‘Economic Suicide’: Biden Admin Justifies Tax Hike Based on Racial Criteria

The Biden administration’s analysis of its revenue proposals for fiscal year 2025 argues targeted tax hikes that disproportionately affect white people would ease racial wealth inequality.

Increasing taxes on capital gains and income-based wealth would reduce racial wealth inequality for black and Hispanic families, the Treasury Department outlined in the analysis published in mid-March. The Treasury points out that white families disproportionately hold assets subject to capital gains tax or are in a higher tax bracket, meaning a hike in those taxes would benefit black and Hispanic families.

The Biden administration argues for taxing capital income for high-income earners at “ordinary rates,” increasing the top rate from 37% to 39.6% for those who earn more than $1 million a year. Taxes on net investment income would also be hiked by 1.2 percentage points to 5% for those who make over $400,000 per year, bringing the total top marginal rate to 44.6%.

“Taxing capital gains at 44.6% at the federal level—not to mention state taxes—would be economic suicide,” Preston Brashers, research fellow for tax policy in The Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the Daily Caller News Foundation, adding:

Before the tax ever took effect, investors would rush to pull their money out of equities subject to such exorbitant tax rates. U.S. businesses would be starved for capital, and business activity would slow to a crawl. Ultimately, corporate income and capital gains income would fall off a cliff, so the net result would be less tax revenue, not more. The middle class and working class would be slammed with mass layoffs and lower real wages.

The Treasury estimates that white families are the recipients of 92% of the benefits of preferential rates on capital gains and qualified dividends, compared to 2% and 3% for Hispanic families. Only 0.4% of white families, less than 0.05% of black families, and 0.1% of Hispanic families will be affected by the proposed rule change on capital gains.

“So, if President [Joe] Biden’s goal of redistribution is to make the rich poorer, his proposal would be successful,” Brashers told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “But if the goal is to lift up the middle class, the plan would fail spectacularly. Note, even the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center uses estimates that imply that the revenue-maximizing long-term capital gains rate is about 28%, so it’s clear that Biden’s proposal is on the wrong side of the Laffer curve.”

The proposal also calls for establishing a minimum 25% income tax that includes unrealized capital gains for those with wealth over $100 million. The Biden administration argues that the wealthiest taxpayers utilize their stake in unrealized gains to lower their total income and reduce their tax liability, but taxing unrealized gains may force many business owners to sell stakes in their company if they are not liquid enough to pay the burden.

“The wealthy already pay far more than their fair share, while the tax burden on large corporations ends up landing on individuals across the economy, including low-income individuals,” Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Biden administration also calls for ending a “loophole” that allows families to postpone their estate tax burden by creating trust assets that benefit multiple future generations and are not taxed on the death of the beneficiary. Around 30% of white families receive an inheritance that would qualify as of 2019, compared to 10% for black families and 7% for Hispanic families.

“Left-wing Biden economists seem unable to appreciate that raising taxes on capital hurts labor. Capital and labor work together to produce economic growth,” Edwards told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They are complements. The Biden economists seem to hold the Marxist view that capital and labor are bitter enemies, and that the only way that labor can win is for the government to crush capital.”

The Biden administration is also proposing to expand the child tax credit, temporarily increasing the amount given per child and permanently restoring the full refundability provision. The Treasury argues that it will ease racial disparities since a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic kids have benefited from it in the past.

“These proposals would also increase the fairness of the tax system by addressing some of the features that have historically reinforced racial disparities,” the proposal reads. “Over time, these proposals are expected to increase wealth accumulation by low- and middle-income families and reduce racial wealth gaps.”

The proposal was released in conjunction with calls from the Biden administration to drastically increase spending for fiscal year 2025, adding at least $14.8 trillion to the national debt by the end of a presumptive second term for the president.

The national debt has continued to grow rapidly under President Joe Biden, totaling more than $34.55 trillion as of April 26, up from $34 trillion at the beginning of the year, according to the Treasury Department.

Huge government spending is also putting the U.S. economy at risk of stagflation, with first quarter growth only totaling 1.6% while inflation remains high at 3.5% in March year-over-year.

“This hints at the false view that sadly underlies much of the Biden administration’s economic policy: high-earners only achieve success through luck, and low-earners can only achieve success through government handouts,” Edwards told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “That is an appalling, un-American view.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/30/economic-suicide-biden-admin-justifies-tax-hike-based-on-racial-criteria/

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‘Harassment’: Feds Impose Trans Agenda on Employers for Pronouns, Bathrooms

Under new federal guidelines, an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a pronoun the person doesn’t want used.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the guidance on Monday. The guidance passed on a 3-2 vote, along party lines on Friday, a source familiar with the EEOC confirmed.

“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new enforcement guidance says.

The guidelines would affect most employers, private or public.

The EEOC announced last fall a proposed update of its harassment policy affecting to include sexual orientation and gender identity rules. This prompted opposition from 20 state attorneys general, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

In November, the attorneys general contended what was then the proposed “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” updates would threaten the First Amendment rights of employers, employees, and possibly customers.

“Here, the proposed guidance would require employers to affirm or convey to employees and customers—often against religious conviction or deeply held personal belief—messages that a person can be a gender different from his or her biological sex, that gender has no correlation to biology, or that they endorse the use of pronouns like ‘they/them,’ ‘xe/xym/xyrs,’ or ‘bun/bunself,” the letter from the attorneys general says.

“This mandate flouts First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech—yet EEOC rejects any role for accommodation of contrary religious beliefs or speech,” the attorneys general add. “Further, EEOC’s for-cause insulation from direct presidential supervision unconstitutionally blurs the lines of accountability for this overhaul of workplaces nationwide.”

In 2021, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows attempted, in a statement, to unilaterally include these actions under harassment without public comment or a vote by the full commission. However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. A separate federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The commission did not appeal the rulings.

Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer with more than 15 employees.

“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Burrows, a Democrat, of the new guidelines in a public statement issued Monday afternoon. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”

Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.

Women’s rights are under attack by the EEOC, said Lucas in a statement issued Monday.

“Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary (male and female) and is immutable,” Lucas said in a public statement. She added, “It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. Relatedly, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”

In 2020, the Supreme Court held in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that a firm violates Title VII if it fires an employee “simply for being … transgender.” But, the Republican state attorneys general argued in the November letter, “Bostock gives no license to these and other of EEOC’s novel proposals.”

“Nor, in all events, can EEOC permissibly require these deeply controversial gender-identity accommodations without express congressional authorization—authorization not found in Title VII,” the letter continued.

The guidance does not carry the same weight as a law passed by Congress or a regulation imposed by an agency. However, the guidance essentially states the position of the EEOC. This means an employee inclined to claim harassment regarding a restroom or pronoun dispute would have the guidance to refer to. Also, under private litigation, a plaintiff could refer to the formal position of a federal agency.

“If you still believed that the Biden administration’s pedal-to-the-metal advancing of gender ideology is all about freedom and individual rights, this new EEOC ‘guidance’ should dispel that myth,” Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)

“Employers may now find themselves in legal hot water if they prefer to use language, including pronouns, and preserve private spaces that comport with biological reality rather than the bizarre canons of gender ideology,” Richards continued. “We’re dealing with a totalitarian ideology that wants to destroy the present order. The sooner normal people understand that, the sooner we can dispatch this ideology to the history books.”

The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”

“The Biden administration is no stranger to twisting federal law to suit its aims, and the publication of the EEOC’s final rule on workplace harassment is a prime example,” Sarah??? Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.

Perry added:

According to the Biden administration, gender identity and expression are tantamount to ‘sex’ in federal law and require an employer to facilitate an employee’s ‘preferred pronoun’ use and requested bathroom use or face a possible complaint for sexual harassment.

This is both an untenable conclusion, and not supported by the underlying Supreme Court decision on which the Administration so greatly relies: Bostock v. Clayton County. What’s more, biological women are again rendered to second-class citizens under the EEOC rule and forced to give up any vestige of privacy and security they previously enjoyed.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the mandatory use of an employee’s requested name and pronouns—those which differ from that employee’s biological sex—is a patent violation of the 1st Amendment, and creates an unavoidable conflict between gender ideology, and freedom of speech and religion. I expect the swift filing of multiple legal challenges against the new rule.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/29/eeoc-harassment-to-not-give-trans-employees-preferred-bathrooms/ .

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Germany Allows Parents to Change Their Baby’s Gender

When it comes to gender politics, many in opposition acknowledge that adults have the ability to choose for themselves whether they pursue hormone therapy or body-mutilating operations, because adults can better weigh the risks of their decisions.

Children, on the other hand, are quite different from adults. Opponents of gender ideology are steadfast in the fight to keep these ideological procedures away from children because they understand how vulnerable children are to the manipulative nature of so-called gender-affirming care. Far too many kids have already become victims of medical experiments as it is.

This is what makes a law recently passed in Germany even more infuriating.

On April 12, the Bundestag, or the German parliament, “passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies,” Reduxx reported. This radical legislation, it added, “establishes ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth.”

Under the Self-Determination Act, citizens may be fined 10,000 euros ($10,719) for “deadnaming,” which is a term LGBT activists use when someone, without his or her permission, is referred to by the name given at birth rather than the name he or she chose as part of this identity façade.

And just when it appears it can’t get any more drastic, the Self-Determination Act also “permits parents to alter the recorded sex of children beginning from birth. From the age of 5 years old, it allows for name and sex changes if there is ‘mutual consent’ between the child and their parents.”

Physicians have emphasized that Europe is ahead of the U.S. in terms of how far gender ideology has gone. Some countries, though, such as the U.K., Sweden, Finland, and Norway have begun backtracking as more evidence comes to light of the harmful nature of such procedures.

Thankfully, the battle is strong in America from the side of those determined to keep children safe by preventing legislation such as the Self-Determination Act, known in Germany as SBGG, from happening in this country.

But several questions come to mind when analyzing this recent development: What implications does a law such as this in Germany offer for what’s next in the gender politics wars? Will similar laws pass elsewhere in Europe? How will America respond?

To help give insight to some of those questions, Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for strategic engagement and biblical worldview, commented to The Washington Stand.

“If we describe ‘radical’ as something far outside the lines of decency, this is definitely a radical policy,” Backholm insisted. “The idea that parents would be allowed to change the sex of their child from birth is outrageous. Any parent who wanted to treat their son as a girl from birth should lose their parental rights, not do so with the support and encouragement of the government.”

Addressing the details of the law passed in Germany, Backholm noted, “The name is ironic but perfect, much like their flagship holiday, Pride. The Self-Determination Act reflects their desire to define their own reality, but reality will never stop pushing back and will never lose.”

This, of course, is exhibited in the mountains of research and evidence that proves the biological reality of the two-sex binary, as well as the reality that biological sex cannot be altered by hormones and surgeries.

“Why is a child’s sex the only thing the parents can change?” Backholm asked. “Why can’t they change their birth year to make them immediately eligible for retirement benefits? Why can’t a child who feels like an old soul identify as a retiree?”

In answer to those questions, Backholm contended: “If we allow this logic to prevail, there’s simply no point in having identification documents. Germany should get rid of any attempt to describe someone’s characteristics and simply give every life (we shouldn’t assume their species) an identification number and let them make up the rest. That’s the only way to be consistent.”

However, he clarified, “that would be insane.” But the sad reality is that “it’s not more insane than this law is.”

For Backholm, the irrational possibility that “the elites” might decide we can “choose our own birth year … may be coming.”

As to how believers should respond, Backholm helpfully observed, “The correct response for Christians to madness like this is to say what we know to be true without fear.” Ultimately, he said, “The more people hear the truth spoken, the more likely they are to speak the truth.”

“These ideas cannot prevail over time,” he insisted, “but they can do a lot of damage before we come to our senses. Our job is to minimize that damage and encourage a return to reality as quickly as possible.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/28/germanys-radical-law-allows-parents-to-trans-their-infants-from-birth/

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Deadly nitazenes drugs spark testing centres push

I hate to sound hard-hearted about this but I am not sure that testing rooms do any good overall. They may encourage involvement with drugs and thus lead to MORE deaths rather than fewer

Drug decriminalisation advocates are pushing for more supervised drug taking centres and testing facilities to be established to curb deaths caused by a synthetic opioid up to one hundred times stronger than fentanyl.

Nitazenes, a family of synthetic opioids that can be more addictive and potent than heroin and morphine, is contributing to an epidemic of drug fatalities across North America, and is now on the rise in Australia, having been detected in Victoria, South Australia and NSW.

The drug is already having deadly effects in Victoria, with the Coroner’s Court warning the opioid had been involved in at least 16 overdose deaths in the state since 2021.

Evidence suggests that nitazenes are coming from labs in China, although its origin is not restricted to one country, and are being sold off the dark web.

Experts, including Monash Addiction Research Centre deputy director Suzanne Neilson, used the World Health Summit to call for supervised injecting facilities, drug checking sites and public education on the benefits of naloxone, a medication that can reverse overdose effects, to help battle the infiltration of the drug and its deadly impact.

“We understand that in most circumstances, people are not intentionally purchasing nitazenes, what is most common is that people are purchasing other drugs,” Ms Neilson told The Australian.

“We do have some early warning systems in place, for example nitazenes that are detected in some emergency department settings … but it is quite limited at the moment in terms of testing for ­nitazenes. And because we don’t have widely scaled-up drug testing, we do get sort of limited in­formation about what’s out there at the moment.”

Ms Neilson said nitazenes can be made to be similar to fentanyl or even 50 to a hundred times stronger.

“In Australia we have had a massive increase in overdose deaths … I think there is a significant threat of a future epidemic if we do follow in the path that we’ve seen in North America and the UK,” she said.

“Once (synthetic opioids) start to enter the market, what we’ve seen is a dramatic rise in deaths. We’d really like to know what’s going on before that happens to prevent those deaths if possible.”

Global Commission on Drug Policy chair and former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark endorsed the controversial medically supervised injecting rooms in Melbourne.

“This is the kind of service that people need to stay alive, to stay healthy,” Dr Clark said.

“When you go to a centre like the safe injecting room, people bring in the stuff they’ve bought on the street corner (and it’s) tested, no one is going to die.”

She voiced her support for a second supervised injecting room in the CBD to go ahead, a measure the Victorian government committed to in 2020 but that has been met with backlash from the community and local businesses.

“The bottom line is that people that are using drugs need to be safe, and that’s why the centre is so important,” Dr Clark said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/deadly-nitazenes-drugs-spark-testing-centres-push/news-story/90cb6af54df6e759f948a0b70f01ed2d

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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