Fox News Compares Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Hitler and Stalin in Unhinged Rant

It’s always easy to tell who the Republican Nationalist Party is most afraid of. It’s the person they lie about most, and whose character they malign with the most vicious insults. Their obvious defensiveness gives away their fear and betrays their intentions to destroy anyone they think is having a real impact on changing the status quo.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The current ogre under the GOP’s bed is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has had the audacity to advocate for the common American, the oppressed, and those who have been left out of the nation’s prosperity. Her recent comments regarding raising the marginal tax rate for multi-millionaires to 70% has brought severe anxiety to the rightists in Congress and the media who serve the wealthy. So their response to this common sense proposal, that was in effect for decades prior to the Reagan administration, is to lash out in the most absurd and offensive way imaginable.

On the Fox Business Network program host Trish Regan invited right-wing clown and alleged economist, Ben Stein, to discuss Ocasio-Cortez. The segment was utterly devoid of any substantive discussion of her ideas or her role in Congress. Instead, it was a bitterly personal assault that was nothing but invective and slander. Stein delivered a thoroughly deranged tirade dismissing her impact and insulting everyone who supports her. “She’s seeing success,” Stein began, “because there’s a lot of people just as ignorant as she is out there.” Never mind that he’s disparaging the majority of Americans (59%) who agree with her.

Stein believes that “messages about justice and equality … always turn out to be messages that lead to a dictatorship.” And his extended comments on Fox affirm that opinion, but go even farther into an abyss of slime (video below):

“We have a society in which there are an awful lot of people who have no idea that Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, all came to power promising the same kinds of things that Miss Ocasio-Cortez is promising. And it led to mass murder. It led to dictatorship. It led to genocide. These promises are old promises and they invariably led to bad things.”

Stalin? Hitler? Does Stein really believe that Ocasio-Cortez is an aspiring tyrant who hungers for the blood of the masses? Does he really believe that her agenda, which is squarely in the mainstream of America’s principles and history, will lead to genocide? Or is he merely mouthing off with noxious hyperbole intended to incite the hatred of Fox’s viewers? If Stein is looking for an aspiring tyrant, he might want to look at Donald Trump, who actually kept a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside. And Trump’s anti-press chant of “the enemy of the people” was stolen verbatim from Stalin. But Stein wasn’t finished:

“Capitalism is a system that allows people to make something of themselves, instead of suppressing other people. Making money is … what our society is about. It’s not about ordering people around, putting them in concentration camps. What do you do if a person is a richer person or a poorer person? What do you do? Do you take him away and shoot him?”

Where on Earth did Stein get that from? Certainly not from anything Ocasio-Cortez, or any Democrat, has ever said. It’s simply Stein inventing horror stories for the Deplorables watching him on Fox News. And the number one viewer is, of course, Donald Trump, who spends countless hours watching, and live tweeting, what he sees on Fox. And as a result of crackpot diatribes like this one, watch for Stein to be hired by Trump as an economic advisor or, perhaps, his new Billionaire Tax Elimination and Peasant Revenue Collection Czar.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

A Tweet For Everything: What Trump Said About the Stock Market Just Six Months Ago

The current President of the United States has shown repeatedly that he is an unstable and ill-informed custodian of the nation’s resources. Donald Trump has a tenuous grip on the complexities of economics, and reacts out of panic and vengeance more than careful study and reason. As a result the country has been burdened with policies that work against the interests of its citizens.

Donald Trump, Stock Market

About six months ago Trump joined with the Republican Congress to pass a tax reform bill that was widely criticized as a giveaway to the wealthy that would balloon the national debt by trillions of dollars. Trump celebrated the legislative victory at a White House ceremony where he reduced it to flagrantly personal terms saying that “It’s always a lot of fun when you win.” It didn’t get a single vote from Democrats.

Republicans, however, were swelling with pride, despite the unfavorable public response shown in most polls. The Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, said confidently that “When people see their paychecks getting bigger in February […] that’s going to change its popularity, I am convinced.” The GOP Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, gloated that “My view of this is, if we can’t sell this to the American people, we ought to go into another line of work.”

I hope he’s dusted off his resume, because the latest polling shows that the Trump Tax Scam is less popular now than ever. It currently has about thirty-four percent approval from the American people. Which isn’t surprising considering the fact that it was crafted to benefit corporations and the rich. Which makes this Trump tweet from December 14, 2017, all the more ironic and sad:

Well, that rosy scenario has wilted. Trump told reporters when the bill passed that “the results will speak for themselves.” Six months later it’s clear that his prediction is true, in the worst possible way. Workers have not received the benefits they were promised. Businesses are taking their profits and putting them into stock buybacks that benefit the executives. Harley Davidson announced today that is the latest company to be moving some of their operations (and jobs) out of the country.

On top of that, the stock market suffered a serious decline on Monday with the Dow Jones down 328 points (1.33%), and the Nasdaq down 160 points (2.09%). The market is negative by almost two percent year-to-date, and is down over 500 points since the tax bill was signed. Even more troubling is that it is off about 2,300 points from its high in January. You don’t hear Trump talking about any of that.

Short term movement in the market is never a good indicator of trends over time. But Trump’s boasting about the market’s performance has blown up in his face because he doesn’t understand it in even the simplest terms. And the trading in the wake of the tax bill, Trump’s punitive tariffs, and associated red flags in bonds and overseas markets are telling us a cautionary tale. At some point the markets are going to reverse course, as they always do, and it may come sooner rather than later. But Trump’s mismanagement of the economy has left us with few and/or weak tools with which to respond. The smart money is taking protective measures, and so should we all.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

It’s Tax Day and Donald Trump is Tweeting Up a Storm to Celebrate, But…

Never one to care anything about facts or truthful dialogue, Donald Trump is attacking the arrival of Tax Day with a celebratory zeal that is entirely out of whack with reality. So what else is new?

Donald Trump

Trump’s day always begins with his most pressing presidential duty: post nonsense and/or rage on Twitter. This Tuesday morning is no different. So here is what the Tweeter-in-Chief is obsessing over while waiting for his tee time in Palm Beach:

Indeed, everybody is talking. Unfortunately for Trump, they are mostly saying that his tax scam bill isn’t helping to do anything but blow up the federal deficit. A poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal show that a pitiful twenty-seven percent think Trump’s tax bill is a good idea. Another poll by Gallup puts those who disapprove in the majority at fifty-two percent. And an analysis by Bloomberg shows that Republicans are going to find it difficult to run on the tax issue in the 2018 midterms.

So happy tax day everybody. We may have a bill that is only benefiting the wealthy, but it is also likely to throw the members of Congress who forced it on us out on their asses.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The Trump Stock Market Meltdown: Make No Mistake, This is Trump’s Fault

The Stock Market closed down today by more than 1,100 points. That would make it almost 2,000 points lower in the last three days. This is the worst decline in over two years. And it totally belongs to Donald Trump.

Donald Trump

For the past year Trump has been bragging about the performance of the stock market and taking credit for its rise. That was a pretty stupid thing to do given the vast array of influences on the market and its volatility. Particularly when we have been stretching out the second longest bull market in history.

Three weeks ago, while stocks were still rising, I wrote an article warning that Trump’s bragging would come back to “Bite Him in His Sh*thole Country.” The article said in part that…

“It’s always dangerous to rely on stock market performance to validate the economy. There are too many factors that can shift investor sentiment. It is a fluid indicator that could reverse course tomorrow. Indeed, many stock analysts regard the market’s current position as overvalued. These analysts are predicting a ‘correction’ that could send the markets down significantly.”

But Trump continued to boast about numbers that he obviously knows nothing about. And now the market is trending lower as if to mock the President’s arrogance. But it needs to be noted that there are tangible reasons why Trump is to blame for this sell off. Many economists are citing something that Trump regards as one of his greatest (only?) accomplishments. And even Trump himself raised it during his speech in Ohio today. When he wasn’t accusing Democrats of “treason” for not applauding him at the State of the Union address, he said this:

The tax cuts that Trump was obsessed with were never a good idea. Their benefits were heavily slanted toward corporations and the wealthy. But they were also an unnecessary stimulus to an economy that was already overheated. That was all that Wall Street needed to justify dumping stocks whose valuations were out of sync with reality. His tax bill also produced new debt in excess of $1.5 trillion. That makes investors nervous about rising inflation and interest rates.

Finally, when an economic stimulus is used at a time when it isn’t needed, that means that it won’t be available in the future when it might actually be useful. So investors are looking forward to a future market correction, or even a bear market, and the government will have no tools to respond or mitigate the damage. Therefore, many are getting out now and moving their assets into safer investments or cash. And none of this would be happening were it not for the greed and ignorance of Donald Trump and his allies in Congress.

Trump’s relentless bragging about the market when it was up presents an interesting problem for him. Who will he blame for the decline? He got exactly what he wanted with the tax bill, which received no Democratic votes. There is no one other than himself to which this can be attributed. Of course, that won’t stop him from inventing some culprit to point his bony fingers at. His narcissism is all-consuming and his GOP supporters still seem unwilling to put their country above their noxious party. So be prepared for more scapegoating as Trump continues to panic and his fear drives him further into desperation.

UPDATE: And that didn’t take long. Sean Hannity is blaming Obama for the Trump Meltdown.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Check Yourselves: Fox News Complains that MSNBC Stars Are ‘Cashing In’ on Trump’s Tax Scam

Shortly after Donald Trump and his Republican cronies passed a tax reform bill that gives away millions to to the rich, a few greedy corporations jumped into the media circus to lavish praise on the president who just made them all much richer. AT&T, Boeing, and Wells Fargo were among the companies licking at Trump’s boots by pretending that they were passing on savings to their employees because of the tax reforms. Never mind that some of them had planned to give bonuses long before this bill was passed, just as they do almost every year. Most of the companies have ulterior motives for exalting Trump. Particularly AT&T who is currently battling the administration in its efforts to acquire TimeWarner.

Fox News Lies

Also on this list of sycophants is Comcast, the parent company of NBC. And that connection was all that Fox News needed to invent a story about MSNBC personalities “cashing in” in on the legislation. Fox’s media correspondent, Brian Flood, published a story on the Fox News website with the absurd headline, “NBC star journalists already cashing in on the tax plan they hate.” The article accuses Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and others of selfishly taking advantage of a tax bill that they opposed. The article stated that:

The highly paid journalists at NBC and MSNBC who keep blasting President Trump’s tax reforms won’t have to wait for their rates to go down to benefit, since parent company Comcast likes the plan so much it is sending out $1,000 checks to employees.

Comcast announced on Thursday that it would award special $1,000 bonuses to over one hundred thousand employees because of the passage of tax reform and the FCC’s action on broadband.

The cable company’s generosity presumably extends to seven- and eight-figure stars, who have been railing nonstop against the landmark GOP reform as benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor.

The first thing that’s wrong with the headline is that Fox has no evidence that any executives or on-air talent are going to receive a cash bonus. So the whole story is based on an invented premise. Flood says that “the cable company’s generosity presumably extends to seven- and eight-figure stars.” Presumably? Apparently that’s enough to be the foundation of a critical article by the standards of Fox News. However, these sort of bonuses are almost never extended to executive personnel who have a different scale of compensation benefits. What’s more, the average amount of company bonuses (about 1,800.00) is much greater than the one these companies are now touting.

Additionally, the article notes that Comcast’s incentive to provide these bonuses was only partly due to Trump’s corporate tax cuts. It explicitly cites “the FCC’s action on broadband.” Otherwise known as the killing of Net Neutrality. Comcast was likely thanking Trump for eliminating a regulation that will net them billions in profits at the expense of a free and open Internet.

But the most startling logical lapse by Flood was his complaint that it would somehow be improper for MSNBC’s stars to take the money since they have been hammering Trump’s tax scam for weeks. WTF is he talking about. The fact that these hosts would criticize a bill that promised them a significant windfall is proof that they are motivated by principle, not greed. They opposed a bill that would put more money in their own pockets because they knew that millions of other Americas would suffer. Most people would regard that as admirable.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

For Fox News to imply that there would be something untoward about them getting a bonus that they campaigned against is stretching the boundaries of reason beyond recognition. They didn’t want it, they didn’t ask for it, and they aren’t even known to be getting it. But Fox is determined to create scandals where none exist because they haven’t got anything truthful or honest to report. And yet, this is remarkably sloppy, even for Fox News.

Watch Trump Admit That He Deliberately Hid the GOP Tax Scam’s Sabotage of ObamaCare

It took nearly a year after the election of Donald Trump for the Republican controlled Congress to pass a significant piece of legislation. And the bill they managed to shove down America’s throat is literally the most unpopular bill in thirty years. The GOP Tax Scam will give the rich a massive tax cut paid for by millions of average Americans. And it will still balloon the debt by as much as two trillion dollars.

Fox News Donald Trump

Included in the legislation is a provision that has been mostly kept under wraps. The bill eliminates the individual mandate language of the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) that requires people to either get health insurance or pay a fee. The purpose of this requirement is to incentivize younger, healthier people to participate in the program in order to keep premiums down for everybody, as well as to be certain they were covered in the event of a medical necessity.

Well, now we have proof that the effort to repeal the individual mandate was deliberately hidden in order to deceive the American people. And that proof came straight out of the mouth of the Deceiver-in-Chief, Donald Trump. At the cabinet meeting held Wednesday morning to gloat about the bill’s passage, Trump raised the issue of ObamaCare and how this the bill addressed it:

“When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means ObamaCare is being repealed. […] We have essentially repealed ObamaCare. And we’ll come up with something that will be much better. Whether it’s block grants or whether it’s taking what we have and doing something terrific. But ObamaCare has been repealed in this bill.”

First of all, the repeal of the individual mandate does not repeal ObamaCare. To be sure, it is a serious blow that will cause premiums to go up for everybody. And apparently Trump thinks that’s worth bragging about. Yet he can’t articulate how he would replace ObamaCare, other than to lamely proclaim some mysterious “terrific” new program. It’s typical of his ignorant and childish rhetoric that employs vague language and superlatives that say literally nothing at all.

But that wasn’t even the worst part of his brief comments. He went on to make a surprising confession about the intentional swindle he incorporated into this initiative (video below):

“We didn’t want to bring it up. I tell people specifically be quiet with the fake news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it. Cause I didn’t know how people would…but now that it’s approved I can say the individual mandate on healthcare, where you had to pay not to have insurance – think of that one, you pay not to have insurance. The individual mandate has been repealed.”

Have you ever heard a president, or any national leader, say out loud that they purposefully withheld information from the public in order to fool them into supporting a dishonestly presented bill? Trump’s admission explicitly notes that he directed his administration to suppress this news by concealing it from the media. That’s an overt acknowledgement of fraud.

Trump must not be allowed to get away with this. Come November 2018 he needs to be rebuked by voters returning control of Congress to the Democrats who can then proceed with impeachment hearings. Unless, that is, special counsel Robert Mueller comes to America’s rescue before then.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Shill: If You Get Your News From Fox News You Probably Like the GOP Tax Scam

Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are hurtling headlong into passage of tax bill that will materially alter the tax code in ways that harm most Americans. It is flagrantly biased in favor of corporations and the wealthy with toxic provisions that will sabotage healthcare and cripple Social Security and Medicare. The GOP refused to hold hearings on the bill or even allow Democrats to review it prior to voting. Much of it was written by corporate lobbyists. And without any justification for their haste, Republicans are ramming it through before the already strong opposition becomes impossible to ignore.

foxnews-mulvaney

As usual, whenever Republicans require a boost in propaganda they turn to Fox News. They know that they can present whatever bullshit they want and that there will be no one to challenge their lies. They took advantage of that Thursday morning when they sent Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, to the studios of Fox and Friends to pimp the tax bill. He received precisely the welcome that he expected as co-host Steve Doocy offered up a softball for Mulvaney to hit out of the park. Surprisingly, Mulvaney took a wild swing that landed in foul territory (video below):

Doocy: People don’t like to pay taxes so you would think that this would be a good story for you. And yet, Mick, the Quinnipiac poll came out and shows that fifty-five percent of Americans don’t like it, as opposed to twenty-six percent who do. Can you explain to me why people don’t like the idea of a tax cut?
Mulvaney: Sure, because if you turn to any channel besides this one, all you’re going to hear is bad news about this particular bill. […] No one is focusing, as you folks do, on what’s good for people in this bill. So if you get your news here, you probably like it because your focused on what’s good for you. But if not, you don’t.

So the only reason Mulvaney had for people not liking the bill was that they weren’t watching enough Fox News. Or worse, they drifted from their “news” teet at Fox and were exposed to actual facts and honest scrutiny. Doocy was taking a chance by citing the Quinnipiac poll which he correctly quoted as showing a historic disapproval rating, especially for something being pitched as a tax cut. The poll provided an explanation for that which Fox News left out entirely. Nearly seventy percent of those polled said the bill favors the wealthy and only twenty-one percent think that it will help the middle class. In other words, people can see through the GOP spin and recognize a fraud when it’s right in front of their faces.

However, what was most interesting about Mulvaney’s response was that he explicitly admitted that Fox News was a pit of partisan bias where viewers would get only the conservative perspective peddled by the White House. He praised the “Curvy Couch” potatoes for being sycophantic hucksters upon whom he could rely to spew the government line. Just like state-run TV outlets are supposed to do. Heaven forbid that the American people might ever get an unbiased analysis of this bill that contained actual facts derived from independent experts. That isn’t what Fox News was created for, and it surely isn’t what they did this morning. Welcome to the American Pravda, now proudly out of the propaganda closet.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

America’s Most Hated President is Pushing a Despised Congress to Pass an Unpopular Tax Bill

We all need to let this sink in. The Republican-controlled Congress is frantically trying to get a tax bill to Donald Trump’s desk before he is impeached. The bill itself is a redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the rich and corporations. It will balloon the national debt and cause millions to lose their health insurance. But all of this is being pursued under extraordinarily peculiar circumstances.

Paul Ryan

What we are witnessing is a spectacle headlined by the least popular president in modern times. His approval ratings would need to improve substantially to reach the gutter. Gallup has him at a death-defying thirty-five percent. That’s just two points off of his all-time low of thirty-three percent earlier this week. He’s been mired in the low thirties for months. He has never risen above the forty-six percent he achieved at his inauguration.

The Congress is faring even worse. They are currently suffering an approval rating of only thirteen percent. That’s down by more than half from the already awful rating they had at the beginning of this session. Considering the fact that they have passed no significant legislation at all since then, it isn’t hard to understand the decline. All they have done is tried (and failed) three times to kill the popular ObamaCare program and find ways to defend Trump’s ignorance and divisiveness.

So Congress is going all in on a tax “reform” bill that promises to boost the economy, create millions of jobs, and cut taxes for everybody, without raising the debt. All of that has proven to be outright lies. The wealthy will be the only beneficiaries of this bill, while most middle class Americans will see tax increases. And the deficit will rise by more than a trillion dollars. Not surprisingly, this bill has garnered little support among the public. A paltry twenty-nine percent of voters support the GOP Tax Scam. More than half (56%) oppose it.

So what we have here is the most hated President in modern times pushing a despised Congress to pass a bitterly unpopular tax bill. It’s a thoroughly Republican project that got zero votes from Democrats. Nevertheless, the GOP is pulling out all the stops to force this garbage down the country’s throat whether they like it or not (they don’t).

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

And throughout the process we are being told lies by representatives who have lost any pretense of decency. They are even going so far as to support a child molester for the senate in Alabama to insure they have the votes they need for this abhorrent legislation. Let’s hope the American people remember this betrayal by their so-called representatives and vote them out of office next November. Then we can get on with the business of impeaching the traitor in the White House.

WTF? Trump’s Treasury Secretary Says GOP Tax Plan Restores Great Depression Policies

When Donald Trump returns from his “Humiliate America Tour” of Asia he will be greeted by politics and scandals that he cannot continue to avoid. His embrace of Vladimir Putin, the ongoing investigation into his collusion with Russia, indictments of his campaign and administration staffers, sexual abuse by GOP senate candidate Roy Moore, and the already floundering Republican attempt at tax reform.

Donald Trump

Trump has dived hair first into the tax debate with his customary aversion to the truth. On multiple occasions he has referred to the still stewing tax legislation as the “biggest tax cut in history.” It isn’t. But that didn’t stop his Treasury Secretary (aka the Foreclosure King), Steve Mnuchin, from lying to CNN’s Jake Tapper on behalf of his pathological boss (video below). In this exchange Mnuchin attempts a shady two-step to relocate the goalposts to another county. Tapper addresses the falsehood that Trump is proposing the biggest tax cut in history:

Tapper: We’ve tried to find a way that this is true, but it’s not.
Mnuchin: This will be the largest change since President Reagan.

A large change since Reagan is not the same thing as the biggest cut ever. Tapper displayed several different ways to calculate the tax impact of the Trump bill, but none of them achieved the ludicrous claims of Mnuchin and the President. So Mnuchin reloads and aims to move the goal posts even further by pointing out that just the corporate tax rate would drop from thirty-five percent to twenty. That, of course, has no impact on the tax bills of average Americans. And it still doesn’t support Trump’s gross exaggerations.

Undeterred, Mnuchin followed that up with perhaps the worst defense of fiscal policy imaginable. He bragged that the pass-through tax rate (which mainly benefits large corporations) “is gonna be the lowest rate since the 1930’s.” So Mnuchin is expressing outright pride that his plan matches the one in effect during the Great Depression. Really?

The big lie that Mnuchin, Trump, et al, relentlessly propagate is that our current tax system makes the U.S. uncompetitive. And they say this at the same time that they brag about how great the American economy is doing. Trump praises himself regularly for the historic performance of the stock market (although he has nothing to do with that). But if that’s true, why would we need to give more tax breaks to the very people and businesses who are already disproportionately prospering? Especially at a time when there are so many other critical demands for resources, including natural disaster relief, healthcare, infrastructure, and deficit reduction.

The goal of the Republican Party has always been to restore the economic principles that benefit their primary constituency and donors – corporations. These are the same principles that brought about the Great Recession of 2008, and most other financial disasters. And that includes the Great Depression. However, we do not often hear them so openly admit that this is their objective. It’s bad enough that these robber barons are constantly trying to steal from the American people to enrich themselves. But when they are so comfortable that they feel no need to disguise what they’re doing, it’s a sure sign of trouble ahead.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump Says His Tax Reform Plan Is ‘Not Good For Me, Believe Me’ – Hell No. Release YOUR Taxes!

This week Donald Trump suffered another legislative defeat as his latest attempt to kill ObamaCare was declared dead (again). So he traveled to Indiana on Wednesday to deliver a speech on his next project, tax reform. He promised to spell out the details of the plan that he will present to Congress. For the most part it was a rehashed jumble of familiar Republican proposals that rotted on the vine decades ago.

Donald Trump

Trump’s snake oil speech peddled such scams as eliminating the estate tax, that affects only 0.2 percent of taxpayers. He also wants to nix the Alternative Minimum Tax that insures that wealthy folks like himself can’t pile up deductions and pay nothing. Corporations will cheer Trump’s proposal to cut their tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent. Never mind that the current schedule hasn’t stopped them from achieving record profits. He would also give them a privileged rate to repatriate offshore funds. It’s ironic that Trump has no problem demeaning the patriotism of people who protest systemic racism, but corporation that hoard money abroad to keep it out of U.S. treasuries – where it would benefit all Americans – are patriotic victims of the system.

Virtually everything in Trump’s plan would benefit corporations and the rich. His proposed tax brackets of 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent, would insure that those with higher income would bear a smaller share of the overall tax burden. At this time Trump has left out popular deductions for things like mortgage interest, charitable donations, or medical expenses. And all of this would supposedly be paid for by a growing economy. Except that that theory has been proven false every time Republicans implemented it in the past. And especially now, when economic recovery is in its eighth year and unemployment is at historic lows, it would have little to no impact.

So it was jarring to hear the President champion this creaky GOP sham as beneficial to low income earners. But to make matters worse, he adorned his gift to rich Americans with this shameless claim to selflessness (video below):

“Our framework includes an explicit commitment that tax refom will protect low income and middle income households, not the wealthy and well-connected. They can call me all they want. Not gonna help. I’m doing the right thing. And it’s not good for me, believe me.”

Believe you? Why the hell would anyone do that? If there’s one thing that Donald Trump is known for, it’s lying. His rated comments at PolitiFact are 69 percent “Mostly False, False” or “Pants on Fire.” He has been scored as telling a lie on average every three minutes. And the Washington Post has collected over 1,000 lies Trump has told since his inauguration.

More to the point, asking people to believe him about his taxes is the height of hubris. Despite promising to release his tax returns during the campaign, he now adamantly refuses to do so. Why would he break that campaign promise unless there was something seriously damaging in his taxes? It could be that he isn’t the success story he claims to be. Or maybe there are blatant violations of the law. It could reveal associations with mobsters. Or even worse – Russians. Anyone who is dumb enough to take Trump at his word should not be allowed outside of an institution. And if Trump wants to us to accept his claim that his tax proposals won’t benefit him, all he has to do is release his taxes. Don’t hold your breath.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.