April 26, 2017 – Rational Nation USA

Reject The Wall… Be A Patriotic American!

(CNN) – Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said Wednesday that failing to fulfill Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall along the Mexican border will hurt the party in the 2018 midterm elections.

“They’re gonna lose the trust of our base if we don’t keep our promises, our base is gonna walk away,” McDaniel said when asked by conservative radio host Laura Ingraham about the possibly of the wall not being built or funded. “They’re gonna feel like, ‘hey you said one thing on the campaign trail to get elected and you didn’t act on it.'”(CNN)Republican National Committee chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said Wednesday that failing to fulfill Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall along the Mexican border will hurt the party in the 2018 midterm elections.

“They’re gonna lose the trust of our base if we don’t keep our promises, our base is gonna walk away,” McDaniel said when asked by conservative radio host Laura Ingraham about the possibly of the wall not being built or funded. “They’re gonna feel like, ‘hey you said one thing on the campaign trail to get elected and you didn’t act on it.'”

Yahoo! Since 69% of Americans oppose the border wall, including many republicans, we are hoping and begging you continue to push your ignorant and costly xenophobic agenda. In the process maybe, just maybe, your conservative agenda will get flushed down the toilet where it belongs.

FULL STORY…

Americans Against The Border Wall…

Washington Post-ABC News poll: Sixty percent of adults oppose building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, while 37 percent support it. Of these respondents, 47 percent are strongly against it. It is worth noting that 76 percent of Trump voters support it, while 91 percent of Hillary Clinton voters don’t. But what the January poll also found is that even among those who supported neither of the candidates, the consensus (69 percent vs. 27 percent) is against building the wall.

It is clear the vast majority of Americans do not want the border wall that Trump made a center piece of his campaign. Rational folks know that a) we cannot afford a border wall, b) we do not need a border wall, and c) simply increasing and improving border surveillance will be adequate.

Democrats, independents, many republicans, with the exception of die-hard Trump supporters, are opposed to the wall. It is likely to remain a political football but one that will never score.

It does keep the Trump xenophobic base pumped however. Which we suppose is the real purpose to begin with.

Full Washington Post write-up HERE.

The Trump Tax Plan…

Remember Voodoo economics, a phrase coined by George Hebert Walker Bush back in the “80’s”? If you do you’ll likely thinks as we do here, that our make-believe POTUS has come up with a new version of voodoo economics. Of course specifics are very sparse and policy wonks will ne having a ball. But in the meantime all the armchair economists can have some fun with what appears to be the plan to ultimately break America for good. While the assumptions and the projected benefits resulting from said assumptions sound great the devil is in the details,and those are something is in very short supply.

Brief summary from The Washington Post.

Many budget experts say they believe the White House’s plan would reduce federal revenue by so much that it would grow the debt by trillions of dollars in the next decade, growing interest costs and slowing the economy.

The central feature of the White House’s plan would be a big reduction in tax rates for virtually all Americans and businesses.

It would eliminate the seven existing income tax brackets and replace them with three brackets, containing new rates of 10 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent, based on someone’s income.

It would also roughly double the standard deduction that Americans can use to reduce their taxable income. The deduction for married couples would move from $12,600 to $24,000.

The White House plan would eliminate the alternative-minimum tax and the estate tax, provisions that raise billions of dollars each year but have long been the target of Republicans seeking to rip up the tax code.

To offset some of the cost of the lower rates, Trump administration officials said they were proposing to eliminate virtually all tax deductions that Americans claim, provisions that they argued primarily benefited wealthier Americans.

This includes the tax deduction people can claim for the state and local taxes they pay each calendar year. These taxes can be particularly high in states with higher income taxes, such as California and New York.

For businesses, Trump’s proposal would lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, and it would also allow smaller businesses, structured in such a way that they are affected by the individual tax rate, to also use the 15 percent threshold.

But they can also include large law firms and lobbying shops.

“We expect that trillions of dollars will come back on shore and will be reinvested here in the United States, for capital goods and job creation,” Mnuchin said.

The trouble Trump has is that while his administration says the tax cuts will over time pay for themselves, Congress’s nonpartisan budgetary referees at the Joint Committee on Taxation won’t work off that same assumption.

Full article CONTINUES HERE.

Conservatives Continue Their Hypocrisy…

Republicans hate the ACA (ObamaCare) and have pledged to repeal or replace it with something better. Although to date they have no GD idea just what that might be.

One thing is clear however. The parts they like they want to keep for their own. In other words congress critters and their staffers.

Republican legislators liked this policy well enough to offer it in a new amendment. They do not, however, seem to like it enough to have it apply to themselves and their staff. A spokesperson for Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-NJ), who authored this amendment, confirmed this was the case: Members of Congress and their staff would get the guarantee of keeping these Obamacare regulations. Health law expert Tim Jost flagged this particular issue to me.

A bit of background is helpful here. Obamacare requires all members of Congress and their staff to purchase coverage through the health law’s marketplace, just like Obamacare enrollees. The politics of that plank were simple enough, meant to demonstrate that if the coverage in this law were good enough for Americans, it should be good enough for their representatives in Washington.

That’s been happening for the past four years now. Fast-forward to this new amendment, which would allow states to waive out of key Obamacare protections like the ban on preexisting conditions or the requirement to cover things like maternity care and mental health services.

If congressional aides lived in a state that decided to waive these protections, the aides who were sick could presumably be vulnerable to higher premiums than the aides who are healthy. Their benefits package could get skimpier as Obamacare’s essential health benefits requirement may no longer apply either.

This apparently does not sound appealing, because the Republican amendment includes the members of Congress and their staff as a protected group who cannot be affected by this amendment’s terms.

You can see it on the sixth page of the amendment, although it is admittedly hard to spot. The Obamacare section that requires legislators to buy on the marketplace is section 1312(d)(3)(D). And if you look at the Republican amendment, and the list of who cannot be included in this waiver? It includes Section 1312(d)(3)(D).

Lets just call it straight out for what it is, goddamn hypocritical. Something that defines the GOP and Trump to a fair the well.

Full VOX article continues HERE.