The Hogwash Report 69.0

Doing A Good Thing Isn’t That Hard

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GOP, Either Way is OK…

It seems the Republicans in Congress are having difficulty agreeing on a way to do a good thing. The GOP has passed a proposed budget that would continue for 10 years the tax cuts Trump got passed in his first term but are scheduled to expire later this year.

The Republicans in the Senate want make them permanent.

The Democrats’ media wing, The Associated Press, is trying to make this out to be a divisive skirmish amongst the GOP legislators. It needn’t be. In fact, that’s just plain hogwash,

Either solution would lead to the same end. Besides, the Democrats do not understand why anyone would want to cut taxes.

The old saw is true, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary tax.” So should be a temporary tax cut. Conservatives loathe raising taxes, and Democrats rarely do so with peril. Therefor, the House version works just as well as the Senate’s wish for them to be made permanent.

Trump wants “one big beautiful bill,” but Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota wants to break things up into two bills, with a separate bill to deal with tax reform. The argument is over the process and judgment calls on which would be easier to pass. Both approaches will lead to stronger border security, a big energy initiative, stronger defense and tax cuts for everyone, not just the rich, as the Democrats whine.

The other main sticking point being argued in the GOP ranks is whether a continuing resolution to keep the government open and operating should be for a full year, as the House Republican leaders want, or make it shorter in duration so it would have to be dealt with again this year.

The one-year deal that could trigger a 1 percent across-the-board discretionary spending cut that would hit defense programs especially hard, some say.

That meager cut, however, could easily be offset by DOGE finding ways to eliminate wasteful spending in the Defense Department. No need to panic over such a small fraction of spending. President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegdseth and DOGE leader Elon Musk have all promised to find ways to make the military’s operations more efficient and effective.

The Democrats have fiddled while the swamp has burned trillions of dollars. The economy has been propped up for years, like a car on cinder blocks in a redneck’s drive way.

We Should Have Seen This Coming. Some did!

Michael Snyder’s Substack this week sounds the alarm that the predicted recession has already begun.

You should read the whole thing for yourself, find it here.

Does This Chart Show That The Recession They Have Been Planning Has Already Begun?

“It’s almost as if someone flipped a switch and decided that it was time for the numbers to show that a recession has started,” Snyder writes. “Of course the truth is that we have been living through an economic horror show for years, and now the economic figures are becoming extremely dismal.

CNN gleefully is reporting that consumer spending unexpectedly dropped in January. It also said consumer confidence has plunged.

It apparently plunged from propped up polling during the Biden years, because anyone on any street in America can tell you that the rampant inflation of the last four years sucked the confidence right out of everyone but the most wealthy in this country.

When the dust of Christmas spending settled, credit card debt forced a high percentage of Americans to put brakes on spending. Retail sales skidded to a precipitous drop in the first month of 2025, the largest decline since last January. The bills from the propped up Biden economy are coming due after he has left the building White House.

While the Democrats and their media lapdogs want to blame this year’s plunge on Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Joseph Robinette Biden is the sole owner of both of those economic wrecks.

Auto loan delinquencies of more than 60 days for less credit-worthy borrowers hit 6.56% in December, the highest percentage ever.

Credit card debt is now at record levels in the U.S., $1.3 TRILLION, an average of $9,000 per family.

Buying a new car is out of the question for most families. The average new car in June of 2023 was $50,300, up from $37,000 when Biden took office.

Insuring your car has increased bigly (a Trumpism) in the past four years. According to Forbes.com, insurance company A (the one with its logo strung between college football goal posts) has increased about 25 percent 2021-24 or more than $700 per year. Company F, the one with an agricultural worker’s title, is up about 32 percent or $990 a year over the same period. Some states have seen car insurance rates grow from 30 to 39 percent.

The insurance industry blames the skyrocketing rates on the cost of the new vehicles on the road and the high cost of repair for these regulation-poor and technology-rich rides. Most new pickup trucks on the road, and there are lots and lots of them that cost upwards of $50,000, meaning repairing them is really ringing the body shops’ cash registers.

Pending home sales were down 5.2 percent in January.

Substacker Snyder said “Things weren’t even this bad during the Great Recession.”

CNN also said more than 41,000 home purchase agreements fell through in January,

More on the-sky-is-falling CNN story: The U.S., for the first time the country’s agriculture trade deficit will reach a record $49 billion this year. We used to feed the world, now the world is feeding us.

We have an interest payment this year of $1.05 TRILLION on our $36.5 TRILLION national debt. And that payment is getting larger by the minute. BTW, a TRILLION dollars is a lot of money and our government is short more than that every year now.

Like the Hogwash Report, Michael Snyder has long been trying to get us to understand what this economy and debt are causing.

“For more than a decade,” Snyder says, “I have been desperately trying to get people to understand that we are literally committing national suicide.”

In the immortal words of radio philosopher Earl Pitts: “Wake up, Umerika.”

Same Theme, Different Writer

Another Substackian, Judd Garrett is a respectable guy, graduate of Princeton University, former NFL player coach and executive. He has followed another Hogwash Report theme with a recent post entitled simply “ $36 Trillion.” You can and should read it here.

$36 Trillion

Garrett also points out “It is absolutely embarrassing how people are screaming bloody murder against what (Elon) Musk is doing and (they are ) defending what has been going on in government for the last 30 years.”

He eloquently defends President Trump against the Democrats’ daily droning about him being a dictator:

“Now his critics are calling Trump a dictator. Dictators enrich themselves and expand the size of government. Trump has lost hundreds of millions of dollars and is shrinking the size of government. He is the exact opposite of a dictator.”

And Garrett points out who the real culprits are:

“You know who has enriched themselves and expanded government, pretty much every Democrat in Washington, and most Republicans. Those politicians told you they are doing it for you, but they were doing it for themselves. Every con artist convinces the person they are ripping off that they are doing it for them.”

Democrats Give Us No Hope

The vultures are circling the Trump Administration and doom and gloom is being predicted.

James Carville, the mouth of the south, a relic from the Clinton brain trust, boldly predicts that Trump’s administration will “collapse” within 30 days.

TheHill.com reported, during a conversation with Mediate’s Dan Abrams, that Carville said, “I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days, is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse of public opinion.

The media, and Carvlle, are saying that Trump’s approval ratings are dropping from the low 50s to the upper 30s.

Do these people just pick these numbers out of the air or are they relying on their own propped up polls?

Realclearpolitics.com shows this in their latest polls:

Emerson Poll, Trump Job Approval 48 percent approve, 43 percent disapprove, +5 rating.

Daily Mail Poll: 54 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove, +8 rating.

NPR/PBS/Marist Poll: 45 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove, -6 rating.

Rasmussen Reports Poll: Approve 50 percent, 48 percent disapprove, +2 rating.

If there ever was a poll that could have less than 40 percent favorable, it would be the NPR/PBS/Marist Poll. That poll, with its blinders on, couldn’t find a handful of conservatives to interview. That poll also says 54 percent of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. The Emerson poll says 52 percent think it’s going in the right direction.

So the Democrats are still believing their friendly polls? Have they not learned anything from the 2024 election. We’ve used that last sentence in at least four straight Hogwash Reports.

And This From Another College Professor

Then there’s Alexander J. Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University’s branch at Newark, N.J., who says, in an opinion piece for TheHill.com, “Despite its chest-beating rhetoric, President Trump’s regime is actually brittle and fated for ineffectiveness, or both.”

His obvious liberal, if not communistic, tilt continues to use the term “regime” throughout the piece, which TheHill.com disclaims as Motyl’s opinion and not The Hill’s.

“Americans may be startled by the all-encompassing nature of the regime, but it’s nothing new,” Motyl writes. “History has so many examples of regimes consisting of an all-powerful leader who makes all the decisions and who is surrounded by psycopathic underlings ruling over weak institutions and using their platforms for self-enrichment.”

The Hogwash Report finds it amusing that Motyl is employed by a weak education institution, a branch campus of a state university, and is using it as a platform for self-enrichment by attacking the ruling political party (when it’s the Republicans).

We have to wonder if Motyl noticed the DEI psychopathic underlings of the Biden Administration and if he predicted the doom that was destined for that regime?

Rutgers University should be ashamed of representation that Motyl gives, even from a branch campus in Trenton.

From The Michael Moore File

The latest post from this Trump hater, Hollywood’s Michael Moore, tells the sordid story how Steve Jobs, co-founder of the Apple miracle, was the product of a young Wisconsin woman and a Syrian Muslim who had come to America to study at the University of Wisconsin.

Railing against President Trump’s deportation of illegal aliens and his move to remove birthright status for alien-produced babies, Moore said this in his tome about all the great things Jobs, as the product of birthright citizenship, was responsible for in his illustrious, but short-lived, life.

“This little story, I hope, will give pause to any bigot who constantly rails against the danger we are all in because of these ‘filthy, lowlife aliens.’ Those of us who count ourselves as part of the ‘non-hater’ demographic of Americans cannot begin to add up or ascertain the innumerable ways our lives have been made better by our beloved immigrant neighbors. Or how many lives have been saved because of their discoveries, or simply, their care for us in an emergency situation.”

The Hogwash Report is not aware of enough evidence from the columns written by Mr. Moore that would exonerate him if he was charged with being a “hater.” (Sarcasm alert) We are sure he jumps at the chance to convince his friends he doesn’t hate Donald Trump or any conservative the might happen by.

But the real reason we point out this column by Moore concerns his logic that children of illegal aliens, who are being removed “by ICE tonight,” could potentially grow up to discover a cure for cancer in 2046, or perhaps one might find a way to keep that Astroid from smashing into earth in 2032.

It’s interesting, that over the last 50 years since Roe vs. Wade, tens of millions of babies have been aborted, snuffing out the lives of children who could have done the same or greater things that the children of illegal aliens could do. Yet, Moore defended and cheered on that fetal slaughter as a champion for candidates who ran on a platform promoting “women’s health.”

In an anti-American July 4 post on Substack, Moore said he wouldn’t accept the “privileges of full citizenship” until Roe vs. Wade is reinstated and every single Republican is booted from office.

“Rather than try to renounce his passport, or move abroad, he said that he'll instead spend every waking moment nagging people he meets about the issues which have inflamed him,” the DailyMail.com said in reporting Moore’s rant.

Nah, Michael Moore isn’t a hater. If you don’t believe The Hogwash Report, just ask him.

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Or you could buy me a cup of coffee here. Decaf please.Too much caffeine and I get too worked up over big things.