The Biggest Personality of the Year

On December 31, the first page of the Berlin newspaper “Tagesspiegel” (Daily Mirror) was covered with drawings of the political personalities of 2017. Most of them were German, but the biggest face in the middle of the page represented Donald Trump. Trump believes he ought to be the center of all attention. He was angry that he was not selected as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, and said so.

But he won’t be happy about his big picture: he had a duck bill, transformed into the cartoon buffoon Donald Duck, the only face that was so distorted. Inside, the review of the political year said that he twittered “nonsense” and has no scruples. In October, more than half of Germans surveyed said relations with the US were bad or very bad. The public thinks Trump is a bigger foreign policy problem than the dictators in North Korea and Russia.

No wonder, since Trump insulted the whole country, one of our closest allies in Europe. At a European Union summit in Brussels in May, he said, “The Germans are bad, very bad. Look at the millions of autos that they sell in the USA. Horrible. We’re gonna stop that.”

German auto makers don’t sell “millions” in the US, but they make hundreds of thousands of cars and employ thousands of workers here. The US can’t just “stop” importing German cars, it’s the whole European Union or nothing. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had already explained this to Trump 11 times during their meeting last March, but it had no effect.

Trump has rejected long-standing foreign policy agreements that are important to Germans, such as the Paris climate agreement and the nuclear deal with Iran. After meeting with Trump in May, Merkel felt the need to make the extraordinary statement that Europe must “really take our fate into our own hands. . . . The times in which we could rely fully on others, they are somewhat over. This is what I experienced in the last few days.” The German foreign minister said last month that “relations with the US will never be the same.”

Trump has also severely damaged the bond with our other most important ally, England. After he re-tweeted anti-Muslim videos from a far right British group, and then rebuked Prime Minister Theresa May, British leaders from all parties were outraged. Members of Parliament called him “stupid”, “racist” and “a fascist”. Parliament debated not allowing him to address them in a future visit, the second time that Parliament talked about whether to deny this American President a state visit. The Speaker of the House of Commons said that Trump would not be welcome to speak in Parliament. Half of Britons surveyed want Trump to be disinvited. The videos have nothing to do with immigration to Britain or the US.

Trump began damaging our relationship with Mexico at the start of his candidacy in 2015, by speaking in demeaning terms about all Mexicans in the US and demanding that Mexico pay for his gigantic Wall. Six days after Trump was inaugurated, Mexican President Peña Nieto canceled a trip to Washington, because of Trump’s insistence about the Wall. In a subsequent phone call, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexican goods and demanded that Nieto stop saying that Mexico would not pay for the Wall: “if you are going to say that Mexico is not going to pay for the Wall, then I do not want to meet with you guys anymore, because I cannot live with that.”

Peña Nieto’s attempts to continue cordial relations with the US government sent his approval ratings down under 15%. A poll in July found that 88% of Mexicans viewed Trump unfavorably. With no evidence that Mexico will make any contribution toward the wall, Trump said again on Saturday that Mexico will pay for the Wall, but he asked Congress to appropriate $18 billion for it.

A new Mexican President will be elected in July, and Mexican officials have told Washington that Trump’s behavior might help whoever is the most anti-American candidate win. Duncan Wood, the director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, part of the Smithsonian Institute, said, “Having worked in international relations for twenty years, I never thought we’d get to the point where one person could come along and blow everything up. But here we are.”

Trump is blowing up our relationships with all our most important foreign friends. He is not the biggest peacemaker, as we have long hoped our Presidents could be. He is not the biggest promoter of democracy, which we have long claimed is our national interest. He is not the best advertisement for America, not the face we wish to show the world. His work is a world-wide disaster.

He just gets the most attention, which he demands and will do anything to keep. Too bad he only succeeds at being the biggest personality, not the best President.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville, IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 9, 2018

Arcing Toward Equality in 2017

Conservatives might celebrate 2017 as a year of triumph. I’m not sure, because I don’t understand the current American conservative mind. Having a man represent you as President who is a constant liar, an abuser of women, and an incompetent manager of people might outweigh the few conservative pieces of legislation he has signed, even if one is a big tax cut for rich people. But most conservatives rallied around an apparent pedophile in Alabama, so ideology seems to be more important than character on the right wing.

What I do know is that American liberals have been thrown into despair by the new nastiness of American politics, as Republicans have given up the principles they defended for so many years in order to force a few political gains over the objections of the majority of voters. The daily news about Trump’s latest tweet, about the real nature of the tax cut, about the desertion of science in the federal bureaucracy, about the attempts to blind the public to the necessity of an informed media, all make each day’s headlines another affront to liberal values. Even worse, truth seems to have been redefined as a liberal value.

But behind the headlines, our country has been evolving in directions that liberals could find encouraging.

Public disdain for homosexuality and discriminatory behavior against homosexuals have a long history. Opinion surveys show an unchanging and strong majority believing that homosexual sex was “always wrong” until about 1990. Over the past 20 years that disapproval, expressed as opposition to same-sex marriage, has been gradually declining, from about 68% in 1997 to 53% in 2007, until approval finally won out over disapproval in 2012. That trend continued in 2017, as support for gay marriage was expressed by nearly two-thirds of Americans.

There are significant differences among sub-groups, with white evangelical Protestants and older Americans showing the least support. But all groups show increasing acceptance of the right of gay people to fully enjoy their lives, and the jump in 2017 from 27% to 35% among white evangelicals and from 18% to 41% among conservatives (these groups overlap considerably) means that 2018 might continue this trend.

Similarly, public acceptance of transgender Americans is rising, although there have only been surveys over the past few years. Since 2015, the Human Rights Campaign’s surveys show positive feelings about transgender people rising from 44% to 47%. In 2017, the proportion of Americans who said that transgender people should be able to use the bathroom of their choice jumped by 10 percentage points. The Boy Scouts of America both reflected this growing acceptance and pushed it further by announcing in January that transgender boys would be allowed to join. Joe Maldonado, who had been rejected in 2016, became a Boy Scout in February 2017.

The most notable cultural shift of 2017 was the public outrage over male sexual abuse of women, symbolized in December by TIME Magazine making female “silence breakers” the Person of the Year. The public naming and shaming of many egregious abusers was the culmination of the gradual shift in public opinion opened by Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas in 1991, and accelerated by the prosecution of Bill Cosby beginning in 2015. 2017 may become known as the year in which sexual harassment became publicly unacceptable.

Discussion of the continuing racism in American society was heated in 2017, but it is harder to discern how much progress was made in the struggle for racial equality. On the positive side, the public glorification of the Confederate defense of slavery, which has been a fundamental feature of the way American history has been told since the late 19^th century, may be coming to an end. Controversy over statues was the most conspicuous flashpoint of violence, but the reconsideration of the content of history textbooks and the naming of buildings at prominent universities point to a more lasting shift in the place of our painful racial history in American self-consciousness.

The public protests by black athletes at the beginning of the NFL season caused a significant backlash, as such protests did at the Olympics in 1968 and 1972, and in many less notable moments since then. In most cases, the athletes were severely disciplined, and Colin Kapernick’s 2016 protest was probably the reason for his continued unemployment as a professional football player. But in 2017, the protesters were not punished, perhaps a signal that public protests of racism, while not acceptable to many Americans, are now seen as within everybody’s democratic rights.

All of these long-term transformations in American culture and public opinion were condemned by conservatives, with Donald Trump in the lead. Backlash against the movement toward racial and sexual equality may have helped him win election, but even the power of the presidency has not been sufficient to stop it. 2017 was a difficult year for Americans committed to equality for all, but the long arc of the moral universe still bent toward justice.

May that continue in 2018.

Steve Hochstadt

Boston, MA

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, January 3, 2017

Good and Bad in New Tax System

We have a new federal income tax system. The Republicans who created it say that it will transform our economy, of course for the better.

Republicans insistently repeat that tax structure determines economic behavior: people will alter their behavior depending on how their money is taxed, including moving to states with lower taxes. Let’s examine what the tax bill shows about how Republicans think Americans should earn money.

In any tax system, there is good income and bad income. Good income is taxed at low rates and bad income is taxed at high rates. For example, in current US tax policy, so-called “carried interest” is very good income. Carried interest is a kind of performance fee for managers of private equity and hedge funds, a share of the profits, which is typically the major source of income for such investment managers. Although these managers earn enormous incomes, which would normally put them into the highest tax bracket of 39.6%, special rules tax this money at only 20%, less than the rate for normal income of the majority of Americans. That’s great income.

Here’s an example of bad income that affects millions of retired Americans. If your only income is Social Security, you will probably pay no income tax on it. But if you also have some other pension income, you could pay taxes on up to 85% of your SS benefits.

Under the current system, a couple who received $40,000 in Social Security and another $20,000 in other pensions would pay under $100 in taxes. But if instead they got $40,000 in pension income, they would pay $4500 in taxes. That works out to an effective rate of about 23% on the added $20,000 in pension income, even though their total income only falls into the 15% tax bracket. Their extra pension income is bad, because it transforms non-taxable SS benefits into taxable ones.

The new tax system does not change either the good carried interest income or the bad pension income. Donald Trump famously said as a candidate that the carried interest benefit allowed the very rich to “get away with murder” and promised to eliminate it if he were elected. Of course, he has done no such thing, and the new tax bill continues this very favorable treatment of such income. No politician in either party has talked about changing the penalty for pension income.

The Republican tax reform creates new types of good and bad income. A new kind of “good income” is earned by owners of businesses which are not corporations. Their profits are taxed as individual income. Now they will be able to deduct 20% of what they earn from their taxable income, effectively dropping their tax rate by 20%. There is a limit to how much income can be sheltered this way, but complex rules put in at the last minute will allow very wealthy owners of real estate firms, like Trump himself, to shelter much more income.

Other kinds of good income in the Republican tax bill are: inheritances between $5.6 million and $11.2 million, which used to be taxed but will be tax-free; and income used to pay private school tuition, which is now deductible for the first time.

New kinds of bad income are: money spent as moving expenses, which is no longer deductible; money spent as part of your job, which is reimbursed by your employer, now to be classified as income; many kinds of employee expenses, which are no longer deductible, such as business travel, research expenses, tools and supplies.

In the new tax bill there are good and bad tax cuts. According to Republicans, corporations deserve the best tax cut. Their tax rate falls from 35% to 21%, a provision which will add $700 billion to the deficit over 10 years, even under optimistic guesses about economic growth. That cut is permanent. The smaller cuts for individuals are temporary.

You can search far and wide looking for any Republican who says that making the tax cuts for individuals temporary is a good idea. They did this because they had to limit how much the tax bill would add to the deficit in order to be able to pass it with their tiny majority in the Senate. If those individual tax cuts become permanent, that would greatly raise the impact on the deficit. If they expire as the new law says, the advantages for individuals would disappear in a few years, while corporations would continue to benefit.

Leading Republicans admit that it’s “bad policy”: White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney calls it “gaming the system”. Mostly Republicans just hope that the economy will expand so much that the individual tax cuts can be made permanent without hurting the deficit.

Why choose to make the so-called “middle-class tax cut” temporary and the corporate tax cut permanent? Why give most taxpayers a break by cutting rates and then take away much of that benefit by eliminating the personal exemptions? Why add provisions which only help the rich, such as reducing the estate tax? Why at the last minute reduce the top rate from 39.6% to 37%?

Why make some of the income of average people “bad” while making lots of rich people’s income “good”? That shows us what Republican economic policy is all about.

Steve Hochstadt

Bloomington, IN

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, December 26, 2017