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We all know about the Paul Ryan budget, which will get a vote on the House floor this week, only one week after it was introduced. Both sides feel they have a story to tell about that budget: Republicans because they’re passing a budget at all, Democrats because that budget is unnecessarily cruel, forces the vast burden of the pain onto the poor and the elderly, and will be a time bomb come November.
But the Senate Democratic leadership is not above scheduling message votes for November themselves. In fact, over the next couple weeks, they’re going to bring to the floor a series of votes, in particular on taxes, to force Republicans to side with corporations and the wealthy. The first will come today:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has scheduled a procedural vote Monday on legislation to repeal billions of dollars in tax breaks for the largest oil companies.
A Senate Democratic aide told The Hill that Reid filed cloture on the bill, authored by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), on Thursday, setting up a procedural vote on Monday at 5:30 p.m. [...]
The legislation eliminates a slew of oil industry tax deductions for major integrated oil companies, using the savings to finance the extension of key renewable energy tax credits.
While this is no-brainer policy in an era of record oil profits, especially when the proceeds get used to further the transition to renewables, it won’t do much for gas prices, and if oil companies stay greedy for the same level of profits, it’ll raise them. Furthermore, Republicans won’t do this in a million years. So that’s a message vote.
Another message vote in the upcoming weeks concerns the Buffett rule:
The third ranking Democrat in the Senate said lawmakers will debate legislation on “tax day” in mid-April, on the filing deadline for personal tax returns, that would ensure millionaires pay at least a 30 percent rate.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Sunday that the Senate will debate Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s (D-R.I.) proposal to enact the so-called “Buffett Rule.”
“You should, if you are very wealthy, God bless you, you made a lot of money, we love you in America, but let’s be fair. You should pay more than your secretary, and that will be on the floor April 15, Tax Day,” Schumer said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.”
The Buffett rule actually got a really bad CBO score, showing that it only raised $47 billion in revenues over ten years. However, Think Progress explains that this is set against the current law baseline, meaning that it describes an environment where the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are already repealed. They cite other studies showing that the Buffett rule would raise $171 billion or $264 billion over that same ten-year window.
But the numbers are somewhat irrelevant, since this isn’t happening either. The positioning of the vote on Tax Day is a dead giveaway.
Once you sift through all the election-year message votes, you can distill down the work of Congress this week to one priority – removing longstanding securities laws, reducing transparency and increasing the probabilities of fraud against investors:
The House is also expected to sign off on the Senate-approved version of a capital-formation bill dubbed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. By a wide margin, the House approved the bill, only to see the Senate tweak it following concerns from Democrats that it lacks sufficient investor protections.
That’s your expected Congressional output for the week.
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The demand for gasoline has been dropping and the supply has been increasing. And yet we currently have higher gas prices than when supplies have been tighter. A clear signal that there are few market forces at work.
Part of the reason that demand is lower is purchases of more energy efficient cars and fleets by those individuals and corporations that can afford to make those purchases. A big bump in gas prices as a result of the repeal of this tax break would dramatically accelerate the move away from fossil fuels. The oil companies know that; OPEC knows that. They have been playing “boil a frog” with prices ever since the Carter administration in order to ensure that there is no dramatic break with fossil fuels. Repealing their tax breaks would not automatically increase gas prices.
Leave aside the fact that this is purely symbolic vote that won’t get cloture.
With this Congress, doing nothing is a virtue.
If investors want protection, they can put their assets in local credit unions.
I get so sick of this complete scum bag, Ryan, acting like “entitlements” are some expense that people don’t deserve. People made salary agreements based on the pensions and other retirement agreements. Now people like Ryan see nothing wrong in taking this agreed upon pay away from people after the work and profits of their labor have been had.
Had these pensions and retirements not been tendered, people would have demanded higher wages so they could save for old age themselves and these phony lying thieves know it. Half now and half after you do the job is a common agreement. Oh now that the job is done, they’re gonna call you stealing and asking for handouts when you expect the other half of your pay. Sociopathic liars shamelessly robbing the elder generation that served in good faith to give money to the ONe Percent and wars for profit for the Onepercent also. Stop Ryan NOW. Ryan is absolutely stealing from vulnerable old people like his s*** doesn’t stink. Most sociopaths have no shame and love painful submission and exploitation of good people. Ryan is textbook.