Trump and His Crypto Cronies Have Big Plans. Be Afraid - by Sam Gustin

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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The author lets loose with every Leftist talking point available to him, irrespective of truth or even reality. Of course this is the methodology of the Left, to simply overwhelm with repeated, rapid-fire factoids. 

We have deemed this The Narrative. The Narrative is the verbiage distributed to media outlets and Leftist apologists by Central Command, used to attack opponents and further The Agenda. The Agenda is the plan by which The System is disassembled and replaced.

So the author is simply doing his duty to promulgate the daily bumper sticker slogans and incendiary rhetoric required to keep to keep the average American propagandized and uninformed.

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Donald Trump hasn’t yet been sworn in as president, but one aspect of his second term is already coming into focus: self-dealing, patronage, and corruption (Irony Alert: Biden's payoff schemes with Ukraine.)

on a scale that will dwarf that of his first stint in the Oval Office. From tax cuts (Tax cuts are good.)

to tariffs (Tariffs are good.)

to digital currencies, (??? Digital currencies are part of the Left's desire to control economies and to transform governments into Socialism.)

Trump is building a government designed to redistribute wealth from working people to rich people in ways not seen since the Gilded Age. (The author just keeps piling on accusations without so much as a link or any documentation at all.)

The result, experts say, will be higher prices, (You mean like Bidenflation?)

reduced consumer protections, and deeper economic inequality in the United States. (Inequality has increased no matter who has been in office:

The danger of graft is real. The incoming Trump administration has the potential to be the most corrupt in more than a century, (Quite a claim considering how corrupt Biden has been.)

Joseph Stiglitz, (An eminent Leftist.) 

the Nobel Prize–winning economist and professor at Columbia University, told The Nation.

“There’s an enormous risk of self-dealing here,” Stiglitz said. “The danger is not only conflicts of interest, but a mindset among Trump and his cronies in which they don’t even understand the concept of conflicts of interest. The irony is that here you have a president who was elected on an allegedly ‘populist’ platform engaging in the most massive pro-billionaire, pro-wealth redistribution in US history.”

Trump has tapped no less than half a dozen of his fellow billionaires to serve in and around his administration, including Elon Musk, who spent more than $250 million to elect Trump. Many of these oligarchs, (An oligarchy rule by a small group of powerful people. Since Trump is not yet president, his group of advisors are only potential oligarchs. 

But ironically, these "oligarchs" are being pressed into service to decrease the power of government, not increase it.)

who boast a combined net worth north of $450 billion, have no government experience. (No need to keep trying to convince us, we already are in favor of them.)

Their only qualifications appear to be huge Republican campaign contributions and, of course, slavish fealty to Trump. (??? How about starting and maintaining huge profitable businesses?)

Many of these latter-day plutocrats (Sigh. A plutocrat is a person who exerts power using his wealth. You know, like Soros. And again, Musk is being pressed into service to reduce government, not exert power.)

are peddling cryptocurrency, the highly volatile, speculative digital “money” that’s not backed by any physical asset (Geeze, this guy just goes on and on. Cryptocurrency is not a feature of a political party, it's simply an alternate method for the exchange of value.)

but rather “mined” by expensive, energy-intensive computer servers (??? This guy is descending into irrationality. Now he's complaining about evil computers. And we note the irony of his article being stored on an evil computer somewhere.)

and then traded largely based on Internet rumors. (What? Does the author have a point to make about Trump, or will he wander even farther from a coherent point?)

Wealthy crypto executives and investors supported Trump and other Republicans with millions of dollars in campaign donations. (The author must have forgotten about Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX cryptopcurrency exchange, who was the second largest donor to Democrats in the 2022 elections at $39.8 million. He's in prison for wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance law violations.)

Now, they aim to cash in.

Newly emboldened crypto bros are hawking a Senate proposal to establish a federal crypto reserve fund, in which the US government would buy $100 billion worth of Bitcoin and then hold it in a “strategic reserve,” like a digital version of gold or oil. The bros insist that crypto will soar in coming years—Bitcoin recently hit a record $100,000, presumably in anticipation of the favors that Trump and GOP lawmakers will shower on the industry—and so they claim a US crypto reserve will help the federal government pay down the deficit without costing taxpayers a dime.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that’s nonsense. (Ah, so it's simply a matter of disagreeing with a policy initiative?)

In fact, the Trump plan appears to be a brazen scheme (Oh. How can something "appear" to be a brazen scheme? And is the author basing his assault against Trump on only what "appears" to be?

Actually, the bill was introduced by Senator Cynthia Lummis R., WY, not Trump. Whether or not it is appropriate for the government to own bitcoin is a matter for debate, but there is nothing nefarious about the proposal itself.

And, unfortunately for the author, the federal government already owns billions of dollars of bitcoin it seized from Silk Road.)

to artificially pump up the price of crypto at taxpayers’ expense, allowing wealthy crypto holders, including the Trump family, (Trump has created a crypto currency project called WLFI, but there is no connection to the government purchasing bitcoin, a completely different crypto currency. What the author is attempting to do is to associate one kind of crypto currency to another.)

to cash out into US dollars, according to Baker. (Assuming the value goes up, which might not happen. Indeed, it could crash and be worthless.)

In the process, the US government—really, US taxpayers—will inflate the price of this otherwise worthless digital asset by creating artificial demand. (Assuming a plan is actually implemented for the government to purchase bitcoin, and assuming it does increase in value, how exactly does that cause problems for taxpayers?

And how do holders or creators of crypto currencies benefit from the government owning bitcoin? Well, it's a mystery.)

In other words, US taxpayers will be artificially subsidizing an industry-based-on-nothing whose financial gains flow disproportionally to wealthy asset holders. (How? Where?)

“Crypto has no inherent value, so why would the government want to buy it?” Baker told The Nation. “There is literally no rationale other than to give money to Trump and Musk and their crypto buddies. If they can tap into the government, they’ve found the ultimate sucker. And very soon, they will control the government.” (Total conspiracy theory nonsense.)

Meanwhile, Musk says his new nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will cut $2 trillion in “waste” from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. It’s a fairly shameless project for a billionaire whose companies over the last decade received more than $15 billion in federal contracts from the Department of Defense, NASA, and other agencies. (Why is that shameless? He won contracts to perform specific things for the government. What does this have to do with cutting wasteful spending?)

Now, the unelected tech mogul wants to slash trillions in spending, beggaring the concept of conflicts of interest. (Which the author can't seem to pin down for us.)

Musk’s “DOGE” plan to make the government more “efficient” is just a new spin on the decades-long Republican crusade to eliminate or privatize government agencies and cripple consumer protections to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. (The author opposes cuts to government of any kind for any reason.)

Economists call it the “starve the beast” strategy, (Yes, please, starve the beast.)

and by now, the playbook is familiar: Step One: Create a budget crisis by passing tax cuts for the wealthy. (The budget has been in crisis for 40 years, regardless of tax cuts or tax increases. The problem has always been spending, not revenue.)

Step Two: Declare that the budget crisis requires massive cuts to government programs because they’re unaffordable. (They are unaffordable.)

Step Three: Shut down the government. Or try to, anyway. (Oh, if only. 

But notice how the author never went on to "Step Four: Cut spending." Because this has never happened. For all the noise from the Left about Republicans starving government, slashing Social Security, ending welfare, etc., none of it has ever happened. But it's the dire warning repeated ad nauseum by the Left.)

“I don’t think Elon Musk is going to propose cuts to the billions of dollars he receives in government contracts,” said Stiglitz. (Well, we simply don't know, do we? If those contracts are wasteful, maybe they will be cut. But simply because he has government contracts doesn't mean those contracts are wasteful.)

The Tesla CEO may benefit from other regulatory rollbacks, however, such as the recent proposal by Trump’s transition team to eliminate autonomous vehicle safety reporting rules opposed by Tesla, whose electric vehicles are the deadliest cars on the road, according to a recent study. (Irrelevant tangent.

We are growing weary of chasing down every rabbit trail and false assertion. We don't know how long we can hold up.)

The main driver of economic inequality moving forward, of course, ("Of course," as if this were self-evident.)

will be Trump’s plan to extend his $2 trillion 2017 tax cut, which disproportionately favored rich people and corporations. (i.e., disproportionately favored those who pay huge amounts of taxes.)

Expect more of the same in 2025—only at a much greater cost—perhaps $5 trillion or more, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. (Cost to whom? Thx money was taken from taxpayers. Cutting taxes means the government did not take as much. This is not a cost. The money belongs to the one who earned it.)

Despite what Trump administration economic officials insisted at the time, the 2017 tax cut did not, in fact, pay for itself. ("Pay for itself?" What does this mean? How does a tax cut do this? If by this the author means that revenue did not increase as much as what was cut, we are in favor of this.

But more to the point, how does one measure how a tax cut pays for itself? There is not a control to compare against, where a tax cut was not implemented. Such a thing is impossible to know.

Let's look at revenue figures:

Does the reader see any time during Trump's presidency when revenue decreased? Even during COVID revenue slipped only very slightly. There is therefore no revenue problem. It is and always has been a spending problem.

Ok, we've had enough of the author's nonsense. So we're done commenting. )

Instead, it was “skewed to the rich, expensive, and failed to deliver on its promises,” according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Center for Budget Priorities. “Like the Bush tax cuts before it, the 2017 Trump tax cut was a trickle-down failure,” the report’s authors concluded.

Meanwhile, Trump’s proposed tariffs could cost the average US family $2,600 per year, according to UCLA economist Kimberly Clausing. That’s because US importers, not foreign countries, will bear the costs of the tariffs and transfer most of those costs to consumers, despite Trump’s bogus claims to the contrary. Clausing and her colleagues argue that Trump’s plan to impose new tariffs will amount to a regressive tax that will “cost jobs, ignite inflation, increase federal deficits, and cause a recession. It would also shift the tax burden away from the well off, substantially increasing the tax burden on the poor and middle class.”

There’s also a serious risk of self-dealing and patronage in US tariff policy. Trump’s first administration granted tariff exemptions to companies “associated with greater campaign contributions to Republican politicians and with smaller contributions to Democrats,” according to a recent paper in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. The study’s authors concluded that this process “worked—at least partly—as a very effective spoils system allowing the administration of the day to reward its political friends and punish its enemies.”

It’s a stark warning about cronyism and corruption heading into Trump’s second term. If past is prologue, Trump’s tax cuts will favor the rich, his tariffs will hurt the poor, his crypto policies will help his friends, and his trade policies will benefit the highest bidder—this time on a scale that will make his first term’s ill-gotten gains look like chump change. “I don’t think there’s been a period in my lifetime with more potential for a massive government role in increasing inequality than what Trump is proposing,” said Stiglitz. “I think you’d have to go back a century or more to find anything like this.”

Sam Gustin is a writer and editor based in New York City.