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The latest reports on the budget deal show some entitlement changes coming to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and the Social Security Trust Fund. The text of the bill is here.
According to analysis of the deal, spending would be increased “by $80 billion over two years, not including a $32 billion increase included in an emergency war fund. Those increases would be offset by cuts in spending on Medicare and Social Security disability benefits.”
The deal sought some much needed structural changes to the SSDI program, because it was slated to reach insolvency sometime in 2016 — which, of course, would play right into the Presidential election cycle.
Some of the proposed changes include: “a medical exam now required in 30 states before applicants could qualify for benefits would be required in all 50 states. That change was projected to save the government $5 billion.”
Another reform looks to be restructuring work and benefits reviews, “in which some people who receive disability benefits could earn money from working with less fear of triggering a review that can result in benefits being cut off. Instead, people participating in the projects could see their benefits gradually curtailed as their income rises … ”
While these changes are a start, they come at a price that no one in the media is really talking about in depth. The NYTimes casually mentions that there were be a reallocation of “funds among Social Security program trust funds to ensure solvency of the disability insurance program.” That sounds well and good, until you get to the details.
The reallocation of roughly $150 billion over the next three years comes from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to rescue the nearly bankrupt SSDI Trust Fund; in other words, we are borrowing money from one entitlement program to another!
SSDI was slated to receive across-the-board 20% cuts in 2016 as a way to deal with its nearly-depleted funds. But that is a very messy topic for a very messy election year. This deal papers over the SSDI funding problem — infusing it with cash from Social Security over the next three years, and extending the insolvency question for the disability question until around 2022.
“Congress has been kicking the can down the road on disability insurance reform for decades and 2016 should have been the end of the road—time for meaningful reform. Instead, policymakers want to provide a little more roadway for the disability insurance program by whacking off a portion of Social Security’s roadway.
This isn’t the first time the disability insurance program has run out of money and it isn’t the first time Congress has kicked the can down the road. As recently as 1994, the disability insurance program was about to run out of money and Congress increased the disability insurance payroll tax by 50 percent, from 1.2 percent to 1.8 percent. That increase was coupled with a stark warning that the disability insurance program was in dire need of additional reforms to sustain it over the long run.
What has Congress done to reform the disability insurance program since then? Nothing.
Rather than looking to improve the efficiency and integrity of the program, Congress sat idly by as the percent of the working-age population receiving disability insurance benefits increased from 2.8 percent in 1994 to 5.1 percent today.”
This cash infusion — from Social Security of all places! — merely obfuscates the larger question of true entitlement reform. Using Social Security Trust Fund money was a perfect cover for lawmakers because it can be explained as a routine “reallocation of Social Security funds”, without explaining it is essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. It is a known fact that both programs are slated to run out of money in the future. This deal just extends the life support for one program, while shortening the life of another.
Though lawmakers made a few minor changes to SSDI, it wasn’t enough. There are major systemic problems with SSDI. Just last month, a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that for 5 years (FY2009-FY2013), disability payments totaling $371.5 million were overpaid to many individuals — all while the program is running out of money. In this instance, “the SSA’s ‘internal controls’ rely on beneficiaries to self-report overpayments.” Why not fix this problem? Start somewhere. But that would be hard. It’s easier to throw new money at the problem (again) instead of actually tackling tough entitlement reform, thereby kicking the can down the road for future lawmakers to deal with (again). All this deal did was hide the problem so that it did not become an issue for any of the Presidential candidates next year.
Last January, I wrote on this topic, reporting a conversation with Charles Blahous, (a Trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds,) about the Social Security situation. Blahous described how “the problem is not that disability needs a bigger share of the overall payroll tax than it now has, but that Social Security as a whole faces a financing imbalance that needs to be corrected. The single most irresponsible response to the pending [disability insurance] trust fund depletion would be to do nothing other than paper it over with a reallocation of funds, delaying meaningful corrective action as long as possible.”
Unfortunately,that’s JUST what we did.
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With open enrollment for Obamacare beginning in a week, the Wall Street Journal outlines some of the major failures of this legislation to attract enrollees. Obamacare is severely behind target, which in turn affects costs for premiums for subscribers and costs to the government for subsidies. The Wall Street Journal suggests that within a year, by 2017, the need to overhaul and/or replace Obamacare will be necessary. Read their thoughts below:
ObamaCare’s image of invincibility is increasingly being exposed as a political illusion, at least for those with permission to be honest about the evidence. Witness the heretofore unknown phenomenon of a “free” entitlement that its beneficiaries can’t afford or don’t want.
This month the Health and Human Services Department dramatically discounted its internal estimate of how many people will join the state insurance exchanges in 2016. There are about 9.1 million enrollees today, and the consensus estimate—by the Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare actuary and independent analysts like Rand Corp.—was that participation would surge to some 20 million. But HHS now expects enrollment to grow to between merely 9.4 million and 11.4 million.
Recruitment for 2015 is roughly 70% of the original projection, but ObamaCare will be running at less than half its goal in 2016. HHS believes some 19 million Americans earn too much for Medicaid but qualify for ObamaCare subsidies and haven’t signed up. Some 8.5 million of that 19 million purchase off-exchange private coverage with their own money, while the other 10.5 million are still uninsured. In other words, for every person who’s allowed to join and has, two people haven’t.
Among this population of the uninsured, HHS reports that half are between the ages of 18 and 34 and nearly two-thirds are in excellent or very good health. The exchanges won’t survive actuarially unless they attract this prime demographic: ObamaCare’s individual mandate penalty and social-justice redistribution are supposed to force these low-cost consumers to buy overpriced policies to cross-subsidize everybody else. No wonder HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said meeting even the downgraded target is “probably pretty challenging.”
The HHS survey shows three of four ObamaCare-eligible uninsured people think having coverage is important—but four of five say they couldn’t fit their share of the premiums into their budgets even after the subsidies. They’re not poor; they tend to have jobs in industries like construction, retail and hospitality but feel insecure financially; and they prioritize items like paying down debt, car repairs or saving to buy a home over insurance.
The law’s failure to appeal to the young and rising middle class is already cascading through the insurance markets. Researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Urban Institute recently published a remarkable study of the industry barometer called medical loss ratios, or MLRs, and the pressure is building fast.
MLRs measure the share of premium revenue that flows to reimbursing medical claims. ObamaCare sets an MLR floor of 80% for patient care, with one-fifth left over for overhead like administration and profits, and the pre-ObamaCare 2010-13 historical trend for the individual market ranged from 79% to 86%.
The researchers found that in 2014—the first full year of claims experience in ObamaCare—average MLRs across all health plans sold on 16 state exchanges roamed from 90% to 99%. Average MLRs in 11 states climbed to 100% or more, reaching as high as 121% in Massachusetts. A business can’t stay solvent for long spending $1.21 for every $1 that comes in.
The 2014 MLRs are used to set rates for 2016 premiums, which are still under regulatory review. But the researchers estimate that to rebound to an MLR of 85%, premiums in the 11 money-losing states need to rise by 10% to 36% in the best estimate and 23% to 52% in the worst scenario. The familiar danger is that as rates rise, more people drop out, and thus rates must rise still higher, as the states that attempted ObamaCare-like regulatory schemes in the 1980s and 1990s discovered.
ObamaCare liberals pose as what-works-and-what-doesn’t technocrats. So perhaps they’d care to explain what it says about their creation that so many rational adults are willing to pay a fine of $695 or 2.5% of their earnings, whichever is higher, for the privilege of not buying an ObamaCare-compliant health plan.
***
ObamaCare will almost inevitably be reopened in 2017, whoever wins the election. The good news is the emerging consensus among Republican candidates about a credible, pragmatic and optimistic alternative. Jeb Bush was the latest to release a plan two weeks ago—and this is a debate that has always deserved to be litigated at the presidential level to create a mandate for reform.
The basic approach is to deregulate insurance and medical practice while replacing ObamaCare’s complex subsidy schedule with a refundable tax credit for individuals who lack job-based coverage. Unchained from benefit and redistribution mandates, insurance products and prices would come to reflect what consumers want. The credit would be sufficient to buy at least coverage for catastrophic expenses if people get sick, and the trade-offs of such skinnier plans might look better to voters priced out of ObamaCare.
GOP reformers also recognize that the Cadillac tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health plans is a heat shield that might let them solve some of the problems of the pre-2010 health finance status quo. Substituting a cap on the tax-code subsidy that helps drive medical inflation is more politically plausible with the Cadillac tax in place than without.
Mr. Bush was shrewd to frame his proposal with the vocabulary of innovation and aspiration. ObamaCare is built on a 20th-century chassis that is ever less relevant to modern medicine and consumer finance. If the law continues to underperform, voters may be open to a new model that puts their choices and needs ahead of the political class’s.
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The cynic in me was wholly unsurprised when the Associated Press reported the Department of Justice (DoJ) concluded that no formal charges would be filed against any of the IRS officials embroiled in the IRS scandal of 2013. In a letter to Congress, the DoJ announced that they found “no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”
Never mind the fact that computer hard drives and emails disappeared, secret email accounts were maintained, interoffice messaging systems were used to avoid written records, only one conservative group received approval under Lerner in three years, and some groups remain unapproved after 5 years — all while Obama’s brother received retroactive tax-exempt approval in less than 30 days.
According to the DoJ letter, such actions were merely, “mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia.” That is utter nonsense.
Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times did a decent round up of the news and reactions to the decision.
“The IRS did mishandle tea party and conservative groups’ nonprofit applications, but their behavior didn’t break any laws, the Justice Department said in a letter to Congress Friday that cleared the tax agency and former senior executive Lois G. Lerner of any crimes.
“Ineffective management is not a crime,” Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik said in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee. “The Department of Justice’s exhaustive probe revealed no evidence that would support a criminal prosecution. What occurred is disquieting and may necessitate corrective action — but it does not warrant criminal prosecution.”
The decision comes more than two years after the IRS’s internal watchdog reported that auditors singled out tea party groups’ applications for special scrutiny and delayed those applications beyond reasonable timelines, preventing the groups from being able to say they were officially recognized nonprofits.
The agency initially admitted its bad behavior, and President Obama vowed an investigation — but he later said, in the middle of the probe, that there was no evidence of corruption.
Some Republicans have questioned the validity of the probe from the beginning, after learning that one of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the investigation was a contributor to Mr. Obama’s political campaigns.
In its letter Friday the Justice Department specifically cleared Ms. Lerner, a senior executive in charge of approving the groups’ applications, who had authored a number of emails that suggested a bias against the tea party movement.
Investigators said none of the witnesses they interviewed believed Ms. Lerner acted out of political motives, and said that Ms. Lerner seemed to try to correct the inappropriate scrutiny once she “recognized that it was wrong.”
“In fact, Ms. Lerner was the first IRS official to recognize the magnitude of the problem and to take concerted steps to fix it,” Mr. Kadzik wrote.
Congressional Democrats said the decision confirmed what they’d figured out years ago — that there was no underhanded political dealing at the agency.
“Over the past five years, Republicans in the House of Representatives have squandered literally tens of millions of dollars going down all kinds of investigative rabbit holes — IRS, Planned Parenthood, Benghazi — with absolutely no evidence of illegal activity,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Benghazi investigation and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
The House Ways and Means Committee conducted its own investigation into the IRS’s tea party targeting, as did the Senate Finance Committee. The House panel was the one that voted to refer Ms. Lerner’s behavior to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, called the Friday letter “deeply disappointing,” but said it wasn’t a surprise given the bent of the Obama administration.
He said his committee’s probe did find “serious and unprecedented actions” by Ms. Lerner that deprived tea party groups of their rights.
“The American people deserve better than this. Despite the DOJ closing its investigation, the Ways and Means Committee will continue to find answers and hold the IRS accountable for its actions,” he said.
Ms. Lerner’s lawyers, in a statement, said they were “gratified but not surprised” by the announcement.
“Anyone who takes a serious and impartial look at the facts would reach the same conclusion as the Justice Department,” they said, adding that she cooperated with the investigators and answered their questions.
That stands in contrast to her interaction with Congress, where she refused to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent — but only after she delivered a statement declaring her innocence.
The House Oversight Committee concluded that she was not, in fact, able to invoke the Fifth Amendment at that point, and when she refused to answer questions, the House voted to hold her in contempt of Congress.
The Justice Department declined to pursue that case, too, arguing that her claim of Fifth Amendment rights was likely to succeed.
Groups that faced targeting by the IRS were infuriated by Friday’s decision.
“To say there is no evidence of discrimination makes a mockery of all we witnessed in the last two years,” said Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, which had its application for nonprofit status delayed as it and another group she was involved in faced scrutiny by everyone from the FBI to federal occupational health authorities.“
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I have written numerous times in the past few months of the fiscal distress in Puerto Rico. I have discussed how Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is the result of years of government mismanagement, and a major key to getting Puerto Rico back on track is to reduce the size and scope of government.
Now, President Obama is calling on Congress to directly aid Puerto Rico, with a plan that is very near a bailout. I’m reprinting the NYTimes article in full below, so to keep the details about the plan intact. I will write my analysis in a separate article.
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“Looking for a way to help debt-ridden Puerto Rico, administration officials on Wednesday proposed an ambitious — if politically perilous — plan that stops short of a direct federal bailout but that its backers hope is sweeping enough to keep the island from becoming America’s Greece.
The plan would create a new territorial bankruptcy regime and impose new fiscal oversight on Puerto Rico, which is mired in the depths of a decade-long recession, running out of cash and struggling to make payments on $72 billion of debt. It represents an urgent bid by President Obama to offer a way forward. But it requires cooperation from a Republican-led Congress bent on imposing spending restraint.
In describing the package on Wednesday, administration officials emphasized that they had exhausted the limits of their own authority to help Puerto Rico, and needed quick action by Congress to avoid a catastrophe.
“Administrative actions cannot solve the crisis,” Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, said in a joint statement with Jeffrey D. Zients, the National Economic Council director, and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the health and human services secretary.
“Only Congress has the authority to provide Puerto Rico with the necessary tools to address its near-term challenges and promote long-term growth,” the statement said.
The situation in Puerto Rico “risks turning into a humanitarian crisis as early as this winter,” one senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. Antonio Weiss, Mr. Lew’s counselor, will explain the administration’s plan in Capitol Hill testimony on Thursday.
The Puerto Rican government has already “done a lot” to restore fiscal order, the official added, but “Puerto Rico cannot do it on its own, and the United States government has a responsibility to 3.5 million Americans living in Puerto Rico” to step in with additional help.
The plan was shared late Wednesday with The New York Times and Agencia EFE, a news organization in Puerto Rico. On the same day, the island’s Government Development Bank said it had ended weeks of fruitless negotiations with certain creditors, aimed at persuading them to voluntarily accept lower bond payments. The bank has a bond payment of about $300 million coming due on Dec. 1.
Virtually all of the administration’s proposed plan would have to be refined and approved by Congress. It would create a special territorial bankruptcy regime — something that does not now exist — to give Puerto Rico a place to restructure all of its $72 billion in debt, which it says it cannot hope to repay.
The new regime could ultimately be a new chapter of the bankruptcy code, available only to Puerto Rico and other American territories. A senior administration official said the specifics would be left up to Congress.
In a nod to Republicans in Congress, who have resisted even limited bankruptcy access for Puerto Rico, the administration also proposes to establish an independent body to monitor the island’s fiscal affairs. Its role would be to improve Puerto Rico’s credibility by policing the imposition of structural economic reforms; it would also demand better financial disclosures.
Officials said the oversight body might resemble one that Congress established for the District of Columbia in the 1990s.
At the same time, the package would seek to bring Puerto Rico, where unemployment tops 12 percent and 46 percent of citizens qualify for Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, into parity with the federal health programs and tax credits available in the states.
The proposal calls for a Medicaid overhaul in Puerto Rico that would expand coverage and access to important services in the short term, and eventually remove a cap that currently applies to the island’s Medicaid program. The effect would be more federal dollars for the Medicaid program in Puerto Rico. Administration officials also said they believed Puerto Rico’s health care facilities needed to be brought up to standards on the mainland.
The administration is also proposing to extend the earned-income tax credit, a refundable credit for the working poor that is payable even to people who earn too little to owe income tax. It is not currently available in Puerto Rico.
Officials said that extending that type of tax credit would help increase the labor participation rate on the island, now a paltry 40 percent, the lowest in the United States and its territories. A fact sheet compiled by the administration said it would provide an “added incentive for formal participation in Puerto Rico’s economy.”
The tax credit, invented by conservative economists, already enjoys some degree of bipartisan backing. Administration officials who detailed the proposal offered no estimate of the cost of extending it to Puerto Rico, nor did they have a cost projection for the Medicaid expansion.
The legislative proposal will be presented on Thursday to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction over all of America’s territories. It is led by Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, which was itself a territory until 1959, when it became the 49th state.
Puerto Rico is now barred from seeking any form of relief under Chapter 9, the type of bankruptcy that municipal governments use. The administration’s proposal for a territorial bankruptcy regime represents a bolder approach than the bankruptcy bills that Congress has considered since the island’s debt crisis began.
Federal law allows for cities, counties, special districts and the like to seek bankruptcy protection if their states agree, but the states themselves are excluded. There are concerns that if Puerto Rico gains access to bankruptcy, fiscally troubled states like Illinois might try to follow suit.
Puerto Rico’s creditors have been arguing that the island’s government has been portraying its financial situation as beyond repair, hoping to force the administration and Congress to give it access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The recent bankruptcies of distressed cities like Detroit showed them that bondholders can emerge with just pennies on the dollar, and they believe the same thing will happen if Puerto Rico is allowed to declare bankruptcy.
The legislation introduced so far would make bankruptcy relief available only to Puerto Rico’s municipalities and its government enterprises, not to the government itself. Even those limited bills have failed to gain support from Republican lawmakers.
There is some willingness, particularly among top Senate Republicans, to work out a compromise on the bankruptcy issue, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. But the Republican leadership appears willing only to grant Puerto Rico limited access to the bankruptcy courts and only with strings attached, like a federal “control board” to oversee the island’s finances.
Control boards have been used in cases of severe municipal distress to take the power to spend public money out of the hands of elected officials. They do not generally have the powers that bankruptcy judges do to abrogate contracts, such as labor contracts and promises to repay debt.
Both Democrats and Republicans are under pressure to respond to the Puerto Rico crisis. Largely because of the island’s economic problems, Puerto Ricans are flooding the mainland United States, particularly central Florida, and are becoming an increasingly important voting bloc in the 2016 presidential race.
In the hearing, Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, will offer his first congressional testimony since his announcement in June that Puerto Rico’s debt had become “unpayable” and he would seek a “negotiated moratorium” with its creditors. His most recent appearance was in 2013, when he accused advocates of statehood of skewing a 2011 plebiscite to make it appear that a majority wanted Puerto Rico to become a state.
“That is a great example of how you can lie with numbers,” he told the same Senate panel at the time.
Another scheduled witness is Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member of Congress and the statehood advocate who designed the 2011 voting process that the governor disputed. Mr. Pierluisi introduced the House bill to to give very limited bankruptcy access to Puerto Rico. In September, he testified before the Senate Finance Committee, challenging the governor’s handling of the debt crisis and saying that general-obligation bonds “must be paid — period.” The third witness is to be Mr. Weiss, the special adviser to the Treasury Secretary.”
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The next open enrollment period for Obamacare begins in a few weeks. “Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced Thursday that an expected 10 million Americans will be covered by late 2016 by health plans they bought on the federal and state insurance exchanges created under the law.”
This is a far cry from the CBO projections when Obamacare was passed. Last year, we saw lower revisions for enrollment from 13 million to a hopeful 9.1 million. Obamacare may have barely hit THAT target; the Washington Post reports that the number looks to be around “9.1 million Americans the administration believes will have ACA health plans by the end of this year.”
This is stunning news. To say that 10 million will be covered by 2016 means that the Obama Administration predicts a mere 1 MILLION enrollees this year. As the Washington Post reminds us, 10 million is “just half the most recent forecast by congressional budget analysts, who have long expected 2016 to usher in the biggest surge in enrollment.”
CBO forecasts had predicted 21 million enrollees in 2016, and 32 million by 2019. As expected, there are a litany of excuses for the abysmal numbers:
Still, substantive forces are at work behind the calculation. According to HHS estimates, about 10.5 million uninsured people are eligible to buy a health plan on the exchange, and they are proving more difficult to reach than those who bought coverage early on.
In addition, federal health officials point out that the dynamics of insurance coverage have not been playing out as analysts expected. Fewer employers have dropped health benefits for their workers, and fewer consumers have switched from older policies they purchased on their own. Both factors, HHS officials say, play into their projection of how many people are likely to gravitate to the exchanges.
HHS contended on Thursday that exchange enrollment, originally pegged to reach 24 million within several years, is not plateauing but is instead on “a much longer path towards equilibrium,” as a senior official said.”
What’s even less clear is how how this affects the budget projections and funding of Obamacare. An article last month in the Washington Times outlined how the enrollees for 2016 needed to double to stay solvent. On top of that, the penalty for not having insurance increases begins to increase sharply. The penalty during the first year was $95 or 1 percent of income above the filing threshold — a relatively minor bite. For tax year 2015, the penalty will be $325 or 2 percent of income, and for 2016 it will be $695 or 2.5 percent of income. Per person.
Remember when we were told that Obamacare would help millions to have insurance and also save Americans $2500/family? Me too.
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For minimum wage advocates, their position is clear: more money in the hands of the worker is better for the worker — a tangible result. Though their hearts may be in the right place, they lack the basic understanding of the invisible effects of minimum wage policies, especially when it pertains to the business side of the equation. What does the business grapple with? Here are three typical responses to a minimum wage hike.
1) By raising minimum wage, many people, especially the poorest among us, will either lose their job or not be able to get jobs at all moving forward. The cost of raising the minimum wage is just like the cost of raising a commodity. For instance, consider the scenario where the price of apples — a basic pantry item for most everybody — goes from $1.50/pound to $2.50/pound. Fewer people will buy the apples, or buy less of them overall. So it is also with a higher minimum wage; with more money going to basic business costs, fewer businesses will hire, or they will hire fewer people overall. An added effect is that the economy will likely contract because of the loss of jobs resulting from a wage hike.
2) Businesses earn less money. Employees are the number one cost for businesses. If even more of the earnings must go to the capital cost, the business earns less profit overall. For some minimum wage advocates, perhaps that is the actual goal — to keep businesses from earning too much at the top. But in reality, the loss of business capital (from both large corporations to small mom and pops) means there is less money for future business endeavors. Whether it is reinvested directly back into the business with equipment upgrades or growing the business through expansion, whatever the case may be, earning less money for the company creates a ripple effect. The less a company can earn, the less it can help grow the economy. Impeding its ability to do so, through the imposition of mandated wage increases, is harmful.
3) In order to offset the increased wage cost, a business can also choose to raise its prices. This will attempt to ensure that the company earns the same amount as before. But the effect of the price increase is negative. As prices increase, people are wont to adjust their purchasing habits and will end up buy less of the product. When consumption decreases, the health of the economy worsens.
Every one of these responses — cutting jobs, loss of business capital, and raising prices — are either bad for the employees or the economy as a whole. Though the minimum wage hikes sound good in theory, in reality, economies don’t exist in a vacuum. These types of policies hurt more than help.
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The only reason why I am mentioning this plan is the sheer ridiculousness of its foundation. In his editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, Santorum announces that he will pay for his tax plan by “repealing ObamaCare and all of its associated taxes.” That is patently absurd. No matter how much I may dislike Obamacare, the likelihood that it will be entirely repealed is slim to none. To stake an entire tax plan (flat tax at that) on something likely to be unattainable, is a bit foolish and naive.
You can read the plan below in its entirety:
Since 2007, 15,000 American factories have shut down and more than two million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Wages have flatlined; American families are struggling.
In every recovery since 1960, real GDP grew by 4% a year, according to a report from the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. The Obama-Biden policies have resulted in a paltry 2.3% annual growth since the recession ended in 2009. This growth gap has cost the country $5.4 trillion in lost economic output and 5.5 million fewer jobs than would have been expected during a normal recovery.
So what is Hillary Clinton’s vision to get the economy moving? She wants to slam investors with higher capital gains taxes. Bernie Sanders wants to raise the top personal-income tax rate to 90%.
Donald Trump’s plan to make America great again? He’s offering a complicated tax cut that the Tax Foundation reports will explode the deficit by more than $10 trillion over a decade. Are any Republicans offering serious, specific proposals to scrap the toxic tax code? Jeb Bush wants three rates. Marco Rubio wants two. Rand Paul has proposed a single rate and creating a European-style value-added tax.
America deserves better. That’s why, in my first 100 days as president, I will submit to Congress a comprehensive Economic Freedom Agenda that will abolish the existing tax code. Under “The 20/20 Flat Tax: A Clear Vision For America,” individuals will pay a simple, low 20% individual rate that will be applied to all streams of income. It eliminates the marriage penalty, death tax and alternative minimum tax. It will treat every American the same. No longer will savings and investment be penalized.
Individuals will receive a $2,750 credit, which will replace the standard deduction and personal exemption. The credit will be refundable and replace the Earned Income Tax Credit. The child tax credit will remain. For low- and middle-income workers, the provision will shield much of their basic wages from federal income taxes. They can keep more of what they earn.
In exchange for the refundable tax credit and low rate, itemized deductions will be eliminated, except for two. Charitable giving in any amount will be fully deductible, to affirm and encourage Americans’ generosity. Mortgage interest—up to $25,000 a year—will also be deductible, as a means of helping low- and middle-income workers buy and maintain their family home without subsidizing millionaires and billionaires.
Businesses too will benefit from a flat 20% tax rate. It will replace the current corporate income-tax rate of 39.1% that is only exceeded by Chad and the United Arab Emirates. An initial 0% tax rate on American manufacturers, phasing up to 20% over two years, will help make America the No. 1 manufacturer in the world again.
Companies will be allowed to deduct 100% of their capital costs in the first year. Full expensing will eliminate complicated depreciation schedules and encourage investment in new plants and equipment. To encourage American companies to bring revenues home and reinvest the $2.1 trillion in profits that have been parked overseas, my plan calls for a low 10% rate on business income that is repatriated.
I will eliminate the deductibility of interest and corporate welfare, including all carve-outs, loopholes and tax shelters. No more special deals and favors for the rich and powerful and their lawyers and lobbyists.
An analysis of my plan by the Tax Foundation found that GDP would rise by 10.2% above the Obama-Biden trajectory over 10 years. Capital investment would grow by almost 30% and wages would increase by 7.3%. More than 3.1 million additional jobs would be created beyond current projections.
I will pay for my plan by repealing ObamaCare and all of its associated taxes. My flat tax will reduce federal revenues by $1.1 trillion over 10 years, after accounting for increased GDP growth and job creation. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, repealing ObamaCare will reduce federal spending by $1.7 trillion over 10 years and increase economic growth by 0.7% annually.
Thus, the 20/20 Flat Tax will not increase the deficit. It will allow us to make needed reforms, such as the expansion of Health Savings Accounts, to give patients and doctors, not Washington bureaucrats, more freedom and control over their health care, and to expand coverage. The new tax code will also provide the resources needed to rebuild our military in an increasingly volatile world.
To maximize the country’s economic potential I will, on my first day in office, repeal each and every Obama-administration regulation that creates an economic burden of more than $100 million. The Keystone XL pipeline will be approved, and expanded production of domestic fuels will be encouraged, not hobbled by federal regulations.
As a U.S. senator I never voted for a tax increase, and the first two bills I co-sponsored were the Balanced Budget Amendment and the Line Item Veto. I always fought for bold tax cuts and government reform. My administration will be no different.
The stakes for America are too high for the GOP to nominate untested newcomers, first-term senators, or governors without proven national results. I offer Americans a clear conservative vision, serious plans for reform and the experience to get the job done.
Mr. Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, is a Republican candidate for president.
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This is an point that I have been writing about for years: workers in the public sector makes more than their private sector counterparts, especially when benefits are factors into the compensation package.
Now, a new study by CATO affirms my supposition. CATO analyzed data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and found that “that federal government workers earned an average of $84,153 in 2014, compared to the private sector’s average of $56,350.”
Even more incredibly, “when adding in benefits pay for federal workers, the difference becomes more dramatic. Federal employees made $119,934 in total compensation last year, while private sector workers earned $67,246, a difference of over $52,000, or 78 percent.”
Government wage increases vastly outpaced the public sector, and the number of government jobs have soared. For the federal government alone, there are 2.1 million workers, “costing over $260 billion in wages and benefits this year.”
It is interesting to ponder the secondary effects of this phenomenon. First, as the amount of government jobs increases, the amount of voters with government jobs increases. What voter is going to seriously vote to cut the size and scope of government when he is the direct beneficiary. Likewise as pay continues to grow, it becomes less likely that someone will vote to cut his or her own pay.
At some point, the number of voters with government pay and benefits will outnumber those without. When that happens, we’ve reached the tipping point with trying to reign in government spending.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
Dear Mr. O’Connor and Mr. McKinnon,
I read with interest many of the reviews of Jeb Bush’s tax plan. As a CPA for the past 40 years, I find his plan overall to be a good start.
However, in your article in the Wall Street Journal, you included a quote from Ms. Holly Shulman of the Democrat National Committee, who declared, “What’s Jeb’s plan? More massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, all while exploding the deficit or shifting the burden onto the middle class.” As we both know, her claim is utterly outrageous.
Why, then, would you just accept a sound-byte quote without even asking if it is the result of an actual reading and analysis of his tax plan? It’s merely just a knee jerk reaction that she thought a gullible writer might just print. It represents the quintessential example of a pundit talking point. Perhaps the better article would have been that a Democrat spokeswoman made the aforementioned claim, but it was obvious that she never even looked at Jeb’s plan; her comments are simply untrue.
In fact, you yourself contradicted her attacks later in your article when you showed that “the most provocative component of Mr. Bush’s plan is his proposal to scrap many tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy”, which included the elimination of “convoluted, lobbyist-created loopholes”, and capping deductions “used by the wealthy and Washington special interests.”
As journalists who are knowledgeable about economics, if you knew the DNC commentary was detached from any economic reality and basic facts, why would you include it in your article?
Yours very truly.
Dear Mr. O’Connor and Mr. McKinnon,
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, ECONOMY, ELECTIONS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, OBAMA, POLITICS, TAXES
It was refreshing to read an Op-Ed about overregulation in the Washington Examiner today. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush is absolutely correct that the explosive expansion of regulations during Obama’s Administration has been a major factor in the tepid economic recovery. I enjoyed seeing a candidate speak to this issue. Below are his remarks in full:
“President Obama has presided over a massive expansion of the federal government during his six and half years in office. He shepherded Obamacare into law — a $1.7 trillion spending bill that vastly increased Washington’s role in the healthcare industry. He has raised taxes by nearly $2 trillion, while adding $8 trillion to the national debt. The president has also imposed more than 2,500 new regulations on the American economy that carry a staggering price tag of $670 billion.
It should come as no surprise then that our economy has limped along during the Obama presidency. The anemic two percent rate of growth on his watch is one of the weakest recoveries in American history and it has resulted in labor force participation falling to a 38-year low. Middle class families’ incomes have fallen by $2,000 and there are six million more people living in poverty today than when Barack Obama took the oath of office.
Right now, federal regulations cost our economy $1.9 trillion a year. This works out to an average of $15,000 per household. We need to cut excessive federal red tape and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in our nation.
Obama-era regulations such as those in Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, and his War on Coal are having a chilling effect on our economy. As president of the United States, I will conduct a spring cleaning of existing regulations to get rid of the ones that are too costly or not providing value to the American people. I will establish a regulatory budget that ensures that for every new dollar of regulations we impose on the American people we cut a dollar of existing regulations somewhere else. I will appoint judges to the judiciary who are committed to reining in regulatory excesses and preventing unelected regulators from exceeding the intent of Congress.
Finally, I will sign into law the REINS Act, which will provide another check on executive agency regulatory authority. The REINS Act would ensure that major rules and regulations are approved by Congress before they can take effect.
Regulations act as a hidden tax on the American people. Reining in their cost is just as important as reducing taxes. When coupled with my bold plan to reduce tax rates and simplify our tax code, my regulatory reform agenda will help drive America to four percent annual growth. Together, these policies will result in the average family seeing their income increase by $3,000 and their tax burden decline by $2,000. This is a significant boost in a middle class family’s budget that will make it easier for them to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, save for college and build a nest egg for retirement.
I know how to do this, because as governor of Florida, I cut taxes every year, by $19 billion total. I streamlined regulations and made my state the national leader in small business creation. During the final seven years of my governorship, Florida led the nation in job creation. Our unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent and we added 1.3 million new jobs. Over the course of my full two terms in office, Florida averaged 4.4 percent economic growth.
Secretary Hillary Clinton will double down on the massive expansion of taxes, debt and regulations we have seen under President Obama. I am offering the country a different vision that will empower entrepreneurs and American businesses to grow and provide better wages and benefits to the American people. I look forward to having the debate with Hillary Clinton and her allies on the defeatist Left about how best to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in America and provide a boost to a middle class that hasn’t seen its wages rise in 15 years.”
