Trump Diverting $3.6 Billion from Military to Build Border Wall
The Department of Defense has approved a plan to divert $3.6 billion to pay for the construction of parts of President Trump’s border wall, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Tuesday. The money will be shifted from more than 100 construction projects focused on upgrading military bases in the U.S. and overseas, which will be suspended until Congress provides additional funds.
In a letter addressed to Senator James Inhofe, chair of the Armed Services Committee, Esper said that in response to the national emergency declared by Trump earlier this year, he was approving work on 11 military construction projects “to support the use of armed forces” on the border with Mexico.
The $3.6 billion will fund about 175 miles of new and refurbished barriers (Esper’s letter does not use the term “wall”).
Esper described the projects, which include new and replacement barriers in San Diego, El Paso and Laredo, Texas, as “force multipliers” that, once completed, will allow the Pentagon to redeploy troops to high-traffic sections of the border that lack barriers. About 5,000 active duty and National Guard troops are currently deployed on the border.
Months in the making: Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border on February 15, 2019, came in the wake of a showdown with Congress over funding for the border wall. The president’s demand for $5.7 billion for the wall sparked a 35-day government shutdown, which ended when Trump reluctantly agreed to a deal that provided $1.375 billion for border security. By declaring a national emergency, Trump gave the Pentagon the legal authority to move billions of dollars around in its budget to address the purported crisis. Legal challenges to the emergency declaration are ongoing.
Conflict with lawmakers: Congress passed a resolution opposing the national emergency declaration in March, prompting Trump to issue the first veto of his presidency. Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee reiterated their opposition to Trump’s move Tuesday, saying in a letter, “As we have previously written, the decision to take funds from critical military construction projects is unjustified and will have lasting impacts on our military.”
Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer was more forceful, saying in a statement, "It is abhorrent that the Trump Administration is choosing to defund 127 critical military construction projects all over the country … and on U.S. bases overseas to pay for an ineffective and expensive wall the Congress has refused to fund. This is a subversion of the will of the American people and their representatives. It is an attack on our military and its effectiveness to keep Americans safe. Moreover, it is a political ploy aimed at satisfying President Trump's base, to whom he falsely promised that Mexico would pay for the construction of an unnecessary wall, which taxpayers and our military are now being forced to fund at a cost of $3.6 billion.”
A group of 10 Democratic Senators said in a letter to Esper that they “are opposed to this decision and the damage it will cause to our military and the relationship between Congress and the Department of Defense.” They said they also “expect a full justification of how the decision to cancel was made for each project selected and why a border wall is more important to our national security and the well-being of our service members and their families than these projects.”
Politico’s John Bresnahan, Connor O'Brien and Marianne LeVine said the diversion will likely be unpopular with Republican lawmakers as well. Republican Senators Mike Lee and Mitt Romney expressed concerns Wednesday about funds being diverted from their home state of Utah. "Funding the border wall is an important priority, and the Executive Branch should use the appropriate channels in Congress, rather than divert already appropriated funding away from military construction projects and therefore undermining military readiness," Romney said.
The Pentagon released a list of construction projects that will be affected late on Wednesday (you can review a screenshot tweeted by NBC News’ Alex Moe here).
An $8 billion effort: In addition to the military construction funds and the money provided by Congress, the Trump administration is using $2.5 billion in drug interdiction money and $600 million in Treasury forfeiture funds to support the construction of barriers on the southern border, for a total of approximately $8 billion. (More on that here.)
The administration reportedly has characterized the suspended military construction projects as being delayed, but to be revived, those projects would require Congress approving new funding. House Democrats have vowed they won’t “backfill” the money.
The politics of the wall: Trump has reportedly been intensely focused on making progress on the border wall, amid news that virtually no new wall has been built during the first two and a half years of his presidency. Speaking to reporters at the White House Wednesday, Trump said that construction on the wall is moving ahead “rapidly” and that hundreds of miles will be “almost complete if not complete by the end of next year … just after the election.”
How to Defuse Exploding Consumer Credit Debt
The average household had a credit card balance of $7,177 in the first quarter, the highest level in six years, according to a new report by CardHub.
Total consumer credit card debt in the U.S. amounted to more than $57 billion for the quarter, despite paying off $34.7 billion in the quarter.
There was some good news in the report: Credit card defaults for the quarter declined more than $350 million to the lowest rate since 1995, and first quarter debt reduction was 7 percent large than those of the past two years.
About a third of households with credit card debt carries a balance from month to month claims a separate study by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling.
Meanwhile, the number of credit card accounts is increasing. In the first quarter, TransUnion says there were 359.64 million credit card accounts, up 4 percent from the first quarter of 2014.
CardHub estimates that net credit card debt for the year will be $55.8 billion, roughly the same level as last year.
Consumers with high levels of credit card debt could benefit from taking advantage of some of credit card transfers, which are among the sweetest they’ve been in years, with many issuers offering zero-percent transfers for a year or more.
Look for a deal that includes no transfer fees or annual fees. Rolling over debt only makes sense if you can pay it off before or immediately after the introductory rate expires.
The Biggest Apple Hit You've Never Heard Of
Even some of the most diehard Apple fanatics missed one of the company’s biggest rollouts. About a year ago, Apple launched a new computer language, Swift, that is rapidly becoming one of the most popular software languages among programmers, according to Bloomberg.
In rankings of programming languages by developer industry analysts at a firm called RedMonk, Swift placed 22nd early this year, up from 68th in the third quarter of last year.
Apple’s new language now finds itself just one spot behind Coffeescript and one spot ahead of Lua, which might not mean much to you but apparently has developers quite excited.
“The growth that Swift experienced is essentially unprecedented in the history of these rankings,” the RedMonk analysis explains.
Previously, Apple developers could only use Objective C, a language built in the 1980s. Responding to complaints that the language was old fashioned and slow, Apple unveiled Swift, which it had been working on since 2010. Developers have responded to Swift’s safety, modernity and "expressiveness," meaning fewer lines of code are required to get the computer to do specific things.
The ride-hailing service Lyft reportedly rewrote its entire app about six months ago using Swift after finding that updates to the code took much less time. Another early user of the code is SlideShare, a document-sharing service owned by LinkedIn.
Still, as Swift is still undergoing rapid evolution, most developers are choosing to wait before adopting it. As of now, Objective C is still Apple developer’s number one choice, but a fully developed Swift could swiftly change that.
Home Buying Gets Easier as Down Payments Dip
One hurdle to first-time homebuyers is starting to get a little lower: The average down payment for a home fell to less than 15 percent in the first quarter of 2015 to its lowest level since early 2012. The average down payment for the quarter was $57,710, according to RealtyTrac.
The lower down payments reflect new loan programs recently introduced by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and lower insurance premiums for Federal Housing Authority Loans. The market is also adjusting as large, institutional investors who had been buying starter homes as rental investments dial back.
Related: U.S. Homeownership Dips, But Household Formation Rises
“Down payment trends in the first quarter indicate that first-time homebuyers are finally starting to come out of the woodwork, albeit gradually,” RealtyTrac vice president Daren Blomquist said in a statement.
Broken down by type of loan, the average down payment for conventional loans was 18.4 percent ($72,590), and the average down payment for FHA loans was just 2.9 percent ($7,609). FHA loans as a share of all mortgages increased from 21 percent in January to 25 percent in March.
Among the country’s largest counties, Wayne County in Detroit, Mich., had the lowest average down payment (12 percent), and New York had the highest (37 percent).
While lower down payments are good news for first-time homebuyers, they also are a reminder of practices that led to the housing bubble that began to burst in late 2006 and contributed to the financial crisis. During the height of the boom, buyers were able to purchase homes that they couldn’t really afford by putting little or no money down on the property.
House Democrat Calls Congress ‘The Poster Child for Cowardice” on ISIS
Amid growing signs that the U.S. faces nothing but bad choices in its war against ISIS, Rep. Jim McGovern, a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, today denounced Congress as “the poster child for cowardice” for refusing to debate a new war powers resolution to set parameters for the Obama administration’s efforts to “degrade and defeat” the jihadist terrorists in Iraq and Syria.
At the behest of Republican and Democratic leaders, Obama sent a proposed war powers resolution to Congress in February outlining his core objectives of systematically destroying the jihadist terror group through a sustained campaign of airstrikes, supporting and training allied forces on the ground and humanitarian assistance – but without committing a large number of U.S. combat troops to the effort.
Related: U.S. Shoots Itself in the Foot By Accidentally Arming ISIS
The administration proposal would give the military “flexibility” to confront unforeseen circumstances, potentially by deploying Special Forces in the region. But it would limit the mission to three years and would not authorize “enduring offensive ground combat operations.”
But rather than roll up their sleeves and debate and vote on the president’s request for new military authorization, Republican leaders have effectively shelved the issue and moved on to other things, such as rewriting the rules for NSA spying on Americans’ phone calls and providing Obama with fast track authority to negotiate a new trade pact with Asian countries.
With many conservative Republicans including Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina complaining that the president’s strategy for defeating ISIS woefully inadequate and some Democrats worried that it goes too far in committing U.S. troops and resources to a no-win situation in the Middle East, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Corker (R-TN) said recently he had no incentive to take up the issue in his committee.
Related: Why Congress Should Simply Bag the War Powers Debate
Frankly speaking, this is unacceptable,” McGovern, a member of the House Rules Committee, said on the House floor today, adding that if the Congress “doesn’t have the stomach” to authorize the war it should vote to bring U.S. forces home, according to Politico. McGovern introduced a bipartisan resolution that would require full debate within 15 days on whether U.S. troops should withdraw from Iraq and Syria. His bipartisan resolution is co-sponsored by Reps. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Barbara Lee (D-CA).
“This House appears to have no problem sending our uniformed men and women into harm’s way,” McGovern said in prepared remarks. “It appears to have no problem spending billions of dollars for the arms, equipment and airpower to carry out these wars. But it just can’t bring itself to step up to the plate and take responsibility for these wars.”
The Phantom Billionaire Who’s Richer Than Warren Buffett
A practically unheard-of billionaire, Amancio Ortega, just blew past household name Warren Buffett to be the second-richest man in the world, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who is worth $85.5 billion, remains first.
Oretega, who has amassed a net worth of $71.5 billion, is the founding chairman of the Inditex fashion group, the world’s largest apparel retailer. Inditex is best known for its chain of Zara clothing and accessories shops, which had sales of $19.7 billion in fiscal 2014.
Related: Bill Gates Is the World’s Richest Man Again. Or Is He?
Worth noting is that Warren Buffett, whose net worth of $70.2 billion puts him at third place, would be in second-place if not for his philanthropic giving.
A native of Spain, Ortega refuses almost all interview requests and until 1999, no photograph of him had ever been published. However, Zara is not so low-profile. The world’s biggest fashion retailer operates over 6,600 stores in more than 88 countries.
Inditex has shown strong growth year over year. In March, it reported net profit up 5 percent from the previous fiscal year. In addition, the company said it planned to open up 480 more stores this year.
Related: America’s Highest Paid CEO Is Not Who You Think
Key to Ortega’s success has been keeping Zara’s manufacturing close to its home base in the ancient port city of La Coruña, rather than outsourcing production to China to cut costs. This allows Zara to act quickly on new trends and put new products into stories right away. Zara shops receive new shipments of clothing twice a week, virtually unheard of among retail stores.
If Inditex brands continue to grow and Zara’s popularity extends to millennials and beyond, the mysterious billionaire’s wealth could eventually push him to number one on the list.