After attacking President Trump yesterday for his refusal to accept ethical boundaries on his behavior and policies, former FBI Director James Comey went on the warpath today against his emotional and intellectual polar opposite over the effects that the Trump government shutdown will have on government employees, particularly those in the agency that Comey formerly led.
FBI families will spend Christmas without a paycheck. This president promised Mexico would pay for the wall but innocent people are now paying the price for another lie. Our thoughts are with hardworking public servants and their families.
— James Comey (@Comey) December 23, 2018
Comey rightfully exposes the central fallacy behind Trump’s petulant refusal to accept anything less than the full $5 billion in allocations he’s demanding to begin building a border wall that represents a primitive and ineffective symbolic “solution” that security experts consider a massive waste of taxpayer money that would be better spent elsewhere.
With Trump’s deluded image of himself as a “winner” at stake, the president wants the public to ignore the fact that he’s already failed to deliver on his promise to force our southern neighbor to bear the cost of constructing his massive boondoggle and now relies on contorting reality by insisting that Mexico will pay for the wall through the voodoo economics he claims will result from his renegotiation of the NAFTA trade deal.
I often stated, “One way or the other, Mexico is going to pay for the Wall.” This has never changed. Our new deal with Mexico (and Canada), the USMCA, is so much better than the old, very costly & anti-USA NAFTA deal, that just by the money we save, MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2018
The president’s dubious claims that the new NAFTA 2.0 will pay for the wall ignores the fact that money from trade between companies does not flow into the U.S. Treasury. Even if one considers the indirect revenue that could come from larger tax collections on an increased amount of goods and services resulting from the trade deal, experts agree that the amount that could possibly be generated comes nowhere close to covering the cost of Trump’s great white whale.
“’Even if we accept conceptually the argument that government revenue attributable to the revised trade agreement constitutes “Mexico paying for the wall,” there are no plausible assumptions of USMCA’s impact that would see government revenue increase by $25 billion,’ said Geoffrey Gertz, a fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution and a research associate at the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford,” according to FactCheck.org.
The former FBI Director accurately accuses Trump of selling out “hardworking public servants” with his lies, and it’s obvious that the entire government shutdown fiasco is being conducted for the sole purpose of feeding Trump’s own ego at the expense of everyone else in the country.
With Comey’s obviously sympathetic consideration of the victims of Trump’s callous, self-centered tantrum, it’s difficult to understand how Trump supporters cannot see the president’s complete disdain for the welfare of anyone but himself in his forcing of the government shutdown. The only consolation we have is the realization that the vast majority of us will never be as despicable in a single moment as Trump is every minute of the day.
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