The Biden administration’s proposal to dramatically expand the inheritance tax bill for wealthy Americans is running into some headwinds with Democrats on Capitol Hill, showcasing nervousness about the scope and size of elements of the White House’s ambitious tax plans.
President Joe Biden’s sweeping expansion of social spending programs would be financed in part by tax hikes on the rich. A key element of that is ending “step-up in basis,” which allows heirs to use the market value of assets at the time of inheritance — rather than the historical purchase price — as the cost basis for capital gains.
Instead of hitting heirs with a hefty tax payment at the time of the death of their benefactor, staff for House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal have floated allowing the beneficiaries to defer the bill as long as they hang on to the asset, according to people familiar with the matter.
That possibility was presented on a Tuesday call with progressive groups and tax policy experts, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the discussion was private.
Asked about the call, Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement, “When Treasury releases its Green Book in the coming weeks, I look forward to reviewing the administration’s various revenue proposals and working with other Ways and Means members to chart a path forward.”
Less Money
The so-called Green Book is a report from the Treasury Department that’s expected to detail the Biden tax plans, which have so far been released only in outline form.
The White House declined to comment.
A separate push by the Biden administration to raise the corporate tax to 28% from 21% met with a call from moderate Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia for a less dramatic increase. Biden has also proposed boosting the top income tax rate and the capital gains rate for those earning more than $1 million.
The change floated by Neal’s staff would give beneficiaries of large estates the incentive not to sell, known as the lock-in effect, and it would mean bringing in less money to pay for Biden’s $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that Biden’s capital-gains proposals, including taxing unrealized gains at death, would generate $372.7 billion over a decade.
A number of ballots couldn’t be scanned during local elections this week in a southwestern county in Pennsylvania, triggering fresh concerns about election integrity.
The ballots, mostly from Republican voters in Fayette County, were missing bar codes that typically help facilitate electronic scanning.
“What we know at this point in time is that a bar code that’s required to allow the paper ballots to be scanned at the polling places was missing,” state Rep. Matthew Dowling, a Republican, told The Epoch Times.
George Rattay, chairman of the Fayette County Democratic Party, was present when the issues began around 7 p.m. on May 18. He said nobody initially knew what the problem was. He and others went to the county Bureau of Elections and found out it was a bar code issue.
“The majority of them were Republican ballots,” he told The Epoch Times.
A bureau spokeswoman declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.
A hand recount was taking place on May 20.
The county said in a statement that the bureau identified and was addressing “a printing issue” with some of the primary election ballots and that the issue was affecting all parties.
“Alternative solutions to the scanning issues were already established and are being enacted. Election officials are currently in direct contact with the judges of elections at all precincts. All judges were trained on these procedures prior to the election,” the county said.
“Every voter will have an opportunity to vote at their polling place. Election officials will ensure every vote is counted.”
Republican county officials helped obtain a judicial order that directed a hand count of all unscanned ballots.
Stephen Miller successfully stopped Biden’s racist plan to provide support exclusively to restaurants owned by non whites.
A judge from the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas sided with Stephen Miller’s America First Legal (AFL) against the Biden Regime’s policy of discriminating against white business owners in the COVID relief plan.
The Judge specifically filed a restraining order against the Small Business Administration (SBA) in defense of a Texas Restaurant owner who has not gotten relief from the SBA Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRF), despite losing revenue during the pandemic.
The Biden Regime passed the American Rescue Plan Package earlier this year. Much of the financial aid allotted to small businesses within the spending bill prioritized minorities and nonwhites over white business owners. The Judge wrote in his statement that the “Defendants’ [the Biden Administration’s] use of race-based and sex-based preferences in the administration of the RRF violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.”
Mary Kate Marshall fell in love with track and cross-country in high school.
Running “gives me so much confidence,” Marshall said. Now an athlete at Idaho State University, Marshall is fighting for Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act—and for every woman’s and girl’s right to compete on a level playing field.
The Fairness in Women’s Sports Act prohibits biological men who “identify” as women from competing in women’s sports. Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed the legislation in March 2020, but the bill was quickly challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union. Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal nonprofit, represents Marshall and fellow Idaho State University track athlete Madison Kenyon in their efforts to reinstate the act and protect women’s sports.
Marshall and Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christiana Holcomb join the “Problematic Women” podcast to explain the significance of the court battle for Idaho and for women’s sports across the nation.
Want to keep up with the 24/7 news cycle? Want to know the most important stories of the day for conservatives? Need news you can trust? Subscribe to The Daily Signal’s email newsletter.
Also on today’s show, Melanie Israel, a policy analyst with the DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation, explains what you need to know about the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear arguments in a case that could upend the abortion precedent set by Roe v. Wade. And as always, we’ll be crowning our “Problematic Woman of the Week.”
Virginia Allen: I am so pleased to be joined by Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christiana Holcomb and Idaho State University student athlete Mary Kate Marshall. Thank you both so much for being here.
Christiana Holcomb: Thank you for having us.
Mary Kate Marshall: Thank you for having us.
Allen: So, a couple of weeks ago, we shared a little bit with our listeners about the situation that’s going on in Idaho regarding the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act. But, Christiana, I want to ask you to take us back to last year when Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act into law. Could you just explain what exactly the purpose of this legislation is?
Holcomb: Absolutely. Well, across the country, we’re seeing state athletic associations and lawmakers pass policies that allow biological males to come in and to dominate the girls’ category. One prominent example, of course, is what we’ve seen in Connecticut, and Alliance Defending Freedom is representing female athletes there, but also in the state of Idaho, where Mary Kate is from, a male athlete from the University of Montana dominated the female category. [He had] previously competed as a male, and in fact, set times that would’ve absolutely crushed the NCAA women’s record in those categories at that time.
So, Idaho looked at this, [and] lawmakers said that we don’t want to see girls in our state lose out on podium spots and advancement opportunities, championship titles, scholarship opportunities due to males competing in the girls’ category. So, they introduced the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act that was later signed by the governor, and just shortly thereafter challenged by the ACLU.
Allen: And why did the ACLU challenge this legislation?
Holcomb: Well, the ACLU believes that biological males who “identify” as female ought to have the right to compete in the girls’ category. And that flies in the face of commonsense, and frankly, nearly 50 years of law and policy in our country, where we’ve set aside the girls’ category for a reason. And that’s because we recognize there are inherent physical differences that give biological males an inherent athletic advantage over female athletes.
In fact, the studies show that males have on average a 10% to 50% performance advantage over comparably fit and trained female athletes. And so, if we want a future where girls like Mary Kate can be on the podium and can get the recognition that her hard work deserves, then we have to protect the integrity of women’s sports.
Allen: Absolutely. Mary Kate, this act, as Christiana has explained, it personally affects you. You are a student at Idaho State University, and I want to get into a little bit about why you signed onto this lawsuit in just a few minutes. But first, I would love to ask you a little bit about your experience running track. What races do you run?
Marshall: Yeah, my main event is 800 [meters], but I also do the 400 and the 1500, and mile indoors.
Allen: Those are hard races. I used to run as well, and I was much more of a short-distance runner. I always feel like the 400 was a tease. It’s, like, still a sprint, but not really. It’s a grueling race. What first got you into track?
Marshall: Well, I actually started running in eighth grade. I did track. And then into high school, I started doing cross-country and track, and that’s just when I fell in love with running and knew I wanted to do it in college, too.
Allen: So, what for you is the most rewarding part of running?
Marshall: Definitely just the feeling after I’m done running, and just, I like to call it a runner’s high. It’s just like I feel like I can keep going forever, and I just feel so good about myself and just it gives me so much confidence.
Allen: Oh, I love that. So, let’s talk a little bit about the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and how it impacts you. As Christiana explained, the act is just intended to protect women’s sports and opportunities for women, and ensured that only women and girls can actually compete in women’s sports.
But when the governor signed the law in Idaho, it didn’t even have a chance to go into effect before the ACLU challenged it. Mary Kate, have you ever had to compete against a biological male in a track event?
Marshall: Yeah, actually my first collegiate cross-country race, I competed against a biological male. And going into it, I was already pretty nervous—my first college cross-country race, and this just made me so much more nervous. And after the race, I got beat by this athlete, and so did all of my other teammates. And it was just very disheartening to see one of our first races of the season and already we’re having to run against a biological male.
Allen: So, when you lined up, did you know that you were running against a biological male, or was it not until after the race that you found out?
Marshall: Yeah, we actually found out a couple of weeks before our season that we were going to be competing against a biological male.
Allen: So, what was running through your head leading up to that race?
Marshall: I really didn’t know what to expect. I just know that males are much faster than females. So, how is this going to be fair? But I wanted to stay open-minded and see what’s going to happen, because we haven’t seen this before. And after the race, I knew this isn’t fair.
Allen: What were your thoughts following the race, and did that individual take first place?
Marshall: The athlete didn’t take first place, but this athlete was amongst the top 10, I believe. And it was just very discouraging to see this athlete up there and just knowing that however hard I train probably is not going to do anything, because this athlete has so much more advantages than I do. And I just knew that this was going to be an issue.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is facing backlash after announcing an anti-white racist plan to only allow “black and brown” reporters to interview her about her two year anniversary in office.
At least one Latino reporter who was granted an interview has cancelled in protest.
Lightfoot’s plan was made public on Tuesday after Mary Ann Ahern of NBC News tweeted it out.
As @chicagosmayor reaches her two year midway point as mayor, her spokeswoman says Lightfoot is granting 1 on 1 interviews – only to Black or Brown journalists pic.twitter.com/PAUsacD9Gj
David Frum is the first prominent journalist to fictionalize the debate over the origins of COVID, but he won’t be the last.
The Atlantic’s David Frum appears to be first out of the gate in what will likely become a coordinated, aggressive media campaign to defend the people and institutions that got the COVID-19 origin story wrong — and absolve them of all responsibility, however complicit they might be — and instead blame it all on Trump and his supporters.
It sounds stupid, I know, but it’s true. Frum thinks Trump and his tens of millions of supporters “are not interested in weighing the evidence” of the virus’s origins, and only want “payback for the political and cultural injuries inflicted on them by the scientists.” The whole thing, for them, is just “a weapon in a culture war here at home.”
Leaving aside the deep irony that Frum, of all people, is accusing anyone of not being interested in weighing the evidence, we need to understand this opening salvo for the retcon job it is. Frum is preemptively exonerating the gatekeepers and experts who resisted, and in some cases actively opposed, any discussion or serious inquiry into the possibility that COVID -19 didn’t emerge naturally but escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
If Trump and his supporters turn out to be right, then they’re right for the wrong reasons, says Frum. As Bret Weinstein noted, this is an attempt to “fictionalize the history” of the debate about COVID’s origins and “immunize” the corrupt people and institutions that were on the wrong side of that debate. (Frum, you have to admit, is the perfect person to lead the charge on this.)
The COVID Origin Debate Isn’t Going Away
The need for such a campaign has become apparent in recent days because the question of COVID’s origins isn’t going away. There are two main theories: either the virus naturally jumped from animal to humans, or it was being studied — and perhaps manipulated or enhanced — in a lab and accidentally escaped.
A much-criticized report issued in March by a World Health Organization-led team dismissed the idea that the virus could have escaped from a lab, calling it “extremely unlikely” despite the team having no access to relevant records or data in China. It concluded animal origin was the more likely of the two possibilities. The WHO-led team, which included scientists from China, devoted just four of 313 pages in its report to the possibility that the virus came from a lab.
Then last week, a group of prominent scientists published a letter in the journal Science calling for a deeper investigation, including the possibility that the virus escaped from a lab by accident. The letter’s signatories include some of the world’s leading coronavirus researchers. One of them is Dr. Ralph Baric, who collaborated with Dr. Shi Zheng-li, China’s foremost expert on bat viruses, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. They were trying to enhance the ability of bat viruses to infect humans.
The letter came just days after Nicholas Wade, a veteran science reporter for Nature and The New York Times, published a long essay laying out in great detail the evidence behind both origin theories. The takeaway from Wade’s piece is that the lab leak theory has a mountain of circumstantial evidence to support it, while the animal theory has absolutely nothing.
Who’s Afraid Of the Truth?
So why did the entire corporate media dismiss the lab leak theory as some crazy conspiracy theory last year? Well, because Trump and his supporters suggested it. When Sen. Tom Cotton last February had the temerity to note on Fox News that the virus emerged not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, The New York Times ran with the headline: “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.”
Never mind that what Cotton actually said was rather mild: “We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there. But because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
The Times’ reaction to Cotton was emblematic of corporate media at large. From the outset, very few journalists wanted to talk about the lab leak theory for fear of being tarred as a fringe conspiracy theorist. No major media organizations devoted resources to investigating the disease’s origin, and almost no prominent scientists came forward to ask the tough questions that some of them are asking now.
