Senate Republicans must be feeling the heat of Herman Cain's insistence that he has a three-step plan to completely remodel the U.S. tax system and the report in the Oct. 13, 2011 Wall Street Journal that twice as many Americans have a favorable view of the Occupy Wall Street groups as have a negative view of them.
The Republicans, led by John McCain, introduced their version of a jobs bill on October 13, misnamed "Jobs Through Growth Act", according to BNAs Daily Tax RealTime. It appears, from the sketchy information provided in the McCain and Rand Paul press release, to primarily involve more failed medicine for the economy in the form of tax cuts for the rich and removal of reasonable regulation from health care insurers and too-big-to-fail banks and a hodgepodge of every other deregulatory idea the corporatist right has pushed for the last four decades and not yet gotten, including opening up public lands without overly pesky EPA reviews, drilling offshore without much hassle, and doing just about anything else that big corporations want to do without any regulatory agency having much power to stop it.
- It repeals the recently passed health care reform, effectively increasing the deficit by the savings that bill would have achieved and sending millions of Americans back to uninsured status while allowing medical costs to continue to escalate.
- It calls for copying Texas cap system of "medical malpractice reform" to end "junk" lawsuits, effectively letting doctors and hospitals perform malpractice without paying reasonable restitution or penalties for doing so
- It calls for a moratorium on new regulations until the unemployment rate drops below 7.7% (years), giving business a pass on internalizing the externalities that their enterprises pass along to society at large.
- And it requires congressional approval for any administrative regulatory action that will "cost the economy $100 million or more"
- And it expands required cost-benefit analysis to look at 'indirect' costs
- it eliminates the payment of attorneys fees for winning attorneys when they are 'repeat' suers of the federal government,
- It calls for the repeal of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation passed just last year on the grounds that a financial institution-funded study says the lost bank profits will cost US jobs, putting us back in the free-for-all casino capitalism that threw us into a tailspin in 2007-2008
- It calls for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution
- It includes a line-item veto for spending
- It changes the tax code by
- lowering the maximum individual tax rate to 25%, thus increasing the deficit
- lowering the corporate tax rate to 25%, thus increasing the deficit
- enact a territorial tax system, thus increasing the deficit
Other provisions intended to destroy protections for workers, environmental protections, and all protections for public lands, waters and air (all this under the name of "job creation"!!) include:
- prohibiting the EPA from regulating air quality on farms (agribusinesses raise incredible dust clouds due to their huge machinery),
- giving EPA 60 days to come to a conclusion about a new mining permit and then no further action may be taken
- prohibits regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act
- permits mineral and energy production on BLM public lands unless the bureau objects within 45 days of request
- specifically prohibits a particular new EPA regulation that Bob Gibbs doesn't like (HR 872)
- shackling the EPA by requiring that any regulation do an analysis of job impact of the regulation,
- prohibiting the NLRB from looking at the way businesses move to right-to-work states as a way to void collective bargaining agreements or working with unions to allow workers to express their desire to join unions in reasonable way (a majority of workers would like to be able to be in a union)
- prohibiting a requirement that government contracts require union labor (the GOP wants the government to assist the big corporations in breaking unions!)
- REQUIRES offshore drilling
- facilitates drilling in the Alaskan continental shelf by "expediting" EPA air-quality permitting process
- "streamlines" leasing on public lands--e.g., wilderness areas, parks, national monuments
The territorial tax system will act, they say, as a permanent incentives for repatriation of offshored profits by multinational corporations (i.e., Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and the other Big IT and Big Pharma companies that have so easily offshored their profits through intellectual property transfers to tax haven subsidiaries). Of course, it will also act as a permanent incentive for offshoring of jobs and profits at an even higher rate than currently.
Oh, and they claim the tax 'simplification' won't increase the deficit because there will be offsets by eliminating loopholes or whatever. They leave that to the Senate Finance Committee to figure out.
The balanced budget amendment is intended to enshrine the stinginess of the current GOP towards the middle and lower classes in constitutional law to make sure that Keynesian policies that could rescue us from recessionary lows will never be able to be used. And the line-item veto will make sure that even when there is a balanced budget (revenue increases, spending on social welfare), a GOP president will be able to kill all safety net spending anyway.
The requirement for congressional approval for regulations costing $100 million or more enshrines the status quo and hamstrings the executive's ability to enforce the laws. With the GOP obstructionism, no further regulations would ever get through Congress. the cost benefit analysis requirement already favors whatever the status quo is (there are ALWAYS costs to change, and the benefits are generally much harder to quantify, since they often relate to good health, sustainable lifestyle, happiness, wilderness protection, resource reservation for future, etc.).
The elimination of attorney's fees for civic organizations suing the federal government (and winning!) ensures that the few civic organizations that remain out there to challenge the corporatist state (like the Environmental Defense Fund) will have an even costlier battle even when they are in the right and fighting for citizens who can't do it on their own.
***** depressing, isn't it?
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