Finally today we see a significant loss for the “Big Club”. Speaker Paul Ryan, the GOPe professional business class, Wall Street and the U.S. CoC accept the Border Adjustment Tax is not going to be a part of any larger tax reform agenda under the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and President Trump win the policy argument with the removal of the B.A.T.
In a joint statement outlining the forward plans for tax reform the “Big Six” tax negotiators (Speaker Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady), announce the consumer punishing BAT will not be included.

[…] “While we have debated the pro-growth benefits of border adjustability, we appreciate that there are many unknowns associated with it and have decided to set this policy aside in order to advance tax reform.” (more)

The B.A.T was to revenue collection on imported products and impact on consumers – what the Obamacare mandate was to revenue collection on healthcare and impact on consumers.
The B.A.T  was simply a scheme to embed the cost of renegotiated trade import tariffs, directly onto the consumer, isolated away from any responsibility on the corporation to reduce their own internal efficiencies as a method to keep the price down. It was a dubious and manipulative effort.
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President Trump’s MAGAnomic and foreign policy agenda is jaw-dropping in scale, scope and consequence. There are multiple simultaneous aspects to each policy objective; they have been outlined for a long time even before the election victory in November ’16.
If you get too far into the weeds the larger picture can be lost. CTH objective is to continue pointing focus toward the larger horizon, and then at specific inflection points to dive into the topic and explain how each moment is connected to the larger strategy.
Today we dive into how MAGAnomic policy interacts with Wall Street, the stock market, the U.S. financial system and perhaps your personal financial value.  Again, the ongoing reference and source material is included at the end of the outline.
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David Mamet famously said (paraphrased): ‘when questioned on policy and consequence, in order to avoid the conflict within their ideological message, modern liberals will always pretend not to know things.’
In today’s audio/visual example we find top national democrat leadership pretending not to know their rebranding message, “A Better Deal“, is nothing short of an almost identical policy platform created by the current President, Donald Trump. A policy platform they are committed to blocking.
You just can’t make this stuff up folks.

“We Haz Plans“

Seriously, it took months of carefully poll tested review of each specific point to create the agenda that Democrats hope will help them win election in 2018. However, if you look at the substance of their “Better Deal” proposals a person cannot help but find themselves feeling deja vu, all over again.
The platform includes: •a $15 minimum wage (economically inadvisable and already having devastating consequences in local areas of enactment), •a $1 trillion infrastructure plan (hey, isn’t that Trump’s idea?), •new trade laws more beneficial to American workers (wait, what, yup, Trump again?), •and a plan to engage in job training and national apprenticeship initiatives (yup, more Trump). Heck, if they throw in a modern Glass-Stegall they can just call it “Trump’s Better Deal 2.0”, or something.
What makes the entire exercise intensely ludicrous is the amount of energy, effort and execution they put into the roll-out:
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Short interview with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney discussing ObamaCare and the potential for Tax Reform.  Unfortunately, one of the key budgetary issues with the failure of ObamaCare reform is the downstream effect on any middle-class tax reform.
Within ObamaCare’s current -mostly political- structure, the expansive growth of Medicaid means tax-paying workers will pay more for insurance premiums and will also be held captive to the need for additional revenue to pay for medicaid; a double whammy.

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If you alert your family not to schedule anything important on round-one NAFTA days, well, you might just be a trade and economics nerd.  LOL  Seriously, this is one of the biggest economic processes that falls almost exclusively outside of the reach of lobbyists.
And within this entire NAFTA trade construct there is little to zero downside to walking away. If Team Trump don’t get what they want from a completely reworked trilateral agreement, they can always just eliminate NAFTA and work on bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada as individual trade partners. Team USA hold all the leverage.  

USTR is anticipating seven rounds of talks which will take place at three week intervals.
The first round is scheduled for August 16th through 20th in Washington DC.

Washington, D.C. – United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer today announced arrangements for the first round of negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
The first round of the negotiations between the United States, Canada and Mexico will take place in Washington, D.C. from August 16 – 20, 2017.
The negotiations immediately follows the 90-day consultation period with Congress and the public initiated on May 18, 2017. On that day, Ambassador Lighthizer notified Congress of President Trump’s intent to renegotiate NAFTA to get a better deal for America’s workers, farmers, businesses and manufacturers.

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Those who have followed the MAGAnomic trade and economic policy closely were aware a tonal shift had taken place in the last several weeks.
Specifically because of their weak position, and faced with the first U.S. President in their modern economic history who intends to stop the erosion of American wealth, China intentionally used North Korean aggression in order to create trade leverage with the U.S.
Today, at the U.S./China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue in Washington DC Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross left no room to doubt the approach President Trump and the U.S. trade team are going to take in the upcoming trade standoff.
At opening remarks between the two sides, Ross outlined the U.S. trade gap with China in unusually blunt terms. While U.S. exports to China have grown in recent years, imports have expanded even faster, leading to a $309 billion trade deficit.

“If this were just the natural product of free-market forces, we could understand it, but it’s not,” Ross said, as Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang looked on. “So it’s time to rebalance in our trade and investment relationship in a more fair, equitable and reciprocal manner.”  (video below)

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It would appear Mitch McConnell, and the larger congress, just lit the fuse on “the big ugly“.  Winter is coming.

• President Trump has requested all Republican Senators to attend a White House luncheon, held entirely in their honor, tomorrow.  • President Trump has also announced a MAGA rally to be held in Youngstown Ohio, next week.   • Not coincidentally this rally announcement comes on the same day Ohio governor John Kasich writes an op-ed in the New York Times gleefully celebrating the defeat of the senate healthcare reform and  ObamaCare repeal. • HHS Secretary Tom Price is NOT HAPPY.
Oh yeah, the Big Ugly is coming.  President Trump is not a politician.

The failure of congress to pass Obamacare reform means the tax reform agenda for the middle class is now far less likely.  The UniParty Congress know this.  The UniParty Congress is doing the bidding of the lobbyists.
The escalating costs of ObamaCare, specifically because of the Medicaid expansion, means increased tax revenues are needed to pay for the program.  John Kasich, and his crew of like-minded governors (there are eleven) demand their state get more federal dollars.  This means more income tax revenues are needed.  This means no middle-class tax relief.
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Various senators deliver remarks following the collapse of their ability to reform and replace ObamaCare with any alternative.  Beginning with the controlled opposition position of Rand Paul and continuing with Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP leadership (at 15:00 of video).

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What these insufferable politicians well understand is that any substantive tax reform will necessarily also be compromised by the flawed dynamics inside ObamaCare. That will have a negative downstream impact on any hope for economic growth. However, they are not stupid – they know this – that is their unified UniParty goal.
The increasing taxpayer costs to keep big government ObamaCare operational, for non-taxpaying medicaid recipients, means the middle-class is once again sacrificed at the altar of the Big Club.
American workers on the individual market will not only see increased insurance rates, but their income tax rates will also be higher as the need to subsidize the lower-income non-working group (medicaid) remains.
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To understand the larger objectives of the global and financial elite it is important to understand the three-decade global financial construct they seek to protect. Global financial exploitation of national markets:

♦Multinational corporations purchase controlling interests in various national elements of developed industrial western nations.
♦The Multinational Corporations making the purchases are underwritten by massive global financial institutions, multinational banks.
♦The Multinational Banks and the Multinational Corporations then utilize lobbying interests to manipulate the internal political policy of the targeted nation state(s).
♦With control over the targeted national industry or interest, the multinationals then leverage export of the national asset (exfiltration) through trade agreements structured to the benefit of lesser developed nation states – where they have previously established a proactive financial footprint.

Since initially explaining this modern import/export dynamic some have asked for specific examples in order to gain a better understanding.  There are a myriad of interests within each sector that make specific explanation very challenging.  However, here’s an attempt.
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Earlier today USTR Robert Lighthizer released President Trump’s NAFTA Objectives outline to congress and the American people.  The NAFTA renegotiations are scheduled to begin in August.
The bilateral trade negotiations with the EU (European Union), S.E.A.N. (Southeast Asian Nations), China, U.K. and all other nations will follow -individually- after the NAFTA process is complete.

It cannot be overstated how critical this is.  Please, please, understand.  There are trillions of dollars at stake.   All political opposition to President Donald Trump will increase in exponential severity as the dates of these renegotiated trade deals draws closer.  There are trillions of dollars at stake.   The entities outlined below will throw everything at the current administration in an effort to secure a better financial outcome for their interests.
Multinational Corporations, Wall Street interests and Multinational Financial stakeholders (mostly banks and foreign governments), have lobbied DC politicians for decades to create trade outcomes favorable to them.  It is, at its core, the financial and policy cancer that has distributed America’s physical and financial wealth globally. Additionally, multinational corporate media are part of this entire process and are stakeholders in the outcomes.
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