A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Quote:I am ridiculously focused on money and truth. Some of my deals fell apart because I was lied to about what they (the Republicans involved) think are minor details: “Do you have full authority and are you willing to make the deal?” The minor detail is the Republican needs a cousin to also sign the deal, which the cousin won’t do at the price she is gonna be paid for her 2.5% share of ownership. A political example: I am so focused on the truth that Bill Clinton burned me and himself when he said, “I did not have sex with that woman.” (I made a bet with a Republican that Bill was telling the truth. I remain angry to this day that I lost the bet.) Bill caused years of trouble by perjuring himself on that minor detail. All his troubles could have been avoided by not lying, but rather accepting some minor embarrassment. All of that is a preamble to two stories about Republicans not truthfully speaking about money:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Well that's because you're laughably ridiculous in your partisanship.
Most people who are in the real world don't only judge somebody on something so stupid.
Talk about "simplistic reasoning"...
Do Right, Be Right. :)
Story #1:
“A Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll published this week found that 27 percent of respondents thought the tax law was a good idea, while 36 percent said it was a bad idea.”
Bummer. So what’s the Republican plan to get the public back on its side?
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) aims to pass another massive tax cut this summer, which Republicans hope will rev up the GOP base and improve the standing of Republicans at the polls….Conservative leaders met with Ryan on Monday and expect a vote in June or July. That would give lawmakers time to discuss the issue with constituents over the August recess and ahead of Labor Day, the traditional kickoff to the election campaign season.
Of course that’s the plan. The answer to every problem always and everywhere is a tax cut.
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/04/guess-what-paul-ryan-wants-to-d
o-as-his-congressional-swan-song/
Story #2, where the White House lies, then lies some more:
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Tuesday said the Congressional Budget Office has no idea how to measure the impact of tax cuts, and dismissed the CBO's prediction that the tax cut bill would raise the debt by $1 trillion over a decade.
"Never believe the CBO," he said on Fox News. "Very important. Never believe them."
"They're always wrong, especially with regard to tax cuts, which they never score properly because they don't understand the growth, the incentives and the encouragements to reward success," he added.
CBO said the tax cut bill would add another $1 trillion in debt. But Kudlow and others have rejected this finding and argue it doesn't reflect the growth that the tax cuts will bring to the U.S.
"We're already moving towards a 3 percent growth path," Kudlow said. "I believe we will stay on that path and make it even better."
"The CBO people are professionals, this is not a personal attack," he added. "But their track record on tax cuts is not good."
Trump and his supporters have been touting the tax cuts as a major achievement as Republicans head toward the midterm elections, and are hopeful that achievement will help keep the GOP in control of Congress.
www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/larry-kudlow-never-believe-the-cbo
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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With the American public holding such little confidence in the federal government, the value of an honest politician seems like it should be at an all-time high. But if that were the case, a politician known to be a consistent liar would pay a heavy price for his duplicity.
Donald Trump’s election appears to disprove any such premium on honesty or penalty for lying. Take, for example, the following chart from The New York Times benchmarking Trump’s falsehoods to Obama’s: https://angrybearblog.com/2018/04/what-happened-to-the-political-price
-for-lying.html
Or consider the analysis done by PolitiFact that shows only 16% of Trump’s public statements are true or mostly true, with the rest being some type of falsehood. A similar analysis by The Washington Post found that Trump made 1,628 false claims in 298 days for an average of 5.5 (public) lies per day. Objectively, then, Trump is an incredibly dishonest man.
Trump’s dishonesty has been well known and well documented throughout his career and presidential campaign. So only a few possibilities can explain his election; his voters must be either delusional about his dishonesty, they don’t care about honesty, or they do care but not very much.
Starting with the delusional possibility, it seems unlikely that most of the 62,984,825 people who voted for Trump are entirely unable to discern fact from fiction. So while I can’t rule it out, I’m going to move on.
To address whether voters say they care about honesty, we can examine polling data, such as the chart below from Fortune, which shows that honesty is actually the number one quality people say they want in a leader, followed closely by integrity: https://angrybearblog.com/2018/04/what-happened-to-the-political-price
-for-lying.html
In fact, when broken out by political party, the Fortune poll showed that Republicans actually ranked honesty higher, at 57%, than Democrats did at 46%. (On a side note, this data is from 2016 and the most recent I could find. It would be interesting to refresh these poll numbers and see if opinions have shifted since then.)
If voters say honesty is important, and they’re not delusional, the incongruity of electing an inherently dishonest person indicates the voters themselves are not being terribly honest about how much they value honesty.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Forbes reporter claims that Donald Trump lied about his wealth in order to crack the Forbes 400 list.
"He figured out what he had to do in order to deceive me and get onto that list. And he did it very well. And he maintained that persona of just sort of talking about his assets without any sense of debt and lying about it," Jonathan Greenberg said in an interview Friday on CNN's "New Day."
Greenberg broke the news in a Washington Post story. He wrote that when he was compiling the magazine's list of the richest people in America in the 80s, Trump had called him posing as "John Barron," a purported executive with The Trump Organization.
Greenberg said Trump's actual net worth at the time was less than $5 million, though the magazine had listed it as $100 million for its first-ever Forbes 400 list.
"He should never have been there in the first place," said Greenberg, who provided an audio recording of the phone call between him and "Barron" to CNN.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-forbes-reporter-says-trump-lied-to-
him-to-embellish-wealth/ar-AAw6MLT?ocid=spartandhp
Does it need mentioning that Trump, when caught in a lie, denied he lied? "Believe me," spoke Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Forbes reporter claims that Donald Trump lied about his wealth in order to crack the Forbes 400 list.
"He figured out what he had to do in order to deceive me and get onto that list. And he did it very well. And he maintained that persona of just sort of talking about his assets without any sense of debt and lying about it," Jonathan Greenberg said in an interview Friday on CNN's "New Day."
Greenberg broke the news in a Washington Post story. He wrote that when he was compiling the magazine's list of the richest people in America in the 80s, Trump had called him posing as "John Barron," a purported executive with The Trump Organization.
Greenberg said Trump's actual net worth at the time was less than $5 million, though the magazine had listed it as $100 million for its first-ever Forbes 400 list.
"He should never have been there in the first place," said Greenberg, who provided an audio recording of the phone call between him and "Barron" to CNN.
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ex-forbes-reporter-says-trump-lied-to-
him-to-embellish-wealth/ar-AAw6MLT?ocid=spartandhp
Does it need mentioning that Trump, when caught in a lie, denied he lied? "Believe me," spoke Trump.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
lol
Forbes should sue this guy for back pay since he obviously wasn't qualified for the job.
What did it take... 20, maybe 30 years for him to figure out he had been played.
Priceless.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:The Washington Post reported in May 2016 that Trump routinely made calls to reporters in the 1970s, '80s and '90s posing as a publicist named John Miller or John Barron. Following the report, Trump denied it was him on the phone or that it sounded like him in an interview with NBC's "Today" show.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
lol
Forbes should sue this guy for back pay since he obviously wasn't qualified for the job.
What did it take... 20, maybe 30 years for him to figure out he had been played.
Priceless.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
There is a running list of Trump lies. www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/statements/?list=speaker
The latest one is "James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION"
— Donald Trump on Thursday, April 19th, 2018 in in a tweet
It just so happens that is a Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire in the terminology. https://goo.gl/kjvxiA
Comey wrote the memos because Trump would lie about the meetings with Comey. Now that Trump has seen the memos, he lies about what is in the memos. If Comey had been smarter, he would have audio recording of the Trump meetings to play on TV today. If Trump didn't like it, too bad for Trump.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/20/comey-memos-trump-what-biggest
-takeaways
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Comey wrote the memos because Trump would lie about the meetings with Comey. Now that Trump has seen the memos, he lies about what is in the memos. If Comey had been smarter, he would have audio recording of the Trump meetings to play on TV today. If Trump didn't like it, too bad for Trump.
Well there's the rub, huh.
You don't know if Trump is lying about what is in the memos, do you?
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:I do know because I read Comey's memos. Trump lied about what is in the memos because he knows that Republicans aren't readers. Trump can say anything and Republicans (at least the ones that are not rich) will believe him about what was written. Not being rich is correlated with being gullible; the proverb is "A fool and his money are soon parted."
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Comey wrote the memos because Trump would lie about the meetings with Comey. Now that Trump has seen the memos, he lies about what is in the memos. If Comey had been smarter, he would have audio recording of the Trump meetings to play on TV today. If Trump didn't like it, too bad for Trump.
Well there's the rub, huh.
You don't know if Trump is lying about what is in the memos, do you?
If you clicked either link, you could read the Comey memos, or if you are lazy, read what somebody who read memos summarizes. I will give you a third link for you not to click: http://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/04/19/2018-4-19.comey.memo.-..enclo
sure.unclassified.pdf
But the simple truth is that Trump falsely says James Comey memos disprove collusion and obstruction.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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You've entirely missed the point.
Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:With the resources of the FBI, Comey could have cheated by creating fake audio recordings. Comey asks on the recording: "What about Russia?" The Trump impersonator: "I colluded with Putin. Isn't that great!"
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
You've entirely missed the point.
Because Comey didn't record anything, the memos themselves might be about as real as tales of Narnia.
6ixStringJack, you are deluding yourself into being cynical about Comey and everybody. That cynicism got you to vote for Trump because he was the unknown "outsider" who was going to "drain the swamp", so rich he would never steal. But Trump was not unknown. He had a long, long history where he would say anything to defraud his investors, bankers, tenants, subcontractors. He has been in court thousands of times and lost. He has threatened to sue tens of thousands of times, claiming that work was poorly done, and then did nothing, just a cheap intimidation trick so that he could get a quick 10% discount on what he owed a contractor who didn't want to go to court to get paid.
6ixStringJack, you fell for Trump's campaign lies. But instead of refusing to believe Trump when he claims the memos are fake, now you are also refusing to believe Comey the Boy Scout who wrote the memos, because Trump the-Well-Known-Liar says Comey is the real liar. If only Comey had a recording of Trump to back the written memos, but you still have to trust Comey to not make a fake recording with a Trump impersonator. Do you trust the Boy Scout? Or do you trust The-Well-Known-Liar? Or are you too stupid to trust anyone but family because you can't remember who has a history of lying?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The real reason the Republican tax cut isn’t going to work. Why are businesses investing so little when profits are so high?
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/04/20/the-real-reason-the-rep
ublican-tax-cut-isnt-going-to-work/
Profits are supposed to be a signal showing businesses where to invest. When they're high, it usually means that there's so little supply of what consumers demand that companies can charge almost anything for it. Other firms, then, should be able to swoop in and compete away some of these profits while still making enough themselves for their upfront costs — the investments they have to make — to be more than worth it. That's what's supposed to be the magic of the market: Just by having everyone pursue their own self-interest, we can figure out how much of everything we need better than any bureaucrat could.
But this process has lost some of its mojo recently. Corporate profits, adjusted for taxes, inventories, and depreciation, have hit an all-time high as a share of the economy the past 10 years, but business investment has not. Nowhere close. It has been average at best.
So what in the name of Adam Smith is going on? Economists aren't entirely sure, but one explanation that makes a lot of sense, and has quite a bit of evidence to support it, is that monopolies are choking off growth. Indeed, corporate markups have increased from an average of 18 percent in 1980 to 67 percent today, with a significant part of that being due to new winner-take-all markets and, yes, mergers and acquisitions, which perhaps shouldn't be too surprising when every sector of the economy has gotten more concentrated during this time. Big profits, then, might not be a sign that there's a big opportunity for others to try to take advantage of so much as that there's none at all. Companies, in other words, might be making so much money not because they've discovered a big, new market, but rather because they've cornered an old one. But that's not a reason for anyone to invest money in it, least of all the monopolist.
Which brings us to the Trump tax cuts. The entire rationale for them is that slashing corporate taxes will increase profitability enough that businesses will increase their investment, which, by making workers more productive, will eventually increase wages as well. But what if bigger profits won't make a company put any more money back into its business, because it's a monopoly that doesn't need or want to expand? Won't a corporate tax cut then just be shoveling money into the pockets of shareholders with no other economic benefits? Well, yes. That's something that Paul Krugman, for example, has been warning about since well before this bill became a hastily drafted law.
And now the Trump team finally has an answer to this: Pretend it can't be a problem. “Opponents, echoing leftists from Marx to Piketty,” Council of Economic Advisers Chair Kevin Hassett wrote, “describe” the Trump tax cuts “as a giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of the working class” when that couldn't possibly be true because “a dynamic, competitive economy” means that “the relationship between companies and employees is symbiotic” and “not antagonistic.” Never mind that there are serious questions about just how dynamic and competitive our economy really is. Hassett is sure that “when profits go up, capital investment goes up, and wages follow” even though that hasn't been the case for a decade now.
Translation: This will work if you assume it will, and pay no attention to all the reasons it might not.
The GOP spent the past 38 years proclaiming that tax cuts for the rich work in theory, and ignoring all the evidence that they don't in practice. Things like the fact that the economy didn't implode like they said it would after Bill Clinton raised taxes, or take off like they predicted when George W. Bush cut them, or collapse like they once again insisted after Barack Obama hiked them, or set off a boom like they were sure it
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