The TRUMP POTUS "Tribute" & "Tribulations" of the Politically Incorrect....!

Let This Thread Live or Shut It Down?

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Andy

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Having gotten to know you and your company, I genuinely believe you on this front. But we don't live in a world run by people like you. I don't think many of your full-time employees qualify for poverty assistance programs. A whole lot of CEOs style themselves as a Hank Rearden when they're really James Taggart. You and I both know very well that on a macroeconomic scale, basically all of that money is going straight into stock buybacks and dividends.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/20/this-is-just-the-start-of-companies-increasing-spending.html

This is just the start of companies handing out bonuses, raising wages and increasing spending

Expect a stampede of companies handing out bonuses, raising pay, spending on capital projects and giving to charities, with the windfall from the newly passed corporate tax cuts.
AT&T, Comcast and a handful of companies said they would use tax reform to give money to their employees and increase capital spending.
Wells Fargo and Fifth Third said they would raise their minimum wage. Analysts expect other banks to follow, as well as other companies that will get a boost from the tax law changes.
Patti Domm | @pattidomm
Published 7:25 PM ET Wed, 20 Dec 2017 Updated 22 Hours Ago

Expect a stampede of companies handing out bonuses, raising pay, spending on capital projects and giving to charities, with the windfall from the massive corporate tax cuts passed Wednesday.

In the hours after Congress approved the GOP tax cut plan, a handful of companies jumped to announce plans to share some of the proceeds on their employees and spend on infrastructure. Boeing was first out of the gate, followed by AT&T, which said it would give more than 200,000 unionized employees a special bonus of $1,000 once the tax bill is signed. The company also said it would increase its capital expenditures by $1 billion.

Both Fifth Third Bancorp and Wells Fargo followed, saying they would raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Fifth Third said it would also give workers a bonus, and Wells Fargo said it would give $400 million to community and nonprofit organizations next year.

Comcast, which owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal, said it would pay 100,000 frontline and non-executive employees special $1,000 bonuses. The company also said it is making the move because of the FCC's recent change in broadband rules and tax reform. It also said it plans to spend well in excess of $50 billion over the next five years on infrastructure improvements.

This is just the start of companies handing out bonuses, raising wages and boosting spending This is just the start of companies handing out bonuses, raising wages and boosting spending
22 Hours Ago | 00:55
Expect a stampede of companies handing out bonuses, raising pay, spending on capital projects and giving to charities, with the windfall from the massive corporate tax cuts passed Wednesday.

In the hours after Congress approved the GOP tax cut plan, a handful of companies jumped to announce plans to share some of the proceeds on their employees and spend on infrastructure. Boeing was first out of the gate, followed by AT&T, which said it would give more than 200,000 unionized employees a special bonus of $1,000 once the tax bill is signed. The company also said it would increase its capital expenditures by $1 billion.

Both Fifth Third Bancorp and Wells Fargo followed, saying they would raise their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Fifth Third said it would also give workers a bonus, and Wells Fargo said it would give $400 million to community and nonprofit organizations next year.

Comcast, which owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal, said it would pay 100,000 frontline and non-executive employees special $1,000 bonuses. The company also said it is making the move because of the FCC's recent change in broadband rules and tax reform. It also said it plans to spend well in excess of $50 billion over the next five years on infrastructure improvements.

Tax reform triggers worker windfalls Tax reform triggers worker windfalls
9:28 AM ET Thu, 21 Dec 2017 | 03:57
"This is exciting stuff. This is good. This is not just a whole bunch of guys saying I can buy back a lot of stock here and jazz up my numbers through financial engineering. This is a bunch of business leaders saying we can use this tax benefit to grow our company, keep our loyal employees and assist the community," said Dick Bove, banking analyst at Vertical Group.

The corporate tax rate is being cut to 21 percent from 35 percent. Bove said banks pay an average 31 percent tax rate.

Bove said he now expects the other banks to follow with similar announcements.

"It looks like they are going to use that money to stimulate more employee loyalty by increasing spending. They are also going to get more liberal with their stock programs. They are going to increase philanthropic activity because it's one of the ways they stimulate business," he said. "I was convinced they were going to cut prices and go to war with each other, which I'm sure they will still do."

Boeing also announced $300 million in employee-related spending and charitable donations. FedEx, when it announced earnings, said it expects U.S. GDP could increase materially next year as a result of tax reform. It said it would likely then increase its capital expenditures and hire to accommodate the additional volumes triggered by higher growth.

The announcements were met by some cynicism by Wall Streeters, especially since the Justice Department has sued to block AT&T's acquisition ofTime Warner. Time Warner stock ended the day higher, after AT&T made the announcement, and President Donald Trump praised the company's action during a celebratory event with Republican members of congress.

But overall, the announcements were seen as positive steps for companies that are not only seeing the tax rate fall but benefiting from important changes in how they account for capital spending.

Yet companies have also been spending on stock buybacks — with $86 billion announced so far this month, the most since June, according to Trim Tabs. Democrats have said the bill favors only business and the rich, and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's office circulated a list of companies that announced buybacks.

Schumer criticized the AT&T announcement, and said the company paid a low tax rate over the last decade. "They have 80,000 fewer employees today than they had then," he said.

Also, companies raising minimum wage may be forced to do so anyway. There are 18 states and some cities where the minimum wage was going to rise in 2018. New York City will have a rate of $15 an hour.

But Bove said the fact companies have immediately given money to workers is a positive surprise, and it could boost the economy if enough do it.

"You'll see more companies doing this," said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. "It's excellent PR after all the mantra across the aisle that it's just a tax plan for the rich and for corporate America and for people who own stocks. ... It's a good PR move, giving back to the folks in the company."

"It affects the psychology of the moment. Giving back to your workers. This was a major victory for corporate America," she said of the tax cuts.

She also expects to see more banks making announcements since they are a major beneficiary of not only the tax cuts, but also deregulation.

"It's good PR. It's good corporate citizenship," said Jack Ablin, CIO of BMO Private Bank. "It's Christmastime. It's the holidays. It's spreading the good cheer around. It's probably from a communications and PR perspective smart, and probably proactive because they're going to get pressure. They might as well do it ahead of time."

Ablin said companies will feel pressured if their competitors make announcements on pay and bonuses.

The industries that see the biggest advantage in the tax law are expected to spread some of the proceeds around. Industrial companies are among the winners, as are media and retailers.

Tech is the sector that will gain the least from tax reform, since the average tax rate is about 24 percent.

"It would be smart for utilities to say they're going to cut their rates because regulators will probably force them to do it anyway," said Ablin.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC.

Correction: This report has been updated that show that Boeing was the first company to announce new employee-related spending in response to the new tax law.
 

Jack@European_Parts

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Nope......... he is indeed signing them now live before Xmas and reiterated the news articles!

I hope he is correct and things get better because the last 8 years have not been fun either.
 

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Andy

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President Trump should dress up like Santa Claus and hand deliver the signed bill to the Congressional record office. :D
 

Jack@European_Parts

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If any of that stuff quoted in the article happens, it will start (and probably end) with the executive teams multi-million dollar bonuses, which they will have to pay even less taxes on.


scrooge.jpg
 

Andy

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When you see it:

5RcNbmp.jpg
 

Eric

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The bit about Trump vs Obama, or "for the year Jan 1-Dec 31 2005", making this poorly executed fake news? :)
 

Andy

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You also missed that it says 2017 when a well executed joke would have 2018.
 

Rembrant

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"Moving expenses" are a taxable deduction in the land of the free?

Don

They are in Canada as well, if you have to move for employment or move to start a business.
 

DV52

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^^^ OK - so the deduction is limited purely for work related reasons - it looked from the form to be applicable for more general reasons.

Thanks for the explanation

Don
 

Uwe

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^^^ OK - so the deduction is limited purely for work related reasons
That's correct. Moving simply because one wants to is not deductible.
 

DV52

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^^^ And "Domestic production activities" - is this the cost of the physical exertion for the ubiquitous act of procreation for which Americans (and Aussies) are so good-at?

Don
 

Uwe

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vreihen

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/2017-tug-tribalism-grew-stronger-100004695.html

In 2017, the tug of tribalism grew stronger

Jerry Adler
Yahoo News
December 22, 2017

Among the unheralded winners of 2017 are political scientists, some of whom could spend the rest of their careers trying to explain Donald Trump’s rise and significance. Two of them, Michael Barber and Jeremy C. Pope of Brigham Young University, saw in Trump’s ever-shifting, ideologically flexible views “a unique opportunity” to test a crucial question in American politics: “To which do people give a higher priority: their ideology or their partisan affiliation?” They ask, Why is it that Republicans, self-described defenders of American values and interests, “became four times more likely to view Vladimir Putin favorably” from 2014 to 2016? What changed is that the Republican Party nominated someone who boasted about the mutual admiration he shared with the Russian dictator, illustrating Barber and Pope’s finding that “group loyalty” and “social identity” are more important in shaping voters’ views than their professed ideology.

Another term for “social identity” is “tribalism,” a word that has appeared in more than 60 articles in the New York Times so far in 2017, almost all in relation to American politics or culture. (It showed up just six times in the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency, including two references to American Indian tribes and one to an indigenous ethnic group in Venezuela.) As James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic, there are any number of synonyms for “tribe,” including “clique,” “pack,” and James Madison’s preferred term, in Federalist #10, “faction.” But “tribal” conveys a kind of blinkered, inbred loyalty that seems especially apt when applied to, say, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, whose babbling, content-free defenses of Trump led MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough to ban her from his show, or former CNN commentator Jeffrey Lord, who described Trump as “the Martin Luther King of health care.”

In this context, “tribalism” has two somewhat overlapping meanings.

One is the phenomenon Barber and Pope describe: the growing tendency to see politics as a zero-sum game between diametrically opposed teams, in which loyalty to one’s side is more important than the national interest, or even, at times, one’s own career. Writing in New York magazine this fall, Andrew Sullivan described how “the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous… two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.”

Again and again over the last year and a half, the tug of tribal loyalty has kept most Republicans in line with a president they privately, or even publicly, admit is dishonest, inept and erratic to the point of posing a threat of nuclear war. Party loyalty has led congressional Republicans to slow-walk their own investigations into allegations of Russian interference in last year’s election. It brought Republicans to the point of voting for a hugely unpopular tax bill, and many observers gleefully, or fearfully, predict they will pay a price for it next November. Barber, quoted in the Times, said that a large corporate tax cut “isn’t really an ideological priority for much of the rank and file” of the Republican Party, but “if it means that their side has ‘won,’ then they are in favor of it. More broadly, I think it shows us that teamsmanship is much more important than any particular policy agenda.”

Most religions, even those that aspire to universality, are susceptible to tribal appeals. The loyalty to Trump shown by evangelical Christian leaders such as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. has led to a growing crisis of confidence among evangelicals, especially younger ones who don’t want their church to serve as an adjunct to a political movement led by a man they wouldn’t invite into their own homes.

This is not a character flaw unique to one party. As Barber and Pope remark in a footnote, “We believe that given a different scenario that similar stories could be told about Democratic attitudes as well.” If Republicans who during the Clinton years considered personal morality an essential attribute in a president have changed their minds under Trump … well, some prominent Democrats have gone in the opposite direction. Nor is this situation inherent in American democracy. It wasn’t always the case that major votes in Congress were decided along strict party lines. For much of the last century, both parties spanned more than half the ideological spectrum, with considerable overlap in the middle. There were pro-civil-rights Republicans and Democrats who were hawks on Vietnam; legislators may or may not have had stronger consciences in those years, but they evidently felt freer to follow them. Congressional leaders in that era were expected to at least pay lip service to the idea that their policies were advancing the national interest rather than narrow partisan advantage. It’s hard to imagine one saying, as Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously did in 2010, that “our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term,” which committed him to automatically opposing anything Obama proposed. It’s not that hard to imagine Nancy Pelosi saying, and certainly thinking, something similar about Trump.

But political parties are “tribes” only in a metaphorical sense; there is another meaning to “tribalism” that cuts much closer to the bone. That is the spread of ethno-nationalism, the polite term for “racism,” which burst into the public consciousness with the tramp of marchers in a torchlight parade through Charlottesville, Va., in August. White supremacy, long thought to have been banished from American public life, came back to life in 2017 in the guise of protecting monuments to the Confederacy, drawing energy from the anti-immigrant rants of Trump and his acolytes. “You will not replace us,” the Charlottesville marchers chanted, with a subliminal, and at times explicit, substitution of “Jew” for “You.”

In his new collection of essays, “We Were Eight Years in Power,” Ta-Nehisi Coates calls Trump “the first white president”: the first whose election — coming after Barak Obama’s two terms — was a specific affirmation of white supremacy, rather than a routine perpetuation of it. Coates proceeds to reject any explanation for the 2016 vote that does not rely on racial identity, such as white working-class dissatisfaction, which he treats as a lazy journalistic trope that obscures the racial biases of Trump’s voters. This analysis — and the passionate dissents to it – are likely to influence political commentary for years to come, assuring that 2017 will go down in history as, among other unfortunate distinctions, the Year of Tribalism.
 

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https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/30/state-department-releases-huma-abedin-emails/

State Department releases emails from Clinton aide Huma Abedin

A conservative activist group is hoping for legal action as a result.

Jon Fingas
12.30.17 in Internet

Like it or not, the Hillary Clinton email saga isn't over yet. The US State Department has released about 2,800 emails and other documents from former Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on the laptop of her soon-to-be-former husband Anthony Weiner. The disclosure is a response to a 2015 Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that has been hoping to use the presence of classified emails from personal accounts as evidence of lawbreaking by Abedin and Clinton. Most of the messages (covering January 2009 to February 2013) are unclassified, though a handful have been redacted at least in part.

Five of Abedin's messages were deemed classified and discussed Middle Eastern affairs, including a call to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a deal with talks between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization and chats with the UAE's foreign minister. The least redacted message discussed a call to Saudi Arabia's Prince Saud al-Faisal in 2010 about WikiLeaks' then-looming release of documents from Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning.

Whether or not anything results from publishing the emails is another matter. While Judicial Watch has demanded a formal investigation, the FBI has stated more than once that it doesn't intend to press charges over the Clinton email probe despite calling her handling of messages "extremely careless." The newly published messages increase the transparency surrounding what happened, but they don't fundamentally change the narrative -- it might take a change of heart or a political vote (Republicans have continued to call for a special investigation) to prompt formal legal action.
 
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