President Biden made known his priorities with the release of his budget plan early this month. One feature is a modest increase in the Medicare payroll tax ("huge" and "giant" says the tax-averse Wall Street Journal editorial board) meant to extend the viability of Medicare for another 25 years beyond 2028 when the trust fund's reserves will otherwise run dry.

The president's offering will be negotiated over the coming months along with budgets from the House and Senate, and the tax increases are destined not to get past Republicans in the House. But the White House proposals do serve to remind that some action needs to be taken
about Medicare by a Congress that resolutely chooses to ignore what's coming at us in the future.

We pay 1.45% of income for Medicare, as do employers, for a 2.9% total. single individuals on income over $200,000 and marrieds filing jointly on income over $250,000 pay an extra .9% for a 3.8% total. For income over $400,000 Biden wants to increase the 3.8% to 5.0%. And he wants "business income" to be be swept into the equation. (Owners of professional service businesses have structured them to classify their earnings as profits which heretofore are not subject to the surcharges).

Republican refusal to consider any tax increases stands out against a backdrop of stunning gains in the wealth of the nation's top earners and business owners. Pay to corporate CEOs has gone steadily upward for decades, skyrocketing 1,460% since 1978.

Even poor results are rewarded, such as $21 million paid to Boeing's David Calhoun in the year its 737 Max airliner was grounded and the company lost $12 billion. Such as Norwegian Cruise Lines' CEO Frank del Rio pocketing $36.4 million with its ships dead in the water from… Read More »

In the early morning hours after the 2020 election, Donald Trump told his supporters "Frankly, we did win this election. We did win it". Thus began "The Big Lie", his campaign that the election had been stolen. Only he said it. Millions believed it because he said it.

But Trump was desperate to come up with something that could make his myth seem true, so his campaign contracted with Berkeley Research Group, a California outfit that helps organizations in "disputes and investigations" to look for the fraud that supposedly cost Trump his presidency. This effort was entirely unknown until The Washington Post broke the story in early February, unknown because Berkeley came up with nothing, a result displeasing to Trump that he and those around him have kept secret for over two years.

In the two months between the election and the January 6th insurrection, about a dozen Berkeley researchers studied results in six "battleground" states where voting was close. The Post
Duped by The Big Lie

quotes one of four sources, "a person familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity":

“They looked at everything: change of addresses, illegal immigrants, ballot harvesting, people voting twice, machines being tampered with, ballots that were sent to vacant addresses that were returned and voted, literally anything you could think of. Voter turnout anomalies, date of birth anomalies, whether dead people voted. If there was anything under the sun that could be thought of, they looked at it.”

There were the usual anomalies, irregularities, mistakes common to all elections given the huge numbers involved but these "actually went… Read More »