Happy Monday all. Got a few things for you today:
Yes Trump Is A Bad Man, A Serial Criminal, But His Agenda Is Even Worse - As part of our “Making June Count” campaign, we are going to work hard to establish this basic contrast I talk about here as millions of voters tune in this month:
Joe Biden is a good and successful President. The country is better off, and will be far better under his leadership in the next 4 years
The Democratic Party is strong, winning elections across the country, raising tons of money and building the most powerful political machine we’ve ever had
And they have Trump - the ugliest political thing we’ve all ever seen - a rapist, fraudster, traitor, felon - and is leading a party that looks far more like the Star Wars bar than the party of Lincoln and Reagan
Our “making June count” campaign is off to a great start. We’ve raised over $100,000 since Saturday morning - amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!! I also know from our paid subscriber chat that many of you are stepping up your volunteer activities this month. Thank you. As we discussed on Friday we need to be aggressive now in making our case for Joe Biden and the Democrats, but we also need to inform voters about the dangers of Trump 2024. Yes, he is a rapist, a fraudster, a traitor and a felon. As bad as he is as a man - and he is really really bad - what he wants to do to the country is far worse and more consequential. Consider:
He wants Putin to win, the West to lose. The border to be in chaos, and migrants to keep flowing into the country. He wants the economy to crash, and his economic plan would slow growth, cause inflation to soar and all of us to lose. He wants women, people of color to lose more freedoms and rights. The planet to warm faster. 10 year olds to carry their rapist's baby to term, and for more women to die on an operating room table. Tens of millions to lose their health insurance. More dead kids in schools. Verified rapists in positions of authority. A restoration of pre-Civil Rights era white supremacy. Big tax cuts for his donors, higher deficits and less for everyone else. Books banned across the US. Seniors to pay more for insulin and prescription drugs. Foreign governments free to pollute our daily discourse and harass our citizens. Teenagers to work night shifts in meat packing plants and not go to school. The minimum wage to stay at $7.25. Mass arrests and mass deportations of immigrants long settled in the US. Insurrectionists to get pardoned. To end American democracy for all time.
I discussed the dangers of Trump’s agenda on CNN this morning:
In recent weeks we’ve started to see far more attention to the economic dangers of Trump’s agenda, which would spike inflation, cause the economy to slow, and dramatically weaken the American-led global economic system which has been the engine of our prosperity for generations. Our friend Rob Shapiro has published a terrific new article in the Washington Monthly, “Trump’s Plans for Mass Deportation Would Be An Economic Disaster.“ In the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein has just dropped a compelling new article, “Trump’s Plan To Supercharge Inflation,” which has the following passages:
Now Summers sees the risk of another price shock in the economic plans of former President Donald Trump. “There has never been a presidential platform so self-evidently inflationary as the one put forward by President Trump,” Summers told me in an interview this week. “I have little doubt that with the Trump program, we will see a substantial acceleration in inflation….”
Summers is far from alone in raising that alarm. Trump’s greatest asset in the 2024 campaign may be the widespread belief among voters that the cost of living was more affordable when he was president and would be so again if he’s reelected to a second term. But a growing number of economists and policy analysts are warning that Trump’s second-term agenda of sweeping tariffs, mass deportation of undocumented migrants, and enormous tax cuts would accelerate, rather than alleviate, inflation.
In an upcoming analysis shared exclusively with The Atlantic, Mark Zandi, the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, forecasts that compared with current policies, Trump’s economic plans would increase the inflation rate and force the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates higher than they would be otherwise. “If he got what he wanted,” Zandi told me, “you add it all up and it feels highly inflationary to me.”
………
For many economists, Trump’s plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on imported products from all countries and 60 percent tariffs on imports from China are the most concerning…..
These new levies go far beyond any of the tariffs Trump raised while in office, several of which Biden maintained, said Clausing, who served as the Treasury Department’s deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis for Biden’s first two years. Trump’s proposed tariffs also dwarf the levies Biden recently imposed on electric vehicles and assorted other products from China: Biden’s new measures affect about $18 billion in Chinese imports, she said, whereas Trump proposes to raise tariffs on $3.1 trillion in imported goods, more than 150 times as much. Trump “has been quite clear that he is envisioning something quite a bit larger than he did last time,” Clausing told me.
In the Peterson study, Clausing and her co-author, Mary Lovely, calculated that Trump’s tariffs would raise prices for consumers on the goods they purchase by at least $500 billion a year, or about $1,700 annually for a middle-income family. The cost for consumers, she told me, could be about twice as high if domestic manufacturers increase their own prices on the goods that compete with imports.
“When you make foreign wine more expensive, domestic manufacturers can sell their wine at a higher price,” Clausing told me. “The same with washing machines and solar panels and chairs. Anything that is in competition with an import will also get more expensive.”
……
While Trump’s proposed tariffs would increase the cost of goods, his pledge to undertake a mass deportation of undocumented migrants would put pressure on the cost of both goods and services. Undocumented migrants are central to the workforce in an array of service industries, such as hospitality, child care, and elder care. But they also fill many jobs in construction, agricultural harvesting, and food production. Removing millions of undocumented workers from the economy at once “would create massive labor shortages in lots of different industries,” Zandi told me. That would force employers to either raise wages to find replacements or, more likely, disrupt production and distribution; both options would raise the prices consumers pay. “If you are talking about kicking 50 percent of the farm labor force out, that is not going to do wonders for agricultural food prices,” David Bier, director of immigration-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told me.
Yes, the Trump agenda is a serious threat to our way of life, and the American-led global order which has kept us peaceful and prosperous for generations. As we work to Make June Count I’ll be spending more time helping you understand why the next four years will be better under Joe Biden than Donald Trump, an argument that we need to hone and advance aggressively as voters across the country check in.
Embracing The Flag, Not Denigrating It - In Joe Biden’s America, the flag is right-sided up, not upside down. Please share this video with your networks. It is in my mind the best media the Biden campaign has produced so far, and powerfully speaks to the moment.
Listen To Donald Trump 2016 Making The Case For Why Those Under “Felony Indictment” Cannot Run For President - It’s a compelling case. (Link)
Making June Count - Friends, we are off to a great start in our new campaign. Thank you all. As I wrote to you on Saturday, I really believe we could win - or lose - the election this month and we need to leave it all out there on the playing field in the coming days.
If you haven’t yet, please consider giving to our campaigns and help us hit our June 30th making June count goals:
Biden Harris - goal of $400,000 - at $330,000 today - donate now
Winning The House - goal of $300,000 - at $226,00 today - donate now
Arizona/Ruben Gallego - goal of $300,000 - at $171,000 today - donate now
North Carolina - goal $300,000 - at $224,000 today - donate now
Nebraska/Blue Dot - goal of $100,000 - at $23,000 today - donate now
As a token of my gratitude for all that you are doing, I am now offering a 10% discount on annual paid subscriptions for new subscribers through the end of the month. Click on this link to subscribe today. I hope we will get to 10,000 paid subscribers by June 30th - we are almost at 8,900 today - putting Hopium in a financial place to end this election strong. People subscribing today or tomorrow will be eligible to join our June paid subscriber gathering tomorrow at 7pm or our Founding Members get-together on Wednesday.
Thank you all for helping Making June Count!
Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you. We have a big election to go win, together - Simon
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