Everyone's Doing It, Here's Jake Tapper

Supporting the Wall in Upstate NY

Some wingnut group called Americans for Limited Government is pushing Elise to support the border wall. They do know it's on the southern border I hope. I'll just put my comments up here. Why mess with perfection.

Americans for Limited Government, a political advocacy group that focuses on property rights and free market policy, on Friday announced it is conducting an online marketing campaign to urge U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Willsboro, to support including funding to build a southern border wall 

What about the people whose property is being snatched by eminent domain in order to build the wall. Good luck with your peeps there, Elise.

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A little info on just how grassroots astroturf this organization is. The funding for ALG comes from three donors.

Americans for Limited Government, the tax-exempt organization that bankrolled a series of controversial ballot initiatives this year, raised 99 percent of its $5.4 million in total contributions in 2005 from just three donors, the Center for Public Integrity has learned.

Trump's First 100 Days

In a few words from Josh Marshall.

When we consider the 100 day marker, it is not so much that Trump has accomplished virtually nothing of substance. It is that nothing of substance is really underway either. That’s the key thing.

On Monday, President Trump’s 102 day in office, he will begin from more or less a cold start, as though the first three months hadn’t happened. The difference is that he’ll face a calendar that is far less friendly to legislation and he’ll have squandered whatever degree of good will, momentum or confidence he had from congressional Republicans in his ability to be an effective President.

I can't help but think the tax reform attempt is going to make the repeal and replace debacle look like a walk in the park. 

The Next Battle

I know the health care fight is not over. TPM has had a couple of posts on how "moderate" Republicans are getting knifed by the actions of the White House and their nuttier brethren.

After being steamrolled in the negotiations surrounding Obamacare repeal, House Republican moderates appear poised to be run over once more—and perhaps, a final time—as momentum grows behind a revived version of the repeal bill.

Their rival faction, the House Freedom Caucus, has backed the newest form of the legislation having received another round of concessions. That means the pressure is on the conference’s centrist wing to fall in line, despite having gained little throughout the negotiation process.

The Washington Post commentators have a few columns up today on the tax reform "proposal" by Trump. It seems like if the health care debacle was bad for supposed moderates, it's not gonna get better when the debate shifts to tax reform. 

Catherine Rampell has the most complete take down. There's lots of good stuff, but I'll just note her explanation of pass-though income since this seems to be an egregious evil inherent in the plan.

(P)ass-through income refers to business income that gets paid at individual income tax rates rather than corporate ones. Income earned by partnerships, sole proprietorships and S-corporations — the vast majority of all companies — falls into this category.

Lots of people, including White House officials, associate pass-through entities with small businesses. But plenty of ginormous companies get taxed this way, including hedge funds, big law firms, publicly traded partnerships and even — coincidentally? — the Trump Organization. In fact, according to the Treasury Department, more than 80 cents of every dollar earned by pass-throughs come from big firms (defined as companies with more than $10 million in income).

Soon we will all be Kansas.

In 2012, the state undertook a huge suite of tax cuts, including eliminating taxes on pass-through income. That overhaul, too, was supposed to “pay for itself.” 

Instead, many more people took advantage of the loophole than expected, the state economy and tax receipts slowed to a crawl, and a gaping budget hole forced legislators to close schools early. The state’s credit rating has been downgraded multiple times. 

Eugene Robinson with my favorite lie about the plan.

“The plan will pay for itself with growth,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said. His rosy projection is that increased growth would produce $2 trillion in new revenue over 10 years. But the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, estimates the tax cuts would cost $6.2 trillion in revenue during that same period, leaving a $4 trillion gap. Even the conservative Tax Foundation, which has rarely seen a tax cut it didn’t like, foresees a $2 trillion gap. 

Max Ehrenfreund with another great lie from Steve Mnuchin. 

Pitching the plan on Wednesday evening, Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said again it will not cut taxes on the rich overall: “Effectively, the effective tax rate will not be a reduction for the rich,” Mnuchin told Tucker Carlson. “This is really about a middle-income tax cut.”

But experts on taxation who have reviewed Trump's ideas say the wealthy would enjoy the greatest benefits, with uneven and uncertain savings for ordinary households.

The broad outline was generally similar to a proposal that Trump had put forward as a candidate, which the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimated would save a typical taxpayer in the richest 1 percent of households $317,000 a year. That amounts to 14.1 percent of the annual income of a typical household in that rarefied group. By contrast, typical households with middling income would save about $1,100 a year on average, which translates to only 1.5 percent of their yearly income.

Meanwhile, some could even pay more, especially single parents and large families. Trump's plan would eliminate certain provisions that currently work to these groups' advantage.

What's with the tax brackets being 10, 25 and 35%? Does that seem a little odd? Those just happened to be the best numbers?

White House Extortion Exposed

I sound like the National Enquirer. Final draft of letter.

    Nice health insurance policy you got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it. That sounds like the sort of protection racket the White House is running. "We'd offer them $1 of cost-sharing reductions for $1 of wall payments. Right now that's the offer we've given our Democratic colleagues." That's Mick Mulvaney from OMB. This is a tweet from President Trump. "Obamacare is in serious trouble. The Dems need big money to keep it going - otherwise it dies far sooner than anyone would have thought."

     Does that sound like low-income folks who depend on subsidies for their health insurance are represented by Democrats and not Republicans? "The Dems need big money to keep it going." The Republicans preference is to see it fail, that seems clear. Savings from the repeal of ACA are still needed to give tax reform any chance of succeeding. The wealthy still need their tax cuts. Both are more important than health insurance for the poor.

    This week Kaiser Family Foundation came out with an analysis of the effects of ending the CSR subsidies that are being held hostage. "The increased cost to the federal government of higher premium tax credits would actually be 23% more than the savings from eliminating cost-sharing reduction payments." It's worth losing money to eliminate every last vestige of President Obama and to build a big, beautiful wall. Maybe Mexico will pay for our health insurance, too.

The Money Was Laundered

So, no problem.

“I didn’t take any money from Russia, if that’s what you’re asking me,” Flynn said at first. Then, when asked who did him pay him, Flynn replied: “My speakers’ bureau — ask them.”

Blame-shifting seems to be a prominent feature of the Trump Administration. Along with money laundering, of course. 

Never Know What You'll Find

I still want to know the back story on the red sports car, though.

A vast battlefield landscape of tunnels and trenches dug to train troops for the first world war has been discovered on army land being cleared for housing.

Archaeologists who worked on the site at Larkhill, in Wiltshire, said the century-old complex was a valuable discovery – although it posed hazards.

“This is the first time anywhere in the world that archaeologists have had the chance to examine, excavate and record such an enormous expanse of first world war training ground,” said Si Cleggett, of Wessex Archaeology. “These men were being trained for the real thing, using live grenades – we know that because we found over 200 grenades in the tunnel and 50% of them proved to be still live. We had to work side by side with experts in dealing with live ordnance, or it could have got very tricky.”