“The Stock Market,” as represented by the DOW Jones “Industrial” average, now wobbles around 35,000. These days hardly anyone bats an eyelash when the DOW falls (or rises) 500 points in a day. That’s remarkable considering that within the lifetime of many of today’s investors a 500 point drop would have trimmed off more than a fifth of the DOW’s value. (In June 1982 the DOW stood at 2,326.18).
Stop and think about for a minute what that means. From 1982 to today the value of a portfolio of stocks that mimic the DOW has grown by a factor of 15. In other words, a $1000 investment in this imaginary DOW-mimicking stock index fund made in 1982 would now be worth $15,000. Meanwhile, inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, has only doubled. That relatively minor $1000 investment made in an IRA or 401k in 1982 would have 7.5 times the buying power today (minus some income tax paid on the withdrawal from the retirement account).
Has the real intrinsic value of this DOW stock portfolio actually risen by 7.5 times in the last 40 years? Here’s where things get weird. Once upon a time investors paid a lot of attention to something called the “Price Earnings Ratio” (P/E ratio). The ownership of stocks rewards investors in two ways, dividends and share price. The price part of the P/E ratio is the cost of a share, while the earnings part is the profit a corporation pays out to investors as dividends. The Price Earnings Ratio of another (and similar) major stock index, the S&P 500, was close to 8 in 1982. The P/E Ratio today is around 37. This rise in P/E ratio is a pretty strong hint that current stocks are “overvalued”, that is, stock prices aren’t justified by the dividends they pay out.
In a free market, according to the economics I learned in high school, price will rise as demand increases (or supply contracts). In the early 1980s my generation, the “baby boomers” were starting to hitting their stride in the jobs and earnings department. The baby boomers were a bulge in population a portion of which had a lot of self-interested political and economic clout. It should be no surprise that Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and 401k-s, investment vehicles that accrue investment gains without being taxed (until withdrawal), took off in the 1980s—just as “the Reagan Revolution” got underway.
Someone pointed out to me decades ago that stock values were bound to rise over the long term simply because the baby boomers were destined to bid up stock values. I wasn’t smart enough to notice that IRAs and 401k-s were a made-to-order accelerant of this trend. After all, my parents grew up during the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression that followed. They were leery of stock investments. What money they had was stored in bank accounts drawing interest that barely kept pace with inflation. Retirement was based on social security and pensions—both of which stopped at death and neither of which build wealth that could be passed on to the next generation.
Now step back and think of everyone who stood at the investment starting line in 1980. Modern-day Republicans would like you to see everyone standing there with no racing handicap, everyone with an equal chance in the race. In fact, that is horse manure. Some entrants in this wealth race came to the starting line with familial wealth behind them that dated back generations, some came with an education supported by the GI Bill, some came who had been excluded from the GI Bill, some came with equity in a home, some came from families that had been restricted to red-lined neighborhoods where home equity didn’t grow.
Given the variety of handicapping at the starting line in 1980, some were able to scrape together enough to fund food and shelter, some scraped together a little to put in an interest-bearing bank savings account, and some were able to make use of the newly popular investment vehicles, the IRAs and 401k-s. Between the population bulge of the baby boomers and the tax free investment vehicles at their disposal demand rose for ownership of stocks. To mix metaphors, the stock wealth multiplier train left the station—and a whole lot of folks were left behind wondering what happened—and increasingly bitter and guarded. Those who were still running the race in 2008 and were almost in reach of the investment train got swatted back as their investments both in their homes and the stock market cratered. Meanwhile, those who made money by managing money demonstrated by the bank bailouts that they were untouchable, that we really aren’t all in this together.
Today’s vast differences between workers’ wages and CEO’s salaries and golden parachutes is just the tip of the iceberg of disparate wealth fueled by a stock market that bears no resemblance to the lives a great many people live.
In this midst of this inflationary wealth spiral for some Republicans have worked hard to make the effects even worse by cutting taxes for the wealthy and slashing estate taxes, making it ever easier to accumulate wealth and pass it on, even as they rely on culture war rhetoric to maintain their minority power.
As the streets fill with snow, Christmas shoppers scurry to acquire the latest thing to put under the tree, and the cars snake through Manito Park to enjoy the Christmas lights, the executive branch of City of Spokane government under Mayor Nadine Woodward is getting into the spirit of Christmas, too. Eight days before the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, Mayor Woodward threatened confiscation of the tent dwellings and belongings of the homeless camped out on the public sidewalk around City Hall. After all, it wouldn’t be right for the City to allow a distraction from the season of giving, would it?
Never mind that Mayor Woodward’s Republican allies on the current three member Spokane Board of County Commissioners are working hard to decide how to spend a federal windfall of 101 million dollars of our income tax dollars from the American Rescue Plan. Never mind that Mayor Woodward and her administration neglected to apply for money appropriated by the State of Washington for efforts to house the homeless. Never mind that home prices and rents in the region are skyrocketing as people move here flush with money from the sale of homes in even more inflated markets. Never mind that bags of PAC money from developers and realtors helped put Ms. Woodward in office—and never mind that these same people are concentrating on refilling those money bags by building and selling homes in the medium and high end market.
Never mind all that. These folks camped out at City Hall must have, in Republican parlance, made “bad choices” that rendered them homeless. Isn’t it just “tough love” at Christmas time to threaten the homeless with confiscation of their belongings and scatter them to live in their tents in the dark and cold and snow in less noteworthy locations like the vacant land near Freya and the freeway?
Mayor Woodward and her executive branch’s threat against the homeless encamped at City Hall was carefully couched in legalistic wording [the bold is mine]:
The city claims the demonstration poses a health and safety risk, and has impacted access to nearby businesses and City Hall.
“The people are able to come back and spend time and protest and have their voices be known. We’re moving property, not people,” city spokesman Brian Coddington said.
Mayor Woodward and the City’s lawyers are tiptoeing around the legal requirement that available shelter space exist before such clearance (See Section 10.10.026, B., 9, of the Spokane Municipal Code). From the Spokesman article that details the controversy surrounding the Mayor’s order:
City officials acknowledge that there is inadequate shelter space during the day to enforce the city’s laws against camping on public property, which require shelter space to be available as a condition of enforcement.
It goes on:
Coddington said the city issued the notices to ensure people have time to make arrangements to store belongings and find shelter. While acknowledging that the city camping law can’t be enforced because there is not adequate shelter space available during the day time, he said there is available shelter space at night.
“The bottom line is there’s places available to sleep inside,” Coddington said.
To which the people who actually run homeless shelters respond:
“It’s illegal. We don’t have enough shelter beds,” Garcia [of Jewels Helping Hands] said.
Whether there are or are not shelter beds to sleep gets lost in weeds over what constitutes a “low barrier” shelter. Moreover, for convenience the City overlooks the practical matter of actually obtaining a bed in a warm place to sleep. Imagine yourself navigating this territory:
HOC [House of Charity] only has check in between 7 and 8pm. It does not matter how many beds they have available at 8:01pm because they are closed to check in. Guests not checked in are not allowed to access day services. Truth [Truth Ministries] only has check in between 6-7pm and all guests must leave at 6am. So, until 6pm there is not a single facility a man can access in our city. Then they must decide which facility to try. If they walk to Truth (2 miles from downtown) and don’t get in, they very well won’t make the check in at HOC. If they wait for HOC, they passed the check in at Truth. Are you starting to see the barriers created?
And this is just finding shelter for one night. Imagine how you would approach seeking employment from the position of having no certain shelter. From the Spokesman article:
It’s hard to go out and get a job when you don’t have a shower every day, if you don’t have clean clothes,” Roofener said. “You tell someone you’re living on the street, they don’t really want to hire you.”
Mayor Woodward was elected in 2019 with a 1.24% vote margin. She was elected with the aid of a record nearly a half million dollars in “independent expenditures” from realtor and developer Political Action Committees. She posted a slanted, politicized video, “Seattle is Dying” to dramatize and frighten over the issue of homelessness and to suggest she held the key to resolving the issue. Since then she has made good on one related (and totally inconsequential) campaign promise: she moved the location of the downtown police precinct. Now, the administration under her leadership having failed to apply for state funds available to address the issue, she orders the homeless outside City Hall swept off to camp in less visible locations. Out of sight, out of mind—and so much for Christian charity in the time of Christmas.
Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations compound north of Hayden Lake, Idaho, was bankrupted, destroyed, and the land donated to the North Idaho College Foundation in 2000-2001. Those of us living here at the time breathed a sigh of relief. It felt like a festering cancer had been excised. The Spokesman article published on September 7, 2010, describing civil rights groups and local government celebrating the ten year anniversary of the excision, ended on what now feels like a prescient note:
Paul Mullet, the self-described national director of the Aryan Nations, contacted the media two weeks ago when he heard about the planned ceremony. He said that although he has moved to Ohio due to a death in the family, the Aryan Nations will never leave North Idaho.
The margins of the excision of the Aryan Nations cancer were never clean. Remnants of the Neo-Nazi, Christian Identity, separatist ideology that Richard Butler fostered locally and nationally from the Hayden Lake compound for thirty years continue to spread, bubbling up in the extremist takeover of the Kootenai County Republican Party and, more recently, the Board of Trustees of North Idaho College (somewhat ironically), and in parts of the SpokaneGOP—think former State Representative Matt Shea, his “Biblical Basis for War” document, and his ongoing efforts to promote a theocratic “Liberty State.”
All of this is intimately intertwined with “The American Redoubt” (emphasis on the second syllable), a movement in our region of which many folks I seem unacquainted. Not every survivalist or “back-to-the-lander” in the inland northwest subscribes to Redoubt ideology, but many do.
All these strands are loosely tied together in a YouTube documentary with more than 1.5 million views entitled, “Inside the American Redoubt: Trump voters building a new state | Times Documentaries.” I strongly recommend you put it on your viewing list. You will recognize many people and places in the Inland Northwest, including Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, Matt Shea, John Jakob Schmidt, parts of Coeur d’Alene, North Idaho College, and Hayden Lake. Less widely recognized, you will meet the editor of Redoubt News (a right wing, digital publication of the Redoubt movement); Chris Walsh of Revolutionary Realty in Coeur d’Alene; and one of the surviving trustees of the hostile takeover of the Board of Trustees of North Idaho College. Toward the end you’ll see Matt Shea and John Jakob Schmidt on stage at what I believe (but which is not identified in the video) is a “God and Country” gathering at the Marble Community compound near Northport in northern Stevens County, Washington, just a half an hour from where Cathy McMorris Rodgers grew up and got her start in Republican politics.
Once again, here is the link to the free video in YouTube:
For more links and musings see the P.S.s.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. We owe the downfall of Richard Butler in large part to the tireless efforts of a newspaper reporter who recently died, Bill Morlin. He covered events in Hayden Lake, the Ruby Ridge standoff, and other extremist events in the region for decades. Were it not for Morlin’s efforts the original Aryan Nations cancer might have grown to a point of being inoperable. Morlin’s efforts will be missed.
P.P.S. Leah Sotille, a terrific young reporter originally based in Spokane, in her podcast series, Bundyville and Bundyville the Remnant, fills in the background to the ideologies now bubbling up in the Redoubt and in a number of domestic terror incidents of the last decades, incidents that might otherwise seem unrelated. I highly recommend either listening to or reading both series accessible at the above links.
Many of my generation came away from high school with a sketchy—and sometimes contradictory—understanding of American history. Ascendant among the ideas presented was a unique document, the Bill of Rights, that assured us of freedom from oppression by tyrannical government encroachment. Furthermore, those individual Rights were protected by a judicial system culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court, a judicial system that operated under “the rule of law”.
The march of American history, we were told, was the story of securing these individual rights (including the right to vote) not just for landed men, but also for women and people of color. The forward march of this concept of individual rights was current in the heady days of the mid-twentieth century when a series of Supreme Court rulings struck down segregation of schools (Brown v. Board of Education) and supported individual autonomy by negating laws against the sale of contraceptives (Griswold v. Connecticut) and a woman’s right to privacy in dealing with pregnancy (Roe v. Wade).
During the same period of the civil rights movement the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. In the words of Martin Luther King, “the arc of history” was “bending toward justice”.
Not so fast. Modern-day Republican’s are fond of “states’ rights”, of “originalism” in interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, and of “Freedom” (at least as regards the 1st and 2nd Amendments). When was the last time you heard a Republican laud, or even mention, the 14th Amendment? The Amendments to the Constitution, at least those that follow the Bill of Rights (the first ten Amendments) are off of radar.
There is a reason for this blind spot. “States’ rights,” often declared to be the issue over which the American Civil War was fought (rather than slavery), is coded language for opposition to the 14th Amendment. Why? The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 shortly after the Union victory in our bloody American Civil War. The 14th Amendment was intended as a turning point in American history, a bending toward justice of history’s arc, an assertion that those human rights declared or implied (see 9th Amendment) by the Constitution —in direct contradiction of the modern-day Republican assertion of “States’ Rights”—were ascendant to State law and enforceable by the federal government. Here’s the text of Section 1 of the 14th:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
“States’ Rights” is code for returning to the ascendancy of state law that existed before the 14th Amendment (and persisted for nearly a century through the Jim Crow era), when states could, and did, enact laws that restricted voting rights and regulated aspects of people’s personal lives without concern over federal interference. “States’ Rights” is code for removing the U.S. Supreme Court’s role in assuring Americans of the rights they are supposed to enjoy under the U.S. Constitution and all its Amendments and leaving the States to ignore the 14th Amendment and do as they please.
Please read Professor of American History Heather Cox Richardson’s post (pasted below). It profoundly changed my grasp of American history and Republican Party rhetoric. (I encourage you to sign up for her daily email if you do not already receive it.)
I will never hear the words “States’ Rights” the same way again.
Today, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the Supreme Court undermined the federal protection of civil rights that has shaped our world since the 1950s.
The case asked whether opponents of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called Heartbeat Bill, could bring a federal case to block the law, which gets around normal challenges by putting private individuals, rather than the state itself, in charge of enforcing it. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court said they could sue, but it limited that ability so severely that the law itself will remain largely intact.
The state law, which went into effect on September 1, prohibits abortion after six weeks of a pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. And yet, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court affirmed that women have the constitutional right to abortion without undue restrictions, primarily in the first trimester of a pregnancy.
This case is about far more than abortion. It is about the federal protection of civil rights in the face of discriminatory state laws. That federal protection has been the key factor in advancing equal rights in America since the 1950s.
When the Framers wrote the Constitution in 1787, shortly after the American Revolution against a king colonists had come to believe was a tyrant, many leading Americans were still worried about concentrating too much power in the hands of a chief executive and a central government. In order to convince people to ratify the Constitution, leaders called for explicit limits to what the new national government could do to citizens. In 1791 the nation added ten amendments to the Constitution to protect individual freedom and rights, including, for example, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to a speedy trial, and so on.
These limits applied to the federal government alone.
States could still enact fiercely repressive laws, including, before the Civil War, laws throwing Indigenous Americans off their lands, denying rights to women (including access to their children in the rare instance of divorce), and enslaving Black Americans. In the wake of the war, legislatures in former Confederate states tried to reassert white control through “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people.
Congressmen recognized the need to use the power of the federal government to override state laws in order to protect equality. In 1866, it passed and sent off to the states for ratification another amendment to the Constitution: the Fourteenth.
The Fourteenth Amendment states that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.”
Congress intended for the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that Black Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures wanted to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery. The states ratified it and it became part of the Constitution in 1868.
In 1870, as white supremacists organized as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized their Black neighbors, Congress passed a law establishing the Department of Justice, which promptly set out to prosecute Klan members, eventually driving the organization underground.
But federal protection of civil rights was both limited and short lived. State legislatures kept or passed wide-ranging discriminatory laws, against Black Americans, for sure, and also against other minorities—Asian immigrants were explicitly prohibited from owning land, for example—and all women. By the early twentieth century, there were state laws against mixed-race marriages, against contraception, against integrated schools and housing, against abortion.
World War II changed the equation. Lawmakers had both to adjust to the demands of the minorities and women who had fought in the war and had kept the factories and fields operating, and to counter communists’ charges that American “democracy” sure didn’t look as equal as communism. To address discriminatory state laws, they turned to the federal government.
After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren and Chief Justice Warren Burger (both appointed by Republicans), the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. In 1965, they protected the right of married couples to use contraception. In 1967, they legalized interracial marriage. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.
Justices in the Warren and Burger courts protected these civil rights by arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment required the Bill of Rights to apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: it said that states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.
But opponents of the new decisions insisted that the court was engaging in “judicial activism,” taking away from voters the right to make their own decisions about how society should work. That said that justices were “legislating from the bench.” They insisted that the Constitution is limited by the views of its Framers and that the government can do nothing that is not explicitly written in that 1787 document. They wanted to replace the court’s interpretation of the Constitution with a view that preserved its “original” intent.
The 1987 fight over President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the Supreme Court, originalist Robert Bork, was the first salvo in the attempt to roll back the court’s expansion of civil rights. Bork was extreme for his day—famously saying that the Constitution did not protect the right for married people to use birth control, for example—and six Republicans joined the Democrats to oppose him. But the swing toward originalism was underway.
Now, finally, thanks to the three Supreme Court justices nominated by Donald Trump and confirmed thanks to then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s breaking of the filibuster, the Republicans have cemented an originalist view of the Constitution on the Supreme Court. Their doctrine will send authority for civil rights back to the states to wither or thrive as different legislatures see fit.
In Texas, the legislature has taken away from its citizens a right guaranteed by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court has declined to assert federal power to stop it.
In a partial dissent from today’s decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that “the clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8 has been to nullify this Court’s rulings,” and quoted an 1809 decision that said, “[i]f the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.” Roberts warned his colleagues that “the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system…is at stake.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunter. Texas has launched “a brazen challenge to our federal structure,” she said, one that “echoes the philosophy of John C. Calhoun, a virulent defender of the slaveholding South who insisted that States had the right to ‘veto’ or ‘nullif[y]’ any federal law with which they disagreed.”
Under this old system, what civil rights will be off-limits?
The court’s “choice to shrink from Texas’ challenge to federal supremacy will have far-reaching repercussions,” Sotomayor wrote. “I doubt the Court, let alone the country, is prepared for them.”
My thinking around “States’ Rights” was further crystallized by reading (the same day) a point-counterpoint that appeared side-by-side on the guest opinion page of the Saturday, December 11, 2021, Spokesman Review digital edition (no paper copy available). Here are the links to the two articles separately:
Mr. Sikkenga (the first author, sounding very Republican) tells us that “some [unnamed] people” want to “update” our government and then hones in on an imagined threat to the Bill of Rights—as though Constitutional Amendments ended with the 10th. Ms. Wydra (the second author), in her counterpoint, immediately focuses on Sikkenga’s blind spot: the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of which the Bill is a part were updated—in the Amendments following the Civil War—a fact that Sikkenga denies implicitly. The contrast is glaring.
Al French, Josh Kerns, and Mary Kuney, the three Spokane County Commissioners, all Republicans, still want to weaken—or take down—the Spokane Regional Health District’s (SHRD’s) efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
…at least two more management positions were unexpectedly eliminated Monday morning, Dec. 6, including the highest-level leader of the division that’s been most involved in the district’s pandemic response.
Three out of five division director positions at the district have been empty for months. District Administrative Officer Amelia Clark explained to Board of Health members in recent months that her proposed budget would combine some of those roles to save money.
Ms. Wohlfeil’s article quotes many employees at SRHD dismayed at the staff cuts and the manner in which they were carried out:
Two leaders [both involved in the response to Covid] were escorted from the building on Monday after being informed they were being placed on paid leave until Jan. 1, 2022, when they will no longer work for the district.
Amelia Clark justifies her action as an effort to “save money”. Let’s look at that. Ms. Wohlfeil writes:
The health board approved the final $47.8 million budget on Dec. 2, and the district is waiting to hear if Spokane County will approve a budget ask of $1.98 million toward that total.
Of the nearly 50 million dollar budget of the Regional Health District, Spokane County contributes just $2 million, four pennies of every dollar—and the District is “waiting to hear” if the County is willing to “approve” even that!??! What’s going on here? Who is pushing this belt tightening that Amelia Clark seems bent on extracting by summarily ushering directors of the pandemic response out the door? Is the County strapped for cash and having to tighten its belt on account of the pandemic?
Well, no, that’s a lie. Last week I received an email from the SpokaneGOP urging me to voice my opinion to the Spokane County Commissioners over how they should spend the $101 million dollars the County received in [the bold is mine] “the first allocation of the American Rescue Plan Coronavirus State & Local Fiscal Recovery Funds from the U.S. Department of Treasury.”
One hundred and one million dollars are coming to the County in federal funds related to the coronavirus pandemic and Amelia Clark is firing managers who worked on the pandemic response. Clark is awaiting “approval” from the three Spokane County Commissioners for 2 million dollars at the same time that the Commissioners received 101 million dollars in coronavirus relief from the federal government, money they have the discretion to disperse. Clark is playing along with the County Commissioners’ program to hamstring the Spokane Regional Health District’s efforts to respond to the pandemic. The Commissioners controlling the Health District Board and Clark, led by Al French, already fired an exceedingly competent County Health Officer, Dr. Bob Lutz, in a nasty spectacle last fall. More recently the Commissioners consolidated their grip on the Board with a reorganization plan that goes into effect January 1. 2022.
The SpokaneGOP, a party chock full of Covid deniers, science deniers, and vaccination protestors, wants its members to influence how the County Commissioners, all Republicans, spend the county’s federal grant of Covid-related money. Do not let Republicans be the only ones to weigh in on how that money should be allocated and give the Commissioners cover for them to squeeze the funding of the Health District in the middle of a pandemic.
If you are a resident of Spokane County I urge you to visit the county website:
Click “Community Survey” and fill out the form. Several of those 101 millions of Covid funds should go to the Spokane Regional Health District.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. Commissioner Al French is fond of pointing out that it is the County, not the municipalities within the County, that “funds” SRHD (money that, in any case comes largely from the property taxes of city dwellers). He used that statement as part of his justification for restructuring the SRHD Board to cut out representatives from the city councils of the City of Spokane and the City of Spokane Valley. French, Administrator Clark, and the SpokaneGOP are all hellbent on taking revenge on the very people who have been helping Spokane deal with the pandemic. Don’t let them take the money away without weighing in.
Preparation of annual federal income tax forms raises questions for every taxpayer. Did I miss something? Did I take advantage of all the legal tax breaks available to me? Will I be audited? The rules are complicated enough to make you wonder if you’ve done it right, but for most taxpayers, folk whose income is already reported to the IRS by W-2s and Form 1099s, the realistic likelihood of triggering an audit is minimal.
As the budget and workforce of the IRS has been cut during the last decade, so has the overall likelihood of an audit. From 2010 to 2020 the full time equivalent workforce of the IRS has shrunk from 95,000 to 75,000. The IRS audited 1% of returns overall in 2010. In 2015, the last year for which we have final data, the figure was only 0.6%. (It’s only 0.2% in 2018, but more from that year may still come under audit.)
Realistically, today the average taxpayer has only a 1 in 167 chance of an audit—and if there is nothing glaring on your return the odds are likely far less.
In that same 2010 to 2015 time period, for those reporting a “total positive income” of more than 10 million dollars, the odds of facing an audit from the IRS fell from 21.5% to 8.0%. and the total “recommended additional tax” stemming from those audits fell from 610M in 2010 to 223M dollars in 2015. These returns are often from people with complicated sources of income, people who hire high priced tax lawyers and accountants, professionals whose whole purpose is to find and exploit every available loophole in IRS regulations and defend the return against an audit by IRS.
With that perspective in mind one might reasonably expect one’s representative to Congress to support greater funding for the IRS to re-expand its efforts to enforce tax regulations, particularly on high income filers.
Imagine my anger and dismay (but not surprise) to receive an email from U.S. Rep. McMorris Rodgers dated December 1, 2021, containing the Q and A you can read at the bottom of this email. She flat out lies about H.R. 5376, the Build Back Better Act, on which she cast a Nay vote. CMR lacks the bandwidth—and probably also the intellectual curiosity—to actually read the relevant parts of the Act itself. (Click the link to bring the text of the Act up in your browser, then hit CMD-F and enter “SEC. 138401” to pull up the part on IRS funding.)
Here are the plain words of the Act describing the application of appropriated funds [the bold is mine]:
(1) …for necessary expenses for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for strengthening tax enforcement activities and increasing voluntary compliance, expanding audits and other enforcement activities, and modernizing information technology to effectively support enforcement activities, except that no use of these funds is intended to increase taxes on any taxpayer with taxable income below $400,000
That’s crystal clear. It directly contradicts CMR’s assertion that the average taxpayer should be fearful of expanded IRS scrutiny—and even if the scrutiny increased—the data presented above strongly suggests that it needs to increase. Apparently, CMR copied her lies and half truths from the Republican echo chamber that feeds the gullible with Republican talking points. Many of her cherrypicked “facts” are ginned up from a one page publication concocted by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. The numbers on that page in part are alleged to come from the same IRS Table 17 cited to which I referred above. Footnote 1 even acknowledges that “The proposal [in the Build Back Better Act], by contrast, would return audit rates to the levels of about 10 years ago…” McMorris Rodgers and her echo chamber completely ignore the plain english of the bill itself for the purpose of disingenuously firing up fear of audits and intrusions by the IRS. This isn’t just politics—it is a bald-faced lie.
McMorris Rodgers should be ashamed of herself and her staff. She is shilling for the wealthy who would rather not have their tax avoidance schemes audited.
Here’s the copy of the relevant part of CMR’s email:
Q: Will there really be an extra 85,000 IRS agents hired to monitor our bank accounts? – Sandi from Rockford
A: Thanks for your question. The short answer? Yes, if the Democrats have their way. President Biden and the Democrats’ radical tax and spending spree, which already passed the House, gives the IRS $80 billion to hire approximately 87,000 new IRS agents to track and audit the financial transactions of Americans.
To make matters worse, the proposal will lead to an additional 1.2 million IRS audits each year, nearly half of which —more than 583,000— will hit middle class families making less than $75,000. Even the lowest income Americans would see more audits —more than 313,000—hitting Americans making up to $25,000 per year.
This approach is completely out of touch with reality and is a serious invasion of privacy. Hardworking families in Eastern Washington are already struggling to make ends meet thanks to President Biden’s inflation crisis, and now he wants to audit them too.
The bottom line is: Democrats are supercharging the IRS so they can wring an extra $200 billion out of hardworking American people while giving a $475 billion tax break to millionaires and billionaires in Democratic states.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. The link CMR’s email offers in the last paragraph quoted above leads to an accusatory Republican screed that suggests it represents the entire Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives. That is patent hogwash on its face. However, the SALT deduction (an acronym never spelled out in the screed) is a real thing. SALT stands for “State and Local Taxes”. The SALT Cap is a cap on the amount a high income individual can deduct for having paid state and local taxes. Removing that cap is, in my opinion, a legitimate gripe, an unnecessary sop to the wealthy. The suggestion that nixing the cap will benefit only the “millionaires and billionaires in Democratic states” is a lie—nothing but inflammatory rhetoric. If CMR were an honest legislator she would have participated in the crafting and amending of H.R. 5376 to leave the SALT Deduction Cap in place, not dishonestly snipe from the sidelines.
The Mississippi case Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health was argued December 1 before the U.S. Supreme Court. Thanks to Mitch McConnell’s maneuvering and Donald Trump’s court appointments it seems likely that the now current majority of avowed religious conservative judges on the court will overturn Roe v. Wade by the end of the court’s term in June of 2022. I have read a multitude of opinions about the direction of the court based on the questions asked by the judges. Hands down, the best I have read is Doug Muder’s post that I have copied below. (If you are not already subscribed to receive Muder’s “Weekly Sift,” email each Monday you should.)
Controversy over the legalization of a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy has been a part of my consciousness since I was a teenager in the 1960s. I am sure I read Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but after nearly half a century, I had lost the detail of the delicate, logical balancing act of his writing. Muder, by quoting Blackmun, restores that detail.
Christian religious conservatives claim there is no legitimate controversy over when life begins—for them life begins when two cells, the egg and the sperm, merge themselves and their genetic material to make a zygote—but designating a zygote as a human with the rights of a human is a construct of these conservatives’ particular religious belief—a belief that, in human history, is relatively recent and contentious. A zygote as fully human is not my religious belief, nor was it the prevailing view of the Methodist Church in which I was confirmed. The First Amendment guarantees free exercise of religion. When human life begins is a matter of religious conviction. Now at least five justices appear ready overrule my religious conviction on this point while establishing Christian conservative doctrine as the rule of the state.
Justice Blackmun rooted a woman’s limited right to chose in a right to privacybased in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (although he also nodded to a basis in the Ninth Amendment, as Muder points out below). The Fourteenth is one of the Reconstruction Amendments passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War that restricts “states’ rights” to infringe on a variety of personal rights. The right to privacy based in the Due Process Clause was already well established by 1973. Ominously, this same right to privacy is also the basis for Supreme Court decisions preventing states from outlawing contraception and same sex marriage. It should not escape note that many “Christian” far right Republicans would happily do away with much of the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections of individuals from invasive laws passed by state governments. Republicans are very fond of the First and Second Amendment (and, lately, the Fifth on self incrimination) but you will rarely hear a Republican announcing support for the Reconstruction Amendments. The 13th, 14th, and 15th are antithetical to Republicans’ wish to shrink the federal government and re-establish individual states’ rights of control.
Read the Weekly Sift entry I’ve pasted below for additional insight on Roe—and contemplate where this Christian extremist Supreme Court wants to go.
Despite numerous claims during confirmation hearings that they would respect precedent, Republican justices look ready to overturn Roe.
Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, a case that invites the Court to overturn Roe v Wade. Their decision will most likely not be announced until the end of the Court’s term in June, and comments justices make during oral arguments do not always predict what they will decide. But it sure sounded like five of the justices — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett — were preparing to overturn Roe, while Chief Justice Roberts was looking for a way to uphold Mississippi’s Roe-violating law (that bans abortions after 15 weeks, in open defiance of Roe’s fetal-viability standard) without reversing Roe completely, thereby chipping away at abortion rights rather than instantly ending them. [1]
What is Roe v Wade? When a Supreme Court decision is talked about as much and as often as Roe has been, sometimes the original gets lost in the noise. So I went back and read Roe, which was decided in 1973. If you’ve never read it, or read it so long ago you don’t remember, it’s worth a look.
For one thing, Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion assembles an excellent summary of the history of abortion laws going back to ancient times. Anti-abortion arguments often imply that abortion has traditionally been illegal, and that only modern judicial hocus-pocus has created a pregnant woman’s right to choose that option. But in fact the opposite is true: Abortion-producing potions are as old as history, and laws banning abortions prior to “quickening” (when women start to feel the fetus moving) were rare until the late 1800s.
It is thus apparent that at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect. Phrasing it another way, a woman enjoyed a substantially broader right to terminate a pregnancy than she does in most States today. At least with respect to the early stage of pregnancy, and very possibly without such a limitation, the opportunity to make this choice was present in this country well into the 19th century. Even later, the law continued for some time to treat less punitively an abortion procured in early pregnancy.
The second thing worth noting is that Roe is a delicate balancing of rights and interests rather than the sweeping extension of judicial authority it is frequently portrayed as. On one hand, “the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision”, but a state also has legitimate interests that could conflict with an “absolute” right to abortion: “in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life.”
That’s where Roe’s trimester breakdown comes from. During the first trimester, Blackmun wrote, abortion is safer than childbirth, so the state’s interest in maternal health can’t justify first-trimester restrictions. The state’s interest in potential life becomes “compelling” at the point of viability.
With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the ‘compelling’ point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.
Where does the right to privacy come from? Any anti-abortion critique of Roe is bound to assert that the Constitution never specifically mentions the “right to privacy” that justifies a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy. In particular, unlike freedom of speech or the right to bear arms, it’s not in the Bill of Rights.
Again is there not danger in the Enumeration of Rights? may we not in the progress of things, discover some great & important, which we don’t now think of? there the principle may be turned upon Us, & what [government power] is not reserved, said to be granted.
The right to privacy has implications far beyond abortion, and had been recognized long before Roe, which provides a long list of previous cases that applied and developed it. One case in particular should resonate with the anti-abortion faction today: Pierce v. Society of Sisters.
In 1925, the Supreme Court struck down an Oregon law that required children to attend public schools. The law was an anti-Catholic measure targeting parochial schools. But if you search the Bill of Rights for a provision that specifically allows parents to choose a Catholic school for their children, you won’t find it. [2] That freedom to choose depends on recognizing a sphere of personal autonomy that governments can’t invade.
Roe does not argue that a right to privacy exists; that was well established by 1973. Rather, the Court concluded in Roe that
This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment‘s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment‘s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
What about fetal personhood? Blackmun discussed this at length in Roe. He concluded that no occurrence of “person” in the Constitution could plausibly be claimed to include the unborn. If the Court was going to recognize the fetus as a person with constitutional rights, it would have to do so on its own authority. Blackmun was unwilling to claim such authority.
Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question.
He goes on to describe views of the ancient Stoics, most Jews, and (as was true at that time) “a large segment of the Protestant community” that the moment of conception does not establish an ensouled being with the full moral value that it will have after birth.
Elaborating on that point, I will say that no branch of the US government should be making pronouncements that establish one religious position as superior to another, if there is any way to avoid doing so. The Founders had were well aware of how religious conflicts had torn England apart during the 1500s and 1600s, as one sect and then another claimed control of the government and used it to enforce their views. They wanted no such conflicts in their new country, which is why they wrote a secular Constitution.
Blackmun continues:
In view of all this, we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake.
Gaslighting. Comments the justices made Wednesday underlined just how dishonest and disingenuous many of them had been during their confirmation hearings. AP summarized:
During his confirmation to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh convinced Sen. Susan Collins that he thought a woman’s right to an abortion was “settled law,” calling the court cases affirming it “precedent on precedent” that could not be casually overturned.
Amy Coney Barrett told senators during her Senate confirmation hearing that laws could not be undone simply by personal beliefs, including her own. “It’s not the law of Amy,” she quipped.
But during this week’s landmark Supreme Court hearing over a Mississippi law that could curtail if not outright end a woman’s right to abortion, the two newest justices struck a markedly different tone, drawing lines of questioning widely viewed as part of the court’s willingness to dismantle decades old decisions on access to abortion services.
Kavanaugh in particular now makes a virtue out of breaking precedent and ignoring the principle of stare decisis.
If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent.
That string included landmark cases like Brown v Board of Education, which overturned the prior standard of “separate but equal” schools. [3]
So the question on stare decisis is why, if … we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn’t the history of this Court’s practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality and — and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn’t?
Maybe he should have told Susan Collins that during his confirmation interview. Or maybe she shouldn’t have been so gullible about what he did tell her.
Dahlia Lithwick thinks it would be “refreshing” if the conservative justices’ new honesty about their intention to reverse Roe meant that the gaslighting is over
Sadly, though, she goes on to point out that the lying continues. Now they’re gaslighting us about the significance of reversing Roe: Kavanaugh pretended that leaving abortion to the states (i.e., giving Mississippi exactly what it wants) would be a compromise. Alito claimed personhood-at-conception isn’t a religious view, because some secular philosophers agree. (Plato believed in the immortality of the soul. Does that secularize the doctrine?) Barrett opined that forced pregnancy is not such a big deal anymore, because (assuming you survive childbirth) it’s easier now to give the child up for adoption. (Why should it bother a woman to devote nine months of her life to the survival of her rapist’s genes?)
But the most extreme gaslighting concerns the implications of overturning Roe: It won’t stop there. The right to privacy undergirds, for example, same-sex marriage, gay rights in general, and the right to use contraception. All of these rights are targeted by the same theocratic faction that put Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett on the Court.
At their [confirmation] hearings, Roe was settled law, the precedent of the court. But now Roe is Plessy, which is why when the justices whisper softly that Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell, and Griswold are not under threat today, you might wonder why you should trust them. They are all settled law—until they are not. They told us as much at their confirmation hearings and assured us today they were lying then, but aren’t lying now.
Where will abortion be illegal? You might imagine that the only immediate effect of the Court deciding in Mississippi’s favor is that their ban-at-15-weeks law would take effect. But 12 states have already passed abortion bans that are set to apply automatically as soon as Roe is reversed: Mississippi, Texas, Idaho, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Utah.
But that’s not all. Josh Marshall connects the dots between abortion and the Republican minority-rule project.
Many purple and even blue states are sufficiently gerrymandered at the state level that we should assume they’ll soon outlaw abortion too. I’m talking about states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio.
Wisconsin as so often is an instructive example. Wisconsin is a very closely divided state politically. It usually goes to the Democrats at the presidential level. But it’s always by a narrow margin whoever wins. The state’s governorship is similarly always close, though at the moment there’s a Democratic governor. The Democrats won the governorship in 2018 by a tiny margin. Then Joe Biden won the presidential race there by another very small margin. And yet Democrats struggled in 2020 to prevent Republicans from getting a supermajority in the state legislature. A supermajority!
Given that Republican majorities in purple-state legislatures have successfully insulated themselves from the people, all it takes is electing a Republican governor one time, and abortion rights will be gone for decades to come.
[1] Appearing to respect a law or precedent while gutting it in practice is a very Robertsy thing to do. For example, he didn’t strike down the Voting Rights Act in 2013, he just eliminated the government’s main tool for enforcing it.
If you look at the broad sweep of Roberts’ career, he wants to achieve partisan objectives without tarring the Court’s non-partisan image.
[2] You also couldn’t claim that the Founders intended to include such a protection. Some of the Founders were virulently anti-Catholic. In a 1774 letter to Parliament, which I believe was written by John Jay, the Continental Congress described Catholicism as “a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed bigotry, persecution, murder and rebellion through every part of the world.”
[3] It’s worth pointing out that the Court didn’t reverse the Plessy standard of separate-but-equal just because the 1954 justices had different views than the 1896 justices. The intervening half-century had brought a long series of cases to the Court in which states claimed that their segregated schools were “equal”, but they really weren’t. In Brown, the Court concluded from experience that the Plessy standard wasn’t workable; separate schools for Black students were always going to be unequal.
Nothing similar has been happening with respect to Roe. The only difference between 2021 and 1973 is that different people are on the Court.
