Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Texas

Coverage of the horrific floods in Texas has dominated the media for several days–first, with videos and descriptions of the devastation and reports of the growing numbers of dead and missing, and more recently, with emerging evidence of governmental failures that undoubtedly cost lives by delaying both effective warnings and responses.

According to numerous media reports, local officials had been told repeatedly over a number of years that the area needed a better warning system, including sirens. But this was Red Texas, which–like Red Indiana–is a state governed by lawmakers congenitally allergic to taxation and dismissive of the common good. Local and state officials refused to spend tax dollars to pay for improving the warning system.

Worse, according to the Washington Post, the county had technology to turn every cellphone in the river valley into a blaring alarm, but local officials didn’t use it before or during the early-morning hours of July 4 as river levels rose to record heights. County officials did eventually send text-message alerts that morning, but only to residents who had registered to receive them.  According to the Post’s review of emergency notifications that night, county officials did not activate a more powerful notification tool they had previously used, even as federal meteorologists were warning of catastrophic flooding.

As usual, the cuts made by DOGE–ostensibly to “waste and fraud”–were also implicated in the tragedy. Thanks to indiscriminate cuts by people who had no understanding of the systems they were devastating, the National Weather Service was short-staffed. Its forecasting evidently remained accurate, but the job of “warning coordination,” the position responsible for transmitting  information from the forecasts to relevant local officials — was vacant.

FEMA’s reduced staffing–including terminated contracts for call-center operators–also deepened the crisis by delaying relief efforts for several days. Phone calls weren’t answered–indeed, according to media reports, response rates declined from nearly 100% to just over 5% on July 7.

And then there was the further delay caused by Kristy Noem, one of the members of Trump’s inept cabinet (appointees who confirm the accuracy of my favorite protest sign: “IKEA has better cabinets.”) According to CNN, Noem recently enacted a sweeping rule requiring every contract and grant over $100,000 to obtain her personal sign-off before any funds can be released–a rule displaying a total lack of understanding of the agency’s function and mission.

For FEMA, where disaster response costs routinely soar into the billions as the agency contracts with on-the-ground crews, officials say that threshold is essentially “pennies,” requiring sign-off for relatively small expenditures.

In essence, they say the order has stripped the agency of much of its autonomy at the very moment its help is needed most.

“We were operating under a clear set of guidance: lean forward, be prepared, anticipate what the state needs, and be ready to deliver it,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN. “That is not as clear of an intent for us at the moment.”

For example, as central Texas towns were submerged in rising waters, FEMA officials realized they couldn’t pre-position Urban Search and Rescue crews from a network of teams stationed regionally across the country.

Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until some 72 hours after the flooding began. 

Of course, the overall lack of preparedness, both locally and nationally, was enabled and abetted by the GOP’s widespread denial of the reality of climate change. (What’s that saying? “Reality doesn’t care if you believe it or not…”)

I wonder whether those MAGA Texans who enthusiastically supported Trump are delighted with the administration’s destruction of that hated “deep state,” filled with “elitists” who actually knew what they were doing. Are they applauding the substitution of lily-White ignoramuses for those despised (and credentialed) “DEI hires”? 

And predictably, In the wake of this enormous tragedy, Texas Republicans are adding insult to injury. Rather than exacting consequences for the glaring ineptitude of various state and federal officials, Texas has moved to further protect them from any possible voter retribution. Governor Greg Abbott has announced that mid-decade redistricting will be taken up during the state’s upcoming special session. The move is in response to White House pressure; Texas Republicans have been urged to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm election in order to protect the party’s slim majority in the House–a majority delivered via the GOP’s previous gerrymandering.

Welcome to MAGA’s version of democracy. Are we great yet? 

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The War On Inclusion

It’s a simple word, intended to communicate an equally simple concept. “Inclusion” is the practice or policy of extending equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized. In other words, it’s an affirmative effort to avoid discriminating against people based upon their race, religion or disability…a commitment to simple fairness.

The goal is to treat people as individuals, to avoid unfair exclusions that aren’t based upon the  deficits of a particular person but rather upon the practice of stereotyping all members of a group–a practice properly described as discrimination. What is it about that goal that so terrifies the MAGA cult? 

Here in Indiana, our MAGA Governor Mike Braun has proudly announced the elimination of “DEI” from hundreds of state programs and websites. As various outlets around the state have reported, that effort has included cancellation of grants to reduce racial health inequities, elimination of scholarships for Black and Hispanic students, bias training workshops and much more. Programs have been abolished, and references to them in agency websites erased in order to comply with a directive from Braun that ordered agencies to replace “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, throughout state government.

Instead, Braun decreed that state policies would elevate “merit, excellence and innovation.” 

I will just note in passing that the individuals currently governing Indiana fail–monumentally–to exhibit either merit or excellence, and that MAGA’s sole “innovation” has been an effort to return the state to the 1950s. I will also note that the clear intent of  substituting “merit and excellence”  for “equity and inclusion” is to convey the racist belief that merit and excellence aren’t attributes to be found in minority populations.

The Capital Chronicle dove into Braun’s effort, examining more than 3,800 pages of information released, and listing numerous examples highlighting the fervor of the attack on previous state efforts to ameliorate the effects of entrenched bigotries. For example, the Indana Department of Health has eliminated two positions– a disparities coordinator and a maternal health coordinator–despite the fact, as the Chronicle noted, that “Indiana has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the world — and Black mothers are more likely to die in the year following childbirth than their white counterparts.”

The linked report lists the elimination of dozens of these efforts, many of them obviously motivated by a desire to exclude minority populations, and others just unintentionally stupid or even humorous. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation, for example, which spends millions of dollars annually in an effort to bring new business into the state, has reportedly “revised its efforts.” I guess that means the agency won’t work to recruit businesses headed by Blacks or women, or enterprises seen as “woke,” despite the agency’s primary mission…

What about the other terms in DEI that so offend our MAGA White Christian male overlords?

Diversity simply means differences. For decades, scholarship has confirmed the benefits of diverse schoolrooms and business enterprises–benefits that are particularly important in a very diverse polity. If I visit your widget store and see no one who looks like me, it turns out that I am less likely to buy my widgets from you. If I am a resident of a city or town entirely governed by folks who represent only a small segment of the population, I’m less likely to participate in political life and more likely to harbor grievances.

And what about that third word: equity?

Equity is defined as the quality of being fair and impartial. Equity does not require giving minority folks extra advantages; it is a commitment to avoid disadvantaging people who don’t share your race, religion or able-bodiedness. When members of a majority group refuse to extend fundamental fairness to people outside their tribe, they are sending a message. They are telling us they don’t want to compete on a level playing field.

They are telling us who they are.  

Have some of the DEI efforts of the past few years gone overboard? Have some of them been less than effective–even “tilting” the playing field a bit too much? I’m sure they have. Whenever a society makes an effort to remedy a previous unfairness, some folks will go too far (and others will be too timid to be effective). But the all-out assault on efforts to erase practices that have been unfair and prejudiced isn’t an effort to correct excesses. It’s an effort to reinstate old prejudices, to offer justifications for bigotries, and to reinforce White (straight) male supremacy.

The Trump/MAGA assault on civic equality is an effort to return to some very Bad Old Days. We cannot allow it to succeed.

 
 
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More Insanity In The “Big Beautiful Bill”

When a piece of legislation is over 900 pages long, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover all kinds of “hidden” provisions that went unread and undiscovered even by the people elected to read and understand what they’re passing. (That includes Trump, of course–a man who evidently can’t read and quite clearly doesn’t understand anything beyond his own childish needs and impulses. Media sources have reported on his meeting with Republican legislators, during which he advised them not to touch Medicaid– totally unaware of what was in his “Beautiful” bill…)

Media outlets have varied widely in the adequacy of their coverage. Most have focused on the major elements of this abysmal legislation: the three trillion dollars plus it will add to the nation’s deficit, the largesse to plutocrats “paid for” by robbing millions of low and middle-income Americans of health care and food stamps, the gargantuan sums allocated to the creation of what can only be described as a Trump administration version of the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s notorious SS.

Those elements are, admittedly, both the most prominent and most terrifying aspects of the bill, but the American Prospect recently highlighted ten lesser-known provisions that ranged from stupid to cruel.

File this one under “stupid.” The bill forces the states to shoulder more of the costs of the SNAP program. But when Lisa Murkowski negotiated a two-year exemption from cost-sharing for Alaska, the language of that provision exempted all states with an “erroneous payment rate” above 13.3 percent– language operating to exempt not just Alaska, but states with the ten highest error rates–and inadvertently incentivizing other states to increase waste and fraud in their programs.

The bill eliminates the $200 tax on gun silencers. Words fail.

Section 70309 allows municipalities to issue tax-exempt bonds to build spaceports. (I have no clue. Perhaps we’re closer to space travel that I thought?)

MAGA’s love of fossil fuels prompted a provision–inserted by Oklahoma’s Republican Senator Lankford– that eliminated taxes on oil drillers. The bill “includes an exemption for domestic oil and gas companies from the corporate alternative minimum tax, as long as they have intangible drilling and development costs.” Oil companies have lobbied consistently for this nice little loophole. (Climate change? Nah…just another scam like vaccinations…)

And speaking of the environment, the bill not only eviscerates President Biden’s climate program, it also provides vast subsidies to coal producers. As the article reports,

At least four million acres of federal land will be opened up to coal leasing, and the royalty rate will be cut from 12.5 percent to 8 percent. Incentivizing coal—the worst fossil fuel for the climate and also particulate pollution—in any way is bad, but Republicans are also literally subsidizing foreign steel companies in places like China, India, and Brazil, by making metallurgical coal eligible for “critical mineral” subsidies through 2030. This coal, which is used in blast furnaces to create steel, is mostly exported to poorer countries with fewer air pollution regulations. Sure enough, the coal doesn’t even have to be used domestically to get the subsidy.

Umn…how, exactly, does this make America great?

There’s much more: a $40 million appropriation to the National Endowment for the Humanities to build statues for a “Garden of Heroes” in Washington, D.C. (We don’t have money to feed children, but we do have money to build a “blood and soil” monument…); removal of limits on the ability of folks with pass-through income (think law partners or hedge fund managers), to take unlimited SALT deductions, giving rich people “yet another legal tax avoidance scheme, worth between $35 and $40 billion over the next decade.”

As policy analysts pore over the 900+ pages of this monstrosity, they will undoubtedly find more examples of pork for donors and lobbyists, funded by vicious cuts to programs for the needy. Meanwhile, the propaganda machine rolls on, with Republicans insisting that Medicaid recipients–the vast majority of whom are children, disabled and elderly–just need to get jobs. (As one FB response asked, “please send me a list of jobs that are available for Alzheimer patients.”) 92% of the rest already do have jobs.

Indiana’s two senators voted for this obscenity. Senator Jim Banks is a White Christian Nationalist and a fervent member of the MAGA cult; his vote was expected. Senator Todd Young, who might have been an effective lawmaker in a different party or time, and who clearly knows better, issued a statement that is gobsmacking in its dishonesty:

“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will deliver the largest tax cut in history for working and middle-class Hoosiers, expand the child tax credit, spur new economic growth and job creation, and advance President Trump’s agenda.”

I don’t know how Senator Young sleeps at night….

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The Guy In The Mirror

Welcome to what seems like a very bad dream…

Congressional Republicans have passed a spending bill that contradicts every principle that party has endorsed over the years.  Furthermore, it’s a measure that will disproportionately hurt their own voters–and we know that they are aware of that fact, because they carefully timed some of the bill’s most egregious elements, like the draconian cuts to Medicaid, to take effect after the midterms.

Those GOP “defenders of liberty” who sport “don’t tread on me” t-shirts and insist that the government lacked even the authority to require masks during a pandemic are nevertheless cool with providing massive new funding for ICE, whose masked thugs display a terrifying similarity to Germany’s SS.

The Republicans in Congress passed this monstrosity because they are in thrall to an ignorant buffoon with tacky taste and the vocabulary, intellect and emotional control of a developmently-delayed five-year-old.

It has become increasingly clear that on the ground, the MAGA movement is the reappearance of the old Confederacy. The voters who continue to support Trump are motivated by fear–fear of losing their status as the “real Americans,” fear that those “others” will actually manage to attain civic equality. But what can we say about the Senators and Representatives those voters sent to Washington? Some–like Indiana’s Jim Banks–are as ignorant and bigoted as those who voted for them, but it’s obvious that many others actually know better, actually realize that their submission to Trump is cowardly, and that they are rewarding the votes of their constituents by robbing them of the little security they have.

What explains those Senators and Representatives–those presumably “traditional” Republicans who talked endlessly about fiscal discipline and limited government, but who obediently bend the knee to a would-be autocrat who routinely trashes those principles?

A recent article by Jonathan Last in the Bulwark took a stab at answering that question. 

A sizable portion of elected Republicans hold on to a residual image of themselves as avatars of a green-eyeshade, business-first party that no longer exists. They’re like a middle-aged man standing in front of a mirror, sucking in his gut and smiling, imagining that he still looks pretty close to his college days.

It’s a lie they tell themselves.

The article raised an interesting question: why didn’t the Republicans just choose to have it both ways–extend the tax cuts for their deep-pocketed donors, but keep Medicaid funded, and just push the debt even higher. After all, they were willing to add over three trillion to that debt–why not just add another 930 billion, and avoid sticking it to their own voters?

This, finally, is the root of the problem. Some Republicans still view themselves as the good guys in the movie. They need to imagine that they’re on the side of the angels. That they are something other than what they’ve become. It’s the guy in the mirror, again.

Trump has no illusions. That is his strength. Some congressional Republicans are reluctant to embrace their roles as kleptocrats and pillagers. That is their weakness. And it’s why they haven’t said, “Fuck it. Let’s just spend all the money.”

Last reminds us that when things go wrong in a cult, no one blames the cult leader. (He points to an example, a MAGA-supporting man in detention due to Trump’s hardline immigration policies, who nevertheless blames the Biden administration for his arrest.)

When millions of Trump voters lose their Medicaid, they aren’t going to blame Trump, either. They’ll blame Congress.

And what does Donald Trump care if a bunch of Republican losers get tossed out of Congress? He has no use for congressional Republicans. He is an aspiring autocrat who rules by fiat. Passing legislation is not anywhere near his list of priorities. Whether or not the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans is of little importance to him.

All of which is why Trump’s party is about to stab millions of Trump-loving Republican voters in the back instead of just throwing more money at the problem.

Trump knows who he is, what he wants, and how to get it. His party, on the other hand, is a bunch of delusional sad sacks. Which is why he will win and they will lose. Again.

At least we can take some satisfaction from the prospect of those “delusional sad-sacks” looking in their mirrors and seeing a greying and flabby reality looking back.

I wonder if any of them will regret providing the Kool-Aid to the cult members who elected them…

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Speaking Of Propaganda…

In the wake of passage of Trump’s reverse Robin Hood bill, the Social Security Administration sent out an email to most recipients. Here is the text of that email:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long‑awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.

The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy.

The new law includes a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Additionally, it provides an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older, ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned.

Social Security remains committed to providing timely, accurate information to the public and will continue working closely with federal partners to ensure beneficiaries understand how this legislation may affect them.

“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,’ said Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano. ‘… By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned.”

I may throw up.

In this blog, I frequently complain about propaganda, assuming that most readers know what propaganda is–misinformation and outright lies intended to sell a bill of goods to people who wouldn’t buy what was being sold if they knew the truth. This email is a perfect example; it should be Exhibit A in classes devoted to the subject.

Allow me to list the lies and intentional misdirections in this example of autocratic BS.

There was no full repeal of Social Security taxes. The law does not eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it introduces a temporary increase in the standard deduction—up to: $6,000 for individuals aged 65+, and $12,000 for married couples filing jointly. Furthermore, the deduction begins phasing out at incomes above $75,000 for singles and $150,000 for couples, and it vanishes entirely at higher income levels.

What’s more, the measure isn’t targeted solely at Social Security benefits; it applies to all taxable income–and it’s temporary,
expiring around 2028. And lest you still somehow think it’s a big deal, or at least a modest help to low-income folks, permit me to introduce you to reality: most low- and middle-income seniors already pay zero federal tax on their benefits.

As one CPA of my acquaintance put it, the claim that the bill eliminates taxes on Social Security benefits for most recipients is simply false. In reality, it merely increases the general standard deduction for seniors for a limited time, indirectly reducing taxes for some of them. It does not repeal or reduce Social Security taxation.

Sometimes, the English language is insufficient to convey the bizarre reality of a situation. In this case, only Yiddish can adequately communicate the sheer shamelessness on display. That word is chutzpah. Chutzpah is nerve or gall on steroids. (An often-used example is a person who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.)

America has a mentally-ill gangster in the White House. He is aided and abetted by craven Congressional Republicans, and they have colluded to pass legislation that will–literally–kill lots of old people by throwing them off Medicaid (among many other terrible things). They know that most Americans–including their own voters– will hate this bill once they actually know what’s in it, so they are trying to pre-empt the spread of accurate information by using our tax dollars to disseminate propaganda–here, by sending out an email that will confuse and mislead the elderly Americans who rely on Social Security.

Talk about chutzpah! We knew they lacked any integrity; now we know that these despicable people have no capacity for shame. 

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