“They’ve tucked a trio of little-noticed tax hikes on the wealthy and big corporations into their coronavirus relief package that together are worth $60 billion.
One takes away deductions for publicly traded companies that pay top employees more than $1 million. Another provision cracks down on how multinational corporations do their taxes. A third targets how owners of unincorporated businesses account for their losses.”
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“[Democrats] ran into problems complying with the stringent budget rules surrounding so-called reconciliation measures like the coronavirus legislation — especially after some wanted to add provisions like one waiving taxes on unemployment benefits.
If Democrats exceeded their $1.9 trillion budget cap for the plan, they would lose the procedural protections that were used to shield the entire measure from a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
The tax increases Democrats picked to help keep their plan’s cost in check had the political benefit of being arcane. Unlike things like raising the corporate tax rate or upping the top marginal tax rate on the rich, the ones they chose won’t produce many headlines.
They also fit Democrats’ themes of fighting inequality by forcing the well-to-do to pay more.
Since the provisions were added late in the legislative process, lobbyists didn’t have much time to rouse opposition to the plans.”
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“Democrats turned to a rule Republicans created as part of their 2017 tax cuts. It limits to $500,000 the amount of losses certain people who own unincorporated “pass-through” businesses can use to offset other income and thereby reduce their tax bills.
That issue became a lightning rod last year when lawmakers temporarily suspended that limit as part of a previous stimulus package. At the time, lawmakers were trying to get money into the hands of businesses owners in order to prevent layoffs by making it easier for them to qualify for tax refunds, and the $500,000 limit would have impeded that.
Many progressives criticized the move, calling it a giveaway to the rich.
Democrats’ coronavirus plan stops short of undoing last year’s provisions, though it does extend the $500,000 limit — which, like much of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, is currently scheduled to expire at the end of 2025 — by an additional year. The Senate Finance Committee says that will raise $31 billion.
Another provision generates $6 billion by going after executive compensation.
Businesses are normally allowed to deduct employees’ pay on their tax bills, though there are rules limiting those deductions when a CEO and a handful of a company’s other top employees earn more than $1 million. Democrats are doubling the number of officials, to 10, that would be subject to that restriction, which would hit businesses such as investment banks.
A third provision, which budget forecasters say will produce $22 billion, repeals an arcane provision giving multinational companies more flexibility in deciding how to account for their interest expenses when they do their taxes.
To be sure, the tax increases are dwarfed by the amount of tax revenue cut by the legislation — about $590 billion, according to the official Joint Committee on Taxation. Lawmakers are sending another round of stimulus checks to millions of Americans as well as temporarily expanding popular breaks like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit.”
“Trump reshaped virtually every part of the U.S. immigration system through executive action, policy guidance and regulatory change.
In total, he made more than 400 changes to immigration policy in the last four years, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank. The Immigration Policy Tracking Project, run by former Obama Homeland Security official, Lucas Guttentag, puts that number closer to 1,000.
Biden has made fighting the coronavirus, which is still infecting tens of thousands and killing 2,000 Americans each day, his top priority. After he helps bring the pandemic under control, he plans to tackle several issues, including the economy, infrastructure, gun restrictions and immigration.
In addition to Trump’s changes, the circumstances surrounding immigration on the ground have changed, making it impossible for Biden to try to just return to pre-2016 policies.”
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” On his first day in office, Biden released a massive immigration package and signed several immigration-related executive orders to halt construction of the border wall, end a ban from some majority-Muslim nations and restart a program to protect so-called Dreamers.”
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“But Biden has yet to address a series of issues: He punted on whether high-skilled workers should be given preference if they are being hired at companies paying more money instead of through a random lottery. He hasn’t fulfilled a campaign promise to tackle the massive backlog at immigration courts that doubled under Trump. (Even with the backlog, many of those cases were denied.)
And last month, he called for a review of the so-called public charge rule that makes it harder for immigrants who rely on public benefits, such as Medicaid, to obtain permanent residency in the country.”
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“Biden will be forced to make decisions on some issues, including the closure of the southern border and granting visas to more than 100,000 foreign workers. But it’s not clear when — or if — he will act at all on others, including fighting court cases and changing the refugee caps.”
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“One of the most pressing issues Biden faces: to allow temporary migrants, such as students, easier access to visas, even though many consulates and embassies are closed. Only 43 of 233 processing centers for guests are processing routine cases, according to the State Department.”
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“Before Trump came into office, nearly 500,000 new foreign students came into the United States in a year, pumping billions of dollars into small and large schools across the country. That number slowly declined under the former president and plummeted last year.
Julie Stufft, acting deputy assistant secretary for visa services, acknowledged the problems in securing visas last week. She said her office is working to solve the problem, though those who plan to reside in the U.S. permanently take precedent. Some immigrants from select countries, including China and much of Europe, are still banned from traveling to the U.S. due to the pandemic.
Gregory Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the Biden administration deserves credit for pursuing many of the reforms he had pledged to do during the campaign. But, Chen said, “The jury is still out on whether they are going to be successful in implementing those policies.””
“Only a tiny portion of the spending in the bill goes toward vaccinations and other priories directly related to the pandemic.
Much of the rest of the spending is not well-suited, or even designed, to respond to current economic conditions, which are increasingly favorable.”
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“Take public education, where Democratic-allied teacher unions dominate. It’s not clear why any additional spending is necessary, given that tens of billions of education funding from prior Covid relief bills are still unspent, even as many districts have already begun to reopen for in-person instruction.
Nonetheless, the bill spends roughly another $130 billion on K-12 education. According to a CBO estimate, by the time most of the money is spent we will have long exited the pandemic that supposedly justifies it.”
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” The $350 billion in aid to states and localities comes despite state and local tax revenue being down only a tick through much of 2020 compared with the year before. According to widely cited Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, the state and local funding gap will be roughly $60 billion through fiscal 2022. Still, states and localities will be showered with money, after more than $500 billion in aid to states and localities last year.”
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“The bill spends $86 billion bailing out union-negotiated multi-employer pension plans.
Transportation gets tens of billions of new spending, which by its nature doesn’t happen quickly, and more than $30 billion goes to expanding Obamacare, a long-term Democratic policy goal.”
“The $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus that the House is expected to pass Wednesday includes roughly $100 billion in aid to families with dependent children.
If that phrase rings a bell, it’s because “Aid to Families with Dependent Children” was the name of the New Deal-era welfare program eliminated by President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform bill. Back then, Democrats worried (with some reason) that AFDC enabled, for some families, long-term dependency on welfare. To limit time spent collecting welfare and to move low-income mothers off the dole, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.
Now, a quarter-century later, in the midst of a Covid recession, the Democrats are reviving no-strings financial assistance to families with children. The bill nearly doubles the Treasury’s expenditure on the child tax credit, and extends eligibility to nearly everyone. The Covid bill would increase the maximum child tax credit from $2,000 per child to $3,600 per child. It would also, for the first time, extend the benefit to nonworking Americans—a significant departure from the program’s origins in 1997 as a tax break for middle- and upper-income families.”
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“the pendulum hasn’t just swung back for Democrats. While the Covid bill was under consideration in the Senate, Republican Sen. Mitt Romney proposed his own expansion of the child tax credit, one that would raise the maximum benefit even higher, to $4,200 per child (though Romney would offset that with cuts to other income-support programs). Romney’s plan was attacked immediately as “welfare assistance” by Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Mike Lee, and in the end, Republicans voted as a bloc against the Covid bill that contained President Joe Biden’s version. But Rubio and Lee favor raising the maximum child tax credit, too; indeed, they want to raise it even higher than Romney, to $4,500. (Their difference with both Romney and Biden is that they would not extend the child tax credit to nonworking families.)”
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“Does increasing the value of the child tax credit risk building the work disincentive back up? It does, but to a much smaller extent. The expansions that Biden and Romney put forth largely mooted these worries by making eligibility virtually universal. If there’s no income level at which you lose your child tax credit, then the marginal tax a jobless person pays on jumping back into the workforce is zero. And if the eligibility cutoff is very high—under the Covid bill, many families earning in the six figures still get the full $3,600—then reducing or eliminating the credit isn’t going to pinch very hard.
The catch is that the closer you get to making a government benefit universally available, the more expensive it gets.”
“The starting point of any conversation about U.S. policy toward Cuba needs to be a piece of unfinished business from the previous administration: the still-unfolding mystery of how 26 American diplomats were injured in Havana in 2016 and 2017.
The exact origins of the injuries remain uncertain, but the known and emerging evidence suggests the Cuban regime is guilty, if not by commission then at least by omission, of injuring U.S. personnel. This episode represents a likely direct attack on one country’s citizens by another, and there has yet to be a full accounting of who is responsible and how it all happened, or a resolution. If the Biden administration is tempted to engage anew with Havana, it must first hold the Cuban government to account for what these American diplomats endured.”
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“Cuba consistently denied involvement. Instead, the regime has peddled the theory that the cause was mass psychogenic illness—aka. mass hysteria—among America’s diplomatic personnel. Conveniently, this theory absolves Cuba of blame, shifting it instead to the victims. Yet the theory doesn’t hold up to scrutiny now, and never did.”
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“Accountability for the injuries of these 26 Americans must begin where the attacks started, in Havana.”
“Although less than half of 1 percent of the U.S. population resides in nursing homes, they account for nearly 40 percent of all Covid deaths. Nursing homes are supposed to help residents remain safe and healthy, but the opposite turned out to be the case: When it came to the coronavirus, residents in nursing homes were more vulnerable, not less.”
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“rebuilding nursing home facilities is an expensive and long-term solution to an immediate crisis. I’ve been studying long-term care settings for many years, and I think there’s a quicker and possibly even more effective approach we can take in the short term to ensure better care for our seniors in the post-Covid era: improve staffing.
It’s no secret that nursing home staff are paid relatively poorly for incredibly demanding work. Certified nurse aides who provide over 90 percent of direct resident care are often paid at or near minimum wage — the same wages as entry-level workers in retail establishments or fast-food chains. Nursing staff are also underpaid; registered nurses and licensed practical nurses who work in nursing homes are often paid below their counterparts who work in hospitals and other health care settings.
What’s more, nursing home staff often lack essential benefits, like health insurance and paid sick leave. That means nursing home workers are incentivized to come to work even when sick — how does that make sense when they are caring for medically vulnerable residents during a pandemic?
Nursing homes are also very hierarchical workplaces with lower-level staff having little autonomy and control in their jobs. Not surprisingly, being undervalued and unempowered makes it hard to recruit and retain individuals to work in nursing homes.
The result is that many facilities around the country often have dangerously low levels of staffing. Additionally, the average U.S. nursing home was recently found to have an annual staff turnover rate of 128 percent. This suggests an average facility’s staff completely changes over the course of a year, and many nursing homes have even higher turnover rates — as much as 300 percent — suggesting the staff changes every four months. If some part of good nursing home quality depends on the relationship between staff and residents, it’s hard to see how those relationships can develop when staff keep changing.”
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“There are a number of things we can do to improve this situation. Here are a few ideas”
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“One solution would be to increase the number of direct care workers by raising the federal minimum staffing standards in nursing homes. The federal standards are relatively low and have not been updated in over 30 years. Many states set staffing levels above the federal standards and these state policies have generally been found to increase staff.”
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“Another idea is to raise minimum wages to increase nursing home staff pay. Many certified nurse aides would see their hourly wages increase under the $15 minimum wage proposed by the Biden administration. In the absence of a broader minimum wage hike, policymakers could also increase wages specifically for nursing home and other long-term care workers.”
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“The elephant in the room is what additional Medicaid or other public funding would be necessary to pay for greater staffing and higher wages. The nursing home industry will inevitably push back against any “unfunded mandates.” The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has found overall nursing home operating margins are currently thin based on the Medicare cost reports. However, there is quite a bit of variability in profitability across facilities. It is also unclear whether some facilities are accurately reporting their costs. Resident advocates have questioned whether a sufficient amount of existing public nursing home funds are spent on staffing. Thus, higher Medicaid funding will be necessary to improve staffing levels and wages, but it needs to be paired with the next suggestion.”
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“We currently lack transparency in how nursing homes spend public dollars on staffing and other areas. Nursing homes are required to submit Medicare cost reports each year to detail their revenues and spending, but these data are known to be incomplete, especially in the context of increasingly complicated corporate ownership arrangements. A series of financial reporting and oversight steps need to be taken to tighten the requirements for facilities. The bottom line is that regulators need to be able to follow the public’s money and ensure it is being spent on staffing as policymakers intended.”
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“Beyond putting more money into wages, policymakers might also consider ways in which they could provide financial support to allow additional education and training to certified nursing assistants and licensed practical nurses seeking upward mobility within a facility. For example, some nursing homes currently have ladder programs that provide nursing assistants with financial support in seeking nursing degrees. These programs could be expanded through direct reimbursement via Medicare and Medicaid.”
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“Improving wages and benefits is a necessary but insufficient step towards valuing nursing home caregivers; we also need to begin to value the work these individuals do and the individuals that do it. If you can believe it, this might be harder than increasing staffing standards and wages. Finding additional money is one thing — changing the culture around nursing home staffing is another.”
“since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reason that brought forth US global supremacy has ceased to exist. There was an original argument for the United States shouldering the immense burdens of global military dominance: Without it, totalitarian powers would conquer much of the Earth. That would be terrible for the world, the thinking went, and it could be bad for the United States.
The problem, though, is the pursuit of military dominance since then has created a lot of enemies of the US that didn’t need to be enemies of the US. We’ve engaged in bad behavior ourselves and stimulated it in others.
I worry that — in a world where the foremost threats to the American people are pandemic disease and climate change — America will continue to define its biggest threats in military terms, even if they aren’t.”
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“Since 1991, I think almost everybody has lost out, aside from the major defense firms and some ruling elites. America’s strategy has been incredibly destructive for people throughout the greater Middle East, and of course, the Iraq War resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
And I don’t think the American people have won out, either. I think that we have gotten less safe and more fearful as a society as a result of constantly being told by leaders of both parties that the whole world is out to kill us and that that’s why we’ve got to go to war to kill them first.
Look, the argument that US military power contributed to world order was very real. The Bretton Woods system played an important role in stabilizing global capitalism. But since the 1970s, and especially the 1990s, I think it’s hard to argue that US military dominance somehow underpins everything else.
It’s very difficult to see how applying sanctions on dozens of countries and waging continual warfare in the greater Middle East somehow serves the general interest of capitalism. Maybe it serves the interests of particular firms, but not the system of capitalism.”
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“What I’m opposed to, first and foremost, is military dominance as an end in itself. That’s what I think it has become in our own time, and I don’t think it began that way. That doesn’t prohibit the US from being a robust power: It’s going to be a great power and it’s going to have a strong military. We should absolutely be able to defend ourselves. I’m not even closing the door on things like humanitarian intervention, either.
What we have to ask, though, is if the US has used all this power wisely and judiciously. It’s clear that we haven’t, and it’s making all of us in America and around the world less safe. Just think of this: Roughly 80 percent of all US military interventions have occurred after 1991. Can we really say the millions at home and abroad have had their lives improved by that? I don’t think so.”
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“I’d lead a systematic policy of disentangling the US from regions where its interests are either not vital, as in the Middle East, or not really imperiled, like Europe. I absolutely believe in the capacity of Europeans to manage their own affairs. The United States does not need to be the protector of Europe.”
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“we have to be cautious in observing how China continues to rise and how it behaves. It has not had a record of territorial conquest with anything like the record of past US adversaries, like the Axis powers or the Soviet Union. That’s a good thing, though you wouldn’t know it from all the cries about China’s desire to dominate the world emanating from Washington, DC.
A President Wertheim — and please let your readers know I’m rolling my eyes as I say that — would recognize the US has an opportunity to cautiously retrench its position militarily in certain regions as it ramps up cooperation on the issues that really matter. I’d encourage allies and partners in the region to step up to counterbalance China. We still have time to allow that process to happen, and that’d be a good thing since it takes two great powers to make a great-power war.”
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“What I am fearful of right now is that it’s almost impossible for many people in the foreign policy community to envision circumstances in which the United States could ever pull back from a region. I worry about the United States putting itself on the front lines of any potential conflict, which could mean a great-power war. We should avoid being in that situation in the first place if we possibly can.”
“According to the BBC, a minimum of 350,000 illegal abortions occur annually in Argentina, a figure that some activist groups feel is undercounting the real number. Illegal abortions can lead to health complications and even death for the people who experience them — the World Health Organization estimates that up to 13.2 percent of maternal deaths worldwide can be attributed to unsafe abortions.
Argentina has seen adherence to Catholicism decline in recent years, according to a study from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). The Buenos Aires Times reports that in 2019, 62.9 percent of the population identified as Catholic, a 13.6 percentage point drop since 2008. Simultaneously, while evangelicals gained new adherents, the share of people identifying with no religion grew the most, reaching nearly 20 percent of the population.”
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“While Argentina is still a largely Catholic country, this decline could explain why Pope Francis’s comments opposing legalizing abortion did not have an overwhelming effect on the outcome of this vote. Francis, who was born and worked in Argentina for much of his life, has referred to abortion as being part of a “throwaway culture” and has rooted his opposition to the medical procedure as being based in science, according to Crux, a Catholic online newspaper.
According to France 24, Catholics weren’t alone in opposing the measure; they joined forces with the country’s growing evangelical wing to mobilize against abortion. They will likely fight to overturn this measure, especially as this change exposes Argentina’s religious fault lines.
But the victorious activists are the abortion rights feminists who have spent years fighting for abortion legalization.”
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“Argentina became the biggest country in Latin America to legalize elective abortion”