How Trump is Scuttling the Ship Before Biden Takes Over, the Georgia Senate Race, Medicare Choices and Venture Capitalists Playing with Your Money

What's With "Venture Capital"?

For years, Republican have claimed that reducing taxes on the very wealthy will enable them to have the resources to build businesses, create jobs and thus, the tax cuts would “trickle down” to the people who work for a living.  The frequency of this claim is matched only by its continuing failure to happen.    The first President Bush had it right when he called it ‘voodoo economics.’ 

What happens to this money which ends up in the hands of the wealthy?  Some is  used to purchase real estate, and some is traditionally invested, going into buying shares of businesses or lending them money in the regulated stock and bond marketplace, but not all of it.   A lot of it ends up as what is called “venture capital.”  An informative article on this appeared in last week’s New Yorker magazine, ‘How Venture Capitalists are Deforming Capitalism.’

You can find it at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-capitalists-are-deforming-capitalism.

There are billions, if not trillions, of dollars out there in the hands of these relatively unregulated ‘venture capitalists,’ looking to use it to fund new, sometimes promising, often speculative and risky, businesses.   It would be better if this money,  the result of Republican tax cuts benefiting the wealthy and the cause of our booming deficit, were redistributed by the government in various programs for the benefit of all Americans rather than being used in a speculative manner by those who benefited directly from these tax policies.  They are not concerned with the health of the nation’s economy.  Republican tax policies and ‘venture capitalists” give capitalism a bad name. 

JL

 

Medicare Open Enrollment Ends on Dec. 7

The Medicare Open Enrollment period ends on December 7.  The ads on TV and in the papers ask those on Medicare to call to find out if they are eligible for a myriad of new benefits.  

Here is the answer. “Yes!” 

If you are on traditional Medicare, you can drop your Medicare Parts A and B and switch to a Medicare Advantage plan offering such benefits, or if you already have a Medicare Advantage plan, you can switch to another, supposedly better, one. 

Right now, however, most Medicare enrollees still are on traditional, original, Medicare Parts A and B. (See earlier posts last month on this.)  In 2019, about 34% of all Medicare beneficiaries were enrolled in Medicare Advantage (Part C) which gives more control to the government and the companies offering these plans.  The rest are still on Parts A and B which gives them more control of their own health care.  (Many of them purchase private 'Medigap' or 'Medicare Supplement' policies to fill the 'gaps' in Parts A and B coverage.  These are becoming increasingly expensive.)

 JL

Georgia Senate Races Beckon You

If you are interested in buying some postal cards and stamps to send to Georgia voters, check out https://www.mobilize.us/flipthewest/event/362341/ where mailing lists of Georgia voters are readily available at no charge.  But do it now.  Two Senate seats will be at stake on January 5.  The election of Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossip will give the Democrats a Senate majority, counting the Vice-President's option to cast a tie-breaking vote.

JL

And Here is Some "Must Reading" for You

A column from the Washington Post, as reproduced in the Palm Beach Post ... by Catherine Rampell.

Trump is planning a massive purge

President quietly dismantling entire federal civil service

Catherine Rampell

Again and again, outgoing Trump officials have demonstrated their intention to salt the earth. They’ve tried to jam through Senate confirmations of partisan cranks while planting regulatory time-bombs scheduled to detonate after President Donald Trump leaves office.

They’ve clawed back funding for emergency lending programs and then placed that money out of reach of the next treasury secretary. After years of swelling federal deficits, they’ve suddenly remembered their aversion to debt. And they’ve sown mistrust in the integrity of U.S. elections.

The latest sign of sabotage, though, has flown largely under the radar: Trump has been quietly dismantling the entire federal civil service – and possibly laying the groundwork for a massive, government-wide purge on his way out the door.

Trump signed a technical-sounding executive orderin October that invented a new category of government employees, called 'Schedule F.' Career civil servants whose jobs include 'policymaking,' the order said, should be newly reclassified under Schedule F – a designation that would strip them of long-held civil service protections and allow them to be fired with little demonstrated cause or recourse.

Including, presumably, for showing insufficient loyalty to Trump.

The current system is by no means perfect. But it needs reasonable management reforms, not more political interference. This order effectively transforms large chunks of the merit-based, expertise-driven, nonpartisan civil service into political appointees who work at the mercy of the president. Already, the U.S. government has more political appointees (4,000) than does any other democracy, a feature that predisposes our government to churn, fickle management and cronyism; Trump’s restructuring would make things even worse, reinstating the sort of patronage-driven, 'spoils' system that Congress abolished in the 1880s.

Trump gave the heads of federal agencies 90 days – that is, until Jan. 19, inauguration eve - to review their personnel rosters and decide which roles should be Schedule F. It wasn’t initially clear how many civil servants would get reclassified or whether Trump would still pursue the reorganization once he’d lost reelection.

Then, last week, a memo leaked from the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB director, beating Trump’s deadline, proposed reclassifying 88 percentof his agency’s workforce, or 425 employees, under Schedule F. The Office of Personnel and Management is reportedly fast-tracking its reclassification efforts too.

These are very bad signs. OMB, for example, reaches across nearly every government function, given its involvement in setting budgets and vetting regulations for other agencies. Had Trump won a second term, he presumably would have used this reclassification to clear out distrusted members of the 'deep state.' Already Trump has been working to politicize traditionally independent agencies, including by 'burrowing' political appointees into senior civil service jobs for which they’re not qualified.

Now that he’s lost, it’s reasonable to wonder if Trump simply plans to fire (and perhaps not replace) as many career experts as possible, leaving Biden with a hollowed-out government unable to perform even its most basic functions.

In other words: a purge.

If that sounds alarmist, recall that Trump has engaged in similar government purges

before, of both political appointees and career civil servants whom Congress intended to be shielded from such retaliation. This has usually happened under the guise of 'draining the swamp.' For example, the Economic Research Service – a small, independent statistical agency within the Agriculture Department - has published research on food stamps, climate change, tariffs and other topics that Trump appointees found politically inconvenient. Last year the agency was abruptly relocated a thousand miles away from where it had been; about three-quartersof affected employees decided to quit rather than uproot their families. Certainly one way to silence independent researchers.

Trump has ordered agencies to disband hundreds of technical advisory councils, including the advisory committee to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And even without formal firings, Trump officials have spurred a mass exodus of scientists, foreign affairs specialists, immigration officials and other supposed 'deep staters' throughout government.

A government employees union has challenged the Schedule F executive order in court, saying it violates statutes regarding civil service protections. Separately, Democratic lawmakers have tried to block it. Presumably, the incoming Biden administration could reverse Trump’s executive order and try to rehire civil servants fired under it.

But in the meantime, a chill is running through the ranks of the civil service. Workers who should be focusing on the country’s health or economic crisis are instead worried about their own job security, and whether it’s still safe to speak truth to power. 

Trump is 'crashing the car before turning back the keys,' observes Max Stier, president and chief executive of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. 'Can you simply fix the car? Perhaps, but (1) people will get hurt in the crash, including the public and public servants; (2) you can’t use the car while it is getting fixed; and (3) it is not clear that the car will ever drive the same.'

Which is exactly what Trump wants.

Catherine Rampell is a columnist for The Washington Post. 

                                                             Grrrrrrrr