For decades those in the religious right have been telling the rest of the country how unusually moral they are. Now they have made a gruesome spectacle of themselves by supporting the most openly vulgar and lascivious president we have ever had. One of the few vices Trump lacks is hypocrisy. He makes no effort to hide how loathsome he is.

Unfortunately, in the minds of young people, Trump is discrediting all of Christianity.

 

While I am on the subject, when will Mexico pay for Trump's Wall? Has the check from Mexico been lost in the mail? Did it fail to clear the bank?

 

You know how those campaign promises work out...

 

Everyone understands how campaign promises work out.
Except that with Trump, he actually has been doing something about them.

Which has triggered despicables.

 

Hey guys what did you say the budget deficit is right now?

 

The only promise Trump kept was to cut taxes for the rich. He told Bob Woodward he could pay off the national debt in eight years. He told the gaping hinds of flyover country that Mexico would pay for his wall.

 

He still has 5 years on the budget thing and Mexico could well still pay for the wall.

They are, after all, finally doing what they should have been doing all along (thank you President Trump).

And thank you for the tax cut, and no, Shooter ain't rich.

And thank you for working on getting the US out of conflicts we should never have gotten into in the first place and thank you for trying to make the world safer, and especially thank you for triggering so many despicables.

Oh, and thank you for saving us from Hillary and her gang of thieves.

From your gaping hinds in flyover country.

 

How FedEx Cut Its Tax Bill to $0


How FedEx managed to cut its tax bill to $0



WASHINGTON — In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard.

The public face of its lobbying effort, which included a tax proposal of its own, was FedEx’s founder and chief executive, Frederick Smith, who repeatedly took to the airwaves to champion the power of tax cuts. “If you make the United States a better place to invest, there is no question in my mind that we would see a renaissance of capital investment,” he said on an August 2017 radio show hosted by Larry Kudlow, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council.

Four months later, President Donald Trump signed into law the $1.5 trillion tax cut that became his signature legislative achievement. FedEx reaped big savings, bringing its effective tax rate to less than zero in fiscal year 2018 from 34% in fiscal year 2017, meaning that, overall, the government technically owed it money. But it did not increase investment in new equipment and other assets in the fiscal year that followed as Smith said businesses like his would.

Nearly two years after the tax law passed, the windfall to corporations like FedEx is becoming clear. A New York Times analysis of data compiled by Capital IQ shows no statistically meaningful relationship between the size of the tax cut that companies and industries received and the investments they made. If anything, the companies that received the biggest tax cuts increased their capital investment by less, on average, than companies that got smaller cuts.

FedEx’s financial filings show that the law has so far saved it at least $1.6 billion. Its financial filings show it owed no taxes in the 2018 fiscal year overall. Company officials said FedEx paid $2 billion in total federal income taxes over the past 10 years.


As for capital investments, the company spent less in the 2018 fiscal year than it had projected in December 2017, before the tax law passed. It spent even less in 2019. Much of its savings has gone to reward shareholders: FedEx spent more than $2 billion on stock buybacks and dividend increases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from $1.6 billion in 2018, and more than double the amount the company spent on buybacks and dividends in fiscal year 2017.

A spokesman said it was unfair to judge the effect of the tax cuts on investment by looking at year-to-year changes in the company’s capital spending plans.

“FedEx invested billions in capital items eligible for accelerated depreciation and made large contributions to our employee pension plans,” the company said in a statement. “These factors have temporarily lowered our federal income tax, which was the law’s intention to help grow GDP, create jobs and increase wages.”

FedEx’s use of its tax savings is representative of corporate America. Companies have already saved upward of $100 billion more on their taxes than analysts predicted when the law was passed. Companies that make up the S&P 500 index had an average effective tax rate of 18.1% in 2018, down from 25.9% in 2016, according to an analysis of securities filings. More than 200 of those companies saw their effective tax rates fall by 10 points or more. Nearly three dozen, including FedEx, saw their tax rates fall to zero or reported that tax authorities owed them money.

From the first quarter of 2018, when the law fully took effect, companies have spent nearly three times as much on additional dividends and stock buybacks, which boost a company’s stock price and market value, than on increased investment.

The law cut the corporate rate to 21% from 35% and allowed companies to deduct the full cost of new equipment investments in the year that they make them. Those cuts stimulated the U.S. economy in 2018, helping to push economic growth to 2.5% for the year and fueling a boost in hiring. Business investment rose at an 8.8% rate in the first quarter of 2018 and was nearly as strong in the second quarter.

But the impact dwindled quickly.

In the summer, the economy grew at just 1.9% and business investment fell 3%, including a 15.3% plunge in spending on factories and offices. Over the spring, companies spent less on new investments, after adjusting for inflation, than they had in the winter.

Overall business investment during Trump’s tenure has now grown more slowly since the tax cuts were passed than before.

Some conservative economists and business leaders said the effects of the tax cuts were undercut by uncertainty from Trump’s trade war, which is slowing global growth and prompting companies to freeze projects. Other economists said the fizzle is predictable because high tax rates were not holding back investment.

“It did provide a short-term boost, but it wasn’t the big response that many people expected,” said Aparna Mathur, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who recently concluded that the 2017 law has not meaningfully changed investment patterns in the U.S.

Smith, 75, a former Marine who built FedEx from a small package delivery service into a global logistics giant, was no stranger to pressing for lower taxes. He tried, without success, to get President Barack Obama to cut the corporate rate. But with Trump’s ascension, the corporate chief began a one-man campaign to convince Washington that now was the moment. He met with the president-elect at Trump Tower on Nov. 17, just days after the election, and appeared alongside the president at official events.

In a conference call with analysts the month after Trump’s election, Alan Graf, FedEx’s chief financial officer, called the prospect of a 20% corporate tax rate “a mighty fine Christmas gift.”

Smith teamed up with his competitor, David Abney, chairman and chief executive of UPS, to push for a tax overhaul, including jointly writing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.

“Fred and I even jointly had some meetings about this with key people, and we were both pushing pretty hard,” Abney said in a recent interview.

FedEx spent $10 million on lobbying in 2017, in line with previous spending, with much of it focused on tax issues, according to federal records. Its team pushed hard to shape the bill behind the scenes, meeting regularly with House and Senate committee staff who were writing the provisions.

Smith met with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in February 2017, and on May 26 he spoke on the phone with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, according to Mnuchin’s public calendar.

Eight months after Congress passed the law, Trump celebrated the tax cuts by hosting Smith and other business leaders at a dinner at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. He singled out Smith several times, bantering with him about a term paper that Smith had written while a student at Yale. The paper formed the basis for the creation of FedEx.

The next week, Smith boasted of his company’s influence on the law in the company’s annual report, which noted that FedEx is “investing more than $4.2 billion in our people and our network as a result of the tax act.”

FedEx increased the size of its workforce by around 4% in its 2018 fiscal year and around 7% in its 2019 fiscal year.

The company also accelerated a previously scheduled wage increase for hourly employees by six months. It gave performance-based pay to other managers and said it would invest $1.5 billion over seven years in its Indianapolis shipping hub. The company also bought 24 Boeing freight jets for $6.6 billion, a purchase officials say would not have happened without tax cuts.

But the company ended its 2018 fiscal year having spent $240 million less on capital investments than it predicted it would in December 2017, shortly before the tax cuts passed. The company’s capital spending declined by nearly $175 million in fiscal 2019.

This year, the company cut back employee bonuses and has offered buyouts in an effort to reduce labor costs in the face of slowing global growth. The company has also added to its pension fund, a move that carried the benefit of reducing its tax liability even further.

FedEx reduced its tax liability in part by taking advantage of a provision in the law that allowed companies to immediately deduct the value of any capital investments they make in a given year. But its biggest gains were from the cut in the corporate rate. FedEx had been carrying a large amount of future tax liabilities on its balance sheet — and when the corporate rate fell to 21%, those liabilities shrank, too.

“Something like $1.5 billion in future taxes that they had promised to pay just vanished,” said Matthew Gardner, an analyst at the liberal Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington. “The obvious question is whether you can draw any line, any connection between the tax breaks they’re getting, ostensibly designed to encourage capital expenditures, and what they’re actually doing. And it’s just impossible to know.”

 

Lets see, the Democrats control the House. All tax bills start in the House. So where is the Democrat tax plan???

What are they waiting for?

 

American manufacturing sinks further into recession one year before Trump’s reelection

https://www.rawstory.com/2019/12/am...-recession-one-year-before-trumps-reelection/

 

So rawsewage says the US is now in a recession? OMFG, that would be funny if it weren't so pathetic and stupid.....

 

How about government agency reports for your source?

 

BUT THE DEFICIT BUT THE DEBT!!!!

Oh wait Trump is president now. Roll those presses. Print that money. Money really does grow on trees. That's where we get the paper to print our IOU's on.


U.S. government hits record for Treasury selling debt

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/other/476015-treasury-reaches-record-for-debt-auctions

 

Employees pay higher taxes than biggest corporations under Trump’s ‘tax cut’: analysis

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/01/em...t-corporations-under-trumps-tax-cut-analysis/

 

Trump's Tax Cut 'Scam' Created 1.3 Million New Jobs, New CBO Data Show

During the tax cut debate in 2017, Republicans argued that the cuts would at least partially pay for themselves by spurring economic growth. Democrats said they were nothing more than a giveaway to the rich. The latest data from the Congressional Budget Office makes it clear that the GOP had it right.

But entirely overlooked is what the CBO report shows about the tax cuts. That they succeeded in boosting economic growth. And that extra growth is, in turn, partially paying for the cuts. Despite what Schumer says, this is precisely what Republicans claimed would happen.

Democrats claim that the solid growth in 2018 was baked in the cake while Barack Obama was president. But that's simply not the case.


In January 2017 — before Trump entered the White House — the CBO projected that the economy would expand by only 2% in 2018, followed by 1.7% in 2019 and 1.5% next year.


That's what was baked in the cake. Continued tepid economic growth. Keep in mind that, when the CBO made those economic forecasts at the start of the Trump administration, they were right in line with other mainstream economic forecasts.


What actually happened was a very different story.


The actual growth for 2018 will likely have been 2.9% or 3%. And the CBO now expects GDP to climb 2.7% this year, and 1.9% next year.


The jobs picture improved dramatically as well.


In January 2017, CBO forecast an average unemployment rate of 4.4% for 2018. The actual number: 3.9%


In January 2017, CBO said that the economy would create an average of just 94,000 jobs a month in 2018. The actual results for 2018: 203,000 news jobs a month.


In other words, the nation's economy in 2018 was almost $400 billion bigger and there were about 1.3 million more jobs created than the CBO had expected.


So, what changed after January 2017 that could explain the sudden shift in economic results? Why did the economy do so much better than anyone had anticipated?

 

It also raised the yearly deficits you complained about when Obama was president. Trump told Bob Woodward he could pay off the national debt in eight years. When is that going to start?

 

Forbes, Dec 8, 2018

Passing the tax cut when unemployment was already at 4.1% wasn’t the best timing , especially since the revenue loss now has the federal yearly deficit on a path to $1 trillion and growing. Additionally, December quarter’s GDP growth seems to be in the mid-2% area...

In the 22 months that Trump has been President (starting with February 2017’s job report) there have been 4.2 million jobs created. However, in President Obama’s last 22 months in office there were 4.76 million jobs generated, 560,000 more than Trump’s...

Trump's job gains are pretty much a continuation from Obama's.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckj...x-cuts-havent-spiked-job-growth/#25702b142df9

 

In January 2017 — before Trump entered the White House — the CBO projected that the economy would expand by only 2% in 2018, followed by 1.7% in 2019 and 1.5% next year.

According to the CBO (The CBO...Congressional Budget Office is a federal agency within the legislative branch of the United States government that provides budget and economic information to Congress.)

has provided analytical evidence that has stated, you are full of shit.

Since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law, the roaring U.S. economy continues to provide new and better opportunities for worker across America.

In March 2018, the number of job openings reached historic levels, with 7.3. million jobs—enough for every unemployed American to go to work.

Thanks to tax reform, the American economy is in a historic period of economic success. Unemployment is low, wages are rising, and Americans across the country now have more money to put food on the table, care for a child, or simply save for a rainy day.

American workers are finding new opportunities across the county.

 

Trump has asked to cut spending across the board by 5% or better....BUT...

House Passes Two-Year Budget Deal to Avoid Big Across-the-Board Spending Cuts
https://www.govexec.com/management/...-avoid-big-across-board-spending-cuts/158711/

I know you know this, but it needs to be said again, the Leftists are the majority in the House, the very leftists that decided it was best to Impeach a sitting POTUS for reasons none other than they just dont like him, Trump committed no high crimes or misdemeanors, no treason and no bribery.

The left has been working on that event for over 2-1/2 years...2-1/2 years of wasted effort, wasted tax dollars and 2-1/2 years of doing their own business and ignoring the business of the people.

The months of negotiations spearheaded primarily by House Democrats that avoids drastic, across-the-board funding cuts that were set to take place in October. It would also suspend the debt ceiling for two years, staving off the threat of a default.

Well Trump probably could do it, however as I have so eloquently illustrated above, the leftist held House has no intentions to cut spending.

 

How much do you think Trump's War With Iran will cost?