The Tax Reform legislation pushed by President Donald Trump is a day or days away from being voted upon in the US Congress.  One Louisiana progressive-leaning organization, Louisiana Budget Progress, compiled the below in its daily newsletter.

What the tax bill does

Michael R. Bloomberg, billionaire and former mayor of New York City contends that the tax bill being considered by Congress will not lead to meaningful wage gains or growth. And while Bloomberg is a proponent of revenue-neutral tax reform, he gives his insights on what the current plan will do:

• It takes money away from schools and students.
• It restricts our ability to invest in infrastructure.
• It does nothing to boost real wages while making health insurance more expensive.
• It makes it harder to control the costs of Medicare and Social Security without cutting defense and other spending -- or further exploding the deficit.

Fr. Fred Kammer, director of Loyola University's Jesuit Social Research Institute provides a moral case against the bill in a letter to The Advocate.

Secondly, the bill increases the regressiveness of the tax system, increasing taxes on low-and-moderate income individuals and families while delivering increased benefits to corporations and the wealthy. This will exacerbate the already egregious income and wealth inequity within our society. As the U.S. Catholic Bishops note in their letter of November 22 to the U.S. Senate: "Tax breaks for the financially secure, including millionaires and billionaires, should not be made possible by increased taxes to families struggling to meet their daily needs."

Trump administration bans words from budget

State senator Sharon Hewitt of Slidell, introduced legislation in 2017 that establishes a pilot evidence-based budgeting process for adult mental health programs. The bill passed unanimously in Louisiana's Senate and by a 91 - 5 margin in the House. But, it would not be welcome in President Donald Trump's budget proposal. That's because evidence-based is one of seven words banned from the budget document by The White House. Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin report for The Washington Post.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of HHS, were given a list of seven prohibited words or phrases during a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget. The words to avoid: "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based" and "science-based."

 

Surging U.S. inequality due to policy choices

Christopher Ingraham reports for The Washington Post's Wonkblog that policy choices in the United States are fanning the flames of mounting income inequality. Louisiana has the second-highest rate of income inequality among the states.

The 2018 World Inequality Report, written by a team of leading international economists including Thomas Piketty of "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" fame, finds that the rise of income inequality in the United States is "largely due to massive educational inequalities, combined with a tax system that grew less progressive despite a surge in top labor compensation since the 1980s, and in top capital incomes in the 2000s." ... The tax bill under consideration in Congress is likely to drive these disparities even wider, via a massive corporate tax cut and further reductions in the estate tax and the income-tax rate for millionaires.