The 152-member House Republican Study Committee (RSC) released its alternative budget (5/20), and it revives Paul Ryan’s proposal to cut “entitlement” spending to make up for tax cuts. Bottom line: They’re coming for your Medicare and Social Security.
“The document is essentially an update of former House speaker Paul Ryan’s 2008 ‘Roadmap for America’s Future,’ a libertarian-inspired vision of what the federal government would do if taxes were never raised. The Republican Study Committee sets out to balance the federal budget through spending cuts alone and keep it balanced well into the future. The result is a dramatic reduction in what the federal government does across the board,” Henry Olsen wrote at the Washington Post (5/21).
“The proposal’s most notable features are its changes to the major entitlement programs most Americans rely on in old age. The age at which one receives full Social Security benefits would go up to 69 by 2030, from a planned rise to 67 in 2022. Medicare’s eligibility age would rise from 65 to 69. Combined, these increases would likely keep many aging Americans in the workforce for years more than they expect or desire.”
House Republicans are proposing slashing spending by $14 trillion over the next decade in order to balance the federal budget, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (5/24). “We’ve faced a year of unprecedented spending,” they wrote in a letter organized by RSC chair Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, noting that the federal government had spent over $7.6 trillion since March of last year—spurred mainly by the pandemic. Apparently, House Republicans forgot they were also the party that helped Trump single-handedly add nearly $8 trillion to the national debt during his four years in office, which was also pretty unprecedented.
“Ah, yes, forget all that planning you’ve been doing—69 is the new 65!” Eleveld wrote. “Now there’s a winning GOP slogan for 2022.”
House Republicans don’t just want to raise the age of eligibility for Medicare, they also want to fundamentally transform the program so that it no longer includes guaranteed services. Instead, retired Americans would get a subsidy they could use to pay for their insurance plans or a new “Fed Plan” that would replace Medicare as we once knew it. In other words, people would have to cover out of pocket any shortfall between the federal subsidy and their plan’s premium.
“Scrap Medicare!”—another GOP winner for 2022.
“Oh, also, ‘Scrap Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Affordable Care Act!’ House Republicans want to package those up into block grants they can then gift to the states, who can then do whatever they please with them in order to balance their own budgets. Gee, wonder if GOP-run state legislatures will find a way to leave constituents holding the bag,” Eleveld added.
VACCINATION DATA SUGGESTS COVID SPREADING AMONG REPUBLICANS. The race to immunize Americans against a pandemic virus that has killed more than 590,000 people in this country has been thoroughly partisanized, vaccination data suggests. Democratic-leaning communities are getting vaccinated. Republican communities aren’t. Analyzing the newest data, CNN reports that 21 of the top 25 most-vaccinated states were won by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, and 21 of the least vaccinated states voted for Trump—including all but one of the bottom 17.
“The correlation between vaccination rates and the 2020 election outcome by state has only strengthened over time,” said CNN analyst Harry Enten (5/23). Polling has shown for a while now that Democrats were more likely to get vaccinated than Republicans. A NPR/PBS-NewsHour/Marist College poll from early May showed 82% of Democrats said they were vaccinated compared to a mere 45% of Republicans. The stats revealed a similar split between Biden backers (82%) and Trump supporters (44%).
The correlation between vaccination rates and the 2020 election outcome by state has only strengthened over time, as supplies have overtaken demand, Enten wrote. “When I examined the stats a month and a half ago, there were a few Trump won states in the top 10. That’s no longer the case.”
Now, not only are all the top 10 states for vaccinations places that went for Biden, all of the top 20 are.
Hunter noted at DailyKos (5/24) “That’s almost certainly because vaccine supply is no longer so constrained, turning personal motivation into the new driving factor for who’s getting the vaccine and who isn’t. We already know who won’t be getting the vaccine, because they are very vocal about it: Trump supporters. Fox News watchers. Diehard Republicans who believe, despite all available evidence and quite probably themselves knowing someone who died, that the world pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by scientists or ‘globalists’ or other supposed elites working behind the scenes.
Hunter added, “This never had to happen. Conservative Americans were encouraged to reject pandemic safety for one simple reason: Donald Trump, an incompetent, disinterested, malignant narcissist who at no point was able to learn even the most basic duties of governance, had no idea how to respond to an emerging pandemic. Since he did not know how to respond, he declared that no response was necessary. As the virus trickled into the United States, then began exploding in local communities, he and his team of real estate scions and D-tier yes-men stuck to the notion that each report was a trick by invisible enemies to make Donald look bad.”
RESUMING IN-PERSON LEARNING AT TEXAS SCHOOLS LAST FALL ACCELERATED SPREAD OF COVID-19, STUDY SAYS. When Texas schools returned to in-person education last fall, the spread of the coronavirus “gradually but substantially accelerated,” leading to at least 43,000 additional cases and 800 additional deaths statewide, according to a study, Marissa Martinez reported at TexasTribune.org (5/10).
The study was done by University of Kentucky researchers for the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., and tracked weekly average COVID-19 cases in the eight weeks before and eight weeks after the state’s school districts sent students back to school in the fall.
The researchers said the additional cases they tracked after students began returning to schools represented 12% of the state’s total cases during the eight weeks after reopening and 17% of deaths.
They analyzed three things: school district reopening plans in every county, COVID-19 cases and deaths, and cellphone data that showed how adult movement changed once a community’s children went back to in-person learning.
Researchers chose Texas because, by the fall term, most schools around the country were still closed as Texas and a handful of other states were reopening in “less-than-ideal circumstances,” said Aaron Yelowitz, an economics professor at the University of Kentucky and one of the study’s researchers. The state also provided good conditions for pre-vaccine study, he added, since data was collected from May 2020 until January of this year, when vaccine rollout was still slow.
Although more Texans have since been vaccinated — about 30% had been fully vaccinated as of 5/8 — Yelowitz said there are still communities in which the study’s findings could matter moving forward, like areas with more vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-resistant people.
Across the state and the rest of the country, school reopening plans divided many communities last year. Proponents of reopening schools said in-person schooling would improve learning, increase social interaction, and allow access to state services like special education and free and reduced-price lunch programs. Opponents said remote learning was safer and did not risk the lives of teachers, faculty and staff, particularly after an intense summer surge.
Last July, state leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, gave individual school districts authority to make reopening decisions, even when they went against the recommendations of public health authorities. The Texas Education Agency required districts to make on-campus attendance an option, stating that districts also had to let students study remotely.
EXTREMISTS SEEKING POLITICAL OFFICE IDENTIFY AS REPUBLICANS, CONFIDENT THE BASE IS ON THEIR SIDE. One of the consequences of the Republican embrace of its extremist elements—from the insurrection denialists and Big Lie gaslighters to the QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—is that far-right extremists are now perfectly comfortable identifying as Republicans. In some cases, they’re demanding the overthrow of the party’s establishment—which can’t seem to decide whether to fight back or just succumb willingly to the incoming far-right tide, David Neiwert wrote at DailyKos (5/24).
` Establishment Republicans in Western states are particularly under siege from extremist elements among their voting base. In Idaho, for instance, armed-standoff-guru-turned-pandemic-denialist Ammon Bundy filed paperwork to run for governor, in a race already featuring another leading state “Patriot” movement figure. In Nevada, an insurgent far-right group organized on social media and led by Proud Boys members are attempting a hostile takeover of the Clark County GOP, the state’s largest county Republican organization, based in Las Vegas.
Bundy’s filing is rich in irony. For starters, he is currently banned from the Idaho Statehouse in Boise after his two ejections and arrests for defying masking requirements, for which he is currently standing trial. For another, as KTVB notes, Bundy himself is not even registered to vote in Idaho, and has apparently never done so in the five years or so that he has lived in Emmett.
He also named himself the treasurer of his campaign, which means that he will have to refile the paperwork, according to the Idaho Secretary of State’s office, which tweeted out an explanation: “Because a treasurer must be a registered Idaho voter, Ammon Bundy will either need to register and refile or name a new treasurer by refiling. IDSOS staff have notified him as such.”
The Republican field to replace incumbent Governor Brad Little (who has not announced whether he will seek re-election) is already large, and Bundy’s competition in the primary already features another leading “Patriot” movement figure, Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin, who announced her candidacy last week. While Bundy was probably the earliest far-right figure in Idaho to take up the cause of opposing COVID-19-related public-health restrictions, McGeachin—who has supported Bundy and his fellow standoff-loving “Patriots” steadfastly from her office in Boise—has also been on the pandemic-denialist bandwagon.
McGeachin appeared alongside Bundy at one anti-restriction rally in Boise. More notoriously, she appeared in a video in which she brandished a handgun and a Bible while sitting in the driver’s seat of a pickup, railing against coronavirus restrictions.
In Nevada, the political insurgency inside Clark County’s GOP was reported Friday by Rory Appleton at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who explained that a group of far-right activists with deep ties to the Proud Boys are positioning themselves to take over the county Republican leadership. Some of its members, meanwhile, are alleged to have threatened a number of prominent Republicans.
The group, Appleton reported, organized online—primarily using the encrypted chat app Telegram—while reveling in anti-Semitic and white-nationalist memes and rhetoric. “Two Republican women in public office told the Review-Journal they’ve been threatened by leaders of the fringe movement, as did the current board of the Clark County party, which is hiring security for a crucial meeting Tuesday,” the story reads.
Calling itself the “Republican Chamber of Commerce” (despite lacking ties to any known GOP organization), the far-right group first made its presence felt last month when it organized a late surge in votes favoring the censure of Barbara Cegavske, the state’s Republican Secretary of State, for refusing to play along with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results based on Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Since then, it has been preparing to provide a similar wave of votes to sweep three of their three leading figures—Rudy Clai, Matt Anthony and Paul Laramie—into the leadership of the Clark County GOP. The group has no record of doing business anywhere in the state of Nevada, and has no connection to any of the known chamber or Republican groups already established in Nevada.
Yet its website appears to be a nominally mainstream GOP group. Its primary emblem resembles the Republican National Committee’s logo but inverted, with a red elephant on a white background encircled in red with the letters “RCC” and “Republican Chamber of Commerce” within.
REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS CUTTING FEDERAL UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS FOR 4 MILLION. Four million workers were to start losing unemployment benefits in June as Republican governors opt out of federal benefit programs enacted in response to the COVID pandemic.
Florida announced it would drop the extra $300 that the federal government has been adding to weekly benefits so that workers would be more willing to accept lower-wage jobs, Arthur Delaney reported at HuffPost (5/24).
“Transitioning away from this benefit will help meet the demands of small and large businesses who are ready to hire and expand their workforce,” state labor secretary Dane Eagle said in a press release.
Florida’s announcement made 23 states that will discontinue the federal benefits, according to The Century Foundation, a think tank that analyzes economic policy.
Florida, Ohio, Alaska and Arizona are only dropping the $300 benefit, while the other states taking action are also canceling federal benefits for gig workers and the long-term jobless. About half of the 4 million workers will continue receiving state benefits, which average less than $400 per week. The other half will be left with nothing.
Sarah Brown of Brownsburg, Ind., gets $469 per week ― $169 in federal long-term benefits for workers who’ve exhausted their state benefits, plus the extra $300. Indiana announced that it would cancel the benefits in June. Brown earns some money from a temporary part-time job helping people file their taxes, but her benefit income will cease entirely.
“I had just hoped we would have it through summer,” she said.
Brown, 36, said she and her partner are reconfiguring their budget as she searches for a data entry job that would let her work from home. She suffers from chronic abdominal pain and is hoping for a position that could accommodate two or three doctor visits every month.
Contrary to stories about employers struggling to find willing workers, Brown said she hasn’t been getting interviews. “I’m just hoping I can find some kind of work,” she said. “I don’t care if it’s full time or part time.”
DECISION TO CUT OFF FEDERAL UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS IN TEXAS COULD BACKFIRE. Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to cut off federal unemployment insurance for Texas workers could backfire, economists told the Houston Chronicle (5/18).
Letting the benefits run to their scheduled expiration in early September would have delivered billions of dollars to tide over Texas working families while making little difference in whether low-road employers can hire. With all states that have announced cancellation of the benefits headed by Republican governors, Abbott’s decision makes sense only in the context of GOP politics:
“I’m still nervous that we’re bowing out of this program before the labor market is fully healed,” said Dietrich Vollrath, an economics professor at the University of Houston. “The bad consequences of doing too much is limited,” he said, “but the bad consequences of doing too little can really be detrimental.”
About 800,000 Texans were receiving federal jobless assistance at the end of April, according to the most recent data. Nearly half of them — the self-employed or other gig economy workers — will lose all of their benefits at the end of June, when the governor is ending the additional aid. The rest will see a steep drop in their weekly checks…
Belinda Román, an assistant economics professor at St. Mary’s University, said ending the payments could backfire and instead drive people further into poverty. If it does work, she said, it may force at least some people into underpaid jobs that they have decided are no longer worth the time or health risk.
Robert Kaplan, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told the Chronicle’s editorial board recently that employers have said workers are most reluctant to accept positions in the $12 to $15 range.
THEIR GUY LOST IN 2020. NOW THEY’RE RUNNING FOR STATEWIDE ELECTION POSTS TO WREAK HAVOC IN 2022 and 2024. After failing to overturn the 2020 election results, several of the GOP’s chief purveyors of election fraud conspiracy theories have decided they want to be running the show in their states next time around, according to Politico. Effectively, if you can’t beat ‘em, position yourself to cheat, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (5/24).
So a handful have launched campaigns to become their states’ top election officials:
• Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results and joined a lawsuit to overturn the results;
• Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, who has pushed the sham election audit in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa;
• Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to overturn his 5-point congressional loss last year;
• Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who devoted herself to claiming election fraud in every pro-conspiracy outlet that would take her.
All four are making bids to control elections in battleground states that will likely prove critical to determining which party controls Congress once the dust settles from the 2022 cycle. That prospect even has some Republican officials worried about how bad actors could undermine the integrity of state elections.
“Someone who is running for an election administration position, whose focus is not the rule of law but instead ‘the ends justifies the means,’ that’s very dangerous in a democracy,” Bill Gates, Republican vice chair of the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Arizona, told Politico. “This is someone who is trying to tear at the foundations of democracy.”
In Georgia and Nevada, these conspiracy-minded Trumpers are running to replace Republicans who they believe betrayed Trump and his voters by adhering to their oaths of office. But in Arizona and Michigan, they are hoping to replace Democrats who ran their state’s elections.
But not all secretaries of state are created equal—they are either imbued with more or less power depending on the state.
Former Kentucky GOP secretary of state, Trey Grayson, framed the distinction this way, “There’s a symbolic risk, and then there’s … functional risk.”
In some ways, Grayson said the symbolic risk of a state official using their position to undermine public trust in an election could prove to be the greater risk given that many secretaries of state mainly perform ministerial duties. “Any secretary of state who is a chief elections official is going to have a megaphone and a media platform during the election,” Grayson said. “A lot of the power is the perception of power, or that megaphone.”
The scenario that is currently playing out in Arizona with the sham audit of Maricopa County offers a window into the havoc one maligned actor with a platform could wreak. While actual Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has been laboring to reassure and educate voters about 2020 election integrity, one of the candidates to replace her, Finchem, has been pushing conspiracy theories as the audit progresses.
On Twitch, where many alt-right, pro-conspiracy voices broadcast, Finchem railed against mainstream media for calling the baseless fraud claims “baseless.”
“I hate to break the news to you, but just in case you news people haven’t been paying attention, there’s a lot of evidence that’s already out there,” Finchem said. “We’ve got the proof, we’ve got the receipts.”
There’s still no proof. There’s still no receipts. All there is in Maricopa right now is the corruption of the process at the hands of people who have zero experience in administering elections. Despite having no proof of their claims, Finchem and others are both preying on and pumping the hopes of Trumpers who still haven’t accepted the simple fact that their guy lost. Nationwide, that’s roughly two-thirds of GOP voters based on repeated polling of the issue.
LAST DAYS OF TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WERE BEDLAM. Apparently, the latter days of the former administration* fall somewhere between bedlam and the House of Usher, Charles P. Pierce noted at Esquire.com (5/17). The former president* was scaring the daylights out of the uniformed military, and the attorney general was spending out money chasing internet hecklers. From Axios:
The one-page memo was delivered by courier to Christopher Miller’s office two days later, on the afternoon of Nov. 11. The order arrived seemingly out of nowhere, and its instructions, signed by Trump, were stunning: All US military forces were to be withdrawn from Somalia by Dec. 31, 2020. All US forces were to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by Jan. 15, 2021. What the f*** is this? Miller wondered.
It was not the first time that question was asked over the preceding four years.
The relatively low-profile Miller had first met Trump as an NSC counterterrorism adviser on Oct. 26, 2019 — the night of the special operations raid that killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. A request by the commander in chief to lead the Pentagon was not something that Miller, a US Army veteran, felt he could turn down, despite pleas from his family and friends. Miller told associates he had three goals for the final weeks of the Trump administration: #1: No major war. #2: No military coup. #3: No troops fighting citizens on the streets.
Lofty goals in a democracy.
Meanwhile, across town, Bill Barr was tasking the DOJ to find out the names of people who were mocking Rep. Devin Nunes on the electric Twitter machine. The DOJ issued a subpoena to Twitter to flush these miscreants into the open.
Given Congressman Nunes’s numerous attempts to unmask his anonymous critics on Twitter—described in detail herein—Twitter is concerned that this Subpoena is but another mechanism to attack its users’ First Amendment rights. Recent litigation also alleges that Congressman Nunes may be using the government to unmask his critics.
Pierce concluded, “We are lucky that the Republic survived—for a while, anyway. The same can truly be said for all of us.”
BIDEN PLANS BIG INCREASE IN IRS FUNDING, STAFFING TO CRACK DOWN ON RICH TAX CHEATS. President Joe Biden is advocating doubling the size of the IRS, adding tens of thousands of new workers over the next decade in order to help achieve another of his goals: upping enforcement and getting tax scofflaws to pay up. That would come with an increase in funding to the IRS by $80 billion, and the return on that could be more than $700 billion in revenue in the next decade, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (5/21).
The funding is included in Biden’s American Families Plan, the $1.8 trillion companion bill to the American Jobs Plan, his infrastructure proposal.
The IRS will need that money, given that over the next six years, 52,000 IRS employees are expected to retire or leave—and the agency currently employs about 87,000 people. The National Treasury Employees Union is applauding that idea.
President Tony Reardon said the union will lobby Congress for that new funding, “giving the civil servants who work there the tools they need to do the job. … Treasury’s plan is a full 180-degree turn away from 10 years of budget cuts that slashed the IRS workforce and starved the agency of the resources it needs to function as intended,” Reardon said.
Decades of budget cuts have left the agency with ancient computer systems and far too few staff members. The House Budget Committee acknowledged these problems with the IRS in a report last fall. “The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has faced harsh budget cuts over the last decade, hindering its ability to serve the American people in fundamental ways,” the committee said. “Even before the pandemic, the underfunded IRS struggled to carry out its core functions of tax collection and enforcement.”
That means a lot of tax cheats—the big ones who could owe hundreds of thousands or even millions—have been getting away with it. “According to a recent report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), due to a lack of resources, the IRS failed to audit more than 897,000 wealthy individuals who skipped out on filing tax returns over a three‑year period—and these individuals owed nearly $46 billion in taxes,” the committee reported. This comes after decades of Republicans vilifying, attacking, and starving the agency.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen outlined the plan the IRS has for the $700+ billion in new revenue with the potential budget increase. She said that the IRS is going to be including the crypto market in the new enforcement measures, as well as going after high-income individuals and corporations. New reporting rules would require that banks and other financial institutions provide information that would help the IRS detect unreported income. Those new reporting rules would also apply to cryptocurrencies, crypto asset exchanges and custodians and crypto payment services.
WAGE THEFT IS A HUGE PROBLEM THAT REQUIRES A CREATIVE SOLUTION. If a worker steals from their employer, they can be fired or even face criminal charges. If an employer steals their workers’ wages, they … usually get to keep the money with no penalties, Laura Clawson wrote at DailyKos (5/22). “Wage theft is outrageously common, and it’s rarely treated as a serious civil violation, let alone a criminal one, despite taking money from people who desperately need it to get by. Minimum wage violations, for instance, are one common form of wage theft, and wage theft doesn’t hit all workers equally. According to the National Employment Law Project, “Black workers experience wage theft at three times the rate of white workers. Foreign-born workers experience wage theft at twice the rate of their US-born counterparts. And women experience wage theft at a rate of 30%, compared to 20% for male workers.”
In 2017, an Economic Policy Institute analysis found that minimum wage violations stole $8 billion a year from workers—in just the 10 most populous states. In 2019, forced arbitration agreements denying workers the chance to make their case in court let employers steal $40 million from Maine workers, NELP reports.
NELP has an answer: retaliation funds. Retaliation funds should be set up by a labor enforcement agency, and workers could draw on them if, after they filed a wage theft complaint with the labor enforcement agency, their pay was reduced or they were fired. At that point, they’d get a one-time payment, and “If the enforcement agency eventually finds that the employer unlawfully retaliated, the employer should replenish the fund with a payment equal to three times the amount the worker received.” That would protect workers from retaliation, which would reduce their fears about reporting wage theft to begin with, and it would act as a disincentive to employers tempted to steal from their workers. Is there a blue state that will consider trying this out?
BILL WOULD END POSTAL SERVICE’S CRIPPLING PRE-FUNDING MANDATE. A bipartisan reform bill that appears to have momentum in Congress could lift the US Postal Service’s horrendous burden of having to pre-fund retiree health benefits.
The Washington Post reported (5/19) that identical bills in both the House and Senate are moving and that Republican Senate co-sponsors have reached a level that would overcome a filibuster.
This is a remarkable development for unions that are represented at USPS. If the bill moves, it would resolve problems Congress created more than 15 years ago that have made it all but impossible for USPS to operate without large deficits.
While more can be done, the bipartisan bill would end requirements that apply to no other business or governmental entity. The sabotage of a service begun by Benjamin Franklin may soon end:
The bill, identical to a version that has advanced in the House, would repeal $5 billion a year in mandatory retiree health-care expenses and require future postal retirees to enroll in Medicare. Advocates say the measures would save the agency $30 billion over the next decade.
The bill would also see the Postal Service develop a public online mail delivery performance dashboard where customers could view the agency’s on-time delivery metrics by Zip code each week.
The National Association of Letter Carriers reports the House version of the bill “addresses two of NALC’s top priorities”:
The repeal of the mandate that the Postal Service pre-fund decades’ worth of health benefits for its future retirees, which was enacted through the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) of 2006, embracing the bipartisan USPS Fairness Act (H.R. 695 and S. 145).
The American Postal Workers Union has also complimented the bill, which would enact prospective Medicare integration. The prefunding mandate requires USPS to fully prefund retirement health benefits for future postal workers who have not even been born yet. This burden—which no other organization is forced to bear—is responsible for 84 percent of the Postal Service’s net losses since 2007.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2021
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