Contributors

Saturday, November 18, 2017

A Salacious Sex Story and a Pivot to Tax Policy!

Sex abuse of minors isn't limited to Republicans, or Democrats, or politicians, or Hollywood celebrities. It isn't even limited to men:
An Oklahoma teacher is accused of having sex with a high school student after the boy’s parents reported nude photographs and text messages on their son’s phone to authorities.

Hunter Day, a 22-year-old teacher at Yukon High School in Yukon, Okla., was arrested Wednesday after authorities said they used the boy’s phone to confirm a meeting and found Day sitting on her living room floor with the lights off and candles lit.
This woman isn't even a real teacher:
Day was hired to teach science at Yukon High School at the beginning of the school year, according to an October report by Oklahoma City-based News 9. She was among the state’s 1,500 emergency certified teachers hired without education training to help mitigate teacher shortages. It’s one of many ways Oklahoma is dealing with a deepening budget crisis that has forced class sizes to surge, art and foreign-language programs to shrink or disappear and — in many districts — schools to operate just four days a week. 
News 9 reported that Day had little to no teaching experience. She held a degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and at one point planned to go to medical school. Day had a 10-month contract to teach at the school, but said she planned to get her certification requirement so she could return next year.
That she's a Baptist like Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused of molesting minors, is particularly humorous.

Child rape is one of the real consequences of the Republican fixation on cutting taxes for billionaires, particularly oil billionaires, who have a stranglehold on Oklahoma politics and have turned the state (along with Kansas) into an economic cesspit.

With their new tax plan, Republicans in Washington want to turn the rest of the country into Oklahoma: by removing the deduction for state and local taxes, they intend to get revenge on richer blue states and force them to reduce or eliminate their income taxes. Income taxes pay for education and infrastructure that make blue states much more attractive to businesses that pay higher salaries.

It's extremely hypocritical. One of the reasons that Republicans say that corporate taxes and the inheritance tax are "so unfair" is that they are "double taxation." The logic for inheritance taxes goes like this: the parent paid taxes on the original wealth, so when the heir is required to pay taxes on the inheritance it's "double taxation."

This is actually false, because most inherited wealth that exceeds the current $5 million threshold is in the form of real estate and capital investments, the value of which has typically increased over time, and those gains have not yet been taxed.

Eliminating the state and local tax deduction really will cause the double taxation problem that Republicans are always screaming about. If low-tax red states are angry that high-tax blue states have better education and infrastructure, then red states can charge income taxes, improve the lives of their citizens and increase their competitiveness.

Hypocritically, Republicans want to keep the charitable tax deduction. That means they won't pay taxes on money that they give to their churches. The vast majority of church donations are spent on their own church buildings, services for church members, pastor salaries, etc. Many churches have associated schools, and donations pay for school buildings, subsidize teacher salaries, etc. Some tiny amount of church money is an actual charity, i.e., spent helping the poor, but it's insignificant compared to the spending on their own infrastructure.

Republicans argue that churches and charities perform a public good that society should help subsidize.

My state and local taxes pay for charitable services to the poor, medical care for the poor, education for the poor, and thousands of other services that benefit everyone in the state, not just members of a particular religion.

If we allow tax deductions for donations to churches and other non-profit charities, then we should be able to claim the taxes we pay to states, counties and cities as charitable donations as well. They serve the public good far more than churches and religious universities that churn out hypocrites like Roy Moore and Hunter Day.

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