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U.S. Politics- SCOTUS 2: The Election Strikes Back


Jace, Extat

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Six months after the Trump/Republican tax cuts, and companies have dropped worker pay by an average of 1% while spending billions to buy stocks and pay dividends.

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Six months after the Tax Cut and Jobs Act became law, there's still little evidence that the average job holder is feeling the benefit.

Worker pay in the second quarter dropped nearly one percent below its first-quarter level, according to the PayScale Index, one measure of worker pay. When accounting for inflation, the drop is even steeper. Year-over-year, rising prices have eaten up still-modest pay gains for many workers, with the result that real wages fell 1.4 percent from the prior year, according to PayScale. The drop was broad, with 80 percent of industries and two-thirds of metro areas affected.

"Now, economic confidence has been good, we're in a strong economy, GDP is growing, but the question has been, where's the paycheck?" said Katie Bardaro, vice president of data analytics at PayScale.  

The answer is, largely, in the companies' coffers. Businesses are spending nearly $700 billion on repurchasing their own stock so far this year, according to research from TrimTabs. Corporations set a record in Q2, announcing $433 billion worth of buybacks — nearly doubling the previous record, which was set in Q1.

When a company buys back some of its outstanding shares, the effect is usually to boost the value of the rest of its stock, sometimes making the company appear more valuable on paper. Because many senior executives are paid in company shares, buybacks temporarily boost their pay (as well as other shareholders' portfolios), sometimes at the expense of investments in infrastructure or workers.

The popularity of stock buybacks in the wake of the corporate tax cuts has drawn lawmakers' attention. A group of senators wrote to the SEC late last month, asking the agency to review the rules around buybacks. "The explosion of stock buybacks has funneled corporate profits to wealthy shareholders and corporate executives instead of workers and long-term investments that spur sustained economic growth," they wrote.

The money that has trickled down to workers this year hasn't been permanent, PayScale found. "One of the things we saw is firms are leaning more toward giving bonuses rather than straight pay increases," said Bardaro. "It's flashy, it makes you feel good, but it then doesn't stick around and compound year over year."

It sure is too bad that nobody could have possibly predicted this.

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15 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

"He doesn't want the Lord's words tainted by the witnessing of said murder. He's watching himself to intercept the siiiiiin, just like Jesus."

Meanwhile, Jace is quite annoyed at the homepage of CNN. All kinds of puff pieces about Republicans standing up to Trump.

Ha!

And if it makes Jace feel better, I haven’t seen Fox hosts trash like this since he won the election.   

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Paul Ryan making it clear that nothing will come of Trump’s performance yesterday and they are just waiting for the news cycle to move on to something else. For him, congress has accepted the intelligence and already passed sanctions, he shrugged off Trump’s comments other than to say he disagrees. He also smirked away questions about whether congress should stop attacking the investigation given Trump’s bizarre behavior.

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Marc Lotter, the former press secretary of Pence, is being interviewed on CNN right now, ignoring every question Kate Bolduan, on the Poppy Harlow show, is asking.

He actually compared Trump's meeting with Putin with Reagan meeting Gorbachev in Reykjavik and the complaints about Trump's meeting with Nixon's comments at the time that the meeting was a terrible mistake.

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1 hour ago, Paladin of Ice said:

It’s almost as if a few posters didn’t say there would be one time bonuses, no pay increases and most of the capital gains would be reinvested in stock buybacks.  

*Paces around and whistles*

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Question being posed on CNN and a lot of other places - is it time for many people to start resigning, because staying adds legitimacy to Trump? The argument always was there should be adults in the room to control Trump, except he's obviously not controllable.

They used a good quote from De Gaulle: "The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men".

De Gaulle was not the first person who made that comment, okay? :P

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So, the GOP appears to be trying to settle on ‘Russia did interfere in the election, but did not actually interfere in the election.’ I mean, that’s going to be a hard sell to non-Trumpists, and those folk would probably buy anything, so I’m slightly curious why they are conceding anything to reality at all. 

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The Republicans have started to circle the wagons by affirming their belief that Russia meddled but stressing that they had no effect. Their armchair analysis is that Trump confuses questions of interference with questioning his legitimacy and that his behavior is explained by defensiveness.

Bullshit. First, the idea that Trump’s personal neuroses are an acceptable excuse for any of his behavior is absurd. It is kind of like the people who write off his lies by claiming that Trump actually believes everything he says is the truth. In both cases, he is mentally unstable and needs to be removed from office immidiately.

Really though, resentment over questioning his legitimacy does not explain his deference toward Putin. 

 

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1 hour ago, Casablanca Birdie said:

Question being posed on CNN and a lot of other places - is it time for many people to start resigning, because staying adds legitimacy to Trump? The argument always was there should be adults in the room to control Trump, except he's obviously not controllable.

They used a good quote from De Gaulle: "The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men".

De Gaulle was not the first person who made that comment, okay? :P

Thing is L'oiseau Canadien, there aren’t any credible people left to resign in protest other than Mattis, and he’s most likely hanging around to mitigate the likely damage Trump could do. If he and Kelly were to resign, I hope you’ll enjoy SoD Bolton and CoS Miller.

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I don't think this has been pointed out here (or maybe it is very obvious) but Putin's answer to that journalist's question was incredibly tongue-in-cheek. 
 

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https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/16/politics/kompromat-russia-trump/index.html

And now, to the compromising material. Yeah, I did hear these rumors that we allegedly collected compromising material on Mr. Trump when he was visiting Moscow. Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this: When President Trump was at Moscow back then, I didn't even know that he was in Moscow. I treat President Trump with utmost respect, but back then when he was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow. Well, let's take St. Petersburg Economic Forum, for instance," Putin said, referencing an annual event for bigwigs. There were over 500 American businessmen, high-ranking, high-level ones. I don't even remember the last names of each and every one of them. Well, do you remember -- do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it's difficult to imagine an utter nonsense of a bigger scale than this. Well, please, just disregard these issues and don't think about this anymore again.

 

Do we think that Russians try to collect compromising material on every wealthy American businessman?
Well yes, actually, I kind of do. It needn't be "each and every one," just the most prominent and/or vulnerable. Which makes Putin's answer all the more subtle, especially since the KGB may have targetted Trump as early as 1987 after the Soviet ambassador personally invited Trump to Moscow, at a time when they would definitely have kept a file on every single American businessman visiting Russia.

It's incredible that Putin took the luxury of not giving a clearly negative answer. He clearly enjoyed it, too.

 

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3 hours ago, SpaceForce Tywin et al. said:

It’s almost as if a few posters didn’t say there would be one time bonuses, no pay increases and most of the capital gains would be reinvested in stock buybacks.  

*Paces around and whistles*

Remember when Mnuchin (iirc) had that meeting with all the corporate bigwigs and asked for a show of hands to see which executives would hire more employees or pay more if the tax cuts were passed? And then looked around in total incomprehension and bewilderedly asked “Why isn’t anyone raising their hand” when only a tiny portion of the room did?

Good times. Too bad there was no way to know that companies wouldn’t hire more people or raise wages after getting a corporate tax break. Obviously the solution is to give them another tax break, as Donny boy has suggested.

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It's incredible that Putin took the luxury of not giving a clearly negative answer. He clearly enjoyed it, too.

Just think about how long and hard Putin has worked to put himself in that position and bring it to fruition. Let the man have his moment. ;)

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