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(H.R. 9) Small Business Tax Cut Act

ipoole — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:29:12 -0400

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The most telling indictment of this legislation comes from the Joint Committee on Taxation analysis, which the Republican sponsors of the legislation chose to ignore. That report said that it would increase deficits by $46 billion, yet "the effects of the bill on economic activity are so small as to be incalculable" in the context of the larger economy. That contradicts the conservative claims that the tax break in this legislation would be an important boost for small businesses and for the economy.

The legislation is also not targeted to benefit what people normally consider to be "small businesses." The way the bill was written, more than 99 percent of all businesses would qualify; nothing in the legislation would prevent a firm that earns $1 billion with just a handful of employees—or a high-priced trial lawyer, lobbyist or other professional organized as a corporate entity—from benefitting from the "small business" tax cut.

Nearly half of the beneficiaries of this tax break would be taxpayers making more than $1 million, and their tax break would be an average of $44,000. And the tax cut can be claimed regardless of whether that tax break is used to hire an employee; even companies that fired employees or sent their jobs overseas would still get the tax break. In fact, the White House's Statement of Administration Policy for the bill said that "small businesses that invested or hired more this year would, in many instances, get a smaller tax cut than those that did not" because the tax cut would be based on net income after expenses, including worker costs.

According to a 2011 Congressional Budget Office report, temporary tax cuts on businesses are the most ineffective means of creating jobs, with a budgetary cost of $1 million dollars per job created. A more effective job-creation strategy would contain such measures as infrastructure investment, aid to state and local governments, and long-term tax reforms that would encourage job creation in the U.S.

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(H.R. 5) Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-cost, Timely Healthcare (HEALTH) Act of 2011

ipoole — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 17:34:35 -0400

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This legislation is based on two fallacies. The first is that a major reason health care costs so much is that patients file unnecessary lawsuits and juries award excessively large judgments to patients. The second, which was a major theme of the 2010 congressional elections, is that an independent payment board determining cost-control measures for Medicare would actually serve as a “death panel” deciding who would be denied life-saving care—even though the legislation explicitly forbids the panel from doing so and presumably the Senate would use its advise-and-consent powers to vet the president’s appointments to this board.
Doctors, particularly those in specialties such as obstetrics, have indeed in the past had to cope with periods of high malpractice insurance rates. But in general, this is legislation that strives to solve a problem that does not exist—and in the process would create new and very real problems. As a 2011 report from Public Citizen notes, the notion that litigation is responsible for the nation’s high health care costs “have never been credible,” and are less so today than they have ever been: “The number of medical malpractice payments made on behalf of physicians fell for the seventh consecutive year in 2010, plummeting to the lowest total in the history of the NPDB,” the federal government’s National Practitioner Data Bank, the report said. The total cost of liability insurance paid by doctors and hospitals, which would naturally reflect the costs of malpractice litigation and claims, has fallen to less than half a cent of each dollar spent on providing health care. While health care spending rose 90 percent between 2000 and 2010, medical malpractice payments fell 11.9 percent.
That is because most medical malpractice cases are handled in state courts, and states have on their own come up with a range of strategies to balance minimizing the costs of liability suits, ensuring that actual victims of medical malpractice are compensated, and deterring irresponsible behavior by doctors, hospitals, drug and medical device providers and insurance companies. In fact, lower medical malpractice costs do not appear to be lower because doctors and hospitals are committing fewer errors. A Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General’s report found that one in seven Medicare patients in hospital care experienced a serious adverse event, that these adverse events contributed to the deaths of 1.5 percent of Medicare patients, and that 44 percent of the adverse events were preventable. But the number of patients winning malpractice claims amount to less than 1 percent of the Medicare patients who experienced avoidable adverse events while in treatment—in other words, malpractice.
But, nonetheless, conservatives have a long history of restricting the ability of consumers to protect themselves from the bad behavior of corporations or profit-motivated individuals, and this legislation is but the latest example of conservatives working to shield the 1 percent from the consequences of their bad actions.
When citizens are harmed by the negligence or malevolence of a health care provider, they not only have the right to be made whole for the harm done to them, but they have a right to a judicial system that can act to deter wrongdoing. A law that limits punitive damages to the point that they can written off as the cost of doing business weakens deterrence.
The legislation also eliminates a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would actually help lower costs in a way that would help patients. As a Kaiser Family Foundation fact sheet puts it, “The Independent Payment Advisory Board was established, at least in part, to mitigate the influence of politics and stakeholders on Medicare payment decisions and give authority to a group of outside experts to recommend savings proposals, rather than Members of Congress.” In a letter to Congress, the Office of Management and Budget noted that the board “has been highlighted by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, economists, and health policy experts as an important contributor to Medicare’s long-term sustainability,” adding that this legislation “would eliminate an important safeguard that, under current law, will help reduce the rate of Medicare cost growth responsibly while protecting Medicare beneficiaries and the traditional program.”
While conservatives are working to eliminate a Medicare board staffed with experts who would establish best practices for cost-effective care, the Republican proposal for Medicare would leave consumers to fight rising health care costs on their own, with nothing more than a voucher toward a private health insurance policy that would decline in value over time relative to the increase in health care premiums. Instead of working to control costs while preserving standards of care, the Republican proposal would force patients who could not afford to bear health care cost increases on their own to decide on their own to deny themselves care. While the “government death panel” is a fevered right-wing delusion, the consequences of remaking Medicare into a voucher program will become very real indeed for the millions of Americans that the private insurance system already has left adrift and for whom the Affordable Care Act was written.

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(H.R. 3606) Reopening American Capital Markets to Emerging Growth Companies Act of 2011

ipoole — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:13:17 -0400

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Even though this legislation received broad bipartisan support, including support from the Obama administration, working-class and middle-class people should be alarmed by the doors this bill opens to rip-off artists and the lowered defenses to fraud. It is for not trivial reasons that what has been sold as the "JOBS Act" is referred to by OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow as the Jivers' Opportunity to Bilk Suckers Act.

The legislation has been opposed by the AFL-CIO, Americans for Financial Reform (the coalition that helped fight for the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill), the Consumer Federation of America, and the American Association of Retired Persons.

In their joint statement, the Consumer Federation of America and Americans for Financial Reform write, "Because it misdiagnoses the problem and proposes a sweeping reduction in investor protections, the JOBS Act risks exposing investors to a new round of damaging fraud and abuse while undermining market transparency. Less reliable and transparent capital markets risk driving up the cost of capital for precisely those companies this legislation purports to benefit. This will harm, not help, our fragile economy."

One stated intent of the bill is to help make it easier for small business owners to raise capital through such techniques as "crowdfunding," using mediums such as the Internet to raise money from individual investors. While crowdfunding has the potential of helping new entrepreneurs get around the barriers presented by banks and Wall Street investment houses, this legislation goes too far in lowering protections against fraud. As Jesse Eisinger writes in ProPublica, "The bill loosens decades-old investor protections so that companies can directly advertise to those who would like to be separated from their money. ... I.P.O. pitches next to "Lose Your Belly!" ads. Sounds like a great idea!"

It is critical to note that the regulations that this bill would relax to make such practices as crowdfunding presumably easier would apply to businesses that are doing as much as $1 billion worth of business in a year. According to Inc. magazine, that's more revenue than earned in 2011 by such companies as Sprit Airlines, the Go Daddy Group, Kimpton Hotels, the Euro-Pro appliance company, and Dunkin' Brands (the Dunkin' Donuts franchisee)—none of which fit what people normally consider "small businesses."

Opponents of this legislation have pushed for the Senate to amend this legislation with the INVEST in America Act, sponsored by Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Carl Levin of Michigan. This amendment would limit the companies that would qualify as “emerging companies” to those with less than $350 million in gross revenue and by eliminating the House bill’s exemptions from accounting rules, say-on-pay and golden parachute vote requirements, and executive compensation disclosures. It would regulate the advertising and selling of "crowdfunding" offerings so that potential investors would have the resources and information to understand the risks. It would also prevent large companies, including banks that have billions of dollars in assets, from using the legislation as it was passed in the House to come out from under SEC regulations.

The "JOBS Act" as passed by the House is a scam-enabling bill that makes it easier for one-percenters to fleece working-class and middle-class people of whatever might remain in our bank accounts. It is true that Internet-enabled crowdfunding of small and local businesses democratizes investment and thus gives economically struggling people another option for climbing up the economic ladder. But the middle class insists on adequate protections to prevent them from being conned out of their money.

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(S. 1813) Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21)

ipoole — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:08:52 -0400

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This legislation is much like the transportation infrastructure in much of the country today: well behind the curve of what is needed to keep pace with the nation's transportation needs. Nonetheless, we rate it a net positive for the middle class, which desperately needs better roads and better public transportation options.

This bill is for two years, rather than the five- or six-year periods covered by bills passed by previous Congresses. And the $109 billion in federal spending it would authorize during that two-year period is significantly less than what has been authorized in previous bills. Our needs are greater than they have ever been for support for infrastructure at all levels—the American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that we need to spend at least $2.2 trillion over the next five years just on repairs—but the Senate bill would have our commitment as a nation shrink to historically low levels.

But at least it's not what was being cooked up by conservatives in the House of Representatives. The bill, H.R. 7, being worked on by House leadership not only would have committed even less to highway and public transit spending, but would have written transportation policy to the dictates of the fossil-fuel industry and anti-environmental zealots. That bill would have for the first time ended dedicated funding to mass transit, while opening wide the doors to the Keystone XL pipeline and fast-tracked offshore oil drilling. But with House Speaker John Boehner unable to get a critical mass of Republicans to even agree to the meager level of spending proposed in the bill, the bill effectively died.

Meanwhile, the Senate bill will create or save an estimated 2.8 million jobs, according to one of its co-sponsors, Environment and Public Works Chairman Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. If the House takes up this bill, which Boehner suggested early in March it would, and moves it quickly to President Obama's desk, some of those jobs would begin to open up during the crucial spring and summer construction season.

Middle-class people concerned about protecting the environment and moving toward a clean-energy economy can take solace in the fact that some key conservative amendments did not succeed. They included an effort to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, bypassing the Obama administration's review process; repeal of incentives for clean energy, including tax credits for alternative-energy vehicles; and a lifting of existing environmental protections against mercury and toxic air pollution from incinerators and industrial boilers. Another defeated amendment that split progressives would have enacted subsidies to encourage the increased use of natural gas vehicles: While some liked the idea of promoting the use of less-polluting vehicles running on a lower-cost, American-sourced fuel, other noted that the subsidy would primarily benefit a small cartel of natural gas suppliers and encourage the use of hydraulic fracking, an environmentally damaging process, to increase natural gas production.

Transportation For America, a largely progressive coalition of urban, environmental and business organizations, today said that some of the benefits it sees in the Senate bill include the fact that it:

For the first time, establishes national policy goals and performance measures for the federal surface transportation program, such as addressing congestion, improving access to multiple travel options, supporting domestic manufacturing and reducing impacts on the environment and adjacent communities;
Consolidates programs and streamlines project delivery, while maintaining existing funding levels;
Holds states accountable for the safe upkeep of our roads and bridges;
Maintains local control over a share of funds and ensures access funding for safer walking and bicycling;
Includes emergency provisions to allow transit agencies to avoid service cuts and fare hikes;
Extends the commuter benefit for transit users, commensurate with parking benefits for drivers;
Helps communities make plans to meet the growing demand for walkable neighborhoods with access to jobs, services and public transportation;
Ensures that federal funds streets that are safe and complete for everyone who uses them, whether motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, wheelchair users or transit riders.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that this vote "is a wonderful opportunity for the Senate and a great accomplishment for our country," adding that "one of the most progressive members of the Senate and one of the most conservative members of the Senate got together and they wanted to do a bill that was good for the American people."
In fact, it is a further testament to the dysfunction that conservatives have wreaked in Congress that this less-than-half-a-tank of transportation legislation is that passes for "great accomplishment" in the Senate. At a time when we have both an infrastructure emergency and an unemployment emergency, the obvious imperative is to spend big today on projects that would put people back to work, building the network that would enable a growing economy to move people and goods more effectively and efficiently.
The Senate bill on balance is better than the wreck that would have been precipitated by the conservative extremists in the House. But the fact that this bill does not rise to what the nation actually needs is a conservative failure, and for their obstruction conservatives should have to answer to the people who will remain stuck in traffic jams or dependent on inadequate public transportation because conservatives stand in the way of the investment we need.

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(H.R. 3630) Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 (Conference Report)

ipoole — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:49:55 -0500

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This is a compromise on extending a payroll tax break and unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed that split progressives in Congress and has left a bitter aftertaste.

The positive side of the passage of this legislation is that it revealed how the conservative position was hypocritical and ultimately unsustainable. Never have conservative lawmakers insisted that tax relief for millionaires, billionaires and multinational corporations be "paid for" with spending cuts. Yet those same lawmakers argued against extending the payroll tax cut that provides at least some cushion to the strapped middle class unless it was "paid for" with cuts to programs that affect economically struggling working-class and middle-class people.

The whole point of the payroll tax cut was to be an economic stimulant, to inject more spending directly into the economy, and to take spending out of the economy by cutting government services—most of which would have gone to the very same people receiving the payroll tax break—made no sense. Ultimately, Republicans abandoned the attempt to "pay for" the payroll tax cut; hence the final legislation is expected to add about $100 billion to the federal deficit.

There are some provisions in the legislation that show conservatives' deep desire to erect barbed wire around the pillars of economic security. One clause would allow drug tests of unemployment beneficiaries if they are unemployed because of a failed or refused drug test or if they are applying for jobs that require drug testing. Another new provision would require the long-term unemployed to go through a "reemployment assessment" and meet education requirements based on that assessment. There would also be a new set of "national job search requirements" for those receiving unemployment benefits.

These are a step back from what Republicans initially proposed, which would have done such things as allow drug testing for all people receiving unemployment benefits and insist that a person wanting to collect on unemployment receive a high school diploma or equivalent. Still, this compromise would move the country a few feet closer to what appears to be the ultimate goal of conservatives: to make the economic supports we offer people who fall off the economic ladder as punitive as possible, and to demean the people who would deign to try to use these supports to get back on their feet.

Speaking of punitive, this compromise also throws a gratuitous punch at federal workers. They would be asked to contribute more to their retirement pensions, and a new formula will mean they will get less of a pension when they retire. After a two-year wage freeze through the end of this year, and the prospect of a third year of a wage freeze, this is beyond asking federal workers to make a fair sacrifice to help get federal spending under control. This is using a cudgel against federal workers—one in which many federal workers will have less take-home pay even if they get the meager half-percent wage increase President Obama proposed for 2013—as part of an anti-government ideological agenda. The American Federation of Government Employees calculates that Republican proposals would extract from federal workers $15 billion to help cover the cost of unemployment benefits plus another $45 billion to help pay for a severely flawed transportation bill. Keeping federal workers demoralized is part of the conservative modus operendi of keeping government dysfunctional as an instrument of the common good.

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To extend the pay limitation for Members of Congress and Federal employees

ipoole — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:57:26 -0500

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The right-wing blogosphere is positively giddy about this, especially in the wake of a Congressional Budget Office study that said that as a whole federal employees do get somewhat better pay and benefits than many of their private sector counterparts. "Federal Workers Overpaid, and CBO Agrees," reads the Heritage Foundation's blog, The Foundry. "Federal Workers Earning More Than Those Paying Their Salaries," harrumphs Red State.

The right wants the rest of us to join the gripe session about overpaid federal bureaucrats. But consider the facts about federal workers—and what's been happening to the rest of the workforce.

If you only have a high school diploma or perhaps a community college education, a federal government job is indeed a good deal, where you can earn significantly higher wages and benefits than you can in the private sector. Your wages will on average be 21 percent higher and benefits package worth on average 72 percent more. But those with advanced degrees are more likely to have higher total earnings in the private sector; on average workers with doctorates only receive 2 percent more in total compensation, only because a richer benefit package helps offset lower wages. (And while there's a ceiling on federal government wages, no such ceiling exists in the private sector.)

The CBO study adds, by the way, that "much of the higher benefit cost incurred by the federal
government stems from differences in retirement benefits," with many federal workers receiving defined-benefit retirement plans and retirees receiving health coverage, benefits now rare in the private sector.

It's worth noting what these employees are doing. One chart in the CBO report reminds us that more than a third of the federal workforce is employed by the Defense Department. Add the Department of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and the Justice Department, and that works out to about 63 percent of the federal workforce. Many of these employees are taking on responsibilities that require a higher level of skill than what is required in the private sector; it's no wonder that a higher percentage of the federal workforce is comprised of people with advanced degrees than the private sector as a whole; and correspondingly a much lower percentage of the federal workforce is comprised of people with only a high school diploma.

The bottom line is that there is often good reason for some federal workers to earn more than some of us who pay their salaries.

But the even more important point is that those of us who pay their salaries should be doing better.

The Commerce Department reported last month that average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation and seasonal factors, fell 0.9 percent from December 2010 to December 2011. That's a consequence of private sector workers cutting wages, or workers being forced into jobs that pay less than the jobs they lost. The total share of national income devoted to wages and salaries, historically above 50 percent, fell to 49.6 percent in the first quarter of 2011 even as corporate profits rose, as Floyd Norris of The New York Times noted in an August 2011 article. Meanwhile, as Sam Pizzigati notes, citing Congressional Budget Office research, the share of the national income going to the top 1 percent increased from 8 percent in 1979 to 17 percent in 2007.

Last year the Commerce Department published a survey of private-sector employee benefits that showed that 36 percent of private sector workers did not have access to a retirement plan, 31 percent did not have access to a work health insurance plan, and 40 percent did not have paid sick leave.

The success that corporations and conservatives have had in weakening unions, and thus disempowering workers, has had a devastating effect on the wages and benefits of private sector workers, as labor writer James Parks reported, citing a National Sociological Review study. The response from the right has been calls to push down wages even further, by eliminating minimum wage laws and generally cheerleading downward the pressure on wages that comes with a race with China and other Asian industrial countries to the bottom.

That's why private sector workers ought not be aligning themselves with the resent-the-federal-worker crowd. That crowd is not interested in you doing better. They are supporting the policies that are causing all workers to be worse off. What federal workers get in pay and benefits—and thus in overall income security—should be the standard for what all workers should be fighting to receive. Allowing conservatives to get us caught in their crabs-in-a-barrel game will only mean we'll all be at the bottom of the barrel.

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(H.R. 4853) Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010

ipoole — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 15:38:34 -0500

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(H. Res. 501) Expressing the Sense of the House Regarding Any Final Measure to Extend the Payroll Tax Holiday

ipoole — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:02:53 -0500

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(H.R. 3630) Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2011: Senate Amendment

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(H.R. 9) Small Business Tax Cut Act

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(H.R. 5) Help Efficient, Accessible, Low-cost, Timely Healthcare (HEALTH) Act of 2011

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(H.R. 3606) Reopening American Capital Markets to Emerging Growth Companies Act of 2011

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(S. 1813) Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21)

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(H.R. 3630) Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 (Conference Report)

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To extend the pay limitation for Members of Congress and Federal employees

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(H.R. 4853) Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010