59% of Voters Fear Trump's Opponents Will Resort to Violence
By Craig Bannister | November 21, 2019 | 4:44pm EST
Fifty-nine percent of U.S. likely voters are concerned that people who oppose President Donald Trump’s policies will resort to violence, a new Rasmussen Reports survey shows.
One in three (34%) are “very concerned” that Trump’s opponents will resort to violence to get their way, with another one in four (25%) reporting that they’re “somewhat concerned” that anti-Trumpers will become violent.
Ironically, Democrats expressed the greatest fear, with 40% reporting that they “very concerned” that Trump’s opponents will resort to violence, compared to 36% of Republicans and 23% of those supporting “other” parties. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Republicans, 59% of Democrats, and 49% of “other” party supporters said they are at least somewhat concerned that Trump’s opponents will become violent.
Voters are actually less concerned that impeaching and removing Trump from office will prompt violence (53%) than are worried that anti-Trumpers will resort to violence (59%) to oppose him.
One in four (24%) voters said they are “very concerned” that “Trump’s impeachment and removal from office will lead to violence,” while another 29% reported that they are “somewhat concerned” ousting Trump will result in violence.
The survey of 1,000 U.S. likely voters was conducted November 18-19, 2019. It has a margin of sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
44% of Black Voters Say Civil War 'Likely' Within Next 5 Years
By Craig Bannister | November 21, 2019 | 1:04pm EST
Forty-four percent of black voters believe it’s likely that the U.S. will “experience a second civil war in sometime in the next five years,” a new Rasmussen Reports survey reveals.
Nationally, 31% of all likely voters say a second civil war in the next five years is either “very likely” (9%) or “somewhat likely” (22%) – but, 15% of blacks consider it “very likely” and 29% say it’s “somewhat likely.”
Compared to all voters, a slightly higher percentage of other minorities (34%) also say civil war is at least somewhat likely. Of those, 10% think civil war is very likely, while 24% say it’s only somewhat likely.
White voters are the least concerned about the prospect of civil war, with 38% saying it’s “not at all likely,” compared to only 22% of blacks and 25% of other minorities. Only 7% of white voters view an impending civil war as “very likely,” while another 20% consider it somewhat so.
The survey of 1,000 U.S. likely voters was conducted November 18-19, 2019. It has a margin of sampling Error, +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
Economists:
America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans
The
wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans,
groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
The
Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity
measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a
serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths
of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3
trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to
earlier this year.
Trump
proposal denies free school meals to half a million children
Children
receive a free lunch at the Phoenix Day Central Park Youth Program in downtown
Phoenix. (AP Photo Matt York)
Economists:
America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans
Getty Images
8 Oct
201918
2:46
The
wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans,
groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the first time on record, the
wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income
groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s
top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than
the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans
paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes
is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the
rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when
their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23
percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income
group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes,
as a Times graphic
shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families,
the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined
modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the
decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more
in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in
the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans
increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the
Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading
economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right
coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan
that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we
need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at
all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter
whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American
workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the
elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has
produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in
the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid
income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class
jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for
working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class
at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened
“significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published
Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485
from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The
measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score
of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate the impact of
President Donald Trump’s end-2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been
worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed
world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and
under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S.
politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential
nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are
promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on
wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana
and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes
higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.
The
Democrats’ opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity
measures, or his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a
serious challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths
of school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3
trillion tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to
earlier this year.
Trump
proposal denies free school meals to half a million children
The Trump
administration has provided a new analysis of how proposed changes to
eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly
known as food stamps, will impact children who participate in the National
School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. By the White House’s own admission,
these changes mean that about a half-million children would become ineligible
for free school meals.
Secretary of
Agriculture Sonny Perdue has described the changes as a tightening up of
“loopholes” in the SNAP system. But those affected by the changes are not corporate
crooks or billionaires, but hundreds of thousands of children who stand to lose
access to free meals. For many American children, free school breakfasts and
lunches make up the bulk of their nutritional intake, and they stand to suffer
permanent physical and psychological damage as a result of the cuts.
The sheer
vindictiveness of the proposed rule change is shown by the minimal savings that
would result—about $90 million a year beginning in fiscal year 2021, or a mere
0.012 percent of the estimated $74 billion annual SNAP budget. Put another way,
the savings would amount to two-thousandths of a percent of the $4.4 trillion
federal budget. But while this $90 million might appear as small change to the
oligarchs running and supporting the government, it will be directly felt as
hunger in the bellies of America’s poorest children.
SNAP provided benefits
to roughly 40 million Americans in 2018 and is the largest nutrition program of
the 15 administered by the federal Food and Nutrition Service. Along with
programs such as the Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children and
school breakfast and lunch programs, SNAP has been a major factor in making a
dent in the hunger of working-class families. But despite these programs’
successes, the Trump administration is seeking to claw them back, with the
ultimate aim of doing away with them altogether.
The US Department of
Agriculture (USDA), which administers the food stamp and school meal programs,
says that the new analysis presented last week is a more precise estimate of
the impact of rule changes in SNAP the USDA first announced in July. The main
component of the rule change is an end to “broad-based categorical eligibility”
for the food stamp program. Food stamps are cut off for households whose
incomes exceed 130 percent of the federal poverty line, or $33,475 per year for
a family of four, calculated after exemptions for certain expenses.
Under “broad-based
categorical eligibility,” which is currently used by over 40 states, households
can be eligible for food stamps based on their receiving assistance from other
anti-poverty programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Under
this rule, which has been in effect for about 20 years, states are allowed to
raise income eligibility and asset limits to promote SNAP eligibility. This
prevents many households from falling over the “benefit cliff,” which happens
when a small increase in income results in a complete cutoff of benefits,
leaving a family worse off than before the rise in income.
According to the USDA,
the rule change on broad-based eligibility would throw more than 680,000
households with children off SNAP. About 80 percent of these households have
school-age children, amounting to about 982,000 children. Of those, 55 percent,
or about 540,000, would no longer be eligible for free school meals, although
most would be eligible for reduced-price meals. About 40,000 would be required
to pay the full meal rate.
However, this does not
paint the full picture. Households thrown off SNAP would be required to apply
separately for access to free or reduced-price school meals. The USDA admits
that its cost estimates “do not account for potential state and local
administrative costs incurred due to collecting and processing household
applications … and also do not account for any increased responsibility placed
on the households to complete and submit a school meals application.”
While the Trump
administration claims that the proposed changes to SNAP eligibility are aimed
at closing up “loopholes” and stopping people from claiming benefits they’re
not entitled to, the reality is that there is no evidence that broad-based
eligibility has allowed significant numbers of people to supposedly “game the
system.” A 2012 Government Accountability Office investigation found that only
473,000 recipients, or just 2.6 percent of beneficiaries, received benefits
they would not have received without the broad-based eligibility offered by
many states.
There is consistent
evidence that SNAP contributes to a decrease in food insecurity, a condition
defined by the USDA as limited or uncertain access to adequate food. By one
estimate, SNAP benefits reduce the likelihood of food insecurity by about 30
percent and the likelihood of being very food insecure by 20 percent. Census
data has shown that SNAP also plays a critical role in reducing poverty, with
about 3.6 million Americans, including 1.5 million children, being lifted out
of poverty in 2016 as a result of the program.
The EconoFact Network
reports that SNAP has improved birth outcomes and infant health. When an
expectant mother has access to SNAP during pregnancy, particularly in the third
trimester, it decreases the likelihood that her baby will be born with low
birth weight. There is also evidence that the benefits of nutrition support can
persist well into adulthood when access to SNAP is provided before birth and
during early childhood. This can have a long-term impact on an individual’s
earnings, health and life expectancy. Conversely, food insecurity in childhood
correlates with greater risk of developing high blood pressure, diabetes,
obesity and cardiovascular disease later in life.
The proposed threat to
school lunches for half a million children has elicited little response from
Democrats in Congress, who are obsessively focused on the Trump impeachment
inquiry. Critical issues such as the health and nutrition of school children
are of little consequence to the Democratic Party, which instead gives voice to
those sections of the military intelligence apparatus that sees Trump’s
actions, particularly his sudden pullout from Syria, as endangering the global
interests of American imperialism.
The Democrats’
opposition to Trump is not based on his imposition of austerity measures, or
his vicious assault on immigrants. While they will not mount a serious
challenge to a proposal that will literally take food out of the mouths of
school children, they were complicit in passing the Republicans’ $1.3 trillion
tax cuts in 2017 and the record $738 billion defense budget agreed to earlier
this year. At $94.6 million, the cost of one of the US Air Force’s newest
and most technologically advanced fighter jets, the F-35A, would cover the $90
annual savings from depriving half a million US schoolchildren of free meals.
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