Percentages no longer matter, the damage has been done. He did this his last term too! Other countries no longer trust the U.S. to keep their word.
Until he is gone there will be no stability.
Other than the authoritarian lurch, this is probably the biggest long-term issue stemming from MAGA. How will we get other countries to trust us again? The point of treaties is that they're agreements between countries; they aren't dependent on who's in office.
How will our own citizens trust the federal government again? The White House is illegally cutting off grant money, firing federal employees, and reversing federal spending. The President doesn't have the power to do any of that. We can't run a country where scientific funding is at risk every four years because the American people elected another wacko. If we're serious about curing cancer or making scientific advancements, we can't live in a world like that.
Trump himself has now asked Congress to exclude the highest earners from the renewal of the 2017 tax break bill. About a month ago Steve Bannon was on Bill Maher's show and said he was going to do this, and now it looks like he has. We'll see if Congress plays along or if this is all just a show for the cameras.
A month ago I agreed with you wholeheartedly, but now I'm not at all sure.
I have a shocker for you:
It was bullshit.
Now, why would the news media credulously report this? Donald Trump is the biggest liar in politics. As far as I can tell, there are only two options:
1) They're the biggest dupes alive
2) They're in the tank for Trump
Don't give this administration the benefit of the doubt.
Let's keep in mind it's -all- performative until the loopholes that allow billionaires to hide all of their money are ALL closed and the IRS has the proper funding it needs to audit the billionaires to ensure compliance with tax laws. Until that happens (and it won't under a Republican - or most Democrats) then they could go ahead and pantomime whatever 'no tax breaks for you' that they want and it will be meaningless theatre.
Trump/DOGE/Elon gutted the IRS for this exact reason. Under Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS got a big funding increase.
They paid us back for that and then some.
The Republican Party's driving ideology, so much as they have one, is to help rich tax cheats.
There's no way any of this is actually about fentanyl. This administration has made so many moves against helping people with addiction issues it's easy to see they really don't care about it as an issue. Also, there's more fentanyl heading into Canada from the US than the other way around, so blaming Canada for fentanyl traffic is nonsensical. Everyone is against drug smuggling, so it's an easy moral "win" to decry it. And fentanyl is the drug of the moment in media. So they're just waving that around as some kind of moral justification for their international trade taxes.
Republican policy can't withstand a single follow-up question. This is another instance. If de minimis is about fentanyl, why did they again lower the de minimis tariff? It's nonsense.
It's also not like a $100 flat fee would impact drug dealers.
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