Taxes

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The consequence of sexism

I’m writing this the morning after the Republicans in the Senate passed a massive tax reform bill that I doubt many of them, or their staff members, or maybe even leadership had read.  The bill wasn’t even printed but evidently photocopies with handwritten insertions and changes were passed out in the hours just before the vote.  There were no hearings.  And now we get to watch Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell try to reconcile the House and Senate bills.  I wish them no success.

So how is this bill a consequence of sexism?  I hadn’t thought about it either until I read this piece by Jill Filipovic in the New York Times.  She writes

Many of the male journalists who stand accused of sexual harassment were on the forefront of covering the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Matt Lauer interviewed Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump in an official “commander-in-chief forum” for NBC. He notoriously peppered and interrupted Mrs. Clinton with cold, aggressive, condescending questions hyper-focused on her emails, only to pitch softballs at Mr. Trump and treat him with gentle collegiality a half-hour later. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose set much of the televised political discourse on the race, interviewing other pundits, opining themselves and obsessing over the electoral play-by-play. Mr. Rose, after the election, took a tone similar to Mr. Lauer’s with Mrs. Clinton — talking down to her, interrupting her, portraying her as untrustworthy. Mr. Halperin was a harsh critic of Mrs. Clinton, painting her as ruthless and corrupt, while going surprisingly easy on Mr. Trump. The reporter Glenn Thrush, currently on leave from The New York Times because of sexual harassment allegations, covered Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign when he was at Newsday and continued to write about her over the next eight years for Politico.

A pervasive theme of all of these men’s coverage of Mrs. Clinton was that she was dishonest and unlikable. These recent harassment allegations suggest that perhaps the problem wasn’t that Mrs. Clinton was untruthful or inherently hard to connect with, but that these particular men hold deep biases against women who seek power instead of sticking to acquiescent sex-object status.

What these journalists did when they interviewed Mrs. Clinton has the same roots as their sexual harassment.

For arguing that gender shaped the election narrative and its result, feminists have been pooh-poohed, simultaneously told that it was Clinton, not her gender, that was the problem and that her female supporters were voting with their vaginas instead of their brains.

The latest harassment and assault allegations complicate that account and suggest that perhaps many of the high-profile media men covering Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump were the ones leading with their genitals. Mr. Trump was notoriously accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment and assault, and was caught on tape bragging about his proclivity for grabbing women. That several of the men covering the race — shaping the way American voters understood the candidates and what was at stake — were apparently behaving in similarly appalling ways off-camera calls into question not just their objectivity but also their ability to cover the story with the seriousness and urgency it demanded.

Filipovic continues

This moment isn’t about a nation of confused men. It’s about a minority of men who choose to treat women alternately as walking sex objects or bothersome and potentially devious nags. It’s about a majority of Americans who give men a pass for all manner of bad behavior, because they assume men are entitled to behave badly but hold women to an entirely different standard.

That is why it’s so egregious that sexual harassers set the tone of much of the coverage of the woman who hoped to be the first female president.

There are at least two other well known men accused of sexual harassment:  Senator Al Franken and Garrison Keillor.  It is true that both supported Clinton.  Both are alleged to have committed an act or acts that, while harassment, are rather on a different scale than Matt Lauer’s or Charlie Rose’s multiple actions.  I taught my first workshops about sexual harassment in the late 1970s to managers in Virginia state government and my staff began investigating complaints.  The manager who put his hand down an employee’s blouse was suspended; the manager who patted an employee on the rear was reprimanded.  No act can be excused, but we need to maintain some perspective.

As Filipovic writes

The 2016 presidential race was so close that any of a half-dozen factors surely influenced the outcome: James Comey, racial politics, Clinton family baggage, the contentious Democratic primary, third-party spoilers, Russian interference, fake news. But when one of the best-qualified candidates for the presidency in American history and the first woman to get close to the Oval Office loses to an opponent who had not dedicated a nanosecond of his life to public service and ran a blatantly misogynist campaign, it’s hard to conclude that gender didn’t play a role.

 And what we get is a tax reform bill that will only help the rich, destruction of the environment, alienated allies, and potential nuclear war.  Thanks a lot, fellows.

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Don’t think Ted Cruz understands government

Senator Cruz has not exactly endeared himself to his fellow Senators in the short time he has been there.  Even those in his own party.  He has been entertaining in a scary kind of way.  It’s hard to believe that he was only elected last year.  I’ve thought for awhile that he didn’t understand governing – and that that is what Senators do after all – and now maybe I understand why:  He doesn’t understand the basics of government.  Here is Ezra Klein.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz knows how to deal with the Internal Revenue Service: Get rid of it!

We ought to abolish the IRS and instead move to a simple flat tax, where the average American can fill out our taxes on a postcard. Put down how much you earn. Put down a deduction for charitable contributions and home mortgage. And put down how much you owe.

OK.  But to whom should you mail the card?  And who will check the math?

That does sound simple! But what if some citizen somewhere declines to fill out the postcard? Well, I guess we need some bureaucrat that will send them a follow-up postcard making sure they got the first postcard. If they don’t fill out that postcard, we need someone who will give them a call to make sure they’re getting these postcards.

The bottom line is follow-up and enforcement.  That is one of the things that government agencies do.  Remember your civics, Senator?  The legislature (that’s the House and Senate) passes laws, the President signs them and then someone has to make sure it happens.  This is not a function of a legislative committee.  Their role is to go back and make sure that everything functions as the law intended.  If it doesn’t, you don’t then abolish the agency but you make sure it gets fixed.  But some seem to operated on the principle that is the bath water is dirty, but throw it AND the baby out together.

And Cruz’s flat tax is actually a bit more complicated than most. It includes deductions for mortgages and charitable contributions. What if everyone says they gave a million dollars to charity and own a huge home? Who’s going to check all that out? Well, some well-meaning flat-tax collection agents, I guess.

The people doing all this need to sit somewhere. The place they sit doesn’t need to be called “The Internal Revenue Service.” It can be called “The Agency of Tax Freedom.” But it is, in effect, the Internal Revenue Service.

Ted Cruz

Maybe we have finally found the bottom line for Senator Cruz and his friends.  They want the benefits that can accrue from government, but they don’t actually understand or like it.

His plan?  That a subject to a whole ‘nother post.

Photograph from Salon.com

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Still more on sequestration

This morning The Fix by Chris Cillizza included this interesting post by Aaron Blake.  Blake posted four great graphics explaining the impact of the sequester.  I am going to copy 2 of them here, but you should look at the entire post.

Blake explains

First up is Pew’s illustration of the year-by-year spending cuts that are included in the sequester. As you can see, the cuts start out relatively small — less than $75 billion in 2013 — but they grow to more than twice that size by 2021, for a total of more than $1 trillion.

The biggest growth in cuts over that time occurs in the interest payments, but everything except for mandatory spending cuts grow steadily over time.

And then there is this depressing news.  Sequester will not have that big of a positive impact.

There has to be a better way.  Maybe spend some money to put people back to work and let them pay taxes thus increasing revenue?  And we do have to fix the tax code so Facebook executives actually pay taxes.  And maybe we can cut programs and defense more selectively.  This won’t be as dramatic, and it might be slower, but it will hurt fewer people.

Meanwhile, members of Congress of both parties are doing their best to keep funding for their own districts.  Politico quotes Senator Lindsey Graham, an opponent of the sequester

I’m almost relishing the moment all these tough-talking guys say: ‘Can you  help me with my base?’” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of the most vocal  critics of the sequester, told POLITICO.

“When it’s somebody else’s base and district, it’s good government. When it’s  in your state or your backyard, it’s devastating,” he added.

Of course Graham’s solution is to do away with the Affordable Care Act or Obama care.  Is the momentum swinging toward a rational budget and solution?  Probably not.

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Why not raise taxes?

It is 7 am here and I am about to turn on Wimbledon, but I had to write about this first.  Surfing the headlines in the New York Times this jumped out at me:  ” We Knew They Got Raises.  But This?”

The final figures show that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was $10.8 million. That works out to a 23 percent gain from 2009. The earlier study had put the median pay at a none-too-shabby $9.6 million, up 12 percent.

Total C.E.O. pay hasn’t quite returned to its heady, prerecession levels — but it certainly seems headed there. Despite the soft economy, weak home prices and persistently high unemployment, some top executives are already making more than they were before the economy soured.

Pay skyrocketed last year because many companies brought back cash bonuses, says Aaron Boyd, head of research at Equilar. Cash bonuses, as opposed to those awarded in stock options, jumped by an astounding 38 percent, the final numbers show.

Granted, many American corporations did well last year. Profits were up substantially. As a result, many companies are sharing the wealth, at least with their executives. “We’re seeing a lot of that reflected in the pay,” Mr. Boyd says.

So if companies are making money again, why aren’t they using some of that profit to hire people. you might wonder.  But I also want to know is what kind of taxes are these guys, and I’m sure they are 99% men, paying?  (I noticed that one person mentioned is Warren Buffet who thinks he ought to be paying more in taxes.)  I think that any of of these executives can afford higher taxes more than I, as a public employee, can afford an increase in health insurance premiums while getting no incease in pay.  Or than the man or woman retired on just a public pension or just social security can afford to pay for health insurance on the private market – even with a Paul Ryan voucher.

Philippe Dauman of Viacom led the executive pay list in 2010. The median was $10.8 million

 Meanwhile there are the rest of us.

Of course, these sorts of pay figures invariably push the buttons of many ordinary Americans. Yes, workers’ 401(k)’s are looking better than they did in some recent years, but many investors still have not recovered from the hit they took during the financial crisis. And, of course, millions are out of work or trying to hold on to their homes — or both.

And it’s not as if most workers are getting fat raises. The average American worker was taking home $752 a week in late 2010, up a mere 0.5 percent from a year earlier. After inflation, workers were actually making less.

Yes, as the story points out, stockholders can vote on the executive pay plan and yes, some corporate heads don’t get salaries just stock like Buffet, but the question remains:  What is wrong with raising the tax rates on people that make this type of salary?  If the argument that the Republican’s are making, that companies need their profits in order to create jobs, then where are the jobs?  I think the Democrats have a powerful argument.  They just need to get the story out.

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Taxes and Gay Marriage

I wrote about a lawsuit filed in Massachusetts to end the Defense of  Marriage Act back in March and yesterday Ellen Goodman published a good piece about why this is important.  Titled “A Strange Duel Citizenship”, Goodman writes

THEY ARE NOT the only married couple in America who talk about taxes and ulcers in the same sentence. Nor are they the only couple who believe they are paying more than they should. On that ground they are part of a noisy majority.

But they are a couple for whom tax season also entails an identity crisis. You see, Melba Abreu and Beatrice Hernandez file state taxes as what they are – a legally married Massachusetts couple. But under federal law, they have to file federal taxes as what they aren’t – two single women.

This identity crisis is not just some psychological blip on the cheerful landscape of their family life. In the last four years, the government’s refusal to consider them a married couple has cost the writer and the CFO of a nonprofit about $5,000 a year. As Beatrice puts it, “We don’t know anyone for whom $20,000 and counting isn’t significant.”

This is not about forcing states to choose to marry people.  It is about the simple act of recognizing legal marriages in other states.  It is not different from my straight marriage being recognized in Massachusetts even though I got married in Virginia.  Goodman concludes

So what do you say about an out-of-date law that enforces an identity crisis? What do you say about a law that “defends” marriage by denying it? The winds are blowing, but in a very different direction.

Amendment to this post

When I wrote this on Saturday morning, I hadn’t seen Stephen Colbert’s video mocking the anti-gay marriage ad – which he describes as combining the 700 Club and the Weather Channel.  Take a look.

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Let’s Tea Party

I don’t know how anyone else feels but I think it is very clear that the Republican Party is caught in a timewarp.  Maybe not 1980, but sometime in the early Reagan Year or even pre-Reagan years.  And they are also trying to be 2009 hip.  The combination is ripe for hilarlity – unfortunately for the Republicans.  First there was Chairman Steeele saying he wanted to appeal to the hip hop crowd kinda like Karl Rove and his famous rap, I guess.  Now there is tea-bagging.  The tea baggers don’t seem to get it that we did really well with the higher tax rates – look at the Clinton years.  It is the Clinton tax rates the President wants to restore.

The original Boston Tea Party in 1773 protested the tax on tea without representation in Parliament.  If I recall my history, we had not yet decided to split from Mother England but just wanted to have some guys in Parliament.  I don’t think it was a protest on the tea tax directly.  The tax on tea touch everyone.  President Obama’s tax plan only effects the very top earners since the rest of us will get a little cut.  Bruce Bartlett, writing in Forbes.com, has posted some very interesting statisitics.

Next week is April 15, the day when most Americans have to file their federal income tax returns. To protest the allegedly high level of taxation in the United States, various right-wing groups are organizing tea parties around the country in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

The irony of these protests is that federal revenues as a share of the gross domestic product will be lower this year than any year since 1950. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal government will take only 15.5% of GDP in taxes this year, compared to 17.7% last year, 18.8% in 2007 and 20.9% in 2000.

The truth is that the U.S. is a relatively low-tax country no matter how you slice the data. The following tables illustrate this fact by comparing the U.S. to other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based research organization.

As Table 1 shows, total taxation (federal, state and local) amounted to 28% of the GDP in the U.S. in 2006. Only four of the 30 OECD countries had a lower tax ratio. Taxes averaged 35.9% for the OECD as a whole and 38% in Europe. Citizens of Denmark and Sweden paid very close to 50% of their total income in taxes.

Table 1: Total Taxes as a Share of GDP, 2006

Denmark

49.1

U.K.

37.1

Ireland

31.9

Sweden

49.1

Hungary

37.1

Greece

31.3

Belgium

44.5

Czech Rep.

36.9

Australia

30.6

France

44.2

N.Z.

36.7

Slovak Rep.

29.8

Norway

43.9

Spain

36.6

Switzerland

29.6

Finland

43.5

Luxembourg

35.9

U.S.

28.0

Italy

42.1

Portugal

35.7

Japan

27.9

Austria

41.7

Germany

35.6

Korea

26.8

Iceland

41.5

Poland

33.5

Turkey

24.5

Netherlands

39.3

Canada

33.3

Mexico

20.6

Source: OECD

Bartlett ends with an interesting observation. (I should say that he also has other charts comparing individual tax rates.)

The point is that one can’t look just at the taxes people pay here or elsewhere without looking at what they get in return. It doesn’t automatically follow that the places with the lowest taxes are the best places to live and work. This is obvious when we think about where to buy a house. We always look at the quality of local schools as a major factor and are willing to pay higher property taxes in return for good schools. The same is true at the national level as well. Higher taxes may pay for services that people value and thus are not as burdensome as they might appear at first glance.

So what are these tea parties really about?  And is this the best the Republicans can do to find a voice?  Once again we have to turn to Rachel Maddow.  Gabriela Resto-Montero writes this intro for the Nation

The “Tea Bag” movement spawned by a rant on CNBC by Rick Santelli seeks to protest the Obama tax cuts by imitating the revolutionary fathers’ Boston Tea Party, which in fact protested taxation without representation (the opposite of a tax cut). While the logic behind the protest is confusing, the right-wing’s complete lack of awareness about the term “Tea Bagging” is even more so. Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox have some fun at the expense of clueless conservatives and point out that at long last Senator David Vitter may have found a worthy cause to champion.

And I have a really stupid question:  Are they throwing in the tea or the entire tea bag?  If it is the entire tea bag, they are really polluting our lakes and rivers with paper made not to dissolve in water.