Thursday, October 31, 2024
New Poll Has Harris With A 3-Point Lead Over Trump
The chart above reflects the results of the Morning Consult Poll -- done between October 25th and 27th of a nationwide sample of 8,807 likely voters, with a 1 point margin of error.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Trump's Crazy Tax Plan Would Not Work (And Would Make Goods More Expensive)
Donald Trump has said he would like to replace the income tax with a heavy tariff on all imported goods. That may sound good to the rich, but it would make life much more expensive for the poor, the working class, and the middle class.
That's because tariffs act like a sales tax. The tariff would be paid by the importer, who would then raise the price of the goods to cover that cost. Some might say just buy goods made in this country. That wouldn't work because many consumer goods are no longer made in the United States. For instance, no TV is assembled in this country. With a 70% tariff a $550 dollar TV would cost $850.
Also, the U.S. imports about 60% of fruits and 40% of vegetables so the price of groceries would skyrocket.
But that's not the only reason the Trump plan wouldn't work. Economist Erica York explains in this Washington Post article. Here is part of what she writes:
Donald Trump has floated a proposal to replace the U.S. income tax system with a new system of tariffs, moving the United States back to the tax mix of the late 19th century. The plan, simply put, is a mathematical impossibility.
Trump’s most obvious challenge would be in how to close the yawning gap between income tax revenue and duties. The U.S. Treasury collected $2.2 trillion from the individual income tax in fiscal 2023 and $80 billion from tariffs.
The gap isn’t, per se, the reason Trump’s vision cannot be realized. On paper, Trump could cover the shortfall with a 70 percent universal tariff on all imported goods.
But the proposal is unworkable because of the sharp difference in the size of the respective tax bases. The Congressional Budget Office projects $15.6 trillion of adjusted gross income in fiscal year 2023. Goods imports totaled about $3.1 trillion in calendar year 2023. Trump’s calculation ignores the precipitous drop in imports a tax increase of this magnitude would cause.
Based on historical data, we can expect imports to drop by 1 percent for every 1 percent increase in import prices. The projected total would fall to $930 billion. Because the base would be smaller, the higher tariffs would raise about $650 billion in revenue, not the trillions Trump projects.
Even adjusting for the inevitable drop in imports overstates the revenue potential of tariffs. No tax enjoys perfect adherence. And applying the stated tax rate to current import prices overstates how revenue would rise in real terms.
Under a full set of standard tax modeling assumptions, the revenue maximizing rate falls between 40 to 50 percent, resulting in revenue between $450 billion to $650 billion. Raising rates above that range would reduce the resulting revenue — meaning tariffs fall well short of what is required to replace $2 trillion of income tax revenue. . . .
Spending on discretionary programs and net interest combined equals 8.8 percent of GDP compared to goods imports at about 11.2 percent of GDP. It would take a nearly 80 percent tax on all goods imports — assuming (implausibly) that imports remain unchanged — to turn enough revenue to cover these major spending items. Applying the actual revenue maximizing tariff rate on imports would not even cover interest payments on the debt, projected to exceed $1 trillion annually by 2025. . . .
Currently, the United States maintains a highly progressive fiscal program, in which higher-income taxpayers generally pay substantially higher income tax rates and lower-income taxpayers receive more back in refundable tax credits than they owe in income taxes.
Tariffs, in contrast, impose a regressive burden on taxpayers. Indeed, this is why analyses of Trump’s proposed tax plan — which raises tariffs and substantially cuts (but does not eliminate) income taxes — would increase the tax burden on at least the bottom 40 percent of taxpayerswhile providing the largest cuts for the top 5 percent.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
ABC Poll Has Harris With A 4-Point Lead Among Likely Voters
The charts above are from the ABC News / Ipsos Poll -- done between October 18th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 1,913 likely voters, with a 2.5 point margin of error.
Michelle Obama Makes The Case For Women's Health And Reproductive Rights
No one has made the case for women's health and reproductive rights better than Michelle Obama.
The following is excerpted from Mrs. Obama’s speech on Saturday at a Kamala Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Mich.
I want you to think about which presidential candidate could possibly care more about our reproductive health.
I just want to take a moment with this particular question, because there is so much that gets lost in the conversation about women’s reproductive rights. I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this. Because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth.
Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work. Some young girls enter puberty not knowing what to expect. Too many of us suffer with severe cramps and nausea for several days every single month.
Then on the other end of the reproductive timeline, too many women my age have no idea what’s going on with our bodies as we battle through menopause and debilitating hot flashes and depression.
See, fellas, most of us women, we suck up our pain and deal with it alone. We don’t share our experiences with anyone, not with our partners, our friends or even our doctors.
Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all. Yes, it brings life, and that’s a beautiful thing, but even when we are not bearing children, there is so much that can go wrong at any moment.
Every woman here knows what I’m talking about: an unexpected lump, an abnormal pap smear or mammogram, an infection, a blockage, all of which could be early signs of a variety of life-threatening cancers.
In those terrifying moments when something goes wrong, y’all, which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country, let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us.
Look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel, to understand the complexities of our reproductive health experiences. In all honesty, most of us as women don’t fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives.
That’s because our experiences are often neglected by science. There’s a huge disparity in research funding for women’s health. If you happen to look like me and report pain, you’re more likely to be ignored, even by your own doctors, studies show.
So let me take a minute to help folks, especially the men in our lives, get a better sense of what could happen if we keep dismantling parts of our reproductive care system piece by piece, as I fear Donald Trump will do. I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health, all of it.
There are good reasons why so many women and physicians are horrified by what’s happened since Donald Trump’s justices overturned Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Just this week, a major medical journal reported that after Roe was overturned, infant mortality in this country rose. One woman spent 22 days in jail on murder charges after she miscarried in her own bathroom.
We are seeing doctors unsure if they can treat ectopic pregnancies, doctors being told that they can’t treat a woman until she becomes so close to death that only a “life of the mother” exception will allow them to act.
Just imagine the profound effects for all of us if Donald Trump wins the election.
In states that are already putting abortion bans into effect, his F.D.A. could further outlaw patchwork systems of telehealth appointments and mail-order pills, thereby eliminating the last remaining protections for women in those states.
He could take actions that effectively ban abortion nationwide, which would put all of us in danger, no matter what state we live in.
We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing lifesaving treatments because they are worried about being arrested; more medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all; more clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving untold numbers of women in communities throughout the country without a place to go for basic gynecological care, which in turn will leave millions of women at risk of undiagnosed medical issues like cervical and uterine cancers. This is real.
Do you think Donald Trump is thinking about the consequences for the millions of women who will be living in medical deserts? Does anyone think he has the emotional maturity and foresight to come up with a plan to protect us?
Y’all, we are teetering on the edge.
Even before these state bans, America was already lagging behind every other wealthy nation on measures like maternal mortality and paid leave.
We could be right back to the days before Roe, which many young people don’t even remember, the days when abortion wasn’t as safe as it is today, the days when the number of mothers of color dying in childbirth was higher.
So to the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life.
Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out-of-state or overseas, or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up.
Your wife and mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care.
Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy.
Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.
This will not just affect women. It will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancies won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.
If you and your partner are expecting a child, you’ll be right by her side at the checkups, terrified if her blood pressure is too high, or if there’s an issue with the placenta, or if the ultrasound shows that an embryo has implanted in the wrong place, and the doctors aren’t sure that they can intervene to keep her safe.
If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.
Then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral. You might be the one left to raise your children alone.
See, these are just some of the ways women die during childbirth. I don’t want to be a downer, y’all, but in many cases, there is no warning, and things can go bad very quickly. When it happens, every second of hesitation or delay can lead to devastating outcomes.
I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.
The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need.
So please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown a deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.
Let me tell you all to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equity.
So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?
Monday, October 28, 2024
Humor Columnist Makes The Endorsement The Washington Post Wouldn't
The following is from the humor columnist of the Washington Post (Alexandra Petri):
The Washington Post is not bothering to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election. (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin and the founder and executive chairman of Amazon and Amazon Web Services, also owns The Post.)
We as a newspaper suddenly remembered, less than two weeks before the election, that we had a robust tradition 50 years ago of not telling anyone what to do with their vote for president. It is time we got back to those “roots,” I’m told!
Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.
But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.
Let me tell you something. I am having a baby (It’s a boy!), and he is expected on Jan. 6, 2025 (It’s a … Proud Boy?). This is either slightly funny or not at all funny. This whole election, I have been lurching around, increasingly heavily pregnant, nauseated, unwieldy, full of the commingled hopes and terrors that come every time you are on the verge of introducing a new person to the world.
Well, that world will look very different, depending on the outcome of November’s election, and I care which world my kid gets born into. I also live here myself. And I happen to care about the people who are already here, in this world. Come to think of it, I have a lot of reasons for caring how the election goes. I think it should be obvious that this is not an election for sitting out.
The case for Donald Trump is “I erroneously think the economy used to be better? I know that he has made many ominous-sounding threats about mass deportations, going after his political enemies, shutting down the speech of those who disagree with him (especially media outlets), and that he wants to make things worse for almost every category of person — people with wombs, immigrants, transgender people, journalists, protesters, people of color — but … maybe he’ll forget.”
“But maybe he’ll forget” is not enough to hang a country on!
Embarrassingly enough, I like this country. But everything good about it has been the product of centuries of people who had no reason to hope for better but chose to believe that better things were possible, clawing their way uphill — protesting, marching, voting, and, yes, doing the work of journalism — to build this fragile thing called democracy. But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.
Trust is like that, too, as newspapers know.
I’m just a humor columnist. I only know what’s happening because our actual journalists are out there reporting, knowing that their editors have their backs, that there’s no one too powerful to report on, that we would never pull a punch out of fear. That’s what our readers deserve and expect: that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.
That’s why I, the humor columnist, am endorsing Kamala Harris by myself!
Sunday, October 27, 2024
49% Of Voters Say Donald Trump Is A Fascist
The chart above reflects the results of the ABC News / Ipsos Poll -- done between October 18th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 2,392 registered voters, with a 2 point margin of error.
It's OK To Be Anxious - But VOTE!
Right now, whether in the train station or on a text chain, the election anxiety is palpable. And it's understandable. This race is incredibly close. The latest New York Times/Sienna poll shows a dead heat, and more importantly, seven key swing states all show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump polling within the margin of error.
This election comes just eight years after a man who made misogynyand racism a key part of his campaign defeated our first truly viable female nominee, and just four years after Trump helped incite an insurrection on the steps of our Capitol.
But I’m not freaking out (yet). And here’s why.
First of all, I think late deciders are breaking for Harris. According to that same New York Times/Sienna poll, “15 percent of voters described themselves as not fully decided, and Ms. Harris is leading with that group, 42 percent to 32 percent. Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump had a minute edge with undecided or persuadable voters, 36 percent to 35 percent.” This is consistent with a recent Emerson College poll that showed Harris leading this group by double digits.
Second, people are already voting, and while GOP turnout is up in some states like Nevada, Democratic voters, especially women, are reportedly casting ballots at higher rates. This is always a good sign, given Harris’s gender gap advantage with women. Even among young men — a group that Trump has spent a great deal of money and effort courting — Harris has a lead in at least one poll among likely young male voters.
Finally, Harris has a far better ground operation for the final push, impacting both enthusiasm and turnout. Does that mean she will win the election? I don’t know yet. No one does. It ultimately depends on who turns out more of their supporters in the final days.
So, yes it’s OK to be anxious. But as someone who’s been through many stressful elections, rather than simply watching the polls shift, the only tried-and-true way to channel that energy is to do something to benefit the democratic process. Go knock on doors in Pennsylvania, or volunteer in a nearby swing state. And of course, vote.
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