The following article by Erica Werner and Damian Paletta was posted on the Washington Post website December 12, 2017:
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) talks with reporters on Capitol Hill this month. Credit: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post
Congressional Republicans are in advanced talks to lower the top tax rate for individuals from 39.6 percent to 37 percent as they finalize a massive $1.5 trillion tax package, said three people familiar with the negotiations.
The move follows complaints from wealthy taxpayers in New York and elsewhere that their taxes could go up under the legislation because of other changes it makes to the code.
The following article by Heather Long was posted on the Washington Post website December 10, 2017:
Randy Sherfy has lived in a traumatic care facility since a driver hit him when he was 41. Cecilia “Sis” Tunnell has Alzheimer’s and requires intensive care. Both would end up paying thousands of dollars more in taxes if the medical deduction goes away, their families say. (Sherfy photo courtesy of Joe Sherfy; Tunnell photo courtesy of Mary Pagel).
Anne Hammer is one of millions of elderly Americans who could face a substantial tax hike in 2018 depending on the final negotiations over theRepublican tax bill.
In her retirement community in Chestertown,Md., it’s the big topic of conversation.
Hammer is 71. Like many seniors, her medical bills are piling up. There are doctor visits, insurance premiums, drugs, a colonoscopy, a heart scan, an unexpected trip to the emergency room that lasted three days, ongoing monitoring for breast and ovarian cancer that run in her family and the costs of medical staff at her retirement community. Her out-of-pocket medical expenses vary, but she estimates they are about $20,000 a year.
The following commentary by Dana Milbank was psoted on the Washington Post website December 8, 2017:
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)
Thursday was Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of one of the deadliest attacks on American soil and perhaps the most unifying day in American history.
This year some of us marked Pearl Harbor Day by attacking America from within.
For five hours on Thursday, President Trump’s partisans delivered a reckless and sustained attack on the FBI and the special counsel. They amplified Trump’s claim that the FBI’s “reputation is in Tatters — worst in History” and that Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia probe, which has already secured guilty pleas from two Trump campaign officials and the indictments of two more, is part of a system that is “rigged,” “phony,” “dishonest” and using a “double standard.” Continue reading “The GOP’s all-out assault on justice”
The following article by Cynthia Tucker was posted on the uexpress.com website December 7, 2017:
Credit: Adam/Flickr.com
In the waning days of the 2016 presidential election, worried political prognosticators, including more than a few moderate Republicans, papered over their fears about the possible victory of Donald J. Trump with reminders of the constitutional balance of power. An independent judiciary and a strong-minded Congress would prevent a President Trump from doing serious harm to the republic, they said.
Even then, those assurances seemed weak. Now, as Trump — with the assistance of a Republican Congress — proceeds to rip apart the social fabric, blow up traditional democratic norms and overturn longstanding foreign policy practices, those assertions seem laughable. The Trump presidency is destroying the nation and threatening the globe.
If that seems a bit hyperbolic, consider the warning that former President Barack Obama issued during an appearance a few days ago. “We have to tend to this garden of democracy, or else things could fall apart quickly,” Obama said. “That’s what happened in Germany in the 1930s which … Adolf Hitler rose to dominate.” Continue reading “Trump Causing Severe Damage, Congress Planning Worse”
The following article by the Center for American Progress Postsecondary Education Team was posted on their website December 7, 2017:
In this February 1, 2017, photo, students walk between classes on campus. Credit: AP/Bebeto Matthews
Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce unveiled its proposal for rewriting the Higher Education Act, the nation’s main law governing postsecondary education. The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act is the beginning of an important conversation about what the future of learning beyond high school should look like in this country going forward.
Unfortunately, the bill’s vision of higher education is an emboldened industry at the expense of students. In a one-two punch, the bill would first eliminate key requirements that shield students from being taken advantage of while they’re in school, and then follow up by undercutting the safety net that prevents debt from ruining the lives of low-income borrowers. Similarly, the bill limits state efforts to oversee schools and loan servicers, and ties the U.S. Department of Education’s hands in conducting oversight work. Continue reading “What You Need to Know About the House Higher Education Act Bill”
The following article by Griffin Connolly was posted on the Roll Call website December 7, 2017:
ATF has begun process to re-evaluate bump stock classification, lawmakers told
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, held a hearing Wednesday that addressed bump stocks, making good on a promise after the Las Vegas shooting. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
More than two months after the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history, the Senate Judiciary committee held a long-awaited hearing addressing the bump stock devices the shooter used to kill more than 50 people and injure hundreds more.
“ATF’s authority to regulate firearms is of course limited by the terms of [the 1934 and 1968 firearms laws], and they do not empower ATF to regulate parts or accessories designed to be used with firearms,” Thomas E. Brandon, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), told lawmakers.
For the ATF to legally regulate bump stocks under current legislation, the devices would need to be classified as “machine guns,” Brandon indicated.
NOTE: Rep. Erik Paulsen voted for this bill in the House.
The following article by David Hawkings was posted on the Roll Call website December 7, 2017:
Expansion of concealed carry permission will die in the Senate, but the NRA really wanted the vote
Majority Whip John Cornyn has some doubts that he can get a bill passed that would improve background checks for gun purchasers but doesn’t make it easier for gun owners to carry concealed weapons across state lines. A House bill passed Wednesday would do both. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)
One government shutdown may be narrowly averted, but another looms right around the corner. The stain of sexual misconduct at the Capitol continues to spread, and an alleged child predator is days away from possibly joining the Senate. Middle East destabilization seems assured as Congress gets its wish to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Public support dwindles daily for a loophole-encrusted, deficit-busting tax package that would be the year’s biggest legislative achievement. The push for presidential impeachment has gone far enough to necessitate procedural pushback in the House.
A week such as this one — already chockablock with headlines touching the Hill — seemed to the Republicans who run the place like an ideal time for making a bold hiding-in-plain-sight move.
And so it was that the House devoted more than two hours Wednesday to passing legislation that has no chance whatsoever of becoming law and is broadly unpopular with the electorate, but nonetheless fulfills the GOP’s commitment to doing the bidding of an extremely potent force in its political base. Continue reading “A Gun Rights Vote Only the GOP Base Can Appreciate”
The following article by Jim Tankersley was posted on the New York TImes website December 4, 2017:
As the Senate prepared to vote on its tax bill, Republican Senators criticized the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation over its analysis that the bill would increase the deficit by $1 trillion. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A Republican requirement that Congress consider the full cost of major legislation threatened to derail the party’s $1.5 trillion tax rewrite last week. So lawmakers went on the offensive to discredit the agency performing the analysis.
In 2015, Republicans changed the budget rules in Congress so that official scorekeepers would be required to analyze the potential economic impact of major legislation when determining how it would affect federal revenues.
But on Thursday, hours before they were set to vote on the largest tax cut Congress has considered in years, Senate Republicans opened an assault on that scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and its analysis, which showed the Senate plan would not, as lawmakers contended, pay for itself but would add $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit.
Public statements and messaging documents obtained by The New York Times show a concerted push by Republican lawmakers to discredit a nonpartisan agency they had long praised. Party leaders circulated two pages of “response points” that declared “the substance, timing and growth assumptions of J.C.T.’s ‘dynamic’ score are suspect.” Among their arguments was that the joint committee was using “consistently wrong” growth models to assess the effect the tax cuts would have on hiring, wages and investment.
The Republican response points go after revenue analyses by the committee and by the Congressional Budget Office, which scores other legislation, saying their findings “can be off to the tune of more than $1.5 trillion over ten years.”
The swift backlash helped defuse concerns about the deficit impact long enough for the bill to pass by a vote of 51 to 49. Some deficit hawks in the Senate caucus were sufficiently concerned about the report on Thursday night to delay the tax vote by a day, but the only Republican lawmaker to vote no was Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, whose last-minute efforts to cut the size of the package or otherwise offset the deficit impact were unsuccessful.
Instead, Senate Republicans questioned the timing of the analysis’ release on Thursday, and a spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee released a statement saying the findings are “curious and deserve further scrutiny.”
Republicans say the committee’s model underestimates how workers will respond to lower taxes and how private investment affects growth. They also say the model assumes that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates faster than Republican lawmakers expect, which would make borrowing more expensive and could slow economic growth.
That sentiment was repeated over and over, before and after the vote. “We think they lowballed it,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, told reporters on Thursday. On Sunday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said on CNN that “there’s no doubt that the J.C.T. has been consistently underestimating the activity in our economy.”
In the final hours before and after the bill passed, party leaders insisted that the tax plan would produce enough economic growth to pay for themselves with additional tax revenue from growing businesses and higher-paid workers. “I’m totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, told reporters early Saturday morning after the vote, adding that he believed the bill would actually be a “revenue producer.”
Yet there was no data to support those claims, despite promises by the Trump administration that such an analysis would be forthcoming. The Treasury, whose secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has said repeatedly that his department was working on an analysis to show how the tax cuts would not add to the deficit, has not produced any studies that back up those claims. Last week, the Treasury’s inspector general said it was opening an inquiry into the department’s analysis of the tax plan.
The attack on the joint committee and its analysis is a change from the praise Republicans have long heaped on the body, which is staffed with economists and other career bureaucrats who analyze legislation in depth.
“The people who prepare our cost estimates are the best in the business, and they’ve been working on this issue for years,” Republicans on the House Budget Committee said on a page that was restored to the committee’s website on Monday afternoon, after what staff members said was an accidental deletion during a site redesign this year.
At stake in the debate is more than the reputation of the economic analysts whose lifeblood is understanding the vagaries and intersections of the federal budget and tax code.
If Republicans are wrong and the joint committee is correct, the tax bill will add to an already worsening fiscal forecast in the United States. The federal government is already running an annual deficit of nearly $700 billion. The amount of federal debt has surpassed $20 trillion, and it is projected to grow by another $10 trillion over the next decade as government safety net spending rises because of retiring baby boomers and increasing health care costs.
The joint committee did find that the tax bill would rev up economic growth but, like other studies, it would not be enough to offset the loss of tax revenue. The analysis found growth from the tax cuts would offset $458 billion in lost revenue, but $51 billion of that would be eaten up by additional interest costs on money the United States would need to borrow to pay for the plan. That would leave just $407 billion to offset a nearly $1.5 trillion tax cut, the committee found.
Other independent analyses echo the joint committee’s findings. The Tax Foundation, which tends to find high growth effects from tax cuts, projected the House version of the tax bill would increase deficits by about $1 trillion after factoring in economic growth. The Tax Policy Center, which tends to find much smaller effects, estimated the deficit increase at nearly $1.5 trillion. So did the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which is run by a former Bush administration economist, Kent A. Smetters.
Both the Penn model and the Tax Policy Center’s model found the Senate version would increase deficits by more than $1 trillion after accounting for growth; the Penn model in particular produced a near-identical score to the joint committee’s. The Tax Foundation did not complete an analysis of the Senate bill as amended in committee, when senators made several large changes to the bill including sunsetting its tax cuts for individuals in 2025.
Until Thursday, though, Republicans could dismiss those findings by pointing to the lack of analysis from the joint committee. The House bill was passed two weeks after it was introduced, before the committee could issue a so-called dynamic score of the bill, one that estimates the legislation’s cost in light of its effect on the economy. When the Senate analysis was finally released, Republicans, who pushed the bill through Congress at such lightning-fast speed that the final bill had handwritten changes in the margins, questioned the timing.
“How is it,” they wrote in their response points, “that J.C.T. found the time to produce and make public its macroeconomic analysis of the Senate bill, when it has yet to produce the same analysis of the House bill that passed weeks ago.”
In a November 28 email shared with The New York Times, the committee’s chief of staff, Thomas A. Barthold, said the committee had suspended its work on the House bill dynamic score in hopes of producing an analysis of the Senate bill before a final vote.
Looking at the calendar, Mr. Barthold wrote, “I made the decision to have my macro colleagues devote their time to producing a macroeconomic estimate of the Finance bill in time for the Finance Committee’s report (in this we failed) or in time for the Senate’s debate on the legislation. My colleagues and I reasoned that we could then return to complete work on H.R. 1” — the House bill — “and with good fortune have the two analyses available for a potential conference.”
The blowback came, in part, from lingering anger over unfavorable analyses of Republican health care plans by the budget office earlier this year, according to a Republican Senate aide. A finding that contradicted their philosophical belief that tax cuts will generate significant growth and revenues inflamed their suspicions.
Instead, they found comfort in ballpark estimates offered by some conservative economists, that the tax bill could increase the size of the economy by as much as 4 percent over a decade, or 0.4 percent a year. Mr. Smetters, of Penn, said that number is actually much higher — that the economy would need to grow by at least an additional 0.57 percent a year for tax cuts to pay for themselves.
Not even the most optimistic analysis of the Senate bill projected it would unleash anywhere close to that rate of additional growth.
The following article by David Hawkings was posted on the Roll Call website December 4, 2017:
Past showdowns happened in divided governments, and still Republicans got blamed. So what’s different now?
President Donald Trump, flanked by Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell faces the prospect of the first government shutdown when one party controlled all levers of government. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
Among the story lines that have made the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency genuinely unique, few can top this one for its potential consequences for responsible governance as well as good politics: A government controlled exclusively by one party may shut itself down.
Four times in the past three decades, budgetary impasses have required non-essential personnel to stay home and the activities at their agencies to be suspended. In each case, at least one chamber of Congress was controlled by a political party different from the president’s, the stalemates reflecting intractable partisan disagreements over policies and spending priorities.
The following article by Dylan Scott and ALvin Chang was posted on the Vox website December 2, 2017:
“The bill is investing heavily in the wealthy and their children.”
America’s rich have gotten richer for decades, while the middle class and poor have seen meager gains. Since the mid-20th century, the top 1 percent have more than doubled their share of the nation’s income, from less than 10 percent to more than 20 percent.
Donald Trump said he was going fix it — that he would represent the forgotten men and women, the people who had been left behind in this widening of income inequality.
