Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both campaigned for, and won, the White House on the watchword “hope.” What watchword will it take for a Democrat to win this time?
My suggestion: soap.
Nearly three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse. It needs to wash out the grime and grease of an administration that every day does something to make the country feel soiled.
Soiled by a president who, Castro-like, delivered a two-hour rant at a rally in Michigan the night he was impeached. Who described his shakedown of Ukraine as “perfect.” Who extolled the world’s cruelest tyrant as someone who “wrote me beautiful letters. … We fell in love.” Who abandoned vulnerable allies in Syria, then opted to maintain troops in the country “only for oil.” Who, barely a year before the El Paso massacre, demonized illegal immigrants who “pour into and infest our Country.”
The list goes on, and most everyone feels it. In June, the Pew Research Center published a survey on how the country sees the state of public discourse. The most striking finding: “A 59% majority of Republicans and Republican leaners say they often or sometimes feel concerned by what Trump says. About half also say they are at least sometimes embarrassed (53%) and confused (47%) by Trump’s statements.”
What’s true of Republicans is far more so of the rest of the United States. Pew found that overwhelming majorities of Americans were “concerned” (76%), “confused” (70%), “embarrassed” (69%), “angry” (65%), “insulted” (62%) and “frightened” (56%) by the things Trump says.
These numbers should devastate Trump’s chances of reelection. They don’t, for three reasons.
First, 76% of Americans rate economic conditions positively, up from 48% at the time of Trump’s election. Second, the progressive left’s values seem increasingly hostile to mainstream ones, as suggested by the titanic row over J.K. Rowling’s recent tweet defending a woman who was fired over her outspoken views on transgenderism. Third, the more the left rages about Trump and predicts nothing but catastrophe and conspiracy from him, the more out of touch it seems when the catastrophes don’t happen and the conspiracy theories come up short.
No wonder Trump’s average approval ratings have steadily ticked up since the end of October. In the view of middle-of-the-road America, the president may be bad, but he’s nowhere near as bad as his critics say.
In that same view, while Trump’s critics might be partly right about him, they’re a lot less right than they believe. In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styled saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk might just win.
How to avoid that outcome?
The most obvious point is not to promise a wrenching overhaul of the economy when it shows no signs of needing such an overhaul. There are plenty of serious long-term risks to our prosperity, including a declining birthrate, national debt north of $23 trillion, the erosion of the global free-trade consensus, threats to the political independence of the Federal Reserve and the popularization of preposterous economic notions such as Modern Monetary Theory.
But anyone who thinks blowout government spending, partly financed by an unconstitutional and ineffective wealth tax, is going to be an electoral winner should look at the fate of Britain’s hapless Jeremy Corbyn.
What would work? Smart infrastructure spending. New taxes on carbon offset by tax cuts on income and saving. Modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.
What these proposals lack in progressive ambition, they make up in political plausibility and the inherent appeal of modesty. They also defeat Trump’s most potent reelection argument, which is that, no matter who opposes him, he’s running against the crazy left.
Hence the second point. Too much of today’s left is too busy pointing out the ugliness of the Trumpian right to notice its own ugliness: its censoriousness, nastiness and complacent self-righteousness. But millions of ordinary Americans see it, and they won’t vote for a candidate who emboldens and empowers woke culture. The Democrat who breaks with that culture, as Clinton did in 1992 over Sister Souljah and Obama did in October over “cancel culture,” is the one likeliest to beat Trump.
Finally, the winning Democrat will need to make Trump’s presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental — an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment, not a fatal cancer within it. Mike Bloomberg has the financial wherewithal to make Trump’s wealth seem nearly trivial. Joe Biden has the life experience to make Trump’s attacks seem petty. Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have the rhetorical skills to turn Trump’s taunts against him.
As with most bullies, the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is. Wouldn’t it be something if his political opponents and obsessed media critics resolved, for 2020, to talk about him a little less and past him a lot more?
When your goal is to wash your hands of something bad, you don’t need a sword. Soap will do.
Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist.

THE RICH LOVE THE SWAMP KEEPER. HE CUT THEIR TAXES AND CUT FOOD STAMP FOR THE POOR TO COVER THE DIFFERENCE.


!ALL! BILLIONAIRES WANT AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS AND DENOUNCE E-VERIFY. KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED TO NEAR SLAVE LABOR LEVELS HELPED THEM GET RICH. JUST ASK MODERN SLAVER JEFF BEZOS OF AMAZON.

 

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 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.

 

World’s 500 Richest People Increased Their Wealth by $1.2 Trillion in 2019




Jeff Bezos is still the richest person on the planet. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The world’s richest people had a good year in 2019, increasing their wealth by a staggering 25 percent. A new analysis of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index found that the 500 richest people on the planet increased their vast wealth by $1.2 trillion in the past year, bringing their total wealth to $5.9 trillion.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos remains the richest person in the world, even in a year that saw him lose around $8 billion due to his divorce from ex-wife McKenzie. She is now 25th on the Bloomberg index, with $37.5 billion.
Among the top gainers of the year were Mark Zuckerberg, whose wealth jumped by $27.3 billion, and Bill Gates, who is $22.7 billion richer than he was at the start of the year. French magnate Bernard Arnault, the third richest person in the world, saw his wealth increase by $36.5 billion in 2019.
One billionaire not on the list is Michael Bloomberg, who owns the website that published it. According to Forbes, Bloomberg’s net worth is around $53.4 billion, which would rank him 19th on the list. But Bloomberg News does not cover Bloomberg LP, so the boss is not on the list.
Incidentally, Elizabeth Warren, one of the leading proponents of soaking the rich in the Democratic race for the presidency, released a new explainer of her wealth tax this week. What timing.


Richest 400 Americans paid lower taxes than everyone else in 2018

According to an analysis by noted economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, previewed this week by New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, the wealthiest American households paid a lower tax rate last year than every other income group for the first time in the country’s history.
Saez and Zucman, both professors at the University of California Berkeley, detail the phenomenon of declining taxes for the richest Americans in their soon-to-be released book, The Triumph of Injustice .
The pair compiled a historical database composed of the tax payments of households in various income percentiles spanning all the way back to 1913, when the federal income tax was first implemented. Their research uncovered that in the 2018 fiscal year the wealthiest 400 Americans paid a lower tax rate—accounting for federal, state, and local taxes—than anyone else.
The overall tax rate paid by the richest .01 percent was only 23 percent last year, while the bottom half of the population paid 24.2 percent. This contrasts starkly with the overall tax rates on the wealthy of 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.
The taxes on the wealthy have been in precipitous decline since the latter half of the 20th century as successive presidential administrations enacted tax cuts for the rich, suggesting that they would result in economic prosperity for all. Taxes that mostly affect the wealthy, such as the estate tax and corporate tax, have been drastically cut and lawyers have been hard at work on the beliefs of their wealthy patrons planning out the best schemes for tax avoidance, seeking to drive tax rates as close to zero as possible. The impetus for the historical tipping point was the Trump Administration’s 2017 tax reform, which was a windfall for the super-rich.
Supported by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, the two parties of Wall Street, Trump’s tax cuts were specifically designed to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the working class to the ruling elite.
The corporate tax rate was permanently slashed from 35 percent to 21 percent, potentially increasing corporate revenues by more than $6 trillion in the next decade. The bill also reduced the individual federal income tax rate for the wealthy and included a number of other provisions to further ease their tax burden.
The story is different for many middle- and working-class Americans. According to multiple analyses of the 2017 tax reform, 83 percent of the tax benefits will go to the top 1 percent by 2027, while 53 percent of the population, or those making less than $75,000 annually, will pay higher taxes. At the same time, the reform will sharply increase budget deficits and the national debt, granting the pretense for the further destruction of domestic social programs.
Furthermore, a majority of Americans are paying higher payroll taxes, which cover Medicare and Social Security. The tax increased from 2 percent just after World War II, to 6 percent in 1960, to 15.3 percent in 1990, where it stands today. It has risen to become the largest tax that 62 percent of American households pay.
The result of the multitude of changes to the US tax system over the last three-quarters of a century is one that has become less progressive over time. The 2017 tax reform effectively set up the foundation for a regressive tax policy where the wealthy pay lower tax rates than the poor.
The implementation of a regressive tax structure has played a major role in engineering the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top that has brought social inequality in America to its highest level since the 1920s.
According to Leonhardt’s preliminary Times review of The Triumph of Injustice, Saez and Zucman offer a solution to the current unjust tax system in which the overall tax rate on the top 1 percent of income earners would rise to 60 percent. The pair claim that the tax increase would bring in approximately $750 billion in taxes. Their tax code also includes a wealth tax and a minimum global corporate tax of 25 percent, requiring corporations to pay taxes on profits made in the United States, even if their headquarters are overseas.
In an interview with Leonhardt, Zucman states that history shows that the US has raised tax rates on the wealthy before so therefore it should be possible to do so now.
However, the last half century of counterrevolution waged against the working class makes the parasitic nature of the ruling elite absolutely clear, and underscores the well-known fact that the US is ruled by an oligarchy that controls the political system. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, who both represent this oligarchy and bear responsibility for the tax system, will make any effort to implement Saez and Zucman’s modest proposal.

California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.


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

Getty Images

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.

White House, congressional Republicans accelerate drive for corporate tax cut worth trillions

The push is accelerating for an overhaul of the US tax system that will divert trillions of additional dollars to the corporate aristocracy, widen the gap between the rich and the working class and set the stage for the destruction of basic social programs.
On Thursday, the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee passed a White House-backed tax bill on a party-line vote, after which House leaders said the measure would come to the House floor for a vote next week. On the same day, the Republican-controlled Senate released its version of the measure, with plans for a floor vote in the upper chamber before the Thanksgiving holiday later this month.
If passed, the two versions will be reconciled and a final bill will be moved through the two chambers and signed into law by President Trump.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans are pushing for passage of the handout to the richest 5 percent by Christmas. The Democrats are putting on a show of opposition that is cynical to the core. They are denouncing the Republican bills for skewing the tax benefits to the wealthy, while fully supporting the centerpiece of the legislation, a huge tax cut for US corporations.
While there are differences between the House and Senate bills, both versions adhere to the same basic framework. The corporate tax rate is to be permanently reduced from the current level of 35 percent to 20 percent, saving US corporations $2 trillion in taxes and generating an additional $6.7 trillion in revenues over the next decade. The House bill enacts the corporate tax cut in 2018, while the Senate bill, in order to reduce the projected deficit from lost federal revenues, delays the corporate tax cut one year, until 2019.
The House bill keeps the top federal tax bracket at 39.6 percent (down from 70 percent in 1980), but applies it to households making more than $1 million a year, as compared to the current threshold of $500,000. The Senate version provides a bigger windfall for the very rich by reducing the top bracket to 38.5 percent.
Both bills eliminate the alternative minimum tax, which almost exclusively impacts the wealthy, and they both slash the tax rate on so-called “pass-through” income reported by business owners.
Each bill allows corporations that have stashed hundreds of billions of dollars overseas to avoid US taxes, such as Apple and Amazon, to repatriate their profits at a sharply discounted tax rate even lower than the new 20 percent corporate rate.
The bills either sharply restrict or eliminate outright the estate tax, which is currently paid by the wealthiest 0.2 percent of households. The House bill doubles the exemption for an individual to $11 million and eliminates the estate tax entirely in 2025. The Senate version doubles the exemption but does not repeal the tax.
Either way, the change underwrites the right of the richest households to pass on their wealth to succeeding generations, institutionalizing the transformation of the United States into an oligarchy, presided over by a semi-hereditary dynastic caste.
Other boons to business are included in both bills, including an immediate 100 percent tax write-off for capital investments. Neither bill eliminates or reduces the so-called “carried interest” loophole that allows hedge fund, private equity and real estate speculators (such as Donald Trump) to pay only 20 percent on their income instead of the normal tax rate, currently almost twice as high.
This is in line with the legislation as whole. While shifting the tax code to further redistribute the social wealth from the bottom to the top, it particularly favors the most parasitic sections of the ruling class, those engaged in financial manipulation.
In order to promote the fiction that the overhaul is geared to the “middle class,” the bills include certain tax breaks, such as a doubling of the standard deduction for taxpayers who do not itemize and an increase in the child tax credit. However, they also rein in or eliminate existing tax deductions that benefit working class and middle class households.
This is driven above all by the need to keep the total ten-year deficit resulting from the legislation to $1.5 trillion. That limit must be met in order to move the tax overhaul on an expedited basis through the Senate, where the Republicans have only a 52 to 48 majority, ruling out a filibuster and enabling passage by a simple majority.
The House bill eliminates the federal tax credit for state and local income and sales taxes, but continues the write-off for state and local property taxes, capping it at $10,000. It reduces the existing tax reduction on mortgage interest payments as well as a tax break on medical expenses. It also eliminates tax credits for student loan payments and imposes a tax on graduate student stipends. These measures amount to a tax surcharge on workers, young people and the elderly to help pay for the tax boondoggle for the rich.
The Senate version calls for a somewhat different package of added tax burdens for the working class and middle class. It eliminates all state and local tax deductions but retains the tax credits for mortgage interest, student loan payments and medical expenses.
The Republicans are resorting to brazen lying to present the legislation as a boon to “hard-working middle class Americans.” Typical is an op-ed column published Friday in the Washington Post by Orrin Hatch of Utah, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “For too long, middle-class Americans have struggled with stagnant wages, sluggish labor markets and economic growth well below the historic average,” he writes. “It is time to pay attention to those Americans who have felt left behind in economic stagnation, by providing tax relief and economic opportunity.”
The line is that corporate America will use the trillions in tax savings to buy new equipment, build new factories, hire more workers and raise wages. This ignores the fact that US corporations already have access to cheap credit, are making bumper profits, and are sitting on trillions of dollars in cash. It also ignores the past record of tax cuts for big business, whether under Reagan or George W. Bush, which pushed up stocks and the wealth of the ruling elite while accelerating the destruction of jobs and working class living standards. The same lying pretext was used to justify Obama’s bailout of the banks.
In fact, the extra trillions will be used to buy more and bigger yachts, private planes, mansions, penthouses, private islands and gated communities and bribe more politicians to do the bidding of the oligarchs.
One indication of the two-faced character of the Democrats’ opposition is the fact that interest groups backed by Republican billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have thus far spent almost $25 million on TV ads to promote the Republican tax plan, while Democratic groups have spent less than $5 million to oppose the plan.
An updated analysis of the House bill published Wednesday by the non-partisan tax center spells out in detail how the tax overhaul is designed to sharply increase the wealth of the richest 5 percent, and especially the richest 1 percent and 0.1 percent, and vastly increase over the next decade the concentration of wealth at the very top.
Under the so-called “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” in 2018, taxpayers in the top 1 percent (with income above $730,000) will receive nearly 21 percent of the total tax cut, an average of about $37,000, or 2.5 percent of after-tax income.
Those in the top 5 percent income bracket, and especially the top 1 percent and top 0.1 percent, will get by far the biggest percentage gains in after-tax income. In other words, if you are among the very rich, the rate of increase you receive will be far higher than for the lower 95 percent. That means the plan is designed to widen the gap between the very rich and everybody else.
In 2018, the top 20 percent of income earners will get 56.6 percent of the total federal tax cut. Within the top 10 percent, the 90-95 percent group will get 7.4 percent of the total, the 95-99 percent group will receive 14.8 percent, the top 1 percent will get 20.6 percent and the top 0.1 percent will receive 10 percent. In other words, within the richest 10 percent, the benefits are skewed dramatically to the richest of the rich.
One decade out, by 2027, the transfer of social wealth to the very rich will be even more pronounced. In 2027, taxpayers in the bottom two quintiles (those with income less than about $55,000) will see little change in their taxes, with a tax decrease of $10-$40. Taxpayers in the middle of the income distribution will see their after-tax incomes increase by only 0.4 percent. Taxpayers in the top 1 percent will receive nearly 50 percent of the total benefit.
Someone in the top 1 percent will get a break of $52,780. Someone in the top 0.1 percent will get a tax cut of $278,370.
In total, 12.8 million households will have a bigger tax bill in 2018 under the law, including more than three million earning between $48,600 and $86,100. By 2027, more than 11 million households in this income group will see their tax bills increase. Overall, by 2027, 47.5 million households, a quarter of the total, will have a tax increase.