“The ultra-wealthy are avoiding nearly $2 trillion in taxes every 10 years,” said Sen. Ron Wyden. “That’s where we ought to go to start making progress.”
The Democratic chair of the Senate Finance Committee said during a hearing Wednesday that instead of tossing Social Security’s sacred guarantee “in the trash” by cutting benefits, lawmakers should crack down on mega-rich tax dodgers as a way to keep the New Deal program fully solvent for decades to come.
“The ultra-wealthy are avoiding nearly $2 trillion in taxes every 10 years,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said during a Senate Budget Committee hearing. “That is enough to keep Social Security whole till the end of this century.”
“Opponents of democracy are terrified that they will lose again at the ballot box in November and are rushing to right-wing judges to hamstring democratic governance,” said one observer.
Photo: American Association of University Professors/flickr/CC
A Republican-appointed U.S. federal judge in Georgia raised eyebrows and objections Thursday after taking what observers called the “unprecedented” step of blocking a rule that hasn’t even been finalized in order to stop the Biden administration from implementing a plan to deliver promised debt relief to millions of student borrowers.
U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Georgia James Randal Hall issued an order blocking the Biden administration’s proposed federal student debt relief rule. Hall—an appointee of former President George W. Bush—granted a motion by a coalition of right-wing state attorneys general to preempt the rule’s eventual implementation.
“What’s at stake is we are reverting back to a system where a person’s financial ability to be able to pay will determine their ability to be healthy.”
The latest coronavirus vaccine costs up to $200 for the roughly 25 million uninsured people in the U.S., due to the defunding of a federal program that previously covered the costs, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
It’s the “latest tear in the safety net as pandemic-era programs wind down, the newspaper reported. Covid-19 vaccines were free for everyone in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, per federal policy. However, in January, congressional Republicans negotiated a deal that rescinded $6.1 billion in emergency coronavirus relief funding, which killed the Bridge Access Program, launched in April 2023, that covered the cost for the uninsured.
Workers from over two dozen hotels across the United States are on strike as of September 2, 2024, which is Labor Day. Photo: UNITE HERE! Local 30/X
After approximately 10,000 hotel workers across the United States walked off the job over the weekend ahead of Labor Day, the strikes not only continued but grew on Monday, with employees of the Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor taking to the streets.
In Maryland’s biggest city, workers with UNITE HERE Local 7 carried signs that said, “Respect our work,” “One job should be enough,” and “Make them pay.”
“In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right. In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care.”
U.S. Olympic rugby player Ariana Ramsey became a sensation on social media this week after documenting a series of free healthcare visits in the Olympic Village in Paris and becoming an advocate for universal care in her home country.
Ramsey’s initial TikTok video, published Saturday, went viral in France after she expressed disbelief about the free healthcare on offer, playing into the European idea that Americans—who live in the only high-income country in the world without universal care—don’t know what they are missing.
“I literally just got a pap smear—for free,” Ramsey, who won a bronze medal last week, said. “And I have a dentist appointment, and an eye exam next week. Like, what!?”
The Olympic Village polyclinic offers cardiology, orthopedics, physiotherapy, psychology, podiatry and sports medicine—all free of charge to athletes, according to Sports Illustrated. The tradition of free healthcare for athletes dates back nearly a century.
Ramsey, a 24-year-old from Pennsylvania who played rugby at Dartmouth College, said in a video that “there’s no reason why me, an American girl, should be so amazed by free healthcare.”
In a separate post on Monday, recording while sitting in a dentist’s chair, Ramsey said, “This is going to be my new fight for action, free healthcare in America. Period.”
She now describes herself as a “universal free healthcare advocate” in her TikTok bio.
Medicare for All advocates argued that everyone in the U.S. should have the same access to healthcare that athletes have at the Olympics.
“In the Olympic Village in Paris, everyone has free healthcare as a human right,” Warren Gunnels, a top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and a staff director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, wrote on social media. “In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can’t afford healthcare. Yes. We need Medicare for All.”
Many Olympians have other jobs to pay the bills. Ramsey, for example, is a certified personal trainer. The U.S. is one of the only countries that doesn’t directly fund its Olympic athletes, according to Voice of America.
“U.S. Olympians are using their trip to the Olympics to get the basic preventative healthcare they can’t afford to get in the U.S.,” Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of Campaign for New York Health, wrote on social media. “We should be embarrassed that we’re the only industrialized country without universal healthcare—all because lobbyists pay off our politicians.”
If Ramsey’s newfound role as a political campaigner comes as a surprise, it’s not the first for her in Paris: the U.S. women’s team had never before medaled in rugby, and the last U.S. men’s medal was 100 years ago.
The result came in stunning fashion. Down to Australia in the final seconds of the bronze medal match, Ramsey got the ball and threw it to teammate Alex Sedrick, who made a miraculous run the length of the field to tie the game just as time expired, and then converted a kick to win the game.
For Ramsey, the bronze medal likely means she’ll receive a bonus of $15,000 from the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. She’s also tried to maximize the medical benefits of being an Olympian in Paris, visiting a gynecologist, dentist, and ophthalmologist.
Back home, medical services won’t be as accessible, at least not for many Americans. There were more than 25 million non-elderly uninsured people in the U.S. as of 2022, according to KFF, a health policy research nonprofit. Even a routine pap smear can cost $125 to $250 for an uninsured person. U.S. spending on health care exceeds any other high-income country and yet its health outcomes are consistently the worst among peer nations.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
After personally participating in the forced displacement of homeless people in a Los Angeles encampment, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to withhold funding from counties that don’t sufficiently crack down on the unhoused.
Buoyed by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court’s recent City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson ruling—which was welcomed by Newsom and other Democratic leaders like San Francisco Mayor London Breed who filed amicus briefs in the case—the governor issued an executive order last month directing officials to clear out homeless encampments, which have proliferated amid rampant economic inequality and stratospheric housing prices in the nation’s most populous state.
“Our proposal for a common minimum tax on billionaires is now on the map. G20 finance ministers have started to engage with it—and there is no going back,” said progressive economist Gabriel Zucman.
Despite pushback from the United States delegation, finance ministers at a meeting of the G20 countries in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday agreed on the need to develop a global taxation system in which the richest in the world are taxed at a higher rate—potentially unlocking hundreds of billions of dollars annually to help close the international wealth gap.
Ahead of the G20 Summit scheduled for November, which Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government will host, the finance officials met this week to discuss economic issues and ultimately agreed to start a “dialogue on fair and progressive taxation, including of ultra-high-net-worth individuals.”
“Voters understand that raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, even if their elected officials in state legislatures and Washington, D.C. remain inactive.”
Former U.S. President Barack Obama had been in office for just over six months when the federal minimum wage was raised to a paltry $7.25 an hour—where it remains today, 15 years later.
Wednesday marked exactly a decade and a half since the federal wage floor was last lifted, an occasion that advocates used to tout state-level pay hikes and make the case for a long-overdue national increase, particularly as the nation’s billionaires and corporations do better than ever.
“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. “Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices.”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday launched an investigation into surveillance pricing and requested information from eight companies on the practice.
The FTC inquiry will look at the effect of surveillance pricing—using data on consumers’ behavior or characteristics to manipulate the price for them as individuals—on privacy, competition, and consumer protection.
