Democrats Give and Republicans Take Away

 Looking forward now that it is 2025 most Texans will have the opportunity to file their federal income taxes online for free using a new website from the IRS. Some information calls it Free File and others call it Direct File. In either case Texans and those in several other states that do not have state income taxes will have the option to use the site to prepare and file their taxes for free. No need to visit an H&R Block office or use Turbo Tax and pay your hard earned money to file the simple form and get your income tax refund quickly. Of course the caveat is that 5 House Republicans from Texas joined 23 others in sending a letter to president-elect Donald Trump asking him to cancel the program as soon as he takes office. That’s certainly what Intuit, the makers of Turbo Tax, H&R Block, and the other corporations that make billions from average Americans using their products would like to happen. Intuit has been fighting to prevent this very scenario for 25 years and President Biden made it happen.

Beginning January 1, 2025 several aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act that Joe Biden ushered through congress a couple of years ago will take effect. Most notably the annual out-of-pocket cap on prescription drugs for Medicare Part D beneficiaries has been lowered to just $2,000. This is huge for our seniors and disabled. I know from personal experience how important this is. This change will save our household an average $500 per month compared to last year.

Medicare will begin negotiating drug prices with manufacturers for certain high-cost drugs, with some of these negotiated prices taking effect this year; saving our tax dollars for better purposes. Another cost saving measure from the bill taking effect this year is that pharmaceutical companies will be required to pay rebates to Medicare if they raise drug prices faster than inflation.

House Republicans have held floor votes more than two dozen times trying to repeal various aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act. The conservative Cato Institute urges Republicans to overturn the whole bill. Considering the influence that Elon Musk and pharmaceutical billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy have on Trump don’t be shocked if the Medicare Part D prescription cost out of pocket limit suddenly goes back up in a year or two.

Since Joe Biden took office enrollment in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace insurance plans has nearly doubled. Unfortunately a large fraction of the subsidies that make those insurance premiums affordable will expire at the end of 2025. Republicans are unlikely to renew the subsidies so even if they fail to pass their plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, millions of Americans especially in Texas will lose their health insurance because they can no longer afford the premium.

The theme you should have noticed is that Democrats have worked hard to save average Americans money while Republicans are making efforts to undo those efforts in order to benefit a relative handful of rich people.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - January 1, 2025

Texas Women Suffer Under Republicans

 Porsha Ngumezi died after not getting a D&C in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land. Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana, reporting for ProPublica the non-profit investigative newsroom found that thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.

D&C refers to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for early pregnancy miscarriages and abortions. Mrs. Ngumezi was bleeding at the hospital for 6 hours passing blood clots the nurses reported were as big as grapefruits and had received two transfusions. In a case like Ngumezi's miscarriage the doctor would typically perform a D&C which is the removal of the remaining tissue from her uterus and the bleeding would end.

The obstetrician on duty, Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue. Trusting the doctor Mrs. Nguzemi took the pills, but the bleeding continued. The doctor had been informed that she had a blood-clotting disorder which increased the danger of her going into hemorrhagic shock. Three hours later Porsha Ngumezi’s heart stopped. The medical examiner found the cause of death to be hemorrhage.

Porsha Ngumezi’s death was preventable "according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica."

Nguzemi's death and the deaths of other Texas women since 2022 when the Texas abortion ban went into effect suggest the law is pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and choose less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Other doctors and patients have described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.

Porsha Ngumezi, a mother of two young boys, was sacrificed to Texas Republicans on the anti-abortion altar they erected. The draconian law is so broad that medical procedure that is used for both abortions and miscarriages is effectively outlawed in Texas regardless of whether or not the fetus is already dead. The legislature has already had an opportunity in 2023 to fix the law and couldn't be bothered to protect the lives of Texas women. How many women have to die before Texans revolt and vote out Republicans?

I am the husband of a woman who went through three miscarriages. I am the father of a wonderful daughter who is of age to have children. I fear for her in this state that she might suffer a miscarriage like her mother but be unable to get the care she needs like her mother did 30 years ago. I'd do anything to get her out of state or out of the country to save her life but in a situation like Mrs. Ngumezi suffered we likely wouldn't be able to get her somewhere she could receive the necessary treatment in time. I've been angry about this legislation and the impact it has on women since before the governor signed it into law and I just keep getting angrier as more women suffer and die while Republicans do nothing. When will the fanatics be held accountable? How Texas voters keep re-electing people who have no empathy toward the suffering of others is beyond my comprehension.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - December 11, 2024

Promoting Christianity in Public Schools a Bad Idea

 A couple of weeks ago the Texas State Board of Education in an 8-7 vote has decided that public schools will have the option to use Bluebonnet Learning curriculum which now includes religious teachings, mostly Christian, as part of reading and language arts as well as history and social studies. There are a few references to other faith traditions but they are token mentions grafted on so the publisher can says the curriculum isn’t biased. The best part is that school districts are being bribed by the SBOE to use Bluebonnet Learning as they’ll get extra state funding for using it.

The Christian holy book is of course the bible, but the various Christian sects can’t even agree on a bible let alone doctrine.

Since the King James version is the most widely used, more than half of Americans use it. For the sake of argument let’s say it is the version chose to work from. Do you remember or did you ever learn that the King James Bible was demonstrably written with an agenda? King James I of England caused it to be written primarily to solidify the power of the Church of England and himself by providing a standardized English translation that would promote religious unity within the kingdom. Some scholars, such as Michael G. Rather Jr. of McNeese State University, argue that certain passages were translated with specific intent to subtly support the King's power and the established order.

Are we sure we want to be teaching public school students using a text that promotes a purported “God’s chosen” as the ultimate authority for the leader of our government. That didn’t work out well for James I successors and our founding fathers knew it when the Constitution was written.

The men who wrote the United States Constitution and the amendments were all familiar with the problems caused by mingling religion with governance. The English Revolution of 1688 which saw King James II deposed over his preference for Catholics had occurred in the lifetime of many of their grandparents and as educated men they would have known about it. In addition those men would have been aware of similar turmoil suffered in Scotland and Ireland as well as all across Europe since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. James Madison, the primary author of the Constitution as well as author of the First Amendment, was involved in passage of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 which is an important precursor to the constitution because for the first time ever many of the protections of individual rights later found in the Constitution were codified in it. The important passage to note for the purposes of this discussion is "all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion". Article VI says in part “no religious Test shall ever be Required as a Qualification To any Office or public Trust under the United States” making clear that no matter a person’s religion or even lack thereof they cannot be prohibited from holding public office.

The first amendment expands on that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, …”. The intention is clearly to prevent the government from selecting a national religion and thus leave it to the individual to choose on their own what if any religion to follow. That is exactly what Texas Republicans have done in deciding to offer Bluebonnet Learning in our public schools.

Why do Republicans insist on reverting to a failed idea especially when it is contrary to the very founding fathers they claim to revere?

Published in the Seguin Gazette - December 4, 2024

This Year I'm Thankful For

 As it is Thanksgiving week I’ll tell you what I’m thankful for besides my family and my job. I’m thankful for Medicare which has allowed my wife to have health insurance since she became disabled more than 20 years ago. Without Medicare no private insurer would cover her until the Affordable Care Act was passed and even that would have been so expensive that we would likely be living paycheck to paycheck like so many other Texans. Medicare isn’t perfect and it doesn’t cover most dental or vision care. Medicare did cover her for open heart surgery, cataract surgery, and treatment for sepsis in a leg that nearly killed her.

I’m thankful for the improvements to Medicare Part D that have reduced my wife’s pharmacy bills over the last couple of years. One of the improvements was the limit on the price of insulin which is a life saving change for many as they often had to choose between insulin and paying rent or buying groceries. Considering how many prescriptions drugs, including insulin, my wife takes not having Part D coverage would have broken us years ago. She qualified for Catastrophic Coverage back in October this year so most medications since then have had no co-pay. According to the projection offered when we renewed her Part D coverage for next year, she’ll qualify much earlier in the year reducing out total pharmacy bill to less than half of this year’s amount.

I’m thankful for the Affordable Care Act through which my brother is covered now that his employer laid off the entire staff and closed its doors. His insurance is not cheap and it isn’t as good as what he had through his employer but at 63 with no the best health it’s important to have insurance at all. The Affordable Care Act provides for expanded Medicaid coverage in many other states, though Texas Republicans chose to punish the some hardest working yet poorest workers in the country by choosing not to take the federal money available. Republican have tried in vain to kill the Affordable Care Act dozens of times since it was passed during the first Obama administration, they couldn’t even manage when Trump was president the first time. Now they’ll get another shot at it. Let’s hope they fail again.

I’m thankful that Joe Biden surprised me and made a strong push for clean energy via regulation and policy as well as working to pass legislation to fund more projects even if some of the benefits are still several years away. 

I’m thankful for all the men and women across this country who stood up and ran for elected office as Democrats. Running for office takes guts, it takes hard work, and it takes someone who is at least moderately comfortable talking to people they’ve never met and who may not even be interested in talking to them. It takes a special kind of person to have the fortitude to do those things.

Last but most definitely not least, I’m thankful for the Democratic Party County Chairs, Precinct Chairs, and all the volunteers that blockwalked, phone banked, wrote postcards, and sent text messages in an effort to get people out to vote. I know they worked hard in Texas even though turnout here was less than 61% of registered voters. That’s pretty pathetic as only six states had worse, including Oklahoma with less than 55% turnout. Texas turnout was lower than it has been in years. It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much time you spend if people just can’t be bothered.

If These Are the Best People

Ever since Trump started his run for the presidency back in 2015 he has claimed that he hires only “the best people”. He showed that to be a lie last time he won and his recently named nominees for various posts show no sign of improvement and may even be worse.

Last week Trump announced that Matt Gaetz, who was elected to represent Florida’s 1st Congressional District located in the panhandle next to Alabama and which encompasses Pensacola Naval Air Station, as his Attorney General nominee, the person who will oversee the entire Department of Justice. Mat Staver, founder and chairman of the Christian legal ministry Liberty Counsel in Orlando, wrote a scathing argument titled “Matt Gaetz is not qualified to be U.S. Attorney General.”

Staver’s letter says, “The nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General is shocking and disappointing to those who have followed this man and the lurid scandals and serious allegations of sex parties and drugs during his tenure in the U.S. Congress. The resignation of Gaetz immediately after his name surfaced for Attorney General is inexplicable except for the fact this resignation now ends the U.S. House Ethics probe.”

Trump’s defense secretary pick, Fox News host Pete Hegseth,  is troubling for a number of reasons. Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault in a settlement agreement that included a confidentiality clause, according to Hegseth’s attorney. Sexual mis-conduct seems to be one of the themes of Trump and his new team.

Hegseth has admitted to being one of 12 U.S. National Guard members were removed from Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration security detail as a "possible insider threat" after vetting by the U.S. military and FBI. Hegseth downplays the issue claiming his removal was over a tattoo of the Jerusalem Cross, when in fact the sergeant charged with reviewing the security team wrote that Deux Vult tattoo which has ties to extremist groups was the reason. According to Robert LeBlanc of Villanova University, the Deus Vult symbol is "actively being used by neo-Nazi and extremist hate groups to incite fear and violence toward other cultures and religions."

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Hegseth could make good on Trump's campaign promises to rid the U.S. military of generals he accuses of pursuing progressive policies on diversity in the ranks that conservatives have railed against. This is especially problematic because we already have problems in our armed services with commanding officers demanding their subordinates attend their particular religious services and events even though it is specifically prohibited by regulations. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation run by Mickey Weinstein a former officer exists to ensure that members of the United States Armed Forces are able to practice their religious beliefs without fear of discrimination or coercion, and to promote the separation of church and state within the military.

Finally there is Trump's pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's most well-known anti-vaccine activist. Doctors all over the United States, especially pediatricians are worried by about this choice as the country is already seeing a drop in vaccination rates leading to more measles outbreaks this year than last year and a five-fold increase in whooping cough cases this year from the year before, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

If these people are the best Trump can do our nation is in for a load of trouble.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 20, 2024

Why Did We Lose?

 After the devastating results of last week’s election it is no surprise that various and sundry talking heads and pundits have been offering their “analysis” of the cause. Turnout was down 6% in Texas even as more people were registered to vote then ever before. Nationally turnout was down about 1.5% and lower turnout is invariably bad for Democrats. 

I’ve read and seen a number of those critiques many of which blame Harris for running a bad campaign. Others say and I agree that Harris actually ran a technically great campaign yet those pundits aren’t entirely wrong. I think that Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have the best answer. Both Reich and Sanders have long promoted the idea that working stiffs like you and I are getting a raw deal from corporate interests, whether you work for one of those big corps or even run your own small business.

Businesses can right off expenses like corporate jets and even yachts if they claim they are for business use but you and I can’t even get a tax deduction for the interest payments on our student loans. Businesses can declare bankruptcy and essentially get all their loans forgiven or pay just pennies on the dollar but if you or I declare bankruptcy we still owe the entire balance of a student loan plus interest.

Reich and Sanders argue that the average American worker has every right to be fed up with neo-liberal Democrats who have passed legislation in favor of corporations while at the same time failed to pass even a long overdue increase in minimum wage. Yes, Joe Biden has been good to labor over the last four years but it hasn’t been near enough and it isn’t just his fault. Too many Democrats in Congress have been captured by the uber-wealthy donors who fund their political campaigns. It’s a lot like Stockholm Syndrome or the phenomenon known as regulatory capture, those legislators spend so much time schmoozing with big money donors that they start seeing the world through the eyes of those donors. Once their worldview aligns with big money they are more easily convinced that voting in the interests of their “friends” is a good idea.

I don’t excuse them for losing sight of the reason they were elected but I do understand how it can happen. That’s brings up another issue that Sen. Sanders points out in his analysis and has been campaigning against for a long time; which is the problem of money in politics. Campaign finance has always been problematic but ever since the Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United which overturned many of the limits on campaign donations at the federal level the amount of money donated and therefore the amount of money any campaign needs to win an election is 5 times what it was in 2000 and that’s after adjusting for inflation.

None of this is to say that Republicans have a better track record on labor issues just that Trump at least recognized it as a significant campaign issue. His “solution” was to blame immigrants just like he did in his to previous campaigns regardless of the fact that immigrants aren’t the problem. He certainly isn’t about to blame big business as those campaign donors favored him. While Trump isn’t actually going to do anything helpful many of the 60% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck voted for him because they felt he at least was listening to them and Democratic candidates weren’t.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 13, 2024

Vote for Harris to Lower Grocery Bill

 Some of those complaining loudest about problems the Biden – Harris administration hasn’t solved are folks who voted for Republicans in 2022 which left Democrats with a single vote majority in the Senate and a Republican controlled House. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has such a thin majority that the high number of cranks in his party has left him unable to even pass budget bills in a timely fashion.

One of the complaints you’re likely to hear most often is that grocery bills have gone way up. There are voters who somehow believe that Trump’s policies would bring grocery bills back down, but let’s face it once inflation raises prices they rarely go back down more that a small amount. Trump’s proposed national sales tax Trump is proposing on all goods that are imported would increase prices for a typical family by thousands of dollars per year. We’re talking about staples like food, clothing, gas, and medicine. As an example, Trump would place tariffs on coffee, bananas, and seafood, of which there is little production of in the United States. Almost none of the coffee or bananas consumed and imports 75 to 80 percent of seafood are produced in the U.S. yet they are staples for many American households. In fact, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a business friendly non-partisan organization, has found that the Trump sales tax would raise costs for some families by as much as $6,000 each year.

When Trump was asked recently about his plan to bring down food prices, he responded that he would block food imports from entering the country. Obviously the fool doesn’t understand supply and demand because when you cut supply prices go up unless demand goes down and I don’t see people eating less food. All blocking food imports would do is raise food costs and cause food shortages without increasing food production here in the United States. Many agricultural products that American families rely on every day, such as bananas and coffee, can only be grown in the United States at a much higher cost than if they were grown elsewhere. Simply demanding that American families can only buy food grown here in the United States would raise costs while reducing the variety of everyday food items that working families need.

Just look at Trump’s record to see that a second term would make consolidation in the food industry, which reduces competition and drives up prices, even worse. During Trump’s first term in office, he gave Big Ag corporations and the wealthiest Americans tax handouts. When it came to help farmers withstand his trade war with China nearly two-thirds of aid funding went to the top 10 percent of applicants rather than to family farms.

Kamala Harris has vowed to revitalize competition in food and grocery prices, because we all know that a healthy and competitive market means lower costs for consumers. She has promised to direct her Administration to crack down on unfair mergers and acquisitions that give big food corporations the power to raise food and grocery prices by instructing agencies like the Federal Trade Commission to specifically evaluate the risk that a proposed merger would raise grocery prices for consumers. On top of this, she’ll instruct her Administration to focus on investigating and prosecuting companies that illegally collude to set prices, up and down food supply chains. Finally, she will make sure the federal government has the resources to identify and take on anti-competitive practices in the food and grocery industries.

If your grocery bill is what drives your vote, then vote for Kamala Harris.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - October 30, 2024