Los Angeles Times – Op-Ed

Pebble Mine is a poison pill for Alaska’s wild salmon

An employee of Northern Dynasty Mines Inc. mans a drilling rig in the Pebble Mine East site near the village of Iliamna, Alaska on June 6, 2007. (Los Angeles Times)

By Carl Safina, Joel Reynolds      November 9, 2017

The Bristol Bay watershed, in southwest Alaska, comprises 40,000 square miles of bogs and evergreen forests, rimmed by distant mountains and shimmering with rivers and feeder streams. In these waterways, miracles happen. Together they sustain the largest remaining salmon fishery on Earth.

For more than a decade, a Canadian mining company, Northern Dynasty Minerals, has wanted to gouge one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines into the heart of the watershed, putting its rivers on a centuries-long poison drip. The company has failed to move forward with the project, known as Pebble Mine, due to intense and sustained opposition. It has also been burdened by proposed restrictions recommended by the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency — the result of a four-year review.

But President Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, has rejected his agency’s review and moved to withdraw its proposal to impose restrictions on the mine, thereby reviving the company’s prospects for federal permitting. Pruitt is poised to take this action imminently, showing a flagrant disregard for the public’s overwhelming opposition.

Now, in what could very well be the most important land-use decision in North America in our time, an essentially eternal supply of food is pitted against an essentially eternal supply of poison.

Alaskans understand that the Pebble Mine is a death wish: 65% of the state’s residents oppose it.

If Pruitt wins, we all lose. The Bristol Bay watershed generates half the world’s remaining wild salmon, including five species: the scarlet sockeyes, the hard-charging kings, the silver coho, the humpbacked pinks and the placid chums. Together the salmon support 14,000 jobs and generate $1.5 billion annually.

Last year alone, 60 million wild salmon surged into the watershed, drawn to its many rivers by faintly remembered scents. This year, on two separate occasions, fishermen caught more than a million fish in a single day. Records were shattered, and several boats became so overloaded that they actually sank.

Nowhere else in the modern world does the landscape grant so much food. You’d think everyone would realize the place is sacred. To Native people, it is — literally.

Salmon perform a kind of alchemy. Although they live most of their lives in the ocean, hundreds of miles from the coastline, they shelter their young from the open sea by hiding them in rivers. In so doing, they bring the nutrients of the ocean to us. Those that get past the fishing nets bring nourishment further uphill, against gravity, to feed eagles and bears and fertilize the forests that shade the streams, which in turn produce more salmon, supporting more communities.

This embarrassment of riches could last an additional few thousand years, or it could be destroyed. Alaskans understand that the Pebble Mine is a death wish: 65% of the state’s residents oppose it; in the Bristol Bay region, that number grows to more than 80%. The opposition includes recreational fishermen, owners of tourist lodges, the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, which is the largest private landowner in the region, and most commercial fishing communities.

It took the Obama administration EPA four years to study the question of how the Pebble Mine would affect the Bristol Bay watershed, ultimately concluding that putting an open-pit mining operation there would be profoundly reckless. The EPA said the mine would produce billions of tons of toxic waste that could not be reliably contained; that it would remain poisonous to water and wildlife for centuries; that it would pose “catastrophic” risks to salmon and other seafood; and that the generative value of the watershed exceeded the value of the mine. The agency proposed significant restrictions. Northern Dynasty’s corporate partners abandoned the project, and the company’s stock plunged 90%. Yet it took Pruitt only one hour with the CEO behind the mine, Tom Collier, to decide last May that the EPA should scrap its review.

We have already destroyed what had previously been the largest salmon complex in the world, the Columbia River system. Global warming, dams, the logging industry and pollution are continuing to debilitate salmon. Farms in British Columbia breed Atlantic salmon, which infest young native salmon with lethal parasites. The resident killer whales of the Pacific Northwest are starving because of salmon destruction.

All that has been lost along the coastline south of Alaska remains fully functioning in the Bristol Bay watershed. There is no simple route to stopping the Pebble Mine — it will take lawsuits, activism and sustained opposition at the state and federal levels — but it must be stopped. It sacrifices too much. The Bristol Bay watershed needs to be protected, its rivers and salmon unspoiled.

Carl Safina is a professor of journalism at Stony Brook University and the founder and president of the Safina Center. Joel Reynolds is western director and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

CNN     KFILE

Trump environmental pick pressed at Senate hearing for comparing belief in climate change to paganism

By Andrew Kaczynski and Chris Massie, CNN    November 9, 2017

Story highlights

• Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley from Oregon pressed White about her past comments at her confirmation hearing to be chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality.
• “I believe those words, senator, with all due respect, have been taken out of context,” White responded.

(CNN)President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the White House’s senior environmental adviser told a Senate committee Wednesday that controversial comments she made, including comparing the belief in global warming to paganism, were taken out of context but added there could have been some mistakes in her writings.

CNN’s KFile previously reported that in 2016, Kathleen Hartnett White described the belief in global warming as a “kind of paganism” for “secular elites.” She also said the goal of climate activists and the United Nations was an all powerful one-world government and “planetary management.”

Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley from Oregon pressed White about her past comments at her confirmation hearing to be chair of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality.

“When you say that those who are concerned about global warming are paganists, and totalitarianists, and Marxists, when you say that, do you believe Oregon’s farmers, who are concerned about three worst-ever droughts with the impact of climate changes are Marxists, or totalitarians, or pagans?” Merkley asked.

“I believe those words, senator, with all due respect, have been taken out of context,” White responded.

“Well, they’re words directly from your writings,” Merkley responded.

Merkley then noted that there are multiple quotes from White “calling environmentalists Marxist, and those who are concerned about climate change as pagans.”

“I think I submitted about 100 pages of either commentaries or research studies that I have done. In that entire corpus there may be some mistakes,” White responded.

White did not immediately respond to questions from CNN asking which quotes she believed were taken out of context.

Later in the exchange, White said she did believe the planet was getting warmer but did not believe carbon dioxide levels had gone up dramatically.

Reuters  Business

Arkansas pushes ahead with summertime ban on Monsanto, BASF weed killers

FILE PHOTO: Monsanto logo is displayed on a screen where the stock is traded on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., May 9, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo

By Tom Polansek, Reuters         November 9, 2017

CHICAGO (Reuters) – An Arkansas regulatory body voted on Wednesday to bar the use of a weed killer critical to Monsanto Co’s seed sales for a second consecutive summer, ratcheting up a standoff after the company sued the state to prevent restrictions on the product.

The Arkansas State Plant Board plans to prohibit sprayings of products containing a chemical known as dicamba between April 16 and Oct. 31, 2018, after an estimated 3.6 million acres of U.S. crops suffered damage linked to the herbicides this year.

A state legislative subcommittee must approve the ban before it becomes official.

The United States has faced a weed-killer crisis this year caused by new versions of herbicides with dicamba, which farmers and weed experts say harm crops because they evaporate and drift away from where they are applied.

Monsanto and BASF SE, which also manufactures a dicamba-based weed killer, say the products are safe when properly applied.

“These new tools need to be available as choices for these growers,” Scott Partridge, Monsanto’s vice president of global strategy, said by telephone after addressing the board at a meeting in Arkansas.

BASF said the ban would be a step backwards for Arkansas farmers.

The companies’ herbicides are designed to be sprayed during the summer over soybeans and cotton that Monsanto engineered to resist dicamba.

Monsanto is banking on its dicamba-resistant soybean seeds to replace seeds that withstand glyphosate, a herbicide used for decades but which is becoming less effective as weeds develop resistance. The dicamba-resistant soybeans also resist glyphosate.

Monsanto’s net sales jumped 8 percent in fiscal year 2017 due partly to increased sales of dicamba-resistant soybean seeds. The company, which is being acquired by Bayer AG for $63.5 billion, also has invested more than $1 billion in a Louisiana dicamba production facility.

Arkansas previously prevented farmers from using Monsanto’s dicamba herbicide in 2017 because the company did not submit studies the state wanted on volatility, or the product’s tendency to evaporate.

On Tuesday, Monsanto provided the board with three binders of data on dicamba, Partridge said, part of a wider attempt to convince U.S. regulators its herbicide is safe.

Monsanto in September questioned the objectivity of two weed experts in Arkansas who said dicamba could drift and last month sued state officials to stop the proposed summertime ban.

Last week, the company asked the plant board to disqualify a member named Terry Fuller from considering the proposal. The board allowed Fuller to participate in Wednesday’s meeting, but he recused himself from voting.

(Reporting by Tom Polansek; Editing by Tom Brown)

EcoWatch

National Wildlife Federation     November 8, 2017

Why the Line 5 Oil Pipeline Threatens the Great Lakes

A diver with the National Wildlife Federation examines Line 5, Enbridge’s oil and gas pipeline running along the bottom-lands of the Straits of Mackinac. National Wildlife Federation

An aging oil pipeline moves 23 million gallons of oil and natural gas liquids per day along the bottom-lands of the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron crash into each other in the heart of the Great Lakes.

This pipeline—Line 5, built in 1953—is operated by the same company responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in North American history: Enbridge. During that pipeline rupture, previously known cracks formed into a 6 foot gash which spilled more than 840,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010.

Endangered piping plovers nest along the Great Lakes shorelines which would be impacted by a Line 5 oil spill.Vince Cavalieri / USFWS

What’s Wrong with the Pipeline?

There are numerous places along the underwater section of the pipeline where protective coating is missing, and for much of the history of the pipeline, sections of pipe were not properly supported on the Lake Michigan lakebed—where it gets pummeled by oscillating currents. In fact, those supports were not replaced until video from a National Wildlife Federation dive inspection revealed they were lacking. Recently, Enbridge itself confirmed that part of its outer protection coating was missing from sections of the pipeline, and revealed in October 2017 that it has known about missing sections of coating since 2014 but failed to report the easement violation to state officials.

An April 2017 National Wildlife Federation report revealed that the land-based sections of Line 5 have leaked at least 29 times since 1968, spilling more than 1 million gallons of oil. We cannot risk a spill in the Straits, which a 2016 University of Michigan study estimates could put up to 700 miles of shoreline at risk depending on current and weather conditions, with up to 150 miles impacted in any one spill, risking a 17,000-square mile spill zone.

Additionally, the pipeline has been operating without an adequate spill response plan, as required by the Clean Water Act. Due to this, the National Wildlife Federation sued the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in January 2017, challenging this illegal operation of the pipeline.

What’s at Stake?

At risk are the fish and wildlife of the Great Lakes, the drinking water relied upon by citizens, and the region’s recreation and tourism economy which supports the northern Michigan way of life. So it should be no surprise that two-thirds of Michiganders oppose the continued operation of the pipeline under the Straits, as reported by a 2016 EPIC-MRA poll commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation.

Of particular note is the threat to the endangered piping plover shorebird. Piping plovers nest in the summer along the sandy beaches of the Great Lakes, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated critical habitat for piping plovers which falls within the spill zone risk identified by the University of Michigan.

What’s Being Done About It?

The State of Michigan released a report on alternatives to Line 5 on June 29, while the week before it scrapped a risk analysis due to a conflict of interest arising from an employee of the firm hired to do the analysis also working on a separate project for Enbridge.

In September, Michigan’s Pipeline Safety Advisory Board authorized a panel of academic experts from Michigan’s universities, led by Dr. Guy Meadows of Michigan Technological University, to resume the risk analysis.

“This is a positive step in getting the state the actionable information it needs to decommission Line 5,” said Mike Shriberg, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Regional Center, and a member of the Pipeline Safety Advisory Board when the academic study was approved. “Engaging top academic minds will ensure that Michigan’s residents and resources will be prioritized.”

Demand Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder act to keep the Great Lakes safe!

ThinkProgress

Trump’s choice for No. 2 at EPA admitted he saw coal baron’s action plan to dismantle agency

Lobbyist attended meetings on Rick Perry proposal to subsidize coal plants.

Mark Hand           November 8, 2017

Andrew Wheeler, President Donald Trump’s nominee for deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, testifies at his confirmation hearing on November 8, 2017. CREDIT: screenshot/Senate EPW committee

President Donald Trump’s nominee for deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admitted he viewed a plan developed by a top coal producer to roll back environmental regulations at the agency and attended meetings on Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants.

Testifying at his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Andrew Wheeler said Murray Energy was one of his lobbying clients while working at the law firm Faegre Baker Daniels. But Wheeler said he de-registered himself as a Murray Energy lobbyist in August.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), in his questioning of Wheeler, said Robert Murray, the head of Murray Energy, “has said that he has a three-page plan that is being implemented by Scott Pruitt at the EPA. He said they’re already through the first page.”

Wheeler, who previously worked on the staff of a top congressional climate science denier, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), acknowledged seeing a copy of Murray’s “action plan” earlier this year. Murray said he provided the plan to Trump in January to help the struggling coal industry. “I did not work on that [plan] or have a copy of that memo,” Wheeler said. “I saw it briefly at the beginning of year but don’t have possession of it. I looked at it.”

Whitehouse contended it’s significant if the CEO of a coal company “has given his regulator a three-page plan” and “takes credit for having gotten through the first page of it already.”

This coal baron has Trump’s ear. What he says is utter nonsense.

PBS gave Robert Murray a platform to say climate change is a gambit to enrich Democrats, not a crisis for humanity.

With Wheeler’s nomination, “We have a candidate for deputy administrator who said he’s seen it and can confirm it exists. I think the American people are entitled to an EPA that is not following a coal company’s three-page plan but is following wherever the best interests of the American people lead,” Whitehouse said.

Since Trump took office, Murray has repeatedly met with administration officials, including at least three times with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Murray has also met with Perry, whom Murray pressed for an executive order to keep coal plants from closing.

Wheeler told the Senate panel that he met with the Department of Energy on behalf of Murray a few months ago about Perry’s proposal to subsidize coal and nuclear plants. He said he also participated in a Capitol Hill meeting on the proposal, which Perry sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for implementation.

Politico reported Monday that Perry’s proposal to change the nation’s electricity markets would provide a windfall for a small group of companies, including Murray Energy. The narrowly written plan would mostly aid power plants in a part of the Midwest and Northeast where Murray Energy is the primary coal supplier, according to Politico.

The Sierra Club said it strongly opposes Wheeler’s nomination to the No. 2 position at the EPA. “Wheeler was not only a key D.C. advocate for the coal industry, but also a former aide for outspoken climate-denying senator James Inhofe,” Matthew Gravatt, Sierra Club’s associate legislative director, said in a statement Wednesday.

ThinkProgress

White House admits Trump climate policies will destroy all U.S. coastal property

Will GOP tax reform burst the trillion-dollar U.S. coastal property bubble?

Joe Romm          November 7, 2017

 Downtown Houston flooding from Superstorm Harvey, August 28, 2017. CREDIT: AP/Jason Dearen

The massive climate report released by the Trump administration on Friday makes clear that the President’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the decades to come.

That means more than $1 trillion in U.S. coastal property will eventually be valueless. So the only question is “when” and not “if” that trillion-dollar housing bubble will burst.

The answer appears to be sooner, rather than later, for two reasons. First, the administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst-case scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming. Second, the GOP tax reform bill will directly deflate coastal property values because it targets the tax breaks for the most expensive properties.

Climate change poses ‘nightmare scenario’ for Florida coast, Bloomberg warns

America’s trillion-dollar coastal property bubble could burst “before the sea consumes a single house.” Here’s why.

Sea levels are rising, and Trump policies will speed that up

Let’s start with how Friday’s congressionally-mandated National Climate Assessment (NCA) makes clear Trump’s climate policies will destroy every last bit of U.S. (and global) coastal property in the coming decades.

The report, the “authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States” by scientists from 13 federal agencies — which the Trump administration reviewed and cleared before releasing Friday — paints a grim picture for our coasts.

The scientists can’t rule out eight feet of sea level rise by century’s end (the “extreme” scenario). But then, the Arctic sees upwards of 18°F warming in the 2071-2100 timeframe, so melting of the Greenland ice sheet will be off the charts.

The NCA looks at a variety of scenarios, including ones where the nation and world meet or even surpass the Paris climate targets to minimize total warming. But it also examines higher emissions scenarios where Paris fails. They reflect plausible worst-case scenarios on the business-as-usual path, which is the path that Trump’s policies keep us on.

In those “intermediate-high” and “high” scenarios, sea levels rise 4.9 to 6.6 feet respectively by century’s end. Significantly, they rise 1.4 to 1.8 feet by 2050, which is in the time frame of 30-year mortgages that banks will soon be considering. When banks stop providing those mortgages, property values will plummet.

Remember, the storm surge from future Harveys and Sandys will be on top of whatever sea level rise we see, which is why studies find that, in high emissions scenarios, Sandy-type storm surges occur every year or two by mid century.

NOAA: Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise To Make Sandy-Type Storm Surges The Norm On East Coast 

The report also looks at the often neglected rate of sea level rise in the coming decades. In the “high” scenario, seas are rising 8 inches per decade by 2050, and 14 inches per decade by 2090. That rise continues to accelerate until it reaches a rate of 2 feet per decade early in the next century.

How exactly do coastal areas adapt to such rapid and accelerating sea level rise? How rapidly do you abandon places that you know will be repeatedly inundated by the combination of sea level rise and storm surge in the coming decades?

And for those who consider such rates of sea level rise unlikely, the NCA has some bad news. The United States is all but certain to see higher “relative sea level” [RSL] rise than the global average especially in the Northeast and the western Gulf of Mexico. In fact for “for high [Global Mean Sea Level] rise scenarios, RSL rise is likely to be higher than the global average along all U.S. coastlines outside Alaska.”

Moreover, the report warns that “climate models are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate the amount of long-term future change.” Again, that means sea level rise is likely to be higher and faster than the report’s projections, especially under Trump’s policies.

The trillion-dollar coastal property bubble is ready to burst

The implications for coastal property values are grave. “The risk will rise as sea levels rise, and when that happens, you’d expect your property value to fall,” as Lloyd Dixon, the director of the RAND Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation, told the International Business Times last month. “At some point, the property becomes worthless.”

Sean Becketti, the chief economist for mortgage giant Freddie Mac, warned a year ago that the coastal property bubble will burst sooner than expected: “Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses. Others will not be so lucky.”

As Bloomberg put it in April, “Demand and financing could collapse before the sea consumes a single house.”

That process may already be starting. Last November, the New York Times reported that “nationally, median home prices in areas at high risk for flooding are still 4.4 percent below what they were 10 years ago, while home prices in low-risk areas are up 29.7 percent over the same period.”

Jesse Keenan, who studies coastal property, has “begun to see evidence in survey data that middle-income people are leaving Miami Beach and other places with nuisance flooding that makes it difficult to get around at high tides or insure a car,” Scientific American reported back in May. “It’s not out of the question that Miami Beach loses 20 percent of its population and most of those people go to the mainland,” said Keenan. “I’m talking about the next 20 years.”

The GOP tax plan could start to deflate the bubble

The GOP tax reform bill the House of Representatives is considering takes a few whacks at states with a lot of coastal property. As the New York Times reports, it proposes “to put a cap of $10,000 on the property taxes that can be deducted at the federal level; to eliminate the deduction for state and local income taxes; and to restrict the mortgage interest deduction to loans of $500,000 or less.”

The key point is these changes hit the highest-price homes the most — and coastal property values are nearly double the value of similar inland property, according to a Congressional Budget Office study. They could deflate coastal property values more than 10 percent.

Given that the coastal property bubble must burst sometime in the not-too-distant future — and that the early sellers of overpriced coastal property will do a lot better than the later ones — this initial deflation may well hasten the inevitable sell-off.

Here’s the ultimate question for owners of coastal property —  and the financial institutions that back them: Who will be with the smart money that gets out early  —  and who will be with the other kind of money?

The Nation

The GOP Tax Bill Is an Attempt to Destroy Government

Americans need more services, not less.

By Robert L. Borosage        November 3, 2017

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell with Senate majority whip John Cornyn, and Senator John Barrasso, talk to reporters, July 25, 2017. (AP Photo / Jacquelyn Martin)

The House Republican tax bill has been introduced, packaged beautifully with lies. Now House Republicans will push to pass, in one week, a 500-page bill written in secret that transforms the tax code. Powerful special interests will spend millions for and against. Legions of lobbyists will fill congressional offices. Experts will duel over the effects. Trump is already boasting about “a great Christmas present” of the biggest tax cuts ever.

Republicans hope that the fog of competing claims will cover their tracks. In the midst of the frenzy, remember one thing: this entire project is utterly wrong-headed. Few politicians dare say it, but the reality is Americans are not overtaxed. They are under-served by their government.

American corporations and American citizens are not overtaxed, compared with other industrial nations. The greatest impediment to corporate competitiveness isn’t what corporations pay in taxes; it is an inefficient, outdated, and increasingly dangerous infrastructure. It is time wasted in traffic jams, slow trains, and overcrowded airports. Our broadband is slower and costs more than that of other leaders in the industrial world. Nine percent of all bridges are rated “structurally deficient” and 40 percent are over 50 years old. Our energy and water systems are aged and fragile. A bridge falls every other day in America. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that our increasingly decrepit infrastructure will cost about 2.5 million jobs and $7 trillion in sales by 2025. For businesses, the best use of public dollars isn’t tax cuts for the rich and big corporations but investments in rebuilding America.

Similarly, America’s workers are gouged far more by inadequate and wasteful public investment than by high taxes. We pay about two times as much per capita for health care—with worse results and leaving millions of people still not covered. The costs of educating kids—from pre-K to summer programs to soaring college tuitions and fees—rise far faster than stagnant wages. Crowded and pot-holed roads steal time and tax cars and tires. Flint is not alone in suffering from aging pipelines and poisonous water. For working people, the best use of public dollars is to invest in Medicare for All, tuition-free college, universal pre-K, and efficient roads and water systems.

Trump and Republicans want to sell tax cuts as key to growth and jobs, but this too is a con. In using public money to create jobs, the most authoritative assessment—made by Moody’s Mark Zandi, a former adviser to John McCain—is that investing in infrastructure would produce far more “bang for the buck” in jobs and growth than tax cuts would create. The money would be more likely to stay here, since 35 percent of corporate tax cuts would go to foreign investors or companies. The working people hired on public projects spend their wages, the rich less so. All this is particularly true now: Corporate profits are near-record levels, inequality is at record extremes, and interest rates are still low. Corporations don’t need tax breaks. They need customers. The rich will get more money under the GOP plan, but they’ve already captured so much of the nation’s income and wealth that even the conservative International Monetary Fund has warned that inequality has reached extremes that are an impediment to growth and jobs.

Republicans hypocritically will run up deficits and add a trillion or two to the national debt, but the real damage is that they will exacerbate what is now a crippling public-investment deficit. For all the alarms you’ll hear from Democrats and some Republicans in the next weeks, the budget deficits aren’t much of an economic concern. Inflation, if anything, is too low, and America bonds sell at remarkably low interest rates.

Budget deficits, however, are a political club. Once the tax cuts are passed, Republicans will return to hectoring about deficits and debt. Their budget documents already call for brutal cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the entire range of public services. As crippling as America’s public investment is today, passage of the Republican tax plan virtually insures that it will get far worse.

As Republicans rush to get this bill passed before it is read, the big lies will be exposed. The rich will clean up; some in the middle class—particularly those with large families—will pay more. Wealthy real-estate operators, investors, lawyers, and accountants will pocket most of the so-called small business “pass-through” tax break. Repatriation and territoriality will give corporations even more incentive to rig their books to report profits in tax havens abroad. But the specific outrages are neither as destructive nor as appalling as the entire project itself. By making it harder to address America’s crippling public-investment deficits, large tax cuts, if passed, will accelerate this country’s decline.

Robert L. Borosage is a leading progressive writer and activist.