BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

So the polls were wrong? The majority of Americans were all for it? I'm just askin'.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Nearly half of Americans give a thumbs-up to Congress' passage of a healthcare reform bill last weekend, with 49% calling it "a good thing." Republicans and Democrats have polar opposite reactions, with independents evenly split.

Whoever sold you the narrative you are repeating is wrong.

The numbers apparently jumped around a bit..

Here is something from March 9 of 2010
https://news.gallup....hcare-Plan.aspx
I couldn't get your link to come up directly but probably it was to the Mar 23 story:
https://news.gallup....ll-passage.aspx
Mar 23 was the day Obama signed it. So it might well be correct that more opposed it than supported it before the vote, but after it was passed the numbers switched.

The high point in public support was 51% in October.

POLITICS
MARCH 23, 2010
By Slim Margin, Americans Support Healthcare Bill's Passage
Independents evenly split in their basic reactions, but more are "angry" than "enthusiastic"
BY LYDIA SAAD
PRINCETON, NJ -- Nearly half of Americans give a thumbs-up to Congress' passage of a healthcare reform bill last weekend, with 49% calling it "a good thing." Republicans and Democrats have polar opposite reactions, with independents evenly split.

The findings, from a March 22 USA Today/Gallup poll conducted one day after the bill received a majority of votes in the U.S. House of Representatives, represent immediate reactions to the vote.

Americans' emotional responses to the bill's passage are more positive than negative -- with 50% enthusiastic or pleased versus 42% angry or disappointed -- and are similar to their general reactions.

Although much of the public debate over healthcare reform has been heated, barely a third of rank-and-file citizens express either enthusiasm (15%) or anger (19%) about the bill's passage. However, only Democrats show greater enthusiasm than anger. Independents are twice as likely to be angry as enthusiastic, and Republicans 10 times as likely.

The Public’s Views on the ACA

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

That hardly supports the narrative that before the bill passed a majority was against it.

True enough, but "a high point of 51% in October" doesn't show great entusiasm either, and some of the low points were considerably lower.

I am recording the State of the Union address. I am hoping that I do not really have to watch it. We bought some wine to help us through it but we have already finished it off. I try to be a good citizen but some things are just too much to ask of me.

Why does anyone actually care how well the ACA polls?

1. Looking at polls in isolation is meaningless. As a rule, medical care in the US polls extremely extremely unpopularly, especially amongst anyone who needs to use it who has anything but a Cadillac plan. People hate what they have, people hate any viable option, and they only thing that the average voter actually likes is "Give me everything for free and make sure to screw over the blacks"

2. I would think that recent experiences with, say, Brexit or the election of Trump show the perils of putting to great faith in voice of the hoi poloi.

Obsessing over small shifts in polls over time seems like an exercise in frustration...

It was the speech of a president whose power is rapidly draining. It came barely a week after Mr Trump caved into Democratic pressure to reopen the US government following a record 35-day shutdown without having secured a dime of funding for the wall. It came just eight days before the US government is set to close again unless Mr Trump agrees to whatever budget deal a bipartisan committee sends to his desk. It will not include any funding for the wall. At which point, Mr Trump will sign because he cannot afford to be blamed for another shutdown. He is then likely to declare a national emergency — one that his most loyal enforcers, most importantly Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, have declared in advance to be constitutionally unwise. In spite of this, Mr Trump insisted on Tuesday night that “I’ll get it [the wall] built”. He has backed himself into a corner from which there is no escape. Without a wall, Mr Trump’s base will drift away. Yet he can only fund one by manufacturing a crisis he would be almost certain to lose.

The other significant message in Mr Trump’s speech was an attack on socialism. Cold War presidents would routinely warn against the Soviet version. It is hard to recollect a US president worrying about socialism at home. Yet Mr Trump’s bromide was borne of a shrewd political calculus. Many of the unapplauding Democrats in front of him today happily flaunt a word that was until recently taboo in US politics. The brewing Democratic presidential primaries are turning into a social democratic beauty contest. Mr Trump knows he could profit from that. “Today we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” he said to thunderous applause from half the chamber.

As for the traditional laundry list of presidential to-do items, most Americans will struggle to name a single one 48 hours from now. The speech was remarkably light on specifics, even by Mr Trump’s standards.

There was a content-free reference to infrastructure — no mention of cost, mechanism or rationale. He talked a little about lowering prescription drug prices and funding a cure for childhood cancer. These were the most tired passages in the speech. It was clear Mr Trump neither expected, nor particularly wanted, to make bipartisan hay with the Democrats. The feeling was clearly mutual. The 2020 election is already under way.

Two things are clear. The first is that Mr Trump will bill the election as a battle between him and a socialist. “We were born free and we will stay free,” he said on Tuesday. The second is that it will take place against the backdrop of a missing wall.

[On Tuesday night], President Trump reserved a few minutes of his State of the Union address to praise his tax reform law, which turned a year old last month. To promote its passage, Mr. Trump and his congressional allies promised Americans that drastically lowered corporate tax rates would bring home large sums of capital that had been stashed overseas and finance a surge of domestic investment.

“For too long, our tax code has incentivized companies to leave our country in search of lower tax rates,” he said, pitching voters in the fall of 2017. “My administration rejects the offshoring model, and we have embraced a brand-new model. It’s called the American model.”

The White House argued they wanted a system that “encourages companies to stay in America, grow in America, spend in America, and hire in America.” Yet the bill he signed into law includes a sweetheart deal that allows companies that shift their profits abroad to pay tax at a rate well below the already-reduced corporate income tax — an incentive shift that completely contradicts his stated goal.

Why would any multinational corporation pay America’s 21 percent tax rate when it could pay the new “global minimum” rate of 10.5 percent on profits shifted to tax havens, particularly when there are few restrictions on how money can be moved around a company and its foreign subsidiaries?

These wonky concerns were largely brushed aside amid the political brawl. But now that a full year has passed since the tax bill became law, we have hard numbers we can evaluate.

For starters, the law’s repatriation deal did prompt a brief surge in offshore profits returning to the United States. But the total sum returned so far is well below the trillions many proponents predicted, and a large chunk of the returned funds have been used for record-breaking stock buybacks, which don’t help workers and generate little real economic activity.

And despite Mr. Trump’s proud rhetoric regarding tax reform during his State of the Union address, there is no wide pattern of companies bringing back jobs or profits from abroad. The global distribution of corporations’ offshore profits — our best measure of their tax avoidance gymnastics — hasn’t budged from the prevailing trend.

Well over half the profits that American companies report earning abroad are still booked in only a few low-tax nations — places that, of course, are not actually home to the customers, workers and taxpayers facilitating most of their business. A multinational corporation can route its global sales through Ireland, pay royalties to its Dutch subsidiary and then funnel income to its Bermudian subsidiary — taking advantage of Bermuda’s corporate tax rate of zero.

No major technology company has jettisoned the finely tuned tax structures that allow a large share of its global profits to be booked offshore. Nor have major pharmaceutical companies stopped producing many of their most profitable drugs in Ireland. And Pepsi, to name just one major manufacturer, still makes the concentrate for its soda in Singapore, also a haven.

Eliminating the complex series of loopholes that encourage offshoring was a major talking point in the run-up to the 2017 tax bill, but most of them are still in place. The craftiest and largest corporations can still legally whittle down their effective tax rate into the single digits. (In fact, the new law encourages firms to move “tangible assets” — like factories — offshore).

Overall, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act amounted to a technocratic sleight of hand — a scheme set to shift an even greater share of the federal tax burden onto the shoulders of American families. According to the Treasury Department’s tally for fiscal year 2018, corporate income tax receipts fell by 31 percent, an unprecedented year-over-year drop in a time of economic growth (presumably a time when profits and government revenue should rise in tandem).

These damning results, to be sure, don’t make for a good defense of what came before the new law. In theory under the old system, American-based firms still owed the government a cut of their global profits. In practice, large firms could indefinitely defer paying this tax until the funds could be repatriated — usually when granted a tax holiday by a friendly administration.

Over a generation, this political dance was paired with rules that made it relatively easy for firms to transfer their most prized intellectual property — say, the rights to popular software or the particular mix of ingredients for a hot new drug — to their offshore subsidiaries. Taken together, they created a tax nirvana of sorts for multinational corporations, particularly in intellectual-property-intensive industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. But it wasn’t enough.

For their next trick, the companies worked with their political allies to favorably frame the 2017 tax debate. When he was the House speaker, Paul Ryan was fond of talking about $3 trillion in “trapped” profits abroad. But those profits weren’t actually, physically, sitting in a few tax havens.

They were largely invested in United States bank accounts, securities and bonds issued by the Treasury or other companies headquartered in the States. As Adam Looney — a Brookings Institution fellow and former Treasury Department official — has explained, companies that needed to finance a new domestic investment could simply issue a bond effectively backed by its offshore cash. (For instance, Apple could bring its “trapped” funds onshore by selling a bond to Pfizer’s offshore account, or vice versa.)

Put plainly, they got the best of both worlds: Uncle Sam could tax only a small slice of their books while they traded with one another based on the size of the entire pie.

The scale of the tax shifting has become so immense that some economists believe curbing it could raise reported G.D.P. by well over a percentage point — something Mr. Trump, who’s been absorbed by opportunities to brag about the economy, should notionally welcome.

President Trump’s economic advisers and the key architects of the bill on Capitol Hill must have known their reform wasn’t going to end business incentives that hurt American workers. Honest reform would have meant closing corporate loopholes — a move they originally promised to make.

Should the opportunity present itself, perhaps to the next president, there are a couple of viable options for a fundamental tax overhaul that wouldn’t require reinstating the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

One of several possibilities is to return to a system of global taxation without the deferrals that enabled empty repatriations. That would mean profits sneakily booked tax-free in Bermuda would be taxed every year at 21 percent. Profits booked in Ireland — or other low-tax nations — would be taxed at the difference between Ireland’s rate and America’s rate.

It’s an approach that would protect small and midsize American companies while cracking down on bad corporate actors with enough fancy accountants and lawyers to rig the game to their advantage. And it would be far better than the fake tax reform passed a year ago.

Happy Birthday Winston.

The Green New Deal has become an incredibly hot item on the political agenda, but to date, it has remained somewhat ill defined. It’s a broad enough concept that everyone can read their aspirations into it, which has been part of its strength, but it has also left discussion in something of a fog, since no one’s quite sure what they’re arguing about.

On Thursday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution that lays out the goals, aspirations, and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. This is as close as there is to an “official” Green New Deal — at last, something to argue about.

There will be lots to say in the days to come about the politics of all this. (In the meantime, read Ella Nilsen’s piece.) For instance, it is interesting that Markey, a living symbol of 2008-era Democratic thinking on climate change (and the leader of the old climate committee), is lending his imprimatur to this more urgent and radical iteration.

But for now, I just want to share a few initial impressions after reading through the short document a few times.

It’s worth noting just what a high-wire act the authors of this resolution are attempting. It has to offer enough specifics to give it real shape and ambition, without overprescribing solutions or prejudging differences over secondary questions. It has to please a diverse range of interest groups, from environmental justice to labor to climate, without alienating any of them. It has to stand up to intense scrutiny (much of it sure to be bad faith), with lots of people gunning for it from both the right and center.

And, of course, it eventually has to give birth to real legislation.

Given all those demands, the resolution does a remarkably good job of threading the needle. It is bold and unmistakably progressive, matched to the problem as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, while avoiding a few needless fights and leaving room for plenty of debate over priorities and policy tools.

The resolution consists of a preamble, five goals, 14 projects, and 15 requirements. The preamble establishes that there are two crises, a climate crisis and an economic crisis of wage stagnation and growing inequality, and that the GND can address both.

The goals — achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, creating jobs, providing for a just transition, securing clean air and water — are broadly popular. The projects — things like decarbonizing electricity, transportation, and industry, restoring ecosystems, upgrading buildings and electricity grids — are necessary and sensible (if also extremely ambitious).

There are a few items down in the requirements that might raise red flags (more on those later), but given the long road ahead, there will be plenty of time to sort them out. Overall, this is about as strong an opening bid as anyone could have asked for.

Now let’s take a closer look.

It’s this threat of multiple ongoing investigations spanning the foreseeable future that should frighten the president the most. Whatever his personal criminal liability, it’s now proven that the organizations he has run — business, political and governmental — have been populated with actual criminals. Six of his associates, including his longtime friend and political adviser, his lawyer, his campaign chairman, his deputy campaign chairman and a foreign policy adviser have been indicted or pleaded guilty. It would be naive at this point to believe that more such charges are not coming. That apple could fall very near the tree indeed.

From There’s now an official Green New Deal. Here’s what’s in it. by David Roberts at Vox:

As I previously noted, cancelled State of the Union speech versus cancelled flight. Do you really claim to not know who scored a knockdown, and who is trash talking while still dazed and laying on the canvas? Dennison is going to have the White House plumbers wall-borders (sic) over to Pelosi's office and build a wall in front of her office. That will be full measure.

I was very puzzled that Pelosi allowed Dennison to give the State of the Union address before the February 15, 2019 deadline to pass appropriations bills when he can shut down government the 2nd time in the first 2 months of this year.

I would have scheduled the speech for something like the later of February 19 or the week after the appropriations bills are passed if and only if there is no additional government shutdown. If Dennison shuts down government again, I would have postponed the State of the Union speech until 2020.

I haven't seen the rationale for giving up one of the biggest bargaining chips to prevent a government shutdown.

The actual resolution that outlines the Green New Deal does not include the "unwilling to work" part, but the overview document, released by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's office, does include the "unwilling" language.