DISPATCHES

MEDICARE, SOCIAL SECURITY STRESSED BUT EXPANDABLE

Medicare’s trust fund for inpatient care will become insolvent in 2026, three years earlier than previously expected, as the Republican tax cut for the wealthy has failed to stimulate economic growth Republicans predicted would cover the shortfall in revenues. Social Security is still expected to remain solvent until 2034.

Republicans have long called for an overhaul, including deep cuts, to Medicare and Social Security, and House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed the GOP-controlled Congress would get it done in 2018. But the issue proved too politically sensitive to tackle in a midterm election year, and impossible to get through the Senate where Republicans have a narrow majority, Alice Ollstein noted at TalkingPointsMemo.com (6/5).

Republicans still say Social Security is running out of money, but the new Social Security Trustees Report confirms that the $2.9 trillion in the fund is sufficient to pay for all benefits and administrative costs until 2034, and 79% of costs thereafter, but Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, said the US can fully afford to expand Social Security.

The most important takeaways from the 2018 Trustees Report are that (1) Social Security has a large accumulated surplus, and (2) Social Security is extremely affordable. Social Security is projected to cost around 6% of gross domestic product (GDP). In 2095, Social Security will constitute just 6.16% of GDP, according to the new report. That is considerably lower, as a percentage of GDP, than Germany, Austria, France, and most other industrialized countries spend on their counterpart programs today. In 2017, Social Security constituted just 5% of GDP.

The average annual benefit received by Social Security’s over 62 million beneficiaries is $16,933 this year, the progressive Economic Policy Institute noted. Expanding Social Security not only addresses the retirement income crisis, it also is part of the answer to growing income and wealth inequality and the financial squeeze on working families. The Democratic Party strongly favors expanding, not cutting Social Security.

The report shows that, with modest legislated increases in revenue, Social Security will be able to pay all scheduled benefits for the foreseeable future and even increase benefits.

“Voters across the political spectrum strongly support raising Social Security taxes on all Americans, and even greater shares in both parties support increasing taxes on top earners, who currently don’t pay Social Security taxes on earnings above $128,400,” Monique Morrissey wrote at EPI.org. “A combination of eliminating this cap and a modest tax increase would not only shore things up, it would give us room to make the system more generous. But the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican Party and its wealthy backers haven’t abandoned their war on what they call ‘entitlements.’ They’re entitled to their opinion, but the rest of us shouldn’t let a small minority dictate policy.“

PELOSI’S PAYGO PLEDGE FRUSTRATES PROGRESSIVE GOALS. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and other top Democrats have pledged to abide by fiscally conservative pay-as-you-go rules if they regain the majority in the House next year, prompting howls from liberals who would like to pursue an ambitious legislative agenda, such as expanding health-care access, subsidizing education opportunities and boosting infrastructure projects — and fear pay-go might be too confining, Mike Lillis reported in The Hill (6/6).

Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (6/8), “In fact, it’s a stupid rule. It is entirely counter-productive to progressive policy goals. It puts the Democratic Party in conflict with the blog’s First Law Of Economics – F*** The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money – and it revives Zombie Simpson-Bowles to stalk the halls of Congress again. In case nobody in the Democratic leadership has noticed, the rising energy in the party is not coming out of the budget-hawk cryptkeepers. This takes seriously the laughable fiction that the Republicans care about deficits and will use them as an effective club on the Democrats. Right now, the country is giving serious consideration to things like Medicare-for-all and some sort of free college. This isn’t the time to go all Al From again. It also guarantees a serious intraparty skirmish that’s already underway.”

Lillis noted that Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the Democrats would be foolish to adopt the fiscal restraints, especially in light of the Republicans’ newly adopted tax-reform law, which is estimated to add almost $2 trillion to the debt over the next decade.

“The pay-go thing is an absurd idea now given the times and given what’s already been done to curry favor with corporate America,” Grijalva said. He noted that the revenue losses created by the tax law are already squeezing federal programs favored by Democrats. Adopting pay-go rules on top of that, he argued, would only pinch them further. “It would be, I think, irresponsible to try to tie up Congress’s ability to respond to economic downturns or, in the current discussion, to slash programs,” he said. “We’re going down a path that I think helped cause the Great Recession.”

Pierce added, “I back up to nobody in my respect for Pelosi as a legislative leader. (Hoyer? That’s another bowl of noodles.) But committing to this little piece of 1990’s DLC thinking is a serious error from both a policy and political standpoint. (And before we hear more howling about replacing Pelosi, let’s remember that the primary people pushing for that are not progressives but white-people-whisperers like Tim Ryan from Ohio and hold off on that for a while.) This is a serious misstep and, worse, an unnecessary one. It’s June and the Democratic leadership in the House already is committed to profound flinch on fiscal issues five months before one of the most critical midterm elections of our time. Sometimes, I really wonder about these people.”

TRUMP TOPS 3,251 LIES IN 500 DAYS. In the 497 days since he took the oath of office, Donald Trump made 3,251 “false or misleading claims” (a.k.a. lies), according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker (6/1). That’s an average of 6.5 lies per day.

But the daily average of false claims keeps climbing as the president neared the 500-day mark of his presidency. In the month of May, Trump made about eight claims a day, “including an astonishing 35 claims in his rally in Nashville on May 29.

“Among the claims at the rally: He more than tripled the projected savings from repealing Obamacare, and said the individual mandate was unconstitutional even though the Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., said it passed constitutional muster. He once again falsely said he passed the biggest tax cut in US history, when it’s only in eighth place. He inflated the trade deficit with Mexico. And he offered a long list of false statements about immigration, ranging from mischaracterizing the visa lottery to whether his long-promised wall is being built. (It’s not.) He also twisted the words of Democrats, casting words of sympathy for undocumented immigrants as support for MS-13 gang members.”

Perhaps Trump’s most astonishing claim in May came on the last day of the month, when he tweeted, “Not that it matters but I never fired James Comey because of Russia! The Corrupt Mainstream Media loves to keep pushing that narrative, but they know it is not true!”

Fact Checker noted that Trump himself told NBC’s Lester Holt just two days after the May 9 firing: “I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

Moreover, the New York Times reported that Trump, in a meeting with Russian officials the day after the firing, said: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Those quotes appeared in a White House document summarizing the meeting.

In comparison, PolitiFact has examined claims made by Barack Obama dating back to June 2007 and found that he told nine “Pants on Fire” lies, 71 false statements and 70 mostly false statements. PolitiFact has found Trump has told 83 “Pants on Fire” Lies, 182 false statements and 123 mostly false statements.

The difference in the Post’s count is that Obama generally did not repeat false claims, while Trump has a proclivity to repeat, over and over, many of his false or misleading claims. “We’ve counted at least 122 claims that the president has repeated at least three times, some with breathtaking frequency. Almost one third of Trump’s claims — 931 — relate to economic issues, trade deals or jobs. He frequently takes credit for jobs created before he became president or company decisions with which he had no role. He cites his ‘incredible success’ in terms of job growth, even though annual job growth under his presidency has been slower than the last five years of Barack Obama’s term. He also loves to cite unemployment figures, even though he repeatedly said during his campaign that the unemployment rate was phony and could not be trusted.

“Not surprisingly, immigration is another source of Trump’s misleading claims, now totaling 379. … Misleading claims about taxes — now at 299 — are also a common feature of Trump’s speeches. Seventy-five times, he has made the false assertion that he passed the biggest tax cut in US history. But moving up the list quickly are claims about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether people in the Trump campaign were in any way connected to it. The president has made 265 statements about the Russia probe, using hyperbolic claims of ‘worse than Watergate,’ ‘McCarthyism’ and, of course, ‘witch hunt.’ He often asserts that the Democrats colluded with the Russians, even though the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign were victims of Russian activities, as emails were hacked and then released via WikiLeaks.”

MULVANEY FIRES ADVISORY BOARD WHOSE MEMBERS CRITICIZED HIM. Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, fired the agency’s 25-member advisory board (6/6), days after some of its members criticized his leadership of the watchdog agency.

An agency spokesman said the Consumer Advisory Board, known as the CAB, will be revamped in the fall with all new members.

The panel was supposed to advise the CFPB’s leadership on new regulations and policies. But some members, who include prominent consumer advocates, academics and industry executives, began to complain that Mulvaney was ignoring them and making unwise decisions about the agency’s future, Renae Merle reported in the Washington Post (6/6).

The firings came two days after 11 CAB members held a news conference and criticized Mulvaney for, among other things, canceling legally required meetings with the group.

In a statement, agency spokesman John Czwartacki took a final swipe at the group. “The outspoken members of the Consumer Advisory Board seem more concerned about protecting their taxpayer funded junkets to Washington, D.C., and being wined and dined by the Bureau than protecting consumers,” he said.

Dismissal of the advisers is likely to exacerbate concerns among Democrats that Mulvaney is weakening the consumer watchdog.

“Mick Mulvaney has no intention of putting consumers above financial firms that cheat them. This is what happens when you put someone in charge of an agency they think shouldn’t exist,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who helped conceive of the bureau, said in a statement.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said: “Mulvaney has proven once again he would rather cozy up with payday lenders and industry insiders than listen to consumer advocates who want to make sure hard-working Americans are not cheated by financial scams.”

OBAMACARE HERE TO STAY? For years Democrats ran from the healthcare issue as though it were a heap of flaming rubble, which, politically speaking, it was. Passage of the Affordable Care Act cost them control of Congress, gave rise to the upstart tea party movement and helped install Donald Trump in the White House.

But Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times reports (6/11) that Democrats have finally decided to stop running away from Obamacare: Polls show support for the law increasing as it becomes more imperiled, and the result has been a political sea change.

Democrats have gotten the message, campaigning on healthcare not just in blue states like California, or swing states like Nevada and Florida, but red states like Kentucky, home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Democrats “don’t have to defend how the ACA works” as they did when President Obama was in the White House, said Robert Blendon, a Harvard expert on healthcare politics. “They just have to say, ‘The other party wants to take coverage away from millions of people,’” he said.

Kevin Drum notes at MotherJones.com, “In a sense, this is what everyone—both liberal and conservative—predicted from the start: it’s hard to put a big new social program in place, but once people get used to it it’s nearly impossible to take away. Republicans understood this well, which is why they fought like demons to get rid of it as soon as they possibly could. Now it’s too late.… In 2015, with Obamacare favorability languishing around 35-40 percent, repealing it wouldn’t have been too hard if President Obama himself hadn’t stood in the way. Today, Obama is gone but ACA’s favorability is 50-55 percent and rising. Even the rich favor keeping it around. There’s just not much appetite for destroying Obamacare anymore except among the tea party-ish base of the Republican Party.”

In 2017, finally controlling both Congress and the White House, Republicans set about to fulfill their pledge to repeal the Affordable Care Act, failing by a single vote in the Senate when Sen. John McCain delivered a dramatic thumbs-down.

That leaves scores of GOP lawmakers on the record supporting a rollback that would have resulted in 23 million fewer Americans having health insurance. Repeal was no longer a mere campaign slogan or partisan rallying point.

The Trump Administration roiled the debate (6/7) by stating in court that it would not defend one of the law’s most popular provisions, which forbids insurance companies from denying coverage to customers with preexisting conditions or charging them more. Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton is leading 20 Republican-led states in challenging the Affordable Care Act, claiming that Congress rendered all of Obamacare unconstitutional by doing away with the tax penalty in Obamacare’s individual mandate when it enacted President Trump’s tax breaks for the rich.

A group of 17 Democratic-led states that have won standing in the case to defend the law filed a brief arguing for ACA’s preservation.

Topher Spiro, vice president of health policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the administration’s legal stance contradicts promises by Trump that he would not tamper with the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.

But on his first night in office, Trump issued an executive order, directing federal agencies to lighten the regulatory burden placed by the law. Last October, the president unilaterally ended a significant part of the law that cushions insurers financially from an obligation to give discounts to decrease out-of-pocket costs to lower-income customers with ACA coverage.

More recently, the White House and Department of Health and Human Services have been working to make it easier for consumers to buy relatively inexpensive health plans that exclude some of the benefits the ACA requires, further undermining support for the comprehensive insurance coverage.

SUPREME COURT CLEARS WAY FOR DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF VOTERS. The Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s practice of removing infrequent voters from its rolls, clearing the way for the mass disenfranchisement of low-income, minority voters across the country, Kira Lerner noted at ThinkProgress (6/11).

In a 5-4 ruling in *Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute*, Justice Samuel Alito found that the National Voter Registration Act does not prevent Ohio from purging from the rolls voters who do not participate in federal elections for two years. If inactive voters do not respond to a mailer asking them to verify their address and do not vote for two more years, they are purged from the rolls.

The ruling will have implications beyond Ohio. “Today’s decision threatens the ability of voters to have their voices heard in our elections,” said Stuart Naifeh, senior counsel at Demos, which challenged the state’s practices.

Six other states — Georgia, Montana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia — use similar practices to remove voters from the rolls if they fail to vote, and 17 GOP-controlled states signed onto a brief supporting Ohio’s position, indicating that they would be interested in using a similar list-maintenance procedure if it’s found to be constitutional.

Ian Millhiser wrote at ThinkProgress that Husted is “the kind of case where ideology matters most. It involves a politically charged topic — whether a state’s effort to make it harder to vote should be permitted — as well as a not-especially-clear statute. These are the sorts of cases where judges have the most discretion to act according to their policy preferences — when the language of a statute permits either result.

“And, sure enough, the Supreme Court split entirely along party lines in Husted. Alito’s opinion is joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito, and by Neil Gorusch, who occupies the seat that Senate Republicans held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it. All four of the Court’s Democrats joined a dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a separate dissent.”

The federal statute at issue in Husted, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), specifically contemplates some kind of “notify, wait, and purge” process like the one used in Ohio. Yet is also includes an significant limitation. “Registrants who have not responded to a notice and who have not voted in 2 consecutive general elections for Federal office shall be removed from the official list of eligible voters,” according to the NVRA, “except that no registrant may be removed solely by reason of a failure to vote.”

The court of appeals that struck down Ohio’s voter purge process looked at how Ohio determined which voters should be eligible for a purge. In Ohio, the “notify, wait, and purge” process is “triggered” by “a registrant’s failure to engage in any ‘voter activity’ for two years.” Such a trigger mechanism, according to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, constitutes removal “solely by reason of a failure to vote.”

Alito’s opinion focuses on the word “solely.” Ohio’s process, he claims, “does not strike any registrant solely by reason of the failure to vote.” Rather, it “removes registrants only when they have failed to vote *and* have failed to respond to a change-of-residence notice.” (Emphasis added.)

“What ultimately matters in Husted, however, is neither the confusing text of the law nor the opinion of the Sixth Circuit. The Supreme Court is supreme over the Sixth Circuit. And five votes is more than four,” Millhiser noted.

US DAIRY TRADE POLICY IS SIMPLE: BASICALLY NO IMPORTS AT ALL. After Donald Trump tweeted (6/9) that his tariffs against Canada were in response to Canada’s 270% tariff on dairy products (he previously claimed the tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were warranted by national security concerns), Kevin Drum of MotherJones noted (6/10) that the US basically allows no dairy imports at all. As the International Trade Commission described it in 2001, “The US dairy sector is also characterized by heavy government intervention. US dairy policies center on four major areas: federal marketing orders, federal price supports, dairy compacts, and international trade policy … US trade measures restrict imports mainly through the imposition of [Tariff Rate Quotas] … TRQs apply to fluid milk as well as processed and high value-added products. High over-quota tariff rates restrict imports within quota levels, except under exceptional market conditions.”

Drum noted that the US sets very tiny quotas for the amount of dairy product that can be imported at low or zero tariffs, and above that the rate is so prohibitive that imports cease entirely. For example, the price of dry skim milk currently runs around 80 cents per pound, while the over-quota tariff is about 50 cents. The price of butter is $2.30 per pound, while the over-quota tariff rate is about 80 cents. No one can sell dairy into the already glutted US market with tariffs like this, so the TRQs essentially act as hard quotas on dairy imports.

Drum concluded, “Roughly speaking, this is the way every country works. *Everybody* protects their dairy industry, though the details vary considerably in how they do it. We’re no different.”

FEINSTEIN BILL WOULD PROHIBIT FAMILY SEPARATIONS AT BORDER. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said at least 50 children a day are taken from their parents at the US border, and has introduced legislation that would make it illegal to separate family members entering the US. Speaking to CNN (6/10), Feinstein called the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy of separating adults and children “inhumane” and “callous.”

The US Customs and Border Protection agency informed Feinstein during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May that 658 children were taken from 638 parents during a two-week period in May, an average of approximately 47 children being separated from their parents.

“They’re taken and no one knows what happens to them,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Their parents don’t know how to find them.”

Feinstein introduced her bill (6/8), the Keep Families Together Act, which would allow separations only if it is found that the children have been trafficked or abused by their parents. President Trump has said he would be open to a bill that aims to keep families together.

“All they have to do is call us,” the president said, according to CBS News. “And we’ll draw a bill that gives us great border safety and security and it’s fair. Because I don’t like these children being separated from their parents, I don’t like it, I hate it! But that’s a Democrat bill that we’re enforcing.”

The president’s claim that Democrats are responsible for creating the law that requires family separations is a lie, Elham Khatami noted at ThinkProgress (6/10). While such separations also took place under the Bush and Obama administrations — albeit rarely — no such law exists. In fact, it was Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” policy, announced in April, that resulted in the dramatic rise in the number of children being separated from their parents.

Under the new policy, the Trump administration has prosecuted all people, including those seeking asylum, who attempt to cross the border into the US without documentation. The consequence of the policy is that children are separated from their families, while their parents are prosecuted.

A Honduran father who was arrested and forcibly separated from his wife and child after trying to enter the US killed himself while in jail, the Washington Post reported (6/9). The father, Marco Antonio Muñoz, his wife, and 3-year-old son were seeking to apply for asylum. Muñoz was found on the floor of his cell (5/13) in a pool of blood with an item of clothing twisted around his neck. It was ruled a “suicide in custody.”

A US district judge in San Diego (6/6) allowed a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenges the practice to move forward, calling the Trump administration’s conduct “brutal” and “offensive.”

NET NEUTRALITY IS OFFICIALLY DEAD. After months of public debate and legislative resistance on the left, net neutrality as we know it ended (6/11). The Federal Communications Commission’s FCC overturn of net neutrality rules, which were enacted in 2015, prohibited internet service providers from offering in unequal access to web content, Nichole Karlis reported at Salon (6/11).

The FCC voted to repeal the rules in December 2017 in a 3-2 vote along party lines. The unraveling of these regulations has indeed been a partisan issue — nearly all Democrats are pro–net neutrality, and the mission to end them was led by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. In May, Democrats banded together in one last attempt to block the overturn when they filed a discharge petition, which, under the Congressional Review Act, would allow for a Senate vote. This initiative, which did not pass the House, would have prevented the overturn from taking effect today, June 11.

“As a result of this inaction, starting today internet service providers (ISPs) have the power to force websites to pay fees for faster internet speeds and limit consumers’ ability to access the internet content of their choice,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “In this 21st century global economy, access to a free and open internet is imperative. It has become a hallmark of our American society,” he continued.

Analysts at Moody’s Investors Service said in December that they believed that ISP companies will “tread lightly” as a result of fear of bad publicity.

“We believe ISPs, namely Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and Charter, will tread lightly when it comes to engaging in paid prioritization and throttling, as there could be significant negative public reaction to these acts,” several analysts wrote in a co-penned note. “At least in the near term, the cost of negative publicity on their existing businesses far outweighs the benefit of additional revenue streams these companies can generate from paid prioritization agreements.”

Amber McKinney, who writes about telecommunications and serves as assistant managing editor at the legal site Law360, explained to Salon changes at first will be subtle — but as before, it is difficult to predict what will happen. McKinney said larger internet companies could be the first the feel the effects of today’s overturn though.

“While all of this is hard to predict, some sources have been telling Law360 that companies with heavy internet presence may be the first to feel impacts from the rollback,” she said. “The line of thinking is that ISPs may approach companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix to negotiate fees to keep their sites at top speeds.”

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2018

Populist.com