Which office is he running for? PotUS or PoS?

He may have been referring to some of the waste over there and there was waste. Unfortunately, given his past track record of disparaging what we did in Iraq, I’m not so sure. One minute he thumps his chest and says he’s going to kick the bad guys’ ass and the next minute he sounds like Code Pink. We took out a very bad regime in Iraq, one with terror ties, WMD, and that murdered tens of thousands of its own people. If he thinks we are worse off without that regime, he probably doesn’t have the foresight to deal with future threats much like the person he is trying to replace.

“In late 2005, several U.S. citizens were criminally charged with respect to the handling of these funds—and have since pled guilty. In February 2007, five more were indicted, of whom four were convicted and one pled guilty,” CRS reported.

$774,300 in cash had been stolen from one division’s vault. Cash payments were made from the back of a pickup truck, and cash was stored in unguarded sacks in Iraqi ministry offices. One official was given $6.75m in cash, and was ordered to spend it in one week before the interim Iraqi government took control of Iraqi funds.”

The minutes from a May 2004 CPA meeting reveal “a single disbursement of $500m in security funding labelled merely ‘TBD’, meaning ‘to be determined’.”

The memorandum concludes: “Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste … thousands of ‘ghost employees’ were receiving pay cheques from Iraqi ministries under the CPA’s control. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

The Pentagon is finally closing the books on the reconstruction programme in Iraq but still cannot say what happened to $6.6billion of the money. [I]nvestigators auditing the cash have admitted that more than half of that huge amount may have been stolen when it got there in ‘the largest theft of funds in national history’.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2003101/Missing-6-6billion-sent-George-W-Bush-aid-Iraq-stolen.html

Listen to Trump’s context.
He was talking about IRAQI soldiers, not AMERICAN soldiers.

And who knows where all that money went?
No one.
We admit that.

Why vote Trump? Because Hillary truly is THAT BAD and a totally corrupted system leaves us no option. If anyone hasn’t realized that by now they’ve had their head in the sand or up Hillary’s butt for several decades. God help this nation if by continued hook and crook that witch retakes the White House instead of facing long overdue justice for her many crimes.

I can’t tell from the snippet of video you provided if Mr. trump was talking about Iraqi or American soldiers, and I really don’t care.
Why not?
When I was in the Army, I knew quite a few soldiers very well. One of them that really stands out in this context was a sawed-off little Puerto Rican dude from the Bronx who was a frequent, and welcome, guest in our home because he loved my wife’s cooking on the one hand, and because we trusted him on the other. He often stayed the night, or watched our young daughter when her mother and I both had the duty, because he was not fearless, but smart-brave, and we knew that anyone who wanted to hurt Teresa would have found it a hard path past him to her.
Having said that, if the Army had given him a sack of cash and told him to pass it out to the civilians, he damned sure wold have tried to find a way to siphon off as much as he could for himself. His buddies only reaction would have been “Good for you. You’re buying at the Liebe Hotel tonight.”
Are our soldiers pretty damned good? Yes. Are they Boy Scouts? No freakin’ way.
Did money disappear in Iraq? Maybe. Don’t know, don’t care.

You seem to be more upset over the fact that he said something than you are curious over whether he was right or not.

@David:

One of the more wasteful efforts was the Al-Arabiya network. Most Iraqis that we ran into said it was like Al Jazeera – chock of full half-truths, lies and propaganda.

Sorry to say, we have our own version of that in this country. It’s called the Main Stream Media.

There are many on both sides who would opt to believe Saddam wasn’t half bad.

It’s like a self fulfilling prophecy for them. Sometimes I wish there was a way we could have had them live under his rule for a year and then ask if they would like us to get rid of him.

He may listen to the briefings and ask good questions, but he always defaults to his flawed understanding of the national security issues and challenges we are facing.

Which calls into question whether or not he’ll make the right decisions like Bush did when he listened to his generals instead of the armchair ones back here and went with the Surge.

As a side note, I checked out Corbin Reiff online. He writes for Rolling Stone Magazine. Not exactly a magazine that held our OIF mission or troops in very high regard. I would think if he was so angry about someone making statements like Trump’s, he would have picked a different magazine to write for. Something doesn’t smell right.

“And now for something completely different…”

Corbin Reiff as the mother and grandmother of great Americans who have served in the armed forces, I say you are a disgrace to the uniform.

@Wordsmith:

If the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming Trump train, America and the conservative movement may be royally screwed.

The conservative movement is screwed. Obama has damaged the country pretty much beyond repair with the help of his fellow leftists and spineless Republicans. Some of it is fixable, some of it is irreversible. The ground we have lost fighting radical Islam is fixable. It will take a Commander-in-Chief who appoints and listens to competent generals (Petreaus, Odierno, Austin) as opposed to incompetent ones (Shinseki) or political yes men (Dempsey) and who rejects fighting the war the PC way.

Other damage may be fixable to an extent but will require time such as healing the racial divide he bestowed upon us and restoring rule of law and the power of the Constitution. Mending his divisive race relations will require a President who acknowledges racism exists while not screaming racism every chance he or she gets. Restoring law and order will require a Supreme Court with a majority of Justices being Constitutionalists. Currently we only have two so that will require a conservative majority in Congress for quite a few years in order to approve them.

Other damage he has done is irreversible the main one being the debt. It is unfixable in not only dollar terms but also in the new standard he has set forth as to what constitutes fiscal responsibility. Before a balanced budget warranted bragging rights. Now a deficit that is under a trillion dollars warrants bragging rights. In order to balance the budget, there would need to be massive cuts to government spending even if the left wing wet dream of taxing the rich 100% were to be put in place. Given how Obamanomics has greatly increased the dependency on handouts, trying to get someone elected to do what is necessary will be next to impossible. That makes all of the above “fixable” damage irreversible because a true conservative won’t get elected in the general election and a left winger will only expand upon the damage Obama has done.

Yep. We are screwed.

@DaNang67: You summed it up perfectly, DaNang67, thank you. And thank you for your continuing service to our country. God bless America1

Donald Trump Shuns Social Security Reform, Takes Target off GOP’s Back

“We’re going to save your Social Security without killing it like so many people want to do,” Mr. Trump said last weekend at a rally in Phoenix.

That also means that when Hillary Clinton Tuesday gives a speech attacking Mr. Trump’s economic policies, she will be deprived of one classic line of Democratic attack on Republicans: telling voters that the GOP is a threat to their Social Security benefits.

Wall Street Journal: Trump’s Social Security Plan ‘Takes Target Off GOP’s Back’

Trump has developed a Third Way economic platform that cuts taxes across the board — and eliminates income taxes for poor people — while also saving Social Security and preserving Medicare in their current versions. The plan is dependent on projected new revenues from Trump’s revised foreign trade deals, new revenues gained from taking off regulations on small companies, and new revenues gained from keeping those companies in the United States.

Trump’s plan seems impervious to Clinton’s attacks. This was evidenced by Clinton’s speech in North Carolina Wednesday. She accused Trump’s plan of increasing the debt and said that his tax cuts “tilt” to the rich.

But those are the same talking points that Clinton and Obama have been using on Republicans like George W. Bush and John Boehner for years. That’s why Clinton had to attack “Congress” and past “Republican presidents,” referring to the Bushes, when she talked in the speech about “trickle-down economics.”

Trump’s plan has nothing to do with trickle-down economics: it eliminates income taxes on the poor.

Donald Trump Rolls Out Winning Platform: Cut Taxes, Save Social Security and Medicare

“We’re going to save your Social Security without killing it like so many people want to do. And your Medicare,” Trump said this weekend at a rally in Phoenix, which followed a rally in Las Vegas where he also highlighted Social Security. Trump is only starting to focus on the issue, but he’s been aware of its political potential at least since the Wisconsin primary, when he taunted conservative-movement candidate Ted Cruz and establishment rival John Kasich: “If we don’t make the country rich again, you’re going to have your Social Security cut by Cruz and Kasich.”

This is a major opportunity for Trump. Both parties have attacked Social Security and Medicare in recent years, causing panic among middle-aged Americans. 51 percent of people who have not yet retired — including 64 percent of people under 30 — doubt that they will ever get any Social Security benefits at all, even though they’re paying into the system. 66 percent of all Americans think Social Security is plagued by either “crisis” or “major problems.” 79 percent of Americans during the 2014 midterm elections wanted Social Security to be increased. 79 percent!

(Snip)

Trump plans to bring back revenue by reversing trade deals, which he says can bring trillions of dollars back into U.S. government coffers practically overnight. He’s also looking for revenue from other sources: He wants to keep companies in the United States by fighting corporate inversion. He wants to dig up $300 billion by allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. He wants to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and eliminate the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. And he wants to help small companies generate more taxable revenue by easing their federal regulatory burden.

“We’re going to get rid of a big, big percentage of the rules and regulations,” Trump said. “We’re going to get rid of Dodd-Frank to a large extent. So that the banks can loan you money because right now they don’t loan businesses money … Unless you have more money than you’re asking for, they don’t want to loan you money because the regulators are running the banks. And you need money to start businesses.”

(Snip)

Trump’s tax plan, which he rolled out during the primaries, is without question the most conservative tax reform plan since Woodrow Wilson and Congress gave us the federal income tax in 1913 — but it still rankles establishment Republicans because it goes after loopholes and tax havens for politically-connected corporations.

The Trump tax plan wipes out income taxes for poor people making less than $25,000 or married couples making less than $50,000, which exempts “nearly 75 million households,” according to the campaign, from losing a dime of wages to the federal government.

For everybody else, you get three tax brackets: 25 percent, 20 percent, or 10 percent. And for businesses, the ceiling is 15 percent for everyone.

Compare that to Ronald Reagan’s tax reform bill of 1986, which conservative hero Grover Norquist’s group Americans For Tax Reform was literally created to help push. Reagan kept the corporate tax rate at 34 percent and the top individual rate at 28 percent. Trump’s plan is much more conservative.

Trump’s plan is also markedly different than George W. Bush’s tax cuts, which gives Trump another advantage: it nullifies the biggest Obama-era criticism of Republican tax policy, that tax cuts favor the wealthy and drive up the deficit in ways that lead to disaster, like the 2008 financial collapse.

Trump is also craftily positioning himself on Obamacare: Get rid of President Obama’s disastrous program, which threw people off their existing private plans and stifled competition, and “replace” it and preserve the universal health care concept but with more inter-state competition and elements of privatization.

Let us note that opening interstate competition for insurance companies was one of the things conservative Republicans wanted to do to help drive healthcare costs down. It also is in following with the tradition of supporting interstate commerce. But the Democrats refused to even let Republicans into the room when they were cooking up Obamacare.

Trump has struck gold politically, but he still has a question to ask himself: How far will he go in preserving the social safety net? Specifically, what will he do about Medicaid? So far, Trump has come out in favor of “block grants” to states for Medicaid. The size of those block grants could end up determining his level of support among African-Americans, who are not currently supporting him by any stretch of the imagination.

Republicans never won the fight to repeal Obamacare, in part, because Obamacare expands Medicaid and that is very popular, especially with African-Americans. Public Policy Polling research during the 2014 midterms — which Republicans still won! — showed 58 percent of people in Florida and 59 percent in Pennsylvania approved of the government expanding Medicaid.

(Snip)

Can Trump really cut taxes and spending better than Ronald Reagan, reverse the Bush-era income inequality aspect of tax cuts, and also save the social safety net? It depends on how much revenue he can really gin up through new trade deals and corporate de-regulations, and it depends on how much budget waste he can eliminate.

But if Trump gets the numbers right, he could overhaul the image that many struggling people have of the Republicans — that they only cut benefits for the poor to pay for their tax cuts for the rich. And he could arrive at a Third Way solution that will change forever the way people vote in America.

I would make another note, and that is that if Trump’s “third way” proves successful, and if he succeeds in putting U.S. workers back to work by transforming the Washington D.C. establishment’s “Service Economy” back into a “manufacturing economy. If all this results in Trump’s promise of more jobs, (higher paying jobs if we can get rid of illegal immigration and its stagnation effect on wages,) then it also means more tax revenues. And one final note; If Trump succeeds, and America prospers, then this will result in raising the Republican party’s reputation, especially among all the voters that the old establishment guard has scorned.

@Greg:

One of Hillary’s own donors agrees with the assessment, but tries to spin it to show how badly it will hurt her Wall Street Crony-class backers.

Donald Trump’s Immigration Plan Boosts Wages, Cuts Unemployment, Says Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street Donor

Donald Trump’s immigration and labor reform policies would force down unemployment, pressure companies to raise Americans’ wages and salaries, and even make housing cheaper for young families, according to a supposedly critical report by Moody’s Analytics now being cited by Trump’s critics, including Hillary Clinton.

“As the immigrants leave, the already-tight labor market will get tighter, pushing up labor costs as employers struggle to fill the open job positions,” the report acknowledged. “Mr. Trump’s immigration policies will thus result in … potentially severe labor shortages, and higher labor costs,” the critical report promises.

The formal unemployment rate would immediately drop by a third, from 5 percent in 2016 to 3.5 percent in 2017, the report predicts. Housing prices would drop by almost 4 percent in 2018 and 2019, says the Moody’s report.

The prediction complements Trump’s repeated populist argument on the campaign trail that large-scale immigration slashes Americans’ salaries.

(Snip)

espite Moody’s good news for working-class and middle-class Americans — whose income and wages have been flat for decades — the report is actually being used by Democrats to slash at Trump.

For example, the New York Times reported Tuesday that “Hillary Clinton’s speech attacking Donald Trump’s economic proposals on Tuesday mentioned a new analysis that says his ideas — if enacted in full — would bring about a ‘lengthy recession’ by the end of his first term.”

The report likely gets the attention of top-level Democrats because it suggests Trump’s reforms would shift wealth from Clinton’s backers on Wall Street to Trump’s backers in Main street. For example, the report claims stock prices would tumble by almost 30 percent by the end of 2019, partly because the departure of the illegal migrants would force up salaries and also reduce the number of taxpayer-supported consumers.

If the market drops, the temporary loss of paper wealth among Clinton’s wall Street donors would be huge. But the Moody’s report also shows the stock market rocketing upwards after 2018, by roughly 40 percent from 2019 to 2021.

(Snip)

The report was prepared by Mark Zandi, a long-standing, self-declared Democrat and an advocate for Democratic policies. In June 2015, for example, he donated the legal maximum of $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign.

In 2009, Zandi predicted Obama’s financial stimulus would produce 5.6 million extra jobs by 2012. That goal was not reached until 2015, five years after the GOP regained their House majority and began slowing Obama’s big-government priorities.

Trump’s tax plans include an increased tax on capital gains, up to 20 percent, which would directly hit Wall Street ‘s short-term investors and bankers.

The report undermines itself by saying that Trump’s promised 2017 reform of the labor market — also known as the repatriation of perhaps 11 million foreign migrants — would mimic the results of Arizona’s 2004 and 2008 reforms, which were analyzed in a 2016 Moody’s report.

But that earlier Moody’s report presented nothing but good news for the state’s labor reformers and for the blue-collar and white-collar Americans whose salaries shot up after the reform.

Arizona’s labor and immigration reforms began in 2004, and the state’s population of roughly 450,000 illegals gradually dropped by roughly 180,000 people from 2007 to 2012, the WSJ reported in February.

Because of the 40 percent drop in illegal labor, the wages earned by Americans rose significantly, said the analysis by Moody’s Analytics. According to the Wall Street Journal:

(Snip)

All those economic, social and technological benefits emerged from only a 40 percent drop in illegal population caused by the state’s modest reforms that Trump is now pitching to all Americans.

Trump has also called for a one-year or two-year pause in legal immigration. That would cut the supply of new labor in those years by roughly 20 percent, further forcing up wages and high-tech investment. Currently, the federal government allows 1 million foreign wage-cutting migrants to enter the United States each year, even though 4 million young Americans enter the weak job market each year.

Trump has also called for reforms to the white-collar guest-worker programs, which would also increase salaries for American college-grads.

Moody’s report echoes the 2013, report by the Congressional Budget Office, which predicted that the much-touted “comprehensive immigration reform plan” would shift national income from wage-earners and from salary-earners over to Wall Street investors. That plan is a mirror image of Trump’s pro-American labor reforms, because the 2013 plan sharply increased immigration and the use of cheap guest-workers.

The 2013 cheap-labor plan was strongly supported by GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is now opposing Trump and his labor reform plans.

So it appears that most of the “bad news” will be for a Trump presidency will be the Wall Street Elite crony capitalists who have had a cosy relationship with the Washington D.C. establishment politicians of both parties. (I understand, Soros has already taken a financial hit because of Brexit.)

Boo-Hoo-hoo.