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Today, Trump will announce the fate of national monuments in Utah. For some, it could offer hope and new jobs. Others fear their history being wiped out. http://cnn.it/2kkD8Ps
Decision day looms for Utah hills and their people
Today, President Donald J. Trump will announce the fate of national monuments in Utah. For some, it could offer hope and new jobs. Others fear their history being wiped out. http://cnn.it/2kkD8Ps
Posted by CNN on Monday, December 4, 2017
By Jeff Taylor December 1, 2017
Good Christians™ screenshot
The Log Cabin Republicans are out with a clever new ad that is calling on Christians to act on their morals.
Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore has been accused by a number of women of sexual misconduct and assault, including some who say they were as young as 14 and 15 when the incidents occurred.
The conservative LGBTQ group’s new spot is titled “Good Christians.”
It opens like every far right Christian conservative campaign commercial you’ve ever seen, with a country chapel, awash in blue tint, and a voice over warning of “a war on Christianity happening right in our midst.”
And then comes the twist.
A recent poll found that 40 percent of Evangelicals were more likely to support Moore despite the allegations against him.
“Roy Moore has spent his entire career using his bigoted brand of Christianity as a weapon to relentlessly attack members of the LGBT community, all the while allegedly preying upon the most vulnerable in our society,” Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo said in a statement released alongside the video.
“Moore’s myopic faith prevents him from seeing that a significant number of LGBT individuals are devout Christians themselves, including many members of Log Cabin Republicans. Regardless of one’s sexual orientation or gender identity, it’s time for good Christians to do what good Christians do: REJECT Roy Moore.”
Alabamans will decide between Moore and Democrat Doug Jones on Dec. 12.
by Yasmin Tayag November 15, 2017
There’s a common thread tying together the most disruptive revolutions of human history, and it has some scientists worried about the United States. In those revolutions, conflict largely boiled down to pervasive economic inequality. On Wednesday, a study in Nature, showing how and when those first divisions between rich and poor began, suggests not only that history has always repeated itself but also that it’s bound to do so again — and perhaps sooner than we think.
In the largest study of its kind, a team of scientists from Washington State University and 13 other institutions examined the factors leading to economic inequality throughout all of human history and noticed some worrying trends. Using a well-established score of inequality called the Gini coefficient, which gives perfect, egalitarian societies a score of 0 and high-inequality societies a 1, they showed that civilization tends to move toward inequality as some people gain the means to make others relatively poor — and employ it. Coupled with what researchers already know about inequality leading to social instability, the study does not bode well for the state of the world today.
“We could be concerned in the United States, that if Ginis get too high, we could be inviting revolution, or we could be inviting state collapse. There’s only a few things that are going to decrease our Ginis dramatically,” said Tim Kohler, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and a professor of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology in a statement.
Currently, the United States Gini score is around .81, one of the highest in the world, according to the 2016 Allianz Global Wealth Report.
A recent Credit Suisse report shows that the richest 1 percent of humanity owns half the world’s wealth.
Kohler and his team had their work cut out for them, as studying inequality before the age of global wealth reports is not a straightforward task. It’s one thing to measure modern day economic inequality using measures of individual net worth, but those kind of metrics aren’t available for, say, hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo during the Paleolithic. To surmount this obstacle, the researchers decided to use house size as a catch-all proxy for wealth, then examined the makeup of societies from prehistoric times to modern day using data from 63 archaeological digs.
Overall, they found that human societies started off fairly equal, with the hunter-gatherer societies consistently getting Gini scores around .17. The divide between rich and poor really began once humans started to domesticate plants and animals and switch to farming-based societies. Learning to till the land meant introducing the concept of land ownership, and inevitably, some people ended up as landless peasants. Furthermore, because these societies no longer lived as nomads, it became easier to accumulate wealth (like land) and pass it down from generation to generation.
The Gini scores got higher as farming societies got bigger. The small scale “horticultural” farmers had a median Gini of .27, and larger-scale “agricultural” societies moved up to .35. This pattern continued until, oddly, humans moved into the New World — the Americas. Then, over time, the researchers saw that Gini scores kept rising in Old World Eurasia but actually hit a plateau in the Americas. The researchers think this plateau happened because there were fewer draft animals, like horse and water buffalo, in the New World, making it harder for new agricultural societies to expand and cultivate more land.
A selection of Gini scores from the 2016 Allianz Global Report are shown in red. A score of 1 is given to societies with the highest inequality.
Overall, the highest-ever historical Gini the researchers found was that of the ancient Old World (think Patrician Rome), which got a score of .59. While the degrees of inequality experienced by historical societies are quite high, the researchers note, they’re nowhere near as high as the Gini scores we’re seeing now.
“Even given the possibility that the Ginis constructed here may somewhat underestimate true household wealth disparities, it is safe to say that the degree of wealth inequality experienced by many households today is considerably higher than has been the norm over the last ten millennia,” the researchers write in their paper.
On Monday, a global report from Credit Suisse showed that modern humans are continuing the trends set by our predecessors: Now, the report showed, half of the world’s wealth really does belong to a super-rich one percent, and the gap is only growing. Historically, Kohler says in his statement, there’s only so much inequality a society can sustain before it reaches a tipping point. Among the many known effects of inequality on a society are social unrest, a decrease in health, increased violence, and decreased solidarity. Unfortunately, Kohler points out, humans have never been especially good at decreasing inequality peacefully — historically, the only effective methods for doing so are plague, massive warfare, or revolution.
The revolution will not be televised. It’ll be sent to your inbox by us.
Photos via Flickr garryknight, Flickr / kennethkonica
By Pat Rynard December 3, 2017
After pretending for a brief moment in 2016 that the Republican Party stood for working people, the Republican-controlled Congress reverted back to trickle-down form on Friday when they passed a tax reform bill that overwhelmingly favored the rich. Not to be outdone, though, Senator Chuck Grassley made clear his disdain for those not benefiting under the new tax law.
“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing, as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies,” Grassley told the Register in a story posted yesterday.
It’s difficult to think of a more condescending, elitist worldview – that if you’re not ultra-wealthy, it’s clearly because you’re wasting all your money on alcohol, frivolous fun and prostitutes (I assume that’s what he meant when he said women). Certainly it couldn’t be because people are struggling to find decent-paying jobs, are straddled with debt from the college education they need to attain better jobs, or are paying outrageous sums for health insurance and medical bills. Nope, it must be because they’re all getting hand jobs from hookers in the back of a dark movie theater while downing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
That’s also an interesting assumption that perhaps only the men in a household make and spend money.
If Grassley wanted to make an ideological economic argument, he could have – that conservatives believe that money invested into businesses by the rich is what drives growth, not spending by consumers – without also needlessly maligning the working class. Because it takes a certain kind of arrogance to assume that every person who isn’t as rich as you are got that way because they’re lazy or dumb or wasteful in their spending habits.
In the same article, Jason Noble explained how the estate tax (which Republicans like to call the death tax) actually affects very few people in Iowa – only 120 people filed estate tax returns last year, just 44 of which owed any taxes. Data found that only 160 farm estates nationwide had to pay the tax in 2016. Still, Grassley for years has argued that the estate tax was destroying family farms even though the numbers simply do not back that assertion up.
The estate tax only applies to estates worth $5.45 million or more that is passed on to surviving family members. In reality, this mostly affects the wealthiest Americans and their fortunate heirs, many of which have plenty of tax advisers to figure out how to limit what gets taxed. But those are exactly the kinds of people who often end up as wealthy donors to Republicans, thus drawing the party’s focus to eliminate it for decades, despite the few well-off people it affects.
So, let this be yet another reminder to all those blue-collar workers in Iowa who voted for Republicans in droves last year: Republicans do not respect you, they only care about their rich friends and they turn their noses up at your small paycheck.
For a lot of working-class people, there is a sense that lazy people living down the street from them are mooching off the government (and hey, there are some bums out there), which draws them to Republicans’ policies. But here’s the thing: Republican elected officials see everyone in the working class as bums. They’re not making a distinction between you and some of the folks around you. They think all of you are worthless if you don’t have a multi-million dollar estate. That’s the Republican Party.
Matthew Daly, Associated Press December 3, 2017
WASHINGTON (AP) — Rarely unified, Senate Democrats stood together in opposing the GOP revamp of the tax code despite the traditional popularity of tax cuts and warnings from President Donald Trump and Republicans about the political cost in next year’s midterm elections.
White House dinners, trips aboard Air Force One and even threats from Trump during campaign stops in their states were not enough to sway Democrats who rejected the nearly $1.5 trillion tax bill early Saturday. Lawmakers voting against the bill included 10 vulnerable Democrats from states Trump won last year, some handily.
When Trump took office 10 months ago, moderate Democrats such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and others were widely expected to break with their party and side with the Republican president.
But on Trump’s top two legislative priorities — taxes and dismantling former President Barack Obama’s health care law — Democrats unanimously rebuffed the GOP president despite his derision.
Trump said Saturday, “We got no Democrat help and I think that’s going to cost them in the election because they voted against tax cuts. I don’t think politically it’s good to vote against tax cuts.”
Democrats argued that the unpopularity of the tax bill with its deep cuts for business and the wealthy and modest changes for many Americans made their votes relatively easy. Multiple polls show the tax bill is supported by less than 40 percent of voters. And Democrats recall a painful political lesson: In 2010, Democrats backed the unpopular health care bill and lost their House majority months later.
“My Republican friends must know that ‘we needed to notch a political win’ isn’t a good enough excuse for a constituent who asks why you voted to raise their taxes but slash them for big corporations,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Friday.
Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, who was singled out for criticism by Trump at a campaign-style event in Missouri this past week, said her vote against the tax bill — and Trump — “is not risky as long as I do the hard work in making sure Missourians understand what’s in the bill.”
Trump went to her state “and told Missourians something that just wasn’t true,” McCaskill said. “This bill is not helping teachers and police officers and construction workers. This bill is helping wealthy people, and he is among the people it is helping.”
Schumer hasn’t had to do a lot of arm twisting with a caucus whose politics range from liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., to Manchin, according to a senior aide. Democrats said they had reasons enough to oppose the GOP bill, which while slashing tax rates for corporations and the wealthy adds more than $1 trillion to the national debt.
“It’s a horrible bill,” said Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, one of the vulnerable Democrats up for re-election in a state Trump won easily.
A third-generation farmer, Tester said if he imposed debt on his family farm at a rate similar to the tax bill, “my kids would go broke.”
Hours before the final vote, Tester released a video on Twitter showing him with a copy of the 479-page tax bill he had been handed minutes before. One page was filled with scribbled policy changes that Tester said he could not be read.
“This is Washington, D.C., at its worst,” he complained.
Heitkamp, who is seeking a second term next year, said the bill’s toll on the national debt made her vote easy.
“The risk is for the fiscal responsibility for this country,” she said. “We all owe a much higher debt — not to a political party or a re-election, but to the people of this country.”
Manchin, who like Heitkamp was considered for a job in Trump’s Cabinet, said he told Trump he wanted to “get to yes” on the tax bill but could not support the bill as drafted by GOP leaders.
“Millionaires, billionaires and gazillionaires should not have tax breaks,” Manchin said in an interview. “That’s what the president told me: It was not going to be for the rich. Well, the bill I have in front of me is not the bill that he talked about” at a White House dinner in September.
Republicans looking to unseat Democrats next year were ready with their criticism.
Rep. Luke Messer, one of several Indiana Republicans seeking to challenge Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly, said Donnelly’s opposition to the bill showed he votes with his party’s leadership to block the president’s agenda.
“Once again, it looks like Sen. Donnelly has made his choice, siding with Chuck Schumer over Hoosiers,” Messer said in an argument that is likely to be used against other Democratic incumbents.
Donnelly said the Senate bill “would result in a tax hike for millions of middle-class families while giving a tax cut to the top 1 percent.”
Rep. Lou Barletta, a Pennsylvania Republican who is seeking to challenge Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, said he was surprised Casey opposed the bill in a state where Trump narrowly won last year.
“Blue-collar Democrats in Pennsylvania voted for Donald Trump because they want to see him do exactly what he’s doing now: allowing them to have more money in their pocket, making sure businesses they work at stay here in Pennsylvania and stopping illegal immigrants who compete for their jobs and depress their wages,” Barletta said.
Casey called the GOP plan “an insult” to middle-class families in Pennsylvania who will pay more in taxes “while the super-rich and big corporations get a windfall. It’s obscene.”
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Check out Michael Phelan’s SocialSecurityWorks.org
The government is now referring to our Social Security checks as a “Federal Benefit Payment.” This isn’t a benefit. It is our money paid out of our earned income! Not only did we all contribute to Social Security but our employers did too. It totaled 15% of our income before taxes.
If you averaged $30K per year over your working life, that’s close to $180,000 invested in Social Security.
If you calculate the future value of your monthly investment in social security ($375/month, including both you and your employers contributions) at a meager 1% interest rate compounded monthly, after 40 years of working you’d have more than $1.3+ million dollars saved!
This is your personal investment. Upon retirement, if you took out only 3% per year, you’d receive $39,318 per year, or $3,277 per month.
That’s almost three times more than today’s average Social Security benefit of $1,230 per month, according to the Social Security Administration. (Google it – it’s a fact).
And your retirement fund would last more than 33 years (until you’re 98 if you retire at age 65)! I can only imagine how much better most average-income people could live in retirement if our government had just invested our money in low-risk interest-earning accounts.
Instead, the folks in Washington pulled off a bigger “Ponzi scheme” than Bernie Madoff ever did. They took our money and used it elsewhere. They forgot (oh yes, they knew) that it was OUR money they were taking. They didn’t have a referendum to ask us if we wanted to lend the money to them. And they didn’t pay interest on the debt they assumed. And recently they’ve told us that the money won’t support us for very much longer.
But is it our fault they misused our investments? And now, to add insult to injury, they’re calling it a “benefit”, as if we never worked to earn every penny of it.
Just because they borrowed the money doesn’t mean that our investments were a charity!
Let’s take a stand. We have earned our right to Social Security and Medicare. Demand that our legislators bring some sense into our government.
Find a way to keep Social Security and Medicare going for the sake of that 92% of our population who need it.
Then call it what it is: Our Earned Retirement Income.
By Kailani Koenig December 3, 2017
Collins: Tax bill will cut deficit through ‘economic growth.
By Eric Levitz November 30, 2017
Country last. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
In 2001, John McCain stood on the Senate floor and denounced the very concept of supply-side tax cuts.
“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief,” the Arizona senator said, explaining his decision to vote against George W. Bush’s signature tax package. Two years later, McCain voted against renewing those tax cuts because they were still “too tilted to the wealthy” — and, also, because it he felt it fiscally irresponsible to cut taxes when no one knew how long or costly the war on terror would prove to be.
Sixteen years later, economic inequality in America is dramatically more severe than it was when McCain said those words; the United States military is still fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the Republican Party is pushing legislation that raises taxes on many middle-class families — and increases the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion — in order to finance a gigantic tax cut for corporate shareholders, millionaire business owners, and the heirs of multimillion-dollar estates.
McCain had more reasons to oppose this legislation than any other Republican senator. Beyond his historic opposition to regressive changes to the tax code, McCain had demanded, just two months ago, that his party take a “bipartisan approach” to its tax legislation. He has spent most of this year railing against the GOP’s subversion of normal parliamentary procedure.
Now, Senate Republicans are trying to pass sweeping changes to the American tax code on a party-line vote — by gaming the rules of budget reconciliation in a manner that all but nullifies the legislative filibuster — while refusing to hold hearings on the bill’s (profound) consequences for our economy, or even present the Treasury Department’s own analysis of the bill’s implications for the national debt (because that analysis would reveal that the Treasury secretary is lying about the bill’s implications for the national debt).
Several Republican senators have expressed concerns about the bill’s deficit impact. But McCain has more concrete reasons to oppose large deficits than those lawmakers do. The Arizona senator has flip-flopped on many issues during his time in office. But his one, unshakable policy conviction is that the United States must maintain a global military empire until the end of time. And empires cost money. The current Republican president won election while promising to curtail America’s involvement overseas and invest more money here at home. There is no popular support for cutting Social Security, while maintaining American boots on the ground in Somalia. If our nation ever enters a true fiscal crisis, McCain’s beloved military-industrial complex is all but certain to take a hit.
The president has tried to publicly humiliate several Senate Republicans — but McCain is the only one whom he has mocked for suffering torture as a prisoner of war. Multiple GOP lawmakers are immune from political pressure because they are headed for imminent retirement — but only McCain enjoys the radical freedom that attends the knowledge of one’s imminent death.
Mitch McConnell still has some wrinkles to iron out. It’s unclear how he will address his deficit hawks’ concerns without alienating his other members. And he has made expensive promises to Susan Collins and Ron Johnson, without revealing how he intends to pay for them.
But if John McCain will vote for McConnell’s final product — even if that means making one of his final acts as a public servant a garish betrayal of his putative principles — then his colleagues are all but certain to do the same.
Michael Kranish, The Washington Post December 2, 2017
Elton John blares so loudly on Donald Trump’s campaign plane that staffers can’t hear themselves think. Press secretary Hope Hicks uses a steamer to press Trump’s pants — while he is still wearing them. Trump screams at his top aides, who are subjected to expletive-filled tirades in which they get their “face ripped off.”
And Trump’s appetite seems to know no bounds when it comes to McDonald’s, with a dinner order consisting of “two Big Macs, two Fillet-O-Fish, and a chocolate malted.”
The scenes are among the most surreal passages in a forthcoming book chronicling Trump’s path to the presidency co-written by Corey Lewandowski, who was fired as Trump’s campaign manager, and David Bossie, another top aide. The book, “Let Trump Be Trump,” paints a portrait of a campaign with an untested candidate and staff rocketing from crisis to crisis, in which Lewandowski and a cast of mostly neophyte political aides learn on the fly and ultimately accept Trump’s propensity to go angrily off message.
“Sooner or later, everybody who works for Donald Trump will see a side of him that makes you wonder why you took a job with him in the first place,” the authors wrote. “His wrath is never intended as any personal offense, but sometimes it can be hard not to take it that way. The mode that he switches into when things aren’t going his way can feel like an all-out assault; it’d break most hardened men and women into little pieces.”
The authors “both had moments where they wanted to parachute off Trump Force One,” but they said they got used to it.
Lewandowski provides a largely admiring portrait of his former boss, saving the skewer for score-settling anecdotes about Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman and rival whom Lewandowski blames for his ouster. The Post obtained an advance copy of the book, which is scheduled for release on Tuesday.
In a section of the book written by Lewandowski, Trump is described as flying on his helicopter when he learns that Manafort has said “Trump shouldn’t be on television anymore, that he shouldn’t be on the Sunday shows” and that Manafort should appear instead. Trump was angrier than Lewandowski had ever seen him, ordering the pilot to lower the altitude so he could make a cellphone call.
“Did you say I shouldn’t be on TV on Sunday? I’ll go on TV anytime I g–dam f—ing want and you won’t say another f—ing word about me!” Trump yelled at Manafort, according to Lewandowski. “Tone it down? I wanna turn it up! . . . You’re a political pro? Let me tell you something. I’m a pro at life. I’ve been around a time or two. I know guys like you, with your hair and skin . . .”
Lewandowski called it “one of the greatest takedowns in the history of the world.”
The aide’s satisfaction at the takedown didn’t last long, however, as he “immediately got a phone call” from Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “telling me I wasn’t a team player and that I’d thrown Paul under the bus.” Lewandowski wrote that Manafort soon arranged for him to be fired.
But Manafort’s days were numbered as well, especially after Breitbart News executive Stephen K. Bannon became an adviser to the campaign and set his sights on ousting the campaign chairman.
In one of the most striking passages of the book, the co-authors describe a scene in which Bannon is read the first few paragraphs of a forthcoming story by a New York Times reporter laying out allegations that Manafort had received a $12.7 million payment from a Ukrainian political party. The encounter occurred at Manafort’s apartment in Trump Tower, where, the co-authors write, an unnamed woman in a white muumuu “lounged” on the couch.
“Does Trump know about this?” Bannon asked, according to the book.
“What’s to know, it’s all lies,” Manafort replied.
The woman on the couch “imploringly” asked, “Paul?” Manafort responded, according to the book, “It was a long time ago. I had expenses.”
The authors write that “Bannon knew what he had in his hand. It was an explosive, page one story.”
Notwithstanding his constant praise of Trump, Lewandowski offers a window into the president’s toughness on those who work nonstop on his behalf. Lewandowski wrote of a time when he was so ill that he fell asleep on a plane, only to be awakened by Trump, saying, “Corey, if you can’t take it, we’ll get somebody else.” He described a meeting in which Trump told another campaign official, Brad Parscale, that “You don’t have to listen to Corey anymore. He’s no longer your boss.”
[From ‘Access Hollywood’ to Russia, Trump seeks to paint the rosiest picture]
Lewandowski wrote that “the cut was deep, but it was only one of a thousand.”
Trump left it to his son Don Jr. to fire him, Lewandowski wrote.
In another episode, Lewandowski describes how staffer Sam Nunberg was purposely left behind at a McDonald’s because Nunberg’s special-order burger was taking too long. “Leave him,” Trump said. “Let’s go.” And they did.
Trump’s fast-food diet is a theme. “On Trump Force One there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza and Diet Coke,” the authors write.
The plane’s cupboards were stacked with Vienna Fingers, potato chips, pretzels and many packages of Oreos because Trump, a renowned germaphobe, would not eat from a previously opened package.
The book notes that “the orchestrating and timing of Mr. Trump’s meals was as important as any other aspect of his march to the presidency,” and describes the elaborate efforts that Lewandowski and other top aides went through to carefully time their delivery of hot fast food to Trump’s plane as he was departing his rallies.
Lewandowski’s description of campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks, who is now White House communications director, underscored the untested nature of the campaign and its personnel. He describes Hicks, a competitive athlete and former model, as “smart and private, with a nearly photographic memory.”
But, he writes, when Trump asked Hicks to join him on a campaign trip, she was working for the Trump Organization as a public relations official. So, the authors wrote, when she was first asked to be press secretary, she responded, in reference to a Trump property, “Which one? The Doral marketing campaign?”
“No, my presidential campaign! I’m running for president,” Trump responded, according to the book.
One of Hicks’s jobs was to make sure that Trump’s suits were pressed when they flew on his plane.
“ ‘Get the machine!’ ” Trump would yell, according to the book. “And Hope would take out the steamer and start steaming Mr. Trump’s suit, while he was wearing it! She’d steam the jacket first and then sit in a chair in front of him and steam his pants.”
One day, when Hicks forgot the steamer, Trump became angry.
“G–dammit, Hope! How the hell could you forget the machine?”
The authors wrote, “It was a mistake she would never make again.”
It was Hicks who, on Oct. 7, took a call from a Washington Post reporter about a video from “Access Hollywood” in which Trump boasted about how he could “grab” women “by the p—y.” Trump looked at a transcript and said “that doesn’t sound like something I would say.” It was Bossie, who served as the deputy campaign manager, who played the video for Trump on his iPad. The campaign came up with the response that it was “locker room” talk.
The authors wrote that as panic ensued among some Republicans, the party’s national chairman, Reince Priebus, decided not to show up at a New York City meeting. Bannon called Priebus, asking, “Where the hell are you?”
“I got off the train in Newark,” Priebus responded, according to the book. “I’m going to turn around.” The book notes that Priebus has said he always intended to come to the meeting.
As Bannon tried to convince him that everything was all right, Priebus said that Republicans were abandoning the candidate. “It’s horrible . . . people are dropping like flies,” Priebus said, according to the book. Once he arrived at the meeting, Priebus said that Trump would either “lose the biggest electoral landslide in American history” or should drop out of the race.
“First of all,” Trump responded, according to the book, “I’m going to win. And second, if the Republican Party is going to run away from me, then I will take you all down with me. But I’m not going to lose.”
Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker contributed to this report.
(Credit: Getty/Hulton Archive/Zach Gibson/Salon)
Ted Morgan December 2, 2017
The “Big Lie” has been most closely associated with the Nazis’ incessant propaganda campaign about an international Jewish “war of annihilation” against Germany, a campaign that brought the totalitarian Nazi regime to power and paved the way for the Holocaust. In assessing Adolph Hitler’s psyche, the U. S. Office of Strategic Services reported,
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
On Nov. 22, Donald Trump declared, “We’re going to give the American people a huge tax cut for Christmas … a great big, beautiful Christmas present.” This is one among many lies Trump has bleated about the tax cut — a con job designed to appeal to Americans who struggle to make ends meet, whether they be unemployed or underemployed, the elderly, working or middle class, or poor. In reality, the Trump/Republican Party tax cut, whatever final form it takes, is a pack of lies and distortions designed to further enrich the wealthiest Americans and solidify the takeover of our government by corporate wealth.
What makes this a Big Lie is its repetition over a period of 35 years of “supply-side economics,” years marked by an unprecedented upward redistribution of income and wealth and the growth of staggering inequality.
We know the wealthy are the chief beneficiaries of this tax cut. According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent receive 34 percent of the corporate tax cut benefit, and the top 20 percent receive 70 percent of the benefit. Eliminating the estate tax only benefits those individuals with wealth exceeding $5 million ($10 million for married couples). Eliminating the alternative minimum tax gets rid of the very tax created to prevent the wealthy from getting away with paying no taxes at all. If it were removed in 2015, for example, Donald Trump would have been $31 million richer and taxed at 3.5 percent. By contrast, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, those with incomes below $75,000 will be paying higher taxes by 2027.
The only possible legitimation for such a blatantly inequitable tax is the claim that cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will produce investment and job growth; not surprisingly Trump claims the tax cut will produce 10.5 percent growth in GDP over 10 years. By contrast, the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center predicts 0.3 percent growth over 10 years. When the non-partisan Congressional Research Services tracked tax rates from 1945 to 2010, they found that cutting the top tax rates had no positive effect on economic growth or the growth of savings, investment or productivity. Corporate CEOs themselves have acknowledged that they would use new revenue to buy back shares, retire debt, and issue shareholder dividends – i.e., benefiting Wall Street and its clients, not Main Street where we live and work.
Only one of 38 economists polled by the University of Chicago believed economic growth would be “substantially higher” in 10 years because of the tax cut; all 38 believed the national debt would be substantially higher. According to the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, the tax cut will produce roughly $1.4 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years.
We’ve been here before. Reagan-era tax cuts tripled the national debt over the 1980s, and G.W. Bush-era tax cuts added $1.5 trillion to the national debt. Each of these administrations also dramatically increased a bloated military budget while reducing programs that aid vulnerable Americans.
Therein lies the covert “benefit” of these soaring budget deficits. With military spending increasing, and popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare typically impervious to budget cuts (though every indication is the Republicans will go after these in the coming months), and required interest payments on the national debt piling up, deficits have been used to justify cuts to a wide range of domestic programs, thereby depriving the nation of the ability to address such accelerating crises as disintegrating infrastructure, overburdened schools, costly and non-universal health care, and climate change.
So, when a Nov. 15 Quinnipiac poll shows two-thirds of the American public in opposition, why are these people pushing a tax cut that enriches the wealthy while debilitating the country as a whole? When asked, Rep. Chris Collins of New York declared, “My donors are basically saying. ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’” Such is the rot eroding our democracy.
Ted Morgan is emeritus professor of political science at Lehigh University and the author, most recently, of “What Really Happened to the 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy.”
E.A. Crunden December 2, 2017
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/JOHN LOCHER
The new tax bill passed by Senate Republicans does away with crucial support for public schools while adding a provision beneficial to their private counterparts. That move would help wealthy parents pay for private schools, including religious schools, while hurting lower-income families. A similar provision is in the House version of the tax bill.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, GOP lawmakers passed the biggest tax overhaul in several decades through a 51 to 49 vote. One lone Republican, Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, voted against the legislation, citing deficit concerns. The bill, which includes a number of dramatic provisions and cuts, will have sweeping implications for many people across the United States.
Under current law, parents can open 529 plans to help pay for future college costs. Those accounts, which differ by state, are tax-advantaged and grow as long as the money is spent exclusively on higher education. A last-minute provision added to the Senate tax bill allows for 529 plans to be used for K-12 private schools. (Lawmakers initially included but later removed a controversial provision allowing parents to open 529 accounts for fetuses.)
In addition to benefitting wealthier families, the new 529 expansion is popular with proponents of “achool choice” — a movement that favors religious education. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a longtime supporter of school choice, filed the amendment expanding 529 plans. Debate over Cruz’s amendment helped stretch tha tax bill vote into the early-morning hours but the addition still won out in the end.
Ron Lieber, a financial columnist for the New York Times, tweeted that the Cruz amendment’s implications could have much broader repercussions than similar language in the House bill.
“Last night, Ted Cruz (w the help of a tiebreaking vote from VP Pence) got the 529s-for-private-schools provision into the Senate tax bill. As I reported last month, this could be worth $30,000 in net new tax savings per child to wealthy families,” Lieber wrote. “The Cruz amendment goes even further than the House 529s-for-private-schools thing did. If the House comes around, you’ll be able to use 529s for tutoring.”
The state and local tax deduction (or, SALT) allows taxpayers to deduct those taxes when determining their federal income taxes. SALT’s biggest beneficiaries are actually wealthy suburban voters in populous states like New York and California, many of whom tend to vote Republican. But the Senate bill initially called for a complete repeal of SALT in order to lower tax rates elsewhere.
Outcry from some Republicans led to a slight change — itemizers may still receive a deduction for property taxes up to $10,000. But the rest of the SALT repeal stands, which is bad news for public schools.
Under SALT, income that paid for public schools went untaxed at the federal level. Current law allows states that raise taxes to better fund public schools to receive a deduction through SALT. The Senate bill ends that ability. As states struggle to lessen the impact of the tax bill on citizens, there will be an outsized amount of pressure on the taxes that typically help public schools.
For families able to afford private school, the combination of SALT’s demise and the tax bill’s new private school provision is likely to make the decision to pay for private education far more appealing. That’s a big win for school choice proponents like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who expressed support for the original 529 plan expansion in the House tax bill.
Public schools in areas with strong upper middle class populations currently fare well because they can afford teachers with higher salaries and offer an array of extracurricular options. Families in those areas are also invested in public schools, to say nothing of incentivized by SALT. But without the deduction, that incentive goes away. Wealthier families will be more inclined to opt for private school instead — especially with the expansion of 529 plans.
Experts have speculated that the elimination of SALT could ultimately cost public schools upwards of $17 billion. That loss will almost inevitably degrade the quality of public schools, something that will hurt families with no other option. Around 50.7 million U.S. students attend public schools — approximately 90 percent of students in the United States.