This Week in Trumpworld (11/5)
David Shasha
Trump Tax Cuts for the Rich: Supply-Side Economics is Back!
The Republicans finally unveiled their Marie Antoinette tax plan which is heavily weighted towards the 1% and the powerful Corporate and Wall Street interests.
The New York Times editorial “A Tax Plan for a New Gilded Age” published on Friday says all we need to know about it:
With their new bill that would slash taxes on the wealthy and blow up the federal budget deficit, House Republicans and President Trump are making it absolutely clear whom they are working for — the top 1 percent — and whom they consider dispensable. Well, that’s pretty much everybody else.
The bill, which House leaders unveiled on Thursday after weeks of back-room negotiations that only Republicans were privy to, contained multibillion-dollar gifts for corporations, Wall Street titans and rich families. While there are a few peanuts thrown at lower-income and middle-class families, many people of modest means who take advantage of deductions and credits for things like housing, state and local taxes, medical expenses and education costs could end up paying more in taxes.
At the same time, the bill would add $1.51 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade. In coming years, Republicans will surely point to that inflated debt to argue that it is imperative that Congress slash spending on infrastructure, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Where to begin? The primary goal of this bill is to slash taxes on corporate profits to 20 percent, from 35 percent. Mr. Trump’s minions in the White House and Congress are mouthing the same old stale arguments: that businesses will take the money saved on taxes and hire more people and hand it over to employees in raises and bonuses. If only. Credible economists believe the benefits of the cuts would accrue nearly exclusively to shareholders and executives. In fact, about $70 billion a year, or 35 percent of the benefits, would flow to foreign investors who own shares in American companies, according to Steven Rosenthal at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
The bill would also lavish benefits on real estate partnerships, hedge funds and other pass-through businesses, which send their profits directly to their owners without taxes being withheld. Republicans want those business owners to pay taxes of just 25 percent on that income, rather than ordinary rates, which go up to 39.6 percent. Republicans argue that this will benefit small businesses. In fact, a large majority of small-business owners already have personal tax rates below 25 percent. This provision would aid a small group of developers, investors and other tycoons who work in professions or industries where it is relatively easy to set up pass-through businesses. Like, yes, Mr. Trump and his family, who make their money from one such industry: real estate. Let’s not forget that Mr. Trump has not released his tax returns, something every other major-party presidential nominee has done for nearly 40 years.
Republican lawmakers argue that they will put in protections to prevent people from turning their salaries into pass-through income. But their promises ring hollow when they are not even bothering to close the carried-interest loophole used by private-equity and hedge-fund managers to treat some of their income as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate than wages. Mr. Trump railed against that tax provision during the 2016 campaign.
On personal income taxes, Republicans say they are simplifying and cutting taxes for most people. But that is not really true. They propose reducing the number of tax brackets to four, from seven, while raising the lowest bracket to 12 percent, from 10 percent. They want to double the standard deduction but eliminate personal exemptions. One new benefit that could help many families would be a $300 tax credit for tax filers and their dependents who are over 17, like an aged parent. Strangely, it would ends after five years. By contrast, the bill’s cuts to corporate and other business taxes would be permanent.
The changes that could affect middle-class families the hardest include the elimination of the deduction for state and local income taxes. And the property-tax deductible would be capped at $10,000. Many people in high-tax states, like California, New Jersey and New York, would be especially hard hit. Those families would also be squeezed by the proposal to cap the mortgage-interest deduction for home purchases starting Thursday, the day the bill was introduced, at $500,000. Reducing this deduction is worthy of consideration, but it ought to be part of a comprehensive reform of housing subsidies that won’t put home buyers in high-cost areas at a disadvantage.
One particularly hardhearted change would eliminate the deduction for medical expenses, which is primarily used by people with serious and chronic illnesses. Gone, too, would be important tax credits and deductions for college tuition and interest on student loans.
Unsurprisingly, the tax bill contains a couple of provisions that are designed to benefit the Trumps and others like them. It would get rid of the alternative minimum tax, which is paid primarily by upper-income families with lots of deductions. This tax accounted for a vast majority of the income tax Mr. Trump paid in 2005, according to a leaked copy of his return. The Trumps would also benefit from the bill’s proposed estate tax changes. That tax currently applies to inherited wealth above $5.5 million. Republicans would exempt wealth up to $11 million starting next year and eliminate the tax after six years. That would benefit the heirs of just 0.2 percent of people who die every year, but cost the government $269 billion over a decade.
It will take experts weeks to fully analyze the House tax bill, but what we already know is frightening enough. No Republican who cares about fairness, economic sense and the financial health of the government can support with a clear conscience this shameless wealth transfer.
The bill puts the lie to Trump’s promises to Working Class Americans as it stands proudly with the wealthiest Americans, seeking to give them more money and more privilege.
John Kelly Defends Confederate Traitors
In another installment of the ongoing deterioration of General Kelly, we have his defense of the Confederacy:
I have previously written about the downfall of the one man who was supposed to transform the Trump White House from a dirty nursery school into an adult institution:
It is once again clear that not only has Kelly not changed Trump, but that Trump has changed Kelly.
Let us accept that, like many others, Kelly was actually a decent person before he entered Trumpworld.
But this paean to Robert E. Lee and the surreal defense of the Confederate secessionists shows us that he is fully ensconced in Trumpworld Fascism and has no real control over his “decency” gene.
Jews and the Trump Russia Conspiracy
An excellent article from JTA gives us a taste of how Zionism and the Jewish world has played a role in the ongoing Mueller investigation:
Here is a key piece of the puzzle related to convicted conspirator George Papadopoulos:
Papadopoulos, who called himself a senior consultant at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., wrote op-eds in the Israeli media in 2014 and 2015 encouraging Israel to favor Greece and Cyprus over Turkey in its natural gas development policy. (Hudson is telling media Papadopoulos was an intern in 2011 and then provided contractual work to the institute until 2014, and was never salaried.)
It’s not clear on whose behalf Papadopoulos was making his pitch, but he knew his readership: He framed his argument on the pro-settler Arutz Sheva news site with a reference to the biblical term for end times, or chaos, “tohu wabohu.” In the 2014 piece, Papadopoulos was not as sanguine about Russia as he would become: Russia and Turkey, he said, were sowing chaos in the region, and it was up to Greece, Israel and the United States to stem it.
In April 2016, Papadopoulos visited Israel and led a briefing at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, impressing a Jerusalem Post columnist as a “young, impressive energy expert” who said Trump saw Putin as a responsible actor worthy of serious engagement.
The St. Louis-based journalist Russel Neiss posted a video sequence this week of settlement leader Yossi Dagan conferring with Papadopoulos during inauguration festivities here.
“We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship between the United States and all of Israel, including the historic Judea and Samaria,” Papadopoulos said, using the biblical term for the West Bank. “Toda raba,” he signs off in decently accented Hebrew before hugging Dagan.
And then of course there is the Ultimate Jew Jared Kushner and the reason he might have to fear Mueller:
One official who may be wary of the probe is Jared Kushner, who is Trump’s son-in-law and was a senior adviser to Trump throughout the campaign. Mueller is known to be looking into Kushner’s campaign activities, and Kushner attended a separate meeting in June 2016 with Trump’s son, Manafort and another Russian figure who was seeking closer ties between the campaign and Russia. That figure, Natalia Veselnitskaya, offered dirt on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, as did Papadopoulos’ interlocutors, in the form of hacked emails.
Emails from Papadopoulos about his Russia contacts reached various people in the campaign. The plea he signed describes them as a “senior policy adviser,” a “high-ranking campaign official,” a “campaign supervisor” and multiple other officials. In those emails, he urged the officials to consider offers by figures close to Russian officialdom to organize a meeting between President Vladimir Putin and Trump.
Many of the email recipients have been identified in the media — Sam Clovis, a campaign co-chairman, is the “campaign supervisor”; Corey Lewandowski, who preceded Manafort as campaign manager, is the “high-ranking campaign official”; and Manafort is “another high-ranking campaign official.” Many others, including the “senior policy adviser,” remain unidentified.
It’s not clear whether Papadopoulos told campaign officials about the hacked emails. Nor is it clear to what degree Kushner knew of the adviser’s meetings with Russia. (Manafort appeared to be skeptical of Papadopoulos’ outreach, while Clovis encouraged it.)
Mueller, in releasing the Papadopoulos guilty plea, suggested there was more to come.
The wheels continue to spin for Trumpworld and fear is the order of the day.
David Shasha