Trump long has maintained that he has no plans to scale back Social Security benefits or raise its qualifying retirement age. The position puts him in line with Clinton. She has said she would “defend and expand” Social Security, has ruled out a higher retirement age and opposes reductions in cost-of-living adjustments or other benefits.
“There is tremendous waste, fraud and abuse, but I’m leaving it the way it is,” Trump recently told Fox Business Network.
Dear Miss Colvin
Please name one Democrat who has said this…i’ll wait.
Trump has a similar take on the minimum wage. Trump said at a GOP primary debate that wages are too high, and later made clear that he does not support a federal minimum wage. Yet when speaking about the issue, he says he recognizes the difficulty of surviving on the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
“I am open to doing something with it,” he told CNN this month.
He also said that the states should dictate any increases…
“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump said at a recent rally, He listed the countries where the U.S. had intervened militarily during her tenure as secretary of state and pointed to her vote to authorize the Iraq war while she was in the Senate.
from Buzzfeed
The purpose of this article and others like it is to snag gullible people and provide them with a rationale to vote for Trump.
Trump regularly shifts positions on multiple issues. With little justification. With little actual detailed policy analysis and explanation. For his supporters, he has established the theme that he will say what “the rubes want”. In this instance, “the rubes” are those OUTSIDE the Trump Base who would fall for Trump’s lies.
Look for this to be one of the most dangerous strategies of Trump. Look for more articles like this one.
The danger of Trump is more the easily swayed people who “want something new”. If this kind of “sounds like a Democrat” snookering takes hold, I can conceive of Trump’s “suggestions”** taking the form of staking out Hillary’s policy positions and then “blocking” them by offering something “Democrat-sounding”–while the Trump supporters (and even GOP pols) smile knowingly and nod to themselves.
** From now on, Trump–in his words–will cloak his policy statements as “suggestions”
Trump does not need an ideology. He has something much more important, ratings.
Messing with Social Security would ruin his ratings He would never let that happen.
Any Democrat who thinks Trump is on their side on any issue is fooling themselves.
Monster Donnie is on his own side first last and always. He has no particular interest in representing even Republicans, who devour whatever bull jive lands on their plates. He’s only in it for his ego.
Calling Hilary a hawk won’t hurt her in the opinions of cons who traditionally give the war department more than they ask for.
“I think I’m running on common sense,”
Any democrat that believes this is dumber than…anything I could compare them to.
Please name one Democrat who has said this.
Barack Obama, when he signed the Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act:
“Each year, the federal government wastes billions of American taxpayers’
dollars on improper payments to individuals, organizations, and
contractors.”
Difficult to name only one, since every single one of the Democrats in the House and Senate voted for it.
OK–any analysis of Trump that seeks to place his ‘policies’ on the usual spectrum of Democratic-Republican differences is guilty of grotesque gullibility and misrepresentation. This is the KKK-endorsed candidate who has promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants ASAP; build a wall with Mexico; ban Muslims from the USA; befriend Putin; use state institutions to target media organizations who have challenged him.
Someone needs to tell Trump’s senior policy advisor Sam Clovis that Trump doesn’t want to make changes to Social Security. He said recently that Trump would be open to looking at entitlement spending. This has been reported by Reuters and other news outlets.
He also said that the states should dictate any increases…
He also complained that a reporter was completely wrong when she said he opposed an increase on the federal minimum wage. Trump has been all over the map on this one. And I have not seen any evidence he knew there was a distinction between the federal level and the state level before he started saying bombastic things about it.
Everybody else pays the same or more.
Republicans love the idea.
I’m not yet certain that Trump isn’t a Democrat on all issues. He may have been trolling Republicans the entire time. Or not. At this point, I’ve yet to come to a conclusion.
I believe in world peace. I want to help other countries."
I want to help (myself/and great guys to) other countries.
From now until November there will be people who will delight at making Democrats “just as bad” as Trump.
That is one of Trump’s greatest weapons…and it is going to be deployed by people calling themselves Democrats, Progressive, Independent and Republican.
Think about that…a man who poses the greatest existential threat not only to the nation but to the planet. Brought to you by a collection of racists on the one hand and smug bastards on the other. Maybe Mr. Spock was right when he said, “Jim, you (humans) are essentially irrational”.
In this case a sociopath attains power using all of America’s cultural characteristics and political structure against it.
To the extent that his inane blatherings to date constitute any sort of a coherent agenda or world view, Trump represents little more than the kinds of magical thinking and unilateralism that have been a hallmark of Republican “thought.”
He has argued that NATO might be obsolete, he has no problem with nuclear proliferation, is OK with leaving Putin and Assad alone to take out ISIS, and said he would not take bombing an ISIS target in Europe off the table.
Granted, his pseudo-populism on supporting “entitlement programs” such as Medicare and Social Security puts him at odds with mainstream GOP supply-siders and movement conservatives like Paul Ryan.
But…
He said he would bring more money into those systems, but his proposed drastic tax cuts – which are similar to those proposed by Ryan and other mainstream Republicans – would place the same kind of budgetary pressures on those programs as the proposals of other “starve the beast” ideologues.
And don’t forget that disingenuous Republicans successfully rallied voters and seniors against Democrats – who have spearheaded and championed those programs against onslaught by Republicans – by lying that “Obamacare” would steal $700 billion from Medicare to pay for coverage to “those people,” when in fact the ACA has already extended the actuarial life of Medicare by almost 20 years.
Once again Trump uses fear to appeal to people’s base instincts instead of trying to promote greater understanding of the issues – on China’s status and the role and nature of trade agreements.
With all the misgivings in mind, I am in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) because I feel they represent an opportunity for us, and I believe we have the leverage to shape the challenge of globalism to our benefit and to the benefit of workers in the partner nations.
And when speaking of leverage, let’s remember what happened in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, which devastated economies globally. The US, pursuing a fiscal policy of economic stimulus and an accommodative monetary policy, has managed to weather the storm better than any other developed economy, and today has recovered from the crisis better and any other developed economy and has created more private sector jobs than all other developed economies combined.
In contrast, the European Union responded to the financial and economic collapse by cutting government spending and pursuing other austerity policies – to their detriment, as the European economies are still coping with high unemployment and struggling to emerge from recession.
China, which in recent decades rose to economic superpower status through a model featuring cheap labor and credit, foreign investment, and cheap exports, turned inward and resorted to stimulative measures involving large-scale land development projects. However, as we’ve seen the past two years, China’s meteoric growth has slowed down from its previous era of double-digit annual growth, and since last year’s near-meltdown of its stock markets, and the current turbulence of its bond market, we are witnessing the Chinese government’s uncertain attempts to contain this crisis and to stem an ongoing capital flight estimated at $300 billion the past six months which has investors leery.
As a result of the progress the US has made in comparison to other nations, and amid concerns about how China is managing its markets, today the US is the prime destination for foreign capital and investment.
Consider that China is not included in the TPP or the TTIP. Recently China’s stratospheric growth rate has been slowing down (and so has foreign investment), and Chinese leadership – hoping to address rising debt levels and some issues within its finance system, and pivot from an investment- and export-based economy to one more aligned with domestic consumer spending (which might include wage hikes and even more-protectionist policies and which will most assuredly raise the cost of doing business there for foreign partners) – has recently announced that it will pursue policies that will sacrifice short-term growth in favor of more sustainable long-term stability.
As Bloomberg News recently put it, “The unprecedented boom in China’s $3 trillion corporate bond market is starting to unravel.
"Spooked by a fresh wave of defaults at state-owned enterprises, investors in China’s yuan-denominated company notes have driven up yields for nine of the past 10 days and triggered the biggest selloff in onshore junk debt since 2014. Local issuers have canceled 61.9 billion yuan ($9.6 billion) of bond sales in April alone, and Standard & Poor’s is cutting its assessment of Chinese firms at a pace unseen since 2003.
While bond yields in China are still well below historical averages, a sustained increase in borrowing costs could threaten an economy that’s more reliant on cheap credit than ever before. The numbers suggest more pain ahead: Listed firms’ ability to service their debt has dropped to the lowest since at least 1992, while analysts are cutting profit forecasts for Shanghai Composite Index companies by the most since the global financial crisis.
“The spreading of credit risks is only at its early stage in China,” said Qiu Xinhong, a Shenzhen-based money manager at First State Cinda Fund Management Co. “Many people have turned bearish.”
And because of the relative lack of transparency in the Chinese bond and stock markets, the confidence of foreign investors is not likely to be assuaged by the efforts of the Chinese government to normalize its financial sector and affect an economic rebound.
Critics of trade deals point to the unrealized promises made by proponents of NAFTA. Indeed, NAFTA was flawed in not adequately addressing concerns about labor rights or environmental protection. The TTP agreement and the TTIP agreement will address both of these concerns, with enforceable standards for worker and consumer rights and workplace and environmental protections that are typically not championed by the free trade advocates and have not been enforced in past agreements.
China is not a party to the TPP or TTIP, so this trade agreement represents part of President Obama’s strategic “pivot” to Asia, which also includes new defense exercises with Japan and the Philipines and also with NATO. Perhaps if this agreement is firmed up we and our trading partners can prevail upon China to address their violations of agreements they made when made a party to the WTO. In addition, with these two trade agreements we can form a trade and strategic bloc that upholds worker rights and environmental protections while undercutting China’s influence and putting pressure on them to raise their standards.
Politically, the fates of these deals is uncertain, with most Congressional Democrats on record as opposed. And concerns about impact on workers might be relieved through a major jobs program, which could be enacted under the Trade Adjustment Authority passed in conjunction with the Trade Promotion Authority bill last year which gave the White House “fast-track” authority to conclude negotiations with member nations and present an agreement to Congress for an up-or-down vote but without the possibility of making amendments.
And with a Republican-led Congress, there seems to be little chance of a massive appropriation needed to fund a massive jobs bill. The only possibility at present might involve a creative approach to tax reform that involves trillions of dollars in expatriated funds held by the foreign divisions of American multinationals.
So, besides an attempt to expand trade relations with a fast-growing region, and strategically re-engage nations that might otherwise fall into China’s sphere of influence, it might also be an attempt to institutionalize worker and human rights and environmental protections by offering favorable trade conditions to nations that uphold these values – which could also reduce the incentives to outsource American jobs to developing nations.
Through these trade initiatives, President Obama appears be working on proposals intended to promote opportunities for expanded overseas trade that wean multi-national firms from reliance on cheap labor and China’s now-shrinking expansionist window and “globalize” worker and human rights and environmental protections.
If we can leverage our negotiating assets of a major market, a dynamic and growing economy – the world’s largest – a vast security umbrella, and a strong and stable currency that serves as the basis of much of the world’s trade to convince the decision makers in the other 11 nations to join us and agree to establish a floor of enforceable international labor and environmental standards that lessen the incentives for American firms to outsource while reducing trade barriers to American exports, in exchange for terms that are similarly favorable to our partners, this could be a mutually beneficial win-win.
The entire global economy is in the doldrums, and much of the world is looking for American leadership. And, since our economy is on an upswing, with growth outpacing other advanced nations, and with much of the developed world experiencing declining growth rates at best or scrambling to avoid another recession, we have an opportunity – and the leverage – to execute an advantageous trade agreement, champion American interests, and uphold – and export – American values.
This whole article seems premised on the notion that Trump is speaking in good faith. Fail.
Also, many issues like trade don’t really fall on a traditional right/left gamut, do double fail.