October, 12 2020, 12:00am EDT
Continued Republican Resistance to COVID Relief Puts Small Businesses at Risk
WASHINGTON
On the continued Republican resistance to COVID relief, Campaigns Director for the Main Street Alliance Cynthia Ward Wikstrom had this to say:
"As nomination hearings start today for the Supreme Court vacancy it is clear Senate Republicans have chosen dismantling health care, during a pandemic, as their priority over saving small businesses. Over one third of small businesses are at risk of permanent closure by the end of year if no additional COVID relief comes through.
According to a new scientific poll of 600 small business owners conducted by Main Street Alliance with Lake Research Partners, over 80 percent of small business owners are concerned that health care prices are too high and that drug companies are overcharging for prescription drugs. With health care on the line with the new Supreme Court nomination, dismantling health care will make these issues even worse. When small businesses are scrambling for support, Senate Republicans intend to kick them while they are down.
Given Republicans are holding up COVID relief in part over a red line on corporate immunity - we must reiterate that this is not what small businesses want, and in fact would put them at a disadvantage. To hold up an essential relief package for large corporate interests, and a Supreme Court seat, exemplifies how the Senate and McConnell in particular have abandoned small businesses and the American people."
The Main Street Alliance (MSA) is a national network of small business coalitions working to build a new voice for small businesses on important public policy issues. Main Street Alliance members are working throughout the country to build policies that work for business owners, their employees, and the communities they serve.
LATEST NEWS
As Prices Soar, Trump Denounces 'Affordability' as 'Democrat Scam'
"The president is trying to gaslight Americans into believing that everything is fine."
Dec 02, 2025
President Donald Trump on Tuesday blew off US voters' concerns about affordability, even as polls show most voters blame him for increasing prices on staple goods.
At the start of a Cabinet meeting, Trump falsely claimed that electricity prices are coming down, despite the fact that Americans across the country are struggling with utility bills being driven higher in large part by energy-devouring artificial intelligence data centers.
The president then claimed more broadly that voter concerns about increased costs were all figments of their imaginations.
"The word 'affordability' is a Democrat scam," Trump declared. "They say it and they go onto the next subject, and everyone thinks, 'Oh they had lower prices.' No, they had the worst inflation in the history of our country. Now, some people will correct me, because they always love to correct me, even though I'm right about everything. But some people like to correct me, and they say, '48 years.' I say it's not 48 years, it's much more, but they say it's the worst inflation we've had in 48 years, I'd say, ever."
Trump: But the word "Affordability" is a Democrat scam. pic.twitter.com/WmXeDLWQ0X
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 2, 2025
Later in the Cabinet meeting, a reporter asked Trump if he believed voters were growing "impatient" with his policies, which have not produced the kind of broad-based decline in prices he once promised.
Trump, however, doubled down.
"I think they're getting fake news from guys like you," he said. "Look, affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats, who caused the problem of pricing."
Q: You talk about affordability. Are the American people getting impatient with the reforms you're making?
TRUMP: I think they're getting fake news from guys like you. Look, affordability is a hoax that was started by Democrats. pic.twitter.com/EhtSaKHEMk
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 2, 2025
The president's claims about affordability being a "scam" issue are at odds with what US voters are telling pollsters, however.
A Yahoo/YouGov poll released late last month, for instance, found 49% of Americans say that Trump's policies have done more to raise prices in the last year, compared with just 24% who say that he's lowered their costs. The survey also found voters are more likely to blame Trump for higher prices than they are to blame former President Joe Biden.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump routinely campaigned on affordability and vowed to start lowering the cost of groceries starting on the very first day of his presidency. Since then, however, Trump has slapped heavy tariffs on a wide range of imported goods, which economists say have led to further price increases.
Many Democrats were quick to pounce on the president declaring affordability a "scam."
"There you have it folks," wrote Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) on X. "From 'I will lower prices on Day 1' to this."
Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) argued that Trump was trying to make Americans' economic anxieties disappear by telling them not to believe their own bank balances.
"The president is trying to gaslight Americans into believing that everything is fine," he observed. "The reality is millions of Americans are worried about their checking accounts and whether they can put food on the table, afford healthcare, and pay their bills."
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) said that Trump's dismissal of voters' affordability worries are "easy to say when you are a billionaire who has never had to choose between groceries and the light bill."
"Working families in Texas know the real scam is his tariffs, his higher premiums, and his complete failure to offer any plan to address the housing crisis or actually lower prices," Garcia added.
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GOP Spending Law Gives Corporations $16 Billion in Retroactive Tax Breaks: Analysis
“You cannot change what a company did in the past, so that half-year of retroactive effect of the provision is just a windfall to companies," said one critic.
Dec 02, 2025
Corporations are likely to claim $16 in fresh tax breaks on expenditures made before the passage of the budget legislation signed earlier this year by US President Donald Trump, according to an analysis by a nonpartisan congressional committee released Tuesday.
The analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT)—a panel composed of five members each from the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee—came in response to a September query from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) regarding the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's (OBBBA) extension of full bonus depreciation, a tax-savings tool allowing businesses to automatically deduct costs of qualifying assets.
As Warren explained in her letter, full bonus depreciation enables corporations "to immediately deduct some or all of the cost of new business investments, such as the purchase of manufacturing equipment, software, and furniture, rather than deducting those costs over the estimated lifetime of those assets."
"This policy was first implemented in 2010 as an intended temporary economic stimulus in the aftermath of the Great Recession, and Congress allowed it to expire the following year," Warren noted.
"However, President Trump’s 2017 tax law reinstated 100% bonus depreciation from 2018 through 2022 in what amounted to a massive corporate giveaway," the senator continued, highlighting nearly $67 billion in tax savings for more than two dozen corporations including Google, Facebook, UPS, and Target.
"And after extensive lobbying from billionaire-funded right-wing lobbying groups, the OBBBA reinstated 100% bonus depreciation permanently to the tune of hundreds of billions of more dollars over the next decade," Warren added.
Applying retroactively to capital expenditures since January 19, corporate tax deductions under the OBBBA's reinstatement of the full bonus depreciation will cost $16 billion in lost federal revenue, according to the JCT's analysis. The tool has been hailed as game-changer for Bitcoin miners, who can write off 100% of hardware costs in the year of purchase.
The OBBBA provision allows firms to use the deduction to write off certain qualifying business-related properties, such as corporate jets. Meanwhile, millions of lower-income US households are suffering from the law's unprecedented cuts to vital social programs including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
While proponents of the full bonus depreciation argue that large corporations benefit most from the tool because they make up the lion's share of investments, critics point out that such breaks are generally poor investment incentives because they are applied after companies have already made their spending decisions.
“Thanks to Donald Trump and Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill, giant corporations will win big while American families see their costs skyrocket," Warren said Tuesday in response to the JCT analysis. "Next year, the federal government will spend over five times more on these tax handouts for billionaire corporations than it spends each year on childcare."
"Time and time again, Donald Trump and Republicans have made clear that they stand with billionaires and billionaire corporations—not American families," she added.
Numerous corporations taking advantage of the full bonus depreciation have paid effective federal corporate tax rates far below the statutory 21%, according to a 2023 analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).
One tax expert called the deduction "a cheat code to saving millions in taxes," as thousands of companies have dodged paying their fair share by effectively reducing their income to zero, or even making it negative.
As Warren noted Tuesday, "over 80% of the 100% bonus depreciation claimed by corporations from 2018-22 went to companies with over $1 billion in yearly income," while "99% of bonus depreciation benefits went to corporations making over $1 million annually."
ITEP federal policy director Steve Wamhoff told the Washington Post Tuesday that “it is quite obvious that if an incentive is retroactive, it is not actually an effective incentive."
“You cannot change what a company did in the past, so that half-year of retroactive effect of the provision is just a windfall to companies," Wamhoff added. "That part is just ridiculous.”
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'Monday Afternoon Massacre': Trump Fires 8 Immigration Judges in NYC
"The goal is to transform an imperfect system which aimed for fairness into a rubber stamp mill, leaving only the 'deportation judges' they want," said one policy expert.
Dec 02, 2025
As the Trump administration intensifies a push to hire what officials call "deportation judges," eight judges were fired Monday from the New York City immigration court that's become the epicenter for anti-immigrant enforcement in the city.
The National Association of Immigration Judges, the union that represents judges who handle immigration cases, confirmed to the New York Times that the eight officials had been dismissed in what one recently fired judge described as a "Monday afternoon massacre."
"The court has been basically eviscerated,” said former Judge Olivia Cassin, who presided over another immigration court in New York City until being fired in November, told the Times.
The judges who were dismissed Monday had worked at the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza, where the city's US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices are also located.
The building has been the scene of harrowing ICE arrests in recent months, with an agent throwing an asylum-seeker to the ground in September as she pleaded with him not to detain her husband, and masked officers arresting NYC Comptroller Brad Lander in June when he tried to offer assistance to an immigrant.
The immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza employs 34 judges. Nearly 100 immigration judges have now been fired across the US this year.
Among those dismissed on Monday was Judge Amiena A. Khan, who served as the assistant chief immigration judge and supervised other jurists.
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found that from 2019-24, Khan ruled on 620 asylum cases and granted asylum to 544 applicants. Cassin decided on 669 asylum cases from 2020-25 and granted asylum to 582 people. Immigration judges across the country denied asylum to refugees more frequently than Khan and Cassin over those same periods, according to TRAC.
After Monday's dismissals were announced, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick posited that "the Trump administration is systematically firing immigration judges across the country for no reason other their above-average grant rates."
Last week, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted on social media a call for legal professionals to join the Justice Department as "a deportation judge to defend your community."
"End the invasion," urged DHS.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the Trump administration appears to want "to poison the applicant pool."
"The job of an immigration judge isn’t to 'end the invasion,'" said Bier. "It is to evaluate whether someone is eligible for relief from deportation under civil immigration law."
Immigration attorney Allen Orr said Tuesday that if an administration's goal is to "improve vetting, you don't fire eight immigration judges in NYC—the epicenter of the national backlog."
Such mass firings are done, he said, "to stall the system, punish immigrants, and create crises. Dismantling is deliberate, not security."
On Monday, former Chicago immigration Judge Carla Espinoza described to Al Jazeera how she was abruptly fired from her courtroom position in July.
The judges who have been fired this year include "attorneys who previously represented immigrants or provided pro bono help to immigrants before they became a judge," she said.
In this episode of #UNMUTE, former US immigration judge Carla Espinoza discusses the wave of firings of judges under the Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/HhT1jhxhzt
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 1, 2025
"For the first time," said Espinoza, "we're seeing a clear indication that there's an expectation that we do things a certain way, that we rule on motions in cases before us a certain way, that we rush through cases, which is something we've never heard before."
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