In a speech in Missouri later today, President Trump will attempt to relaunch his administration’s tax-reform crusade. If you believe what he says, his plan will be the bestest, biggest,…
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In a speech in Missouri later today, President Trump will attempt to relaunch his administration’s tax-reform crusade. If you believe what he says, his plan will be the bestest, biggest, boldest tax reform ever devised in the whole history of man.
It will be beautiful; it will be huge, that I can tell you.
However, once you peer inside that nicely wrapped giftbox — when you peel off the gilt-edged rhetoric and the beautifully tied bow — what do you find inside?
Not over yet –> As Houston began to recover from Hurricane Harvey, the storm made landfall again on Wednesday, dumping as much as two feet of rain on smaller towns near the Texas-Louisiana border, including Orange, Port Arthur and Beaumont. Todd Frankel, Avi Selk and David A. Fahrenthold report for The Washington Post that the biggest storm ever recorded in the US has left at least 37 people dead and 35,000 in shelters.
Paul Ryan, speaker of the House and the conservative movement’s intellectual darling, recently paid a visit to a Boeing plant in Everett, Washington. Everett is a medium-sized, working-class city just north of Seattle that’s been home to Boeing facilities for decades. In fact, the biggest building in the world — the Boeing Everett Factory — is the company’s crown jewel in the region.
But Ryan wasn’t there for a simple tour and to take in an AquaSox game. He was there to garner support for the Trump tax plan — a series of tax reforms Republicans claim will create jobs and spur the economy.
Donald Trump’s plans to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% will are unlikely to create the promised boom in jobs, according to a new report from the non-partisan Institute on Tax and Economic Policy.
Trump and Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, have been pushing hard for the plan. The president travels to Missouri on Wednesday to promote the plan and Ryan has taken to the road to venues including Boeing’s headquarters, where Ryan pledged to make the cuts by the end of the year.
But the Washington thinktank found that the cuts were unlikely to work . The study looked at 92 publicly-traded corporations that reported consistent profitability between 2008 and 2015, and found that they already benefitted from low effective tax rates, paying less than 20% of that net income to the federal government in tax.
Fifty-four years ago this week, on Aug. 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of people gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The event marked a turning point in our society in recognizing the need for civil rights and equality for African Americans. But it’s painfully clear we have yet to achieve the dream set forth that day by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Our nation remains divided along racial and class lines. The events in Charlottesville highlighted the terror that white supremacists still inflict upon people of color, religious minorities and the LGBTQ community.
But white supremacy goes well beyond the venomous hate spewed by neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other white nationalists. It permeates our economic systems, workplaces and institutions.
President Trump’s much-awaited speech about his plans for tax reform has fired up the debate about who really wins when taxes are slashed.
The president has previously proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent — a move budget experts project would cost the country $2.4 trillion over a decade. The reduction, he has argued, would encourage companies to stay and grow and hire in the United States.
“We need a competitive tax code that creates more jobs and higher wages for Americans,” Trump said Wednesday in Missouri. “It’s time to give American workers the pay raise that they’ve been looking for for many, many years.”
To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the United States’ tax burden is a major impediment to economic growth. In a speech in Springfield, Missouri, on Wednesday, Trump framed his plan to dramatically lower corporate and individual tax rates as a coup for ordinary Americans, whose pay has stagnated in the past four decades.
In fact, the evidence suggests that Trump’s tax cuts would line corporate CEOs’ pockets, while depleting the Treasury and doing little, if anything, to boost working class Americans’ bottom line.
“Trump’s plan would double down on the anti-populist features of the current system,” said Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the progressive Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Here are some ideas Trump could get behind if he is really interested in championing working people.
A month later, in December 2015, Trump advocated for the use of war crimes to defeat ISIS, saying that the U.S. would have to “take out their families” and that he’d “knock the hell out of” ISIS: “You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. . . . When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families,” Trump said, as he complained about the “politically correct war” the U.S. is fighting in the battle against ISIS.
Judging by Trump’s comments, it seems as though by “politically correct” he was referring to the United States making efforts to protect civilians.
Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.
The restaurant is on “short shift” at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders – roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.
Despite working six days a week, Marion, 37, a single mother of two, can’t make ends meet on the $9.50 an hour she gets at Popeyes (no apostrophe – founder Al Copeland joked he was too poor to afford one). A fast food worker for 22 years, Marion has almost always had a second job. Until recently, she had been working 9am-4pm at Popeyes, without a break, then crossing town to a janitorial job at Bartle Hall, the convention center, where she would work from 5pm to 1.30am for $11 an hour. She didn’t take breaks there either, although they were allowed.
Over the decades, the concept of “nation-building” has been in and out of favor with successive American administrations. President Donald Trump says he wants no part of it in Afghanistan.
But past presidents have found that when it comes to foreign interventions, it’s very difficult to achieve and sustain military gains in the absence of a stable, functioning government and the institutions that go along with it. That’s one of the main arguments in favor of nation-building — or state-building, as some, including President George W.’s Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chose to call it.
Here’s a look at where broad assistance has worked and where it hasn’t, and some of the lessons about why.
