Saturday, December 21, 2019

TRUMPERNOMICS - U.S. CORPORATIONS PAID NO TAXES


The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

Report finds US corporations paid “zero to negative” income tax rate in 2018

Three hundred and seventy-nine highly profitable Fortune 500 corporations in the United States paid an average effective federal income tax of just 11.3 percent in 2018 as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law by President Donald Trump in December of 2017. This was one of the key findings of a report published Monday by the nonprofit tax policy organization, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).
The report also found that more than half of the 379 companies, or 195, paid less than half of the new statutory corporate tax rate of 21 percent. Fifty-six companies paid effective tax rates of between zero and 5 percent in 2018. Ninety-one highly profitable corporations paid zero or less (negative) income tax in 2018.
The report explains that negative corporate tax rates can occur “because a corporation carries back excess tax deductions and/or credits to an earlier year or years and receives a tax refund check from the US Treasury Department.” In total, these highly profitable corporations received $6.29 billion in tax rebates.
The Trump plan was passed without any serious opposition from Democratic lawmakers, who voted against the bill but refused to appeal to or mobilize popular opposition to it, knowing that the measure would pass in both the House and Senate, which at the time were both under Republican control. The Democrats openly supported a somewhat smaller tax windfall for corporations, along the lines of a bill introduced under the Obama administration.
The cut in the corporate tax rate to 21 percent was a decrease of 40 percent from the previous 35 percent rate. That some of the most profitable corporations paid so much less than this already lowered rate was, according to the report, “by design,” a result of loopholes in the 2017 tax law that affected the overall tax rate.
According to ITEP, just 25 companies accounted for over half of the federal tax subsidies doled out at the expense of the working class. Many of those 25 include financial giants such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, and other monopolies like Wal-Mart, Comcast and AT&T.
Loopholes include accelerated depreciation, which allows companies to take larger upfront write-offs on the expected wear and tear of newly purchased equipment, and special deductions for the stock options included in executive compensation packages.
The corporations that were allowed to get away with paying zero or negative federal income tax rates include:
* Starbucks Corporation, which reaped $4.774 billion in profits in 2018 and received a $75 million tax rebate, effectively paying -1.6 percent in taxes. The corporation is notorious for paying workers low wages, forcing them to work unhealthy schedules and fostering an abusive and hostile work climate.
One worker wrote recently about his experience at Starbucks on the job review website indeed.com: “Terrible company with terrible leadership, can’t pay a living wage to their employees, all they do is threaten their managers, handicap them from doing their jobs, and make as much money as possible over the safety and well-being of their employees and customers. They don’t actually care about the experience, they just want money.”
* Amazon.com, which took in $10.84 billion in profits and was taxed -1.2 percent in 2018. The corporate giant received a $29 million rebate primarily due to a loophole in the tax code for treatment of stock options for executives.
Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos is currently the richest man in the world with a personal net worth of over $113 billion. The monopolistic corporation makes much of its profits through a web of warehouses worldwide where highly exploited workers are under constant surveillance. The company spies on employees and tracks their every move. Under physically demanding conditions, workers are paid just barely enough to survive. Many Amazon workers are homeless.
* FedEx, with $2.31 billion in profits in 2018, was taxed at an effective rate of -4.6 percent and received a rebate of $107 million. FedEx makes its profit off of a highly exploited global workforce that faces many of the same precarious and dangerous working conditions as UPS workers. The Teamsters union isolated the UPS workers from the FedEx workers and rammed through a sellout contract in 2018 despite a vote by the Teamsters rank and file against the contract.
* General Motors, which recorded $4.32 billion in profits in 2018, received a $104 million tax rebate, an effective tax rate of -2.4 percent. With the indispensable assistance of the United Auto Workers union, the company pushed through a sellout contract in October of this year following a 40-day strike.
General Motors headquarters in Detroit, Michigan
* United States Steel, which made a profit of $432 million, received a $40 million rebate and had an effective tax rate of -9.3 percent. Earlier this year, US Steel announced several hundred layoffs at its plants across the US and production shutdowns around the world after pushing through a concessions contract in 2018 with the help of the United Steelworkers union (USW) that stripped workers of job protections.
* Delta Airlines, which reaped $5.07 billion in profits during 2018, received $187 million in tax rebates, benefiting from an effective tax rate of -3.7 percent. Flight attendants have suffered serious injuries on the job only to be denied health care from the claims company Sedgwick, which Delta uses to process workers’ insurance claims.
Had the 379 corporations identified in the ITEP study paid 21 percent in federal income taxes, they would have owed $73.9 billion to the federal government. To put that $73.9 billion into perspective, it is more than the amount needed to make tuition free at public colleges across the US ($70 billion per year) and twice what it would cost per year to end world hunger ($30 billion).



A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

 

Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires


The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder



Sacha Baron Cohen Calls Silicon Valley ‘Greatest Propaganda Machine in History’ for Hate Groups

Kevin Winter/Getty Images
 22 Nov 201918
3:52

Actor Sacha Baron Cohen railed against social media firms giants including Facebook, Google, and Twitter calling them “the greatest propaganda machine in history” for hate groups.

CNBC reports that British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has blamed tech giants Facebook, Google, and Twitter for boosting the voices of hate groups and spreading fake news during a speech before the Anti-Defamation League this week.
Baron Cohen is best known for playing the lead characters in films such as Borat about a documentary filmmaker from Kazakhstan coming to America, he also portrayed the character of Ali G on Da Ali G Show where he would conduct interviews in character with guests who were often unaware that Baron Cohen was an actor. The actor’s signature style has been to trick the people he interviews into revealing their own biases or convincing them to say offensive things or take part in outrageous scenarios.
But Baron Cohen lashed out at the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley recently during a speech before the ADL. Baron Cohen stated that hate groups and divisive rhetoric are on the rise across the world and blamed Big Tech for acting as “the greatest propaganda machine in history.” He stated during his speech:
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history — the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous.
Baron Cohen harshly criticized Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who promoted freedom of speech to students during an event at Georgetown University recently. The actor pointed out issues he had with Zuckerberg’s refusal to police speech on the Facebook platform, stating:
If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants [to] kill Jews, would the owner of the restaurant be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not! The restaurant owner has every legal right and a moral obligation to kick the Nazi out, and so do these internet companies.
Baron Cohen stated that believes Facebook should be regulated and that there should be an automated delay between the time material is uploaded and it is posted to the platform in order to ensure that violent content is not allowed on the platform. He stated:
There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist. And if these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups like the ADL, insist on facts and purge these lies and conspiracies from their platforms.
Baron Cohen referred to the CEO’s of Silicon Valley’s biggest firm as “The Silicon Six”, this includes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and four executives from Google’s parent company Alphabet: Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
A Twitter spokesperson noted after Baron Cohen’s speech that it had suspended the accounts of 186 hate groups so far. The spokesperson stated:  “Our rules are clear: There is no place on Twitter for hateful conduct, terrorist organizations or violent extremist groups.” Facebook, Google, and YouTube did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or email him at lnolan@breitbart.com






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.

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 taxAnd 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.

 

 

A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

The Lessons of Theodore Roosevelt

To get out of our Second Gilded Age, look no further than how we got out of the first one.
September 6, 2019
Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
We’ve been rocked by scandals over the past year involving the nation’s most wealthy and powerful. We’ve learned that a twisted multimillionaire allegedly procured and raped girls in his Manhattan mansion and on his private Caribbean Island; entitled celebrities and corporate plutocrats paid millions of dollars in bribes to get their kids into elite universities; pillars of the Hollywood and media establishments have used their stature to sexually prey upon underlings; and, yes, our president was caught lying about possibly violating campaign finance laws with hush money payoffs to a porn star and Playboy bunny.
This moral corruption is accompanied by the regressive government policies of a scandal-stained administration. President Donald Trump is rolling back programs that protect consumers, voting rights, the environment, and competitive commerce faster than Congress can issue subpoenas. His cabinet includes 17 millionaires, two centimillionaires, and one billionaire with a combined worth of $3.2 billion, according to Forbes. He presides over the most corrupt administration in American history, one marked by nepotism and self-dealing. His so-called “A Team” of senior officials has undergone a record 75 percent turnover since he took office—most of whom resigned under pressure, often caught up in scandal.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, whose net worth is estimated at $600 million, reflected the arrogance and empathy deficit that typifies the Trump White House during last winter’s record-long government shutdown. He suggested that federal workers just take out loans until they got paid.
But nobody tops the swamp king, Trump himself. Forget the sleaze, forget the obstruction of justice, forget the constant dissing of Congress. His defying the Constitution’s emoluments clause alone would, in a normally functioning American democracy, make him the subject of impeachment. Instead, he flouts the rules as if they don’t apply to him. If he gets his way and hosts next year’s G-7 summit at Mar-a-Lago, we may as well send the Constitution to the shredder. And yet, as more recent controversies have shown us, including the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and Jeffery Epstein’s sex trafficking racket, this kind of indifference to moral values is not confined to government grandees.
So, what gives? Is America drowning in a marsh of unchecked corruption and entitlement brought on by latter-day Louis XVI’s and Marie Antoinettes? Are the uber-wealthy out of control? There’s something rotten in America and, if we don’t fix it soon, we invite a new wave of national decline and social disintegration.
The good news is that we have faced similar challenges before. Some prescriptions from a previous era may provide a lodestar for a future Democratic president to steer the country in the right direction. As Mark Twain, who coined the term “the Gilded Age,” once said, “The external glitter of wealth conceals a corrupt political core that reflects the growing gap between the very few rich and the very many poor.” He was talking about the original Gilded Age, but that diagnosis could just as easily apply to our current American condition.
The first Gilded Age was marked by rapid economic growth, massive immigration, political corruption, and a high concentration of wealth in which the richest one percent owned 51 percent of property, while the bottom 44 percent had a mere one percent. The oligarchs at the top were popularly known as “robber barons.”
Theodore Roosevelt, who was president at the time, understood that economic inequality itself becomes a driver of a dysfunctional political system that benefits the wealthy but few others. As he once famously warned, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching economic democracy.”
His response to the inequities of his times, which came to define the Progressive Era, have much to teach us now about how to sensibly tackle economic inequality. It’s worthwhile to closely examine the Rooseveltian playbook. For instance, his “Square Deal” made bold changes in the American workplace, government regulation of industry, and consumer protection. These reforms included mandating safer conditions for miners and eliminating the spoils system in federal hiring; bringing forty-four antitrust suits against big business, resulting in the breakup of the largest railroad monopoly, and regulation of the nation’s largest oil company; and passing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the FDA. He prosecuted more than twice as many antitrust suits against monopolistic businesses than his three predecessors combined, curbing the robber barons’ power. And he relentlessly cleaned up corruption in the federal government. One-hundred-forty-six indictments were brought against a bribery ring involving public timberlands, culminating in the conviction and imprisonment of a U.S. senator, and forty-four Postal Department employees were charged with fraud and bribery.
Now, we are in a Second Gilded Age, facing many of the same problems, and, in some ways, to an even greater degree. The gap between the rich and everyone else is even greater than it was during the late 19th Century, when the richest two percent of Americans owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth. Today, the top one percent owns almost 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, or more than the bottom 90 percent combined, according to the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. The first Gilded Age saw the rise of hyper-rich dynastic families, such as the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, and DuPonts. Today, three individuals—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. And three families—the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Mars—have enjoyed a nearly 6,000 percent rise in wealth since Ronald Reagan took the oath as president, while median U.S. household wealth over the same period has declined by three percent.
The consequences of this wealth gap are dire. Steve Brill explains in his book Tailspin that, by manipulating the tax and legal systems to their benefit, America’s most educated elite, the so-called meritocracy, have built a moat that excludes the working poor, limiting their upward mobility and increasing their sense of alienation, which then gives rise to the populist streak that allowed politicians like Trump to captivate enough of the American electorate.
Similarly, psychologist Dacher Keltner’s research shows that power in and of itself is a corrupting force. As he documents in The Power Paradox, powerful people lie more, drive more aggressively, are more likely to cheat on their spouses, act abusively toward subordinates, and even take candy from children. Too often, they simply do not respect the rules.
For example, in monitoring an urban traffic intersection, Keltner found that drivers of the least expensive vehicles virtually always yielded to pedestrians, whereas drivers of luxury cars yielded only about half of the time. He cites surveys covering 27 countries that show that rich people are more likely to admit that it’s acceptable to engage in unethical behavior, such as accepting bribes or cheating on taxes.“The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially appropriate behavior,” says Keltner.
That’s why we need to reform our political system if we are to survive the rampant amorality and lawlessness of the Second Gilded Age. Simply put, so very few should not wield so much sway over so many.
One of the first priorities of an incoming administration should be to narrow the wealth and income gap. French economist Thomas Picketty favors a progressive annual wealth tax of up to two percent, along with a progressive income tax as high as 80 percent on the biggest earners to reduce inequality and avoid reverting to “patrimonial capitalism” in which inherited wealth controls much of the economy and could lead essentially to oligarchy.
The leading 2020 Democratic candidates favor raising taxes, as well. Elizabeth Warren has proposed something commensurate to Picketty’s two percent wealth tax for those worth more than $50 million, and a three percent annual tax on individuals with a net worth higher than $1 billion. She has also proposed closing corporate tax loopholes. Joe Biden wants to restore the top individual income tax rate to a pre-Trump 39.6 percent and raise capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders has proposed an estate tax on the wealth of the top 0.2 percent of Americans.
Following Theodore Roosevelt’s example, we need to aggressively root out the tangle of corruption brought on by Trump and his minions. This has already begun with multiple and expanding investigations led by House Democrats into the metastasizing malfeasance within the Trump administration. Trump’s successor, however, should work with Congress to appoint a bipartisan anti-corruption task force to oversee prosecutions and draw up reform legislation to prevent future abuses.
“Of all forms of tyranny, the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy,” Roosevelt once warned. The free market has made America the great success it is today. But history has shown that unconstrained capitalism and a growing wealth gap leads to an unhealthy concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. When the gap between the haves and the have-nots goes unchecked, populism takes hold, leading to the election of dangerous demagogues like Trump, and the disastrous politics they bring with them. It is not too late to reverse course. But first, we need to re-learn the lessons from our first Gilded Age if we are going to get out of the current one.

 

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.

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 taxAnd 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.

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.