Incomes are rising and poverty is falling, but the gap between the rich and poor has grownTaken together, the census numbers paint a portrait of an economy pulled in different directions, with the falling poverty rate coinciding with high inequality and the growing cadre of people at financial risk because they do not have health coverage.
NEW ORLEANS — President Trump has portrayed America’s cities as wastelands, ravaged by crime and homelessness, infested by rats.
But the Trump administration’s signature plan to lift them — a multibillion-dollar tax break that is supposed to help low-income areas — has fueled a wave of developments financed by and built for the wealthiest Americans.
Among the early beneficiaries of the tax incentive are billionaire financiers like Leon Cooperman and business magnates like Sidney Kohl — and Mr. Trump’s family members and advisers.
The federal government will rack up $12.2 trillion in deficits through 2029, according to a new projection from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), an $809 billion increase from its last projection in May.
The CBO, Congress’s official budgeting scorekeeper, said that the deficits would average 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) through the next decade, a significant increase from the 2.9 percent average over the past 50 years.
Fueling the increase from May’s projection is the bipartisan deal to raise spending caps, which would add $1.7 trillion to the deficit over the course of the next decade. The projection is particularly high because the deal raised stringent budget caps that would have cut spending, meaning that the lion’s share of the projected new deficit is in comparison with scheduled cuts, not new spending.
View the complete August 21 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.
In 2018, the 10 largest individual donors funneled more than $436 million to Super PACs in the most expensive midterm elections ever. Big money in politics has overwhelmed the political process, granting wealthy special interests more power now than at any time in recent American history. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC and other court decisions left Congress and the states constitutionally prohibited from putting limits on raising and spending money in elections, unleashing a flood of corporate dollars in U.S. elections and opening the door for the super-rich to fuel their own interests in our government at the expense of ordinary Americans. While this trend has been decades in the making, these decisions further dismantled our campaign finance laws.
This summer, I joined with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and other Senate Democrats to introduce the Democracy for All Amendment, a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. FECand other disastrous court decisions. The amendment would give Congress and the states the power “to regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections” as well to draw a distinction “between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law.” Continue reading “The Super-Wealthy Have Outsize Influence in Politics. Here’s How We Can Change That”
It’s often taken for granted that, whatever else you might say about President Donald Trump, he has at least been good for the U.S. economy. That, many argue, is the fact that may lead to his re-election in 2020.
Except this uncritically accepted pearl of conventional wisdom is quite dubious, as many experts in economics would tell you.
One of those experts, Trump-appointed Fed Chair Jerome Powell, even announced a cut to interest rates this week in light of weak business investment in the economy and the uncertainty caused by the president’s trade wars.
View the complete August 2 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – Two years ago today, the Senate rejected Trump’s health care bill that would have spiked costs and jeopardized coverage for Minnesotans with preexisting conditions. Ken Martin, Chairman of the Minnesota DFL, issued the following statement:
“Donald Trump’s relentless effort to strip Minnesotans of their health care and spike their costs is not only irresponsible, it’s cruel. Their efforts haven’t stopped either: after failing to get their way in Congress, Trump and his allies are trying to use the courts to continue their sabotage of our health care system.
“Democrats are working to defend and expand Americans’ access to health care. We know that it’s unacceptable for families to be forced to choose between food on the table and having access to the health care they need. The contrast between the parties on this issue is crystal clear and voters will hold Trump and the GOP accountable in 2020.”
Tax Expenditures Are Skewed to the Wealthy Even After TCJAOverview
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which gave the largest tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, also failed to address the inefficiency, lack of fairness, and cost of many spending programs administered through the tax code.
Introduction and summary
Government spending through the tax code has flourished in the years since the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which significantly reduced the cost of a large number of tax breaks. In 2019, the federal government will spend roughly $1.6 trillion through special provisions of the tax code, called tax expenditures,1 up from an inflation-adjusted $600 billion in 1988—more than a trillion-dollar difference.2 Yet, as detailed later in this report, tax expenditures receive little direct oversight in the budget process, and many are poorly targeted to the goals they claim to achieve. As a result, the tax code contains many tax expenditures that do not achieve their stated claims, are unfairly skewed in favor of higher-income taxpayers, or both.
This report will review the status of individual tax expenditure policy in the aftermath of the December 2017 tax law, known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). After providing a brief review of the theory around tax expenditures, it will use specific examples to explain how the structure of individual income tax expenditures, as amended by the TCJA, affects their cost and who benefits, as well as how some tax expenditures are ineffective, with their underlying goals best not pursued through the tax code at all.
The bipartisan congressional leadership and White House reached a two-year budget deal on Monday, seemingly averting another government shutdown and preventing a default on the national debt that has grown to an all-time high under President Donald Trump.
But despite previously backing the 2017 tax cuts for the rich that have helped fuel the largest monthly budget deficits in American history, several self-styled deficit hawks in Congress are now signaling their opposition based on claims of fiscal conservationism.
The deal — which Trump praised on Twitter as “a real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets!” — will provide more than $1.3 trillion for agency spending for each of the next two years and suspend the nation’s debt limit until after the election. This will prevent the government from defaulting on its debt payments for the first time in history and avert some of the spending cuts agreed to in the 2011 Budget Control Act.
View the complete July 23 article by Josh Israel on the ThinkProgress website here.
The most commonly heard refrain when Donald Trump and the GOP were seeking to pass some version of corporate tax reform went something like this: There are literally trillions of dollars trapped in offshore dollar deposits which, because of America’s uncompetitive tax rates, cannot be brought back home. Cut the corporate tax rate and get those dollars repatriated, thereby unleashing a flood of new job-creating investment in the process. Or so the pitch went.
It’s not new and has never really stood up to scrutiny. Yet virtually every single figure who lobbied for corporate tax reform has made a version of this argument. In the past, Congress couldn’t or wouldn’t take up the cause, but, desperate for a political win after the loss on health care, Trump and the GOP leadership ran with a recycled version of this argument, and Congress finally passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on December 22, 2017. The headline feature was a cut in the official corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Continue reading “New Data Show Costly Trump Tax Cut Achieved Little”
