monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Medicare for All. The Green New Deal. Free college tuition.

With each new entrant into the Democratic presidential sweepstakes comes a fresh cascade of ambitious social programs to entice and excite would-be supporters.

The list of “payfors,” to use a bit of Washington jargon, grows more slowly. They’ll pay for this how, again? Tax the rich, tax the rich — or take cover behind a convenient bit of progressive dogma: Don’t worry about the fiscal impact because America’s rising budget deficits and debt levels don’t much matter.

That’s a scary drift of thought, and it should set off alarm bells for all Americans. Vast increases in debt will ultimately compromise Washington’s ability to maintain its current array of spending programs, let alone add new ones, and threaten our standard of living.

A short history: While Republicans once were the party of fiscal responsibility, President Ronald Reagan threw that out the window by embracing enormous tax cuts justified by a fiction: the idea that the resulting growth would more than pay for them.

More than a decade later, President Bill Clinton nursed the budget back into surplus, only to have President George W. Bush force through his own tax cuts. His vice president, Dick Cheney, once reportedly said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

That attitude, plus the puncturing of the dot-com bubble, two wars and a financial crisis, brought us our first $1 trillion gap in 2009. But by 2015, President Barack Obama had whittled the deficit down to $439 billion.

Then came President Trump, with his vast tax cuts along with a bipartisan move to abandon spending restraint with the fiscal 2018 budget. The resulting legislation added $400 billion to the deficit, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Budget, and the consequence is a deficit for the current fiscal year of nearly $900 billion.

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....Many Palestinians maintain a death cult mentality, which is continuously stoked by religious and governmental indoctrination, agitation and propaganda. For example, in 2015 Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, aired a speech on PA television in which he stated “…We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah…”

Both sides in this debate maintain valid arguments. Nevertheless, in the unlikely event that prosecutors in this case seek the death penalty, the body of the killer should be cremated to deny the enemy the ability to give the terrorist stardom status with grandiose funeral processions and a burial shrine. All traces of the terrorist should be erased.

The tragic death of Ori Ansbacher highlights another disturbing Palestinian practice known as “Pay for Slay.” The Palestinian economy is a beggar economy subsisting on handouts from European Union nations, Norway and Switzerland. Yet this did not prevent the PA from doling out cash to more than 30,000 terrorists and their families to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. It is likely that Arafat Irfayia or his family will now receive a hefty stipend from the PA’s coffers, care of the unsuspecting European taxpayer.

In response to the Taylor Force Act, passed by Congress in 2017, the Trump administration slashed funding to the PA. The legislation, named after a U.S. soldier who was murdered by a PA Arab, aims to force the PA to cease the repugnant practice of Pay for Slay. In 2018, the administration cut $200 million in economic aid earmarked for the PA. In addition, the administration cut funding to the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which the State Department classified as an “irredeemably flawed operation.” That is an understatement at best. UNRWA employees have given aid and comfort to terrorist organizations, distributed anti-Semitic literature at UNRWA-run schools and permitted Hamas to stockpile rockets at its educational facilities. It is an organization that serves to perpetuate conflict rather than end it.

The brutal murder of Ori Ansbacher serves to underscore the reason why peace with the Palestinians is a far-fetched pipedream. While Israel takes action to apprehend its extremists and bring them to justice, the Palestinians provide their killers with pecuniary rewards and name streets, schools and squares after them. A society that revels in death and gore is not a normal society but is rather a death cult, undeserving of any form of statehood...

When Israel's existence is predicated on its refusal to abide by international resolutions and agreements in order to maintain a particular demographic majority then its existence is necessarily oppressive. It should not exist.

And it all will have been done in the name of maintaining its oppression of the Palestinian people for ethnocentric purposes. Talk about fanatical extremism. ISIS and al Qaeda would have absolutely nothing on the Zionists.

Krugman nails it again. Trump fails it again.