Publicly, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says that he’ll bring a COVID-19 “stimulus” deal to a vote if the House sends it over. Privately, he’s telling President Trump to avoid a pre-election deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump, for his part, is eager to sign a bill that sends checks to every voter before the final election day.
Will Republicans in Congress reject a massive spending pre-election spree, clinging to their conservative principles, or will they set their fiscal conservatism aside, and rubber stamp it because Trump’s reelection is worth $2 trillion to them and to the country?
Background Resource:
McConnell Moves to Head Off Stimulus Deal as Pelosi Reports Progress
[The New York Times, October 20, 2020]
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Bill Whittle Network ยท Trump, the $2 Trillion Man? McConnell Tries to Block Pre-Election Pelosi Stimulus Deal
15 replies on “Trump, the $2 Trillion Man? McConnell Tries to Block Pre-Election Pelosi Stimulus Deal”
NATIONAL OPERATING DEBT: $27 TRILLION as of 10/25/2020
Current running SPENDING: #6.6 TRILLION
Current nNational DEFICIT aS OF 10/25/2020: $3.1 TRILLION
GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT: $19.7 TRILLION
DEBT per TAXPAYER: $272,000
TOTAL US DEBT: $83 TRILLION
This a SPENDING Problem and Our children, grandchildren and Posterity will be BURNED with the TRILLIONS of dollars of DEBT.
The DEBHT is Mt. Vesuvius ready to EXPLODE and it will not be a pretty picture.
Milton Friedman on the four ways you can spend money
Sad to observe that this election cycle has grayed all your heads.
They are putting the debate in the public and asking the Republican & libertarian opponents to put up or shut up. No one has an alternative so they’ve shut up. Its compensation for forced Covid 19 furloughs. Trump and his supporters in congress do not care about Debt. Trump wants to switch to a gold currency and reprice/ pause the debt anyway.
Nancy is employing a simple and well known strategy known as “The Poison Pill”., it’s a form of negotiation in bad faith. The way it works is you insert a condition or conditions that you KNOW your opposites are never going to agree to so that you never have to worry about an agreement being reached. You have to do this in such a manner that it appears you’re being reasonable to the people on your own side, that’s the hard part.
The Palestinians have been doing this for decades, they’re masters at it
Nancy Pilosi hasn’t “agreed” to anything. She sent a partisan bill from the House to the Senate. At the last minute, to try to make it look like it’s the Republicans who are keeping help away from Americans in financial trouble. This is a method of shifting the monkey from her back to the back of the Republican Party.
All of this is ridiculously obvious and wouldn’t work if the main stream media was at all fair about things. But then … we all know the rest of that story.
The problem is, as mentioned that neither McConnell nor Trump will call out these absurd “riders” in the bills.
Since the election is only a couple of weeks away, I am absolutely willing to wait until afterwards if it will help keep Granny Winebox from getting her way in providing Democrat cities and states from getting help with the failings of their own policies. I call the bill a relief bill, not a stimulus bill. Most of us really could use it, especially the portion of the bill to go to small businesses who have been harmed so badly by the city, county and state restrictions on how they do business. I’ve been of the mind since the beginning of the virus that it’s been handled backwards. We should have quarantined the sick; warned and protected the vulnerable, and left everyone else alone.
You guys are wrong about this being a takings issue instead of just a normal stimulus bill. The federal gov’t did not order any businesses to close or anybody to stay home from work, that was the job of the states and they each did it to varying degrees. The States are the ones that shut businesses down and if we are making a takings case then it should be the states paying it out. With the federal gov’t doing it it just punishes those in South Dakota and other states that never shut down and still have booming economies who have to now pay more in taxes to pay for commiefornia, New York, etc. who are still closed down by their own choice. The states were the issue here and the federal gov’t should not be handing out checks to make up for evil, corrupt politicians running certain states. And even if they should be, they don’t have any money to do it. Why don’t the individual people take out a loan instead of the gov’t taking one out to indiscriminately hand checks out to people who have been working the entire time?
The states did the taking, they need to provide compensation. That the people of their respective states are both receiving the compensation and paying it is a result of electing tyrants who made this mess. There should be severe consequences for those tyrants but there’s no way they can provide recompense on their own. If we are a government of the people then the people must take responsibility for the actions they enabled.
It’s a sad and complex matter, if for no other reason than those who didn’t vote for the tyrants get punished along with those who did and even those who did might not have expected and wouldn’t have approved of the tyrannical actions. Unfortunately there’s no way around it – the government committed takings and must provide recompense. That can ultimately only come from the people.
McConnell is playing one- or zero-dimensional chess. Why did he suddenly get credit for growing balls after Trump was elected when he was universally condemned as spineless before?
He’s trying to game – better, appease – all sides here. Whatever he thinks he’s going to accomplish, he will fail.
Thanks for the spelling correction, as I had misspelled “appease” as GOPe below. A most suitable word given the history of the Republican Party these last two or so decades.
It is always useful to have someone provide a countervailing statement to the usual or conventional mode of expression (at least when they aren’t wingnut insane!). Even if we don’t always agree with the sentiment thus expressed, it acts as a splash of cold water on the face and forces us to think or rethink our views on the given statement or issue.
We can agree that McConnell is less outspoken (or charismatic) for conservative views than we would like, but we must also acknowledge he is thinking of the Senate as an institution beyond Trump, and at least to some degree he is showing Madison’s wisdom in suggesting the different governmental bodies would work to counter each other as they protected their respective roles and privileges. Our populist concern (and outrage) is that such institutional views are nice but “we are at war with the Left; let’s act like it!! We are already in or close to a shooting civil war!
I appreciate that McConnell might be “thinking of the Senate as an institution beyond Trump,” but even if that’s his motivation he cannot succeed by spinning in the middle. If he really is both supporting and discouraging a relief bill, he has surrounded himself with the House, Trump, and Republican senators. I don’t see him achieving any goals that way.
Bill at 7:00: “Inability of Republican leaders to get to the heart of the matter and stay there!” That is the crux of why the GOP is now described as the GOPe. Outside of Defense and the fair minded courts, Republicans aren’t supposed to have any other rice bowls that need defending.
And of course Scott’s fiscal conservative comments at the end are true, but incomplete in that the people receiving the money may not be the ones paying it back in the future, given our current and prospective progressive tax structure. A progressive tax structure may or may not be a bad thing, but it should be recognized that there is basically a redistribution of wealth going on here. It might well be justified for such a wealthy country as ours, but that fact should not be outside of the discussion and commentary on this bill and payment process.
A little gratitude from the recipients would also be nice, wouldn’t it (say those of us who can readily afford $110/year for BWDC). .
I wish that Cocaine Mitch had Trump’s cajones and would just call Pelosi out with the kind of language she uses when tlking about President Trump. It’s not like she’s a difficult target, betweem Blowout-Gate, her $25 ice cream tubs & her Nephew putting his boot on the neck of his state’s economy
Money that is printed without a trace of productivity behind it is not worth the paper it is printed on. ALL it does is dilute the money in circulation: inflation. Always has and always will. Trying to “fix” an economy by printing money is like trying to fix a cold by blowing your brains out. The cold is gone but so are you.
The ONLY fix is to remove the weight of government from we who can and do produce the wealth that is being spent without thinking of what happens the day after tomorrow. This works. It works every time it is tried. However, it won’t be allowed to be tried simply because IT WILL WORK!
The 100% goal behind all of this insanity is to destroy everything that makes staying alive worth the effort. All because some power lusting politicians want to keep the power they think they have and use it to FORCE people do what they otherwise would not do.
Pull the plug! It is already dead. Stop the madness!