Tax Cuts...Again?

The Trump Administration is proposing another Republican tax cut. And those tax cuts, like the Regan and Bush tax cuts before them, are slated to disproportionately aid the wealthy. Not withstanding Gary Cohn's lie that the wealthy won't benefit from the Trump Tax Plan () the Trump tax cuts appear to give:

• 50% of the net tax cuts to the top 1% of households, those that earn over $700,000 annually
• 30% of the net tax cuts to the top 0.1% of households, those that earn over $3.8 million annually

(based on an analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).

The plan has some special benefits for special households:

• Pass-through income would get a special 25% rate. Pass through income is income from partnerships, S corporations, and sole proprietorships that business owners claim as their personal income. This includes hedge funds, real estate developers and law firms exempt from corporate tax rates and taxes on dividends. 79% of the benefits of this tax cut would flow to filers with income over $1 million.The 400 households with the top income would each receive a cut of $5.5 million.
• Only the wealthiest 0.2% of estates pay the estate tax. The first $5.9 million ($11 million for a couple) is already exempt from taxation. 
• Most economists conclude that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% would mainly benefit stockholders, who would receive stock buy-backs and dividends, rather than workers receiving wage increases or consumers receiving lower prices.
• The Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) was designed to ensure that the wealthiest individuals that benefitted from inordinate deductions would have to pay a minimum amount of taxes. Ending the AMT (rather than updating its provisions) will allow the wealthy to game the system and avoid taxes.

In total, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimate that the top 1% of households would receive 50% of the tax cuts or about $150,000 each, while the top 0.1% of households would receive 30% of the tax cuts or about $800,000 per year.

Perhaps Gary Cohn thinks that you need to be above the top 0.1% to be wealthy, i.e. make more than $3.8 million per year? What would you expect from a former Goldman Sachs exec? 

It IS Time to Talk About Climate Change

The Director of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, doesn't think that it is time to talk about climate change. With the effects of two devastating hurricanes being felt in Texas and Florida, Pruitt says that it is inappropriate to talk of climate change:

“What we need to focus on is access to clean water, addressing these areas of superfund activities that may cause an attack on water, these issues of access to fuel,” he said. “Those are things so important to citizens of Florida right now, and to discuss the cause and effect of these storms, there’s the… place (and time) to do that, it’s not now.”

While I absolutely agree that the items Pruitt enumerated in the Washington Post article need attention at the moment, there is absolutely no reason not to focus on climate change at this moment also. Americans have shown a remarkable propensity to question science, and it is leaders such as Pruitt who foster this regrettable tendency with their actions, actions which probably stem less from a disbelief in science but rather from a vested interest in reaping monetary benefits from the results of questioning what is truly unquestionable.

In the 1960's NASA was at the forefront of America's exploration of space. While a large portion of NASA was made up of administrators and engineers that designed and managed the spacecraft that astronauts rode into space, they were working based on the theories and discoveries made by the scientists. When President John Kennedy charged America with reaching the moon in a decade, America didn't question the advances NASA scientists and engineers where making. This was probably due to the decades of American scientific achievements that had been made to win World War II, develop new drugs and vaccines, and all the other achievements that made the late 40's and '50s a period of plenty for the growing American middle class.

But today, when NASA presents the evidence and scientific consensus (97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree on the causes of global warming), major administration officials, including the President and the Director of the EPA refuse to acknowledge what is known scientifically: Global Warming is man-made, is an existential danger to man's existence, and that we must change the way we live if we are to save our way of life.

I suspect that Scott Pruitt understands man-made climate change. He simply stands to gain too much from his associations with fossil fuel developers. Al Gore's new movie 'An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power' covers the dramatic fall in the price of renewable-based energy generation, which now is comparable to the price of fossil fuel generation. It seems a no-brainer: if you can generate electricity for the same price using a resource like wind or solar that costs the same as oil or natural gas, but doesn't contribute to global warming, why wouldn't you choose the renewable energy? The answer, of course, depends on whether you own fossil fuels or renewables. And therein, I believe, is the real reason Scott Pruitt doesn't want to talk about climate change.