The Madness of King Donald’s massive, recently signed tax cut and spending law continues to be a focus on today’s BradCast. As does his madness and non-stop lying, in general, and the deadly climate disasters that continue to worsen by the day, coincidentally, following adoption of the Republican anything-but-beautiful bill that guts U.S. investment in cheap, clean, climate saving, renewable energy. [Audio link to full show follows below.]
Before we get to our guest today, some quick news items, including…
- A few independently verifiable fact-checks on the mountain of a lies told by Donald Trump during Tuesday’s ridiculous, televised “Cabinet Meeting” at the White House, including several of his falsehoods regarding inflation, his tariff policy, his massive spending bill, China‘s use of wind energy, California‘s clean and reliable power grid, and more.
- The climate chaos continues seemingly unabated this week. First it was record deadly flash-flooding in Texas on Friday. Then record deadly flash-flooding on Sunday in North Carolina. And, on Tuesday, deadly flash-flooding in Ruidoso, New Mexico, in an area scarred by wildfires and flooding just last year. (Also, Chicago saw a months worth of rain in about 90 minutes on Tuesday, stranding vehicles, triggering rescues, etc.) The Fox “News” Weather website had fairly good coverage in their story headlined: “Deadly walls of water pummel communities across three states in just one week, spawn unprecedented devastation”. But, can you guess what they forgot to even mention in their coverage of all of that deadly climate-fueled chaos in less than one week? Right. Not a single mention of the manmade global warming and climate change which exacerbated the chaos, made it more likely, more intense and, sadly, more and more deadly.
THEN… We are joined by RYAN COOPER, Managing Editor at The American Prospect, who (presciently?) filed a story late last month about how climate-fueled disasters cost the U.S. almost a trillion dollars over the past year, far outpacing estimates even by Nobel Prize winning economists. And that was before the seemingly non-stop disasters of the past week.
It was also before Donald Trump gutted much of Joe Biden and the Democrats’ landmark Inflation Reduction Act investments in clean, renewable energy, as Trump did when he signed the GOP budget monstrosity last Friday. Imagine how much farther the trillion dollars of damage from last year alone could have gone if it had been used to combat climate change instead.
“This is the real irony of what is happening here,” Cooper explains today. “President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act was expected to cost about a trillion dollars in spending over ten years…a really big policy. But economic analysis now indicates that repealing that and replacing it with coal subsidies and whatnot [as the Trump/GOP law does] isn’t going to boost GDP, it’s going to reduce it. It’s going to hurt economic growth.” And, of course, the climate.
“Now that solar panels and batteries have gotten so cheap, this is the best way to drive economic growth. So we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face. We’re allowing China to monopolize the industries of the 21st century, while the American auto industry is going to be stranded, using obsolete technology, while China takes over the rest of the world with dirt cheap electric vehicles. So much for America First.”
Cooper argues: “It’s just completely senseless in way that’s almost impossible to describe what Republicans have done to America and to the American economy. And the world, too.”
But the gutting of clean energy investment is hardly the only under-reported absurdity in Trump’s big bill. While there has been much coverage of its trillion dollars worth of cuts to health care via Medicaid, much less reportage has been given to the fact that — unless Congress adopts a fix, and quickly — as much as $500 billion will be cut from MediCARE as well over the next ten years, including $50 billion over the next year alone.
All of that to help pay for $4 trillion in tax cuts to mostly wealthy people, at the additional cost of $3 trillion added to the national debt.
Cooper and TAP’s David Dayen this week rounded up even more under-reported idiocy from the Trump/GOP megabill, that we finally find time to cover today, including ten bizarre items hidden in the bill, such as its perverse incentives for states to defraud the SNAP food stamp program; a provision that exempts oil and gas drilling companies from paying taxes at all; and something that Cooper and Dayen refer to as “The Mass Shooter Subsidy”. (Yes, it’s as outrageously stupid as it sounds…)
Some of us vote for psychopaths thus When You Are Governed By Psychopaths – 10.
PHOTOGRAPIC PROOF.
Can Mamdani ever recover from this?
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