Tag Archives: policy

Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

by damioncio68 Posted on January 18, 2017

At his final press conference on Wednesday, the president said that some issues — for example, “how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change” — are just part of the “normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-flow of policy.”

Other issues, though, might get him riled up enough to speak out after he leaves office. “[T]here’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake,” he said. He listed a few things that he would see as threats to those core values: “systematic discrimination,” “obstacles to people being able to vote,” “institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press,” and deportation of so-called Dreamers.

It sounded like an articulation of his priorities in the Trump era, and global warming didn’t make the cut. Likewise, in Obama’s farewell address last week, he mentioned climate change and clean energy, but his more passionate points were dedicated to sustaining a healthy democracy.

In September, Obama talked about focusing on climate change after he leaves office, but at that point, he thought Hillary Clinton would be succeeding him. Now that Donald Trump is moving into the Oval Office, Obama seems to be indicating that he’ll focus on other problems instead.

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Get those Instagrams in now: Climate change is going to mess up good weather days.

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While Trump tweets out insults, Obama publishes an article about clean energy in a scientific journal.

by MarisolM85 Posted on January 9, 2017

In the piece, which appeared in Science on Monday, the president outlines four reasons that “the trend toward clean energy is irreversible”:

1. Economic growth and cutting carbon emissions go hand in hand. Any economic strategy that doesn’t take climate change into account will result in fewer jobs and less economic growth in the long term.

2. Businesses know that reducing emissions can boost bottom lines and make shareholders happy. And efficiency boosts employment too: About 2.2 million Americans now have jobs related to energy efficiency, compared to about 1.1 million with fossil fuel jobs.

3. The market is already moving toward cleaner electricity. Natural gas is replacing coal, and renewable energy costs are falling dramatically — trends that will continue (even with a coal-loving president).

4. There’s global momentum for climate action. In 2015 in Paris, nearly 200 nations agreed to bring down carbon emissions.

“Despite the policy uncertainty that we face, I remain convinced that no country is better suited to confront the climate challenge and reap the economic benefits of a low-carbon future than the United States and that continued participation in the Paris process will yield great benefit for the American people, as well as the international community,” Obama concludes — optimistically.

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While Trump tweets out insults, Obama publishes an article about clean energy in a scientific journal.

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Saving for Retirement Is a Struggle—Unless You’re a CEO

by GayleClaypool Posted on December 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama has called runaway income inequality the “defining issue of our time.” The disparity between exploding corporate profits and stagnating paychecks fueled Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and continues to grow. Currently, the United States has a wider gap between the very rich and everyone else than at any time since the late 1920s. And according to a new study from the Institute for Policy Studies, that spells disaster for Americans trying to save enough to retire.

The study, titled “A Tale of Two Retirements,” found that in 2015 just 100 CEOs had retirement funds worth $4.7 billion—equivalent to the entire retirement savings of the least wealthy 41 percent of American families, or 116 million people. That figure is even more staggering when broken down by race: Those 100 execs’ retirement funds are worth as much as the entire retirement savings of the bottom 44 percent of white working-class families, the bottom 59 percent of African American families, and the bottom 75 percent of Latino families.

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Look at it another way. Those 100 CEOs have nest eggs large enough to generate a retirement check of more than $250,000 per month for the rest of their lives. Meanwhile, the average American fortunate enough to have a 401(k) plan has socked away only enough to receive a monthly check of just $101. And those are the lucky ones: 37 percent of all US households have no retirement savings at all. Neither do 51 percent of African American families and 66 percent of Latino families. Things are also particularly bleak for millennials, as Americans younger than 40 have saved 7 percent less for retirement than similarly aged boomers.

The hollowing out of workers’ retirement benefits punishes female retirees, in particular: Median incomes for women 65 and older are 45 percent lower than men’s. And since women live longer than men, on average, they must stretch their retirement savings even further.

So who are these rapacious retirees? Many of them head companies that have been cutting back on worker pensions and retirement funds for years. John Hammergen, the CEO of the pharmaceutical giant McKesson, holds nearly $150 million in retirement assets. Shortly after joining the company in 1996, he closed its pension fund to all new employees. Yet Hammergen found enough money to set up a retirement account that has furnished him with assets worth more than $20,000 for every day he’s spent at the company’s helm.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon already had $67.8 million stashed in an untaxed, deferred compensation account in 2015, despite having only held his post since 2014. His predecessor, Michael Duke, retired with more than $140 million in deferred compensation. In contrast, fewer than two-thirds of Walmart’s 1.5 million employees have a company-sponsored retirement account. Those who do have an average balance of less than $24,000, enough for a monthly retirement check of $131—not even 0.04 percent of what McMillon can expect to take home every month.

Jeff Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, has more than $92 million in retirement assets. Between 1987 and 2011, the company contributed not one penny to employee pension plans, counting on rising stock prices to offset its expected contribution. After the economy crashed in 2008, Immelt froze pensions and closed them to new participants. The company has only funded 67 percent of its outstanding pension obligation to workers and its pension deficit has grown by $5 billion since 2011. During the same time, Immelt’s company-sponsored retirement assets have swelled from $53 million to $92 million.

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So how has this happened? Simply, the tax rules are structured in favor of massive executive retirement packages. Ordinary workers face strict limits on how much pre-tax income they invested in tax-deferred plans like 401(k)s. (The current limit is $18,000.) CEOs may participate in regular employee plans, but they also get Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans, which Fortune 500 companies set up with unlimited tax-deferred compensation. Since more than half of executive compensation is tied to stock price, CEOs have direct incentives to cut back on worker retirement benefits to pad their balance sheets. The money saved by those cost-cutting measures goes straight back into executives’ pockets, often tax-free: Corporations may deduct unlimited amounts of executive compensation from their federal taxes so long as it’s “performance based.”

Much of this is the result of Reagan-era policies that worked to prioritize corporate profits and undo the power of unions. Under Reagan, companies began to adopt 401(k)s over pensions, shifting investment risk from employers to workers, as these plans required workers to deduct savings from their paychecks with no guarantee of future benefits. Companies have also reduced retirement benefits by converting workers’ pension assets to cash balance plans, freezing retirement plans, closing retirement plans to new hires, or terminating retirement plans altogether.

Might this get better under President-elect Donald Trump, whose economic message seemingly resonated with white-working class voters? Don’t count on it. If Trump and congressional Republicans cut the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 33 percent, Fortune 500 CEOs would stand to save $195 million when they withdraw cash from their tax-deferred retirement accounts, according to IPS.

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Saving for Retirement Is a Struggle—Unless You’re a CEO

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Trump Wants to Deport Millions of Immigrants. Here’s One Way to Slow Him Down.

by KrystynaK18 Posted on December 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump ran on a staunchly anti-immigrant platform, vowing to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and deport millions of “criminal aliens” in his first hours in office. Last week, Democratic legislators in California—home to about one-fifth of the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants—introduced a series of measures aimed at protecting the state’s immigrants under Trump’s policies. Two of those bills could help immigrants facing deportation in a crucial way: by making sure they have legal representation in court.

Unlike defendants in criminal courts, immigrants facing deportation aren’t guaranteed a right to a court-appointed attorney. These immigrants have to bear the costs of securing a lawyer on their own, and this can be a costly and difficult process, especially for those held in detention centers. Nationally, only 37 percent of immigrants facing deportation proceedings have access to a lawyer, according to a study released by the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration nonprofit. Immigrant detainees have it even worse: Only 14 percent receive legal representation. Studies have shown that one of the most important factors in determining an immigration case is whether immigrants had a lawyer—women and children, for instance, are up to 14 times more likely to win some form of relief from deportation or be released from detention when they have access to legal representation.

Together, California’s Assembly Bill 3 and Senate Bill 6 would provide funding so immigrants facing deportation would have access to free legal assistance, as well as set up state-funded trainings in immigration law so defense attorneys and public defender’s offices can better assist immigrants. Nearly 70 percent of detained immigrants in the state do not have legal representation, according to a report by the California Coalition for Universal Representation, and without it, only 6 percent of immigrants have won their cases over the past three years.

State Sen. Ben Hueso, a Democrat from San Diego who introduced SB 6, estimates that the state could allocate between $10-$80 million to fund these efforts. The measures “send a clear message to undocumented Californians that we won’t turn our backs on them,” said Hueso. “We will do everything in our power to protect them from unjustified deportation.”

The measures would require a two-thirds majority to be enacted, and with Democrats holding the majority in the state Legislature, the bills are likely to pass. Gov. Jerry Brown has yet to comment specifically on the legislation, taking a more cautious tone at a press conference last week, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I’m going to take it step by step and work in a collaborative way, but also defend our principles vigorously,” Brown said. “I think that’s the wiser course of action.” The measures will be voted on next month.

California could become the second state to help fund legal assistance for immigrants facing deportation, following an approach first implemented in New York: In 2013, nonprofit groups in New York City piloted a program that gave free representation to immigrants who couldn’t afford lawyers at one of the city’s immigration courts. Within a year, attorneys in the project won almost 70 percent of their cases, and the approach was so successful that the city fully funded the program. The model inspired similar programs in New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Despite a recent interview in which Trump appeared to soften his stance toward deporting so-called Dreamers, or young immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, immigration advocates say they are preparing for a mass deportation plan under his administration. Shortly after the election, Trump insisted he would deport immigrants who had committed crimes, saying he still planned to remove some 2-3 million undocumented immigrants immediately. (A Migration Policy Institute report found that about 820,000 undocumented immigrants had criminal records, but some advocates worry that Trump will broaden his definition of a “criminal” immigrant to include people who have been arrested—though not necessarily convicted of a crime—to gain popular support for deportations.) And his nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general and appointment of Kris Kobach as an immigration adviser to his transition team have also concerned immigration advocates.

Francisco Ugarte, a public defender in San Francisco, where community groups and the city’s public defenders have asked the city to set aside $5 million for free legal assistance, says the funding is desperately needed. “We have to provide representation for any noncitizen facing deportation proceedings,” Ugarte says. “That’s how fairness works.”

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Trump Wants to Deport Millions of Immigrants. Here’s One Way to Slow Him Down.

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Trump Promised to Kill Billionaires’ Favorite Tax Loophole. Of Course His Economic Adviser Loves It.

by EthanRiggs Posted on December 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an economic policy speech at the Detroit Economic Club in August 2016, Donald Trump repeated a promise he’d made many times on the campaign trail: “The rich will pay their fair share.” He went on to explain that his reform “will eliminate the carried interest deduction and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors, and for people like me, but unfair to American workers.”

Trump’s promises to reform taxes to aid regular Americans undoubtedly helped him win in November. But earlier this month, he announced the appointment of the members of his President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of 16 business leaders who will advise him on government policy regarding economic growth and jobs. The head of that group is billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and CEO of the Blackstone investment juggernaut. In 2016, he was ranked the 113th richest person in the world, and Blackstone, in which he holds a roughly 20 percent stake, is one of the largest private equity management firms in America. He also happens to be one of the biggest proponents of the carried-interest deduction that helps create and enrich billionaires—the very loophole Trump vowed to close during his campaign.

The carried-interest deduction works like this: People who manage the investments of others—usually private equity bosses—are often paid with a cut of the investment profits. Under the loophole, they are taxed on those earnings as if they were capital gains, not personal income, which has a much higher rate. Sometimes referred to as the “billionaire’s loophole,” Alec MacGillis for The New Yorker wrote, it “has helped private equity become one of the most lucrative sectors of the financial industry.”

As a private equity heavyweight, Blackstone has been a main beneficiary of the carried-interest deduction. In March 2007, Blackstone earned $4 billion for its managers when it went public. The initial public offering caused a public uproar because it was largely based on the favorable tax treatment of carried interest. A few months later, Schwarzman placed a call to Leo Hindery, a fellow private equity fund manager, the night before Hindery was set to testify before Congress about closing the carried-interest tax loophole. According to Hindery, Schwarzman called him “a traitor.”

Schwarzman later solidified his stance as a staunch proponent of the tax deduction in July 2010, when he compared the Obama administration’s efforts to close the loophole—Obama’s 2010 budget proposal called for changing the carried-interest tax deduction—to the Third Reich. “It’s a war,” Schwarzman said at the board meeting of an unnamed charity. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Schwarzman was widely criticized for the comments, including by Vice President Joe Biden.

Then in August 2011, billionaire investor Warren Buffett wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he called for closing the carried-interest deduction, noting that thanks to the loophole, his tax rate that year had been lower than that of any of his office employees. Schwarzman went on CNBC to counter Buffett’s argument, saying he was paying a combined federal and state tax rate of 53 percent. “I’m not feeling undertaxed,” he said. (The Times pointed out that Schwarzman likely hadn’t received much carried-interest-eligible income that year, since many of the investments managed by his company were still recovering from the financial crisis.) In response to a question about Trump’s promise to close the carried-interest loophole last September, Schwarzman implied that he’d be okay with it—only as part of a general move toward a flat tax, a move that would also disproportionately benefit the uber-rich.

Schwarzman has also long been a generous Republican donor, donating more than $790,000 in the 2016 cycle to down-ballot races and PACs dedicated to maintaining a GOP legislative majority. (He did not donate to the Trump campaign.) But now, he and his compatriots will certainly have Trump’s ear: Their first meeting is set to happen at the White House in February—just weeks into the first term of President Trump.

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Trump Promised to Kill Billionaires’ Favorite Tax Loophole. Of Course His Economic Adviser Loves It.

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Twitter Cracks Down On A Few Alt-Righters But Fails To Protect Users

by HelaineMcGowen4 Posted on November 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Twitter is finally taking steps to clean up its platform:

Long criticized for allowing bullies, terrorists and bigots to run rampant to the detriment of its own bottom line, Twitter made a surprising move Tuesday by banning a slew of accounts belonging to white nationalists and leaders of the alt-right movement — which holds that traditional conservatives don’t sufficiently protect the interests of white people….Among recently banned Twitter users are Richard Spencer, head of the alt-right think tank National Policy Institute, and other alt-right leaders, including Paul Town, Pax Dickinson, Ricky Vaughn and John Rivers, according to news reports.

Maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age,1 but there’s something fishy about this. Twitter critics have been asking for years for better tools to manage the tsunami of abuse that frequently engulfs users, especially women and people of color.2 Here are a few suggestions for abuse management tools that have made the rounds:

Ability to block IP addresses
Allow people to up/down rate new accounts
Provide some kind of human tech support for complaints
Ability to block new accounts
Ability to block accounts with certain words in bio
Ability to block all followers of an account (this helps prevent abuse storms from followers of popular accounts)
Ability to suspend retweets
Ability to block tweets that contain certain keywords3

This list is by no means comprehensive, but do you notice something? Nobody especially wants Twitter to eject specific individuals: it smacks of censorship; it’s not something Twitter management is good at doing; and it will never come close to solving the abuse problem anyway. There’s no way Twitter will ever be able to ban all the flaming assholes in the world, and very few of us feel comfortable with Twitter deciding on who they are in any case. We just want tools that allow us to manage our abuse problems, which are different for everyone.

So why would Twitter do the one thing that even Twitter critics might be uncomfortable with, instead of all the things Twitter critics have actually asked for? It’s almost as if they’re trying to make Twitter reform controversial. We tried, but nothing satisfies you guys!

But then again, maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age.

1OK, fine, there’s no maybe about it.

2If you want to learn more about this, BuzzFeed’s “A Honeypot For Assholes” is probably the definitive piece about Twitter’s problems.

3Twitter announced a tool for this a couple of days ago. Time will tell how well it works.

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Twitter Cracks Down On A Few Alt-Righters But Fails To Protect Users

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2016 Is the Most Policy-Heavy Election in Decades

by AutumnSidwell69 Posted on October 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s conventional wisdom that this year’s presidential campaign is one of the most policy-free of all time. The reason is obvious: Donald Trump is a policy void. He knows nothing, doesn’t want to know anything, and brags frequently about how everything you need to know to be president can be learned in an hour or two. His milieu is entertainment and insults, not policy wonkery.

I think this view is wrong, and I’d like to present a thoughtful, nuanced argument against it. Unfortunately, I don’t have that in me at the moment. Instead, here’s a quickie blog-length micro-essay making my case.

Among political junkies, “policy” means white papers. It means understanding the details of how government programs work. It means charts and tables. It means historical context. It means stuff generally written by folks with PhDs who have deep subject matter expertise.

This is my meat and drink. If this blog had a mission statement, it would be something like this: Bringing policy lite to the masses. I like reading academic papers and trying to explain them in plain English that any ordinary educated person can understand. I like historical context. I respect folks with deep subject matter expertise. I adore charts and tables. And I want to spread all this stuff to more people.

But we live in a country where a third of the population can’t name the three branches of government and something like 95 percent probably have no idea how Social Security works. Feel free to sneer if you must, but most people just aren’t interested in policy deep dives. And why should they be? Being a political junkie is basically a hobby, like collecting stamps or writing bad poetry. You probably aren’t interested in that stuff, and there’s no reason lots of people should be interested in your hobby.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t care about political issues. Many of them care more than you do. They just don’t have much a jones for white papers. Nonetheless, all of these things are policy:

Building a wall to reduce illegal immigration from Mexico.
Keeping troops in Afghanistan.
Changing our strategy for destroying ISIS.
Improving relations with Russia.
Toughening visa requirements to keep potential terrorists out of the country.
Expanding or repealing Obamacare.
Signing an agreement with Iran to halt their nuclear program.
Making college free.
Halting new trade agreements until they’re made better for American workers.
Spending more on the military.
Insisting that treaty allies pay a higher share of defense costs.
Creating a federal maternity leave and child care program.
Tackling climate change.
Whether we should make America more energy independent via more clean power or more extraction of fossil fuels.
Profiling Muslims and surveilling mosques to stay ahead of Islamic terrorism.
Appointing liberal vs. conservative Supreme Court justices.
Routine stop-and-frisk as a way of combating crime.
Raising the minimum wage.
Rebuilding infrastructure.

This is a long list, and it doesn’t even include the usual evergreens (abortion, guns, tax cuts) or stuff that hasn’t broken through enough to really affect things (vets, charter schools, NSA spying). In a nutshell, then, I’d argue not only that 2016 is a policy-heavy year, but that thanks to Donald Trump’s, um, earthy approach to things, the differences in policy between the two candidates are sharper than in nearly any election during my adult life. Lack of detail is irrelevant. Nor does it matter if you don’t like Trump’s earthiness. For the average Joe and Jane, Trump’s coarse approach makes his positions more policy-centric than arguments over whether we should use chained CPI for Social Security COLAs or support a public option for Obamacare.

There is, obviously, a vast rhetorical gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but their policy gap is equally far-reaching. And my guess is that more people know about their policy differences than in any year in recent memory. If anything, 2016 has featured more policy topics making it into the spotlight than usual. It’s the year that policy truly took over an American presidential election.

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2016 Is the Most Policy-Heavy Election in Decades

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Clinton’s VP Pick Just Gave an Eloquent Defense of a Woman’s Right to Choose

by KelleePulido Posted on October 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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At the end of Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate—which was full of interruptions and topical tangents—Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) cut through the chaos to deliver an eloquent defense of reproductive rights, after moderator Elaine Quijano asked the candidates to speak about social issues and their religious faith.

Kaine said that when it comes to making decisions around pregnancy, “We trust American women to do that.”

“I think you should live your moral values,” Kaine added, after speaking earlier about his own sense of conflict between his Catholic faith and some of the policy decisions he faced in politics. “But the very last thing the government should do is to punish women who make reproductive choices. And that is the fundamental difference between a Clinton-Kaine ticket and a Trump-Pence ticket.”

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Clinton’s VP Pick Just Gave an Eloquent Defense of a Woman’s Right to Choose

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Obama took up Standing Rock, albeit delicately, at his last Tribal Nations Conference.

by AntonetHipple Posted on September 27, 2016

Yes, if Sen. Debbie Stabenow has her way. The Michigan Democrat announced The Urban Agriculture Act in Detroit on Monday.

The Department of Agriculture already offers support for city farmers, but this bill would add to those grants, loans, and education programs. It would also provide $10 million for urban ag research, $5 million for community gardens, incentives for farmers to provision neighbors with fresh food, and resources for composting and cleaning up contaminated soil.

So far Stabenow hasn’t released much more than a list of bullet points. The road from proposing a bill and passing a law is long, and details could change, which means there’s not much to analyze. But in general, urban ag is a mixed bag of policy greens.

Urban farms can build community, teach people about farming, and provide extra cash to laborers in cities, but they don’t create many good-paying jobs. If we farm vacant lots, rooftops, and former lawns, that’s likely a win for the environment. But if farms displace housing and spread cities out, that’s a loss. Similarly, if we replace plants grown under the sun with plants grown indoors under artificial lights, that’s no good for the climate.

For more on urban farms see our previous work, and this Next City analysis.

Credit – 

Obama took up Standing Rock, albeit delicately, at his last Tribal Nations Conference.

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Donald Trump Has Killed Off Support for a Border Wall

by Monty5006709 Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve been bemused for a while by the support for Donald Trump among hard-core anti-immigrant pundits. Mainly this is because I wonder why they think he’s serious about his wall. Pretty much everything he says and does is a con job of one kind or another, and there’s no real reason to think he’d stick to his guns about the wall if he became president. Instead, since he doesn’t actually care one way or the other about this, he’d probably cut a deal with Paul Ryan for some kind of comprehensive immigration reform—and it would have a far better chance of actually passing than it would if Hillary Clinton proposed it. For the anti-immigrant dead-enders, Trump is likely to be the worst possible choice.

More recently, though, I’ve also begun to think that Trump will be bad for the anti-immigrant crowd even if he loses. For starters, it’s never good to have your signature policy associated with a loser. More to the point, though, we all know that public support for specific policies depends a lot on who they come from. When President Obama supports something, Republicans suddenly hate it. When Trump supports something, people who dislike Trump suddenly hate it. Since Trump is dropping in the polls like a rock, this suggests that support for getting tough on immigrants might be dropping too.

Michael Tesler reports that this is exactly what’s happened:

A number of studies have found that Trump performed best in the primaries among the most anti-immigrant Republicans. But now, in the middle of the general election campaign, Trump is easily the most unpopular major party nominee in modern times. And his historic unpopularity may have also eroded support for the border wall.

The Pew Research Center gauged support for the border fence before and after June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy. The percentage supporting the border fence was the exact same in 2007, 2011, and 2015: 46 percent. However, that dropped to 36 percent in March 2016.

In CBS/New York Times polls, public support for “building a wall along the US-Mexico border to try to stop illegal immigration” also dropped….The results from the RAND Corp’s Presidential Election Panel Survey (PEPS) are even more telling….The PEPS data reveal who was particularly likely to shift to opposing the border wall: people who did not like Trump in 2015.

….It appears, then, that Trump’s strong support for the border wall has made this policy considerably less popular with the American public.

Supporting Trump was always a high-risk strategy for supporters of a border wall. They put all their money on snake eyes, and it turns out the dice were not their friends.

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Donald Trump Has Killed Off Support for a Border Wall

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