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The cynic in me was wholly unsurprised when the Associated Press reported the Department of Justice (DoJ) concluded that no formal charges would be filed against any of the IRS officials embroiled in the IRS scandal of 2013. In a letter to Congress, the DoJ announced that they found “no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”
Never mind the fact that computer hard drives and emails disappeared, secret email accounts were maintained, interoffice messaging systems were used to avoid written records, only one conservative group received approval under Lerner in three years, and some groups remain unapproved after 5 years — all while Obama’s brother received retroactive tax-exempt approval in less than 30 days.
According to the DoJ letter, such actions were merely, “mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia.” That is utter nonsense.
Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times did a decent round up of the news and reactions to the decision.
“The IRS did mishandle tea party and conservative groups’ nonprofit applications, but their behavior didn’t break any laws, the Justice Department said in a letter to Congress Friday that cleared the tax agency and former senior executive Lois G. Lerner of any crimes.
“Ineffective management is not a crime,” Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik said in a letter to the House Ways and Means Committee. “The Department of Justice’s exhaustive probe revealed no evidence that would support a criminal prosecution. What occurred is disquieting and may necessitate corrective action — but it does not warrant criminal prosecution.”
The decision comes more than two years after the IRS’s internal watchdog reported that auditors singled out tea party groups’ applications for special scrutiny and delayed those applications beyond reasonable timelines, preventing the groups from being able to say they were officially recognized nonprofits.
The agency initially admitted its bad behavior, and President Obama vowed an investigation — but he later said, in the middle of the probe, that there was no evidence of corruption.
Some Republicans have questioned the validity of the probe from the beginning, after learning that one of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the investigation was a contributor to Mr. Obama’s political campaigns.
In its letter Friday the Justice Department specifically cleared Ms. Lerner, a senior executive in charge of approving the groups’ applications, who had authored a number of emails that suggested a bias against the tea party movement.
Investigators said none of the witnesses they interviewed believed Ms. Lerner acted out of political motives, and said that Ms. Lerner seemed to try to correct the inappropriate scrutiny once she “recognized that it was wrong.”
“In fact, Ms. Lerner was the first IRS official to recognize the magnitude of the problem and to take concerted steps to fix it,” Mr. Kadzik wrote.
Congressional Democrats said the decision confirmed what they’d figured out years ago — that there was no underhanded political dealing at the agency.
“Over the past five years, Republicans in the House of Representatives have squandered literally tens of millions of dollars going down all kinds of investigative rabbit holes — IRS, Planned Parenthood, Benghazi — with absolutely no evidence of illegal activity,” said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Benghazi investigation and ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
The House Ways and Means Committee conducted its own investigation into the IRS’s tea party targeting, as did the Senate Finance Committee. The House panel was the one that voted to refer Ms. Lerner’s behavior to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, called the Friday letter “deeply disappointing,” but said it wasn’t a surprise given the bent of the Obama administration.
He said his committee’s probe did find “serious and unprecedented actions” by Ms. Lerner that deprived tea party groups of their rights.
“The American people deserve better than this. Despite the DOJ closing its investigation, the Ways and Means Committee will continue to find answers and hold the IRS accountable for its actions,” he said.
Ms. Lerner’s lawyers, in a statement, said they were “gratified but not surprised” by the announcement.
“Anyone who takes a serious and impartial look at the facts would reach the same conclusion as the Justice Department,” they said, adding that she cooperated with the investigators and answered their questions.
That stands in contrast to her interaction with Congress, where she refused to answer questions, invoking her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent — but only after she delivered a statement declaring her innocence.
The House Oversight Committee concluded that she was not, in fact, able to invoke the Fifth Amendment at that point, and when she refused to answer questions, the House voted to hold her in contempt of Congress.
The Justice Department declined to pursue that case, too, arguing that her claim of Fifth Amendment rights was likely to succeed.
Groups that faced targeting by the IRS were infuriated by Friday’s decision.
“To say there is no evidence of discrimination makes a mockery of all we witnessed in the last two years,” said Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, which had its application for nonprofit status delayed as it and another group she was involved in faced scrutiny by everyone from the FBI to federal occupational health authorities.“
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I have written numerous times in the past few months of the fiscal distress in Puerto Rico. I have discussed how Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is the result of years of government mismanagement, and a major key to getting Puerto Rico back on track is to reduce the size and scope of government.
Now, President Obama is calling on Congress to directly aid Puerto Rico, with a plan that is very near a bailout. I’m reprinting the NYTimes article in full below, so to keep the details about the plan intact. I will write my analysis in a separate article.
_______
“Looking for a way to help debt-ridden Puerto Rico, administration officials on Wednesday proposed an ambitious — if politically perilous — plan that stops short of a direct federal bailout but that its backers hope is sweeping enough to keep the island from becoming America’s Greece.
The plan would create a new territorial bankruptcy regime and impose new fiscal oversight on Puerto Rico, which is mired in the depths of a decade-long recession, running out of cash and struggling to make payments on $72 billion of debt. It represents an urgent bid by President Obama to offer a way forward. But it requires cooperation from a Republican-led Congress bent on imposing spending restraint.
In describing the package on Wednesday, administration officials emphasized that they had exhausted the limits of their own authority to help Puerto Rico, and needed quick action by Congress to avoid a catastrophe.
“Administrative actions cannot solve the crisis,” Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, said in a joint statement with Jeffrey D. Zients, the National Economic Council director, and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the health and human services secretary.
“Only Congress has the authority to provide Puerto Rico with the necessary tools to address its near-term challenges and promote long-term growth,” the statement said.
The situation in Puerto Rico “risks turning into a humanitarian crisis as early as this winter,” one senior administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly. Antonio Weiss, Mr. Lew’s counselor, will explain the administration’s plan in Capitol Hill testimony on Thursday.
The Puerto Rican government has already “done a lot” to restore fiscal order, the official added, but “Puerto Rico cannot do it on its own, and the United States government has a responsibility to 3.5 million Americans living in Puerto Rico” to step in with additional help.
The plan was shared late Wednesday with The New York Times and Agencia EFE, a news organization in Puerto Rico. On the same day, the island’s Government Development Bank said it had ended weeks of fruitless negotiations with certain creditors, aimed at persuading them to voluntarily accept lower bond payments. The bank has a bond payment of about $300 million coming due on Dec. 1.
Virtually all of the administration’s proposed plan would have to be refined and approved by Congress. It would create a special territorial bankruptcy regime — something that does not now exist — to give Puerto Rico a place to restructure all of its $72 billion in debt, which it says it cannot hope to repay.
The new regime could ultimately be a new chapter of the bankruptcy code, available only to Puerto Rico and other American territories. A senior administration official said the specifics would be left up to Congress.
In a nod to Republicans in Congress, who have resisted even limited bankruptcy access for Puerto Rico, the administration also proposes to establish an independent body to monitor the island’s fiscal affairs. Its role would be to improve Puerto Rico’s credibility by policing the imposition of structural economic reforms; it would also demand better financial disclosures.
Officials said the oversight body might resemble one that Congress established for the District of Columbia in the 1990s.
At the same time, the package would seek to bring Puerto Rico, where unemployment tops 12 percent and 46 percent of citizens qualify for Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, into parity with the federal health programs and tax credits available in the states.
The proposal calls for a Medicaid overhaul in Puerto Rico that would expand coverage and access to important services in the short term, and eventually remove a cap that currently applies to the island’s Medicaid program. The effect would be more federal dollars for the Medicaid program in Puerto Rico. Administration officials also said they believed Puerto Rico’s health care facilities needed to be brought up to standards on the mainland.
The administration is also proposing to extend the earned-income tax credit, a refundable credit for the working poor that is payable even to people who earn too little to owe income tax. It is not currently available in Puerto Rico.
Officials said that extending that type of tax credit would help increase the labor participation rate on the island, now a paltry 40 percent, the lowest in the United States and its territories. A fact sheet compiled by the administration said it would provide an “added incentive for formal participation in Puerto Rico’s economy.”
The tax credit, invented by conservative economists, already enjoys some degree of bipartisan backing. Administration officials who detailed the proposal offered no estimate of the cost of extending it to Puerto Rico, nor did they have a cost projection for the Medicaid expansion.
The legislative proposal will be presented on Thursday to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which has jurisdiction over all of America’s territories. It is led by Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, which was itself a territory until 1959, when it became the 49th state.
Puerto Rico is now barred from seeking any form of relief under Chapter 9, the type of bankruptcy that municipal governments use. The administration’s proposal for a territorial bankruptcy regime represents a bolder approach than the bankruptcy bills that Congress has considered since the island’s debt crisis began.
Federal law allows for cities, counties, special districts and the like to seek bankruptcy protection if their states agree, but the states themselves are excluded. There are concerns that if Puerto Rico gains access to bankruptcy, fiscally troubled states like Illinois might try to follow suit.
Puerto Rico’s creditors have been arguing that the island’s government has been portraying its financial situation as beyond repair, hoping to force the administration and Congress to give it access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The recent bankruptcies of distressed cities like Detroit showed them that bondholders can emerge with just pennies on the dollar, and they believe the same thing will happen if Puerto Rico is allowed to declare bankruptcy.
The legislation introduced so far would make bankruptcy relief available only to Puerto Rico’s municipalities and its government enterprises, not to the government itself. Even those limited bills have failed to gain support from Republican lawmakers.
There is some willingness, particularly among top Senate Republicans, to work out a compromise on the bankruptcy issue, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly about it. But the Republican leadership appears willing only to grant Puerto Rico limited access to the bankruptcy courts and only with strings attached, like a federal “control board” to oversee the island’s finances.
Control boards have been used in cases of severe municipal distress to take the power to spend public money out of the hands of elected officials. They do not generally have the powers that bankruptcy judges do to abrogate contracts, such as labor contracts and promises to repay debt.
Both Democrats and Republicans are under pressure to respond to the Puerto Rico crisis. Largely because of the island’s economic problems, Puerto Ricans are flooding the mainland United States, particularly central Florida, and are becoming an increasingly important voting bloc in the 2016 presidential race.
In the hearing, Puerto Rico’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, will offer his first congressional testimony since his announcement in June that Puerto Rico’s debt had become “unpayable” and he would seek a “negotiated moratorium” with its creditors. His most recent appearance was in 2013, when he accused advocates of statehood of skewing a 2011 plebiscite to make it appear that a majority wanted Puerto Rico to become a state.
“That is a great example of how you can lie with numbers,” he told the same Senate panel at the time.
Another scheduled witness is Pedro Pierluisi, Puerto Rico’s nonvoting member of Congress and the statehood advocate who designed the 2011 voting process that the governor disputed. Mr. Pierluisi introduced the House bill to to give very limited bankruptcy access to Puerto Rico. In September, he testified before the Senate Finance Committee, challenging the governor’s handling of the debt crisis and saying that general-obligation bonds “must be paid — period.” The third witness is to be Mr. Weiss, the special adviser to the Treasury Secretary.”
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The next open enrollment period for Obamacare begins in a few weeks. “Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced Thursday that an expected 10 million Americans will be covered by late 2016 by health plans they bought on the federal and state insurance exchanges created under the law.”
This is a far cry from the CBO projections when Obamacare was passed. Last year, we saw lower revisions for enrollment from 13 million to a hopeful 9.1 million. Obamacare may have barely hit THAT target; the Washington Post reports that the number looks to be around “9.1 million Americans the administration believes will have ACA health plans by the end of this year.”
This is stunning news. To say that 10 million will be covered by 2016 means that the Obama Administration predicts a mere 1 MILLION enrollees this year. As the Washington Post reminds us, 10 million is “just half the most recent forecast by congressional budget analysts, who have long expected 2016 to usher in the biggest surge in enrollment.”
CBO forecasts had predicted 21 million enrollees in 2016, and 32 million by 2019. As expected, there are a litany of excuses for the abysmal numbers:
Still, substantive forces are at work behind the calculation. According to HHS estimates, about 10.5 million uninsured people are eligible to buy a health plan on the exchange, and they are proving more difficult to reach than those who bought coverage early on.
In addition, federal health officials point out that the dynamics of insurance coverage have not been playing out as analysts expected. Fewer employers have dropped health benefits for their workers, and fewer consumers have switched from older policies they purchased on their own. Both factors, HHS officials say, play into their projection of how many people are likely to gravitate to the exchanges.
HHS contended on Thursday that exchange enrollment, originally pegged to reach 24 million within several years, is not plateauing but is instead on “a much longer path towards equilibrium,” as a senior official said.”
What’s even less clear is how how this affects the budget projections and funding of Obamacare. An article last month in the Washington Times outlined how the enrollees for 2016 needed to double to stay solvent. On top of that, the penalty for not having insurance increases begins to increase sharply. The penalty during the first year was $95 or 1 percent of income above the filing threshold — a relatively minor bite. For tax year 2015, the penalty will be $325 or 2 percent of income, and for 2016 it will be $695 or 2.5 percent of income. Per person.
Remember when we were told that Obamacare would help millions to have insurance and also save Americans $2500/family? Me too.
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It was refreshing to read an Op-Ed about overregulation in the Washington Examiner today. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush is absolutely correct that the explosive expansion of regulations during Obama’s Administration has been a major factor in the tepid economic recovery. I enjoyed seeing a candidate speak to this issue. Below are his remarks in full:
“President Obama has presided over a massive expansion of the federal government during his six and half years in office. He shepherded Obamacare into law — a $1.7 trillion spending bill that vastly increased Washington’s role in the healthcare industry. He has raised taxes by nearly $2 trillion, while adding $8 trillion to the national debt. The president has also imposed more than 2,500 new regulations on the American economy that carry a staggering price tag of $670 billion.
It should come as no surprise then that our economy has limped along during the Obama presidency. The anemic two percent rate of growth on his watch is one of the weakest recoveries in American history and it has resulted in labor force participation falling to a 38-year low. Middle class families’ incomes have fallen by $2,000 and there are six million more people living in poverty today than when Barack Obama took the oath of office.
Right now, federal regulations cost our economy $1.9 trillion a year. This works out to an average of $15,000 per household. We need to cut excessive federal red tape and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in our nation.
Obama-era regulations such as those in Dodd-Frank, Obamacare, and his War on Coal are having a chilling effect on our economy. As president of the United States, I will conduct a spring cleaning of existing regulations to get rid of the ones that are too costly or not providing value to the American people. I will establish a regulatory budget that ensures that for every new dollar of regulations we impose on the American people we cut a dollar of existing regulations somewhere else. I will appoint judges to the judiciary who are committed to reining in regulatory excesses and preventing unelected regulators from exceeding the intent of Congress.
Finally, I will sign into law the REINS Act, which will provide another check on executive agency regulatory authority. The REINS Act would ensure that major rules and regulations are approved by Congress before they can take effect.
Regulations act as a hidden tax on the American people. Reining in their cost is just as important as reducing taxes. When coupled with my bold plan to reduce tax rates and simplify our tax code, my regulatory reform agenda will help drive America to four percent annual growth. Together, these policies will result in the average family seeing their income increase by $3,000 and their tax burden decline by $2,000. This is a significant boost in a middle class family’s budget that will make it easier for them to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, save for college and build a nest egg for retirement.
I know how to do this, because as governor of Florida, I cut taxes every year, by $19 billion total. I streamlined regulations and made my state the national leader in small business creation. During the final seven years of my governorship, Florida led the nation in job creation. Our unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent and we added 1.3 million new jobs. Over the course of my full two terms in office, Florida averaged 4.4 percent economic growth.
Secretary Hillary Clinton will double down on the massive expansion of taxes, debt and regulations we have seen under President Obama. I am offering the country a different vision that will empower entrepreneurs and American businesses to grow and provide better wages and benefits to the American people. I look forward to having the debate with Hillary Clinton and her allies on the defeatist Left about how best to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in America and provide a boost to a middle class that hasn’t seen its wages rise in 15 years.”
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The recent Wall Street Journal article discussing the pitfalls of raising interests rates in near future was so utterly fully of incorrect information and assumptions, that I felt compelled to call out the author, Mr. Narayana Kocherlakota, for his pomposity. He contends that raising the interest rates — we’re talking .25% here — would “create profound economic risks….given the prevailing economic conditions.” Though Mr. Kocherlakota recognizes the fragility of our current economy, he fails to recognize that Obama’s economic policies and the Fed’s meddling are the chief sources of the malcontent.
So here we have the current president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis blathering on and on as if his point of view — that very low interest rates are necessary and good — is a foregone conclusion. But it’s not. Any economist worth his salt knows that the problem all along is one that Mr. Kocherlakota has not even considered, because it is the exact opposition of his world view. Low interest rates have been the problem all along, not the solution. Yet we have this Fed chief who can’t even understand basic economics and has the audacity to pontificate from the Wall Street Journal on a point that is incorrect.
These sustained low interest rates have been harmful to our recovery. The assertion that inflation is merely 0.3% (and therefore well under the “target 2% rate”) is laughable. Ask anyone who has purchased food or paid energy costs in the last several years, and they will tell a different story. Everything is more expensive than it was a few years ago. Compound that with soaring healthcare costs, rising taxes (at all levels of government) and stagnant wages, and the result is an anemic economy.
For Mr. Kocherlakota to suggest that a .25% rate hike, therefore, would “discourage spending” and “create a drag on economic activity” is a slap in the face to all the Americans who diligently saved for their retirement golden years — only to watch their investments and savings shrink because of the non-existent interest rates and loss of Return On Investment (ROI).
These Fed officials are just out of touch with reality. For instance, QE1, 2, and 3 were miserable failures. The open-endedness of floodgate printing left consumers and investors unsure of what to do with their money for a very long time; now that quantitative easing has ended, with no measurable positive results, we have prolonged, and thus weakened, our ability to recover satisfactorily. But officials like Mr. Kocherlakota believe otherwise.
Case-in-point: Mr. Kocherlakota suggests that, “when the public comes to doubt a central bank’s commitment to its goals, the economy can land in a permanent low-interest-rate trap. The central bank is then much less able to fight recessions effectively.” This is patently untrue. The public doubt stems from ineffective policy by the Fed, which creates market uncertainty and a reluctance to invest. Smart Americans know that the best way to fight recessions are curbing government spending, promoting entrepreneurship, and letting the market correct itself without excessive, unconventional tinkering by a central bank. The public doubt is mainly about the Fed leaders — like Mr. Kocherlakota — who fail basic Economics 101.
What Mr. Kocherlakota and many other Fed officials and Washington bureaucrats fail to recognize, is that artificial monetary policies do not create jobs or businesses, which are the greatest source of expanding an economy. This is achieved by a free market and private capital, with minimal government regulation and reduced government spending. Anything else than that, such as prolonged low interest rates, is a recipe for failure.
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Kasich recently discussed the minimum wage while on the campaign trail Kasich was receptive to the possibility of raising the minimum wage 1) if the hike was “reasonable.” and 2) and when it made “sense” between management and labor.” Giving his answer in fairly broad terms allowed to Kasich to appear supportive of this policy at least in some circumstances, while also recognizing that such policy is not always beneficial, thereby satisfying potential voters on both sides of the aisle.
Kasich also went on to say that he favored state-level minimum wage policy over federal, because of the variation in economies and standards of living; his answer guarded him against outright supporting a blanket federal minimum wage rate hike — and it should. Even if Kasich were for state-level minimum wage increases, there is virtually no excuse for him to support a federal one. Anyone trying to argue that the minimum wage level should be the same in both New York and Arkansas is ludicrous. People may think that it helps, but when the minimum wage is way out of proportion for a jurisdiction in which it applies, the policy becomes especially harmful to businesses and workers.
Though Kasich’s answer was okay, he could have taken a better position. You can understand someone not wanting to take an absolute firm position on the minimum wage, considering that ⅔ of Americans favor it in some form or another. But it is also not honest to suggest that you are for it, without making it clear that your receptivity is merely to accommodate the will of the people, without trying to get the message out that the minimum wage, is in fact, a terrible thing.
What Kasich should say is that it is unfortunate that most people in the country do not understand that a minimum wage is a bad thing for the economy. It would have been preferable for him to explain that a minimum wage keeps people remaining in poverty — — but if that is what the people want, he won’t stand in the way. For his part, Kasich is not a full-throated advocate of a minimum wage, but he could have done a better job educating the voters on the pitfalls of such policy.
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A few days ago, I wrote about the Senate Finance Committee report, which revealed that ten groups have yet to receive tax exempt approval — some waiting as long as five years. ATR had also delved into that report, and found only one conservative group actually received approval in a three year interval with Lois Lerner at the helm:
The report by the Senate Finance Committee revealed that,
“Due to the circuitous process implemented by Lerner, only one conservative political advocacy organization was granted tax-exempt status between February 2009 and May 2012. Lerner’s bias against these applicants unquestionably led to these delays, and is particularly evident when compared to the IRS’s treatment of other applications, discussed immediately below.”
and furthermore:
“The unfortunate consequence of imposing this highly rigid and unorthodox process on EO Determinations was that many Tea Party applications that could have been decided in 2010 were not. Rather, those Tea Party applications unnecessarily languished for several more years, while the IRS mismanaged its way through a series of failed initiatives designed to bring the applications to decision.”
Not all groups received such treatment:
“Although applications from the Tea Party and conservative organizations languished at the IRS, this was not the case for all groups that applied. In cases where the IRS wanted to act quickly, it did – particularly for other high-profile applications that attracted political attention.”
And don’t forget Obama’s brother was fast-tracked in 2011 for approval in 30 days!
Yet, as I noted earlier, the assessment of Lerner’s misdealings by Senate investigators was particularly weak. She was chastised for failing to “adequately manage the EO employees who processed these applications”, her handling of applications “was flawed in design and/or mismanagement”, and she showed “little emphasis” on “providing good customer service.”
Heads should roll. But they won’t, ever. The scandal is two years old now — which is ancient in the political world. People have moved on from their outrage and they are now focused mainly on 2016. The scandal is barely covered in the news anymore. It’s outrageous.
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Washington Free Beacon had a sobering article about the lack of fiduciary responsibility in the Social Security Administration. A report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that for 5 years (FY2009-FY2013), disability payments totaling $371.5 million were overpaid to many individuals. “The report examined how concurrent Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) payments affect Disability Insurance (DI) overpayments.”
The most recent annual Social Security Trustees report showed that the projected date of insolvency for the Social Security Disability Insurance Trust Fund is late 2016, a date that remained unchanged from the prior year. With this crisis looming in the background, the report of overpayments is especially concerning. From the article:
“The GAO found that SSA did not detect concurrent FECA payments for about 1,040 individuals during at least one month from July 1, 2011, through June 30, 2014.
To test SSA’s internal controls, GAO randomly selected 20 beneficiaries for review. In all 20 cases, SSA’s controls failed to detect and prevent overpayments. In seven of the cases, SSA did not detect overpayments for more than a decade, and each of these individuals received $100,000 in overpaid benefits.
One of these seven individuals received FECA benefits in the 1980s and was approved for disability benefits 14 years later in 1994. The GAO found that this individual received $200,000 in overpayments for more than 20 years.
The SSA’s “internal controls” rely on beneficiaries to self-report overpayments.
“SSA officials told us that if beneficiaries do not self-report benefits, there are no system prompts that would alert SSA staff to ask beneficiaries if they are receiving any workers’ compensation benefits, including FECA payments,” states GAO. “SSA officials agreed that relying on beneficiaries to self-report benefits presents a challenge in identifying overpayments related to the concurrent receipt of FECA benefits.'”
Congress is aware of the projected date of insolvency, but has yet to agree on a path forward. What’s more, the date roughly coincides with the 2016 election, so of course no one is willing right now to make any decisions or provide any possible solutions. Without any changes, benefits will be reduced by nearly 20%. Currently the Disability Trust Fund provides more than $100 billion a year to roughly 11 million recipients, making it the largest government assistance program in the country.
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From CNS News:
“The federal government raked in a record of approximately $2,446,920,000,000 in tax revenues through the first nine months of fiscal 2015 (Oct. 1, 2014 through the end of June), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.
That equaled approximately $16,451 for every person in the country who had either a full-time or part-time job in June.
It is also up about $178,156,270,000 in constant 2015 dollars from the $2,268,763,730,000 in revenue (in inflation-adjusted 2015 dollars) that the Treasury raked in during the first nine months of fiscal 2014.
Despite the record tax revenues of $2,446,920,000,000 in the first nine months of this fiscal year, the government spent $2,760,301,000,000 during those nine months, and, thus, ran up a deficit of $313,381,000,000 during the period.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total seasonally adjusted employment in the United States in June (including both full and part-time workers) was 148,739,000. That means that the federal tax haul so far this fiscal year has equaled $16,451 for every person in the United States with a job.”
There are three months left of the fiscal year. According to the US Debt Clock, today’s federal debt is is about $18,609,920,535,000. At the end of FY 2015 the total government debt in the United States, including federal, state, and local, is expected to be $21.694 trillion.
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I have written about disparate impact many times over the past couple of years. I was gravely concerned about Loretta Lynch’s nomination to be the next Attorney General because of the huge role she has played in civil asset forfeiture cases. Now that the disparate impact case has been decided by the Supreme Court, I am concerned that she will now take up the mantle of disparate impact, much in the way Thomas Perez, the Labor Secretary, has done (and don’t forget, Perez was the original front runner for the AG job).
Below is Loretta Lynch’s statement on the SCOTUS ruling regarding disparate impact — the last line says it all: “Bolstered by this important ruling, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act with every tool at its disposal – including challenges based on unfair and unacceptable discriminatory effects.”
Remember, disparate impact allows if a protected class of citizens has a statistically lesser representation with respect to a business (hiring, mortgages origination, etc) it may be implied that the business or offender has intentionally discriminated — because there is an adverse impact as a result. In other words, “offenders” can be sought after for violating the law, whether or not there was actual intent. Unfortunately, disparate impact thus puts the burden to show lack of discrimination on the accused offender, meaning he is guilty until proven innocent.
It looks like with this statement that the Department of Justice will begin to more actively pursue disparate impact cases.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, Thursday, June 25, 2015
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch Statement on the U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communites Project Inc.
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch released the following statement today after the Supreme Court ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project Inc.:
“I am pleased that the Supreme Court has affirmed that the Fair Housing Act encompasses disparate impact claims, which are an essential tool for realizing the Act’s promise of fair and open access to housing opportunities for all Americans. While our nation has made tremendous progress since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968, disparate impact claims remain an all-too-necessary mechanism for rooting out discrimination in housing and lending. By recognizing that laws, policies and practices with unjustified discriminatory effects are inconsistent with the Fair Housing Act, today’s decision lends support to hardworking Americans who are attempting to find good housing opportunities for themselves and their families. Bolstered by this important ruling, the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously enforce the Fair Housing Act with every tool at its disposal – including challenges based on unfair and unacceptable discriminatory effects.”
