Egberto Willies has the post Robert Reich destroys Right Wing economist attempt to sell GOP tax cuts (VIDEO).

“You are wrong about one thing that’s very very fundamental,” Reich said. “It is the middle-income and poor people who actually through their spending create jobs. Businesses are not going to invest in new jobs unless there are people who are purchasing. That’s one of the problems we’ve had over the last 25 years. This recovery has been as sluggish as it was because the middle class and the poor don’t have the money.”

As I like to say, “What part of not enough freakin’ customers do you not understand?”

The Independent has the story America denies Puerto Rico request for waiver to bring vital fuel and supplies to island.

The Trump administration on Tuesday denied a request to waive shipping restrictions to help get fuel and supplies to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, saying it would do nothing to address the island’s main impediment to shipping, damaged ports.

Naomi Klein has written a book to describe the type of thing Trump is doing. The book is titles The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

I have written a number of posts about this book as far back as 2008 – The Shock Doctrine in 2010, The Shock Doctrine in 2008, Trump’s Shock Doctrine in 2017, Harvey Didn’t Come Out of the Blue. Now is the Time to Talk About Climate Change in 2017. You can search this site for Naomi Klein to find more posts.

YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders Reacts & CRUSHES Trump’s New Tax Reform plans 9/27/2017.

Bernie has an excellent message here.

Personally, I posit that tax cuts for the wealthy actually harm the economy. The tax cuts do not create more jobs for American workers, they actually cut jobs for American workers. American workers with money to spend is the foundation of consumer demand that drives the need to hire people to fulfill that demand. If we shift even more money from the workers to the ultra-rich, there will be even less consumer demand, and less need for workers to produce goods and services.

In another Sanders sponsored video, there is the empirical evidence that Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Create Jobs. His video doesn’t try to give an explanation as to why this is. My explanation above is nothing more than Keynesian economics.

Business Insider has the article IT’S HERE: All the details of Trump’s massive tax plan. Here is an excerpt from the article with a few liberties taken by me to adjust the content to be more truthful.

“Too many in our country are shut out of the dynamism of the US economy, which has led to the justifiable feeling that the system is rigged against hardworking Americans,” the nine-page plan reads. “With significant and meaningful tax changes, we will create a system that accentuates the rigging. If you think the rich have been draining money out of the economy before, just wait to see what they will be able to get away with after we make things worse.”

The rich already take too much money out of the economy. They rake in the money, but as John Maynard Keynes explains, there are no real assets worth investing in due to lack of consumer wealth to demand more product. Instead, the wealthy put money into things like elevating stock prices which companies use to buy other companies or sock it away for future use. They buy other companies to eliminate competition. They strip the assets from these companies, and then shut them down. This does not create jobs.

We need to keep this money out of the hands of the idle rich, or take it back from them in taxes, and put the money to use in the economy by investing in our future and putting the money in the hands of people who would spend it to restore consumer demand.

Senator Bernie Sanders has posted his thoughts on the tax cut proposal.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, President Trump’s tax plan is morally repugnant and bad economic policy.

His post refers to the NBC story GOP Plan Cuts Corporate, Individual Taxes and Repeals the Estate Tax.

Normally, raising taxes is not thought of as a way to stimulate the economy. However, in the current circumstances, taxing away some of the money from the rich who do not use that money to stimulate the economy, and putting it to better use in stimulating the economy would actually be a net benefit to reviving the economy. I am not saying this is the only way, or necessarily the best way, but the argument is a good counter-weight to Trump’s belief that tax cuts will stimulate the economy. Tax-cuts under the current circumstances will only put the economy into a deeper sleep.

Naked Capitalism has the article Jared Bernstein Shows the Costs of Not Understanding Sovereign Currencies.

The Republican and New Democrat deficit strategy is to force Democrats to make an endless series of “Sophie’s choices.” Choose which excellent program to kill in order to save (temporarily) another from the chopping block because we supposedly cannot afford to provide both. Then repeat the process. The Republicans and New Democrats constantly, and falsely, claim that the federal government cannot afford to provide medical care availability that is routinely provided in most of Europe and Canada. It is a pure myth that the United States cannot afford to provide the safety net of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

I certainly believe the MMT (Modern Money Theory) explanation of how the monetary system works, but I have come to realize that there are a couple of important factors that MMT proponents ignore. My issues do not invalidate the gist of the above article, but I feel it necessary to get the MMT experts to address my issues. Doing so can only increase the credibility of MMT.

One factor is the belief that the money created in the private sector by lending is somehow always a less important economic force than money created by the sovereign power. The accounting balance of assets and liabilities (money lent and obligation to repay) is a static balancing. The economy is dynamic, however. Money lent can be spent immediately. The obligation to repay is in the future. In the time span between when the money is lent and when it must be repaid, there is a lot of economic activity going on. The effects of this cannot be ignored.

The other factor is mark-to-market valuation of assets. I’ll defer discussion of that to a later comment.

There is plenty of evidence in economic history, both recent and not so recent, to demonstrate the importance of the two factors mentioned above.

I would love to see a discussion of both factors by the MMT theorists.

Keynesian explanations of why monetary policy is not the only factor driving the economy still apply after all these years. After all, these too are just explanations of how things work whether you choose to act on that knowledge or not.

The Black Agenda Report has this interview with Ajamu Baraka Black Caucus Backs Trump’s War Budget. It is about more than just the Black Caucus.

Democrats detest everything about Donald Trump — except his war policies, said Ajamu Baraka, the former Green Party vice presidential nominee and spokesperson for the Black Alliance for Peace. A majority of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Donald Trump’s gargantuan war budget, which will inevitably result in drastic cuts in social programs. The Obama war-making legacy has “resulted in Black people having a less critical stance” on U.S. wars, said Baraka.

Global Research has the article Wall Street Vultures Descend On Debt-Ridden Puerto Rico. This is an interview with Déborah Berman-Santana.

DBS: With the eventual elimination of industrial tax incentives beginning in the 1990s, Puerto Rico’s governments increasingly looked to loans to balance its budget and continue practices of rewarding political cronies with contracts for large infrastructure projects. Subsequently, President Clinton’s elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act allowed for investment bankers to increasingly engage in bond market speculation. Puerto Rico received “triple exemption” because of its colonial status, which meant that every pension fund and every municipal and state government, among others, bought Puerto Rico bonds, ignoring the fact that its economy began shrinking once the special industrial exemptions were completely eliminated in 2006.

Election of a protégé of the Koch Brothers, Luis Fortuño, as Puerto Rico’s governor in 2008 resulted in a “bitter medicine” law that eliminated tens of thousands of public jobs, which accelerated the descent of an economic recession into a depression. By 2011 the major credit agencies began degrading Puerto Rico’s ratings, with the result that it increasingly resorted to short-term, high interest loans similar to “payday loans.” Bondholders increasingly unloaded their Puerto Rico bonds in the secondary bond market, which were then swooped up by vulture funders such as Paul Singer and John Paulson – often at 10 to 20 percent of the bond’s value. Today, these vulture funders possess up to 50 percent of Puerto Rico’s public debt, and are the creditors who are least willing to renegotiate the terms of the loans. They have been the major lobbyists for the Congressional law known as “PROMESA” that recently became law.

I was challenged recently to put up a link to back up my claim that Wall Street was responsible for duping Puerto Rico into its current debt situation. I did a brief Google search on Wall Street War on Puerto Rico to come up with the article above.

As I get further and further into the article it only gets worse for Puerto Rico. Here is the reaction to the question about the similarities between Greece and Puerto Rico.

DBS: I would say they are strikingly similar, and in fact that the same playbook is being used in both countries, despite the differences between them. For example, the acronym TINA, “There Is No Alternative” to continued policies of austerity, privatization, and increased taxes in order to pay off an unsustainable public debt, is constantly repeated, as is the myth that “There is no Plan B,” and that political independence for both (in Greece’s case, leaving the European Union and the eurozone) would be disastrous — as if U.S. and EU colonial rule is not already a disaster! In Greece there is already a junta de control fiscalnamed by the EU which must approve — and often even write — laws that the Greek government must implement, such as automatic budget cuts and further privatizations. While as a classic colony Puerto Rico cannot officially deal with the IMF, in practice the PROMESA bill follows the IMF playbook, as was prescribed by “former” IMF officials who were hired by the Puerto Rican government — as ordered by their masters in Washington — to produce a report with recommendations for dealing with the debt crisis. In addition, you see “vulture capitalists” such as Paul Singer and John Paulson swooping into both Greece and Puerto Rico to buy up assets such as banks and land, plus debt — at a discount. The fact that Puerto Rico is a classic colony actually makes the problems of lack of sovereignty much clearer. Greece is still officially an independent country, so for some people its de facto colonial status may not be quite as clear. Also, the problem of equating national sovereignty with fascism is particularly acute in Greece as a European country. In Puerto Rico we have some of that confusion, but it is not as strong since in general Latin Americans, including Puerto Ricans, understand the necessity for national sovereignty as part of anti-colonial struggles.

RT has the article N. Korea has already suffered untold devastation by US, knows ‘fire & fury’ firsthand – analysts.

We must remember once again that, according to Chinese statistics, an estimated 30 percent of the North Korean population was killed, 70 percent of whom were civilians. The United States waged an absolutely unrestrained air war.

I doubt that there are many people in the USA that understand this. I was only 10 years old at the time of the Korean War, so I didn’t fully get what was going on at the time. Imagine all of our people who have been born since then. What chance do they have of understanding this?

YouTube has the video Hillary Clinton Attacks Progressives, Critiques Bernie’s ‘Medicare for All’ Bill.

Hillary Clinton has been making the rounds on cable news shows in an attempt to both (a) promote her new book, and (b) continue f*cking over America even more. Not only is she tripling-down on her attacks against progressives—calling them divisive, and implying that they’re sexist—but she’s also trying to undermine Bernie Sanders by criticizing his ‘Medicare for All’ bill and condescendingly implying he doesn’t understand his own bill and can’t determine how much it will cost. She’s also trying to persuade the Democratic Party to not give Bernie any influence. Thanks, Hillary!