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United States Congress of Fail (Part 3)


Destiny

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11 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Unbelievable. Is this guy even a lawyer? There was no one else they could dig up? And he gets a cushy job for life? Even worse, Kennedy spends the whole five minutes proving that this guy is ridiculously unqualified. The other four get a pass because they were smart enough to not raise their hand?

Well, at least he was honest about not knowing a damn thing about the job he's hoping to get.

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"The GOP tax bill may be the worst piece of legislation in modern history"

Spoiler

If the Republican tax plan passes Congress, it will mark a watershed for the United States. The medium- and long-term effects of the plan will be a massive drop in public investment, which will come on the heels of decades of declining spending (as a percentage of gross domestic product) on infrastructure, scientific research, skills training and core government agencies. The United States can’t coast on past investments forever, and with this legislation, we are ushering in a bleak future.

The tax bill is expected to add at least $1 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, and some experts think the real loss to federal revenue will be much higher. If Congress doesn’t slash spending, automatic cuts will kick in unless Democrats and Republicans can agree to waive them. Either way, the prospects for discretionary spending look dire, with potential cuts to spending on roads and airports, training and apprenticeship programs, health-care research and public-health initiatives, among hundreds of other programs. And these cuts would happen on top of an already difficult situation. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution points out, combined public investment by federal, state and local governments is at its lowest point in six decades, relative to GDP.

The United States is at a breaking point. In August, the World Bank looked at 50 countries and found that the United States will have the largest unmet infrastructure needs over the next two decades. Look in any direction. According to the American Road & Transportation Builders Association, the United States has almost 56,000 bridges with structural problems (about 1,900 of which are on interstate highways), and these are crossed 185 million times a day.

Another industry report says that in 1977 the federal government provided 63 percent of the country’s total investment in water infrastructure, but only 9 percent by 2014. There’s so much congestion in America’s largest rail hub, Chicago, that it takes longer for a freight train to pass through the city than it takes to get from there to Los Angeles, according to Building America’s Future, a public interest group.

There is no better indication of the U.S. government’s myopia than the decline in funding for research. A recent report in Science notes that for the first time since World War II, private funding for basic research now exceeds federal funding. Research and development topped 10 percent of the national budget in the mid-1960s; it is now less than 4 percent. And the Senate’s version of the tax bill removed a crucial tax credit that has encouraged corporate spending on research, though the House-Senate compromise version will probably keep it. All this is happening in an environment in which other countries, from South Korea to Germany to China, are ramping up their investments in these areas. A recent study found that China is on track to surpass the United States as the world leader in biomedical research spending.

When I came to America in the 1980s, I was struck by how well the government functioned. When I would hear complaints about the IRS or the Federal Aviation Administration, I would often reply, “Have you ever seen how badly these bureaucracies work in other countries?” Certainly compared with India, where I grew up, but even compared with countries such as France and Italy, many of the federal government’s key offices were professional and competent. But decades of criticism, congressional micromanagement and underfunding have taken their toll. Agencies such as the IRS are now threadbare. The Census Bureau is preparing to go digital and undertake a new national tally, but it is hamstrung by an insufficient budget and has had to cancel several much-needed tests. The FAA lags behind equivalent agencies in countries such as Canada and has been delayed in upgrading its technology because of funding lapses and uncertainties. The list goes on and on.

There are genuine problems beyond underfunding. The costs of building American infrastructure are astronomical. But during the Depression, World War II and much of the Cold War, a sense of crisis and competition focused America’s attention and created a bipartisan urgency to get things done. Ironically, at a time when competition is far more fierce, when other countries have surpassed the United States in many of these areas, America has fallen into extreme partisanship and embraced a know-nothing libertarianism that is starving the country of the essential investments it needs for growth. Those who vote for this tax bill — possibly the worst piece of major legislation in a generation — will live in infamy, as the country slowly breaks down.

 

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7 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

Thank you for that visual I will never be able to get out of my head.:eyewash:

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Ann Coulter couldn't keep her idiotic thoughts to herself and had to tweet them to the world. So Aunt Crabby gave her this sage advice. 

 

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"Want to know what Republican values are? Look at the choices they’re making in their tax bill."

Spoiler

Later today, Republicans will unveil their final tax bill as they frantically attempt to rush it through Congress before too much opposition has a chance to build. When they do, they’ll offer the same bogus lines we’ve been hearing for months about how if we all squeeze our eyes shut and promise to believe, the bill will shower riches not upon its actual beneficiaries — corporations and the wealthy — but struggling middle-class Americans. You can feel free to ignore all that rhetoric, not only because it’s absurd but also because it isn’t the point.

Instead, the best way to understand this bill may be to focus on this question: What values are being expressed by the choices Republicans are making?

The first value is the one lying at the heart of all Republican tax policy: The rich are just better than the rest of us. They’re more noble, more deserving, more worthy of consideration and help. When Republicans speak of tax “relief,” it is the wealthy whose burdens are being lifted. So it is with this cut, which not only has multiple provisions explicitly benefiting the wealthy, like a reduction in the top income tax rate and a doubling of the inheritance tax exemption, but also phases out many of the cuts that benefit those at lower incomes, so that with each passing year its benefits flow more to the top.

When you make a choice to eliminate a provision that helps ordinary people so that you can preserve a corporate tax cut, you’re making a statement of values.

The centerpiece of the bill is a dramatic reduction in corporate taxes, and there’s something important to understand about that: It’s a big tax cut for the wealthy, too.

You no doubt remember how Mitt Romney was roundly mocked in 2011 when he said, “Corporations are people, my friends.” But he was actually right. What many missed was the next thing he said by way of explanation: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.”

Which is true — it’s just that there are very specific people getting that money. While Republicans would like you to believe the spectacular windfall they’re bestowing on corporations will be passed on to workers in the form of higher wages, that’s not what the corporations themselves are saying. They don’t seem to have plans to make huge investments that would create jobs, because they’re already making near-record profits and they don’t have the demand that would justify those investments. So what are they going to do with the money? “U.S. corporations are saying they would use a tax reform windfall to buy back shares, retire debt and other shareholder-friendly moves, in recent post-earnings calls with investors and securities analysts,” Reuters recently reported.

So there are people benefiting from the corporate cuts: people who own a great deal of stock in corporations. In other words, rich people.

And it’s not just rich people who are the greatest beneficiaries of this bill, but idle rich people. The bill gives some of its most generous benefits to people who inherit money — they’ll now be exempt from any taxes on the first $11 million. The corporate tax cuts will flow to those who own stock, which is not money you work for. While we don’t know for sure how it will work in the final version, reports lately have indicated that the gigantic new pass-through loophole may be structured to advantage people who don’t actually work in their pass-through businesses, but are just passive owners.

If you actually rely on your wages as your sole source of income, you’re probably going to be out of luck. And in fact, analyses of the Senate bill — which it looks like the final bill more closely resembles than the House version — showed that by 2027, every income group under $75,000 would see a tax increase. Those are people whose incomes don’t come from large inheritances and stock portfolios. The Tax Policy Center’s analysis found that the Senate bill “could reduce taxes by nearly three times as much for business owners in 2019 as for people … whose primary source of income is wages or salaries.”

This is from a party that loves to deliver stern lectures to poor people who rely on public assistance on how their meager benefits need to be cut so that they’ll fully appreciate “the dignity of work.”

There are lots of other ways Republican values are coming through, like the reduction in the deductibility of state and local taxes, which they’ve barely pretended is anything other than an effort to harm states that elect Democrats (despite the fact that those states already tend to send more tax money to the federal government than they receive in spending). Or the elimination of the individual health insurance mandate, which will save hundreds of billions of dollars by reducing spending on health care for people of modest incomes — money that is being put toward the corporate rate cut. Or the fact that despite all their rhetoric about “simplifying the tax code,” this bill actually injects new layers of complexity and new opportunities for tax avoidance which could be particularly lucrative for those with high incomes.

None of this should be much of a surprise to those familiar with the contemporary Republican Party. Indeed, the values behind this bill have been clear for a while, even to citizens who aren’t all that attentive to the minutiae of policy. Which is why the bill is so remarkably unpopular, with majorities opposing it in just about every poll that has been taken.

That’s a big part of why Republicans are in such a hurry. If they went through an ordinary process — lots of hearings, a lengthy floor debate, lots of time for the public to consider the implications and let legislators know how they feel about it — the bill would probably be doomed. In order to pass it, they’d have to change it dramatically, in ways that would mean it no longer reflected their values.

So this bill is what we’ve got, and what they’re almost certain to pass next week. It shows who they are, and if they think voters aren’t going to understand, they’re going to be in for a surprise.

 

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No surprise, Corker and Rubio caved: "The final GOP tax bill is complete. Here’s what is in it"

Spoiler

Republicans were joyful Friday as they finalized their tax plan, bridging differences between the House and Senate bills and moving another step closer to getting legislation to President Trump by Christmas.

Republicans also appear to, at least for now, have locked down the votes they need to pass the measure through the House and Senate, after holdout Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) pledged their support.

Overall, the “Tax Cut and Jobs Act” is the largest one-time reduction in the corporate tax rate in American history: from 35 percent down to 21. The bill also lowers taxes for the vast majority of Americans and small business owners — at least until the cuts expire after 8 years.

Last-minute changes to the GOP's big plan gave a larger tax break to the wealthy and preserved certain tax savings for the middle class, including the student loan interest deduction, the deduction for excessive medical expenses, and the tax break for graduate students. A change Friday morning to win over Rubio gives expand the working-class families who kids a few hundred dollars more in money back from the government.

Here's a rundown of what's in the final bill. The full text is expected to be released to the public Friday and voted on early next week.

What is changing:

A new tax cut for the rich: The final plan lowers the top tax rate for top earners. Under current law, the highest rate is 39.6 percent for married couples earning over $470,700. The GOP bill would drop that to 37 percent and raise the threshold at which that top rate only kicks in. This amounts to a significant tax break for the very wealthy, a departure from repeated claims by President Trump and his top officials that the bill would not cut taxes on the rich. The new tax break for millionaires goes beyond what was in the original House and Senate bill, as Republicans sought to ensure wealthy earners in states such New York, Connecticut and California don't end up paying substantially higher taxes as a result of the bill.

A massive tax cut for corporations to 21 percent: Starting on January 1, 2018, big businesses would see their tax rate fall from 35 percent to just 21 percent, the largest one-time rate cut in U.S. history for America's largest companies. The House and Senate bills originally had the big-business tax rate falling to 20 percent, but Republicans were not able to make the math work to keep the rate that low and start it right away in the new year, so they compromised by moving the rate to 21. It's still amounts to roughly a $1 trillion tax cut for businesses over the next decade. Republicans argue this will make the economy surge in the coming years, but most independent economists and Wall Street banks predict only a “modest” and short-lived boost to growth.

You can deduct just $10,000 in state, local and property taxes: One of the most controversial parts of the GOP tax plan is the push to greatly scale back how much state and local taxes Americans can deduct on their federal income taxes. Under current law, the state and local deduction (SALT) is unlimited. In the final GOP plan, people can deduct up to $10,000. The House initially restricted the $10,000 deduction to just property taxes, but the final bill allows any state and local taxes to be deducted, whether for property, income or sales taxes. The move is widely viewed as a hit to blue-states like New York, Connecticut and California, and there are concerns it could cause property values to fall in high-tax cities and leave less money for public schools and road repairs.

Working-class families get a bigger Child Tax Credit: Thanks to a late push by Marco Rubio and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), the Child Tax Credit became more generous low-income families and the working class. The current Child Tax Credit is $1,000 per kid. Both the House and Senate bills expanded the Child Tax Credit, with the Senate going up to a maximum of $2,000 per child. The final bill keeps the $2,000 per child credit (families making up to about $400,000 get take the credit), but it also makes more of the tax credit refundable, meaning families that work but don't earn enough to actually owe any federal income taxes will get a large check back from the government. Benefits for those families were initially limited to about $1,100, but through changes Rubio and Lee pushed for, it's now up to $1,400.

You can inherit up to $11 million tax-free: In the end, the estate tax (often called the “death tax” by opponents) remains, but far fewer families will have to pay it. Under current law, Americans can inherit up to $5.5 million tax-free (that threshold is $11 million for married couples). The House wanted to do away with the estate tax entirely, but some senators felt that was too much of a giveaway to the mega rich. The final compromise was to double the threshold, so now the first $11 million that people inherit in property, stocks and other assets won't be taxed (and yes, that means $22 million for married couples).

 

I called both my senators and my house rep this week, none will vote for it, but it doesn't matter, because the repugs are on a roll.

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Wow: "How the oldest Senate ever is taking a toll on the business of Washington"

Spoiler

In November, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, who is 83, was at the helm when the Senate’s massive tax bill came through the Finance Committee. But Hatch also deputized four younger Republicans on the panel to serve as de facto co-chairmen over various parts of the legislation.

This week, with a compromise bill marching toward final passage in both chambers, the House has to vote first — because a pair of senators, Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), are recuperating from, respectively, non-melanoma skin surgery and the side effects of cancer treatments.

Hatch’s advisers say his move demonstrates a keen sense of coalition building, and aides and friends to Cochran, 80, and McCain, 81, contend that their bosses should be back in the Senate before long.

But here’s something else to consider: All three are exemplars of an institution that has become, by one measure, the oldest Senate ever. Eight octogenarians currently serve, nearly twice as many as ever before, according to records maintained by the Senate Historical Office. Another handful of senators are at least 75.

For decades, older members of Congress have brushed aside questions about their fitness for office. They have defended their health and faculties, and some have implied that those who inquire are ageists who don’t understand that America is growing older.

But the change in schedule for the tax bill is at least the third time this year that Senate leaders paused action to accommodate ailing colleagues. It is now clear that the large number of older senators in positions of power is taking a toll on the operations of Washington.

First came the unsuccessful repeal effort of the Affordable Care Act, delayed until McCain returned to Washington following his initial diagnosis and surgery. McCain as of Saturday was at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, suffering from the side effects of an aggressive round of chemotherapy and radiation.

In mid-October, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) waited out Cochran’s return from a debilitating urinary tract infection to pass a budget that was essential to setting up the framework for passage of the tax plan.

To be fair, some of these seniors are healthier and wittier than their junior colleagues — Sen. Charles E. Grassley, 84, runs four times a week — and some exemplify an aging society where professionals function at high levels well beyond traditional retirement age.

But, collectively, the institution is struggling amid the weight of so many seniors holding such critical positions. Some colleagues say that it has become too hard for senators to walk away at the right time.

“What happens around here, it’s pretty seductive,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a 65-year-old who decided this fall he would retire at the end of 2018. “The longer you’re here, the more influence that you have. So it causes you to want to stay and stay and stay.”

All eight of today’s 80-something senators hold top posts. Cochran, first elected in 1978, controls the purse strings of every federal agency as chairman of the Appropriations Committee. McCain, who oversees the Pentagon on the Armed Services Committee, temporarily handed over the gavel this week to Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who ran hearings on Middle East security issues. Inhofe, 83, is normally chairman of the Environment Committee.

Some senators get angry when asked about their age. “If I can run three miles four times a week, I’ll be running for reelection,” said Grassley (R-Iowa), pondering a bid for reelection in 2022, when he will be 89. “I ran just two miles this morning, but don’t read too much into that. Because it’s the same day I packed my suitcase to go home, and I needed a little extra time.”

Informed that this was the oldest Senate ever, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) chuckled. “I feel younger every day,” the 77-year-old joked.

Leahy, first elected in 1974, won reelection last year to a term that will end when he is 82. He has a ritual, around every birthday, to test his physical fitness. He goes scuba diving, first swimming down to the depth of his new age, doing a somersault underwater to the 90-foot mark, then swimming to the surface.

“If I reach the point that I can’t go scuba diving and do my somersaults, that will be one clear indication,” Leahy said of knowing when to retire.

For the Senate’s first 100 years, no one ever served into their 80s, according to Senate Historical Office data. Over the next 100 years, there were a few brief moments with two or three. Only 49 senators have ever turned 80 in office, and 15 of those came in the past 20 years.

It’s a very sensitive topic. When Leahy noted that “some in both parties stayed too long,” his chief of staff interjected to say the senator was not referring to any of today’s senators.

Some senators face pressure to stay in office from former staffers whose K Street livelihood is in large part connected to clients with interests before that senator. Sometimes it comes from leaders back home who want their states to reap the benefits of Senate seniority.

Trent Lott, the Republican former Senate majority leader, said his friends in Mississippi are worried about Cochran’s health, but he tells them that the Appropriations chairmanship is too valuable to pass up: “Some people say, ‘Is it time for Thad to come home?’ I say, ‘No! We should keep that chairmanship until the bloody last day that we can.’ ”

Now running the lobbying shop Squire Patton Boggs, Lott gives a presentation to senators who decide it is time to retire. “It’s called the wheel of fortune. And every spoke represents what you can do when you get a real life,” he said, with options ranging from joining a lobbying shop to teaching.

“It’s hard to know when it’s time to move on,” Lott added.

President Trump, 71, is pressing Hatch (R-Utah) to ask the voters in his state to elect him to an eighth six-year term that would end when he is 90 and bring his service in the Senate to 48 years. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the oldest senator, is already running for reelection to a fifth full term that would last until she is 91.

Cochran, when he has appeared in the Senate in recent months, has been attended by a staffer who sits next to him and alerts the senator when it is time to vote. McCain, who appeared in good health when he won a sixth term last year, in the past few weeks has relied on staff to push him in a wheelchair to Senate votes.

Corker says it’s easy to grow comfortable with the trappings of power and a large staff that, as senators grow older, sometimes functions like a team of aides in a retirement home.

“Think about it,” he said. “If you’re older, you’ve got more influence, and you’ve got an entire staff of people that, in essence, take care of you every day. Where else, where else can you obtain that? Seriously?”

Yet for him, the decision to retire was clear. He wanted to leave on his own terms, at an age, 65, when he could start another chapter of his life. There are fewer senators than ever making that choice.

“It is a lot of work, if you really want to do your job right,” Leahy said. “You’ve got to be able to do that. If you can’t, it’s not fair to your state or the U.S. Senate to stay here.”

 

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Here’s what a millionaire has to say about what this proposed tax bill will mean for him.

 

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Marco Rubio weighs in on the tax debate:

Better to be poor and walk in integrity than rich and crooked in one’s ways. Proverbs 19:1

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Because of course, nobody wants transparency! All kinds of things would become visible that were so carefully swept under the rug...

Kaine's bid for Senate harassment data rejected

Quote

The secretive office that processes workplace misconduct complaints on Capitol Hill has declined Sen. Tim Kaine's request for data on sexual harassment claims filed in the upper chamber — data that Kaine had said he would make public.

The Virginia Democrat sought details Dec. 6 on the taxpayer-funded settlements that the Hill's Office of Compliance approved for Senate employers, adding that he would release the broad outlines of the data in the interest of transparency as Congress considers an overhaul of its own harassment system. The compliance office's Monday decision to decline his request is particularly notable given that the office provided the House Administration Committee details on taxpayer-funded settlements processed in that chamber one day after they were requested.

In a letter responding to Kaine's request, the compliance office's executive director said "confidentiality provisions" of the 1995 law that created the Hill's workplace misconduct system prevented a detailed response.

The current structure of the law means that "the OOC does not possess reliable information regarding the number of sexual harassment claims that have been filed or settled, the identities or positions of the individuals alleged to have committed sexual harassment, or why the parties reached settlements," Susan Tsui Grundmann wrote to Kaine.

Grundmann stated that the Senate Rules Committee received "a statistical breakdown of settlement amounts" stemming from Senate offices dating back to 1997. A spokeswoman for the Rules panel, which did not follow its House counterpart in publicly releasing harassment settlement data, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Kaine's original request asked for broad totals of Senate sexual harassment claims filed and resolved, along with settlement amounts, "which should not breach any confidentiality agreement between the parties or the identities of the survivors and the accused."

Grundmann's letter declining his request also referred Kaine to the Secretary of the Senate, noting that "we would not necessarily know about" any harassment settlements paid using accounts other than the compliance office's separate settlement fund. Recently resigned Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), for example, used his personal office budgets to settle a sexual misconduct claim in 2015 — a strategy that the House ethics committee has no formal policy prohibiting.

“If Congress truly wants to fix a broken system, we need to understand the scope of the problem," Kaine said in a statement. "I’m disappointed the OOC didn’t release any information to help us do that. I’m going to keep pushing for public release of this data and working on reforms that help prevent harassment and assault.”

1

 

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A crash course in conniving Congress corruption:

Republican Senators Will Save Millions With Special Real-Estate Tax Break

Quote

When the U.S. Senate takes up the final tax bill this week, more than a quarter of all GOP senators will be voting on a bill that includes a special provision that could give them a new tax cut through their real estate shell companies, according to federal records reviewed by International Business Times.

The provision was not in the original bill passed by the Senate on Dec. 1. It was embedded in the final bill by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is among the lawmakers that stand to personally benefit from the provision. 

In response to Democratic lawmakers who have slammed the provision as a lobbyist-sculpted giveaway to the rich, Republican Majority Whip John Cornyn promoted on Twitter a column by Ryan Ellis, a registered bank lobbyist who has been working to influence the tax legislation and who has defended the provision.

In all, 14 Republican senators (see list below) hold financial interests in 26 income-generating real-estate partnerships — worth as much as $105 million in total. Those holdings together produced between $2.4 million and $14.1 million in rent and interest income in 2016, according to federal records. 

IBT first reported on the tax carve-out, which allows investors in “pass-through” entities, including real-estate partnerships such as LLCs and LPs, with few employees to deduct part of their income that passes through those partnerships. In response to IBT’s reporting, Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who owns up to $35 million in “pass-through” real-estate interests, claimed he did not know of the carve-out when he announced his support for the legislation on Friday, after previously casting the only Republican vote against the bill in the Senate, which did not then include the provision.

In the face of a Twitter-trending hashtag #CorkerKickback, Corker has been vociferously defended byLiam Donovan, a registered lobbyist for the construction and real estate industry who is lobbying Congress on tax reform and specifically on “pass-through rates,” according to federal records.

While Republicans have argued the House version of the bill contained the controversial provision, experts have told IBT the provision appeared in the legislation only after the bill was finalized during House-Senate Conference Committee deliberations.

“The mechanism is completely new and can’t be found in any prior version of the bill,” Matt Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute of Economics and Tax Policy, previously told IBT.

Because the provision was added by the conference committee, it is “unlikely to have been fully priced into the revenue estimate, because the new provision was never subject to the benefits of crowdsourced analysis of all its implications,” University of Southern California law professor Edward Kleinbard told IBT.

Corker, the Senate’s fourth richest member in 2015, with an estimated net worth of over $69 million, reported the highest 2016 income from real-estate partnerships — up to $7 million — among GOP senators. His income came from three properties held by LLCs that together were worth as much as $35 million. Montana Sen. Steve Daines, whose estimated net worth was $14.4 million in 2015, reported earning between $425,000 and $4.2 million last year in rental income from eight properties managed by Genesis LLC. Daines, with Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, pushed for a more generous tax deduction for pass-through entities during the Senate tax bill process.

Other top earners were Johnson and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, who both earned as much as $1 million in 2016 from real estate pass-through vehicles.

Elaine Hatch, the wife of the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee who said Monday that hewrote the real-estate tax break and disputed IBT’s report that the provision had not been in previous versions of the bill, owns a stake in a real-estate LLC worth up to $500,000 that generated between $5,000 and $15,000 of income from rent/royalties, interest and capital gains in 2016.

Several of these senators were also top recipients of campaign cash from the real estate industry during the 2016 election cycle. Ohio Sen. Rob Portman’s campaign took in over $900,000 from real estate industry PACs and individuals; Johnson received roughly $780,000; and Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson got $520,000 from the industry.

Beyond Republican senators, other major beneficiaries of the provision could be President Donald Trump, who owns or directs over 560 companies, most of which are LLCs or LPs. Democrats in recent days have seized on the provision — and its potential benefits to Republican lawmakers — in demanding the bill be halted.

“President Trump made several promises to the American people on tax reform, including the assurance that his tax proposal wouldn’t enrich people like him,” Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware told IBT in an emailed statement. “Unfortunately, Republicans are rushing through a tax plan that does indeed enrich the wealthiest people in our country, including business-owners like Mr. Trump. It’s regrettable and, frankly, shameful that my Republican colleagues are rushing ahead with their partisan tax bill despite the mounting questions and concerns about its provisions.”

>list of corrupt congressmen and how much they are enriching themselves<

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Oopsie...

 

Ugh, once the House gets done voting they will go home. Every year they get to leave for Christmas, Rep Dingleberry from Nebraska always comes thru my drive thru. Last year he was conveniently on the phone, used his policitician credit card too, so Nebraskans paid for it ;). This year I'm gonna hold him accountable about CHIP. If he comes thru while I'm there and isn't on the phone. I will even clock off to do it.

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I've been so focused on the tax bill, that I forgot about the possible government shutdown:

Quote

Even as Republicans are poised to pass a $1.5 trillion tax-cut bill, a brewing fight over federal funding may lead to a government shutdown at week’s end.

Speaker Paul Ryan plans to pass a continuing resolution later this week to fund the government until Jan. 19, but there are major disagreements within the House GOP over the move. There are also disputes between House and Senate Republicans, as well as the ever-present struggle with Democrats.

Right now, no one on either side of the Capitol has any clear idea how this three-way funding fight will play out, but all the major factions are digging in. Lawmakers and aides said the House and Senate could end up “ping-ponging” a spending bill back and forth until the issues are resolved, although some worry that Congress could blunder into a shutdown. Ryan on Tuesday instructed lawmakers not to leave town, signaling how concerned leadership is about the Friday funding deadline.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/19/republican-infighting-government-shutdown-304923

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These guys (we're talking about you, Teabaggers) can't wait to get their respective feet out of their mouths so they can be ready to step on their own dicks at a moment's notice. 

Everyone, by now, knows that anything to do with government shut down is radioactive.  Republicans can no longer blame it on the Democrats. 

Back to the tax bill.  I haven't heard anything about preserving the requirement to cover pre-existing medical conditions as Obamacare is being dismantled.  And CHIP is still dangling. 

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