DACA today

Today is the deadline for congress to act on DACA and nothing has happened. Recall that President Obama was under some pressure to help the young illegal immigrants who were brought here as children but he said it was up to congress. Responding in October 2010 to demands that he implement immigration reforms unilaterally, Obama declared, "I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself." In March 2011, he said that with "respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that's just not the case." In May 2011, he acknowledged that he couldn't "just bypass Congress and change the (immigration) law myself. ... That's not how a democracy works." When congress failed to act Obama took measures into his own hands. "In the absence of any immigration action from Congress to fix our broken immigration system, what we’ve tried to do is focus our immigration enforcement resources in the right places," Obama said June 15, 2012. "This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people." No court said this was illegal. Then last fall Trump gave congress six months to take action on DACA and the courts said he did not have the authority to do that. So by today congress was supposed to solve this problem but they failed to do so. Courts can be confusion.

Import tax

Most countries have an import tax but the European Union also has a VAT (value added tax). This tax applied to all products including imports and varies by country from 12% to 17%. In addition the EU places a 10% import tax on cars. This puts American cars imported to Europe at a disadvantage. In 2016, the EU exported motor vehicles worth EUR 192.0 billion. Imports in that same year amounted to 40 % of that value (EUR 77.0 billion), giving an EU trade surplus of EUR 128.2 billion. This is a plan that puts the EU first. The US has a 2.5% import tax on foreign cars and a 25% import tax on trucks. One result is that most foreign trucks are made in the USA. Trump has proposed taxing cars imported from the EU to, as he says, equal the playing field.

Center

Over the years political experts have conceded that an independent cannot be elected president. The two parties are so well entrenched that they have closed the door on any outsider but Trump has come as close as can happen to acting like an independent. The first attempt at this occurred with Bill Clinton when he moved to the center in a process called triangulation. He would take the extremes of each party on a particular issue and bring both to the center and Trump is doing the same thing only more so. The idea is to take the best from the right and the left and discard the rest. Trump used this on immigration and on guns and now on trade. Some members of each party like it and others dislike it. It is a way to break the grid-lock that has a strangle hold on Washington.

California

There is a line from a Country/Western song, “All the gold in California Is in the bank in the middle of Beverly Hills” and it referenced the money from Hollywood stars but there is a new bank today and that is located in Silicon Valley. Nowhere in the country is the gap between the rich and the poor more evident than in California. They have a higher percentage of people in poverty than any state and they are loaded with high tech millionaires. 50% of the States income tax revenue is collected from one percent of its citizens. There are 20 million people working in the state and 200,000 of them pay one-half of the taxes. Now that is even more progressive than the country as a whole where the top 1% pays 45% of the taxes. Total personal income in California is 2.4 trillion and 20% of this goes to the top one percent. They are already paying 60% of their income to state and federal income tax so if we take the remaining 40% and give that to the 20 million who are working then each would receive $9600. Those top one percenters can live off of their saving but they will be less likely to continue to work so next year everyone will be back where they are now. Pre-tax cash incomes in California have been diverging for decades, and economic cycles have reinforced the longer-term trend. Top incomes are 40 percent higher than they were in 1980, while middle incomes are only 5 percent higher and low incomes are 19 percent lower. While redistributing income does not have that much effect the redistribution of wealth would be significant. The top guy at Amazon is worth 120 billion and if that were given to the 20 million working people, they would each get $6,000. It would of interest to see a poll asking if the government should take that and give it to the poor. After all isn’t one billion enough? There are 124 billionaires living in California.

Delta

Delta Airlines has taken what many in the press call a principled stand when they said that NRA members will no longer be given a discount. It seemed as though there were still companies willing to put principles above profit but then it was announced on CNN that only 13 people used the NRA discount last year. This was out of 180 million passengers last year. Now the airline has itself in a pickle as Georgia is threatening to stop a $40 million dollar tax break that was supposed to go in effect. Delta CEO says, 'Our values are not for sale,' after Georgia lawmakers drop tax break It will be interested to see if Delta stockholders are as interested in the CEO’s principles as he is.

Fair trade

One of the many things that cause consternation among the Trump watchers is his lack of political consistency. The latest example is the proposed import tax on steel. Just a few years ago President Obama came up with a similar idea and it was met with loud protest. THE OBAMA administration may have taken a page out of GOP front-runner Donald Trump's book this week after receiving criticism for months for not being tough enough on international trade standards. The Commerce Department announced Tuesday a wide-ranging slew of tariff increases on certain imported steel products, notably slapping Chinese producers with a preliminary 266 percent tariff after they failed to cooperate in a trade investigation. They both use the argument that free trade is good but unfair trade is not.

Openness and tweets

On several occasions Trump has stated that since he came on the scene the new media has received higher ratings and this includes print, radio and TV. There are articles on the Internet stating how Trump saved CNN as their ratings were in decline until he came along. This AM Morning Joe started his show by saying they had seven White House stories to cover anyone of which would have been a two week news cycle just two years ago. Many of these stories were given additional impetus by Trumps tweets. While almost all news outlets oppose these tweets they often times barely beat the leaks that follow. By tweeting ahead of the news the administration becomes one of the most transparent as well as one of the leakiest.