America's Inequality Machine Is Sending the Dow Soaring [feedly]

America's Inequality Machine Is Sending the Dow Soaring
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-15/how-america-s-inequality-machine-is-firing-the-dow-into-orbit

America's Inequality Machine Is Sending the Dow Soaring

By 

Craig Torres

 and 

Jordan Yadoo

December 15, 2017, 4:00 AM EST

The Great Recession is a speck in the rear-view mirror for America's financial markets. They've advanced far beyond pre-crisis levels. In fact, Goldman Sachs says you can go back a century before 2008, and still not find a "bull market in everything" like today's.

If the real economy had roared back the same way, Donald Trump might not be president. Instead, it's been a grind. While unemployment is near a two-decade low, wages have grown slowly by past standards. They're nowhere near keeping pace with the asset-price surge.

Elected on a promise of better jobs and pay, Trump is about to pull the most powerful lever any government has for firing up the economy: fiscal policy. By slashing taxes on corporate profits, its authors say, the Republican plan will unleash the animal spirits of American business -- and everyone will benefit.

A rising tide does lift all boats -- but nowadays, in the U.S., not equally. Under both parties, recoveries have become increasingly lopsided. The current one has helped millions of people find work; it's also benefited asset-owners far more than people who trade their labor for a paycheck. Income distribution, already the most unequal in the developed world, is getting worse. And that's starting to influence everything from America's spending habits to its elections.

"The story of our time is polarization -- by party, by class and by income," said Mark Spindel, founder and chief investment officer at Potomac River Capital in Washington, and co-author of a 2017 book about the Federal Reserve. "I don't see anything in the tax bill to make that any better.''

The Fed's post-2008 toolkit included massive purchases of financial assets, which supported a liftoff on the markets but took time to trickle through to the real economy. Trump's tax critics say his plan will have a similar effect, because companies will spend the windfall on share buybacks or dividends, instead of job-creating investments. Plenty of executives say that's exactly what they'll do.

Bank of America's most recent buyback program totals $18 billion. Chairman Brian Moynihan championed the tax proposal this month. "It's good for corporate America, and it's good for us," he said.

There was an echo there of one of the American business world's classic slogans. As applied to the Trump tax cuts, it's highly misleading, according to Nell Minow, vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors.

Good for U.S.?

This isn't a case of "what's good for General Motors is good for the U.S.," said Minow, who's dedicated her career to pushing corporations toward long-term investments in people and businesses. "In my list of the top 100 things companies should do for sustainable wealth creation, buybacks would be number 100."

Companies in the S&P 500 Index bought $3.5 trillion of their own stock between 2010 and 2016, almost 50 percent more than in the previous expansion. The pace has slowed in the last two years. The tax bill could kickstart it.

Buybacks have fueled the stock rally (there's disagreement about how big a part they played). And the rally's biggest benefits go to the richest. On Twitter last week, Trump invited his followers to check their swelling retirement accounts. Only about half the country's households have any such nest-egg.

Soaring markets helped the top 1 percent of Americans increase their slice of the national wealth to 39 percent in 2016, according to the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances. The bottom 90 percent of families held a one-third share in 1989; that's now shrunk to less than one-quarter.

Republicans are gambling that they can run the economy so hot that companies will hire more workers, and eventually boost their wages. There's a strong argument that the private sector can train them better than government programs can.

'Benefits Everybody'

"The more growth we have, the more that benefits everybody," said Ike Brannon, a former Bush administration Treasury official who's now president of Capital Policy Analytics, a consulting firm. "It forces businesses to train people at the fringes." He points to the late 1990s, when growth averaged more than 4 percent and the poorest one-fifth of households saw substantial income gains.

Looming in the background then was a technology-stocks bubble. It burst in March 2000, plunging the economy into recession. What happened next is telling -- it illustrates the perverse asymmetry of bubbles. In the following three years, those poorest households saw their incomes fall more than twice as much as their richest counterparts.

The pattern was repeated after the even bigger housing crash of late 2007. Today, even after an increase of more than 9 percent over two years, incomes at the bottom are short of pre-crisis peaks, while higher earners have comfortably surpassed them.

Companies flush with cash are using it to buy more customers via mergers, or reward capital through dividends, according William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, the country's biggest labor union group. But American workers won't put up with any more business cycles that yield them few gains, he says. "This is the last time they can get away with it, because the backlash is going to be huge."

In the end, the trend toward inequality amounts to capitalist suicide, Spriggs argues. Companies need demand, which requires rising wages so that workers can afford goods and services. "Businesses can't create themselves, they respond to general growth in income," he said. "Inequality chokes off business development."

Support for that kind of argument is surfacing in unlikely quarters.

The International Monetary Fund used to be so entwined with American government thinking that its preferred market-friendly recipe was known as the Washington Consensus. Now, the Fund is cautiously backing redistributive measures -- falling foulof the Trump administration in the process.

In October, the IMF said rich countries can share their prosperity more evenly, without sacrificing growth, by shifting more of the tax burden onto high earners. It warned that "excessive inequality can erode social cohesion, lead to political polarization, and ultimately lower economic growth."

'Broken System'

The U.S. is already experiencing some of those strains.

During last year's election campaign, both major parties effectively broke in half. In both cases, an outsider candidate scored unexpected wins by running against the party establishment, and railing at an economic system they said was rigged against ordinary Americans.

Self-described socialist Bernie Sanders surprised pundits by mounting a serious challenge in the Democratic contest. Trump won his party's nomination and the presidency. He told voters he had experience on the buy-side of American politics, having paid for favors from both parties, and so was well-placed to fix a "broken system" dominated by corporate lobbyists.

Now, Trump is about to hand corporations -- which are already making high profits by historical standards -- a giant tax cut. The bill "addresses problems we don't have, and makes existing problems worse," said Alan Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton University. "Especially the deficit, inequality, health care, and infrastructure investment."

Trump Promises `Giant Tax Cut' for Christmas

President Donald Trump promised everyday Americans a "giant tax cut for Christmas" in a speech at the White House.

(Source: Bloomberg)

If the tax changes end up helping markets most, they'll be widening a gap noted last month by JPMorgan Chase's chief investment strategist, Jan Loeys. There's not much sign of "economic overheating," which happens when companies start spending more on wages and other inputs, Loeys argued. "Financial overheating, in contrast, is well advanced," he wrote. "It merits monitoring a lot more closely for signs of bubble-trouble." 

Even Trump's Treasury has flagged the danger. Last week, the Office of Financial Research made its annual report to Congress on the vulnerabilities of the financial system. It was sanguine about most of them, from inflation and bank solvency to debt levels.

But the agency, which color-codes its assessments, did see one major threat -- from market risk. That gauge is at red alert.

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The Republican Party's Heartlessness--the Casualty Loss Provision of the purported "tax reform" legislation [feedly]

The Republican Party's Heartlessness--the Casualty Loss Provision of the purported "tax reform" legislation
http://ataxingmatter.blogs.com/tax/2017/12/the-republican-partys-heartlessness-the-casualty-loss-provision-of-the-purported-tax-reform-legislat.html

The GOP is cruising towards passage of its class warfare tax legislation that continues the long trend of Republican tax policy to redistribute upwards to the very rich.  The legislation, however, is supported by a small minority of the American public (latest polls put support for the tax legislation at less than 30%). See, e.g., Allan Smith, Polls show key Republicans could get whacked by the tax bill, Business Insider.com (Dec. 4, 2017). That's astonishing when you consider that one provision in both the House and Senate bills that is used as a "revenue raiser" to pay for the huge tax subsidies to corporations and wealthy taxpayers will be especially hard hitting to lots of middle class and lower-income people, including many who voted for Trump.

The legislation will gut the "casualty loss" provision that currently allows taxpayers to deduct losses from hurricanes and fires and other accidents and forces of nature, to the extent those losses aren't covered by insurance (after a $100 per loss limitation).  Thus, people who were flooded by Harvey can claim casualty losses on their 2017 tax returns for amounts not covered by insurance.  People who lost their homes in the fires that raged earlier this fall in northern California can claim casualty losses on their 2017 tax returns for amounts not covered by insurance.  But, as Bob Cesca notes for Salon.com, As L.A. Burns, Republicans Vote for a Tax Hike on the Victims (Dec. 8, 2017).  See also Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting News, 2017 Tax Reform: proposed individual tax changes in the 'Tax Cuts & Jobs Act' (Nov. 3, 2017) and Sally Schreiber et al, Details of Tax Reform Legislation Revealed, Journal of Accountancy (Nov. 2, 2017) (noting that the personal casualty loss is repealed, except, in the House version, for such losses associated with special disaster relief legislation--which requires congressional action for each one); Tony Nitti, Senate Releases Tax Bill: Here's How It Compares to Current Law & the House Plan, Forbes.com (Nov. 10, 2017).

You have to wonder just how the Republican Party and Trump administration became so completely heartless.  And why they think that Americans won't notice that they only care about multimillionaires in the "one percent".

VISIT WEBSITE
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WTO and Food Security: Biting the Hand that Feeds the Poor [feedly]

WTO and Food Security: Biting the Hand that Feeds the Poor
http://triplecrisis.com/wto-and-food-security-biting-the-hand-that-feeds-the-poor/

Timothy A. Wise

Since 2013, controversy has swirled around India's National Food Security Act (NFSA), the most ambitious food security initiative in the world, with its plans to buy food grains from small-scale farmers to distribute to some 840 million poor Indians, two-thirds of the country's people. The controversy came at the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the U.S. government accused India of unfairly subsidizing its farmers by paying a support price above market prices.

At the WTO biannual ministerial conference in Bali, India stood firm, questioning the subsidy calculation as an artifact of old WTO rulemaking and asserting that, in any case, such programs that are used for legitimate food security purposes should be exempt from such restrictions. The conflict nearly torpedoed the WTO's modest negotiated agreements in Bali, but a "Peace Clause" granted India and other developing countries with such programs a grace period while negotiators tried to reach a permanent solution. (See my coverage of the controversy here.)

That grace period is up now, as trade ministers from across the globe board planes for the December 10 opening of the WTO's 11^th Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. With no progress on the matter at the 2015 conference in Nairobi, Kenya, India and other developing countries have called for a simple exemption of such programs from WTO restrictions. U.S. negotiators, themselves under fire for "dumping" agricultural surpluses on global markets at prices below the costs of production, are demanding more restrictive measures and further concessions from developing countries.

I covered the Bali conflict, pointing out the unabashed hypocrisy of the U.S. government, which subsidizes wealthier farmers at higher rates for less compelling reasons, calling out a far poorer country for subsidizing its much poorer farmers for the purpose of feeding a large and hungry population.

As the controversy dragged on toward the Nairobi WTO meeting in late 2015, I traveled to India to see the reality of the National Food Security Act. What I found were moderate subsidies, which helped stabilize rural markets while putting urgently needed food rations into hands of poor women so they could feed their families. What I saw, in fact, was a far more ambitious version of the U.S. farm programs enacted as part of the New Deal for much the same reasons.

Feeding the hungry

I traveled to Shivpuri in the state of Madhya Pradesh, an area of the country in which 26 starvation deaths in 2001 and 2002 had shocked the nation and pushed the country's Supreme Court into intervening to insist that the government do more to ensure poor citizens' right to food.

According to the 2011 Madhya Pradesh Development Report, the state had the highest infant mortality rate in India—42 percent of children under five were stunted and 36 percent were underweight, with 18 percent qualified as severely underweight, or "wasted." As one of India's most populous states, with 75 million people, the human costs of food insecurity, even in just this one state, boggled the mind. In 2003, an estimated 160,000 children died before their fifth birthday, a child death rate of 89 per 1,000 live births.

The NFSA increased the basic food ration from 20 to 35 kilos/month (44 to 77 pounds/month) of cereals for a family, and expanded eligibility so the majority of rural Indians could qualify. Beyond the basic grains—rice and wheat—the NFSA entitled recipients to distributions of sugar, salt, and kerosene for cooking. All were given out by the Public Distribution System (PDS) through a network of thousands of village-level ration shops.

Recipients pay very low, subsidized prices; a kilo of rice that might cost 20 rupees in the market cost just 1 rupee in the ration shop—about 1 penny per pound instead of 10. A ration card was issued to qualified female heads of household, with the card stamped and registered to show compliance, a system soon to be replaced with more corruption-proof, fingerprint-based biometric systems for identifying beneficiaries and documenting distributions.

In the villages of Upsil, Benskedi, and Bineka, I met villagers who generally applauded the expansion of the program but demanded better service from the ration shops as well as the inclusion of lentils and cooking oil, key local sources of protein and fat. Children seemed poor but not desperately malnourished, though one can't know from such a visit.

As it turned out, I visited these villages at one of the less needy times of year, just after food crops had been harvested. Three months earlier, I would have seen the hungry season, that paradoxical period when the fields are green with early growth but last year's stores have long run out. In regions as poor as Shivpuri, they have a different name for that season.

"We call it the season of death," said Sachin Jain of Vikas Sanvad, a member organization of the Right to Food Network in the state capital of Bhopal. Nineteen people in the region died in 2011 from malnutrition. Six died just two months before my visit.

But Sachin confirmed that things were improving with the NFSA. Thanks to the full range of court-ordered anti-hunger measures—school lunches, Integrated Child Development Services for women and young children, and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program, in addition to NFSA—rural welfare had improved considerably. Government spending on programs for children under six years old increased twentyfold over the previous decade. The child death rate had been cut almost in half in 10 years. In Madhya Pradesh, the percentage of underweight children had dropped from 60 percent in 2006 to 43 percent in 2016.

Food better to distribute than cash

There is significant variation in how well the NFSA is being implemented across India's vast territory, but Madhya Pradesh has emerged as a leader. That was thanks in no small part to government officials like Dr. Manohar Agnani, State Commissioner for Food and Civil Supplies, the agency in charge of the Public Distribution System.

Dr. Agnani told me that Madhya Pradesh, with its high poverty levels and strong program inclusion, expects to enroll 75 percent of the state population, not just 67 percent, more than 60 million people. For reference, that is more beneficiaries than the U.S. has in its entire SNAP (food stamp) program.

He said food distributions for India were far preferable to cash benefits, which are favored by the U.S. government because they are seen as less "market-distorting." Agnani was dismissive of the new fascination with cash. "We have discrimination based on gender and caste," he said. Many male heads of household, he told me, would use cash distributions for things other than food, and for themselves rather than their families. Men would more readily control the income. "I don't believe in efficiency at the cost of effectiveness and gender equity," he went on.

Agnani, who has since moved on to a job with the national Health Ministry, said that Madhya Pradesh has proven that the NFSA can be implemented efficiently and effectively to reach the millions of Indians going hungry. But what about its procurement at subsidized prices? That was the question on the table at the WTO.

Originally published by Food Tank.

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Game Theory and the Greater Good

POSTED ON: December 10, 2017TOPICS: dean's note, game theory

Our current political moment

Before I begin today's note, a comment on recent political events. We have just seen the Senate pass a bill that will systematically undermine previous efforts towards progressive taxation, widen income gaps, deepen challenges to social mobility, and start a process of inexorably chipping away at the Affordable Care Act, exposing millions to again being uninsured or having substandard insurance. At the same time, Congress continues to fail to reauthorize spending for the Children's Health Insurance Program, which provides low-cost health insurance coverage for families who do not qualify for Medicaid. These are all, sadly, systematic efforts to place the interests of a few—in particular, those who already have substantial advantage in this country—over the interests of the many. Early in the Trump administration, I wrote about its potential impact on the health of the public. It is deeply troubling that the worries that were then just hints on the horizon are slowly coming to fruition. To my mind, the challenges of the present are, once again, a reminder of the profound impact that politics can have on population health, and why our work must be concerned with ensuring that the values that animate public health are front and center in the national conversation. While there is little to lift the spirit in the face of some of the administration's recent actions, I continue to hope that these years will prove formative for a generation of students who are coming of age during a time of trial for the health of populations, and who will use the troubled present as inspiration for work that improves the conditions that create health in the coming decades.

To continue our engagement with this topic, on Tuesday, May 8, 2018, we will, together with the Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health in the Trump Era, host a daylong symposium, called "The Trump Administration and the Health of the Public." The symposium will aim to catalyze data-informed discussion about how the changes we are seeing to national policy may influence public health now and in the future. Additional details will be posted online. For today—a note that explores the forces that underlie our country's political shifts, written with the goal of implementing healthier polices on the national stage, once our present moment has passed.

On game theory

Those of us who study the health of populations know that populations do not always act in their collective best interest. Americans, for example, have long been ambivalent about policies that could improve the country's health, such as federal welfare benefits and universal health care. Additionally, as Professor Jacob Bor's research shows, many of the country's unhealthiest citizens voted for Donald Trump, who has since done much to undermine the polices and programs that safeguard health in the US. What makes people act against their core interests? Journalist Thomas Frank famously tackled this question in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. The book looks at how Kansans went from being historically progressive to strongly conservative, electing candidates who, once in office, implemented economic policies that disadvantaged the very working-class voters who put them in power. With this in mind, today's note seeks to answer a perennial, perplexing question: Why do populations oppose measures that could improve their health?

To answer this, I will draw an example from a perhaps unexpected place: the world of game theory. It is here that we encounter the ultimatum game. The ultimatum game is an economic experiment in which two players participate. Player One is given a sum of money and the choice of how to apportion it between herself and Player Two. She may give Player Two all of the money, or none. The second player then chooses whether to accept or reject the first player's offer. If he rejects it, both players get nothing. The game depends on individual self-interest regulating itself, so that each player will benefit, however unequally. Figure 1 provides a useful visualization of the game's dynamics, when the total sum is $10.

Figure 1.
Talwalkar P. The Ultimatum Game and the Hollywood Writer's Strike. Mind Your Decisions Web site. https://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/01/15/game-theory-tuesdays-the-ultimatum-game-and-hollywood/ Published January 15, 2008. Accessed November 26, 2017.

Theoretically, assuming rational actions on the part of both participants, the second player would always accept whatever Player One offers, since something is always better than nothing. Yet this is not invariably the case. On average, second players tend to accept offers above 40 percent of the total sum, with about half of all second players declining offers below 30 percent. The motivation of players who decline the lower offer is not difficult to guess. If they believe that Player One is taking advantage, or benefitting unfairly from the rules of the system, it opens the door to a sense of competition, turning what should be a mutually beneficial exchange into a zero-sum game. As a consequence, the second player would rather no one benefit, than someone do so apparently at his expense.

Lessons for our work in population health

Our politics often shows how this motivation can be used to rally support for policies that do not always serve the people who vote for them, but that nevertheless speak to the anger and anxiety of these populations—to their frustration with the status quo or suspicion of certain socioeconomic groups. This can mean the creation of scapegoats, who come to embody "the unfair first player"—the individuals or groups who seem to undeservedly benefit from the advantages of a given policy. During the 2016 election, for example, then-candidate Donald Trump leveraged fear of "the job-taking immigrant" into working-class support for a movement that has, so far, done little to benefit the working class. More recently, opponents of the Affordable Care Act have argued, in effect, that healthy people should not have to subsidize the care of sick people, that those "who have done things the right way" should be rewarded, and that those who have "not" should fend for themselves.

How can we avoid this "ultimatum game trap?" Game theory suggests a possible solution. Suppose each player in the game is weighing her or his options. Player One knows that she must offer Player Two something, or else Player Two has no incentive to accept. Player Two knows he can only gain by accepting whatever he is offered, as long as it is more than nothing. Each understands how adhering to this strategy benefits the other player, not to mention their own self-interest. They therefore decide not to deviate from the course of action that will lead to the best outcome for them both: Player One offers a sum, and Player Two accepts it. This solution is called the Nash Equilibrium, named after the economist John Nash. To function, it requires each player to see which course of action is most beneficial for himself and his fellow player, and then to not deviate from what is understood to be the best strategy for success. A "real-world" parallel would be obeying a law that no one has the incentive to break, even if that law were to go unenforced—obeying traffic lights, for example, when a car is driving in your direction. Or, indeed, investing in health as a public good in a country where deleterious social, economic, and environmental influences put populations at risk of injury and disease every day. Through this framework, positive outcomes occur when self-interest meets an awareness of how the needs of others need not conflict with, indeed may even complement, one's own. For populations to make choices that are more in line with their interests, they must first see how what is good for others can be good for them, and vice-versa—that the world does not have to be divided into "winners" and "losers," where someone can only thrive at another's expense.

I have written previously about the challenge of implementing measures that could improve the health of all, when some individuals or groups perceive these measures to be burdensome. I suggested that vaccines are an example of how something that was once viewed with skepticism can eventually achieve acceptance when its proven benefits become widely known. It is encouraging that this is so—that spreading awareness of a public health good can be enough to change minds and persuade populations to accept initiatives for the betterment of all. However, as we have seen, this is not always possible. Sometimes, a measure's benefits can be clear, yet it will still be opposed on the grounds that it might help the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Often, this opposition has its roots in the resentment of particular socioeconomic groups. To overcome this resentment, and apply the Nash equilibrium to population health, we must not only promote health as a collective value, we must continue to emphasize that this value is not attainable as long as our society tolerates stigma and hate. These forces have great power to mobilize and mislead, distracting populations from core health interests. For this reason, any effort to nudge the public towards a deeper understanding of the true causes of health must approach advocating for the marginalized not as an incidental goal, but as a central organizing principle. This fits with the mission of public health, and with our school's stated aim "to improve the health of local, national, and international populations, particularly the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable." Our pursuit of these goals points us towards a truly broad-based movement in favor of the institutions and policies that promote health. Ultimately, it is through cooperation, rather than competition, that we can best apply the lessons of game theory to the work of public health, empowering populations to know, and do, what is in their best interests.

I hope everyone has a terrific week. Until next week.

Warm Regards,

Sandro

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor
Boston University School of Public Health
Twitter: @sandrogalea

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Eric DelGizzo for his contributions to this Dean's Note.

Previous Dean's Notes are archived at: http://www.bu.edu/sph/tag/deans-note/

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AFL-CIO Joins CWA Call for $4,000 Wage Increase for Working People [feedly]

AFL-CIO Joins CWA Call for $4,000 Wage Increase for Working People
https://aflcio.org/2017/12/12/afl-cio-joins-cwa-call-4000-wage-increase-working-people

CWA

The Donald Trump administration repeatedly has claimed that its tax bill would result in a $4,000 wage increase for working people. Today, the AFL-CIO has joined a campaign by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) to demand corporations guarantee this raise in writing. The labor federation is rallying the power of its 12.5 million members and the entire union movement to support this campaign in every industry.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said:

CWA has inspired an innovative movement to demand working people get our fair share and expose the scam that is the Republican tax bill. Working people have heard the same old lies about the benefits of economic policies written by and for greedy corporations for too long. This campaign is about holding corporations and politicians accountable to their claims and getting a much-needed raise for America's workers.

On Nov. 20, CWA sent a letter to its major employers, including AT&T, Verizon, General Electric Co., American Airlines and NBC Universal, calling on them to commit to that raise in writing. In joining the CWA's efforts, the AFL-CIO is encouraging all unions from all sectors to join in by reaching out to their employers and encouraging all working people to sign a petition that puts employers on notice that they will be held accountable if the Republican tax bill becomes law. 

In a powerful op-ed, CWA President Christopher Shelton laid out how the Republican tax scam would hurt working people and increase the deficit by more than $1 trillion:

Republicans are on the brink of passing a massive tax overhaul, and it's looking like the biggest con of the Trump era so far. And that's saying a lot.

The legislation being jammed through by the House and Senate Republicans is a tax giveaway to corporations and the richest 1 percent, paid for by working and middle-income families.

Across the board, working people will be hurt by this plan, whether by the new incentives to corporations to send U.S. jobs overseas, the loss of the medical expense deduction, new taxes imposed on education benefits, the inability to deduct interest on student loans, the loss of state and local tax deductions, or the forced budget cuts to Medicare, transportation, health care and other critical programs.

Despite the double-talk from Republicans anxious to sell this plan, it's not hard to figure out who Republicans really want to help. Why else would tax cuts for corporations and tax changes that benefit the wealthiest Americans—like the estate tax—be permanent, while individual tax cuts for middle-income families are only temporary?...

Working people know better than to believe the boss' promises unless they are in writing. That's why my union has asked some of our biggest employers to sign an agreement that says if the tax plan passes, working people will get their $4,000.

Kenneth Quinnell Tue, 12/12/2017 - 14:10

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Urban Institute: How Would Spending on Children be Affected by the Proposed 2018 Budget? [feedly]

How Would Spending on Children be Affected by the Proposed 2018 Budget?
https://www.urban.org/research/publication/how-would-spending-children-be-affected-proposed-2018-budget

If the Trump administration's proposed 2018 budget were to be fully adopted, federal spending on children would be at least 9 percent lower over the 10-year budget window compared with projections under current law. The largest proportional cuts would be to spending on education programs, which would be reduced by 15 percent below baseline spending projections for 2018–27. SNAP, Medicaid, and TANF would also experience substantial cuts, and some housing and social services programs would be eliminated entirely. The brief builds off the Urban Institute's annual Kids' Share reports, which track government spending on children annually and current-law projections.

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