Aug 28, 2024
Dusty Johnson
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Dusty Johnson
[The following is from Republican Congressman Dusty Johnson's interview with CNN, discussing the ongoing turmoil caused by MAGA Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives (Oct 2023)]
"If we don't change the foundational problems within our [Republican] conference, it's just gonna be the same stupid clown car with a different driver."
"If Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise can't figure out how to deal with that saboteur (Matt Gaetz), we're just going to have another blow-up, whether it's two weeks, or six weeks, or eight weeks. You know, Matt Gaetz and those hardliners, they're a real problem. And I don't think the pyromaniacs are going to be satisfied after they burn down one house. I think they're going to have an itching to go burn down a couple more."
"These guys, chaos artists, decided that we need to take a couple of weeks off from governing the country. They've been playing silly D.C. parlor games about leadership rather than having us actually get things done. And because they crave the attention, because they crave the chaos, it doesn't end here. We've got some real work to do if we're going to be a real big boy, big girl, grown-up party to govern the House." (source: Rep. Johnson's interview)
Who: Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-South Dakota)
Twitter: @RepDustyJohnson
When: March 2021
What: Healthcare Heroes
Watch on C-SPAN
Read Congressional Record
South Dakota Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson's new bill is expected to aid Trump's goal of returning the Panama Canal to the U.S.
Their proposal would make Social Security fully solvent through taxes on higher earners and corporations.
Arthur Delaney and Daniel Marans at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and progressive Democrats on Monday reintroduced a bill to increase Social Security retirement benefits and shore up the program’s finances solely by taxing corporations and the wealthy.
Sanders has introduced identical bills in the past, including in 2022, but the newest version of the legislation comes out amid a national debate over Social Security between President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans.
Seizing on proposals like Florida Sen. Rick Scott’s plan to force Congress to renew all federal programs every five years and a House GOP plan to raise the program’s eligibility age, Biden has accused Republicans of wanting to use “debt ceiling” negotiations to force cuts to the popular program. The GOP has forcefully denied that it would include Social Security in debt-ceiling talks — a concession that Biden sounded prepared to accept at last week’s State of the Union address.
Sanders’ legislation pushes the boundaries of the present debate over Social Security still further to the left by asking Republicans to respond to the prospect of both bigger benefits and heftier taxes.
“At a time when nearly half of older Americans have no retirement savings and almost 50 percent of our nation’s seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $25,000 a year, our job is not to cut Social Security,” Sanders said in a release. “Our job is to expand Social Security so that every senior in America can retire with the dignity that they deserve and every person with a disability can live with the security they need.”
Sanders’ Social Security Expansion Act is unlikely to become law, but it lays down a marker for the progressive position — namely that there’s no need to cut future benefits in order close the gap between the program’s projected spending and revenue. The bill serves as an implicit response to complaints from conservative policy experts that the program’s funding gap cannot be closed entirely through tax increases on high earners.
Brian Riedl, a fiscal policy scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute, acknowledged last week that Sanders’ 2022 proposal, which is identical to the new one, would extend the program’s solvency for a few decades.
But, Riedl wrote on Twitter, “That leaves few ‘tax the rich’ options to close the Medicare gap that is 2-3 times larger. The math doesn’t work.”
Unlike most other federal programs, Social Security is entirely self-funded, meaning that it cannot borrow to pay out promised benefits.
As a result of the ongoing retirement of the historically large Baby Boomer generation, the program is slated to fall short of the revenue needed to pay out future benefits in the coming years. If Congress fails to make any changes to the program, Social Security will only have enough money to fund 80% of scheduled benefits beginning in 2035. That would amount to an across-the-board 20% cut in benefits.
To ensure the program can pay out future benefits and then some, Sanders proposes subjecting earnings over $250,000 to the 12.4% payroll tax while not counting the new taxed earnings toward a person’s benefits. As of this year, only $160,200 of wage income is subject to payroll taxes. Sanders proposes levying other taxes as well, such as subjecting investment income over $200,000 to payroll taxes.
Sanders released a letter Monday from Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary declaring that his legislation “would extend the ability of the [Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance] program to pay scheduled benefits in full and on time throughout the 75-year projection period.”
In addition, the new revenue Sanders’ bill would generate for Social Security enables him to finance a more generous benefit formula that would increase the benefits of low- and moderate-income earners by about 15%. He would also tie the size of benefits to a consumer price index designed to account for seniors’ higher living costs.
Republicans have signaled since last year that they would demand major cuts to federal spending in exchange for supporting legislation to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit this year. The Treasury Department hit the limit last month and has resorted to “extraordinary measures” in order to pay the government’s bills. If the cap isn’t lifted, the government could fail to make payments to bondholders and even beneficiaries of federal programs like Social Security. A financial crisis and recession could result.
Good on Sen. Sanders (I/D) for countering the GOP's attacks on Social Security with proposing a bill boosting SS benefits called the Social Security Expansion Act.
Give the Market a Steer
Well, I doan mean to brag but I think this tweet was pretty timely...💅
Here's news about bringing sunlight to cattle auction and cash contracts:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture launched its pilot Cattle Contracts Library yesterday (Jan. 31, 2023) on th...
If you're wondering, as I did, how a cattle futures market has operated since 1964 without standardisation, convergence or publicly available contracts in the cash or auction ("spot") market, the substantive answer is probably "it relies on enforcement actions". Here's a CFTC action from 2021 charging a Washington State Rancher and Feedyard with a $233 Million Phantom Cattle Fraud Scheme.
The slightly less helpful answer is that the futures market relies on an index which uses inputs reported by the USDA on a nifty little app which cites, inter alia, volume of cattle sold at prices distributed around the average in $2 segments. What that doesn't tell you, of course, is how the USDA garners—or, more importantly, guarantees the integrity of—its reported price data, which presumably leans heavily on interviews with producers.... and that's where my limited grasp of the market parameters evaporates.
Anyway, now that we've got a head start on a cattle contract library, how long do you think it will take before the CFTC starts penalising farmers for dealing cattle via "non-approved" electronic communications devices?
Kidding? Yes, perhaps I am.... (or, perhaps they already are. 🤷🏻♀️)