Budget 2020 Quotes

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States would have to spend $3.6 trillion more than currently budgeted just to bring our infrastructure up to acceptable levels by 2020.95 China and India are spending almost 10 percent of GDP on infrastructure; Europe, around 5 percent.96 Even Mexico spends just over 3 percent.97 The United States has not broken 3 percent once since the mid-1970s.98

I’m also testing how supplying money to cities that have corrupt politicians will work, and having a city that has the corrupt politicians with no money in their budgets, will work. Chicago is the city I’m keeping bankrolled, while Detroit is the city that has no money coming from me, or from any of my banks. I predict that Detroit will become a ghost town by 2020, but, that’s only a simulation.

For example, while China expects to have 350 ships by 2020, the NDP report notes that the Obama administration provides for only 260 ships or fewer, which is far less than the 323 to 326 required to meet the potential challenges in the Western Pacific.73 And despite increasing threats worldwide, the Obama strategy calls for the smallest and oldest air force fleet in modern history, planning a 50 percent reduction to bomber, fighter, and surveillance forces by 2019.74 The NDP concludes that the Obama defense budget “will increasingly jeopardize our international defense posture and ultimately damage our security, prospects for economic growth, and other interests.”75

As the 2019 elections were approaching, the Modi government felt the need to appear less pro-rich and more pro-poor again. But the union budget passed in February was somewhat a missed opportunity so far as the peasants were concerned. No loan waivers were announced in their favor, simply an enhanced interest subvention on loans and an annual income support of Rs 6,000 (80 USD)—6 percent of a small farmer’s yearly income—to all farmers’ households owning two hectares or fewer.131 In fact, the union budget was once again more geared to pleasing the middle class. The income tax exemption limit jumped from Rs 200,000 (2,667 USD) to 250,000 (3,333 USD), and the income tax rate up to Rs 5 lakh (6,667 USD) was reduced from 10 to 5 percent. The income tax on an income of Rs 10 lakh (13,333 USD) dropped from Rs 110,210 (1,470 USD) to Rs 75,000 (1,000 USD).132 The poor were doubly affected by the fiscal policy of the Modi government in 2014–2019: not only did the tax cuts in favor of the middle class, the abolition of the wealth tax, and, more importantly, the reduction of the corporate tax rates have to be offset by increased indirect taxes, but the stagnation of fiscal resources did not allow the government of India to spend more on public education and public health—all the more so as Narendra Modi wanted to reduce the fiscal deficit. First of all, tax collection diminished. The exchequer “lost” Rs 1.45 lakh crore (1.933 billion USD) in the reduction of the corporate tax, for instance. That was the main reason why gross direct tax collection dipped 4.92 percent133 in 2019–2020, a fiscal year during which gross tax collections were less than those in 2018–2019. Tax collections had never declined on a year-on-year basis since 1961–1962.134 Second, government expenditures diminished. The central government reduced its spending on education from 0.63 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.47 percent in 2017–2018. The trend was marginally better on the public health front, where the Center’s spending declined from 0.37 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.34 percent in 2015–2016, before rising again to reach 0.38 percent in 2016–2017.

Amazon generated $89 billion in revenue in Q2 2020, greater than the annual budget of the Department of Education ($68 billion), or enough to end malaria worldwide.

Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

Stop saying "we can't afford" Homes for All, Green New Deal or Medicare for All. If we didn't spend trillions on endless wars and tax breaks for millionaires, we could afford to house our homeless, care for our seniors, and save our planet. We suffer from greed, not scarcity. (7/29/2020 on Twitter)

As Kennedy documents in detail, Fauci ensured that the federal agencies that were supposed to regulate industries were instead controlled by the industries they were supposed to regulate. Fauci’s regulatory empire was built on a huge taxpayer-supplied budget and piles of money from big pharma, and all the power that money gave him over hospitals, doctors, research institutes, universities, and even medical journals. Even more, Fauci’s power extends far beyond the US because the reach of American pharmaceutical interests stretches over the globe (especially when mixed with concerns about biological weapons, which brings in our defense and intelligence agencies).

Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents. Only Kentucky and the District of Columbia spent over half of their TANF funds on basic cash assistance.

Nationwide, for every dollar budgeted for TANF in 2020, poor families directly received just 22 cents.

Mental health is an enormous business; in the United States, more money is spent on mental health conditions than any other medical specialty, with an estimated $201 billion spent in 2013 alone and an estimated increase to $280 billion by 2020 (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2014). More than half of the budget for the American Psychiatric Association is income received directly from pharmaceutical companies, and drug-makers are the most frequent and largest donors of mental health advocacy groups (see, e.g., Harris, 2009). Speaking and consulting gigs for the pharmaceutical industry can earn psychiatrists up to $1 million or more in direct fees per year,4 and at least 70% of the professionals making up the task force for the DSM were tied to pharmaceutical companies (Cosgrove & Krimsky, 2012), raising concerns about corporate interests reflected in practice and policy and accusations of disease mongering (Moynihan, Heath, & Henry, 2002). The incentive for ensuring the medical and biological framework for conceptualizing problems in living is huge.

The concept of the end of policing and prisons was not new in 2020. There have been leftists advocating for police and prison abolition for as long as I’ve been politically conscious. Activists demanding the abolition of police had a large corpus of theoretical writing to draw from. But there was usually a key difference between the older school of police and prison abolition and the demands of the most impassioned days of 2020: the former almost always imagined that a world without formal policing would emerge only after other society-altering changes had taken place. Typically, this was defined as the fall of capitalism and the establishment of some sort of socialist system, a system without poverty and deprivation. In other words, the radicals I knew might imagine the end of the police, but they imagined that end would come after the revolution. To debate the concept in 2020 was to skip a lot of steps. This was a general issue in the first year after Floyd’s murder, a sense that people wanted to dodge the hard work that would have been necessary before society-altering changes could take place. In part because of the extremely low odds of success for a police abolition movement, many who supported defunding the police insisted that the intent had never been to abolish the police at all. In this telling, “defund the police” means reducing the budgets of police departments, drawing down their resources, and redirecting some of those funds to other uses,

The government will also receive resources from mines and minerals, and other such revenue generating departments. During the current financial year, Balochistan received its complete share from the federal government as projected in the federal budget for 2020-21.

The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner, accounting for more than 29 percent of its trade in goods in 2020. In tandem, the Frontex budget surged from €6 million in 2006 to €460 million in 2020, rising again to €543 million in 2021. The EU pledged to spend €34.9 billion for border and migration management between 2021 and 2027. The global migrant population accelerated by more than 80 percent between 2000 and 2020 with an estimated 281 million international migrants, 3.5 percent of the world’s population.