Republicans Protecting Tax Cheats

 Eighteen months ago the then Democrat controlled Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Since then, using funds allocated by that legislation the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) declared open season on wealthy tax cheats and so far has recovered over $480 million in overdue taxes from delinquent millionaires. Last month the IRS opened 76 new examinations into the largest partnerships in the U.S. that include hedge funds, real estate investment partnerships and large law firms.

More than 160 million Americans voluntarily pay their federal income taxes every year and generally pay what they owe. The right leaning Wall Street Journal reported that “Americans didn't pay an estimated $68 billion in taxes due on their 2021 returns—the largest shortfall ever.” Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) organized an investigation which found that nearly 1,000 Americans who make more than $1 million a year failed to file tax returns over multiple recent years, potentially owing $34 billion in taxes.

According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the US paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. If you’re reading this article you likely paid around 10% of your total income in federal taxes. The really wealthy pay a lower percentage of taxes than you and I do and yet still cheat on their taxes.

During last year’s debt ceiling negotiations between the Biden administration and the now Republican controlled House; Monica de la Cruz, Chip Roy, and their cronies held the paychecks of millions of Americans hostage. In order to avoid damage to individuals and the national economy that a government shut down would cause, President Biden accepted budget reductions that include taking back billions of dollars allocated to the IRS. Those cuts will affect the ability of the IRS to continue pursuing wealthy tax cheats and modernization that was intended to reduce wait times and improve the experience tax payers have when calling the IRS for answers to questions about their incomes taxes.

The fact that supposedly budget conscious Republicans chose to target the IRS for major funding reductions when all indications are that for every $1 spent the agency will bring in an extra $2 goes to show you it isn’t really about the budget. The Republican attack on the IRS is all about protecting the wealthy tax cheats that provide campaign cash, high paying jobs for family members, and free vacations in posh resorts.

None of the billions in overdue taxes include the taxes evaded through tax shelters like owning professional sports teams or race horses, or other income re-classification tricks the super-wealthy use to game the system.

When Trump was in the White House an American earning less than $50,000 a year was more likely to be audited than someone earning $1 million a year and the percentage of mega-corporations earning billions hit an all time low. No wonder the super-wealthy want Trump back in the White House. How anyone earning less than $1 million a year can vote Republican is beyond me.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - January 17, 2024

Biden Making US Better

 Since this is an election year let’s review some of the most important accomplishments of the Biden administration in the last year and how the American people were affected by it. 

In the area of prescription drug and health care costs; 15 million Americans now save $800/year on health insurance and insulin cost for seniors for seniors is now capped at $35 per month. Drug companies are now required to pay rebates to Medicare if they raise prices faster than inflation. Pharmaceutical companies now must allow Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, starting with the 10 costliest, most widely used drugs used to treat blood clots, cancers, arthritis, diabetes. The Biden administration successfully encouraged 42 states to expand Medicaid postpartum coverage from two months to 12, but not Texas. A record number of Americans now have health insurance and we’ve just had the strongest Obamacare enrollment ever.

Regarding the costs of living; inflation spurred by the pandemic has fallen 65% since last summer and gasoline prices are down more than $1.90 from its peak. Grocery inflation is at its lowest level in two years; egg prices are down a $1/dozen. Americans are saving billions of dollars a year due to crack downs on hidden junk fees in airline tickets, banking, investment advice, health insurance and apartment rentals.

In the area of employment and pay the Biden administration’s economic policies created over 14 million jobs, including 800,000 manufacturing jobs, while unemployment has stayed below 4% for 22 straight months. Biden supported unions and collective bargaining making him the most pro-union president in history. The economy is so good that the country set a record of 14.6 million applications to start new businesses. Wages, wealth and the share of working-age Americans with jobs are higher than before the pandemic. The US has had the fastest post-COVID economic recovery of G7 industrialized countries.

In only three years the Biden administration has made more progress on the climate crisis than any prior administration while lowering energy costs. The Inflation Reduction Act, provided for the largest investment in climate action ever by created 210,000 new clean energy jobs in 2023 alone. While there is much more to do Biden deserves credit for helping to secure a historic, international agreement at COP28 to transition away from fossil fuels, triple renewable energy globally by 2030. The administration’s fiscal and other policies spurred hundreds of billions of dollars in private sector investment in wind, solar, electric vehicles, saving families an average of $500/year on energy costs. Biden took executive action to cut emissions across the economy, including issuing standards to reduce methane pollution.

The Biden administration made higher education more affordable by approving $127 billion in debt cancellation for 3.6 million Americans, more than any President in history even in the face of Republican-led lawsuits. Biden’s SAVE plan will cut undergraduate loan payments in half and prevent student loan balances from growing due to runaway interest. Administration policies helped 700,000 people access public service loan forgiveness programs. The administration invested $7 billion in Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Biden signed Executive Orders to protect access to abortion, contraception and the right to travel across state lines to obtain care in reaction to state abortion bans that followed the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, like here in Texas. The administration strengthened privacy protections for patients and doctors.

There’s plenty more that Biden and Democrats have done in the face or Republican obstruction, just think of how much more could be accomplished if we re-elect Biden and a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - January 3, 2024

Immigrant Bashing for Votes and Bad Policy

 Florida under Gov. Ron DeSantis is showing Texas what happens when a state passes draconian immigration laws. Undocumented immigrants flee the state which then shuts down construction businesses and leaves unpicked crops in the fields. Republicans in Florida are getting mad at DeSantis for wrecking their businesses while he grandstands on his harsh immigration policies while campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in states like Iowa.

Gov. Greg Abbott just signed S.B. 4 last week which is similarly harsh regarding undocumented immigrants sending them to jail or deporting them quickly. In a few months there will be crops that need tending, homes that need building, and repairs that need doing but not enough people to do them here in Texas just like Florida today. Of course if Texas Republicans could remember as far back as 2011 they’d know this all played out before in Georgia and Alabama leaving millions of dollars in crops rotting in fields.

Florida has a 2.8% unemployment rate, which is more than 25% lower than the 3.9% national rate, so the argument that immigrants steal jobs from citizens is easily discredited. In fact there are only 53 people looking for work for every 100 job openings in Florida. Now the Republican controlled Florida legislature is considering solving the “problem” by loosening child labor laws to allow 16 and 17 year olds to work overnight during the school year. Such regulations were originally put in place to prevent work from interfering with children’s health, safety, and education. This isn’t about doing something positive for children it’s about bailing out the legislature from its own bad policy and giving benefits to corporations. From their point of view Republicans probably think high-schoolers that work too much and end up not finishing their education are a gold mine of future voters as the lower a voter’s educational attainment the less likely they are to vote for Democrats.

20 years ago Democrats and Republicans shared similar views in that they equally believed that immigrants strengthened the country. Today that’s no longer true as Republicans candidates and media talking heads have found a receptive audience for immigrant bashing. Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and presidency raised such bashing to new heights all while Republican legislators have fought any form of comprehensive immigration reform. Today Republicans are using the desire of President Biden to continue supporting Ukraine in protecting its borders and citizens against the Russian invasion as leverage to push further harsh measures on immigrants and asylum-seekers.

Strangely we have blowhards like Senator Ted Cruz raising a ruckus about supposed open borders under Biden, a claim that is patently untrue, but which is getting media attention in Central and South American countries thereby encouraging migrants to rush to our southern border. Cruz and his Republican colleagues are actually a major cause of the very “crisis” they’re so loudly complaining about.

Then you have Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) whose mother was a Cuban refugee who fled the island nation in 1959 when Fidel Castro took power. When Malliotakis campaigned to represent the 11th District of New York in 2022 her rhetoric consisted of attacking asylum-seekers. That's more than a little hypocritical coming from the direct offspring of someone who came here seeking political asylum.

Democrats have repeatedly tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform that is both fair and effective but their colleagues across the aisle refuse to cooperate. If Republicans really wanted to address immigration they’ve had plenty of opportunities but have chosen not to because they prefer to use it as a hammer when campaigning and fund-raising.

Published in the Seguin Gazette December 27, 2023

Proof Republicans Lack Moral Courage

It’s astonishing to me that contrary to what Republican legislators like Senator Bryan Hughes says about his 2021 anti-abortion bill SB8, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is dead set on proving that claims that Republican passed anti-abortion laws apply even when a woman’s life, health, and future ability to have a child is at risk.

This latest episode started with Kate Cox, a 31 year old Dallas mother of two, who was delighted to learn she was pregnant with her third child then months later learned that the fetus suffers a lethal anomaly which could cause it to be born only to die within hours at best and at worst die in her uterus and a cause fatal infection that even if treated could cause to be unable to ever have another child at worst. She wants to terminate her pregnancy and while Sen. Hughes and others claim the law allows that doctors and hospitals and their lawyers say that’s not what the law says. A Travis County district judge granted a temporary restraining order allowing Mrs. Cox to terminate her nonviable pregnancy.

A.G. Paxton then sent a letter to three hospitals, threatening legal action if they allowed the abortion to be performed at their facility. Next Paxton asked the Texas Supreme Court to intervene and they have issued a stay on the temporary restraining order, meaning the existing law remains in effect so no abortion for Mrs. Cox, she’ll just have to suffer the consequences of Republican over-zealousness.

Some months ago Hughes wrote a letter to the Texas Medical Board asking for an investigation into "disturbing allegations" that patients with serious pregnancy complications were being sent home from the hospital without care. Hughes wrote "Pregnancy complications such as these should be swiftly and reasonably treated to prevent or address a medical emergency determined by the physician," asking the Texas Medical Board to issue guidance on the issue.

Paxton is the state’s lawyer and he believes that there are no conditions under which terminating a pregnancy is not a violation of Texas law. This is the same Ken Paxton who has been impeached for accepting bribes and other crimes in order to cover up his adultery and provide his mistress with a job and home in Austin. Paxton has also been indicted for violations of federal securities laws.

About half the population of Guadalupe County is represented in the Texas Senate by Dr. Donna Campbell who talks about her career as an emergency room physician and her anti-abortion stance whenever she campaigns. You’d think that a physician, a career that most of us associate with extreme compassion, would be the first to recognize that sometimes terminating a pregnancy is medically necessary. Campbell has not once made an effort to amend the state’s anti-abortion legislation to make it possible to address the complexities of pregnancy that she must know full well exists. Of course, she’s also among the majority of Senate Republicans that voted to acquit Ken Paxton in his impeachment trial even after Paxton’s former chief assistant described his efforts to encourage Paxton to step back from his dishonorable actions and dismay at having to resign and report Paxton’s behavior.

There’s a reason that maternal mortality dropped over much of the last century but has been going back up here in Texas for the last few decades. How many women will have to die, how many will have to lose their ability to have children before these Republicans who lack empathy are forced to back off even a little on their zealous application of narrow-minded law?

Published in the Seguin Gazette - December 13, 2023

Believe Trump When He Tells You Who He Is

Respected media sources such as NBC and the right leaning Washington Post have recently reported disturbing plans that show Donald Trump and groups supporting him, especially the Heritage Foundation, marching further into right-wing authoritarianism. What’s more frightening is how positively Republican voters have reacted to his plans and pronouncements.

Trump hasn’t even been subtle about his desire to turn the Department of Justice into a retribution organization that he’d unleash on his “enemies” including his own former Attorney General William Barr, and Chief of Staff John Kelly. Trump is miffed by their harsh criticism of him since he left office in 2021. That’s in addition to Trump threatening to tap a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.

The Heritage Foundation is working on a guide for use by the next Republican administration which they’ve named Project 2025. The guide envisions changing federal service rules that would allow Trump to cut tens of thousands of civil service workers and replace them with ones deemed loyal to Trump’s agenda. The guide also calls for invoking the 1871 Insurrection Act on the first day in office in order to use military forces against protestors.

CNN reports that according to a source familiar with it Trump’s anti-immigrant plan involves rounding up undocumented immigrants already in the US and placing them in detention camps to await deportation. This sort of thing has been done before and often ends up with U.S. citizens being deported because they have brown skin and no one believes them when they claim citizenship even when documentation is provided.

Trump has said he would require local law enforcement agencies to use the widely disparaged stop-and-frisk tactic in order to receive some Justice Department funding. He’s also suggested he would deploy the National Guard to cities dealing with high levels of crime.

In a policy aimed at combating homelessness Trump calls for the building “tent cities” on “inexpensive land” staffed by health care workers, then giving homeless people a choice between relocating to the tent city or facing jail time. That’s not a solution, that’s hiding the problem and past experience with other attempts to hide problems like orphanages and homes for pregnant girls shows the residents are often abused, sometimes fatally.

In his speech at a Veteran’s day rally Trump said that “we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” The “vermin” comment wasn’t an off the cuff remark, it was contained in the written remarks provided to the press. Trump is using the same kind of language as previous genocidal leaders. Nazis characterized Jews as “rats” infecting their pure Aryan society, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge described their enemies as “worms” and “leeches” and in Rwanda, Hutu leaders called Tutsi “cockroaches”.

The poem on the Statue of Liberty says; “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Apparently welcoming and openness is no longer appreciated by Trump and the vast majority of Republicans.

All this ugliness has been revealed by Trump and his team yet he is gaining support among Republican voters. Both Trump and his supporters are telling us who they really are, we should believe them and act accordingly.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 29, 2023

Not Conservative, Reactionary

The contortions that the conservative mind can go through to justify an action or choice is mind boggling. A case in point is the reaction to the claims that Hillary Clinton has classified information on her personal server and therefore risked national security. Only one actually was ever actually marked classified and it was inconsequential in content. Trump supporters chanted lock her up. Seven years later, it has become quite clear that Trump retained more than one hundred classified or higher level national security information after leaving office. Many of those documents were stored in boxes or scattered on desks at his Mar-a-Lago club behind doors with locks a ten year old could pick while foreign nationals wondered around un-escorted. I have yet to hear a single one of those chanting lock her up in 2016 say such a thing about Trump even though his behavior is far more egregious especially considering that we now know that he bragged to Australian business tycoon Anthony Pratt providing details on how stealthy our nuclear submarines are and how many nuclear missiles they carry.

Here in Texas the state legislature with the backing of Gov. Abbott passed a bill to provide incentives in the form of low interest loans to electricity generators that use fossil fuels, gas in particular. They did this claiming that it’s to brace up the electricity grid which is in danger of failing due to high energy demand. The reason we barely escaped the summer without blackouts is the record high temperatures experienced across much of the state. It is beyond doubt that climate change is causing the extreme weather and that human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and thus dumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, is causing it. We know all that and yet our governor and state legislature are all in on building more power plants that will dump more CO2 into the atmosphere exacerbating the problem rather than mitigating it. They’d rather give away taxpayer dollars to their fossil fuel friends than arrange to build out sufficient transmission lines to the west Texas wind mills and solar power facilities that investors are anxious to build but can’t get permits because there isn’t enough transmission capacity. Let’s not forget the big freeze in 2021 when most of the state was without power for 3 days was due to gas powered plants and pipelines not being sufficiently weatherized to deal with extreme low temperatures, and nothing has been done about that.

There many other examples of the hypocrisy and denial that Republican voters and their elected officials engage in but I’ll leave you with just one more. The pro-life crowd rants about the sanctity of life but does nothing to make that life better for either child or the mother. In reality they are simply pro-birth and are quite happy to leave children go hungry, lacking in health care, with inadequate education and worst of all no hope. They will lie about abortion risking the health of the woman when the fact is that carrying a child to term in Texas is much riskier especially if you are a poor black woman.

In summation Republicans can claim to be conservative but that’s a lie, they are reactionary and I’m sick of it.

Insurrectionist in Charge

Last week House Republicans finally managed to select a new Speaker of the House to replace Kevin McCarthy. It took three weeks and several false starts to accomplish. They finally settled on Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, a man who’s most outstanding accomplishment is having provided the legalese of what is essentially the dog ate my homework quality excuse for voting to overturn the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump which was then used by two thirds of the Republicans in the House.

Not only is Johnson an insurrectionist, he has voted for a nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions and against same sex marriage. Johnson is one of the extremists even if he isn’t as loud as the first speaker candidate Jim Jordan, or Matt Gaetz who threw Kevin McCarthy under the bus.

In an interview with journalist Irin Carmon in 2015 Johnson said “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control, you know, in certain segments of society, and it’s just shocking and sad, but this is where we are. When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, that it’s expendable, then you do wind up with school shooters.” That’s a wild and evidence free connection between school shootings and abortion.

Johnson’s way out there conspiracy theory like ideas don’t stop there. He delivered a sermon at Christian Center of Shreveport in 2016 and claimed the United States was founded as a Christian nation but had gotten off track in recent years with the introduction of things like “no-fault divorce laws,” “legalized abortion,” and the teaching of evolution, per the MeidasTouch PAC.

Johnson then explained how in his addled mind this leads to mass shootings: “And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”

In addition to voting for a nationwide abortion ban Johnson has co-sponsored three anti-abortion bills all of which carry criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for physicians who perform abortions.

In a September 2022, Johnson spoke about is ahistorical view of the doctrine of separation of church and state saying, “The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around. If anybody tries to convince you that your biblical beliefs or your religious viewpoint needs to be separated from public affairs, you should politely remind them to review their history and you should not back down.” Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams all said differently.

When he was chair of the Republican Study Committee, which puts out budgets, last term Johnson proposed extreme cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

The fact that the entire Republican caucus voted for an insurrectionist is another example of what I wrote a few weeks ago, voting for Republicans is voting for an authoritarian takeover of the country.

In my view Johnson’s best attribute is he has zero experience raising big campaign donations for his party which is one of the primary functions of the Speaker after setting the House agenda. Between his extremist views and lack of fundraising prowess he should be helpful in enabling a Democratic takeover of the House in 2024.

Published in the Seguin Gazette - November 1, 2023