The Donald Trump Score Card

McConnell didn't start acting on rescuing the coal miners pension funds until Kentucky elected a Democratic governor in 2016. Mitch McConnell is a senior senator from Kentucky and the current Senate majority leader.

The eight coal mine company bankruptcies during the past year (in an industry Trump promised to turn into success) further compelled reluctant Republicans in Congress and Trump to act on the passage of bail-out legislation at the end of 2019, just before the 2020 election year.



Congress rushes to save miners’ pensions but ignores larger retirement crisis
By REBECCA RAINEY
12/26/2019 01:12 PM EST

Congress rushes to save miners’ pensions but ignores larger retirement crisis

excerpt:

"Until recently, Congress was moving just as slowly to rescue the United Mine Workers Health & Retirement Fund, which was set to run dry in 2022. That changed on Election Day, when Kentucky, which in 2016 went for Donald Trump by a nearly 30-point margin, elected a Democratic governor.

The next day, that coal state’s senior senator, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, declared at a news conference his support for a bill to redirect taxpayer funds set aside to clean up abandoned mining sites to rescue the UMW’s pension. Earlier this month, the president signed the measure into law."

 

The problems in the coal mining and farming sectors were worsened by Trump's 'easy to win' trade war which made it more difficult to sell U.S. coal and agricultural products overseas because of the strained trade relations and retaliatory tariffs.

The coal workers and the farmers are now being bailed out at U.S. taxpayer expense, about $10 billion and $28 billion, respectively.

Ironically, Trump's protectionist policies are worsening markets in a way that forces him to sign legislation or repurpose existing funds to bail them out, which can be considered a form of the socialism that he and his supporters say they detest.

 

The Congress and Trump are shielding themselves from accountability by using financial tricks to bail out the farm industry, such as using very liberal interpretations of existing programs to skirt the original intent and repurpose the money, such as using natural disaster relief money to treat a manmade disaster (Trump and his trade war). It's someone else's money that will need to be backfilled later with more taxpayer money (preferably just after an important election).

It generates delight in the recipients (farmers in politically important battleground states praising Trump for their direct subsistence checks) without the Congress and Trump incurring political fallout, at least not until later when the repurposed programs need to be backfilled with more taxpayer money and the intended recipients of the repurposed money realize the damage that was done to them. For Trump, hopefully most of the intended recipients who lost the money aren't in election battleground states, won't notice, or won't care.

 

Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected
Heard on All Things Considered
Dan Charles
December 31, 2019 4:13 PM ET

Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected

excerpt:

"For one thing, it's an enormous amount of money, more than the final cost of bailing out the auto industry during the financial crisis of 2008. The auto industry bailout was fiercely debated in Congress. Yet the USDA created this new program out of thin air; it decided that an old law authorizing a USDA program called the Commodity Credit Corp. already gave it the authority to spend this money.

"What's unique about this is, [it] didn't go through Congress," Glauber says. Some people have raised questions about whether using the Commodity Credit Corp. for this new purpose is legal.

Glauber sees a risk of "moral hazard" — a situation in which someone is shielded from the consequences of poor decisions. The decision to start the trade war was costly, he says, and the Trump administration, by tapping the federal Treasury, is avoiding the political fallout from that decision. "The sector that is hurt the most, and which would normally complain, all of a sudden it's assuaged by these payments. To me, that's a problem," he says."

 

Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected

excerpt:

"Events in 2019 tested that alliance, as the USDA helped farmers while restricting SNAP payments.

"They've already given out $19 billion to farmers, but they're cutting $5 billion from people in need," says Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee. "I don't even know how to describe it except to say that it is cruel, it is unfair, and it is clearly designed to support the president's base, as he sees it, as opposed to those whom he sees as being undeserving.""

 

An informative article about the plight of the pension funds of the coal miners.

The legislation that Congress passed and Trump signed in 2019 apparently is the first time that U.S. taxpayer money is being used to bail out the coal mine pension fund.



Congress Saves Coal Miner Pensions, but What About Others?
Lawmakers will use taxpayer money to fill a roughly $10 billion hole in the miners’ doomed fund. But more plans face the same problems.
By Mary Williams Walsh
Dec. 24, 2019

Congress Saves Coal Miner Pensions, but What About Others?

excerpts:

"The coal miners belong to one of about 1,400 pension plans that cover a large group of workers in a single industry or trade. These so-called multiemployer plans cover more than 10 million workers in unions including the Teamsters, the American Federation of Musicians, the Screen Actors Guild and, in Mr. Pettit’s case, the United Mine Workers of America. Even President Trump has a multiemployer pension, worth about $70,000 a year, earned in his reality-TV days.

But nearly three-quarters of the people with this type of pension are in plans that have less than half the money they need to pay promised benefits, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that insures pension plans. Chronic underfunding, lax government oversight and serial bankruptcies have left them in dire straits. And the guaranty corporation’s program backing up these plans — which operated under the assumption that they were inherently strong — would be wiped out by the failure of just one of the major pension pools."


"Usually, leaving a multiemployer pension plan is an expensive proposition for a company. It must pay off its share of any shortfall to leave. But bankruptcy provides a cheap exit ramp, because the pension plan is treated as an unsecured creditor — the kind that goes to the back when everyone lines up to be paid.

After Alpha Natural Resources declared bankruptcy in 2015, for example, the pension fund’s trustees calculated that it owed $985 million. Alpha got out for about $75 million: a $10 million payment spread over four years and the rest in stock in the new company.

But when companies get out of the pension pool, their employees stay in — and become the responsibility of the companies still kicking in money. As more companies failed, it only increased the pressure on the others to get out."

 

Hmmmm.... Sounds like socialism to me.

 

don panoccio tried to sell protection to andy cap, who didn't hesitate to tell don panoccio, in precise anatomical detail, what he could do with it.

 

Wait but... isn't socialism evil and the absolute last thing the republicans would do?

Hold on, hold on...none of this is making sense. I'm gonna need a capitalist loving Trump supporting Republican to explain this to me

 

Oh no, the farmers again, they never get enough support

 

For the last 987 pages

 

Shouldn't the coal miners and farmers just work harder? Get second jobs? That's what America is all about. Anyone who works hard can make it, and if you're not making it, you're just not putting in the effort.

 

" 'Trump money' is what we call it," Henry said. "It helped a lot. And it's my understanding, they're going to do it again."

Farmers Got Billions From Taxpayers In 2019, And Hardly Anyone Objected

 

They should poke it up his arse, lit end first !!!

 

I just saw an article which said that in some states like Kansas they have started arresting and jailing poor people for medical debt. I already knew it was happening in Mississippi. It sounds like Trump and the Republicans have a new answer to health care insurance for all … debt prisons.

 

But then don't prisoners get 'free' medical treatment ??? - this could be a self-defeating programme !!!

 

In America the prisoners are supposed to get medical treatment but it is of poor quality, given at the last moment before death, and often given by unqualified persons. Prison medical officers are often not doctors. Prisoners are taken to regular hospitals after permission from the warden/judge and then chained to the hospital bed and a guard is stationed at the door. Last month 15 prisoners died in a Mississippi prison.

 

That's despicable, but it doesn't surprise me !!!