) and it’s still going down. The U3 is under 3% in my state, which is insanely low. Home values are going up. The GDP is growing by over 4%.
So what have the current president and congress done to spur economic growth. Up until a couple weeks ago the only thing you could really point to is the president cutting the regulatory bureaucratic red tap. This kind of flies under the radar, but can have a huge impact. But now with tax cuts, particularly the corporate tax cut, things should really take off. We have trillions (yes, with a ‘t’) of dollars stuck off shore because of the punitive taxes placed on repatriating those funds. A large portion of those funds will now be finding it’s way back and reinvested in our economy. As soon as the bill hit Trump’s desk a number of large corporations announced bonuses and raises to their workers. Workers who will also benefit directly from the tax cuts.
The National Debt is actually a pretty small number in relation to GDP. That debt can be dealt with via a relatively small number of years of financial responsibility. It’s actually pretty small potatoes.
The total for unfunded liabilities, currently sitting between $127 Trillion and $200 Trillion is the real killer. Dealing with that will take political will that no one has.
The fact that we owe most of it to ourselves makes it even worse.
Strych, the vast majority of that debt wrapped up in the devaluation of the dollar, which is effectively water under the bridge, taxes that have been payed and spent. To bring the national debt to zero would require reducing the money supply to the point where an ounce of gold is once again $20. Even spread out over decades that kind of deflation would be disastrous to the economy. That said, doubling the national debt every 8 years through increasing the money supply is a recipe for a stagnant economy.
Likewise, the unfunded liabilities aren’t in themselves a problem. They like to run these figures out 75 years, so what it amounts to is taking babies that haven’t even been born yet, calculating the social security benefits they’ll be getting 7 decades from now, but not bothering to count the money they pay in FICA taxes over their whole lives. Not that our social security system is exactly healthy, but it’s a way to pump up the dollar figure to make it sound much worse than it is. The bottom line is that as we live longer we also need to work longer. Or save more while we do work.
Gov.
There is no particular reason to worry about zeroing out the debt per se. However, it can be done and done with relative ease (hahahahahaha Congress… *wipes eyes*) without any real use of monetary policy. Fiscal policy, properly managed, will cover it quite well over time provided a steady 3.5-4% growth rate and a rational budget. Both these things are attainable and sustainable… except politics.
When you speak of the unfunded liabilities being calculated for 75 years you’re [probably] talking about Medicare and Social Security (~$47 Trillion). The vast majority of the rest of this amount is calculated out to 20-25 years and is mostly made up of state and local pension funds which is why I say we owe it to ourselves.
This is why the numbers vary so much. Low estimates of total UL are around $100T with high estimates well over $200T (I think the highest I’ve seen is $260T). Various entities calculate these things differently and calculate them for different times into the future. Also, some places flat out lie (see CalPERS extra set of books found last year and the suspicions that more sets of books still exist). That said, most of the money is not calculated on a 75 year timeline because most of it is outside Federal budgeting rules.
However, the timeline really doesn’t matter. The simple fact of the matter is that presently all levels of government combined take in about $7 Trillion in revenue. Most of that is already spoken for at the time it comes in (in some cases more than all of it actually) and these UL’s, especially at the state level, are rising at a mind boggling rate even compared to the rosiest forecasts on government revenue.
Putting that aside however; if we were to stop growing the UL’s tomorrow and start paying them off on a 75 year time scale we would have to pay $2.66T/year starting tomorrow. That would be ~38% of all government revenue, at every level of government, going to UL’s. Yes, growth can help dig us out of that hole but with many states UL’s growing at rates that approach double digits, actual sustainable growth simply cannot keep up over the long haul.
Yes, a lot of state and local public pensions are not just underfunded but in complete crisis. I think the key here is not to worry about ‘unfunded’ liabilities because those will be funded by future workers. It’s ‘underfunded’ liabilities like the pension funds that are supposed to be fully pre-funded or 90% funded but are currently 65-70% funded. Taxes will have to go up, services cut, AND many public employees are going to find their pensions don’t turn out to be quite as rosy as promised. It’s the older workers that will make off like bandits off the backs of the younger ones. And as to the unfunded liabilities, like I said we’re either going to have to work harder of longer because we’re going to live longer.
As far as balancing the budget, it’s the best thing we could do for our economy. Every extra dollar we print has the same macro-economic effect as a dollar taxed. Then we print up more dollars to pay for the interest on the bonds we sell, making the net gain on bonds next to nothing. It’s all a giant racket, but as long as everyone has faith in the system we’ll be just fine. A panic on the dollar could wipe us out though. Sort of like Bitcoin.
The “National Debt” belongs to those that incurred it: Congress and the associated office holders. How convenient that they are the only ones liable to pay it via excise on Federal Income.
Perhaps they should consider moonlighting.
“The National Debt is actually a pretty small number in relation to GDP. That debt can be dealt with via a relatively small number of years of financial responsibility. It’s actually pretty small potatoes.”
A simple tax of 0.1% on financial transactions, if one had been passed the moment Trump was in office, would be enough to pay off the debt before two presidential terms, while bringing all interstates and U.S. highways up to modern standards. If Trump really wanted to be in the history books, being the president who got the debt paid off would be a brilliant way to do it. And, after all, debt is not a conservative value!
Roymond,
No thanks. I am not interested in paying an excise on something that I cannot avoid, on something that I did not incur.
The current law (26 USC) works JUST fine, thank you very much. Those that are “taxpayers” (public office holders/those that receive Federal Income) made a choice to have a privileged classification. Better idea is simply raise the minimum rate to 90% until the debt is paid off.
This would have the added benefit of clearing out most government workers. Would be great to see how they fare in the private sector.
The “advancement of NRA legislation” is simply the expansion of freedom and the rollback of infringement. This is what he considers a “constant threat” in his world? Good grief, man. Grow up.
Dang what a weenie pic…
Free Helicopter rides for Liberals….
This pencilneck is not a liberal. You’re a liberal. I’m a liberal. The PotG are liberals because we want to advance liberty. Timmy wants the opposite. So he is not a liberal.
You can thank FDR for convincing us that black is white and up is down.
Doesn’t that imply that pencilneck is a fascist?
He’s a progressive…pretty much the same thing.
Salon? I think you meant Saloon, since Timmy is obviously drunk.
Lemmie FIFY:
“Peaceful, responsible citizens have found their national voice on gun matters with the new administration, dragging the N R A into acting a bit like the membership organization it’s supposed to be, and some congresscritters into acting like a few 10’s of millions of their constituents maybe shouldn’t be demonized. This must be stopped.
Now is the time for ever more vigorous waving of bloody shirts, suppression of inconvenient facts: safe gun use millions of times a day, D G Us, that the few people doing bad things with guns are about doing bad things, never mind how.
Progress on gun rights, n ever-improving pubilic safety must be denied, less Bloonie’s billions stop flowing. Get the proles wee-wee’d up again or we might have to get real jobs.”
“anti-gun safety members ….”
Little Timmy gets a gold star for using buzz words to generate tortured phrases. It is so cute to watch a snot nosed little twerp struggle to become a full fledged word murderer.
That hyphenation made my head hurt, but it does make one thing perfectly clear: whoever these “safety members” are, they’re definitely anti-gun.
Wow, I bet this guy is a C U C K.
Two things……
1) Look at Timmy’s picture.
2) Article from Salon.
Nuff said!
The NRA’s pandering to the “unwashed” will in the end be its own undoing. The NRA does not dare offend its radical unwashed base which insures that the very thing it is trying to prevent, all out gun confiscation, is assured to become a reality far sooner than it realizes. The NRA by refusing to back laws that would actually prevent many mass shootings and the rampant rivers of blood flowing in the streets of our large cities are the results of its policies that lay the carnage directly at the feet of the Morons who run the NRA.
It was the Morons of the NRA that at first fought the idea of the Brady Bill and then at the last moment gutted its true intention by preventing the vetting of second hand gun purchases as well as the thorough vetting out of mental basket cases from buying guns. It also opposed mandatory safe storage laws which again guaranteed a steady supply of stolen guns right into the hands of nut cases and criminals. All this simply added to the mass carnage on our streets and absolutely guarantees the mass confiscations already being put into effect starting with California this year. Its not something that’s coming its already here and right in our face.
Lets face facts the outrageous assault on the working man by the Gangster Criminal Republicans with the new tax rape bill, the withholding of information to the Consumer Watch dog groups that protect consumers from criminal money lenders, the deregulation of the banks that will almost guarantee another economic melt down and rape of the consumer, the change in Obama Care by lifting the requirements for the young and healthy to have insurance and the coming assault on the very life of our Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid social programs, the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Talks, all have shocked the general public to the core. All this means a blue wave in 2018 and loss of control of Congress and hopefully a roll back of all the destruction to the economy and the welfare of the American people. The 2020 elections if Herr Drumpf is still president also means a slam dunk for the Democrats even if they ran Alfred E. Newman for President. And that means more and more gun confiscation and ammo bans.
Remember it was Hillary who said that “I think its impractical to confiscate 300 million weapons so banning ammo is the next best way to control gun violence”. Actually she was both right and wrong as melting down 300 million weapons worked splendidly in Australia and it will work here too if they pass such a law as Australia proved no amount of guns is to big to melt down and far more quickly than one could possibly ever have been imagined.
Its a little early in the day to be doing whatever controlled substance your obviously on.
Bitter, huh? 😂