Shun Trump

 

When someone violates a group’s standards, one recourse has been to exclude that person from the group’s activities. For example, various churches have the equivalent of excommunication. Other groups have practiced the silent treatment. And so on.

 

Well, we find ourselves in a situation in which the leader of the country violates so many of our standards that the normal deference we give to the President only serves to encourage him to continue his outrageous behavior. There is no need to review the long list of insults, attacks, racism and lies, the demonization of immigrants and minorities and women, and.... which we all have experienced in the past year.

 

We need to ask ourselves a few questions. Why do we obsess over his comments and tweets? They may reveal his state of mind of the moment, but they are not official policy. Why do we pay attention to press briefings in which no questions of import are answered?

 

So, a modest proposal: Shun Trump.

 

The main stream media should publish a weekly list of his most interesting tweets and outrageous statements, without comment. The talking heads should cease speculating about the meaning of his words. We all should note them, but cease over-reacting to them.

 

The main stream media should stop attending his press conferences (if any) and the White House press conferences. Why waste time on empty talk?

 

The Democratic leadership should refuse to meet with him, focusing instead on dealing with the Republican leadership. Who needs a Presidential photo op or a pretense of togetherness?

 

Most important, the media, the Democrats, and all of us who care about good government should pay attention to the formal legislation, decisions, rules, and budgets which determine what kind of government we have. This is where the real damage is being done. This is where America is being undone on a daily basis. This is where the resistance has to work.

 

Shun Trump. It may not change his behavior, but it just might drive him crazy.

 

Tuesday, 15 January 2018

Published on the Huffington Post

 

The Great $2.6 Trillion Tax Robbery

 

The New York Times repeatedly has referred to the Republican tax bill as a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax cut. It is not. The same New York Times 1 has published a beautiful chart which makes it clear that the bill calls for a $5.9 trillion tax cut. This is offset by revenue increases of $4.5 trillion, for a net debt increase of $1.4 trillion over ten years. Am I just quibbling over the numbers? NO.

 

Reading the chart at the end of this note, of the $5.9 trillion in tax cuts, about $3.9 trillion goes to the rich and to corporations, and $2.0 trillion to the rest of us. (I have assumed that about 60% of the individual income tax cuts go to the rich.)

 

Of the $4.5 trillion in tax increases, about $1.3 trillion is taken from corporations, and $3.2 trillion is taken from the rest of us.

 

Bottom line: the net tax benefit to the rich and corporations is $2.6 trillion, and the net tax increase to the rest of us is about $1.2 trillion (plus a $1.4 trillion increase to the national debt).

 

So the bill transfers $2.6 trillion from the people to the rich and corporations. Just read the chart!

 

Plus the cuts to the individual income tax disappear in a few years, while the corporate tax cuts are permanent.

 

Do corporations really need a stimulus right now, when we are at nearly full employment and the economy is growing over 2% a year? Won’t that extra cash just go to shareholders and managers rather than into new investment? And do the rich really need more money?

 

The transfer of $2.6 trillion from most of us to the rich and the corporations is supposed to trickle down back to us in several years, maybe. Why not just give us the tax cuts permanently, and raise taxes on the rich and corporations to pay for it?

One more great example of how Trump and the Trumpettes care more for the rich and corporations than for the rest of us! As Trump would say, “An historic robbery, the biggest ever!”

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1  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/15/us/politics/every-tax-cut-in-the-house-tax-bill.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A New Democratic Agenda

 

Let’s be honest: the Democratic Party abandoned its voters several decades ago. For me, it started with Bill Clinton’s “Sister Souljah” moment in 1992, when he abandoned African-Americans in his Presidential campaign. He continued by adopting Republican-lite economic policies. Since then, we have bailed out the banks and financial interests, while watching tens of thousands lose their homes without government assistance.

 

The Party also abandoned its voters by focusing only on Presidential elections. Local, state and Congressional elections were neglected, resulting in massive losses over the years. The resulting conservative majorities and gerrymandering make it a long haul to recover some balance in party representation.

 

Now, we are seeing a struggle between the Clintonian centrists and the Sanders progressives for the soul of the Party. Those who presided over the erosion of the Democratic Party must be replaced by a new generation of energetic leaders. We need a new beginning.

 

Since the Fall election, many have asked, “What do the Democrats stand for?” The Clintonians answer, “Look at all our position papers,” but the kitchen sink approach failed before a simple campaign with a few endlessly repeated slogans. After all these years, we need to learn from the defeats. We must learn to focus on a few key issues, and hammer them repeatedly. We need charismatic speakers and meaningful slogans. And, we need a 50 state strategy.

 

Here are some suggestions for an agenda for 2018. Keep it simple, and keep it focused on the priorities of our base. People need to see the benefits of voting Democratic. Otherwise, another decade in the wilderness...

 

          O Jobs for Everyone

          O Medicare for Everyone

          O Voting Rights for Everyone

          O A Fair Tax System for Everyone

 

Jobs for Everyone

 

Unemployment is low, but too many people have been cast aside, particularly in the Rustbelt, Appalachia and minority communities. Globalization and technology continue to erode wages and jobs. Those who are hurt need our assistance.

 

     1. Create the Rebuild America Corps, training and employing the jobless:

 

          O Repairing and rebuilding our housing, installing insulation and solar power as well;

 

          O Repairing our roads and bridges;

 

          O Serving as school teachers and aides; and

 

          O Providing support for the sick and elderly.

 

     2. Create the Worker Care Program:

 

          O Workers displaced by overseas moves should receive full salaries for three years, paid by their companies;

 

          O These displaced workers should be eligible for training and relocation expenses for three years, again paid by their companies; and

 

          O Pensions must be fully funded and first-in-line protected in bankruptcies; pension liabilities must be assumed by any buyers; if full bankruptcy, the government will guarantee to make up any pension shortfalls.

 

Medicare for Everyone

 

Obamacare was a great first step, but nearly 30 million remain uninsured, costs and copays are escalating, there is too large a gap before insurance kicks in, and administrative costs are too high. Eliminating the insurance middlemen will save huge amounts of money. Everyone needs to be enrolled in Medicare. But we need to focus on Medicare cost controls, too.

 

          O Participating doctors must be salaried, like government GS levels;

 

          O Medicare must be able to negotiate prescription costs, and require generics if available;

 

          O Hospital charges also must be negotiated, and partially based upon performance, with periodic audits;

 

          O The supply of doctors and nurses needs to be increased: provide free medical education, in return for a minimum of ten years of salaried Medicare service;

 

          O Exorbitant drug and treatment costs, in particular, need to be justified by an audit of the real costs of research and development;

 

          O We cannot afford every possible treatment for every patient: we need to study reasonable treatment options, not extraordinary treatment options; and

 

          O Businesses will no longer have to provide health care for their employees, but should contribute a percentage of gross income to Medicare.

 

Voting Rights for Everyone

 

We need to stop making it harder for people to exercise their voting rights:

 

          O Automatic registration for every citizen for federal elections; use birth and naturalization records, or if missing, just show birth certificate or naturalization papers once for lifetime registration;

 

          O Non-partisan redistricting panels required in every state; strangely shaped districts prohibited;

 

The Electoral College has to be fixed. Migration and concentration of the population in cities have given Congressmen from small states undue power: for example, the number of citizens per Senator is much smaller in small states, distorting the basis for the Electoral College. We need to strive for equal representation for each voter:

 

          O Require scaling votes to roughly equal populations for each House and Senate representative; this implies that some Senators, in particular, would cast fractional votes, rather than whole votes.

 

A Fair Tax System for Everyone

 

The system is rigged with favors for big business. Some pay their full share, while others use deductions to avoid most of their share. Corporate tax revenue, compared with individual tax revenue, has fallen from over 40% in the middle of the 20th century, to under 20% today. 1 That is, the relative burden of corporate taxes has been cut in half! We don’t need more business tax cuts. We need a business tax increase, but a fair one. Here are some thoughts in this direction:

 

          O Tax big business: The alternative minimum tax for large businesses should be raised to 30%, with strict enforcement. This would cut through the thousands of tax preferences at one stroke, as well as restore the balance between business and individual tax revenue.

 

          O Support small business: No income tax for the first five years of a small business; after that, a 15% alternative minimum tax.

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          O Tax stock trades, as many have suggested.

 

          O Treat capital gains, dividends and interest as ordinary income, for those with gross income over $250,000/year.

 

          O Remove the income cap on Social Security contributions.

 

Summary

 

I have outlined a four point agenda for the Democratic Party for 2018. Simple, clear, and focused on voter’s major concerns.

 

          O Jobs for Everyone

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          O Medicare for Everyone

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          O Voting Rights for Everyone

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          O A Fair Tax System for Everyone

 

It’s worth a try, isn’t it?

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1  https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals - Table 2.1

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Wednesday, 30 August 2017

Published on the Huffington Post

 

Job-Killing Regulations:

     The Elephant Not in the Room

 

Ever since Ronald Reagan first went after “job-killing regulations” the slogan has become a universal truth. Now, the media routinely report on Republican studies, suspensions, and reversals of many regulations. It is like a scene from Animal Farm, Trump and the Trumpettes shuffling around the fire, grunting “Regulation bad! De-regulation good!” while throwing thousands of pages of despised regulations into the flames. Billions saved. Industries saved. Jobs saved. Hoorah!

 

There is, however, just one small problem with this picture: it is not true.

 

Over the past few decades, a fair number of studies have looked for the evidence that regulations are job-killers. Industry studies generally conclude that many jobs are lost through regulation. Progressive studies often conclude that regulations are job-creators. Who can be believed? Let’s look at recent reviews.

 

Cary Coglianese (1) at Penn reviewed four major studies of the evidence in 2013, concluding that the effect of the regulations on jobs and the economy was marginal.

 

The Institute for Policy Integrity in 2017 issued a fact sheet (2) highlighting their conclusion that “regulations have little effect on aggregate employment or unemployment rates.” Since studies often rely upon models to predict effects on jobs, the fact sheet also emphasized that “job analysis models can easily be manipulated to predict either job losses or gains.” In technical talk, the assumptions made in the models can sharply swing the results one way or the other. The models are very sensitive to the assumptions.

 

Alana Semuels, writing in the Atlantic, (3) looked more narrowly at environmental regulations, and found that the studies showed marginal effects on jobs. Jenna Ruddock, writing on the Medium, (4) reviewed the literature and summarized her findings in the title of her article: “Do environmental regulations really “kill jobs”? The data says no.”

 

And another. Abel Russ and Eric Schaeffer, (5) at The Environmental Integrity Project, looked back at over thirty years of studies, and summarized the data as: “don’t believe the job-killer hype.”

 

Most interesting, I think, is the annual Office of Management and Budget report to Congress on the costs and benefits of major regulations. (6) Generally, a major rule imposes a cost of over $100 million dollars a year. OMB is no friend of regulations. In this report, OMB compiles the costs and benefits of major Federal regulations over the past ten years, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each agency’s cost-benefit analyses.

 

It is worth quoting the first paragraph of the OMB Executive Summary: “The estimated annual benefits of major Federal regulations reviewed by OMB from October 1, 2005, to September 30, 2015, for which agencies estimated and monetized both benefits and costs, are in the aggregate between $208 billion and $672 billion, while the estimated annual costs are in the aggregate between $57 billion and $85 billion, reported in 2001 dollars. In 2014 dollars, aggregate annual benefits are estimated to be between $269 and $872 billion and costs between $74 and $110 billion. These ranges reflect uncertainty in the benefits and costs of each rule at the time that it was evaluated.”

 

That is, looking at 129 major Federal rules over a ten year period, for which both costs and benefits were estimated, collectively the benefits outweighed the costs by 3-8 times. For every dollar in costs, there were three to eight dollars in benefits.

 

Attacking “job-killing regulations” only makes sense if you ignore the benefits!

 

But not all regulations are created equal. The OMB report notes that the 37 major EPA rules accounted for the greatest costs and benefits, with the benefits far outweighing the costs. And nearly all the costs and benefits of EPA’s rules were from rules to improve air quality.

 

The two rules with nearly all of EPA’s benefits were related to fine particulates in the air: the Clean Air Fine Particle Implementation Rule (2007); and the National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants From Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units (“MATS” - 2011). The principal benefit is reducing premature deaths from inhaling fine particulate matter when we breathe.

 

What this means is that the air we breathe is not yet clean enough. Consider the very recent report by Harvard researchers, “Air Pollutant Mortality in the Medicare Population.” (7) A database of 60 million seniors was reviewed. The first finding was that there is no safe level below which particulates are not a problem. The second finding was that the risk of premature death could be reduced even further, with benefits exceeding the costs, even below the requirements of the current national standard adopted by EPA.

 

Thus, the “job-killing” EPA is saving lives cost-effectively.

 

Looking at all this material, it would be easy to bog down in the details. No need. The elephant is not in the room. Job-killing regulations do not kill jobs. Rather, repealing some of these regulations would kill tens of thousands of Americans.

 

The slogan “job-killing regulations” has persisted because it has political value, no more than that. Everyone knows someone who has lost a job. It is as easy to blame regulations as to blame anything or anyone else. Isn’t it just common sense that if complying with regulations costs money, then it must also cost jobs? Another case where common sense may not be sensible. Republicans will not give up this slogan until it no longer works to mobilize their supporters.

 

Honesty: Caveats. (A) Specific regulations may harm local businesses or industries, leading them to cut jobs or salaries, ask workers to do more with less, or even relocate to another state or country with looser regulations. All of these have happened. We should not just shrug and say it’s too bad for the workers. We also should not shout the slogan and cancel the regulations.

 

Rather, we should begin to care more for the affected workers. We need legislation to address worker care, just as we address Medicare. Support for job training, relocation expenses, or even several years of salary, all need to be addressed for specific cases with local adverse effects. The market is cruel. We need not be, when it comes to our workers.

 

(B) Not every regulation is cost-effective. If the benefits and costs are about the same, we need to be willing to consider the trade-offs before plunging ahead with the regulation. There may be other ways to achieve the desired results.

 

Bottom line: If evidence matters, if serious analyses matter, if facts matter, then the slogan “Job-Killing Regulations” needs to be shoved under the bed, only to be brought out late at night in stories to scare the children, while the adults wink at each other, knowing that it is only a story after all.

 

The elephant is not in the room. Are there any adults here?

 

(1)  Professor of Law and Political Science, Penn Law School and School of Arts and Sciences, https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/issue-brief/v1n3.php, March 2013

(2)  Institute for Policy Integrity, New York University School of Law, http://policyintegrity.org/files/media/Jobs_and_Regulation_Factsheet.pdf, February 2017

(3)  Alana Semuels, “Do Regulations Kill Jobs?” https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/regulations-jobs/513563/, January 2017

(4)  Jenna Ruddock, “Do environmental regulations really “kill jobs”? The data says no.” https://medium.com/@jmruddock/do-environmental-regulations-really-kill-jobs-the-data-says-no-5cf198b1ae6, February 2017

(5)  Abel Russ and Eric Schaeffer, “Don’t believe the job-killer hype,” http://www.environmentalintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Jobs-and-environment-report.pdf,
January 2017

(6)  OMB, “2016 Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations” https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/
legislative_reports/draft_2016_cost_benefit_report_12_14_2016_2.pdf, Dec 2016

(7)  Qian, Wang, et al, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1702747

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Wednesday, 16 August 2017

Published on the Huffington Post