ALSO SEE: CBS CEO: "For Us, Economically,
Donald's Place in This Election Is a Good Thing"

Not Just Trump: Every GOP Candidate Is an Extremist

By Bryce Covert, Rolling Stone

01 March 16

 

Despite painting themselves as moderates compared to Trump, every Republican in the race is economically radical

n the race to Stop Trump, virtually every Republican candidate has been held up as a potential beacon of moderation in comparison to the Donald. If Rubio can't play the role, perhaps Kasich can? If no one knows who Kasich is, well, at least Cruz isn't quite as extreme as Trump?

And while Trump has been called out as radical on his views about Mexicans and Muslims, when it comes to economics he's mostly been taken at face value. When he said his tax plan would make "hedge-fund guys" pay up while reducing taxes for the middle class, mainstream news reports heralded the plan as "populist."

But when you dig into the numbers the remaining Republican candidates have proffered in their economic proposals, none of them can hold the title of moderate or populist. Every single one is an extremist. All have put forward relatively detailed plans, and while they all have their quirks, the numbers are strikingly similar — and substantial.

Every single candidate gives a huge gift to the wealthy and a meager one to the less fortunate. Trump doesn't go after the "hedge-fund guys" all that hard, it turns out. Nearly 40 percent of the benefits of his tax package would flow to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans; on the other hand, those in the middle and two bottom-fifths of the income scale would get about 16 percent. The raw dollar amounts are equally eye-popping: Under President Trump, the poorest Americans would see about $200 in tax relief over a decade; the 0.1 percent, richest of the rich, would get more than $1.7 million.

Rubio, the son of a maid and a bartender (as he is wont to mention), looks pretty much the same as the guy who got a $1 million loan from his dad. He would hand more than 40 percent of the benefits of his tax relief to the richest 1 percent of Americans, leaving little for the middle and bottom. That works out to $232 for the poorest, and about $1.1 million for the richest 0.1 percent.

Trump did at least follow through on his promise to include in his plan raising the tax rate on capital gains, or money made from investments rather than through a salary — a means overwhelmingly enjoyed by the rich, although it would still be taxed lower than the highest income bracket. Rubio, though, floats an idea no other Republican has embraced: scrapping the tax on capital gains altogether. All those hedge-fund guys, and every other wealthy person with investments, would receive an enormous handout.

Cruz's tax plan looks a little bit different for deploying what he calls a "business flat tax," which is pretty similar to a European-style value-added tax. But the distribution still ends up skewing toward the rich. With all of his changes taken together, the 1 percent would get a 17 percent boost in their income right out the bat. The poorest, meanwhile, would be only 2.2 percent better off.

Carson takes this repeating script and gives it his own flair. He offers a flat tax, levying a uniform rate on all income, big or small. While the numbers are more bloated, they follow the same pattern: The 1 percent would get two-thirds of the benefits from his plan. At the same time, Carson has been clear that – unlike his rivals – he wants every citizen to owe income taxes, even the most destitute who currently don't pay anything because they make so little. That means that the poorest 40 percent would actually see a tax increase under his plan, while millionaires' burdens would go down. A person in the bottom 20 percent would owe almost $800 more, while someone in the 1 percent would owe about $350,000 less.

Kasich — the supposed rational moderate in the GOP field — hasn't enticed any group to run the numbers on his plan, possibly because he left some key details blank. But the basic building blocks are very similar. In his plan, as with all of his rivals', corporations would face a lower tax rate, as would people who fall in the highest bracket. He would eliminate the estate tax, paid by the wealthiest 0.2 percent when they pass on their inheritances, and lower the capital gains rate — all giveaways to the richest of the rich.

Tax cuts don't come for free — not for the poor or the rich. And so each candidate proposes losing significant amounts of revenue in order to hand these favors to the wealthy. Over the next decade, the government would lose $9.6 trillion under President Carson, $9.5 trillion under President Trump, $8.6 trillion under President Cruz, and $6.8 trillion under President Rubio. There is certainly an enormous different between a $9.6 trillion and $6.8 trillion cost, but these figures are unprecedented. Reagan's tax cuts amounted to a loss of 2.1 percent of GDP, while George W. Bush's cost 1.4 percent. On the other hand, Trump's would cost 4 percent, Cruz's 3.6, and Rubio's 2.6.

Kasich's plan throws in an extra dollop of hardheartedness. He promises to balance the budget in eight years, which might sound good if you think the federal government's finances function like a checkbook, but in fact, they don't. The country currently has a $544 billion deficit; to bring that to zero, particularly while losing so much revenue to tax cuts and implementing his call for a big increase in military spending, all other government programs would have to swallow truly extreme cuts.

Kasich isn't alone in making such a promise, however. Rubio goes even further, calling for an amendment that would require the government to maintain a balanced budget. That would decimate the government's ability to spend more in times of economic turmoil, making recessions longer and deeper, and would force cuts in some parts of the budget if spending has to rise in others — if, for instance, a bunch of people lose their jobs in a recession and file for unemployment insurance at once.

Some of these candidates have actual legislative histories to back up their outrageous proposals, while Trump and Carson so far haven't enacted anything. As governor of Ohio, Kasich pushed through more than $3 billion in tax cuts that helped the wealthy but not anyone else. He also balanced his state's budget without raising new taxes, necessitating huge spending cuts that led to massive layoffs and some cities to actually disincorporate. Rubio and Cruz have spent years in the Senate, and while their proposals haven't become law, Rubio took a colleague's tax-cut package and made it even more costly and beneficial to the rich.

But presidents tend to govern along the lines of the promises they make as candidates. If any of these five men make it to the White House, the economy is in big trouble.

With Scalia's Death, Corporate America May Have a Harder Time Watering Down Collective Legal Rights

By Alan Pyke, ThinkProgress

01 March 16

 

he meat industry’s business model has radically reshaped Storm Lake, Iowa, in the past few decades.

The 10,000-person town is home to numerous meatpacking plants owned by Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest industrial meatpacking firm. In recent years, Tyson’s pork processing operation in Storm Lake became the latest epicenter in a long-running campaign to convince the Supreme Court to undermine the rights of the kinds of people who make the town prosperous.

Like the rest of the industrialized agriculture business, Tyson relies on low-wage workers to keep up with its fast-paced production lines.

One worker per month on average manages to cut off a piece of herself, 2015 data on Tyson’s safety record indicates. The company’s 113,000 workers take knives, saws, and skinners to a staggering volume of carcasses. The firm processes out 35 million chickens, 400,000 pigs, and 128,000 cows every week, a speed that means poultry workers are expected to handle as many as 14,000 chickens per day.

Facilities like Tyson’s have made Storm Lake a major draw for immigrant workers willing to be paid as little as $10.16 per hour to perform arduous, repetitive tasks with a higher risk of injury than many other blue-collar occupations. Surrounding Buena Vista County was less than 1 percent Hispanic as the Reagan era waned. Now more than one in five county residents are Hispanic or Latino, a shift the New York Times noted in 2007 in a report on divisive immigration politics ahead of the 2008 election.

They have also made Storm Lake a hotbed for wage theft allegations. To keep per-unit costs as low as possible across roughly 68 million pounds of meat per week, Tyson takes a tight-fisted approach to payroll questions.

Workers have sued the company repeatedly over the years for payroll issues stemming from its commitment to compressing labor costs. But the company appears content to pay for years and years of litigation to fight back worker claims rather than adopting a more generous approach.

A 1988 lawsuit from federal labor officials was tied up in court until 1996. Four years after it was resolved, the Department of Labor took Tyson to court for the same set of issues. That suit took 9 years to reach completion.

This spring, the company is awaiting a Supreme Court decision in yet another long-running labor case. A group of 10 workers in Storm Lake including a woman named Peg Bouaphakeo sued Tyson in 2007, saying the company violates both state and federal wage laws by paying workers for just four minutes per day for the time they spend “donning and doffing” safety equipment.

Bouaphakeo and her coworkers won class-action status for their complaint, and a jury awarded the group $6 million in compensation based upon a statistical average of the actual time workers spent wrangling protective equipment before and after standing on the production line.

Rather than absorb that hit – which Mother Jones noted last year is the equivalent of two hours of operating profits for the meat titan – Tyson deployed its lawyers. And a familiar cast of corporate allies lined up to fight alongside them.

If the business side wins in Bouaphakeo, it won’t just undermine compensation for Storm Lake’s cheated workers. It will further tip the balance of justice away from large groups of wronged individuals and toward the interests of the powerful, continuing a pattern of the court under Chief Justice John Roberts.

But in the months between oral arguments last fall and an actual decision that could dull the power of class-action suits to cut into abusive corporate profiteering, Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly in bed in Texas.

The shocking death of one of the most reliable conservative votes on the high bench leaves consumer advocates hopeful that the streak of Roberts court decisions chipping away at critical tools for America’s legal underdogs will end in Storm Lake.

What Should It Cost To Cheat The Little Guy?

In this case, Tyson’s defense centers on the technical argument that the plaintiffs’ average time spent dealing with safety gear overstates the damages that its standardized four-minute payroll assumption caused. It’s asking the court to reject such statistical evidence as grounds for determining damages in class-action suits, and to invalidate the class entirely on the grounds that some members of it weren’t underpaid at all according to the plaintiffs’ study.

Strip away the Latin phrases and inscrutable citations, though, and Tyson v. Bouaphakeo is a simple thing. When lots of relatively powerless people seek the law’s protection from a powerful entity, how can the law prevent that inequality from infiltrating courtrooms?

The class-action system is among the most efficient and effective tools that an underdog has when defying someone who can afford decades of legal fees.

“Class-actions offset asymmetries and imbalances,” David Seligman, an attorney at the workers’ rights non-profit Towards Justice, said in an interview. “Class-action means that if there’s one worker who realizes she has these rights and is courageous enough to come forward, she can represent all her coworkers. Low-wage workers are often really scared to come forward, and their employers know it. A lot of them bank on never being sued.”

Such intimidation and despair can be great for business. The small individual sums Tyson workers weren’t paid became profit for their employer. And Tyson doesn’t dispute that workers should be paid for donning and doffing time, or that its system shorted many of them. It just argues the penalty should be limited to the exact amount workers were underpaid.

Allowing companies to be that persnickety about what it should cost them to break the law misses a key point about what class-action suits are supposed to achieve. “We’re not talking only about allowing people to obtain redress, to become whole, but also about disgorging profits from entities that obtain them illegally,” Seligman said.

“That’s part of what the law has to do. Because otherwise people have an incentive to keep breaking the law.”

Workers have an interest in being fairly compensated for all the time it takes them to do their jobs. Their employer has an interest in paying them only for the time they spend actively earning the firm profits. Our legal system says companies can’t foist the cost of doing things the right way off onto their workers – but unless that national value can be enforced at the bar, it’s useless.

Over the past several years, Justice Scalia helped radically limit the actual utility of class-action suits. His death was a dramatic enough shift in the court’s view of corporate rights that Dow Chemical just volunteered to give away $835 million rather than take their chances in a price-fixing case before a post-Scalia Supreme Court.

The Scalia-era court leaves a broad legacy of decisions that curtail little-guy rights in a variety of ways. It derailed the largest class-action in history in 2011, siding with Walmart in a case of alleged gender discrimination on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ strong proof of a discriminatory outcome from corporate policy didn’t mean the company had actively discriminated against women in its employ. The same term, in a case called Concepcion, the justices approved the increasingly common corporate practice of burying forced-arbitration clauses in contracts that renounce a worker or customer’s right to seek class-action relief from the courts for any dispute that may arise in the future.

Scalia authored the majority opinion in both cases. Each was decided 5-4, with the court’s four liberals dissenting from Scalia’s central findings.

The Legal War On Class-Action Rights

A favorable ruling for Tyson would make it much harder to use class-action suits to punish workplace practices that convert money that should go to workers into profits for their employer, National Consumer Law Center attorney Charles Delbaum said in an interview.

“If the Supreme Court were to overturn this decision, it means that only individual workers will be able to prove a claim for overtime. They’ll have to have their own records of exactly how much time they spent without getting paid,” said Delbaum.

A 4-4 tie would preserve the previous judgment from the Eighth Circuit while depriving it of any binding precedential power in other courts. It might still carry significant weight, Delbaum said, because the Eighth Circuit has traditionally been hostile to class-action claims but found in the workers’ favor here.

Delbaum and Seligman saw some reason for optimism even before the conservative bloc lost Scalia’s voice, simply because of how far Tyson and its compadres were asking the court to go.

“By law, it’s the employer’s responsibility to record how many hours the employee worked,” Seligman said. Where employers fail to provide an adequate record, employees are free to bring courts a credible estimate of the ill-gotten profits earned by the company through payroll errors.

“That’s how it’s worked for a century,” Seligman said. “The alternative that Tyson is asking for is for employees to come forward with very specific evidence of how many hours they worked. That turns wage and hour law on its head, and the more pragmatic members of the court were really concerned about that.” The sheer ambition of Tyson’s request made their opponents hopeful, and Scalia’s death has upped the odds of a positive outcome dramatically.

Business interests flock to cases like these, coordinating their fire in hopes of shrinking the utility of class-action techniques. Bouaphakeo, for example, saw amicus filings on behalf of Tyson Foods from a long list of organizations including the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, Walmart, Dow Chemical, and multiple trade groups representing defense attorneys.

“The Chamber of Commerce is at the forefront of that effort. It’s all part and parcel of the overwhelming change in the landscape that arose from Concepcion upholding arbitration clauses that deprive people of the right to participate in a class action,” said Delbaum. “That’s a strong example of the bias of the majority of this Supreme Court, when Justice Scalia was alive at least, against consumer class-actions.”

The court’s recent trajectory adds up to nothing less than an assault on one of the best tools individual Americans have for confronting the powerful entities that define their lives, the consumer attorneys said.

“I think there’s absolutely a war on class actions,” Seligman said. “It’s not to encourage efficient dispute resolution, but to squelch disputes entirely, which in many ways is antithetical to the principles of law and economics that many conservatives care about.”