Monthly Archives: July 2017

Jul 20 2017

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney Discusses ObamaCare, CBO, Tax Reform and MAGAnomics…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Tree House on July 20, 2017 by

Short interview with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney discussing ObamaCare and the potential for Tax Reform.  Unfortunately, one of the key budgetary issues with the failure of ObamaCare reform is the downstream effect on any middle-class tax reform.

Within ObamaCare’s current -mostly political- structure, the expansive growth of Medicaid means tax-paying workers will pay more for insurance premiums and will also be held captive to the need for additional revenue to pay for medicaid; a double whammy.

The increasing taxpayer costs to keep big government ObamaCare operational, for non-taxpaying medicaid recipients, means the middle-class is once again sacrificed at the altar of the Big Club.

American workers on the individual market will not only see increased insurance rates, but their income tax rates will also be higher as the need to subsidize the lower-income non-working group (medicaid) remains.

Jul 20 2017

Judiciary Committee Unanimously Approves Christopher Wray’s FBI Nomination…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Tree House on July 20, 2017 by

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday unanimously approved the nomination of Christopher Wray to be FBI director following the dismissal of the agency’s former chief, James Comey, by President Donald Trump.

All 20 members of the committee voted to approve Wray, a white-collar crime lawyer and former assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, sending his nomination to the full Senate for a vote. (read more)

Jul 20 2017

Suspicions Confirmed: Murdoch Told Ailes To Tilt Coverage Toward Anyone But Trump, Even Clinton…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Tree House on July 20, 2017 by

A recent article written by Roger Ailes confidant Michael Wolff affirms one of the more transparently obvious hidden secrets in the 2015/2016 presidential race and election.

Fox News owner/mogul Rupert Murdoch was intensely against the candidacy of Donald Trump. So much so that Murdoch instructed former President of Fox News, Roger Ailes, to shape favorable coverage toward anyone other than Donald Trump, including a request to tilt toward support for Hillary Clinton.

New York – […] It was Ailes’ tacit support of Trump that, in part, made his removal from Fox all the more urgent for the Murdochs. And it was not just the liberal sons who were agitated by Ailes’ regard for Trump, but also the father, whose tabloid, the New York Post, helped create Trump, but who found him now, with great snobbery, not of “our” conservative class. (“When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch senior tweeted the day after Trump officially declared himself a candidate.)

Murdoch instructed Ailes to tilt to anyone but Trump, Ailes confided to me before he was fired, even Hillary. (Ailes, for his part, characterized Murdoch’s periodic efforts at interference as similar to Nixon’s instructions to bomb this or that country — best ignored.)

After the election, a confounded Murdoch had to call on his ex-wife Wendi’s friends, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, to broker a rapprochement with the disreputable Donald. Now, to Trump’s great satisfaction, a humbled Murdoch is a constant caller. (read more)

All intellectually honest media and political observers already knew this was the basic premise for Fox News in the 2015 and 2016 presidential race.   Murdoch supported Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as the frontrunners.

The August 2015 ambush by Murdoch’s princess Megyn Kelly was merely a highly visible example of Murdoch’s aversion. Kelly was later paid $10 million by Harper Collins, another Murdoch company, as advance payment on her book deal.

After Jeb Bush dropped out, the executive in charge of Fox News debates was Bill Sammon. Sammon’s daughter, Brooke Sammon, was head of Marco Rubio’s communication team.  Murdoch was furious at Chris Christie when he took Rubio to the woodshed in the New Hampshire debate.

 

Jul 20 2017

Euro Rally


Armstrong Economics Blog/Euro €

Posted Jul 20, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

Once the Euro closed above the Weekly Bullish Reversal last week, we have rallied strongly simply on comments from Draghi that a strong Euro is good. It is hard to contemplate his reasoning since this increases the debt burden of Southern Europe and reduces German export competitiveness. His comments that changing police will come September. So we have the 99% bullish sentiment acting still in anticipation.

We have exceed the 2016 high of of 11616 intraday reaching 116574. The Quarterly Bullish Reversal stands at 11694 and this is the key area to watch. Exceeding that allows the rally to reach the Downtrend. With this middle target on our objective reached, technically we have an outside reversal to the upside which has cleaned out the stops. This is setting the stage for the Monetary Crisis that begins in 2018. The higher we move in one direction, the worse it swings in the opposite.

We times timed the Frankfurt seminar with this move as well as our meetings with institutions over the next two weeks.

Jul 20 2017

Mark Your Calendars: First Round of NAFTA Renegotiation August 16th – 20th…


Re-Posted from The Conservative Three House on July 20, 2017 by

If you alert your family not to schedule anything important on round-one NAFTA days, well, you might just be a trade and economics nerd.  LOL  Seriously, this is one of the biggest economic processes that falls almost exclusively outside of the reach of lobbyists.

And within this entire NAFTA trade construct there is little to zero downside to walking away. If Team Trump don’t get what they want from a completely reworked trilateral agreement, they can always just eliminate NAFTA and work on bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada as individual trade partners. Team USA hold all the leverage.  

USTR is anticipating seven rounds of talks which will take place at three week intervals.

The first round is scheduled for August 16th through 20th in Washington DC.

Washington, D.C. – United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer today announced arrangements for the first round of negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The first round of the negotiations between the United States, Canada and Mexico will take place in Washington, D.C. from August 16 – 20, 2017.

The negotiations immediately follows the 90-day consultation period with Congress and the public initiated on May 18, 2017. On that day, Ambassador Lighthizer notified Congress of President Trump’s intent to renegotiate NAFTA to get a better deal for America’s workers, farmers, businesses and manufacturers.

Ambassador Lighthizer also announced that John Melle, Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for the Western Hemisphere, will serve as Chief Negotiator for the NAFTA negotiations. In his role as Chief Negotiator, Melle will be responsible for the day-to-day negotiations at the staff level.

Since joining USTR in 1988, John Melle has held a number of positions covering Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean and Central America. As Assistant USTR for the Western Hemisphere, he is responsible for developing, coordinating and implementing the United States’ trade policy for the region.  (read more)

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Jul 20 2017

Paris Climate Accord = Junk Science


Armstrong Economics Blog/Climate

Re-Posted Jul 20, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; I read a piece on the Paris Climate agreement that said climate experts now warn that an increase of more than 2 degrees Celsius could bring about irreversible consequences, including unpredictable superstorms and crippling heat waves. That seems to be anti-cyclical. How do they create such “science” without proof?

PL

ANSWER: They just make it up. Every long-term study I have looked at disagrees with this bogus claim. They have found the Romans made it to Canada because the sea was much warmer back then than it is even today. Even if we assume that if temperature rose 2 degrees that would create superstorms, which has never happened when there were periods when the Earth was much hotter, it would never be “irreversible” for the Earth does not function in a stagnant linear fashion. The only way the Earth would die is (1) the atmosphere burned off, or (2) the entire planet became snow covered reflecting sunlight and then it would never become warm again (White Earth Effect).

If there was more CO2, the planet would be greener and there would be more oxygen than CO2. The system would reverse.

800,000-year Ice-Core Records of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

Jul 20 2017

Sun Activity Has Collapsed to the Lowest in 9,300 years


Armstrong Economics Blog/Climate

Posted Jul 20, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

THE sun is the source of all our warmth. Without it, we would not exist.  Like everything else, it is cyclical in nature. The term “lunatic” referred to people who seemed to go a bit strange when there was a full moon. Some people are perhaps susceptible to its gravitational forces. After all, it is the moon that lifts the entire oceans creating high and low tide. There are people who have varying mood swings and others who are a tad more steady. Yet we all have our ups and downs.

There is the Human Excitability Study where war was correlated to sunspot activity. The sunspot cycle is roughly every eleven years. However, this time it’s different. The sun is headed for a very rare, super-cooling period that threatens to topple civilization itself as it has throughout history roughly following a 300 year cycle.

For most of its history, science believed the sun’s output was constant. They finally realized that a thermal dynamic cycle beats like your heart so the sun could not exist if it was a steady outflow of energy. One degree less and it would blow itself out. Hence, it is cyclical rising and falling in intensity.

The eleven-year cycle in sunspots itself builds in intensity like the Economic Confidence Model (ECM) reaching “grand maxima” and “grand minima” over the course of 300 years. The last grand maximum peaked circa 1958, after which the sun has been steadily quieting down. Today, the drop in activity is at its steepest in 9,300 years, which is being ignored by the Global Warming propaganda.

The last Maunder Minimum, during which the sun languished for seventy years, took place from 1645 to 1715 when the sun’s brightness declined and the number of sunspots collapsed to almost zero.

A.L. Tchijevsky (1897-1964) did a study on sunspot and human activity. He found that humans responded even creating wars with the swings in sunspot activity.

Categories: Climate
Jul 20 2017

Why Global Warming is Good


Armstrong Economics Blog/Climate

Re-Posted Jul 20, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

 

One of my greatest concerns with all this Global Warming nonsense is that nobody seems to ever plot weather against the rise and fall of civilization. When you do, you arrive at a strikingly different perspective of global warming. The greatest advancements in civilization have ALWAYS taken place during periods of global warming. When the temperatures drop, crops fail, death becomes widespread, and society seems to barricade itself in withdrawing from trade.

History is constantly being re-written as new discoveries are made, The global warming period that allowed the rise of Rome included the warming of the seas to the point that the Romans did sail to Canada where Roman swords have been discovered in addition to sending ambassadors to China.

The Minoan society began the Bronze Age. To make bronze, they needed tin. Low and behold, the Minoans traded with the British of Stonehenge Age period prior to 1650BC. They sailed into the Atlantic for trade giving birth to the Bronze Age. The money for trade consisted of bronze ingots cast into the shape of a sheep-skin with the four legs.

 

The fall of the Minoan Civilization coincided with the eruption of Thera (today known as Santorini). This destroyed their ships and commerce and allowed the barbarians, then the Greeks from Mycenae, to plunder their society and also that of Troy before collapsing into a Dark Age due to climate change and global cooling.

If the climate turns bitterly cold after 2032, there is not much we can do about it. The Earth will not obey any law passed by humankind. Global Warming is when civilization rises – it does not end.

 

Jul 19 2017

The Unconstitutionality of the Income Tax the Supreme Court Ignores


Armstrong Economics Blog/The Hunt for Taxes

Re-Posted Jul 19, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

QUESTION: I read that the income tax violates the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. It seems logical on the surface, but nobody has gotten away with that that I have ever heard. Would you can to comment of how they got around this issue?

ANSWER: The way to get around such issues is to be a word smith and break it down to the absolute minutest detail. That is what the Supreme Court did back in United States v. Sullivan, 274 US 259 (1927). They essentially avoided the application by saying that there was no right against self-incrimination to simply write things on a form to thus avoid filing anything. They did not decided whether you could raise the 5th Amendment as to a specific item. Let’s say you are a drug dealer and your income is all illegal. To declare that you made money as a drug dealer would raise that issue. But it does not prevent you from filing a form in general.

“If the form of return provided called for answers that the defendant was privileged from making he could have raised the objection in the return, but could not on that account refuse to make any return at all. We are not called on to decide what, if anything, he might have withheld. Most of the items warranted no complaint. It would be an extreme if not an extravagant application of the Fifth Amendment to say that it authorized a man to refuse to state the amount of his income because it had been made in crime. But if the defendant desired to test that or any other point he should have tested it in the return so that it could be passed upon. He could not draw a conjurer’s circle around the whole matter by his own declaration that to write any word upon the government blank would bring him into danger of the law”

I personally disagree with the Supreme Court which has held it does not violate the Equal Protection Clause to charge disproportionate levels of taxation. In a recent case where some people were given tax amnesty and others paid the tax, the Supreme Court used another rule to escape the logic of a constitutional violation. They wrote in Armour v. Indianapolis (2012):

“This Court has long held that ‘a classification neither involving fundamental rights nor proceeding along suspect lines … cannot run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause if there is a rational relationship between the disparity of treatment and some legitimate governmental purpose.’”

Class warfare is the essence of socialism/communism. There is no other discrimination throughout history that has resulted in the slaughter of more lives than class warfare. It has been responsible for killing tens of millions of people far more than race or religious discrimination. To ignore this is ethically dishonest by the Supreme Court and is clearly a ruling in favor of government because it seeks to extort money from people in violation of equal justice for all

Jul 19 2017

Italy Threatens to Blow Up the Refugee Crisis


Armstrong Economics Blog/Refugees

Re-Posted Jul 19, 2017 by Martin Armstrong

If you are against the refugees, many will call you a racist even though the refugees are not of a single race. The problem is they are economic migrants – not refugees from exclusively Syria, which the West can stop in a heartbeat. The crisis is economic. These people coming in are getting the benefits of unemployed workers without work and are breaking down an economic system at the worse possible moment.

Nicolas Sarkozy of France says immigrants should ‘speak French’ and attacks ‘medieval’ burkini revealing the culture clash. This influx is even starting to change fashion gradually. There is little assimilation, but the West is bending over backwards to accommodate them and in so doing is starting to change itself.

The crisis is economic. Italy cannot afford to pay for all these people benefits when the State is in serious economic trouble to begin with. They are now threatening a ‘nuclear option’ to migrant crisis by giving EU visas to 200,000 incomers and sending them north as the country struggles with the sheer cost of human warehousing.