US taxation

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Workers matter and government works: eight lessons from the Covid pandemic

      by

      Maybe it’s wishful thinking to declare the pandemic over in the US, and presumptuous to conclude what lessons we’ve learned. So consider this a first draft.1. Workers are always essentialWe couldn’t have survived without millions of warehouse, delivery, grocery and hospital workers literally risking their lives. Yet most of these workers are paid squat. Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage but it totals only about $30,000 a year. Most essential workers don’t have health insurance or paid leave. Many of their employers (including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to take but two examples) didn’t give them the personal protective equipment they needed.Lesson: Essential workers deserve far better.2. Healthcare is a basic rightYou know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? That’s how all healthcare could be. Yet too many Americans who contracted Covid-19 got walloped with humongous hospital bills. By mid-2020, about 3.3 million people had lost employer-sponsored coverage and the number of uninsured had increased by 1.9 million. Research by the Urban Institute found that people with chronic disease, Black Americans and low-income children were most likely to have delayed or foregone care during the pandemic.Lesson: America must insure everyone.3. Conspiracy theories can be deadlyLast June, about one in four Americans believed the pandemic was “definitely” or “probably” created intentionally, according to the Pew Research Center. Other conspiracy theories have caused some people to avoid wearing masks or getting vaccinated, resulting in unnecessary illness or death.Lesson: An informed public is essential. Some of the responsibility falls on all of us. Some of it on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that allowed misinformation to flourish.4. The stock market isn’t the economyThe stock market rose throughout the pandemic, lifting the wealth of the richest 1% who own half of all stock owned by Americans. Meanwhile, from March 2020 to February 2021 80 million in the US lost their jobs. Between June and November 2020, nearly 8 million fell into poverty. Black and Latino adults were more than twice as likely as white adults to report not having enough to eat: 16% each for Black and Latino adults, compared to 6% of white adults.Lesson: Stop using the stock market as a measure of economic wellbeing. Look instead at the percentage of Americans who are working, and their median pay.5. Wages are too low to get by onMost Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So once the pandemic hit, many didn’t have any savings to fall back on. Conservative lawmakers complain that the extra $300 a week unemployment benefit Congress enacted in March discourages people from working. What’s really discouraging them is lack of childcare and lousy wages.Lesson: Raise the minimum wage, strengthen labor unions and push companies to share profits with their workers.6. Remote work is now baked into the economyThe percentage of workers punching in from home hit a high of 70% in April 2020. A majority still work remotely. Some 40% want to continue working from home.Two lessons: Companies will have to adjust. And much commercial real estate will remain vacant. Why not convert it into affordable housing?7. Billionaires aren’t the answerThe combined wealth of America’s 657 billionaires grew by $1.3tn – or 44.6% – during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, with $183.9bn, became the richest man in the world. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, added $11.8bn to his $94.3bn fortune. Sergey Brin, Google’s other co-founder, added $11.4bn. Yet billionaires’ taxes are lower than ever. Wealthy Americans today pay one-sixth the rate of taxes their counterparts paid in 1953.Lesson: To afford everything the nation needs, raise taxes at the top.8. Government can be the solutionRonald Reagan’s famous quip – “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” – can now officially be retired. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” succeeded in readying vaccines faster than most experts thought possible. Biden got them into more arms more quickly than any vaccination program in history.Furthermore, the $900bn in aid Congress passed in late December prevented millions from losing unemployment benefits and helped sustain the recovery when it was faltering. The $1.9tn Democrats pushed through in March will help the US achieve something it failed to achieve after the 2008-09 recession: a robust recovery.Lesson: The federal government did not just help beat the pandemic. It also did more to keep the nation afloat than in any previous recession. It must be prepared to do so again. More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Joe Biden: time for corporations and richest Americans to 'start paying their fair share' – video

      by

      The US president, Joe Biden, has said it is time for corporations and the richest Americans to ‘start paying their fair share’ as he pitched his $4tn infrastructure and welfare plans at an event in Virginia.
      Speaking at a community college in Norfolk, Biden made the case for increasing taxes on the wealthiest in the US to fund his $1.8tn American families plan and $2tn infrastructure plan. The packages would provide funds for childcare, invest in free universal pre-schooling and rebuild America’s transport and public housing.
      ‘I think it’s about time we started giving tax breaks and tax benefits to working class families and middle class families, instead of just the very wealthy,’ Biden said.

      Biden calls on richest Americans to ‘start paying their fair share’ of taxes – live More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden says it’s time for richest Americans to pay ‘their fair share’ of taxes

      by

      Joe Biden said it is time for corporations and the richest Americans to “start paying their fair share” of taxes as he hit the road on Monday in a concerted effort to promote his administration’s huge new infrastructure and welfare spending plans totaling about $4tn.Speaking at a community college in Norfolk, Virginia, on Monday afternoon, the US president made the case for increasing taxes on the wealthiest in the US in order to help fund his ambitious $1.8tn American Families Plan and $2tn infrastructure plan.The packages would provide funds for childcare and free universal pre-school education facilities, as well as massive programs to rebuild America’s crumbling transport systems and public-sector housing in ways that also contributes to government action on the climate crisis.“I think it’s about time we started giving tax breaks and tax benefits to working-class families and middle-class families, instead of just the very wealthy,” Biden said, while speaking in Portsmouth, Virginia.Discussing the excessive profits wealthy corporations have made in the past year, Biden said he’s not “anti-corporate”, but “it’s about time they started paying their fair share”.Biden said the American families plan, which would dedicate $1tn in spending on education and childcare over 10 years, and $800bn in tax credits aimed at middle- and low-income families would not increase taxes for the vast majority of people in the US.“It is paid for by making sure corporate America and the wealthiest 1% … just pay their fair share,” he said. Biden said the plan would benefit 65 million children, and “cut child poverty in half this year”.The plan would also allocate $200bn for free, universal preschool education and $109bn for free community college, regardless of income for two years, Reuters reported.“Do we want to give the wealthiest people in America another tax cut, or do you want to give every high school graduate the ability to earn a community college degree?” Biden said.Continuing the theme of taxing the rich, Biden said: “If you asked the top 1% to pay the same tax rate they paid in 2001 when George Bush was president, that would generate around $13bn a year.”He reiterated what he has been saying in the first 100 days of his presidency and emphasized at his address to a joint session of the US Congress last week: “Trickle-down economics has never worked.”Biden is keen to shed the philosophy that is a conservative touchstone among Republicans, much popularized during the Ronald Reagan presidency and most recently continued by Donald Trump, that tax breaks for the rich spur business investment that ultimately benefits the masses below in the longer term.“For too long we’ve had an economy that gives every break in the world to the folks who need it the least. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up,” he said.Monday’s trip with several stops in Virginia, accompanied by his wife and the first lady, Jill Biden, was the latest leg of what the White House is calling the president’s Getting America Back on Track Tour, which will see Biden head to Louisiana next week.Georgia, Ohio and North Carolina are among the other destinations for either Biden personally or members of his entourage, as they bid to sell the public on his rebuilding packages.Biden is urging Republicans in Congress ensure bipartisan support for his legislation on the big plans.He cited “overwhelming support” for the spending among many Republican voters and said he need that to translate in the corridors of Washington.“Now I just have to get some of my Republican colleagues to support it,” he said.Meanwhile, the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Monday that he expected no Republicans would back Biden’s infrastructure and families packages, indicating Republican lawmakers are open to a roughly $600bn bill.“I think it’s worth talking about but I don’t think there will be any Republican support – none, zero – for the $4.1tn grab bag which has infrastructure in it but a whole lot of other stuff,” McConnell said in a press conference in his home state of Kentucky. More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Yellen seeks to tamp down concern over US government spending under Biden

      by

      The US treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, on Sunday sought to tamp down concerns that Joe Biden’s plans on infrastructure, jobs and families will cause inflation, saying spending will be phased in over a decade.“It’s spread out quite evenly over eight to 10 years,” the former chair of the Federal Reserve told NBC’s Meet the Press.She said the Fed would monitor inflation carefully.“I don’t believe that inflation will be an issue but if it becomes an issue, we have tools to address it,” Yellen said. “These are historic investments that we need to make our economy productive and fair.”Addressing Congress on Wednesday, Biden said his “American Jobs Plan is a blue collar blueprint to build America. That’s what it is.”He has said his plans will be paid for by a series of tax increases on the wealthiest Americans, less than 1% of the population, and by raising corporate taxes. Some Democrats have expressed concerns such increases will slow economic growth.“We’re proposing changes to the corporate tax system that would close loopholes,” Yellen said.“This comes also in the context of global negotiations to try to stop the decades-long race to the bottom among countries in competing for business by lowering their corporate tax rates. And we feel that will be successful.The president has pledged that no family earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes“The president has pledged that no family earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes. And we’ve been assiduous in sticking to that pledge.”Republicans oppose corporate tax increases. The Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy told Fox News Sunday: “Academics would say if you raise taxes on corporations, you have lower wages, you have less investment, and you hurt shareholders. Think pension funds.“Now, if it’s OK to have lower wages for working people, it’s a blue collar thing. If it’s OK to have less investment, it’s a blue collar thing. But if you want higher wages, if you want more investment, if you want more efficient deployment of capital, than it’s anti-blue collar.”Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, countered Cassidy’s claims.Corporations, he said, “got that giant tax cut in 2017 [under Donald Trump]. What we’re talking about is just rolling some of that tax cut back. So we’re talking about putting the rate back up to 28%. It was 35% before that tax cut came. So corporates would still have a lower tax rate than the rate they had prior to 2017.“We think that 2017 tax cut didn’t meet its promise. You didn’t see massive investments in [research and development], you didn’t see wages go up. What you saw was CEO pay go up … So we think we can raise those taxes on corporations and fund the things that make the economy grow. Bridges, roads, airports, rail.”Republicans also oppose the scope of Biden’s infrastructure proposals, contending priorities such as expanding green energy, electric cars and elder and child care should not be pursued.“The administration needs to kind of be honest with the American people,” Cassidy said. “If you really want roads and bridges, come where Republicans already are. If you want to … do a lot of other stuff, well that’s a different story. Roads and bridges, we’re a lot closer than you might think.”Yellen would not speculate on whether Biden would accept a bill from Congress that does not include a way to pay for the spending increases he wants.“He has made clear that he believes that permanent increase in spending should be paid for and I agree,” she said. More

    • 238 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      The first 100 days of Biden were also the first 100 without Trump – that’s telling | Robert Reich

      by

      By almost any measure, Joe Biden’s first 100 days have been hugely successful. Getting millions of Americans inoculated against Covid-19 and beginning to revive the economy are central to that success.Two-thirds of Americans support Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus plan, already enacted. His infrastructure and family plans, which he outlined on Wednesday night at a joint session of Congress, also have broad backing. The $6tn price tag for all this would make it the largest expansion of the federal government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But for most Americans, it doesn’t feel radical.Rather than bet it all on a single large-scale program such as universal healthcare – which Bill Clinton failed to accomplish and which Barack Obama turned into a target of Republican fearmongering – Biden has picked an array of popular initiatives, such as preschool, public community college, paid family and medical leave, home care and infrastructure repairs, which are harder to vilify.Economists talk about pent-up demand for private consumer goods, caused by the pandemic. Biden is responding to a pent-up demand for public goods. The demand has been there for years but the pandemic has starkly revealed it. Compared with workers in other developed nations, Americans enjoy few if any social benefits and safety nets. Biden is saying, in effect, it’s time we caught up.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s handBesides, it’s hard for Republicans to paint Biden as a radical. He doesn’t feel scary. He’s old, grandfatherly. He speaks haltingly. He’s humble. When he talks about the needs of average working people, it’s clear he knows them.Biden has also been helped by the contrast to his immediate predecessor – the most divisive and authoritarian personality to occupy the Oval Office in modern memory. Had Biden been elected directly after Obama, regardless of the pandemic and economic crisis, it’s unlikely he and his ambitious plans would seem so benign.In his address to Congress, Biden credited others for the achievements of his first 100 days. They had been accomplished “because of you”, he said, even giving a nod to Republicans. His predecessor was incapable of crediting anyone else for anything.Meanwhile, the Republican party, still captive to its Trumpian base, has no message or policies to counter Biden’s proposals. Donald Trump left it with little more than a list of grievances irrelevant to the practical needs of most Americans: that Trump would have been re-elected but for fraudulent votes and a “deep state” conspiracy, that Democrats are “socialists” and that the “left” is intent on taking away American freedoms.Biden has a razor-thin majority in Congress and must keep every Democratic senator in line if he is to get his plans enacted. But the vacuum on the right has allowed him to dominate the public conversation about his initiatives, which makes passage more likely.Trump is aiding Biden in other ways. Trump’s yawning budget deficits help normalize Biden’s. When Trump sent $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans last year regardless of whether they had a job, he cleared the way for Biden to deliver generous jobless benefits.Trump’s giant $1.9tn tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy, none of which “trickled down”, make Biden’s proposals to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure and education seem even more reasonable.Trump’s fierce economic nationalism has made Biden’s “buy American” initiative appear innocent by comparison. Trump’s angry populism has allowed Biden to criticize Wall Street and support unions without causing a ripple.At the same time, Trumpian lawmakers’ refusal to concede the election and their efforts to suppress votes have alienated much of corporate America, pushing executives toward Biden by default.Even on the fraught issue of race, the contrast with Trump has strengthened Biden’s hand. Most Americans were so repulsed by Trump’s overt racism and overtures to white supremacists, especially after the police murder of George Floyd, that Biden’s initiatives to end police brutality and “root out systemic racism”, as he said on Wednesday night, seem appropriate correctives.The first 100 days of the Biden presidency were also the first 100 days of America without Trump, and the two cannot be separated.With any luck, Biden’s plans might prove to be the antidote to Trumpism – creating enough decent-paying working-class jobs, along with benefits such as childcare and free community college, as to forestall some of the rightwing dyspepsia that Trump whipped into a fury. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans fret over AOC backing for Biden as 100-day mark draws near

      by

      As Joe Biden welcomed a series of polls showing majority approval for his first 100 days in the White House, and prepared to address Congress for the first time on Wednesday, Republicans attacked his progressive record in office.One senior senator said: “AOC said his first 100 days exceeded her expectations. That’s all you need to know.”Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was talking to Fox News Sunday about remarks by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman and leading progressive from New York.Speaking to an online meeting on Friday, she said: “The Biden administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had.”Citing the $1.9tn Covid relief and stimulus bill, Ocasio-Cortez said Biden had been “very impressive” in negotiating with Congress to pass “progressive legislation”. She also voiced dissatisfaction with Biden’s $2.25tn infrastructure package.On Sunday, speaking to CNN’s State of the Union, Vice-President Kamala Harris trumpeted the administration’s achievements.“We are going to lift half of America’s children out of poverty,” she said. “How about that? How about that? Think about that … That’s good stuff. That’s really good stuff.”Republicans oppose the price tag on the American Jobs Plan and priorities within it, including plans to raise taxes on wealthier Americans and proposed spending on environmental initiatives.So do some Democrats – on Sunday the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, a key vote in the 50-50 chamber, told CNN he favoured a slimmed down, “more targeted” bill.Graham was not the only senior GOP figure to complain about something many on the left have praised: that Biden campaigned as a moderate but is governing more as a progressive.Also speaking to Fox News Sunday, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, accused Biden of “a bait and switch. The bait was he was going to govern as bipartisan but the switch is, he’s governed as a socialist”.Graham said: “During the campaign, he made us all believe that Joe Biden would be the moderate choice, that he really thought court-packing was a bonehead idea. All of a sudden we got a commission to change the structure of the supreme court. Making DC a state, I think that’s a very radical idea that will change the make-up of the United States Senate.”Progressives defend Biden’s commission on the supreme court as a necessary answer to Republican hardball tactics that skewed the panel 6-3 in favour of rightwing judges. However, Biden’s commission to examine the issue both contains conservative voices and is unlikely to produce an increase beyond nine justices any time soon.A bill to make DC a state, thereby giving the city representation it currently lacks and almost certainly electing two Democratic senators, has passed the House but is unlikely to pass the Senate.“AOC said his first 100 days exceeded her expectations,” Graham added. “That’s all you need. I like Joe Biden, but I’m in the 43%.”Sunday brought a slew of polls. Fox News put the president’s approval rating at 54% positive to 43% negative, nine points up on Donald Trump at the same time four years ago. NBC put Biden up 51%-43%, ABC made it 52%-42% and CBS reported a 58%-42% split.Graham also insisted Biden had “been a disaster on foreign policy”.The South Carolina senator was once an eager ally of John McCain, the late Arizona senator, presidential nominee and a leading GOP voice on foreign affairs. Biden was a senator from Delaware for 36 years and chaired the foreign relations committee.“The border is in chaos,” Graham said, “the Iranians are off the mat … Afghanistan is gonna fall apart, Russia and China are already pushing him around. So I’m very worried.“I think he’s been a very destabilising president, and economically thrown a wet blanket over the recovery, wanting to raise taxes a large amount and regulate America basically out of business.“So I’m not very impressed with the first 100 days. This is not what I thought I would get from Joe Biden.” More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US CEOs think Biden’s corporate tax rate hike will have negative impact – survey

      by

      The bosses of America’s largest companies overwhelmingly believe Joe Biden’s proposed increase in the country’s corporate tax rate would have a negative impact on their businesses, according to a survey released on Monday.The influential business lobbying group Business Roundtable, whose members include Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook, released a survey of 178 CEOs on their thoughts on an increase in corporate tax. The survey specifically questioned the CEOs on the president’s proposed corporate tax hike, which would raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, to pay for his $2.3tn infrastructure plan.According to 98% of the CEOs surveyed, the corporate tax increase would have a “moderately” to “very” severe impact on their company’s ability to compete on a global scale. Three-fourths of the CEOs said that the tax would negatively affect their ability to conduct research and development innovation and 71% said it would negatively affect their ability to hire new employees.The increase in the corporate tax rate, along with a proposal for higher taxes on companies seeking to get lower tax rates abroad, is part of Biden’s plan to undo the tax cuts Donald Trump made in 2017.When the cuts were passed, Republicans argued that it would encourage domestic investment, which would increase worker productivity and ultimately raise wages. Democrats and some economists are skeptical that any of the benefits from the cuts were seen in the economy before the Covid-19 pandemic.A report released earlier this month from the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that at least 55 of America’s top companies, including FedEx and Nike, paid no federal corporate income tax because of loopholes and substitutes. The report found that the tax breaks cost $8.5bn in potential tax revenue.“Our tax revenues are already at their lowest level in generations,” Janet Yellen, treasury secretary, told reporters last week. “If they continue to drop lower, we will have less money to invest in roads, bridges, broadband and R&D.”But business leaders and lobbying groups have made clear in the last weeks similar concerns that Biden’s tax plan would hurt businesses and ultimately offset the progress made by his infrastructure plan.“It will actually obviate all the economic gains we could possibly gain in infrastructure,” Neil Bradley, executive vice-president of the US Chamber of Commerce, told the Washington Post.The US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have made promises to lobby against the corporate tax increase. While Republicans have been generally supportive of spending on infrastructure, the party is unified in opposition to tax hikes. This means that moderate Democrats, especially Joe Manchin, the party’s most conservative member in the Senate, will be the stars of the debate around a potential increase.Manchin has already said that he would not support an increase to 28%, but said going up to 25% is something he could get behind.“We have to be competitive, and we are not going to throw caution to the wind,” he told a local West Virginia radio station. More