Trump administration allows deferral of Social Security tax

President Donald Trump speaks from the South Lawn of the White House on the fourth day of the Republican National Convention, Thursday, Aug. 27, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Friday allowed employers to suspend collection of some Social Security taxes, although business groups don’t like the idea and it may create political headaches for Republicans. Democrats are already saying it would undermine retirement benefits.

The Treasury Department guidance came late in the day, less than 24 hours after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention and a speech by President Donald Trump in which he promised to protect Social Security and Medicare.

It allows employers to offer their workers a temporary deferral of the 6.2% payroll tax employees pay into the Social Security Trust Fund for the rest of this year. The taxes owed would not be forgiven, and instead would come due in 2021.

It’s unclear how many employers will take the option, since implementing it would involve additional effort and expenses on their part.

“The guidance allows employers to defer withholding and paying the employee’s portion of the Social Security payroll tax if the employee’s wages are below a certain amount,” Treasury said in a terse press release. The earnings cutoff is $104,000 a year.

Trump had ordered the tax deferral in early August after Congress deadlocked on the latest coronavirus relief bill. The president argues more money in workers’ pockets for the rest of this year will translate to a boost for the economy.

But major business groups traditionally allied with the White House called the idea unworkable for employers and unfair to workers. Employers wanted to avoid the hassle of having to collect the deferred taxes later on from their workers.

Neil Bradley, policy chief for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Friday night the Treasury guidance leaves many practical questions unanswered.

“However, it makes clear that employees will be required to pay more taxes beginning in January to offset any benefit they receive now,” Bradley said. “The only way to achieve a workable proposal is for Congress and the administration to come together and enact a change in the law.”

Lawmakers have little desire to tinker with Social Security.

An analysis by the Chamber found that a hypothetical worker making $75,000 a year would get nearly $179 more every two weeks through the rest of this year. But that same worker would owe about $1,610 next year. A worker making $35,000 would get about $83 more biweekly the rest of this year, and owe just over $750 next year.

Separately, AARP wrote Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to express concerns about the potential consequences for Social Security finances.

Regardless of the practical impact of Treasury’s action, it appears Social Security will be thrust into the election maelstrom.

Trump has also teased that if he’s reelected he would press for a permanent cut in Social Security taxes. Although the president argues it will help revive an economy battered by the coronavirus, many economists disagree.

“At the end of the year, the assumption that I win, I’m going to terminate the payroll tax, which is another thing that some of the great economists would like to see done,” Trump told reporters earlier this month, adding that “tremendous growth” in the U.S. will cover the costs of Social Security. “We’ll be paying into Social Security through the general fund.”

White House aides insist that Trump is only referring to permanently forgiving the taxes that would be deferred this year, but the president himself has repeatedly indicated he has much bigger ideas in mind.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare, and Democrats say he has now abandoned that promise.

“He is defunding Social Security and breaking his promise — it’s staring us in the face,” said Rep. John Larson, D-Conn., who chairs a subcommittee that oversees the program. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has joined the criticism.

While the president has the authority to defer collection of the tax in a national emergency, only Congress can forgive the amounts owed. Trump directed Mnuchin to work with lawmakers to secure that goal. Administration officials say any legislation would repay the Social Security Trust Fund as well.

But congressional Republicans have shown little interest.

Many economists say the policy is dubious. While it would put more money in workers’ pockets, people might not spend it if they’re afraid the government will ask for it back. Also, a payroll tax deferral benefits those who are working, not the unemployed going without a $600 weekly benefit from the federal government that has lapsed.

The White House says Trump’s commitment to Social Security is ironclad.

Trump to head to Louisiana as Hurricane Laura cleanup starts

LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP) — The angry storm surge has receded and the clean up has begun from Hurricane Laura, but officials along this shattered stretch of Louisiana coast are warning returning residents they will face weeks without power or water amid the hot, stifling days of late summer.

The U.S. toll from the Category 4 hurricane stood at 14 deaths, with more than half of those killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from the unsafe operation of generators.

President Donald Trump plans on Saturday to tour the damage in Louisiana and neighboring Texas. He told reporters he considered delaying his Thursday night speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for reelection because of the storm. But he said that, as “it turned out, we got a little bit lucky. It was very big, it was very powerful, but it passed quickly. ”

Across southwestern Louisiana, people were cleaning up from the destructive hurricane that roared ashore early Thursday, packing 150-mph (240-kph) winds. Many were deciding whether they wanted to stay in miserable conditions or wait until basic services are finally restored.

Lauren Sylvester returned to her townhouse in Lake Charles on Friday after heeding a mandatory evacuation order and staying with her mother in a city about 95 miles (130 kilometers) away.

The inside of her unit was not directly damaged, but the roof lost shingles. Around her home, it was a different story. Power lines and trees were down.

“It’s still an incredible amount of damage,” said Sylvester, who was heading back to her mother’s house as soon as she finished cleaning up.

Simply driving was a feat in Lake Charles, a city of 80,000 residents hit head on by the hurricane’s eye. Power lines and trees blocked paths or created one-lane roads that drivers had to navigate with oncoming traffic. Street signs were snapped off their posts or dangling. No stoplights worked, making it an exercise in trust with other motorists sharing the roads.

Mayor Nic Hunter cautioned that there was no timetable for restoring electricity and that water-treatment plants “took a beating,” leaving barely a trickle of water coming out of most faucets. “If you come back to Lake Charles to stay, make sure you understand the above reality and are prepared to live in it for many days, probably weeks,” Hunter wrote on Facebook.

Caravans of utility trucks were met Friday by thunderstorms in the sizzling heat, complicating recovery efforts.

The Louisiana Department of Health estimated that more than 220,000 people were without water. Restoration of those services could take weeks or months, and full rebuilding could take years.

Forty nursing homes were relying on generators, and assessments were underway to determine if more than 860 residents in 11 facilities that had been evacuated could return.

The much weaker remnants of the hurricane continued to move across the Southern U.S., unleashing heavy rain and isolated tornadoes. North Carolina and Virginia could get the brunt of the worst weather Saturday, forecasters said.

When the storm moves back over the Atlantic Ocean, forecasters said it could become a tropical storm again and threaten Newfoundland, Canada.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards called Laura the most powerful hurricane to strike Louisiana, meaning it surpassed even Katrina, which was a Category 3 storm when it hit in 2005. He said Friday that officials now believe the surge was as high as 15 feet (4.5 meters).

The hurricane also killed nearly two dozen people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic en route to the Gulf Coast.

In Lake Charles, chainsaws buzzed and heavy machinery hauled tree limbs in the front lawn of Stanley and Dominique Hazelton, who rode out the storm on a bathroom floor. A tree punctured the roof not far from where the couple was taking cover.

They regretted staying.

“There’s people without homes,” Stanley Hazelton said. “So it was dumb. We’ll never do it again. We’ll never stay through another hurricane again.”

___

Associated Press contributors include Jamie Stengle in Dallas; Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans; John L. Mone in Holly Beach, Louisiana; Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas; Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland; and Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee.

Portland rioters stage sit-in at mayor's home

Dumb & Dumber
Mayor Ted Wheeler

A group of Portland, Ore.rioters staged a sit-in inside the lobby of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s condominium building Friday evening while others held a loud concert outside.
The rioters said they wouldn’t leave until Wheeler meets with them over their demands that he resign, reduce the Portland Police Bureau budget and never vote to increase police spending.
The protest appeared to be peaceful as of 10 p.m. local time, although red-paint handprints were seen on the glass outside the lobby, according to independent journalist Garrison Davis.
Some of the protesters had left by 10 p.m. for unspecified "safety reasons," Davis reported.
Late Friday, Wheeler's office released a statement saying,  "We are monitoring the situation and hope rioters remain peaceful for the safety of other residents," according to KION-TV reporter Jennifer Dowling.
It was not immediately clear if Wheeler was home during the protest.
Earlier, Wheeler tweeted a message, praising the rioters' efforts.
“Thank you Portlanders for a powerful display of solidarity at last night's demonstrations,” he tweeted. “Racial justice requires the entire community to come together. Let's continue to focus on the work ahead and move forward with reform, recovery and resilience plans for PDX.”
Earlier Friday, Wheeler wrote a letter to President Trump, declining an offer of more federal officers to quell rioting that has plagued the city since the May 25 death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis.
“We don’t need your politics of division and demagoguery,” he wrote. “When you sent he Feds to Portland last month you made the situation far worse. Your offer to repeat that disaster is a cynical attempt to stoke fear and distract us from the real work of our city.”
Wheeler also condemned violence and vandalism that has marred mostly peaceful protests.
“There is no place for looting, arson or vandalism in our city,” he wrote. “There is no room here for racist violence or those who wish to bring their ideology of hate into our community. Those who commit criminal acts will be apprehended and prosecuted under the law."
The presence and tactics of federal agents who were sent to the city last month to protect the federal building downtown amid nightly protests were highly controversial. Agents have since been drawn down.
The local U.S. attorney announced Thursday that 74 people are now facing federal misdemeanor and felony charges related to protesting, include assaults on federal officers, arson and damaging federal property.
In a tweet a few hours later, Trump called Wheeler “incompetent” and said if he couldn’t get control of the city “we will go in and take care of matters the way they should have been taken care of 100 days ago!”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

House bill would block rioters from coronavirus unemployment benefits

A House Republican introduced a bill Friday that would make those charged with violence, looting or vandalism in connection with a protest ineligible for enhanced coronavirus unemployment benefits.
The “Support Peaceful Protest Act” would also make rioters “financially liable for the cost of federal policing,” according to the bill, which is sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind.
“If you’re convicted of a crime that caused more manpower and law enforcement officers to deal with it, then perhaps you should be on the hook to pay for that,” Banks told WIBC-FM in Indianapolis.
Banks said he introduced the bill the day after an older couple who are his constituents were harassed by protesters while leaving President Trump’s nomination acceptance speech at the White House on Thursday evening.
He said many rioters have time to participate in violence because they are unemployed people receiving government benefits -- including increased federal benefits for those who have lost their jobs amid the pandemic.
“What we’re seeing happen in big cities and around the country are angry violent mobs showing up at federal properties, tearing down monuments on federal properties, especially in Washington, D.C. and it’s got to stop,” he said. “What my bill would do is add new consequences to those individuals who are breaking the law.”
Banks said he supports peaceful protest.

U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind.

“There are a lot of Americans who are showing up at peaceful protests,” he said, adding that his bill is a “common sense” step to add some “accountability for some of these angry mob protests that are occurring around our country.”
“The people who are acting out in violence are very different from those who are showing up peacefully and it’s easy to see the difference,” he told WIBC.
He added that the option for peaceful protest is part of being an American, but causing harm to another person or defacing federal property isn’t OK.
“We should take those tax dollars away and say that those who break the law in violent protest shouldn’t receive taxpayer dollars."

Sarah Palin's lawsuit against NY Times can go to trial: judge

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's defamation lawsuit against The New York Times will go to a trial, according to a federal judge's ruling Friday.

There was “sufficient evidence to allow a rational finder of fact to find actual malice by clear and convincing evidence," Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan determined.
The judge set a trial date for Feb. 1.
Palin expressed her gratitude for the judge's ruling, tweeting "Humbled and thankful."
The Times expressed a different view.
“We’re disappointed in the ruling but are confident we will prevail at trial when a jury hears the facts,” a Times spokesperson said in a statement published in the paper's own report on the ruling.
The former GOP vice-presidential candidate sued the Times for libel after a June 2017 editorial about the shooting of GOP U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise and others mentioned a map put out years earlier by SarahPAC that had crosshairs over different Democratic congressional districts. While the map had been used in reference to ObamaCare, the editorial connected it to Jared Loughner’s 2011 shooting of then-U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., whose district was among those identified in the map.

The editorial said the SarahPAC map had Giffords and other Democrats under crosshairs (though the targets were over their districts).
In discussing the Scalise shooting, the Times said, “Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask of the right.”
The Times published a correction after receiving backlash for the editorial, noting that there was no link between the map and the shooting.
Fox News' Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.

Blue State Cartoons 2020

Trump’s RNC finale outside White House triggers Dems: ‘Get off our lawn’

President Trump really knows how to push the Democrats Buttons :-)

With a first-ever Republican Convention finale held outside the White House on Thursday night, President Trump and the GOP once again ignored Washington’s rules – and left Democrats fuming. :-)

“Get off our lawn,” former presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., tweeted as Trump formally accepted the GOP nomination in a speech on the South Lawn.
The Republican Party brought together more than 1,000 spectators for the final night of its quadrennial gathering – the makeshift event prompted by concerns about the coronavirus.
The party initially planned to hold a traditional-style convention in Charlotte, N.C., but ultimately decided against that, opting instead to have most of its speakers deliver their addresses from Washington’s Mellon Auditorium, just a short distance from the White House.
For Thursday’s finale, however, White House senior adviser Ivanka Trump and the president spoke to the crowd from a stage on the South Lawn.
Two large Trump campaign signs were posted on either side of the stage, irking Democrats who vented their frustrations on social media.
“My blood is boiling over political banners at the White House,” former U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri wrote. “Awful. Just awful.”

“Let’s be clear,” wrote former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Ind. “It is wrong and illegal to use federal property and taxpayer resources for partisan campaigning.”
“A @JoeBiden presidency cannot come soon enough,” Buttigieg added in another tweet.
Other Democrats seemed bothered that Republicans appeared to be less worried than them about the coronavirus. Few attendees at the White House event appeared to be wearing masks, and most of the spectators sat closer to one another than the recommended social distancing length of six feet.
The GOP also appeared to flout the recommendations on previous nights, during a Wednesday event in Maryland featuring Vice President Mike Pence and during a Tuesday speech at the Rose Garden outside the White House featuring first lady Melania Trump.
“Is coronavirus gone? Is COVID-19 gone?” Biden campaign senior adviser Symone Sanders asked Thursday on a call with reporters, according to The Associated Press. “I didn’t see any masks or social distancing happening during the vice president’s speech last night. So, the reality is, there is a lack of leadership here.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Politico hammered for tweet saying Alice Johnson has been 'propped up' by Trump campaign

Politico raised eyebrows Thursday night with its description of Alice Marie Johnson, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of President Trump after being granted clemency while serving a life sentence.
Johnson, 63, was convicted of drug conspiracy and money laundering in 1996, but her story caught the attention of Kim Kardashian, who met the president at the White House to advocate for Johnson's clemency. Johnson has since become a criminal justice reform activist.
On Thursday evening, Politico tweeted about her RNC speech, but one phrase stood out from the rest of the post.
"Alice Johnson, a key player in Trump’s criminal justice reform push, delivered her RNC address tonight," the tweet began. "She’s been propped up as one of the most prominent beneficiaries of the terms of the First Step Act. Kim Kardashian played a role in her prison release."

Critics blasted the news outlet for suggesting Johnson was being "propped up."
"This is a disgusting racist headline," Reagan Battalion reacted.
"This headline removes agency from Alice in a way that is extremely uncomfortable and bizarre." tweeted Erielle Davidson, a senior policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.
"@Politico's bitter and desperate partisanship on full display today," tweeted Trump 2020 Advisory Board member Nan Hayworth. "Alice Johnson is no one's prop. How dare you disrespect this amazing and powerful woman. You reveal yourselves in your derision. How petty, small, and pathetic you are."
"Tell us how you really feel about Black women, why don't ya!" GOP political analyst Melik Abdul exclaimed.
Other media outlets have demeaned the presence of Black RNC speakers. An op-ed published in The Daily Beast Wednesday referred to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron among others as "token minorities."
A piece in The Nation similarly accused "Black tokens" of being used by the RNC to say "it's OK" to accept President Trump's racism.
MSNBC host Joy Reid endorsed that article, saying Black people were "trotted out to make white [sic] Americans feel good about white [sic] nationalism."