18 May 21
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Robert Reich | The Secret Tax Loophole Making the Rich Even Richer
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "How do we prevent America from becoming an aristocracy, while also funding the programs that Americans desperately need?"
One way is to get rid of a tax loophole you’ve probably never heard of. It’s known as the “stepped-up basis" rule.
Here’s how the stepped-up-basis loophole now works. Take a man named Jeff. At his death, Jeff owns $30 million-worth of stocks he originally bought for a total of $10 million. Under existing law, neither Jeff nor his heirs would owe federal tax on the $20 million of gains because they’re automatically “stepped up” to their value when he dies — $30 million.
Under Biden’s proposal, Jeff’s $20 million of gains would be taxed. And don’t worry: Biden’s proposal doesn’t touch tax-favored retirement accounts, such as 401-Ks, and it only applies to the very richest Americans.
As it is now, the stepped-up basis loophole enables the super-rich, like Jeff, to avoid paying more than $40 billion in taxes each year. It has allowed them to skip taxes on the increased values of mansions and artworks as well as shares of stock.
In fact, it’s one of the chief means by which dynastic wealth has grown and been passed from generation to generation, enabling subsequent generations to live off that growing wealth and never pay a dime of taxes on it.
Unless the stepped-up basis loophole is closed, we will soon have a large class of hugely rich people who have never worked a day in their lives.
Over the next decades, rich baby boomers will pass on an estimated $58 trillion of wealth to their millennial children — the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth in history.
Closing this giant tax loophole for the super-rich is how Biden intends to fund part of his American Families Plan, which would provide every child with 2 years of pre-school and every student with 2 years of free community college, as well as provide paid family and medical leave to every worker.
Close this stepped-up basis loophole, and we help finance the programs the vast majority of Americans desperately need and deserve. We also end the explosion of dynastic wealth. It should be a no-brainer.
Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty Images)
How Dems Can Force Manchin and Sinema to Put Up or Shut Up
Max Burns, The Daily Beast
Burns writes: "Senator Kyrsten Sinema is confused. At a private caucus meeting last week, she pointedly asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer why Democrats can't overcome Republican opposition to the major ethics and voting rights reforms that Joe Biden promised voters, and that over 60 percent of Americans across party lines support."
opener If those two really think bipartisan compromise remains possible, all they need to do is bring 10 Republican senators with them. If not, it’s time to take down the filibuster.
enator Kyrsten Sinema is confused. At a private caucus meeting last week, she pointedly asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer why Democrats can’t overcome Republican opposition to the major ethics and voting rights reforms that Joe Biden promised voters, and that over 60 percent of Americans across party lines support. But Sinema wasn’t talking about the For the People Act that Schumer hopes to squeak through. She was referring to her own competing legislation.
Not to be outdone, last week Senator Joe Manchin announced his own plan to address the GOP’s nationwide war on voting rights, a not-so-subtle way of saying he won’t be signing on to Schumer’s consensus bill, either.
If Sinema and Manchin breaking ranks didn’t complicate matters enough, neither is willing to end or even modify the filibuster to get voting rights passed. Instead, they’re telling Democrats—and the millions of Americans at risk of losing their votes in 2022 and beyond—to trust in the myth of Senate bipartisanship. So Schumer should issue an ultimatum: find 10 Republicans to pass your bill or Democrats are taking down the filibuster.
Without any modifications to the filibuster, Manchin and Sinema will need to come up with 10 Republican senators willing to oppose the GOP’s sweeping attempts to gut the right to vote. Good luck—almost 90 percent of all voting-related legislation in the states this year has come from Republican lawmakers.
Spoiler alert: Those bills aren’t about helping voters, but stopping them. In Georgia, Republicans remain so traumatized by Biden’s upset victory that they’re now considering targeting the same suburbs that once elected Newt Gingrich with a new round of Trump-inspired voter suppression laws.
Voter suppression is one of the few unifying ideas left in a Republican Party hollowed out and pillaged by Trumpism. Manchin has as much chance at persuading them to undermine their own electoral fortunes as he does at convincing Elizabeth Warren to pass a tax cut for Big Tech.
Manchin made media hay of a joint statement calling for the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act that he authored with GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski, but Murkowski has pointedly not signed on to any of the voting rights bills before the Senate. And even if she did, Senate Republicans have abandoned Murkowski for her insufficient loyalty to Donald Trump.
“Inaction is not an option,” Manchin and Murkowski wrote. “Congress must come together—just as we have done time and again—to reaffirm our longstanding bipartisan commitment to free, accessible, and secure elections for all.”
Left unsaid in that soaring rhetoric is the fact that the Senate that voted 77-19 to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was not in thrall to a far right as dominant as today’s MAGA movement. Manchin doesn’t seem to notice or care that the broad bipartisan coalition of Rockefeller Republicans and progressive Democrats who passed the original VRA hasn’t existed for over 40 years. Those critical liberal Republicans, now entirely extinct, didn’t even survive the GOP’s rightward lurch at the end of the 1970s.
For his part, Biden seems committed to fostering some kind of progress on voting rights. The president has lavished attention on both Manchin and Sinema, despite or because of their resistance to both his infrastructure plan and other Democrats’ dream of ending the filibuster. He doesn’t have much of a choice. Biden has excoriated Republican voter suppression efforts in Georgia, calling them “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and arguing that “we have a moral and constitutional obligation to act.”
Biden is acutely aware that Black voters—more than any other single group—are responsible for installing him in the White House. He also knows that as Manchin and Sinema go speed-dating for GOP votes, Republicans in the states are busy chipping away at what few voter protections remain.
When Sinema and Manchin fail to deliver on their big talk about the power of bipartisanship, Schumer and Senate Democrats must be prepared to force a serious effort to kill the filibuster. Without it, GOP efforts to undermine the vote in 2022 and 2024 will proceed with impunity, undermining the marginalized communities that delivered a Democratic Senate and White House on the explicit promise that they would be protected from Republican reprisals.
Those reprisals are now here, and Senate Democrats are nowhere to be found.
Earlier this month Florida Governor and rumored 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed a sweeping voter suppression law restricting the use of vote-by-mail and ballot drop boxes, both of which helped Black Democrats in Georgia overcome intentionally long lines and shuttered polling places in 2020. DeSantis made sure his supporters saw his attack on voting rights by arranging to sign the legislation live on Fox & Friends, a right-wing morning show that now explicitly serves as the GOP press office. And that was just one of the nearly 3,000 draconian voter suppression bills introduced this year.
Every day of inaction to protect voting rights is another day for Republican operatives in Congress and in the states to purge voter lists, as Mississippi is doing, or enact tough new voter ID requirements while closing DMVs, as North Carolina Republicans did. Voters can’t afford to wait while Manchin talks up his role as the Great Compromiser—without ever striking a compromise in Democrats’ favor.
The activist base of the Democratic Party has reached its boiling point with Sinema and Manchin’s empty promises that bipartisan victories are just around the corner. If moderate Democratic senators can create a viable voting rights plan with Republican buy-in, it will deserve high praise for achieving the impossible.
But if they fail, Schumer and Biden must be prepared to take all steps necessary to ensure the right to vote is protected from unprecedented Trumpist attacks. At least Sinema and Manchin can say they tried.
Rep. Val Demings. (photo: Shawn Thew/Getty Images)
Rep Val Demings Will Challenge Marco Rubio for His Senate Seat in 2022
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root
Crockett Jr. writes: "Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) is not coming to play games."
She was reportedly considered to be Joe Biden’s running mate, has a history of being a no-nonsense straight shooter, and the people of Florida—the ones who aren’t on meth or saving up their coins to afford a Mar-a-Lago membership—love her. So it makes sense that she’s going to leave her House seat for the Senate.
In 2022, Demings will challenge Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for his seat, Politico reports.
“Val is an impressive and formidable candidate whose potential entrance would make the race against Rubio highly competitive,” a Democrat with knowledge of the party’s direction told Politico.
Demings had been toying with the idea of entering the Senate race, telling MSNBC anchor Jonathan Capehart in April that she was considering a run.
“I have received calls and texts and messages from people all over the state asking me to run because they feel that they are not represented and their voices are not heard,” she said. “I want to go, Jonathan, to the position where I can do the most good. And be the most effective and do the most work. My home state of Florida deserves that.”
Demings has served in the House since 2017 and her husband is the mayor of Orange County, Fla. And because white people love this shit, Demings worked as the chief of Orlando’s police department.
But why now?
“If I had to point to one thing, I think it’s the COVID bill and the way Republicans voted against it for no good reason,” an adviser for Demings told Politico. “That really helped push her over the edge. She also had this huge fight with [Ohio Republican Rep.] Jim Jordan and it brought that into focus. This fight is in Washington and it’s the right fight for her to continue.”
Rubio was planning to run for reelection for his seat, which he’s held since 2011, but something tells me he may make up a stomach-thingy so he can leave school early now that he knows that Demings wants a fight.
A memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Still Waiting on Justice for George Floyd
Anand Jahi, In These Times
Jahi writes: "I expect I would have been angry had the police officer who killed George Floyd been acquitted. But I also didn't feel happy or celebratory, as many people did, when Derek Chauvin was found guilty. I felt numb. Empty."
One man has been condemned, but the system he came to represent is still intact.
While they may have been sparked by the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for an excruciating 9.5 minutes, the uprisings that swept across the world in summer 2020 were about more than just these two men. The images struck a nerve in the American collective consciousness.
A stone-faced white police officer kneels on the neck of an unarmed, handcuffed, prone Black man accused of a petty and nonviolent crime as he pleads for his life. The Black man gasps that he can’t breathe, calls for his mother and then goes limp. All the while, the white police officer, his face cold and disinterested, keeps the pressure on, even after the Black man has died. It would be difficult to conjure an image that better epitomizes the criminal justice system’s brutal and bureaucratic suffocation of Black America over the past several decades.
Yes, last summer’s uprisings were a condemnation of Derek Chauvin. But they were also a response to deep-seated, large-scale, systemic pain.
That pain was exacerbated by a pandemic. George Floyd was murdered during the first wave of Covid-19 in the United States, in which a disease buoyed by government inaction and mismanagement was disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities. Like Derek Chauvin, the virus was deadly and unrelenting. For that reason, too, the image resonated.
Recall that at the time, U.S. unemployment was hitting the highest rate since the Great Depression, the government was printing money to pay for relief bills and nonviolent offenders were being released from prisons and jails because of the public health threat. To act like a guilty verdict represents justice is to accept that, even in such circumstances, the appropriate response to someone who was made unemployed by the pandemic and who was allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill is to lock him up.
It was illegal to kill George Floyd; the guilty verdict affirms that. But it would have been wrong to arrest George Floyd even without incident — a fact that seems to have been completely lost in the wake of the murder conviction.
Perhaps that’s why the conviction of Derek Chauvin left me feeling empty. One man has been condemned, but the system he came to represent is still intact. One of the core roles of a police force is to protect and serve capital. Police officers routinely do so by depriving human beings of their lives and liberty. That core dynamic remains firmly in place.
Still, continued calls to defund the police and invest in life-giving systems give me hope. While some may take solace in the Chauvin verdict as evidence that the system has righted itself, others remember it was always about more than just two men. True justice entails grappling with the systems that shaped them and their experiences, that sent them careening toward each other and that ultimately destroyed them both.
Joe Arpaio was the sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona. (photo: Darren Hauck/AP)
Arizona Sheriff Arpaio's Immigration Patrols Targeting Latinos to Cost Public $200 Million
Associated Press
Excerpt: "The costs to taxpayers from a racial profiling lawsuit stemming from former Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration patrols in metro Phoenix a decade ago are expected to reach $202 million by summer 2022."
Taxpayers are on the hook for lawyer bills and the costs of complying with overhauls of the sheriff’s office after a verdict found Arpaio’s officers profiled Latinos in traffic patrols that targeted immigrants.
he costs to taxpayers from a racial profiling lawsuit stemming from former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration patrols in metro Phoenix a decade ago are expected to reach $202 million by summer 2022.
Officials approved a tentative county budget Monday that provides $31 million for the cost of complying with court orders in the fiscal year that begins on July 1. No one can say exactly when the costs from the 13-year-old lawsuit will start to decline.
The growth in spending “is enough to make any of us cry as we’re trying to be fiscal stewards of the county taxpayer money,” Supervisor Clint Hickman said.
Taxpayers in Arizona’s most populated county are on the hook for lawyer bills and the costs of complying with massive court-ordered overhauls of the sheriff’s office after a 2013 verdict concluded Arpaio’s officers had profiled Latinos in traffic patrols that targeted immigrants.
Arpaio, known for a tough-on-crime approach in his 24 years as sheriff that included forcing jail inmates to wear pink underwear and housing them in tents in triple-digit desert heat, targeted illegal immigration and was convicted of criminal contempt for disobeying a court order to stop his immigration patrols. His misdemeanor conviction was later pardoned by then-President Donald Trump.
The taxpayer spending is expected to continue until the Maricopa County sheriff’s office has fully complied with overhauling its traffic enforcement and internal affairs operations for three straight years.
Although some of the agency’s numbers are near or at 100%, the sheriff’s office hasn’t yet been deemed fully compliant.
Attorneys who pressed the case against the sheriff’s office have criticized the agency for traffic-stop studies since the profiling verdict showing deputies often treat drivers who are Hispanic and Black differently than other drivers, though the reports stopped short of saying Latinos were still being profiled.
The lawyers also have asked a judge to hold civil contempt-of-court hearings against Arpaio’s successor, Sheriff Paul Penzone, over a backlog of more than 1,700 internal affairs cases, each taking an average of 500 days to complete.
Penzone’s office said the funding and employees hired as part of the overhaul effort will need to remain in place once the agency is deemed fully compliant.
“Effectively, this is the new ‘standard of policing’ and the majority of this funding will need to remain in the MCSO budget,” the sheriff’s office said. “MCSO is working diligently to come into full compliance with the Court orders.”
Raul Piña, who serves on a community advisory board set up to help improve trust in the sheriff’s office, said the funding is necessary so the agency can respect the constitutional rights of Hispanic people.
“Of course, we are tired of paying, but if you are a Hispanic vehicle operator, you are tired of being racially profiled at the same time — and the agency isn’t in a rush to stop that,” Piña said.
Arpaio’s immigration patrols, known as “sweeps,” involved large numbers of sheriff’s deputies converging on an area of metro Phoenix — including some Latino neighborhoods — over the course of several days to stop traffic violators and arrest other offenders.
Arpaio led 20 of the large-scale patrols from January 2008 through October 2011. Under Arpaio’s leadership, the agency continued doing immigration enforcement in smaller, more routine traffic patrols until spring 2013, leading to his criminal conviction.
On Monday, Arpaio said he doesn’t regret carrying out the immigration patrols and contends his crackdowns still helped reduce taxpayer costs for providing education and health care to immigrants in the United States illegally.
As for the financial costs of the profiling lawsuit, Arpaio said the spending on equipment and additional employees was needed anyway to modernize the agency.
“It’s a one-side type of story they (his critics) want to push out,” Arpaio said. “Don’t blame me for the money being spent.”
Over the years, taxpayers have paid a combined $18 million in legal fees to lawyers on both sides of the case and about $20 million for a team of experts that monitors the sheriff’s office.
The overwhelming majority of the spending goes toward hiring employees to help meet the court’s requirements. Penzone’s office said there are 192 positions budgeted for compliance, though 42 of them are vacant.
The court-ordered changes also include new training for deputies on making constitutional traffic stops, establishing a warning system to identify problematic behavior, equipping deputies with body-worn cameras and interventions for deputies flagged for having statistical differences from their peers in how they have treated Latinos.
The sheriff’s office was deemed 98% compliant in a first set of requirements for reforming its traffic patrol operations and 79% compliant in meeting a second set of requirements.
The agency is faring better with an overhaul that the judge ordered for its internal affairs operations, which under Arpaio had been criticized for biased decision-making aimed at protecting officials from accountability. It met 100% of a first set of requirements and 92% of a second set.
People protest the Tokyo Olympics on Monday in Tokyo. (photo: Yuichi Yamazaki/Getty Images)
Japanese Doctors Call for Olympics Cancellation Amid Covid-19 Surge
Katerina Ang, Jennifer Hassan, and Derek Hawkins, The Washington Post
he Tokyo 2020 Games start in 66 days, but a major Japanese doctors group is calling for the already delayed event to be canceled over fears that Japan’s health-care system cannot accommodate the potential medical needs of thousands of international athletes, coaches and media amid a surge of coronavirus cases in the country.
“We strongly request that the authorities convince the [International Olympic Committee] that holding the Olympics is difficult and obtain its decision to cancel the Games,” the Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association said. Tokyo hospitals “have their hands full and have almost no spare capacity,” the association of roughly 6,000 primary-care physicians added.
Infections continued to trend downward in the United States. President Biden said that coronavirus cases are down in all 50 states for the first time since the pandemic began and that the nation would share even more coronavirus vaccine doses internationally.
Tony Pigford, a Black, fourth-generation Denverite, in front of his home. (photo: Will Tracey)
How Green Is Denver if You're Black? These Residents Are About to Find Out
Caroline Tracey, Guardian UK
Tracey writes: "For decades, the clubhouse of the Park Hill golf course in north-east Denver, Colorado, hosted weddings and graduation parties for residents of nearby neighborhoods."
An oasis of green space has become a lightning rod in ongoing debates about gentrification, open spaces and racial equity
or decades, the clubhouse of the Park Hill golf course in north-east Denver, Colorado, hosted weddings and graduation parties for residents of nearby neighborhoods. “It’s been a very valuable resource to this community, when you need event space and can’t afford swankier venues,” said Shanta Harrison, who lives eight blocks away.
The 155-acre golf course stands out as an island of green space in the middle of the only remaining neighborhoods in Denver where over 40% of residents identify as African American. And according to state law, it’s supposed to stay that way forever: since 1997, the property has been under a conservation easement - a deed restriction stating that it can never be developed.
But in the last year, the golf course has become a lightning rod in ongoing debates about gentrification, open spaces and racial equity in Denver. In 2019, the developer Westside Investment Partners bought the private golf course, and has since gestured at big plans: a mixed-use vision that includes both market-rate and affordable housing, businesses, as well as a grocery store and a park.
“We bought it because we knew we could do so much better than a golf course,” said Westside principal Kenneth Ho.
Opponents argue the golf course should stay as is or be turned into another kind of green space. But despite this pushback, since February the city has been moving forward with a planning process that is often the first step in developing a site. The city hopes to have a development agreement with Westside in place by next summer, according to documents revealed through public records requests and reported here for the first time.
The fight to block development is led by environmental groups and city council members who say Black residents – who, along with Latinos in Denver, live in historically underserved neighborhoods – should have proper access to nature and green space. In a city famous for open spaces, natural beauty and outdoor recreation, environmental justice activists are now asking whether local officials are committed to preserving Black residents’ access to these environmental amenities.
“I’m not a golfer. I’m interested in open space,” said Sandy Robnette, a Black resident. “And what I see here is environmental racism.”
Community activists are now butting heads with the city over whether the easement can legally be lifted. But even if the easement must be upheld, it remains unclear whether the deed restriction supports other uses, beyond a golf course.
Environmentalists are doing their best to bring these questions to light – in part because they see their fight as not only about 155 acres in Park Hill but about which contracts the city will uphold.
Opponents of Westside’s plans worry that the city is abdicating its responsibility to protect green space.
Following the sale of the Park Hill golf course, a group of residents formed an organization called Save Open Space (SOS) Denver to challenge development on environmental and legal grounds. The group – which counts the former Denver mayor Wellington Webb and former state legislator Penfield Tate, both of whom are Black, among its membership – wants the space to become a park instead.
This month, SOS requested and obtained public records that outline the city’s step-by-step plan for getting the golf course developed, and to have an agreement in place by August 2022.
A spokesperson for the city told the Guardian that timeline would be followed “only if a community vision supports the idea”. Westside’s Ho argued it is “pretty normal for a big project to have a proposed overall roadmap”.
This year, the city moved forward with a “visioning process” aimed at “hear[ing] from the longtime residents who live near the golf course” to better “understand their hopes and goals for this land”. The city argues this information gathering should take place “before entertaining any discussion on modifying the conservation easement”, but neighbors to the golf course say it signals the city is taking steps to develop the land.
The golf course has been under the conservation easement since 1997. In the 1980s, easements became the primary tool for land conservation in the US, as federal funding for conservation dried up. And Colorado has 3.2m acres under easement, more than any other state.
For the Park Hill golf course, the city of Denver oversees the easement, to ensure the land remains conserved. But local activists worry the city is neglecting its responsibility.
“It felt clear that the city told Westside, ‘We’ll take care of the easement,’” says Maria Flora, a Park Hill resident and SOS member.
In 2019, two weeks before Westside bought the golf course, the governor of Colorado signed a law to make it much harder to nix easements, and requiring district court approval. The chief architect of the revisions says they were designed specifically to stop cities – like Denver and Boulder – from walking away from their role in upholding easements.
“We decided, an easement is an easement, and everyone should have to follow the same rules,” says Erik Glenn, head of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust. “If you’re going to try to extinguish, you have to get the court’s blessing.”
Even if the district court decided the easement must be upheld and the site cannot be developed, it’s unclear if the easement supports other, more communal uses, such as a park.
SOS members have argued that the easement does allow for other forms of open space, while the city and Westside insist that the wording dictates that it can only serve as a golf course. Melissa Daruna, who heads the state’s alliance of land trusts, says that the question will have to be answered by “case law, which nobody likes to hear, [and] looking at the precedent of other cases”. She added: “Everyone wishes they had an answer by reading [the easement], but every time there’s a conflict, it takes third parties.”
The neighborhoods that surround the Park Hill golf course – particularly North Park Hill and Northeast Park Hill – have been splintered by the debate. Proponents of development have gained sway among community members, emphasizing the need for more affordable housing.
“It’s been sad,” says fourth-generation Black Denverite Tony Pigford. “It’s causing a rift in the African American community in Denver.”
But residents who want to maintain the golf course as green space say Westside is dangling false promises of affordable housing to garner support.
“They’re saying they’ll listen and give the community what it wants and needs, and we’re trying to look at the track record and expect what will actually come,” says Pigford. At Loretto Heights, a development under way in south-west Denver, Westside is building between 1,000 and 1,200 housing units, 12% of which will be affordable.
SOS member Robnette worries that developing the golf course will gentrify the neighborhood.
“Just like everywhere else in this city, this project is designed to remove the homeless, the Black, whatever [developers] think is ugly,” she says.
Responding to the allegations of environmental racism, Westside’s Ho said “We understand the fear of gentrification,” but offered that the company is “[focused] on the community” and job growth.
Asked to respond to the possibility that the city’s planning process for developing the site reveals that community members prefer to keep the golf course as is, Ho said, “I think it’s pretty clear that no one wants a golf course.”
But some do.
“So many of us have family down south – aunts and uncles who are 90, 100 years old and still live in their houses,” says Robnette. “Why is that? It’s because they are surrounded by open space [and] the benefit of air. For that reason, if it can’t be a park, I would strongly prefer it to remain a golf course.”
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