Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
If you do something wrong long enough it becomes right by default. USA!
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
After leaning that "literally" has two contradictory definitions, I can no longer be disappointed about the evolution of our language.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,795
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
After leaning that "literally" has two contradictory definitions, I can no longer be disappointed about the evolution of our language.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
If you do something wrong long enough it becomes right by default. USA!
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
After leaning that "literally" has two contradictory definitions, I can no longer be disappointed about the evolution of our language.
which way did you lean?
Correct: (Guy who marries women he grew up next door to) "She was literally the girl next door."
Incorrect: (Woman talking about how large she was when she was pregnant) "I was literally a whale." (I chose this example because I actually saw it used once).
As far as I can tell, the first way was the correct way, but people used it to mean it's opposite (figuratively) as a point of emphasis so much that dictionaries now point to both as correct.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
After leaning that "literally" has two contradictory definitions, I can no longer be disappointed about the evolution of our language.
which way did you lean?
Correct: (Guy who marries women he grew up next door to) "She was literally the girl next door."
Incorrect: (Woman talking about how large she was when she was pregnant) "I was literally a whale." (I chose this example because I actually saw it used once).
As far as I can tell, the first way was the correct way, but people used it to mean it's opposite (figuratively) as a point of emphasis so much that dictionaries now point to both as correct.
I'm going to walk around and start saying I was figuratively....in the way that people wrongly use literally and see if people think I am crazy
Scio me nihil scire
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
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The Juggler
Behind that bush over there. Posts: 47,284
Haha....there are people who use "literally" wrong on purpose for the comedic effect though. Those people are literally the worst.
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
If you do something wrong long enough it becomes right by default. USA!
I’m considering just changing over to speaking German full time now. If my friends and co-workers don’t like it, I could literally care less.
Today the local right wing radio in Austin was complaining that we have shot down the three more recent smaller "balloons" without knowing enough about them. And perhaps are purposefully destroying the evidence to protect China. And that every American should be very outraged about several small balloons floating around...And Karl Rove said that it is the duty of the president to speak to the American people to ease their fears about china and or Russia and these balloons. Speaking of loons
Do you not think Biden should be talking about this though? Seems strange to me.
I couldn't care less about these balloons and think it is the biggest non story of my lifetime
I appreciate your correct use of “couldn’t care less.” I hate when people say “I could care less.”
Irregardless of that the balloon story is overhyped
Bad news, irregardless is now officially a word.
If you do something wrong long enough it becomes right by default. USA!
I’m considering just changing over to speaking German full time now. If my friends and co-workers don’t like it, I could literally care less.
President Joe Biden addresses the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference in Washington, DC, on February 14.
Leah Mills/Reuters
CNN —
President Joe Biden has made another series of inaccurate claims in an economic speech.
In late January, CNN fact-checked Biden’s false and misleading claims in an economic speech to union workers in Virginia. In a speech this Wednesday to union workers in Maryland, Biden repeated one of those claims and made three other incorrect statements – all of them about statistics.
Trump and the national debt
In the Wednesday speech, Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump. After correctly noting that the federal budget deficit increased every year of Trump’s term, Biden said, “And because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt – that’s a 200-year debt – never added more to the national debt than my predecessor.”
ADVERTISING
Facts First: This claim is false. More debt was added in the eight years under President Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, than in the four years under Trump. The Trump era set the record for most debt added in a single four-year presidential term, but Biden made it sound here like the Trump era set the record even when you include two-term presidents like Obama. (Biden correctly said in his State of the Union address last week that he was referring to a record for debt added in a four-year period.) Also, while Biden mentioned “record deficits,” plural, under Trump, only one Trump-era deficit, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020, was actually a record; the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 were all lower than every deficit in Obama’s first term, when the country was emerging from a major recession and Obama approved some policies that increased deficits.
There are various ways to measure the debt. Using the basic headline measure, total public debt, the debt increased about $9.3 trillion over Obama’s eight years, from about $10.6 trillion on the day he was inaugurated in 2009 to about $19.9 trillion on the day Trump took office in 2017. The debt increased by about $7.8 trillion over Trump’s four years, to about $27.8 trillion when Biden replaced him in 2021.
It’s also important to note that it is an oversimplification to blame presidents alone for debt incurred during their tenures.
A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors – such as the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid decades ago – and by circumstances out of a president’s control, such as an inherited recession for Obama and the global Covid-19 pandemic for Trump.
And while some debt can fairly be attributed to a single party – Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, unanimously opposed by congressional Democrats, were a significant contributor – other debt is bipartisan. Notably, the debt spiked in 2020 after Trump approved trillions in emergency pandemic relief spending that Congress had passed with overwhelming Democratic and Republican support.
Biden was right when he said that the deficit increased every year under Trump. But the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 under Trump were all below $1 trillion – lower than the deficits in fiscal 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 under the Obama-Biden administration. The deficit then roughly tripled, to a record level of about $3.1 trillion, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020.
Biden and the national debt
In another part of the speech, Biden said, “We cut the debt by $1.7 billion the last two years.” The White House made a correction to the official transcript to make it “$1.7 trillion” instead of “$1.7 billion.”
Facts First: This claim is inaccurate even if you ignore Biden’s billion-versus-trillion mixup. The national debt has continued to increase under Biden. It is the deficit that has declined by about $1.7 trillion – and experts say it is misleading for Biden to take credit for that reduction.
The debt has increased about $3.7 trillion during Biden’s time as president, rising to about $31.5 trillion. As Biden also did in speeches during the 2022 midterms, his claim in this speech conflated the debt (the accumulation of federal borrowing plus interest owed) with the deficit (the one-year difference between spending and revenues).
The deficit did fall by roughly $1.7 trillion between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2022, from about $3.1 trillion to about $1.4 trillion. But as CNN has repeatedly noted, it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for the decline – which overwhelmingly occurred because the emergency pandemic spending from the end of the Trump era expired as planned. In fact, independent analysts say Biden’s own new laws and executive actions have significantly added to current and projected future deficits, not reduced those deficits. You can read more here and here.
Medicare and the Inflation Reduction Act
Biden made a confusing remark about prescription drug costs and the Inflation Reduction Act he signed into law last year.
He said the law “saves seniors a lot of money” on prescription drugs, then added that, by bringing down the cost of these drugs, the law “will cut the federal deficit, saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over time.”
Both of these assertions are fair. But then Biden added that if Republicans repealed this law, they would be getting rid of “$159,000 a year in savings on lower drug costs.”
Here’s a fuller quote: “Now, our Republican friends want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. They’d get rid of the savings on prescription drugs that we buy, like Medicare – I mean, we buy from – through – through Medicare. And it would eliminate, today, right now, $159,000 a year in savings on lowered drug costs. Now, that just means your tax dollars are going to save – be saved $159,000 to do what we’re doing right now.”
Facts First: The Inflation Reduction Act does not provide “$159,000 a year in savings on lowered drug costs.” A White House official made clear to CNN on Thursday that Biden was attempting to say that government savings of $159 billion over 10 years would be lost with a Republican repeal of two key Inflation Reduction Act provisions on prescription drugs.
Viewed one way, Biden’s “$159,000 a year” figure significantly understated the total savings from these two provisions. (One allows Medicare to negotiate the price of certain prescription drugs. The other requires pharmaceutical companies to pay rebates to Medicare for price increases over the rate of inflation.) But his use of such a modest number may have led some listeners to believe that he was talking about giant savings to particular seniors or families rather than modest savings to the government. And his figure was incorrect regardless of how it was perceived.
The White House corrected this section of the official transcript of the speech after CNN inquired about the “$159,000” figure.
Billionaires and taxes
Biden reprised an inaccurate figure he used in the Virginia speech in late January. He said of billionaires in the United States: “You know what their average tax they pay is? About 3%.”
Facts First: Once more, Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the third time in less than a month, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim in the late-January speech, the White House published a corrected transcript of that speech to make it “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even the 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.
“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in late January – though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”
Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and the Virginia speech – and “2%” in another January speech.
President Joe Biden addresses the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference in Washington, DC, on February 14.
Leah Mills/Reuters
CNN —
President Joe Biden has made another series of inaccurate claims in an economic speech.
In late January, CNN fact-checked Biden’s false and misleading claims in an economic speech to union workers in Virginia. In a speech this Wednesday to union workers in Maryland, Biden repeated one of those claims and made three other incorrect statements – all of them about statistics.
Trump and the national debt
In the Wednesday speech, Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump. After correctly noting that the federal budget deficit increased every year of Trump’s term, Biden said, “And because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt – that’s a 200-year debt – never added more to the national debt than my predecessor.”
ADVERTISING
Facts First: This claim is false. More debt was added in the eight years under President Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, than in the four years under Trump. The Trump era set the record for most debt added in a single four-year presidential term, but Biden made it sound here like the Trump era set the record even when you include two-term presidents like Obama. (Biden correctly said in his State of the Union address last week that he was referring to a record for debt added in a four-year period.) Also, while Biden mentioned “record deficits,” plural, under Trump, only one Trump-era deficit, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020, was actually a record; the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 were all lower than every deficit in Obama’s first term, when the country was emerging from a major recession and Obama approved some policies that increased deficits.
There are various ways to measure the debt. Using the basic headline measure, total public debt, the debt increased about $9.3 trillion over Obama’s eight years, from about $10.6 trillion on the day he was inaugurated in 2009 to about $19.9 trillion on the day Trump took office in 2017. The debt increased by about $7.8 trillion over Trump’s four years, to about $27.8 trillion when Biden replaced him in 2021.
It’s also important to note that it is an oversimplification to blame presidents alone for debt incurred during their tenures.
A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors – such as the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid decades ago – and by circumstances out of a president’s control, such as an inherited recession for Obama and the global Covid-19 pandemic for Trump.
And while some debt can fairly be attributed to a single party – Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, unanimously opposed by congressional Democrats, were a significant contributor – other debt is bipartisan. Notably, the debt spiked in 2020 after Trump approved trillions in emergency pandemic relief spending that Congress had passed with overwhelming Democratic and Republican support.
Biden was right when he said that the deficit increased every year under Trump. But the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 under Trump were all below $1 trillion – lower than the deficits in fiscal 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 under the Obama-Biden administration. The deficit then roughly tripled, to a record level of about $3.1 trillion, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020.
Biden and the national debt
In another part of the speech, Biden said, “We cut the debt by $1.7 billion the last two years.” The White House made a correction to the official transcript to make it “$1.7 trillion” instead of “$1.7 billion.”
Facts First: This claim is inaccurate even if you ignore Biden’s billion-versus-trillion mixup. The national debt has continued to increase under Biden. It is the deficit that has declined by about $1.7 trillion – and experts say it is misleading for Biden to take credit for that reduction.
The debt has increased about $3.7 trillion during Biden’s time as president, rising to about $31.5 trillion. As Biden also did in speeches during the 2022 midterms, his claim in this speech conflated the debt (the accumulation of federal borrowing plus interest owed) with the deficit (the one-year difference between spending and revenues).
The deficit did fall by roughly $1.7 trillion between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2022, from about $3.1 trillion to about $1.4 trillion. But as CNN has repeatedly noted, it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for the decline – which overwhelmingly occurred because the emergency pandemic spending from the end of the Trump era expired as planned. In fact, independent analysts say Biden’s own new laws and executive actions have significantly added to current and projected future deficits, not reduced those deficits. You can read more here and here.
Medicare and the Inflation Reduction Act
Biden made a confusing remark about prescription drug costs and the Inflation Reduction Act he signed into law last year.
He said the law “saves seniors a lot of money” on prescription drugs, then added that, by bringing down the cost of these drugs, the law “will cut the federal deficit, saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over time.”
Both of these assertions are fair. But then Biden added that if Republicans repealed this law, they would be getting rid of “$159,000 a year in savings on lower drug costs.”
Here’s a fuller quote: “Now, our Republican friends want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. They’d get rid of the savings on prescription drugs that we buy, like Medicare – I mean, we buy from – through – through Medicare. And it would eliminate, today, right now, $159,000 a year in savings on lowered drug costs. Now, that just means your tax dollars are going to save – be saved $159,000 to do what we’re doing right now.”
Facts First: The Inflation Reduction Act does not provide “$159,000 a year in savings on lowered drug costs.” A White House official made clear to CNN on Thursday that Biden was attempting to say that government savings of $159 billion over 10 years would be lost with a Republican repeal of two key Inflation Reduction Act provisions on prescription drugs.
Viewed one way, Biden’s “$159,000 a year” figure significantly understated the total savings from these two provisions. (One allows Medicare to negotiate the price of certain prescription drugs. The other requires pharmaceutical companies to pay rebates to Medicare for price increases over the rate of inflation.) But his use of such a modest number may have led some listeners to believe that he was talking about giant savings to particular seniors or families rather than modest savings to the government. And his figure was incorrect regardless of how it was perceived.
The White House corrected this section of the official transcript of the speech after CNN inquired about the “$159,000” figure.
Billionaires and taxes
Biden reprised an inaccurate figure he used in the Virginia speech in late January. He said of billionaires in the United States: “You know what their average tax they pay is? About 3%.”
Facts First: Once more, Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the third time in less than a month, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim in the late-January speech, the White House published a corrected transcript of that speech to make it “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even the 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.
“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in late January – though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”
Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and the Virginia speech – and “2%” in another January speech.
If you go by inauguration date, that’s significantly inaccurate, because as you likely know, the first nine months of any presidents term occur under a fiscal year budget established by the preceding president.
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,795
Biden declares 'Kyiv stands' in surprise visit to Ukraine
By EVAN VUCCI, JOHN LEICESTER, AAMER MADHANI and ZEKE MILLER
59 mins ago
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — President Joe Biden paid an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Monday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a defiant display of Western solidarity with a country still fighting what he called “a brutal and unjust war” days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
“One year later, Kyiv stands,” Biden declared after meeting Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace. Jamming his finger for emphasis on his podium, against a backdrop of three flags from each country, he continued: “And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”
Biden spent more than five hours in the Ukrainian capital, consulting with Zelenskyy on next steps, honoring the country’s fallen soldiers and seeing U.S. embassy staff in the besieged country.
The visit comes at a crucial moment: Biden is trying to keep allies unified in their support for Ukraine as the war is expected to intensify with spring offensives. Zelenskyy is pressing allies to speed up delivery of promised weapon systems and calling on the West to provide fighter jets — something that Biden has declined to do.
The U.S. president got a taste of the terror that Ukrainians have lived with for close to a year when air raids sirens howled just as he and Zelenskyy wrapped up a visit to the gold-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral.
Looking solemn, they continued unperturbed as they laid two wreaths and held a moment of silence at the Wall of Remembrance honoring Ukrainian soldiers killed since 2014, the year Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and Russian-backed fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine.
The White House would not go into specifics, but national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that it notified Moscow of Biden’s visit to Kyiv shortly before his departure from Washington “for deconfliction purposes” in an effort to avoid any miscalculation that could bring the two nuclear-armed nations into direct conflict.
In Kyiv, Biden announced an additional half-billion dollars in U.S. assistance — on top of the more than $50 billion already provided — for shells for howitzers, anti-tank missiles, air surveillance radars and other aid but no new advanced weaponry.
Ukraine has also been pushing for battlefield systems that would allow its forces to strike Russian targets that have been moved back from frontline areas, out of the range of HIMARS missiles that have already been delivered. Zelenskyy said he and Biden spoke about “long-range weapons and the weapons that may still be supplied to Ukraine even though it wasn’t supplied before.” But he did not detail any new commitments.
“Our negotiations were very fruitful,” Zelenskyy added. Sullivan would not detail any potential new capabilities for Ukraine, but said there was a ”good discussion” of the subject.
Biden’s mission with his visit to Kyiv, which comes before a scheduled trip to Warsaw, Poland, is to underscore that the United States is prepared to stick with Ukraine “as long as it takes” to repel Russian forces even as public opinion polling suggests that U.S. and allied support for providing weaponry and direct economic assistance has started to soften. For Zelenskyy, the symbolism of having the U.S. president stand side by side with him on Ukrainian land as the anniversary nears is no small thing as he prods allies to provide more advanced weaponry and step up delivery.
“I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about U.S. support for Ukraine in the war,” Biden said.
Biden’s visit was a brazen rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had hoped his military would swiftly overrun Kyiv within days. Biden, a Democrat, recalled speaking with Zelenskyy on the night of the invasion, saying, “That dark night one year ago, the world was literally at the time bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Perhaps even the end of Ukraine.”
A year later, the Ukrainian capital remains firmly in Ukrainian control. Although a semblance of normalcy has returned to the city, regular air raid sirens and frequent missile and killer-drone attacks against military and civilian infrastructure across the country are a near-constant reminder that the war is still raging. The bloodiest fighting is, for the moment, concentrated in the country’s east, particularly around the city of Bakhmut, where Russian offensives are underway.
At least six civilians have been killed and 17 more have been wounded in Ukraine over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office reported. In the eastern Donetsk region, the Russian army was using aviation to strike cities on the front line. A total of 15 cities and villages have been shelled over the past 24 hours, according to the region’s Ukrainian Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko. In the northeastern Kharkiv region, cities near the border with Russia came under fire. A missile strike hit Kupiansk, damaging a hospital, a plant and residential buildings.
“The cost that Ukraine has had to bear has been extraordinarily high,” Biden said. “And the sacrifices have been far too great.” But “Putin’s war of conquest is failing.”
“He’s counting on us not sticking together,” Biden said. “He thought he could outlast us. I don’t think he’s thinking that right now. God knows what he’s thinking, but I don’t think he’s thinking that. But he’s just been plain wrong. Plain wrong.”
The trip gave Biden an opportunity to get a firsthand look at the devastation the Russian invasion has caused on Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians have been killed, millions of refugees have fled the war, and Ukraine has suffered tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure damage.
Biden, wearing a blue suit and at times his signature aviator sunglasses, told Zelenskyy the U.S. will stand with him “for as long as it takes.” Zelenskyy responded in English: “We’ll do it.”
The Ukrainian leader, wearing a black sweatshirt, as has become his wartime habit, said through an interpreter that Biden’s visit “brings us closer to the victory,” this year, he hoped. He expressed gratitude to Americans and “all those who cherish freedom.”
It was rare for a U.S. president to travel to a conflict zone where the U.S. or its allies did not have control over the airspace.
The U.S. military does not have a presence in Ukraine other than a small detachment of Marines guarding the embassy in Kyiv, making Biden’s visit more complicated than other recent visits by prior U.S. leaders to war zones.
While Biden was in Ukraine, U.S. surveillance planes, including E-3 Sentry airborne radar and an electronic RC-135W Rivet Joint aircraft, were keeping watch over Kyiv from Polish airspace.
Speculation has been building for weeks that Biden would visit Ukraine around the Feb. 24 anniversary of the Russian invasion. But the White House repeatedly had said that no presidential trip to Ukraine was planned, even after the Poland visit was announced.
Since early morning on Monday many main streets and central blocks in Kyiv were cordoned off without any official explanation. Later people started sharing videos of long motorcades of cars driving along the streets where the access was restricted.
At the White House, planning for Biden’s visit to Kyiv was tightly held — with a relatively small group of aides briefed on the plans — because of security concerns. Sullivan said Biden gave final approval for the trip, which had been in the works for months, on Friday during an Oval Office meeting at which he was briefed on security plans for the visit.
The president traveled with an usually small entourage, with just a few senior aides and two journalists, to maintain secrecy.
Asked by a reporter on Friday if Biden might include stops beyond Poland, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied, “Right now, the trip is going to be in Warsaw.” Moments later — and without prompting — Kirby added, “I said ‘right now.’
Biden quietly departed from Joint Base Andrews near Washington at 4:15 a.m. on Sunday, making a stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany before making his way into Ukraine. He arrived in Kyiv at 8 a.m. on Monday. He departed after 1 p.m.
Until Monday, Biden’s failure to visit was making him something of a standout among Ukraine’s partners in the West, some of whom have made frequent visits to the Ukrainian capital. White House officials had previously cited security concerns with keeping Biden from making the trip, and Sullivan said Monday that the visit was only undertaken once officials believed they had managed the risk to acceptable levels.
In June, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi traveled together by night train to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak visited Kyiv in November shortly after taking office.
This is Biden’s first visit to a war zone as president. His recent predecessors, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, made surprise visits to Afghanistan and Iraq during their presidencies to meet U.S. troops and those countries’ leaders.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,795
edited March 2023
I'll chalk this up as a win for that doddering old fool brandon.....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Wow! Huge win. This is a big deal and the administration needs to celebrate it.
In a bar with beers and shots. Faux will just report that insulin was removed from the market by Brandon and is no longer available so stay home and die. Half of ‘Muricans will believe it.
Plunge in border crossings could blunt GOP attack on Biden
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
Today
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows some support for changing the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers allowed into the country. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say the level of immigration and asylum-seekers should be lowered, while about 2 in 10 say they should be higher, according to the poll. About a third want the numbers to remain the same.
The decrease in border crossings followed Biden's announcement in early January that Mexico would take back Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans under a pandemic-era rule that denies migrants the right to seek asylum as part of an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19. At the same time, the U.S. agreed to admit up to 30,000 a month of those four nationalities on humanitarian parole if they apply online, enter at an airport and find a financial sponsor.
The administration has also proposed generally denying asylum to anyone who travels though another country on their way to the U.S. without seeking protection there — effectively all non-Mexicans who appear at the U.S. southern border.
The new rules put forth by Biden could help the president fight back against critics who complain he hasn’t done enough to address border security issues. But the moves have also fueled anger among some of his Democratic allies who are concerned that he is furthering a Trump-era policy they view as anti-immigrant and hurting vulnerable migrants who are trying to escape dangerous conditions in their native countries.
And the new changes — and subsequent drop in illegal border crossings — are unlikely to stop the barrage of attacks from conservatives who see border security as a powerful political weapon.
Biden has been on the defensive as Republicans and right-wing media outlets have hammered him over the soaring increase in migrant encounters at the border. The new House GOP leadership has held hearings on what they call the “Biden border crisis” and talked of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Agents detained migrants more than 2.5 million times at the southern border in 2022, including more than 250,000 in December, the highest on record. According to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, Border Patrol agents stopped migrants about 130,000 times in February, similar to January.
Among Republicans, the poll shows about two-thirds say there should be fewer immigrants and asylum-seekers, while only about 1 in 10 say there should be more.
Democrats are split: About a quarter say the number of immigrants should increase, a quarter say it should decrease, and about 4 in 10 say it should remain the same. They are slightly more supportive of asylum-seekers specifically, with 37% supporting an increase, 26% backing a decrease, and 36% saying the number should remain the same.
Under U.S. law, numbers are not capped on asylum, which was largely a policy afterthought until about a decade ago. Since 2017, the U.S. has been the world’s most popular destination for asylum-seekers, according to U.N. figures. Even those who lose in court can stay for years while their cases wind through a backlogged system.
Omar Reffell, a 38-year-old independent voter in Houston, said that he supports immigration but that news coverage of “caravans of people trying to cross the border” sends the wrong message to migrants.
“People think that they just show up at the border, come across, there is not going to be any repercussions,” Reffell said. “I’m not against immigration. I think immigration is good for the country, but it has to happen in a very orderly manner or it puts a lot of stress, especially on the border states being able to provide resources.”
More than 100,000 migrants each month were being released in U.S. border cities late last year with notices to appear in immigration court or report to immigration authorities.
Dan Restrepo, a top White House adviser on Latin America during Barack Obama’s presidency, believes the American public will accept high levels of immigration — if a systematic process can be followed.
The challenge in managing migration “is the sense of chaos and disorder that can be created by images of overwhelmed processing facilities and the like at the physical border,” he said. “It’s less the numbers and more the imagery” that bothers voters.
Republicans cast Biden’s expansion of humanitarian parole for four nationalities as a political ploy to divert attention from the border and are not likely to let up on their criticism of the president on immigration. The Federation of American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration group, called January’s plunge in border numbers “a shell game” to boost Biden’s reelection prospects.
Fox News Channel has hit hard on the story over the last year. Reporter Bill Melguin said in a “Battle for the Border” special on Nov. 3 that he had spent more than 200 days on the Texas border.
“We’ve been shooting the video all day long,” Melugin said in a typical report from the Texas town of Eagle Pass. “We keep getting these massive groups of 150 to 200 crossing every single day.”
The network’s night-vision drone cameras have showed hundreds of migrants walking across the border, each one appearing as a luminous white stick slowly advancing across a dark screen.
The poll found 39% of U.S. adults approve of how Biden is handling immigration, and 38% approve of him on border security — slightly below his overall approval ratings. About two-thirds of Democrats but only about 1 in 10 Republicans say they approve of his handling of either issue.
The poll was taken Feb. 16-20, just before the administration proposed on Feb. 21 that asylum should generally be denied to migrants who pass through another country without applying for protection there if it is deemed safe. The administration is angling to have the new rule take effect before the pandemic-related limits on asylum are expected to end May 11, though legal challenges appear imminent.
Becky Steelsmith, a 70-year-old independent voter from Zachary, Louisiana, is reluctant to heap blame on Biden because solutions also eluded his predecessors, but she notes that the optics are not great.
“The only reason why I disagree with Biden’s handling of it is that I think he’s a little too soft,” said Steelsmith, a retired teacher. "I'm not saying it’s his fault that it’s happening. I’m saying that as president, he needs to sit down and really focus and come up with some kind of a solution, or the beginning of a solution.”
___
The poll of 1,247 adults was conducted using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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mickeyrat
up my ass, like Chadwick was up his Posts: 35,795
That deficit reduction goal is significantly higher than the $2 trillion that Biden had promised in his State of the Union address last month. It also is a sharp contrast with House Republicans, who have called for a path to a balanced budget but have yet to offer a blueprint.
The White House has consistently called into question Republicans' commitment to what it considers a sustainable federal budget. Administration officials have noted that the various tax plans and other policies previously backed by GOP lawmakers would add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.
“This is something we think is important,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said about the plan Biden intends to discuss Thursday in Philadelphia. "This is something that shows the American people that we take this seriously.”
The proposal would seek to close the “carried interest" loophole that allows wealthy hedge fund managers and other to pay their taxes at a lower rate, and prevent billionaires from being able to set aside large amounts of their holdings in tax-favored retirement accounts, according to an administration official. The plan also projects saving $24 billion over 10 years by removing a tax subsidy for crypto currency transactions.
The official who provided the details spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the plan before its official release.
It also includes:
—expanding the ability of Medicare to negotiate on pharmaceutical drug prices, with an estimated spending cut of $160 billion over a decade.
—auctioning off rights to the radio spectrum, which would generate $50 billion.
—steps to reduce identity theft and unemployment insurance fraud.
—targeting insurance companies that overcharge Medicaid, with anticipated savings of $20 billion through repayments to the government.
—ending subsidies valued at $31 billion for oil and gas companies.
—scrapping a $19 billion tax break for real estate investors.
It's a delicate time with the U.S. economy on edge because of high inflation. The government this summer is likely to exhaust its emergency measures to keep Washington running, setting up the risk of a default on payments along with cataclysmic series of job losses that could crash the economy.
Biden's package of spending priorities is unlikely to pass the House or Senate as proposed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday that the plan “will not see the light of day," a sign that it might primarily serve as a messaging document going into the 2024 elections.
Rohit Kumar, a former McConnell aide who is now an executive with the tax consultancy PwC, said Biden's plan does matter “in terms of putting ideas out there." He said that if Biden won a second term, elements of this spending blueprint could be part of negotiations in 2025 about the expiring provisions in the 2017 tax cuts that President Donald Trump signed into law.
Given the scope of the deficit reduction in Biden's proposal, Kumar said it was unlikely that the president's plan would identify which parts of the expiring tax cuts he plans to keep, as the president has vowed no tax increases on anyone making less than $400,000. But while the White House has charged that Republican plans increase deficits by $3 trillion, about $2.7 trillion of that total comes from renewing all the Trump-era tax cuts that disproportionately favored the wealthy.
In February, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the national debt held by the public will grow by more than $20 trillion over the next decade. The publicly held debt — which reflects the cumulative impact of yearly deficits — would be equal to 118% of U.S. gross domestic product, up from 98% this year. Biden's budget would reduce the debt, though it would still be high relative to historical levels.
Republicans, newly in control of the House, are demanding sharp spending cuts. Biden has suggested that tax increases on the earnings and holdings of the country's wealthiest households can bolster government finances and also improve Medicare and Social Security.
The president contended in a Monday speech that there are 680 billionaires in the United States and that many of them pay taxes at a lower rate than do families who think of themselves as being in the middle class. Biden said not to hold him to the precise number of billionaires, but that they could afford to pay more for the good of the country.
“No billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a fire fighter — nobody,” Biden said at a gathering of the International Association of Fire Fighters.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
Ooooooo, scary! BOO! But it’s okay, Sarah hucksterabee Sanders is going to save the day by allowing children to work in meat packing plants to take away all the jobs from the oh so very spooky other.
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
Yeah I can’t walk down the street it’s just full of immigrants! I’ve started to notice that there’s a large increase of immigrants from Eastern European countries! But I’ve also noticed that they have started to beg for money on the exits of the highway the difference being that the Latin American immigrants don’t beg at least here on Long Island they don’t! They just work at everything there’s nothing they won’t work at!
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
Then why is everywhere still short staffed?
Well they have a lot of work to do then to pay back the 150 billion they are costing us.
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
Yeah I can’t walk down the street it’s just full of immigrants! I’ve started to notice that there’s a large increase of immigrants from Eastern European countries! But I’ve also noticed that they have started to beg for money on the exits of the highway the difference being that the Latin American immigrants don’t beg at least here on Long Island they don’t! They just work at everything there’s nothing they won’t work at!
I'm not saying they don't work hard. They are here illegally costing the country mega amounts of money and utilizing the countries dwindling resources that are there for legal citizens. This should not be a debatable subject. You wouldn't walk into your local gym that you don't belong to and start working out would you? Then when they ask you to leave you say " the gym I belong to sucks so I need to work out here" . Rules are rules!
Comments
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-may-give-speech-balloon-unidentified-objects-source-2023-02-15/
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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There are no kings inside the gates of eden
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which way did you lean?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Incorrect: (Woman talking about how large she was when she was pregnant) "I was literally a whale." (I chose this example because I actually saw it used once).
As far as I can tell, the first way was the correct way, but people used it to mean it's opposite (figuratively) as a point of emphasis so much that dictionaries now point to both as correct.
2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul 2016 Fenway, Fenway, Wrigley, Wrigley 2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley 2021 Asbury Park 2022 St Louis 2023 Austin, Austin
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Dark Brandon takin bitches down
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Chicago; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Fact check: Biden’s latest false statistical claims
President Joe Biden has made another series of inaccurate claims in an economic speech.
In late January, CNN fact-checked Biden’s false and misleading claims in an economic speech to union workers in Virginia. In a speech this Wednesday to union workers in Maryland, Biden repeated one of those claims and made three other incorrect statements – all of them about statistics.
Trump and the national debt
In the Wednesday speech, Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump. After correctly noting that the federal budget deficit increased every year of Trump’s term, Biden said, “And because of those record deficits, no president added more to the national debt – that’s a 200-year debt – never added more to the national debt than my predecessor.”
Facts First: This claim is false. More debt was added in the eight years under President Barack Obama, with Biden as vice president, than in the four years under Trump. The Trump era set the record for most debt added in a single four-year presidential term, but Biden made it sound here like the Trump era set the record even when you include two-term presidents like Obama. (Biden correctly said in his State of the Union address last week that he was referring to a record for debt added in a four-year period.) Also, while Biden mentioned “record deficits,” plural, under Trump, only one Trump-era deficit, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020, was actually a record; the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 were all lower than every deficit in Obama’s first term, when the country was emerging from a major recession and Obama approved some policies that increased deficits.
There are various ways to measure the debt. Using the basic headline measure, total public debt, the debt increased about $9.3 trillion over Obama’s eight years, from about $10.6 trillion on the day he was inaugurated in 2009 to about $19.9 trillion on the day Trump took office in 2017. The debt increased by about $7.8 trillion over Trump’s four years, to about $27.8 trillion when Biden replaced him in 2021.
It’s also important to note that it is an oversimplification to blame presidents alone for debt incurred during their tenures.
A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors – such as the creation of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid decades ago – and by circumstances out of a president’s control, such as an inherited recession for Obama and the global Covid-19 pandemic for Trump.
And while some debt can fairly be attributed to a single party – Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, unanimously opposed by congressional Democrats, were a significant contributor – other debt is bipartisan. Notably, the debt spiked in 2020 after Trump approved trillions in emergency pandemic relief spending that Congress had passed with overwhelming Democratic and Republican support.
Biden was right when he said that the deficit increased every year under Trump. But the deficits in fiscal 2017, 2018 and 2019 under Trump were all below $1 trillion – lower than the deficits in fiscal 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 under the Obama-Biden administration. The deficit then roughly tripled, to a record level of about $3.1 trillion, in pandemic-era fiscal 2020.
Biden and the national debt
In another part of the speech, Biden said, “We cut the debt by $1.7 billion the last two years.” The White House made a correction to the official transcript to make it “$1.7 trillion” instead of “$1.7 billion.”
Facts First: This claim is inaccurate even if you ignore Biden’s billion-versus-trillion mixup. The national debt has continued to increase under Biden. It is the deficit that has declined by about $1.7 trillion – and experts say it is misleading for Biden to take credit for that reduction.
The debt has increased about $3.7 trillion during Biden’s time as president, rising to about $31.5 trillion. As Biden also did in speeches during the 2022 midterms, his claim in this speech conflated the debt (the accumulation of federal borrowing plus interest owed) with the deficit (the one-year difference between spending and revenues).
The deficit did fall by roughly $1.7 trillion between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2022, from about $3.1 trillion to about $1.4 trillion. But as CNN has repeatedly noted, it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for the decline – which overwhelmingly occurred because the emergency pandemic spending from the end of the Trump era expired as planned. In fact, independent analysts say Biden’s own new laws and executive actions have significantly added to current and projected future deficits, not reduced those deficits. You can read more here and here.
Medicare and the Inflation Reduction Act
Biden made a confusing remark about prescription drug costs and the Inflation Reduction Act he signed into law last year.
He said the law “saves seniors a lot of money” on prescription drugs, then added that, by bringing down the cost of these drugs, the law “will cut the federal deficit, saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over time.”
Both of these assertions are fair. But then Biden added that if Republicans repealed this law, they would be getting rid of “$159,000 a year in savings on lower drug costs.”
Here’s a fuller quote: “Now, our Republican friends want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act. They’d get rid of the savings on prescription drugs that we buy, like Medicare – I mean, we buy from – through – through Medicare. And it would eliminate, today, right now, $159,000 a year in savings on lowered drug costs. Now, that just means your tax dollars are going to save – be saved $159,000 to do what we’re doing right now.”
Facts First: The Inflation Reduction Act does not provide “$159,000 a year in savings on lowered drug costs.” A White House official made clear to CNN on Thursday that Biden was attempting to say that government savings of $159 billion over 10 years would be lost with a Republican repeal of two key Inflation Reduction Act provisions on prescription drugs.
Viewed one way, Biden’s “$159,000 a year” figure significantly understated the total savings from these two provisions. (One allows Medicare to negotiate the price of certain prescription drugs. The other requires pharmaceutical companies to pay rebates to Medicare for price increases over the rate of inflation.) But his use of such a modest number may have led some listeners to believe that he was talking about giant savings to particular seniors or families rather than modest savings to the government. And his figure was incorrect regardless of how it was perceived.
The White House corrected this section of the official transcript of the speech after CNN inquired about the “$159,000” figure.
Billionaires and taxes
Biden reprised an inaccurate figure he used in the Virginia speech in late January. He said of billionaires in the United States: “You know what their average tax they pay is? About 3%.”
Facts First: Once more, Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the third time in less than a month, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim in the late-January speech, the White House published a corrected transcript of that speech to make it “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even the 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.
“Biden’s numbers are way too low,” Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, told CNN in late January – though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”
Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and the Virginia speech – and “2%” in another January speech.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — President Joe Biden paid an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Monday to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a defiant display of Western solidarity with a country still fighting what he called “a brutal and unjust war” days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion.
“One year later, Kyiv stands,” Biden declared after meeting Zelenskyy at Mariinsky Palace. Jamming his finger for emphasis on his podium, against a backdrop of three flags from each country, he continued: “And Ukraine stands. Democracy stands. The Americans stand with you, and the world stands with you.”
Biden spent more than five hours in the Ukrainian capital, consulting with Zelenskyy on next steps, honoring the country’s fallen soldiers and seeing U.S. embassy staff in the besieged country.
The visit comes at a crucial moment: Biden is trying to keep allies unified in their support for Ukraine as the war is expected to intensify with spring offensives. Zelenskyy is pressing allies to speed up delivery of promised weapon systems and calling on the West to provide fighter jets — something that Biden has declined to do.
The U.S. president got a taste of the terror that Ukrainians have lived with for close to a year when air raids sirens howled just as he and Zelenskyy wrapped up a visit to the gold-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral.
Looking solemn, they continued unperturbed as they laid two wreaths and held a moment of silence at the Wall of Remembrance honoring Ukrainian soldiers killed since 2014, the year Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and Russian-backed fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine.
The White House would not go into specifics, but national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that it notified Moscow of Biden’s visit to Kyiv shortly before his departure from Washington “for deconfliction purposes” in an effort to avoid any miscalculation that could bring the two nuclear-armed nations into direct conflict.
In Kyiv, Biden announced an additional half-billion dollars in U.S. assistance — on top of the more than $50 billion already provided — for shells for howitzers, anti-tank missiles, air surveillance radars and other aid but no new advanced weaponry.
Ukraine has also been pushing for battlefield systems that would allow its forces to strike Russian targets that have been moved back from frontline areas, out of the range of HIMARS missiles that have already been delivered. Zelenskyy said he and Biden spoke about “long-range weapons and the weapons that may still be supplied to Ukraine even though it wasn’t supplied before.” But he did not detail any new commitments.
“Our negotiations were very fruitful,” Zelenskyy added. Sullivan would not detail any potential new capabilities for Ukraine, but said there was a ”good discussion” of the subject.
Biden’s mission with his visit to Kyiv, which comes before a scheduled trip to Warsaw, Poland, is to underscore that the United States is prepared to stick with Ukraine “as long as it takes” to repel Russian forces even as public opinion polling suggests that U.S. and allied support for providing weaponry and direct economic assistance has started to soften. For Zelenskyy, the symbolism of having the U.S. president stand side by side with him on Ukrainian land as the anniversary nears is no small thing as he prods allies to provide more advanced weaponry and step up delivery.
“I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about U.S. support for Ukraine in the war,” Biden said.
Biden’s visit was a brazen rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had hoped his military would swiftly overrun Kyiv within days. Biden, a Democrat, recalled speaking with Zelenskyy on the night of the invasion, saying, “That dark night one year ago, the world was literally at the time bracing for the fall of Kyiv. Perhaps even the end of Ukraine.”
A year later, the Ukrainian capital remains firmly in Ukrainian control. Although a semblance of normalcy has returned to the city, regular air raid sirens and frequent missile and killer-drone attacks against military and civilian infrastructure across the country are a near-constant reminder that the war is still raging. The bloodiest fighting is, for the moment, concentrated in the country’s east, particularly around the city of Bakhmut, where Russian offensives are underway.
At least six civilians have been killed and 17 more have been wounded in Ukraine over the past 24 hours, Ukraine’s presidential office reported. In the eastern Donetsk region, the Russian army was using aviation to strike cities on the front line. A total of 15 cities and villages have been shelled over the past 24 hours, according to the region’s Ukrainian Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko. In the northeastern Kharkiv region, cities near the border with Russia came under fire. A missile strike hit Kupiansk, damaging a hospital, a plant and residential buildings.
“The cost that Ukraine has had to bear has been extraordinarily high,” Biden said. “And the sacrifices have been far too great.” But “Putin’s war of conquest is failing.”
“He’s counting on us not sticking together,” Biden said. “He thought he could outlast us. I don’t think he’s thinking that right now. God knows what he’s thinking, but I don’t think he’s thinking that. But he’s just been plain wrong. Plain wrong.”
The trip gave Biden an opportunity to get a firsthand look at the devastation the Russian invasion has caused on Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians have been killed, millions of refugees have fled the war, and Ukraine has suffered tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure damage.
Biden, wearing a blue suit and at times his signature aviator sunglasses, told Zelenskyy the U.S. will stand with him “for as long as it takes.” Zelenskyy responded in English: “We’ll do it.”
The Ukrainian leader, wearing a black sweatshirt, as has become his wartime habit, said through an interpreter that Biden’s visit “brings us closer to the victory,” this year, he hoped. He expressed gratitude to Americans and “all those who cherish freedom.”
It was rare for a U.S. president to travel to a conflict zone where the U.S. or its allies did not have control over the airspace.
The U.S. military does not have a presence in Ukraine other than a small detachment of Marines guarding the embassy in Kyiv, making Biden’s visit more complicated than other recent visits by prior U.S. leaders to war zones.
While Biden was in Ukraine, U.S. surveillance planes, including E-3 Sentry airborne radar and an electronic RC-135W Rivet Joint aircraft, were keeping watch over Kyiv from Polish airspace.
Speculation has been building for weeks that Biden would visit Ukraine around the Feb. 24 anniversary of the Russian invasion. But the White House repeatedly had said that no presidential trip to Ukraine was planned, even after the Poland visit was announced.
Since early morning on Monday many main streets and central blocks in Kyiv were cordoned off without any official explanation. Later people started sharing videos of long motorcades of cars driving along the streets where the access was restricted.
At the White House, planning for Biden’s visit to Kyiv was tightly held — with a relatively small group of aides briefed on the plans — because of security concerns. Sullivan said Biden gave final approval for the trip, which had been in the works for months, on Friday during an Oval Office meeting at which he was briefed on security plans for the visit.
The president traveled with an usually small entourage, with just a few senior aides and two journalists, to maintain secrecy.
Asked by a reporter on Friday if Biden might include stops beyond Poland, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied, “Right now, the trip is going to be in Warsaw.” Moments later — and without prompting — Kirby added, “I said ‘right now.’
Biden quietly departed from Joint Base Andrews near Washington at 4:15 a.m. on Sunday, making a stop at Ramstein Air Base in Germany before making his way into Ukraine. He arrived in Kyiv at 8 a.m. on Monday. He departed after 1 p.m.
Until Monday, Biden’s failure to visit was making him something of a standout among Ukraine’s partners in the West, some of whom have made frequent visits to the Ukrainian capital. White House officials had previously cited security concerns with keeping Biden from making the trip, and Sullivan said Monday that the visit was only undertaken once officials believed they had managed the risk to acceptable levels.
In June, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi traveled together by night train to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak visited Kyiv in November shortly after taking office.
This is Biden’s first visit to a war zone as president. His recent predecessors, Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, made surprise visits to Afghanistan and Iraq during their presidencies to meet U.S. troops and those countries’ leaders.
___
Madhani and Miller reported from Washington.
___
Follow the AP’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine.
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1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Chicago; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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SAN DIEGO (AP) — A sharp drop in illegal border crossings since December could blunt a Republican point of attack against President Joe Biden as the Democratic leader moves to reshape a broken asylum system that has dogged him and his predecessors.
A new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows some support for changing the number of immigrants and asylum-seekers allowed into the country. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say the level of immigration and asylum-seekers should be lowered, while about 2 in 10 say they should be higher, according to the poll. About a third want the numbers to remain the same.
The decrease in border crossings followed Biden's announcement in early January that Mexico would take back Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans under a pandemic-era rule that denies migrants the right to seek asylum as part of an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19. At the same time, the U.S. agreed to admit up to 30,000 a month of those four nationalities on humanitarian parole if they apply online, enter at an airport and find a financial sponsor.
The administration has also proposed generally denying asylum to anyone who travels though another country on their way to the U.S. without seeking protection there — effectively all non-Mexicans who appear at the U.S. southern border.
The new rules put forth by Biden could help the president fight back against critics who complain he hasn’t done enough to address border security issues. But the moves have also fueled anger among some of his Democratic allies who are concerned that he is furthering a Trump-era policy they view as anti-immigrant and hurting vulnerable migrants who are trying to escape dangerous conditions in their native countries.
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And the new changes — and subsequent drop in illegal border crossings — are unlikely to stop the barrage of attacks from conservatives who see border security as a powerful political weapon.
Biden has been on the defensive as Republicans and right-wing media outlets have hammered him over the soaring increase in migrant encounters at the border. The new House GOP leadership has held hearings on what they call the “Biden border crisis” and talked of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Agents detained migrants more than 2.5 million times at the southern border in 2022, including more than 250,000 in December, the highest on record. According to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, Border Patrol agents stopped migrants about 130,000 times in February, similar to January.
Among Republicans, the poll shows about two-thirds say there should be fewer immigrants and asylum-seekers, while only about 1 in 10 say there should be more.
Democrats are split: About a quarter say the number of immigrants should increase, a quarter say it should decrease, and about 4 in 10 say it should remain the same. They are slightly more supportive of asylum-seekers specifically, with 37% supporting an increase, 26% backing a decrease, and 36% saying the number should remain the same.
Under U.S. law, numbers are not capped on asylum, which was largely a policy afterthought until about a decade ago. Since 2017, the U.S. has been the world’s most popular destination for asylum-seekers, according to U.N. figures. Even those who lose in court can stay for years while their cases wind through a backlogged system.
Omar Reffell, a 38-year-old independent voter in Houston, said that he supports immigration but that news coverage of “caravans of people trying to cross the border” sends the wrong message to migrants.
“People think that they just show up at the border, come across, there is not going to be any repercussions,” Reffell said. “I’m not against immigration. I think immigration is good for the country, but it has to happen in a very orderly manner or it puts a lot of stress, especially on the border states being able to provide resources.”
More than 100,000 migrants each month were being released in U.S. border cities late last year with notices to appear in immigration court or report to immigration authorities.
Dan Restrepo, a top White House adviser on Latin America during Barack Obama’s presidency, believes the American public will accept high levels of immigration — if a systematic process can be followed.
The challenge in managing migration “is the sense of chaos and disorder that can be created by images of overwhelmed processing facilities and the like at the physical border,” he said. “It’s less the numbers and more the imagery” that bothers voters.
Republicans cast Biden’s expansion of humanitarian parole for four nationalities as a political ploy to divert attention from the border and are not likely to let up on their criticism of the president on immigration. The Federation of American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration group, called January’s plunge in border numbers “a shell game” to boost Biden’s reelection prospects.
Fox News Channel has hit hard on the story over the last year. Reporter Bill Melguin said in a “Battle for the Border” special on Nov. 3 that he had spent more than 200 days on the Texas border.
“We’ve been shooting the video all day long,” Melugin said in a typical report from the Texas town of Eagle Pass. “We keep getting these massive groups of 150 to 200 crossing every single day.”
The network’s night-vision drone cameras have showed hundreds of migrants walking across the border, each one appearing as a luminous white stick slowly advancing across a dark screen.
The poll found 39% of U.S. adults approve of how Biden is handling immigration, and 38% approve of him on border security — slightly below his overall approval ratings. About two-thirds of Democrats but only about 1 in 10 Republicans say they approve of his handling of either issue.
The poll was taken Feb. 16-20, just before the administration proposed on Feb. 21 that asylum should generally be denied to migrants who pass through another country without applying for protection there if it is deemed safe. The administration is angling to have the new rule take effect before the pandemic-related limits on asylum are expected to end May 11, though legal challenges appear imminent.
Becky Steelsmith, a 70-year-old independent voter from Zachary, Louisiana, is reluctant to heap blame on Biden because solutions also eluded his predecessors, but she notes that the optics are not great.
“The only reason why I disagree with Biden’s handling of it is that I think he’s a little too soft,” said Steelsmith, a retired teacher. "I'm not saying it’s his fault that it’s happening. I’m saying that as president, he needs to sit down and really focus and come up with some kind of a solution, or the beginning of a solution.”
___
The poll of 1,247 adults was conducted using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden's upcoming budget proposal aims to cut deficits by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade, the White House said Wednesday.
That deficit reduction goal is significantly higher than the $2 trillion that Biden had promised in his State of the Union address last month. It also is a sharp contrast with House Republicans, who have called for a path to a balanced budget but have yet to offer a blueprint.
The White House has consistently called into question Republicans' commitment to what it considers a sustainable federal budget. Administration officials have noted that the various tax plans and other policies previously backed by GOP lawmakers would add roughly $3 trillion to the national debt over 10 years.
“This is something we think is important,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said about the plan Biden intends to discuss Thursday in Philadelphia. "This is something that shows the American people that we take this seriously.”
As part of the budget, the president already has said he wants to increase the Medicare payroll tax on people making more than $400,000 per year and impose a tax on the holdings of billionaires and others with extreme degrees of wealth.
JOE BIDEN
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The proposal would seek to close the “carried interest" loophole that allows wealthy hedge fund managers and other to pay their taxes at a lower rate, and prevent billionaires from being able to set aside large amounts of their holdings in tax-favored retirement accounts, according to an administration official. The plan also projects saving $24 billion over 10 years by removing a tax subsidy for crypto currency transactions.
The official who provided the details spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the plan before its official release.
It also includes:
—expanding the ability of Medicare to negotiate on pharmaceutical drug prices, with an estimated spending cut of $160 billion over a decade.
—auctioning off rights to the radio spectrum, which would generate $50 billion.
—steps to reduce identity theft and unemployment insurance fraud.
—targeting insurance companies that overcharge Medicaid, with anticipated savings of $20 billion through repayments to the government.
—ending subsidies valued at $31 billion for oil and gas companies.
—scrapping a $19 billion tax break for real estate investors.
It's a delicate time with the U.S. economy on edge because of high inflation. The government this summer is likely to exhaust its emergency measures to keep Washington running, setting up the risk of a default on payments along with cataclysmic series of job losses that could crash the economy.
Biden's package of spending priorities is unlikely to pass the House or Senate as proposed. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Tuesday that the plan “will not see the light of day," a sign that it might primarily serve as a messaging document going into the 2024 elections.
Rohit Kumar, a former McConnell aide who is now an executive with the tax consultancy PwC, said Biden's plan does matter “in terms of putting ideas out there." He said that if Biden won a second term, elements of this spending blueprint could be part of negotiations in 2025 about the expiring provisions in the 2017 tax cuts that President Donald Trump signed into law.
Given the scope of the deficit reduction in Biden's proposal, Kumar said it was unlikely that the president's plan would identify which parts of the expiring tax cuts he plans to keep, as the president has vowed no tax increases on anyone making less than $400,000. But while the White House has charged that Republican plans increase deficits by $3 trillion, about $2.7 trillion of that total comes from renewing all the Trump-era tax cuts that disproportionately favored the wealthy.
In February, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the national debt held by the public will grow by more than $20 trillion over the next decade. The publicly held debt — which reflects the cumulative impact of yearly deficits — would be equal to 118% of U.S. gross domestic product, up from 98% this year. Biden's budget would reduce the debt, though it would still be high relative to historical levels.
Republicans, newly in control of the House, are demanding sharp spending cuts. Biden has suggested that tax increases on the earnings and holdings of the country's wealthiest households can bolster government finances and also improve Medicare and Social Security.
The president contended in a Monday speech that there are 680 billionaires in the United States and that many of them pay taxes at a lower rate than do families who think of themselves as being in the middle class. Biden said not to hold him to the precise number of billionaires, but that they could afford to pay more for the good of the country.
“No billionaire should be paying a lower tax rate than a fire fighter — nobody,” Biden said at a gathering of the International Association of Fire Fighters.
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You bet there's a sharp drop in border crossings. They're all here now!
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/03/08/analysis-over-15-5m-illegal-aliens-in-u-s-costs-taxpayers-150b-annually/