White House Pushes ‘Pure Giveaway’ to Rich Investors While Urging Cut to Pandemic Unemployment Aid 

White House Pushes ‘Pure Giveaway’ to Rich Investors While Urging Cut to Pandemic Unemployment Aid 

Recipients of the enhanced unemployment benefit could see the aid slashed by more than 50% under a plan being discussed by the Trump administration and GOP

By Jake Johnson

The Trump White House is publicly advocating a massive tax cut for wealthy U.S. investors while simultaneously urging Congress to pare back the expanded unemployment benefits currently serving as a financial lifeline for more than 30 million—and counting—jobless Americans.

“Regarding the ‘capital gains holiday,’ remember this key stat: 82% of all capital gains tax is paid by the richest 1%. A capital gains tax holiday is a pure giveaway to the rich.”
—Michael Linden, Groundwork Collaborative

In an interview on Fox Business Monday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said President Donald Trump wants included in the next Covid-19 stimulus package “a payroll tax holiday”—which critics warn is a stealth attack on Social Security—and a reduction in the capital gains tax.

A levy on profits from the sale of assets, the capital gains tax disproportionately affects the wealthy and most of the benefits of any cut would largely be enjoyed by rich investors.

Slashing the capital gains tax is a longtime goal of congressional Republicans and Trump, who last year considered but ultimately abandoned a legally dubious plan to lower the tax with an executive order.

While stressing that formal talks with Congress on the next stimulus package have not yet begun, Kudlow said the administration is also pushing for “reforms” to the $600-per-week boost in unemployment insurance (UI) payments, which he characterized as excessively generous “disincentives” to work.

The benefits are set to expire at the end of the month without action from Congress.

“So the White House position is that we have to cut the incomes of 30 million people who lost their jobs or who lost hours, while also giving a giant tax cut to the biggest corporations and the richest people in the world,” tweeted Michael Linden, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank.

“Regarding the ‘capital gains holiday,’ remember this key stat: 82% of all capital gains tax is paid by the richest 1%,” Linden added. “A capital gains tax holiday is a pure giveaway to the rich.”

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that after previously urging complete expiration of the enhanced unemployment benefits, “Trump administration officials have begun opening the door to accepting a narrower version of what Congress previously approved.”

“One potential compromise discussed by Republican lawmakers would involve cutting the unemployment benefit from $600 per week to between $200 and $400 per week and making up at least part of the difference by sending another round of $1,200 stimulus payments,” the Post reported.

Trump spokesman Judd Deere told the Post that the White House is open to approving a reduction in the current weekly UI payments but remains opposed to extending the full $600-per-week.

“UI reform is a priority for this White House in any phase four package and we are in ongoing discussions with the Hill,” said Deere.

Julia Wolfe, state economic analyst with the Economic Policy Institute, warned in a blog post last week that if Congress fails to extend the enhanced unemployment benefits through next year, “it could cost us more than five million jobs and $500 million in personal income.”

“We should despair for the millions who have lost their jobs and for their families,” Wolfe wrote, “and our top priority as a country should be protecting the health and safety of workers and our broader communities by paying workers to stay home when possible, whether that means working from home some or all of the time, using paid leave, or claiming UI benefits.”

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Source: White House Pushes ‘Pure Giveaway’ to Rich Investors While Urging Cut to Pandemic Unemployment Aid | Common Dreams News

‘Alarming’: Some Small Businesses Received Just $1 in Covid-19 Relief Loans as Kushner Family, Wall Street Investors Raked in Millions

‘Alarming’: Some Small Businesses Received Just $1 in Covid-19 Relief Loans as Kushner Family, Wall Street Investors Raked in Millions

“Serious questions remain about whether PPP funds were equitably distributed to minority-owned businesses, and there is an alarming rate of small-dollar loans.”

By Jake Johnson

The Kushner family, large chains backed by private equity, Wall Street investors, Kanye West, members of Congress, and the law firm that represented President Donald Trump during the Mueller probe were among the thousands of beneficiaries of a Covid-19 relief program aimed at rescuing struggling small businesses and keeping workers employed, according to new federal data released Monday.

While the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) data disclosure reveals just a fraction of recipients of forgivable Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, critics voiced concern that large, wealthy firms were able to readily access millions of dollars in relief funds as more vulnerable companies frequently received less money than they applied for—or nothing at all.

“We cannot allow those small businesses that were grossly underfunded or disadvantaged by the program to disappear and not have their stories told and rectified.”
—John Arensmeyer, Small Business Majority

“Serious questions remain about whether PPP funds were equitably distributed to minority-owned businesses, and there is an alarming rate of small-dollar loans,” John Arensmeyer, founder and CEO of advocacy group Small Business Majority, said in a statement. “Nationally, a total of more than 21,800 small businesses, many with multiple employees, received a loan for under $1,000.”

“To raise eyebrows even more,” Arensmeyer added, “more than 1,200 of those businesses received less than $100—with some receiving loans as low as $1.00! Underfunding has been a pervasive problem for borrowers since PPP launched.”

As the American Prospect‘s David Dayen pointed out on Twitter, it’s not as if the $660 billion program was not sufficiently funded to provide small businesses with the relief they requested. At the previous PPP loan application deadline on June 30, more than $130 billion in funding remained in the tank. Last month, Congress extended the application deadline to August 8.

“The problem, in other words, is the incompetent filtering of the program through private sector banks because we’ve hollowed out public sector benefit delivery,” wrote Dayen.

The SBA’s disclosure—which included only the names of beneficiaries who received at least $150,000 in PPP funding—came in response to widespread outrage over the Trump administration’s effort to keep information about loan recipients secret.

A searchable database of PPP beneficiaries can be viewed here.

As the Washington Post reported, “companies owned by the family of Jared Kushner… received several PPP loans. Princeton Forrestal LLC, a Kushner Cos. affiliate that bought the Princeton Marriott Hotel in 2018, received a loan of between $1 million and $2 million.”

“Companies that appear to match those associated with two Trump cabinet officials also received PPP loans,” according to the Post. “A company with a name matching one listed on the 2017 financial disclosure of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos received at least $6 million.”

Meanwhile, Arensmeyer of Small Business Majority said around 25% of the companies in his group’s network “have reported receiving a lower loan than what they requested.”

“While many business owners received no explanation for why they did not receive the full loan amount,” Arensmeyer added, “a number of other businesses have reported that lenders and the SBA either failed to catch and rectify errors on applications, or businesses were told to accept less than what they would qualify for to move things through the process quickly.”

“The survival of America’s small businesses depends on the full disclosure of PPP’s successes and failures,” said Arensmeyer. “Sunlight has always been the best disinfectant, and we cannot allow those small businesses that were grossly underfunded or disadvantaged by the program to disappear and not have their stories told and rectified.”

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Source: ‘Alarming’: Some Small Businesses Received Just $1 in Covid-19 Relief Loans as Kushner Family, Wall Street Investors Raked in Millions | Common Dreams News

 

‘How the Trump White House Sees You’: Top Economic Adviser Under Fire for Calling Workers ‘Human Capital Stock’ 

‘How the Trump White House Sees You’: Top Economic Adviser Under Fire for Calling Workers ‘Human Capital Stock’

“They’ve always been indifferent to human life. And in the face of mass death, the masks are coming off.”

By Jake Johnson

In a remark critics characterized as further evidence that the Trump administration views workers as nothing more than disposable tools of economic growth and corporate profit, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on Sunday nonchalantly referred to laid-off employees as “human capital stock” as he pushed people to return to their jobs amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Voicing optimism about the potential for a speedy economic recovery even as U.S. unemployment surges to levels not seen since the Great Depression, Hassett told CNN Sunday that “our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so that there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises.”

Watch:

Rolling Stone‘s Peter Wade wrote Monday that “the way Hassett used the term so casually lines up with the lack of empathy shown to the victims of the coronavirus by Trump’s administration and Republicans since the crisis began months ago.”

“Calling human beings ‘stock’— especially as essential workers are putting their lives and bodies on the line right now—is undeniably absurd and heartless,” Wade added.

Others weighed in on social media, condemning Hassett’s comment as indicative of the Trump administration’s casual willingness to sacrifice lives for the sake of the economy.

“‘Human capital stock.’ Also known as people; as mothers and fathers and spouses and siblings,” tweeted Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible. “They’ve always been indifferent to human life. And in the face of mass death, the masks are coming off.”

“This is how the Trump White House sees you, American human capital stock,” wrote John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Not asked to explain his use of the dehumanizing label, Hassett went on to say that an expansion of federal nutrition benefits and another round of direct stimulus payments may not be necessary because “the economy’s picking up at a very rapid rate”—a claim belied by ongoing mass layoffs and surging hunger across the United States.

Instead of relief for the tens of millions of people who are newly out of work and struggling to afford basic necessities, Hassett said the White House could “potentially move on to other things that the president has mentioned, like the payroll tax cut and potentially even a capital gains holiday.”

Advocacy groups have repeatedly warned that a payroll tax cut represents a sneak-attack on Social Security and Medicare that would do nothing for the unemployed. The latter idea Hassett floated would be a massive boon for rich investors, as the Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell noted in a column Monday.

“Even before the pandemic, the White House was proposing additional capital gains tax off-ramps,” Rampell wrote. “Now Hassett suggests this new iteration: For some temporary, to-be-determined length of time, rich people could sell their assets, realize whatever gains they’ve accumulated over the decades, and never pay taxes on the income.”

Bharat Ramamurti, a member of the congressional panel tasked with overseeing the Trump administration’s handling of bailout funds, tweeted that in the face of “historic unemployment rates, the administration response is to prop up the stock market by promising no-strings-attached money to big corporations, and then let investors avoid taxes on those gains.”

“This proposal is a pure giveaway to those who least need it right now,” Ramamurti wrote.

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Source: ‘How the Trump White House Sees You’: Top Economic Adviser Under Fire for Calling Workers ‘Human Capital Stock’ | Common Dreams News