Conservative Blogger
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Trump tax plan met with mixed reviews
Donald Trump's long-awaited tax plan -- which would eliminate federal taxes for millions -- was met with mixed reviews Monday, with one anti-tax group calling it a jobs engine but others questioning its impact on the debt and deficit.
The plan unveiled Monday would eliminate federal income taxes on individuals earning less than $25,000 and married couples earning less than $50,000.
It also would benefit businesses and top earners. It would lower the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent and lower the highest income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 25 percent.
"We have an amazing code," Trump said of his tax system. "It will be simple. It will be easy. It will be fair."
Out of the gate, the plan won an endorsement from Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who hailed the proposed corporate tax cut.
"This makes us competitive worldwide. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs," he tweeted.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former Congressional Budget Office director, noted tax reform plans typically involve lowering rates and broadening the base. "He's lowering the rate and narrowing the base," he said.
Asked about Trump's claim that the plan is revenue-neutral, Holtz-Eakin quipped: "He claims his hair is real, too."
The billionaire real estate mogul says the country would pay for the tax cuts through a combination of eliminating deductions and loopholes. Trump wants to eliminate the so-called "carried interest loophole" that allows managers of hedge funds and private equity firms to pay a lower tax rate than most individuals. He also wants to allow corporations to bring money held in overseas accounts back to the United States after paying a one-time tax of 10 percent.
Trump said the plan would impact the wealthy by reducing or eliminating most deductions and loopholes.
"In other words, it's going to cost me a fortune," he said at a news conference at his Trump Tower skyscraper in Manhattan.
Pomerleau, though, said Trump's plan likely would cut taxes for low- and high-income filers alike. And the most expensive provision -- for the federal budget -- would likely be the lowering of the top income tax rate, he said.
"That's a big swing from nearly 40 to 25 percent," he said.
Still, the plan would significantly impact the other end of the income spectrum.
While millions of low-income Americans already do not pay federal income taxes, Trump's plan would significantly expand that group -- his campaign says it would remove "nearly 75 million households" from the federal income tax rolls.
According to the Tax Foundation, under current law a single filer with no children would not pay taxes on income under $10,300. Under Trump's plan, that threshold rises to roughly $25,000.
Further, instead of having to file taxes and wait for a refund for any tax dollars that were withheld, lower-income Americans would simply send in a one-page form to the IRS saying, "I win," according to the Trump campaign.
The Trump plan also reduces the number of tax brackets from seven to four.
Pomerleau said, overall, "simplification is better."
Trump estimated that his plan would lead the economy to grow at least 3 percent a year, and as much as 5 or 6 percent.
The tax plan is the third major policy proposal from Trump, who has also outlined plans for immigration and guns. He has been criticized for failing to unveil specific policy proposals as he's risen in early polling.
Club for Growth Action, whose parent group has been feuding with Trump in recent weeks, put out a statement contrasting Monday's plan with Trump's "long history of calling for the largest tax increase in U.S. history."
"His tax plan begs the question: Does this mean you were completely wrong about all your liberal policies on taxes, trade, health care, bailouts, and eminent domain?" the group said in a statement.
Obama, Putin sharply disagree over chaos in Syria
President Obama and Russia’s Vladimir Putin wrapped up their first face-to-face meeting in nearly a year late Monday at the United Nations summit where they fundamentally disagreed over the chaos in Syria.
A U.S. official said the pair have agreed to discuss political transition in Syria but were at odds over the role that Syrian President Bahar al-Assad should play in resolving the civil conflict.
The official said Obama reiterated to Putin that he does not believe there is a path to stability in Syria with Assad in power. Putin has said the world needs to support Assad because his military has the best chance to defeat Islamic State militants.
Putin said the meeting, which lasted a little over 90 minutes, was “very constructive, business-like and frank” and the two world leaders discussed Russia’s potential involvement in a military campaign against Islamic State militants in Syria.
“We are thinking about it, and we don’t exclude anything.” Putin told reporters.
The Kremlin chief said that any Russian action would be in accordance with the international law.
A senior administration official described the meeting as “business-like back and forth” and productive.
The two met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. Syria and Ukraine were expected to top the agenda for the sit-down.
Earlier, the two clashed sharply in separate addresses to the General Assembly in New York City, with Obama urging a political transition to replace the Syrian president but Putin warning it would be a mistake to abandon the current government.
Obama said the U.S. is "prepared to work" with Russia and Iran to resolve the bloody Syrian civil war.
But, in a clear reference to Putin's support for the regime in Damascus, Obama said the world cannot see a "return to the pre-war status quo" in Syria.
"Let's remember how this started," Obama said. "[Bashar] Assad reacted to peaceful protests by escalating repression and killing."
Without elaborating, Obama said "compromise" will be required to end the fighting in Syria and stomp out the Islamic State. But he said there must be a "transition" away from Assad.
Putin, though, used his own address to voice support for the Syrian government and argue that its military is the only viable option for defeating the Islamic State.
"We believe it's a huge mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian authorities, with the government forces, those who are bravely fighting terror face-to-face," Putin said during his first appearance at the U.N. gathering in a decade.
Obama and Putin's disparate views of the grim situation in Syria left little indication of how the two countries might work together to end a conflict that has killed more than 250,000 people and resulted in a flood of refugees.
The Syria crisis largely overshadowed the summit's other discussions on peacekeeping, climate change and global poverty.
The Obama-Putin meeting comes as Moscow builds up its military presence in Syria, for reasons that U.S. officials have said remain unclear.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Planned Parenthood president says she's 'proud' of organization's actions amid controversy
Planned Parenthood's president will tell a House committee Tuesday that she is "proud" of the work her organization does, even as the organization is embroiled in a controversy over videos depicting the sale of fetal tissue.
Cecile Richards will testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform committee Tuesday morning. It will be her first appearance since the scandal erupted this past July.
The ten videos released so far by a group called the Center for Medical Progress capture Planned Parenthood officials casually describing how they sometimes obtain tissue from aborted fetuses for researchers. In one video, a doctor for a Planned Parenthood tissue harvesting partner appears to admit a baby’s “heart actually is still beating” at times following abortions and an ex-procurement tech gives a first-person account of watching a baby’s heart beat before she dissects its brain.
Planned Parenthood foes say the videos show the group breaks federal laws barring for-profit fetal tissue sales and altering abortion procedures to obtain usable organs. Planned Parenthood and its defenders say it's done nothing illegal and says that Daleiden dishonestly edited the videos to distort what was said.
In prepared testimony for her appearance Thursday obtained by Fox News, Richards said Planned Parenthood "is proud of its limited role in supporting fetal tissue research." She said just 1 percent of Planned Parenthood's nearly 700 clinics obtain fetal tissue for researchers seeking disease cures
She also fires back at Center for Medical Progress Project Lead David Daleiden, calling for him to be investigated after she says he "tried unsuccessfully to entrap Planned Parenthood physicians and staff for nearly three years." Daleiden obtained the videos after posing as an executive of a nonexistent firm that buys fetal tissue for scientists.
So far, the most damage inflicted on Planned Parenthood by the videos is the insensitive way some of its officials discuss the procedures. That has drawn apologies from Planned Parenthood and bitter criticism from Republicans.
Most Democrats have rallied behind the group, and President Barack Obama has threatened to veto GOP legislation cutting its federal money. Public opinion polls show majorities oppose blocking Planned Parenthood's taxpayer dollars. Departing House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., fearing voter anger, have rebuffed conservatives who would shut down the government if Obama doesn't agree to halt Planned Parenthood's money.
The organization receives about a third of its $1.3 billion annual budget, around $450 million, from federal coffers, chiefly reimbursements for treating Medicaid's low-income patients.
Democrats have used a Senate filibuster -- a virtually endless procedural delay -- to block GOP legislation halting Planned Parenthood's federal payments. So two House committees plan to approve filibuster-proof legislation shifting Planned Parenthood's Medicaid funds -- about $350 million -- to community health centers.
The bill would also keep a promise made during this spring's budget debate to repeal key elements of Obama's signature health care law. Panel votes are expected Tuesday and Wednesday.
In addition to the four congressional committee investigations of Planned Parenthood, Boehner has said he will also appoint a special committee to probe the group.
Planned Parenthood has defended itself with newspaper ads, petition campaigns and lawsuits against state efforts to curb its funding. On Tuesday, volunteers and supporters scheduled events in nearly 90 cities and planned to give lawmakers more than 2 million signatures on "I Stand With Planned Parenthood" petitions.
State Dept: Clinton email storage safe not secure for some messages
WASHINGTON – The State Department has told Senate investigators that it didn't provide Hillary Rodham Clinton's lawyer with a secure-enough method to read now-highly classified material from her homebrew email server because it didn't anticipate that the messages would be deemed so secret.
In July, State Department officials installed a safe at the office of attorney David Kendall after the government determined some of Clinton's emails may have contained classified information. But it said last week the safe wasn't suitable for so-called top secret, sensitive compartmented information, known as TS/SCI, which the government has said was found in some messages.
Assistant Secretary of State Julia Frifield wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley on Sept. 22 that "while the safe was suitable for up to (top secret) information, it was not approved for TS/SCI material" because the material wasn't held in a facility set up for discussing highly secret information, known as a SCIF, or sensitive compartmented information facility.
Those questions were not an issue at the time the safe was installed because "there was no indication that the emails might contain TS or TS/SCI material," Frifield wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. Kendall has a top secret security clearance.
The State Department's letter underscores how even the nation's diplomatic apparatus didn't anticipate Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, would have sent or received such highly sensitive information on her private email server while secretary of state. Questions about her use of such a server have at times dominated her White House run.
Kendall and a Clinton spokesman did not immediately return messages seeking comment Monday.
"It shows how badly the wires were crossed" between the State Department, which didn't anticipate any of the emails would be top secret, and the intelligence community, which decided they were classified, said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists.
The State Department also said it was unaware of whether anyone's security clearances were suspended pending an investigation into possible improper handling of classified information, one of several questions posed by Grassley, R-Iowa. Such an action is not uncommon amid such classification reviews, said Bradley Moss, a Washington lawyer who deals regularly with security clearance matters.
The AP in March first discovered that Clinton ran her server off an Internet connection traced to her Chappaqua, New York, home. Clinton later confirmed she operated the server for convenience but did not provide details on how well the basement server was backed up or how adequately it was protected from hackers.
Since then, the State Department has indicated through Freedom of Information Act releases of Clinton's emails that dozens of messages that passed through her private server were later deemed classified. Most messages released so far have been marked "confidential," the lowest level of U.S. government classification.
But two emails, although not marked classified at the time they were sent, have since been slapped with a "TK" marking, for the "talent keyhole" compartment, suggesting material obtained by spy satellites, according to the inspector general for the intelligence community. They also were marked "NOFORN," meaning information that can only be shared with Americans with security clearances.
One email included a discussion of a U.S. drone strike, part of a covert program that is nevertheless widely known. A second conversation could have improperly referred to highly classified material, but it also could have reflected information collected independently, U.S. officials who have reviewed the correspondence told the AP.
Clinton has since apologized for using a private server and said she's provided copies of all the messages she was required to turn over. She reiterated in a recent interview that she didn't "send or receive any material marked 'classified.' We dealt with classified material on a totally different system. I dealt with it in person."
Since earlier this year, government investigators — and her political adversaries in particular — have focused on Clinton's email practices that effectively bypassed government-run systems. Also potentially at issue is whether Clinton withheld any work-related emails from the roughly 30,000 messages she provided to the State Department.
The AP is one of several organizations that have sued the State Department for records during her tenure, including emails to and from Clinton and her former top aides.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Downsize UN role in refugee crises, US relief agency suggests
One of America’s largest non-profit relief organizations is warning that the practice of shoveling mountains of money at major humanitarian emergencies like Syria is being overwhelmed by the scale of disasters the world faces, and that rich countries need to try something drastically new—starting with less reliance on bureaucracy-bound United Nations relief agencies.
“Our humanitarian communities are maxed out,” warns Andrea Koppel, vice-president of global engagement and strategy for Mercy Corps, a Portland, Oregon-based disaster relief agency that operates in more than 40 countries, often alongside such agencies as UNICEF and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. “There has to be recognition from all donor governments that the status quo is not working. We are using humanitarian assistance as a band aid.”
Her warning came two days after the Obama Administration announced it would sent $419 million more in aid for Syria, which has been engulfed in civil war for nearly five years.
“We are really at a crossroads with the traditional aid system,” Koppel added. The relatively small group of countries that put up the bulk of relief funding “are now waking up to the fact that the status quo is not cutting it.”
Instead, Mercy Corps is calling for a “new normal” in international disaster relief that bypasses U.N. agencies as necessary, especially as international relief coordinators, and puts more authority in the hands of private relief agencies.
“The existing humanitarian system is too centralized, top down and U.N. focused,” Mercy says in a 58-page analysis that takes stock of the current global crisis environment. “In fragile states in particular, the existing system is unsustainable—both overstretched and underfunded.”
“We need a system that is more cost-effective, less bureaucratic and more nimble if the challenges of the new normal are to be met.”
If not, the mega-disasters that now are sending refugees across Europe’s borders are only likely to multiply and grow.
Mercy Corps’ analysis underlines a grim reality that wealthier nations acknowledge but have not fully confronted. Some of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, such as civil wars, now last for years if not decades, often involve local governments as aggressors or passive actors—which adds to U.N. ineffectiveness--are made worse by other natural disasters like drought, and collectively involve human displacement on a scale not seen since World War II.
They also are often centered in some of the world’s poorest countries, where “fragile state” status is increasingly endemic, internal and external refugee movements are massive, and the black hole of under-funding looms largest.
The under-funding and over-stretching are getting harder and harder to ignore. Last week’s State Department announcement of $419 million in aid for Syria and surrounding countries came only three months after a previous $360 million aid bump—and brought the U.S. total to some $1.6 billion just in fiscal 2016.
All told, the U.S. has given more than $4.5 billion in relief to Syria and surrounding countries since the start of the Assad onslaught against Syrian rebels began in late 2010, making the U.S. far and away the largest single aid donor to the Syrian emergency.
Yet despite that largesse, the overall $8.4 billion United Nations appeal for the regional crisis this year—the U.N. remains the overall aid coordinator—is only 40 percent funded. As millions of refugees have spilled over into neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq—and now Europe itself—Koppel noted “the human needs have been growing exponentially. There are not enough dollars to meet them.”
“We have never had to operate on so many fronts before,” said a senior official of an international relief organization, who requested anonymity. “The disasters are more complex, more numerous, and place extreme stress on human resources.” And “they are definitely not going to get better.”
The problem is not only the magnitude of challenges in Syria, the surrounding Middle East, and long-festering disasters like the Democratic Republic of Congo, , the Mercy report says. The difficult also lies with the origins of “international aid architecture” in the development of the U.N. itself.
The analysis cites among other things a numbing array of U.N. bureaucratic institutions—“the humanitarian coordinator system, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, interagency needs assessments, the consolidated appeals process”-- that were created in 1991 and have only updated slightly since. These were “not designed for the challenges of the modern 21st-Century world,” the report says. Subsequent U.N. attempts to jerry-rig improvements “remain unrealized.”
CLICK HERE FOR THE REPORT
The better idea, Mercy argues, would be to sweep away the old institutions where they are not likely to be effective and place greater reliance on new combinations of private-sector organizations, civil society groups and different levels of government. This, the report says, would allow humanitarian organizations to take bigger risks to support local victims regardless of government response, and work faster and more easily with local communities when national governments are virtually non-existent.
It would also help move relief efforts more quickly toward blending longer-term—and cheaper—solutions with short term aid that can merely leave refugees as a dependent community in place, and reduce some of the underlying accelerators of violence, or at least make it easier for refugees to return when violence or other calamities abate.
Not surprisingly, Mercy’s argument is based on some of its own achievements—which the relief organization, founded in 1979, also feels deserve more attention.
In Syria, for example, Mercy, along with other private-sector organizations, has for several years been doing what U.N. agencies were unable to do—operate in areas outside Assad government control to bring food, medical supplies and emergency relief to millions of Syrians under assault by their Russian-backed government.
The decision to go where the vast majority of Syrians were suffering first involved creation of a separate relief organization on Syria’s borders while Mercy still operated another relief arm under Assad supervision, then a decision to break with the Assad government entirely. Funding continued to come from USAID, British government agencies and the European Commission.
With the cooperation of thousands of Syrian volunteers, community organizations and aid workers Mercy is still bringing those supplies across neighboring borders to some 500,000 Syrians per month, in one of the most dangerous civil war zones in the world, including besieged communities under ferocious assault by Assad with chlorine bombs and other weapons of mass devastation.
That situation has been further compounded by the aggressive savagery of the Islamic Front, which has pushed even more Syrians and neighboring Iraqis into flight. There, the risks are so great, Koppel says, that “we made a decision a year or two ago not to operate in areas where the Islamic State is also operating.”
U.N. agencies, on the other hand, were largely constrained for years by their ties with the Assad regime and were largely blocked from sending aid to areas not under Assad’s control, even after a 2014 U.N. Security Council resolution—nearly four years after the ugly conflict began—finally allowed the U.N. to start up similar cross-border relief.
“When it came to the massive needs in the rest of the country,” says a senior official with an international relief agency, “ the international side”—the U.N.—“was completely paralyzed.”
In the vacuum, however, non-government organizations such as Mercy learned that they too could provide relief services at U.N.-scale.
The question is whether major donor nations will agree.
For its part, the U.S. government says it is not tilting one way or the other, even though more than half of its latest $419 million infusion of Syria aid--$236.5 million—goes to unspecified NGOs, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees getting less than a third of that amount.
A senior State Department official told Fox News that the disparity had more to do with State Department funding cycles than with a tilt toward non-government relief agencies.
“That’s why we have so many different organizations to support,” the official said. “they each have different strengths.”
The issue of how best to rebuild the world humanitarian order will get a U.N.-sponsored look in May 2016, at a first-ever World Humanitarian Summit slated to take place in Istanbul.
In customary U.N. fashion, a year-long series of regional U.N. summit meetings on the humanitarian topic began in June 2014 and ground on through July 2015. They will be followed by an Internet-based “Global Consultation” in Geneva in October.
One thing the U.N. has already made clear, however, is that the “fundamental principles” enshrined in its 1991 reworking of the ungainly international relief system, will “guide our work,” even as the U.N. explores “how to create a more global, inclusive and effective humanitarian system.”
Bill Clinton blames Republicans, media for extending wife Hillary's email controversy
Former President Bill Clinton is blaming Republicans and the media for the controversy related to wife and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, saying the GOP has led a “full-scale frontal assault” on her campaign.
Clinton entered the race as the clear party front-runner. But her poll and favorability numbers have dropped since news broke in March that she used a private server and email accounts for official business while serving as secretary of state.
“I have never seen so much expended on so little,” the former president said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN. “The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible.”
Clinton maintains that she didn’t break any rules or laws by using the private system, including those on sending and receiving confidential emails. But she has admitted to making a mistake in judgment and has said she is sorry, in an effort to bury the controversy.
She has turned over thousands of official emails that the government is releasing in batches. And federal officials reportedly will be able to recover those she deemed private and deleted, which is prolonging the controversy.
Bill Clinton likened the email controversy to questions over the Whitewater land deal that he faced during his 1992 presidential campaign. Saying the furor was more politics than substance, Clinton argued that his wife has been open in answering questions and will bounce back from a decline in the polls.
“She said she was sorry that her personal email caused all this confusion,” he said. “And she’d like to give the election back to the American people. And I trust the people. I think it will be all right.”
Clinton added that the news media also played an inappropriate role in his wife’s troubles.
“You know, at the beginning of the year, she was the most admired person in public life,” he said. “What happened? The presidential campaign happened. And the nature of the coverage shifted from issue-based to political.”
In addition, the Obama administration on Friday reportedly discovered a chain of emails that his wife failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of her work-related correspondence as the country’s top diplomat
Their existence challenges her claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
"I think that there are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons,” Bill Clinton said. “And they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her. And so this email thing became the biggest story in the world.
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