Open Thread - Politics Plus

Bernie Sanders has a lot of plans. He's got his single-payer health care plan, his tuition-free college plan, his infrastructure plan, his youth jobs plan, his expanded Social Security plan, his (borrowed from Kirsten Gillibrand) paid family leave plan, and many others.

And for every plan, he's got an idea to pay for it. College? Slap a financial transactions tax on Wall Street. Infrastructure? Tax corporations on profits they earn abroad. Single-payer? Raise income and payroll taxes, and then a bunch of others too.




While Sanders tends to portray these as separate ideas with separate financing, I thought it'd be worth adding them up and seeing what the tax code looks like with all of them. I looked specifically at his changes to personal income, payroll, and capital gains tax rates.

That leaves out the financial transactions tax, his carbon tax plan, the elimination of many corporate tax breaks he proposes, and so forth. And, of course, it's highly unlikely that everything Sanders is proposing would be passed in its current form should he be elected president, especially with a Republican House. But the combined rates nonetheless give a sense of the scale of change he's calling for.

First off, let's look at income and payroll taxes

Clinton Democrats voting for Trump? Absurdist argument.

Unemployment is high and the Labor Participation Rate is at a Depression Era low;
Over the past 8 years insane numbers of people have lost their homes to foreclosure;
The jobs that are created facilitate under-employment and a lesser standard of living;
Tuitions are at an all-time high;
Small businesses are not only harder to start but are preyed upon by bureaucratic Federal Government agencies;
The one-percenters have gotten richer while the Middle Class is disappearing;
The cost of living is high;
Tax reform (as well as all entitlement reforms) has again fallen by the wayside;
Obamacare, deemed a tax by the US Supreme Court, was levied against the populace;
Race relations are at the lowest point since the Civil Rights Movement;
Our military is understaffed, underfunded, under-appreciated by our government and stretched thin;
The Veterans Administration is failing our warriors;
And, our leadership on the world stage is non-existent.

Among the complete and utter bs and total fabrications is that unemployment being high.

STAGE 1: Polite condescension toward what is perceived to be harmless (we think it’s really wonderful that your views are being aired).

STAGE 2: Light, casual mockery as the self-belief among supporters grows (no, dears, a left-wing extremist will not win, but it’s nice to see you excited).

STAGE 3: Self-pity and angry etiquette lectures directed at supporters upon realization that they are not performing their duty of meek surrender, flavored with heavy doses of concern trolling (nobody but nobody is as rude and gauche online to journalists as these crusaders, and it’s unfortunately hurting their candidate’s cause!).

STAGE 4: Smear the candidate and his supporters with innuendos of sexism and racism by falsely claiming only white men support them (you like this candidate because he’s white and male like you, not because of ideology or policy or contempt for the party establishment’s corporatist, pro-war approach).

STAGE 5: Brazen invocation of right-wing attacks to marginalize and demonize, as polls prove the candidate is a credible threat (he’s weak on terrorism, will surrender to ISIS, has crazy associations, and is a clone of Mao and Stalin).

STAGE 6: Issuance of grave and hysterical warnings about the pending apocalypse if the establishment candidate is rejected, as the possibility of losing becomes imminent (you are destined for decades, perhaps even generations, of powerlessness if you disobey our decrees about who to select).

STAGE 7: Full-scale and unrestrained meltdown, panic, lashing-out, threats, recriminations, self-important foot-stomping, overt union with the Right, complete fury (I can no longer in good conscience support this party of misfits, terrorist-lovers, communists, and heathens).

Concrete Evidence of the Continuing Plunge in Both Civil and Criminal Immigration Enforcement

In the confluence of these reports, we see concrete evidence of several things:

The abject failure of this administration to grapple with sanctuary jurisdictions, even while continuing to ply them with federal monies under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program;

The ineffectual nature of PEP, which has been rejected by many sheriff's offices out of hand, despite a considerable amount of time and effort by Homeland Security authorities, including the secretary himself, to use their powers of suasion to convince law enforcement that PEP is the best thing since sliced bread;

An apparent newfound unwillingness, quite probably as the result of directives emanating from new Attorney General Loretta Lynch, on the part of U.S. attorneys to prosecute immigration crimes, because there is absolutely no reason whatever to think that aliens have suddenly become more law-abiding in the lenient "no rules, just right" atmosphere created by this White House.

As we lurch and stumble through the last year of this president's hammerlock on the levers of power, look for nothing good to occur in the arena of immigration enforcement; hope, rather, that he doesn't leave such a shambles that it cannot be undone.