Biden Bashes Trump on Social Security, Taxes, Health Care

By Yuval Rosenberg

Postmaster General: We Don’t Need More Money for Election

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told a Senate panel Friday that
he’s "extremely highly confident" that the U.S. Postal Service will
be able to handle the mail-in ballots it receives for this
November’s elections, despite letters reportedly sent by his agency
recently to 46 states warning that it cannot guarantee timely
delivery of all votes sent by mail.

"As we head into the election season, I want to assure this
committee and the American public that the Postal Service is fully
capable and committed to delivering the nation’s election mail
securely and on time," DeJoy testified at a hearing of the Senate
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "This
sacred duty is my No. 1 priority between now and Election Day."

DeJoy, a former logistics executive and a major donor to
President Trump, has come under fire for changes he implemented at
the Postal Service since taking office in June. DeJoy defended his
moves Friday — and confirmed that, while he has suspended
additional changes until after the election in response to a public
outcry, he still plans
sweeping changes and cost-cutting measures after
the election.

“We are not self-sustaining,” DeJoy
said Friday. “We have a $10 billion shortfall, and
over the next 10 years we’ll have a $245 billion shortfall.”

Democrats want to provide $25 billion in emergency funding for
the Postal Service, in part to help handle an expected surge of
mail-in ballots, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has emphasized that
the dollar figure is what the Postal Service Board of Governors
earlier this year said it needed.

Asked by Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) if the Postal Service needs a
“massive federal bailout” to be able to deliver election mail,
DeJoy said no, but suggested that the Postal Service should be
reimbursed by the federal government for the costs of continuing to
provide its services during the pandemic.

"I don't need anything to deliver mail on election night, but we
do need legislative reform,” he said, adding, "We continued to do
what we're supposed to do and at a significant cost impact, you
know, and I'm one to try to get to a sustainable model, but in this
case we — I believe we deserve some compensation for it.”

DeJoy also said the Postal Service needs to be freed from the
requirement imposed by Congress in 2006 that it
pre-fund its employee retirement benefit programs,
a controversial move that created huge financial challenges.

“If we just throw $25 billion at us this year and we don’t do
anything, we’ll be back in two years,” he said.

Why it matters: “With DeJoy’s comments that he doesn’t
need election-related funding, it could get harder for Democrats to
persuade Republicans to fund the Postal Service in any coming
coronavirus relief package,” The Washington Post’s Amber Phillips

writes.

What’s next: The House is set to vote Saturday on
the Democratic bill to provide $25 billion for the Postal Service.
The White House
said Friday that it “strongly opposes” the
legislation and threatened to veto it. President Trump and White
House officials have said that they would consider additional
Postal Service funding as part of a coronavirus relief package as
long as their other priorities were included.

DeJoy and Robert M. Duncan, chair of the Postal Service’s board,
are scheduled to testify Monday before the House Oversight
Committee.

Biden Bashes Trump on Social Security, Taxes and Health Care:
What You Need to Know

Joe Biden’s well-received acceptance speech for the
Democratic presidential nomination Thursday night may have
emphasized his differences with President Donald Trump —with a
heavy focus on personal traits such as compassion, trust and moral
character — but Biden also touched on some of his proposals on key
policy issues, including Social Security, health care and
taxes.

Here’s what Biden said and what you should know about
it.

Social Security

What Biden said: “For our seniors, Social Security
is a sacred obligation, a sacred promise made,” Biden

said. “The current president is threatening
to break that promise. He's proposing to eliminate the tax that
pays for almost half of Social Security without any way of making
up for that lost revenue. I will not let it happen. If I'm your
president, we're going to protect Social Security and Medicare. You
have my word.”

What you should know: Earlier this month, as part
of his effort to unilaterally provide economic relief
from the coronavirus pandemic, Trump ordered the deferral of
employee’s share of payroll taxes dedicated to Social Security for
the remainder of the year. The payroll tax, which is split between
employer and employee, covers nearly 90% of the cost of Social
Security, according to government data
reported by FactCheck.org. Last year, the
tax produced about $945 billion; the deferral ordered by Trump
would reduce the total this year by about $100 billion over the
next four months, according to an
analysis by the Committee for a Responsible
Federal Budget.

While the White House has claimed that deferral would in
no way harm Social Security, with the lost revenues through
December made up for from general funds, Trump has repeatedly said
that he wants to eliminate the payroll tax altogether: “If I’m
victorious on November 3rd, I plan to forgive these taxes and make
permanent cuts to the payroll tax. So I’m going to make them all
permanent,” he said on August 8.

William Hoagland of the Bipartisan Policy Center says that
a temporary cut to the payroll tax wouldn’t destroy Social
Security, although it could move up the depletion date for the
Social Security trust funds by a year or two. But if Trump were to
“make permanent cuts to the payroll tax,” as he has promised to do,
it would indeed represent an existential threat to the Social
Security system.

For his part, Biden is proposing to boost revenues for the
Social Security system and increase benefits for some
beneficiaries. Workers would have to start paying payroll taxes on
income over $400,000 (the tax currently applies only to the first
$137,700). And beneficiaries would see higher minimum payment
levels, an increase in survivor benefits and a 5% boost for those
who have received benefits for more than 20 years.

Taxes

What Biden said: Biden took aim at the tax cuts
Republicans passed in 2017, referring to “the president’s $1.3
trillion tax giveaway to the wealthiest 1% and the biggest, most
profitable corporations, some of which do not pay any tax at
all.”

What you should know: Biden has promised to roll
back some of those cuts by raising taxes on households making more
than the $400,000 and hiking the corporate tax rate from 21% to
28%.

Fact checkers note that the majority of households
received a tax cut from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with 65% of
households paying less to the IRS in 2018 than they would have
otherwise. But the cuts were considerably larger at higher income
levels, and when the individual provisions of the legislation
expire in 2026, the majority of the benefits — 82.8%, according to
an analysis by the Tax Policy Center — will flow to the top
1%.

Health Insurance

What Biden said: Biden warned that Trump’s “assault
on the Affordable Care Act will continue until its destroyed,
taking insurance away from more than 20 million people -- including
more than 15 million people on Medicaid -- and getting rid of the
protections that President Obama and I passed for people who suffer
from a pre-existing condition.” Biden said that he wants to develop
“a health care system that lowers premiums, deductibles, and drug
prices by building on the Affordable Care Act [Trump is] trying to
rip away.”

What you should know: Most experts agree that the
Trump administration’s effort to have the Affordable Care Act
overturned — arguments will be heard in the Supreme Court shortly
after the election — would, if successful, result in upwards of 20
million people losing their insurance and eliminate the protections
provided for people with pre-existing conditions. While Republicans
have insisted that they are in fact protecting those with
pre-existing conditions, there have taken no concrete steps to do
so, while pursuing repeal efforts that would eliminate those
protections.

Biden also said that as a result of the coronavirus
pandemic, “more than 10 million people are going to lose their
health insurance this year.” While the number is an accurate
estimate, the majority of those people are expected to pick up
coverage from other sources, including family members, Medicaid or
the federal marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act.
The Urban Institute estimates that about 2.9 million people will be
left without health insurance after those transitions are accounted
for.

Poll of the Day: Protecting Social Security Benefits

Protecting Social Security is a top priority for American
voters, according to a poll conducted by progressive think tank
Data for Progress and released with Social Security Works, an
advocacy group. The online survey of 1,074 potential voters was
conducted on August 7 and has a margin of error of 3 percentage
points.


Read more at CNBC.

Chart of the Day: $1 Trillion Yet to Be Spent

“There is $1 trillion stashed away in the U.S., and
it just might save the economy,”
says economist Tim Duy at Bloomberg. That sum is
what’s left in people’s accounts from the $2.2 trillion CARES Act,
which provided $1,200 stimulus checks and $600 per week in extra
unemployment benefits. “It’s enough to either boost consumer
spending by at least $78 billion dollars a month over the next year
or supercharge growth if confidence soon turns higher,” Duy
says.

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