The Real Social Security Fraudsters, He Says

 

Howard Lutnick, late of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is not, by any stretch, a poor man, has sorted out who the real fraudsters and abusers of Social Security might be--the people who would complain if they failed to receive a check. If they failed to receive their check, that they were counting on, because they paid into the system during their entire working life? I mean, say what, now?

“What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who’s not hurt, who’s on disability for 50 years,” he claimed. “It’s ridiculous, and they have another job.”

At one point in the wide-ranging, nearly two-hour conversation, Lutnick also said that if Social Security “didn’t send out their checks this month,” his “mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain.”

“She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining,” the billionaire businessman said.

This Trumpworld Grab-Bag is a Showboat

There's a certain frustration that goes with seeing a beautiful lie get destroyed and the realization that so many people--like VP Mike Pence, like Sean Spicer's gifted understudy Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and all the folks who went to bat for the idea that Donald Trump was acting on the advice of AG Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who both submitted letters about why James Comey had to go--was just so much stage dressing for the real decision-making, which was Trump and Trump alone. He decided Comey had to go, for whatever reason he did decide, which almost certainly still could not possibly be about his treatment of Hillary Clinton's email investigation, and equally almost certainly had to do with the Russian hacking inquiry. It's frustrating because we may never know how clowned those people must have felt when their careful story got blown.

I think the best part of the Lester Holt interview is where Trump calls Comey a "showboat", mostly I suppose for appearing on Trump's television giving testimony for this and that--because the House or Senate had requested him to. Comey is a "showboat" coming from gold-plated everything celebrity tv reality show-guy seems, I don't know...just mighty rich. Comey investigating Trump was this thing called "a job", and briefing Congress was a part of it (see "checks and balances" and "Constitution" and stuff).

For an even more bizarre take on what Trump even expected from Comey, we have a report that he wanted him to "pledge loyalty" to him. (Yes, I linked to Ben Shapiro's take deliberately. This thing should be as perplexing to folks on the right as on the left because of a thing called a "republic" where public servants don't pledge loyalty to any person, but to the Constitution--this sounds very much like a cult of personality, not like patriotism.)

But there's more: Trump explained his claims that Comey had admitted three times that Trump was not under FBI investigation for the Russia hacking inquiry by explaining that Comey had sought contact with him in hopes of "staying on" and that Trump also sought him out to be sure of where the inquiry stood with respects to himself.  Both of these things are pretty awkward. For one thing, Comey had a ten year appointment and so did not have a reason to automatically suspect he wouldn't be "kept on" (like an old family retainer once the young laird has come into his inheritance, one did not add). Also, remember how some people saw former President Bill Clinton speaking with Obama's AG Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix? Well, maybe President Trump reaching out to the lead in the investigation into the Russian interference is also a cause for a kind of concern. But Comey's associates say Trump's tale is bosh altogether.

But this is just speculation--the more instant obvious thing Trump's admissions does is cast doubt on all the stories other people in Trump's circle tried to tell to explain something that only really was clear in the mind of Trump, himself. This is not great leadership because he doesn't explain and doesn't seem to grasp that he is a public servant: meaning explanation and accountability to the people are part of the job.

There is more concerning business regarding Trump and his understanding of his job, though. Two other recent interviews are a little alarming. In one, to The Economist, he seems to think he came up with the idea of "priming the pump', which has been a colloquialism since the 1800s and an economic term since the 1920s. 

And to Time Magazine?  There's this one really odd passage everyone has seen by now, right? It's this:

On the future USS Ford-class carriers

You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, "Ah, how is it working?" "Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air." 

It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said–and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be–"Sir, we’re staying with digital." I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.

No, I get this; you don't, but I do. Trump is going to insist carriers use coal-fueled steam-boilers for the catapults, which will create who knows how many coal-related jobs. Capital thinking, old chap. Why aren't we steaming everything? Planes, boats, rice, trains, infrastructure. Gilt and steam. That's some trans-continental railway to the 21st century he's talking about! Next stop--Jim Crow 2.0! Who's a showboat now?

Keynes Wasn't a Communist, Just a Touch Pink?

I don't mind addressing Niall Ferguson's somewhat thoroughly erroneous take on the personal life and philosophy of John Maynard Keynes even after his fairly prompt apology if only because the error wasn't an error nor was this cranky ad hom out of the blue, either as a tactic from the right (re: personal arguments against Keynes) or from Ferguson (re: ad hom in general).  (To be taken seriously, I would think it would be better not to say things that are specifically untrue because they suit one's argument but then conveniently forget one's actual meaning in saying them in the first place when either defending oneself or apologizing, but what do I know?) Just to sum it all up, what he was saying is:

[Ferguson:] Keynes was a homosexual and had no intention of having children. We are NOT dead in the long run…our children are our progeny. It is the economic ideals of Keynes that have gotten us into the problems of today. Short term fixes, with a neglect of the long run, leads to the continuous cycles of booms and busts. Economies that pursue such short term solutions have always suffered not only decline, but destruction, in the long run.

Right up until everyone understood what he was saying and properly thumped him for it.   After being reminded that Keynes very nearly became a father and was actually concerned about the future enough to have written a bit about it, he can't imagine why he said anything about it at all, at all:

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life. As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.

I don't necessarily believe he's prejudiced. But he doubtless knows some people are, doesn't he? And doesn't that go some way to suggest why he uses this particular line of offense against Keynes? It wouldn't be a impossible thing to suppose regarding a popularizer of ideas, perhaps?

Don't ask me. I'm probably just inferring too much from the times he's had to point out that he is an imperialist, not a racist, by Jingo.

(I think I will add a label "word mean things" to my list of tags.)

Always Read Krugman--Keynes Was Right

This is the man :

In declaring Keynesian economics vindicated I am, of course, at odds with conventional wisdom. In Washington, in particular, the failure of the Obama stimulus package to produce an employment boom is generally seen as having proved that government spending can’t create jobs. But those of us who did the math realized, right from the beginning, that the Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (more than a third of which, by the way, took the relatively ineffective form of tax cuts) was much too small given the depth of the slump. And we also predicted the resulting political backlash. 

So the real test of Keynesian economics hasn’t come from the half-hearted efforts of the U.S. federal government to boost the economy, which were largely offset by cuts at the state and local levels. It has, instead, come from European nations like Greece and Ireland that had to impose savage fiscal austerity as a condition for receiving emergency loans — and have suffered Depression-level economic slumps, with real G.D.P. in both countries down by double digits 

This wasn’t supposed to happen, according to the ideology that dominates much of our political discourse. In March 2011, the Republican staff of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee released a report titled “Spend Less, Owe Less, Grow the Economy.” It ridiculed concerns that cutting spending in a slump would worsen that slump, arguing that spending cuts would improve consumer and business confidence, and that this might well lead to faster, not slower, growth.

 I've got a metric fuckton of observations that go with this, from "Wouldn't it be neat if Bush et als were big on Hayek back when Bush inherited a budget surplus, so that instead of a tax cut and massive government spending, the house would have been in order for a less-miserable crash that more people could have walked away from?" to ""True stimulus has yet to be tried", to "The operation isn't successful if it's killing the patient".  And also "Things cost more because they cost more--not because of inflation right this minute" and also,  Atrios makes sense when he talks about free money.  Or if you asked me, (who does?) I'd at least say since this slump had to do with a debt crisis, let's see some debt forgiveness and for an old-fashioned kind of money-in-people's pockets scheme--pay raises. Up the minimum wage. Bills get paid and more money goes around.

*I don't even know where that Russ Meyer econowonk tattoo display came from. Of course I don't.