Washington: US President Joe Biden will make a renewed push to overhaul the nation’s tax code and dramatically raise the rates paid by corporations and wealthy Americans, the media reported.
The President is expected to lay out the tax hikes on Thursday as part of his budget blueprint for federal spending in fiscal 2024, which begins in October. The higher taxes would likely be borne by Wall Street and the top sliver of US households, Fox Business reported.
Biden previewed some proposals during his State of the Union address in February, when he called for steeper taxes on billionaires and floated quadrupling the current 1per cent levy on corporate stock buybacks.
“I’m a capitalist. But just pay your fair share,” he said in the speech. “And I think a lot of you at home agree with me that our present tax system is simply unfair.”
The so-called billionaire’s tax would impose a 20 percent rate on both income and unrealized capital gains, including stock and property of US households worth more than $100 million, or about 0.01 percent of Americans, Fox Business reported.
Households that were already paying 20 percent will not be required to pay an additional tax.
The rate may ultimately be even higher at 25 percent, according to a report from Bloomberg News, citing a White House official familiar with the plan.
On top of that, the White House introduced a plan this week to raise payroll taxes from 3.8 percent to 5 percent on Americans earning more than $400,000 in a bid to keep Medicare solvent for at least another quarter-century, Fox Business reported.
Another aspect of the plan would apply to business income, in addition to investment, wages and self-employment income, representing a change from the initial surtax levied when applied under the Affordable Care Act.
The four U.S. citizens, who have not been publicly identified, were kidnapped at gunpoint on Friday in Matamoros, in the state Tamaulipas, shortly after crossing the border into Mexico, officials said. A Mexican woman was also killed in the episode. The four Americans were later found in Ejido Longoreño, a rural area east of Matamoros, The Associated Press reported, after getting caught amid fighting between rival cartel groups last week.
“We’re providing all appropriate assistance to [the victims] and their families,” Price said on Tuesday. “We extend our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of the deceased. We thank our Mexican and U.S. law enforcement partners for their efforts to find these innocent victims, and the task forward is to ensure that justice is done.”
Both the FBI and the Justice Department are investigating the episode, and authorities “will be relentless in pursuing justice” on behalf of the victims, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement on Tuesday. “We will do everything in our power to identify, find, and hold accountable the individuals responsible for this attack on American citizens.”
The FBI said that the investigation into the kidnapping was ongoing, and that the agency was working with the State Department to recover the bodies of the two victims who were killed.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also addressed the kidnapping on Tuesday.
“Since day one of this administration, we have been focused on disrupting transnational criminal organizations, including Mexican drug cartels and human smugglers,” Jean-Pierre said at the daily press briefing, adding the Biden administration had “imposed powerful new sanctions against cartel organizations in recent weeks.”
She declined to provide names of those abducted. “For the sake of privacy and out of respect to the families, we are going to refrain from further comment about those circumstances at this time,” she said.
[ad_2]
#Americans #killed #survivors #returned #U.S #kidnapping #Mexico
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Washington: Indian Americans from across the US have raised more than USD 300,000 for earthquake victims in Turkey and Syria.
A fundraiser organised by several eminent Indian Americans led by Dr Hemant Patel, the former president of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI), the community raised more than USD 230,000.
The fund raised over the weekend in New Jersey was attended by Turkish Ambassador to the US Murat Mercan, along with Turkish Consul General in New York Reyhan zg r, wherein they profusely thanked the Indian American community for the generous support for the earthquake-hit people of their country.
“They (the ambassador and the consul general) spoke very highly of what is being done and what the Indian community is doing for the Turkish people,” Patel, a recipient of the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honour, told PTI.
Sewa International Houston’s AmeriCorps team recently organised a donation drive in support of the victims of the earthquake in Syria and Turkey. People from different communities all over Houston came together to donate hundreds of items, including food, clothes, winter coats, hygiene items, outdoor supplies, tents, hand warmers, shoes and baby necessities.
More than 200 boxes were taken to the warehouse, filling over three pickup trucks, a trailer, an SUV and a big U-Haul truck.
The BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Robbinsville, New Jersey organised a special prayer assembly this week for those affected by the humanitarian crisis. The community members at BAPS offered support for the people of Turkey through prayer and a generous donation of USD 25,000 through its humanitarian relief arm, BAPS Charities, to the Embrace Relief Foundation.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
In addition, majority non-white neighborhoods accounted for more applications per capita than did majority-white ZIP codes.
Borrowers in blue states were generally more likely to sign up for the program than borrowers in red states, where many Republican officials have railed against its legality and cost. Congressional districts won by Democrats averaged about 57,000 applications for debt relief while GOP-won districts averaged 50,000 applications.
The new details come as Biden’s debt relief program, which offers up to $20,000 of loan forgiveness, remains stuck in legal limbo. The Supreme Court later this month will hear oral arguments in two cases brought by Republican-led states and a conservative group, which argue that Biden’s debt cancellation is illegal.
POLITICO examined the ZIP codes associated with each of approximately 23.6 million applications for Biden’s debt relief that were received by the Education Department between Oct. 14 and Nov. 11, when the program was frozen in response to a court ruling. The department provided the data in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
POLITICO’s analysis matched application ZIP codes with U.S. Census Bureau estimates of per-capita income, college attendance and racial demographics, as well as the results of the 2022 midterm elections.
Lower-income areas applied at a higher rate
Critics of Biden’s debt relief program, including many Republicans, have decried it as a handout to wealthy Americans who don’t need the help. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C,), who has led the GOP charge against the plan as chair of the House education committee, has blasted the program as a “transfer of wealth from working class Americans to privileged college graduates.”
The White House, meanwhile, claims that about 90 percent of the benefits will go to families earning less than $75,000. When he announced the program, Biden said it was targeted to “working and middle-class people hit especially hard during the pandemic.”
It’s impossible to know the precise income of the tens of millions of borrowers who applied for debt relief because the Education Department didn’t collect that information. On the application, borrowers were required only to self-certify that their annual income fell below the program’s $125,000 limit for individuals and $250,000 for couples.
The per-capita income of the ZIP codes where applicants live is one proxy for estimating their income. Most people, however, earn more or less than the average of their neighborhood.
POLITICO’s analysis found that more than 98 percent of applications came from ZIP codes where the average income is under $75,000. About two-thirds were from neighborhoods with an average income below $40,000.
Applications from higher-income ZIP codes were more rare. Less than 1 percent of the total applications came from the wealthiest ZIP codes where per-capita income is more than $100,000 — roughly corresponding to the portion of Americans who live in these ZIP codes.
Applications from lower-income areas comprised a greater share of the population of adults who attended at least some college compared to applications from higher-income areas.
For example, about 60 percent of those college-educated adults live in neighborhoods where the per-capita income is less than $40,000. But those areas accounted for a greater share, 66 percent, of the applications for student debt.
There were more applications per capita in majority non-white neighborhoods
The NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and other proponents of student debt cancellation have argued it will help narrow the nation’s persistent racial wealth gap.
Overall, about 15 million applications came from majority-white neighborhoods, while about 8.6 million applications were from ZIP codes that are majority non-white, the POLITICO analysis found. But the number of applications per capita was higher among majority non-white ZIP codes than it was in majority white ZIP codes.
In Georgia, for example, about 43 percent of the total population lives in ZIP codes that are majority non-white. But those areas accounted for about 54 percent of the student debt relief applications.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) was one of the most prominent Democrats pushing Biden to cancel student debt and ran on the issue during his close reelection bid last fall — even as Democrats in other close races distanced themselves from the program.
Several Atlanta-area ZIP codes, the state’s Democratic strongholds, had particularly high volumes of applications. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) represents the eastern suburbs of Atlanta in a majority-Black district that had among the highest number of applicants of any congressional district in the country.
“My district is a prime example of why the relief is so important,” he said in an interview, noting that about half of his constituents have a bachelor’s degree but “many others” have debt but no degree. He noted the median household income of the district, which is about $69,000, according to the Census Bureau.
“That’s not wealthy,” Johnson said, pushing back on GOP criticism of the program. “That is doing everything you can to keep your head above water.”
Politically speaking, Johnson said, canceling student debt “was a powerful lever” to drive Democratic turnout across Georgia last fall. “I think it was one of the reasons that people turned out to vote for Raphael Warnock” even as other statewide races, notably the gubernatorial contest, went for Republicans, he said.
“People are looking forward to that relief,” Johnson said. “They know that it came from national Democrats, that it was a Biden initiative.”
The debt relief program is more popular in blue states
The White House launched the application for student debt relief during the 2022 midterm election campaign, and Biden promoted the application in several speeches in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
The applications skewed toward congressional districts won by Democrats, according to POLITICO’s estimates. About 52 percent of applications came from Democrat-won districts; 48 percent were from GOP-won districts.
In the typical Democratic district, the number of applications was a greater share of the population that attended college than it was in the typical Republican district.
Nationally, about 63 percent of federal student loan borrowers estimated to be eligible for relief had applied for the program or were in line to automatically receive relief, according to the POLITICO analysis of Education Department data.
That sign-up rate was higher in many blue states where Democrats heavily promoted the administration’s debt relief application. In Vermont and Massachusetts, for example, about 68 percent of eligible borrowers raised their hand for relief.
Many GOP states, by contrast, had participation rates that were lower than the national rate. That includes Republican-led states where officials are suing to block the plan, such as Arkansas (57 percent) and Missouri (59 percent). Wyoming had the lowest share of eligible borrowers: about 55 percent apply for the program.
Methodology
This is a snapshot of about 23.6 million out of a total of 25 million applications because the Education Department has not yet — or is unable to — match the remaining applications with ZIP codes of borrowers, or has masked applications counts in ZIP codes where fewer than 100 applications were filed. There may be duplicates in this pool of applications if people submitted multiple applications.
The data analysis was based on ZIP code-aggregated data provided by the Education Department. We crossed the ZIP codes with approximately equivalent Census Bureau-defined ZIP code tabulation areas using a crosswalk compiled by the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Demographic data used for this analysis is mostly from the 2021 Census Bureau American Community Survey five-year estimates. In some cases, the surveys did not provide median income estimates for certain ZCTAs.
To align the ZCTAs with congressional districts, we used the Geocorr tool created by the Missouri Census Data Center. Because ZCTAs sometimes overlap congressional districts, the portion of applications assigned to those districts were weighted by the portion of population living in each congressional district in these estimates.
The Education Department has determined these applications were submitted by real federal student loan borrowers. It matched applications received on StudentAid.gov last fall to ZIP codes it has on file for student loan borrowers. It has not yet determined that these borrowers actually qualify for relief (whether they have the correct type of federal student loan, whether they took out the loan before July 2022, etc.). In other words, they are just applications, not approvals. Before the program was shut down, the department had begun issuing approvals and approved approximately 16 million borrowers for relief by Nov. 11.
[ad_2]
#25M #Americans #signed #Bidens #student #debt #relief
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Charleston: Several eminent Indian-Americans believe that Republican leader Nikki Haley, who launched her White House bid, has great credentials and leadership skills to be the next president of the US.
Haley, 51, formally launched her 2024 presidential bid on Wednesday, casting herself as a younger and fresher alternative to the 20th century politicians like her one-time boss and former president Donald Trump.
“Nikki Haley comes with great credentials, as governor of South Carolina and with foreign policy experience as US Ambassador to the United Nations,” M R Rangaswami, founder of Indiaspora told PTI.
Haley, a former two-term governor of South Carolina, is the third Indian American to have launched a presidential bid. The other two are Bobby Jindal in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2020. Harris is now the Vice President of the country.
“It is gratifying to see the rise of Indian Americans in the Republican Party, mirroring their prominence on the Democratic side,” Rangaswami told PTI.
“She (Haley) represents the majority of the middle. She is not extreme either. The way she ran South Carolina was amazing,” said Raj Vasudeva, from South Columbia who has known her for more than 30 years now.
Vasudeva and his wife both were present at the formal launch of the presidential campaign. We believe in her. She has got a great heart and a great head. We believe she can bring both sides together,” he said.
“I think she would do great things for the country,” Vasudeva told PTI.
Dr Anil Yallapragada, who grew up in South Carolina and has lived in South Carolina for the past three decades along with his parents, said Haley is an extraordinary and special person.
“I believe South Carolina has a lot to do with her success in terms of the environment,” he said.
Describing Haley as “a highly talented and gifted leader” Dr Yallapragada said that her leadership would take the country to a new level and unite its people.
“The (Indian American) community is proud of her. She represents the best and brightest of us,” he said.
“She is a great human being,” he said.
“We want the best person for the job to run the country. There are very few people who are prepared to be the president of the country. She is one of them,” Dr Yallapragada told PTI.
He was among the small group of Indians to attend the launch of his presidential campaign of Haley.
Dr Yallapragada resides in his hometown of Charleston and is a practising Neurohospitalist and Board Certified Vascular Neurologist. He currently serves on the American Heart Association National Advocacy and Policy Board and the World Stroke Association Global Policy Board.
Kartar Singh, also from South Carolina, who has known the family of Nikki Haley for more than three decades, said that the former governor and the former US ambassador to the United Nations have all the credentials to be the president of the country.
“She’s a hard worker. She is very intelligent. She is very sincere in what she says. She is not like other politicians. I feel she had a very good chance in primaries,” said Singh, who now leads a retired life in South Carolina.
“She is very conservative. She is very reasonable. She’s outspoken. She is not afraid of anything. If something is right she will stick her head,” Singh said, referring to Haley’s decision to remove the confederate flag during her term as governor following a mass shooting in a church in Charleston.
“She can make brave decisions. She did a very good job as a governor, revived a lot of industries and opened up new ones in South Carolina,” Singh said.
Dr Rajwant Singh, chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education and senior advisor of the National Sikh Campaign said that it is a proud moment for people of colour in America that a first-generation American of Sikh background is aspiring for the top post in America.
“You may disagree with her policies and her political views but it is still a remarkable journey. Her father is a proud Sikh and wears a turban and had attended her swearing-in ceremony when she was elected governor of South Carolina,” Singh said.
“It is important for Americans to see that she belongs to a rich heritage and turban-wearing Sikhs are part of her immediate family. This widens the horizon for many people including Sikhs to aspire for higher office in the United States,” he said.
According to him, Haley’s running will also help sensitise Americans about Sikh identity and turban.
“Still a majority of Americans have a misconception about Sikhs and Sikh identity. So there is a good chance that her political campaign will help educate about the Sikhs in America as an additional benefit,” he said.
Robinson’s Soviet co-workers in the factory, as well as supporters across the Soviet Union, called for justice. “The Negro worker is our brother like the white American worker,” read a statement released to the public. “American technique: yes!” went one rallying cry, “American prejudice: no!”
The outrage led to the formation of a prosecution panel made up of nine elected workers of different backgrounds, two of whom were women. The result was a trial conducted not by the government but rather by representatives of the factory acting as a quasi-judiciary — a procedure made possible by the Soviet emphasis on the power of workers. Whether driven by values or propaganda, the trial was not really about Robinson, nor even about Lewis and Brown. It became about the USSR versus America: communism versus capitalism. The panel’s duty was to conclusively prove the attack on Robinson was racially motivated, which in turn would be an indictment of American culture and a distraction from the faults of the USSR, including the tragic consequences of Stalin’s rapid collectivization of agriculture — widespread famine and increasingly brutal repression as the new dictator consolidated power.
On August 22, 1930, the makeshift courtroom in the Tractor Works Club buzzed with excitement with more than a thousand people in attendance. They were all there to see Robinson, who sat amid supporters, uncomfortable with his overnight celebrity. In the streets, passersby praised Robinson for his heroism and apologized for what happened to him. A teacher approached him before the trial on his walk to the front of the courtroom and pleaded with him to come speak to her 7-year-old students. Robinson was stunned, but he walked over to the children and shook their hands. Rallies in support of Robinson were held in public spaces, decrying the evils of American racism. In the factory, Robinson was greeted with nods and words of approval by his Russian cohorts.
Back in the States, there were powerful people who had reason to try to turn the tide against justice. The acting chief of Eastern European Affairs for the State Department sent information to the Bureau of Investigations (the forerunner of the FBI), led by a 35-year-old J. Edgar Hoover. If Soviet officials saw a chance to elevate Robinson, Americans saw an opportunity to tear him down. An assortment of surviving documents and correspondence held in the National Archives reveals a plot to intervene by the diplomats, who sought evidence that could depict Robinson as an anti-American subversive.
The clock was ticking. If Hoover’s agents could find or manufacture dirt on Robinson, they could leak information to try to sway the public, both Soviet and American. Congress was gearing up for hearings about the dangers of communism, which included discussion of Robinson’s case. The U.S. government had not yet opened an embassy in Moscow, but declassified State Department documents reveal that American diplomats in Latvia, who handled diplomatic matters with the Soviet government, insisted that the trial for “beating an American Negro” was engineered “for communist and revolutionary propaganda purposes” rather than genuine justice, implicitly mocking the “determination of Soviets to have no race prejudices.” One of the envoys dismissed as a “comic interlude” a statement by a man sympathetic to the attackers that all Blacks “should be lynched.”
Meanwhile, Soviet newspapers continued to frame the attack on Robinson as an attack on the Soviet way of life, and in turn, a capitalist attack on the working man. But the Party carefully shielded the fact that had Robinson fought back against his attackers, casting him as a pure victim.
Meanwhile, Lewis and Brown’s defense, provided by the Soviets, framed them as brainwashed by American capitalist racism, which resonated with the Soviet public. Lewis was urged to write an apology to the Soviet proletariat for failing to understand the consequences of national and racial dissension. But this fell flat, since it was discovered that his response was crafted by others, and prior to that, that a line had been scratched out. When later questioned by a journalist as to why, Lewis’ explanation for the change was that the omitted phrase had been a “direct apology to the ni—-.”
“I did not think I would be brought to trial,” Lewis reportedly commented. “In America, incidents with negroes — this is simply considered a street fight.”
“In America,” Brown said, “this would be treated as a joke.”
Brown and Lewis were outgunned from the outset, though, with witnesses across various spectrums coming to Robinson’s defense. Lewis in particular became the focal point of the factory court’s ire. Brown pointed the finger at him, trying to distance himself. Lewis was described by witnesses as a “drunken rowdy” and a fascist.
When it was his turn on the stand, Robinson had to be exceedingly careful. He did not want to vocalize politics he did not believe in, even though he knew that Blacks who failed to support the party could face consequences. The Communist Party power structure that protected them could be turned against them. Singer Paul Robeson ultimately would be exiled and blacklisted in the USSR after questioning domestic policy on Jews. No matter how he handled himself at trial, Robinson could expect aftershocks from either American or Russian operatives. He defended his actions but managed to avoid articulating a political framing of his situation.
After six days of speeches and witness testimonies, the verdict was handed down: Lewis and Brown were sentenced to two years of imprisonment. One of the nine members of the prosecution panel summarized their position: The perpetrators of the attack “contaminated” their community. However, their sentences were commuted to 10 years of exile from the Soviet Union, because they had been “inoculated with racial enmity by the capitalistic system.” In the eyes of the Russian public, there was no harsher penalty than banishment.
An American living in the Soviet Union who observed the trial recalled that “the Russian workers were so indignant at white men treating a fellow worker in that fashion simply because of his race that they demanded their immediate expulsion from the Soviet Union.” America was rattled by the Great Depression, and to Soviet citizens, a forced return there amounted to being abandoned in a wasteland of unemployment and sparse food.
American press coverage in the wake of the verdict fractured. Several mainstream outlets exhibited less interest in the outcome than they had in the trial itself, while multiple Black newspapers commended the stand against racism.
Robinson was offered a position elsewhere but decided to stay at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory. His growing fame from the trial may have been undesired, but it also empowered him. The public focus on Robinson seemed to stall further attempts at sabotage by American intelligence operatives, who would not want attention on their tactics.
[ad_2]
#Americans #Decided #Drown #River
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
