A Young Republican On The Inauguration And Future Under President Trump NPR Will Estrada is chairman of the Loudoun County Republican Committee in Virginia. NPR's Scott Simon speaks with him about Trump's inauguration. Facebook; Twitter. Google+. Email. Sign Up for the NPR Politics Newsletter. We follow politics; you follow us. |
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A Young Republican On The Inauguration And Future Under President Trump - NPR
New York Times | Donald Trump, Republican Party, Syria: Your Friday Evening Briefing New York Times It was a day of pomp and circumstance as dignitaries amassed at the Capitol to witness the transfer of power. In his inaugural address, the 45th president presented a dark vision of a nation exploited by Washington elites, of children trapped in ... |
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Donald Trump, Republican Party, Syria: Your Friday Evening Briefing - New York Times
The election of Donald Trump with a Republican-majority Congress is proving once again that conservative economic policy largely reduces to cutting taxes, mostly for the rich.
But wait a second, arent they also wading into health care reform?
They are, and it proves my point. While much attention is reasonably focused on how theyre all repeal with no replace and how thats likely to reverse the coverage gains weve seen and undermine insurance markets theres something else going on here. And that is a big tax cut for the rich.
The Affordable Care Act has provided health insurance coverage to 20 million people, bringing the uninsured rate to an all-time low of 9.1 percent, from 16 percent before the reform was enacted. And most of the revenue the ACA raised flows from some very rich waters.
If the law is repealed without a replacement, tens of millions of people are expected to lose coverage. But the other side of that is a big tax cut for the wealthiest Americans.
Just how fat of a tax cut? That question is answered in a new report by three of my colleagues at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Using IRS data, they show that the 400 richest Americans, whose average annual income is more than $300 million, each would get an average $7 million kickback from ending two ACA taxes: the 0.9 percent Hospital Insurance tax and the 3.8 percent unearned income Medicare tax.
The base for both taxes are individuals with incomes of more than $200,000 and couples with incomes of more than $250,000, making this a highly progressive revenue source. That also means the 160 million households with incomes below these levels get no tax benefits from repealing those taxes.
As my CBPP colleagues point out, ACA repeal would significantly raise taxes on about 7 million low- and moderate-income families due to the loss of their premium tax credits worth an average of $4,800 in 2017 that help them buy health coverage through the health insurance marketplaces and afford to go to the doctor when needed. In fact, the repeal leads to the richest 400 households getting a $2.8 billion tax break thats bigger than the value of almost 670,000 ACA tax credits worth $2.5 billion going to people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
This isnt just the usual Robin Hood in reverse weve come to expect from Republican tax plans: This is Robin Hood slamming the Batmobile into reverse at 100 mph.
Recent news reports tell of a few Republicans worrying that repeal might be courting more trouble than their colleagues realize. After six years of the fight to kill the ACA, the repealers have few ideas for replacement. The ideas they have floated high deductible plans, health savings accounts, block grants for Medicaid and vouchers for Medicare all shift more costs onto regular people relative to the current system. That is the only possible outcome when you so deeply cut health care resources.
So perhaps the ACA repeal will founder on the shoals of political reality, but I doubt it. Reality isnt exactly constraining this crew.
Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to former Vice President Joe Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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How Republican-style health care reform becomes a tax cut for the richest of the rich - Columbia Daily Tribune
"We're not gonna get together, hold hands and sing Kumbaya," said Jamie Hammach, a Trump supporter.
He and five others -- three Democrats and three Republicans in total -- sat down with CNN's Alisyn Camerota at the George Washington University Library. They shared why they are excited, or why they are concerned, and debated the issues.
Hammach said he is looking forward to the change in Washington, while fellow Trump supporters Alex Chalgren and Sara Duncan are hoping to see improvement on the jobs front. Chalgren is the National Deputy Director for Students for Trump.
Among the Democratic voters, Rhea Beddoe is concerned for her fellow immigrants. Owen Evans is worried about how Trump will manage the government and the economy. And Carol Evans, no relation to Owen, believes he has an "anti-Earth agenda." Beddoe is the Director of Special Events for Take the Lead Women, Owen Evans is the Vice President of Membership for the George Washington University College Democrats and Carol Evans is the co-founder of Executive Women for Hillary.
"Life goes on," Hammach said after the Democrats voiced their concerns. "Eight years ago, a lot of us on this side of the table would've been like, 'Oh God, what's happening now?' Eight years from now, or four years from now...you're going to look back and say, 'Yeah, it wasn't that bad.'"
Owen Evans replied that it was not accurate to compare the last transfer of power to current one.
"It's not from Bush to Obama," he said. "Trump is on his own sphere."
The group went on to debate a host of issues -- the meaning of nationalism, how the economy should work and the country's participation in NATO -- until Camerota stepped in.
"Are we all just going to sort of agree that this is a divided country?" she asked.
Carol Evans conceded that they probably would not convince each other of anything, but appreciated the chance to discuss the issues.
"I think it's very important for us to talk," she said.
"It does make me genuinely sad ... when good people say they're fearful," Duncan said. "If I can help anyone else to feel the calm or the excitement that I have, then that's definitely the goal."
Owen Evans summed it up: "I think we need to connect with empathy."
"I like all three of you," he said to the Trump supporters. "And I think if we can recognize that ... that is one of the big steps."
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Democratic and Republican voters: It's important to talk - CNN
Cam Harris, a recent college graduate hoping to build a career as a political consultant, received an unwelcome email from a New York Times reporter this month. As the reporter, Scott Shane, recounted on the front page of Thursdays Times, he had discovered that Harris was the publisher of a fake news site dedicated to smearing Hillary Clinton.
So Harris did what came naturally. He started to spin. First, he admitted that he had written the hoax news articles casting Clinton as a criminal on his site, ChristianTimesNewspaper.com. Eight of his stories attracted enough attention on social networks to merit debunking by Snopes, the fact-checking site, and one of them, published a month before the election, attracted six million readers with the headline, BREAKING: Tens of thousands of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.
But when he was asked about his motives for posting elaborate disinformation about Clinton online over the course of 11 months, Harris was a little more economical with the truth. Even though he had attacked Clinton relentlessly on Twitter during the campaign, and voted for Donald Trump, Harris told The Times that his goals were purely financial. He had focused on potentially damaging fabrications about Clinton, he claimed, simply because those pieces generated more clicks and so more ad revenue than attacks on Trump.
I didnt really have a political motivation whatsoever, he told Shane in a subsequent Facebook Live interview. It was a way to make money.
What Harris failed to mention to The Times, however, is that during the entire time that he was spreading lies about the Democratic presidential candidate, he was employed as a legislative aide and campaign manager for a Republican member of the Maryland state legislature, David Vogt III.
Harris also concealed from The Times that when he sat down to create his anti-Clinton fiction at the kitchen table in his apartment, he was living in Vogts basement in Brunswick, Maryland. As Marylands Frederick News-Post reported on Wednesday, an FEC filing related to Vogts failed race for Congress earlier this year listed the same home address for both the state lawmaker and his young campaign manager, Harris.
Vogt fired Harris Wednesday afternoon, after the Times story went online, and said he had no idea what his young aide and tenant had been up to at that kitchen table. I was shocked to hear that he could do such a thing, the legislator told The Washington Post.
Harris backed that account in a text message to the Frederick News-Post. Delegate Vogt was not involved in any way, he wrote.
He then posted a long statement on Twitter, which included a brief apology and a longer discourse on the dynamics behind the spike in election-related fake news.
But even if Vogt was entirely unaware of the anti-Clinton hoaxes regularly published by his aide, the fact that these pieces were produced by a Republican operative during an election campaign suggests that at least some of what we now refer to as the new phenomenon of fake news might be better described by using an older term: dirty tricks.
Seen through that lens, Harris like the many other Trump supporters who concocted fake medical records or spread malicious rumors about Clinton in the guise of news reports is part of a long tradition exemplified by Watergate-era dirty tricksters like Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser.
As Stone boasts on his website, he was the youngest member of the staff in President Richard Nixons re-election camping in 1972, the notorious CREEP Committee for the Re-Election of the President. In a New Yorker profile, Jeffrey Toobin explained that Stones work for CREEP began when he dropped out of college and found a way to dupe reporters into printing false news:
Stone moved to Washington to attend George Washington University, but he became so engrossed in Republican politics that he never graduated. He was just nineteen when he played a bit part in the Watergate scandals. He adopted the pseudonym Jason Rainier and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, who was challenging Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1972. Stone then sent a receipt to the Manchester Union Leader, to prove that Nixons adversary was a left-wing stooge.
Top photo: Cameron Harris in Annapolis, Md., Jan. 16, 2017.
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Major Fake News Operation Tracked Back to Republican Operative - The Intercept