Trump Surrenders, Again

With the withdrawal of support to the  Kurds in Syria and Iraq, Trump has surrendered to Turkey, Iran, Russia, and of course Assad in Syria.

 This cedes control of that whole region of the Middle East to Russia and Iran.

Trump has now strengthened Iran, as well as Russia; all to appease Turkey, an erstwhile NATO ally.

How can GOP conservatives, Saudi Arabia and Israel be happy with this development ?

I said that Trump surrenders again because in my earlier posts I wrote about his surrender of Asia to China and Eastern Europe to Russia. 

 Western Europe stands alone. Of course, Trump has alienated Mexico and Canada, and taken shots at Australia.

At least he's beloved by dictators, autocrats, kings, thugs and ( sadly) Israel.

Pax Americana is over and the US is going it alone for now.  Trump only wants only bilateral trade agreements that no one else really wants.  They may have to trade with us since we are such big, rich bullies; but the resentment will fester and eventually hurt us.

 I always thought  that the goal of trade was "win-win". Not according to Trump. By the way, trade deficits are meaningless "red herrings". 

These developments can only harm America in the long run. 

Tax Cuts For Donald Trump Act

The Tax Cuts for Donald Trump Act: 

That should be the name of the recently announced GOP tax plan. The major beneficiary of this tax plan is not the American public broadly but, instead, Donald J Trump and his family, personally.

First of all not reducing the highest income tax rate for higher earners is not relevant to Trump. Virtually none of his income is taxable at ordinary income tax rates .

Almost all of Trump's income comes from pass-through entities which will now be given a windfall tax rate of 25%. It is grossly misleading to say this new rate benefits small business. Most truly small businesses already pay at a 25% rate. Rather the only pass entities that will receive this unjustified windfall are the kind in which Trump is invested, including, of course, The Trump Organization.

The second major windfall for Trump and his family is the eventual elimination of the estate tax. It is grossly misleading to present this as a benefit for family farms and small businesses because under current law estates of up to $11,000,000 are exempt from  paying estate taxes.  This change is exclusively for the benefit of the .1% . This change alone would save the Trump family billions.

 Finally,  the elimination of AMT, as Rachel Maddow revealed, is the only thing that resulted in Trump paying meaningful taxes for that year, or  any year for that matter. Eliminating it, rather than appropriately modifying it to not apply to upper middle class taxpayers, would save Trump tens of millions of dollars. AMT was intended to insure that the rich still paid taxes. While it has ensnared more than the rich;  just terminating it would once again allow some of the richness among us to avoid paying any federal income taxes. 

Even this simplistic analysis (of but a few salient provisions of the GOP tax plan) clearly shows that  Donald Trump and his family personally would be a very major beneficiary of this tax bill.

Thus , "The Tax Cuts for Donald Trump Act" seems the most honestly descriptive name for the GOP's tax plan.

Eric