Lies my President Told Me (abridged) Part 1

Lies My President Told me (abridged) A Partial History

       Every Trump statement of “fact” referred to herein has been proffered multiple times in some version and as recently as January 2020.

·       “To help you keep your family farm and keep it in the family, we virtually eliminated the deeply unfair estate tax or death tax.”

       This is a huge exaggeration.  Trump often claims he saved family farms and small businesses by gradually reducing the federal estate tax. The rate (40%) actually is unchanged, but the threshold was raised.  The first part of the quote is pure propaganda. Reducing the estate tax primarily benefits the very wealthy.  The estate tax rarely falls on farms or small businesses, since only those leaving behind more than $5 million paid any estate tax at all in 2016. When Barack Obama was elected, the threshold for estate tax was $2 million dollars total estate value. During the Obama years, that threshold was raised to over $5 million.

       The Trump administration, abetted by a Republican Congress, has increased that threshold to over $11 million.  According to the Tax Policy Center, just under 5,500 estates in 2017 — out of nearly 3 million (a bare .14% of all estates) were even subject to estate tax! This was before the Trump limit increase! Of those, only about 80 taxable estates were farms and small businesses. The relatively few farms and farmers involved are a far cry from the small “family” farmers Trump panders to in the statement.

       On the other hand, in typically self-serving fashion, he also has managed to markedly increase the untaxed cash he can leave to his relatively useless offspring.

·       “They (referring, one supposes, to Democrats) want open borders …essentially what they are saying is they want crime. Now they say they don't want crime but that's what you get with open borders.”

        This has been repeated numerous times and in various contexts. His sycophant fan base believes it because he says it. The problem? Most independent research contradicts the idea that illegal immigrants bring more crime.

      A 2018 peer reviewed study published in the journal Criminology, by Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, evaluated these allegations by determining whether places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants have higher rates of violent crime such as murder or rape. Note that  this is “apples to apples”, undocumented status vs crime frequency.  The results are revelatory. 

       States with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through 2014. Comparable statistics were found in another study by the same researchers that looked at nonviolent crime, such as drug arrests and driving under the influence (DUI) arrests.

        Even the libertarian Cato Institute (hardly a pawn of Democrats) in 2018 looked at 2015 criminal conviction data among undocumented immigrants in Texas. Texas in of primary interest because it is one of the relatively few states which records whether a person who has been arrested is in the country illegally or not. Researchers found that criminal conviction and arrest rates in Texas for undocumented immigrants were lower than those of native-born Americans for homicide, sexual assault and larceny.

       No compilation of this nature would be complete without Trump’s being in high dudgeon due to individuals being less that idolatrous towards him.

·       “Another Fake Book by two third rate Washington Post reporters, has already proven to be inaccurately reported, to their great embarrassment, all for the purpose of demeaning and belittling a President who is getting great things done for our Country, at a record clip. Thank you!”

       The book referenced is, of course, "A Very Stable Genius," by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. While Trump apparently disdains it (he doesn’t read, so he cannot possibly be referring to actual material therein), the book has received rave reviews for its level of detail and insights into the Trump presidency. Much has subsequently given nods of confirmation by those who know. No "proof" of any sort has emerged to suggest it was inaccurately reported. Although Trump refers to the authors as "third-rate" reporters, both have won Pulitzer Prizes.

·       “The economy is the best it's ever been in -- we have never had an economy like this in history.” Repeated 257 times

       Simply put: bullshit! By just about any important economic metric, the economy today is not doing as well as it did under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson or Bill Clinton — or Ulysses S. Grant, for that matter. 

One last one for now:

·       “Today we just had passed the USMCA. It's going to take the place of NAFTA, which was a terrible deal.”

       Always with the references to “deals.” You know, as in the title of the book he didn’t actually write? Trump constantly maintains that he significantly overhauled the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He would like for us to think he completely threw out NAFTA, a Bush 41 initiative, and replaced it with as Monty Python said so often, “something completely different”.  

       The truth is that it’s not close to a total trade revolution, as Trump promised, although  USMCA does make some changes to modernize trade rules in effect from 1994 to 2020, and it gives some wins to U.S. farmers and blue-collar workers in the auto sector.

       In fact,  economists and auto industry gurus think USMCA is going to cause car prices in the United States to rise and the selection to go down. (Good for Detroit, bad for us consumers.) Surprisingly, some elements of the “new” deal were "borrowed" (copied) from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, the trade deal which Trump scrapped at the start of his term, principally because it had an Obama/Clinton connection. As of December, 2019, the “new” agreement was altered slightly in order to win the votes of House Democrats.

       Previously, the "new" agreement was 95 percent the same as the old NAFTA; now it's more like 85 to 90 percent. The bottom line: Trump didn't burn up NAFTA, He made some modest modernization adjustments.   

       For simplicity’s sake, let’s look at how this claim to change really works. Remember, candidate Trump promised to completely throw out NAFTA and TPP. But did he?

Trump's biggest talking point has consistently been better access to Canadian markets for U.S. American dairy farmers but, “What was eventually agreed upon will have probably the least impact, in dollar terms of the entire agreement!” (CNN)

       Canada reportedly agreed to give U.S. dairy farmers access to about 3.5 percent of its almost  $16 billion annual domestic dairy market. Under the deal, the Canadian government will be allowed (yeah, we're allowing Canada to do what they as a sovereign nation can do with or without our consent!) to compensate dairy farmers hurt by the deal.

       But…Canada had already agreed to open up wider access to dairy markets under the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, from which Trump withdrew in January of  2017. For this agreement Canada also won a key concession from the U.S., which agreed to preserve a trade dispute process that Ottawa pushed hard to maintain. Canada relies on the settlement process to protect its lumber producers from US anti-dumping tariffs.

       In essence, Trump scrapped the names NAFTA and TPP, blaming his predecessors for “bad deals,” then, having changed relatively little concrete material, renamed them and took credit for having reinvented the wheel.