Dispatches

TRUMP TAX ‘CUTS’ MAY BECOME POLITICAL DISASTER

Millions of Americans filling out their 2018 taxes will be surprised to learn their refunds will be less than they expected, or they owe money to the IRS, as a result of Donald Trump’s tax “reforms.”

People have already taken to social media, using the hashtag #GOPTaxScam, to vent their anger, Heather Long reported at Washington Post (2/10). Many blame President Trump and the Republicans for shrinking refunds. Some on Twitter even said they wouldn’t vote for Trump again after seeing their refunds slashed.

The uproar follows passage of a major overhaul to the tax code in December 2017, which was enacted with only Republican votes and is considered the biggest legislative achievement of Trump’s first year. While the vast majority of Americans were supposed to receive a tax cut in 2018, refunds are a different matter. Some refunds have decreased because of changes in the law, such as a new limit on property and local income tax deductions, and some have decreased because the IRS has altered withholding in paychecks.

The average tax refund check is down 8% ($170) this year compared to last, the IRS reported (2/8), and the number of people receiving a refund so far has dropped by almost a quarter.

An IRS spokesman cautioned that the early data reflects only returns processed through 2/1, and the partial government shutdown caused delays in processing filings.

Early data can shift a lot, tax experts say, but there’s reason to believe frustrations could rise as more Americans complete their tax returns. The Government Accountability Office warned last summer that the number of tax filers who receive refunds was likely to drop for the 2018 tax year, while the number of filers who owe money would rise.

The GAO pointed to an IRS estimate that about 4.6 million fewer filers would receive refunds this tax filing season. Another 4.6 million filers were likely to owe money who had not had that experience in the past.

Republicans hoped that once voters saw fatter paychecks, the GOP would see better poll numbers, Eric Levitz noted at New York Magazine (2/8). “And just to be sure that voters noticed all the good Paul Ryan had done for them, the Trump administration reportedly pressured the IRS to err on the side of withholding too little from Americans’ paychecks ‘so people will see big increases in their take-home pay ahead of this year’s midterm elections.’”

This did not work out as planned, Levitz noted. Even with (allegedly) light withholding, the tax bill’s breaks for middle-class people weren’t large enough to attract much notice. Between changes in salaries, health-care premiums, and 401(k) contributions, most Americans didn’t detect much tax relief in their paychecks. The Trump Tax Cuts actually became less popular after they took effect. And, of course, Paul Ryan’s majority drowned in a blue wave.

Now, the bill for the GOP’s (reported) withholding shenanigans is coming due: The average American’s tax refund was 8.4% lower in the first week of 2019 than it was one year ago (under the pre-Trump tax code). And while Americans have trouble noticing tax changes when they’re dispersed across 12 to 24 separate paychecks, they do typically pay very close attention to the size of their refunds. About three-quarters of the country typically qualifies for a tax refund most years — and for many of those households, that check from the IRS is the largest lump sum they’ll receive all year.

“Ask people how much they paid in taxes, nobody knows. Ask them how much they got in their refund, people know,” Howard Gleckman , a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, told the Intercept’s David Dayen. “Everyone focuses on size of the refund, and it does affect perception.”

In other words, Levitz concluded: “It looks as though the Republican Party implemented their signature tax bill in a manner that will lead many people who received tax cuts to believe that Donald Trump raised their taxes.”

TRUMP TELLS AT LEAST 28 LIES ON STATE OF UNION. Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech (2/5) once again was chock-full of stretched facts and dubious figures, the Washington Post’s Fact Checkers reported (2/6). Of course, these are on top of the 8,459 false or misleading claims Trump has made from his inauguration through Feb. 3.

Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in repeating them. Among the 28 State of the Union lies analyzed by the Fact Checkers:

• “We have created 5.3 million new jobs and importantly added 600,000 new manufacturing jobs.” In fact, there have been almost 4.9 million jobs created since January 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of which 436,000 are manufacturing jobs.

• “Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades.” Wages rose 3.1% from December 2017 to December 2018, according to the Labor Department’s Employment Cost Index for civilian workers, a widely watched measure of pay that does not take inflation into account. That is the biggest increase — not adjusted for inflation — since the year that ended in December 2008. But adjusted for inflation, wages for all workers grew 1.3% from December 2017 to December 2018, making the increase only the largest since August 2016, according to the Labor Department.

• “Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps.” About 3.6 million people have stopped receiving food stamps since February 2017, according to the latest data.

• “The lawless state of our southern border is a threat to the safety, security and financial well-being of all Americans. We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.” By any available measure, there is no new security crisis at the border. Apprehensions of people trying to cross the southern border peaked most recently at 1.6 million in 2000 and have been in decline since, falling to just under 400,000 in fiscal 2018. The decline is partly because of technology upgrades; tougher penalties in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; a decline in migration rates from Mexico; and a sharp increase in the number of Border Patrol officers.

The fiscal 2018 number was up from just over 300,000 apprehensions at the US-Mexico border for fiscal 2017, the lowest level in more than 45 years.

There are far more cases of travelers overstaying their visas than southern border apprehensions. In fiscal 2017, the Department of Homeland Security reported 606,926 suspected in-country overstays, or twice the number of southern border apprehensions. In fiscal 2016, U.S. officials reported 408,870 southern border apprehensions and 544,676 suspected in-country overstays.

• “The next major priority for me, and for all of us, should be to lower the cost of health care and prescription drugs — and to protect patients with preexisting conditions.” The Trump administration has refused to defend the Affordable Care Act against a lawsuit that would end protection for patients with preexisting conditions. When the district court ruled against the law, Trump celebrated the ruling.

NAFTA REWRITE WOULD LOCK IN HIGH MED PRICES. More than 70 organizations launched an effort to remove new monopoly protections for pharmaceutical firms added to the revised North American Free Trade Agreement.

In a letter to Congress, the groups – representing tens of millions of Americans – demand that the pact’s giveaways to Big Pharma that would keep medicines unaffordable be removed before the pact is sent to Congress.

The diverse group of patient advocacy, faith, consumer, labor and other public interest organizations that signed the letter took aim at NAFTA 2.0 terms that would “lock in place existing US policies that have led to high medicine prices, undermining the authority of this and future Congresses to implement important reforms to expand generic and biosimilar competition, lower medicine prices and expand access.”

Among other dangerous requirements is that each NAFTA country guarantee a minimum of 10 years of marketing exclusivity – that is, longer monopoly protections – for cutting-edge biologics, which includes many new cancer treatments and even vaccines. This would lock the US into its current system that keeps prices for biologics sky-high and export it to Mexico, which does not mandate a special exclusivity period for biologics, and to Canada, which now has an eight-year period.

Some of the signatory organizations said the NAFTA 2.0 text improves on the original NAFTA on labor and environmental matters. But NAFTA 2.0 is dramatically worse than the original with the new monopoly rights for pharmaceutical corporations that would help them avoid competition from generic and biosimilar products and keep medicines unaffordable.

The letter notes that a decade ago, congressional Democrats and then-President George W. Bush agreed on a standard for trade-pact intellectual property terms that strove to promote innovation and access to affordable medicines. That standard is not met in the NAFTA 2.0 text.

With one in five people in the United States failing to fill prescriptions due to their cost, the letter signers urge the new Congress to demand “that the administration eliminate the provisions in the NAFTA 2.0 text that undermine affordable access to medicines.” Focus on widespread public anger over health care costs helped propel the Democrats to victory in the midterm elections.

The letter’s signers include representatives of Consumer Reports, Doctors Without Borders, NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Social Security Works, the AFL-CIO and Public Citizen.

BLACK VIRGINIANS SUPPORT NORTHAM IN BLACKFACE SCANDAL. Virginians are deadlocked over whether Gov. Ralph Northam (D) should step down after the emergence of a photo on his 1984 medical school yearbook page depicting people in blackface and Ku Klux Klan garb, but African Americans say by a wide margin that he should remain in office despite the offensive image, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll.

The poll, conducted 2/6 through 2/8, finds residents split over Northam’s fate, with 47% wanting him to step down and 47% saying he should stay on. Northam gets higher support among blacks — who say he should remain in office by a margin of 58% to 37% — than among whites, who are more evenly divided.

On the scandals buffeting the state’s other top elected officials, the poll by the Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University finds that about a third of Virginians think Atty. Gen. Mark R. Herring (D) should resign after he admitted wearing blackface at a party in 1980 when he was a 19-year-old undergraduate at the University of Virginia. A 60% majority say he should stay in office.

Most remain undecided about a woman’s allegation that Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax (D) sexually assaulted her in 2004, with 65% saying they didn’t know enough to judge Fairfax’s denial of the accusation. Respondents were not asked about a second sexual assault accusation against Fairfax by a Maryland woman on 2/8, after the poll began.

The Post-Schar School poll also found that 11% of residents have either worn blackface — an activity common in 19th-century minstrel shows, which featured white performers portraying African Americans in demeaning ways — or know someone who has.

Another poll found that roughly a third of Americans thinks it is acceptable to wear blackface.

The study released Feb. 11 by Pew Research, was carried out before recent revelations that Virginia Gov. Northam and State Atty. Gen. Herring both wore blackface in the 1980s. The state’s Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment (R), also admitted being the editor of the Virginia Military Institute’s 1968 yearbook which was filled with racial slurs and photos of individuals in blackface, Luke Barnes noted at ThinkProgress (2/11).

According to the survey, 34% of Americans said blackface was “always or sometimes” acceptable to wear as part of a Halloween costume, compared to 53% who believed it was rarely or never acceptable.

There was, not surprisingly, significant variance in the responses by according to racial and ethnic group. Just 19% of African-Americans thought blackface is ever acceptable, compared to 39% of whites. For Hispanics, that number was 26%.

GREEN NEW DEAL REFLECTS 2016 DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM, BUT STRONGER. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) introduced the Green New Deal resolution (2/7) to address the climate crisis while generating millions of high wage jobs.

But while the Green New Deal may appear to be a sweeping and radical new proposal, in fact its main ideas strongly resemble the 2016 Democratic Platform — a document written by some of the most senior party policymakers and endorsed by the entire party establishment at the Democratic National Convention that year, Joe Romm noted at ThinkProgress (2/8).

Both documents lay out the case for immediate mobilization of the entire society to reengineer the economy to be run on renewable energy. Both insist on starting with a rapid decarbonization of the electric grid. And both lay out a broad and deep program.

If taken on their own, many of the commitments proposed in either the Green New Deal or the 2016 Democratic Platform tout similarly ambitious goals.

As the 2016 text reads: “We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II.” Meanwhile the Green New Deal says we need “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.”

And where the Green New Deal says the it must ensure “that frontline and vulnerable communities shall not be adversely affected” and provide “access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature,” the 2016 platform says “Our climate change policy will cut carbon emission, address poverty, invest in disadvantaged communities, and improve both air quality and public health.”

The 2016 platform was written by the 15-member Platform Drafting Committee  and was chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) who has served in Congress for two decades and now chairs the House Oversight Committee.

The 2016 platform included input from activists like 350.org founder, Bill McKibben, who told ThinkProgress in an email that “the platform didn’t go far enough, but it does provide a good … platform for thinking this through.”

SENATE LEADER McCONNELL LINKED TO RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS. One of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s major donors, Len Blavatnik, benefited when Trump and McConnell lifted Russian sanctions (1/27), Leslie Salzillo noted at DailyKos (1/28).

The Dallas Morning News reported (12/15/17) that Blavatnik, who is tied to Vladimir Putin and other Russian oligarchs, contributed a total of $3.5 million to a PAC associated with McConnel. Blavatnik contributed $1.5 million to the GOP Senate Leadership Fund PAC in the name of Access Industries and another $1 million in the name of AI-Altep Holdings during the 2015/2016 election season. And as of September 2017, he had contributed another $1 million this year through AI-Altep.

Blavatnik, whose family emigrated to the US in the late 1970s, is a longtime business associate of Russian oligarchs Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg, both of whom have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Along with McConnell, Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham received hefty sums from Blavatnik as well, the News reported.

LOSS OF NEWSPAPERS LEADS TO POLITICAL POLARIZATION. The steady loss of local newspapers and journalists across the country contributes to the nation’s political polarization, a new study has found, David Bauder wrote for the Associated Press (1/30).

With fewer opportunities to find out about local politicians, citizens are more likely to turn to national sources like cable news and apply their feelings about national politics to people running for the town council or state legislature, according to research published in the Journal of Communication.

The result is much less “split ticket” voting, or people whose ballot includes votes for people of different parties. In 1992, 37% of states with Senate races elected a senator from a different party than the presidential candidate the state supported. In 2016, for the first time in a century, no state did that, the study found.

“The voting behavior was more polarized, less likely to include split ticket voting, if a newspaper had died in the community,” said Johanna Dunaway, a communications professor at Texas A&M University, who conducted the research with colleagues from Colorado State and Louisiana State universities.

Researchers reached that conclusion by comparing voting data from 66 communities where newspapers have closed in the past two decades to 77 areas where local newspapers continue to operate, she said. “We have this loss of engagement at the local level,” she said.

The struggling news industry has seen some 1,800 newspapers shut down since 2004, the vast majority of them community weeklies, said Penelope Muse Abernathy, a University of North Carolina professor who studies the contraction. Many larger daily newspapers that have remained open have effectively become ghosts, with much smaller staffs that are unable to offer the breadth of coverage they once did. About 7,100 newspapers remain.

Researchers are only beginning to measure the public impact of such losses. Among the other findings is less voter participation among news-deprived citizens in “off-year” elections where local offices are decided, Abernathy said. Another study suggested a link to increased government spending in communities where “watchdog” journalists have disappeared, she said.

Dunaway said voters in communities without newspapers are more likely to be influenced by national labels — if they like Republicans like President Donald Trump, for example, that approval will probably extend to Republicans lower on the ballot.

The diminished news sources also alter politicians’ strategies, Dunaway said.

“They have to rely on party ‘brand names’ and are less about ‘how I can do best for my district,’” she said.

ICE CONFIRMS ASYLUM SEEKERS ON HUNGER STRIKE ARE BEING FORCE-FED. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has confirmed that asylum-seekers who have been on a hunger strike in protest of abusive conditions and prolonged detainment are being force-fed, a torturous, painful process that has left some of the men in the El Paso Processing Center facility with “nasal and rectal bleeding and vomiting,” National Public Radio reported (1/31).

ICE acknowledged that officials had resorted to the extraordinary step of acting on the court orders to force feed the detainees, with officials claiming that they have explained the negative health effects of not eating to the detainees participating in the protest. But that touches on why detainees are on strike in the first place. “My clients don’t speak any English,” attorney Ruby Kaur said, “and part of the reason they are doing the hunger strike is that ICE has not provided them with anyone who can speak Punjabi.”

This has been an ongoing problem for federal immigration agencies. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that the Department of Homeland Security didn’t have a systematic method for assessing its foreign-language needs, the Arizona Daily Star reports. But “the federal watchdog closed its recommendation as not implemented in 2014, saying the department had not fully mets its recommendations.” Five years later, this is clearly still a major problem, Gabe Ortiz noted at DailyKos (2/1).

Some strikers also say they have been verbally abused, while others are undergoing “debilitating angst created by a total absence of information about their impending asylum cases.” They are striking because they are desperate, but someone is now finally listening. “I was deeply alarmed by this report,” tweeted US Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-TX. “I immediately requested a visit, and was able to spend several hours this afternoon at the detention facility talking to personnel and to 6 detainees being force-fed, many of whom have been detained for 15-18 months.”

Some of the detainees have been striking for as long as a month, and have been force-fed for two weeks now. “This is unacceptable,” Escobar continued. “I’m closely monitoring this situation and as a new member of the House Judiciary, vow to implement policies that provide increased oversight and accountability to ensure detainees are treated with dignity and respect. El Paso and our country are better than this.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted, “none of this should be happening in America.”

TRUMP TRADE WAR PUSHES FARMERS INTO RECORD BANKRUPTCIES. Hard times for farmers got tougher with President Donald Trump’s trade war. Now Midwestern farmers are filing the highest number of bankruptcies in a decade, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data (4/6).

And farmers aren’t hopeful about this year.

Twice as many farmers in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin declared bankruptcy last year compared to 2008, according to statistics from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, the Journal reported. Bankruptcies in states from North Dakota to Arkansas leaped 96%, according to figures from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, Mary Papenfuss reported at HuffPost (2/11).

Farmers are being battered by sinking commodity prices — and stiff tariffs from China and Mexico in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on imports.

The new 11-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) treaty last year slashed tariffs — but not for US farmers since the Trump administration pulled out of negotiations. That drove customers to farmers and ranchers in competitive countries, like Australia, serving another blow to American operations.

Farmers fear it will take years to rebuild those trading relationships.

According to figures from the US Agriculture Department, farm income last year was about 50% of what it was in 2013, the Wisconsin State Farmer reported.

The dairy industry was hopeful about meeting growing demand in China, but now trade is a major stumbling block. “The problem is that both nations have stubborn leaders,” Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said at an agricultural forum last week in Madison.

Soybeans were also a major victim. “Agriculture prices live and die by exports. In all commodities, we’re heavily dependent on China, especially for soybeans,” Kevin Bernhardt, agribusiness professor at the University of Wisconsin in Platteville, told the Milwaukee Independent.

Government subsidies to farmers were up 18% last year over the previous year, due to the $4.7 billion in tariff aid and $1.6 billion in disaster payments for farmers impacted by hurricanes, floods and other disasters. But it wasn’t enough to stave off the end for some.

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2019

Populist.com