Author: A.T.

This six-minute Philadelphia story starts out nicely and just gets better and better. (Thanks, Mel!)

Have a beautiful day.  I’m thankful for your readership!

But first — hey, look at this!  FANH, first suggested here at $5.40 (when the symbol was CISG) closed last night at $23.75.  Profits are way up and they have begun to pay a dividend.  Sometimes, patience is rewarded.  I’m selling half and letting the rest ride.

And also — turns out, now that I’ve read it, there’s much to recommend in Donna Brazile’s book, the unfortunate excerpt that fueled the notion the primary was rigged, notwithstanding.

That the news media seized on that excerpt is understandable, but later in the book Donna writes, more plainly:

[Bernie] had legitimate reasons to complain about the actions of a handful of people at the DNC, and I had been totally forthcoming to him about that.  But overall the game was not rigged against him.  He knew this and has said as much, but his staunchest supporters refused to accept it.

Personally, I would go a little further in characterizing the situation.  My own perspective is that, especially in context, there was even less legitimate room for complaint than most Bernie supporters came to believe.

But however you look at it, nothing the DNC did could possibly be construed to have won Hillary 4 million more votes than Bernie.  For better or worse, as Donna has gone on to say, Hillary won fair and square.

Where the rigging was real, aggressive, and almost surely history-changing — as you’ll see in some pretty scary detail if you read Donna’s book and continue to follow the news — was in the general election.  Russia rigged it.  That we as a nation are not going batshit over this successful attack on our democracy is just part of Russia’s victory.

(Donna’s book also devotes quite a few pages to the CNN debate question she was fired for having given Hillary in advance.  If you read her account, I think you’ll believe her when she says she honestly has no recollection of ever having done this; can’t find any record of it on her computer; and can’t say for sure, but thinks this may have been Russian one more example of Russian disinformation, designed to screw things up.)

Because: disinformation is real, and a lot of Americans really do seem to be disinformed.

Here’s why — arguably — Hillary won by only 3 million votes when it should have been 30 million.  (There’s no sound; just watch the captions that flash by.  E.g., 40% of Trump voters think he won the popular vote; 39% believed the stock market went down under Obama; 67% believe the unemployment rate went up under Obama; 46% believe Hillary helped run a child sex slave ring out of a DC pizza parlor.)

And now!

Jim Burt on the estate tax (which they call the “death” tax but should really be called the “inheritance” tax, because it burdens not dead people, or estates, but inheritors of great wealth):

Our Founding Fathers considered the concentration of wealth in a few families dangerous to a free republic.  They didn’t have tools like income taxes or inheritance taxes, as those had not yet been invented, but they wrote three measures to fight hereditary inequality into our earliest laws.  The Constitution prohibits titles of nobility, with their baggage of hereditary status and privilege – ‘privilege’ being a word from two French roots, meaning ‘private law’.  The other two measures were written into the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, enacted by a unanimous Congress before ratification of the Constitution and re-enacted by the first Congress under the Constitution.  One of these prohibited primogeniture, the other, entail — two major devices for massive wealth accumulation in the 18th Century.

If the Founding Fathers had thought of the inheritance tax — a tax on wealth accruing to people by virtue of their wise choice of parents — the evidence suggests they would have adopted it, and likely at a high rate.  How do we know this?  Well, the laws I summarize above are the best evidence, but we can also look to their words:

“A power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly  absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every  generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from  posterity. Such extension of property is quite unnatural.” — Thomas Jefferson

“There is no point more difficult to account for than the right we conceive men to have to dispose of their goods after death.” — Adam Smith (not a founding father, but an inspiration to them)

“The great object [of political parties] should be to combat [this] evil: . . . by withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches . . .” — James Madison

“[America] will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people, because of the equal distribution of property.” — George Washington

“I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. . . . [I]t is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.” — Thomas Jefferson (in reaction to the evils observed in France)

Our Founding Fathers considered vast disparities in wealth and the concentration of wealth in a few hands to be pernicious to the survival of a free republic.  They were right.  The inheritance tax is the least we should do to further the founding principles of our country.

Have a great weekend.  a short, heart-warming clip tomorrow, while the turkey bastes.

As you know, Trump often re-read a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.  From the foreword to that 1941 volume — a passage that might be seen to apply equally well to Trump:

Hitler is past master of throwing up verbal smoke screens to conceal his intended moves. He knows equally well the effectiveness of massive oratorical assaults that shake the nerves of his victims and opponents and break down their resistance. He knows how to give pledges that will be broken later but will serve temporally to divide and confuse and to create the illusion of Security. He uses insults and lies in the same manner as his generals use Stuka planes and tanks to break the respectable but often weak front of his adversaries. He contradicts himself constantly but his contradictions often produce the effect of a psychological pincer-movement which crushes the best defenses of logic and ordinary morality.

It is in that unhappy context that I offer these sober stocking-stuffer suggestions:

• The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy, written in 2012 — and
  “prescient,” as Fareed Zakaria recently told us (4 minutes well worth watching).
• The Despot’s Apprentice . . . Donald Trump’s Attack On Democracy.
• Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.

America’s brand ranked #1 worldwide under Obama.  Now the headline is: Germany Takes Top ‘Nation Brand’ Ranking, As U.S. Drops to Sixth.

According to a survey of 20,185 people in 20 countries conducted this past July:

. . . global perception of the United States saw a substantial decline over the past year, causing the U.S. to drop from first to sixth place in Anholt-GfK’s annual Nation Brands Index (NBI).

Germany moved from second to first place; France rose to second place from fifth; and the U.K., which lost some ground after the Brexit vote, improved its score and maintained its third-place ranking.

Japan saw a large (2.12-point) jump in its score and made the top 10 ranking for the first time since 2011, tying with Canada for fourth place. Italy rose to sixth place, from seventh.

Switzerland, Austria and Sweden maintained their eighth, ninth and tenth places, respectively.

Who would have thought, in 1945, that one day Germany and Japan would outrank us in world esteem?

We have a lot of work to do to regain our footing.  I don’t believe Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Sean Hannity, and Vladimir Putin are the bunch we need to do it.

And — given, as the latest evidence, their terrible tax plan — I don’t think the Republicans in the House and Senate are, either.

I don’t want to be relentlessly negative. Look for a post Thanksgiving Day that will warm your heart, and another Friday that will turn you into a recycling genius.  (Or click here for Stage 4 cancer hope.)

But how to look at last week’s events and not have your head explode?

(By the way? Exploding Head Syndrome, from which one of the characters in Meteor Shower, Steve Martin’s terrific new play, suffers, is real.)

Yes: a deeply conscientious Democratic senator was — rightly — called out for a stupid, gross, unacceptable thing he did in an earlier career, while volunteering his time for the troops.

He quickly acknowledged his mistake as inexcusable and constructively apologized.

The victim accepted that apology (if she can, can’t we?) but our disastrous president — himself widely accused of much worse and taped boasting about some of it — used the occasion not to apologize himself, but to divert attention from the tax bill he hopes soon to celebrate, as he recently celebrated passage of a “mean, mean, mean” health care bill.

Diversion is necessary, because as attention is focused on the tax bill, heads explode.  Even now, CNBC reports, “the tax-cut package is extremely unpopular, and it’s not hard to see why.”

The bill is in serious trouble because it so clearly and overwhelmingly favors the rich.

Indeed, it goes further!

Here’s how the Republican tax bill takes from the rich to give to the extremely rich:

The House Republicans’ tax reform plan has arrived. And as it turns out, the people it aims to please aren’t the infamous 1 percent, the upper class, or even millionaires.

Instead, they’re multi-multi-millionaires and billionaires — the top 0.1 percent or even the top 0.01 percent.

This rarefied group has poured gobs of money into Republican campaigns in recent years. And they expect a return on their investment.

First up is a cut in the federal tax rate that corporations pay on their profits — from 35 percent to 20 percent. Republicans have dutifully argued this cut will help ordinary workers by encouraging companies to expand and create jobs, but this is nonsense. The tax savings would largely go to dividends and other payouts to stock owners. And since wealth ownership in this country is even more unequal than income, the benefits of this cut overwhelmingly go to the richest of the rich. . . .

And there’s more.  Read the whole thing.

Here is Congressman Tim Ryan’s head exploding in two minutes.

Maybe he gets a little carried away — but can you blame him?  Record inequality is already tearing our country apart and dimming our future.  Now they want more?

It is a vibrant middle class, not a plutocracy, who are the “job creators.”

We’ve tried this.  Presidential candidate George W. Bush told a multi-trillion-dollar lie — that “by far the vast majority” of the benefits of his proposed tax cuts would go to “the bottom of the economic ladder.”

That was as bald-faced and demonstrable a lie as Trump’s idiotic insistence that today’s Republican tax cuts are directed at the middle class — and would not benefit people like him.

In the case of Bush, the electorate was fooled into giving him almost as many votes as Gore, in part based on this lie; the rich got dramatically richer; take-home pay remained stagnant for everyone else; infrastructure decayed; the National Debt soared.

In the case of Trump, the electorate was fooled into giving him nearly 3 million as many votes as his opponent (he promised massive tax cuts for the middle class and “great health care for everybody at a tiny fraction of the cost”) and the rich are poised to get dramatically richer again, as infrastructure decays, the deficit grows, and everyone else is left behind.

(In his own case, the principal tax we know he paid in 2005 — the Alternative Minimum Tax — the Republican bills would eliminate.  That alone would have saved him $20 million.  Eliminating the estate tax — if his net worth is $10 billion as he claims — would save his heirs $4 billion.)

Listen: there are things that should be done to improve the tax code.

But the estate tax — which should be called the inheritance tax, not the death tax, because it is the inheritors, not the dead, who bear its burden (if inheriting only $70 million, say, instead of $100 million, can be called a burden) — should remain at 40% above the first $11 million.

(So if, after your spouse inherits everything tax free but then dies and leaves your/her heirs $20 million, 40% of the amount above that exempted $11 million would still be taxed away, leaving them only $16.4 million.)

On estates above $50 million the rate should rise to 50%!

And on that portion of an estate above $250 million, to 60%!

Why not?

Would entrepreneurs and inventors and venture capitalists be any less incentivized to get rich, knowing that they’d be able to pass each grandchild somewhat smaller trust funds (even if they could name just as large a university research center, orphanage, or opera house)?  Would they wind up creating any fewer jobs?

Does anyone — anywhere — actually believe this?

The same is true of so much else in the Republican tax bill, but elimination of the estate tax is easiest to understand and perhaps more clearly than anything else puts the lie to their professed motivation of boosting the economy and aiding the beleaguered common man.

One more example.  Do you know why eliminating the “individual mandate” is projected to save the Treasury $330 billion over 10 years?  It’s because millions fewer people would be getting coverage.  And that’s great, from the Republican perspective, because it means the government would not have to chip in subsidies to keep their health care affordable.

My view: we should not be eliminating the individual mandate — or cutting rates for the very wealthy — we should be modestly raising taxes on dividends-and-capital-gains-above-$1-million — by 2%, say — in order to lower co-pays and deductibles to make coverage more affordable.  And that would still leave the rate on investment income lower than it was when Ronald Reagan, world’s greatest American, left office after eight years.

My head is exploding.

(And this is just the tax bill!  What about ceding world leadership to China?  What about ignoring Russia’s ongoing attack on our country that changed the course of our nation’s history?  What about allowing our planet to become uninhabitable?  What about respect for science, competence, facts, and truth?)

Let me leave you with two last thoughts:

> There is much talk of “simplifying” the tax code, and, invariably, reducing the number of tax brackets.  Hello?  The number of tax brackets is not what makes the tax code complicated.  The tax table (if anyone even ever looks at it anymore) is less than one page in a tax code thousands of pages long.  For 99.9% of individuals, the tax code needs no simplifying.  You simply open an inexpensive tax-preparation program like this one or this one (that used to have my name on it) — or perhaps this free one — answer the questions, and you’re done.  After the first year, you won’t even have to type your name and address, social security number, bank account names, and the rest.

It may well make sense to simplify the corporate code.

It may also make sense to lower the 35% rate by closing some loopholes.

But only if these things can be done in a revenue-neutral way — or perhaps in a way that raises more revenue, because we clearly need it to revitalize our infrastructure and damp down our deficit.

> You’ve played Monopoly™, right?  How about a new rule: when the game ends, the winner gets to keep all his money and houses and hotels (or give it all to his kids) to use at the start of the next game.  That’s what eliminating the estate tax does.  That’s what Republicans, the party of the rich and powerful, stand for.  And if you think that’s a good way to structure the game, more power to you.  But it makes my head explode.

Plus health care, dictatorship, a 24-hour marathon . . .

But first: what about WheelTug?  This 18-minute video in the style of a 40’s film noir would be excruciating for anyone expecting the The Maltese Falcon.  (In real life, CEO Isaiah Cox talks as fast as Bogart, but here he is addressing airline executives for whom English is not their first language.)  But for those of us who own shares in Borealis — bought only with money we can truly afford to lose, and with “limit orders” so as not to pay double what we need to — it may be of interest.  As you’ll hear, the FAA approval process is underway, and “just last week they completed their PDR,” which stands for “preliminary design review,” a milestone of sorts.  None of this guarantees success; but is surely, at very least, “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

(Seriously?  You don’t get that reference?  Watch the trailer and then the film!)

And now: Following up from yesterday’s post, one victim of whataboutism — John Podesta — writes that Trump wants to upend 230 years of constitutional principle:

. . . What the Founding Fathers built with a written Constitution and 85 Federalist Papers, the president is trying to tear down 140 or 280 characters at a time.

For months, Trump has been trying to divert attention from the walls closing in on his former campaign chairman, his former national security adviser and his own son Donald Trump Jr. . . . Trump has practiced some of the favorite tactics of his role model Vladimir Putin, labeling any damaging revelation as “fake news” and practicing a refined form of “whataboutism.” . . .

But what appeared to be a typically Trumpian media damage-control strategy has taken a more lawless and sinister turn. This week, it was reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions — in an apparent effort to appease Trump — is considering appointing a special counsel to investigate Clinton’s role in approving the purchase of Uranium One . . .

. . . a charge entirely debunked, as noted in the link from Fox News yesterday.

It’s worth reading the full Podesta column.

And find 4 minutes to watch Fareed Zakaria on how the world is shifting away from democracy — and not just in Turkey.  It’s an overview everyone should have in mind as they watch Trump cozy up to Putin, Erdogan, Duterte and the rest . . . even as he dismantles our foreign service and cedes world leadership to one-party China.

Republicans desperately want to help the wealthy by ending Obamacare (whose subsidies are paid for in meaningful degree by an extra $3.8 million in taxes on each $100 million in dividends and capital gains you earn) . . . and so they’ve done all they can to kill it.  Yet enrollment is 46% ahead of last year’s pace — apparently, some people want it — and that’s good, because the Republicans have halved the enrollment period.

I.e., get on the stick, people.

If you know folks who need health insurance, shoot them this link and let them know they have just 29 days left to sign up.

Meanwhile, what are you doing December 4th and 5th?  Any interest in spending all or part of 24 hours circling the globe, trying to keep it habitable?  Sign up to watch, free, from the comfort of your home.

Have a great weekend!

I had never heard this term before — “whataboutism.”

As in: Sure, Trump is a pathological liar who’s destroying our government and our standing in the world, but what about the child porn ring Hillary ran out of a pizza parlor? What about the four Americans she killed at Benghazi?  What about the uranium deal?!  The attorney general needs to appoint a special prosecutor!

I have two things to say about that.

1. If you haven’t already seen it, here’s Shepard Smith on Fox News explaining the uranium deal.  Guess what: Hillary did absolutely nothing wrong.
2. Here is John Oliver explaining whataboutism.  Warning: it’s very funny and, yes, very irreverent.  Trump supporters, just like Judge Roy Moore supporters, will find it deeply disrespectful, elitist, snide — all that. And they will stick with the alternative facts with which they are comfortable.  But the rest of us?  Until this nightmare ends — as soon as possible, because it’s truly an emergency — we can never be reminded too often how absurd and deeply dangerous Trump’s presidency is.  Putin is winning, bigly.

Have a great day.

Bang!!!!!  (I can’t emphasize that enough.)

After which it took 8.8 billion years for Earth to form 5 billion years ago . . . and then another 800 million years or so for “life” to emerge.

Microbes, according to Life at the Edge of Sight.

But plants?  Plants didn’t evolve until a mere 500 million years ago.

What do I know?  But that’s a long time, if you ask me — 3.7 billion years — to go from microbes to plants.  What was so hard about plants?

Humans appeared half a minute ago (200,000 years?) — and with them, presumably, human intelligence — but we didn’t really figure anything out until a second ago.

And now we’re figuring things out faster and faster — so exponentially so that it’s all almost surely coming to an explosively glorious beginning for us — or end — over the next second.

(And conducting humanity’s crescendo we had people like Obama, Biden, Clinton, and the Pope.  Now we have people like Trump, Bannon, Kushner, and the Pope.  It’s enough to turn me Catholic.  But I digress.)

Did you know that when I was a little kid you couldn’t direct-dial from New York to California?  It could take five operators to put through a long-distance call.  Here’s that story.

Now, barely an instant later, you can reach a friend in China in seconds.  Or in Kenya. Or in Tonga.

Virtually free!

A video call!!

While you’re walking in the park!!!

And when you don’t even know where the friend is!!!!

I was listening to “Hamilton” yet again — “Look around!  Look around!  How lucky we are to be alive right now!” — and realized that (a) it’s more true than ever; and that (b) I’m nearly a third as old as America.

“American history,” which seems so imposing when, as kids, we first encounter it, is in fact a very short story.

So, too, really, human history.

And weeeeee have the astounding good fortune — and daunting responsibility — to help determine how it all ends.

Will it be “the end of history” as Francis Fukuyama suggested as the Cold War drew to a close?

Bye-bye, KGB; hello, the universal adoption of liberal Western democracy — and they all lived happily ever after?

Or — because we couldn’t find ways to live with each other sustainably on our spaceship — will it be, after the 13.8 billion years it took to get to this miraculous point, merely The End?

Too much for a Tuesday morning?  Okay, how about this: I just learned you can take beer out of the refrigerator if you over-estimated demand.  (They went for the hot-buttered-rum instead.) It won’t go “skunky,” and you can reclaim all that refrigerator space.

Oh, happy day.

ALABAMA: So let’s recap.  The former Republican Alabama Senator, Jeff Sessions, now attorney general, may have lied under oath to Congress.  The current Republican nominee to fill Sessions’ seat, Republican Roy Moore — twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court and president of the Foundation for Moral Law — is an alleged child molester.  Republican Alabama state auditor, Jim Zeigler, defends that molestation, comparing it to adult carpenter Joseph’s relationship to the teenage Virgin Mary.  (Stephen Colbert notes that the Virgin Mary was a virgin — that was pretty much the miracle of the thing — so there’s no reason to think Joseph kept anything but a respectful, appropriate distance before, during, and after her pregnancy.)  Just what will happen with Moore’s candidacy is in part up to Kay Ivey, who recently replaced Alabama’s Republican Governor Robert Bentley in the wake of a sex and corruption scandal. 

Could it be time for the many, many good people of Alabama to elect a Democrat?

INDIANA: South Bend, Indiana’s young mayor, Pete Buttigieg (pronounced: BUTT-edge-edge), was Howard Dean’s choice for DNC chair and is likely to go far.  He’s started Hitting Home, because real-life stories like Jennica’s and Becky’s really do.  Three minutes each.

VETERAN’S DAY: One of you wrote me Saturday, “Why do you and other Libs not mention Veterans and the sacrifices they made for this country?  At least on THIS day?  Why?”  (This was in apparent response to Friday’s post, “Time To Ask Why,” about Trump’s decimation of the foreign service, ceding world leadership to China and Russia.)

Actually, many of us liberals do.

Here’s an email one liberal sent Saturday, in case you’re not on his list:

Andrew —

Today is a day to recognize those who have honored our country with its highest form of service.

We owe our veterans our thanks. Our respect. Our freedom.

Today, we humbly acknowledge that we can never truly serve our veterans in quite the same way that they served us. But we can try. We can practice kindness. We can volunteer. We can serve. We can respect one another. We can have each other’s backs.

Yesterday, I dropped by a service project in Northeast D.C., where a group of veteran volunteers were preparing for a project to help revitalize the Langston Terrace public housing project. Langston Terrace, the first federally funded housing project in D.C., was built in the 1930s as part of President Roosevelt’s Public Works Administration. Its 274 units provided affordable shelter for families trying to get back on their feet after the Great Depression. And today, a group of veterans are fixing it up, working alongside members of their Washington, D.C., community.

Just think about that for a moment. On a day dedicated to honoring their sacrifice, these veterans chose to honor their fellow citizens. Lift up their own communities. They chose, on this day, to roll up their sleeves and ask, “Now, what else can I do?”

That is true service. The pure and selfless personal agency that makes us who we are as Americans.

Thousands of you are doing this every day, in your own communities. Folks like Kyle, from Germantown, Maryland. Kyle wrote Michelle and me earlier this year to tell us about Washington D.C.’s Dog Tag Bakery, where she works. Dog Tag helps support disabled veterans, military spouses, and caregivers during their transitions into civilian life by providing them with valuable work experience. (They also happen to bake, as Kyle puts it, “the most amazing brownie you’ve ever had.”) Kyle told us how inspired she was by her colleagues’ strength and commitment to service. She wrote that we should all “support this transition for those who have sacrificed so much for our country and well being” — and I couldn’t agree more.

Notes like Kyle’s remind me that one of the many ways we contribute as citizens is by holding each other accountable — by encouraging each other to stand up and do better.

We’ve been asking folks all around the country to share with us what they’re committed to changing in their communities in the next few months. Join them by making a commitment of your own today.

Every day, we walk among citizens willing to lay down their lives for strangers like us.

Today, we can show our own love for our country by loving our neighbors as ourselves. By rolling up our sleeves, and asking: “Now, what else can I do?”

May God bless all who served, and still do.

— Barack

Amen.

But first: Take three minutes to meet James Mackler.  Yes, it’s Tennessee: but I sure wouldn’t bet against this guy to fill Bob Corker’s Senate seat — would you?

And now: read Ambassador Stephenson’s letter and then, if her question strikes you as important, watch Rachel Maddow’s answer.

Time to Ask Why
ADVANCE COPY
December 2017 Foreign Service Journal
President’s Views
By AFSA President Ambassador Barbara Stephenson

I begin with a reminder that we, the members of the career Foreign Service, have an obligation as stewards of our institution to be effective advocates for why diplomacy matters. . . .

The cover of the Time magazine that arrived as I was writing this column jarred me with its graphic of wrecking balls and warning of “dismantling government as we know it.”

While I do my best, as principal advocate for our institution and as a seasoned American diplomat, to model responsible, civil discourse, there is simply no denying the warning signs that point to mounting threats to our institution—and to the global leadership that depends on us.

There is no denying that our leadership ranks are being depleted at a dizzying speed, due in part to the decision to slash promotion numbers by more than half. The Foreign Service officer corps at State has lost 60 percent of its Career Ambassadors since January. Ranks of Career Ministers, our three-star equivalents, are down from 33 to 19. The ranks of our two-star Minister Counselors have fallen from 431 right after Labor Day to 369 today—and are still falling.

. . . Were the U.S. military to face such a decapitation of its leadership ranks, I would expect a public outcry. Like the military, the Foreign Service recruits officers at entry level and grows them into seasoned leaders over decades. The talent being shown the door now is not only our top talent, but also talent that cannot be replicated overnight. The rapid loss of so many senior officers has a serious, immediate, and tangible effect on the capacity of the United States to shape world events.

Meanwhile, the self-imposed hiring freeze is taking its toll at the entry level. Intake into the Foreign Service at State will drop from 366 in 2016 to around 100 new entry-level officers joining A100 in 2018 (including 60 Pickering and Rangel Fellows).

. . . As the shape and extent of the staffing cuts to the Foreign Service at State become clearer, I believe we must shine a light on these disturbing trends and ask “why?” and “to what end?”

Congress rejected drastic cuts to State and USAID funding. The Senate labeled the proposed cuts a “doctrine of retreat” and directed that appropriated funds “shall support” staffing State at not less than Sept. 30, 2016, levels, and further directed that “The Secretary of State shall continue A-100 entry-level classes for FSOs in a manner similar to prior years.”

Given this clear congressional intent, we have to ask: Why such a focus on slashing staffing at State? Why such a focus on decapitating leadership? How do these actions serve the stated agenda of making the State Department stronger?

Remember, nine in ten Americans favor a strong global leadership role for our great country, and we know from personal experience that such leadership is unthinkable without a strong professional Foreign Service deployed around the world protecting and defending America’s people, interests and values.  Where then, does the impetus come from to weaken the American Foreign Service?  Where is the mandate to pull the Foreign Service team from the field and forfeit the game to our adversaries?

Sincerely,

Ambassador Barbara Stephenson

Rachel Maddow led off Thursday with these questions, and — in her trademark long-form way — surrounded them with context, color (did you know that Ben Carson hired Eric Trump’s wedding planner to run much of the Housing Department?) — and at least the hint of an answer.  Watch.

Finally, for those who may have missed it, both Donna Brazile and Elizabeth Warren have now made it clear that no, the 2016 primary was not rigged.

Have a great weekend!

But first, Mark Cuban’s two-minute plan for getting rich.  I’m in love.

And what a fantastic result at the polls yesterday!

Had it not been for the full-scale, sustained attack by the former Soviet Union and the systematic Republican voter suppression that cost us states like Wisconsin, it’s the sort of day we would have had a year ago.

Voter suppression is one of the basic differences between the two parties:  Democrats want to make voting easier; Republicans want to make it harder.

Listen:  “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” — Paul Weyrich, beloved by Republicans like Mike Pence.

Another basic difference is taxes.  Republicans are all about easing the burden on the rich, however relatively-light the burden has become — even if it means exploding the National Debt, as Reagan, Bush, and Bush massively did.

(Leaving Clinton and Obama to get it back to growing slower than the economy).

Yesterday, I covered the inheritance tax.  The Republicans have long wanted to eliminate it, which would help not a single middle class family (but save the Trump kids $4.5 billion).

Today, consider what the Republican tax bill would do to the cost of education.

Handing the mike over to a pro, Dana Chasin, who writes, in part:

The bill that House Ways and Means is marking up hikes taxes in various ways, with the heaviest burden falling on middle and working class students and families — and the changes don’t even raise much revenue in the process.

Student Loan Interest Deduction, Gone?

Under the GOP plan, people who are repaying their student loans would lose their current $2,500 deduction.  . . .

Teacher Supply Deduction, Ditto?

[Today], teachers can deduct up to $250 in expenses for classroom and supplemental supplies.  For two-teacher households, the deduction can total $500 annually. The GOP tax bill would eliminate this deduction completely. . . .

University Endowments

An unexpected provision in the Republican tax bill introduced a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of private universities with an endowment of at least $100,000 per full-time student. . . . The New America Foundation and the National Association of College and University Business Officers estimate that around 160 universities would meet the proposed taxation threshold.  The average loss per educational institution is $187.5 million. . . .

Charitable Deduction

Donations constitute the primary funding source for university endowments.  Such donations can be deducted as charitable giving. With the move to filing taxes on a postcard under the House legislation, the number of itemizers is expected to decline from 33 percent today to about 5 percent. So the millions of taxpayers who itemize the charitable deduction today will no longer be able to do so if the bill becomes law.  As a result, colleges and universities would almost certainly see a substantial reduction in philanthropic donations.

[Not to mention the impact eliminating the estate tax would have — suddenly, giving $100 million would no longer provide a $45 million estate-tax break, and so become nearly twice as expensive.]

Employer-Sponsored Educational Assistance

The GOP plan would also eliminate the tax break for employer-sponsored educational assistance programs . . .

Teaching Assistant Tuition Waivers

The House legislation includes a little-noticed provision in which graduate students who receive tuition waivers while working as teaching assistants or research assistants would see those waivers taxed as if it were standard income. This would require all graduate students to pay taxes on up to $50-60,000 of tuition, limiting this avenue of education to the wealthiest students who can bear that kind of burden (and driving up student debt for those who can’t).

One place the bill would be more generous?

“The Republican tax plan would allow unborn children to be named as the beneficiaries of 529 Plans. Anti-abortion groups have praised the measure,” Chasin reports, “while Planned Parenthood has slammed this as a likely vehicle for restricting access to abortion.”

But by and large, the tax bill would make education more expensive, to help off-set tax cuts for the rich.

Student debt outpaces even auto and credit card debt.  The Democrats have a few simple ideas on this score. The most glaringly compelling?  Let those with federal student loans refinance at today’s low rates — just as you can refinance a mortgage when rates fall.  We proposed it; they nixed it.

Better still: make higher education debt free, as called for in the 2016 Democratic Party platform.

May I make a suggestion?  Let’s keep up the momentum.  If everyone who favors middle-class priorities over tax cuts for the rich comes out to vote Democrat next year, we can begin to get the country back on a progressive track.