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Stories tagged with “Nebraska”

Economy

Nebraska Gov. Proposes Making His State’s Regressive Tax Code Even Worse For The Poor

By Travis Waldron on Jan 28, 2012 at 9:30 am

The state of Nebraska already has a regressive tax code that asks lower-income families to pay more than the state’s wealthiest residents. According to the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, the poorest 20 percent of Nebraskans pay an average of 11.1 percent of their annual income in state and local taxes, while the richest 1 percent pay just 6.1 percent of theirs, thanks to the state’s heavy reliance on regressive property taxes.

Gov. Dave Heinemen (R), however, seems to believe that the poor aren’t doing their part in his state. Despite saying his “highest priority” was “tax relief for Nebraska’s hard-working, middle class taxpayer,” Heinemen used his State of the State speech to unveil a tax proposal that would do next to nothing to help Nebraska’s poorest residents while providing sizable tax breaks to the rich, Citizens for Tax Justice found:

In his recent State of the State speech, Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman unveiled his three-pronged tax reduction proposal: income tax rate reductions and broadening of income tax brackets, a reduction in the corporate income tax rate, and complete elimination of the inheritance tax. [...]

Nebraska’s tax structure is already regressive and asks more of lower income families than better off families…The Governor’s proposal does nothing to reduce property taxes, does little to assist the lowest income Nebraskans, and would actually make this disparity worse.

As CTJ notes, Heinemen’s proposal wouldn’t replace the $40 million generated by the inheritance tax, just a year after his last budget eliminated state aid to local governments. In Omaha, the county board passed a resolution opposing Heinemen’s plan because it would “force” them to raise property taxes, thereby increasing the tax burden on lower- and middle-class Nebraskans.

Reducing the income tax rate, meanwhile, would have a similar effect, forcing the state to rely even more heavily on regressive property taxes instead of the more progressive income tax structure.

LGBT

Nebraska Senator Seeks To Ban All Municipal LGBT Protections

By Zack Ford on Jan 19, 2012 at 11:45 am

Nebraska Sen. Beau McCoy

Nebraska state Sen. Beau McCoy (NP) has introduced a bill (LB 912) that would prevent municipalities across the state from creating any nondiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity:

MCCOY: It just merely says that if we’re going to change the protected classes … we need to come to the Capitol to do it so that it’s consistent across the state. If it’s the right thing to do, it ought to be the right thing to do border-to-border, not just in one city or municipality. Nebraskans want uniformity. If it’s discrimination in Omaha, why wouldn’t it be the same in Scottsbluff, Gering, Kearney, Grand Island, you name it?

McCoy’s duplicitous interest in “uniformity” ignores that his bill mirrors a Tennessee law passed last year that specifically targeted the LGBT community for discrimination. In fact, the anti-LGBT Family Action Council of Tennessee (FACT) scripted the debate on that bill by cloaking its biased impact with economic rhetoric. The law’s passage invalidated LGBT protections that had recently been passed in Nashville.

If McCoy truly wanted consistent nondiscrimination policies across the state of Nebraska, he would propose a bill that protected sexual orientation and gender identity for the entire state. That he’s seeking to prevent such protections demonstrates his commitment to making sure LGBT people’s identities are enough to disqualify them from employment. (HT: Aksarbent.)

Green

Keystone Rider Delays Process For Rerouting The Controversial Pipeline

By Amanda Peterson Beadle on Jan 10, 2012 at 3:30 pm

When Congress finally approved the payroll tax cut extension in December, it had a policy rider attached requiring President Obama to make a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days. But the requirement is now causing confusion that could slow the review process because the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) said it will take at least six months to choose and approve a new route — much more than Obama’s 60-day window. State officials will work with TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to build the pipeline, to find an alternate route for the pipeline to avoid a major water source in the state, the Ogalala aquifer.

But Inside Climate News reports that before a new route can be set, DEQ and TransCanada need a memorandum from the State Department that outlines the agency’s involvement in the process, which could slow the process while they wait on it:

TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard said the company conducted some aerial flyovers in early December, along with on-the-ground surveys on public roads. “[But] we’re not really in the full-blown field stage yet,” he said. “We have to have that memorandum of understanding … there’s just been too many surprises. We don’t want to look at potential routes if we don’t understand the process.”

DEQ spokesman Brian McManus said the State Department is working with the DEQ to draft the memorandum, but he does not know when it will be finalized. [...]

McManus said his agency will proceed with the reroute regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C.

“We’re just carrying out the role that was described to us by the Nebraska legislature,” he said. “We’ll deal with the federal [implications] in late February, depending on what decisions are made.”

Before Republicans attached the Keystone rider to the payroll tax cut, Obama had pushed back making a decision on the pipeline so that the State Department could consider alternate routes and other impacts. The pipeline would carry 830,000 gallons of heavy crude oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast, and despite lofty claims about the jobs the pipeline will create, the Keystone XL project is unlikely to be a job creator.

Green

Newt Gingrich Calls Nebraskans ‘Utterly Irrational’ For Delaying Keystone XL

By Brad Johnson on Dec 16, 2011 at 9:43 am

Nebraska rancher Randy Thompson, Keystone XL opponent.

At an Iowa debate last night, Republican presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich bashed the decision to extend review of the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Spurred by intense, bipartisan opposition in Nebraska to the pipeline’s proposed route over the Ogallala Aquifer, the State Department decided that alternate routes needed to be assessed. After an emergency legislative session called by Republican governor David Heineman, the state of Nebraska has begun its own environmental review. The Canadian tar sands company behind the pipeline, TransCanada, has said it will redirect the pipeline away from the sensitive Sandhills.

However, Gingrich dismissed the will of the people of Nebraska, attacking President Obama for threatening a veto of the Republican Keystone XL poison pill in the payroll tax cut bill:

The president of the United States cannot figure out that it is — I’m using mild words here — utterly irrational to say, “I am going to veto a middle-class tax cut to protect left-wing environmental extremists in San Francisco,” so that we’re going to kill American jobs, weaken American energy, make us more vulnerable to the Iranians, and do it in a way that makes no sense to any normal rational American.

Watch it:

The farmers and ranchers of Nebraska who stood up to the foreign tar sands company TransCanada might not agree that their opposition to unlimited foreign oil greed means they aren’t a “normal rational American.”

In fact, it’s the decision to rush Keystone XL that Nebraskans think is “utterly irrational.” “We do not even have a new route out of the Sandhills yet, and they want to rush the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline,” said Bruce Boettcher, landowner and rancher in the Sandhills, in a statement to ThinkProgress Green. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

“Not only will this pipeline risk jobs of our farmers and ranchers, it is built as an export pipe sending tarsands to Latin America and Asia. If Newt wants a real education on this issue, we invite him to work just one day on a ranch in the Sandhills,” Nebraska activist Jane Kleeb tells ThinkProgress Green.

NEWS FLASH

Nebraska Governor Hires Anti-Government Activists To Implement Health Care Reform | The New Nebraska Network reports that Michael Sciullo and John Paul Sabby, two policy analysts recruited by Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman (R-NE) to help with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), were previously anti-government activists with the anti-ACA Young Americans for Liberty. During an interview at an anti-government protest last year, Sciullo said that “government is always oppression.” A few months later, Heineman hired Scuiloo and Sabby to implement the very law they had been protesting.

– Karl Singer

By Guest Blogger on Nov 2, 2011 at 5:58 pm

NEWS FLASH

Nebraska’s Catholic Conference: Therapists Should Be Able To Refuse Service To Gays, Deny Referrals | Jim Cunningham, the executive director of the Nebraska Catholic Conference, is insisting that “psychologists, therapists and other licensed counselors should be able to refuse to treat clients because of religious or moral convictions and not have to refer them to another therapist.” According to the AP, the NCC’s concern “rose largely from an Iowa Supreme Court ruling that allowed same-sex marriage, raising the prospect that gay couples could come to Nebraska therapists for marriage counseling.” State social workers, psychologists and family therapists are responding to the demand by asking Nebraska to adopt rules “that would require certain mental health professionals to offer referrals to gay patients if they refuse to treat them because of religious beliefs.”

Justice

Nebraska GOP Backs Mini-Electoral College Rigging Plan

By Ian Millhiser on Sep 19, 2011 at 5:30 pm

Nebraska is one of just two states which allocates its Electoral College votes by congressional district — a fact that enabled President Obama to win one electoral vote in the state despite losing the state as a whole in 2008. The Nebraska Republican Party, however, just voted to twist its own lawmaker’s arms to prevent this from happening again in 2012:

[T]he [Republican state central] committee approved a resolution that would deny party support to any Republican state senator who fails to support legislation returning Nebraska to a winner-take-all presidential electoral vote system.

An ancillary effect of that action, primarily designed to wipe out any Democratic opportunity to pick up the 2nd Congressional District electoral vote for the second presidential election in a row, could be depression of Democratic activity in the Omaha district to [Sen. Ben] Nelson’s disadvantage.

As a matter of electoral fairness, there is no reason why Nebraska should use a different system than any other state — and, indeed, it would undermine the legitimacy of a second Obama term if the only reason Obama won reelection was a bizarre quirk in one state’s law. Nevertheless, the timing of the Nebraska GOP’s decision to eliminate this quirk before a hotly contested election suggests that it has little to do with preserving the legitimacy of 2012′s winner and everything to do with manipulating the state’s law to the GOP’s advantage.

Moreover, the GOP’s plan to make a solid red state a winner-take-all state stands in stark contrast to their plan to force blue Pennsylvania to give away as many of a dozen of its electoral votes to whoever wins the Republican presidential primary. As Alexander Burns explains, “a voter could be forgiven for thinking lawmakers are trying to tinker with the rules of the 2012 race for purely partisan reasons.”

Green

Yet Another Pro-Keystone XL Pipeline Front Group Set Up In Nebraska

By Lee Fang on Sep 7, 2011 at 9:46 am

Stacy Thompson, a Minnesota-based consultant, working to create a pro-Keystone XL pipeline "grassroots" group in Nebraska

Last week, lobbyists in Washington, DC announced the creation of yet another front group in Nebraska to support the approval of the controversial Keystone XL, a pipeline running through the Midwest from tar sands mining sites in Canada to refineries in Texas. Given its central location underneath the proposed expansion route for the Keystone XL, Nebraska has become a flash point in the debate over approval of the plan.

To counteract the broad opposition to the pipeline, oil lobbyists have paid special attention to Nebraska. As ThinkProgress reported, the American Petroleum Institute, an oil lobbying federation that counts many foreign oil companies as paying members, has set up fake citizens groups to support the pipeline (a version for Nebraska, called the “Nebraska Energy Forum,” can be found here). Now, the U.S. Chamber, a lobbying association funded by oil companies and other fossil fuel polluters, has announced its own astroturf effort in Nebraska:

LINCOLN — The U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy and key Nebraska business leaders today launched the “Partnership to Fuel America,” (www.fuelingus.org) in Nebraska, a major new initiative designed to build a stronger foundation for the U.S. – Canadian energy relationship. [...]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations.

The press release for “Partnership to Fuel America” is filled with falsehoods. For one thing, the Chamber has already admitted that its claim of representing 3 million businesses is a lie. Second, the new group isn’t even managed from Lincoln, Nebraska. In fact, ThinkProgress has learned that the group is orchestrated by a Minnesota-based lobbying firm called Public Affairs Company. A call to the firm confirmed that Stacy Thompson, a Minneapolis-based Republican consultant, is really behind the Nebraska pipeline fake citizens group. Moreover, though the release claims the pipeline will help the local economy, a single spill could forever doom Nebraska’s agricultural industry by poisoning the water supply.

Backlash to the pipeline is growing every day. Conservative Gov. Dave Heineman (R-NE) even fired of a letter on Aug. 31 to administration officials broadcasting his opposition to the current plan. Reacting to a groundswell of opposition, Heineman, ordinarily no friend of the environmental movement, stated blunted: “I am opposed to the proposed route of this pipeline … 254 miles of the pipeline would come through Nebraska and be situated directly over the Ogallala Aquifer.” Gov. Peter Shumlin (D-VT) and former Vice President Al Gore have also spoken out against the pipeline. But when even a conservative Republican governor leans against the pipeline, it’s no wonder oil companies are working to make multiple political groups to give the appearance of public support for the project.

Update

Joining Heineman, Nebraska Sens. Mike Johanns (R) and Ben Nelson (D) also urged Obama to reject the pipeline proposal. Nebraska Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R) also opposes the pipeline and urges “a comprehensive environmental review.”

NEWS FLASH

Keystone XL Tar Sands Action Day Three: Nebraskans Sit In | Nebraskans who will be directly impacted by the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline if President Obama approves it are prepared to risk arrest at day three of the Tar Sands Action at the White House. The pipeline would run over the Nebraska Sand Hills, putting fresh water supplies at risk. Over the first two days of the sit-in, 110 Americans have been arrested and jailed.

Update

“I’ve held numerous positions and public office in Washington but my current position feels like one of the most important.” — speaking from jail, Gus Speth, co-founder of NRDC, chair of President Carter’s CEQ, founder of WRI, administrator of the U.N. Development Programme, dean of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.


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