The Border Wall Fight Is Coming Back

Plus, the soaring price of Trump's Air Force One

The Fight Over Funding Trump's Border Wall Is Coming Back Soon

The fight over funding for President Trump’s border wall looks set to resume.

As lawmakers work on allocating federal funding for fiscal 2020, Senate Republicans are reportedly looking to divert money from health and education to pay for the wall, Roll Call’s Paul M. Krawzak reports:

“According to several people familiar with the process, Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote an allocation for the fiscal 2020 Labor-HHS-Education spending bill that is about $5 billion lower than it would have been to provide funding for the wall.”

We’ve been here before: Disagreements over funding for Trump’s border wall led to a 35-day partial government shutdown last December and January, the longest ever. Congress then approved $1.375 billion in border barrier money for fiscal 2019, far less than the $5.7 billion Trump had been demanding, and the money came with restrictions on how it could be spent.

Unsatisfied with that funding, the president in February declared a national emergency at the border in order to tap an additional $6.7 billion from military funding and other sources for wall construction. The Supreme Court last month cleared the way for the administration to divert $2.5 billion in Defense Department money to build sections of the border wall.

Senate republicans will have to deal with Democrats: Shelby’s appropriations provision will be subject to negotiations with House Democrats, who did not include any wall funding in their Homeland Security bill. How far will Democrats be willing to go on the issue? Krawzak reports that, while Senate Democrats may oppose Shelby’s $5 billion, one former GOP aide suggested that the money provided in the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations may still be “generous” enough win some Democratic support. The likely political pressure Democrats would face for supporting Trump’s wall might suggest otherwise.

Another high-profile appropriations fight? A White House move last weekend to block as much as $4 billion in foreign aid spending by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development is raising Democratic alarms and could also spill over into the coming appropriations talks. “This administration seems determined to ignore the will of Congress and undermine American leadership. I will do everything in my power to stop this illegitimate action taken by the administration,” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said Thursday. One Democratic aide tells Roll Call that the directive could lead Democrats to put up a bigger fight over any administration efforts to shift money around for next year.

Number of the Day: 6.5%

From Modern Healthcare: “Average total cash compensation for health system executives rose 6.5% from 2018 to 2019, extending a consistent rise in executive pay that governance experts do not expect to slow.” Modern Healthcare’s annual Executive Compensation Survey has found pay hikes ranging from 4% to 7% in each of the last four years.

“What surprises people I think as compensation becomes very generous because it is a competitive market, some think a hospital administrator shouldn’t expect to make more than the average physician,” Paul Keckley, an industry consultant, told Modern Healthcare. “Those days are long gone.”

An earlier Modern Healthcare analysis of more than 2,000 not-for-profit hospitals found that the 25 highest-paid not-for-profit health system executives saw their total compensation rise by more than 33% in 2017 alone.

Who Isn’t Paying Income Taxes?

Ten years ago, an economist at the Tax Policy Center calculated that 47% of Americans paid no federal income tax. That figure gained a degree of infamy in 2012 when presidential candidate Mitt Romney was recorded telling a group of wealthy supporters that this huge group of non-taxpayers are a lost cause for Republicans, since they will never vote to cut taxes or “take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

"There are 47% of the people who will vote for [President Barack Obama] no matter what," Romney said. "All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”

The Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman wrote earlier this week that “the number came to symbolize a class of entitled takers who lived their lives getting government benefits while contributing nothing to society. They were this century’s version of Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens.”

But the number was quite misleading, Gleckman says, as tax experts have long understood. For one thing, as Romney critics argued in 2012, many of those households pay federal payroll taxes as well as state and local taxes. And a new analysis of who pays federal income taxes published in the National Tax Journal provides some data that provides a very different picture of nonpayers (now an estimated 44% of Americans).

Gleckman highlights two details from the report:

  • Those who pay no federal income tax tend to be very young or very old. If you limit the analysis to workers in the prime employment ages of 25 to 55, only 11% pay no federal income tax. By contrast, more than 80% of those 75 and older pay no federal income tax. Nearly half of all nonpayers are retirees living on Social Security, with incomes so low that they are excluded from the tax.
  • Nonpayment is transitory for the most part. “Among those of prime working age who do not pay federal income tax in any given year, nearly one-third will do so for only one year,” Gleckman writes. “Almost 6 in 10 will be paying income tax within three years, and just one-in-eight are non-payers for a decade or more.”

When it comes to the “entitlements” or benefits decried by Romney seven years ago, the pattern is much the same, Gleckman says, with older Americans being much more likely to receive transfers payments than younger people. At the opposite end of the age spectrum, many younger nonpayers are low-wage workers who frequently move in and out of the labor force due to layoffs and seasonality.

“The 47 percent number came to take on a bigger, symbolic meaning: Nearly half of Americans live their lives taking government benefits but contributing nothing,” Gleckman says. But the new analysis shows that the politically powerful symbolism “simply is false.”

The Price of Trump’s Air Force One Keeps Rising

A few weeks before taking office, President-elect Donald Trump publicly criticized the effort to build new Air Force One jets, declaring that the program’s high projected costs were a problem that he aimed to solve as only a hard-nosed businessman can.

“Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!,” Trump tweeted in December 2016.

Since then, Trump has claimed to have negotiated a significantly lower price for the program, which includes two Boeing 747 jets that are being modified heavily for presidential use. “We've got that price down by over $1 billion and I probably haven't spoken for more than an hour on the project,” Trump declared in 2018. “I got the generals in who are fantastic … but I told Boeing that isn't good enough, the price is still too high.”

Estimates made last year, however, suggest that Trump hadn’t actually reduced the projected cost much, if at all, with the price still coming in at around $4 billion. Now, according to the latest projections from the Air Force, it looks like the price has actually gone up by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Based on the Pentagon’s acquisition report on the project, the pair of jets that will be used as Air Force One are projected to cost $4.7 billion, Air Force Magazine reported last week. Add in the cost of hangar construction, engineering and other related components, and the total comes to $5.2 billion.

An Air Force spokesperson gave The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank a different breakdown – $3.9 billion for Boeing and $1.4 billion for related costs – with an even higher total cost of $5.3 billion.

“Apples-to-apples comparisons are tricky, largely because Trump tends to make up numbers,” Milbank wrote Wednesday, “but by any measure, the price tag is up — bigly — from when Trump first complained about it.”

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