End of 2017 Edition
This is brief; there’s obviously a lot more going on (ie, Mueller) that I didn’t have time to get to. Oh well! See you in 2018!
WELL, THEY PASSED THIS CRAP: Without a single Democratic vote, the GOP rammed through Congress its massive transfer of wealth plan, what the folks at Pod Save America have taken to calling the Donor Relief Act of 2017. A few of the most egregious provisions (like the taxation on grad students’ tuition waivers) were removed, but the tax cut law will dramatically compound America’s already staggering inequality. (In fact, the final bill is worse in that respect than the House or Senate versions that preceded it.) It violates the clear and specific promises Trump and the GOP made throughout the last two years about their tax plan: (1) that it would be revenue neutral (in fact, it costs at least $1.5 trillion, and maybe many billions more); (2) that it would raise taxes on the rich, including Trump (in fact, the plan overwhelmingly benefits the rich and specifically real estate owners and developers like Trump; it even decreased the top tax bracket); (3) that it would simplify the tax code (in fact, it removes only one of the hundreds of tax expenditures in the tax code and adds dozens of new ones); (4) that it would close the hedge fund manager/carried interest loophole (the loophole remains). Jonathan Chait points to a small upside of this fiasco: It has brought all of congressional Republicans’ liabilities to Trump, and Trump’s to congressional Republicans, where both sides had tried to distinguish themselves during the 2016 campaign: “The regular Republican Party of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation of polluters and the financial industry once seemed to be set apart from its clownish demagogue presidential candidate. In rapid order, the strands have merged together into a party disdainful of transparency and united in self-enrichment.”
GOOD READS ON A SHIT BILL: You should read every word of this Yglesias piece on “the wholesale looting of America,” of which the tax bill plays a central but not singular role. Please go read it. Charles Pierce has a barnburner on Paul Ryan and his lifelong drive to establish a plutocracy. Chait writes that the GOP’s professed desire for “tax reform” was a lie all along. Dylan Scott at Vox explains how the bill worsens inequality. Sarah Anderson and Chuck Collins at the Nation lay out bunch of ideas for how to “make a ‘yea’ vote on this stinker a mark of shame for candidates trying to get reelected in 2018 and 2020.”
9 MILLION KIDS IN PERIL: In October, Congress let funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program run out. CHIP provides health insurance to kids whose parents make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but do not get insurance from their employer. Everyone purported to agree that funding CHIP was a priority and would be dealt with immediately, and yet somehow, “immediate” never arrived. Now it looks like Congress won’t take up a funding bill until next month -- even as states are starting to shut down their programs as they run out of funding. “On January 2, Alabama will stop allowing new children to enroll in its CHIP program. Connecticut and Colorado will shutter their programs on January 31, if Washington does not provide new funds before then. Meanwhile, other states are already wasting money and personnel hours on contingency plans for CHIP’s demise. Last month, The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey reported that West Virginia had stopped pushing eligible families to sign up for the program, a development that could lead to many more low-income children going without coverage, even if the program gets reauthorized in early January.” A Georgetown study found that 1.9 million children will lose their insurance by the end of next month, when 25 states run out of funding. But hey -- heirs will no longer have to pay taxes on their multi-million-dollar estates! So at least we have that.
Endorsements
- These 30 seconds of gape-mouthed silence when Roy Moore surrogate Ted Crocket is informed that, who knew?!, non-Christians are allowed to be elected officials in the U.S.
- Horn-tooting alert: Our firm won a good and righteous case today that I was involved in, and the AP wrote it up.
- In honor of end-of-year lists, here are the best books I read this year. (To be clear, these are just books I read this year, not ones that were necessarily published this year).
- Best novels I read for the first time: Little Fires Everywhere (Celest Ng); The Immortalists (Chloe Benjamin)
- Best novels I re-read: The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood -- even better on re-read); The Harry Potter books (essential self-care in the Trump era); Anna Karenina (better and better with each re-read)
- Best nonfiction: The Prize (Dale Russakoff); Giant of the Senate (Al Franken -- yes, yes, but this book was still THE BEST).
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