Obama All but Calls Cosby a Serial Rapist
For months, comedian Bill Cosby has come under relentless attack amid allegations that he raped dozens of women over the years after slipping them drugs. As the controversy grew, some on Capitol Hill questioned whether something should be done to strip the long-celebrated actor of a Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded him in 2002 during the Bush administration.
Today at a White House news conference, President Obama abruptly veered from an extensive defense of the Iran nuclear deal to a thinly veiled denunciation of Cosby as a serial rapist. In response to a reporter’s question of whether he would consider rescinding the medal, Obama said, “There’s no precedent for revoking a medal,” and that “we don’t have the mechanism.”
Then, after noting that he rarely publicly discusses pending civil law suits that might result in criminal charges, he made this startling pronouncement: “I’ll say this: If you give a woman -- or a man for that matter -- without his or her knowledge a drug and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”
It was a dramatic moment as the first African American president in U.S. history denounced from the White House pulpit the conduct of one of the most prominent and (once) beloved black actors and comedians of modern times.
Related: Bill Cosby's Moralizing Comes Back to Haunt Him
Cosby and his lawyers for months have dismissed as fantasy claims by more than two dozen women that they had been sexually assaulted by the actor over the past several decades – frequently after having been given knock-out drugs to make them groggy or put them to sleep.
But this ‘he said-she said’ controversy came to an end earlier this month after Cosby had admitted in a deposition giving Quaaludes to women he wanted to have sex with.
The documents, dating back to 2005, stem from a civil lawsuit filed by Andrea Constand -- one of the dozens of women who have publicly accused the comedian of sexual assault. The records were made public after The Associated Press went to court to compel their release.
Following that report, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said it was an outrage that Cosby continued to hold the highest civilian honor in America. In a statement to Politico, a spokeswoman for Gillibrand said Cosby's medal must be revoked "because we need to set a clear example that sexual assault will not be tolerated in this country."
Obama apparently agrees with the senators, but just doesn’t know what he could do to take the medal back.
Big Ad Buys to Push Tax Reform
Two conservative groups are spending millions to promote an overhaul of the tax code.
The American Action Network announced Thursday that it will spend $2 million on a new TV ad featuring a Midwestern mom who says her family is “living paycheck to paycheck” and that a middle class tax cut would give them “piece of mind.” The ad will air in 28 congressional districts currently held by Republicans. Americans for Prosperity, backed by the Koch brothers, will spend $4.5 million on ads that promote tax reform while criticizing three red-state Democratic senators -- Claire McCaskill (MO), Tammy Baldwin (WI) and Joe Donnelly (IN).
Some States Will See Dramatic Obamacare Price Hikes in 2018
Premiums for Affordable Care Act policies are set to rocket higher in many places in 2018. Many of the rates for next year won't be made public until November, but The New York Times found that Georgia has already approved increases of up to 57.5 percent, while the average rate in Florida will jump by about 45 percent and the average in New Mexico will climb by 30 percent. Minnesota, on the other hand, announced this week that a new state reinsurance program has helped stabilize rates and price changes for individual plans in the state will range from a decrease of 38 percent to an increase of 3 percent.
Confusion stemming from the White House and Congress, including uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will continue to make cost-sharing payments to insurers, is largely driving the increases. Keep in mind, though, that about 85 percent of people who buy insurance through Obamacare exchanges won’t feel the price hikes because their plans are subsidized — but the federal government will have to shell out more for those subsidies.
A Tax Reform 'Game Changer'?
The National Association of Home Builders says it's open to changes to the mortgage-interest deduction — a major policy shift that could have significant implications for the Trump administration's proposed tax reform, Politico's Lorraine Woellert reports. The break benefiting homebuyers was preserved as part of the tax framework released last week, but the reform plan also calls for increasing the standard deduction, a shift that would make the mortgage interest deduction less valuable. The National Association of Realtors last week criticized the administration's plan, even though it left the mortgage tax break in place. "This proposal recommends a backdoor elimination of the mortgage interest deduction for all but the top 5 percent who would still itemize their deductions," the group's president said.
Warren Buffett: Eliminating the Estate Tax Would Be a ‘Terrible Mistake’
The world’s second-wealthiest man is worth about $75 billion, but he isn’t worried about the government taking a bite out of his estate after he’s gone. In fact, Buffett thinks the estate tax, which applies to just a few thousand estates a year, is a reasonable way to allocate resources, especially in a society in which the rich have gotten much richer over the last few decades. Buffett’s main concern is the emergence of “dynastic wealth” that “goes totally against what built this country, what this country stands for.” In an interview Tuesday, Buffett criticized the latest GOP proposal to get rid of the estate tax: "If they pass the bill they're talking about, I could leave $75 billion to a bunch of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And if I left it to 35 of them, they'd each have a couple billion dollars ... Is that a great way to allocate resources in the United States?” (CNBC)
Treasury Pulls a Paper That Contradicts Mnuchin’s Corporate Tax Argument
The Treasury Department has taken down from its website a 2012 analysis that found that business owners and shareholders — not workers — bear most of the burden of corporate taxes. The findings of the report run counter to the argument Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been making in selling the benefits of a reduction in the corporate tax rate. The Trump administration’s tax reform framework calls for dropping the corporate rate from 35 percent to 20 percent.
The 2012 report from the Office of Tax Analysis found that “workers pay 18 percent of the corporate tax while owners of capital pay 82 percent” — figures that are “in line with many economists’ views and close to estimates from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
A Treasury spokeswoman told the Journal: “The paper was a dated staff analysis from the previous administration. It does not represent our current thinking and analysis.”
Jason Furman, who was chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, tweeted that the goal of the technical paper series that included the removed study “was to be more transparent about the methodology Treasury used for its modeling and analysis.”
Treasury website has 40+ yrs of Tax Working & Technical Papers. This is the only one removed https://t.co/QzLTSHderk https://t.co/MFZRd7HoFQ
— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) September 29, 2017