Tag: GOP Tax Policy

Public Schools Are Hiring Immigrants As Teachers

The Daily Escape:

Another view of spring flowers in the Tejon Pass, CA – May, 2018 photo by Dianne Erskine-Hellrigel

While it appears that the teacher walkout in Arizona is over, red state education cuts are bad enough that teaching jobs are now being outsourced. The NYT reports that many US schools are filling low-paying teaching jobs with immigrants:

Among the latest states hit by the protests is Arizona, where teacher pay is more than $10,000 below the national average of $59,000 per year. The Pendergast Elementary School District…has recruited more than 50 teachers from the Philippines since 2015. They hold J-1 visas, which allow them to work temporarily in the United States, like au pairs or camp counselors, but offer no path to citizenship.

The NYT reports that according to the State Department, more than 2,800 foreign teachers arrived in America last year through the J-1 visa program, up 233% from about 1,200 who landed here in 2010.

Are public school teachers a new class of migrant workers in America? Is teaching becoming another category of “jobs Americans won’t do” in the Trump era?

Arizona has a reported shortage of 2000 teachers state-wide. This is a direct result of Arizona’s low teacher salaries, (43rd in the nation), and poor funding for public education. More from the NYT:

According to the State Department, 183 Arizona teachers were granted new J-1 visas last year, up from 17 in 2010.

Trump opposes immigration because he says it takes away American jobs. Yet, here we have an immigration program designed precisely to take away American jobs, and it is growing, because there is no alternative but higher taxes, which is not an acceptable solution to Republicans.

Poor school funding and low teacher salaries are a direct result of tax cuts that then require government expense cuts. Local governments can’t engage in deficit spending for very long without ruining their bond rating, so when tax revenues go down, salaries are frozen, maintenance is deferred, and expenses are slashed.

Wrongo’s home town has this very issue in front of us. Our student population has declined by about 11% over the past few years, but the town’s school budget has steadily increased, despite the declining student census. When the budget goes to voters in a few days, it is likely to be voted down, because so few people are willing to see their taxes increased.

This should be a wake-up call to all of us. Tax cuts do not create revenue growth in our towns, states or the country, regardless of what the faux economists say about trickle-down economics.

There is no “teacher shortage” in America. Do we say there is a shortage of Corvettes because we’ll only pay the dealer $25k for a brand new one? We are seeing across many job categories that fewer skilled individuals are willing to work for the low pay offered in both the private and the public sector.

It seems like a simple concept. The people who you entrust your children to for learning and personal growth should earn an adequate wage, and be able to remain members of the middle class.

If we denigrate a profession enough so that people are wary of investing their time and money to get an education and meet the needs of the job, we will have a teacher shortage. Hopefully, this won’t be the case and aspiring teachers continue to come forward with a willingness to learn the profession – click here to learn about online courses for teachers if you want to pursue this as a career. It would be a travesty if we put off our nation’s young people from seriously looking into teaching as an option for a career.

If we then hire foreigners who are willing to do the work for peanuts, we will complete the job of making teaching a low income profession.

This is a plan designed by the right and their hedge fund billionaire buddies to privatize and ultimately, break public education.

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Saturday Soother – November 18, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise at Mesa Arch, Canyonlands National Park, Utah

It’s Saturday, and the dominant issue should be the Republicans’ efforts to enact a tax cut, now that the House has passed its version of the legislation. The plan distills Republican economic philosophy perfectly: Take lots of money and give it to the people at the top, while pretending that doing so will help everyone else.

Speaker Paul Ryan said it’s a middle-class tax cut:

This plan is for the middle-class families in this country who deserve a break. It is for the families who are out there living paycheck to paycheck, who just keep getting squeezed… The Tax Cut and Jobs Act will deliver real relief for people in the middle, people who are also striving to get there.

David Leonhardt offered this view:

Amazingly, the bill…would increase taxes, on net, for families that have at least one child and make less than $100,000. That conclusion comes from a rigorous independent analysis of the bill, released yesterday afternoon by the Tax Policy Center.

The elevator version of the Republican plan is to add $1.5 trillion to the deficit in order to give permanent tax cuts to corporations. Since that sounds terrible, the GOP proposes holding down the bill’s total cost by raising taxes on middle-class and poor families. More from Leonhardt:

A big reason is that personal exemptions — the $4,000 in income, per person, that families can write off — would disappear. The bill would increase standard deductions that all taxpayers can take, but the increase isn’t large enough for many families to make up for the disappearance of per-person exemptions…

OTOH, households making at least $5 million would receive an ANNUAL tax cut of almost $300,000 once the bill is fully phased in.

The cynicism is spectacular: Congressional leaders want to raise taxes on most of the middle and lower classes, while claiming that the bill does just the opposite. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, said:

At the end of the day, nobody in the middle class is going to get a tax increase.

Worse, if the GOP tax bill becomes law, and we look a few moves ahead, we know that Republicans will once again pose as deficit hawks and look to gut Medicare and Medicaid.

On our backs. Happy Thanksgiving!

Our Republican friends plan to fund a permanent tax cut for their beloved constituents, American corporations. For decades Americans have been against increased taxes. We bought the idea that cutting taxes would give people an incentive to work harder and thus make the American economy flourish. The GOP tells us this as they try to roll back corporate taxes, as they plan to eliminate the estate tax, and as they continually work to prevent the government from taking action against offshore tax havens.

We endure potholes, we live in fear of collapsing highway bridges because our leaders want their special constituents to have more. Our kids sit in underfunded schools so that a handful of wealthy individuals can sit in gated communities or on their own private beaches.

Think of what we might do with the sums we will lose to this GOP “tax reform” over our lifetimes. Think about the crumbling infrastructure that could be fixed. Think of all the young people saddled with student-loan debt: We could make that unnecessary, rather than give more to corporations by denying students the deductibility of the interest on their loans. Think of the drug-addicted people all over America: With these tax cuts, we will never help them.

Until the words “discredited trickle down tax plan” come out of the mouth of every single Democratic politician, we won’t have a great chance of killing the Republican’s tax plan.

Enough! It’s Saturday, and time to let the mind wander. So grab a Vente cup of Union’s Hand-Roasted Coffee, Brewer’s El Topacio Microlot, El Salvador (just £8 for 200g). Now sit near a big window and watch the last days of fall, while listening to Beethoven’s “Violin Concerto in D major Op, 61” here performed in 1959 by violinist David Oistrakh with the French National Radio Orchestra, directed by Andre Cluytens.

Listen to the sound of a Stradivarius played by one of the giants on 20th Century violin:

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Saturday Soother – November 4, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Grand Tetons early morning – 2011 photo by Wrongo

Two short thoughts for your Saturday. First, hidden in the language of the GOP’s Tax Bill  is a something that would change the Johnson Amendment, a provision in the tax code that prohibits churches, faith communities, and other non-profits from outright endorsing political candidates:

…The provision is not a complete repeal of the Johnson Amendment. As written, it would only free up religious communities—not all non-profits—to endorse candidates and appears to prohibit churches from going out of their way to campaign for a candidate outside of their normal religious activities.

The GOP wants to erode the separation of church and state. Let’s see who, if anyone, in Congress is willing to fight for the Constitution.

Second, the Democrats had a grenade go off inside the DNC when an excerpt from Donna Brazile’s new book was published by Politico. She claims that the Clinton administration assumed control over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in exchange for keeping it solvent, then funneled most of the funds raised into her campaign, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races.

The states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had garnered from the Hillary fund-raisers the campaign was holding to support state-level candidates. That’s about $4.1 million.

When Howard Dean was chair of the DNC he instituted a 50-state policy, saying the DNC would maintain full time workers in each state, to contest seats up and down the ballot from the county, to state legislature to house and senate races.

When Obama won, Dean was out, and the 50-state policy was dismantled. After that, the DNC was reorganized to serve only national level elections. And Obama For America took its place as the funds-raising vehicle for the presidential re-election. And Hillary did much the same with the Hillary Victory Fund, but she went further, as Brazile reveals: The DNC would covertly back Hillary in the primaries.

And now, through these efforts, the Democrats have lost the White House, the Senate and the House, in addition to most state governments.

It’s hard to decide what’s worse, that the party is run by incompetents, or that it is just hopelessly corrupt.

Time for a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party.

On to the weekend. You obviously need to go to a happy place that doesn’t include continual assaults by our national media. So brew up a cup of London-based Union Hand-Roasted Coffee’s El Topacio Microlot, El Salvador, available online for £8/200g.

Now kick back someplace you can see the natural world outside, and listen to Peter Mulvey playing his instrumental, “Black Rabbit”. Mulvey is known for his guitar chops and songwriting. He got started by playing in the Boston metro. This short acoustic gem is executed with ease, and pure musicality:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Monday Wake Up Call – October 30, 2017

The Daily Escape:

Fall at the Statehouse in Augusta, Maine – photo by Robert F. Bukaty

Welcome to what we may start to call Robert Mueller Monday. Ray Dalio, the founder of the Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund has serious concerns about the uneven recovery of the US economy.

In a LinkedIn post, Dalio said that if politicians and business people look only at the economy’s average statistics about how Americans are doing, they could easily make “dangerous miscalculations” because the averages mask deep differences in how people in various income segments are doing.

Dalio divides the economy into two sections: the top 40%, and the bottom 60%. He then shows how the economy for the bottom 60% of the population, (that’s three in five Americans for you English majors), has been much less successful than for those in the top bracket.

For example, Dalio notes that since 1980, real incomes have been flat or down for the average household in the bottom 60%. Those in the top 40% now have 10 times as much wealth as households in the bottom 60%, up from six times as much in 1980.

Dalio says that only about one-third of people in the bottom 60% (20% overall) save any of their income. Only a similar number have any retirement savings. These three in five Americans are experiencing increasing rates of premature death. They spend about four times less on education than those in the top 40%. Those in the 60% without a college education have lower income levels, and higher divorce rates.

Dalio believes these problems will intensify in the next five to ten years. The inequality problem is caused by our politics and our fiscal policies, not by the Fed’s monetary policies.

OTOH, Dalio’s concerns aren’t a surprise to anyone who follows the political economy. In fact, it isn’t a surprise to anyone who has walked through any mid-sized American city, or driven through any small town in the heartland.

The problem is not low wage growth.

The problem is not long-term unemployment, as degrading and humiliating as that is.

The problem is that the US economy has been restructured over the past 30 years as an underemployment, low-wage economy in which most new jobs created are temporary jobs (whether you are a laborer, a technician, a service worker or a professional) with no job security, low wages and few benefits.

The real question is can we solve the problem? Many old lefties argue for a Universal Basic Income, (UBI), but Wrongo thinks that’s, er, wrong. If the UBI were high enough to provide even a subsistence living for every American, it would be massively inflationary. And it would merely allow businesses to pay lower wages, which is why some wealthy business people, like Peter Thiel, support a UBI.

Wrongo thinks we should support guaranteed work, not guaranteed income. Most people need and want to work in order to keep their place in our society. Getting a check just isn’t sufficient. If people matter at all, and if 95% of them lack the means to live without working, society must strive to employ all of those who have been deemed redundant by the private sector.

And there is plenty to do around America. Start with the 5,000+ bridges and dams that need replacing, or the 104 nuclear power plants that are falling apart.

We need real tax reform that can’t be loopholed. Corporations must pay more, not less. Stop the move to give corporations incentives to repatriate offshore earnings by lowering their effective tax rates. That only compromises our future tax stream. Corporations have to pay more in taxes, and agree to increase the wages of average workers.

Economically, we are in a pretty scary place. People across party lines and socio-economic levels are frightened for their financial security. We need a jobs guarantee, not a UBI.

So, wake up America! Letting corporations and the rich dictate our investment in human capital or infrastructure has us on the road to eclipse as a country. To help you wake up, here is Todd Snider performing “Conservative Christian, Right Wing, Republican, Straight, White American Male“, live at Farm Aid 2014 in Raleigh, North Carolina in September, 2014:

Why aren’t the Dixie Chicks singing harmony on this?

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – September 17, 2017

(There will be no Monday Wake-Up Call this week, as Wrongo is visiting family on Cape Cod)

A rich harvest of cartoons this week. Hillary’s book signings, Bernie’s health insurance bill, Trump’s new deal with the Dems, Equifax, and the hurricanes!

Hillary lets Bernie know what she thinks of his Medicare for all bill:

Equifax tries to minimize their gigantic fail:

Equifax creates more losers than Irma:

GOP makes their priorities about disasters clear:

Trump’s dealing with Dems may hurt the GOP:

Bipartisanship deal making cuts both ways:

Why is Bannon on the left wing? Seems wrong:

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Tax Cuts Won’t Pay for Irma and Harvey

The Daily Escape:

Talking Heads Decision Wheel

It’s time to question how we pay for disasters. The estimated costs of Harvey and Irma are $290 billion. That might turn out to be high or low, it is still early days in assessing total costs. The insurance industry says that they expect to take a $70 billion combined hit for Irma and Harvey.

That leaves $220 billion to be funded by individuals, or taxpayers. Where will that money come from?

The president and his GOP buddies want to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but they call it tax reform. They’ll throw some chump change at the middle class, so that their base feels they got something for their vote last November, but at best, their tax plan will be revenue-neutral. That will provide nothing new for the rebuild of Texas and Florida.

We shouldn’t accept the usual “revenues can’t be increased” mantra when we know cities and people may not be able to afford rebuilding on their own. There are many costs that need to be considered, for example victims of the flood will have to contact some of the roofing companies austin has to offer in order to get their roof fixed, or they will have to find a roofing service closer to their home. They will also have to pay for all new furniture, and decorating services. Getting their lives back on track will be extremely difficult and costly, but with the help of donations they’ll get there. We could also raise revenues. It’s time for a specific and time-limited National Recovery Tax. And everybody has to chip in. This can be a unifying moment. Nobody wants to pay more, but the job must be done.

Think for a second about the Hand In Hand benefit. The idea was that celebrities would induce the average person to donate to disaster relief. The minimum donation that Hand In Hand asked for on their web site is $25. The average US Net worth for 45-54 year olds is around 84k. $25 is .0003% of the average US family’s net worth.

Celebrities should ask us to open our wallets, but that can’t be the way we raise the billions necessary to fund this recovery. And we can’t count on the corporations. Apple gave $5 million, that’s nice. Apple is worth about $850 billion; $5 million is .0000058% of Apple’s net worth. They gave less proportionately than the average American. Apple pays very little tax relative to their profits, most of which are kept overseas. Here is a link to how Apple’s income is sheltered.

Think about where Apple’s money comes from. You bought the iPhone, iPad and maybe a MAC computer. You were the source of their money. The same is true for Michael Dell’s $36 million donation to Harvey relief. He gave a heroic amount, but it’s a pittance when we need $220 billion.

Disasters happen. We need a fund to make people whole, and it has to come from increased revenues. Some could be from state-level taxation in the states impacted, but other states won’t do that voluntarily. That assessment has to come from a new federal tax assessment. Congress should work out the details.

We need to wave off any discussion of additional tax breaks for corporations or for the wealthy, until we rebuild Texas and Florida.

We are all beneficiaries of living in America, including those companies that keep their money offshore. We all should be in this together. If we don’t look out for each other, we’re screwed.

There are other questions, such as, should we be rebuilding in the “bathtub” parts of Houston or Florida? Should we continue allowing coastal homeowners access to federal flood insurance when they tap into it every few years? Maybe we shouldn’t build on waterfront. The NYT had a piece about St. Augustine, FL. They routinely have sunny day flooding caused by rising sea water. What do we need to do to protect historic sites like St. Augustine? Should we protect them?

Can we even ask these questions? Can we agree to do a study? Views differ. But the truth doesn’t travel far in America, because the truth hurts. So, we never ask the big questions, or seek answers to them. We just occasionally donate a little to the disaster of the moment in order to feel a little better.

How can we keep America great if we fail to fund the recovery from disasters? A temporary tax on everyone is the best answer to what just happened in the South.

Here are the Talking Heads with “Once in a Lifetime” from their 1980 album, “Remain In Light”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Takeaway lyric:

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself, “My God! What have I done?”

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – April 30, 2017

It only took 100 days for Donald Trump to reduce the office of the presidency to the point of near-zero credibility. Unfortunately, it appears as though his base and Republicans in Congress remain very accepting of him as president. In Twitter speak, #So Sad.

Back to the administration’s one page tax plan: The plan works if we assume 6% annual GDP growth for the full 8 years of a Trump presidency. Since the end of the Great Recession, annual GDP growth has been about 2%. More to the point, we now have a 3.5% (of GDP) budget deficit, and we are at the top of the current business cycle, with a 75% debt-to-GDP ratio.

Republicans used to refer to that as being broke.

Mostly, what has been accomplished in the last 100 days are a blizzard of executive orders and proclamations. We all remember when executive orders like Trump’s were considered tyranny by Fox News. On to cartoons. The GOP walks out on its long-term companion, the deficit hawks:

Trump’s first 100 days did NOT include tons of winning:

The clown show about trickle-down economics continues:

Trump explains his new tax brackets:

Arkansas needs help after botching another execution:

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Thoughts on Tax Day

The Daily Escape:

Tu Lien Bridge (design, to be built) – Hanoi, Vietnam

Today is officially the day our federal income tax returns are due. That’s because April 15 was a Saturday, while Monday is a holiday in Massachusetts. And as the Bay State goes, so goes America when it comes to filing taxes. Wrongo appreciated the extra time.

Americans shouldn’t mind paying their taxes. We live in a great country, and if you want to fly first class, you gotta pay the fare (unless, of course, you’re flying Air Force One).

The process of filing taxes could (and should) be simplified, but reducing taxes would be a mistake. America has deferred spending for social needs and for infrastructure, and not just on the federal level. Wrongo sits on his town’s Roads Committee. If we were to continue to fix our local roads at the same rate going forward as we have for the past few years, it will take us 40 years to fix just the roads that are rated “poor” quality or worse. Still, many in town think we should spend less, so they could be taxed less. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted in a dissenting opinion in a 1927 Supreme Court case:

Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

Some of us are still learning that.

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Monday Wake Up Call – March 20, 2017

The Daily Escape:

(Restored American Cars at Jose Marti Airport, Havana Cuba. 2014 photo by Wrongo)

America is snoozing on the Republican effort to turn health insurance into a party for the powerful. The LA Times’ reporter Michael Hiltzik took a look at the back pages of Paul Ryan’s Trumpcare bill and found a loophole that allows health insurance companies to pay their CEOs more money:

It does so by removing the ACA’s limit on corporate tax deductions for executive pay. The cost to the American taxpayer of eliminating this provision: well in excess of $70 million a year. In the reckoning of the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank that analyzed the limitation in 2014, that would have been enough that year to buy dental insurance under the ACA for 262,000 Americans, or pay the silver plan deductibles for 28,000.

This is the opposite of the executive pay strategy under Obamacare. The ACA decreed that health insurance companies could deduct from their taxes only $500,000 of the pay of each top executive.

That’s a tighter restriction than the limit imposed on other corporations, which is $1 million per executive. The ACA closed a loophole for insurance companies enjoyed by other corporations, which could deduct the cost of stock options and other “performance-based” pay; for insurance companies, the deduction cap is $500,000 per executive, period. The reduced deductions would have been the equivalent of raising $600 million in new taxes over 10 years.

Well, that was more than the executives and their bought and paid for Congress critters could stand, so buried in the 123 pages of the House Republican bill repealing the Affordable Care Act, Hiltzik found that:

The House Republican bill repeals the compensation limit as of the end of this year. The GOP hasn’t exactly trumpeted this provision; it’s six lines on page 67 of the measure, labeled “Remuneration from Certain Insurers” and referring only to the obscure IRS code section imposing the limit. Repeal of the provision apparently means that the insurers will be able to deduct $1 million in cash per executive, plus the cost of “performance-based” stock awards and options, like other corporations.

So now, insurance companies’ executives will have a level playing field with other CEO’s. This fits in with the rest of the GOP bill: It does nothing to bring coverage to more Americans or make it cheaper. But it does help to further line the pockets of the privileged, and maybe that’s the point.

Wake up America! As Don Henley once said, “The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away”. We need to read what the GOP is really doing on the back pages of their legislation. To help us wake up, let’s pay tribute to Chuck Berry. To call him a legend of American musical history is an understatement. He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and Kennedy Center Honors. Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” was the only rock-and-roll song included on the Voyager Space Probe Record.

Among the bands in which you hear his influence are The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Both recorded his songs, and John Lennon said this:

If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.

Berry played a Gibson model ES350. Sadly, while many great Rock and Roll guitarists have signature Gibsons, there is no Chuck Berry model. Here is Berry with a live version of “Roll Over Beethoven” from 1956. While the video isn’t the best, check out his guitar work on the intro:

Chuck probably duck-walked up to the Pearly Gates.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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