Our reader, who identifies herself as Carolmalaysia, posted this comment:
She writes:
I can understand why Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates need tax breaks. Thank you, Republicans, for making this possible.
………………………. The world’s 500 wealthiest people got $1 trillion richer in 2017 | Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The world’s richest people got a whopping $1 trillion richer, according to a new report from Bloomberg News. That’s about four times the gains they made last year.
That data comes courtesy of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks and ranks the world’s 500 richest people. It attributes much of the economic growth to the stock market’s record-high year. (The MSCI World and Standard & Poor’s 500 indexes grew about 20 percent this year.)
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, clocked in as the world’s richest person, gaining $34.2 billion in wealth. (Mr. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates came in at No. 2. Mr. Bezos is worth about $99.6 billion, according to Bloomberg. Mr. Gates is valued at $91.3 billion…
“I cannot relax as I listen to the cold, callous conversations among our people and hear that monster who passes as a leader.
“You go††a see these sycophants applauding the cruel tax bill. “There was a festival of flattery on the White House lawn today to celebrate the passage of the Republican tax cut bill,” Lemon said. After playing a clip, he couldn’t hold back the chuckles any longer. “Oh my god, is that SNL?” Lemon asks.
“But it wasn’t fantasy. This man leads, even as the television puts forth a torrent of violent images and aggression, and video games offer kids target practice.
“Selling callous, cruelty is the business model. Even the commercials are nasty.
What a surprise that crime is up and so is drug addiction. Coping with life in America, today, makes relaxing hard to do, especially when one ha to chose between putting food on the table, and paying the rent, let alone buy-in medical care, or education for a kid.”
This is the triumph of libertarian thought. Take care of yourself, no one else. If they suffer, Tough. It’s God’s will or fate or bad luck. I am not my brother’s keeper. This is not Christian. Jesus would reject those who preach indifference to suffering in His name.
Read Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains.” Read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money.” Read Gordon Lafer’s “The One Percent Solution.”
We live in an era of greed, selfishness, ruthless power, and injustice, one in which the rich and powerful want more for themselves. Less for the needy. They happily put their boots on the backs of the poor and occasionally throw them a penny.
On Christmas Day, it is traditional to remember those who are less fortunate and to resolve to make the world better for them, not just to offer charity.
It is important to recognize the growing inequality in America and the return of extreme poverty and to understand why this is happening.
The New Deal enacted programs that reduced poverty and enabled many to rise into the middle class.
But something changed. Many things changed. Over several decades, the social safety net built to strengthen our nation and spread hope and opportunity has been shredded by the rich and powerful.
“Since the 1970s, the safety net has been diminished considerably. Labor regulations protecting workers have been rolled back, and funding for education and public programs has declined. The poor have been the hardest hit. With welfare reform in 1996, poor single parents with children now have a lifetime limit of five years of assistance and mandatory work requirements. Some states require fingerprinting or drug testing of applicants, which effectively criminalizes them without cause. The obstacles to getting on welfare are formidable, the benefits meager. The number of families on welfare declined from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.1 million this year. The decline of the welfare rolls has not meant a decline in poverty, however.
“Instead, the shredding of the safety net led to a rise in poverty. Forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty — which U.N. investigators defined as people reporting income less than one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States has the highest child poverty rates — 25 percent — in the developed world. Then there are the extremely poor who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care. These are people who cannot find work, who have used up their five-year lifetime limit on assistance, who do not qualify for any other programs or who may live in remote areas. They are disconnected from both the safety net and the job market.
“In addition to the reduction of public assistance and social services, the rise in extreme poverty can also be attributed to growing inequality. To quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the U.S. … now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.” In 1981, the top 1 percent of adults earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent of adults. Today the top 1 percent earn 81 times more than the bottom 50 percent.
“Declining wages at the lower end of the economic ladder make it harder for people to save for times of crisis or to get back on their feet. A full-time, year-round minimum wage worker, often employed in a dead-end job, falls below the poverty threshold for a family of three and often has to rely on food stamps.”
Do we want America to be the Land of Illusion, no longer the Land of Opportunity? Are we prepared to do something about it?
It’s common to hear people say that the quality of students’ education shouldn’t depend on their ZIP code. But the Republican House and Senate tax bills would make ZIP codes matter more than ever. They would create an incentive to hoard opportunity by raising funds that remain close to home.
Why does our education system have so much at stake? A vast majority of funding for public schools, about 90 percent, comes from the money raised by state and local governments. Currently, taxpayers can deduct their state and local taxes, and that deduction makes them more likely to support higher spending on programs funded by those taxes, including public schools.
With its bills, Congress would significantly cut the deduction of state and local taxes, slicing into that incentive. This is why education advocates are fighting to keep the deductions, and why those who believe state and local governments are too big want to get rid of them.
After a consideration of eliminating all state and local deductions, current proposals have been marketed as a political compromise: Both bills take away taxpayers’ ability to deduct income taxes but allow a property tax deduction of up to $10,000 per year. The problem is that states depend more heavily on income taxes, and local governments on property taxes, so the compromise favors raising funds at the local level. Structuring it this way will only add to inequality in the school system.
As an economist who has studied education funding and policy, to me the historical record is clear: State-level school spending is critical. Economic segregation across school districts means some areas need an infusion of resources to have a chance at serving their students well, and states are the primary source of that infusion. Research shows that when states send more resources to their neediest districts, achievement levels in those districts rise.
But states are already in a tough spot: The most recent data show they are still recovering from the recession, with over half of them spending less on K-12 now, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they did in 2008.
It’s worth noting that more is at stake for states than just education funding. Federal spending cuts are sure to come to pay for this tax bill. There will most likely be calls for cuts in programs that provide food, health care and income assistance to poor families. Just as people will look to the states to fill these new holes in the safety net, it will be harder than ever for states to raise the funds to do so.
Julian Vasquez Heilig spoke at the Journey for Justice National Town Hall in D.C. on December 12. He addressed his remarks to the charter supporters who dismissed claims that charters exacerbate segregation. Specifically, he spoke in response to an article in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait, who said that charters don’t cause segregation, they help its victims. Heilig contends that charters exacerbate segregation, as choice always does, and that they draw resources away from the districts that enroll most students.
Heilig has been an active member of the NAACP and chair of its education committee in California.
This is his speech:
Members of the civil rights community have expressed that charters are more segregated, are underperforming, and lack appropriate transparency and accountability to the public.
As a result, in 2016, the Movement for Black Lives, the NAACP and Journey For Justice all called for a charter moratorium.
A national conversation about charters is especially important for the African American community because a report by the NAACP’s Task Force on Quality Education found that one in eight African American students in the United States now attends a charter school.
Even though the popularity of charter schools has plummeted in the public discourse and in many quarters of the civil rights community, the rise in the number of charters has been particularly rapid during the past ten years. Many states have lifted caps on the number of charter schools contained within the original state legislation, owing in part to millions of dollars in financial incentives created by government grant programs and funding that has poured in from foundations funded by billionaires such as Broad, Walton, Gates, Arnold and others
Considering the rapid growth of charter schools, it’s important for the public conversations about school choice to distinguish fact from rhetoric and sloganeering.
Are charters more segregated that neighborhood public schools?
The AP recently reported that about 1 in 7 charters schools are 99% students of color.
In addition to media reports, the predominance of peer reviewed research examining national and local data on the segregation of students in charter schools over the past ten years has demonstrated that school choice is exacerbating existing patterns of segregation.
The research has actually shown this for about two decades. For example, using three national data sets, one research study found that charter schools are “more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation.”
Research conducted by Vanderbilt University and Mathematica argued that charters are not “creating greater segregation,” but a careful reading of the data reveals that in the majority of states examined, white and African American students were more likely to choose even more homogenous charter schools.
Why are charters more segregated? The argument is often made by charter proponents that their schools sit in segregated neighborhoods. However, one of the big problems with school choice is that research is demonstrating that “Parents choose to leave more racially integrated district schools to attend more racially segregated charter schools.”
The peer reviewed research has shown that Whites are less likely to attend charters schools with large numbers of Black and Latinos because White families purposefully avoid charter schools that focus on test preparation and “No Excuses” discipline. Recent research has also shown that White families are more likely to attend charters that have parent voice on the board— charters predominately serving Black and Latinos are much less likely to have board members that are parents.
In sum, peer reviewed research has demonstrated that the purposeful choice of African American and white families leads to schools with more homogenous racial compositions than neighborhood public schools and “explains why there are so few racially balanced charter schools.”
So what about the argument that charters perform better? A prominent study found that choice was bad for achievement on average as, “the relatively large negative effects of charter schools on the achievement of African America students is driven by students who transfer into charter schools that are more racially isolated than the schools they have left.”
Even CREDOs most recent study of urban students shows that in 93% of measurements of reading and math in large cities across the United States, charters actually still have a negative impact on Black students. In the cases where charter perform better, the difference is typically minuscule, like the amount of difference between two football teams that are 1-10 and 0-11. In somes cases where charters perform better overall, such as Philadelphia, the overall positive performance of charter can be attributed to White and Asian students success, rather than spectacular academic success for Black and Latino students.
Furthermore, it is very clear that after more than 25 years of trying, charters have failed to dramatically change the inequality status quo in our nation. However, where they are succeeding is setting democratically-accountable districts like Los Angeles on a collision course with bankruptcy.
Our society has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building, financing and funding charters schools at great expense to taxpayers— considering the evidence to this point, the underwhelming results, and in many cases reprehensible, should be considered a national disappointment.
Today is Thanksgiving Day, and some will sit down to bounteous meals while others will line up at soup kitchens or go hungry. That’s America 2017.
It is a day for giving and a day for thanks. One way to Give is to volunteer at a soup kitchen at a local church. You will be glad you did. You will truly understand that it is better to give than to receive. You will learn to count your blessings.
The 1% can give thanks to the Republican Congress. Its tax plan will make them much, much richer, while shutting down deductions and tax credits that help students, teachers, and the middle class.
How will the rich benefit?
Here is one analysis, written by Ulrich Boser and Abel McDaniels of the Center for American Progress.
“Under the tax plan currently before Congress, billionaires like U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos would save hundreds of millions of dollars. A new analysis by the Center for American Progress Action Fund suggests that the money used to give DeVos and her family just one of these tax breaks would be enough to pay more than 6,000 teachers. Similarly, the money used to give President Donald Trump and his family an enormous tax break would be enough to pay more than 20,000 teachers.
“CAPAF’s analysis underscores how the House GOP plan will drain federal revenues. Yet, Betsy DeVos is one of several cabinet members who would reap millions as a result of the House Republican plan to eliminate taxes on multimillion-dollar estates. The plan also caps the tax rate on the income of wealthy owners of businesses like Amway, which the DeVos family owns.
“While many have examined how the plan will hurt ordinary working families and concentrate economic power in the largest corporations and the ultrawealthy, the magnitude of the tax cuts for the wealthy is difficult to understand. To put the effects of these cuts in perspective, CAPAF calculated the tax breaks that Betsy Devos and Donald Trump and their families would gain from just one provision of this plan and compared the value of those tax breaks to the cost of providing teachers for the nation’s students.
“For the analysis in this column, the authors relied on the previously mentioned CAPAF column, as well as the U.S. Department of Education’s 2016 allocations for selected programs and the Michigan Department of Education’s 2017 allocations to determine the amount of the state’s 21st Century Learning Centers grant and Title II grant awards, and divided the estate tax gain DeVos’s heirs would see by these numbers. The authors also used the average public school teacher salary determined by the National Center for Education Statistics, and the median bus driver salary determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and divided the estate tax gain the Trump family would see by those numbers.
“To be clear: The federal estate tax does not fund state teacher and bus driver salaries; however, the comparison provides a concrete way of understanding the magnitude of just one of the many tax breaks for the wealthy contained in the House and Senate tax plans.
“DeVos’ family would gain $351 million from the estate tax repeal, according to the CAPAF analysis. The DeVos’ tax break amounts to more than five times the amount of federal money her home state of Michigan received for teacher professional development. Alternatively, the amount of the DeVos’ estate tax break alone could fund afterschool programs in Michigan for about 10 years. Or, that amount could pay the salaries of more than 6,000 badly needed public school teachers.
“Repealing the estate tax will give Trump’s heirs a $1.15 billion tax break, according to CAPAF’s calculations. That revenue would be enough to pay the salaries of more than 20,000 public school teachers, or more than 36,000 bus drivers, of which there is a shortage. Again, federal estate tax revenues do not fund state public employee salaries, but the comparison is useful for understanding how large the proposed tax cuts for the wealthy are.
“The Trump-McConnell-Ryan plan contains other provisions that do directly impact public schools. For example, the proposed expansion of college savings accounts will siphon money away from public schools. Wealthy families would be able to avoid paying taxes on thousands of dollars used for private school tuition. EdChoice, a conservative-leaning advocacy organization which actually supports the provision, admits the proposal is “not a solution for every family” and this is especially true “for families with limited means.””
It is a Reverse Robin Hood Tax Plan. Take from hard-working middle-income families and give to the undeserving rich.
For those white working class people who voted for Trump, please notice that you will get crumbs from his bounteous table at Mar-a-Lago, surrounded by friends who paid $200,000 to join his club.
The two lists are confusing when seen together because the Gates family and the Bezos family are not on the second list but families with far less billions are.
Oh, well.
During the Eisenhower administration—the 1950s—the highest marginal tax rate was 91% for those at the very top. There was less income inequality then than now. The average CEO made about 20 Times more than the average worker. Today, the average CEO makes 270 times more than the average worker.
This is a valuable review to share with friends who are not familiar with Eva’s strategies: cherrypicking students, high attrition rates, high teacher turnover, disciplining and suspending those she wants to get rid of, cultivating billionaires, boasting that her methods are scalable when they are not, and so on.
The great lie that Erickson fastens on is that Eva, like others in the charter industry, like to pretend that going to a charter school is an escalator to the middle class, but what they refuse to confront is the social and economic inequality that keeps a few at the top, and a great many at the bottom. Schools can’t fix that, no matter how hard they push “no excuses.”
It may be hard to believe that billionaires are deeply concerned with the well-being of poor children of color. They fight any tax ibpncreases that might reduce income inequality and improve the quality of life for the families of these children. But they are more than willing to invest in charter schools.
In this article, teacher-writer Jake Jacobs explores the charter-love of the billionaires. Bear in mind that he has only scratched the surface, as there are billionaires in Idaho (the Albertson family), in Texas (Tim Dunn), in North Carolina (Art Pope), in Washington (Bill Gates), in California (Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Doris Fischer, etc.), all of whom would rather pay to expand charters than to pay for a successful public sector.
Jacobs spreads the blame in a bipartisan manner. But behind it all is charters instead of taxes for the rich.
Jacobs writes:
“Trump went further than Hillary, promising a rapid expansion of charter schools – but this meant charter advocates were siding with both presidential candidates. After winning, Trump wasted no time seeking out the notorious charter maven Eva Moskowitz, CEO of the 41 school Success Academy network in New York City.
“Moskowitz had financial ties to the Trump campaign through Wall Street financier John Paulson. An $8.5 million donor to Success Academy who served as economic advisor to the Trump campaign. Billionaire investor Julian Robertson who gave Success a record-shattering $25 million gift is also a donor to a prominent pro-Trump PAC.
“After meeting Trump, Moskowitz pledged support for his plan to expand charters – as well as controversial private school vouchers – but she stopped short of joining Trump’s cabinet. Next, Moskowitz offered praise to Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (whose foundation had previously donated $300,000 to Success Academy). Moskowitz then invited Ivanka Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan to tour Success charter schools in Harlem.
“Most people do not realize that PACs allied with Moskowitz also helped engineer a political coup in Albany. Her two charter school lobbying groups, Families for Excellent Schools and Great Public Schools PAC, an offshoot of Students First NY, spent over $10 million making pro-charter donors the biggest political manipulators in NY state.
“Another group of hedge funders called New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany financed a massive advertising campaign in 2014 to keep the NY State Senate in Republican hands and pro-charter. Success Academy mega-donor Daniel Loeb contributed $1 million to the group.
“Also pushing charter schools is Reclaim NY, a PAC disguised as a “charity” backed by reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. When it’s founding VP Steve Bannon stepped down to work in Trump’s White House, it illustrated why The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported Mercer has “surrounded” Trump with “his people” by “paying for their seats.”
“MAYORAL CONTROL MATTERS
“As the plan to expand charter schools in NY starts with wealthy donors who in turn fund legislators, an important focus is wresting control from local stakeholders who might oppose charters opening in their neighborhood.
“Just as we see in charter-heavy Chicago, the key to this in NYC was mayoral control. In 2002, the NY legislature upstate first granted then-mayor Michael Bloomberg unilateral control of NYC schools for a term of seven years, dissolving locally-elected school boards. Because Bloomberg was an advocate for privatizing education and had successfully expanded charters, he was granted a six-year renewal in 2009.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 