A deed registered with L.A. County on May 31 shows that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., signed the property over to Hillcrest Asia Ltd., a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The price tag: $13.5…. Trump bought the property, at 809 North Canon Drive, for $7 million in 2007, according to L.A. County land records. The county assessed the property last year at $8.3 million.
Hmmm. Luxury homes have been very hot in Los Angeles over the past few years, but the Beverly Hills market softened considerably last year and prices dropped. A home like this one should probably sell in the neighborhood of $10-11 million. So why did this Indonesian guy pay $13.5 million? We can guess, but I suspect we will never know.
Next year, for the first time since 1982, the program must start drawing down its assets in order to pay retirees all of the benefits they have been promised, according to the latest government projections. Unless a political solution is reached, Social Security’s so-called trust funds are expected to be depleted within about 15 years. Then, something that has been unimaginable for decades would be required under current law: Benefit checks for retirees would be cut by about 20 percent across the board.
….“Fifteen years is really just around the corner for people planning their retirements,” said John B. Shoven, a Stanford economist who is also affiliated with the Hoover Institution and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Oh please. The last time Social Security was in trouble, the supposedly final, drop-dead, full-on crisis date was April 1983, when Social Security would start to run a deficit and check processing would be delayed. Do you know when President Reagan finally signed legislation to fix things? April 1983.
I’m all in favor of reforming Social Security now, because it’s easier if we give ourselves time to phase in the changes. But if we don’t, retirees are astronomically unlikely to face any problems. Congress might not get around to fixing things until a few weeks before checks will be slashed, but they’ll get around to it. Anything else would be political suicide.
The best time to do this will probably be a few years from now, when President Harris and Speaker Ocasio-Cortez agree on a plan to soak the rich in order to increase benefits to low-income retirees and stabilize payments for everyone else. Republicans could probably avoid this by cutting a deal now, but they’re too dumb and shortsighted to do it.
Because I’m a neoliberal shill I’ve never been a big fan of rent control. I figure that if you want to help poor and working-class folks afford the rent in big cities, you should just let the market work normally and then give them money or vouchers or whatnot that they can use toward their rent payments.
What I didn’t know, because this has never been a big hot button for me, is what Adam Serwer calls “a well known result of rent control.” Namely this:
This is from the Wall Street Journal, which says that the biggest beneficiaries of rent control in New York City—by far—are affluent white folks in Manhattan:
Manhattan renters get a steep discount from market rents in the same neighborhood: about $1,000 a month per apartment, up to nearly $2,000 a month in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In many less affluent working-class neighborhoods, regulated rents are no different than, or only slightly below, market rate rents in the same locale.
….In all of Manhattan, median regulated rents were 53% below median market rates in the borough. In Queens, 8.6% were below market rates; in the Bronx, it was 13.5%; and in Brooklyn it was 16.7%, the analysis found.
….More affluent renters also received a bigger discount from market rent. A typical renter with an income in the top quarter of all New York households paid about $1,650 in rent, compared with $2,700 in rent for a similar renter paying market rents, a discount of 39%. For a renter in the bottom quarter of income the difference was 15%.
White renters in rent-protected apartments benefited more than any other race group, the analysis found, with a discount of 36% from market rates, compared with 16% for black renters and 17% for Hispanic renters.
I guess I’m surprised there isn’t a more stringent income cap on rent control in New York City. It’s one thing to help out the poor and working class, but I’m not sure why landlords should be required to offer reduced rents to affluent folks on the Upper West Side.
I’m trying out an updated exercise regime that happens to involve watching more TV. So this morning, after pulling out my new rowing machine, I tuned into Fox News and discovered that Darrell Issa was today’s guest on Outnumbered. The question of the moment was whether Democrats were being petty and ridiculous by trying to stop Donald Trump from redesigning Air Force One. (“We all agree,” Lisa Boothe burbled at the end, and I think you can all guess what they agreed on.)
So what did Issa say? Well, Air Force One is constantly being repainted, different colors, different designs, etc. Why, when Issa flew on the old 707 version of Air Force One as it was being delivered to the Reagan Museum, it was in the middle of being repainted! Every president has done this, so who cares if Trump does it too? Get a life, losers.
I have no life, so Issa got me curious: has the design of Air Force One changed over the years? It took a bit of sleuthing to find photos with clear dates and non-museum settings, but I did it. You can thank me later. Here are the results:
Air Force One in 1963Air Force One in 1987Air Force One in 2018
I can’t swear that the Pantone numbers of the paint jobs are literally identical, but these sure look the same to me. I don’t doubt that Air Force One has been repainted periodically, but the design hasn’t changed at all.
Later on, either Issa or one of the others also repeated the lie about Trump cutting $1.5 billion off the contract price of the new pair of 747s the Air Force is buying to replace the old ones. In reality, Trump cut $0 off the price.
Now, none of this matters much. But it’s literally what I saw after turning on Fox News at random and listening for five minutes. They repeated President Trump’s lies and then made up new lies of their own to add to them. They do this every minute of every day, no matter how trivial the subject. It’s hardly any wonder that regular viewers are so poorly informed even if they don’t stay up to watch the prime time shills.
The Office of Special Counsel has recommended the removal of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway from federal office for violating the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from engaging in political activity in the course of their work….The counsel said Conway was a repeat offender and recommended that she be removed from federal office.
The Office of Special Counsel is run by Henry Kerner, whom Trump nominated to the post.
Trump’s options are to (a) fire Conway or (b) write tweets about Kerner being part of a deep-state conspiracy against his administration. I wonder which he’ll choose? Hmmm.
In Germany, the pill is charmingly called "die Antibabypille."Imago via ZUMA
Ted Cruz is suddenly a bipartisan Jedi warrior:
I agree. Perhaps, in addition to the legislation we are already working on together to ban Members of Congress from becoming lobbyists, we can team up here as well. A simple, clean bill making birth control available over the counter. Interested? https://t.co/7kh3kqxN1w
As many people have pointed out, Cruz probably isn’t especially interested in making contraceptives more widely available. What attracts him is the fact that if birth control is sold on drugstore shelves it would no longer be mandated by Obamacare.¹
For what it’s worth, I don’t care much if his motives are good or bad. There are lots of benefits to making contraceptives available over the counter, not least of which is that competition would probably drive down prices. In Portugal, for example, where birth control pills are available OTC, the typical cost is four or five dollars per pack. There’s also considerable evidence that pregnancy rates go down if women have quick and easy access to contraceptives instead of having to renew a prescription every month.
Another thing to keep in mind: this would apply to birth control pills, but not to things like IUDs or other forms of long-term birth control, which require a doctor’s intervention.
If Congress passed a bill to make birth control pills freely available, the price would be low and states would still have the option to allow Medicaid to cover the cost. There’s also the simple fact that contraceptive pills should be available OTC. They’re as safe as aspirin, and OTC decisions really ought to be driven by science, not by whatever insurance regulations we happen to have at the moment. I’d take Cruz up on his offer.
¹Actually, I think this would happen only if HHS rewrites its regulations. However, it’s a good bet that Trump’s HHS would do this pretty quickly.
Matt Yglesias points us to the latest Federal Reserve calculations of net worth, and as usual, we can say that the post-Reagan era has been a great time to be rich in America. Here’s the net worth of the top 1 percent:
That’s an increase of more than 4 percent per year above and beyond inflation. The upper middle class has done OK during the same period, increasing its net worth by about 2 percent per year.
And the bottom 50 percent? Their net worth has declined. The basic story is that they didn’t have much to begin with and they lost it all during the housing bust. Literally, they lost it all: their collective net worth hit zero. They’ve been building their net worth back since then, but they still haven’t reached the level they were at in 1990, let alone surpassed it.
And the other income groups? They all lost a bit during the housing bust but made it back within three years. They’ve been building ever since, and at such a fast rate that the recession is now just a blip in the rear-view mirror.
I have good news and bad news this morning. The good news is that Donald Trump isn’t the moron he seems to be. It’s just an act, and he’s actually highly intelligent and focused on his job.
The bad news is that he has given the signal for the invasion to begin. Soon we will all be slaves of the reptilian Plasmadorfian Empire.
President Trump on Wednesday said he would consider accepting information on his political opponents from a foreign government, despite the concerns raised by the intelligence community and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In an Oval Office interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Trump also said he wouldn’t necessarily alert the FBI if a foreign country approached his campaign with “oppo research” about his Democratic challenger. “I think you might want to listen; there isn’t anything wrong with listening,” Trump said. “If somebody called from a country, Norway, ‘We have information on your opponent,’ oh, I think I’d want to hear it.”
That writeup is from the Washington Post, and it’s typical. Vox said the same thing. Ditto for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But there’s something odd about all this. Nowhere in the interview did Stephanopoulos use the word “government.” Neither did Trump. Here’s the closest they came:
Stephanopoulos: Your campaign this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept or should they call the FBI?
Trump: I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen. There’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, “We have information on your opponent,” oh, I think I’d want to hear it….If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI. If I thought there was something wrong.
Stephanopoulos is vague—“if foreigners, if Russia, if China”—and Trump merely talks about “somebody” calling from a foreign country. ABC News itself was more careful than the rest of the media; in their teaser for the interview they reported that Trump said he wouldn’t go to the FBI if “foreign figures” approached him with information.
So be careful with the “Trump admits he’d take oppo from foreign governments” stuff. It just gives Trump a huge opening to yell “FAKE NEWS!” and claim that he never said any such thing.
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