NEWS: 165 Biden admin staffers are demanding Biden stop surrendering on climate & start using his power to fulfill his climate promises.
“We’ve done our part. We implore you to do yours…For the sake of our survival, you must use your authority.”
@edgarblythe,
He needs to fire those staffers.
Biden is currently at conflict between his woke staff, and millions of Americans who are paying hundreds a month in gas. The price has lowered slightly because he caved and begged the Saudis for oil. He needs to keep begging like the pathetic little man he is.
A quiet scandal is happening in D.C. Biden has nominated three brutal prosecutors as judges for local D.C. courts, including the *same prosecutor* Trump tried (and failed) to nominate to the highest court in D.C. If Congress allows this, it's a disaster for people in D.C.
Each of Biden's nominees chose to devote their professional career to anti-science human caging policies that are unprecedented in history. That choice to use power/privilege to crush poor people was what made the highest ranking one appealing to Trump.
Alec Karakatsanis
@equalityAlec
·
1h
I litigated for years against the office from which Biden selected the other two of these nominees. We proved rampant prosecutor misconduct, lying, sweeping ethics violations under the rug, complicity with cop violence. Where have these nominees spoken publicly against this?
Alec Karakatsanis
@equalityAlec
·
1h
Each of those nominees chose to work for years in an office that is responsible for D.C. caging Black people at a rate 19 times that of white people, and almost exclusively poor people:
T L Trevaskis
@tl_trevaskis
·
1h
Replying to
@equalityAlec
Is it my imagination, or has Biden been indicating that he's in favor of a kind of police state?
m00ph
@m00ph23
·
1h
That's Bidens career. Combined with his cop VP, it's no wonder some of us were not thrilled about this ticket.
Hoarder of Ball lids
@ya_argh
·
23m
Replying to
@equalityAlec
and
@CriminalUnionFW
But but but we need to vote blue no matter who
Trans Gruber
@DraughtJane
·
15m
Replying to
@equalityAlec
He has to do it, because the GOP has a lot of senators or something. His hands are tied! Or something.
Or something.
Nina Turner
@ninaturner
·
4h
Louis DeJoy is planning on cutting 50,000 jobs from the USPS. It should absolutely be a bigger story.
***************
If Biden really cared he would have been able to get rid of DeJoy.
Dems’ Gift To Their Wall Street Donors
Democrats and the Washington press corps spent the last week insisting that the party was about to close a notorious tax loophole that allows many Wall Street billionaires to pay a lower tax rate than most Americans.
In truth, the proposal would have left most of the loophole open, fulfilling Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) longstanding pledge to protect the private equity industry that bankrolls his campaigns. Now, the plan is gone.
On Thursday night, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a favorite of private equity donors, announced that Democrats "have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision.” Meanwhile, President Joe Biden — who pledged to close the loophole — continues to decline to try to use his executive tax enforcement authority to shut the tax break.
Taken together, Democrats’ bait and switch allowed party lawmakers to pretend they were finally cracking down on private equity moguls, while actually protecting them.
That political gift to Wall Street comes after the private equity industry has delivered $83 million to Democratic politicians and $62 million to Republicans at the federal level over the last two election cycles. That includes $1.2 million to Schumer in just the last cycle, and $283,000 to Sinema.
Despite the fact the provision was always set to mostly preserve the loophole, corporate media outlets echoed Democratic leaders’ insistence that they were closing it — even as a major corporate law firm and other experts acknowledged that was not actually happening.
“Contrary To Discussions In The Media”
At issue is the so-called “carried interest” tax loophole, which permits private equity managers to classify their earnings as capital gains rather than regular income. That allows them to have portions of their income taxed at the lower capital gains rate of 20 percent, as opposed to the top income rate of 37 percent.
Democratic politicians have long pledged to close the loophole, and they have previously introduced legislation to reap $63 billion by completely eliminating it. They spent the last week insisting their new Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would do that.
“I think the people that have benefited from carried interest for years and years and years knew that they had a good run, it was long overdue to get rid of it and you can’t justify it anymore,” Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) told The Hill last week.
However, the proposal negotiated by Manchin and Schumer rejected the party’s previous legislation and would have only slightly limited the tax break.
Instead of generating $63 billion in savings, as a 2021 proposal to fully close the loophole would, the new version would have only recouped $14 billion — effectively preserving most of the controversial tax break.
The measure would have only increased the time that firms must hold assets in order for their income to qualify as carried interest, changing it from three years to five years.
This reform would have increased the amount of private equity income subject to taxes at the ordinary rates, but only modestly, because many private equity investments last far longer than five years.
For instance: The Carlyle Group’s investment in Manorcare, a nursing home company, lasted 11 years. Petsmart has been in BC Partners’ portfolio for more than seven years. The Blackstone Group held Hilton Hotels for 11 years.
Tax law professor Victor Fleischer, a former top Democratic tax policy aide on Capitol Hill who initiated the effort to end the carried interest loophole in 2007, said on Twitter, “The Schumer-Manchin deal on carried interest isn’t great. All it does is extend the holding period from 3 to 5 years… Most private equity deals are 5-7 years, so most carried interest will continue to be taxed as long term capital gain.”
DLA Piper, a law firm with a large private equity practice, noted in a client alert last week, the IRA “would not, contrary to discussions in the media, close the carried interest loophole.”
One way to know for sure: As corporate lobbyist Liam Donovan tweeted, existing Democratic legislation to fully close the loophole would have raised more than four times as much revenue as the provision originally included in the Manchin-Schumer deal.
Big Donors To Democrats
It should not come as a shock that Democrats weren’t pushing to outright close the carried interest loophole.
Schumer, for example, has long been an ally of the private equity industry. In 2009 and 2010, he tried adding a poison pill to a legislative effort to kill the loophole.
His recent carried interest proposal arrived just days before a private equity giant hired his son-in-law.
The industry has also showered President Joe Biden with cash. Private equity manager Marc Lasry raised more than $3 million for Biden’s 2020 campaign, while Blackstone Group executives donated $350,000 to a pro-Biden super PAC.
While the IRA would not have closed the carried interest loophole, and would not have affected the majority of private equity income, the industry went through the motions of pressing allied lawmakers to strip the carried interest changes out of the bill.
After many news stories indicated Sinema was pushing to remove the measure, she issued a statement saying that Democrats are nixing the carried interest proposal. She added that she's planning to work with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), to "enact carried interest tax reforms, protecting investments in America's economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes.”
Corporate Media Gets The Story Wrong
As the private equity industry and Sinema worked to kill Democrats’ carried interest proposal, corporate media outlets repeatedly oversold the measure, saying it would end the loophole entirely. These mistakes had the effect of making Schumer and Manchin look like populist heroes while also providing cover to those who wanted the measure gone.
On Wednesday, NPR compared the current carried interest language to a 2019 proposal that would have also raised $14 billion over a decade, rather than the gold standard 2021 proposal from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), which would have raised $63 billion over a decade.
In their August 2021 press release, Wyden and Whitehouse said, “Unlike other bills, the senators’ bill would close the entire carried interest loophole.” Similarly, Punchbowl News, one of the Beltway’s most reliable purveyors of corporate spin, oversold the carried interest changes several times.
Last week, Punchbowl asserted that the Manchin-Schumer “plan eliminates the carried-interest loophole.” Punchbowl similarly wrote on Wednesday, “Perhaps the biggest question in the reconciliation process is whether the elimination of the carried-interest loophole makes it through Congress.”
Schumer’s Family Business
Blackstone just hired Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law as a lobbyist, the latest of his relatives to take a job at a company lobbying the Senate on major legislation.
When Elon Musk is thanking Joe Manchin for legislation 🚩🚩🚩
Schumer Lets Aide Kill Key Drug Price Reforms
BY DAVID SIROTA – 06 AUG 2022 –
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) let a U.S. Senate adviser kill key parts of Democrats’ promised drug pricing legislation, as Schumer has become the Senate’s second largest recipient of pharmaceutical industry cash.
On Saturday, the Senate's parliamentary adviser Elizabeth MacDonough — who Schumer can remove — issued a non-binding advisory opinion saying Democrats should remove provisions in their spending bill that would punish drugmakers for inflating their prices for patients in private health insurance plans. The provision could have saved $40 billion, according to one estimate.
“The exclusion of the private insurance price limits means there is little left that will reduce costs for the vast majority of Americans who receive health insurance through their private sector employer,” reported Politico.
MacDonough also advised Democrats against including a provision in their legislation to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 a month for people on private insurance plans. Democrats ultimately held a failed vote to overrule her on the insulin cap.
Democrats’ legislation does still allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the first time — but only on 10 drugs by 2026, and eventually 20 drugs per year. Removing the inflation cap will substantially limit protections for patients on private health insurance plans. Medicare patients will benefit from the $35 cap on out-of-pocket insulin costs, but patients on private insurance plans will not.
Taken together, Democrats’ signature drug pricing measure is now a shell of the proposal that lawmakers debated for much of last year, and far weaker than the compromise deal negotiated by the party’s drug industry allies.
“Unfortunate Ruling”
Like Republicans have done in the past, Schumer could simply fire MacDonough or the Democrats’ presiding officer of the Senate could ignore her opinions. Instead, though, Schumer has issued public statements lamenting the advisories, but refusing to do anything to change, stop, or ignore them.
Before this, he allowed the parliamentarian to initially kill Democrats’ promised $15-minimum wage legislation, and then eight Senate Democrats voted with Republicans to prevent it from being revived. The parliamentarian also killed Democrats’ immigration reform plan.
In this new case, pharmaceutical lobbyists have been working with Republican lawmakers to help them influence MacDonough’s advisories.
“While there was one unfortunate ruling in that the inflation rebate is more limited in scope, the overall program remains intact,” Schumer said of his aide’s latest non-binding opinions.
MacDonough, the parliamentarian, also helped kill the $35 cap on out-of-pocket costs for insulin. Democrats could have ignored her advice but didn’t, before trying to keep the measure in the bill anyway.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) raised a point of order, which led to a vote to keep the measure in the bill that would have required 60 votes to succeed. Handled differently, Democrats could have set up a scenario in which it may have required 60 votes to exclude the provision from the bill.
In the end, all 50 Democrats voted to keep the insulin cap in the bill, along with seven Republicans, and it failed.
Pharma Cash Floods Into Democratic Coffers
Schumer’s refusal to do anything about the parliamentary adviser’s edict on the drug inflation cap comes as he has raked in more than $289,000 from donors in the pharmaceutical and health products industry during his 2022 election campaign. Eight of the Senate’s top 10 recipients of donations from that industry are Democrats.
That includes Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has raked in more than $556,000 from the industry since 2017. She has also benefited from a flood of supportive TV ads from a Big Pharma front group.
Sinema recently said her support of the bill would be subject to the parliamentarian's review. She previously said: “There is no instance in which I would overrule a parliamentarian’s decision.”
Yet, Sinema actually voted on Sunday to overrule the parliamentarian and keep the $35 insulin cap in the bill. Perhaps she would have voted differently if the measure had a genuine shot at passage.
In all, the pharmaceutical and health products industry has funneled more than $61 million to Democratic candidates in the last two election cycles, far more than it gave to GOP lawmakers in the same time period.
Where Did The Public Option Go?
BY ADITI RAMASWAMI, ANDREW PEREZ – 11 AUG 2022 – →
President Joe Biden has, not once since his inauguration, mentioned the public health insurance option he and every single competitive Senate Democratic challenger promised voters during the 2020 election.
The idea of creating a government-run health insurance plan that people could buy into has completely disappeared from the political conversation in Washington. Instead, Democrats have opted to deliver tens of billions of dollars of new government subsidies demanded by private health insurers that have funneled millions of dollars into Democratic campaign coffers.
In their latest spending bill, Democrats once again chose to give $42 billion in additional subsidies to private health insurers to help steer people into plans that feature high out-of-pocket costs and routine claim denials, as those insurers continue to raise premiums.
The move further entrenches Democrats’ 2010 health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and the corporate health insurance industry — rather than bringing the country closer to achieving universal coverage and saving the federal government substantially more money in the long run.
While pundits frequently raise questions about how much money a single-payer health care system would cost, no one in Washington ever seems to consider the cost of the subsidies being used to prop up the health insurance industry. The total cost of the ACA subsidy scheme would likely exceed $800 billion over a decade if these expanded subsidies are renewed down the road, according to a Lever review of government analyses.
On Sunday, the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a spending bill that — among other key health care provisions — would extend expanded federal health insurance subsidies for another three years. The expanded subsidies were first enacted last year in Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act to lower premiums in 2021 and 2022 for people buying individual health insurance plans through the ACA marketplaces.
For much of its history, the ACA’s premium tax credits only went to poorer families, creating what was known as a “subsidy cliff” that made it difficult for middle-class households to afford exchange plans. The American Rescue Plan expanded the eligibility criteria for these subsidies, with the policy halving monthly premium payments for millions of Americans.
Those subsidies are set to expire soon; without their extension, millions of marketplace enrollees would receive notices about sharp premium increases in October, shortly before the November midterm elections. Making matters worse: Insurers are preparing to hike premiums more than they have in recent years, with a median proposed increase of 10 percent for Americans on individual plans, according to a recent review by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the IRA proposal would prevent 3.1 million Americans from losing coverage, while lowering premiums for millions more. And thanks to the expanded subsidies, 2.8 million more people received the tax credits in 2022 than in 2021.
While the subsidies are clearly helping millions of Americans gain or keep health insurance coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic, they are also a costly and remarkably inefficient giveaway to the health insurance industry at a time when such companies are raking in sky-high profits — all while health care costs remain the top financial concern for U.S. adults.
“The First Thing I Would Do As President”
During his presidential campaign, Biden pledged to build upon the ACA, commonly known as “Obamacare,” by providing Americans with a “choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare.”
In 2019, Biden said: "The first thing I would do as president is say, look, here’s the deal: We're going to eliminate all the changes that [the Trump] administration made trying to kill Obamacare, number one, and we're going to add to it a public option."
Democrats previously debated including a public option in the ACA in 2009 and 2010, before dropping the idea at the behest of the health insurance industry and conservative Democratic senators who all went on to become corporate lobbyists or join Washington’s lucrative influence industry.
Biden and the Democratic establishment once again pitched a public option during the 2020 campaign, as a compromise measure that could satisfy progressive voters demanding Medicare for All, and one that would stand a better shot at passage in Congress.
However, Biden has failed to push for such a vision since becoming president, with Democrats instead rallying around expanded subsidies for ACA plans — an idea ripped straight out of a list of recommendations offered by health insurance lobbyists.
In fact, since becoming president, Biden has not publicly uttered the phrase “public option” or “public health insurance option,” according to Factba.se, a website that maintains a searchable database of all of Biden’s speeches and interviews.
There was a brief mention of “creating a public option” in a White House fact sheet for Biden’s proposed American Families Plan last year, though Biden ultimately omitted the idea in his budget. As The Hill reported at the time, “While Biden supports a public option for health care, the budget did not assume the passage of any such proposal, leaving out key questions about costs and how to pay for it.”
And while it seemed for a moment like congressional Democrats were poised to introduce a public option bill, it wasn’t long before even progressive lawmakers gave up on the popular idea, despite long touting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (Ind.-Vt.) Medicare for All legislation that would offer every American government-run health coverage.
Just five months into Biden’s presidency, Congressional Progressive Caucus chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) deemed the idea “much more difficult than lowering the Medicare eligibility age and expanding benefits.” Democratic proposals to lower the age of eligibility for Medicare and add dental and vision benefits to the program have now also been shelved.
In the 2020 election cycle, Biden’s campaign and Democrats’ Senate and House party committees received more than $4.7 million in donations affiliated with six major health insurers, including UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health (which owns Aetna), Anthem and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cigna, Centene, and Humana. Those insurers all offer plans on state marketplace exchanges.
America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the insurance industry lobbying group that spent more than $100 million to kill a public option in 2009-10, lauded the Senate’s recent vote to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies.
“Every American deserves access to affordable coverage and high-quality care, and the Senate’s action will continue vital support that millions of hardworking American families need to purchase their own health coverage in the years to come,” said Matt Eyles, president and CEO of AHIP, in a statement.
As The Lever reported last year, an AHIP-led front group called the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), led by lobbyists for AHIP, drugmakers, and hospital chains, quickly signaled its opposition to the “Medicare-X Choice Act,” a limited public option proposal introduced last year by Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tim Kaine of Virginia.
PAHCF spent $60 million in 2019-20, according to its tax returns. The group’s activities appear to have grown more sporadic in recent months.
Saving Money And Lives
Last week, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) announced that the national uninsured rate hit a record low of 8 percent in early 2022, in part thanks to the ACA subsidies.
While this may qualify as an accomplishment, a relatively small percentage of people get their insurance through the ACA marketplace, since most Americans are insured through their employer or public coverage. Enrollees in ACA plans also tend to experience high rates of claim denials, in addition to steep deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.
Besides, the news out of HHS means that tens of millions of Americans still lack health insurance, while many millions are still underinsured, meaning they cannot afford health care services despite paying for coverage.
Millions more Americans could lose Medicaid coverage when the designated COVID public health emergency ends. Worse still, Senate Democrats failed in the IRA to close the Medicaid coverage gap for low-income adults in states that have not yet expanded the program since ACA passage.
Some states have taken matters into their own hands. Colorado, for instance, is creating, through an approved federal waiver, a public option plan that will be sold on the ACA exchange and could lower premiums by an average of 22 percent.
However, Congress has not made any earnest effort to advance Medicare for All legislation, or even a federal public option proposal, despite the fact such a plan could be significantly more affordable for Americans and the federal government alike.
The new ACA subsidies will surely help millions, but it’s a very expensive way to expand coverage. If you consider the cost of the existing ACA subsidy program as well as the new subsidies, assuming they are made permanent, the total cost to the federal government would be roughly $825 billion over a 10-year period.
By contrast, an April 2021 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that a public option, depending on how it’s designed, could increase federal revenue — not to mention lower people’s monthly premiums and reduce administrative costs. Going a step further, as The Lever previously reported, a single-payer health care system like Medicare for All would confer several significant benefits, including eliminating premiums, increasing longevity, and boosting the overall economy. And, according to the CBO, such a system could generate as much as $650 billion in federal savings annually.
The people, like Edgar here, who are doing their best to increase the likelihood of a Republican victory in November of this year and in 2024...should hide their heads in shame. But I doubt most of those people have the intelligence or integrity to see they should.
I do not know if a Hell exists, but if there is such a place, the people doing their best to increase the likelihood of a Republican victory...should roast there once they depart Earth. It will not be a sufficient punishment, but it would be as much as can be offered.
Promising the moon then delivering **** is a sure way to dampen enthusiasm with important elections coming up.
To ignore blatant failures is to encourage ever more blatant failures.
Frank, you’ve lost that last crumb of brain. You’re making a fool of yourself.
But if you want to subsist on your current level of idiocy: You are the traitor to the promise of this country. Because of you, this country will never recover. It’s a morass of unaccountable criminals seeing who can outmaneuver the next. Multimillionaires buying news trends. FBI, CIA, IRS: all providing the muscle against the people for the highest bidder. The world built by Frank.
Frank Apisa: traitor to America, oppressor of women and minorities and their children.
