Taxing Family Health Care for Deficit Reduction is Wrong
More than 156 million Americans get their health care coverage through their employers. Employer and most worker contributions to health insurance premiums are excluded from workers’ taxable incomes.
Even after health care reform is fully phased in, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that nearly 160 million people will hold employer-sponsored insurance plans.
But recent proposals—under the guise deficit reduction—have called for ending or reducing that exclusion. The most recent came from last year’s budget deficit commission report that calls for a cap on the premium tax exclusion before eliminating it entirely.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds that the cap would impact almost all family health plans by 2018, including “middle of the road” plans—not just high-cost plans. Not only would taxing the plans encourage employers to drop coverage, it would also lead to less comprehensive care for working families.
The report “Reducing the federal deficit by increasing households’ risk: Phaseout of tax exclusion for health insurance premiums leads to less health and financial security,” also finds that despite claims by its backers, the tax cap and eventual complete exclusion won’t lead to reduced health care costs, just reduced health care coverage for working families. Read the rest of this entry »
Deficit Report Fails Panel Vote, But Job-Killing Threat Remains
The job-killing, Social Security, corporate-tax-lowering report unveiled Wednesday and backed by some of the members of federal deficit commission failed to get enough votes from the panel’s 18 members today to send the recommendations to Congress.
But, warns AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, “this debate has just begun” and many of the recommendations are likely to surface in other forms. The report, approved by 11 of panel’s members, represented:
the outcome of eight months of negotiations among Washington insiders. They reflect little sense of the everyday reality of working Americans, who are looking for leadership and guts from their elected officials.
True political courage would take on the powerful and the wealthy, and ask them to pay their fair share to bring our fiscal situation back into balance—not cut the top tax rate for the wealthy and for corporations. Read the rest of this entry »
Deficit Commission Report Buries Outsourcing Tax Break
Yesterday when the federal deficit commission issued its proposal, most of the media attention focused on the call for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, ending long-standing middle class tax breaks and lowering taxes on the wealthy. But a proposal that could encourage corporations to ship American jobs overseas was little noticed.
The proposal would change the way corporate taxes are levied and, in effect, exempt a corporation’s foreign profits from domestic taxation. AFL-CIO Deputy Chief of Staff Thea Lee told Sam Stein at The Huffington Post:
There is no question that this incentivizes outsourcing, and that’s the opposite direction from the one we want to be going in. It’s directly contrary to how we should change our tax system. We need to change our tax code to remove incentives for offshoring. This changes the tax code to greatly enhance the corporate tax incentive.
On last night’s The Ed Show, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard called the outsourcing tax break tax “absolute financial insanity.” Read the rest of this entry »
Trumka: Latest Deficit Commission Proposal Tells Workers ‘Drop Dead’—Again
With 800,000 workers losing their unemployment benefits last night, the deficit commission’s proposal “once again tells working Americans to ‘Drop Dead,’” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. All the commission members should vote against the latest blueprint presented by commission co-chairs Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, which calls for keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy while cutting Social Security and Medicare, Trumka said. And all members of Congress should oppose these “job-killing policies” if they are raised in future legislation or budgets, he said.
We need to focus now on the jobs deficit, Trumka said.
Fifteen million people are out of work, and another 11 million have given up looking or are working part-time involuntarily. We need to end tax breaks that send American jobs overseas and invest in jobs by rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and green technologies.
Report: Deficit Commission Proposals Would Cost 4 Million Jobs
The deficit reduction plan released last week by the co-chairmen of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility shows that this so-called budget deficit commission shows the commission has run severely off course.
The recommendations issued by co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles would cost 4 million jobs over three years and reduce economic growth by 0.7 percent in 2012, 1.4 percent in 2013 and 1.9 percent in 2014, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
The Simpson-Bowles approach calls for job-killing budget austerity to begin in October 2011, even though most economic forecasters expect unemployment to remain as high as it is today or even increase by then.
Simpson and Bowles also call for deep cuts in Social Security benefits, even though Social Security is not responsible for our long-term budget problem and the public is overwhelmingly opposed to benefit cuts.
Mourning in America: Death of the Middle Class
The deficit commission report issued last week is another Saturday night special pressed to the temple of the American middle class.
“Turn over your money and your benefits or your country will die,” the report screams at workers. “You want your country to go bankrupt? No? Then you gotta delay retirement, get less from Social Security, pay more for health insurance and lose your precious few income tax breaks like the one that helps pay your mortgage while the banker is breathing down your neck right now.”
For 30 years, rich conservatives have successfully threatened the American middle class this way, ever since that rich, conservative Ronald Reagan converted the White House into a castle.
U.S. Poverty, Home Repos Soar, 300 Economists, Policymakers Say Time to Act BIG
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Two bad economic reports this morning reinforce today’s call by 300 economists and policymakers urging the president and Congress to “redouble efforts to create jobs” through investment in infrastructure, sending aid to the states and creating public service jobs.
First, the bad news.
- U.S. poverty hit its highest rate since 1994, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2009, one in seven people were in poverty, and one in five children were in poverty.
- U.S. home seizures reached a record for the third time in five months in August as lenders completed the foreclosure process for thousands of delinquent owners, according to RealtyTrac Inc. Bank repossessions climbed 25 percent from a year earlier to 95,364. RealtyTrac sees a record 1.2 million repossessions this year, up from just under 1 million last year, with more than 3.2 million homes in some stage of foreclosure.
Such data make all the more relevent the statement by 300 prominent economists, “Don’t Kill Growth and Jobs in the Name of Deficit Reduction.” In short, the statement urges the president and lawmakers:
Deficit Chair Simpson Rants Against Seniors Again. Time to Go
Maybe when he’s back on some Wyoming ranch, Alan Simpson can avoid stepping in it. But the co-chairman of the federal budget deficit commission seems to squish deep into it, every time he opens his apparently out-of-control mouth about Social Security.
After the latest loose-lip flap, leaders of seniors’ organizations say it’s time for Simpson to head back to the ranch and resign from the commission.
In a nasty e-mail to Ashley Carson, executive director of the Older Women’s League (OWL), Simpson berates her for an April blog she wrote on Huffington Post in which she takes him to task for distorting the opposition to the Social Security cuts. Raising the retirement age is one such potential cut, one that Simpson supports.
Deficit Commission’s Not So Secret Target—Social Security
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The federal budget deficit commission—actually just a front group to cut Social Security—is trying desperately to keep a lid on its closed-door deliberations. But as David Dayen on Firedoglake points out, the worst kept secret inside and outside the Beltway is the panel’s push to raise the retirement age and make other cuts. Most of which, he writes:
hit the middle class and the working poor directly.
Read his whole column here.
Meanwhile, as part of Social Security’s 75th birthday celebrations this month, Will Parry told a big crowd of Alliance for Retired Americans members in Seattle last week that in 75 years, Social Security
hasn’t made a single millionaire, but in every one of those 75 years, it’s kept millions of people out of poverty.
Social Security Cuts Eyed by Deficit Commission ‘Especially Painful,’ Report Finds
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Next month, Social Security, one of the nation’s most successful and important government programs, turns 75. It is the cornerstone of retirement security for tens of millions of Americans.
(Today, the U.S. House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security will examine the success of Social Security 75 years after President Franklin Roosevelt signed it into law. We’ll be covering the hearing.)
