Republicans seem determined to pass that turd of a tax "reform" bill, but it keeps taking PR hits: the Tax Policy Center finds that more than half of Americans would get a tax hike in 10 years under the Senate bill, a mere one out of 42 economists in a University of Chicago survey said the bill would substantially stimulate the economy, and a UPenn report said it would blow a hole in the deficit. Of course, the middle item -- suggesting that tax cuts don't stimulate the economy -- shouldn't surprise you, since Kemp-Roth didn't stimulate the early '80s economy and Tha Bush Mobb tax cuts didn't, either. There's also Sam Brownback's now-seven-year supply-side "experiment" in Kansas to consider.
Here's something I didn't know: 20 U.S. states assess some kind of absurd penalty for defaulting on your student loans, usually confiscating your professional license but also (in South Dakota) confiscating your drivers' license. Preventing these people from working (or driving to work!) sure doesn't seem like the best way to get them to start paying their bills again -- especially considering there are so many other ways to get them to pay, and folks can't even discharge student loans in bankruptcy proceedings -- but, hey, big balls gotta swing!
Adam Johnson at FAIR carefully chronicles how the "liberal" media generally failed to note the Trump Administration's fairly blatant attempts to spin the HBO hacking story into an attack on Iran's government. I guess it is impressive that the Washington Post got the story right, and I'm actually less forgiving than Mr. Johnson of other papers' apparent inability to digest reporting from one of our papers of record, but no matter how far the "liberal" media seem to have come in Trump's America, we should remember that they still have a long way to go.
Here's a vital reminder from former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, that Republican "experts" are completely full of soup. The list of Republican know-nothings who seem to fail upward (often with the help of "wingnut welfare" from Fox News) is a bit depressing, but be thankful, at least, for his spot-on assessment on the King of the Know-Nothings, Newt Gingrich: that he succeeded "through a combination of confident and aggressive assertion, citation of 'facts' and 'statistics' that, while specious and cherry-picked, the listener was not in any position to immediately refute, and the glibness that masquerades as eloquence."
Finally, President Trump takes credit for springing one of infamous basketball dad LaVar Ball's sons from a Chinese jail, then whines about Mr. Ball's apparent ingratitude -- and then some Trump supporters harass actor LeVar Burton online. I wonder which Fulbright scholar had to wipe off his computer screen after calling Mr. Burton a "has been (sic) actor with a thief for a son." Well, I guess all blacks look alike to some people. (I know, that was easy, but do these morons really deserve more from me than that?)
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