Are concerned about the next election? Read this

You probably have no idea what President Biden has done. The Democrats do a poor messaging job.

Here is a brief outline, taken from 30 Things Joe Biden Did as President You Might Have Missed

  • Infrastructure law: $1.2 trillion for roads, waterlines, broadband networks, airports etc.Joe Biden: The President | The White House
  • Expanded overtime guarantees for millions
  • OTC birth control pill
  • Office of Gun Violence Prevention
  • Student wellness and school mental health program
  • Inflation Reduction Act to support green power sources: solar and wind, and green hydrogen.
  • Anti-redlining framework requiring banks to lend to lower-income communities
  • Cut junk fees by airlines, cable companies, concert ticket-sellers and hotels.
  • Forced Chinese companies to open their books
  • Brokered a deal that saved the Colorado River
  • Cracked down on food monopolies; supported small and midsize U.S. farmers.
  • CHIPS and Science Act: $50 billion for new microchip facilities
  • Boosted research and development in national research facilities.
  • Brokered cooperation between Japan and South Korea to offset China’s regional threat.
  • Reinvigorating cancer research to lower death rates
  • Cemex decision strengthens unions
  • Aided 5G wireless technology
  • Strenthened oversight of artificial intelligence
  • Strengthening military ties to the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, India, Australia, Britain, Japan.
  • Strengthened Cyber Safety Review Board to investigate computer security breaches
  • Raised compensation for passengers when flights get disrupted.

You can read the full article to get more complete information.

Now, here is what you can expect from a Trump administration in 2025. The following two articles are presented without comment. They speak for themselves.

The sole question: Is this the America you want?Trump plans to hold news conference on January 6 riot anniversary

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An article by Amber Phillips (Email Amber Phillips)

If Donald Trump struggled somewhat in his administration to move the country dramatically to the right, he’ll be ready to go if he’s elected again.

That’s the aim behind Project 2025. It’s comprehensive plan by former and likely future leaders of a potential Trump administration to remake America in a conservative mold while dramatically expanding presidential power and allowing Trump to use it to go after his critics.

It’s getting so much attention right now because of the dramatic policy changes it calls for, and because Democrats — dealing with an existential crisis of their own — see it as an easy campaign target.

It’s coming up as Trump is trying to moderate his stated positions to win the election, so he’s criticized some of what’s in it as “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.”

Still, what’s in this document is a pretty good indicator of what a second Trump presidency could look like. Here’s what Project 2025 is and how it could reshape America.

A blueprint for a second Trump administrationIn Sheep's Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism -  9781538183281

The centerpiece is a 900-page plan that calls for extreme policies on nearly every aspect of Americans’ lives, from mass deportations, to politicizing the federal government in a way that would give Trump control over the Justice Department, to cutting entire federal agencies, to infusing Christian nationalism into every facet of government policy by calling for a ban on pornography and promoting policies that encourage “marriage, work, motherhood, fatherhood, and nuclear families.”

The main organization behind the plan, the Heritage Foundation, is a revolving door for Trump officials.

“This is meant as an organized statement of the Trumpist, conservative movement, both on policy and personnel, and politics,” said William Galston, head of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

How It Would Move America to the Right
A few of the highlights:

1. Remake the federal workforce to be political: Instead of nonpartisan civil servants implementing policies on everything including health, education and climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists.

“It is necessary to ensure that departments and agencies have robust cadres of political staff,” the plan says.

That means nearly every decision federal agencies make could advance a political agenda ― as in whether to spend money on constituencies that lean Democratic.Fulton students fly Trump banner at basketball game vs. Syracuse school:  'It's racism,' coach says - syracuse.com

The project calls for cutting LGBTQ health programs, for example.

2. Cut the Education Department: It would cut longtime low-income and early education federal programs like Head Start and even the entire Education Department.

“Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” the plan reads.

3. Give Trump power to investigate his opponents: Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms like the FBI, directly under presidential control.

It calls for a “top-to-bottom overhaul” of the FBI and for the administration to go over its investigations with a fine-toothed comb to nix any the president doesn’t like.Sanho Tree on X: "“Five people were arrested on Thursday as part of a  long-running investigation into suspicions that during Bolsonaro's 2019-22  government the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (Abin) was used to

This would dramatically weaken the independence of federal law enforcement agencies. “There’s going to be an all-out assault on the Department of Justice and the FBI,” Galston said. “It will mean tight White House control of the DOJ and FBI.”

4. Make reproductive care, particularly abortion pills, harder to get: It doesn’t specifically call for a national abortion ban, but abortion is one of the most discussed topics in the plan, with proposals throughout encouraging the next president “to lead the nation in restoring a culture of life in America again.”

It would do this by prosecuting anyone mailing abortion pills (“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” the plan says).

It would raise the threat of criminalizing those who provide abortion care by using the government to track miscarriage, stillbirths and abortions, and make it harder to get emergency contraceptive care covered by insurance.

It would also end federal government protections for members of the military and their families to get abortion care.That Time the Media Cheered for Gestapo Immigration Tactics | Mises  Institute

5. Crack down on even legal immigration: It would create a new “border patrol and immigration agency” to resurrect Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send out the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally (including dreamers) — a deportation effort so big that it could put a major dent in the U.S. economy.

“Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized,” the plan says.

6. Slash climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.”Is Global Warming the Same as Climate Change - Unite for Change

It would increase Arctic drilling and shutter the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change departments, all while making it easier to up fossil fuel production.

7. Ban transgender people from the military and consider reinstating the draft: “Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service,” it reads.

The author of this part of the plan led the Defense Department at the end of Trump’s presidency, and he told The Washington Post that the government should seriously consider mandatory military service.

How all of this would be implemented
A huge part of this project is to recruit and train people to do this. There’s even a place on the plan’s website where you can submit your résumé.Why we're so obsessed with Donald Trump's body - The Washington Post

But there are some major hurdles. For one, Trump doesn’t appear to agree with everything in it. His campaign platform barely mentions abortion, while Project 2025 repeatedly zeroes in on it.

Also, some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.

Ominously, one of the project’s leaders opened the door to political violence to will all of this into being: “We are in the process of the second American revolution,” Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, warned recently, “which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be.”

 

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Trump allies at Heritage declare 2024 election illegitimate in advance

A “war game” presented at the right-wing foundation imagined far-fetched scenarios for election interference to justify preemptive measures.

 
Barbra Streisand kidnapped by Hamas. Antifa-BLM protesters taking over a migrant detention facility. The FBI arresting Donald Trump two days after winning the election.

These were among the far-fetched scenarios imagined by a simulation of threats to the 2024 election showcased Thursday by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

The presentation, delivered at the foundation’s Washington headquarters, stated as a given that the Biden administration was already engaged in a sweeping conspiracy to use multiple forms of federal power to influence the presidential election. It did not supply any evidence.

 
The report said a key finding was that the sitting president is the greatest danger to the peaceful transition of power, with no mention of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.
 
Instead it offered that conclusion as justification for doubting the outcome of the 2024 election and trying to reject anything other than a Trump victory.
 
Trump himself has repeatedly declined to say he will accept the results or rule out a violent response. He has told his supporters that he can only lose through cheating.
 
Howell said the exercise would lead Heritage to file more litigation over election procedures. He also said it should help the public resist “psychological operations” that he claimed were used in 2020 and are being used again.
 
He didn’t say who supposedly ran the operations.

“The upshot is that we will see a contested election the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said Adam Ellwanger, a rhetoric professor at the University of Houston-Downtown who helped lead the simulation.

“If we see the kind of manipulations that we saw in 2020, I wonder if average Americans who are supporters of the president [Trump] will swallow that so easily as they did in 2020.”

The Heritage Foundation, a longtime bastion of conservative orthodoxy that has more recently reinvented itself for the Trump era, has become a lightning rod in the campaign because of its role in convening “Project 2025.”

That project published detailed policy proposals for every federal agency, ready for the next Republican administration to implement.Jessica Yellin | AP REPORT: HOSPITALS DENY EMERGENCY CARE TO PREGNANT WOMEN  IN CRISIS We are sharing this today as the U.S. Supreme Court hears a case…  | Instagram

Some of the most controversial ideas including banning abortion medication, facilitating White House involvement in law enforcement and rolling back legal protections for LGBTQ+ Americans.

As some of those proposals have garnered scrutiny, Trump and his campaign have repeatedly distanced themselves from the effort. Many of the proposals were written by alumni of his administration and are likely to be appointees if he wins another term.

Attendees on Thursday walked past a mobile billboard criticizing Trump and Project 2025, which the Democratic National Committee positioned outside Heritage’s headquarters.

Biden campaign spokesman James Singer called Thursday’s presentation “nothing more than an attempt to justify their efforts to suppress the vote, undermine the election, and ultimately another January 6.”

Howell said the election threats project was devised in response to a 2020 bipartisan group of academics, former officials, journalists and others that tried to anticipate and prepare for ways that then-President Trump might try to disrupt the election or the peaceful transfer of power.

Their report raised concerns about violence but did not imagine the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol that temporarily disrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

Howell accused the Biden administration of a “coordinated invasion over our southern border for the purposes of impacting this election.”

As evidence, he said a camera crew went door to door in an apartment complex outside Charlotte, asking people whether they were noncitizens registered to vote, with 10 percent responding yes.

Howell said his team did not verify those registrations. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare.

One scenario in the war games involved people flooding the FBI with reports of civil rights violations as a staged provocation for the Justice Department to take over local election authorities.

Howell and Ellwanger objected to those observers using a version of arguments that have been consistently made against civil rights legislation since the Civil War.

“To put it simply, the federal government should have a very limited role in our election systems. They should be left to the states to decide,” he said.

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Will this be your America in 2025?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

How not to protect American industry. Be bipolar.

Here is the situation: Chinese manufacturers, possibly with the financial aid of the Chinese government, are taking business from key American industries. Quality and other marketing factors are not the real issues. The Chinese companies are doing this with low prices.
Man Pointing Gun At Camera On A Brick Wa... | Stock Video | Pond5
I’m taking your money so you will buy American-made goods. I know this makes no sense, but I’m the government. Trust me.
How should the American government protect these important industries? The American government essentially has two alternatives:
  1. It can force American consumers and businesses to pay higher prices for Chinese goods while taking growth dollars out of the U.S. economy, or
  2. It can help American consumers and businesses to pay lower prices for American goods while adding growth dollars to the U.S. economy.
Which alternative is better for American consumers and businesses? The Biden administration, and the Trump administration before it, have chosen alternative #1: Higher prices for Chinese goods and reducing Gross Domestic Product by taking dollars out of the economy. For reasons beyond logic and common sense, both administrations believe American consumers and businesses should pay higher prices for important commodities, and somehow this not only is beneficial but won’t be inflationary. So they add high taxes, which Americans pay, to the prices of Chinese goods. The alternative, of course, is to give American manufacturers tax breaks or other financial support, so they can compete on prices. That, in fact, is the primary purpose of federal taxes: To control the economy by giving tax breaks to what the government wishes to encourage. Increasing federal taxes should only be a last resort, a punishment when a reward doesn’t work. Federal taxes do not fund federal spending. They are a tool for federal economic control. But rather than use that tool, the federal government has chosen to punish American consumers with higher prices.

Biden announces new tariffs on imports of Chinese goods, including electric vehicles MAY 14, 20245:01 AM ET Asma Khalid

President Biden will slap tariffs on $18 billion of imports of goods from China including electric vehicles, semiconductors, and medical products to protect the strategic sectors and punish China for unfair trade practices.

Joe Biden: The President | The White House
To reduce inflation, my Inflation Reduction Act will give American businesses money so they can produce more, and charge consumers less. Then I’m going to charge those same consumers more with my new tariffs. Makes sense to me.
He could have given tax breaks and other financial support to America’s manufacturers of electric vehicles, semiconductors, and medical practices, thereby saving American consumers money and fighting inflation.

He will also keep in place the tariffs that former President Donald Trump had placed on more than $300 billion of imports from China.

He correctly criticized Trump for the tariffs that are paid for by American consumers.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement that she raised concerns last month during a trip to Beijing about “artificially cheap Chinese imports,” concerns that she said many other countries share.

She said the new tariffs are necessary to protect American workers and companies from what could become a flood of unfairly traded products.

This “protects American workers and companies” by making them pay more for the products. Some protection that is.

The move comes as Biden pushes forward to implement three pieces of legislation that contain hundreds of billions of subsidies to boost the domestic manufacturing and clean energy sectors— and ahead of a presidential election where trade and jobs will again be an issue.

The Biden administration suffers from bipolar disease. On the one hand, they subsidize industries, and on the other hand, they charge them more in taxes.

“We know China’s unfair practices have harmed communities in Michigan and Pennsylvania and around the country that are now having the opportunity to come back due to President Biden’s investment agenda,” Lael Brainard, Biden’s top economic adviser, told reporters.

His investment agenda is good, but it’s being undone by his import duty agenda. Additionally, duties take dollars out of the economy, which by formula, reduces Gross Domestic Product. This is a recessionary act. If instead, the Biden administration stuck with subsidies, this would add dollars to the economy, a growth act. Between growth and recession, Biden chose recession.

Here’s a list of the new tariffs. Most of the new tariffs cover items that the Biden administration has sought to have made in America through investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Some increases will take place this year. They include tariffs of:

100% on electric vehicles, up from 25% 50% on solar cells, up from 25% 50% on syringes and needles, up from zero 25% on lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, and battery parts, up from 7.5% 25% on certain critical minerals, up from zero 25% on steel and aluminum products, up from a range of zero to 7.5% 25% on respirators and face masks, up from zero to 7.5% 25% on cranes used to unload container ships, up from 0% China makes cheap electric vehicles. Why can’t American shoppers buy them?

Other hikes will be phased in, including:

50% on semiconductors, up from 25%, by 2025 25% on other lithium-ion batteries, by 2026 25% on natural graphite and permanent magnets, up from zero, by 2026 25% on rubber medical and surgical gloves, up from 7.5%, by 2026

The White House says this is different from Trump’s approach.

No, it isn’t different. Give it any name you can invent and it still is a tax on purchases. It still takes dollars out of the economy. It still punishes consumers. It still is inflationary and recessionary.

Trump had made tariffs on China one of his signature policy moves when he was in the White House. At first, some Democrats warned this could really hurt the economy — and that American consumers would pay the price.

Biden’s team began reviewing those tariffs when he took office, and now has decided to keep them in place.

“One of the challenges is once tariffs have been imposed, it is quite difficult politically to reduce them — because the affected industry tends to get used to them, like them, operate with them as baked into their plans,” said Michael Froman, who was U.S. Trade Representative during the Obama administration.

It would be far more beneficial to the economy and consumers for industries to “get used to” subsidies, which grow the economy than to get used to taxes, which are inflationary and recessionary.

The White House has tried to distinguish its strategy from Trump’s approach.

It points to comments made by Trump in rallies and interviews that he would broaden tariffs on all imported goods, including targeting Chinese cars, if he wins the election — something that they said would hike consumer prices.

Huh? Taxes on Chinese cars would hike consumer prices, but taxes on the above-listed items will not hike consumer prices???

The White House has downplayed the risk that the new tariffs could spark retaliation from China, saying that the issues have been discussed during meetings of top U.S. and Chinese officials, and were unlikely to come as a surprise.

One could only hope that the Chinese government is as foolish as the American government, and increase tariffs on imports of American goods. That would be a blow to the Chinese economy. SUMMARY Raising federal taxes on the American consumer takes dollars out of the American economy, raises prices, and costs consumers money. It is the worst possible step the government could take. To protect American businesses, the government should rely on tax breaks and other forms of financial support, which would add growth dollars to the economy and lower inflationary prices. Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY