Trump allows dairy farms a path for migrant labor, upsetting anti-immigration camp: President Donald Trump was expected to announce the expansion of a guest-worker program to the dairy industry at a Wisconsin event. Instead, the news came out in a press release. - "However, Van Orden, a Trump ally who also took credit for persuading the White House to expand the H-2A program, said the policy announcement was delayed because it wasn’t ready in time for Trump’s visit to Wisconsin." [ed. note: lol that's never stopped him before]
What a ‘mansion tax’ did to Los Angeles: Taxes that narrowly target the rich are not the best way for cities to broadly help the poor. - "Any tax will create some combination of two outcomes: new revenue and changed behavior. Which of these results is stronger depends on how the tax is designed.
"This is where things went wrong. Measure ULA’s goal was to raise revenue, but it was written like a tax to change behavior. Revenue-maximizing taxes tend to have low rates and broad bases. ULA had the opposite. It applied a high rate (transfer taxes rarely exceed 2 percent) to a very narrow base (just 4 percent of the city’s sales are over $5 million). The narrow base was a political advantage but a fiscal liability. It made ULA’s revenue reliant on a small group of people who, precisely because they weren’t everyday owner-occupants, could avoid the tax by choosing not to sell.
When the tax took effect, higher-end sales plunged, and stayed down. Measure ULA, which was projected to raise up to $1.1 billion annually, has averaged just one-third of that. It has also diminished other local revenue. In California, property can’t be reassessed unless it changes hands, so ULA, by reducing transactions, is depressing the local property tax revenue that supports schools and other services."
This voter ID law would spell trouble from Florida to Texas: The Save America Act has a worthy goal. But states can run elections on their own. - "The bill’s design prefers IDs that Democrats tend to have more than Republicans do. It privileges passports, which Democrats own at higher rates than Republicans, and removes concealed carry licenses as permissible ID in several states. The bill also adds paperwork for married women who change their names, who are disproportionately Republicans. And it ends online voter registration for rural — mostly Republican — voters. If Republicans are hoping to gain an electoral edge with this bill, they are sorely mistaken."
Vanilla Ice Knows When America Was Great: To celebrate the country’s 250th birthday, the rapper wants to transport us to another decade. - "A drug-fueled downfall ensued, culminating in a nearly lethal dose of heroin and other substances after a day of jet skiing on July 4, 1994. He told journalists that he'd felt like a 'sellout' who'd been marketed as a pretty-faced simpleton, when really he was a survivor from the streets. 'I've faced a lot of adversity,' he told me. 'Probably more than any person to ever play a record or become a musician.'" [ed. note: l o l]
