This Week in America took an extended hiatus following the inauguration of that guy who won the electoral college while falling short of Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes. The outrages were piling up so quickly that just keeping track of them all would have been a full-time job, and we here at TWiA World Headquarters already have multiple full-time jobs. We've never made a dime off TWiA (though you could change that by contributing a dime here), and simply couldn't afford--financially or emotionally--the cost of the reporting/analysis we like to do.
So 99 days later, we're wading back into those waters, with this abbreviated edition. Things have slowed down a little, and there are enough things going on this week that require some explication. If the response is good enough, or if we feel similarly about the task next week and beyond, we'll keep it going. Please help by sharing it on your social media and telling all your friends. Also, keep an eye on TWiA's Twitter feed, @ThisWeekAmerica , which we'll also try to make more active. One of these days we may actually launch that Facebook page, if people care.
This Week in 100 Days
As has been reported everywhere, Saturday marks Trump's 100th day in office. Desperate to look like they've done something, the administration has spent the last few weeks trying to do anything, without success. In fact, all Trump has to show for his 100 days are a bunch of executive orders like the ones he constantly attacked when Obama used them (and, as he's shown, executive orders are easily overturned), and one Supreme Court Justice.
That is, in fact, a momentous achievement, one that will last and bedevil our nation for decades to come. But that achievement doesn't belong to Trump. Instead, it's due to the act of near-treason by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: denying the twice-elected-by-a-much-Yuger-margin President Obama his rightful SCOTUS pick, then demolishing the Senate filibuster to install Trump's. That double-whammy will follow McConnell into the history books, forever tainting what could have been a reputation as one of the Senate's most significant players. Instead, he'll go down as a man who put party ahead of country in the most destructive way possible--no patriot, but instead a conniving huckster who did his best to harm America.
Given that Trump's only achievement in 100 days was one he had almost nothing to do with (Neil Gorsuch would have been on the list of any Republican), the only appropriate single-word summation of this president so far is weak. There's no reason to think that's going to change.
This Week in Taxes
One of the big topics under discussion this week has been Trump's tax "plan." In actuality, it's more of an idea for a concept of an outline of a plan--it all fits onto one side of a single sheet of paper, double-spaced, with a lot of white space and not many numbers on it. It could be summed up more succinctly than that, in these three words "Me want more!"
The "plan" includes some middle class tax cuts, but they're mostly cosmetic--essentially, confetti thrown our way so we don't notice that the prime beneficiaries are millionaires and billionaires and corporations (which are headed largely by millionaires and billionaires). The plan would cut Trump's own taxes bigly (the elimination of the alternative minimum tax alone would have sliced $31 million off his tax bill in 2005, the year we've seen two pages of tax documents from), as well as eliminating the estate taxes that his heirs might otherwise have to pay when he eventually dies (as if they weren't rich enough already). We can't know specifically how his taxes would be affected, since unlike every presidential candidate/president since Richard Nixon, he's refused to show the American public his tax returns, offering a series of nonsensical lies to explain his reticence. The truth, of course, is that he considers non-rich Americans a bunch of chumps who don't deserve to see behind his gold lamé curtains.
Because there's so little detail in his "plan," we can't know what we would pay--the tax structure is simplified down to three tax rates, but it's impossible to know which we'd fall under. Lots of tax deductions we might use are done away with, too. But we do know that the top corporate tax rate would be slashed from 35% to 15%. Now, most big corporations don't actually pay that 35%--some pay nothing at all.
What we can know about the "plan" is that if it were enacted, the national debt and the deficit would skyrocket. When there are Democratic presidents, or Democrats control Congress, Republicans like to pretend that they care about deficits. But when the tables are turned, as former VP Dick Cheney famously said, "Deficits don't matter." Trump seems to be working from that starting point, and genuine deficit hawks are already cringing.
His financial advisers, like former Goldman Sachs execs Gary Cohn and Steven Mnuchin, claim that the economic growth that would be unleashed by this brilliant "plan" would make it pay for itself. That is, in a word, nonsense. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush made the same claim about their huge tax cuts. Reagan had to follow it up with multiple tax increases to try to control the damage. The first President Bush had to raise taxes again, and we still had a recession anyway. George W. Bush didn't even do that much, and at the same time put two wars on the national credit card. These ill-considered actions hampered the economy and made it hard to respond appropriately to the Great Recession that the tax cuts helped cause. Neither of their cuts paid for themselves; both increased the debt and ran up the deficit.
More recently, the governor of Kansas tried the same economic approach that Trump promises in his state, with disastrous results.
There is no time in the history of the country that tax cuts have paid for themselves, or led to ongoing economic growth.
The less-discussed flip side of this is what happens when the government isn't taking in the revenue that it needs to maintain services. Who suffers in those cases (or, to be more direct, who would suffer to give the rich the massive tax cuts Trump proposes)? Answer: not the rich. The programs that tend to be cut are those that benefit the middle class and the poor. Parks and libraries close. Government agencies are understaffed and therefore can't adequately serve the public. Assistance to the working poor shrinks. Medical care suffers.
Trump's "plan" would increase inequality in this country--making the rich richer and the rest of us poorer, and increasing the gap between us. It would take trillions of dollars out of federal hands--where, theoretically at least, it can be spent in ways that benefit us all: defense, security, infrastructure, scientific research, disease prevention, food safety, pollution mitigation, health care, and on and on--and hand it over to the richest among us. It's large-scale redistribution of wealth, from those who can afford it least to those who need it least.
It's unlikely to be passed--even by a Republican Congress--in this form, in part because it's so skimpy on details and in part because it wouldn't actually accomplish the goals that tax reform should aim for. But even though the "plan" as is won't go anywhere, House Speaker Paul Ryan and his colleagues will try for something else, probably equally damaging. We need to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't hurt the American public in their ongoing quest to cut taxes for the wealthiest of us.
Side Note: Yes, our tax code is way too complex. When you look at the thousands of pages it comprises, though, you're not--as conservatives would have you believe--looking at an overbearing government run amuck, but at the work of lobbyists protecting the interests of industry on multiple levels. There's not much in there that benefits ordinary Americans, but plenty that carves out big chunks of change for the wealthy and the corporations.
Sweden, on the other hand, has a streamlined, simplified tax system that we'd do well to emulate. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars and hours upon hours to do their own taxes, Swedes get their forms in the mail, already filled out. If they agree with what they get, they can simply accept the forms on their phones, and they're done. Yes, they pay a little more in taxes than Americans do, but not a lot--and what they get for those taxes is far, far more than we do. College? Paid for. Health care? Paid for. Infrastructure? Paid for. Have a kid? You don't have to take a deduction next April; you get a check in the mail every month, because having children is considered to benefit society.
Tax reform isn't a bad idea. Tax cuts, though, aren't tax reform. In this case, they're nothing but a giveaway to the rich at the expense of everyone else.
This Week in Corruption
Not unrelated to the above, Trump, his family, and his administration are almost unbelievably corrupt. As Common Cause reports in an extensive study of the administration's ethical lapses:and his
Rather than advancing the public interest in fixing the rigged system he assailed as a candidate, Trump and his team have set about serving private interests. Under the guise of promoting job growth, they are moving to privatize core government functions like public education and systematically dismantling regulations that, however imperfect, were put in place to protect public health and safety, and serve as the people’s checks and balances on private power. They have casually discarded decades of sound ethical practices, weakened enforcement of existing rules, and opened unprecedented opportunities for government officials to enrich themselves at public expense. Rather than advancing the intent of government of, by, and for the people, the Trump administration is turning the regulatory structures over to the very industries the agencies were intended to oversee.
The conclusion is inescapable: Donald Trump has presided over the most corrupt first hundred days in the history of the American presidency. The good news is that “we the people” still have the power to use other checks and balances on his authority.
And ProPublica took a look at Trump's definition of "accountability" in this enlightening Tweetstorm.
It's almost as if Trump looked at the worst, most venal banana republics in history--or, you know, the corrupt and murderous oligarchy that is Putin's Russia--and said, "If I could do that here, I could really cash in!" So far, Congress shows no interest in reining him in.
This Week in School
Trump's Education Secretary, the highly unqualified Betsy DeVos, is a huge proponent of using vouchers to enable kids to attend private schools--thereby defunding public schools and putting the profit motive in between our children and their education. A new study by her own Education Department shows that in the only federally funded voucher program in the country, the kids taking "advantage" of those vouchers performed worse in standardized testing than kids who didn't. Many other studies have shown negative results for kids in charter schools and other private schools. All this might make DeVos change her tune, if she were capable of learning. Alas, we don't have any reason to believe that's the case.
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Then there's this news, from Alabama:
A federal judge’s ruling this week that allows a predominantly white Alabama city to separate from its more diverse school district is stoking new debate about the fate of desegregation initiatives after decades of efforts to promote racial balance in public education.
Judge Madeline Haikala of the U.S. District Court in Birmingham ruled that the city of Gardendale’s effort to break away was motivated by race and sent messages of racial inferiority and exclusion that “assail the dignity of black schoolchildren.”
She also found that Gardendale failed to meet its legal burden to prove that its separation would not hinder desegregation in Jefferson County, which has been struggling to integrate its schools since black parents first sued for an equal education for their children in the 1960s.
Still, Haikala ruled Monday that Gardendale may move forward with the secession, basing her decision in part on sympathy for some parents who want local control over schools and in part on concern for black students caught in the middle. The judge wrote that she feared they would bear the blame if she blocked the city’s bid.
Further down in the piece is this nugget:
Federal judges have over the years allowed a succession of majority-white cities to pull their schools out of the Jefferson system, leaving the county schools with a smaller tax base and a growing proportion of low-income and black students. But until now, no judge has so closely examined whether efforts to draw new school-district boundaries here were racially motivated — much less concluded that they were.
“It’s hard to square,” said Monique Lin-Luse, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who also represents black parents in the case. The court’s acknowledgment that race played a factor in the secession effort was a vindication “even beyond what we had hoped for,” Lin-Luse said, but the notion that the city of Gardendale can take steps toward forming its own system anyway is “of deep concern.”
Blatant racism is alive and well in America, and it elected its own president. We need to do better.
This Week in the Free Internet
Trump's new FCC Chair wants to put private profit ahead of the public interest (do you sense a theme with this administration?). In this op-ed, senators Ron Wyden (D/OR), Al Franken (D/MN), and former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler explain why this is a terrible idea:
For as long as the Internet has existed, it has been grounded on the principle of net neutrality — that what you read, see or watch online shouldn’t be favored, blocked or slowed down based on where that content is coming from. Net neutrality means that cable companies can’t reserve the fastest Internet speeds for the biggest companies and leave everyone else in the slow lane. That’s what ensures a website for a local pizza place in rural Oregon or Minnesota loads as quickly as the website for Pizza Hut or Domino’s. Or why a social network built in a garage is available to the same people as Instagram or Twitter.
That’s why it’s so alarming to see that the Federal Communications Commission, a federal agency that’s expected to help protect the Internet, is planning to roll back net neutrality rules.
In the past few months, President Trump’s new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has already abandoned other important consumer protections: He backed out of a proposal to free people from having to rent expensive cable boxes, and he is trying to make it harder for low-income families to access affordable high-speed Internet. It’s amazing that Trump, having promised to stand up to the powerful on behalf of ordinary Americans, now has an FCC that gives the powerful what they ask for — even if it hurts consumers.
Okay, that last line overstates it--there's nothing "amazing" about it, unless you believe the constant lies that tumble from Trump's mouth. In fact, any observant American could have seen just where he wanted to take us. Now he's in the White House, and the damage he can do is hard to fathom.
This Week in Public Lands
Public lands belong to all of us. The movement to "give them back to the states" (as if they ever belonged to the states anyway) is really about letting the states turn them over to private interests for short-term profits. Once they're exploited to pad the bank accounts of the rich, we'll never have them back. It's a con, and we're all the marks.
Trump has announced a plan to "review" the national monument designations the last few presidents have made under the Antiquities Act. Here's a piece from High Country News detailing some of the lies told by those who support his attack on our public lands.
This Week in Books
Longtime readers will know that we're huge fans of Pete Souza, the former official White House Photographer under Barack Obama. The publisher Little, Brown has just announced a new book by Souza, in which he'll pick 300 of his favorites from among the thousands of images he made while serving in that role. It comes out in November, so just in time for the holidays.
Side Note: Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day across the country. We here at TWiA World Headquarters will be celebrating by taking part in a writer's conference in Mesa, AZ, called Cirque du Livre, and doing a signing with independent bookseller Bonny Books, at the conference's Pop-up Bookstore (PUB). Check the conference website for the details, and stop by the signing at 3 PM if you're in the area.
This Week in Bears
Has there ever been a more adorable bear than Otto, an orphaned cub at Tennessee's Appalachian Bear Rescue facility? Hard to say.
In other bear news, although TV's Yogi used to steak pic-a-nic baskets, this Yogi just takes a seat at the family's picnic table and waits to be served. And in Montana, your more educated bears tote their own laptops.