Tag: Jacobin

The Tax Prep Industry Doesn’t Want You to File Your Taxes for Free

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2023/11/irs-direct-file-free-tax-filing-intuit

Excerpt:

The tax preparation industry claims that current efforts to create a government-run system that would allow eligible Americans to file their taxes for free could be prohibitively expensive. But a new report reveals that the potential cost of such a free-file program could be less than the total tax subsidies scored last year by the biggest player in an industry that reaps billions from people using services that could be free.

In effect, government tax credits are subsidizing Intuit’s fight against a direct-file system that would let Americans avoid paying for the company’s tax filing services. In October, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced it would pilot its free Direct File platform for select taxpayers in thirteen states during the 2024 tax season — potentially delivering a final blow to a twenty-year agreement with the tax preparation industry that prohibited the IRS from effectively becoming a competitor. That’s assuming Congress doesn’t eliminate funding for the free tax filing program as part of its new military aid bill for Israel, as Republicans have proposed.

In return for the IRS not launching its own e-filing product, private tax prep companies like Intuit and H&R Block were required to provide access to free filing services for qualified taxpayers. But only 3 percent of eligible taxpayers utilized these free services, largely due to roadblocks set up by companies that forced people into paying for their products instead. Both companies ended up pulling out of the free IRS program in recent years.

These deceptive strategies and hurdles have proven to be lucrative for the industry. In 2019, at least fourteen million Americans paid for tax prep services that should have been free, according to a Treasury Department audit spurred by a ProPublica investigation. This earned the industry around $1 billion in revenue.

Author(s): LAUREN LIEBHABER

Publication Date: 10 Nov 2023

Publication Site: Jacobin Magazine

Canada’s Health Care Crisis Is in Large Part a Labor Crisis

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2023/02/canada-health-care-crisis-labor-shortage-wage-cuts-austerity

Excerpt:

Canada’s system of Medicare — a point of national pride — was strained before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It’s now teetering on the brink, with some Conservative provincial leaders salivating at the prospect of privatization.

For months, provincial premiers have been demanding that the federal government increase health transfer payments. Indeed, the cost-sharing model which sees the federal government currently kick in around 22 percent of health funding should be revised so that Ottawa pays more of the bill. Although a deal to boost federal funding appears to be in sight, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals are failing to ensure that protecting public health care delivery is a part of it.

….

Canada’s health care crisis is in large part a labor crisis. In general, unceasing anguish over a generalized “labor shortage” in Canada has had only the most tenuous relationship to reality. In the health care sector, however, worker burnout and a consequent lack of staff are all too real. While the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, the mouthpiece of Canadian employers, bemoaned a purportedly economy-wide labor shortage that was crippling business, an actual dearth of nurses and other health care professionals snowballed as deteriorating pay and working conditions drove these workers out of their jobs.

Newly released Statistics Canada payroll data helps paint the picture. Overall payroll figures show year-over-year employment across the whole economy virtually unchanged in November 2022, despite the Bank of Canada’s aggressive series of interest rate hikes (how much longer stable employment numbers will persist is debatable). Job vacancies — the bugbear of employers in Canada for most of the past year — declined another 2.4 percent, down to 850,300 from 1,002,200 at their peak, and reached their lowest post-pandemic level since August 2021. Average weekly wage growth, while continuing to lag inflation, ticked upward slightly to 4.2 percent (5.3 percent in goods-production alone).

Author(s): Adam D.K. King

Publication Date: 1 Feb 2023

Publication Site: Jacobin

France Won’t Accept Emmanuel Macron’s Attack on Pensions

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2023/02/france-emmanuel-macron-pension-reform-protest-strike-welfare

Excerpt:

According to police figures, Tuesday’s nationwide protests marked the largest single-day union-backed demonstration in France in thirty years. Some 1.272 million turned out to the streets. That’s more than the already-impressive January 19 turnout, it’s more than any of the single-day peaks of the 2010 and 2003 movements over retirement reforms — it even topped the height of the legendary 1995 protests.

And there’s more to come. The united union coalition has called for two further days of strikes and protest: Tuesday, February 7, and Saturday, February 11. “Until then,” the coalition has also called on the public to “multiply actions, initiatives, meetings, and general assemblies across the country, in workplaces [and] at places of study, including through strikes.”

After two successful national mobilizations, the movement seems to be entering a new phase. Public opinion is clearly on its side — and yet, the government isn’t budging on the proposed hike in the retirement eligibility age from sixty-two to sixty-four. Clearly, it’s going to take more for organized labor to win this battle.

….

Clearly, the strike calls over pension reform have resonated beyond organized labor’s traditional bastions of support in the public sector: namely, schools, health services, and transit networks (the national SNCF rail company and the Paris metro network). Workers in all these sectors have walked off the jobs, but so have others in the private sector. The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) has shared a list of strikes on January 31 that illustrates this point: five thousand strikers at Airbus; a walkout from 90 percent of the staff at a FNAC department store outside of Toulouse; a strike from 80 percent of the workers at a LU Mondelēz factory in Normandy, etc.

Author(s): Cole Stangler

Publication Date: 2 Feb 2023

Publication Site: Jacobin

Does the GOP Want a Government Default So It Can Kill Social Security?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/republicans-debt-ceiling-shock-doctrine-spending-cuts

Excerpt:

The debt ceiling is normally a dull topic, and many have understandably neglected to follow along. To recap, the debt ceiling is the artificial cap Congress places on the amount of money the government can borrow. As Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen and others have pointed out, there is little practical reason for the debt ceiling to exist at all. From a technical point of view, it is a formality to authorize the Treasury to pay bills the government has already incurred. Through creative accounting, the Treasury can keep paying for a few more months, and then it will have to stop unless Congress votes to raise the debt ceiling.

All sides agree that the US government deliberately defaulting on debts would be the financial equivalent of an atom bomb, causing immediate painful shocks across the world economy and unpredictable long-term effects. In order to avoid this scenario, voting to raise the debt ceiling is usually a matter of course — though the number of near and actual government shutdowns from Congress playing chicken with the ceiling have increased in recent decades.

But it might be different this time. As Politico reported last week, a number of former government officials who negotiated during previous standoffs over the debt ceiling think there’s much less room for a negotiated settlement this year.

The main reason is that, at least on the surface, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is in a weak position, effectively held hostage by conditions that were imposed on him by the most extreme members of the House Republican conference during his election to speaker. Those conditions specifically require significant spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt ceiling.

….

Democrats also argue that though Republicans insist on reducing spending, they have refused to make specific demands for what they want cut. Here is where The Shock Doctrine might provide a hint of what’s to come. The idea of privatizing Social Security has been “lying around” since George W. Bush’s presidency. Joe Biden himself has a long, well-documented history of trying to cut Social Security and Medicare, though in public statements since 2020 he has consistently said he would not agree to do so.

Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans have repeatedly floated the idea of cutting the popular programs over the past year. While McCarthy appeared to abruptly back off the idea of cutting Social Security and Medicare as part of the debt ceiling negotiations on Sunday, his ambiguous promise to “strengthen” the programs without specifying what that means leaves plenty of room for privatization.

Author(s): Ben Beckett

Publication Date: 31 Jan 2023

Publication Site: Jacobin

The CEO-to-Worker Pay Gap Is Climbing to Truly Obscene Levels

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/ceo-worker-pay-gap-obscene-levels-lowest-median-wages

Excerpt:

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) analyzes compensation at the three hundred publicly held US corporations with the lowest median wages in 2020. The report, authored by Sarah Anderson, Sam Pizzigati, and Brian Wakamo, finds that the average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670:1 in 2021, up from 604:1 in 2020. Forty-nine of the firms had ratios above 1,000:1.

Wages at 106 of the firms did not keep pace with the 4.7 percent average US inflation rate last year, and of those, sixty-seven spent resources buying back their own stock, with repurchases totaling $43.7 billion. The biggest buybacks took place at Lowe’s, Target, and Best Buy. As the IPS notes, “With the $13 billion Lowe’s spent on share purchases, the company could have given each of its 325,000 employees a $40,000 raise. Instead, median pay at the company fell 7.6 percent to $22,697.” None of the big-box stores’ retail workers are currently unionized, though there are nascent union campaigns underway at several Target stores.

Of the three hundred companies analyzed by the IPS, 40 percent received federal contracts between October 1, 2019 and May 1, 2022, for a combined value of $37.2 billion. Only six of the 119 contractors had pay gaps of less than 100:1. Maximus, a company that handles federal student debts and Medicare call centers, took in the most federal contracts of any of the firms, with $12.3 billion during the period under consideration. IPS notes that Maximus CEO Bruce Caswell made $7.9 million in compensation, or 208 times the firm’s median income and thirty-six times the salary of the officials who direct the agencies awarding the contracts.

Author(s): Alex N. Press

Publication Date: 7 June 2022

Publication Site: Jacobin

Why For-Profit Workplace Insurance Ruins Workers’ Lives

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2022/06/victoria-australia-workers-comp-private-insurance

Excerpt:

In Victoria, Australia, a broken workplace injury compensation system is letting workers down. WorkSafe is the state’s institution that regulates industry safety standards and governs workplace injury insurance. However, its workers’ compensation arm, WorkCover, outsources the handling of workers’ compensation claims to private insurance companies that place profit ahead of the health of our communities’ most vulnerable members.

Deprived of a political voice that can stand for them, injured workers report being stalked by private investigators in order to force them back into work before they have recovered. This frequently exacerbates their injuries and triggers new and often debilitating psychological harm. This harassment is most often targeted at workers with long-term injuries or those who are homebound as a result of their injuries.

Recently, however, injured workers from across Victoria have started coming together to campaign for change. Most importantly, they are demanding an end to outsourcing essential social services to private insurance agents who have an interest in cutting workers off from compensation payments as soon as possible. For these efforts to bear fruit, however, it’s crucial to understand the origins of the existing system that prioritizes insurance companies’ profits over injured and sick workers’ health.

Author(s): Reece Gittins

Publication Date: 9 June 2022

Publication Site: Jacobin

A Four-Day Workweek Will Benefit Everyone, But Especially Women

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2022/03/four-day-workweek-trial-gender-pension-gap

Excerpt:

A four-day week would make it easier to balance life and work responsibilities. This would decrease the pressure on women to drop out of full-time employment and make it easier for others to rejoin full-time employment if they wish. It would also decrease underemployment, lessen the costs of paid childcare, and help level the playing field for unpaid care work by keeping men at home longer.

A recent policy paper published by the Women’s Budget Group comments in regard to a four-day week: “As the marginal worker is usually female, this effect could reduce gender gaps in both employment and income.” As the definition of full-time employment is decreased, more women will surpass the £10,000 a year threshold for autoenrollment and also have higher sustained pension contributions throughout their working life.

Belmont Packaging in Wigan, a company that practices a four-day week, asked its employees how they spend their three-day weekend. One employee said, “It’s like a bank holiday every week. Not exactly like one, because the wife has me doing chores every Friday.” During the early months of the pandemic, when many workers were kept at home, research showed that men took on a greater share of housework and women’s disproportionate burden decreased.

Author(s): James Derry

Publication Date: 25 March 2022

Publication Site: Jacobin

On Social Spending, the Question Isn’t “Can We Afford It?” but “Who Will Pay?”

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://jacobinmag.com/2021/11/social-spending-biden-reconciliation-bill-build-back-better

Excerpt:

There are three possible answers to the question of who pays for social expenses. First, governments can pay by taxing their citizens to fund social programs. Second, employers can pay by using corporate revenues to provide employment-related benefits. Third, individuals and families can pay out of pocket, rely on unpaid labor from friends and relatives, or make do without.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States had a workable answer to the “Who pays?” question that drew on a mix of all three sources. Government provided certain social benefits like Social Security, Medicare, and public education. Aided by government tax incentives, many employers offered a wide range of benefits like health insurance and pensions, creating what political scientist Jacob Hacker refers to as a “public-private welfare regime.” And with one-third of the labor force unionized, and even nonunion employers pressured to match union-scale wages and benefits, many workers earned enough to support their families and handle the social expenses not covered by government- and employer-based programs.

….

For its part, government social spending has been uneven. Large universal programs like Medicare and Social Security have proven resistant to most retrenchment efforts, and Obamacare included a major expansion of Medicaid — though this was blocked in some Republican-dominated states. Meanwhile, more means-tested programs targeting low-income Americans have proven more vulnerable. In a context where employers have sharply cut back their commitment to providing social benefits, and individuals and their families are faced with stagnating wages, government’s response has proven inadequate.

Author(s):Barry Eidlin

Publication Date:28 Nov 2021

Publication Site: Jacobin