December, 20 2017, 01:00pm EDT
![Americans for Tax Fairness](https://assets.rbl.ms/32012609/origin.jpg)
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Chris Fleming,Email:,chris@redhorsestrategies.com
Americans Overwhelmingly Reject the Trump-GOP Tax Plan
WASHINGTON
Despite national polling that has steadily shown widespread disapproval among most Americans, Republicans have passed a deeply unpopular and partisan tax bill.
American voters have strongly opposed nearly every iteration of the Republican tax plan in poll after poll. According to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, this measure is the least popular tax bill since 1986--even ranking below bills that raised taxes during the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.
National polls consistently show that only about one-in-three voters supports the Republican tax plan:
- In a NBC News/WSJ poll released on December 19, just 24 percent of Americans say that the Trump-backed tax plan is a good idea, versus41 percent who believe it's a bad idea. The bad idea response is up 6 points from an October poll.
- According to the latest CNN poll released on December 19, more than half--55 percent--of respondents disapprove of the tax proposals put forth by Republicans in Congress, up 10 points from a CNN poll in early November, where just 45 percent of those surveyed opposed the plan. While opposition to the plan has skyrocketed in the last month, its favorability hardly increased. In the November CNN survey, the plan had 31 percent favorability, and the December survey saw a mere 2-point increase.
- In a survey from Monmouth University released on December 18, nearly half the public (47 percent) disapproved of the Senate and House tax bills, with just 26 percent approving of them.
- The latest Quinnipiac University poll released on December 5 found that voters disapproved of the Republican tax plan pending in Congress by a 2-to-1 margin, with 29 percent approving and 53 percent disapproving. This is slightly worse than a November 15Quinnipiac University poll showing voters disapproved of the plan 25 percent to 52 percent. This low favorability matches the level of approval the failed Republican health care bill had when it was defeated in August.
- A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on December 11 shows that of those who were aware of the tax bill being negotiated in Congress, 49 percent opposed the plan, consistent with polling from previous weeks.
- An ABC/Washington Post survey from early October found that only 33 percent support the bill.
- Even the most favorable polling on the Republican tax plan conducted by Politico/Morning Consult, initially had the bill garnering 48 percent support in early October, now shows only 36 percent support--a drop of 12 points in less than two months.
- A Washington Post analysis found that the Republican tax plan is the second most unpopular piece of major legislation considered by Congress in the last thirty years--second only to the Republicans' failed health care effort earlier this year.
Why is support for the Trump-GOP tax plan so low?
Most voters believe the benefits will go to large corporations and wealthy Americans at the expense of the middle class:
- In a NBC News/WSJ poll released on December 19, 63 percent say the tax plan was designed to mostly benefit the wealthy and corporations; just 22 percent say it will help everyone equally and 7 percent say it's designed to help the middle class. Also, 37 percent say they believe the middle class will pay more if the bill becomes law and a majority believes the wealthy and corporations will pay less.
- In a CNN poll released on December 19, two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents said they see the bill benefitting the wealthy more than the middle class.
- A USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll released on December 10 showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans, or 64 percent, say the wealthy will get the most benefits--just 17 percent think the middle-class will.
- A November Quinnipiac University survey found that 61 percent of voters think the wealthy will benefit most from this plan, compared to just 24 percent who say the middle class will benefit most. Even more striking, 59 percent think the Republican tax plan favors the rich at the expense of the middle class.
- An ABC/Washington Post poll from November showed 60 percent think the tax plan will favor the rich above everyone else, compared to just 13 percent who think the interests of the middle class are put first.
- In a Marist poll released on December 12, six in ten people surveyed (60 percent) believe the tax bill will mostly benefit the wealthy. About one in five Americans (21 percent) thought it will help the middle class, while only 4 percent say it will mostly aid lower-income Americans, and 15 percent remain unsure of who Republicans seek to assist with this legislation.
- A CBS News poll from December 7 reported that a plurality of voters from all political leanings believe the Republican plan will help large corporations and the wealthiest Americans, and only one in three think it will help the middle class.
- A conservative-leaning electorate from several 2018 Senate battleground states surveyed by GSG and Hart Research Associates in October noted that about six of every ten people polled said they thought the plan would benefit the wealthy more than the middle class, with only two in ten saying they believed it would benefit them personally.
- Even small business owners oppose the plan, despite Republican claims that the measure is aimed at helping them. According to a Public Policy Polling survey released on November 27, 51 percent of small business owners oppose the plan compared to just 34 percent who support it. And 58 percent of small business owners believe that the wealthy and big corporations will benefit most, compared to just 32 percent who say the middle class and small business owners like themselves with gain under the plan.
Americans are skeptical of the fundamental arguments that Republicans have made in selling the bill:
- A poll conducted by Monmouth University in December found that half the public (50 percent) anticipate their own taxes would increase under the Republican plan, and more than half of respondents said they would like Congress to abandon the current measure and start over with a bipartisan approach in 2018.
- In the same Monmouth University survey, only 17 percent of respondents believed Republicans were making genuine effort to reform the current tax system, while 35 percent said the attempt to pass this bill is motivated by the Republicans' desire to achieve a political victory.
- According to a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, 53 percent of those surveyed predicted their own families would not pay lower taxes as a result of the measure, with an equal 53 percent saying it would not boost the economy in a significant way.
- A Marist poll released on December 12 reported that 52 percent of those surveyed thought the Republican legislation would mostly hurt their personal family finances rather than help.
While passage of the Trump-GOP tax bill is a big legislative win, it is a public relations nightmare that is likely to have significant repercussions throughout 2018. Its effect could be comparable in scale to the public opposition engendered by passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.
Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) is a diverse campaign of more than 420 national, state and local endorsing organizations united in support of a fair tax system that works for all Americans. It has come together based on the belief that the country needs comprehensive, progressive tax reform that results in greater revenue to meet our growing needs. This requires big corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share in taxes, not to live by their own set of rules.
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Critics Warn Manchin-Barrasso Permitting Bill 'Is Taken Straight From Project 2025'
"You thought Project 2025 was just a threat after the election? It's actually happening *right now,*" said one climate campaigner.
Jul 26, 2024
Climate and environmental defenders on this week implored U.S. senators to block a permitting reform bill introduced this week by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that one campaigner linked to Project 2025, a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
Common Dreamsreported Monday that Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Barrasso (R-Wyo.)—respectively the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that although the proposal "includes several positive reforms for the accelerated development of transmission projects," it also advocates "limiting opportunities for communities to challenge projects, loosening oversight for drilling and mining projects, extending drilling permits and fast-tracking [liquified natural gas] permits, and several other provisions friendly to fossil fuel giants."
"This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
These are nearly identical policies to what's proposed in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. The plan, which was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, calls for "unleashing all of America's energy resources," including by ending federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands; limiting investments in renewable energy; and rolling back environmental permitting restrictions for new oil, gas, and coal projects, including power plants.
While Manchin has been trying—and failing—to pass fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform legislation for years, Brett Hartl, director of public affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that his "Frankenstein legislation is taken straight from Project 2025, and it's the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry."
Hartl said the bill "deprives communities of the power to defend themselves and gives that power to Big Oil by making it harder for communities to challenge polluting projects in court," and "prioritizes the profits of coal barons over public health."
"And it mandates oil and gas extraction in our oceans," he continued. "The insignificant crumbs thrown at renewable energy do nothing to address the climate emergency."
"Monday was the hottest day in recorded history," Hartl noted. "It's shocking that as the climate emergency continues to break records around us, the Senate continues to fast-track the fossil fuel expansion that is killing us. This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
Hartl added that "to preserve a livable planet," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "must squash this legislation now."
Manchin—who has said this will be his last term in office—has been a steadfast supporter of the fossil fuel industry, partly because his family owns a coal company. The senator says his permitting reform bill "will advance American energy once again to bring down prices, create domestic jobs, and allow us to continue in our role as a global energy leader."
However, Allie Rosenbluth, Oil Change International's U.S. manager, warned Thursday that "this bill is yet another dangerous attempt by Sen. Manchin to line the pockets of his fossil fuel donors, sacrificing communities and our climate along the way."
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else," she continued. "It would unleash more drilling on federal lands and waters, unnecessarily rush the review of proposed oil and gas export projects, and lift the Biden administration's pause on new LNG exports."
"We urge Congress to reject this proposal and commit to action that protects frontline communities from the impacts of fossil fuel development and the climate crisis," Rosenbluth added.
"Don't be fooled: The Energy Permitting Reform Act is another dirty deal to fast-track fossil fuels above all else."
NRDC managing director of government affairs Alexandra Adams said Wednesday that "this bill is a giveaway for the oil and gas industry that will ramp up drilling and environmental destruction at a time when we need to be putting a hard stop to fossil fuels."
"We cannot afford to roll back so many of our bedrock environmental and community legal protections and offer a blank check to the oil and gas industry," she stressed. "We need new solutions for permitting if we are going to meet our clean energy potential and address the climate challenge. But this is not it."
"This bill would altogether be a leap backward on climate, health, and justice if passed into law," Adams added. "The Senate should reject it and look toward alternative solutions already being considered."
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'Nothing To Eat': War-Torn Sudan Faces Mass Famine as Military Delays Aid
Both parties in Sudan's civil war are to blame for a looming mass famine, experts say, and the military's blocking of U.N. aid at a border crossing with Chad exacerbates the problem.
Jul 26, 2024
Sudan's military is blocking United Nations aid trucks from entering at a key border crossing, causing severe disruptions in aid in a country that experts fear may be on the brink of one of the worst famines the world has seen in decades, The New York Timesreported Friday.
The border city of Adré in eastern Chad is the main international crossing into the Darfur region of Sudan, but the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the state's official military, which is engaged in a civil war with a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has refused to issue permits for U.N. trucks to enter there, as it's an RSF-controlled area.
U.S. and international officials have issued increasingly alarmed calls for steady aid access to help feed the millions of severely malnourished people in Darfur and other areas of Sudan.
Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., said that the SAF's obstruction of the border was "completely unacceptable."
Both warring parties in Sudan continue to perpetrate brazen atrocities, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. This piece focuses on the SAF's ongoing obstruction of essential aid. The situation is catastrophic. The policy is criminal. https://t.co/FKhqQh3EI9.
— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum) July 26, 2024
The Sudanese who've made it out of the country and into Adré reported dire and unsafe conditions in their home country.
"We had nothing to eat," Bahja Muhakar, a Sudenese mother of three, told the Times after she crossed into Chad, following a harrowing six-day journey from Al-Fashir, a major city in Darfur. She said the family often had to live off of one shared pancake per day.
Another mother, Dahabaya Ibet, said that her 20-month-old boy had to bear witness to his grandfather being shot and killed in front of his eyes when the family home in Darfur was attacked by gunmen late last year.
Now the mothers and their families are refugees in Adré, where 200,000 Sudanese are living in an overcrowded, under-resourced transit camp.
In addition to those that have made it out of the country, there are 11 million people internally displaced within Sudan, most of whom have become displaced since the civil war began in April 2023.
An unnamed senior American official told the Times that the looming famine in Sudan could be as bad as the 2011 famine in Somalia or even the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
In April, Reutersreported that people in Sudan were eating soil and leaves to survive, and The Washington Postcalled it a nation in "chaos," reporting that World Food Program trucks had been "blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted, and detained."
In late June, a coalition of U.N. agencies, aid groups, and governments warned that 755,000 people in Sudan faced famine in the coming months.
The U.S. last week announced $203 million in additional aid to Sudan—part of a $2.1 billion pledge that world leaders made in April, which some countries have not yet delivered on.
Some officials including Thomas-Greenfield, who has dubbed the situation in Sudan "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world," have called for the U.N. Security Council to allow aid delivery into the country even in the absence of SAF approval; it's believed that Russia would veto such a measure.
Sudan's civil war has seen a great deal of international interference. Amnesty International on Thursday published an investigatory briefing showing that weapons from Russia, China, Serbia, Turkey, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been identified in the country. And The Guardian on Friday reported that the passports of Emirati citizens had been found among wreckage in Sudan, indicating the UAE may have troops or intelligence officers on the ground, though the UAE denied the accusation.
The International Service for Human Rights on Friday warned that both the SAF and RSF were engaged in wrongful killings and arrests, especially targeted at lawyers, doctors, and activists. The group called for an immediate cease-fire.
The SAF and Sudanese government figures have cast doubt on international experts' claims about famine in the country.
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JD Vance Doubles Down on Attack on 'Childless Cat Ladies'
Vance "meant no disrespect to cats, but he did mean to demean women and still holds the view in 2024 that they should be punished for not having children."
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After days of condemnation from critics including actress Jennifer Aniston and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Sen. JD Vance was given the opportunity on Thursday to clarify his remarks from 2021 in which he said the Democratic Party was run by "childless cat ladies."
Instead, the Ohio Republican and running mate of former President Donald Trump assured SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly on "The Megyn Kelly Show" that while he has "nothing against cats," he meant what he said in terms of "the substance" of his argument.
Vance made it clear, said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), "that he meant no disrespect to cats, but he did mean to demean women and still holds the view in 2024 that they should be punished for not having children."
The comments in question were made by Vance to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was running for the Senate.
Calling out Buttigieg—who, the secretary disclosed this week, was struggling at the time to adopt a child with his husband—and Vice President Kamala Harris, a stepmother of two and the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee, Vance said people without biological children "don't really have a direct stake in" the future of the country and therefore shouldn't hold higher office.
In separate remarks that same year, Vance said parents should "have more power" at the voting booth and that "if you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice."
He also specifically categorized people who don't have children as "bad" in an interview in 2021, saying the government should "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad," with people taxed at a lower rate if they have children.
While a spokesperson for Vance told ABC News that the senator's taxation proposal was "basically no different" than the child tax credit supported by the Democratic Party, Democrats who have pushed for the credit have heralded its proven ability to slash child poverty rates and help families afford groceries, childcare, and other essentials, rather than viewing the tax savings as a way to reward people for procreating.
In his interview with Kelly on Thursday, Vance attempted to pivot away from his own comments, saying his point was to criticize "the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child" and claiming without evidence that the Harris campaign had "come out against the child tax credit"—a signature policy of the Biden-Harris administration.
"I'm proud to stand for parents and I hope that parents out there recognize that I'm a guy who wants to fight for you," said Vance. "The Democrats, in the past five, 10 years, Megyn, they have become anti-family. It's built into their policy, it's built into the way they talk about parents and children. I don't think we should back down from it, I think we should be honest about the problem."
Vance and Kelly went on to lament the anxiety "hardcore environmentalists" and progressive lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have expressed about the damage fossil fuel extraction is doing the planet, accusing them of pushing people to forgo having families—but said nothing about Republican policies that have made child-rearing less accessible.
In recent years, the entire Republican caucus in Congress was joined by conservative then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia in blocking the extension of the enhanced child tax credit, which had been credited with cutting the national child poverty rate in half. Republicans also allowed a pandemic-era universal school meal program to expire, while several Democratic-led states have passed state-level programs to ensure all children can have meals at school, regardless of their family's income.
Under Republican abortion bans, numerous stories have cropped up of pregnant people who have been forced to carry pregnancies to term despite finding out that their fetuses had fatal abnormalities and would die soon after birth—as have stories of children who were forced to give birth or had to cross state lines in order to get abortion care.
As with his position that nonparents should be "punished" for not having children, "who else does 'pro-child/family' Vance think should 'face consequences and reality' by way of curtailing choices, rights, and freedoms?" asked writer Alheli Picazo. "Women and girls who become pregnant through rape/incest."
University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick said that one could test "empirically" Vance's claim that Democratic policies are anti-family.
"But I haven't heard the GOP talk much about things that would help my family and my kids," she said, "like reducing childcare and tuition costs."
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