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For Immediate Release
June, 24 2019, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Linda Benesch, 240-342-4301, lbenesch@socialsecurityworks.org
New College Affordability Package Would Carry on FDR's Legacy
The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works,
WASHINGTON
The following is a statement from Nancy Altman, President of Social Security Works, in reaction to the new college affordability package from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN):
"The vision of Social Security -- the comprehensive economic security that President Franklin Roosevelt and his closest advisers recognized that all of us need -- includes and rests on a guaranteed quality education. In the 21st century, with its technological advances, today's work often requires more than a high school diploma. Free college should be a right for everyone in America, just as free K-12 education is. As part of that comprehensive Social Security, those who find themselves caught in the web of indebtedness for the "crime" of seeking a higher education should have those debts cancelled.
Kudos to Representatives Omar and Jayapal, and to Senator Sanders for their legislation, which will increase the economic security of not just those who directly benefit, but the economic security of all of us."
Social Security Works' mission is to: Protect and improve the economic security of disadvantaged and at-risk populations; Safeguard the economic security of those dependent, now or in the future, on Social Security; and Maintain Social Security as a vehicle of social justice.
LATEST NEWS
2% Wealth Tax on Just 3,000 Billionaires Could Raise $250 Billion a Year: Nobel Economists
"Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible."
Jul 07, 2025
Seven Nobel laureates on Monday published an op-ed advocating for "a minimum tax for the ultrarich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth," in the French newspaper Le Monde.
"They have never been so wealthy and yet contribute very little to the public coffers: From Bernard Arnault to Elon Musk, billionaires have significantly lower tax rates than the average taxpayer," wrote Daron Acemoglu, George Akerlof, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz.
Citing pioneering research from the E.U. Tax Observatory, the renowned economists noted that "ultrawealthy individuals pay around 0% to 0.6% of their wealth in income tax. In a country like the United States, their effective tax rate is around 0.6%, while in a country like France, it is closer to 0.1%."
Although the "ultrawealthy can easily structure their wealth to avoid income tax, which is supposed to be the cornerstone of tax justice," the strategies for doing so differ by region, the experts detailed. Europeans often use family holding companies that are banned in the United States, "which explains why the wealthy are more heavily taxed there than in Europe—though some have still managed to find workarounds."
The good news is that "there is no inevitability here. Not only is it necessary to impose a stronger burden of justice on billionaires, but more importantly, it is possible," argued the economists, who say that taxing the overall wealth of the ultrarich, not just income, is the key.
The wealth tax approach, they wrote, "is effective because it targets all forms of tax optimization, whatever their nature. It is targeted, as it applies only to the wealthiest taxpayers, and only to those among them who engage in tax avoidance."
💡 "One of the most promising avenues is to introduce a minimum tax for the ultra-rich, expressed as a percentage of their wealth."Seven Nobel laureates in economics advocate for the Zucman tax in their latest op-ed.Read the full @lemonde.fr article 👇www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...
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— EU Tax Observatory (@taxobservatory.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 8:05 AM
The anticipated impact would be significant. As the op-ed highlights: "Globally, a 2% minimum tax on billionaire wealth would generate about $250 billion in tax revenue—from just 3,000 individuals. In Europe, around $50 billion could be raised. And by extending this minimum rate to individuals with wealth over $100 million, these sums would increase significantly."
That's according to a June 2024 report that French economist and E.U. Tax Observatory director Gabriel Zucman prepared for the Group of 20's Brazilian presidency—which was followed by G20 leaders' November commitment to taxing the rich and last month's related proposal from the governments of Brazil, South Africa, and Spain.
"The international movement is underway," the economists declared Monday, also pointing to recent developments on the "Zucman tax" in France. The French National Assembly voted in favor of a 2% minimum tax on wealth exceeding €100 million, or $117 million, in February—but the Senate rejected the measure last month.
The economists urged the European country to keep working at it, writing that "at a time of ballooning public deficits and exploding extreme wealth, the French government must seize the initiative approved by the National Assembly. There is no reason to wait for an international agreement to be finalized—on the contrary, France should lead by example, as it has done in the past," when it was the first country to introduce a value-added tax (VAT).
"As for the risk of tax exile, the bill passed by the National Assembly provides that taxpayers would remain subject to the minimum tax for five years after leaving the country," they wrote. "The government could go further and propose extending this period to 10 years, which would likely reduce the risk of expatriation even more."
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Case Challenging Trump's 'Ideological Deportations' of Pro-Palestine Students Heads to Court
"The policy chills noncitizens from speaking and, by extension, robs these organizations and their U.S. citizen members of noncitizens' perspectives on a matter of significant public debate," the Knight Institute said in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Jul 07, 2025
The Trump administration, for the first time, had to defend its policy of deporting immigrants for their political views in court Monday.
A case filed by a group of professors will be heard in a Massachusetts federal court. The lawsuit challenges attempts by the Trump administration to arrest and remove foreign-born college students from the country based purely on their pro-Palestine speech.
Though hundreds of cases have been filed against the Trump administration since January, this is one of very few that has reached the trial phase.
The case was filed in March by Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP); AAUP's Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers campus chapters; and the Middle East Studies Association.
It is one of half a dozen other lawsuits filed following the arrest of Columbia graduate student and protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who was abducted in the dead of night by plainclothes ICE officers and shipped to a detention center for nearly three months.
Khalil and several other students had their legal immigration status revoked not for having committed any crime, but because the Trump administration deemed their views at odds with the "foreign policy objective[s]" of the United States.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the defendant in this case, has acknowledged stripping the legal status of hundreds of student protesters based on their speech.
"The policy chills noncitizens from speaking and, by extension, robs these organizations and their U.S. citizen members of noncitizens' perspectives on a matter of significant public debate," the Knight Institute said in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs.
In a pre-trial brief, the group argued that this "ideological deportation policy" illegally discriminates against students and faculty based on their pro-Palestinian viewpoints.
"The First Amendment framework that applies is straightforward," the brief said. "If a regulation of speech discriminates based on content or viewpoint, then the regulation is 'presumptively unconstitutional' unless the government demonstrates that it is 'narrowly tailored to serve compelling state interests.'"
The plaintiffs argue that the intent behind the Trump administration's stripping of green cards and visas from legal holders was to punish speech they found disfavorable and to coerce others into silence.
"Noncitizen members of the AAUP have been chilled by these ideological deportations and forced to self-censor in a variety of different ways, and citizen members have been harmed as a result, because they have been deprived of the insights and engagement of their non-citizen students and colleagues," the brief said.
They cited examples of professors scrubbing their social media accounts to remove commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict, abandoning research on the Middle East that could prove too "nuanced" for the administration's liking, and even cancelling international travel for academic opportunities for fear of being disallowed entry back into the country.
"The First Amendment does not permit government officials to use the power of their office to silence critics and suppress speech they don’t like," said Andrew Manuel Crespo, a Harvard Law professor and general counsel of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter.
The AAUP lawsuit marks the first time the Trump administration will defend its use of deportations for political speech in court. But it is not the first time the courts will rule on its attacks against higher education.
Courts have blocked the Trump administration's efforts to ban Harvard from hosting foreign students and strip its funding, saying the measures violated due process.
While the case over deportations deals with non-citizens, AAUP President Todd Wolfson said it has implications for free speech for everyone in America.
"The Trump administration is going after international scholars and students who speak their minds about Palestine, but make no mistake: they won't stop there," Wolfson said. "They'll come next for those who teach the history of slavery or who provide gender-affirming health care or who research climate change or who counsel students about their reproductive choices. We all have to draw a line together—as the old labor movement slogan says: an injury to one is an injury to all."
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Report Shows How Deadly Texas Floods Were Driven by Human-Induced Climate Crisis
"Very exceptional meteorological conditions" preceded the Texas floods, climate scientists have found.
Jul 07, 2025
A new report from a trio of prominent climate researchers has concluded that the devastating floods that hit central Texas over the last three days were made significantly worse due to the impacts of human-induced climate change.
A study published on Monday by ClimaMeter found that the floods in Texas were caused by "very exceptional meteorological conditions" that cannot be explained merely by natural variability.
The authors—Davide Faranda of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France, Mireia Ginesta of the University of Oxford in the U.K., and Tommaso Alberti of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Italy—contend that the meteorological conditions present at the start of the Texas floods on July 4 "were characterized by slightly negative surface pressure anomalies over Central Texas, with values ranging up to –2 hPa, indicating the presence of a weak low-pressure system over the region." They also found that "temperatures were significantly below the climatological average for this time of year, with anomalies reaching –5°C across much of the area affected by the flooding."
The researchers then compared how extreme weather events that occurred under meteorological conditions similar to those present during this week's floods would have manifested had they occurred in the years from 1950 until 1986, a three-decade period during where human-induced climate change had yet to cause a global surface temperature spike. They concluded that the meteorological conditions ahead of the deadly Texas floods this year were up to 7% wetter than those that had proceeded past floods in the region.
The ClimaMeter study adds heft to statements made by climate scientists over the weekend who argued that there was no question that human-induced climate change—which is driven largely by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels—had tipped the floods into historic disaster territory.
"The tragic events in Texas are exactly what we would expect in our hotter, climate-changed, world," said Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysics and climate hazards at University College London. "There has been an explosion in extreme weather in recent years, including more devastating flash floods caused by slow-moving, wetter, storms, that dump exceptional amounts of rain over small areas across a short time."
As of this writing, at least 80 people have been confirmed dead as a result of the Texas floods while dozens more people have been reported as missing. The Washington Post reports that data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Integrated Public Alert and Warning System shows that Kerr County, Texas didn't send out an Amber Alert-style push message to local residents until Sunday, two days after the floods overwhelmed the area's rivers and creeks.
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