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Trump’s Tax Return Suggests He’s the Most Incompetent Billionaire in the Nation

by MelindaYali42 Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Tonight’s exciting news: David Cay Johnston somehow got hold of the first page of Donald Trump’s 2005 federal tax return. He released it on the Rachel Maddow show tonight:

Here are Trump’s major sources of income:

Interest income: $9 million
Business income: $42 million
Capital gains: $32 million
Rental income: $67 million
Miscellaneous: $2 million
Total: $152 million

After a writeoff of $103 million, his adjusted gross income clocked in at $49 million. His taxable income came in at $31 million and his tax bill for this was $5 million. That’s a tax rate of about 3 percent. Ka-ching!

Sadly for Trump, the Alternative Minimum Tax kicked in, which meant he had to pay $38 million in taxes. I guess it’s no wonder that Trump doesn’t think very highly of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Without more pages from his tax return, there’s a limit to what we can learn from this. Trump’s income of $150 million fits fairly well with the estimates I’ve seen. But I will add one thing.

Trump’s total investment income was $108 million, and Trump claims to be worth $5 billion or so, depending on what day you ask him. That means he earned a return on his assets of about 2 percent. In 2005! During the housing bubble! I’m no tax expert, and maybe he had hundreds of millions in capital gains that he didn’t realize that year. Who needs more than $150 million in income, after all? It still seems pretty low, though, and if Trump really did earn a return of only 2 percent he is, by long odds, the most incompetent billionaire in the country.

Alternatively, of course, Trump is actually worth about $1-2 billion and he earned something like a 5-10 percent return. Take your pick.

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Trump’s Tax Return Suggests He’s the Most Incompetent Billionaire in the Nation

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Trump Plans to Slash the Most Effective Social Program in History

by KristopHunt Posted on March 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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Reuters tells us what to expect from President Trump’s budget:

Under the proposal, which was sent to the EPA this week, grants to states for lead cleanup would be cut 30 percent to $9.8 million, according to the source, who read the document to Reuters.

What an idiot. This is hardly the biggest issue in his budget, and I’ll grant that the current allocation for lead cleanup is so pitiful that a 30 percent cut hardly matters. On principle, though, it’s obvious that Mick Mulvaney’s crew just saw a line item in their spreadsheet and slashed it without knowing anything about it. Nice work, folks. You get a gold star.

By coincidence, the Washington Post ran a piece yesterday that’s all about lead—though the reporter didn’t realize it:

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration….He is one agent of a deeply entrenched social policy that took root across the country in the 1970s and ’80s. The guiding principle was simple: States, counties and cities believed that parents were shedding responsibility for their delinquent children and expecting the government to pick up the tab.

.…”It was a very different time, when too many parents frequently wanted to essentially ‘dump’ their adolescent children on juvenile courts when they found them unruly, ungovernable, uncontrollable,” Linda O’Neal, executive director of the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, said of the era decades ago when the laws were implemented.

Regardless of what you think about this policy, there’s a reason it “took root” in the ’70s and ’80s: Kids of that era spent their early childhoods surrounded by lead fumes from automobiles, so they contracted lead poisoning in massive numbers. By the time they were teenagers they really were “unruly, ungovernable, uncontrollable,” and parents didn’t know what to do.

As it turns out, there was nothing they could do. The damage was done. But nobody knew that, so we put in place pointless laws based on the premise that if only they worked harder, parents could keep their kids under control. In reality, the only policy that ended up working came from Trump’s hated Environmental Protection Agency, which banned leaded gasoline and put an end to our national epidemic of lead poisoning.

But the old laws are still around, even though they don’t work, while the EPA’s lead cleanup program is being slashed, even though it does work. Welcome to America.

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Trump Plans to Slash the Most Effective Social Program in History

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Raw Data: Retiree Spending Across the Country

by LouanneBuck77 Posted on February 21, 2017

Mother Jones

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In case you’re wondering what finally got me to try GeoFRED,1 it was a report I got this morning from the retirement boffins at EBRI, “Geographic Variation in Spending Among Older American Households.” This put me in mind of maps, and reminded me to check out FRED’s mapmaking prowess.

Anyway, the EBRI report turned out not to be all that interesting, but here’s a bit of raw data anyway about retiree spending:

The folks down in Texas and Arkansas sure have low expenses, though I’m not sure how much this tells us. Do they really have low expenses, or do they just have low incomes and can’t spend very much? Probably some of both. In any case, this gives you an idea of how much retirees spend in whatever part of the country you live in.

1I realize no one was wondering that. Work with me here.

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Raw Data: Retiree Spending Across the Country

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Cleaning Up After Trump

by KayleeHuntingto Posted on February 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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From the Wall Street Journal:

Jim Mattis, on his first trip to Iraq as defense secretary, said he plans to assess the fight against Islamic State in the country and that the U.S. isn’t there to take its oil. “I think all of us here in this room, all of us in America, have paid for our gas and oil all along and I’m sure that we will continue to do so in the future,” he told reporters in Abu Dhabi the day before leaving for Iraq. “We are not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil.”

So far, Mattis and VP Mike Pence have been fanning out across the world to assure our allies that President Trump thinks NATO is great; that America’s support for Europe is “unwavering”; that Trump will be tough on Russia; and that we’re not going to take Iraq’s oil. In other words, basically the opposite of everything Trump himself has said over the past year.

This is becoming the signature of the Trump administration. At home, Trump says something stupid, and Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway gamely go out to clean up the mess and claim that Trump didn’t really mean what he said. Abroad, Mattis and Pence and Rex Tillerson play the same role. They’re like the guys who follow the elephants at a parade.

I’ll bet they didn’t think this was how they’d be spending their time as some of the most powerful people in the world.

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Cleaning Up After Trump

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Congress Just Got a Lot Closer to Defunding Planned Parenthood

by JanetCouture134 Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

On Thursday afternoon, the House voted to approve a resolution that is widely seen by advocates as a step towards defunding Planned Parenthood. Should it become law, the measure would weaken contraceptive access across the country.

The bill, HJ Resolution 43, allows states to withhold Title X family planning funds—about $300 million distributed to states annually—from providers who also offer abortion care, a group that includes Planned Parenthood affiliates. In December, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services finalized a rule that anticipated this sort of effort by prohibiting states from withholding Title X family planning money from Planned Parenthood and other providers. This House resolution proposed overturning that HHS rule via the 1996 Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to repeal new regulations within 60 days of their passage. A version of this bill is also moving through the Senate.

At a House committee hearing earlier this week, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) called this bill “the most serious threat women have faced so far this Congress.” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) called this the Republicans’ “first salvo” in defunding Planned Parenthood.

This development comes on the heels of several actions by the Trump administration and Congress that threaten women’s health care. They include Congressional efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s mandate requiring insurance coverage for contraception; the approval by the House of a bill to codify the Hyde Amendment, which prevents the use of federal funds for most abortions; and Trump’s expansion of the global gag order, which prohibits health providers overseas from receiving any US funding if they so much as mention abortion as an option for patients.

In the last Congress, a broader bill to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood passed both chambers, but was vetoed by then-President Barack Obama. In contrast, Trump’s campaign said often that defunding Planned Parenthood would be a top priority for his administration.

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Congress Just Got a Lot Closer to Defunding Planned Parenthood

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The Capital’s Hottest Restaurants Will Shut Down To Protest Trump

by LinoConrick Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Urban dwellers in Washington, DC, will have a tough time dining out tomorrow: A growing number of the city’s restaurants and bars will be closed in solidarity with a strike dubbed “A Day Without Immigrants.” Fliers circulating on social media are urging all immigrants to skip work and school and to refrain from shopping on Thursday in defiance of President Donald Trump’s harsh immigration pledges.

Immigrants made up roughly 17 percent of the District’s workforce in 2013. “Without us and our contribution this country is paralyzed!!!!” reads a flier for the strike in a photo posted by chef Jorge Hernandez on Twitter.

Several high-profile restaurants such as Busboys and Poets and Bad Saint will be closed during DC’s planned strike, while others will be operating with limited service; Eater is updating a list of participating eateries as it hears about them. José Andrés—a popular immigrant chef from Spain who has been feuding with Trump ever since he backed out of opening up a restaurant in Trump’s luxury hotel in downtown Washington, DC—announced that he’d be shuttering all of his restaurants in the nation’s capitol and the surrounding areas for the day.

The strike mirrors Milwaukee‘s Day Without Latinos, Immigrants, and Refugees protest on February 13, when thousands of immigrants in the Wisconsin city refused to work and instead took to the streets to protest Trump and Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. (Clarke Jr. recently made comments about helping federal agents crackdown on immigrants.) “No matter what status you have, we’re here to work hard,” Mayra Estrada, a 33-year-old protester, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “And we’re not taking anybody’s job, we’re doing our job.”

A Day Without Immigrants is centered in DC, but the Washington Post is reporting that immigrants across the country are planning to take part as well. The strikes, which are intended to show how economically paralyzed communities would be without immigrants, come on the heels of several high-profile raids last week. Nearly 700 undocumented immigrants, including a “DREAMer” granted temporary legal status under DACA, were arrested in sweeps that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials called “routine.” On Twitter, Trump referred to the sweeps as a “crackdown.”

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The Capital’s Hottest Restaurants Will Shut Down To Protest Trump

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Reality Just Keeps Biting President Trump in the Ass

by KandiceUYRG Posted on February 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump’s implicit appeal during the presidential campaign was his status as a complete outsider, a proverbial bull in a china shop who didn’t care if pearl clutching elites took to their fainting couches while he turned their Ivy League world upside down. Was he ignorant? Sure, maybe, but that’s what the country needed: someone with common sense who would just go ahead and do the right thing and not worry about smashing the crockery along the way.

But just as Theresa May and her fellow Brexiteers are learning that the real world is more complicated than they thought, Trump is learning that just because he doesn’t know something doesn’t mean it’s not important:

President Trump, who presented himself as a staunch supporter of Israel during last year’s campaign, took a harder line on settlements in an interview published on Friday and indicated that he was rethinking his promise to move the United States Embassy to Jerusalem….Mr. Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, have been exploring an Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative that would enlist Arab allies, and a host of Arab leaders have told the new president that provocative pro-Israel positions would not help.

….“They don’t help the process,” Mr. Trump said of settlements in the Israel Hayom interview. “I can say that. There is so much land left. And every time you take land for settlements, there is less land left.” He added: “I am not somebody that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”

Imagine that. Trump and Kushner have talked to Arab leaders—for the first time ever, I imagine—and discovered that they have big issues with things like settlements and Jerusalem. It wasn’t just a bunch of milksop lefty nonsense after all. It was reality.

But this lesson still hasn’t filtered down to his UN ambassador:

This is all very Trumpish: Obama coddled the Palestinians, therefore we don’t like them and oppose their appointment to anything. As it turns out, a moment’s worth of consultation would have informed Haley that Salam Fayyad is widely respected, including within Israel. He’s long been a moderate, anti-Hamas, anti-corruption voice in the Palestinian Authority, and he was appointed to the Libya mission by a newly installed UN chief who is notably more sympathetic to Israel than his predecessors. The “signal” his appointment sent was a very pro-Western one.

But once again, bumper stickers won the day.

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Reality Just Keeps Biting President Trump in the Ass

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Donald Trump Just Attacked Another Judge

by Danny81R8157 Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Good morning.

Last night, a federal judge in Seattle issued a sweeping stay against Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban.” Soon after, US Customs informed airlines that they could go back to doing things the old way and the State Department announced that it was halting all attempts to implement the immigration executive order.

Seeing all of this, this morning Donald Trump woke up and decided to launch an attack on the judge.

This isn’t the first time he’s attacked a federal judge, and it probably won’t be the last.

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Donald Trump Just Attacked Another Judge

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The Dakota Access Pipeline is creeping one step closer to completion.

by TheresaBitner Posted on February 1, 2017

The People’s Climate March will descend on D.C. with an intersectional coalition of green and environmental-justice groups, indigenous and civil-rights organizations, students and labor unions. The march will take place on Saturday, April 29, exactly 100 days into Trump’s presidency.

In January, the Women’s March gathered half a million demonstrators in D.C. alone. There have also been talks of an upcoming Science March, which has no set date but almost 300,000 followers on Twitter.

April’s climate march is being organized by a coalition that emerged from the People’s Climate March of 2014, a rally that brought 400,000 people to New York City before the United Nations convened there for a summit on climate change. It was the largest climate march in history — a record that may soon be broken.

“Communities across the country have been working for environmental and social justice for centuries. Now it’s time for our struggles to unite and work together across borders to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and environmental destruction,” Chloe Jackson, an activist with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, said in a statement. “We have a lot of work to do, and we are stronger together.”

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The Dakota Access Pipeline is creeping one step closer to completion.

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Malia Obama has joined the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

by MaxineBorowski Posted on January 30, 2017

The People’s Climate March will descend on D.C. with an intersectional coalition of green and environmental-justice groups, indigenous and civil-rights organizations, students and labor unions. The march will take place on Saturday, April 29, exactly 100 days into Trump’s presidency.

In January, the Women’s March gathered half a million demonstrators in D.C. alone. There have also been talks of an upcoming Science March, which has no set date but almost 300,000 followers on Twitter.

April’s climate march is being organized by a coalition that emerged from the People’s Climate March of 2014, a rally that brought 400,000 people to New York City before the United Nations convened there for a summit on climate change. It was the largest climate march in history — a record that may soon be broken.

“Communities across the country have been working for environmental and social justice for centuries. Now it’s time for our struggles to unite and work together across borders to fight racism, sexism, xenophobia, and environmental destruction,” Chloe Jackson, an activist with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment, said in a statement. “We have a lot of work to do, and we are stronger together.”

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Malia Obama has joined the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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