Tag Archives: government

House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

by Adam Stossel Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

So what are Republicans in the House of Representatives up to these days? According to Danny Vinik, they just passed a bill that would reduce taxes on the rich and raise them on the poor.

I know, I know: you’re shocked. But in a way, I think this whole episode is even worse than Vinik makes it sound.

Here’s the background: The child tax credit reduces your income tax by $1,000 for each child you have. It phases out for upper middle-income folks, but—and this is the key point—it phases out differently for singles and couples. The way the numbers sort out, it treats singles better than couples. This is the dreaded “marriage penalty,” which is bad because we want to encourage people to get married, not discourage them.

So what did House Republicans do? Naturally, they raised the phase-out threshold for married couples so that well-off couples would get a higher benefit. They didn’t have to do this, of course. They could have lowered the benefit for singles instead. Or they could have jiggled the numbers so that everyone got equal benefits but the overall result was revenue neutral.

But they didn’t. They chose the path that would increase the benefit—and thus lower taxes—for married couples making high incomes. The bill also indexes the credit to inflation, which helps only those with incomes high enough to claim the full credit. And it does nothing to make permanent a reduction in the earnings threshold that benefits poor working families. Here’s the net result:

If the House legislation became law, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that a couple making $160,000 a year would receive a new tax cut of $2,200. On the other hand, the expiring provisions of the CTC would cause a single mother with two kids making $14,500 to lose her full CTC, worth $1,725.

So inflation indexing, which is verboten when the subject is the minimum wage, is A-OK when it comes to high-income taxpayers. And eliminating the marriage penalty is also a good idea—but again, only for high-income couples. Which is crazy. I don’t really have a firm opinion on whether the government should be in the business of encouraging marriage, but if it is, surely it should focus its attention on the people who need encouragement in the first place. And that is very decidedly not the upper middle class, which continues to get married at the same rate as ever.

So we have a deficit-busting tax cut. It’s a cut only for the upper middle class. It’s indexed for inflation, even though we’re not allowed to index things like the minimum wage. And the poor are still scheduled for a tax increase in 2017 because this bill does nothing to stop it. It’s a real quad-fecta. I wonder what Paul Ryan thinks of all this?

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Lower Taxes on the Rich and Raise Taxes on the Poor

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The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

by BobbieWhinham Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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In the Halbig case that struck down subsidies on federal Obamacare exchanges earlier today, one of the key issues was deference to agency interpretation of the law. Longstanding precedent holds that courts should generally defer to agency interpretations as long as they’re plausible. They don’t have to be perfect. They don’t even have to be the best possible interpretations. They merely have to make sense.

The DC circuit court decided that there really wasn’t any serious ambiguity in the law, and therefore no deference was due to the IRS’s interpretation that state and federal exchanges were meant to be treated the same. The dissent was scathing about this, since the record pretty clearly showed tons of ambiguity. So if and when this case makes it up to the Supreme Court, what’s going to happen? A lawyer buddy of mine is pessimistic:

Sadly, I think the Supreme Court will eagerly uphold the challenge because it gets to an issue that conservatives have generally despised: deference to administrative agencies’ interpretation of statutes.

It’s long been a fundamental principle in administrative law that an agency’s interpretation of a federal statute that they are charged with enforcing is entitled to judicial deference, unless such deference is unreasonable. Conservatives would prefer that courts not defer to the government because #biggovernment. Thus, they want to weaken the deference standard and Halbig gives them basically a two-fer. Or a three-fer since the agency interpreting the statute is the IRS: Take out Obamacare, knock back the deference standard, and punch the IRS. This invariably will help advance the conservatives’ legal goals because with a lower deference standard, their eccentric theories (such as on tax issues) have a better chance of surviving.

In normal times, the deference standard would likely be left intact because weakening it raises serious issues with government enforcement across all agencies, and courts are loath to send the country into a tailspin. But those days are apparently long past. Truly frightening times.

So what’s next? In breaking news, the Fourth Circuit court has just upheld the federal subsidies in Obamacare, ruling squarely on deference grounds—and disagreeing completely with the DC circuit opinion, which held that the legislative language in Obamacare was clear and plain. In fact, said the Fourth Circuit, the statute is ambiguous, and therefore the court owes deference to the IRS interpretation. This is good news for Obamacare, especially if today’s DC circuit decision by a three-judge panel is overturned by the full court, thus giving the government two appellate court wins. If that happens, it’s even possible that the Supreme Court would decline to hear an appeal and simply leave the lower court opinions in place.

But I’d say an eventual Supreme Court date still seems likely. There’s no telling if my friend’s read of the politico-legal climate among the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is correct, but I thought it was worth sharing.

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The (Possibly) Frightening Implications of the Halbig Case

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Americans Stopped Caring About Iraq in 2011, But the Horrors Continued

by CathleenZWLM Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story is a collaboration between Truthout and TomDispatch.com and first appeared on their respective websites.

For Americans, it was like the news from nowhere. Years had passed since reporters bothered to head for the country we invaded and blew a hole through back in 2003, the country once known as Iraq that our occupation drove into a never-ending sectarian nightmare. In 2011, the last US combat troops slipped out of the country, their heads “held high,” as President Obama proclaimed at the time, and Iraq ceased to be news for Americans.

So the headlines of recent weeks—Iraq Army collapses! Iraq’s second largest city falls to insurgents! Terrorist Caliphate established in Middle East!—couldn’t have seemed more shockingly out of the blue. Suddenly, reporters flooded back in, the Bush-era neocons who had planned and supported the invasion and occupation were writing op-eds as if it were yesterday, and Iraq was again the story of the moment as the post-post-mortems began to appear and commentators began asking: How in the world could this be happening?

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Americans Stopped Caring About Iraq in 2011, But the Horrors Continued

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Government Failures On the Rise? Take It With a Grain of Salt.

by TravisMcnutt Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Paul Light has gotten a lot of attention for his recent study showing that “government failures” are on the rise. I’ve seen several criticisms of his study, but it seems to me that basic methodology is really the main problem with it. First off, his dataset is a list of “41 important past government failures (between 2001 – 2014) from a search of news stories listed in the Pew Research Center’s News Interest Index.” Is that really a good way of determining the frequency of government failures? A list of headlines might be a good way of determining public interest, but it hardly seems like even a remotely good proxy for cataloging government failure in general.

For example, 2007 appears to be an epically bad year for government failure. But among the failures are “wounded soldiers,” “food safety recalls,” and “consumer product recalls.” Those all seem a bit amorphous to count as distinct failures.

This methodology also mushes up timeframes. Fast & Furious is counted as a government failure in 2011, but that’s just the year it made headlines. The operation itself ran from 2006-11. Likewise, the “postal service financing crisis” is hardly unique to 2011. It’s been ongoing for years.

Some of the items don’t even appear to be proper government failures. Was the Gulf oil spill in 2010 a government failure? Or the Southwest airline groundings? In both cases, you can argue—as Light does—that they exposed lax government oversight. But this basically puts you in the position of arguing that any failure in a regulated industry is a government failure. I’m not sure I buy that.

Finally, on the flip side, there are the things that don’t show up. The government shutdown in 2013? The fiscal cliff? The debt ceiling standoffs? The collapse of the Copenhagen conference? Allowing Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora? The scandalous demotion of Pluto to non-planet status?

Maybe I’m just picking nits here. But given the weakness of the core methodology; the small number of incidents; the problems of categorization; and the overall vagueness of what “failure” means, I’m just not sure this study tells us much. I’d take it with a big shaker of salt for the moment. It seems more like clickbait than a serious analysis of how well or poorly government has done over the past decade.

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Government Failures On the Rise? Take It With a Grain of Salt.

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Dot Earth Blog: China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak

by Myrna Posted on July 15, 2014

A top Chinese official says the country may announce a peak year for climate-warming emissions soon. Read More –  Dot Earth Blog: China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak ; ;Related ArticlesSummer School for AnchoviesOpinion: A Pipeline Threatens Our Family LandEquity Firm Restores Louisiana Marshland to Earn Credits It Can Sell ;

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Dot Earth Blog: China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak

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China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak

by Myrna Posted on July 15, 2014

A top Chinese official says the country may announce a peak year for climate-warming emissions soon. Source article:  China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak ; ;Related ArticlesThe Good, the Bad and the Anthropocene (Age of Us)Population by the Numbers: Unplanned PregnanciesProtecting Parrotfish on the Path to a Caribbean Reef Revival ;

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China Clarifies its Plans on Setting a CO2 Emissions Peak

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Will the Washington Post Destroy "Incidental" NSA Intercepts When It’s Done With Them?

by GordonGellert Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago the Washington Post published an article based on a cache of thousands of surveillance intercepts that it got from Edward Snowden. That produced the suggestion—not widespread, I think, but still out there—that the Post was now violating privacy just like the NSA has been. Glenn Greenwald thought this was pretty dumb, but Julian Sanchez wasn’t so sure:

Doesn’t seem TOTALLY frivolous. I hope you & WaPo are destroying copies of intimate communications once reporting’s done.

This is actually….a good point. The charge against the NSA isn’t just that it ends up surveilling thousands of innocent people who are merely innocent bystanders in court-approved investigations. Even critics concede that this is inevitable to some extent. The problem is that once the NSA has collected all these “incidental” intercepts, they keep them forever in their databases and make them available to other law enforcement agencies for whatever use they want to make of them. At the very least, privacy advocates would like these incidental collections to be destroyed after they’ve served their immediate purpose.

So will the Post do this? Once they’ve finished their immediate reporting on this, will they destroy these intercepts? Or will they keep them around for the same reason the NSA does: because, hey, they have them, and you never know if they might come in handy some day?

There’s always been a tension inherent in Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s surveillance programs: Who gets to decide? You may think, as I do, that the government has repeatedly shown itself to be an unreliable judge of how much the public should know about its mass surveillance programs. But who should it be instead? Snowden? Glenn Greenwald? The Washington Post? Who elected them to make these decisions? Why should we trust their judgment?

It’s not a question with a satisfying answer. Sometimes you just have to muddle along and, in this case, hope that the whistleblowers end up producing a net benefit to the public discourse. But in this case, we don’t have to muddle. This is a very specific question, and we should all be interested in the answer. Do Greenwald and the Post plan to destroy these private communications once they’re done with them? Or will they hold on to them forever, just like the NSA?

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, there’s a difference here. On the one hand, we have the government, with its vast law-enforcement powers, holding onto massive and growing amounts of incidental surveillance. On the other we have a private actor with a small sample of this surveillance. We should legitimately be more concerned with possible abuses of power by the government, both generally, and in this case, very specifically. But that’s a starting point, not the end of the conversation. Sanchez is still asking a good question.

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Will the Washington Post Destroy "Incidental" NSA Intercepts When It’s Done With Them?

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Joe Biden’s World Cup Gift to Brazil: A Chilling Torture Memo

by LaraLafferty Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Vice President Joe Biden visited Brazil for the start of the World Cup soccer tournament last month, he brought along something of an odd gift for President Dilma Rousseff: a collection of State Department cables and reports that included a chilling account of state-sponsored torture. The documents were from 1967 to 1977 and covered assorted human rights abuses conducted by the military dictatorship then ruling Brazil—a government that was supported by the Nixon administration and its foreign policy poobah Henry Kissinger.

Brazil has been examining its dark past through the work of the Brazilian National Truth Commission, and the 43 documents turned over by Biden are meant to help the commission uncover the dirty deeds of the recent past. As the National Security Archive notes, these records report on “secret torture detention centers in Sao Paulo, the military’s counter-subversion operations, and Brazil’s hostile reaction in 1977 to the first State Department human rights report on abuses.”

And one document stands out: a 1973 cable from the US embassy in Brazil to State Department headquarters titled, “Widespread Arrests and Psychophysical Interrogation of Suspected Subversives.” The report noted that arrests by military forces of regime critics—mostly university students—had recently increased, and that “the detainees are being subjected to an intensive psychophysical system of duress designed to extract information without doing visible, lasting harm to the body.” The cable reported that Brazilians suspected of being “hardened terrorists…are still being submitted to the older methods of physical violence”—such as the use of electrical shock devices and being tied to and hung from a suspended bar—”which sometimes cause death.” But the main point of the cable was that the Brazilian military had developed “a newer, more sophisticated and elaborate psychophysical duress system…to intimidate and terrify the suspect.”

The cable then detailed, in a rather clinical fashion, this process:

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State Department Report on Brazilian Interrogation Abuses (PDF)

State Department Report on Brazilian Interrogation Abuses (Text)

The cable noted that detainees with “good connections” inside and outside the government were usually spared this torture.

This document is a rare step-by-step description of government-backed torture. Yet it contained no criticism of the regime or the practice. It reported that public reaction to a recent wave of arrests “has been mild thus far and is likely to continue to be subdued.”

The cable was in sync with the Nixon/Kissinger policy of not getting worked up about torture conducted by military regimes Washington favored. (See Kissinger and Argentina.) And a cable sent to Foggy Bottom a year earlier by William Rountree, then the US ambassador to Brazil, noted that though the US embassy in Brazil had “on appropriate occasion and in appropriate manner” informed the Brazilians that the US government did not condone “excesses in the form practiced in Brazil,” Rountree believed the United States had to make this case without “unduly jeopardizing our relations with this country or causing a counter-productive reaction on the part of the” government of Brazil. In this cable, Rountree said that he strongly supported the State Department’s opposition to legislation then under consideration in Congress that would cut off US funding to Brazil as long as the government engaged in torture.

Rountree explained, “Given Brazilian pride and sensitivity about sovereignty, efforts by any branch of US government or by US political figures to bring pressure on Brazil would not only damage our general relations but, by equating reduction in anti-terror measures with weakness under pressure, could produce opposite of intended result.” In other words, the United States shouldn’t lean too heavily on the torturers of Brazil.

The Brazilian Truth Commission, which has posted the documents Biden handed over, has been at work for two years, and Biden, when he was in Brazil, promised that the Obama administration would mount a broader review of top-secret CIA and Defense Department documents that might be useful to the commission. So the World Cup has given Brazil more than just a soccer tournament; it has highlighted the nation’s effort to come to terms with its recent past of government abuse and violence—and Washington’s own effort to acknowledge its support of that regime.

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Joe Biden’s World Cup Gift to Brazil: A Chilling Torture Memo

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Sentences I Did Not Expect to Read Anytime Soon

by MohammaLeboeuf Posted on June 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s the latest on the ISIS insurgency in Iraq:

The Obama administration said it is preparing to open direct talks with Iran on how the two longtime foes can counter the insurgents.

The U.S.-Iran dialogue, which is expected to begin this week, will mark the latest in a rapid move toward rapprochement between Washington and Tehran over the past year….Iranian President Hasan Rouhani said on Saturday that his government was open to cooperating with the U.S. in Iraq and that he exchanged letters with President Obama.

Um, what?

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Sentences I Did Not Expect to Read Anytime Soon

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Inside the Unraveling of Las Vegas Shooting Spree Suspect Jerad Miller

by 41laowo Posted on June 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Two years before Jerad Miller and his wife, Amanda, allegedly gunned down two police officers and a third person in a Las Vegas shooting spree, before taking their own lives, he pondered when it might be justified to kill law enforcement officers on the website of conspiracy-peddling radio personality Alex Jones. In a May 28, 2012, post titled, “The Police (To Kill Or Not To Kill?)” Miller wrote on Jones’ Infowars.com website: “I live in Indiana and recently a law was passed named the right to resist law. As i can make out from it, if a police officer kicks in my door and is not there legally, then I may shoot him.”

His posts on Infowars depict an angry, down-on-his-luck man who blamed his woes—decaying teeth, lack of health insurance, and inability to find work—on the tyranny of government. (Alex Jones has insisted the shooting spree Miller and his wife allegely carried out was “absolutely staged” by the federal government.) The justice system became a focus of Miller’s wrath following his arrest for selling marijuana. “Before I got arrested I had 2 jobs and was selling weed to my friends and family on the side,” he wrote. “Now I cannot find a job. My probation officer states that if I protest that my probation will be violated. They have tried to tell my fiance, who has no criminal record, that she may not own a firearm if I live in the house. Now, i face a dire problem.”

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Inside the Unraveling of Las Vegas Shooting Spree Suspect Jerad Miller

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