ThinkProgress Logo

Politics

Chambliss’ Office Was The Source Of ‘All Faggots Must Die’ Hate Speech

By Ian Millhiser on Sep 22, 2010 at 9:44 pm

saxbychamblissAs ThinkProgress previously reported, a commenter on the gay right’s blog Joe My God left a comment yesterday saying “all faggots must die.”  After some investigation, the blog’s author Joseph Jervis determined that the commenter’s IP address appeared “to resolve to the neighborhood of GOP U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ Atlanta office.”  Tonight, Chambliss confirmed that his office was the source of this hate speech:

U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss’ office has determined it was indeed the source of a highly publicized homosexual-bashing slur on an Internet site.

But in a statement, Chambliss’ office said it has not discovered exactly who was behind the slur, and has turned the matter over to the Senate sergeant at arms. The office employs 42 people.

“The [sergeant at arms] has worked side by side with our personnel to determine whether the comment in question emanated from our office. That appears to be the case,” an unsigned statement from Chambliss’ press office read.

“There has not been a determination as to who posted the comment,” the statement read. “That part of the review is ongoing, and is now in the hands of the Senate sergeant at arms.”

Chambliss’ decision to involve the Senate’s chief law enforcement officer is a good sign that whoever was responsible for the hate speech will be disciplined. But this step is cold comfort to the thousands of gay and lesbian Americans denied the opportunity to serve their country by Chambliss’ anti-gay voting record. If the senator truly wants to demonstrate that bigotry has no place in his office, he should start by reversing his unconscionable vote to continue Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell.

Economy

Koch-Backed Groups Helped Kill Law Designed To Prevent Voter Suppression Plot Hatched By Koch-Backed Groups

By Josh Dorner on Sep 22, 2010 at 8:10 pm

Earlier this week, One Wisconsin Now revealed an alleged voter suppression plot designed to disenfranchise minorities, students, and others in heavily-Democratic areas of the state. At the center of this apparent “voter caging” operation that we reported on yesterday is the Wisconsin chapter of Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. While the allegations of potentially illegal conduct leveled against Americans for Prosperity, the Wisconsin Republican Party, and other tea party groups are extremely serious, a ThinkProgress investigation reveals an even larger and more insidious effort by Koch-backed groups to tamper with the democratic process.

While a federal crime, the most essential voting issues, from registration and eligibility to specific early and Election Day voting procedures, are largely governed by state law. Even before becoming involved in the apparent plot to suppress the vote in Wisconsin, a web of Koch-backed groups played a key role earlier this year in defeating a proposed Wisconsin law that included numerous voter protection measures—including significant penalties for efforts to unlawfully challenge and intimidate voters. In fact, those at the center of the alleged voter suppression plot were caught on tape in June admitting that they could only proceed with their so-called “Election Observer Program” because they had successfully blocked the Voter Protection Act from passing earlier in the spring:

“And since the voter law did not get passed this year that could hit you with $100,000 and three years for unsuccessfully challenging a voter, we can still do this,” said Tim Dake, a prominent tea party member with the Wisconsin GrandSons for Liberty, the group that provided cover for Americans for Prosperity and the Wisconsin GOP by agreeing to be the public face for the campaign.

“Hallelujah,” shouted an unidentified meeting attendee in response.

“Yes, everybody gets to take credit for that,” replied Dake, before decrying early voting and detailing purported instances of voted fraud committed by individuals with Vietnamese surnames.

Tellingly, the Voter Protection Act provision that Dake references only criminalizes acts that “make use of or threaten to make use of force, violence, restraint, or any tactic of coercion or intimidation in order to induce or compel any person to vote or refrain from voting or to refrain from registering to vote at an election.” It also put in place less severe penalties for attempting to prevent someone from registering or voting “based upon fraudulent, deceptive, or spurious grounds or information.” If the goal of their “Election Observer Program” was simply to weed out ineligible voters and notify the proper authorities of any issues—rather than the deliberate use of intimidation and other tactics to suppress votes—it’s unclear why Dake and his compatriots would have been concerned about this provision or considered it an impediment to their plans.

Whether they were concerned about the bill’s voter protection provisions, numerous other provisions designed to make it easier to register to vote and to vote early or absentee, or the provision that implemented a federal law that makes it easier for military voters—including troops serving overseas—to cast ballots, right-wing activists derided it as the “Voter Fraud Protection Act,” an ACORN-Style Election Fraud Act,” and the “election deform bill.”

Regardless of the exact source of their concerns, a network of Koch-backed groups swooped in earlier this year and succeeded in killing the bill. Here’s a look at the key Koch-backed players that pushed for the defeat of the Voter Protection Act: Read more

Economy

After Slashing Services And Raising Middle Class Taxes, Christie Looks To Cut Income Tax For The Rich

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 22, 2010 at 8:02 pm

Back in June, even with his state facing a $10 billion budget shortfall, Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) vetoed a tax increase for millionaires, deriding the proposal as a “cute idea” that “doesn’t work.” He then set about slashing New Jersey’s budget to ribbons, including cutting the Earned Income Tax Credit and homestead rebates to such an extent that he increased taxes on the middle class.

Now, Christie has a new plan for getting his state’s finances under control that involves raising the retirement age and cutting retirement benefits for public-sector workers, including ending cost-of-living adjustments for current retirees (which amounts to a benefits cut). But at the same time, Christie is ready to blow a new hole in his state’s budget, as he told Bloomberg Radio that he hopes to implement a cut in the state’s top marginal income tax rate in the next year or two:

“We’ve got to do that,” said Christie…“You can’t be competitive when your top marginal rate is three times your neighbor.”

The 9 percent top marginal tax rate in New Jersey only applies to those making $500,000 or more annually, and because it’s a marginal rate, it is only levied on income in excess of that amount. The median income in New Jersey is about $69,000, so someone subject to the highest rate is making about seven times more than the median household.

It’s understandable that Christie is making budget cuts to deal with the effects of the Great Recession (though I think he made some bad choices), and it also makes sense that he is looking to reform his state’s pension system, which is badly underfunded. But to do so while simultaneously cutting taxes for the state’s most well-off residents is the height of fiscal irresponsibility. The Newark Star-Ledger’s Editorial Board took Christie to task for the proposal on those grounds:

Think about those priorities. Middle-class families just lost their property tax rebates. Schools lost nearly $1 billion in funding, their biggest hit ever. Thousands of working poor families were closed out of health care programs. And our colleges and universities were whacked hard, forcing tuition hikes as the state scholarship programs run dry. The governor said those cuts were necessary because the state’s vaults were empty. He was the guy telling us to live within our means, to face hard realities. And now this — a tax cut that would blow a new hole in the budget.

The Gloucester County Times also weighed in, saying Christie “ought to suspend his supply-side tax policy freight train long enough to examine the consequences.” But with his proposal, Christie is simply confirming what we already knew: Republican concerns about deficits evaporate when they see an opportunity to cut taxes for the rich.

Health

Rep. Loretta Sanchez: States Should Exclude Insurers That Suspend Child-Only Plans From The Exchanges

By Igor Volsky on Sep 22, 2010 at 7:15 pm

Several large health insurers have announced that they would suspend child-only insurance plans “rather than comply with a new federal healthcare law that bars them from rejecting youngsters with preexisting medical conditions.” Most Democrats have remained mum about how to address the problem, but this afternoon Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) appeared on MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and suggested that states should prohibit such “bad faith” insurers from participating in the exchanges in 2014. Under the health care law, states can exclude certain insurers from the exchanges if they demonstrate a pattern or practice of excessive or unjustified premium increases.

Sanchez said that states — rather than the federal government — would be primarily responsible for holding insurers accountable and encouraged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign a California bill that would prohibit insurers that stop offering child-only policies, from participating in the exchanges for a period of five years:

SANCHEZ: So obviously, one of those things is when we do set up exchanges in three years, we are going to get to choose. We are going to have a commission that is going to get to choose what policies are put in there. Certainly, I would call a company that is not writing children’s insurance a bad faith company and I would suggest they wouldn’t be found in that new 30 to 40 million-person market that we will create.

Watch it:

Some insurers may have decided to leave the child-only market because the new take-all-kids regulation made that product less profitable, but it’s also possible that other companies suspended their plans in order to avoid possible premium increases (that could have made them ineligible for the exchanges.) Still, the very notion that members of Congress are calling on states to use their regulatory authority to clamp down on “bad faith” insures, is quite encouraging.

Climate Progress

NSIDC director: “The volume of ice left in the Arctic likely reached the lowest ever level this month.”

By Joe Romm on Sep 22, 2010 at 6:26 pm

Serreze: “I stand by my previous statements that the Arctic summer sea ice cover is in a death spiral. It’s not going to recover.”

“We are proud of being the first sailing vessel, together with “Peter 1st”, that ever has sailed through both the Northeast and Northwest Passage in one short Arctic summer.”

This amazing Arctic melt season is finally coming to an end.  We just about equaled 2008 for the second lowest sea ice extent and area.  But volume matters more — and here it looks like we’re setting the record.

We’ve seen that National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) scientists have tracked a sharp drop in oldest, thickest Arctic sea ice.  So it’s no surprise that the Polar Science Center‘s PIOMAS model for mid-September shows a record low volume for the month and hence the year and hence “any time in recent geologic history”:

PIOMAS 9-10

Daily Sea Ice volume anomalies for each day are computed relative to the 1979 to 2009 average for that day. The trend for the 1979- present period is shown in blue. Shaded areas show one and two standard deviations from the trend.

This graph shows more than a 1000 km^3 drop in ice volume over the record low last year of 5,800 km^3 (67% below its 1979 maximum).  I did check with PSC about their confidence level in this relative decline.

Read more

Security

Woodward Book Demonstrates Obama’s Nuclear Terror Focus

By Max Bergmann on Sep 22, 2010 at 6:20 pm

obamas-wars-bob-woodward-One interesting tidbit highlighted in the Washington Post story on the new Bob Woodward book is a President, in stark contrast to his predecessor, that is strongly concerned by the threat of nuclear terrorism. The Washington Post notes:

A classified exercise in May showed that the government was woefully unprepared to deal with a nuclear terrorist attack in the United States. The scenario involved the detonation of a small, crude nuclear weapon in Indianapolis and the simultaneous threat of a second blast in Los Angeles. Obama, in the interview with Woodward, called a nuclear attack here “a potential game changer.” He said: “When I go down the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that’s one where you can’t afford any mistakes.”

While President Bush also claimed to share this concern and in the 2004 national security debate with John Kerry cited it as the most serious potential threat, the Bush administration did little to actually address it. This is not only evident in the lack of preparedness of the US at the time of Bush’s departure, but the lack of any big high-level international initiatives to address the threat. Instead, as Ambassador Robert Gallucci noted, the Bush administration was “sleepwalking on these issues.”

In stark contrast, the Obama administration hasn’t just paid lip service to the threat, it is actually taking steps to eliminate it. The Nuclear Security Summit that was held in Washington this past April elevated nuclear security to the top of the international agenda and put forth concrete work plans that advance the President’s goal of securing all loose nuclear materials within four years.

Yet despite being the largest gathering of heads of state in the US since the founding of the UN, the summit drew more attention from the Washington-based press corps for the traffic jams it caused than for the substantive purpose behind the gathering. Similarly, conservatives greeted the conference with a big yawn, saying sure it was important but it didn’t deal with the real “threat” of Iran. The reaction to the summit not only demonstrated how media coverage is essentially driven by horse-race politics, or alternatively by what conservatives think matter, but it also exposed how totally disconnected the right is with global political realities.

The nuclear terrorist threat is ultimately a trans-national threat that is rooted in the weakness of states, not the strengths. States in the former Soviet bloc that have nuclear materials, suffer from the decay of state institutions, and have a developed criminal black market are the frontlines in this fight. Once materials hit the black market, it is quite straight forward for terrorist groups to acquire them. In other words, a nuclear terrorist, just like a 9-11 terrorist, doesn’t need the support of any state actor.

Yet the right-wing national security establishment frankly does not comprehend the existence of non-state actors. Instead, everything is a state-based threat. By dismissing the Nuclear Security Summit as irrelevant because it didn’t directly address the “real” nuclear threat of Iran, as Charles Krauthammer did, the right only exposed their cluelessness. The fact is that the only way to combat nuclear terrorism is to get other countries to do mundane tasks to secure and consolidate their nuclear and radiological materials so they don’t fall into the hands of criminals and terrorists. One of the reasons the Bush administration paid lip service but did little to address the nuclear terror threat is because it ultimately requires multilateralism to address the threat. The United States can’t single handedly secure every countries’ nuclear materials. It can’t bomb criminal networks.

And, as a result, the right simply isn’t interested in this reality-based national security issue, even though it poses the most likely nuclear threat. You don’t see right wing national security conferences on how we can secure loose nuclear materials. No, instead you get bizarre conferences on some imagined EMP threat. You get arguments that nuclear security is all about building more nuclear weapons and missile defense. You get a hyper focus on states like Iraq, now Iran, that to the right are somehow intimately linked to Al Qaeda. You get a world view that is part cold war, part sci-fi futurist fantasy that is simply divorced from the reality of a modern globalizing world in which national borders increasingly mean less and in which global challenges and threats require collective global efforts.

Yglesias

Endgame

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 22, 2010 at 6:16 pm

Businessmen with stopwatch hearts—they don’t beat:

— Sara Mead and Rick Hess on the “merit pay” study.

— Irrational fear of inflation.

— “Central Banking in a Democratic Society”.

— Rich members of congress don’tlike estate taxes “even after we accounted for their party affiliations, their National Taxpayer Union ‘scorecards’ (reflecting opposition to taxes on other bills), and the characteristics of their districts (median income, urbanicity, and polled opposition to the estate tax).”

— Paul Krugman (sensibly!) takes himself out of the running to be NEC director. I think Larry Summers’ leftwing detractors would be surprised to learn how little daylight there is between he and Krugman on the issues.

— Hedge funds and talent allocation.

— Sebastian Mallaby continues to show he’s the smartest man in journalism through his consistent focus on defending the interests of the richest people on earth.

Delerium (featuring Emily Haines), “Stopwatch Hearts”.

Politics

After Blasting Reconciliation, Ryan Now Says Republicans ‘Have To’ Use It To Reverse Democratic Policies

By Zaid Jilani on Sep 22, 2010 at 5:55 pm

Last spring, Senate Democrats utilized what is known as the budget reconciliation process to pass a “fix” to the Senate’s health care bill, adjusting certain elements of it to make it more palatable to House Democrats. The process, which was used by the Republicans to pass tax cuts for the wealthy, had a long history of use in the Senate and fell within the standard rules.

Yet Republicans cried foul, claiming that the use of the reconciliation process was undermining our very democratic system itself. One of the Republicans who objected to the use of reconciliation was Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI). As Democrats prepared to use the process to amend the Senate’s health care bill, the “Young Gun” Republican blasted the process in statements and op-eds:

– Ryan called the reconciliation process a “convoluted legislative charade” and the result of Democrats “employing any means to achieve political victory” in an op-ed in the Washington Post. [3/14/10]

– The congressman referred to using reconciliation for the legislative fix to the bill as “an extraordinary and unprecedented abuse” of the reconciliation process during a debate on the House Budget Committee. “Never before has the House committee process been so grossly exploited,” he said. [3/15/10]

– In testimony before the House Rules Committee, Ryan complained of using the budget reconciliation process, “This is not good democracy. This is not good government.” He claimed his Democratic colleagues in the Senate didn’t have “the courage to have a clean up or down vote in the people’s house.” [3/20/10]

Yet during an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Ryan was singing a very different tune about the reconciliation process. Host Larry Kudlow asked Ryan, who is slated to be chairman of the House Budget Committee if the Republicans win the House, if he would be willing to use the reconciliation process to “chip away and gradually roll back some of the unpopular Obama policies” in the event of a GOP takeover. Ryan responded that not only does he “want” to use the tactic to do that, but that Republicans “have to use reconciliation” to reverse Obama’s policies:

KUDLOW: Congressman, I know you’re going to be chairman of the Budget Committee if the GOP Controls the house. That puts you in charge of the reconciliation process which is a very important task. Can you use reconciliation to chip away and gradually roll back some of the unpopular Obama policies?

RYAN: Yes you can. It’s then a question of where Judd [Gregg] works and where he sits. The question is who controls the senate and where are the votes in the senate? Reconciliation is the fastest best path to get there. We do want to use reconciliation, you ultimately have to use reconciliation to get there.

Watch it:

It appears that Ryan’s view is that when Democrats want to use the reconciliation process to tweak their health care bill, it is an affront to democracy. But when Republicans want to “roll back” policies passed by their Democratic colleagues, then it’s completely fine to use the procedure.

LGBT

After Cloture Failure, White House Pressured Not To Appeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Ruling

By Igor Volsky on Sep 22, 2010 at 5:30 pm

With the failure of the Senate to even begin debating the defense authorization bill and an amendment to repeal Don’t Ask, Dont’ Tell some — including the New York Times — are now pressuring the White House not to appeal a recent California District Court ruling which found the policy unconstitutional. Activists argue that because the case challenges the law on its face, the decision could apply to the whole country and will end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The Justice Department has until tomorrow to file an appeal in the case filed by the Log Cabin Republicans.

Congress’s three openly gay members, Reps. Barney Frank (D-NY), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Jared Polis (D-CO), are already drafting a letter to President Barack Obama, urging him not to appeal the decision and today, the Palm Center released a new analysis arguing that “the White House has a strong foundation for not filing an appeal to the recent case which declared ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ unconstitutional.” DOJ has an obligation to defend existing law, the report notes, “[h]owever, it would be inaccurate to characterize this common practice as a mandatory requirement that DOJ must always defend federal laws in all cases, without exception”:

First, there is executive discretion to decline to defend federal law when the president believes the law intrudes upon his express constitutional authority, such as the commander-in-chief authority. [...]

Under the second exception, the executive branch has discretion to choose not to defend a federal law when that defense would involve asking the Supreme Court to disregard or alter one of its constitutional rulings….Under the second exception, the constitutionality of “don’t ask, don’t tell” has been seriously undermined by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). … Lawrence was the basis for Judge Phillips’s ruling in Log Cabin Republicans. She held that, after Lawrence, the government could no longer rest on unsupported congressional and military opinion alone. Before the government could impose sweeping restrictions on personal intimacy and autonomy, it had to offer evidence that “don’t ask, don’t tell” significantly furthered the government’s interest in military readiness, and that the policy was necessary to further that interest. However, in Log Cabin Republicans the government was unable to produce any evidence beyond the opinions offered in support of the law back in 1993.

Indeed, as AmericaBlog has consistently argued, administrations have a long history of refusing to defend certain laws:

In fact, George W. Bush (ACLU et al., v. Norman Y. Mineta – “The U.S. Department of Justice has notified Congress that it will not defend a law prohibiting the display of marijuana policy reform ads in public transit systems.”), Bill Clinton (Dickerson v. United States – “Because the Miranda decision is of constitutional dimension, Congress may not legislate a contrary rule unless this Court were to overrule Miranda…. Section 3501 cannot constitutionally authorize the admission of a statement that would be excluded under this Court’s Miranda cases.”), George HW Bush (Metro Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission), and Ronald Reagan (INS v./ Chadha – “Chadha then filed a petition for review of the deportation order in the Court of Appeals, and the INS joined him in arguing that § 244(c)(2) is unconstitutional.”) all joined in lawsuits opposing federal laws that they didn’t like, laws that they felt were unconstitutional. It is an outright lie to suggest that the DOJ had no choice.

As DADT scholar Nathaniel Frank explained last night to Rachel Maddow, Democrats now have three paths for repealing the law: the Senate can try to pass repeal during the lame duck session, President Obama could issue an executive order ending implementation of the policy, or the Justice Department could refuse to appeal the Log Cabin Republicans case. “The court case, I think, is one of the more likely now, for the President to say, this actually is unconstitutional and although there is a tradition of defending standing law, it’s not obligated to defend a policy that it believes is unconstitutional,” Frank added.

The White House has been reluctant to publicly advocate on behalf of repeal, however, and has previously indicated that it would not take steps beyond the legislative compromise to change the policy.

Yglesias

Wall Street and Inequality

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 22, 2010 at 5:28 pm

logo-mr-monopoly 1

I want to thank everyone who sent me a copy of Steven N. Kaplan and Joshua Rauh “Wall Street and Main Street: What Contributes to the Rise in the Highest Incomes?” overnight. They make an effort to really bore down into the question of who, exactly, the superrich are. The answer turns out to be—largely finance types:

We look at hedge fund, venture capital (VC) fund, and PE or buyout fund investors. The data here are very coarse, and we make a number of assumptions to obtain estimates of income. A large number of professionals in these areas are highly compensated We estimate that the professionals in hedge, VC, and PE funds include roughly the same number of individuals in the top 0.1% of the AGI income distribution as the top nonfinancial executives. While we do not estimate precise distributional changes over time for this sector, we show that these industries are significantly larger today than ten and twenty years ago and, therefore, that their employees must represent a larger fraction of the top brackets than before.

We also find that hedge fund investors and other “Wall Street” type individuals comprise a larger fraction of the very highest end of the AGI distribution (the top 0.0001%) than CEOs and top executives. In 2004, nine times as many Wall Street investors earned in excess of $100 million as public company CEOs. In fact, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all five hundred S&P 500 CEOs combined (both realized and ex ante). This trend accelerated after 2004. In 2007, it is likely that the top five hedge fund managers earned more than all five hundred S&P 500 CEOs combined.

They show that star athletes “represent a similar percentage of the top 0.1% AGI bracket in 2004 as in 1995 (0.8% for both years), but a larger percentage of the top 0.01% AGI bracket” and also that non-sports celebrities “comprise a substantially smaller share of the top brackets” yet another reminder of the under-acknowledged declining real wages of movie stars. They further show “that the fraction of lawyers in the 0.1% (and top 0.5%) AGI brackets rose substantially from 1994 to 2004.”

I think some of the interpretive conclusions they draw from this are a bit funny, but the clearest conclusion they offer is that this undermines accounts of inequality that focus on corporate governance, the decline of unions, or other labor market institutions. After all, increases in executive compensation at publicly traded firms have been matched or exceeded by increases in the realm of finance where these issues aren’t in play.

So what’s left? They say “theories of skill-biased technological change, greater scale, and their interaction.” Scale is easy to understand—the heads of bigger firms get paid more, as do asset managers who manage more assets, and scale has increased in both financial and non-financial sectors. But this is a pretty special kind of skill-biased technological change. In particular, it’s not the kind that would be ameliorated by boosting the high school graduation rate or improving the quality of community colleges. Instead they say technological improvements “provide part of the explanation for the increase in pay of professional athletes (technology increases their marginal product by allowing them to reach more consumers) and Wall Street investors (technology allows them to acquire information and trade large amounts more easily).”

If it were my paper, I would have discussed this under the heading of “globalization” which they instead dismiss with the odd remark that “it seems difficult for globalization to explain the increase in the top end of VC investors, PE investors, hedge fund investors, and professional athletes.” In part this becomes a question of semantics, but I think it’s quite obvious that globalization helped Tracy McGrady earn more money by becoming a celebrity in China. Similarly, globalization helped American financiers get richer by managing the money of rich people from the developing world.

Either way, I think the more granular view of what’s driving inequality helps refocus the policy conversation on questions of what it is we’re trying to do with progressive policy. If reducing high-end inequality means implementing regulations that make the very richest hedge fund managers less rich to the benefit of lesser managers of financial assets then that doesn’t seem like a particularly important goal. By contrast, if what’s happening is that finance types are getting rich off a badly flawed regulatory scheme that leaves the world economy vulnerable to catastrophic crashes and panics then that’s a problem all on its own completely apart from the impact on inequality. Last, taxes. These hedge fund and private equity guys are paying a lower marginal tax rate on their income than you or me or a teacher—that’s outrageous.

But beyond income taxes, I’m not sure that whether Stephen Schwartzman earns $400 million or “only” $100 million next year is something I really care that much about. But I do care a great deal about whether the bulk of his $4.7 billion fortune ends up going to charity or whether it sets his heirs up as a new aristocratic elite. Whether or not we have a meaningful estate tax in this country will make a big difference there.

Older

Switch to Mobile
ThinkProgress Signup Overlay Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress Skip and Continue to ThinkProgress

Sign Up