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radicalurbanista · 4 years

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there is one possible good outcome of this year that I’ve been thinking about a lot

It requires a lot of action before and after the election and a focused political strategy for the next few election cycles. It will have to meet certain conditions at critical times, but if it does, it could mean the end of the republican party the passage of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and a labor party. Basically, it depends on splitting the Democratic party after ensuring Democrat control of Congress and the White House, DSA expansion, and eliminating the electoral college.

1) Circa the 2020 election

Biden wins the electoral college

This is almost completely dependent on white moderates in swing states voting for Biden and on massive protests during what will likely be a highly contested legal battle for the presidency. The protests are to show leaders that we reject any legitimacy of another trump term. Protests against trump will face even more violence at the hands of police and their conspiring with white nationalists. There is still the possibility of a coup. But voting alone will not ensure trump’s removal from office, everyone needs to be out in the streets and organizing strikes and protests. It will be a lot easier than stopping trump after he’s secured a second term. If this fails, protesting conditions will become even more hostile, and Americans will see no relief from the economic depression or pandemic. The U.S. may end as a dictatorship, but I have no idea when.

Democrats take majority control of the senate

This is essential as well. There are many senate seats this year where Republicans could be replaced by Dems. Here is a more thorough guide on who could be unseated. This will help with passing bills that Dems agree on. The more the better. Without this, splitting the party won’t be possible yet.

Democrats expand control of the House

This will make splitting the Dem party easier.

DSA (Democratic Socialists) expand control at the local and state level

The emergence of DSA to a national party requires many more wins at the local level. This will give them the chance to become the left-wing national party. 50% of Democrat voters support socialism, and that’s pre-pandemic and pre-depression. It is these voters who will be attracted to the DSA as they grow.

Democrats expand control in state legislatures

Once the census results are in and states have to redistrict, Democrat-controlled state legislatures will likely produce less gerrymandered conservative districts. This will secure more representational elections for the next decade.

2) Before the 2022 election

Eliminate the electoral college

This is another very difficult part. Conservative Dems (like Biden) oppose eliminating the electoral college. His current views may not matter once the DNC tells him to do otherwise. It will likely be moderate and left Dems who push this agenda forward, as it is within the best interest of the Dem party to make the popular vote chose the presidency. National support for it may also be higher than ever after the election, meaning more pressure on Dems to act while they can. If the electoral college is eliminated, Republicans will lose their chance at winning the presidency again, meaning trump 2024 won’t be possible

Begin major canvassing for M4A, GND, police defunding, and abolishing ICE

Once Dems control Congress and the White House, the left can be more on the political offense rather than defense. The DNC opposes Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, but support for them will only likely increase as more people die from COVID-19, suffer under medical debt, face record breaking unemployment and evictions, and climate crises continue to destroy areas. These bills are popular, and the DSA supports them, which will give them leverage in winning more elections and even in poaching Democrat representatives like Bernie and AOC. Support for abolishing ICE and the police are only likely to grow thanks to continued BLM organizing.

Counter Republican campaigns at the state and local levels

Republicans are unified, backed by money, and think long-term, but this election is different because their only platform is supporting trump. Should they lose the White House and Congress, and lose the electoral college, they will have to create a whole new base and platform goals to win a national election ever again. Local organizers will have to counter republican strategies at the local and state levels in hopes of killing the party. Republicans might be able to find a way to attract half of the voter base again, but they might also be clinging too tightly to racism, which, although strong, is no longer enough to win the presidency through popular vote. They could also lose southern state control as cities like Atlanta and Houston grow and their voters flip the state blue.

3) Circa the 2024 election

Enter the DSA into national elections

If the electoral college is gone and the DSA was won more local and state seats in 2020 and 2022, the DSA has a chance to enter national elections. As a popular left-wing party and with the decline of the republican party, the DSA can now attract left-wing previously “captured” by Dems. They may likely not win the presidency, but the DSA will force Dems to be the nation’s right-wing party and become the left-wing party in doing so. Formerly republican voters will likely switch to Dems as the Democratic party becomes more conservative and if republicans no longer have a chance at winning national elections.

Center campaigns around major bills not yet passed (M4A, GND, police defunding, and/or abolishing ICE)

This keeps important issues relevant and keeps Dems on the defense as to why they won’t pass the bills.

4) After

Continue building revolutionary potential now that the two national parties are welfare capitalism/socialism-lite and neoliberalism.

The DSA will likely capture much of the working-class vote, Millennials and Gen Z, and POC. If republicans are still around, their goal will be to find a new way to split the working class vote, likely requiring collaborating with Dems. However, their old strategy of splitting by rural/urban may no longer work. Businesses will do everything they can to stop a party from representing workers: it’s why the parties realigned after the New Deal.

This is all possible and will offer actual harm reduction to the working class for the first time since the 70s. None of it will be possible without massive organizing and protest efforts on the ground. None of it will be possible without strong interracial ties and community building. Voting is essential, but it’s the bare minimum and inadequate alone. During this period, BLM and new leftist movements could grow, we could see a militant left party to further curb U.S. domestic authoritarianism. We could see national policy that interferes less in the Global South. We would likely see increased protections for workers, a redistribution of wealth, and new public infrastructure. We could even see the end of the U.S. by the close of the decade, or at least how it would finally happen.

I’m happy to explain any point further, but I thought I’d put my degree to use and share a possible political strategy for the next decade that could use protest and direct action with electoral politics to end U.S. dominance and global capitalism while making the conditions for final stages of revolution less hostile. The next decade will be turbulent regardless, but would this ^^^ is the best way for that turbulence to lead to liberation.

#essay #politics #strategy #social policy #text #US #biden #green new deal #medicare for all #DSA #defund police #blm #party realignment #DNC #long post #revolution

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kadehenry · 4 years

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Beyond Apologetics and “the image of god”

This is a love letter – a curiosity, a hope towards our freedom.

Dear siblings, I am trying to find out what we mean. I know I won’t know it for all of us. And I know I won’t know it alone. I am only ever myself, in my body. And I believe you about your bodies too. I know lots of people don’t. And no one wants to tell the story differently. Because the story we have already feels so precious. But I think maybe the story isolates us from each other. We pick it up as the Narrative That Matters, because it is the first one that kind of fits.

Like the first time you put on that dress. The first time you squeezed into that binder. The first time there was eyeliner.

We were so certain we all looked good. And we did. And we’ve grown since then.

I hope for a theology for the guys who all go camping, huddled in the van before breakfast, tenderly administering each other’s shots so that we don’t have to be in charge of stabbing ourselves one more time.

What I want to do in my work is simply to administer the shot. To reflect back on our dosage. To be in charge of the sharps for a minute, so you can take off the binder and revel in the sunshine the way we never do at the beach because the surgery is too expensive, or we want kids first, or we’ve actually always hated our bodies, and dysphoria was just another word we gave ourselves, or they gave us.

I’m writing for the women whose dysphoria has gotten worse as the other pieces click into place. Maybe that is what I feel – dysphoria about the imago dei. People keep saying I’m in the imago dei, and I don’t know what they mean. Or I do, and I don’t think that’s how it really is. I like the idea, I can perform the apologetic, but I don’t feel like that. Or I do feel like that, and I wonder what it is I’ve signed on for. I worry about the masculinity. I worry about the passing.

But, you may ask, why does it matter? Don’t we have theological arguments about that? Aren’t we all imago dei - made in the image of God?

It matters because Alexis killed herself. It matters because Stephanie has days where all the imago dei in the world won’t quiet the dysphoria. It matters because Mason is still dealing with their pronouns being fucked up, and by people who claim to love and care about them. It matters because all the imago dei in the world isn’t making Medicare pay for Ryn’s chronic pain medication, or Aiden’s anxiety, or Crystal’s allergies and respiratory issues, or Daryl’s eating disorder, or Moira girlfriend, whose job security relies on hernot publicly dating a trans woman, or Brian’s sobriety, or August’s sobriety, or Caryne shaking and crying in their car as teenagers surround the vehicle pounding on it. Imago dei isn’t thick enough to get my friends through another winter without killing themselves. It doesn’t give Scout back hir home or hir childhood. It doesn’t un-institutionalize Leo for those 18 months. It doesn’t get Janice out of jail.

And I am so tired of the story.

When we claim the imago dei as an apologetic strategy we may claim our humanity, but we don’t even begin to touch God. And although in one sense that may be fine – we all just want to be human and not dead to the people around us – in another it matters because if we’re only using imago dei to say something about ourselves, then we’re still stuck with whatever God it is that someone else decides we’re in the image of. And I believe God is bigger than that. We deserve more than just harm-reduction apologetics.

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fullcirclehealthreview-blog · 4 years

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Health Care Reform - Busting The 3 Biggest Myths Of ObamaCare

In the last few months we've seen a lot of Health Care Reform rules and regulations being introduced by the Health and Human Services Department. Every time that happens, the media gets hold of it and all kinds of articles are written in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the TV network news programs talk about it. All the analysts start talking about the pros and cons, and what it means to businesses and individuals.

The problem with this is, many times one writer looked at the regulation, and wrote a piece about it. Then other writers start using pieces from that first article and rewriting parts to fit their article. By the time the information gets widely distributed, the actual regulations and rules get twisted and distorted, and what actually shows up in the media sometimes just doesn't truly represent the reality of what the regulations say.

There's a lot of misunderstanding about what is going on with ObamaCare, and one of the things that I've noticed in discussions with clients, is that there's an underlying set of myths that people have picked up about health care reform that just aren't true. But because of all they've heard in the media, people believe these myths are actually true.

Today we're going to talk about three myths I hear most commonly. Not everybody believes these myths, but enough do, and others are unsure what to believe, so it warrants dispelling these myths now.

The first one is that health care reform only affects uninsured people. The second one is that Medicare benefits and the Medicare program isn't going to be affected by health care reform. And then the last one is that health care reform is going to reduce the costs of healthcare.

Health Care Reform Only Affects Uninsured

Let's look at the first myth about health care reform only affecting uninsured people. In a lot of the discussions I have with clients, there are several expressions they use: "I already have coverage, so I won't be affected by ObamaCare," or "I'll just keep my grandfathered health insurance plan," and the last one - and this one I can give them a little bit of leeway, because part of what they're saying is true -- is "I have group health insurance, so I won't be affected by health care reform."

Well, the reality is that health care reform is actually going to affect everybody. Starting in 2014, we're going to have a whole new set of health plans, and those plans have very rich benefits with lots of extra features that the existing plans today don't offer. So these new plans are going to be higher cost.

Health Care Reform's Effect On People With Health Insurance

People that currently have health insurance are going to be transitioned into these new plans sometime in 2014. So the insured will be directly affected by this because the health plans they have today are going away, and they will be mapped into a new ObamaCare plan in 2014.

Health Care Reform Effect On The Uninsured

The uninsured have an additional issue in that if they don't get health insurance in 2014, they face a mandate penalty. Some of the healthy uninsured are going to look at that penalty and say, "Well, the penalty is 1% of my adjusted gross income; I make $50,000, so I'll pay a $500 penalty or $1,000 for health insurance. In that case I'll just take the penalty." But either way, they will be directly affected by health care reform. Through the mandate it affects the insured as well as the uninsured. Get More Info Full Circle Health reviews

Health Care Reform Effect On People With Grandfathered Health Plans

People that have grandfathered health insurance plans are not going to be directly affected by health care reform. But because of the life cycle of their grandfathered health plan, it's going to make those plans more costly as they discover that there are plans available now that they can easily transfer to that have a richer set of benefits that would be more beneficial for any chronic health issues they may have.

For people who stay in those grandfathered plans, the pool of subscribers in the plan are going to start to shrink, and as that happens, the cost of those grandfathered health insurance plans will increase even faster than they are now. Therefore, people in grandfathered health plans will also be impacted by ObamaCare.

Health Care Reform Effect On People With Group Health Insurance

The last one, the small group marketplace, is going to be the most notably affected by health care reform. Even though the health care reform regulations predominantly affect large and medium-sized companies, and companies that have 50 or more employees, smaller companies will also be affected, even though they're exempt from ObamaCare itself.

What many surveys and polls are starting to show is that some of the businesses that have 10 or fewer employees are going to look seriously at their option to drop health insurance coverage altogether, and no longer have it as an expense of the company. Instead, they will have their employees get health insurance through the health insurance exchanges.

In fact, some of the carriers are now saying they anticipate that up to 50% of small groups with 10 or fewer employees are going to drop their health insurance plan sometime between 2014 and 2016. That will have a very large effect on all people who have group health insurance, especially if they're in one of those small companies that drop health insurance coverage.

It's not just uninsured that are going to be affected by health care reform, everybody is going to be impacted.

Health Care Reform Will Not Affect Medicare

The next myth was that health care reform would not affect Medicare. This one is kind of funny because right from the very get-go, the most notable cuts were specifically targeting the Medicare program. When you look at Medicare's portion of the overall federal, you can see that in 1970, Medicare was 4% of the U.S. federal budget, and by 2011, it had grown to 16% of the federal budget.

If we look at it over the last 10 years, from 2002 to 2012, Medicare is the fastest growing part of the major entitlement programs in the federal government, and it's grown by almost 70% during that period of time.

Because of how large Medicare is and how fast it's growing, it's one of the key programs that ObamaCare is trying to get a handle on, so it doesn't bankrupts the U.S. Medicare is going to be impacted, and in fact the initial cuts to Medicare have already been set at about $716 billion.

Medicare Advantage Cuts And The Effects

Of that $716 billion cut, the Medicare Advantage program gets cut the most, and will see the bulk of the effects. What that's going to do is increase the premiums people pay for their Medicare Advantage plans, and reduce the benefits of those plans.

Increased Medicare Advantage Costs

Right now, many people choose Medicare Advantage plans because they have zero premium. When given a choice on Medicare plans, they view it as an easy choice because it's a free program for them, "Sure, I get Medicare benefits, I don't pay anything for it; why not." Now they're going to see Medicare premiums start to climb, and go from zero to $70, $80, $90, $100. We've already seen that with some of the Blue Cross Medicare Advantage plans this year. It's going to get worse as we go forward in the future.

Reduced Medicare Advantage Benefits

In order to minimize the premium increases, what many Medicare Advantage plans will do is increase the copayments, increase the deductibles, and change the co-insurance rates. In order to keep the premiums down, they'll just push more of the costs onto the Medicare Advantage recipients. Increased premiums and reduced benefits are what we're going to see coming in Medicare Advantage plan.

Fewer Medicare Physicians

And then if that wasn't bad enough, as Medicare doctors begin receiving lower and lower reimbursements for Medicare Advantage people, they're going to stop taking new Medicare Advantage recipients. We're going to see the pool of doctors to support people in Medicare starting to shrink as well, unless changes are made over the course of the next five years. So Medicare is going to be affected, and it's going to be affected dramatically by health care reform. Everybody's kind of on pins and needles, waiting to see what's going to happen there.

Health Care Reform Will Reduce Healthcare Costs

The last one, and probably the biggest myth about health care reform, is everybody thinking that ObamaCare will reduce healthcare costs. That's completely hogwash. Early on in the process, when they were trying to come up with the rules and regulations, the emphasis and one of the goals for reform was to reduce healthcare costs.

But somewhere along the line, the goal actually shifted from cost reduction to regulation of the health insurance industry. Once they made that transition, they pushed cost reductions to the back burner. There are some small cost reduction components in ObamaCare, but the real emphasis is on regulating health insurance. The new plans, for example, have much richer benefits than many plans today: richer benefits means richer prices.

Health Care Reform Subsidies: Will They Make Plans Affordable?

A lot of people hope, "The subsidies are going to make health insurance plans more affordable, won't they?" Yes, in some cases the subsidies will help to make the plans affordable for people. But if you make $1 too much, the affordable plans are suddenly going to become very expensive and can cost thousands of dollars more over the course of a year. Will a subsidy make it affordable or not affordable is really subject to debate at this point in time. We're going to have to actually see what the rates look like for these plans.

New Health Care Reform Taxes Passed On To Consumers

Then there's a whole ton of new health care reform taxes that have been added into the system to help pay for ObamaCare. That means everybody who has a health insurance plan, whether it's in a large group, a small group, or just as an individual, is going to be taxed in order to pay for the cost of reform. Health care reform adds various taxes on health care that insurance companies will have to collect and pay, but they're just going to pass it right through to us, the consumer.

Mandate Won't Reduce Uninsured Very Much

During the initial years of health care reform, the mandate is actually pretty weak. The mandate says that everyone must get health insurance or pay a penalty (a tax). What that's going to do is make healthy people just sit on the sidelines and wait for the mandate to get to the point where it finally forces them to buy health insurance. People with chronic health conditions that couldn't get health insurance previously, are all going to jump into healthcare at the beginning of 2014.

At the end of that year, the cost for the plans is going to go up in 2015. I can guarantee that that's going to happen, because the young healthy people are not going to be motivated to get into the plans. They won't see the benefit of joining an expensive plan, whereas the chronically ill people are going to get into the plans and drive the costs up.

Health Care Reform's Purpose Is Just A Matter Of Semantics

The last portion of this is, one of the key things - and it's funny, I saw it for the first two years, 2010, and '11 - one of the key things that was listed in the documentation from the Obama administration was: Health Care Reform would help reduce the cost that we would see in the future if we do nothing today. That was emphasized over and over again. That was how they presented health care cost reduction, that it would reduce the future costs. Not today, but it would reduce what we would pay in the future if we did nothing about it now.

Well, that's great, 10 years from now we're going to pay less than we might have paid. And we all know how accurate future projections usually are. In the meantime, we're all paying more today, and we're going to pay even more in 2014 and more in 2015 and 2016. People are going to be pretty upset about that.

Conclusion

Those three myths, that health care reform is only going to affect the uninsured, that it won't affect Medicare beneficiaries, and that ObamaCare is going to reduce healthcare costs, are just that. They are myths. There's nothing to them.

It's really important that you pay attention to what's happening with health care reform, because there are more changes that are coming as we go through this year, 2013. Knowing how to position yourself so that you're in the right spot to be able to make the best decision at the beginning of 2014 is going to be really important for everybody.

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octavejohn2-blog · 4 years

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replacing An Excess Skin With A Facelift.

Hifu Treatment

Content

What Can I expect during My Cryopen therapy?

two therapies.

Cryomatic Ii Cryo Console.

contact united States Today For Your Cryo storage Space Solutions (or Anything Else Gas Or Cryo Related).

Femiwand vaginal Area tightening treatment Edinburgh.

See Our providers.

What Can I Do To lessen Cellulite?

There is nothing that I feel can be improved at Cadogan Cosmetics. I was dealt with as well as cared for very well the location was very clean.

Cosmetic surgery outcomes as well as benefits can differ and also are various for each person. Therefore, https://luton.hi-fu.co.uk/ can not ensure specific results. Mr Alamouti is among our top boob job, fat reduction & abdominoplasty surgeons.

Nevertheless, it is essential to remember that although your external look will certainly look healthy and balanced and recovered, inside your body will certainly still take 6 to eight weeks to recover completely. The outcomes of the Principle ™ Facelift procedure will certainly leave your with a natural, fresh as well as vibrant appearance that lasts up to ten years. I really feel so excellent regarding myself and also can not think how much far better I appear to look. I would very advise having surgical treatment with Amir at Bella Vou. I really feel much more youthful and also revitalised in my look, as well as it's all thanks to Bella Vou.

Mr Super qualified in Medication in 1987 and also learnt Bariatric surgical treatment in 2001. We'll exist to assist throughout your journey, from yourfirst consultationto completion of yourcomprehensive aftercareprogramme. Facelift surgery can offer you a more vibrant and renewed appearance. Consent By ticking this box you consent to obtain marketing material by means of email, text, post and telephone calls from The Medical facility Team and Transform and any third parties directly related to your care.

Can you get frostbite from cryotherapy?

Frostbite is possible if someone has wet clothing or is overly sweaty during the session. Make sure the client is completely dry before they enter the cryotherapy chamber. If not make sure they dry off any water or excess sweat from working out with a towel.

What Can I anticipate during My Cryopen treatment?

Hi-Fu.co.uk hifu Daventry: full feature set will certainly ask you concerning the results you're wishing for and also deal with you to attain the best end result. Springfield Medical facility opened up in 1987 and is just one of Essex's leading private healthcare facilities. It is a 64 bedded device containing fifty 8 private bedrooms 4 of which are 2 bedded moms and dad as well as child areas and a high observation system with 2 beds. The operation is performed under a basic anaesthetic and also normally takes two to three hours.

What is the cost of ThermiVa?

The Non-Invasive, Non-Hormonal Option Average Cost: $2,650. Range: $1,250 to $3,900 for 3 treatments for the first year. One follow-up appointment per year: $1000-$1500 per year afterwards. ThermiVa is NOT covered by insurance or Medicare.

Tea and coffee are high in caffeine, so we suggest you to keep those to a minimum. Also, attempt to stay clear of foods that are high in sugar and salt as high as feasible. These include the advancement of a blood clot, nausea or vomiting as well as vomiting, as well as postoperative pain. As the surgical treatment entails the use of an anaesthetic representative, it is likewise feasible that you may create anaesthetic issues. At the end of the surgical procedure, the registered nurses will certainly move you to a recovery space. Below, you will slowly wake up from your anaesthetic under close guidance.

My skin is tighter and also more flexible, stretch marks are hardly noticeable, as well as I make certain I wouldn't even get approved for abdominoplasty surgery anymore.

As the ultrasound waves are focused throughout the treatment areas, you will certainly really feel small quantities of power transmitted with to accurate depths under the skin.

Dr Dhillon will evaluate the skin and assistance figure out if HIFU is the most appropriate treatment to deal with any type of concerns patients might have, factoring in the condition of the skin and the individual's unique goals.

A full HIFU face as well as neck procedure normally takesbetween minutes, while an upper body treatment on its own will certainly take about thirty minutes.

A gel is applied to the location that will be treated as well as the ultrasonic tool is overlooked the skin.

Routine touch-up treatments will certainly aid keep the skin producing new collagen and also prolong the longevity of results.

Some clients delight in an initial result immediately complying with the treatment, yet the ultimate results will take place in simply 2 to 12 weeks, as exhausted collagen is renewed as well as renewed.

There is no special prep work or recovery as well as usually on the face it usually takes one treatment to obtain a recognizable outcome on the body a program of 4 therapies generally obtains the preferred outcomes.

two therapies.

The procedure takes in between 1 - 1.5 hrs, can be performed either under local anaesthetic or sedation, and is treated as a day case. The natural aging process will certainly proceed from the factor accomplished following the procedure.

You want to redefine your face by lowering loose, drooping skin. The appearance of your face is making you look older than you feel.

Cryomatic Ii Cryo Console.

We have actually invited an option of the country's very best specialists to join us at the Cadogan Center to ensure that you can be sure that whatever the nature of your treatment, you will be seeing one of the top professionals in the country. A 'mini-lift', or 'mini-facelift', is an innovative anti-ageing procedure that uses the most recent minimally intrusive medical strategies to transform the clock back on the age of your face by about 10 years. I really felt entirely safe and guaranteed, he explained every little thing in fantastic information and I really felt really confident that I would get the appearance I wanted, and also I did I'm thrilled with the end result. Among the Bella Vou group will certainly give you a phone call the day after surgical treatment to see to it you're well, have actually had a great evening, and to address any kind of questions. Prep work for your treatment can help reduce the danger of infection and also boost recovery. Shower and also laundry hair everyday as well as quit smoking cigarettes as well as e-cigarettes to minimize the danger of healing issues. Sometimes people present earlier, in their early forties as well as the treatment can be successful in the seventies, eighties or even nineties.

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The benefit of the Principle ™ Facelift is that it is under local, not a general anaesthetic, making it much safer for individuals with existing clinical issues. Bella Vou is committed to offering fulfillment, the highest possible requirements of treatment, and a very personal touch throughout the client journey. The highly-skilled, professional personnel are enthusiastic concerning helping people achieve the results they desire, but likewise making their experience delightful, stress and anxiety, and convenient. You will have little bruising, swelling, or scarring complying with the Concept ™ Facelift. Many people can go back to their normal regular within an issue of days.

get In Touch With united States Today For Your Cryo storage Space Solutions (or Anything Else Gas Or Cryo Related).

How can a 60 year old lose belly fat?

Burn more calories than you eat or drink. Eat more veggies, fruits, whole grains, fish, beans, and low-fat or fat-free dairy; and keep meat and poultry lean. Limit empty calories, like sugars and foods with little or no nutritional value. Avoid fad diets because the results don't last.

I feel more certain, I felt there was a more youthful person waiting to venture out, it has actually made a great difference to me and also how I feel. The entire experience has actually been superb as well as I'm over the moon with my outcomes. The treatment defined on this web page might be adjusted to meet your individual needs, so it is very important to follow your medical care professional's guidance and also raise any kind of inquiries that you might have with them. Also after you've left medical facility, we're still looking after you every step of the means. Once you're ready to be discharged, you'll need to prepare a taxi, pal or relative to take you house as you will not be able to drive. You must additionally ask if they can run some light tasks such as looking for you as you won't be really feeling up to it.

Woodland Hospital has 28 solitary areas, all with en collection facilities, 10 short remain beds as well as a 2 bedded high dependency device. If you would like to talk with somebody what is included and also just how much the procedure will set you back, call our team on, or leave us a message via our online query type here. Other sorts of facelift include the mid-face lift and composite facelift and also include lifting much deeper layers of the face. A healthy diet regimen is an essential factor in assisting you to heal and recoup after a facelift. Eat great deals of healthy and balanced environment-friendly veggies, fresh fruit, and high-protein foods such as chicken, fish and also legumes.

Does Cryo hurt?

HOW WILL MY BODY REACT TO THE COLD TEMPERATURE? Cold air therapy in the whole-body chamber uses dry, oxygenated air, so you won't experience shivering, goosebumps or other reactions that you might associate with being cold. Because of this technology, unlike an ice bath or immersion, cryotherapy is not painful.

There are many various other anti-ageing solutions readily available, both surgical and also non-surgical. Ask for a telephone call from among our client advisors or publication an appointment at the Cadogan Center if you would love to review your problems in more information. You may function from home the following day, yet it will certainly rely on just how sensitive you are to the discovery of current surgical treatment, as to when you head out to fulfill individuals. The factor is that you will certainly not be jeopardising the result by going out. Our Surgical Client Expert, Ellie, addresses our patients most regularly asked inquiries. Adhering to the procedure, you will certainly recuperate in our ambulatory healing rooms for in between two to three hrs, depending on the scale of the procedure. Once our professional nursing team more than happy that your first recuperation is full and also you are secure to return home, you will be permitted to leave the Clinic come with by a good friend or participant of your family members.

Femiwand vagina tightening Up therapy Edinburgh.

The results of Mini Face Lifting surgical treatment are anticipated to be stable for 3-- 5 years, however note that as you mature your face will certainly transform throughout the years. For instance, the tissues around the cheek will remain to be influenced by the aging adjustments and also gravity. People can go back to their normal day-to-day tasks after 1 week, however prevent difficult exercise/ activity for 6 weeks including any contact sporting activities. Mini Facelift Surgery usually takes approximately 1 -2 hrs to carry out depending on the complexity of the surgery. Muscles additionally shed their size and stamina as well as with loss of bone particularly around the upper as well as lower jaws, the face handles the regular functions of aging. The skin loses collagen as well as hyaluronic acid, with sun-damage and contamination, pigmentation, fine blood vessels as well as wrinkles show up.

Is Cryoskin better than coolsculpting?

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-11-02/nancy-pelosi-is-worried-2020-candidates-are-on-wrong-track?__twitter_impression=true

🍁🏈🍎🍁🏈 🍎🍁🏈 🍎🍁🏈 🍎🍁

NEW: Speaker Pelosi warns her party’s presidential hopefuls that ideas like Medicare For All and free college may fire up the left but won’t beat Trump.

“Remember November,” she says. “You must win the Electoral College.”

Pelosi tells Bloomberg News: “What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan. What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”

PELOSI on

Medicare for All: “has its complications... the Affordable Care Act is a better benefit than Medicare.”

Green New Deal: “very strong opposition on the labor side ... because it’s like 10 years, no more fossil fuel. Really?”

Remarkable quotes from Speaker Pelosi here questioning the political viability of the most progressive ideas in the 2020 Democratic primary.

“As a left-wing San Francisco liberal I can say to these people: What are you thinking?”

Nancy Pelosi, who could still be Speaker in 2021, says the next president must abide by pay-as-you-go rules because “we cannot just keep increasing the debt.”

That would limit the ambitions of an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

When asked by @SahilKapur Speaker Pelosi if she favors a wealth tax, she didn’t say yes or no, but called for “bipartisan” tax changes that unwind the “dumb” Trump tax cuts of 2017.

Nancy Pelosi Is Worried 2020 Candidates Are on Wrong Track

Sahil Kapur | Published November 2, 2019, 6:00 AM ET |Bloomberg | Posted November 2, 2019 |

Speaker questions appeal of Medicare For All, Green New Deal

Ideas could repel voters in swing Midwestern states, she says

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is issuing a pointed message to Democrats running for president in 2020: Those liberal ideas that fire up the party’s base are a big loser when it comes to beating President Donald Trump.

Proposals pushed by Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders like Medicare for All and a wealth tax play well in liberal enclaves like her own district in San Francisco but won’t sell in the Midwestern states that sent Trump to the White House in 2016, she said.

“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said at a roundtable of Bloomberg News reporters and editors on Friday. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”

“Remember November,” she said. “You must win the Electoral College.”

Pelosi was careful not to back any one candidate in the party’s contentious presidential contest, but didn’t hold back when asked about which ideas should – and shouldn’t – form the party’s case to American voters. Or about her fears that candidates like Warren and Sanders are going down the wrong track by courting only fellow progressives – and not the middle-of-the-road voters Democrats need to win back from Trump.

This is familiar ground for Pelosi, who has spent the year tussling with the “Squad,” a vanguard of liberal newcomers to the House led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

“As a left-wing San Francisco liberal I can say to these people: What are you thinking?” Pelosi said. “You can ask the left — they’re unhappy with me for not being a socialist.”

Her call for caution is backed by the authority she carries as a giant of Democratic politics who rose from the left wing of the party to become the first female speaker of the House and has earned grudging praise from her foes for her skill as a legislator.

Warren and Sanders are betting on a different theory — that voters who float between parties are less ideological and can be inspired to vote for candidates who represent bold new change in Washington.

Pelosi said Democrats should seek to build on Obamacare instead of pushing ahead with the more sweeping Medicare for All plan favored by Warren and Sanders that would create a government-run health insurance system and abolish private coverage.

“Protect the Affordable Care Act — I think that’s the path to health care for all Americans. Medicare For All has its complications,” Pelosi said, adding that “the Affordable Care Act is a better benefit than Medicare.”

Warren has been under pressure from Biden and other candidates to demonstrate that her plan wouldn’t require tax increases on middle-class Americans.

On Friday, her campaign said it would cost $20.5 trillion and would be funded by raising taxes on large corporations and the wealthy, cracking down on tax evasion, reducing defense spending and putting newly legalized immigrants on the tax rolls. The Biden campaign called that plan “mathematical gymnastics” intended to hide the fact that it would result in higher taxes for the middle class.

Warren swatted back at the criticism, accusing Biden of “running in the wrong presidential primary.”

“Democrats are not going to win by repeating Republican talking points,” the Massachusetts senator said in Des Moines, Iowa. “So, if Biden doesn’t like that, I’m just not sure where he’s going.”

Pelosi also expressed worries about voters’ reactions to the Green New Deal, which Sanders and Warren also support, that calls for radical, rapid reductions in carbon emissions. “There’s very strong opposition on the labor side to the Green New Deal because it’s like 10 years, no more fossil fuel. Really?” she said.

Pelosi said Democrats must stick with pay-as-you-go rules to avoid adding to the debt, a point of contention with left-leaning figures who want to permit more deficit spending for ambitious liberal priorities.

“We cannot just keep increasing the debt,” she said.

Pelosi added that she doesn’t understand the race to the left among some candidates, because “Bernie and Elizabeth own the left, right? Is anybody going to out-left them?”

She stopped short of endorsing a tax on wealth, an idea that Warren and Sanders have embraced as a means to reduce income inequality and expand the safety net. The speaker said she wants “bipartisan” tax changes that lower the debt and fix the “dumb” Republican tax cuts of 2017.

She also steered clear of backing a cap on pay for chief executive officers.

The speaker, who recently led the House to formally vote on an impeachment inquiry into Trump, said the most critical question candidates should be answering for voters is why they should be president.

“Show them what’s in your heart, your hopes and dreams,” she said. “It’s not about you. It’s about them.”

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#trumpism #president donald trump #against trump #donald trump #democrats #democratic party #2020 candidates #2020 election #2020 presidential election #bernie 2020 #speaker pelosi #madam speaker #pelosi and schumer #nancy pelosi #politics and government #political science #us politics #politics

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phroyd · 5 years

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Democrats criticized the legislation, originally known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, but officially called An Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Titles II and V of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2018, but Republicans defended the law as a necessary overhaul to previous tax laws and a means to provide economic relief for the middle class.

The dueling partisan narratives left many taxpayers with a murky understanding of the law’s impact.

To gain a better grasp on the intricacies of the 2017 Act, professors David Kamin, Lily Batchelder, and Daniel Shaviro—tax law experts from the New York University School of Law—cowrote a paper analyzing the sweeping legislation which appears in the Minnesota Law Review.

According to the authors, “Many of the new changes fundamentally undermine the integrity of the tax code and allow well-advised taxpayers to game the new rules through strategic planning.”

Here, the authors describe how some may take advantage of the new system, and how changes to the tax laws may affect the US economy.

‘CRACKING AND PACKING’

David Kamin: One of the largest tax cuts in the legislation goes to “pass-through” businesses—where income is taxed at the level of the owner rather than the business. But, to be eligible for this tax cut, owners need to meet certain very complex criteria.

For those with higher incomes, this includes being in the “right” line of business. That means being an architect (eligible) and not a lawyer (not eligible). Selling skincare products (eligible) but not being a dermatologist (not eligible). The formalistic and largely arbitrary lines then allow for much gaming, including what we—borrowing from the election law context—call “cracking and packing,” pulling apart and combining businesses.

For instance, a dermatologist office might “crack” apart a skincare products business run out of the same office, share overhead expenses, and then try to assign as much of those overhead expenses as possible to the dermatology practice to maximize profits eligible for the deduction. Possibly abusive? Yes, but very hard for the IRS to catch.

Lily Batchelder: The bill creates large incentives for the wealthy to convert their labor income into business income. This was already an issue in the tax code because of the carried interest loophole and loopholes in the payroll tax. But the bill makes a bad situation much, much worse.

If a wealthy individual hires an elite tax advisor to make their labor income look like pass-through business income, they can cut their marginal tax rate by more than 7 percentage points. And if they don’t need to spend the income anytime soon and treat it as corporate income, they can cut their tax rate by 20 percentage points.

Theoretically, middle class families could engage in the same games but they are much less likely to do so for at least three reasons. First, middle class families would receive much smaller tax benefits from such gaming and in many cases, none. Second, they often have little leverage over their employers to restructure their compensation and, even if they did, probably would have to give up all of their employee benefits in exchange. This includes their health insurance, 401(k), and disability insurance. Last, they are less likely to be able to afford a tax advisor with the expertise to structure this kind of arrangement in the first place!

GAMING THE SYSTEM

Daniel Shaviro: One of the many disappointing aspects of the 2017 act was its failure to address the opportunities for sheltering labor income from tax at full individual rates, through use of the corporate tax. Pre-2017, the top corporate rate was far closer to the top individual rate than it is post-2017. The main rationale for the corporate rate reduction pertained to global tax competition for scarce capital. This has no bearing on the case where the owner-employee of a corporation pays herself far less than the market value of her work.

For example, suppose I create a wildly successful new start-up and pay myself zero salary, despite my becoming, in net worth terms, a billionaire via the stock appreciation. The income that my efforts yield will show up in the corporate tax base, and be taxed at only 21 percent. True, I would face a second level of tax on paying myself dividends or selling my stock, but even this would be at a reduced rate. And what’s more, I may not need to make such payments if I am sufficiently financially liquid, e.g., by reason of borrowing against the value of the stock.

Opinions in the “biz” differ on how frequently taxpayers will find it worthwhile to do this, given the difficulty of extracting funds from one’s company tax-free. What is plain, however, is that Congress in 2017 deliberately did nothing to prevent this from happening. Indeed, the final version of the 2017 Act reduced the efficacy of a provision in the House bill that would have slightly addressed the problem by setting the tax rate for “personal service corporations” (PSCs) at 25 percent rather than just 21 percent. In the final act that rate is just 21 percent, like the general corporate rate, causing the PSC rules to be close to meaningless as a defense against using corporations as a tax shelter for labor income.

Shaviro: In the international realm, the 2017 Act may actually have improved the law marginally. At a minimum, it created a new regime that could be tweaked by future Congresses to yield a better system than the previous one. However, the main new international rules that it added to the code unnecessarily created multiple opportunities for game-playing. Just to give some quick examples without getting too deep into the weeds:

The foreign-derived intangible income (FDII) rules, which provide a special deduction for exports by companies, such as Apple and Facebook, that have valuable intellectual property, create incentives for “round-tripping” goods—e.g., selling them to a foreign taxpayer, then buying them back with just enough bells and whistles to prevent the entire transaction from being disregarded.

Both FDII and the global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) rules can create incentives to locate business assets abroad rather than at home.

The base erosion anti-avoidance tax (BEAT) can be gamed through such means as restructuring supply chains so one is purchasing sale items for customers from one’s foreign affiliates. The BEAT can also be gamed by adding lots of extra deductions (offset by lots of extra income so the sum total is a wash), so that so-called “base erosion tax benefits” will fall below an arbitrary “floor” (as a percentage of total deductions) that the BEAT imposes for no discernible reason.

VIOLATING THE WTO TREATY?

Shaviro: The FDII rules almost certainly violate the World Tax Organization treaty, of which the US is a signatory. They are expressly an export subsidy, and the WTO makes export subsidies illegal. If other treaty signatories challenge the FDII rules, there is a very high probability that they’ll be held illegal, with the consequence that peer countries will be authorized to respond with targeted provisions of their own.

In the last 30 or so years, the US has enacted illegal export subsidy rules on three separate occasions. Each time the rule was held violative and the US backed down. Why do this again? I think the main answer was cynicism, but ironically the prospect of an overturn makes the US companies that wanted favorable tax treatment more leery than they would otherwise have been of setting up complex structures to take maximum advantage of the FDII rules.

‘AN ARRAY OF MISTAKES’

Kamin: The legislation was written at an extremely rapid clip, leaving an array of mistakes—some minor and some large. An early one to emerge was the “grain glitch.” In attempting to apply the pass-through deduction to businesses organized as cooperatives, especially prevalent in agriculture, legislators wrote in an even larger loophole by accident. Effectively, farmers selling to these cooperatives (think Ocean Spray cranberries) could potentially entirely wipe out their tax liability because of the glitch.

This one was large enough—and was causing sufficient chaos in the agricultural sector—that it was fixed. But most haven’t been. So, take another: one of the largest revenue raisers in the legislation was limiting the deductibility of state and local taxes for individuals to $10,000. However, the letter of the law seems to fail to apply that to another form of cooperative, a housing cooperative.

So, owners of pricey cooperatives in NYC may be able to deduct their property taxes without limit; by contrast, owners of traditional condominiums and houses will not. And the list could go on.

MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

Batchelder: The bill is heavily tilted towards the wealthy. According to the official Congressional budget scorekeepers, this year the average millionaire will get a tax cut of more than $27,000 on their personal tax return, compared to a tax cut of $431 for an average middle-class family earning $40,000 to $50,000. Even as a share of their after-tax income, the tax cut for the average millionaire is three times as large.

It is also a very costly bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will increase our national debt by $1.9 trillion by 2028, even after including its effects on the economy. These large tax cuts will eventually have to be paid for. If Congress pays for them by raising revenues in proportion to income, the vast majority of middle class and low-income families will end up worse off. These families will be hit even harder if the bill is paid for by cuts to programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Shaviro: It’s often said that tax legislation should be judged by four main criteria: fairness, efficiency, complexity, and revenue adequacy. The 2017 Act, despite having good particular rules here and there, egregiously failed on all four counts.

It was an act of class warfare benefiting those at the top relative to everyone else, for the most part it reduced economic efficiency by creating perverse incentives and arbitrary distinctions between different activities, it made tax planning more complicated for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice, and it will probably lose on the order of $2 trillion of net revenue over 10 years, even if all supposedly expiring provisions are actually allowed to expire.

It was also the sloppiest, most poorly drafted tax legislation that I have ever seen, despite all the talent and effort deployed by hard-pressed staffers, because the process was so secretive and rushed.

Source: New York University

Phroyd

#taxes #wealthy

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is good news for liberal policy activists. And that’s whether she wins the nomination or not. The Massachusetts senator appears poised to serve as a progressive policy anchor in the 2020 Democratic field, pushing the field — and the eventual nominee — toward aggressively liberal policy stands.

How might Warren have such influence? Because the Massachusetts senator is planning to release detailed and decidedly liberal policy proposals on issue after issue. Her rivals, if past primary campaigns are any guide, will feel pressure to either “match” her on policy by coming up with their own proposals, say that they agree with Warren, or convince the party’s increasingly left-leaning electorate that Warren’s proposals are too liberal. And remember that presidential winners usually try to implement their promises — so an idea put out by Warren in March could be in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s platform in August and be signed into law by a President Gillibrand in 2021.

Here’s an example of how this works, from a past Democratic primary. Early in the 2008 campaign, John Edwards released a comprehensive plan to provide health care for millions of Americans. A few months later, then-Sen. Barack Obama, looking to compete with Edwards among liberal voters and activists, put out a similar proposal, which was the basic outline for the Affordable Care Act he signed into law as president.

In the 2020 Democratic nomination process, I expect that other candidates will also have lots of policy proposals. And Bernie Sanders in particular is likely to join Warren in pushing the Democratic primary debate to the left. But Warren is likely to be at the forefront of the “policy primary,”– the one-time Harvard professor is perhaps the wonkiest person in the field. And Warren knows how to push her ideas onto the national agenda quite well. Before she was elected to the Senate, Warren convinced congressional Democrats and President Obama to create the agency now known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren campaign aides told me that unveiling major policy proposals will be a big part of her candidacy, with the ideas intended to reinforce Warren’s broader message that the country needs “big, structural change,” not just incremental tweaks.

“I’ve been working on one central question for 30 years,” Warren told me in brief interview after a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, on Saturday, “‘what’s going wrong with working families across this country, why is America’s middle class getting hallowed out?’ I never thought I would come into politics, not in a million years, but that was my chance to fight bigger, back in 2012, when I went to the Senate.”1

“Getting into the presidential race means I can talk about the kinds of big, systemic changes we need to make,” she added.

“Warren is an unusually wonkish, policy-focused figure, not just attached to some concerns … but very specific and knowledgeable about them,” said David Karol, a University of Maryland political science professor and expert on the presidential nominations process, in an e-mail message.

Karol said that Warren’s potential effect on the 2020 race is analogous to four years ago, when Sanders seemed to push Hillary Clinton to take more leftward stances than she might have otherwise. If Clinton had been elected president, she would have felt pressure to implement some of those liberal campaign promises, which would have made Sanders’s 2016 run particularly important in shaping U.S. public policy. But Karol argued that Warren is somewhat distinct from Sanders, because in his estimation, she is more attuned to the finer details of legislation. So Warren might push the rest of the Democratic field to the left and force Sanders, who is already very liberal, to be more specific in explaining how his proposals will work.

“[Warren] has a deep mastery of policy, a staunchly progressive voting record,” said New York-based liberal political activist Sean McElwee, best known for advocating for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in an e-mail message. “She’ll be a real contender and will force every other candidate to get smart on policy and push the boundaries of what it means to be a progressive.”

So what are Warren’s ideas? It’s worth separating them into two general categories: ones that she is one of the principal authors of and those where she has embraced someone else’s proposal. The latter is important too — Warren taking up an idea while running for president can bring attention to obscure proposals written by backbenchers on Capitol Hill.

Here are some major Warren-authored policies:

A 2 percent annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and an additional 1 percent tax on household net worth above $1 billion.

Bans on members of Congress and other top officials in Washington from owning individual stocks while in office and doing any kind of lobbying after they leave office.

Postal banking, a requirement that all U.S. post offices offer checking and saving accounts to Americans who want to sign up for them.

Federal manufacturing of generic prescription drugs.

The removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

A reduction in the overall Department of Defense budget.

Federal funds to help first-time homeowners make the down payment on homes if they buy in neighborhoods that suffered in the past from redlining.

A requirement that large corporations reserve 40 percent of the seats on their boards for board members selected by workers at the company.

A ban on the U.S. using nuclear weapons first in a military conflict with another country.

A $146 billion “Marshall Plan” for Puerto Rico.

Here are a couple of proposals written by others that Warren has embraced:

Medicare-for-all;

The “Green New Deal,” a proposal championed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey to limit fossil fuel use in the U.S. in order to address climate change..

There are two caveats to this analysis. First, Warren’s influence on policy rests on her remaining a viable candidate, appearing in the debates, regularly visiting the early primary states and not, say, dropping out in May of this year. Second, I think Warren will particularly affect candidates, like Sanders, who are competing with her for support among liberal Democratic primary voters and activists like McElwee who comprise the party’s left wing. So Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who appears to be targeting more moderate Democrats, may not feel that she has to match Warren policy-for-policy.

That said, even more centrist candidates are likely to feel Warren’s pull on the race. Journalists and activists are going to ask candidates like Klobuchar if they support single-payer or Medicare-for-all. That will create pressure on those candidates to address Warren’s proposals, even if in the end they call for a less liberal variant — some kind of Medicare option for people between ages 50 and 64 instead of Medicare-for-all, for example. And Warren is likely to come up with ideas on issues that disproportionately affect blacks, Latinos, and young voters, three other key electoral blocs in the party. More moderate candidates can’t concede those voting blocs, so Warren’s proposals on issues that affect those voting blocs will likely influence all of the candidates.

So watch for Warren’s ideas — in some ways separately from Warren. A week after Warren unveiled her wealth tax, Sanders put out a plan to vastly increase the estate tax. I’m not saying Sanders proposed that idea only because of Warren’s move, but he might have proposed it so early in the presidential race (even before he officially announced his candidacy) because he felt pressured to match Warren. I would assume many Democratic candidates will put out proposals to vastly increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans — even if they aren’t as aggressive as Warren’s proposals. And his opposition to Warren’s wealth tax seems to be one of the primary reasons ex-Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, a one-time Democrat, is considering an independent presidential run.

So while Warren’s poll numbers put her behind some of her rivals right now, she’s already having an outsized influence on the race — and I would expect that to continue.

#IFTTT #FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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squareallworthy · 6 years

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Taking UBI seriously part 5: Sheahen

This is the fifth in a serious of posts looking for a serious proposal for universal basic income. Previous posts:

A Budget-Neutral Universal Basic Income by Jensen et. al.

Basic Income – Why and How in Difficult Economic Times: Financing a BI in Ireland by Healy et. al.

Andrew Yang’s proposal as part of his presidential campaign

A variety of indicators evaluated for two implementation methods for a Citizen’s Basic Income by Malcom Torry

Score so far: 0 serious proposals for a full UBI, 1 serious proposal for a partial income

In this post, I will look at It’s Time to Think BIG! How to Simplify the Tax Code and Provide Every American with a Basic Income Guarantee by Allan Sheahen.

tl;dr: Not a serious plan. Sloppy and politically poisoned. There is no way to tell whether poor people are better off or not, and the proposal includes several provisions that would never get a hearing in Congress. If this is as good as UBI proposals get, then there are no serious UBI proposals.

Allan Sheahen was a long-time advocate of a universal basic income, or basic income guarantee, as he preferred to call it. He published two books on the subject, Guaranteed Income: The Right to Economic Security in 1983 and The Basic Income Guarantee: Your Right to Economic Security in 2012, as well as numerous articles and papers. He was an early leader of the US Basic Income Guarantee Network (usbig.net) and spent more than 30 years advocating for basic income. Basic Income Earth Network ran an article noting his passing in 2014 which you can read here.

Sheahen published this proposal in 2006, using 2004 budget figures. On the benefits side, the plan is straightforward and typical: a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) of $10,000 per year for each adult US citizen under the age of 65, and $2000 for each child. Recipients of Social Security and other federal retirement programs would get either their current benefit or the BIG, whichever is greater. He would distribute this as a refundable tax credit, so none of the BIG would be taxed back.

He calculates a gross cost of $1,895.6 billion. To pay for this, he plans on treating all other income as taxable at standard rates and increasing taxes in various ways, eliminating a bunch of current transfer programs (basically everything except Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), and making deep cuts to defense spending. Figures below are in billions of dollars.

The budget cuts and tax increases are enough to fund the BIG with $265 billion left over. (Sheahen also considers a 2% tax on wealth, but that is for the purpose of balancing the federal budget. Since that is unrelated to the BIG, I am leaving it out of this budget.)

There is a lot going on in that $985.2 billion in the first line. It includes personal exemptions, standard deductions, all itemized deductions, all tax credits, and most importantly, all the tax expenditures for 2004 from this list, which Sheahan characterizes as “tax loopholes.” He provides details on all these provisions -- far too many to go into here -- which give his proposal the appearance of being thoroughly thought out. Once you start digging into it, though, it becomes clear that he didn’t pay that much attention to what he was doing. As a result, his proposal is sloppy, unclear on what it accomplishes, unfocused, and politically doomed.

General sloppiness

Sheahan seems to have taken a list of what he considers tax loopholes and, without looking at what they are, decided that they all have to go. He applied the same bulldozer approach to cutting transfer payments. The result is a mess.

Contradictory on pensions. Sheahen says that recipients of Social Security and other federal retirement programs would continue to receive their current benefits or the BIG, whichever is greater (p. 7). But then on pp. 20 and 21 he calls for eliminating spending on pensions for railroad workers, District of Columbia government employees, and veterans. What he actually intended is unclear.

Double-counting Some of the savings he expects to get from closing tax loopholes are incompatible with his spending cuts. For instance, on p. 20 he calls for eliminating public assistance programs such as food stamps, and then on p. 15 he counts on additional revenue from taxing those benefits as ordinary income. He plans on taxing contributions to IRAs, (p. 17), which would leave taxpayers no reason to use them, but doesn't subtract income taxes paid on money withdrawn from IRAs. This doesn't amount to a great deal compared to the cost of the whole program, but it's sloppy and annoying.

Unequal comparisons Eliminating these tax expenditures means converting many things that are not normally considered income into taxable income. The biggest such item would be employer contributions to health insurance. Also included would be scholarships and tuition reductions for students, for instance, or housing and meal benefits for military personnel. Under Sheahen's plan, the cash equivalent would count as income and would be taxed as income.

Counting employer-provided health insurance as its cash equivalent could easily boost someone's reportable income by $5000. Imputed rental income (which I will return to below) could add $10,000 or more. Not everyone will be hit by these additional taxes, but homeowners with health insurance make up a solid slice of the middle class.

This means that when he compares the current system to his BIG plan on pp. 23-24, he does not compare like to like. The person with $40,000 in reportable income under the current system is not the same as the person with $40,000 income under the BIG plan. But he calculates increase/decrease figures as if they were. The net increase in disposable income he calculates on pp. 23-24 will be wrong for anyone who owns a home, has employer-provided health insurance, is in the armed forces, is a student paying tuition or on a scholarship, is paying student loans, or has an IRA, among other circumstances.

It may be Sheahen's intention to place more of the tax burden on homeowners and on people who have employer-provided health insurance. If so, it's dishonest of him to hide it in this way. But I don't think he did, because I don't think he has an accurate picture of where money is coming from and going to, which leads me to my next point.

Are poor people actually better off? How many?

The worst fault in his number-crunching is that he doesn't realistically account for the value of benefits lost to the poor. For a single parent with one child, he estimates benefits for the poorest incomes at $4,800 for TANF and $2400 for food stamps. But those are just two out of the many means-tested benefits he plans on cutting. TANF and food stamps together amount to $46 billion, but Supplemental Security Income and Section 8 vouchers add up to $56 billion, so he's accounting for less than half of the benefits the poor would lose.

Furthermore, those benefits are very unevenly distributed. Only a minority of poor households receive Section 8 vouchers, for instance, but those that do would be hit very hard by losing them. It may be that some poor families would be better off under his plan, but some will come out worse. How many? Forty percent? Sixty percent? We have no idea.

This is why people create tax models and run simulations. The current tax system is complex, the benefits system is complex, and the variation in circumstances among people at the same income level is complex. If you are not willing to get into the nitty-gritty of those details, then you have no basis for a claim that the sweeping reform that you propose actually delivers the benefits that you want to see. Sheahan certainly doesn't.

Political poison

Sheahen seems to have given no consideration to political problems at all. He plans on eliminating “welfare programs which will not be needed under a BIG.” But "welfare” turns out to include things like this dealbreaker (p. 21):

How could anyone not immediately realize that this is political poison?

Imagine twenty thousand disabled veterans parading down Constitution Avenue. A thousand men and women in wheelchairs lead the way. They include veterans of every conflict from World War II to Afghanistan, all of them wearing their uniforms, all of them wearing their decorations. When they reach the Capitol, they raise their prosthetic arms in the air and shout “This is not welfare!”

No politician who wants to get re-elected is going to support this plan.

Other cuts under the heading of “welfare” include:

Student loans

Pell grants

GI bill benefits

Farm subsidies

Refugee assistance

As for the tax expenditures he wants to eliminate, most are too obscure and wonky for the typical American voter to care about. Many of the others, such as the lower tax rate on capital gains, mainly benefit the rich. But some of them are extremely popular. Making employer-provided health insurance taxable will anger a huge portion of the middle class. Making Social Security fully taxable will lose you the support of the AARP.

Perhaps the oddest one is “imputed rental income,” which no one but an economist would reasonably consider income. This is the rent that homeowners could be collecting if they rented their houses out. “Imputing” this income means pretending that they pay rent to themselves as tenants and collect it as landlords. Homeowners are not going to be happy to hear that they owe thousands more to the IRS because of taxes on purely hypothetical income.

And on top of this, the Department of Defense would be cut by 35%.

Whether these provisions are good ideas or not, they range from very difficult to obviously impossible in their political feasibility. Politicians who want to get re-elected are not going to support them. If you could convince Congress to cut the Pentagon's budget by more than a third, then that would be great, go at it! But you can't, so they won't, so any plan that relies on doing so is dead on arrival.

Sheahen asks, on page 7, "How can the U.S. afford $1,895.6 billion?" His answer is "by completely ignoring political reality."

Lack of focus

Remember that extra $265 billion that Sheahan was left with after totaling up his budget? Why is that there?

If he's got $265 billion left over, then his plan actually does not rely on $160.9 billion in defense cuts. He justifies his other cuts by calling them welfare, but defense spending is no more related to his BIG plan than spending on national parks or Amtrak. Singling out the Pentagon is entirely gratuitous. He could have left that out and avoided opposition from defense hawks.

With $265 billion to work with, he could have left out the defense cuts and left out the cuts to veterans benefits and the cuts to farm subsidies and left income tax rates at the post-1994 levels, all of which would have increased the political viability of his plan.

Instead, he went on to try to balance the budget with a 2% wealth tax. And then he pointlessly goes on to consider scrapping the current income tax system and replacing it with a 35% flat tax, even though this would be worse for poor households.

So maybe cutting defense spending is a good idea. Maybe balancing the budget is a good idea, and a wealth tax is a good way to do it. Maybe we should consider changing to a flat tax.

Maybe so, maybe not, but all of these are unnecessary for the BIG program that Sheahen is proposing. Packaging them together just makes the whole thing more complicated and politically contentious. If your main goal is ending poverty, why mess around with the other stuff?

A responsible person who actually wanted to get something done and pass legislation would leave out anything that isn’t necessary to do the job. Sheahen couldn’t be bothered to do that, or to spend any time considering the political implications of his plan, or even to ask someone to look over his accounting to see if it made sense. If he’s not going to take his own work seriously enough to put in that minimal amount of effort, neither should anyone else.

Conclusion: after spending 20 years in the UBI movement, the best Allan Sheahan could do was this sloppy, unclear, politically incompetent mess. If this is as good as UBI proposals get, then there are no serious UBI proposals. And if this is what passes for serious UBI activism, then there is no UBI activism worth paying attention to.

#ubi #universal basic income #usbig #Allan Sheahen

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Do Republicans Want Tax Cuts

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-want-tax-cuts/

Why Do Republicans Want Tax Cuts

Treasury Says State Tax Cuts Ok If Separated From Virus Aid

Americans Hate The Idea Of Corporate Tax Cuts So Why Do They Keep Voting Republican?

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. Responding to concerns from state officials, the U.S. Treasury Department said Wednesday that states can cut taxes without penalty under a new federal pandemic relief law so long as they use their own funds to offset those cuts.

Republican governors, lawmakers and attorneys general have expressed apprehension about a provision in the wide-ranging relief act signed by President Joe Biden that prohibits states from using $195 billion of federal aid to either directly or indirectly offset a reduction in net tax revenue. The restriction could apply through 2024.

A treasury spokesperson told The Associated Press that the provision isnt meant as a blanket prohibition on tax cuts. States can still offset tax reductions through other means.

We should not let federal restrictions weigh in on that direction were going as a state, Hutchinson said.

Why Do The Dc Republicans Have Any Credibility

President Biden has introduced his American Jobs Plan which will fund investments in our people and our infrastructure with higher taxes on corporations and individuals who make over $400,000.00 per year. S&P predicts that Bidens infrastructure plan will create 2.3 million jobs by 2024, inject $5.7 trillion into the economy which would be 10 times what was lost during the recession and raise per-capita income by $2,400, Axios reported.

This should come as no surprise to anybody but the sabotage minded D.C. Republicans have come out in opposition to Bidens plan. One of the key talking points from the right is that the proposed tax increases would be job killers. Senator Susan Collins alleged that the proposed 28% corporate tax rate would cause the loss of jobs. Not to be outdone in the pessimism sweepstakes, Senator Tim Scott in the GOP response to President Bidens address to members of Congress last week contended that the plan contains: The biggest job-killing tax hikes in a generation.

Now what I find interesting is that the GOP has been erroneously prognosticating that tax increases on the rich would hurt the economy since way back in 1993. Its like Collins and Scott simply cut and pasted GOP talking points from the Clinton and Obama years. Lets take a little trip down memory lane and see how previous D.C. Republican predictions of doom and gloom played out.

Gop Must Stop Believing In Magic

Im not making a plea for larger government just a plea for economic sanity.;If Congress in its all-seeing wisdom wants to spend $700 billion on the military, billions of dollars on farm subsidies;and so on,;it must either raise enough money in taxes to pay for the programs it authorizes or reduce the size of government.;

Instead, although Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate;and the House from 2017 to 2019, they;chose not to make any substantial cuts to government programs that would balance the revenue lost by their;series of massive unfunded tax cuts.

Unquestioning;and unsubstantiated;belief in the magical power of tax cuts isnt a viable economic policy. The;GOP is putting America on an unsustainable path that is disastrous both for;its;fiscal future and for the hopes of people trying to get ahead.;

Steven Strauss;is a lecturer and;visiting professor at;Princeton University’s;Woodrow Wilson School;of Public and International Affairs, an economic development specialist and a member of USA TODAYs Board of Contributors. Follow him Twitter:;

Also Check: Did Trump Say Republicans Are Stupid

Republicans View 2017 Tax Law The Way Democrats View Obamacare: As A Signature Achievement They Will Fight To Keep

Republicans have taken an aggressive approach to President Bidens plans to finance his roughly $6trillion agenda: Dont mess with their 2017 tax cuts.

Even before Biden formally unveiled his plans, Republicans sent a message that they consider the 2017 law that slashed personal and corporate tax rates as a sacrosanct measure that theyve no intention of gutting.

Sen. Roger Wicker explained this ethos in unusually blunt fashion when he returned to the Capitol on April12 after Biden met with a small bipartisan group of lawmakers involved in infrastructure issues, telling the group he was targeting the very taxes that Republicans slashed four years ago.

Clearly there are parts of his program that are non-starters for Republicans. The pay-for, I view the pay-for as a problem, Wicker told reporters in the Capitol after that meeting. I view the 2017 tax bill as one of my signature achievements in my entire career.

In many ways, Wicker signaled to Biden that Republicans view the 2017 law in the same manner that Democrats regard the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act: a signature achievement of domestic policy that they will defend in every way possible.

The two laws obviously had very different goals and very different results, one trying to provide health insurance for millions of uninsured Americans and the other reducing taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Why Do Republicans Oppose Extending The Payroll Tax Cut

NYT reports that many Republicans are opposed to extending the payroll tax cut proposed by the Obama administration.

The payroll tax cut affects SS and Medicare contributions that employers deduct from their workers paychecks. It would mostly benefit low and middle-income Americans.

Many of the Republicans who oppose extending the tax cut have demanded an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Why do you think Republicans support extending tax cuts for wealthy Americans while opposing the extension of tax cuts for low- and middle-income Americans?

Recommended Reading: Gop Lapel Pin

Gop Lawmakers’ Education Spending Bump Buys Down Property Taxes

Republicans on Thursday also unveiled a plan to increase state support for public schools. The plan increases state money paid to schools, but doesn’t increase the amount of money schools will have to work with, because it simply replaces school funding previously provided;through property taxes with funding from the state.

Under the plan, the state would:

Buy down property taxes that fund schools by increasing;state general school aid funding by $408 million over two years.

Provide $167 million to replace property tax funding sent to charter schools associated with the City of Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and UW-Parkside.

Spend $72 million on buying down property taxes directed to;the Wisconsin Technical College System.

Overall, the plan would cost $647 million over two years.;

The proposed spending plan is a sizable state spending increase;from the education plan approved by the Republican-controlled budget committee last month, which would have spent $1.4 billion less than Evers proposed on K-12 schools. That;Republican plan spurred concerns from the U.S. Department of Education, which said it could mean the state would fall short of federal requirements for Wisconsin to receive $2.3 billion in school aid under the two most recent coronavirus aid packages.;

According to the Legislatures nonpartisan budget office,;the new school funding proposed Thursday would bring Wisconsin into compliance with the federal requirements to receive the aid.;

An Exhaustive Lobbying Campaign

Almost immediately after Mr. Trump signed the bill, companies and their lobbyists including G.E.s Mr. Brown began a full-court pressure campaign to try to shield themselves from the BEAT and GILTI.

The Treasury Department had to figure out how to carry out the hastily written law, which lacked crucial details.

Chip Harter was the Treasury official in charge of writing the rules for the BEAT and GILTI. He had spent decades at PwC and the law firm Baker McKenzie, counseling companies on the same sorts of tax-avoidance arrangements that the new law was supposed to discourage.

Starting in January 2018, he and his colleagues found themselves in nonstop meetings roughly 10 a week at times with lobbyists for companies and industry groups.

The Organization for International Investment a powerful trade group for foreign multinationals like the Swiss food company Nestlé and the Dutch chemical maker LyondellBasell objected to a Treasury proposal that would have prevented companies from using a complex currency-accounting maneuver to avoid the BEAT.

The groups lobbyists were from PwC and Baker McKenzie, Mr. Harters former firms, according to public lobbying disclosures. One of them, Pam Olson, was the top Treasury tax official in the George W. Bush administration.

This month, the Treasury issued the final version of some of the BEAT regulations. The Organization for International Investment got what it wanted.

Recommended Reading: Snopes Trump Republican Dumb

Csb Bancorp Inc Declares Third Quarter Cash Dividend

But together, Biggs said he’s not sure how well it works. “Those people who do save more than $2,400 may take that figure as a cap and reduce their saving, even if they could benefit from the Roth treatment,” he said. “Moreover, if bosses or human resource managers who decide whether a firm sponsors a plan don’t like the cap, they may be less willing to have a 401 for their employees.”

Money For Roads And Schools

Republican On Why You Don’t Deserve Tax Cuts

The bigger question for Democrats and think tanks like Policy Matters Ohio is whether income tax cuts would be better spent on state services.;

The Senate plan would cut $874 million from Ohio’s budget.;

That’s money Senate Minority Leader Kenny Yuko, D-Richmond Heights,;would rather see spent funding public schools, repairing roads, fixing lead pipes and;increasing internet access in underserved communities.;

“Making our middle class stronger is crucial for a robust economic recovery. However, the majoritys proposed tax cuts will not achieve that goal,” Yuko said in a statement. “For almost 20 years, the General Assembly has prioritized income tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, instead of policies that support workers and families.”

Anna Staver is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.

Don’t Miss: Republican Presidential Candidates Summary

Democrats Hope To Undo Many Trump Tax Cuts To Fund Biden’s $35 Trillion Budget Plan

Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has proposed rolling back much of the 2017 GOP tax cuts to help pay for President Biden’s $3.5 trillion social spending plan.hide caption

toggle caption

Democrats hope to unwind many of the tax cuts Republicans enacted under former President Donald Trump as a way to pay for the majority of the $3.5 trillion spending bill currently under consideration in Congress.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., released details Monday of a plan that includes increasing the top corporate tax rate to 26.5%, up from the current rate of 21%, and restoring the top rate to 39.6% for individuals earning more than $400,000 and married couples earning over $450,000.

The changes are part of the tricky balancing act plaguing Democrats’ efforts to approve the bulk of President Biden’s domestic agenda. Leaders are attempting to prove to skeptics within their own party it is possible to finance a vast expansion of federal spending on everything from housing and health care to financial support for families and climate change all without increasing taxes on everyday Americans.

Republicans Not Biden Are About To Raise Your Taxes

President Trump built in tax increases beginning in 2021, for nearly everyone but those at the very top.

Mr. Stiglitz, a university professor at Columbia, is a Nobel laureate in economics.

The Trump administration has a dirty little secret: Its not just planning to increase taxes on most Americans. The increase has already been signed, sealed and delivered, buried in the pages of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initiallylowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped taxincreases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under thats about 65 percent of taxpayers will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.

For most, in fact, its a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised correctly, so far that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.

Looking at the analyses of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation at the time the December 2017 tax bill was enacted, we see very clearly how different income groups are affected by the Trump tax plan. And its disturbing.

They must be stopped.

Don’t Miss: Who Is Right Republicans Or Democrats

The Tax Cut Will Pay For Itself

It was an article of faith among Republicans that their tax cut wouldnt just boost economic growth, but would actually generate more revenue than the old, higher tax rates. Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt, Mnuchin said. Kevin Hassett, then chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, agreed: You dont really need to have a big growth effect to have Secretary Mnuchin be correct. Former Rep. Jeb Hensarling, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, insisted that economic growth would be more than enough to make up for the lower tax rates.

That growth failed to materialize. Unsurprisingly, so have higher tax revenues. Corporate tax receipts plummeted from $240 billion to $140 billion in the first quarter after the tax cut passed, and have stayed at that level ever since.

So what happened to the federal deficit? Republicans lied about the effect of their cut on tax receipts and at the same time they also decided to stop worrying about keeping spending down. As a result, the federal deficit has gone upand thats not even accounting for the COVID-19 stimulus spending. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has heard the same Republican tax arguments for decades and now recognizes them for the fabrications they are.

Who Truly Wants Tax Cuts For Rich

Donald TrumpTexas announces election audit in four counties after Trump demandSchumer sets Monday showdown on debt ceiling-government funding billPennsylvania AG sues to block GOP subpoenas in election probeMORE and Republicans for handing out tax breaks to their wealthy friends and donors. Joe Biden last week at the national convention called Democrats the party for the working class and blue collar Americans. But is that really the case? Let us take a look at the two main tax stimulus proposals in front of Congress.

The plan from Trump would cut the payroll tax over the rest of the year. It would provide 140 million low and middle income Americans a 6 percent tax cut and would lower payroll costs for 30 million small businesses. The typical family with an income of around $60,000 would receive a $1,000 pay raise for the rest of the year. Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiOvernight Energy & Environment Presented by the League of Conservation Voters EPA finalizing rule cutting HFCsDemocrats steamroll toward showdown on House floorPanic begins to creep into Democratic talks on Biden agendaMORE has stated she opposes the idea, even though she supported this when Barack Obama was president. Trump signed an executive order to at least delay the payroll tax for those who make less than $100,000 during the rest of the year.

Stephen Moore is an adviser at Freedom Works and a member of the White House economic recovery task force. Find him on Twitter .

Don’t Miss: Who Is Right Republicans Or Democrats

Why Do Republicans Want To Repeal Obamacare So Much Because It Would Be A Big Tax Cut For The Rich

There are going to be so many tax cuts for the rich, you’re going to get tired of tax cuts for the rich. You’re going to say, Mr. President, please don’t cut taxes for the rich so much, this is getting terrible.

And it will start;when Republicans repeal Obamacare.

This is the Rosetta Stone for understanding why conservatives have acted like subsidized health care was the end of the republic itself. It wasn’t just that it had the word Obama in its name, which, in our polarized age, was enough to ensure that 45 percent of the country would despise it. No, it was that Obamacare was one of the biggest redistributive policies of the last 50 years. The Republican Party, after all, exists for what seems like;the sole purpose of reversing;redistribution.

A quick recap: Obamacare is a kind of three-legged stool. First, it tells insurance companies that they can’t discriminate against sick people anymore; second, it tells people that they have to buy insurance or pay a penalty, so that everyone doesn’t just wait until they’re sick to get covered; and third, it helps people who can’t afford the plans they have to buy be able to. Which is to say that you need to come up with a whole lot of money to make this work money that Obamacare gets by taxing the rich. Indeed, at its most basic level, it raises taxes on the top 1 percent to pay for health insurance for the bottom 40 percent.

Getting tired of tax cuts for the rich yet?

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davidrusselblr · 3 years

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Tax deductions with Accounting Software in Pakistan

Erpisto #1 Accounting Software in Pakistan There is a lot of confusing and contradictory information available. It's difficult to grasp what a sole owner needs to do to understand the tax ramifications of running their business between the website and sites with a lot of adverts. That's why we decided to write this guide — no adverts, fluff, or technical jargon, just straightforward, easy-to-understand facts. Are you paying attention to what we're saying?

As a solo proprietor, you're always looking for ways to save money and increase your profits.

We understand. So, let's discuss about tax deductions for sole proprietorships.

The quick version is that more deductions equals lower taxes.

As a sole proprietor, it's in your best interest to take advantage of and maximize tax deductions. They'll lower your tax bill, allowing you to put more money into your company.

It's not easy to file taxes as a sole owner, so don't fret. We're here to assist you.

To begin, we'll go through the fundamentals of a sole proprietorship and how it's taxed. Then we'll go through many tax deductions you should be aware of and how to take advantage of them.

Erpisto #1 Accounting Software in Pakistan

What are the signs that I'm a sole proprietor?

That is an excellent question. To assess your tax responsibilities, you must first decide if you are a sole proprietor. This is required in order to calculate your deductions!

Ownership is not restricted to a single industry. A lone proprietor is a person who owns and operates their own firm. Because it is not a legal corporation, the owner is responsible for all financial and legal obligations.

Even if you work as an independent contractor for one or two companies, you are very certainly a sole owner. In most cases, employers do not deduct taxes from an independent contractor's pay. You're probably a lone owner if no one is withholding your taxes.

The simplicity of starting a business as a lone owner is appealing. It's by far the simplest business to start because all you need is yourself and a set of abilities. Here's an example of a sole proprietorship business to get you started:

Services for computer repair

Freelance writing or graphic design are two options.

Photography for a landscaping or lawn service

Do sole proprietors have to pay taxes on a quarterly basis?

If you're new to working for yourself, you'll need to brush up on your tax knowledge.

One significant distinction is the payment of estimated taxes. Because your company does not deduct this money from your paycheck, you must make these every quarter to assist you meet your tax obligations.

If you work with an accountant, they can assist you in calculating your quarterly single proprietor taxes.

You'll need to know your net profit or loss to make accurate payments. Any net income over $400 earned each year must be paid to the Accounting Software in Pakistan.

What is the best way for a sole proprietorship to pay taxes?

It's time to start thinking about taxes now that you've determined you're a sole owner. We understand that this isn't the most enjoyable subject.

We'll break things down for you and make the process a little easier.

The quickest and most convenient way to pay your lone proprietor taxes is to go to the website and pay online. You have the option of using your bank account, a debit card, or a credit card. You can plan payments in advance by using your bank account. Those paying by debit or credit card can now make a payment over the phone. You can send a check, but the fastest way is to do so online. If you can't pay your tax bill right away, you can set up a payment plan. It's worth noting that this figure could contain interest and late fees. Don't forget to visit the website of your state's Department of Revenue. They are in charge of state sole proprietorship taxes, and it is to them that you must submit your state payment. While you may owe less in state taxes than in federal taxes, it's still vital to pay them.

Do sole proprietorships have to pay sales tax?

As a result, if you manage a flower shop or an internet store, you'll have to pay state taxes on the items you sell. The state in which you live will determine your tax rate.

You won't have to pay sales taxes on your services if you're a writer or graphic designer, but you will have to pay state sole proprietorship taxes on the money you make.

What is the procedure for a lone proprietor to receive a tax refund?

Overpaying on quarterly projected payments is the greatest way for a solo proprietor to seek a refund. If you pay more than you think you owe, you'll have a better chance of getting a refund when you file your return.

If you pay more in the hopes of getting a refund, you'll miss out on the opportunity to put that money to better use throughout the year.

As a lone proprietor, what expenses may you deduct?

Now comes the fun part. Let's speak about the deductions you can take as a sole proprietor when submitting your taxes.

You can have a lot of inquiries, such as "how much of my phone can I deduct from my taxes?" or “Can a home repair be written off?”

Each of these is covered in detail in the sole proprietorship standards. However, to save you time (which we understand is valuable as a business owner), we've compiled a list of significant deductions to be aware of. This will assist you in lowering your sole proprietorship's tax burden.

Is it true that our initial costs are tax deductible?

You're well aware that beginning a business is a difficult task.

It's also quite costly.

You can, fortunately, deduct some of your charges. In your first year in business, the Accounting Software in Pakistan will allow you to claim up to $5,000 in deductions. Advertising, travel, and fees linked with services or consultants are examples of these costs.

All of your beginning costs should be treated as capital expenses, according to the IRS. While interest and taxes can be deductible in some situations, they cannot be deducted as startup costs on sole proprietorship taxes.

Getting your firm off the ground costs a lot of money.

Starting a business as a sole proprietorship has one of the lowest entry barriers. However, you will need to invest some money to get your idea off the ground, just like any other firm. Many of these costs can be deducted from your taxes as a sole proprietor.

The majority of businesses require a website. There are fees associated with getting a site online, whether you develop it yourself or hire an expert. You'll need to get a domain name and create landing pages, among other things. Each of these goods has a price tag attached to it. You may deduct each as a business cost on your single proprietorship taxes, which is wonderful news.

Continuing education is important.

Perhaps you'd want to attend a few classes to extend your horizons.

The cost of your own schooling is deductible. You can subtract classes that help you maintain or develop your abilities in your current field.

You must be able to demonstrate that the knowledge you received maintains or enhances the job-related abilities.

If you're an accountant, taking a culinary class is unlikely to be tax deductible (but it may save you money on client dinners).

Deductions for health-insurance premiums

You probably bought insurance from a private company or the Healthcare Exchange.

In most cases, you'll be able to deduct the cost of any health, dental, or eligible long-term care insurance you buy.

You, your spouse, and any dependents may be included. These are not only wonderful investments, but they also help you save money on your sole proprietorship taxes.

Taxes on Social Security and Medicare can be written off.

The deduction of Social Security and Medicare from most W-2 employees' paychecks is handled by their employer.

You'll have to handle this on your own as a lone proprietor. On your quarterly social security and Medicare payments made throughout the year, you can claim a 50% reduction.

Plans for Retirement

It's a no-brainer to put money into a retirement account. As a lone proprietor, it's even more critical to keep track of your finances. You can deduct portion of your contributions from your taxes, according to the Accounting Software in Pakistan.

Let's look at two of the most common programmes and how they affect your sole proprietorship taxes.

Roth IRA: Roth IRA contributions are not tax deductible. Traditional IRA: If you or your spouse (if you're married) aren't protected by an employer retirement plan, you can deduct your whole contribution. When it comes to single proprietorship taxes, the rules are a little more complicated. The amount deducted varies depending on the plan you choose and whether or not you contribute to it.

It's beneficial to work in your pajamas.

In today's world, it's highly likely that you're working from home. Maybe that's where you've always worked. This space can be claimed as a deduction because it is used for a business. The Simplified Method and the Regular Method are the two procedures used by the Accounting Software in Pakistan for home office deductions. There are two key conditions that must be met regardless of the option you choose: Your home office should be your primary place of business and should be utilized solely for these purposes. It's where you do most of your business. We'll go over how to figure out how much your home office is worth and how much you may deduct. If you have a home office or a room that is utilized for that purpose.

Simplified Method:

This option became available in the 2013 tax year.

It does not modify the qualification standards, but it does make the calculation easier.

$5 per square foot is the standard deduction (up to 300 sq. feet).

Mortgage interest and real estate taxes, for example, may be eligible.

By decreasing the quantity of record-keeping, this strategy makes things simple.

Regular Method:

If you pursue the traditional approach, you'll need to figure up all of your home office expenses (utilities, mortgage interest, insurance, etc.)

Rather than cost per square foot, the deduction is based on the percentage of your home that is used for commercial purposes.

You may be able to claim direct and indirect expenses on your taxes if you use the traditional technique.

Here's the whole list of deductions you can take from your home office:

Losses due to rent casualties

Insurance against mortgage interest

Utilities

Depreciation

Repairs and maintenance

These write-offs are usually divided into two categories: direct and indirect charges. Repairs and upkeep to your office would be considered direct expenses because they are only tied to the commercial section of your house. Typically, these are entirely deductible. Indirect costs are those that apply to your entire home. Insurance and utilities, for example, are indirect because you use them for both commercial and personal purposes. To determine the permitted deduction, you'll need to compute the proportion usage of these items in relation to your firm.

Is it possible to deduct home repairs?

Home repairs that are directly relevant to your home office can be deducted. Perhaps you installed some storage, a new workstation, or repainted the room. These are costs that are tax deductible.

Unfortunately, deducting the cost of new kitchen countertops is not an eligible deduction.

What is the maximum proportion of utilities that I can claim?

When you saw utilities on the list, that was certainly one of the first things that came to mind.

Because home utilities overlap with personal use, you'll need to figure out what percentage of your home is used for business. You can use that formula to figure out how much of your utility costs you can deduct.

How can you figure out how much your home office is worth?

The Accounting Software in Pakistan allows you to depreciate the portion of your home that you use for business, but not the cost or value of the land. Before you depreciate your house, there are a few things you should know:

When you first started doing business out of your house.

The expense of upgrades done before and after you started doing business with it.

The proportion of your home that is used for business.

Your home's adjusted basis when you first started utilizing it for your business.

Alternatively, the fair market worth at the time you used it for business.

What if you rent?

Since we’ve talked about home office space, this may raise a question: “I’m a renter. Can I deduct rent on my sole proprietor taxes?”

The short answer is, yes. The same requirements apply to the business use of your home.

If you rent space (an office, co-working desk, store, etc.) you can use this as a deduction.

The IRS does have a caveat on what they refer to as “unreasonable rent.” Meaning, if you’re renting space from someone to whom you’re related, you need to pay them the same amount you would a stranger landlord. This situation typically only arises if you’re related, in some way, to the owner of the property.

Choosing a deduction option for a home office

If you're not sure which method is ideal for you, take out your calculator (also known as your cell phone) and conduct some calculations. If the projected deduction is close to the same, utilizing the simplified technique will likely save you time and frustration.

This is one of the best deductions for single proprietorship taxes, regardless of whatever option you choose.

Daycares are exempt from the rule. You can still claim a home deduction if you use your house to care for children, people over the age of 65, or people who are unable to care for themselves. You'll need to figure out how much of your home is used for childcare.

For your phone, there are deductions.

If you own a company, you're undoubtedly wondering, "How much of my phone can I deduct on my taxes?" After all, it's a significant element of your business. Cell phones aren't getting any less expensive, either (as we said earlier, it doubles as your calculator).

The IRS does not allow you to deduct the expense of your home's first phone line. Long-distance calls and the use of a dedicated business phone are both allowable deductions.

Deducting your travel and mileage expenditures

As a lone owner, you presumably use your vehicle for business activities, such as driving to meetings, conferences, and business meals, even if you usually work at home or at an office.

You are free to utilize the automobile in your personal life as well. If that's the case, you'll need to figure out what percentage your company uses.

It is possible to deduct mileage. This refers to journeys taken outside of your typical commute or within the approximate vicinity of your workplace and home.

Meals

The client dinner, oh, the client meal. Lunch is another option. Perhaps some coffee. Whether you like them or not, these meetings may pile up. Meals and entertainment expenses are normally eligible for a 50% deduction. The cost of travel to these meetings is a distinct expense that is not subject to the 50% rule.

When travelling for work, it's common to take advantage of free time and sight-seeing opportunities. You cannot deduct any expenses incurred during your vacation that are not relevant to your business (for example, travelling to a sporting event or visiting a museum).

Is it possible to claim coffee as a business expense?

If you enjoy coffee, you're in luck. In certain circumstances, you may be able to deduct your coffee expenses.

This is not deductible if you go to your local coffee shop for an afternoon pick-me-up. If you're meeting someone for a meeting, though, you can deduct 50% of the expense.

If you purchase brewing equipment or coffee for your home office, you can deduct the cost on your IRS sole proprietorship taxes.

Assets that depreciate

It's rare that most sole Accounting Software in Pakistan have a substantial number of assets having depreciation that can be deducted.

Let's take a quick look at this to make sure we've covered all of our bases. You can deduct a maximum of $1,040,000 starting in tax year 2020.

Depreciation on a vehicle is the most likely application for your sole proprietorship. The maximum depreciation deduction for a vehicle you use for work and that was first put into operation in 2019 is $10,100.

Expenses associated with impairment

If you have a disability, you may be able to employ services or tools to assist you with business responsibilities. If the support is solely for business purposes, the charges might be deducted from your sole proprietorship taxes.

Perhaps you require a computer to type documents and emails but are unable to do so. Buying dictation software for your business might be written off as a business expense.

Bad debts, loan interest, fees, oh my...

Hopefully, this does not happen frequently, but you may have a client who is unable to settle a bill you owe them.

A bad company debt can only be claimed if it was previously disclosed on your income.

Interest on loans that you intend to repay can usually be deducted. This is especially handy if you bought your firm with the help of a mortgage. You can deduct the costs of obtaining a mortgage from your sole proprietor taxes (again, providing you utilize the property for business purposes). The interest you pay on your mortgage can also be deducted.

Clubs and fees for organizations

A chamber of commerce, trade association, or networking group might be a good option. These groups are great for getting the word out about what you offer and meeting other professionals. These fees can be deducted if the organization is established for a business purpose.

This exception is to the IRS rule that club meals are not deductible. Your membership to a golf course didn't make it into the list.

We can help you to help yourself

There are many things you can do in tax season to make it less stressful.

Keep track of all your records. You can either save your records digitally or print them (preferably both). This information should be kept safe. Keep your receipts, bills, and statements organized. This will make it easier to find and allow you to take advantage of any deductions.

Hire a competent accountant. It is worth it to file correctly and get all the sole proprietorship tax deductions. It's OK if you are not a great at keeping records. A professional bookkeeper can make your life easier and prevent you from making costly mistakes. When it comes time to file taxes, your accountant will be grateful for the work of the bookkeeper. These services are also deductible.

Separate your personal and business expenses. If you blur these lines, things can become complicated. You should only make purchases with your business income ( Hint : eating out for yourself is not deductible).

Considerations for COVID-19

The IRS delayed the deadline for 2019 taxes due to ongoing economic crisis and pandemic. It will now be July 15, 2020.

Numerous state governments have changed their tax deadlines. Check with your Department of Revenue to find out more.

Additional resources available for sole proprietors

Due to the increase in gig jobs, IRS resources for sole proprietorship have been made easily available. Side gigs can be anything from ride-sharing to online creative marketplaces. More people are making side incomes than ever before.

These types of work are often part-time or temporary and done via digital platforms. This category could include services such as freelance writing, photography, and design work. Other sellers may offer handmade goods on online marketplaces such as Etsy and Uncommon Goods.

These fields have tax implications. You will need to pay taxes on gig work, regardless of whether it is your full-time job or a side hustle with Accounting Software in Pakistan. To reduce the tax burden on sole proprietorship taxes, the IRS recommends keeping track of all expenses.

You must keep track of your income. This is good business practice. You will still need to report income, even if you don’t receive a 1099 form from the people with whom you have worked.

Solopreneur does not necessarily mean you are in it alone

Even the most financially well-informed, tax season can send a chill down your spine. Many people worry about how to pay their taxes or what they should do. It doesn't have to be lonely filing taxes as a sole proprietor.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by all the information available. However, it will be easier to have a competent accountant or bookkeeper.

Even if your ability to manage your own records is sufficient, you should consider buying reliable bookkeeping software. This will allow you to keep all of your information in one place. It is crucial to keep good records in order to pay your sole proprietorship taxes. Your life will be easier after April 15 (or July 15, 2020).

Good habits are key to maximizing your business income. Your taxes can be viewed as a way to lower your expenses. Taxes can be one expense that you don't have control over if you are a sole proprietor. It is difficult to reduce rent, payroll, and insurance. You can reduce the tax impact on your bottom line by being meticulous in your business management.

To help sole proprietors do the things they love. This allows you to spend less time worrying about details such as taxes and deductions.

Simple Accounting Tips

KISS Keep it simple. Start small. A sole proprietorship is the simplest entity to start your business. This type of ownership does not require any special communication to the Internal Revenue Service or filings until you begin paying employees.

You are the sole proprietor. If your municipality or county requires it, you can only obtain an occupational license. You, the owner, are responsible for all state and city taxes collected on wholesale or retail sales that your business makes. State tax collection is not applicable to service businesses or most cross-state sales.

A personal liability umbrella policy is the best and most affordable way to protect yourself from personal liability as sole proprietor. It is important to know your trade and keep detailed records to avoid any liability.

Focus on building your business, not on communicating with the IRS. The IRS won't even know that you are a sole proprietor until you file your first personal income tax returns. Schedule C will be included in your return. This schedule lists all sales and expenses that you have recorded for your business. These sales and expenses don't need to be held in separate accounts as required by the LLC/Incorporation form. To provide a tax refund, the sole proprietor's losses can be offset by your day job's earnings.

In the first five years, 90% of small businesses go under or become new owners. You can plan your business to prosper, but if it becomes sole proprietor, you must cease doing business. There is no need to communicate with the IRS or fill out special forms. You will not be subject to additional taxes. Just file the final Schedule C along with your next personal tax return. KISS.

How can you get paid as sole proprietorship? You can simply take the money out as an advance. There are no quarterly forms or payroll taxes. Startups lose money in the initial years. Keep your day job to cover your living expenses.

You should know that "write-off" does not mean you are exempt from expenses. It only means that you will be able to save some taxes if you use the income for specific purposes.

Once you have passed the five-year hurdle you can speak with a CPA to discuss other entity types that may be able to save you taxes. A simple bookkeeping entry can transfer all business assets from the sole proprietorship to the new entity, without tax penalties of Accounting Software in Pakistan. You can then quit your job and celebrate your new income.

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your-dietician · 3 years

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New obesity drug semaglutide is safe and effective for weight loss and diabetes

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/health/diabetes/new-obesity-drug-semaglutide-is-safe-and-effective-for-weight-loss-and-diabetes/

New obesity drug semaglutide is safe and effective for weight loss and diabetes

After learning that the venom of a Gila monster lizard contained hormones that can regulate blood sugar, Daniel Drucker started wondering why. And could the venom somehow help treat diabetes?

Drucker is a scientist and endocrinologist at the University of Toronto who has dedicated his career to understanding the universe of hormones in the body, which do everything from regulating appetite to helping with digestion. His curiosity about the Gila monster led to a call with a zoo in Utah. In 1995, Drucker had a lizard shipped from Utah to his lab and began experiments on the deadly venom.

Ten years later, a synthetic version of a hormone in the venom became the first medicine of its kind approved to treat type 2 diabetes. Known as a GLP-1 (for glucagon-like peptide-1) receptor agonist, the medicine set off a cascade of additional venom-inspired discoveries.

After doctors noticed mice and humans on the drug for diabetes appeared to lose weight, they began to consider its use in obesity science. In June 2021, another effective treatment, this one for obesity, got Food and Drug Administration approval. Called semaglutide and marketed as Wegovy, it also takes its structure from the lizard’s venom.

If this origin story sounds outlandish, consider the history of obesity treatments. Over the years, people have turned to extreme and unlikely interventions to try to lose weight, from jaw wiring, laxatives, and vagotomies to lap band operations and fen-phen, a “miracle” diet drug that was ultimately recalled.

The new treatment — a once-weekly injectable from Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company that has hired many leading diabetes and obesity scientists as consultants — is poised to safely help many people with health-threatening obesity, physicians and researchers say. It may even illuminate some of the mysteries around how appetite works in the first place.

“It’s phenomenal,” says Michael Krashes, a diabetes and obesity investigator at the National Institutes of Health. Semaglutide is “a big step forward — we finally have something that’s reliable and able to produce sustained effects over time,” adds Ivan De Araujo, a neuroscientist who studies brain-gut interactions at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Neither scientist is affiliated with Novo Nordisk.

Doctors who treat obesity patients told Vox they wished they had a treatment option like semaglutide years ago, and patients described the drug as life-altering.

Yet many people with obesity may not seek out semaglutide, and doctors may not prescribe it to them — not only because of the dangerous history of weight loss medications, but also because of a persistent bias and stigma around a disease that now afflicts nearly half of Americans. Obesity is still widely viewed as a personal responsibility problem, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. And history has shown that the most effective medical interventions, such as bariatric surgery — currently the gold standard for treating obesity — often go unused in favor of dieting and exercise, which for many don’t work.

There’s also a practical challenge: Health insurers don’t typically cover obesity medications, says Scott Kahan, an obesity doctor and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the George Washington University School of Medicine. “Medicare explicitly excludes weight medications,” Kahan, who consults with Novo Nordisk, says. “And most insurers follow what Medicare does.”

The new drug certainly won’t be a cure-all for obesity, Krashes adds. “You are not taking a 280-pound person and making them 130,” he points out, though reductions that are enough to improve health outcomes are typical. Drucker, who began consulting with Novo Nordisk and other drug companies after his reptilian discovery, agrees that it’s a starting point for obesity: “It will only scratch the surface of the problem in the population that needs to be healthier.”

But semaglutide is the most powerful obesity drug ever approved, he adds. “Drugs that will produce 15 percent body weight loss — we did not have that before in the medical therapy of obesity.” With additional, potentially more effective GLP-1 receptor agonists coming online in the future, we’re at the beginning of a promising new chapter of obesity therapeutics. A look at the fascinating science of how the medication works could also go a long way to changing how Americans think about this disease.

“We have to thank the lizard for that,” Drucker says.

What semaglutide reveals about weight problems

To understand how semaglutide causes some people to eat less, it’s helpful to understand what hormones do. They’re the body’s traveling messengers: Manufactured in one area, they move to another to deliver messages through receptors — molecules that bind to specific hormones — in distant organs and cells.

The gut makes dozens of hormones, and many of them travel to the brain receptors that either curb appetite or stimulate it, Drucker explains. GLP-1 is one such gut hormone. It’s unleashed in the gut in response to food and stimulates the pancreas to make more insulin after a meal, which lowers blood sugar. (GLP-1 is also made in the brain stem, where it may modify appetite.)

“It sends a signal to our brain that says, ‘You know, we’ve had enough to eat,’” says Drucker.

Enter semaglutide, one of a class of medicines — the GLP-1-receptor agonists — that imitate GLP-1, helping the body lower glucose (in the case of people with diabetes) and, researchers suspect, curb appetite (in the case of people living with obesity who may also have diabetes).

The precise way the drug works on obesity is still unknown, in part because scientists don’t understand exactly how appetite works. But researchers generally agree that the drug harnesses the brain’s GLP-1 receptors to curb food intake. When researchers delete the GLP-1 receptors from the brains of mice, the drug loses its appetite-suppressing effects, says Krashes.

Obesity is “primarily an issue of our brain biology, and the way it’s processing info about the environment we live in,” says Randy Seeley, a University of Michigan researcher focused on obesity treatments, who also consults with Novo Nordisk.

With semaglutide, the idea is that “we’re changing your brain chemistry for your brain to believe you should be at a lower weight,” Seeley added.

This brain-based pharmacological approach is likely to be more successful than diet and exercise alone, Seeley says, because “the most important underlying part of somebody’s weight has to do with how their brain operates,” not a lack of willpower.

Not quite a “game changer”

Some people with a higher body mass index are perfectly healthy and don’t require any treatment. Semaglutide was only indicated by the FDA for patients who classify as clinically obese — with a body mass index of 30 or greater — or those who are overweight and have at least one weight-related health problem.

For the many people who have used it, it has proved safe and effective, according to the FDA. In weight loss clinical trials, semaglutide helped people lose about 15 percent of their body weight on average — significantly more than the currently available obesity drugs and more than enough to improve health outcomes.

The drug’s most common side effects — nausea, diarrhea, constipation, and vomiting — were mostly short-lived. De Araujo is finding that adverse reactions might be caused by how the drug differs from the naturally occurring peptide hormone: The hormone acts mostly locally and degrades quickly, while the medicine works mainly on the brain and is designed to stick around in the body. “That’s where the nausea, vomiting probably derive from,” De Araujo argues.

Patients who have tried semaglutide told Vox that it helped them manage their weight and relationship to food, and that their side effects were manageable and quickly resolved.

Jim Eggeman, a 911 operator in Ohio, said that before taking semaglutide, “I could sit down and eat a large pizza, and now it’s one to two pieces at the most.” He started on the drug for diabetes after a heart attack in December 2019 and lost 35 pounds, bringing his weight to 220.

Paula Morris-Kaufman, of Cheshire, UK, used the drug to address weight gain following cancer treatments. It helped her bring her weight back to a normal range, she says, and curb her habit of compulsive eating. “If you give me a plate of food, I just eat a small portion of it — and feel full really quickly.”

It’s possible that some of the benefits of treatment come in part from lifestyle changes, which were encouraged by the clinical trials. In many cases, patients on semaglutide also switched to a healthier diet when they started on the drug and added exercise to their routines. But study participants taking the drug still lost significantly more weight than those under the same conditions who received a placebo.

The need for additional interventions — like diet and exercise — is one reason why Kahan stops short of calling this drug a game changer. “It’s an incremental improvement” over existing drugs, he says, and it’s still out of reach for many of the individuals who could benefit from it. “The ‘game changer�� description is not appropriate, because many people don’t have access to these medicines.”

A mindset shift

Only about 1 percent of eligible patients were using FDA-approved medications for obesity in 2019, a study showed. The same is true for bariatric surgery, currently the most effective intervention for obesity, which can also drive type 2 diabetes into remission.

“If someone walks into your office with heart disease and you as a physician don’t try to treat it, that’s malpractice,” Seeley says. “If somebody comes in with a BMI over 30 and you don’t treat it, that’s Tuesday.” He thinks some of the hesitancy for treating patients with obesity medications comes from the history of dangerous weight loss drugs.

“We would never blame other individuals for developing high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease or cancer”

Ingrained biases about obesity have also made it harder for patients to get access, Kahan says. “Obesity tends to be categorized as a cosmetic issue in health insurance policies,” he says. “In order to get coverage, employers have to explicitly decide to buy a rider and sign a contract to add weight management services and products to their insurance plans.” He’d like to see obesity treatments covered by insurers in the same way diabetes and hypertension drugs are.

That will require a shift in mindset, Drucker says. “We would never blame other individuals for developing high blood pressure or cardiovascular disease or cancer,” he says. It’s widely known that those conditions are driven by complex biological determinants, including genes, as well as environmental factors. “Obesity is no different.”

When Drucker started in endocrinology in the 1980s, he didn’t have many tools to help patients. With the addition of semaglutide, there are multiple surgical options and drugs for obesity and diabetes. The challenge now is helping those who would benefit gain access.

“I would be delighted if no one needed GLP-1 for diabetes and obesity,” Drucker says. That might be possible in a food landscape that didn’t nudge people toward the overeating and poor diet that leads to these chronic conditions. But for now, “we have new options that are safe, appear to reduce complications, and are very effective. … We shouldn’t just throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do.”

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Federal Budget Would Raise Spending by $320 Billion https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/us/politics/budget-deal.html

Federal Budget Would Raise Spending by $320 Billion

By Emily Cochrane, Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley | Published July 22, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 22, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — White House and congressional negotiators reached accord on a two-year budget on Monday that would raise spending caps and lift the government’s debt ceiling, likely averting a fiscal crisis but splashing still more red ink on an already surging deficit.

If passed by Congress and signed by President Trump, the deal would stop a potential debt default this fall and avoid automatic spending cuts next year. The agreement would also bring clarity about government spending over the rest of Mr. Trump’s term.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

· 20m

I am pleased to announce that a deal has been struck with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy - on a two-year Budget and Debt Ceiling, with no poison pills....

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....This was a real compromise in order to give another big victory to our Great Military and Vets!

13.7K

5:44 PM - Jul 22, 2019

“It’s pretty clear that both houses of Congress and both parties have become big spenders, and Congress is no longer concerned about the extent of the budget deficits or the debt they add,” said David M. McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative group that advocates for free-enterprise.

The agreement, struck by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, would raise spending by $320 billion, compared to the strict spending levels established in the 2011 Budget Control Act and set to go into effect next year without legislative action. Spending on domestic and military programs would increase equally, a key demand of Ms. Pelosi, offset by about $75 billion in spending cuts, far lower than the $150 billion in cuts that some White House officials initially demanded.

The deal would lift the debt ceiling high enough to allow the government to keep borrowing for two more years, punting the next showdown past the 2020 elections. The negotiators hope to enact the accord before Congress leaves for its August recess.

The president said he was pleased with the added military spending and made no mention of the mounting deficits that he and Republicans once railed against.

The deal is a coup de grâce for the Budget Control Act of 2011, which President Barack Obama signed into law after House Republicans, led by the current acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, pushed the government to the brink of defaulting on its debt. The law, once seen as the Republicans’ crowning achievement in the Obama era, set strict spending caps, enforced with automatic spending cuts.

But since 2014, a succession of budget deals has waived the Budget Control Act caps, and the new deal not only lifts them again but allows the whole law to expire in 2021.

Meantime, the federal debt has ballooned to $22 trillion. Despite healthy economic growth, the federal deficit for this fiscal year has reached $747 billion with two months to go — a 23 percent increase from the year before.

“It appears that Congress and the president have just given up on their jobs,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which blasted out a statement arguing the tentative deal “may end up being the worst budget agreement in our nation’s history.”

“The economy is great and able to accommodate changes,” she said in an interview. “But we’re about to make things worse due to nothing other than the lack of political will.”

The rising costs of an aging population, with the baby boom generation drawing Social Security and Medicare benefits, and Washington’s spending habits have led to increases in both federal spending and interest costs on the growing national debt. During the first two years of the Trump administration, the debt increased by more than $2 trillion, in part because of the 10-year, $1.5 trillion tax cut and large spending increases Mr. Trump signed into law.

The president has repeatedly called for deep spending cuts in the budgets he has submitted to Congress — then signed several laws that have boosted the deficit even further.

As president, Mr. Trump has overseen both a binge in discretionary spending and a plunge in expected tax revenues as a result of the tax cut legislation that stands as his signature legislative achievement. The federal budget deficit has increased by an average of 15 percent for each fiscal year he has been in office. (Mr. Obama ran large deficits in his first term in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But his second term saw deficits fall by an average of 11 percent per fiscal year.)

In that first Obama term, which included a large government stimulus package to jump-start job creation in the depths of the recession, discretionary spending on military and domestic items rose by about 3 percent per year, on average. In his second term, such spending declined by an annual average of nearly 2 percent.

Mr. Trump is currently on pace to increase discretionary spending by an average of nearly 4 percent per year.

Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which reduced rates for businesses and individuals, have not paid for themselves, as some administration officials said they would. Instead, they have reduced individual and corporate tax revenues by about 8 percent per year, compared to what budget forecasters expected before the cuts were passed into law.

Combined with increased costs from paying interest on a larger national debt, the tax cuts are on pace to add nearly $400 billion to the national debt in the course of the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office.

But Democrats are not inclined toward austerity either. In the first round of Democratic presidential debates, the national debt was barely mentioned.

Still, passage of the budget agreement is not certain. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Mnuchin, who have led the negotiations in private phone calls over the last week, will have to sell the deal to their parties ahead of an anticipated House vote this week, before that chamber leaves on Friday. The Senate is scheduled to leave for its recess next week.

In her caucus, Ms. Pelosi must wrangle votes from both her fiscal hawks and liberal members opposed to increased military spending. Mr. Mnuchin must secure the president’s signature and wave off critics of government spending Mr. Mulvaney.

But the threat of an economically disastrous default on the nation’s debt, coupled with widespread desire to avoid automatic cuts to military and domestic programs, are likely enough for the proposed measure to become law.

“I can’t imagine anybody ever even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge,” Mr. Trump said on Friday. “We can never play with it.”

Once a deal is enacted, lawmakers have to race to agree on how to allocate the money before Oct. 1, when current spending laws expire.

Meantime, the deficit hawks are getting more disheartened.

“Everybody getting what they want is not bipartisan compromise, it’s irresponsible policymaking that harms the next generation,” said Michael Peterson, chief executive of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an advocacy group for debt reduction.

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.

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moodboardinthecloud · 4 years

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The trillion-dollar woman

A conversation with the economist Stephanie Kelton about the "deficit myth," Modern Monetary Theory for dummies, and why the age of capital may finally be ending

Anand Giridharadas

Mar 30

Joe Biden is president of the United States, but he lives in Stephanie Kelton’s world.

An economist and champion of so-called Modern Monetary Theory, Kelton has long agitated against what she calls “the deficit myth,” which is also the title of her bestselling book on the subject.

At the most basic level, Kelton believes the United States government is capable of investing far more than it ordinarily does, or than most people think it should, in making people’s lives better. And she argues that much of the resistance to doing so is grounded in outdated, gold-standard thinking that has no place in reality today.

Whatever you think of her ideas, which have a rapidly growing number of adherents, and which tend to make Larry Summers cry, there is no question that they are carrying the day in the American public debate. Indeed, it is hard to understand the comfort the new Biden administration has had with significant government spending — contrary to Biden’s own past nature — without understanding how much the terms of the debate have shifted, and how much Kelton herself has to do with that shift.

So I’m excited to bring you this interview with her today.

But first: I will be doing my regular live chat/webinar thing today at 1 p.m. New York time, 10 a.m. Pacific time, and 6 p.m. London time. If you’re new to The Ink, they’re fun and engaging. If you haven’t yet, subscribe today to join us. Subscribers will receive login details beforehand.

Subscribing to The Ink is the best way to keep it free and open to all, and to support independent media that hopefully makes you think and enlivens your conversations. I appreciate your support for this undertaking. Every subscriber makes a difference.

“We’re closer than we’ve been in a long time”: a conversation with Stephanie Kelton

ANAND: In the wake of the passage of the American Rescue Plan, we’ve heard every manner of reaction. Joe Biden is a dangerous socialist. Joe Biden is putting lipstick on the pig of austerity politics. Joe Biden is the second coming of FDR. Or maybe LBJ. How would you assess what happened and what it tells us about where this presidency is headed?

STEPHANIE: I served as one of eight members on the Biden-Sanders “unity task force” on the economy. Some of the other members are now in the administration. I’m not sure exactly what I expected to see from Biden in his first 100 days, but the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act went beyond anything I would have anticipated.

And they’re not done. Later this week, we’ll get the details of a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure package. It will almost certainly be too small, given the enormous challenges we face, and it isn’t clear how much of the proposed spending they will try to “pay for” with higher taxes. If they insist on raising a slew of taxes to offset all (or mostly all) of the spending, it could make it more difficult to hold all 50 Senate Democrats together. Any slippage risks paring back the price tag and, thus, delivering an even smaller package.

But it’s encouraging to see the president recognize that temporary relief wasn’t enough. I think he knows that he can’t afford to preside over the kind of “recovery” we experienced after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. That’s what the “Build Back Better” agenda is about.

Biden is no socialist, but he does seem to understand that his presidency will be judged, in large part, on the degree to which his policies deliver material improvements in people’s lives.

It’s way too early for comparisons to FDR and LBJ. I think Harvey Kaye, who has written several books on FDR, has this right. He tweeted that Biden will be less like FDR or LBJ and more like Dwight Eisenhower if Dems succeed in passing an infrastructure bill but can’t bust the filibuster and pass the PRO Act and the For the People Act.

ANAND: The dog that didn’t bark during the rescue plan debate was deficit anxiety. You’ve devoted years of life to training that dog to stop barking. Can you explain what you observed in this debate regarding deficit angst fading from the culture, and why that matters?

STEPHANIE: Back in March 2020, I said, “It took a virus to kill the deficit myth.” It’s not dead, but you’re right. It’s been dormant for the last year. Angst over the deficit faded as soon as Covid became a national emergency. Congress spun out multiple packages without so-called “pay-fors.” The biggest — the CARES Act — was a $2.2 trillion spending bill. We got another one ($900 billion) in December and one more ($1.9 trillion) about a month ago. All of it added to the deficit.

Occasionally, the deficit still came up. Remember, the bipartisan group that worked out the $900 billion package in December openly worried about the “price tag” and whittled the survival checks down to $600. But Biden defended the $1.9 trillion by invoking the founding fathers, who he explained had given the federal government the ability to do what state and local governments can’t do — deficit-spend! He publicly embraced the deficit in a way I haven’t seen any president do in my lifetime.

What I’m watching for now is where the administration goes next. The Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, raised concerns about debt and deficits in her confirmation hearings, and she has a long history of worrying about a phantom debt crisis. She has talked about the need to “pay for” the parts of the Build Back Better agenda that are permanent, “to not raise long-term deficits.” The Obama administration’s pivot to deficit reduction remains an open wound in my heart. I hope the Biden team will turn a blind eye to the deficit and stay focused on healing the real economy.

ANAND: You are a leading champion of what’s called Modern Monetary Theory. It’s a domain with a devoted fan base and many people who don’t understand a thing about it. Give me the explanation you’d give to a 10-year-old about what the old thinking was and what MMT seeks to replace it with.

STEPHANIE: The first chapter in my book is called “Don’t Think of a Household.” I open with a Sesame Street reference, so this is an explanation that most 5-year-olds can grasp. For those who grew up watching the show, a frequent segment was aimed at helping kids distinguish things that are alike from things that have some fundamentally different characteristics.

“One of these things is not like the other,” the song went. So think about these four things: A household, a business, state and local governments, and the federal government. The first three share something important in common: none of them can issue the U.S. dollar. In order to spend, they must first come up with the money.

The federal government is completely different. It has the sole legal authority to issue the currency. Biden was right! Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution enshrined that power. Unlike the rest of us, the federal government can spend money it doesn’t have. New dollars are created every time the federal government spends.

Take the Covid relief package. Congress didn’t go out and “find” $1.9 trillion before passing that legislation. It didn’t have to, because it has something the rest of us don’t — the power of the purse. The bill effectively ordered up $1.9 trillion new dollars from a bank called the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve carries out payments on behalf of Treasury, using nothing more than a computer keyboard to change the appropriate bank account numbers.

If you received one of those $1,400 stimulus checks, that money was keystroked into existence to help your family. If you’re unemployed, and you’re getting an extra $300 a week in unemployment benefits, you’re also receiving newly created dollars, courtesy of the federal government.

If households, businesses, governors, and mayors had this power, they would plug any holes in their budgets on their own. But they can’t. They are financially constrained. The federal government isn’t.

MMT is about providing an accurate description of the monetary system that exists today and government finance mechanics. In other words, MMT describes how things work. We’re not on a gold standard anymore, but we haven’t come to terms with what that means.

We still have this idea that the federal government needs our money in order to pay its bills. That is wrong. Could Congress spend too much? Absolutely! But the punishment for overspending is inflation, not insolvency, contrary to what Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham would have us believe.

At its core, MMT is about replacing the (flawed) concept of a government budget constraint with a natural resource (inflation) constraint. It’s not that there aren’t any limits. There are! But they’re not on the financing side (as we have been trained to believe). Our government cannot run “out of money,” as President Obama once falsely claimed. We cannot end up like Greece, and, contra these economists, we were never facing a fiscal crisis.

MMT teaches us to ask not, “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” The politics are hard, but coming up with the money for Medicare for All, tuition-free college, or a huge infrastructure package is the easy part. Managing the use of our productive resources, and respecting our ecological constraints, is the defining challenge of our time.

ANAND: How significant is the new child benefit, and do you think it creates the rudiments of a basic income in American life?

STEPHANIE: It’s significant. Anytime you can cut child poverty in half with a stroke of the pen, it is, as Biden says, “a big f-ing deal.” It is life-changing and significant for millions of families. It shows that poverty is and always has been a policy choice. But it’s also, potentially, a temporary improvement in their economic station.

It’s also the case that the aid is targeted to a particular group of people based on specific identified needs (i.e., child-related expenses), so in that respect, it is not like a universal basic income. It does get us closer to a point where every person has a guaranteed minimum income. However, it is also being considered in concert with an expansion of pre-K and a buildout of other care-related infrastructure, so it’s not just “give them cash and let the market sort it out.”

ANAND: What do you think about many of these most significant — even philosophically significant — elements of the American Rescue Plan being temporary and requiring renewal before long? Is this a dangerous way of going about things, or perhaps a clever way of whetting the public appetite for change and then pushing it through when that appetite has grown?

STEPHANIE: Remember that Democrats passed the latest rescue package through a process known as budget reconciliation. And remember that the Senate is currently bound by the Byrd Rule, which, among other things, prevents lawmakers from using reconciliation to pass legislation that increases the deficit outside the 10-year budget window.

So it’s a bit like when Republicans passed their tax cuts in December 2017. They used reconciliation as well, and they had to sunset specific provisions to comply with Byrd. Specifically, they made the corporate tax cuts permanent, but the individual income tax cuts temporary.

There was just no way for Democrats to get a package through a standalone bill with the filibuster in place. To have the kind of freedom to do bold, FDR-like stuff, they need to get rid of a whole suite of self-imposed budget rules and constraints. I think you’re right, though. The public’s appetite has been whetted. Unlike the GOP tax cuts, Biden’s rescue package was enormously popular, and that should make it easier for lawmakers to turn some of the temporary measures into longer-term commitments.

ANAND: I wanted to ask you about the minimum wage. The increase to $15 was famously removed from this rescue plan. But the same legislators like Senator Joe Manchin, who didn’t like that provision, didn’t have a problem with $1.9 trillion of government spending.

If I’m generous, it makes me wonder if the concern is the pain on small businesses. Is there any way to raise the minimum wage but spare small businesses the burden — via some public support that would, in essence, make the society pay that increase, not individual firms? Is that a terrible idea?

STEPHANIE: I think there is a way, but it’s not really about making society pay. Lawmakers could negotiate a tax cut for small businesses to get the votes needed to raise the minimum wage. It’s basically how Congress did it the last time the minimum wage was increased.

In 2007, Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to gradually raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25 per hour. How did it happen? The bill was introduced in the House on January 5, 2007, and passed on January 10. All 233 House Democrats voted “aye.” Eighty-two Republicans joined them in voting “aye.”

A cloture motion — to stop debate and move to a vote — in the Senate failed after President George W. Bush said he wanted tax cuts for small business owners who might be adversely impacted. The Senate included the tax cuts, and the amended bill sailed through with a vote of 94-3. I don’t see why we couldn’t do something like that again.

ANAND: So here’s confusion I hear a lot. Modern Monetary Theory proposes that we should stop thinking about what programs we can do in terms of what taxes we can raise.

Yet there are these important calls for raising taxes on the ultra-rich — and whether it’s Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, they justify them in large part because of what can be paid for with the revenues. Is this a problematic way to pitch it?

Should we do a wealth tax? And if not for paying for things, then why?

STEPHANIE: First, the economics behind the conventional way of thinking about taxes is simply flawed. As the New York Federal Reserve's former head observed way back in 1946, “Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete.” The conventional wisdom derives from outmoded, gold-standard thinking, and we should stop debating tax policy as if we have a monetary system that is no longer with us. State and local governments need tax revenue to operate. The federal government does not. To have a fruitful discussion about federal tax policy, the word “revenue” should never come up.

In addition to getting the economics wrong, I believe it is politically harmful to pretend that we cannot afford to fix our crumbling infrastructure, or care for our people, unless and until we successfully wrest part of Jeff Bezos’ fortune away from him.

I mean, come on. Congress just did something that will halve child poverty, and it didn’t raise a single tax to do it. So, of course, we don’t need to tax the rich in order to be able to spend trillions on programs that benefit the majority of the population. As I argued here, we’ve had that power all along.

Here’s how I put it in “The Deficit Myth”:

We can, and must, tax the rich. But not because we can’t afford to do anything without them. We should tax billionaires to rebalance the distribution of wealth and income and to protect the health of our democracy.

But we don’t need to crack open their piggy banks to eradicate poverty or to have the federal job guarantee with a living wage that Coretta Scott King fought for. We already have the tools we need. Feigning dependence on those with incredible wealth sends the wrong message, making them appear more vital to our cause than they are.

I think every MMT scholar strongly favors substantial tax increases on the wealthiest people in our society — not so much because they’re not paying their fair share but — because they have been taking more than their fair share for too long, something you’ve written about yourself. We have dangerous levels of income and wealth inequality, and that is all the justification I need to support many of the tax increases Senators Warren and Sanders have proposed.

But we must go further. Senator Warren admits that the uber-wealthy will barely feel the pinch of her 2 percent wealth tax (escalating by another 1 percent on fortunes over $1 billion). Why? Because, she admits, their wealth tends to grow at an annual clip that far exceeds 2 or 3 percent, meaning it doesn’t get us to a place where we’re dealing with extreme concentrations of wealth.

Ironically, I think this has to do with the fact that the wealth tax is being touted primarily as a way to “pay for” parts of the progressive agenda. It’s almost as if the goal is to peel off just enough to claim that it will “pay for” universal pre-K, some student debt cancellation, etc., rather than to aggressively deal with the concentrations of wealth that have been undermining our democracy.

That may be changing. I noticed last week that Senator Sanders seems to be inching closer to the MMT view. As Niv Elis wrote in the Hill, “Sanders also made it clear that he sees the issue not so much as a matter of paying for favored policies, but in creating a more equitable society.”

ANAND: Given the historical residue of the Cold War and the lingering American fear of big government and communism around the corner, how can those who want what you want in terms of economic policy do a better job of pitching their ideas to those millions of members of the public who are skeptical, if not hostile?

STEPHANIE: I think Biden is a pretty terrific messenger. He sold the population on the need for a nearly $2 trillion rescue package, and he’s on the verge of barnstorming the country to build support for another $3 to $4 trillion for his Build Back Better agenda. He could go even bigger, and I think he could do it without giving the other side any rope to hang him with.

It’s not communism or socialism but a kind of protectionism that he could successfully lean into to build support for a more progressive suite of economic policies.

Donald Trump successfully pushed a protectionist narrative. A typically racist and ugly kind of protectionism, but protectionism nonetheless. Much of it was purely racist. It was about protecting “us” from “them.” But he also spoke of the economic system's failures and the way he intended to protect workers from raw trade deals and the like.

“Help is on the way,” he bloviated, pretending to understand the pain of working-class voters who had seen their towns and communities become shadows of their former selves, hollowed out by decades of neoliberal trade, labor, and environmental policies.

Biden wouldn’t be selling communism or socialism, but he could sell America on a different kind of protectionism.

And now we come full circle. FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights was a protectionist document. It enumerated a set of essential protections that should be afforded to every person in this country. The right to a job and a decent wage, the right to operate a business free of unfair competition and monopolies, the right to an education, to housing and health care, and to a secure retirement.

We all want the sense of security that comes from knowing that whatever the vagaries of capitalism may throw our way, there are certain safeguards in place to protect all of us from poverty and deprivation.

Biden could even one-up FDR, presenting us with a 21st-century version of an Economic Bill of Rights. Something along these lines.

ANAND: For years, my plea has been that we have to end the age of capital — this neoliberal era — and launch an age of reform. Where do you think we are at this moment in time on that long arc?

STEPHANIE: I’d say we’re closer than we’ve been in a long time, but it could well get much worse before it gets better. I hope I’m wrong, but climate change is going to confront us with some very bad circumstances. If we can’t rebuild basic levels of empathy and communitarian commitment, those bad circumstances are going to make us meaner, more scared, more selfish, and ultimately more violent than we already are.

Stephanie Kelton is an economist, professor, and former advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. You can order her latest book, “The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy,” here. This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

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Are Republicans Trying To Get Rid Of Social Security

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Are Republicans Trying To Get Rid Of Social Security

Trumps Scheme To Sabotage Medicare And Social Security

Republican Introduces Legislation To Completely Gut Social Security

Dont get too comfortable with your Social Security and Medicare.

Thats the warning President Trump sent from his New Jersey golf course Saturday as he announced a package of coronavirus relief that turns out to be more of a cynical and cruel campaign stunt.

Heres why its cynical:

Democrats and even some Republicans are questioning the legality of his new executive orders, which depend in large measure on the voluntary cooperation of employers and cash-strapped state legislatures.

The cut in payroll taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare is actually a deferment that workers or their employers would have to cough up next year. But Trump vowed to make the cut permanent.

The temporary $400 in weekly supplemental unemployment benefits turns out to be only $300. States would be challenged to kick in another $100, but most legislatures are cash-strapped and forbidden by constitutions or laws to run deficits like the federal government can. They cant print money either. Trump would filch the $300 of federal money from funds budgeted for natural disasters in hurricane season no less and that is certain to be challenged in court.;

The order to resume a moratorium on evictions is nothing more than an instruction to government agencies to consider whether it needs to be done and to look for money in their existing budgets to help terrified renters.

Hes raising false hopes for everyone else. Thats what makes it cruel.

This is what he said:

Trumps Plan To Defund Social Security

On August 8, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, President Donald Trump announced that his administration is seeking to delay much of the payroll tax that funds Social Security1 of 4 unilateral actions he took in lieu of negotiating with Congress on meaningful economic relief legislation. The president also said that if he is reelected, he wants not only to turn the delay into a tax cut that would result in significant revenue losses for Social Security, but also to eliminate employee payroll taxes for good. As our analysis based on the Social Security trustees projections shows, eliminating employee payroll taxes along the lines that the president has proposed would, absent additional action, completely exhaust the Social Security trust fund by 2026 or earlier and result in steep benefit cuts.

Trump has made clear that he wants the tax that is delayed this fall under his unilateral action to be permanently forgiven, which would result in a permanent revenue loss of about $100 billion for Social Security. At the Bedminster press conference, President Trump also stated, If Im victorious on November 3rd, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax. Trump doubled down on these comments on Monday, August 10, reiterating, After the election, on the assumption that it will be victorious for an administration thats done a great job, we will be ending that tax, well be terminating that tax.

Social Security Is Facing A Nearly $17 Trillion Funding Gap

If Biden wins in November, he’ll have a host of issues to immediately tackle, including the ongoing response to the coronavirus pandemic, job creation, and growing the U.S. economy. But don’t overlook perhaps the biggest long-term challenge facing the president: Social Security’s widening cash shortfall.

Every year, the Social Security Board of Trustees releases a report that examines the short-term and long-term outlook for the program. In each of the past 35 years, the Trustees have cautioned that long-term revenue collection won’t be sufficient to cover outlays. This is a fancy way of saying that the existing payout schedule, inclusive of cost-of-living adjustments , isn’t sustainable. Social Security is facing an estimated $16.8 trillion funding shortfall between 2035 — when the Trustees anticipate the program will exhaust its $2.9 trillion in asset reserves — and 2094. Benefit cuts of up to 24% may await retired workers as a result.

Something needs to be done soon to shore up Social Security; otherwise, our nation’s retired workforce could be in big financial trouble in less than 15 years.

However, Biden has a plan.

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President Trump Wont Destroy Social Securitybut Hes Not Going To Save It

Former Vice President Joe Biden is running campaign ads that claim President Trump signed an executive action directing funding cuts for Social Security and proposed slashing hundreds of billions of dollars from the Social Security Trust Fund every year.;

The problem is, however, that this just isnt so.

A Biden campaign TV ad falsely claims that a government analysis of President Donald Trumps planned cuts to Social Security shows that if Trump gets his way, Social Security benefits will run out in just three years from now, says FactCheck.org.;

The cliche politics aint beanbag exists for a reason: Campaigns use overhyped rhetoric to distort their opponents positions and make them appear less electable. Seniors should rest easy and understand that their Social Security benefits arent going anywhere.

But this dynamic of misleading charges belies a more fundamental problem: Something will eventually need to be done to buttress Social Securitys finances. Episodes like this dont bode well for future attempts to reform Social Security.

President Trumps Record On Social Security

In 2016, the president distinguished himself from other Republicans by promising to leave Social Security alone. Over the past four years, hes pretty much done just that.

There have been no Bush-like privatization plans from the Trump administration, no Simpson/Bowles-inspired murmings over cutting benefits or raising the full retirement age. Theres been no real plan to do much of anything. The Biden campaign ad is as close as theres been to a controversy, and even that misrepresents the presidents aims.

Should Trump win in November you can expect more of the same.;

I haven’t seen anything discussed on Social Security reform, Andrew Biggs, a research fellow at the conservative-leaning think tank AEI told Forbes Advisor. The president has argued against any Social Security benefit cuts but hasn’t waded into how Social Security’s long-term funding should be secured.

While this should assuage any fears about changes to the Social Security status quo and soothe soon-to-be retirees worried about cuts to their monthly checks, its less than ideal that the Trump administration has no plans to shore up Social Securitys long-term finances.;

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Switch The Program’s Inflationary Tether To The Cpi

Fourth and finally, Biden has suggested that the inflationary tether for Social Security be changed from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers to the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly .

The CPI-W has been the program’s inflationary measure since 1975, and while it’s resulted in a positive COLA in 42 of the past 45 years, the purchasing power of Social Security dollars has been slashed by 30% since 2000. That’s because the CPI-W doesn’t do a very good job of accurately measuring the costs that seniors are contending with. Even though more than 80% of Social Security beneficiaries are seniors, the CPI-W tracks the spending habits of urban and clerical workers, who often aren’t seniors or receiving Social Security benefits.

Under Biden’s plan, the CPI-E would become the new inflationary tether. The CPI-E specifically tracks the spending habits of households with persons aged 62 and up. In theory, this should result in a more accurate COLA each year.

Democrats Oppose Relief For Essential Workers Just Because Of Politics

Payroll taxes are the largest taxes most workers pay, and during the economic lockdown, many families have gone from earning two incomes to earning just one. Thats why Congress ought to provide an instant payraise for the frontline workers who are keeping this economy running by supporting Rep. Kevin Bradys Support for Workers, Families, and Social Security Act. The bill forgives employee …

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They Aim To Fix Social Security Through Long

Finally, Republicans do want to fix Social Security, but they are at the opposite side of the spectrum from Democrats on how to do that. Whereas Democrats prefer raising revenue to make up for an expected $13.2 trillion cash shortfall between 2034 and 2092, Republicans want to reduce the program’s long-term expenditures.

How, you ask? As noted, they’d implement the Chained CPI, which would result in lower annual COLAs, and thereby reduce the amount of expenditures heading to beneficiaries over the long run.

Republicans are also big proponents of raising the full retirement age, or the age at which you become eligible for your full retirement benefit. Currently, set to peak at age 67 for those born in 2022 or later, Republicans would like to see this gradually increased to as high as age 70. This would require retired workers to either wait longer to receive their full payout, or to accept a steeper monthly reduction if claiming early. Either way, it reduces the lifetime benefits paid out by Social Security, and thereby saves the program money.

Some Republicans, including Donald Trump, have called for a form of means-testing, which would reduce or eliminate Social Security benefit payments for those folks or couples who are wealthy.

Do Republicans In Congress Want To Take Away Social Security Medicare Medicaid

Republicans Are Lying About Social Security

Its been a time-tested Democratic attack line: Republicans are going to take away your Medicare, or maybe your Social Security. We gave a variant of the line our 2011 Lie of the Year.

Now the talking point has re-emerged, in a , from Oregons Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee:

“#TrumpTax was only the beginning. After giving massive tax giveaways to wealthy & powerful shareholders, Republicans in Congress are plotting to take away Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

#TrumpTax was only the beginning. After giving massive tax giveaways to wealthy & powerful shareholders, Republicans in Congress are plotting to take away Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Ron Wyden

In reality, the notion that congressional Republicans are scheming to “take away” Medicaid, Medicare or Social Security is inaccurate.

The Democratic news release

The first piece of evidence undercutting the tweets message is actually linked in the tweet itself.

An accompanying Senate Democratic press release, dated March 27, starts by saying, “Its only been a few months since Republicans jammed through their massive giveaway to corporate executives and wealthy shareholders. Now theyre planning on paying for it with huge cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, despite President Trumps promises that he wouldnt do so.”

These quotes suggest the Republican in charge of the House continues to seek overhauls of the entitlement system.

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Biden To Meet With Senate Republicans About Covid

The cuts can be avoided, budget experts say, only with 60 Senate votes leaving Democrats back where they started, because it’s unclear whether Republicans would vote to prevent the cuts after having opposed a partisan relief package.

“It’s Medicare. It’s farm subsidies,” said Marc Goldwein, a budget expert at the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “It’s a bunch of programs that would be cut.”

The size of the reductions in Medicare and other social safety net program would depend on the size of the package, but they’d be significant even if the price tag fell under $1 trillion. Social Security and low-income programs would be exempt.

“The cuts would be huge,” said Paul Van de Water, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. “It’s a critical issue, which, at some point, is going to have to be dealt with.”

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who will shepherd the reconciliation process and has been a supporter of expanding safety net programs, will work to prevent the cuts, said his spokesman, Keane Bhatt.

Bhatt pointed to the last time budget reconciliation was used to make a big change when Republicans passed a costly tax cut on a partisan vote, which triggered $25 billion in Medicare cuts. But Democrats joined Republicans to prevent the cuts from taking effect in a government funding measure that was passed subsequently.

NBC News app for breaking news and politics

Republicans Are Pushing Myths About Social Security

Republican politicians want to cut Social Security. They never say so out loud, but their 2016 platform reveals the truth. In the section labeled, Saving Social Security, it proclaims, As Republicans, we oppose tax increases Since Social Security cannot deficit spend and is projecting a shortfall in 2035 if Congress doesnt act, that only leaves benefit cuts.

Representative John Larson , the Chairman of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Social Security, is trying to force his Republican colleagues into the open. Larson is the sponsor of the Social Security 2100 Act, which increases Social Securitys modest benefits. Additionally, it raises enough revenue to ensure that all benefits can be paid in full and on time through the year 2100 and beyond. Ninety percent of the Democrats in the House of Representatives are co-sponsors, but not a single Republican. Given their refusal to back his bill, Rep. Larson has urged Republicans to offer an alternative proposal to no avail.

Non-action is not an option, unless your goal is to cut Social Security. The most recent Social Security Trustees’ Report projects that with no action, benefits will be automatically reduced by 20 percent in 2035. As Chairman Larson has plainly stated, The hard truth of the matter is that Republicans want to cut Social Security, and doing nothing achieves their goal.

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Trump White House Claim The Tax Relief Will Not Impact Social Security

On Sunday, as he boarded Marine One, Trump told reporters that the executive order deferring;payroll taxes for some Americans;will “have zero impact on Social Security.”;

“We protect Social Security,” he added, according to Fox News.

An official from the;White House told USA TODAY on Tuesday that the Social Security Trust Fund is not at risk, since payment deferral is only temporary, and at present, must be paid back early in 2021. The official confirmed, though, that the president;called;on;Congress to make the;deferral permanent,;thereby eliminating the tax.

Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, an independent tax policy think tank, told USA TODAY that eliminating the tax is not the same as eliminating Social Security.

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“Strictly speaking, Social Security could be funded using general fund revenue or alternative revenue source, so terminating a tax and terminating a program are distinct things,” he;wrote in an email.

“However, it would be reasonable to ask what would happen with the program absent an alternative plan to fund it,” Watson added.

On Wednesday, Trump suggested an alternate source for the first time the general fund of government revenues ;per Fox Business.

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Republicans Demand Social Security And Medicare Cuts Is It Reported

Yesterday The Hill reported, in House GOP says sequester is leverage in next budget battle, that Rep. Paul Ryan is pushing for cuts in Social Security and Medicare:

In a meeting with House conservatives, Rep. Paul Ryan , told rank-and-file lawmakers that, as the partys chief budget negotiator, he would push instead for long-term reforms to entitlement programs in exchange for changes to sequestration spending cuts that Democrats are expected to demand.

Rep. Matt Salmon said that during the GOP meeting, Ryan pointed to sequestration as the partys leverage with Democrats and said the Republican negotiators would not accept revenue increases in exchange.

Were going to try to push for some substantial reforms on entitlement spending and our backstop is sequestration, Salmon said in describing Ryans remarks.

Most Americans dont read The Hill. And most Americans dont know that long-term reforms to entitlement spending specifically means cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Reuters is pretty much the only outlet carrying this news, in;U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan wants narrower focus for new budget talks,

Thats about it. So lets go back to a few weeks before The Hills report, and see if there have been reports in the major media that spell out for the public that, having dropped their demand to get rid of Obamacare Republicans are demanding cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

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Democrats Risk Unintended Medicare Cuts If They Pass Partisan Covid Relief

WASHINGTON Democrats considering a maneuver to forgo bipartisan support to pass Covid-19 relief are confronting an unintended consequence: Doing so could automatically cut Medicare.

Many Democrats want to pass President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief proposal, which includes $1,400 stimulus checks and aid to local governments. A group of Republican senators is pushing for a smaller plan that would provide $1,000 checks.

So Democratic leaders are preparing to use a process known as budget reconciliation, which would allow them to pass Biden’s proposal without getting 60 votes in the Senate, which would require at least 10 Republicans.

But under the Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, known as PAYGO, new laws that raise the national debt automatically trigger offsetting cuts in some safety net programs.

They Haven’t Taken A Dime From The Social Security Program That Isn’t Accounted For

Another misconception is that the Republican Party stole money from the Social Security Trust and used it to fund wars. More specifically, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush have come under intense scrutiny for borrowing from Social Security and “not putting the money back.”

However, the truth of the matter is that Congress has been able to “borrow” Social Security’s excess cash for five decades, and it’s happened under every single president over that stretch. In fact, the Social Security Administration is required by law to purchase special-issue bonds and certificates of indebtedness with this excess cash. Please note the emphasis on “required by law” that I’ve added above. The federal government isn’t simply going to sit on this excess cash it borrows from Social Security. It’s spending this cash on various line items, which may be wars and the defense budget, as well as education, healthcare, and pretty much any other expenditure you can think of.

This setup is actually a win-win for both parties. The federal government has a relatively liquid source of borrowing with the Social Security Trust, and the Trust is able to generate significant annual income from the interest it earns on its loans. Last year, $85.1 billion of the $996.6 billion that was generated by the program came from interest income.

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