tax policies

Former CNN Chief Business Correspondent Ali Velshi, now an MSNBC anchor, is not an idiot... but... On his morning show yesterday the Hairless Prophet of Doom introduced a question to Jared Bernstein, once a professor at Columbia and then Vice President Biden's Chief Economic Adviser, by claiming that Trump's plan to eliminate the estate tax would help the middle class. Before Bernstein got to whatever Velshi's question was, he addressed the GOP talking point Velshi had just slipped onto the air so matter-of-factly. The estate tax only impacts .02% of the richest Americans.

In his Washington Post column yesterday, just before Señor Trumpanzee's closed-to-the-public speech in Springfield, Missouri, Greg Sargent predicted that we'd hear the death rattle of whatever pretensions to genuine economic populism Trump has ever harbored

On Tuesday we asked half a dozen of the Blue America candidates how eager they are to go on the offensive over the GOP tax agenda. All of them are very eager to do just that. For example, James Thompson, the candidate for the Kansas congressional district centered around Wichita, thinks if the 2018 election iOS decided on tax policies, he'll be the next congressman from KS-04.

I had lunch with an old friend today, a wealthy old friend who is very progressive but was interested if I thought Congress is going to cut taxes. He's kind of looking forward to that prospect from a personal perspective but not looking forward to it on a political perspective. Complicated.

McConnell had hoped the Senate would vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday night. He was wrong on two counts: the Senate rejected the repeal again-- and it came on Friday morning, the 52nd anniversary of Medicare.My great-grandparents came to the U.S., refugees from the genocidal tyrannies of Eastern Europe, in the early 1900s. When I was a kid my grandmother sometimes used Yiddish words from her childhood around the house. When I was trying to think of a word to describe Trump's horrifying, degenerate, shameful and dysfunctional regime one of those words popped into my head: hegdesh.

Thursday morning's tweet from Ro Khanna (D-CA)-- above-- is a good example of how someone can promote genuine economic populism. The program he, Bernie and virtually all progressives back to make state colleges free again is incredibly popular-- far more popular than Schumer's and Pelosi's recycled Papa John's Pizza slogan.

Robert Reich explains the theft plan buried within Trump's so-called "infrastructure" plan (h/t Jennifer Nix on Facebook)by Gaius PubliusAll you need to know about Donald Trump's theft of your dollars under the guise of an "infrastructure" plan is explained neatly in the video above. I call it "theft" because as Reich points out, it steals from the public twice — once with a massive tax giveaway and once more with a bunch of extracted tolls ("usage fees").

Last month we speculated that unless congressional Republicans stop him, Trump would do to the U.S. what Governor Sam Brownback did to Kansas. Stopping him, though, isn't what Paul Ryan and his members have in mind-- encouraging him is more in line with what they want to do.

You know how states are supposed to be petri dishes for new ideas? Long before the federal government was looking into protecting consumers from predatory mortgage banksters, Assemblyman (and then state Senator) Ted Lieu was hammering out and passing controversial legislation that did just that in California.

One deduction that Trump's tax plan seeks to eviscerate just happens to focus primarily on blue states. If his plan passes, deductions of state and local taxes from federal income taxes will be eliminated. There are 7 states with no state income tax-- Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming-- and neither Tennessee nor New Hampshire taxes wages, so those 9 states won't be impacted at all.