Bill USA
Bill USA's JournalGOP 'health' bill is a $600 billion (at least) tax cut almost entirely for the wealthy - Vox.com
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"members of the top 0.1 percent, who each on average make more than $3.75 million annually, would get an average tax cut of $165,090."[/font]
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/7/14844362/ahca-ryancare-trumpcare-tax-cut-rich
Most analysis of the American Health Care Act, the new House Republican plan for repealing and replacing Obamacare, has focused on the fact that it will take away health insurance from millions of Americans, including, eventually, millions of poor, elderly, and disabled Americans currently on Medicaid. It’s reasonable in light of that to ask what there is to like about the proposal.
The main answer, for Republicans is Congress, is that it also contains $600 billion in tax cuts — tax cuts that would save the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans nearly $200,000 each in a single year, according to a batch of analyses released by the Joint Committee on Taxation on Tuesday.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget helpfully combined them into a single table:
The single biggest tax cut included in the bill is the repeal of the 3.8 percent tax the Affordable Care Act applied to capital gains, dividend, and interest income for families with $250,000 or more in income ($125,000 for singles).
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Tucson police rough up 86-year-old lady at protest -
I'm sure someone probably posted this before.. but for those, like me, who missed it..... here's a (likely) reprise....
(please go to original article to see video. I couldn't get it to paste into this post)
http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2017/02/27/roberts-tucson-police-take-down-old-lady/98499602/
While some in the Arizona Legislature move to shut down public protests, they might want to add an amendment to the bill with special sanctions for little old ladies who yell at police officers.
Body camera footage of a Feb. 16 immigration protest in Tucson shows a woman, reported to be 86 years old, approaching several police officers, pointing and yelling at them.
In response, a police officer pushes the woman to the pavement. As another protester — this one a 65-year-old woman — moves to older lady's side, the officer rushes forward and pepper sprays her.
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Senate Bill 1142 would expand the state’s RICO laws – the ones set up to combat organized crime – to target protesters. Should it become law, police will be able to seize the assets of anyone involved in a protest that turns violent -- regardless of whether they were the ones rioting.
Fortunately, the bill appears to be dead after it making national news last week, proving that not all of our leaders are totally insane. Still nothing is dead until the Legislature leaves town.
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Trump budget cuts - WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-presidential-budget-2018-proposal/?utm_term=.94cfe60e56f9To pay for an increase in defense spending, a down payment on the border wall and school voucher programs, among other things, funding was cut from the discretionary budgets of other executive departments and agencies. The Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department and the Agriculture Department took the hardest hits. The proposal also eliminates funding for these 19 agencies.
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In total, the budget proposes to eliminate funding for these 19 agencies:
African Development Foundation
Appalachian Regional Commission
Chemical Safety Board
Corporation for National and Community Service
Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Delta Regional Authority
Denali Commission
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Inter-American Foundation
U.S. Trade and Development Agency
Legal Services Corporation
National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Humanities
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation
Northern Border Regional Commission
Overseas Private Investment Corporation
U.S. Institute of Peace
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
100 days of Trump claims: in 56 days in office: "we've counted 219 false or misleading claims."-WaPo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims/?tid=a_inl(more)
Washington Post says it's keeping track of the Donald's lies and Big Lies for the first 100 days. Suggest everyone email of comment on Post's Sunday open thread (see Plum Line) asking them to continue this project through out this entire ordeal.
Donald Trump's first budget outline, explained - Vox.com
Donald Trump's first budget outline, explained(emphases my own)
The impact of the cuts and hikes laid out in the document would be massive. Trump wants to fund a border wall, deportation raids, a hiring spree for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and purchases of new F-35 fighter jets and a variety of Navy vessels. And it would dramatically hamper enforcement of environmental and labor regulations, end grant and loan programs for clean energy and disadvantaged regions, and significantly reduce funding for biomedical research.
The document is a “skinny” budget that ignores taxes and entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps. It only specifies changes to “discretionary” spending by agencies. In total, this is about a third of the overall federal budget; non-defense discretionary is about 16 percent.
The budget will not pass in full, and provisions are already provoking political backlash on Capitol Hill. It will be up to Congress to actually implement spending policy; Trump can only offer suggestions. But the document is revealing and important nonetheless. It gives a clear signal of the administration’s priorities on agency spending, and signals that it will support any efforts by Congress to crack down on international programs, environmental protection, and anti-poverty programs.
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Trumps budget blueprint is a war on the future of the American economy - Yglesias, Vox.com
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/16/14940712/trump-budget-science-education-health[font size="3"]President Donald Trump’s debut budget proposal is a stark declaration of war on the future of the American economy that substitutes a curious mix of ideology and blind nostalgia for any effort to think critically about the actual needs of a 21st-century nation.[/font]
The war starts with reducing spending — even though an aging population, plus the government’s role in inherently labor-intensive activities like education and long-term care, militates overwhelmingly in favor of a somewhat larger role for the state. But it continues with the priorities Trump set for where the remaining cash gets spent.
The picture that emerges is overwhelmingly one of nostalgia — more money for men with guns, less money for education, caring, and pointy-headed science. But nostalgia is not memory. The midcentury economy Trump yearns for was, almost by definition, less technologically advanced and educationally intensive than today’s.
But it was an extraordinarily forward-looking time. Propelled by the imperatives of Cold War competition, the United States made investments on an unprecedented scale in institutions dedicated to education and research, while engaging in massive public-private partnerships to disseminate then-new technological marvels like cars, phones, and televisions.
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Rachel Maddow Stands Tall And Refuses To Back Down When Threatened By Donald Trump
[FONT SIZE="3"]Rachel Maddow refused to bow to Donald Trump's baseless threats. After the Trump White House had threatened her, the MSNBC host reported on a leak of Trump's 2005 tax return. [/FONT]
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/03/14/trump-white-house-threatened-rachel-maddow.html
Rachel Maddow refused to bow to Donald Trump’s baseless threats. After the Trump White House had threatened her, the MSNBC host reported on a leak of Trump’s 2005 tax return.
Video:
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Maddow said, “The White House confirmed to us tonight that this return is real. They threatened us and said it is illegal for us to publish it. It is not illegal for us to publish it.”
It’s true that the unauthorized release of federal tax returns is a criminal offense, however Maddow argued on the air that releasing the tax returns was a matter of public interest, given that every single president has done so since Nixon except for this one, who just so happens to be under scrutiny for his foreign ties. Thus MSNBC was exercising its First Amendment right.
Trump promised to release his tax returns if elected, and then once elected had his surrogates announce that no one cared. Polls disagree with the Trump administration’s claims on the matter of his tax returns. Americans think they do matter and they want to see them.
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here's a funny video. till you realize this is what the GOP does to "average" Americans every chance
... they get!
https://www.facebook.com/100010902512781/videos/401746443532103/
a couple figures the CBO scoring of TrumpCare bill left out..
We all know that the CBO scoring of the Trumpcare bill will result in 24 million people, who are now insured thanks to Obamacare to lose their health insurance coverage.
Trumpcare could cost 24 million people their insurance, government analysis finds
But what the CBO report in estimating costs and potential savings from that bill left out was:
1) The cost of providing care to those who lose their insurance
Medical care needs won't go away just because people have lost their health insurance - except for those who die of course (yeah, for those who would have lived under Obamacare, that will save money because the dead don't need healthcare. - Hoo-ray!... thank you GOP). For those who lose their insurance, they will return to emergency rooms for medical care. That is the most expensive way to provide healthcare. Also, without insurance they won't be seeing a doctor on a regular basis and almost all the serious health concerns won't be caught early on, when you can treat them more effectively (and more economically). Hospitals will see their costs of uncompensated care increase. Where will the money come from to reimburse hospitals? This is a cost the CBO didn't examine.
2) TrumpCare allows insurance companies to sell 'bare bones' plans, in other words: FAKE insurance.
That is, insurance that doesn't really provide complete or adequate coverage of all costs incurred when the policy holder needs medical care. This means again, increased costs that will fall to the hospitals to 'eat'. How much will the extra costs be which will NOT be covered by the 'bare' bones insurance (i.e. FAKE insurance)?
Any estimates of the costs / savings from passing the Trumpcare plan that does not consider these costs is not complete or realistic.
Cons insurgents rage 4 more HRC emails, while Bush admin "lost" millions of emails never supplied to
National Archives and Records Administration. While the Conservative insurgents of Judicial Watch are demanding further harassment of Hillary Clinton via emails, nobody seems to have any interest in millions (yes, I said "Millions"
of emails the Bush administration claimed were lost - later to be "found", when Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sued the Executive Office of the Presidency to reveal them. While the Bush administration "found" some of these emails millions have still not been provided the National Archives and Records Administration.
In Bush administration there were a dozen or so, White House staff and advisors using an email account with a commercial emails service provider. Actually, the account owned by the Republican National Committee, and since it was an account with a commercial email service provider, these emails can be 'found' by that email service provider - even if the Bush administration "couldn''t find" them.
CREW LAWSUIT REVEALS 83% OF BUSH-ERA EMAILS WERE NEVER ARCHIVED
As part of a settlement of the lawsuits CREW and the Archive brought against the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) over the millions of Bush-era emails missing from White House servers, EOP agreed to conduct a comparison of archived email and email restored from backup tapes for 21 days previously identified as having a suspiciously low volume of email. The comparison revealed that 83% of emails found on the backup tapes was not part of the archived collection of Bush emails and would be lost if not for CREW’s and the Archive’s lawsuits. But, as CREW and the Archive explained in their letter to the archivist, because EOP used a patently flawed process to identify low volume days, a large volume of unrestored emails on backup tapes still remains missing. The archivist now has custody and control over all the backup tapes that would be used for further restoration.
CREW and the Archive also sent a second letter to White House Counsel Bob Bauer, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, and Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein, asking them to lead a broader effort to address the government-wide problem of managing and preserving emails. NARA recently released a report showing that 79% of federal agencies responding to a NARA survey may be improperly destroying records in violation of federal law. CREW and the Archive called on the White House to convene a high-level commission to develop a plan of action to respond to this systemic problem.
Anne Weismann, CREW’s chief counsel, said, “The Bush administration spent millions of dollars trying to prove there were no missing emails in the first place. Now we know the truth: emails did in fact vanish from White House servers. Unless the archivist takes further action, most of the emails lost from a 2 year period critical to our nation’s history will never be recovered.” Ms. Weismann continued, “As troubling as the missing Bush emails are, the Obama administration has a much bigger problem on its hands. With the majority of federal records at risk of destruction, the government simply cannot sit back and do nothing while valuable records are lost to history .”
for backround, see: FLASHBACK: When Millions of Lost Bush White House Emails (From Private Accounts) Triggered a Media Shrug - Alternet
and: [link:THE GEORGE W. BUSH WHITE HOUSE ‘LOST’ 22 MILLION EMAILS|THE GEORGE W. BUSH WHITE HOUSE ‘LOST’ 22 MILLION EMAILS - Newsweek]
the Untold Story of the Bush WH emails - 22 million "lost" then "found"
CREW: BUSH WHITE HOUSE IGNORED WARNINGS ABOUT EMAIL - CREW
You Want a Real Email Scandal? Take a Look Back at the Bush-Cheney White House. - Mother Jones
Flashback: Rove Erases 22 Million White House Emails on Private Server at Height of U.S. Attorney Scandal – Media Yawns - Pensito Review
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