(continued via CNN transcript here) For the first post in the series, see here.
TAPPER: Thank you. President Biden?
BIDEN:
Well, look, the greatest economy in the world, he’s the only one who thinks that, I think. I don’t know anybody else who thinks it was great – he had the greatest economy in the world.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is that we found ourselves in a situation where his economy – he rewarded the wealthy. He had the largest tax cut in American history, $2 trillion. He raised the deficit larger than any president has in any one term. He’s the only president other than Herbert Hoover who has lost more jobs than he had when he began, since Herbert Hoover. The idea that he did something that was significant.
And the military – you know, when he was president, they were still killing people in Afghanistan. He didn’t do anything about that. When he was president, we still found ourselves in a position where you had a notion that we were this safe country. The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any – this – this decade – doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he did.
Comment:
First of all, Biden misuuotes Trump, who said, "We had the greatest economy in the history of our country." [Note that I demolished that claim in my earlier post] It is true in terms of nominal GDP, we have had the world's largest economy since the nineteenth century. On a PPP basis, China exceeds us.
It is true Trump has FALSELY claimed the largest tax cut in history, and Biden incompetently repeats the lie:
The largest tax cut ever in American history occurred in 1981 under Ronald Reagan's administration as a percentage of the economy, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget. Instead, Trump's $1.5 trillion tax cut ranks as the 12th largest as a percentage of GDP. In relation to inflation-adjusted dollars, the Committee for a Responsible Budget said Trump's tax cut ranks as the fourth highest.
Second, as the quote points out, Biden overstates the tax cut by a third, and keep in mind this is over a decade. It's not "rewarding" the wealthy; there is no distribution going to the higher-incomed taxpayer. He's talking about future tzx payments assuming income remaining constant. But the problem is, we have the most progressive income tax system in the world. (see chart below) There are perverse aspects to increasing the marginal tax rate: you no longer have as much an incentive to maximize your income because much. if not most, of your incremental income is going to the benefit of the government than yourself. Flattening the tax rate provides more incentive fort higher-income workers {and aspiring ones) to earn more. There are dynamic aspects to reforming. Tax brackets: additional income earned with a lower tax rate can at least partially offset the expected revenue loss from higher tax rates, in a manner similar to how Walmart earns high profits with lower-priced items. We could only wish that Biden's budget deficits were $150 B a year, the alleged Trump tax cut installment. Instead, Biden has altready piled up over a $6 T debt, second only to Trump's one-term record and counting. The fact is, just servicing the $34 T+ national debt is costing about $1 T/yr, more than the defense budget. Biden isn't going to cut spending. He disingenuously has tried to pass off expiring pandemic spending as "cutting the deficit". He also fails to note Trump was dealing with Dem-controlled House. Now an argument can be made that Trump should have balanced his tax reform with spending cuts and/or other revenues. In any event, one can argue that under Biden, the US tax policy is increasingly noncompetitive globally (see second chart below).
As to Trump's job numbers, it is true that Trump was just the second President since Hoover to have a net job loss on his watch. But it's not an honest criticism because Trump was not responsible for the pandemic crash. The fact is that Trump went into 2020 with an aggregate gain of about 5 million jobs.
|
Country |
Overall
Rank |
Overall
Score |
Corporate
Tax Rank |
Individual
Taxes Rank |
Consumption
Taxes Rank |
Property
Taxes Rank |
Cross-Border
Tax Rules Rank |
|
100 |
2 |
1 |
14 |
1 |
14 |
||
|
89.9 |
1 |
4 |
26 |
5 |
9 |
||
|
89.7 |
32 |
7 |
1 |
2 |
21 |
||
|
82.9 |
11 |
9 |
4 |
36 |
2 |
||
|
81.9 |
6 |
5 |
25 |
6 |
11 |
||
|
80.6 |
26 |
14 |
6 |
14 |
5 |
||
|
77.9 |
5 |
6 |
38 |
18 |
3 |
||
|
76.9 |
3 |
11 |
31 |
7 |
24 |
||
|
76.6 |
20 |
8 |
13 |
23 |
8 |
||
|
76 |
17 |
30 |
10 |
10 |
10 |
||
|
75.5 |
29 |
20 |
9 |
4 |
23 |
||
|
74.2 |
8 |
18 |
22 |
8 |
12 |
||
|
74.1 |
21 |
3 |
29 |
3 |
34 |
||
|
71.3 |
25 |
22 |
16 |
22 |
4 |
||
|
70.2 |
30 |
26 |
15 |
11 |
6 |
||
|
69.3 |
27 |
31 |
8 |
25 |
16 |
||
|
69 |
15 |
23 |
23 |
16 |
13 |
||
|
68.6 |
23 |
32 |
17 |
15 |
7 |
||
|
67.5 |
36 |
33 |
7 |
12 |
17 |
||
|
67.4 |
9 |
28 |
21 |
20 |
22 |
||
|
67.3 |
33 |
16 |
5 |
27 |
;;ll;klkjkjfrt26 |
||
|
66.8 |
22 |
21 |
3 |
29 |
35 |
||
TAPPER: President Trump, I want to follow up, if I can. You wanted…
TRUMP: Am I allowed to respond to him?
TAPPER:
Well, I’m going to ask you a follow-up. You can do whatever you want with the minute that we give you.
I want to follow up. You want to impose a 10 percent tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. How will you ensure that that doesn’t drive prices even higher?
TRUMP:
Not going to drive them higher. It’s just going to cause countries that have been ripping us off for years, like China and many others, in all fairness to China – it’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money, reduce our deficit tremendously, and give us a lot of power for other things.
But he – he made a statement. The only thing he was right about is I gave you the largest tax cut in history. I also gave you the largest regulation cut in history. That’s why we had all the jobs. And the jobs went down and then they bounced back and he’s taking credit for bounceback jobs. You can’t do that.
He also said he inherited 9 percent inflation. No, he inherited almost no inflation and it stayed that way for 14 months. And then it blew up under his leadership, because they spent money like a bunch of people that didn’t know what they were doing. And they don’t know what they were doing. It was the worst – probably the worst administration in history. There’s never been.
And as far as Afghanistan is concerned, I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power. He got out, it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.
COMMENT
Trump is beyond economically illiterate. Tariffs, contrary to Trump's delusion, is a de facto surtax that gets passed along to consumers, just like any product component cost..
Despite what the President says, it is almost always paid directly by the importer (usually a domestic firm), and never by the exporting country. Thus, if the US imposes a tariff on Chinese televisions, the duty is paid to the US Customs and Border Protection Service at the border by a US broker representing a US importer, say, Costco.
Of course they factor into inflation. Cheaper Chinese-made goods are purchased by budget-minded low- to-middle-income Americans. Competitive domestic goods have less incentive to keep their prices down. Trump was corruptly motivated, trying to buy the support of politically connected domestic suppliers and their workers.
"It’s going to just force them to pay us a lot of money, reduce our deficit tremendously." That's a knowing lie. According to Treasury, custom duties per year amounted to about 2% of over $4 T in government revenue or about $80 B. Trump ran up about an $8 T debt in 4 years. The idea that pennies on the dollar could close an annual $1 T+ budget gap is a fantasy.
Free trade is NOT a matter of other countries "ripping us off". There were also consequences to Trump's unprovoked trade wars. Countries being targeted by punitive tariffs generally seem to respond in kind. It was not surprising when China responded to Trump's tariffs by targeting farm exports (e.g., replacing them with Brazilian exports. Trump then redirected tariff income (from American consumers) to farmers hurt by retaliatory actions, a type of Trumpist welfare/socialism.
In my last essay, I demolished Trump's claim he had the biggest tax cut in history. (Reagan's was far bigger). Similar hype also puffs up Trump's deregulation claims.
Trump’s attempts to cut red tape were significantly hindered by his administration’s unfamiliarity with the ponderous bureaucratic processes that govern regulations. Federal rulemaking is a lengthy process that involves public comment, congressional and administrative review, and ultimately oversight from courts. To get rid of a regulation is similarly onerous, unless it happens within the 60-day time window that the Congressional Review Act gives lawmakers to block a new rule. The Trump administration often glided over steps in that process and used faulty reasoning to nix Obama-era regulations (or enact its own), which led courts to overturn a stunning 200 of 258 regulatory actions in the first Trump term.
Both indicators [below] show a rough plateauing of the upward trend, with a very small increase between the last year of Barack Obama’s administration (2016) and the last year of Trump’s (2020). Between these landmark years, the number of pages in the CFR increased 0.8 percent (to 186,645), as did the number of restrictions (to 1,083,001). According to both series, then, the net effect (new regulations, including deregulatory rules, minus abrogated or simplified ones) of the Trump administration has not been deregulation but, at best, a plateau in the upward historical trend. At best, 0 percent of federal regulation did “go,” to use Trump’s expression.
Trump's attempt to escape blame for inflation is understandable in the sense of something known as response lag. Any Econ 101 student knows it can take 18 months or so for fiscal or monetary policy changes to make themselves felt in the economy. (For example, when I got my stimulus checks, I put them in my savings, In part I was worried I could get laid off from work) But let's be clear: Trump was an easy money whore, not a sound money guy like me, from day 1. Recall, Trump was heavily pressuring the Fed to establish negative interest rates. He was obsessed when they surfaced in the EU. Before COVID-19 surfaced in 2020, he wanted a robust economy boosted with accommodative monetary policy heading into his reelection. But most importantly, he named Jerome Powell Fed Reserve chair, and Powell was slow to raise interest rates in 2021/2. As I recall at the time, there was discussion of transitional inflation. Both parties an both Presidents threw a lor of money at the pamdemic and the Fed flooded the financial system with liquidity, plus Biden reappointed Powell. It's not surprising gas cost less when people were laid off or working from home. Shopping options were limited and there was a lot of job insecurity. And so it's not surprising as the economy picked up, especially with the availability of vaccines in late 2020, that inflation picked up. You saw it more quickly in the financial sector, when the stock market quickly recovered from a 30%+ dop around March. (Trump actually brags about it but seems oblivious to inflated stock assets):
Lockdowns in many economies around the world since March, and a sharp rise in U.S. unemployment, prompted a 30% drop in stock prices. However, the recent rebound in stock prices, in spite of economic projections of sharply lower, perhaps negative economic growth and business profits for 2020, has surprised many. If the price of a company’s shares reflects the discounted present value of future cash flows to shareholders, this stock market recovery makes little sense. However, there is a second important determinant of stock prices—the amount of money made available in the hands of investors by central banks.
In recent decades, central banks have reacted to sharp stock market declines by pumping money into the economy. The size of assets on central bank balance sheets is a measure illustrating this. See Figure 1 for a time series of total consolidated assets on the U.S. Federal Reserve System (FRS) balance sheet from December 2002 to June 2020. In 2008, the FRS assets more than doubled from US$901,710 million on August 6, 2008, to US$2,212,852 million on November 12, 2008. As the risk of widespread bankruptcies in the financial sector subsided, the stock market responded to this massive injection of money in the following year by recovering a large part of its losses and rising well above the 2008 levels.
Finally, there's np doubt that the Afghanistan exit was messy on Biden's watch. I still remember as a young man, but Trump's argument he would have done better is simply unsupported. There are reasons that the US had been neen bogged down for a generation, and there is no evidence that Trump's generally inept administrators reformed the bureaucracy. Even though Trump's agreement targeted a spring withdrawal, there was no evidence of an exit plan or that Trump's xenophobic State Department had vetted any of the politically vulnerable Afghans who had cooperated with our forces had been vetted for the promised migration to the US: [Note: this does not excuse Biden's mismanagement; after all, Biden postponed Trump's planned late spring withdrawal, citing it was premature.]
Now, a year to the day after the fall of the US-backed government in Afghanistan, it’s unclear who, if anyone, has been held accountable.
There was a bureaucratic failure and a strategic failure. Trump had pledged to draw down US forces to zero in Afghanistan, with a May 1, 2021, timeline, but his team had not created a plan for it. As president, he had hollowed out the State Department and left Biden to rebuild the visa program.
So it was a failure of White House coordination, of urgency on the State Department’s part to get Afghan partners out, of the Defense Department and intelligence agencies and military contractors, and of regional powers like Pakistan, and of course of Afghanistan’s own government. The cascade of blunders and the absence of accountability during America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan have repeated the same systemic failures during its two-decade invasion and occupation.
But even as he took responsibility, Biden obfuscated. He blamed Afghans (“Afghanistan political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”). He also blamed his predecessor for making a bad deal with the Taliban. Yes, the Afghan army did disintegrate. And Trump, who signed the Doha Agreement in 2020 with the Taliban that committed to withdrawing US troops by May 2021, laid few plans to follow through on it.
TAPPER:
President Trump, over the last eight years, under both of your administrations, the national debt soared to record highs. And according to a new non-partisan analysis, President Trump, your administration approved $8.4 trillion in new debt. While so far, President Biden, you’ve approved $4.3 trillion in new debt.
So former President Trump, many of the tax cuts that you signed into law are set to expire next year. You want to extend them and go even further, you say. With the U.S. facing trillion-dollar deficits and record debt, why should top earners and corporations pay even less in taxes than they do now?
COMMENT:
I have to interject here that Tapper asked this question in an incompetent manner, which assumes a leftist talking point. He should be talking lower tax rates, not lower taxes. The whole idea is that when you increase the incentive to realize income you get more taxable income/ The relevant question :do you get enough tax revenue at the lower tax rate to offset the taxes at the higher rate, i.,e., do tax cuts pay for themselves? Note that even at a flat rate, higher-income individuals will ALWAYS pay more taxes. And under progressive tax systems like ours, they pay disproportionately more. Alternatively, Tapper should ask Trump, if tje tax cuts don't pay for themselves, what mix of new taxes and spending cuts do you propose so the budget deficit does not increase
TRUMP:
Because the tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen just prior to COVID, and even after COVID. It was so strong that we were able to get through COVID much better than just about any other country. But we spurred – that tax spurred.
Now, when we cut the taxes – as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that – we took in more revenue with much less tax and companies were bringing back trillions of dollars back into our country.
The country was going like never before. And we were ready to start paying down debt. We were ready to start using the liquid gold right under our feet, the oil and gas right under our feet. We were going to have something that nobody else has had. We got hit with COVID. We did a lot to fix it. I gave him an unbelievable situation, with all of the therapeutics and all of the things that we came up with. We – we gave him something great.
Remember, more people died under his administration, even though we had largely fixed it. More people died under his administration than our administration, and we were right in the middle of it. Something which a lot of people don’t like to talk about, but he had far more people dying in his administration.
He did the mandate, which is a disaster. Mandating it. The vaccine went out. He did a mandate on the vaccine, which is the thing that people most objected to about the vaccine. And he did a very poor job, just a very poor job.
And I will tell you, not only poor there, but throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore.
We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation. And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country.
And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.
COMMENT:
An incompetent debater, Trump, as usual, dodges the question of how he would balance massive deficits like during his administrations. With unpopular spending cuts and/or tax changes, never mind detailing the specifics of how he would follow up extending/expanding his expiring tax cuts. He implies that increasing oil/gas leases/royalties. The problem here? "Lease sales and royalties that companies pay on extracted oil and gas brought in more than $83 billion in revenue over the past decade." When you're running trilliom dollar deficits, doubling or tripling $8B in revenue is pennies on a dollar
We've already debunked Trump's hype over the greatest economy earlier, but here's more evidence:
GDP Annual Growth Rate in the United States averaged 3.15 percent from 1948 until 2024, reaching an all time high of 13.40 percent in the fourth quarter of 1950 and a record low of -7.50 percent in the second quarter of 2020. source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
Year GDP Growth (%) Annual Change
2020 -2.77% -5.06%
2019 2.29% -0.65%
2018 2.95% 0.70%
2017 2.24% 0.57%
Now let's look at Trump's lie (mostly) of greater corporate income tax revenues. From the Fed:
It is true we pulled in then record tax revenue in FY2021, and Trump was POTUS for 4 months of that year. You can argue Trump's tax cuts weren't effective at the start, but Trump's hype doesn't fit the facts.
Let's talk about Trump and COVID. He didn't work to quarantine returning infected Americans, just a delayed halt in foreign visitors. Under his administration, the government had an initial monopoly and took several weeks to release their initial tests, which turned out to be defective. [This stood in contrast with the South Korean government, which worked with the private sector to release accurate ones more quickly.] Without testing, we couldn't identify the infected and reach out to family members and contacts/ [Some infected were asymptomatic, like Typhoid Mary..] And then Trump idiotically argued against expanded COVID testing: "U.S. President Donald Trump said that increased COVID-19 testing makes the U.S. look bad by increasing coronavirus case numbers.." Just because you don't test an infected person doesn't mean he doesn't have the disease or can't propagate the disease to others.
Trump is scientifically illiterate and promoted unproven, dangerous remedies in his failed leadership:
Previous studies have shown that individuals with high influence (ie, individuals with large social capital or political power) can affect public decisions and purchasing power. Moreover, many of these individuals have the ability to affect content, sentiment, and public attention by using social media to disseminate information. Donald J Trump is one such individual who has previously influenced behavior through his high social presence on the internet and his political capital as the president of the United States.
In 2020, during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people were focused on uninvestigated therapies, especially Donald J Trump. However, it has become increasingly clear that some therapies, such as hydroxychloroquine, had numerous concerns surrounding them. Studies have reported that hydroxychloroquine can cause conduction disturbances and fatal arrhythmias, the supply of hydroxychloroquine may decrease for approved conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, and chloroquine is similar to chloroquine products that are used as aquarium cleaners, which may be toxic if ingested in large quantities. A death has already occurred due to the ingestion of chloroquine products.
Trump justifiably takes some credit for the development of effective vaccines, but he doesn't quite understand what that means. In the early pandemic, we were overwhelming hospital capacities , healthcare staffing and available critical specialized technologies like ventilators. Vaccines are effective if they can get undesirable outcomes like serious illness requiring hospitalizations or deaths under control. Now ideally there are sterilizing vaccines which basically stop the virus from replicating; these are less likely when the virus is rapidly mutating to evade immune systems, like COVID-19. Major variants to date include: Alpha (B.1.1.7), Beta (B.1.351), Gamma (P.1), Delta (B.1.617.2), Omicron (B.1.1.529). The initial vaccines and boosters through the bivalent boosters in fall 2022 were designed to combat the alpha variant (the latter also targeted omicron subvariants). So the fact that the original vaccines continued to work well in terns of severe health experiences. However, a consider number of people weren't vaccinated or not recently vaccinated with declining antibodies over time and unsurprisingly infections continued. So Trump wants to compare COVID deaths (below). So, deaths ended at roughly 467K through those last 10 months of the Trump Presidency, and the current deash toll is 1.194 M. So that's like 770K over the 3.5 years of the Biden Presidency, So simple arithmetic tells you deaths have trended downwards since the vaccine became available--and this is in spite of the fact that more contagious variants have developed in the interim and only the last couple of years have we seen doses specific to more recent variants like omicron. This is despite the vaccines being voluntary and less than a quarter of Americans taking last fall's monovalent booster. We never reached the criterion of herd immunity. It's difficult to see how Biden is responsible; Health security is more of a state issue under the Constitution. Perhaps you can make a case for related trade or immigration reform. I don't know why Trump is talking about the vaccine or testing mandate. Is he saying vaccines or testing worsened health outcomes? Originally Biden tried to mandate large companies through workplace regulations, until SCOTUS struck it down. He did have responsibility in overseeing the federal workforce. Perhaps Trump was referring to things like military staffing issues, but Trump's discussion is too vague to be credible or useful.
Finally, Trump accuses Biden of "losing our respect" abroad, of weaponizing the Justice Department against him, and Biden opened the borders to violent criminals, the mentally ill, etc. This is all rubbish. Unlike Trump who was ignored and ridiculed by foreign leaders, e.g., at a 2019 NATO Summit, Biden has coordinated an international response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is no evidence of the Biden Administration conspiring against Trump; in fact, the Justice Department declined to pursue federal charges analogous to NY state's hush money trial. NARA had been trying to retrieve documents for 18 months and Trump didn't comply with a relevant subpoena. And Trump was impeached over J6. NY and Georgia are state, not federal charges. No, there is zero evidence of Trump's lies against migrants. Cato Institute has shown unauthorized migrants are more law-abiding than citizens. Trump is relying on a few high-profile notorious crimes. .
TAPPER: President Trump, we will get to immigration later in this block. President Biden, I want to give you an opportunity to respond to this question about the national debt.
BIDEN:
He had the largest national debt of any president four-year period, number one.
Number two, he got $2 trillion tax cut, benefited the very wealthy.
What I’m going to do is fix the taxes.
For example, we have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.
We’d be able to right – wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that – all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.
Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
COMMENT:
First, it is true that Trump piled up a raw record one-term deficit of about $7.8T. But, using debt to the penny numbers, Biden is threatening Trump's numbers:
On Jan. 20, 2021, the day of Biden's inauguration, it was $27,751,896,236,414.77, according to data published by the U.S. Treasury Department. As of this Fourth of July, it was $34,847,568,990,054.13.That is an increase of $7,095,672,753,639.36 -- in less than four years. No other president has increased the debt that much between his inauguration and the Fourth of July in his fourth year in office.
Second,, the tax-cut cost is being exaggerated by Biden. The actual original cost is $1.5 T. A CBO projection raised that estimate to $1.9 T. And note that economists believe that lower tax rates were expected to spark economic growth with related tax revenues offsetting the effects of lowered tax rates
Biden's implied claim that the tax cuts primarily; they were more significant for middle-income and the well-off paid an even larger share of the tax burden. The 8.2% tax rate for the wealthy is complete fiction, a lie. He's talking about a speculative unconstitutional wealth tax. Even ignoring constitutional questions estimating the value of illiquid assets is intrinsically difficult and arbitrary. Never mind large transactions can adversely affect security prices.
The economically-illiterate POTUS hasn't got a clue about economic consequences of tax hikes. Plus, he hasn't done a damn thing in terms of cutting spending, and in fact, he lists a series of priorities to spend on other political priorities.
Note he ends his segment with some convoluted brain fart on Medicare.
Personally, if I were Trump, I would point a finger at Biden's corrupt college loan forgiveness adding directly to the deficit and debt.
TAPPER: Thank you, President Biden. President Trump?
TRUMP:
Well, he’s right: He did beat Medicaid (ph). He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare, because all of these people are coming in, they’re putting them on Medicare, they’re putting them on Social Security. They’re going to destroy Social Security.
This man is going to single-handedly destroy Social Security. These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare. So he was right in the way he finished that sentence, and it’s a shame.
What’s happened to our country in the last four years is not to be believed. Foreign countries – I’m friends with a lot of people. They cannot believe what happened to the United States of America. We’re no longer respected. They don’t like us. We give them everything they want, and they – they think we’re stupid. They think we’re very stupid people.
What we’re doing for other countries, and they do nothing for us. What this man has done is absolutely criminal.
TAPPER: Thank you, President Trump.
COMMENT
I'll be ending this essay on the switchover in moderators. I hope the reader is noting how the debaters are not directly challenging each other's arguments like I have. Awful debate from that sense
Trump as usual is lying about unauthorized immigrants. unauthorized aliens pay taxes including payroll (SSA/Medicare) taxes EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE INELIGIBLE TO DRAW BENEFITS BY LAW:
Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes annually, between tax returns filed and taxes deducted from paychecks, experts estimate....The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank, notes that “most experts believe the vast majority of tax returns filed with ITINs today are filed by undocumented immigrants...In 2019, according to the IRS, more than 2.5 million tax returns were filed using ITINs, accounting for nearly $6 billion in taxes.... In 2010, for example, the Social Security Administration estimated that payments from unauthorized workers accounted for about $12 billion in tax revenue for Social Security.
First of all, it's rich to hear both candidate pointing at each other over entitlements. Without a fix, both Medicare (before the end od the decade) and social security (in 10 years), operationally losing money which must be covered by dwindling reserves, will be unable to meet expenses in full, meaning maybe a 25% cut in benefits across the board. Biden's "solution"--as always, soak the rich, not adjust benefits, raise revenues and/or cut expenses. But if you recall, Trump wanted to enact a payroll tax holiday which would have hastened the day of reckoning.
The closing rant by Trump is as the Mafia Godfather in Chief. He thinks he should be able to extort allies for protection money, etc. He wants them to pay their fair share or he'll deny them protection. The same arrogance shows in trade where he still doesn't understand the concept of a trade deficit. He is squandering the goodwill underlying the dollar as the global reserve currency . Trump's bullying type of diplomacy endangers our alliances and exacerbates global tensions.
