America's tax policy limits poverty------- Ramesh Bonoro

America's tax policy limits poverty
Ramesh Bonoro
A recent report by the UN Human Rights Council criticized the United States for ignoring "extreme poverty and human rights."
In this regard, the United Nations rapporteur, Philip Alston, referred to policies on taxation and welfare. The Los Angeles Times considered it a "condemnation report". The report showed that the United Nations is wasting a lot of money, much of it from the United States, on political propaganda.
The Alston report confirmed that the tax cuts implemented in December 2017 benefited the wealthy, without making it clear to confirm his point of view.
The tax cuts have helped to ease the federal tax burden of each wage bracket. People whose annual income exceeds $ 1 million will see a decline in federal taxes by a lower percentage than others.
But determining the right way to evaluate this depends on your vision of how to take advantage of those taxes. The report of the UN Commission claims that there are compelling facts to confirm the case, and worse, the report suggests that federal taxes are not at all escalating.
The health care report came worse than before. The Congressional Budget Office discovered last year that a bill that would change the Obama Care plan would reduce the number of health care beneficiaries by 22 million. The targeted decline came after the abolition of fines imposed on people without health care.
Many conservatives argued that the Congressional Budget Office had exaggerated the impact of those fines. In November, the budget office said it was about to reduce its estimates. Alston shortened the case by saying that members of the Democratic Party were seeking to add about 20 million poor and middle-class to a non-health-care segment.
What is happening here is a triple distortion; the report takes advantage of an exaggerated number, ignores the role of voluntary choice, and considers that members of the Republican Party are seeking a result, while they do not believe it can happen from the ground up.
In his debate on poverty, Alston once again adopted the traditional leftist line, while ignoring the counter-argument. He pointed out that trillions of dollars spent by the government in the fight against poverty have been an important factor in reducing poverty.
Alston hypothesized that this was enough to refute the idea that the reform of social welfare programs was counterproductive, and therefore justified the use of sarcastic statements about people who believed these programs were supposed to be "more efficient" and "targeted" specific segments . The report presents the reform of the bipartisan social welfare system of the 1990s as a humanitarian disaster that has increased the number of people living in extreme poverty - less than $ 2 a day. But this trend is beginning to fade with the use of non-cash benefits such as food vouchers, according to Scott Winship, a researcher at the Manhattan Institute, in a study published in 2016. The researcher concluded that the rate of child poverty has fallen to unprecedented levels since the enactment of the Welfare Reform Act Social. Poverty rates have declined significantly since Trump came to power because of the state of good economy, a point not addressed by the United Nations' Alston analysis. So the Reuters news agency has every excuse to understand the report as follows: "Poor America is prosperous in the Trump era."
"There is a real need to convince the majority of Americans that taxes are not only in their interest but also play a role in the growth process," the report concluded by calling on Americans to not pay high taxes.
The United States is doing better than the United Nations suggests. For example, the United Nations decision did not notice that detention rates had declined. But none of this progress can be self-gratifying, because there are many ways of changing that we can fight poverty. There are two policies adopted by many conservatives and liberals: the reduction of many requirements for professional permits, the easing of restrictions on housing, and the United Nations has ignored both policies.
We can use a logical analysis of how to tap and build on the successful US policy of fighting poverty and how to reform what has not worked. But we must look elsewhere than the UN Human Rights Council for this purpose.
- In agreement with «Bloomberg»