Trump aide, SJU alum quits over resume lies

LINKEDIN PHOTO / TAYLOR WEYENETH

Trump aide, SJU alum quits over resume lies 1

Taylor Weyeneth and President Trump in the Oval Office.

Posted: Thursday, February 1, 2018 10:30 am

Trump aide, SJU alum quits over resume lies by Christopher Barca, Editor Queens Chronicle | 0 comments

Taylor Weyeneth, a 24-year-old St. John’s University alum, resigned Wednesday from President Trump’s administration after the Washington Post reported the resume of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s deputy chief of staff was full of falsehoods.

According to the newspaper, the class of 2016 graduate said on his resume that he worked for Manhattan law firm O’Dwyer and Bernstien from late 2014 until April 2016, shortly before taking a paid position on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

But Brian O’Dwyer, the firm’s partner, told the Post that Weyeneth was actually fired in August 2015 for repeatedly not showing up to work.

Weyeneth resubmitted his resume to the administration last year, while also amending the number of hours he volunteered at a Queens monastary during his time at St. John’s from 275 to 150.

But when he sent in yet another revised resume shortly after, he had removed the section about volunteering entirely.

Fordham University officials said Weyeneth did not have a master’s degree from that school as he claimed. A Kappa Sigma fraternity spokesman also said the Trump aide was only vice president of SJU’s branch for 18 months, not three years as listed on his resume.

Last month, 10 Democratic senators wrote to Trump to express their “extreme concern” over the 24-year-old’s meteoric rise from low-level staffer to deputy chief of staff.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy has been tasked with battling the country’s opioid addiction epidemic.

Posted in Queenswide, South Queens News, Eastern/Southeast Queens News, Central/Mid Queens News, North/Northeast Queens News, Western Queens News on Thursday, February 1, 2018 10:30 am. Government

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The Republicans’ deficit scam is exposed for all to see

The National Debt Clock, a billboard-size digital display showing the increasing US debt, on Sixth Avenue August 1, 2011 in New York.

Stan Honda / AFP / Getty Images

The Republicans’ deficit scam is exposed for all to see

02/01/18 10:03 AM

By Steve Benen

Up until fairly recently, federal officials believed the nation would have to raise the debt ceiling by late March or early April. Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office said action will be required even sooner – because the Republican’s $1.5 trillion tax cut is already starting to affect U.S. finances.

According to the budget office, the borrowing limit will most likely need to be raised in early March after the “extraordinary measures” to extend borrowing employed by the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, are exhausted. The budget office previously projected that the debt limit would need to be raised beyond its current level of $20.5 trillion in late March or early April.

The reason for the change stems from the tax cuts, which went into effect in January and are expected to translate into less revenue for the federal government.

A separate New York Times report added this week that annual budget deficits “are creeping up to $1 trillion and the national debt has topped $20 trillion.” The Treasury Department “will need to borrow $441 billion in privately held debt this quarter,” which is the largest sum in eight years.

And yet, Republicans – ostensibly, the nation’s fiscal hawks and stalwarts of fiscal responsibility – have nothing to say about this. The issue has largely disappeared.

Consider this: in Barack Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress in early 2009, the Democratic president mentioned the budget deficit eight times. A year later, in his 2010 State of the Union, Obama went further, mentioning the deficit 13 times.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, delivered his first speech to a joint session last year, and while he briefly referenced the “trade deficit,” he made no mention of the budget deficit. This week, in his State of the Union address, the Republican mentioned the “infrastructure deficit,” but again, when it came to the annual budget shortfall, Trump was literally silent.

The underlying issue here is one of the most cynical political scams Americans have ever seen or will ever see.

As regular readers probably know, it’s one of the few constants in American politics. When George W. Bush was president, Republicans put two wars, two tax cuts, Medicare expansion, and a Wall Street bailout on the national credit card – and made no effort to pay for any of it. Dick Cheney declared that “deficits don’t matter” and Orrin Hatch said it was “standard practice not to pay for things” in the Bush era.

Then Barack Obama was elected and many of those same Republicans decided the fate of Western civilization was dependent on balancing the budget.

Remember the Tea Party movement? According to many of its leaders, one of its principal goals was deficit reduction: annual budget shortfalls, they said several years ago, threatened the future of the nation, its families, and its security.

And because Republicans have an amazing ability to dictate the public conversation, everyone played along, taking the deficit seriously throughout the Obama era. To reject the fiscal argument was to condemn our children and grandchildren to future misery.

Under Obama, however, the deficit shrunk in his first seven years by a trillion dollars – that’s “trillion” with a “t” – at which point the issue quietly lost its potency.

At least in theory, for those who care about the deficit, the issue should be back with a vengeance. But it’s not: even as the deficit gets significantly larger, due entirely to deliberate Republican choices, the public conversation largely ignores the issue. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center found that the deficit is steadily fading as a priority.

But we know from recent history those attitudes will shift back the moment Democrats have some power again, because this cynical game is nothing if not cyclical.

Above is from:  https://www.yahoo.com/finance/m/b2bab837-3955-3c13-877e-4637415fe085/ss_the-republicans%27-deficit-scam.html

Shown below some figures from:  https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-to-gdp

While Trump Blames Immigrants for Low Wages, An Alternative Theory Gains Traction Among Economists

Hal Singer , Contributor

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31, 2018 -- U.S. President Donald Trump(L) delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., the United States, Jan. 30, 2018. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu via Getty Images)

“Since the election, we have created 2.4 million new jobs, including 200,000 new jobs in manufacturing alone. After years of wage stagnation, we are finally seeing rising wages.”

---Donald Trump, State of the Union, January 30, 2018

The President’s rising-wages claim from his State of the Union (SOTU) address sent the fact-checkers into overdrive, with the Washington Post’s Heather Long noting that average hourly earnings grew at the same rate (2.5 percent) as the end of Obama’s presidency, and the Post’s Glenn Kessler observing that real annual wage growth rose at a slower rate in 2017 relative to 2015 and 2016.

Not only are wage levels going sideways, but wages are falling when expressed as a percentage of national income. The share of national income captured by labor (“labor share”) has declined sharply since the early 2000s, falling from 66 percent in 2000 to 58 percent in 2017 according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The decline in the labor share over the past 30 years reflects the gap between labor productivity (which has continued to grow) and compensation (which has stagnated).

Notwithstanding Trump’s misdirection on the wage trajectory, the relevant economic questions are: What is causing wage growth to be so anemic? And what can be done from a policy perspective to accelerate it? The answer to the first question informs the policy implications.

The President is quick to advance an immigration-based hypothesis for sluggish wage growth, suggesting that open borders are to blame (and closed borders are the elixir). To wit, in his SOTU, Trump asserted that “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They have allowed millions of low-wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans” (emphasis added). To say that there is lack of economic support for this claim is an understatement. Indeed, the economic literature reveals that immigration does not reduce wages for native-born workers. Ottaviano and Peri (2012) and Borjas (2014) find that foreign-born workers (that is, earlier immigrants) bore the brunt of the wage impact from immigration, with native-born workers actually experiencing a slight increase in wages owing to immigration.

Even if it were true that undocumented immigration had a noticeable effect on the wages of native-born workers, data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show that the decline in these inflows has actually been quite modest under Trump. As in so many other areas (think unemployment), the President is taking credit for the culmination of trends that unfolded under his predecessors, years or even decades before he took office.

So if open borders aren’t to blame, as Trump asserts, what is a plausible alternative for stagnating wage growth? Several recent studies have focused on the role of industry concentration. The working theory is that as firms gain control in product markets, the opportunities for job mobility within a given industry are restricted, which permits these firms to exercise buying (or “monopsony”) power in the labor markets.

In Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share (2017), MIT economist David Autor and his co-authors use regression models to explain variation in the share of firms’ revenues captured by workers (a variant of the “labor share” mentioned above). They find that concentration of sales of the largest firms in an industry (and of employment) has risen from 1982 to 2012 in each of the six major sectors covered by the U.S. economic census. Controlling for other factors that move the labor share, they find a negative and significant relationship between concentration and the labor share—each percentage point rise in an industry’s concentration index (as measured by the share of shares accruing to the 20 largest firms) predicts a 0.4 percentage point fall in its labor share. In an effort to determine the causes of industry concentration, the authors further find that the fall in labor share is mainly due to a reallocation of labor toward larger and more productive (“superstar”) firms with “lower (and declining) labor shares, rather than due to declining labor shares within most firms.” Why their workers aren’t sharing the productivity gains of these “superstar” firms is an open question that deserves further research.

In Declining Labor and Capital Shares (2016), London Business School economist Simcha Barkai also estimates labor share regressions, with the aim of isolating the impact of industry concentration (a proxy for industry markups above cost). Barkai attributes most of the decline in the labor share to decreased competition, which has allowed firms to spend less on both labor and capital, and thus to keep more profit. He estimates that if competition increased to levels last observed in 1984, wages would increase by 24 percent. With respect to policy implications, he notes that “[it] may well be the case that the forces of technological change and globalization favor dominant firms and are causing the decline in competition. The causes of the decline in competition are left as an open question for future research.”

In The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share (2013), University of Edinburgh economist Michael Elsby and his co-authors study the determinants of payroll shares in a regression model. The authors find that the labor share declines the most in U.S. industries strongly affected by import shocks, which suggests that “offshoring of the labor-intensive component of the U.S. supply chain” (but not immigration) is putting downward pressure on wages. One of the key explanatory variables in their model is unionization-coverage rates. The authors find that “cross-industry variation in changes in unionization rates explains less than 5 percent of the variation in changes in payroll shares across industries.” Although the estimate is not statistically significant at conventional levels, the finding is consistent with the notion that greater worker bargaining power vis-à-vis employers would lead to higher wages.

Most recently, in Labor Market Concentration (2017), Roosevelt Institute economist Marshall Steinbaum and his co-authors analyzed the movements in wage levels (as opposed to wage shares) using a database of job listings in CareerBuilder.com. (I asked Steinbaum why he assessed wage levels as opposed to wage shares, and he told me that he lacked revenue data for the employers in his sample.) The authors find that America’s local labor markets are highly concentrated, and that employers also tended to advertise lower pay in cities and towns, as well as in occupations, where fewer businesses were posting jobs. Controlling for other factors such as “market tightness” (equal to the ratio of vacancies to applications), they estimate that moving from the 25th percentile of labor market concentration to the 75th percentile would lower (advertised) pay level in a metro area by 17 percent. Reflecting its import in policy circles, the one-month-old article already has been reviewed in the Economist, Slate, and the New York Times.

If these researchers are onto something—namely, that industry concentration dictates wage shares and wage levels—it could have important implications for how we think about antitrust enforcement and other labor policies (such as minimum wage, unionization, and state-based occupational licensing).

A bill proposed by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) in September 2017 would require the Government Accountability Office to assess wage impacts of mergers. Senator Corey Booker (D-New Jersey) recently called on the antitrust agencies to consider employment impacts in merger reviews. Perversely, the squeezing of input prices, including for labor, is considered a merger synergy under current antitrust doctrine. Beyond mergers, the antitrust agencies (or state attorneys general or private enforcers) could bring monopsony cases when a dominant firm unilaterally erects artificial restrictions to labor mobility (such as non-competes), or when a group of firms jointly agree not to compete for labor.

So far it seems the industry-concentration hypothesis has not shown up on Trump’s radar. But if the President is seriously concerned about the distribution of income between employers and labor, as opposed to merely increasing the size of the pie via short-term stimulus (think corporate tax cut), he might consider abandoning (or at least supplementing) his immigration-based theories in favor of something with a real basis in economics.

Twitter: @HalSinger

Above is from:  https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2018/02/01/while-trump-blames-immigrants/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix&yptr=yahoo#711b5b1c41ed