During the Fifth Quarter of Saturday’s Maryland–Wisconsin football game …
… Steve Miller conducted his “Swingtown” as played by the UW Marching Band.
That really happened. I am not being by posting this …
… nor am I a …
UW Band director Mike Leckrone has such powers that he asks perhaps Wisconsin’s biggest rock act of all time to come to town, and …
Just another example of …
Four days before Halloween was the world premiere of the more recognizable version of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”:
The song was an appropriate theme for the Friday-bad-horror-flick-show “The Inferno” on WMTV in Madison:
Britain’s number one song today in 1957:
The number one song today in 1963 was the Four Tops’ only number one:
James Wigderson follows up on the big twist in Donald Trump’s Russian dossier:
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for the creation of a dossier of scandalous claims about President Donald Trump. While Democrats have denied any connection to the creation of the dossier, the Washington Post is reporting that Marc E. Elias, a Clinton advisor and DNC lawyer, hired Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
The dossier, compiled by a former British spy working for Fusion GPS, contained allegations of odd sexual conduct and supposed connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The contents of the dossier have been debunked, but not until they were leaked and published by Buzzfeed.
“Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC,” the Washington Post reported. The Clinton campaign, through Elias and Perkins Coie, continued to pay Fusion GPS through the end of October 2016. Fusion GPS has refused to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee regarding the funding of their research. Perkins Coie was paid
Elias and his law firm Perkin Coie are well known to Wisconsin Democrats.
Elias, a well-known political “fixer,” was hired by Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin after her office ignored warnings about problems at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Tomah, WI. According to a report in the Washington Free Beacon, two “dark money” groups founded by Elias, Majority Forward and Vote Vets PAC, then ran ads attempting to defend Baldwin’s record. The money for those groups came from a “Super PAC” associated with former Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada, called Senate Majority PAC.
The law firm of Perkins Coie was paid $90,000 for the work by Elias for Baldwin.
A call to Baldwin’s Washington D.C. office asking for comment on her ties to Elias was not returned by deadline.
Republicans criticized Baldwin for her ties to Elias and Perkins Coie.
“After helping Senator Baldwin cover up her roll in the Tomah VA scandal, Marc Elias and Perkins Coie have been caught once again lying to the voters in order to protect the political future of Democrats,” said Alec Zimmerman, spokesman for the Republican Party of Wisconsin. “Wisconsin families deserve better and Senator Baldwin needs to immediately denounce the reckless actions of her Tomah crisis attorney.”
The campaign of Kevin Nicholson, the Delafield Republican running for Baldwin’s U.S. Senate seat, also issued a statement critical of the senator. “Tammy Baldwin spared no expense trying to keep the Tomah VA scandal quiet, so it’s sadly not surprising to learn the fixer she hired has a history of spreading sordid allegations to help liberal candidates and causes,” said Michael Antonopoulos, spokesman for Nicholson for Senate. “Tammy Baldwin will say and do anything to hang onto power.”
So this is just a Washington scandal, right? Not really:
Baldwin is not the only Wisconsin Democrat with ties to Perkins Coie and Marc Elias.
Tim Burns, a candidate for the state Supreme Court, and Josh Kaul, a Democratic candidate for state Attorney General, are attorneys with the Perkins Coie law firm. Both campaigns were reached by phone Wednesday, but neither campaign responded to the request for a comment on their law firm’s role in the scandal or if the candidates were personally aware of the work by Perkins Coie and Marc Elias.
According to the Washington Post, “The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in ‘legal and compliance consulting’’ since November 2015.”
The Washington Post:
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.
Fusion GPS gave Steele’s reports and other research documents to Elias, the people familiar with the matter said. It is unclear how or how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC and who in those organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele. One person close to the matter said the campaign and the DNC were not informed by the law firm of Fusion GPS’s role.
The dossier has become a lightning rod amid the intensifying investigations into the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia. Some congressional Republican leaders have spent months trying to discredit Fusion GPS and Steele and tried to determine the identity of the Democrat or organization that paid for the dossier.
Trump tweeted as recently as Saturday that the Justice Department and FBI should “immediately release who paid for it.”
Elias and Fusion GPS declined to comment on the arrangement.
A DNC spokeswoman said “[Chairman] Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization. But let’s be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened.”
Brian Fallon, a former spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said he wasn’t aware of the hiring during the campaign.
“The first I learned of Christopher Steele or saw any dossier was after the election,” Fallon said. “But if I had gotten handed it last fall, I would have had no problem passing it along and urging reporters to look into it. Opposition research happens on every campaign, and here you had probably the most shadowy guy ever running for president, and the FBI certainly has seen fit to look into it. I probably would have volunteered to go to Europe myself to try and verify if it would have helped get more of this out there before the election.”
U.S. intelligence agencies later released a public assessment asserting that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to aid Trump. The FBI has been investigating whether Trump associates helped the Russians in that effort.
The Post’s Callum Borchers adds:
When BuzzFeed published that now-infamous dossier of unproven claims about Donald Trump and Russia, in January, former Hillary Clinton campaign aides expressed outrage that news outlets that had obtained the dossier before Election Day did not make its contents public in time to influence voters, and Clinton later aired the same grievance in her book about the presidential race.
It turns out that the reaction of the Democratic presidential nominee and her team was disingenuous. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday night that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund the dossier, compiled by a former British intelligence officer, through a law firm hired to conduct opposition research.
The Clinton camp left out its own role in the dossier’s creation, as it ripped the media for sitting on information that journalists had been unable to verify. What Clinton and her advisers presented as their judgment that the media had made the wrong call was, in fact, their frustration at having failed to plant negative news reports before ballots were cast.
Recall that BuzzFeed published the dossier in full on Jan. 10, after CNN reported that the FBI had briefed President Barack Obama and then-President-elect Trump on its contents. Many journalists criticized BuzzFeed’s decision, arguing that news outlets should not spread claims they can’t corroborate, even if the FBI considers the claims significant enough to share with the president and his soon-to-be successor.
But Clinton press aides Brian Fallon and Nick Merrill contended, on Twitter, that the real journalistic malpractice was not publishing information contained in the dossier earlier.
Also that day, Mother Jones magazine reported that a “former senior intelligence officer for a Western country” had “provided the [FBI] with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump — and that the FBI requested more information from him.” The memos comprised the dossier that BuzzFeed later published.
Consistent with the Mother Jones report, the Times reported that “intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Mr. Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate.”
“Still,” the Times added, throwing the “cold water” Merrill spoke of, “they have said that Mr. Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.”
Clinton complained about the Times report in her post-election book, “What Happened”:
In the summer of 2016, according to The Washington Post, the FBI convinced a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there was probably cause to believe that Trump adviser Carter Page was acting as a Russian agent, and the received a warrant to monitor his communications. The FBI also began investigating a dossier prepared by a well-respected former British spy that contained explosive and salacious allegations about compromising information the Russians had on Trump. The intelligence community took the dossier seriously enough that it briefed both President Obama and President-elect Trump on its contents before the inauguration .. . .
Sources within the FBI also convinced the New York Times to run a story saying they saw “no clear link to Russia,” countering Franklin Foer’s scoop in Slate about unusual computer traffic between Trump Tower and a Russian bank.
Note that Clinton described the dossier only as having been “prepared by a well-respected former British spy” — as if the spy, Christopher Steele, had acted on his own. Clinton certainly gave no indication that her campaign helped finance his work.
There is a fundamental contradiction here: Clinton wanted the dossier to be viewed as credible yet she did not want to be connected to it. She hoped the media, before Election Day, would publish claims about Trump to which she was unwilling to attach her own name.
Britishers with taste bought this single when it hit the charts today in 1961:
Today in 1965, the four Beatles were named Members of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. The Beatles’ visit reportedly began when they smoked marijuana in a Buckingham Palace bathroom to calm their nerves.
The Beatles’ receiving their MBEs prompted a number of MBE recipients to return theirs. “Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war — for killing people,” said John Lennon, previewing the public relations skills he’d show a year later when he would compare the Beatles to Jesus Christ. “We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.”
Lennon returned his MBE in 1969 as part of his peace protests.
Jim Geraghty chronicles:
Ken Stern, who worked at NPR from 1999 to 2008 and served as the institution’s CEO, chose to spend an entire year living in “red America” and getting to know the Americans who saw issues differently from him: evangelical Christians, gun owners, Tea Party activists, NASCAR fans, etcetera. He’s pleasantly surprised by what he found, and he concludes there’s a strong argument to be made that the country’s largest media institutions poorly serve large swaths of the country, out of a combination of bias, ignorance, and cultural barriers:
Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.
Take, for instance, the issue of legitimate defensive gun use (DGU), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time — 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day, according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families.
Journalism requires judgment. If you pick up a newspaper (pardon my anachronistic examples) and everything that’s on the front page seems boring, irrelevant, and not that important to you, you probably won’t buy it or read it. Journalists and editors need to have good acumen for what’s important in the lives of their audience and a sense of how to balance what you need to read and what you want to read. We all have a sense of how the world works, and those of us who follow politics tend to develop strong, even intense beliefs of how things are and how they ought to be. Revising those beliefs is a slow and difficult process.
The Washington Post’s health-care correspondent dismissed the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell as a “local crime story.” A Democratic senator is currently on trial in corruption, not far from the media capital of the country, with allegations of private jets ferrying the senator to party with gorgeous supermodels at lush tropical resorts and $100 million stolen from Medicare to pay for the lavish lifestyle and fill campaign coffers . . . and it’s gotten intermittent coverage at best. A longtime Democratic staffer was arrested by the FBI as he attempted to flee to Pakistan, wiping his phone of all data hours earlier.
Orwell described this well: “The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield . . . To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
No doubt, we on the right have these blind spots as well. But we have the advantage of constantly encountering the left-of-center views from dominant institutions, so I think more counter-arguments permeate our “bubble.” I think we’re slightly better at revising our beliefs in the face of contrary data, although I’m sure a lot of progressives will scoff at this. But you’ve seen quite a few prominent conservatives rethink their views on incarceration and various criminal justice issues and whether drug use should be criminalized. Most Republicans are far more wary of military interventions and the promotion of democracy abroad after the Iraq War. There’s far more acceptance of gay marriage than a decade or two ago. No one is perfect, but I think Red America understands Blue America more than Blue America understands Red America.
Another example would be E.J. Dionne, who writes as you would expect a lifetime political writer to write:
Permit me to confess: I am one of the very last people in the United States who does not consider the word “politician” to be an insult. On the contrary, the work politicians do is important because politics is a good and essential thing in a free society. It’s the degradation of politics in the Trump era we need to worry about, not politics itself.
Click on the link if you want to read the rest of Dionne’s Washington-centric claptrap. One of the unfortunate realities of my line of work is its Stockholm Syndrome, where people who cover something for a long time become emotionally embedded, instead of having the correct cynical attitude about the people they’re supposed to be covering.
The other thing, of course, is to observe that this is how you get more Trump.
Shadi Hamid is not a fan of Donald Trump, but …
We are confronted daily not simply with outrage, but a kind of end-of-worldism: America is on the brink of dictatorship; Trump is going start World War III; the president’s access to the nuclear codes might actually destroy the universe; if he manages to control his impulses, then his withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords will still destroy the universe, just a bit more slowly.
As someone who works on the Middle East, I find myself, oddly enough, in a near constant state of relief. Nine months into Trump’s tenure, it could have been better, but it could just as well have been worse, perhaps much worse.
The world hasn’t ended.
Every new day, though, seems to bring new cause for panic. Republican Senator Bob Corker’s biting remark that “the White House has become an adult day care center,” and that “someone obviously missed their shift” was tailor made for liberal fantasies. Vanity Fair correspondent Gabriel Sherman, parrying the thin line dividing news and gossip, reported on the “speculations” of an unnamed former official. According to the official, there was the open question of whether White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis would “tackle” Trump, presumably to prevent him from ordering a nuclear strike.
Before Trump even had a chance to prove just how unfit for office he was, liberals and Democrats were already preemptively tossing around the word “impeachment.” The vigor for the Russia investigation is driven, in part, by the hope that clear evidence of criminal activity will emerge, thereby justifying the introduction of articles of impeachment. Yet despite no smoking gun, 40 percent of Americans – and more worryingly 72 percent of Democrats – say they would support impeachment, according to one recent poll.
If unimpeachable evidence does, in fact, emerge, then fine. Since some are realizing how unlikely this is, the conversation is now moving onto the 25th amendment, with mainstream outletscovering it as a serious possibility. It’s almost as if the goal is to find a reason to get rid of Trump, by any means, or amendment, possible. The very eagerness with which some on the left (and the never-Trump right) are raising such drastic measures is, itself, cause for concern.
A plain reading of 25th amendment makes clear that it doesn’t apply to our current situation. Section 4 allows a majority of cabinet members or Congress to submit a written declaration that “the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” President Trump is able to discharge the powers of the presidency; the problem is how he discharges them, and the fact that many Americans believe (rightly) that he is discharging them rather badly. This is primarily a political, and therefore a subjective, judgment. To state the obvious, Americans, like all citizens of a democracy, have the right to elect bad, even very bad, politicians.
Yet someone as well regarded as legal scholar Eric Posner has made the argument, shared by apparently millions, that Americans should consider new ways, however unprecedented, to remove a president who reaches a certain level of subjective badness. Posner is explicit about this, writing that the president “can be removed, under the conventional understanding of the 25th Amendment, if he is incapacitated by mental or physical illness. But there is no obvious solution for a president who has not committed a crime or been disabled by illness, but has lost the confidence of the public because of a failure of temperament, ideology or ability.”
Today in 1963, the Beatles played two shows in Sundstavagen, Sweden, to begin their first tour of Sweden. The local music critic was less than impressed, claiming the Beatles should have been happy for their fans’ screaming to drown out the group’s “terrible” performance, asserting that the Beatles “were of no musical importance whatsoever,” and furthermore claiming their local opening act, the Phantoms, “decidedly outshone them.”
Three thoughts: Perhaps the Beatles did have a bad night. But have you heard a Phantoms song recently? It is also unknown whether the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” was intended as revenge against the Swedes.
One year later, a demonstration of why the phrase “never say never” holds validity: Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones made their first appearance on CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show.
A riot broke out in the CBS studio, which prompted Sullivan to say, “I promise you they’ll never be back on our show again.” “Never” turned out to be May 2, 1965, when the Stones made the second of their six performances on the rilly big shew.
RightWisconsin on a Republican shooting his mouth off like a Democrat:
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, has thrown tantrums before. Whether it’s writing strange letters to conservative groups, using the press room at the Capitol for primal therapy or sending angry textmessages to the governor, Vos turned the state budget debate into a political circus that often obscured the issues at stake.
But this time Vos has gone too far. When asked by Mike Gousha on UpFront about another tantrum, Vos threw yet another one and called three conservative Republican state senators “terrorists.”
“Frankly I wish Governor Walker hadn’t negotiated with terrorists,” Vos said. “That’s a bad way to operate the legislature.”
“Terrorists? You’re calling rogue senators ‘terrorists’?” Gousha asked, stunned at the word.
“That’s what they are,” Vos answered. “You don’t hold somebody hostage for your own personal needs.”
It appeared to be premeditated slander. Vos repeated the charge of terrorism when challenged and had a ready (if outrageous) defense of it.
These three senators, Chris Kapenga of Delafield, Duey Stroebel of Saukville and Steve Nass of Whitewater, are all former members of the state Assembly, all former colleagues of Vos. Far from being a “terrorist,” Nass served in the Wisconsin Air National Guard for 33 years. Kapenga and Stroebel are businessmen and leaders in their communities. All three deserve more respect from Vos than being called terrorists.
We’re not even going to get into whether Vos should be considered a terrorist because he threatened to hold the budget hostage if it included any bonding for transportation as every budget before it has. The terrorism remark is the kind of rhetoric that we expect from Antifa or One Wisconsin Now. Perhaps Vos should just hire Scot Ross as his spokesman if this is how the Speaker of the Assembly is going to behave.
What’s even more disturbing are reports from within the Capitol that this tantrum is a premeditated attempt by Vos to scuttle the rest of the conservative agenda for the fall legislative session. We’re hearing this is all a facade to hide Vos’ real desire not to take up legislation that will upset his more moderate financial contributors and favorite capitol lobbyists.
If that truly is the case, that Vos is willing to make disgusting personal attacks in an effort to avoid passing conservative legislation, then Assembly Republicans should demand new leadership. Better a new leader than re-living the 2006 and 2008 elections when conservatives punished the state GOP for failing to live up to their promises.
However, we’re going to take Vos at face value, that he really is behaving like a child. Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, R-Kaukauna, said in a message to RightWisconsin that he believes Vos can still lead the Republicans. Vos needs to prove it by growing up. He can start with a sincere and personal apology.
RightWisconsin posted that Monday morning. Later came this report:
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, issued an apology of sorts for using the word “terrorist” to describe three members of the state senate in an interview with Mike Gousha on UpFront that aired Sunday.
“As Speaker, I have strived to increase the civility within the legislature,” Vos said in a statement released Monday afternoon. “I now regret using the word terrorist because it goes against the guidelines I’ve set for our chamber, and myself. For that, I apologize.”
While Vos apologized for violating “the guidelines,” he continued his criticism of the three Republican state senators: Chris Kapenga of Delafield, Duey Stroebel of Saukville and Steve Nass of Whitewater. The three conservatives refused to vote for the state budget until they received assurances from Governor Scott Walker that several provisions in the budget would be vetoed.
“I continue to be concerned, however, that the actions of a few Senators, who cannot work with their colleagues in their own caucus, could disrupt progress on important legislation for the people of Wisconsin,” Vos said. “Will we now have to run everything past a few rogue holdouts before committees take executive action?”
Vos continued with a defense of not allowing those outside of the budget negotiations of having a say in the final version of the state budget.
“Every lawmaker has a voice, but we must recognize that we now have large majorities in both houses,” Vos said in his statement. “If the Governor has to negotiate every initiative with more than 80 individual legislators, nothing will get accomplished.”…
Stroebel reacted Sunday evening. “To imply fellow Republican legislators are terrorists is the type of hyperbolic rhetoric Wisconsinites are tired of hearing,” Stroebel said. “Wisconsinites expect more of their leaders than to make these kind of personal attacks.”
Governor Scott Walker’s spokesman Tom Evenson issued a statement critical of Vos’ remarks. “It’s unacceptable the word was used to describe good public servants at a time when our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorism around the world,” Evenson said. …
Nass reacted with a statement on Monday, saying Vos was trying to use the controversy to stop conservative legislation.”In my view, it’s a shallow political ploy to reignite the budget disagreement to lay the groundwork to thwart conservative legislation from advancing in the Fall Floor Session,” Nass said. Nass also called for Vos to apologize.
The conservative group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), also weighed in. “Instead of insulting legislators for fighting for their principles, Speaker Vos should explain to his caucus and the people of Wisconsin why he rammed through a special interest giveaway to the Public Finance Authority that would have enriched a few businessmen in California while leaving Wisconsin with all the risk,” AFP State Director Eric Bott said in a statement. …
Vos’s statement did not address whether the use of the word, “terrorist,” was intended to disrupt the fall legislative session to prevent conservative bills from passing.
A genuine, non-sarcastic, authentic “hurrah” to this Tweeted statement from President Trump: “There will be NO change to your 401(k). This has always been a great and popular middle class tax break that works, and it stays!”
There are three main ways that Americans can save money for retirement. The first is an individual retirement account (IRA), where the money is not taxed when you deposit it or as it grows in value, but you pay income taxes when you withdraw it after retiring. The second is a Roth IRA, where you pay income tax on the money when you put it in, but don’t pay taxes on withdrawals when you retire. The third is the 401(k), which operates like a traditional IRA but your employer offers a matching contribution up to a certain percentage of your salary. Many financial planners will advise you to contribute as much as you can afford to your 401(k), or at least to the matching limit, because if you don’t, you’re effectively turning down free money for retirement from your employer.
The New York Timesreported Friday that House Republicans were considering a plan to sharply reduce the amount of income American workers can save in tax-deferred retirement accounts as part of a broad effort to rewrite the tax code. Right now, you can put up to $18,000 in 401(k) accounts and not pay taxes on that money, $24,000 if you’re over age 50. (The IRS recently announced that the limit will go up to $18,500 next year.)
The Times article reported that one of the ideas under consideration was reducing the annual amount workers can set aside to as low as $2,400. Eliminating the tax break for 401(k)s entirely in 2018 would generate $115 billion in new revenue. Our Andrew Stuttaford rightly labeled this idea “idiocy” and it’s such a bad idea, it’s fair to wonder just how seriously this idea was considered. It’s usually voices on the left that want to eliminate the tax incentives for saving money.
Still, as she sat at the witness table on Oct. 7 at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and Labor, running through the litany of what’s wrong with the 401(k) and other defined-contribution retirement plans — they have high fees, for one — Ghilarducci didn’t think she was courting controversy. “I was saying things that seemed completely milquetoast,” she recalls. Ghilarducci did bring up a bold proposal to replace the 401(k) with a mandatory, government-run pension plan and suggested that Congress immediately allow retirees to swap 401(k)s battered by the stock market’s collapse for monthly payouts from the government. But she had floated both ideas before, to little effect.
President Obama was pretty pro-IRA as far as Democratic presidents go. Back on the campaign trail in 2008, he said he wanted to require employers who do not offer retirement plans to offer their workers access to automatic IRAs and contribute via payroll deduction. Given a choice between mandating employers create IRAs and mandating they provide health insurance, I would have chosen the former. Unfortunately, Obama prioritized the latter, and after Obamacare, neither a Democrat nor Republican-run Congress was willing to force employers to provide another benefit to all employees.
Later in his presidency, Obama shifted to the “MyRA,” a nice enough idea that never really worked. The idea was a “no-fee, no-minimum-investment version of a Roth individual retirement account,” allowing up to $5,500 per year invested in government bonds.
Unfortunately, the idea flopped:
Running the entire program through the federal government, the Obama administration spent $70 million and only got 20,000 Americans to invest — an outrageous cost of $3,500 for each new account. Of that, $10 million went to a single bank — Comerica — to act as custodian for this small number of simple, non-trading accounts.
But President Obama had worse ideas. Back in 2013, he proposed eliminating certain tax advantages on IRAs and other tax-preferred retirement accounts when funds exceed a certain threshold. The threshold was pretty high — $3 million or so — but once again, Congress saw little appetite for punishing people who had saved a lot of money for retirement.
The Obama administration also flirted with the idea of taxing 529 college savings accounts.
What kind of tax hit might that have added up to for families who are just about to start 529 accounts themselves? I asked Vanguard to run some numbers. Parents who deposited $5,000 a year over 18 years and got a 6 percent return each year on their money would eventually end up with $179,140.48 that they could draw on during college.
That’s a lot of tax-free growth, so it’s only natural that it might have become a target. A family in the 25 percent tax bracket would have paid $22,285.12 in income taxes on that growth under the president’s plan if they withdrew it over four years, according to Vanguard. A household earning enough to be in the 35 percent tax bracket would have paid $31,199.17.
The administration abandoned that plan after a week of scathing press coverage.
Eliminating the tax benefits for 401(k)s and retirement savings was a terrible idea when Democrats proposed it, and reducing the tax benefits is an almost as equally terrible idea from Republicans.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 