AFTER TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH, TRUMP NOW ASSAULTS THE POOR TO BALANCE THE BUDGET

"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. "

Work or Starve, Trump Administration Tells Poor People

By Sarah Jones

Donald Trump’s sins are so plentiful that they

battle constantly for condemnation. Each 

week brings some fresh outrage: a new crime, 

or new information about an old crime, or 

another example of his hostility for anyone 

who does not resemble his mostly white, 

mostly male, relatively well-off base. Inevitably the news drowns out whatever came before it so we are reduced to ticking off a list to remember the truth. Yes, two dozen women have accused him of sexual harassment and assault. Yes, he is racist. Yes, he is corrupt. And yes, he hates the poor.

It is not unusual for a Republican administration to seek cuts to welfare. It’s not even totally out of character for a Democratic president to do the same. (Triangulation, as practiced by Bill Clinton, had its victims.) But Trump has pursued this objective with remarkable vigor, and the USDA’s new food-stamp rule, out today, is proof.

Significant restrictions on food-stamp eligibility predate the Trump presidency. The related ideas that the poor are poor because they are lazy, and that they deserve to go hungry, are written into existing work requirements for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Able-bodied people who are not caring for dependants can only receive food stamps for a period of three months in three years, unless they prove they are working at least 20 hours a week or attending school or vocational training. States can lift these rules for areas in economic crisis. If local unemployment is 20 percent above the national average or more, residents benefit from expanded SNAP eligibility. But the White House now wants to shrink this loophole to a pinprick.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday morning, states can now only apply for waivers if local unemployment hits 6 percent. The change will cut off food aid for an estimated 755,000 people, and it’s also only the first of three changes the USDA proposes for SNAP. Another proposal, which the USDA is likely to finalize, would take food stamps from another 3 million people. Right now, households with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level can receive food stamps. The New York Times explained, for reference, that this guideline extends food aid to families of four with a household income of about $50,000. Households with assets of at least $2,250 would also no longer be eligible for aid. The USDA itself has admitted that its reforms would cost almost half a million children their free school lunches, since eligibility is often determined by a household’s receipt of food stamps. The Urban Institute has estimated that the administration’s three rule changes, if finalized, will deprive around 3.7 million people total of food aid.

The administration has said its proposals would cut $4.5 billion from the USDA’s budget, and would limit food assistance to those who truly need it. But hunger is already a national problem. The 

USDA’s own data show that over 14 million 

Americans suffered food insecurity in 2018. Social media is replete with outrage over school districts denying children hot meals over unpaid lunch debt. And while it’s true that unemployment is low, wage growth is still out of pace with inflation, and rising costs of living add further pressure on families in need. Work, in other words, does not necessarily keep the lights on, or fill empty bellies. Not that it should really matter. A straight line connects the notion that some forms of poverty are more acceptable than others to proposals like the one the USDA finalized today.

While this is not the first time the American government has told its poor to work and starve, it is quintessentially Trumpian to do so less than three weeks before Christmas. “If I become president, we will be saying Merry Christmas again,” Trump vowed on the campaign trail. Maybe it’s merry for him, and for USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue. But hundreds of thousands of people will now struggle through the holiday season with dread.

Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

JOHN BINDER

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.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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.

Children receive a free lunch at the Phoenix Day Central Park Youth Program in downtown Phoenix. (AP Photo Matt York)

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.