Are Presidents Above the Law? 

Donald Trump thinks presidents should be allowed to commit crimes. Rubbish.

Trump claims that quote, “A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY” from prosecution for any crime committed while in office. His lawyers even claim that a president could be immune from prosecution for having a political opponent assassinated.

Trump says anything less than total immunity would quote, "incapacitate every future president.” Baloney. It would incapacitate him! He’s the only president who’s been criminally charged with trying to orchestrate a violent coup on January 6th, 2021.

Trump wants to turn the U.S. president into a supreme ruler — who is not bound to the same laws that everybody else is — the very antithesis of the bedrock values this country was founded on. A president shouldn’t be above the law.

In reality, this is all part of Trump’s plan to avoid accountability. He wants to gum up the legal system to delay his federal trial until after the 2024 election. If he really believed he was innocent, wouldn’t he want to have a trial as soon as possible?

Just as bad, the Supreme Court is abetting his plan by dragging its feet.

Trump’s criminal trial in the January 6 case was supposed to begin in March. But now, it’s on hold until Trump’s immunity claim is resolved by the Supreme Court. Who knows how long that will take?

The high court could have ruled on Trump’s immunity claim immediately — which Special Counsel Jack Smith asked it to do last December. Instead, the Supreme Court accepted Trump’s request not to expedite a ruling. Trump’s immunity claim then went slowly through the lower courts, which, not surprisingly, found that, no, presidents DO NOT have carte blanche to commit crimes.

The Supreme Court then had another chance to expedite a ruling on this, but it took weeks even to set a date for arguments.

The Supreme Court can move quickly when it wants to. When Trump appealed Colorado’s decision to keep him off the state ballot, the Supreme Court rushed to get a ruling out before the Colorado primary. Shouldn’t the court move with the same urgency on Trump’s immunity claim? Otherwise, Trump’s January 6th trial may not be decided before the presidential election.

Voters are entitled to know before casting their ballots whether they are choosing a felon for president.

I have just posted this video on YouTube.

Why are we imposing tax rates only designed for those with much higher incomes onto students earning little more than the minimum wage? It makes no sense, at all.

The transcript is:

Why are so many people paying up to 38 per cent tax on quite, well, average levels of earnings in the UK?

As we know, the basic rate of income tax on earnings up to £50,270 a year in the UK in 2024 is supposedly 20%. Supposedly, but not actually, of course.

If you earn your income from work, you also pay National Insurance. And that adds 8 per cent to the bill.

And then if you're a younger person who's been to university, and approximately half of younger people now have, then you'll also be repaying your student loan. If you're earning much over £25, 000, that means that your combined tax rate will now be 38%.

Now, people say, but that's a student loan repayment, that's not a tax.

Of course, it's a tax. It's charged on your income at a fixed rate depending on how much you make. So, it's a tax in anything but name.

And the reality is, that means that a person who is on little more than minimum wage now could be paying 38 per cent marginal tax rates. When somebody earning double that sum - on £60,000 a year, but who did not go to university - might only be paying 42%, and the

There is no sense to this. In fact, the only sense within it is that it is extremely unfair and it must be designed to be so. Why else would we end up with such a bizarre situation? Somebody, I presume, wanted it to happen.

Well, I don't. And I don't think anyone with any sense should. Because this unfairness, first of all between the young, and secondly between those on lower incomes and those who are on higher incomes who had the benefit of going to university free of charge in a great many cases, should not exist inside our tax system.

It's a disincentive to the young, it prevents them saving, it prevents them buying their own homes, it prevents them putting money aside for a pension and it leaves them worse off than those on a much higher level of income with regard to their tax rate.

This should stop. The student loan repayment system does not cover even a tiny proportion of the cost of sending students to university. Let's stop pretending it does. Let's stop charging unfair tax as a result. And let's come up with a better way of funding universal education for everyone, which our society needs.

I am human. I make mistakes. I did so yesterday in the video that we put outin the video that we put out. Instead of saying that proportional representation required the creation of larger constituencies, I said the first-past-the-post did. I did not notice it until the video video was out, when others drew it to my attention. I immediately posted a narrative correction, pointing out the very obvious mistake. I thought that was good enough.

Several commentators disagreed. In every case the theme was similar. The point they made was that I do, inevitably, have critics on the web, and they might jump on such mistakes and use them to suggest that I really do not know what I am talking about. I get that point. I think it might have reasonable in times gone by, when I might well have agreed with them.

On reflection, however, I decided to leave the video on the platforms where I shared it . Firstly, that was because the mistake was acknowledged. It’s hard to really create capital of an acknowledged mistake.

Second, these TikTok orientated videos are not meant to be the ultimate answer to any question. Just like no blog post is intended to achieve that goal these are parts of an ongoing narrative. I think the world sees such content in that way.

Third, my critics will have a go at me even if I get things right. As a matter of fact, blogs ,tweets and other material saying that I am wrong is put out pretty much every day for those who want to believe it.

Fourth, soon if someone wants to make a video of me saying pretty much anything it will be possible for them to do so using AI, and apart from the fact that I will not have put it out it will be very hard to differentiate it from the real thing.

Fifth, perfection is the enemy of the good. If I spent forever trying to eliminate every typo on this blog the amount of content would go down considerably and my enjoyment from doing so would entirely disappear. Despite the fact that I sometimes am apparently unable to spot glaring errors, and have an occasional tendency when using the iPad to make really awful mistakes, the traffic has survived and, based on what they tell me, is the envy of many a publisher who would like returns equivalent to those I enjoy for the effort and cost expended.

Sixth, people were watching, liking and discussing the video and that seemed to be of benefit. Plus, I was out all day and had no alternative material to offer.

Seventh, it’s a lesson learned. Just as this morning’s video has some typos in the transcript ( which is normal almost everywhere as they are AI generated), mistakes happen. And we are only just over a week into this experiment in terms of putting material out.

It has been a massive learning curve. Thomas has worked phenomenally hard and has risen to the challenges, including a demand for speed whilst encountering new issues almost continually, and somehow we got well over 100,000 views in that week. I am pleased with that.

We’ve tried two cameras, and the iPhone is better. Now we need to master it in more environments. The intention is to make way from the desk sometime.

We have tried three microphones and there are strengths and weaknesses. This is a complicated area.

I never thought I would use a sound mixer, but I have.

We have learned a lot about lighting and avoiding glare in my glasses.

I now know why you wear make up when making video, because a little cuts down weird lighting reflections a lot. Oddly, no one seems to notice it if I forget to wipe it off either, so we must have got the balance about right.

And we’ve learned to reject what we’ve made. More attempts have been abandoned than got finished, by some way. We are trying to do well.

That said, we will definitely do better. The focus will be on getting the captions more accurate next. And yes, of course we will try to avoid obvious mistakes. More care will be taken. I/we get the message. But, so far I think the experiment is proving to be worthwhile.

Comments are, of course, welcome.

I posted this on TikTok this morning:

@richardjmurphy

The Bank of England has failed us Across the developed world inflation is now falling back to levels last seen before the Covid crisis. The UK will soon be there. However, interest rates are not falling back to the levels of that period. The Bank of England increased them, saying that doing so would beat inflation, which was untrue, and now they’re keeping them high to benefit the wealthy. It's time they were cut significantly. #bankofengland #money #uk

♬ original sound - Richard Murphy - Richard Murphy