Zero Hedge — The Narrative Changes: Republicans "Pour Cold Water" On Trump's Massive Stimulus, Will Block Tax Cuts

Republican lawmakers warned "that there could be a major obstacle to enacting President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda: the national debt."

“I was disappointed that it wasn’t brought up in the campaign — anybody’s campaign really — it really wasn’t mentioned,” Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said of deficits and debt. “So I’m very concerned about it. It’s going to be tough to address if there’s no push from outside of the Congress,” he added. “I’m very concerned about it. It’s the biggest problem we face, by far.”

“We did not hear anything about entitlement reform from either of the candidates, and that’s a serious issue,” said Michael Sargent, a research associate at The Heritage Foundation. “You cannot address the growth in spending without addressing entitlement issues.”...

As Bloomberg explains, Trump’s race to enact the biggest tax cuts since the 1980s went under a caution flag Monday when during a news conference, "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned he considers current levels of U.S. debt “dangerous” and said he wants any tax overhaul to avoid adding to the deficit."…

“What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” he said. “Take you back to 2009. We borrowed $1 trillion and nobody could find that it did much of anything. So we need to do this carefully and correctly and the issue of how to pay for it needs to be dealt with responsibly.”

Then there is the debt limit, which will need to rise next year to avoid defaulting on government obligations; McConnell said he wasn’t sure if that would be paired with any deficit-reduction measures next year as it was in 2011, when Republicans held the debt limit hostage and extracted more than $2 trillion in deficit cuts over a decade from President Barack Obama.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has also said he wants tax changes to be deficit-neutral, indicating that Republicans will assume positive macroeconomic benefits from tax cuts to ease the projected budgetary hit - a process known as dynamic scoring that is popular on the right.…

Finally, even if all the changes are implemented immediately, and the GOP rolls over, virtually none of Trump's stimulus package will generate any impact on the economy until some time in 2018 as Goldman calculated last week.…

Trumponimics DOA?

Zero Hedge
The Narrative Changes: Republicans "Pour Cold Water" On Trump's Massive Stimulus, Will Block Tax Cuts
Tyler Durden

David Dayan — Debate Moderators Under the Spell of Deficit-Obsessed Billionaire Pete Peterson

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization that is virtually unknown outside of Washington, was nonetheless cited in four different questions during this year’s presidential and vice-presidential debates.

Moderators Elaine Quijano and Chris Wallace, seemingly unable to string together an intelligent thought about domestic policy on their own, outsourced their questions to a cabal of self-styled serious grown-ups who believe that advocating for cutting Social Security and Medicare makes them look like paragons of virtue.…

 Sociologists, psychologists and PR people call it cultivating an image — of being VSPs —Very Serious Persons.

HRC is in Peterson's pocket, in addition to that of George Soros, Wall Street, Saudi Arabia and all the rest of Bill and Hillary's patrons and donors.

The Intercept

Debate Moderators Under the Spell of Deficit-Obsessed Billionaire Pete Peterson

David Dayan

Steven Rosenfeld — How Deficit Hawks Are Pitting Millennials Against Seniors to Attack Social Security and Medicare

Pete Peterson and cronies at work. Disgusting.

AlterNet
How Deficit Hawks Are Pitting Millennials Against Seniors to Attack Social Security and Medicare
Steven Rosenfeld

My conversation with David Walker today exposed a lot. Like, he really, really, doesn't have a clue.

My Twitter conversation today with David Walker exposed a lot, like, he's very confused. First he tried to say that I "grossly misrepresented" him with my sound clip of our interview, where he said that the Social Security checks would not bounce, thus contradicting himself and all of his efforts in trying to make people believe that the program was insolvent.

Today he clarified in his tweet that he was referring to the short term health of SS, but not long term. Then I said to him that it didn't matter, short term or long term; the U.S. can't run out of dollars. I sent him the clip of Alan Greenspan smacking down Paul Ryan on this very subject.

The effort apparently went right over Walker's head because his response to me was that I didn't understand government finance. He said--get this--that it was a question of fiscal policy and not monetary policy. (As if I didn't understand that.) I never even mentioned monetary policy to this guy!!!

All at once it made me realize that Walker didn't grasp what Greenspan and I were saying. I guess he thought that we must have been referring to monetary policy because we said something about the government not running out of dollars and he believes those dollars can only come from one place and one place only and that is the Fed. (He's obviously hooked on the Fed "money printing" thing.)

Walker went on to say there were "legal issues" that I didn't understand as well. What legal issues? My guess is that he was trying to make a point that the Fed could not "pay into" Social Security. No kidding, but that was never anything that I ever mentioned.

He continued by trying to impress me with the fact that he was a Social Security Trustee for five years. This was intended to mean that he, not I, was the expert on the matter. (And we all know that government bureacrats and even high level policy "experts" ALL know what they're talking about when it comes to the monetary system right? !@#$%)

Anyway, the whole conversation left me very depressed. This guy really, really, has no clue.