Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.

In the category of:  Ego on display

Military chiefs have concerns about politicization of Trump’s 

In the category of:  All hail the Chief

OF COURSE TRUMP’S NEW FED NOMINEE THINKS TRUMP IS AN ECONOMIC GENIUS

Judy Shelton also thinks the Fed is the “biggest risk” to the economy.

Earlier this year, Donald Trump’s Fed Board nominees crashed and burned when it turned out that, in addition to being economically illiterate, they had résumés that included hawking worthless penny stocks and writing misogynistic, racist, and generally disturbing op-eds. And while some people’s takeaway from that experience might have been to pick a nominee whose views don’t indicate they might try to destroy the Fed from the inside, that’s obviously not how Donald Trump rolls. Instead he’s tweeted his intention to recommend one Judy Shelton to the Fed Board.

What does the president like about Shelton? Well, first and foremost, she’s offered regular praise for his economic policies, cheering his $1.5 trillion tax cut, two-for-one deregulatory approach, and trade war with China. That counts for a lot. Second, she has called for the Fed to lower interest rates to nearly 0%, which Trump has unsuccessfully tried to bully current Fed chair Jerome Powell into doing for over a year now. Third, she’s called the Fed the “biggest risk” to the economy, and said things like, “How can a dozen, slightly less than a dozen, people meeting eight times a year, decide what the cost of capital should be versus some kind of organically, market-supply determined rate? The Fed is not omniscient. 

Continue

In the category of:  Tell me about you.

It’s a major win for Democrats and activists.

In a major win for Democrats and activists — and disappointment for President Donald Trump — the US census will not include a citizenship question the next time it is conducted in 2020.

This decision, announced by former Obama White House counsel Daniel Jacobson on Tuesday, comes in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last week. The ruling temporarily barred the addition of a citizenship question, noting that the Trump administration’s reasoning for adding it didn’t pass muster. The court did not, however, forbid the White House f

rom including the question. Instead, it simply asked for it to come up with better evidence for why it wanted to add the query to the standard census for the first time since 1950.

At that point, the administration was forced to make a choice, Dara Lind reports for Vox: Either it could move forward with the census, sans citizenship question, and meet a June 30 deadline for completing the needed forms. Or it could attempt to cobble together more evidence to prove why it wanted a citizenship question and try to secure a court decision in its favor, while delaying the kickoff of the census printing process until as late as October.

Trump responded to the decision by repeatedly arguing that delays to the census might be necessary and said he had asked the “lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long.”

Continue