Tag: Trump wealthcare

Corporations Have Biggest Profit Gain In Six Years

Trump continues to build an economy focused on rewarding wealthy corporations at the expense of working families. The Trump tax law gave massive new tax breaks to big corporations and did nothing for workers. Now, while corporations just had their best profit gain in six years, real wages for workers continue to decline.

Corporations just had their best 12-month profit gain in six years largely thanks to the Trump tax law.

Wall Street Journal: “The Commerce Department said its broadest measure of profits across the U.S. economy rose 16.1% from the second quarter a year earlier, the largest year-over-year gain in six years. Taxes were a big part of the boost to the bottom line. Taxes paid by U.S. companies were down 33% from a year earlier, according to the new government data, or more than $100 billion at an annual rate.”

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Booming Economy May Be Little Felt as Voters Decide

The following articl by Ben Casselman and Jim Tankersley was posted on the New York Times website August 17, 2018:

Republicans are telling you that tax cuts and roaring economic growth are going to stop any “blue wave” in the midterm elections. Democrats say the lack of wage growth, even as corporate profits surge, will impel voters to change leadership in Congress.

It’s not that simple.

A new survey of nearly 10,000 American adults shows that the strong economy is rallying Republicans and maybe swaying some independents. But many voters still aren’t feeling the benefits of robust growth, and the tax overhaul passed last year looks as likely to hurt Republicans at the polls as help them.

View the complete article here.

‘Stuck in a belligerent doldrum’: Wages rise in the nation’s hottest job market — but so do costs

The following article by Todd C. Frankel was posted on the Washington Post website August 17, 2018:

Isabel Moctezuma works as a cook at Iowa State University during the school year and in the kitchen at Texas Roadhouse during the summer to support herself and her 8-year-old daughter, Mia. Credit: Rachel Mummey, The Washington Post

AMES, Iowa  — Isabel Moctezuma was cooking again. Now, at least, she was doing it at home, making salmon for dinner in her small apartment. Her daughter, Mia, 8, sliced carrots next to her. Moctezuma was just off the clock and still wearing her Texas Roadhouse work shirt, which on the back read, “I (heart) my job.” The slogan made her laugh.

Moctezuma, 39, worked this summer in the restaurant’s kitchen for $11.50 an hour — less than what she had made as a cook six years ago. The rest of the year she worked as a cook at Iowa State University, where the pay was a little better. But she had seen the “Help Wanted” signs all over town. She’d heard how the local economy was soaring. And she’d recently applied for a supervisor’s job. She wondered if this was her chance. It was only later, when dinner was over and with the dishes done and Mia watching TV, that she allowed herself to imagine what that might feel like.

“It would be nice to not have to worry so much,” she said.

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No, Trump Voters, Your Wages Aren’t Going Up

The following article by David Cay Johnston was posted on the DCReport.org website August 15, 2018:

Unless You Were Already Making More than $1 Million a Year

We’ve got some disappointing news for all those people who voted for Donald Trump because he promised rising wages.

While Trump keeps saying wages are rising the official government data show that’s just not true.

Consider a worker paid the median wage, half make more and half less, of $600 a week in round numbers. If she got the average 2.8% raise on July 1, her gross pay rose by a bit under $17.

View the complete article here.

Public debt of the United States of America from July 2017 to July 2018, by month (in billion U.S. dollars)

The website Statista.com provides a month-by-month graph of the U.S. national debt.  Take a look at what has happened in the last year:

So much for Republican fiscal responsibility.  This is what has happened since they passed the Trump wealthcare bill.  As we move toward this November’s election, remember Rep. Erik Paulsen voted FOR the bill that caused this increase in debt.

Visit the site here.

In U.S., wage growth is being wiped out entirely by inflation

The following article by Heather Long was posted on the Washington Post website August 10, 2018:

Applicants chat with potential employers during a jobs fair at Minneapolis International Airport on July 17. Credit: David Zalubowsk, AP.

Rising prices have erased U.S. workers’ meager wage gains, the latest sign strong economic growth has not translated into greater prosperity for the middle and working classes.

Cost of living was up 2.9 percent from July 2017 to July 2018, the Labor Department reported Friday, an inflation rate that outstripped a 2.7 percent increase in wages over the same period. The average U.S. “real wage,” a federal measure of pay that takes inflation into account, fell to $10.76 an hour last month, 2 cents down from where it was a year ago.

The stagnation in pay defies U.S. growth, which has increased in the past year and topped 4 percent in the second quarter of 2018 — the highest rate since mid-2014.

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Indexing Capital Gains to Inflation Will Only Further Rig the Economy Against Workers

The following article by Andrew Schwartz and Galen Hendricks was posted on the Center for American Progress website August 8, 2018:

A street vendor sells replicas of the Wall Street Bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange, Credit: Drew Angerer, Getty Images

The Trump administration’s most notable legislative passage has been the massive tax plan enacted at the behest of its political donors. The tax cuts, heavily skewed to corporations and the wealthy, will cost nearly $2 trillion over the next decade. Now, the Trump administration is resurrecting an old idea: attempting to use authority that has been repeatedly rejected on legal grounds to bypass Congress and give another tax cut that’s even more skewed to the wealthy, estimated to be worth at least $10 billion annually.

The goal is to adjust the cost basis of an asset using inflation indexing, so that when the asset’s owner sold the asset, it would reduce the gained amount. This is effectively reducing capital gains taxes. This policy would almost exclusively benefit the wealthy, since they own the bulk of capital assets, such as stocks and other securities and interests in businesses. In fact, 63 percent of the benefit would go to the wealthiest 0.1 percent. Very few middle-class Americans would see any benefit whatsoever. Most Americans only own financial assets through pensions and retirement plans that are tax-favored savings vehicles not subject to capital gains taxes, and home sales have large capital gains exemptions. Tax experts have warned that indexing capital gains taxes without indexing other aspects of the tax code—including interest deductions—would create new loopholes and invite the wealthy to game the system.

Even worse, the Trump administration is openly considering the move in violation of the law. During the George H.W. Bush administration, the U.S. Department of the Treasury evaluated implementing capital gains indexing via regulation. However, the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel determined that the move would have been unlawful, since the law and congressional intent are clear that capital gains taxes should not be indexed for inflation. In the intervening years, the legal case for indexing capital gains by regulation has only grown weaker based several decades of legal doctrine, as scholar Daniel Hemel and David Kamin recently detailed.

View the complete article here.

Debt Piled On Your Children And Your Childrens’ Children

The following commentary by Stan Collender was posted on the DCReports.org website August, 2018:

Trump’s Deficits Will Cause Very Serious Challenges For Multiple Generations Of Americans

Trump displays his signature after signing the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul plan in the White House, Dec. 22, 2017.

The headline above is not partisan hyperbole or a rhetorical flourish: The $1 trillion-plus annual Trump budget deficits that are about to start will soon create huge policy challenges for future generations of Americans.

While presidents submit and Congress adopts one-year budgets (when they bother to do a budget at all, that is), the spending and taxing policies put in place in those budgets are more or less permanent.

This is certainly true with federal spending because most of it is “mandatory”‘ and will continue until Congress and the president change it. Given that most mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare and many veterans benefits, for example) are growing in popularity, reductions aren’t likely any time soon…and maybe not at all.

View the complete article here.

NOTE:  Rep. Erik Paulsen voted for this tax bill.

Multi-Millionaire Steve Mnuchin Takes Care Of His Own

The following article by David Cay Johnston was posted on the DCReport.org website July 31, 2018:

Treasury Secretary Plans Another Tax Giveaway for the One Percent

The swamp monster who Donald Trump chose as Treasury secretary has a plan to save the richest of the rich billions and billions in taxes – and without any vote by Congress, either.

Steve Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachser and later California banker who grew rich exploiting the housing crisis, revealed the plan to The New York Times while in Argentina for the G-20 meeting of the world’s richest countries.

The plan would radically increase the concentration of wealth in America, accelerating a trend that will be explained below with some shocking numbers. And it comes as the Trump administration, reneging on campaign promises, is floating proposals to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as well as using subtle means to scuttle the Affordable Care Act.

View the complete article here.

GOP’s tax scam gives millionaire CEOs a huge Trump Bump in pay

The following article by Oliver Willis was posted on the ShareBlue.com website July 30, 2018:

Ultra-rich CEOs are raking in even more millions of dollars, thanks to the GOP’s tax scam.

Credit: Evan Vucci, AP

The Republican tax scam, passed with only GOP votes and Trump’s signature, has led to a massive Trump Bump in pay for multi-millionaire CEOs while average Americans have been left out to dry.

In a review of SEC filings since the passage of the GOP tax scam, Politico found that executives “have been profiting handsomely by selling shares since Trump signed the law on Dec. 22 and slashed corporate tax rates to 21 percent.”

Further, according to Politico, public companies have announced $600 billion in buybacks this year alone, and approximately 28 percent of S&P 500 companies have announced plans to offer buybacks to shareholders.

View the complete article here.