The
editors at USA Today take on the estate tax repeal, pointing out that it rewards the nation's wealthy elite:
Despite all the rhetoric about the "death tax," dead people don't pay taxes. They are dead. Repealing the tax would be a huge windfall for their heirs. The average tax break per estate would be an estimated $3 million in 2016, and the 318 largest estates would get an average tax cut of $20 million.
Critics loudly and repeatedly claim the estate tax forces heirs to sell family-owned farms and businesses to pay the tax. That would be a powerful argument — if it were true. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that in 2013, only about 20 farm and small-business estates owed any estate tax.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield say they (and the rest of the nation's wealthy citizens) don't need another tax break:
Yes, we're witty and created a successful global brand. Yes, we're handsome and in demand for selfie shots in malls and village squares around the country. And yes, we're wealthy, thanks to the good fortune of our efforts — but also because of many other societal factors that contributed to our wealth.
But these are not good reasons for the tax cut nutters in Congress to abolish the estate tax, a levy paid exclusively by multi-millionaires and billionaires. [...] Instead of abolishing the estate tax and pandering to billionaire campaign contributors, lawmakers should get back to the people's business. Wages have been stagnant for decades. Young people are carrying around anvils on their backs called student debt. Our public infrastructure is falling apart.
The success of our business depends on having prosperous customers. If our customers are hurting, then we are hurting. It is not in our business interest to allow this polarization of income and wealth to continue.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Catherine Rampell:
Limiting federal funding on Medicaid spending would indisputably accomplish one objective: Limiting federal funding on Medicaid spending. But that’s it. It won’t make the growing costs of the program magically disappear. It would just dump them onto someone else’s doorstep, in this case the states’, which are likely less equipped to deal with complex management and cost control given their smaller scale. State governments would either have to contribute more of their own funds or, more likely, institute deep cuts to poor beneficiaries and the providers that serve them. Medicaid already spends so little per beneficiary — about 27 percent less for children, and 20 percent less for adults, than private insurance does on similar patients — that further cuts would almost certainly cause providers to exit the program, reducing access to care.
But, hey, at least this new system wouldn’t force federal politicians to shoulder the blame for reducing health care for the poor. And they’d get to take credit for cutting the federal deficit in the process!
Damon Linker at The Week writes about how presidential races are "the ultimate battlefield" in the culture war:
More than ever, presidential politics is about something other than politics. It's about culture, identity, signaling, and symbolism. In a country of 318 million people, in which there is no shared religious conviction, no shared ethnicity, and increasingly no common culture or moral consensus about marriage and sex, and in which the burden of what is typically a nation's greatest act of collective endeavor and sacrifice (war) has been offloaded to a tiny segment of the population that voluntarily bears the burden largely out of public sight and mind — in such a centerless country, with a media culture that fixates on image, style, and symbolism, a single nationwide quadrennial election in which every adult citizen can participate has taken on existential overtones.
More than affirming his or her ideology or policy proposals, we want to be able to look at a presidential candidate and say: "That's me. That's who I am. That's how I see America."
Democrats are used to making this kind of point about Republicans. With their swaggering gait, ostentatious denials of evolution and climate change, and gratuitous references to God, guns, grits, and gravy, GOP presidential candidates do nothing to conceal their cultural signaling. Unless it involves race. In that case, Democrats point out, Republicans will speak in subtly camouflaged terms about wanting to "take our country back" from the likes of "Barack Hussein Obama." What Republicans mean when they talk this way is that they want a president who looks like them, which means white. (Many Democrats assume that this unedifying display of prejudice will be repeated in gendered terms should Hillary Clinton become the first female president in 2016.)
Over at The New Yorker,
Jeffrey Frank takes an in-depth look into how FDR's death changed the office of the vice-president:
What did change after 1945, though, was the job of the Vice-President, with the idea that they needed useful work and needed to know what the President was up to. A lot of credit for that goes to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican elected in 1952, who had been appalled at Truman’s unpreparedness and rightly blamed F.D.R. Eisenhower, a former four-pack-a-day smoker, was determined to assure a smooth succession if he were to die in office. While he was not particularly fond of Nixon, his Vice-President, he saw to his training. In the fall of 1953, he sent Nixon and his wife on a sixty-eight-day trip through Asia, followed by other foreign assignments, some more successful than others.
That model, up to and including Joe Biden, endures. But if Vice-Presidents are no longer likely to be at sea, as Truman was seventy years ago, there is still no assurance that our next President will know very much about the job. There is no School for Presidents. There is no General Eisenhower to send people like Governor Scott Walker on real ventures that are not potentially embarrassing “trade missions.”
Meanwhile,
John Nichols at The Nation urges a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote:
Despite the protections delineated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (which in 1964 formally banned poll taxes), headlines remind us that the right to vote is “still threatened.” The US Supreme Court has mangled the Voting Rights Act, and the Congress has failed to repair the damage done. The Brennan Center for Justice has determined that at least 83 restrictive bills were introduced in 29 states where legislatures had floor activity in 2014, including proposals to require a photo ID, make voter registration more difficult, reduce early voting opportunities, and make it harder for students to vote.
“The stark and simple truth is this—the right to vote is threatened today—in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago,” said President Obama.
The great American process of forming a more perfect union is far from complete. The events of 150 years ago were not the end of anything. They were a pivot point that took the United States in a better direction. But the was incomplete, and insufficient to establish justice. So the process continues.