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A missed opportunity, not a disaster; what the polls are showing about the debate.

  By 2024, Elections and Voting, Politics

Two post-debate poll results that allow for comparison to pre-debate polls. Almost no change compared to polls before the debate. Ipsos: Biden down 1.5; Trump up .4; Biden ahead by 2.8 Morning Consult: Biden up 1; Trump unchanged, Biden ahead by 1 Other post-debate polls show a very close race. No evidence that the debate cause a significant drop in Biden’s support. Data for progress Trump 48-Biden 45; no recent previous polls Survey USA Trump 45- Biden 43; no recent previous poll Polls do show most people think Trump won the debate whatever that means and more are worried about Biden’s age. But no sharp changes. Why didn’t the debate have more impact? 1. Biden’s age was already baked into the result. As I pointed out above, the real harm is that Biden didn’t do anything to change concerns about this age. But those concerns were not much greater and… Continue reading

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Would another candidate be stronger than Biden?

  By 2024, Elections and Voting

Data for Progress–a really good pollster I’ve worked with a few times in the past–has a new poll showing that no other Democratic candidate does any better against Trump than Biden. Two important notes: 1. The undecideds go up a both D and Trump drop a bit with other candidates. Many of the alternatives to Biden are not well known. So they would have a a greater opportunity to pick up more support among undecideds than Biden does. If Democrats chose someone I think is a really good candidate, like Gretchen Witmer, I think that as she became better known (and assuming no skeletons we don’t know about) she’d win by five points, despite the handicap of being a woman. (Most sexist aren’t voting for Democrats no matter what gender they are.) 2. Trump’s support is pretty static. He tops out at 48%. That suggests that those undecideds are not… Continue reading

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What Happens If Biden Steps Down

  By 2024, Elections, Politics

I mentioned in a previous post that whether it makes sense for Biden to withdraw depends on what we think the process of replacing him will look like and who the likely candidate would be. Here are my thoughts about that first part. To begin with, the only way the nomination is opened up is if luminaries like Obama and Clymer, along with Jill Biden can convince the president to withdraw. I think that’s unlikely. If that does happen, then there is going to be a wide open process involving 6 or 7 candidates that will likely involve some debate as well as many meetings with groups of delegates over a six to eight week period. I imagine that Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsome, and Gretchen Witmer will run. Josh Shapiro, Cory Booker, Amy Kobuchar and Elizabeth Warren may run as well. Who knows, maybe Bernie Sanders will jump… Continue reading

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A Point of Extreme Political Danger

  By Resisting Trump, Tump, US

I wrote this in 2019. “Trump is like a Bond villain. Totally over the top. Bent on world domination and the accumulation of riches without end because of a terrible psychic injury in childhood. Determined to dominate all the men and sleep with all the women around him because of the same injury. Utterly self-involved and untrustworthy. In other words, almost totally unbelievable. Except that it is real we are stuck with him for the foreseeable future.” I have seen no reason to change my mind except to say that, even though I understood Trump’s appeal in teh summer of 2016, I did not expect that his hold over the this country would be so impossible to shake. Trump is not by any means a political genius. His hold over half the country is a a product of the gruesome fit between his psychic flaws and the deep, long-standing flaws… Continue reading

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Statement on Child Tax Credit Expansion

  By Child Tax Credit, Penn Policy Center, Statement, US

STATEMENT on Child Tax Credit Expansion- Marc Stier. Executive Director, Pennsylvania Policy Center The House Ways and Means Committee today voted in favor of bi-partisan tax legislation that includes an expansion of the child tax credit along with the restoration of some expired business tax credits. The legislation is the product of negotiations between the Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Jason Smith (R-MO) and the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden (D-OR). This legislation would benefit 16 million children in low-income families, or 1 in 5 of children under 17, including 506,000 children in Pennsylvania. It would especially help Black, Latino, and Asian children, whose parents are overrepresented in low-paid jobs due to structural barriers to opportunity. In the first year, the expansion of the child tax credit would lift 400,000 children nationwide- and roughly 16,000 kids in Pennsylvania- out of poverty. Additionally, another 3… Continue reading

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Statement in response to the Basic Education Funding Commission Report

  By Education, K-12 Education in PA, Penn Policy Center, Statement

The adoption of the Basic Education Funding Commission Report yesterday is a major step forward in meeting our constitutional and moral responsibility to fund education fully and fairly in Pennsylvania. The first step in this process was a Court decision by a Republican judge holding that our current system of funding education is not constitutional. Yesterday, the state took a second step. We are grateful that a majority of the Commission, including the Governor and the members of the General Assembly, provided a detailed and specific plan to meet the constitutional and moral requirement of adequately and equitably funding our schools—a plan we believe is fair. The plan comes very close to meeting our expectations. It sets a plausible and defensible standard for evaluating the adequacy of funding in every school district. By that standard, we need $5.4 billion per year in new funding to close the adequacy gap in a… Continue reading

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ITEP Report: Tax Fairness in Pennsylvania

  By Pennsylvania State Taxes, Presentation

Every few years, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy releases its survey of taxes in the states, “Who Pays?” Click here to read the seventh edition, released on January 9, 2024.  A summary of the data for Pennsylvania is found below. This year’s report continues to tell the same story that we have seen for decades. Taxes in Pennsylvania are among the most upside-down in the entire country. The report shows that The lowest-income 20 percent of taxpayers face a state and local tax rate that is 152 percent higher than the top 1 percent of households. The average effective state and local tax rate is 15.1 percent for the lowest-income 20 percent of individuals and families, 11.4 percent for the middle 20 percent, and 6 percent for the top 1 percent. Pennsylvania has the highest tax rate on low-income families in the entire country at 15.1%. Pennsylvania has… Continue reading

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Press Release: Taxes in Pennsylvania Are Upside-Down

  By Penn Policy Center, Pennsylvania State Taxes, Statement, Taxation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 10, 2024  Contact: Kirstin Snow at Penn Policy Center snow@pennpolicy.org or Jon Whiten at ITEP jon@itep.org. RELEASE: Pennsylvania’s Tax System Exacerbates Inequality, In-Depth National Study Finds State Has the 4th-most Regressive Tax Code in the Nation Harrisburg, PA — Pennsylvania’s tax system is upside-down, with the wealthy paying a far lower share of their income to taxes than low- and middle-income families. That’s according to the latest edition of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy’s Who Pays?, the only distributional analysis of tax systems in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In sharing the data, Marc Stier said, “The new report from our national partner, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, shows that Pennsylvania has one of the most upside-down state and local tax systems in the country. We should be ashamed to live in a state with the highest rate of… Continue reading

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Why Claudine Gay Unjustly Came Under Fire I: Her Testimony Before Congress

  By Jew Hatred, White Supremacy and Structural Racism

In the drastically over-simplified world of public media, it’s easy for narratives to take off that bear little relationship to the truth. And it’s very hard for even those of us who are attentive to politics to delve beneath the headlines or whole stories in even our “leading” newspapers to find the truth. I’m sorry I didn’t pay enough attention to the story about the presidents of Harvard and Penn testimony. I’ve now looked more deeply into what former Harvard President Gay said in her written and oral testimony. And there is absolutely nothing objectionable let alone anti-Semitic about it. It was a good statement. In answering Rep. Stefanik’s leading hypothetical question she tried to do what a good teacher and intellectual should do, and point out that words and actions have meaning in context and that any set of words have to be evaluated in their context. That’s the… Continue reading