So Trump finally signed the Virus Relief bill, thereby solving a problem he created. As millions panicked over where they would get money for food and shelter and others sweated out losing their homes, Trump sat on his fat ass and cheated on his golf score.
It was painfully obvious when he took office that Trump knew almost nothing about how government worked and it became even more obvious over the last four years that he had no desire to fill this information gap. All that came to a head when Trump decided it would be a good idea to throw a monkey wrench into the Virus Relief bill by demanding the weekly giveaway jump to $2000 from $600. Sure it had a lot to do with an outsized ego wanting to be in the forefront of that in which he had been too lazy to involve himself in the first place, but it also had very much to do with his lifelong pursuit of ignorance. He has no idea how anything works and no desire to find out. This, along with being the worst President in the history of the United States, will be Trump’s legacy.
******
People keep complaining that Trump isn’t doing anything but playing golf when he should be jumping into all the problems at which his disgraceful administration is failing. Intelligent viewers know better. Play golf Donald! Play from dawn to dusk. Just stay the hell out of the government. Anyone who wants to see this moronic stumblebum try to work on our country’s problems isn’t playing with a full deck.
Trump is so completely non-functional that all he can do by sticking his wrinkled nose into the business of government is to create chaos and screw up whatever he touches.
The one thing that Trump, a spiteful little snot-nosed brat, could but won’t do is order his various departments to stop dicking around and get down to cooperating with the Biden people on making the transition happen. Biden had to take to the tube this week to complain about a lack of cooperation.
Neither Trump nor his lackeys seem to understand that their lack of cooperation in making the transition happen smoothly is tantamount to treason.
*****
Meanwhile, in typical Trumpian tradition, while the fat clown isn’t cooperating in the transition, he is sticking his bloated nose where it no longer has any business. He had his shot at making the COVID Relief bill work and he never went near it. Now that it is all settled and ready to go he decides that it needs his non-functional help and demands an increase in the payout. Yes the increase is a good thing but it should have happened months ago when the negotiating was going on, not last week when all they needed was his signature and time was running out. Moscow Mitch was not happy with any payout, but he thought he had the whole mess in his pocket when the Dumb Orange decided to open his fat mouth. McConnell wanted it off the table because it was messing up the election in Georgia. At least he could say the GOP voted for something and now he will never get the conservatives to vote for the $2000 payoff. That will kill the chances of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the GOP candidates who regardless of the reality, need Georgians to think they are for helping the poor,.
Loeffler and Perdue are begging McConnell to go with the $2000 but he just can’t. What he really wants to do is shove the suggestion down Trump’s throat with the fat end of a baseball bat. This one’s gonna be fun.
*****
Watched Governor Cuomo’s news conference this week and admired how open and transparent he was to the questions, especially about the problems that have come with the non-eviction legislation. Full disclosure, I am the owner of a small building with 8 tenants, 3 of whom are stabilized and a couple of others who have been hit hard by the economic results of the pandemic.
I agree with the Governor that no one who is the victim of the pandemic should be evicted during the pandemic and that neither penalties nor interest should be paid on rents not paid because of job or business loss as a result of the virus. I even think that when possible, rents lost should, be forgiven but I also think that cities and the state must, at minimum, share the burden when it comes to property taxes and their abatement.
Yes! I know the states and cities are getting killed because of the lack of cooperation from Washington but just as it’s the landlord’s job to keep his building going, it’s the governor’s job to do that with the state. So if it means not paying it’s share of state collected taxes to the federal government until they come up with some COVID relief funding to carry the states over, that’s what has to be done.
Look, I know that everyone doesn’t agree with me about giving the tenants a free ride even when they are, through no fault of their own, unable to pay their rent, but to me it’s the only approach that makes sense. This is especially true with commercial tenants like restaurants that have been shut down by the government. Do these building owners really think that they are going to re-rent this space in a city where half the commercial space was empty before the pandemic hit?
A walk down Broadway on the Upper West Side a year and a half ago, before the pandemic hit, revealed one empty store after another, the result of inflated rents that no business could support. A brand new beautiful building on the SW corner of 80th & Broadway has been offering its street floor for three years now and has yet to attract a tenant. Maybe if its greedy owners had asked a reasonable rent it wouldn’t have been so hard to find a tenant. Now with the pandemic it’s impossible.
Why you ask, when they saw they couldn’t rent the space didn’t they just reduce the rent? It’s not that easy. They had already put themselves in a box by their original greedy demand. This happened when they sold their residential apartments whose costs and maintenance fees were based on the unreasonable rent they planned to get from the commercial part of the building. If they now rent that space for less, they will have to go back to tenants who signed solid contracts and try to get them to shell out more. Would you? No? Well you might have to.
With the small residential landlords it’s a whole other problem. Most, like me, own one building with a few tenants. Maybe they even live in it themselves. The ones that do barely break even and some don’t even do that, but they depend on their rents to keep the buildings going and pay the taxes. If you evict a tenant who has always paid his rent simply because his job was a victim of the pandemic you may never get as good a tenant again. What do you do? I say you have to help them get through this, just as the city has to help you with the property taxes because you have always paid them on time. So here we are. It’s time for the city to step up, but it can’t until the feds do their share. That means nothing can happen until the fat creep from Mar-a-Largo has left the building.