From: Ryan Grim [mailto:ryan.grim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2017 10:47 PM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: The GOP's blue-state swindle
Congress is on the brink of passing an amendment -- let’s call it the Amazon
Amendment -- that will turn over most of the government’s purchasing power to
Amazon. What could go wrong? Here’s David Dayen with the scary prospect.
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2. Republicans in the House have a problem: they want to give trillions in tax
cuts to corporations and the super wealthy, but an obscure budget rule says
they can only increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion if they want to get the
legislation through the Senate with just 50 votes. But $1.5 trillion will
barely get your standard oligarch through the weekend, so what is Congress to
do? Easy: raise taxes on the middle and upper-middle class, and then you can
give even more in corporate tax breaks. (And then wealthy people can legally
turn themselves into corporations and also pay the lower rate.)
But Republicans also want to lower rates for everybody across the board, so
what they're left with is going after deductions to raise revenue, and the big
ones are the mortgage interest deduction and the one for state and local taxes.
And so the GOP bill cuts the mortgage deduction in half, and mostly eliminates
the ability to deduct the taxes you pay to state and local governments. Some in
the press have noted that this move would hurt blue state residents, who live
in states with semi-functioning safety nets financed by higher taxes. But it
will also hit anybody else who pays non-trivial state and local taxes.
Part of it is simple math -- they need the money to make it work -- but part of
it is ideological: they don't like the high state and local taxes, but can't
directly lower them, so by eliminating the deduction, that puts huge pressure
on states to cut their taxes, and subsequently cut their spending on education,
health care, roads, police and the other sorts of things states pay for. And
that's how we'll pay for a corporate tax cut, and make sure the nephews of
billionaires don't have to pay any taxes on their inheritance. I talked about
this today on TYT with tax policy analyst Jacob Leibenluft
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of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
And here is Kate Aronoff explaining
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things better than I did.
3. I also have a few thoughts on that wild Donna Brazile book excerpt in
Politico today.
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Hoo boy. So, in the fall of 2015, a year before the presidential election,
the Democratic National Committee was bought at the equivalent of a pawn shop
by the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
The party organization was still deeply in debt from the 2012 campaign, owing
millions to banks and to vendors, burning through what little cash it had at a
stunning rate of some three to four million per month. One senior party
official told me that by August 2015 it was becoming unable to make payroll and
approaching the equivalent of bankruptcy.
And so it sold itself secretly to the only bidder. In exchange for bailing it
out, the Clinton campaign effectively took it over, according to Donna Brazile,
who would later take the organization over.
"The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook
with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and
investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and
all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the
party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the
other staff,” Brazile writes in an explosive excerpt of her book, published
Thursday in Politico. “The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign
about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
Brazile’s revelation has enflamed a long-burning fight between backers of
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, now that Brazile has acknowledge that the
DNC was in fact under the direct control of the Clinton campaign, rather than a
neutral arbiter of the race.
But walking away rather unscathed from the flamewar is the man who set the
blaze in the first place: former President Barack Obama. “Nobody wanted to out
the fact that Obama had let it get so bad,” the party official mentioned above
said.
Brazile’s’ decision to add “a copy to Marc Elias” to that line was an extra
twist of the knife. Elias was the Clinton campaign’s attorney, and also the
attorney for the DNC. A partner at Perkins Coie, Elias replaced Bob Bauer,
another Perkins Coie attorney, when Obama brought him into the White House. (If
you work at or have thoughts on Perkins Coie, I may be writing something on
their role in the Democratic Party, so reach out if you have something to
share.)
Obama, whose campaign operation, Obama for America, took small-dollar giving to
never-before seen heights, opening up the possibility of a transformation of
politics, quickly decided to marginalize his group after the election. He
renamed it Organizing for America, but ordered it to do very little organizing,
worried that if grassroots activists attacked Blue Dog Democrats, they would
bolt from the president and lose in 2010. (Most lost anyway in 2010, as the tea
party wave swept them out.)
The new OFA became Obama’s primary campaign apparatus, supplanting the DNC,
which became an afterthought, run by Tim Kaine. After the 2010 wave, Obama put
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on top of the moribund institution, a clear
signal that he was uninterested in it as a central component of the party.
Instead, Obama became the party, his dynamic and charismatic personality
carrying it at the national level.
Obama was reelected, but the party itself went on a historic losing spree,
ultimately shedding nearly 1,000 seats across the country. Even after Democrats
lost the Senate in 2014, and the DNC continued spending money on consultants at
an eye-popping rate, Obama decided not to make a leadership change. Instead, he
left it saddled with debt -- debt the Clinton campaign would later agree to pay
off in exchange for control of it.
Obama finally became interested in the party itself after the 2016 loss, and
recruited Tom Perez, his Labor Secretary, to stop Keith Ellison from winning
the race to run the DNC. Obama and Perez won. DNC funding has been anemic
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, and it recently had to add to its roughly three million in debt. As
president, Obama accomplished a ton. But this is also a part of his legacy.
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