During a panel discussion with union leaders in Clinton, Iowa — in a county that flipped from Obama to Trump — Brown listened as local labor leaders and organizers detailed the challenges facing Iowa workers: stagnant incomes, low starting wages, a state attempt to close down a training center, dramatic limits to collective bargaining rights, workers’ compensation that covers less and less, politicians who don’t seem to care and a general lack of respect. At one point, Tracy Leone of Teamsters Local 238 reflected on Brown’s use of the phrase “dignity of work” and, in the process, summed up many of the frustrations felt in places such as Clinton. “It made me think: There is no dignity of work right now in the country,” Leone said, noting that a person’s job is much of his or her identity. “I meet you. ‘Hi, my name’s Tracy. What do you do for a living?’ Right? It defines us. But everybody that I know and am working with are in this precarious situation. I know a guy who is an accountant — company got bought up by a foreign company, so there’s nobody locally who cares about the workers, right? They make decisions, they don’t know them as people, they know them as an item on a spreadsheet.” Brown cut in and sympathized: “And a cost to be minimized.” “Right,” Leone said, voicing the frustration that many of the candidates are noting. “You’re not a human being, you’re just a data point . . . So when we think about the dignity of work anymore in this country, I think all of us know people who get disrespected on a daily basis. And the one thing that we had, that gave us a little bit of dignity, are our unions, a voice in the job … Probably, if we go around the room, everybody will have their story about some bad boss somewhere who just treated them like they’re disposable.”
Pollster Mallory Newall on Thursday told Hill.TV that the sentiment that the rich have too much influence is shared globally. “We know that a majority of the American public feels that the current system is broken,” Newall, research director at Ipsos Public Affairs, told host Jamal Simmons on “What America’s Thinking.” “An equal number say that the system is rigged to favor the rich and powerful, and that’s a sentiment you see globally in more than two dozen countries,” she continued. “So there is a fundamental belief that the rich have too much influence,” she said. An Axios/Survey Monkey poll released last month found that 89 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Independents in the U.S. believe that economic unfairness favors the rich. Studies have also shown that the feeling is shared around the world, with the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer reporting that roughly three-quarters of respondents believe the political and economic system is biased against ordinary people.
While headlines continue to proliferate about average Americans discovering they will not receive the tax return they were expecting — and in many cases, depending on — new federal date released Thursday showed that major U.S. banks earned an extra $28 billion in profits last year thanks to the tax scam bill passed by the Republican Party and signed by President Donald Trump at the end of 2017. As was said by critics of the new tax law at the time, the rich and corporations were given an “early Christmas gift” when the bill was signed, but according to new figures from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) it is a gift that continues to give to the nation’s banking industry. Citing the FDIC’s latest quarterly profile of the 5,406 banks it insures, The Hill reports that yearly profits for those institutions — which made nearly $237 in profit overall — “increased $72. 4 billion from 2017, and the rise includes $28.8 billion more than banks would have kept under the previous tax regime. Bank profits in the fourth quarter of 2018 rose to $59 billion, an $8.1 billion increase from the same period in 2017.”
As one Twitter user, Bobby Reyes, put it: “So, let me get this straight . . . We can’t give ppl healthcare, affordable housing, rent stabilization but we can afford to give banks this?” Banks reaping the rewards of the Republican tax plan while working class Americans continue to face the uncertainty of their 2018 tax liabilities and struggle to make ends meet, struck Warren Gunnels, staff director for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as a stark contrast. “I thought Donald Trump said he was going to stop Wall Street from getting away with murder, not give big banks another massive tax break,” Gunnels said. “Now is the time to take on the greed and power of Wall Street, break up the largest financial institutions in the country, stop big banks from ripping off the American people, and make sure Wall Street CEOs pay their fair share of taxes.” This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The average tax refund so far has shrunk to $2,640 from $3,169 at the same point last year, according to Internal Revenue Service data through Feb. 15 that were released late Friday. That’s a 16.7% drop. The total number of returns that qualified for refunds was down 26.5% compared with last year and the amount of money refunded was off by 38.8%, the data showed. The IRS has processed 6.6% fewer returns compared with last year because of the partial federal government shutdown. The figures are based on about a quarter of the 154 million tax returns Americans are expected to file this year, and the trend could reverse. But the decline in the average refund has grown during the three weeks of IRS data released so far, and the decline in the number of returns with refunds and total money refunded both jumped in the most recent report. Analysts had predicted the total amount of money refunded would go up this year, but economists from UBS said this week they were maintaining that forecast “with hesitance” after seeing the initial IRS figures.
A Treasury simulation in the report estimated 32 million taxpayers would owe money on their returns this year, about 4.6 million more than if the law had not been changed. Democrats, who universally opposed the tax law championed by President Trump and congressional Republicans, have pounced on the refund declines to argue that the changes helped the wealthy and corporations far more than average Americans. “It looks like the Trump Treasury Department spent 2018, an election year, goosing people’s paychecks by under-withholding, and it should have been obvious that the bill would come due eventually,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). He and other Democrats have called for the IRS to waive any penalties for people who unexpectedly owe taxes this year.
The Republican law cut individual tax rates across the board through 2025 while permanently slashing the corporate rate to 21% from 35%. People are discovering smaller refunds at the same time some large corporations are reporting record profits and huge declines in their tax bills. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Thursday that U.S. bank profits were up 44% last year to a record $237 billion — about $29 billion of which came from the lower corporate tax rate. “Let’s call the President’s tax cut what it is: a middle-class tax hike to line the pockets of already wealthy corporations and the 1%,” California Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate, tweeted in response to the lower refunds. Republicans already were on the defensive about the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Polls show more Americans disapprove than approve of it. And anger about the law, particularly in California and other high-tax states hit hard by a new limit on the deduction for state and local taxes, is widely believed to have contributed to the Democratic takeover of the House majority in last fall’s midterm elections.
As a Canadian living and studying health policy in the United States, I’ve watched with interest as a growing list of Democratic presidential candidates — Senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker — have indicated support for a Canadian-style single-payer plan with little or no role for private insurance. Approval of such a system has become almost a litmus test for the party’s progressive base. But rather than looking north for inspiration, American health care reformers would be better served looking east, across the Atlantic. Germany offers a health insurance model that, like Canada’s, results in far less spending than in the United States, while achieving universal, comprehensive coverage. The difference is that Germany’s is a multipayer model, which builds more naturally on the American health insurance system.Although it receives little attention in the United States, this model, pioneered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883, was the first social health insurance system in the world. It has since been copied across Europe and Asia, becoming far more common than the Canadian single-payer model. This model ensures that all citizens have access to affordable health care, but it also incorporates age-old American values of choice and private competition in health insurance. Germans are required to have health insurance, but they can choose between more than 100 private nonprofit insurers called “sickness funds.” Workers and employers share the cost of insurance through payroll taxes, while the government finances coverage for children and the unemployed. Insurance plans are not tied to employers. Services are funded through progressive taxation, so access is based on need, not ability to pay, and financial contributions are based on wealth, not health. Contributions to sickness funds are centrally pooled and then allocated to individual insurers using a per-beneficiary formula that factors in differences in health risks.The United States has the foundation for this kind of system. Its Social Security and Medicare systems use taxation to pay for social insurance policies, and the health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act provide marketplaces for insurance policies. In an American version of this system, private insurers would have to be heavily regulated to ensure that coverage was affordable and to prevent the sort of rapid increases in premiums, deductibles and cost-sharing that have occurred over the past decade. Similar to regulations for Medicare and Medicaid, insurers would be required to provide a comprehensive set of benefits with limits on patient cost-sharing, which could be means-tested or tied to other criteria, such as having a chronic disease.In Germany, for example, insurers can charge only small out-of-pocket fees limited to 2 percent or less of household income annually. Compared with the mostly fee-for-service, single-payer arrangements in Canada or the Medicare system, enrolling Americans in managed care plans paid on a per-patient basis would offer greater incentives to increase efficiency, improve quality of care and promote coordination of care. Under a German-style plan, states could still be given flexibility in regulating nonprofit insurers to reflect regional priorities, similar to the flexibility offered to states in managing Medicaid and the A.C.A. exchanges. Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and other countries with similar systems vastly underspend the United States. Americans may be concerned that lower spending reflects rationing of care, but research has consistently found that not to be the case.Other high-income countries spend less on health care than the United States because they have lower prices, not because they receive less care. In Germany, sickness funds leverage market power to secure lower prices, coming together regionally to negotiate contracts with doctors and hospitals, and nationally to negotiate drug prices.Administrative and governance costs in multipayer systems are higher than in single-payer systems — 5 percent of health spending in Germany compared with 3 percent in Canada. But there is much room to cut prices. If, for example, insurers were able, on average, to achieve hospital and physician prices at the level of Medicare, and prescription drug prices at the level of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the savings would be significant. While recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans support so-called Medicare for all, approval diminishes when the plan is explained or clarified. The former Starbucks chief executive, Howard Schultz, who is considering running for president, called the proposal to eliminate private health insurance “not American.” A German-style multipayer road to universal coverage might receive a much warmer reception.Americans have long valued choice and competition in their health care. The German model offers both: Patients choose private insurers that compete for enrollees, in the process driving innovation and improving quality. If the United States adopted this model, insurance companies would be more tightly regulated and required to become nonprofits, and some job losses would be likely. But they would not need to be eliminated, an idea suggested, and then retracted, by Ms. Harris in her call for Medicare for all. The diversity of health financing arrangements globally demonstrates that there are many possible paths to achieving universal health care at an affordable cost — as Ms. Harris’s advisers acknowledged after walking back her call for the elimination of private insurance. Advocates and policymakers should pick carefully among these paths, choosing one that strikes a balance between what is possible and what is ideal for the United States health system. While the single-payer model serves Canada well, transitioning the United States to a multipayer model like Germany’s would require a far smaller leap. And that might encourage Americans to finally make the jump.
Midland, Michigan, where my husband and I are raising our two young children, is a small town surrounded by rural communities. Many of us living here have seen, generation-by-generation, that we’re falling behind. Our anxiety is real, but we wholeheartedly reject attempts by those in power to blame immigrant families who have their own struggles, or to suggest that a made up “national emergency” is any kind of solution. We know better. One of my friends and her husband both work full time and each have separate health insurance through their jobs — but their three children aren’t insured. Their income is too high for the kids to qualify for the MIChild insurance the state offers children of working families. But their income isn’t high enough to allow them buy coverage independently. Their third child was born just a few months ago. She doesn’t have paid maternity leave, so even though she should’ve recovered at least six weeks after a necessary C-section, she went back to work after three weeks. “We shouldn’t have to just get by each month,” she said to me. “We should be able to get ahead like our parents did. But we can’t, and now we are just kinda living here — where one unplanned $20 expense means you can’t buy groceries, and you’ve lost hope of ever paying your bills.” Her family is falling through the cracks. Like so many Michigan small town and rural families, they’re working hard, doing all the right things, and just barely getting by. Forty percent of our households in Michigan struggle to afford the basic necessities, like housing, food, and health care.
In situations of growing desperation, it’s natural to want to blame someone or some group of people, especially when our loudest leaders are constantly presenting us with an enemy to focus on. We’ve been inundated with messages in the last three years inciting us to blame immigrants for all our troubles, whether it’s lack of jobs or the cost of health care. Baloney. We all know that our system of unchecked capitalism is to blame. Too many profitable companies don’t insure their employees or their families. Mega-corporations like Amazon pull in billions — and pay no federal income taxes — while their workers go on food stamps. Others, like General Motors, take tax huge tax breaks only to ship thousands of jobs overseas. My small-town Michigan neighbors understand that other people, struggling just as we are, aren’t the ones to blame for these harms. As parents, we share the impossible agony of the mom at the southern border forced to return to her country of origin without her 5-year-old child. As neighbors, we recognize our immigrant friends attending church, school meetings, and soccer practices beside us. These one-on-one interactions prove over and over that we all desire the same security, stability, and community. We all have the same love for our families, and hopes for a better future.
The mantra of “immigrants are taking our jobs” comes from people with virtually no first-hand knowledge of any immigrant taking the job of any citizen we know. The jobs held by immigrants are often either the low-skilled jobs that U.S. citizens often don’t take, or high-education jobs in our science labs, hospitals, and engineering firms that similarly benefit us all. Up here, we’re the first to see through the fallacy of walls as we look across our lakes and rivers to Canada. There’s no talk on this border of a permanent concrete wall to stand as a forever monument to xenophobia and the ego of our current leaders. We know at heart there’s only one reason — sheer racism — that we’re asked to believe the need for a wall on one border is an emergency, while there’s no talk of one on the other border at all. Powerful people stoke this racism and fear to keep the poor at each other’s throats. That kind of thinking isn’t our way and shouldn’t be welcome in our communities, our state, or our nation.
It Normally Takes Centrists to Get Things Done
It seems both political parties have become hopelessly extreme, intransigent, combative & locked into their tribal group-think. Plus they’re sorely lacking in good ideas. Maybe the only way to break out of our polarization & gridlock is to abandon the two-party system, as explained in this conclusion to global-opinions/is-this-the-
But the transformation of both parties is not just about brutal language. Like their U.S. equivalents, the British parties were once broad movements with links to real institutions that mattered to people, institutions such as trade unions and church groups that offered not just political participation but also an identity. As the power of those real institutions faded — as identity became a thing people increasingly found online — the mainstream parties became hollow vehicles for politicians to gain power. In an information landscape increasingly governed by algorithms that favor anger and extremism, it was a short step from there to their capture by angry, extremist minorities. The question now is whether something as amorphous as an “Independent” group can attract the voters left politically homeless by these changes. In the short term, given the British government’s tiny minority, it might be possible to create a centrist block whose votes have to be secured if the ruling party wants to pass any legislation. In the longer term, as in the United States, Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a centrist party to make any headway at the polls.
The bigger question is whether there is something that can replace the modern, all-purpose political party. Perhaps there is space in Britain and the United States for mayors and local councilors to win elections on local issues and with local partnerships, as happens in some European countries. Perhaps there are floating, cross-party coalitions to be built around particular issues. It’s too late now, but if there had been a cross-party “moderate Brexit” group within the British Parliament two years ago, it might have had enormous influence on subsequent negotiations. And if it can’t be built within Parliament, could it be built somewhere else? For the past 200 years, parties both conceived ruling philosophies and policies, and promoted them for years, if not decades, across different election cycles. If their philosophies and policies no longer have mass appeal, then perhaps new organizations — perhaps new online networks — will take their place. But no one yet knows what this would look like, which is why politics at present are so convoluted and opaque. There are other possibilities. The Independent Group could grow to become a mainstream party. Alternatively, it could disappear at the next election. The old system is dying, to paraphrase the philosopher’s famous saying, but the new one has not yet been born. In the interim, many odd things are happening. The Independent Group is one of them.
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