Yes

Well past time, actually.

Why we cultivate poverty

This is the conversation about poverty that we don’t like to have: We discuss the poor as a pity or a blight, but we rarely admit that America’s high rate of poverty is a policy choice, and there are reasons we choose it over and over again. We typically frame those reasons as questions of fairness (“Why should I have to pay for someone else’s laziness?”) or tough-minded paternalism (“Work is good for people, and if they can live on the dole, they would”). But there’s more to it than that.

[...]

It is in our power to wipe out poverty. It simply isn’t among our priorities.

[...]

The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency [...] .

  NYT

Not to mention, we need a "volunteer" army.

Reports that low-wage employers were having trouble filling open jobs sent Republican policymakers into a tizzy and led at least 25 Republican governors — and one Democratic governor — to announce plans to cut off expanded unemployment benefits early. Chipotle said that it would increase prices by about 4 percent to cover the cost of higher wages, prompting the National Republican Congressional Committee to issue a blistering response: “Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage, and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill.” The Trumpist outlet The Federalist complained, “Restaurants have had to bribe current and prospective workers with fatter paychecks to lure them off their backsides and back to work.”

But it’s not just the right. The financial press, the cable news squawkers and even many on the center-left greet news of labor shortages and price increases with an alarm they rarely bring to the ongoing agonies of poverty or low-wage toil.

As it happened, just as I was watching Republican governors try to immiserate low-wage workers who weren’t yet jumping at the chance to return to poorly ventilated kitchens for $9 an hour, I was sent “A Guaranteed Income for the 21st Century,” a plan that seeks to make poverty a thing of the past. The proposal, developed by Naomi Zewde, Kyle Strickland, Kelly Capatosto, Ari Glogower and Darrick Hamilton for the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy, would guarantee a $12,500 annual income for every adult and a $4,500 allowance for every child. It’s what wonks call a “negative income tax” plan — unlike a universal basic income, it phases out as households rise into the middle class.

[...]

Beyond writing that the plan “would require new sources of revenue, additional borrowing or trade-offs with other government funding priorities,” Hamilton and his co-authors don’t say how they’d pay for it, and in our conversation, Hamilton was cagey. “There are many ways in which it can be paid for and deficit spending itself is not bad unless there are certain conditions,” he said. I’m less blasé about financing a program that would increase federal spending by almost 20 percent, but at the same time, it’s clearly possible. Even if the entire thing was funded by taxes, it would only bring America’s tax burden to roughly the average of our peer nations.

I suspect the real political problem for a guaranteed income isn’t the costs, but the benefits. A policy like this would give workers the power to make real choices. They could say no to a job they didn’t want, or quit one that exploited them. They could, and would, demand better wages, or take time off to attend school or simply to rest.

[...]

Most Americans don’t think of themselves as benefiting from the poverty of others, and I don’t think objections to a guaranteed income would manifest as arguments in favor of impoverishment. Instead, we would see much of what we’re seeing now, only magnified: Fears of inflation, lectures about how the government is subsidizing indolence, paeans to the character-building qualities of low-wage labor, worries that the economy will be strangled by taxes or deficits, anger that Uber and Lyft rides have gotten more expensive, sympathy for the struggling employers who can’t fill open roles rather than for the workers who had good reason not to take those jobs.

[...]

Inflation would be a real risk, as prices often rise when wages rise, and some small businesses would shutter if they had to pay their workers more. There are services many of us enjoy now that would become rarer or costlier if workers had more bargaining power. We’d see more investments in automation and possibly in outsourcing. The truth of our politics lies in the risks we refuse to accept, and it is rising worker power, not continued poverty, that we treat as intolerable.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The failed state of America

In 2020, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worst possible ways. No other rich country has such a poor public health infrastructure or such a tattered social safety net. America’s levels of both police violence and violent crime find their closest peers in countries like Venezuela and South Africa, not Canada and Germany. And even Cuba and Bosnia and Herzegovina beat the world’s only superpower in infant mortality and other key social indicators.

In the most powerful country on Earth, 29.3 million people say that they “sometimes” or “often” do not have enough to eat. Forty million Americans are impoverished, according to the UN. Half a million are homeless.

And all this was true before the full brunt of the pandemic’s economic recession hit.

Given these stark figures, the relative stability of the United States is a wonder. The country has maintained popular suffrage and democratic institutions (for white males, at least) for two centuries and married that form of government with a dynamic capitalist economy capable of creating vast wealth. In fact, American business owners have managed to avoid even the rise of a major social-democratic or labor party; in the US, demands for economic justice are filtered through – and watered down by – a centrist Democratic party and a byzantine system of government deliberately designed to limit popular passions.

  Guardian

We're floating on credit.

The past decade has seen bolder challenges to the establishment order – the Occupy movement, the surprising outsider challenge of Bernie Sanders, the equally unexpected rise of Donald Trump and the populist right, and street protests against police violence. Faced with all of this, as well as its inability to address the Covid pandemic, the American state looks embarrassingly ineffectual and increasingly lacking in popular legitimacy.

[...]

The labor journalist Robert Fitch put it well: “The aim of the right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict – to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically.”

[...]

Yet despite our past failures, popular organizing has yielded enough gains, over time, to create a US that is not quite the worst of all possible worlds. We have maintained crucial democratic rights and extended those rights to black Americans, women and other oppressed groups. We have a limited welfare system for the very poor and the elderly and public guarantees to primary and secondary education for all. But we live in the shadow of the failure of our workers’ movement to take root in the US as firmly as it did in the 20th century in other developed countries. The result is a state woefully inadequate to address either slow-moving crises like hunger and poverty or more acute ones like coronavirus and climate change.

Winning mass support for a program of Medicare for All, green jobs, affordable housing, and more seems within reach. But the left must find a way to not just popularize our goals, but secure the means – institutional reform – to achieve them.

[...]

We must more fundamentally fight to transform the pre-modern political system that we’ve grafted on to our modern economy and society. For progressives, that’s a battle far more daunting than just getting Trump out of the White House – but it’s just as necessary.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Tom Cotton and humans using other humans for their own enrichment

Tom Cotton - perfectly named, considering.

Last week, Cotton [R-Arkansas] introduced a bill to prohibit federal funds from being used in schools to teach "The 1619 Project," which posits that slavery was embedded in the country's very foundation.

[...]

It is breathtaking in the year 2020 to hear a United States senator use the term "necessary evil" to describe slavery. But it is important to note that Cotton's comments came in a context: Millions of Americans are waiting on Congress to pass another economic relief package, lest they lose their homes and ability to feed their families. But Senate Republicans haven't taken action yet — in part because some of them worry that unemployment benefits are too generous.

[...]

Republicans haven't deployed the term "necessary evil," but they are making the case it is more important to get people back to work than to pay to let them stay home.

[...]

If the aim is to take care of Americans during the pandemic, then the solution is relatively easy: keep giving them money. If Republicans won't do so, it is worth asking why not. To ensure that existing businesses continue to have a cheap labor supply? To reduce unemployment rates to goose President Trump's election prospects? Why is it necessary to force Americans back to work? And is it truly worth the cost of endangering their health and safety — or is it just convenient for a few people at the top of the heap?

Low-wage work in a pandemic is certainly not the same thing as chattel slavery. Modern-day Americans still have a choice, technically, about whether to work or not. But a similar justification undergirds the viewpoints of elites in both cases: Humans are a means to an end — a better economy, efficient production, beating another country at war — instead of having value in and of themselves.

[...]

Rather ominously, Cotton's comments echoed America's original enslavers, who justified themselves by saying slavery was needed to build the south's economy — and to maintain white supremacy. Cotton, however, seemed to argue on Sunday that he meant only to refer to the Founders' views that the actual process of making a union — that is, bringing the states together under the Constitution to form the United States — required northern states to compromise in order to bring southern slave states into the fold.

[...]

Even viewed in that light, Cotton's statement is troubling, because it endorses the notion that the lives, bodies, and freedom of Black slaves were an acceptable down payment to build this country. The idea is abhorrent — and, for many Americans, was abhorrent at the time the time of the founding.

[...]

The antifederalists rejected the idea that it was worth accommodating slavery in order to achieve the union. Some recognized America's leaders wouldn't be willing to endure the evil they deemed necessary to inflict on others. "Where is the man, who under the influence of sober dispassionate reasoning, and not void of natural affection, can lay his hand upon his heart and say, I am willing my sons and my daughters should be torn from me and doomed to perpetual slavery?" a trio wrote for a Massachusetts newspaper in 1788.

[...]

Whenever the term "necessary evil" is used, it should be questioned: Necessary to whom? Evil for whom? And for what purpose? Is the evil truly justified, or merely convenient?

  MSN

Cotton’s bill, the Saving American History Act of 2020, labels the 1619 Project as “a distortion of American history,” and would cut off federal professional development funds from any school district that teaches the project’s curriculum, as well as reducing other federal funding in the amount estimated for that district’s “cost associated with teaching the 1619 Project, including in planning time and teaching time.”

[...]

In his interview with the Arkansas paper, Cotton called the 1619 Project “left-wing propaganda,” “factually, historically flawed,” and “revisionist history at its worst.”

  Mediaite

"Saving American History."

“[I]f local left-wing school boards want to fill their children’s heads with anti-American rot, that’s their regrettable choice,” said Cotton. “But they ought not to benefit from federal tax dollars to teach America’s children to hate America.”

Always with the "they hate America" trope.

“It won’t be much money,” he pointed out. “But even a penny is too much to go to the 1619 Project in our public schools. The New York Times should not be teaching American history to our kids.”

How many kids read The New York Times?

Cotton spoke at length about the core premise of the 1619 Project. “The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project,” he said, “is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable. I reject that root and branch.”

Is that a reference to the trees from which Southerners like Tom Cotton hung black people for centuries?

Cotton also addressed how he believes slavery should be taught.

[...]

“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said.

A necessary evil. That's America's excuse for every atrocity it perpetrates.

Compare and contrast

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sorry, rural kids, you lose

I do believe the cruelty is the point with this administration.

More than 800 schools receiving federal funds under the Rural and Low-Income School Program could become ineligible due to a sudden change in bookkeeping, The New York Times reported Friday.

[...]

According to the Times, the letter said an audit of the program showed that districts had “erroneously” received funding when they had not met eligibility requirements outlined in the federal education law since 2002.

The Education Department argued that schools were not using the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to determine if at least 20 percent of the students at their schools were below the poverty line.

Instead, schools used a percentage of students who qualified for subsidized school lunches, which the Times noted follows the same guidelines for determining if a student is living under the poverty line, and is better than the Census at ensuring each student attending the district is counted.

The Education Department has allowed this form of reporting in the past 17 years since the laws governing who qualifies for these funds were created.

[...]

“When you discover you’re not following the law Congress wrote, you don’t double down; you fix it,” Hill told the Times. “If that’s what Congress wants, Congress should pass it, and the Education Department will happily implement it. We will also continue to look for ways to help ensure students are not unnecessarily harmed.”

  The Hill

Hey, I have a way: keep funding the kids' education and lunches while you work with Congress to get you a law you can honor.

The change comes less than a month after the Department of Education cut funding for the Rural Education Achievement Program, a fund created by Congress to assist rural schools.

What is wrong with this picture?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tax cut sham

The GOP tax law, enacted in late 2017, created the “opportunity zones” program, which provides capital gains tax breaks to those who make investments in certain low-income census tracts.

[...]

Democrats are pushing for more substantive changes to the program and have become increasingly concerned about opportunity zones in recent weeks, following news reports highlighting how wealthy developers are influencing and benefiting from the program.

[...]

The opportunity zone portion of the GOP tax law provides several different types of capital gains tax breaks to investors in the zones.

[...]

Some articles and think-tank studies have drawn attention to specific areas designated as opportunity zones, including areas included in zones because they are adjacent to low-income census tracts, areas that are already gentrifying and areas that are in college towns that aren’t disadvantaged but appear to be low income because much of their populations are students. There have also been several reports about areas being designated as opportunity zones after developers lobbied government officials.

One specific zone that has drawn criticism is in Storey County, Nevada. The New York Times reported last month that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin instructed the department to designate the area as a zone — after it had been previously determined to be ineligible — after spending time with former “junk bond king” Michael Milken, who co-owns a company that holds land in the area.

[...]

There have also been reports that focus on specific investments being made in opportunity zones that critics say aren’t benefiting low-income residents of the areas, such as investments in luxury apartment buildings.

[...]

Investors who realized capital gains and then rolled over the gains into “opportunity funds” investing in the zones can temporarily defer taxes on those existing gains. If investors hold their previously earned capital gains in opportunity funds for at least 5 years, they pay less in taxes on the investments. And if investors hold investments in opportunity funds for at least 10 years, they don’t have to pay any capital gains taxes on new gains produced by those investments.

  The Hill

GOP always looking out for their constituency.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Iraq - 16+ years after US invastion

Despite the Opec member country’s vast oil wealth, many Iraqis live in poverty or have limited access to clean water, electricity, basic healthcare and education. Iraq is struggling to recover from years of conflict following the US-led invasion in 2003 that overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein.

Iraqis blame a political elite they say is subservient to one or other of Iraq‘s two main allies, the United States and Iran. Many suspect these powers use Iraq as a proxy to pursue their struggle for regional influence, without concern for the needs of ordinary people.

[...]

Thousands of Iraqi protesters occupied Baghdad’s central Tahrir square on Sunday, defying a bloody crackdown that killed scores over the weekend and an overnight raid by security forces seeking to disperse them.

[...]

Protesters were locked in a cycle on Sunday of advancing deeper into Tahrir square and towards the Green Zone which houses government buildings, then retreating when the barrage of teargas canisters became too much.

[...]

More women joined the protests on Sunday, from university and high school students to government employees and even old ladies in black abayas, the robe-like dresses worn by some women in parts of the Muslim world. Medical students formed small teams that treated the demonstrators, as tuk-tuks swarmed around carrying the badly injured to ambulances. Tents were erected from which food and masks were distributed.

[...]

Iraq’s elite counter-terrorism service said on Sunday it had deployed in the streets of Baghdad to protect important state buildings “from undisciplined elements”. Violence has flared in other areas across the south, with protesters storming and setting fire to party and militia offices, prompting authorities to impose curfews in some areas. Counter-terrorism forces beat and arrested dozens of protesters in the southern city of Nassiriya on Saturday night.

  Guardian

Global protests against economic inequality

In Chile:

In Lebanon:



UPDATE

Take a look at this graph

Yeah, that X axis is pretty bizarre.  But I think the bigger point here is that Joe Biden is essentially no better than Trump when it comes to income inequality in this country, and no different at all for most people, and, sadly, I think that's why he's going to be the Democrats' nominee. 

We just can't seem to get out of this rut.

It's easier to target the poor

The IRS audits the working poor at about the same rate as the wealthiest 1%. Now, in response to questions from a U.S. senator, the IRS has acknowledged that’s true but professes it can’t change anything unless it is given more money.

ProPublica reported the disproportionate audit focus on lower-income families in April. Lawmakers confronted IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig about the emphasis. [...] Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Rettig for a plan to fix the imbalance. Rettig readily agreed. Last month, Rettig replied with a report, but it said the IRS has no plan and won’t have one until Congress agrees to restore the funding it slashed from the agency over the past nine years — something lawmakers have shown little inclination to do.

  ProPublica

I wonder why.

On the one hand, the IRS said, auditing poor taxpayers is a lot easier: The agency uses relatively low-level employees to audit returns for low-income taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit. The audits — of which there were about 380,000 last year, accounting for 39% of the total the IRS conducted — are done by mail and don’t take too much staff time, either.

[...]

On the other hand, auditing the rich is hard. It takes senior auditors hours upon hours to complete an exam. What’s more, the letter says, “the rate of attrition is significantly higher among these more experienced examiners.” As a result, the budget cuts have hit this part of the IRS particularly hard.

For now, the IRS says, while it agrees auditing more wealthy taxpayers would be a good idea, without adequate funding there’s nothing it can do.

But what's the return on the investment? What if they took people off the poor taxpayers and put them on the wealthy? Would they not in the end come up with more recovered money for the government? Maybe someone should give that test, you think?

Since 2011, Republicans in Congress have driven cuts to the IRS enforcement budget; it’s more than a quarter lower than its 2010 level, adjusting for inflation.

Another reason to vote out the Republicans.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

I am so sick of this "president"

Just what we need: more economic inequality

The White House is reported to be planning to unilaterally adjust the way capital gains are assessed to benefit the wealthiest Americans. The proposal would adjust capital gains for inflation, reducing taxes disproportionately for the wealthiest households who own most assets by limiting their taxable gains to those above and beyond the inflation rate.

[...]

The plan, which has long been rumored but apparently is now more serious and detailed, is for the administration to change—through regulatory action, not legislation—the definition of capital gains to exclude gains that reflect inflation. This was considered during the administration of George H.W. Bush, but officials then decided that the move would likely not be legal—that the definition of gains in statute is quite clear and does not provide much room for interpretation. The Trump Administration apparently is ignoring this history and plowing ahead.

[...]

To understand [the] argument [for indexing capital gains], imagine that you buy something for $5 million and then 10 years later you sell it for $9 million. Under our tax rules the $4 million profit you made from selling it is a capital gain, which is subject to federal income tax.

However, imagine that the inflation rate during the ten years is 6 percent annually. In this case, when you sell the asset for $9 million, you are only keeping up with inflation. You have not genuinely profited, they argue, when inflation is considered. You cannot buy more with the $9 million in proceeds from the sale than you could buy with $5 million a decade ago. So, the argument for excluding such gains from taxable income might initially seem compelling. But dig a little deeper and the argument falls apart.

[...]

Let’s expand upon the example above: You purchase an asset for $5 million and sell it for $9 million a decade later. Over the same time period, your friend puts $5 million in a savings account that pays an interest rate of roughly 6 percent on average, the same as the rate of inflation. If there was no income tax, both you and your friend would have approximately $9 million at the end of the decade. You would have $4 million in capital gains and your friend would have $4 million in interest. In both cases, you might argue that the income really just reflects inflation and should not be taxed.

In the real world, both types of income are taxed but the interest is taxed more.

[...]

The figures in this table assume that both capital gains and interest are taxed at ordinary income tax rates. In reality, the capital gains in this example would be taxed at lower rates under current law.

[...]

Let’s say you and your friend got together and figured out how you could profit from this mismatch in the tax code. You borrow $5 million from your friend and pay her 6 percent interest, which over a decade comes to $4 million. At the end of the decade you sell the asset for $9 million, meaning your gain of $4 million exactly equals the $4 million in interest you have paid. As has always been the case, you are allowed to deduct the $4 million in interest payments as a business expense. But now, thanks to the Trump administration, you no longer owe income tax on the $4 million in gains because gains would be taxed only to the extent that they exceed inflation.

In fact, you would even be willing to pay your friend a higher interest rate to lure her into the deal, so you effectively split the profits from your tax arbitrage. Thus, you have an incentive to make investments that do not make any sense economically but only become profitable because of inconsistent tax rules.
  ITEP

As Himself famously said, "That makes me smart."

Donald Trump surely remembers a time in the 1980s when the tax code encouraged such inefficient decisions by wealthy investors—the construction of empty buildings and other investments that were profitable only as tax shelters. President Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 cleared most of those tax shelters away, and Trump testified before members of Congress calling that tax reform a “catastrophe.” In turn, his approach to taxes today is, unfortunately, hardly surprising.

The Trump Administration faces mounting pressure from conservative thinkers and activists — including calls from its own National Economic Council director — to promulgate a U.S. Treasury Department regulation that indexes capital gains for inflation. Proponents of such a move — which is sometimes called “presidential indexation” — make three principal arguments in favor of the proposal: (1) that inflation indexing would be an economic boon; (2) that the President and his Treasury Department have legal authority to implement inflation indexing without further congressional authorization; and (3) that in any event, it is unlikely that anyone would have standing to challenge such an action in court. This Article evaluates the proponents’ three arguments and concludes that all are faulty.

  SSRN (Yale Journal)

Get ready for more legal challenges.  Another reason to pack those courts.  (Sen. Michael Bennett, running for president in 2020, recently said that literally the only thing they're getting done in the Senate is installing federal judges.  Those are the only votes Mitch McConnell will bring to the floor.)

Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Waltons (2019 version)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Works for me

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Fairness ideology is ruining this country

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Taking on Davos

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They can never get enough

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) joined Sens. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Thune (R-SD), members of the Senate Finance Committee, in releasing legislation to permanently repeal the federal estate tax, which conservatives refer to as “the death tax.”

The Republican tax law passed in 2017 already dramatically weakened the estate tax, allowing couples with $22 million to pass on their estates without facing the tax.

In 2018, following the GOP tax law, only 5,000 taxpayers were expected to file estate tax returns, according to projections by the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel, an organization of estate attorneys, based on Internal Revenue Service data. About 1,700 families are expected to actually pay the tax annually, said Howard Gleckman, a tax expert with the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

  WaPo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

WOW, indeed

And then he says she made "an ignorant statement."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  She's going to be tough to trample:



LOL.

Also...