See a pattern?

 

Also, guess what year Citizens United (allowing corporations to be considered people for the purposes of campaign contributions) was passed.

Yep.  2010.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the real "wealth redistribution" in this country.

Trump 2.0 - clearing the way for money laundering

 

And in related news...

Covid-19 relief for business executives

Since the 1980s, businesses have only been able to deduct 50 percent of their meal expenses off their federal taxes. A proposal championed by the White House and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) would increase that deduction to 100 percent allowing companies to deduct the full cost of a business meal off their federal taxes.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin included the meal deduction as a White House priority in negotiations.

  WaPo

A priority!

During a roundtable discussion in May, Trump brought up the idea unprompted and suggested it would be more important than hundreds of billions in emergency small business loans.

“I think it’s, frankly, more important than even the other things we’re talking about,” the president said of restoring the deduction.

[...]

Trump and Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council, have been among the most aggressive proponents of restoring the meal deduction.

[...]

Trump urged that the United States “go back to the original” version of a tax deduction for entertainment and meals.

Which he will be using liberally once he's out of office and back in business. AND he'll use it at Trump properties, so double bonus for him.

The president added: “They’ll send their executives, they’ll send people there, and they get a deduction. That is something that will really bring life back to the restaurants; I think make them hotter than before. You know, they used to have it. And when they ended it, it was really never the same. It was never the same.”

Oh, bullshit. It was a few dollars less in businessmen's pockets. It didn't hurt the restaurant business one bit.

President Trump has for months talked about securing the deduction — derisively referred to as the “three-martini lunch” by critics — as a way to revive the restaurant industry badly battered by the pandemic.

This, I think is absurd. The restaurant business will revive when people feel comfortable eating out. That's it. That's all that's holding back the restaurant business. The deduction is a way to put money back into the pockets of wealthy businessmen - when they (and their clients) feel comfortable dining out.

Some Democrats recoiled at the proposal, though it has also been denounced as ineffective by conservative tax experts as well.

Senate leaders on both sides of the aisle each blamed the other for the long stint between the last coronavirus relief package and the deal reached Dec. 20. (U.S. Senate)

During negotiations, however, Democratic leaders agreed to the provision in exchange for Republicans agreeing to expand tax credits for low income families and the working poor in the final package, according to a Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of internal negotiations.

“Republicans are nickel-and-diming benefits for jobless workers, while at the same time pushing for tax breaks for three-martini power lunches. It’s unconscionable,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.

Yes, it is. And that's the Republican party for you.

Liberal and conservative economists and tax experts have panned the idea.

“Months later it is still bad policy, and still not good economic relief for the current situation,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a tax analyst at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank. “It just should not be in there.”

But it is.

Wealth redistribution the capitalist way

Corporate double-dip

How nice for them.  After they siphoned off much of the coronavirus relief funds Congress meant for small businesses.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

What Fox viewers didn't get to see

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

The Trial & the Tax Cuts: America's elite kleptocrats taking the country down

On the eve of the Paul Manafort trial, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin casually announced that the Trump administration was considering a fresh $100 billion tax cut for the wealthy. The two events—the trial and the tax cut—should be considered plot points in the very same narrative. Manafort had grown very rich by looting public monies, and Mnuchin was proposing an arguably legal version of the same.

Unlike past Trump tax cuts, this proposed cut would be implemented by executive fiat, without a congressional vote.

  The Atlantic

So much easier that way.

The trial of Paul Manafort is not merely an episode in a larger scandal that will unfold over many chapters. [...] It’s an occasion for the United States to awaken from its collective slumber about the creeping dangers of kleptocracy.

[...]

Conventional wisdom long held that America’s free market would never tolerate the sort of clientelism, nepotism, and outright theft that prevailed in places like Brazil and Italy. [...] America has become the sanctuary of choice for laundered money, a bastion of shell companies and anonymously purchased real estate.

[...]

During the 1980s and 1990s, [Paul Manafort] provided strategic advice to the thuggish dictators who served as proxies for the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist foreign policy. With his mastery of American media, he helped sanitize crooks like the former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda—the symbol of their regime, the 3,000 pairs of shoes she owned, was a little less than the number of people by killed it. These dictators (also Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi) should never have been respectable figures in Washington. But Manafort reinvented them as latter-day Thomas Jeffersons, allies in the cause of democracy, and successfully lobbied for them to receive arms and aid from the U.S. government.

[...]

In Russia, the KGB steered billions into offshore accounts during the dying days of the [Communist] regime. [...] These funds became the basis for some of the fortunes of those who now appear as characters in the Russiagate scandal. Vladimir Putin himself amassed wealth that totaled more than $40 billion. [...] Russians who invested in Trump real estate over the years had many motives. But everything we know about kleptocracy suggests that they were likely attempting to relocate their money to a place where it would both disappear from public view and have the protections that come with the American rule of law.

[...]

During [the years Manafort represented Ukrainian oligarchs], the country hemorrhaged more than $118 billion in illicit financial flows, according to the Kleptocracy Initiative, a think tank that has published invaluable reports about the scourge of corruption. (To set that number in relief, the country’s entire gross domestic product in 2013 was $181 billion.) Stealing this money wasn’t a victimless crime: It came at the expense of Ukraine’s development as a market economy; it sucked funds away from public investment; it eroded faith in democracy and Western institutions.

Of course Manafort wasn't the only American involved.

Barack Obama’s White House counsel Greg Craig and his top-drawer law firm Skadden Arps abetted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s efforts to smash the political opponents who might get in the way of his thievery. Manafort arranged for the firm to publish a report justifying the arrest of a former Ukrainian prime minister, who had been denied counsel at crucial moments of her trial. (Last April, Craig retired from the firm under a cloud of scandal. Another Skadden associate who worked with Manafort has pled guilty to misleading Mueller’s investigators.) Tony Podesta, a leading Democratic lobbyist of his generation, has watched his own power firm collapse after Mueller revealed his complicity in Manafort’s efforts. [...] American law firms play an essential role in protecting global kleptocracy and helping it relocate money to the United States.

Russia never got a chance to establish a working democracy. People like Manafort were there from the beginning.

It doesn’t require any imagination to see how money stolen from Ukrainian coffers, money won in rigged privatizations and crony contracts, money obtained after the brutal murder of rivals, ended up with Paul Manafort. Clean money doesn’t need to travel through shell companies in Cyprus, like the millions that Manafort poured into accounts there. And Manafort allegedly used the same techniques of his dodgy clients to repatriate the money in the United States, taking advantage of gaps in the enforcement of anti-money-laundering laws to sneak cash into the country through real estate, expensive rugs, and tailored suits.

And the Manafort trial, I'm sure, is just a scratch on the surface.  Unfortunately, the fact that so many in Congress - particularly, but not exclusively in the GOP - have dirty hands will be a barrier to having these practices routed out, even once they are exposed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The report you were supposed to miss

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) just released its annual report in March.

Until Trump’s administration makes a case that its own OMB and agencies are wrong — not just by a little, but by tens of billions of dollars — the presumption of every journalist and politico in Washington should be that there is no coherent policy rationale for Trump’s deregulatory agenda.

It is, like his health, tax, and infrastructure initiatives, simply the polar opposite of populism: the targeted transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, at the public’s expense.

[...]

[The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)] gathered data and analysis on “major” federal regulations (those with $100 million or more in economic impact) between 2006 and 2016, a period that includes all of Obama’s administration, stopping just short of Trump’s. The final tally, reported in 2001 dollars:

*Aggregate benefits: $219 to $695 billion
*Aggregate costs: $59 to $88 billion

By even the most conservative estimate, the benefits of Obama’s regulations wildly outweighed the costs.

According to OMB — and to the federal agencies upon whose data OMB mostly relied — the core of the Trumpian case against Obama regulations, arguably the organizing principle of Trump’s administration, is false.

  Vox

Imagine that.

At least since Reagan, conservatives have had particular and growing hostility toward environmental regulations. This has proven a source of great anguish to (older) environmentalists, who lament that such regulations used to be bipartisan.

But the right-wing turn against environmental rules is no great mystery. The OMB report reveals the core reason:

[...]

Air quality regulations serve as a downward redistribution of wealth, out of the pockets of industrialists and into the pockets of ordinary Americans, particularly the poor and vulnerable Americans (African Americans and Hispanics in particular) who tend to live closest to pollution sources. They shift costs, from the much higher health and social costs of pollution remediation to the comparatively smaller costs of pollution abatement.

And therein lies the source of industry and GOP rage toward EPA. It’s why EPA delayed and delayed air rules under Bush. It’s why the GOP Congress worked so furiously to block air rules under Obama. And it’s why EPA is weakening or repealing air rules as fast as possible under Trump.

The GOP is opposed to downward redistribution of wealth. If one policy goal has unified the right above all else, it is upward redistribution. Even as its base drifts further into a fog of xenophobic, reactionary ressentiment, its moneyed interests and policy leaders remain laser-focused on reducing taxes and regulatory burdens on the wealthy. Upward redistribution is what unites GOP health care policy, tax policy, financial sector policy, and environmental policy.

Yeah, I think we knew that, too.

[Environmental regulations] don’t “kill jobs.” From the perspective of the overall economy, they don’t do much of anything to jobs, other than shift them from certain regions/industries to others. As it happens, those shifts are often unfavorable to GOP constituencies, but that’s not a license to, you know, lie about them.

[...]

GOP lawmakers shouldn’t be allowed to simply burp up the words “burdensome” and “job-killing” and move on. The OMB finds no evidence that federal regulations have any noticeable impact on aggregate national employment or economic growth. There is evidence that they produce public benefits well in excess of their costs.

If EPA head Scott Pruitt wants to say that defending children from toxics or rural communities from coal ash pollution is burdensome, he ought to offer some numbers, or evidence, or ... something. Goofy homilies are not enough. (His latest claim is that the Bible recommends the deregulatory agenda.)

Dear God.