All of them.

Today, I signed a pardon for all the January 6th persons who entered the Capitol or who were charged in connection thereof.   From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched them being selectively, and unfairly, prosecuted. Without aggravating factors like an intent to actually overturn an election; said persons were demonstrating and in fact were egged on by both FBI agents and those in their employ, such persons are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for walking in a government building. It is clear that the January 6ers were treated differently when compared with myriad others who did identical things, including those who obstructed the confirmation hearings for Justice Kavanaugh and some went further than waving signs -- they presented knowingly-false testimony in an attempt to irrevocably corrupt his nomination process.
 
The charges in these cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated two unlawful and unwarranted impeachments and used those lies to oppose my election, then planted agents in the crowd to deliberately incite a riot.  When that was unsuccessful they intentionally opened the doors from the inside -- doors that could not be forced from the outside without heavy machinery -- and waved the protestors in to manufacture the pretext for these alleged offenses.  Then, the January 6th committee deliberately and with malice aforethought withheld exculpatory evidence, hid the DOJs and FBIs involvement in inciting said events, failed to identify the person or persons in their employ who clearly opened the doors to the Capitol and invited members of the public inside – with a number of my political opponents in Congress taking credit for bringing political pressure on the process.  Had justice prevailed a misdemeanor trespassing charge might have been appropriate in some cases, but certainly not felony charges and convictions, never mind the attempted misapplication of Sarbanes-Oxley to this circumstance, a deliberate and outrageous act wildly outside the remit of the Statute and ultimately turned back by the courts.
 
No reasonable person who looks at the facts of the Jan 6th cases can reach any other conclusion than that these individuals were singled out only because they were supporters of my campaign, baited deliberately and then framed – and that is wrong.  These political, tin-pot dictatorial abuses of power have continued for four years and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.
 
For my entire career I have followed a simple principle: just tell the American people the truth. They’ll be fair-minded. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further. I hope Americans will understand why a President would come to this decision. 

Oh, one is not good for the other?

The Hell it isn't.

January 20th at 12:01 PM is when this hammer must come down.

Come and get it!  Recorded yesterday morning.

Well, the last part of this was rather interesting.  Note the cuts -- and the post-hoc adding in the last section of this interview, with no capacity to rebut.

But here's the problem: Bill is right that Congress has the control of the system.  However, it is Congress that has created the entire inflationary process, not the bankers.  Further, Bill is claiming that "money" is the same as credit and this is always and everywhere false.  You need look nowhere beyond my short segment on MMT back when Lauren Lyster was on RT with myself as a guest where I demonstrated the idiocy of the idea that you can simply print up all the money you want and its all good.  BULLSHIT!

Money is the economic surplus you have after you produce something and pay all of the expenses of its production, including your personal maintenance as an individual.  If you go to work for $20/hr, work 40 hours in a week ($800 gross) and between rent, food, the power, heat and water bills and taxes which fund things like the road you drive on to get to the work, all of which have to be paid for, you have $100 left that's your money.  If you spend another $500 on top of it that's credit.

Conflating the two is fraud and the idea that government can simply emit whatever it wants sounds good except for the fraud part.  The original Coinage Act in the United States, which mandated death by hanging for tampering with the money supply and thus conflating money and credit, came about for this exact reason.  It is all well and good to advocate for "the US Government simply issuing US notes" but only if the penalty for issuing more of them than is taxed first is the instant hanging of every single person so-involved because fraud is STILL a crime.

When you borrow there is a clear indication -- in the form of the debt instrument -- that you did so.  When a sovereign exercises its seigniorage privilege you might think that's superior to a "hidden" (not really) cabal of bankers but the last four years should have instantly disabused you of this, because in fact what Treasury did was issue unbacked credit and without an external pushback all you have left is a violent revolution to stop it as nobody, which you can see, hanged for doing it.

PS: Don't know why the video on your end was that horrible on the half coming to you, but it was. Bandwidth issues on your internet connection perhaps?  Don't know; Zoom is what it is, and both you and I were perfectly clear both video and audio during the hit itself on this end.

Livestream NOW, or watch the replay at your leisure......

This is the biggest cockgobbling piece of shit "journalism" I've read in ages and it appears the market is buying it for the time being.

Bessent acknowledged that the federal government's mandatory spending – particularly the Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs – is a major driver of budget deficits. However, he said he thinks it's more realistic for the incoming Trump administration to focus on curbing discretionary spending, a much smaller portion of the overall federal budget, to create momentum for a future administration to take on entitlement reform.

First, Social Security is not the problem.  Social Security is currently running a modest cash-based deficit, but the key word here is "modest."  Lifting the FICA tax by, say, 1%, lifting the cap by 10% or so or some combination would likely balance it today and, in the next 10 or 20 years die offs from Boomers will start to reduce the outlays.  Bessent knows this because he can read the MTS so assuming he's not deliberately blind he's lying and thus it is my sincere hope that he took six clotshots and gets his just reward for doing so along with his entire family.

I'd usually be a bit more-kind but not this time, and here's why:

"These entitlements are massive. I think the next four years isn't the time to deal with them, that we've got to deal with the discretionary portion of the budget and get that under control. But I think the signal – I always say, crawl, walk, run – we've got to crawl, maybe walk our way to get the current deficits under control, then the next step is for a future administration to have the confidence to be able to deal with entitlements," Bessent said.

The entire problem is in CMS.

CMS is less than 20% funded by tax receipts and as a result you'd have to multiply the current Medicare tax by FIVE in order to bring it into fiscal balance.  That is clearly not going to happen as it would be politically impossible.

But the problem isn't that the system was originally designed out of balance as when it was designed medical care was about 3-4% of the economy; it is that it has been turned into a monstrous scam across the board, all of it wildly illegal through price-fixing and other games and since the laws being violated are felonies and have been on the books for over 100 years.  The validity of this law in application to the medical, health insurance and pharmaceutical industries has been proved up at the Supreme Court more than forty years ago thus it is trivial to fix it -- indict people in size starting with doctors, hospital administrators, drug company and insurance executives.  One of the games used by states to fuck the Federal Government and accelerate the deficit is to assess fees on Medicaid providers, thus driving up the total and funds granted to said state, then they rebate the "assessment" it back to who they took it from.  This sort of shit is wild-eyed accounting fraud and yet it is utterly commonplace.  So is the crazy cost-shift done by Biden during the last year to prevent a over 100% price-spike in Medicare Part D, all occasioned by "deciding" to pay for insanely expensive and dubiously-safe-and-wildly-permanent things that force people into lifetime dependence like Ozempic.

Further, the direct inflationary impact of this deficit spending cannot be avoided due to the destruction of trade sequestration that will not come back in the short term (caused by the Ukraine war related sanctions) and is probably gone forever because economies and trade abhor vacuums and alternatives have already been established.  There is little or no reason to believe that privilege we used to have will ever be restored since we've proved we cannot be trusted at our word and thus just like Jimmy Carter permanently ruined the nuclear fuel reprocessing industry via an Executive Order that Reagan rescinded on the first day, yet here we are more than 20 years later with no commercial reprocessing, the trade sequestration must be considered permanently gone as well.  That's a solid $100 billion+ a year, and perhaps two or three times that much, in deficit spending every single year we didn't have to pay for in inflation but now we do and will forevermore have to into the future.

That change, which we did to ourselves, means that every dollar of deficit spending is immediately inflationary to the United States economy.  So if you want to have a 2% inflation rate in the US you must not have more than a real 2% deficit ex productivity on a cash basis, which is not going to happen in real terms when you pay out 200% of last years hospital CMS payments October-over-October and a roughly 57% comparable-month increase across CMS as a whole -- which we just did!

Bessent thinks he can run a "3-3-3" program; 3% fiscal deficits (about $800 billion total, 3% real productivity and 3 million additional barrels of oil production a day.

Problem: Last fiscal year's deficit was $2 trillion and no, you don't have four years to cut it to $800 billion because the inflationary impact of $2 trillion is about 7% annually so to get to 3% real productivity you would need a gross 10% increase.  That has never happened outside of two periods -- after the deflationary crash of 1920/21 and for a time after WWII when the war had blown up almost literally every single production facility in Europe.  There is a zero probability of the US seeing a gross 10% productivity increase and if you want a real 3% productivity increase into a 3% fiscal deficit it has to be 6% in gross terms which is also fantasy-land bullshit.  The actual real productivity expansion in the 2010 decade was a meager 0.72% annually and the modern-era (last ~20ish years) average is about half that 3% figure.  Only the Internet revolution period in the 1990s has posted up anything like a 3% number in modern times.

No, drilling for more oil is not going to lead to conditions similar to the creation of the Internet.

Yes, I understand that so-called "entitlements" are third rail of politics.  But just like politicians always conflate Social Security (which is easy to fix) with Medicare and Medicaid (which isn't, as the grift is in the latter and not the former) only Medicaid is an "entitlement", that is to say WELFARE in that the other two you paid for during your working life.  Further, fixing it does not require refusing to cover what people paid for and while changing what Medicaid is ought to be done, as I've outlined, because you can provide indigent Americans with superior access to health care without it we can fix the problem in CMS immediately by removing the fraud, theft, and other outrageously felonious behavior without refusing to honor the agreement Americans entered into.

You can huff, puff and chin-wag all you want but the facts are what they are.  The entire problem forcing the deficit higher resides in CMS and it is occurring on an exponential basis -- it is not Social Security.  Yes, discretionary spending is also out of control but cutting discretionary spending back (and we must) will not resolve the issue; you must dismantle the medical monopolists and only the threat of hard prison time, which incidentally 15 USC Ch 1 already provides for and thus there are no new laws required, will do the job and it must be done immediately, not over 4 years or worse, into the next term after Trump leaves office.

We are out of time and must deal with this problem now.

The inflationary spike from October is already baked into the cake because that spending has already happened and essentially all of it was in CMS.  Bessent either knows this and is lying or he hasn't read the MTS in which case, given that he wants the Treasury Secretary's job and claims to be competent to take it he should be locked in a paddock with Mr. Hands after having mare scent slathered on his bare asshole.

This is going to blow up in our face come next year and this chucklefuck is proposing to jam the accelerator to the floor while we're already headed for a solid granite wall, making the outcome much worse.