The Pronk Pops Show 674, May 6, 2016, Story 1: The Coming Obama Recession and What Will Trump Do About It? — It is The Economy Stupid — Only The Shadow Knows — Survive To 2020 — Fair Tax Less — Videos
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The Pronk Pops Show 674, May 6, 2016, Story 1: The Coming Obama Recession and What Will Trump Do About It? — It is The Economy Stupid — Only The Shadow Knows — Survive To 2020 — Fair Tax Less — Videos
FairTax: Fire Up Our Economic Engine
Freedom from the IRS! – FairTax Explained in Detail
The FairTax: It’s Time
Trump uses tax plan to push back on criticisms
Donald Trump explains his 2016 tax plan
Donald Trump unveils his tax plan at Trump Tower
The pros and cons of Donald Trump’s tax plan
Obama Economy: Weak Growth – 160K Jobs Added In April – Stuart Varney
Donald Trump Is Right On US Debt
LIMBAUGH: In Trump’s World A Minimum Wage Would Be IRRELEVANT
Trump Warning Massive Economic Collapse in 2016
Trump: I would leave minimum wage to the states
In Reversal Trump Expresses Openness to Raising Minimum Wage – 5/4/16
Donald Trump: We cannot raise the minimum wage
Keiser Report: ‘Making America Great Again’ Quest (E908)
Keiser Report: Debt Slavery (E906)
Keiser Report: Most Destructive Force in the Universe (E901)
Current Economic Collapse News Brief – Episode 959
President Obama Delivers a Statement on the Economy
Obama Does It Again: Fourth Worst Economy In U.S. History
Donald Trump’s Blueprint For The Economy If Elected President – Road to 2016 – Hannity
How does Donald Trump’s economic plan rank?
Donald Trump: “We’re Sitting On An Economic Bubble; The Country Is Headed For A Massive Recession”
Jim Rogers It’s Time to Prepare – 2016 will be bad for the dollar, US economy & stock market!
Jim Rogers: America’s İmminent Recession, America’s Tax System, China’s Bubble
David Stockman’s – Fed Fix Demand Their Resignations
Peter Schiff – Great Recession 2016 – Financial Crisis
Stefan Molyneux and Peter Schiff The Causes Of The Economic Collapse
David Stockman: The World Economy Has Stopped Growing And Is Headed Into A Depression
David Stockman – Recession nearing in this unsafe world
Harry Dent on the U S economy and Donald Trump’s comments on a possible recession
Economic Collapse – Analyst Issues a Blunt Reality Check to America
April jobs report takes June rate hike off the table
New jobs report shows hiring slowed in April
April jobs report disappoints with 160,000 jobs
Here’s Every Reason the U.S. Economy Could Hit a Recession
Donald Trump On How To Revive The U.S. Economy
Donald Trump on Economic Recovery (1991)
The Shadow Knows
TAX REFORM THAT WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
The Goals Of Donald J. Trump’s Tax Plan
Too few Americans are working, too many jobs have been shipped overseas, and too many middle class families cannot make ends meet. This tax plan directly meets these challenges with four simple goals:
- Tax relief for middle class Americans: In order to achieve the American dream, let people keep more money in their pockets and increase after-tax wages.
- Simplify the tax code to reduce the headaches Americans face in preparing their taxes and let everyone keep more of their money.
- Grow the American economy by discouraging corporate inversions, adding a huge number of new jobs, and making America globally competitive again.
- Doesn’t add to our debt and deficit, which are already too large.
The Trump Tax Plan Achieves These Goals
- If you are single and earn less than $25,000, or married and jointly earn less than $50,000, you will not owe any income tax. That removes nearly 75 million households – over 50% – from the income tax rolls. They get a new one page form to send the IRS saying, “I win,” those who would otherwise owe income taxes will save an average of nearly $1,000 each.
- All other Americans will get a simpler tax code with four brackets – 0%, 10%, 20% and 25% – instead of the current seven. This new tax code eliminates the marriage penalty and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II.
- No business of any size, from a Fortune 500 to a mom and pop shop to a freelancer living job to job, will pay more than 15% of their business income in taxes. This lower rate makes corporate inversions unnecessary by making America’s tax rate one of the best in the world.
- No family will have to pay the death tax. You earned and saved that money for your family, not the government. You paid taxes on it when you earned it.
The Trump Tax Plan Is Revenue Neutral
The Trump tax cuts are fully paid for by:
- Reducing or eliminating most deductions and loopholes available to the very rich.
- A one-time deemed repatriation of corporate cash held overseas at a significantly discounted 10% tax rate, followed by an end to the deferral of taxes on corporate income earned abroad.
- Reducing or eliminating corporate loopholes that cater to special interests, as well as deductions made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rate on corporations and business income. We will also phase in a reasonable cap on the deductibility of business interest expenses.
DETAILS OF DONALD J. TRUMP’S TAX PLAN
America needs a bold, simple and achievable plan based on conservative economic principles. This plan does that with needed tax relief for all Americans, especially the working poor and middle class, pro-growth tax reform for all sizes of businesses, and fiscally responsible steps to ensure this plan does not add to our enormous debt and deficit.
This plan simplifies the tax code by taking nearly 50% of current filers off the income tax rolls entirely and reducing the number of tax brackets from seven to four for everyone else. This plan also reduces or eliminates loopholes used by the very rich and special interests made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rates on individuals and companies.
The Trump Tax Plan: A Simpler Tax Code For All Americans
When the income tax was first introduced, just one percent of Americans had to pay it. It was never intended as a tax most Americans would pay. The Trump plan eliminates the income tax for over 73 million households. 42 million households that currently file complex forms to determine they don’t owe any income taxes will now file a one page form saving them time, stress, uncertainty and an average of $110 in preparation costs. Over 31 million households get the same simplification and keep on average nearly $1,000 of their hard-earned money.
For those Americans who will still pay the income tax, the tax rates will go from the current seven brackets to four simpler, fairer brackets that eliminate the marriage penalty and the AMT while providing the lowest tax rate since before World War II:
| Income Tax Rate | Long Term Cap Gains/ Dividends Rate | Single Filers | Married Filers | Heads of Household |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | 0% | $0 to $25,000 | $0 to $50,000 | $0 to $37,500 |
| 10% | 0% | $25,001 to $50,000 | $50,001 to $100,000 | $37,501 to $75,000 |
| 20% | 15% | $50,001 to $150,000 | $100,001 to $300,000 | $75,001 to $225,000 |
| 25% | 20% | $150,001 and up | $300,001 and up | $225,001 and up |
With this huge reduction in rates, many of the current exemptions and deductions will become unnecessary or redundant. Those within the 10% bracket will keep all or most of their current deductions. Those within the 20% bracket will keep more than half of their current deductions. Those within the 25% bracket will keep fewer deductions. Charitable giving and mortgage interest deductions will remain unchanged for all taxpayers.
Simplifying the tax code and cutting every American’s taxes will boost consumer spending, encourage savings and investment, and maximize economic growth.
Business Tax Reform To Encourage Jobs And Spur Economic Growth
Too many companies – from great American brands to innovative startups – are leaving America, either directly or through corporate inversions. The Democrats want to outlaw inversions, but that will never work. Companies leaving is not the disease, it is the symptom. Politicians in Washington have let America fall from the best corporate tax rate in the industrialized world in the 1980’s (thanks to Ronald Reagan) to the worst rate in the industrialized world. That is unacceptable. Under the Trump plan, America will compete with the world and win by cutting the corporate tax rate to 15%, taking our rate from one of the worst to one of the best.
This lower tax rate cannot be for big business alone; it needs to help the small businesses that are the true engine of our economy. Right now, freelancers, sole proprietors, unincorporated small businesses and pass-through entities are taxed at the high personal income tax rates. This treatment stifles small businesses. It also stifles tax reform because efforts to reduce loopholes and deductions available to the very rich and special interests end up hitting small businesses and job creators as well. The Trump plan addresses this challenge head on with a new business income tax rate within the personal income tax code that matches the 15% corporate tax rate to help these businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers grow and prosper.
These lower rates will provide a tremendous stimulus for the economy – significant GDP growth, a huge number of new jobs and an increase in after-tax wages for workers.
The Trump Tax Plan Ends The Unfair Death Tax
The death tax punishes families for achieving the American dream. Therefore, the Trump plan eliminates the death tax.
The Trump Tax Plan Is Fiscally Responsible
The Trump tax cuts are fully paid for by:
- Reducing or eliminating deductions and loopholes available to the very rich, starting by steepening the curve of the Personal Exemption Phaseout and the Pease Limitation on itemized deductions. The Trump plan also phases out the tax exemption on life insurance interest for high-income earners, ends the current tax treatment of carried interest for speculative partnerships that do not grow businesses or create jobs and are not risking their own capital, and reduces or eliminates other loopholes for the very rich and special interests. These reductions and eliminations will not harm the economy or hurt the middle class. Because the Trump plan introduces a new business income rate within the personal income tax code, they will not harm small businesses either.
- A one-time deemed repatriation of corporate cash held overseas at a significantly discounted 10% tax rate. Since we are making America’s corporate tax rate globally competitive, it is only fair that corporations help make that move fiscally responsible. U.S.-owned corporations have as much as $2.5 trillion in cash sitting overseas. Some companies have been leaving cash overseas as a tax maneuver. Under this plan, they can bring their cash home and put it to work in America while benefitting from the newly-lowered corporate tax rate that is globally competitive and no longer requires parking cash overseas. Other companies have cash overseas for specific business units or activities. They can leave that cash overseas, but they will still have to pay the one-time repatriation fee.
- An end to the deferral of taxes on corporate income earned abroad. Corporations will no longer be allowed to defer taxes on income earned abroad, but the foreign tax credit will remain in place because no company should face double taxation.
- Reducing or eliminating some corporate loopholes that cater to special interests, as well as deductions made unnecessary or redundant by the new lower tax rate on corporations and business income. We will also phase in a reasonable cap on the deductibility of business interest expenses.
FairTax
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The FairTax is a proposal to reform the federal tax code of the United States. It would replace all federal income taxes (including the alternative minimum tax, corporate income taxes, and capital gains taxes), payroll taxes(including Social Security and Medicare taxes), gift taxes, and estate taxes with a single broad national consumption tax on retail sales. The Fair Tax Act (H.R. 25/S. 155) would apply a tax, once, at the point of purchase on all new goods and services for personal consumption. The proposal also calls for a monthly payment to all family households of lawful U.S. residents as an advance rebate, or “prebate”, of tax on purchases up to the poverty level.[1][2] First introduced into the United States Congress in 1999, a number of congressional committees have heard testimony on the bill; however, it has not moved from committee and has yet to have any effect on the tax system. In recent years, a tax reform movement has formed behind the FairTax proposal.[3] Attention increased after talk radio personality Neal Boortz and Georgia Congressman John Linderpublished The FairTax Book in 2005 and additional visibility was gained in the 2008 presidential campaign.
As defined in the proposed legislation, the tax rate is 23% for the first year. This percentage is based on the total amount paid including the tax ($23 out of every $100 spent in total). This would be equivalent to a 30% traditional U.S. sales tax ($23 on top of every $77 spent—$100 total).[4] The rate would automatically adjust annually based on federal receipts in the previous fiscal year.[5] With the rebate taken into consideration, the FairTax would be progressive on consumption,[2] but would also be regressive on income at higher income levels (as consumption falls as a percentage of income).[6][7] Opponents argue this would accordingly decrease the tax burden on high-income earners and increase it on the middle class.[4][8] Supporters contend that the plan would effectively tax wealth, increase purchasing power[9][10] and decrease tax burdens by broadening the tax base.
The plan’s supporters state that a consumption tax would increase savings and investment, ease tax compliance and increase economic growth, increase incentives for international business to locate in the US and increase US competitiveness in international trade.[11][12][13] The plan is intended to increase cost transparency for funding the federal government. Supporters believe it would increase civil liberties, benefit theenvironment and effectively tax illegal activity and undocumented immigrants.[11][14] Opponents contend that a consumption tax of this size would be extremely difficult to collect, and would lead to pervasive tax evasion.[4][6]They also argue that the proposed sales tax rate would raise less revenue than the current tax system, leading to an increased budget deficit.[4][15] Other concerns include the proposed repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, removal of tax deduction incentives, transition effects on after-tax savings, incentives on credit use and the loss of tax advantages to state and local bonds.
Rep John Linder holding the 133 page Fair Tax Act of 2007 in contrast to the then-current U.S. tax code and IRS regulations.
The legislation would remove the Internal Revenue Service (after three years), and establish Excise Tax and Sales Tax bureaus in the Department of the Treasury.[16] The states are granted the primary authority for the collection of sales tax revenues and the remittance of such revenues to the Treasury. The plan was created by Americans For Fair Taxation, an advocacy group formed to change the tax system. The group states that, together with economists, it developed the plan and the name “Fair Tax”, based on interviews, polls, and focus groups of the general public.[4] The FairTax legislation has been introduced in the House by Georgia Republicans John Linder(1999–2010) and Rob Woodall (2011–2014),[17] while being introduced in the Senate by Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss (2003–2014).
Linder first introduced the Fair Tax Act (H.R. 2525) on July 14, 1999, to the 106th United States Congress and a substantially similar bill has been reintroduced in each subsequent session of Congress. The bill attracted a total of 56 House and Senate cosponsors in the 108th Congress,[18][19] 61 in the 109th,[20][21] 76 in the 110th,[22][23] 70 in the 111th,[24][25] 78 in the 112th,[26][27] 83 in the 113th (H.R. 25/S. 122), and 81 in the 114th (H.R. 25/S. 155). Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (Republican) had cosponsored the bill in the 109th–110th Congress, but it has not received support from the Democratic leadership.[21][22][28] Democratic Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota and Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia cosponsored and introduced the bill in the 108th Congress, but Peterson is no longer cosponsoring the bill and Miller has left the Senate.[18][19] In the 109th–111th Congress, Representative Dan Boren has been the only Democrat to cosponsor the bill.[20][22] A number of congressional committees have heard testimony on the FairTax, but it has not moved from committee since its introduction in 1999. The legislation was also discussed with President George W. Bush and his Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson.[29]
To become law, the bill will need to be included in a final version of tax legislation from the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, pass both the House and the Senate, and finally be signed by the President. In 2005, President Bush established an advisory panel on tax reform that examined several national sales tax variants including aspects of the FairTax and noted several concerns. These included uncertainties as to the revenue that would be generated, and difficulties of enforcement and administration, which made this type of tax undesirable to recommend in their final report.[8] The panel did not examine the Fairtax as proposed in the legislation. The FairTax received visibility in the 2008 presidential election on the issue of taxes and the IRS, with several candidates supporting the bill.[30][31] A poll in 2009 by Rasmussen Reports found that 43% of Americans would support a national sales tax replacement, with 38% opposed to the idea; the sales tax was viewed as fairer by 52% of Republicans, 44% of Democrats, and 49% of unaffiliateds.[32] President Barack Obama does not support the bill,[33] arguing for more progressive changes to the income and payroll tax systems.
Tax rate
The sales tax rate, as defined in the legislation for the first year, is 23% of the total payment including the tax ($23 of every $100 spent in total—calculated similar to income taxes). This would be equivalent to a 30% traditional U.S. sales tax ($23 on top of every $77 spent—$100 total, or $30 on top of every $100 spent—$130 total).[4] After the first year of implementation, this rate is automatically adjusted annually using a predefined formula reflecting actual federal receipts in the previous fiscal year.
The effective tax rate for any household would be variable due to the fixed monthly tax rebate that are used to rebate taxes paid on purchases up to the poverty level.[2] The tax would be levied on all U.S. retail sales for personal consumption on new goods andservices. Critics argue that the sales tax rate defined in the legislation would not be revenue neutral (that is, it would collect less for the government than the current tax system), and thus would increase the budget deficit, unless government spending were equally reduced.[4]
Sales tax rate
During the first year of implementation, the FairTax legislation would apply a 23% federal retail sales tax on the total transaction value of a purchase; in other words, consumers pay to the government 23 cents of every dollar spent in total (sometimes called tax-inclusive, and presented this way to provide a direct comparison with individual income and employment taxes which reduce a person’s available money before they can make purchases). The equivalent assessed tax rate is 30% if the FairTax is applied to the pre-tax price of a good like traditional U.S. state sales taxes (sometimes called tax-exclusive; this rate is not directly comparable with existing income and employment taxes).[4] After the first year of implementation, this tax rate would be automatically adjusted annually using a formula specified in the legislation that reflects actual federal receipts in the previous fiscal year.[5]
Effective tax rate
A household’s effective tax rate on consumption would vary with the annual expenditures on taxable items and the fixed monthly tax rebate. The rebate would have the greatest effect at low spending levels, where they could lower a household’s effective rate to zero or below.[34] The lowest effective tax rate under the FairTax could be negative due to the rebate for households with annual spending amounts below poverty level spending for a specified household size. At higher spending levels, the rebate has less impact, and a household’s effective tax rate would approach 23% of total spending. A person spending at the poverty level would have an effective tax rate of 0%, whereas someone spending at four times the poverty level would have an effective tax rate of 17.2%.[34] Buying or otherwise receiving items and services not subject to federal taxation (such as a used home or car) can contribute towards a lower effective tax rate. The total amount of spending and the proportion of spending allocated to taxable items would determine a household’s effective tax rate on consumption.[34] If a rate is calculated on income, instead of the tax base, the percentage could exceed the statutory tax rate in a given year.
Monthly tax rebate
| One adult household | Two adult household | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Family Size |
Annual Consumption Allowance |
Annual Prebate |
Monthly Prebate |
Family Size |
Annual Consumption Allowance |
Annual Prebate |
Monthly Prebate |
| 1 person | $11,770 | $2,707 | $226 | couple | $23,540 | $5,414 | $451 |
| and 1 child | $15,930 | $3,664 | $305 | and 1 child | $27,700 | $6,371 | $531 |
| and 2 children | $20,090 | $4,621 | $385 | and 2 children | $31,860 | $7,328 | $611 |
| and 3 children | $24,250 | $5,578 | $465 | and 3 children | $36,020 | $8,285 | $690 |
| and 4 children | $28,410 | $6,534 | $545 | and 4 children | $40,180 | $9,241 | $770 |
| and 5 children | $32,570 | $7,491 | $624 | and 5 children | $44,340 | $10,198 | $850 |
| and 6 children | $36,490 | $8,393 | $699 | and 6 children | $48,500 | $11,155 | $930 |
| and 7 children | $40,890 | $9,405 | $784 | and 7 children | $52,660 | $12,112 | $1,009 |
| The annual consumption allowance is based on the 2015 DHHS Poverty Guidelines as published in theFederal Register, January 22, 2015. There is no marriage penalty as the couple amount is twice the amount that a single adult receives. For families/households with more than 8 persons, add $4,160 to the annual consumption allowance for each additional person. The annual consumption allowance is the amount of spending that is “untaxed” under the FairTax. | |||||||
Under the FairTax, family households of lawful U.S. residents would be eligible to receive a “Family Consumption Allowance” (FCA) based on family size (regardless of income) that is equal to the estimated total FairTax paid on poverty level spending according to the poverty guidelines published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.[1] The FCA is a tax rebate (known as a “prebate” as it would be an advance) paid in twelve monthly installments, adjusted for inflation. The rebate is meant to eliminate the taxation of household necessities and make the plan progressive.[4] Households would register once a year with their sales tax administering authority, providing the names and social security numbers of each household member.[1] The Social Security Administration would disburse the monthly rebate payments in the form of a paper check via U.S. Mail, an electronic funds transfer to a bank account, or a “smartcard” that can be used like a debit card.[1]
Opponents of the plan criticize this tax rebate due to its costs. Economists at the Beacon Hill Institute estimated the overall rebate cost to be $489 billion (assuming 100% participation).[36] In addition, economist Bruce Bartlett has argued that the rebate would create a large opportunity for fraud,[37] treats children disparately, and would constitute awelfare payment regardless of need.[38]
The President’s Advisory Panel for Federal Tax Reform cited the rebate as one of their chief concerns when analyzing their national sales tax, stating that it would be the largestentitlement program in American history, and contending that it would “make most American families dependent on monthly checks from the federal government”.[8][39] Estimated by the advisory panel at approximately $600 billion, “the Prebate program would cost more than all budgeted spending in 2006 on the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, and Interior combined.”[8] Proponents point out that income tax deductions, tax preferences, loopholes,credits, etc. under the current system was estimated at $945 billion by the Joint Committee on Taxation.[36] They argue this is $456 billion more than the FairTax “entitlement” (tax refund) would spend to cover each person’s tax expenses up to the poverty level. In addition, it was estimated for 2005 that the Internal Revenue Service was already sending out $270 billion in refund checks.[36]
Presentation of tax rate
Mathematically, a 23% tax out of $100 yields approximately the same as a 30% tax on $77.
Sales and income taxes behave differently due to differing definitions of tax base, which can make comparisons between the two confusing. Under the existing individual income plus employment (Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid) tax formula, taxes to be paid are included in the base on which the tax rate is imposed (known as tax-inclusive). If an individual’s gross income is $100 and the sum of their income plus employment tax rate is 23%, taxes owed equals $23. Traditional state sales taxes are imposed on a tax base equal to the pre-tax portion of a good’s price (known as tax-exclusive). A good priced at $77 with a 30% sales tax rate yields $23 in taxes owed. To adjust an inclusive rate to an exclusive rate, divide the given rate by one minus that rate (i.e. 
).
The FairTax statutory rate, unlike most U.S. state-level sales taxes, is presented on a tax base that includes the amount of FairTax paid. For example, a final after-tax price of $100 includes $23 of taxes. Although no such requirement is included in the text of the legislation, Congressman John Linder has stated that the FairTax would be implemented as an inclusive tax, which would include the tax in the retail price, not added on at checkout—an item on the shelf for five dollars would be five dollars total.[29][40] The legislation requires the receipt to display the tax as 23% of the total.[41] Linder states the FairTax is presented as a 23% tax rate for easy comparison to income and employment tax rates (the taxes it would be replacing). The plan’s opponents call the semantics deceptive. FactCheck called the presentation misleading, saying that it hides the real truth of the tax rate.[42] Bruce Bartlett stated that polls show tax reform support is extremely sensitive to the proposed rate,[38] and called the presentation confusing and deceptive based on the conventional method of calculating sales taxes.[43] Proponents believe it is both inaccurate and misleading to say that an income tax is 23% and the FairTax is 30% as it implies that the sales tax burden is higher.
Revenue neutrality
A key question surrounding the FairTax is whether the tax has the ability to be revenue-neutral; that is, whether the tax would result in an increase or reduction in overall federal tax revenues. Economists, advisory groups, and political advocacy groups disagree about the tax rate required for the FairTax to be truly revenue-neutral. Various analysts use different assumptions, time-frames, and methods resulting in dramatically different tax rates making direct comparison among the studies difficult. The choice between staticor dynamic scoring further complicates any estimate of revenue-neutral rates.[44]
A 2006 study published in Tax Notes by the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University and Dr. Laurence Kotlikoff estimated the FairTax would be revenue-neutral for the tax year 2007 at a rate of 23.82% (31.27% tax-exclusive).[45] The study states that purchasing power is transferred to state and local taxpayers from state and local governments. To recapture the lost revenue, state and local governments would have to raise tax rates or otherwise change tax laws in order to continue collecting the same real revenues from their taxpayers.[39][45] The Argus Group and Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics each published an analysis that defended the 23% rate.[46][47][48] While proponents of the FairTax concede that the above studies did not explicitly account for tax evasion, they also claim that the studies did not altogether ignore tax evasion under the FairTax. These studies presumably incorporated some degree of tax evasion in their calculations by using National Income and Product Account based figures, which is argued to understate total household consumption.[45] The studies also did not account for capital gains that may be realized by the U.S. government if consumer prices were allowed to rise, which would reduce the real value of nominal U.S. government debt.[45] Nor did these studies account for any increased economic growth that many economists researching the plan believe would occur.[45][48][49][50]
In contrast to the above studies, William G. Gale of the Brookings Institution published a study in Tax Notes that estimated a rate of 28.2% (39.3% tax-exclusive) for 2007 assuming full taxpayer compliance and an average rate of 31% (44% tax-exclusive) from 2006 to 2015 (assumes that the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule and accounts for the replacement of an additional $3 trillion collected through the Alternative Minimum Tax).[4][15][51] The study also concluded that if the tax base were eroded by 10% due to tax evasion, tax avoidance, and/or legislative adjustments, the average rate would be 34% (53% tax-exclusive) for the 10-year period. A dynamic analysis in 2008 by the Baker Institute For Public Policy concluded that a 28% (38.9% tax-exclusive) rate would be revenue neutral for 2006.[52] The President’s Advisory Panel for Federal Tax Reform performed a 2006 analysis to replace the individual and corporate income tax with a retail sales tax and estimated the rate to be 25% (34% tax-exclusive) assuming 15% tax evasion, and 33% (49% tax-exclusive) with 30% tax evasion.[8] The rate would need to be substantially higher to replace the additional taxes replaced by the FairTax (payroll, estate, and gift taxes). Several economists criticized the President’s Advisory Panel’s study as having allegedly altered the terms of the FairTax, using unsound methodology, and/or failing to fully explain their calculations.[36][45][53]
Taxable items and exemptions
The tax would be levied once at the final retail sale for personal consumption on new goods and services. Purchases of used items, exports and all business transactions would not be taxed. Also excluded are investments, such as purchases of stock, corporatemergers and acquisitions and capital investments. Savings and education tuition expenses would be exempt as they would be considered an investment (rather than final consumption).[54]
A good would be considered “used” and not taxable if a consumer already owns it before the FairTax takes effect or if the FairTax has been paid previously on the good, which may be different from the item being sold previously. Personal services such as health care, legal services, financial services, and auto repairs would be subject to the FairTax, as would renting apartments and other real property.[4] Food, clothing, prescription drugs and medical services would be taxed. (State sales taxes generally exempt these types of basic-need items in an effort to reduce the tax burden on low-income families. The FairTax would use a monthly rebate system instead of the common state exclusions.) Internet purchases would be taxed, as would retail international purchases (such as a boat or car) that are imported to the United States (collected by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection).[54]
Distribution of tax burden
Boston University study of the FairTax. Lower rates claimed on workers from a larger tax base, replacing regressive taxes, and wealth taxation.
President’s Advisory Panel’sanalysis of a hybrid National Sales Tax. Higher rates claimed on the middle-class for an income tax replacement (excludes payroll, estate, and gift taxes replaced under the FairTax).
The FairTax’s effect on the distribution of taxation or tax incidence (the effect on the distribution of economic welfare) is a point of dispute. The plan’s supporters argue that the tax would broaden the tax base, that it would beprogressive, and that it would decrease tax burdens and start taxing wealth (reducing the economic gap).[9][55] Opponents argue that a national sales tax would be inherently regressive and would decrease tax burdens paid by high-income individuals.[4][56] A person earning $2 million a year could live well spending $1 million, and as a result pay a mere 11% of that year’s income in taxes.[4] Households at the lower end of the income scale spend almost all their income, while households at the higher end are more likely to devote a portion of income to saving. Therefore, according to economist William G. Gale, the percentage of income taxed is regressive at higher income levels (as consumption falls as a percentage of income).[6]
Income earned and saved would not be taxed until spent under the proposal. Households at the extreme high end of consumption often finance their purchases out of savings, not income.[6][38] Economist Laurence Kotlikoffstates that the FairTax could make the tax system much more progressive and generationally equitable,[2] and argues that taxing consumption is effectively the same as taxing wages plus taxing wealth.[2] A household of three persons (this example will use two adults of any gender plus one child; the rebate does not consider marital status) spending $30,000 a year on taxable items would devote about 3.4% of total spending ( [$6,900 tax minus $5,888 rebate]/$30,000 spending ) to the FairTax after the rebate. The same household spending $125,000 on taxable items would spend around 18.3% ( [$28,750 tax minus $5,888 rebate]/$125,000 spending ) on the FairTax. At higher spending levels, the rebate has less impact and the rate approaches 23% of total spending. Thus, according to economist Laurence Kotlikoff, the effective tax rate is progressive on consumption.[2]
Studies by Kotlikoff and Daivd Rapson state that the FairTax would significantly reduce marginal taxes on work and saving, lowering overall average remaining lifetime tax burdens on current and future workers.[9][57] A study by Kotlikoff and Sabine Jokisch concluded that the long-term effects of the FairTax would reward low-income households with 26.3% more purchasing power, middle-income households with 12.4% more purchasing power, and high-income households with 5% more purchasing power.[10] The Beacon Hill Institute reported that the FairTax would make the federal tax system more progressive and would benefit the average individual in almost all expenditures deciles.[7] In another study, they state the FairTax would offer the broadest tax base (an increase of over $2 trillion), which allows the FairTax to have a lower tax rate than current tax law.[58]
Gale analyzed a national sales tax (though different from the FairTax in several aspects[7][46]) and reported that the overall tax burden on middle-income Americans would increase while the tax burden on the top 1% would drop.[6] A study by the Beacon Hill Institute reported that the FairTax may have a negative effect on the well-being of mid-income earners for several years after implementation.[50] According to the President’s Advisory Panel for Federal Tax Reform report, which compared the individual and corporate income tax (excluding other taxes the FairTax replaces) to a sales tax with rebate,[8][36] the percentage of federal taxes paid by those earning from $15,000–$50,000 would rise from 3.6% to 6.7%, while the burden on those earning more than $200,000 would fall from 53.5% to 45.9%.[8] The report states that the top 5% of earners would see their burden decrease from 58.6% to 37.4%.[8][59] FairTax supporters argue that replacing the regressive payroll tax (a 15.3% total tax not included in the Tax Panel study;[8] payroll taxes include a 12.4% Social Security tax on wages up to $97,500 and a 2.9% Medicare tax, a 15.3% total tax that is often split between employee and employer) greatly changes the tax distribution, and that the FairTax would relieve the tax burden on middle-class workers.[2][53]
Predicted effects
The predicted effects of the FairTax are a source of disagreement among economists and other analysts.[42][43][56] According to Money magazine, while many economists and tax experts support the idea of a consumption tax, many of them view the FairTax proposal as having serious problems with evasion and revenue neutrality.[4] Some economists argue that a consumption tax (the FairTax is one such tax) would have a positive effect on economic growth, incentives for international business to locate in the U.S., and increased U.S. international competitiveness (border tax adjustment in global trade).[11][12][13] The FairTax would be tax-free on mortgage interest (up to a basic interest rate) and donations, but some law makers have concerns about losing tax incentives on home ownership and charitable contributions.[60] There is also concern about the effect on the income tax industry and the difficulty of repealing the Sixteenth Amendment (to prevent Congress from re-introducing an income tax).[61]
Economic
Americans For Fair Taxation states the FairTax would boost the United States economy and offers a letter signed by eighty economists, including Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith, that have endorsed the plan.[12] The Beacon Hill Institute estimated that within five years real GDP would increase 10.7% over the current system, domestic investment by 86.3%, capital stock by 9.3%, employment by 9.9%, real wages by 10.2%, and consumption by 1.8%.[50] Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics projected the economy as measured by GDP would be 2.4% higher in the first year and 11.3% higher by the 10th year than it would otherwise be.[48] Economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Sabine Jokisch reported the incentive to work and save would increase; by 2030, the economy’s capital stock would increase by 43.7% over the current system, output by 9.4%, and real wages by 11.5%.[10] Economist John Golob estimates a consumption tax, like the FairTax, would bring long-term interest rates down by 25–35%.[62] An analysis in 2008 by the Baker Institute For Public Policy indicated that the plan would generate significant overall macroeconomic improvement in both the short and long-term, but warned of transitional issues.[52]
FairTax proponents argue that the proposal would provide tax burden visibility and reduce compliance and efficiency costs by 90%, returning a large share of money to the productive economy.[2] The Beacon Hill Institute concluded that the FairTax would save $346.51 billion in administrative costs and would be a much more efficient taxation system.[63] Bill Archer, former head of the House Ways and Means Committee, asked Princeton University Econometrics to survey 500 European and Asian companies regarding the effect on their business decisions if the United States enacted the FairTax. 400 of those companies stated they would build their next plant in the United States, and 100 companies said they would move their corporate headquarters to the United States.[64]Supporters argue that the U.S. has the highest combined statutory corporate income tax rate among OECD countries along with being the only country with no border adjustment element in its tax system.[65][66] Proponents state that because the FairTax eliminates corporate income taxes and is automatically border adjustable, the competitive tax advantage of foreign producers would be eliminated, immediately boosting U.S. competitiveness overseas and at home.[67]
Opponents point to a study commissioned by the National Retail Federation in 2000 that found a national sales tax bill filed by Billy Tauzin, the Individual Tax Freedom Act (H.R. 2717), would bring a three-year decline in the economy, a four-year decline in employment and an eight-year decline in consumer spending.[68] Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto states the FairTax is unsuited to take advantage of supply-side effects and would create a powerful disincentive to spend money.[56] John Linder states an estimated $11 trillion is held in foreign accounts (largely for tax purposes), which he states would be repatriated back to U.S. banks if the FairTax were enacted, becoming available to U.S. capital markets, bringing down interest rates, and otherwise promoting economic growth in the United States.[11] Attorney Allen Buckley states that a tremendous amount of wealth was already repatriated under law changes in 2004 and 2005.[69] Buckley also argues that if the tax rate was significantly higher, the FairTax would discourage the consumption of new goods and hurt economic growth.[69]
Transition
Stability of the Tax Base: A comparison of Personal Consumption Expenditures and Adjusted Gross Income.
During the transition, many or most of the employees of the IRS (105,978 in 2005)[70] would face loss of employment.[45] The Beacon Hill Institute estimate is that the federal government would be able to cut $8 billion from the IRS budget of $11.01 billion (in 2007), reducing the size of federal tax administration by 73%.[45] In addition, income tax preparers (many seasonal), tax lawyers, tax compliance staff in medium-to-large businesses, and software companies which sell tax preparation software could face significant drops, changes, or loss of employment. The bill would maintain the IRS for three years after implementation before completely decommissioning the agency, providing employees time to find other employment.[16]
In the period before the FairTax is implemented, there could be a strong incentive for individuals to buy goods without the sales tax using credit. After the FairTax is in effect, the credit could be paid off using untaxed payroll. If credit incentives do not change, opponents of the FairTax worry it could exacerbate an existing consumer debt problem.[71] Proponents of the FairTax state that this effect could also allow individuals to pay off their existing (pre-FairTax) debt more quickly,[11] and studies suggest lower interest rates after FairTax passage.[62]
Individuals under the current system who accumulated savings from ordinary income (by choosing not to spend their money when the income was earned) paid taxes on that income before it was placed in savings (such as aRoth IRA or CD). When individuals spend above the poverty level with money saved under the current system, that spending would be subject to the FairTax. People living through the transition may find both their earnings and their spending taxed.[72] Critics have stated that the FairTax would result in unfair double taxation for savers and suggest it does not address the transition effect on some taxpayers who have accumulated significant savings from after-tax dollars, especially retirees who have finished their careers and switched to spending down their life savings.[39][72] Supporters of the plan argue that the current system is no different, since compliance costs and “hidden taxes” embedded in the prices of goods and services cause savings to be “taxed” a second time already when spent.[72] The rebate would supplement accrued savings, covering taxes up to the poverty level. The income taxes on capital gains, estates, social security and pension benefits would be eliminated under FairTax. In addition, the FairTax legislation adjusts Social Security benefits for changes in the price level, so a percentage increase in prices would result in an equal percentage increase to Social Security income.[16] Supporters suggest these changes would offset paying the FairTax under transition conditions.[11]
Other indirect effects
The FairTax would be tax free on mortgage interest up to the federal borrowing rate for like-term instruments as determined by the Treasury,[73] but since savings, education, and other investments would be tax free under the plan, the FairTax could decrease the incentive to spend more on homes. An analysis in 2008 by the Baker Institute For Public Policy concluded that the FairTax would have significant transitional issues for the housing sector since the investment would no longer be tax-favored.[52] In a 2007 study, the Beacon Hill Institute concluded that total charitable giving would increase under the FairTax, although increases in giving would not be distributed proportionately amongst the various types of charitable organizations.[74] The FairTax may also affect state and local government debt as the federal income tax system provides tax advantages to municipal bonds.[75] Proponents believe environmental benefits would result from the FairTax through environmental economics and the re-use and re-sale of used goods.[76] Former Senator Mike Gravel states the significant reduction of paperwork for IRS compliance and tax forms is estimated to save about 300,000 trees each year.[76] Advocates argue the FairTax would provide an incentive for illegal immigrants to legalize as they would otherwise not receive the rebate.[1][11] Proponents also believe that the FairTax would have positive effects on civil liberties that are sometimes charged against the income tax system, such as social inequality, economic inequality, financial privacy, self-incrimination,unreasonable search and seizure, burden of proof, and due process.[14][77]
If the FairTax bill were passed, permanent elimination of income taxation would not be guaranteed; the FairTax bill would repeal much of the existing tax code, but the Sixteenth Amendment would remain in place. Preventing new legislation from reintroducing income taxation would require a repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution with a separate provision expressly prohibiting a federal income tax.[61] This is referred to as an “aggressive repeal”. Separate income taxes enforced by individual states would be unaffected by the federal repeal. Passing the FairTax would require only a simple majority in each house of the United States Congress along with the signature of the President, whereas enactment of a constitutional amendment must be approved by two thirds of each house of the Congress, and three-quarters of the individual U.S. states. It is therefore possible that passage of the FairTax bill would simply add another taxation system. If a new income tax bill were passed after the FairTax passage, a hybrid system could develop; albeit, there is nothing preventing a bill for a hybrid system today. To address this issue and preclude that possibility, in the 111th Congress John Linder introduced a contingent sunset provision in H.R. 25. It would require the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment within 8 years after the implementation of the FairTax or, failing that, the FairTax would expire.[78] Critics have also argued that a tax on state government consumption could be unconstitutional.[69]
Changes in the retail economy
Since the FairTax would not tax used goods, the value would be determined by the supply and demand in relation to new goods.[79] The price differential/margins between used and new goods would stay consistent, as the cost and value of used goods are in direct relationship to the cost and value of the new goods. Because the U.S. tax system has a hidden effect on prices, it is expected that moving to the FairTax would decrease production costs from the removal of business taxes and compliance costs, which is predicted to offset a portion of the FairTax effect on prices.[11]
Value of used goods
Since the FairTax would not tax used goods, some critics have argued that this would create a differential between the price of new and used goods, which may take years to equalize.[38] Such a differential would certainly influence the sale of new goods like vehicles and homes. Similarly, some supporters have claimed that this would create an incentive to buy used goods, creating environmental benefits of re-use and re-sale.[76] Conversely, it is argued that like the income tax system that contains embedded tax cost (seeTheories of retail pricing),[80] used goods would contain the embedded FairTax cost.[72] While the FairTax would not be applied to the retail sales of used goods, the inherent value of a used good includes the taxes paid when the good was sold at retail. The value is determined by the supply and demand in relation to new goods.[79] The price differential / margins between used and new goods should stay consistent, as the cost and value of used goods are in direct relationship to the cost and value of the new goods.
Theories of retail pricing
A supply and demand diagram illustrating taxes’ effect on prices.
Based on a study conducted by Dale Jorgenson, proponents state that production cost of domestic goods and services could decrease by approximately 22% on average after embedded tax costs are removed, leaving the sale nearly the same after taxes. The study concludes that producer prices would drop between 15% and 26% (depending on the type of good/service).[81] Jorgenson’s research included all income and payroll taxes in the embedded tax estimation, which assumes employee take-home pay (net income) remains unchanged from pre-FairTax levels.[4][82] Price and wage changes after the FairTax would largely depend on the response of theFederal Reserve monetary authorities.[29][38][83] Non-accommodation of the money supply would suggest retail prices and take home pay stay the same—embedded taxes are replaced by the FairTax. Full accommodation would suggest prices and incomes rise by the exclusive rate (i.e., 30%)—embedded taxes become windfall gains. Partial accommodation would suggest a varying degree in-between.[29][83]
If businesses provided employees with gross pay (including income tax withholding and the employee share of payroll taxes),[45] Arduin, Laffer & Moore Econometrics estimated production costs could decrease by a minimum of 11.55% (partial accommodation).[48] This reduction would be from the removal of the remaining embedded costs, including corporate taxes, compliance costs, and the employer share of payroll taxes. This decrease would offset a portion of the FairTax amount reflected in retail prices, which proponents suggest as the most likely scenario.[29] Bruce Bartlett states that it is unlikely that nominal wages would be reduced, which he believes would result in a recession, but that the Federal Reserve would likely increase the money supply to accommodate price increases.[38] David Tuerck states “The monetary authorities would have to consider how the degree of accommodation, varying from none to full, would affect the overall economy and how it would affect the well-being of various groups such as retirees.”[83]
Social Security benefits would be adjusted for any price changes due to FairTax implementation.[16] The Beacon Hill Institute states that it would not matter, apart from transition issues, whether prices fall or rise—the relative tax burden and tax rate remains the same.[45] Decreases in production cost would not fully apply to imported products; so according to proponents, it would provide tax advantages for domestic production and increase U.S. competitiveness in global trade (see Border adjustability). To ease the transition, U.S. retailers will receive a tax credit equal to the FairTax on their inventory to allow for quick cost reduction. Retailers would also receive an administrative fee equal to the greater of $200 or 0.25% of the remitted tax as compensation for compliance costs,[84] which amounts to around $5 billion.
Effects on tax code compliance
One avenue for non-compliance is the black market. FairTax supporters state that the black market is largely untaxed under the current tax system. Economists estimate the underground economy in the United States to be between one and three trillion dollars annually.[85][86] By imposing a sales tax, supporters argue that black market activity would be taxed when proceeds from such activity are spent on legal consumption.[87] For example, the sale of illegal narcotics would remain untaxed (instead of being guilty of income tax evasion, drug dealers would be guilty of failing to submit sales tax), but they would face taxation when they used drug proceeds to buy consumer goods such as food, clothing, and cars. By taxing this previously untaxed money, FairTax supporters argue that non-filers would be paying part of their share of what would otherwise be uncollected income and payroll taxes.[11][88]
Other economists and analysts have argued that the underground economy would continue to bear the same tax burden as before.[13][87][88][89] They state that replacing the current tax system with a consumption tax would not change the tax revenue generated from the underground economy—while illicit income is not taxed directly, spending of income from illicit activity results in business income and wages that are taxed.[13][87][88]
Tax compliance and evasion
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“No, No! Not That Way”—Political cartoon from 1933 commenting on a general sales tax over an income tax.
Proponents state the FairTax would reduce the number of tax filers by about 86% (from 100 million to 14 million) and reduce the filing complexity to a simplified state sales tax form.[53] The Government Accountability Office(GAO), among others, have specifically identified the negative relationship between compliance costs and the number of focal points for collection.[90] Under the FairTax, the federal government would be able to concentrate tax enforcement efforts on a single tax. Retailers would receive an administrative fee equal to the greater of $200 or 0.25% of the remitted tax as compensation for compliance costs.[84] In addition, supporters state that the overwhelming majority of purchases occur in major retail outlets, which are very unlikely to evade the FairTax and risk losing their business licenses.[45] Economic Census figures for 2002 show that 48.5% of merchandise sales are made by just 688 businesses (“Big-Box” retailers). 85.7% of all retail sales are made by 92,334 businesses, which is 3.6% of American companies. In the service sector, approximately 80% of sales are made by 1.2% of U.S. businesses.[29]
The FairTax is a national tax, but can be administered by the states rather than a federal agency,[91] which may have a bearing on compliance as the states’ own agencies could monitor and audit businesses within that state. The 0.25% retained by the states amounts to $5 billion the states would have available for enforcement and administration. For example, California should receive over $500 million for enforcement and administration, which is more than the $327 million budget for the state’s sales and excise taxes.[92] Because the federal money paid to the states would be a percentage of the total revenue collected, John Linder claims the states would have an incentive to maximize collections.[11] Proponents believe that states that choose to conform to the federal tax base would have advantages in enforcement, information sharing, and clear interstate revenue allocation rules.[90][91]A study by the Beacon Hill Institute concluded that, on average, states could more than halve their sales tax rates and that state economies would benefit greatly from adopting a state-level FairTax.[90]
FairTax opponents state that compliance decreases when taxes are not automatically withheld from citizens, and that massive tax evasion could result by collecting at just one point in the economic system.[38] Compliance rates can also fall when taxed entities, rather than a third party, self-report their tax liability. For example, ordinary personal income taxes can be automatically withheld and are reported to the government by a third party. Taxes without withholding and with self-reporting, such as the FairTax, can see higher evasion rates. Economist Jane Gravelle of the Congressional Research Service found studies showing that evasion rates of sales taxes are often above 10%, even when the sales tax rate is in the single digits.[88] Tax publications by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), IMF, and Brookings Institution have suggested that the upper limit for a sales tax is about 10% before incentives for evasion become too great to control.[38] According to the GAO, 80% of state tax officials opposed a national sales tax as an intrusion on their tax base.[38] Opponents also raise concerns of legal tax avoidance by spending and consuming outside of the U.S. (imported goods would be subject to collection by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection).[93]
Economists from the University of Tennessee concluded that while there would be many desirable macroeconomic effects, adoption of a national retail sales tax would also have serious effects on state and local government finances.[94] Economist Bruce Bartlett stated that if the states did not conform to the FairTax, they would have massive confusion and complication as to what is taxed by the state and what is taxed by the federal government.[38] In addition, sales taxes have long exempted all but a few services because of the enormous difficulty in taxing intangibles—Bartlett suggests that the state may not have sufficient incentive to enforce the tax.[43] University of Michigan economist Joel Slemrod argues that states would face significant issues in enforcing the tax. “Even at an average rate of around five percent, state sales taxes are difficult to administer.”[95] University of Virginia School of Law professor George Yin states that the FairTax could have evasion issues with export and import transactions.[39] The President’s Advisory Panel for Federal Tax Reform reported that if the federal government were to cease taxing income, states might choose to shift their revenue-raising to income.[8] Absent the Internal Revenue Service, it would be more difficult for the states to maintain viable income tax systems.[8][94]
Underground economy
Opponents of the FairTax argue that imposing a national retail sales tax would drive transactions underground and create a vast underground economy.[4] Under a retail sales tax system, the purchase of intermediate goods and services that are factors of productionare not taxed, since those goods would produce a final retail good that would be taxed. Individuals and businesses may be able to manipulate the tax system by claiming that purchases are for intermediate goods, when in fact they are final purchases that should be taxed. Proponents point out that a business is required to have a registered seller’s certificate on file, and must keep complete records of all transactions for six years. Businesses must also record all taxable goods bought for seven years. They are required to report these sales every month (see Personal vs. business purchases).[41] The government could also stipulate that all retail sellers provide buyers with a written receipt, regardless of transaction type (cash, credit, etc.), which would create a paper trail for evasion with risk of having the buyer turn them in (the FairTax authorizes a reward for reporting tax cheats).[53]
While many economists and tax experts support a consumption tax, problems could arise with using a retail sales tax rather than a value added tax (VAT).[4][38] A VAT imposes a tax on the value added at every intermediate step of production, so the goods reach the final consumer with much of the tax already in the price.[96] The retail seller has little incentive to conceal retail sales, since he has already paid much of the good’s tax. Retailers are unlikely to subsidize the consumer’s tax evasion by concealing sales. In contrast, a retailer has paid no tax on goods under a sales tax system. This provides an incentive for retailers to conceal sales and engage in “tax arbitrage” by sharing some of the illicit tax savings with the final consumer. Citing evasion, Tim Worstall wrote in Forbes that Europe’s 20-25% consumption taxes simply would not work if they were a sales tax: that’s why they’re all a VAT.[96] Laurence Kotlikoff has stated that the government could compel firms to report, via 1099-type forms, their sales to other firms, which would provide the same records that arise under a VAT.[53] In the United States, a general sales tax is imposed in 45 states plus the District of Columbia (accounting for over 97% of both population and economic output), which proponents argue provides a large infrastructure for taxing sales that many countries do not have.
Personal versus business purchases[edit]
Businesses would be required to submit monthly or quarterly reports (depending on sales volume) of taxable sales and sales tax collected on their monthly sales tax return. During audits, the business would have to produce invoices for the “business purchases” that they did not pay sales tax on, and would have to be able to show that they were genuine business expenses.[41] Advocates state the significant 86% reduction in collection points would greatly increase the likelihood of business audits, making tax evasion behavior much more risky.[53] Additionally, the FairTax legislation has several fines and penalties for non-compliance, and authorizes a mechanism for reporting tax cheats to obtain a reward.[41] To prevent businesses from purchasing everything for their employees, in a family business for example, goods and services bought by the business for the employees that are not strictly for business use would be taxable.[41] Health insurance or medical expenses would be an example where the business would have to pay the FairTax on these purchases. Taxable property and services purchased by a qualified non-profit or religious organization “for business purposes” would not be taxable.[97]
FairTax movement
A FairTax rally in Orlando, Floridaon July 28, 2006.
The creation of the FairTax began with a group of businessmen from Houston, Texas, who initially financed what has become the political advocacy group Americans For Fair Taxation (AFFT), which has grown into a large tax reform movement.[3][29] This organization, founded in 1994, claims to have spent over $20 million in research, marketing, lobbying, and organizing efforts over a ten-year period and is seeking to raise over $100 million more to promote the plan.[98] AFFT includes a staff in Houston and a large group of volunteers who are working to get the FairTax enacted. Bruce Bartlett has charged that the FairTax was devised by the Church of Scientology in the early 1990s,[43] drawing comparisons between the tax policy and religious doctrine from the faith, whose creation myth holds that an evil alien ruler known as Xenu “used phony tax inspections as a guise for destroying his enemies.”[99] Representative John Linder told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Bartlett confused the FairTax movement with the Scientology-affiliated Citizens for an Alternative Tax System,[100] which also seeks to abolish the federal income tax and replace it with a national retail sales tax. Leo Linbeck, AFFT Chairman and CEO, stated “As a founder of Americans For Fair Taxation, I can state categorically, however, that Scientology played no role in the founding, research or crafting of the legislation giving expression to the FairTax.”[98]
Much support has been achieved by talk radio personality Neal Boortz.[101] Boortz’s book (co-authored by Georgia Congressman John Linder) entitled The FairTax Book, explains the proposal and spent time atop the New York Times Best Seller list. Boortz stated that he donates his share of the proceeds to charity to promote the book.[101] In addition, Boortz and Linder have organized several FairTax rallies to publicize support for the plan. Other media personalities have also assisted in growing grassroots support including former radio and TV talk show host Larry Elder, radio host and former candidate for the 2012 GOP Presidential Nomination Herman Cain, Fox News and radio host Sean Hannity, and Fox Business Host John Stossel.[102] The FairTax received additional visibility as one of the issues in the 2008 presidential election. At a debate on June 30, 2007, several Republican candidates were asked about their position on the FairTax and many responded that they would sign the bill into law if elected.[30] The most vocal promoters of the FairTax during the 2008 primary elections were Republican candidate Mike Huckabee and Democratic candidate Mike Gravel. The Internet, blogosphere, and electronic mailing lists have contributed to promoting, organizing, and gaining support for the FairTax. In the 2012 Republican presidential primary, and his ensuing Libertarian Party presidential run, former Governor of New Mexico and businessman Gary Johnson actively campaigned for the FairTax.[103] Former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza Herman Cain has been promoting the FairTax as a final step in a multiple-phase tax reform.[104] Outside of the United States, theChristian Heritage Party of Canada adopted a FairTax proposal as part of their 2011 election platform[105] but won no seats in that election.
See also
- Americans For Fair Taxation
- Consumption tax
- Debates within libertarianism
- Georgist land value tax
- Hall–Rabushka flat tax
- Optimal tax
- Single tax
- Tax reform
- Tax shift
Notes
Civilian Labor Force Level
158,924,000
Series Id: LNS11000000 Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (Seas) Civilian Labor Force Level Labor force status: Civilian labor force Type of data: Number in thousands Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 142267(1) | 142456 | 142434 | 142751 | 142388 | 142591 | 142278 | 142514 | 142518 | 142622 | 142962 | 143248 | |
| 2001 | 143800 | 143701 | 143924 | 143569 | 143318 | 143357 | 143654 | 143284 | 143989 | 144086 | 144240 | 144305 | |
| 2002 | 143883 | 144653 | 144481 | 144725 | 144938 | 144808 | 144803 | 145009 | 145552 | 145314 | 145041 | 145066 | |
| 2003 | 145937(1) | 146100 | 146022 | 146474 | 146500 | 147056 | 146485 | 146445 | 146530 | 146716 | 147000 | 146729 | |
| 2004 | 146842(1) | 146709 | 146944 | 146850 | 147065 | 147460 | 147692 | 147564 | 147415 | 147793 | 148162 | 148059 | |
| 2005 | 148029(1) | 148364 | 148391 | 148926 | 149261 | 149238 | 149432 | 149779 | 149954 | 150001 | 150065 | 150030 | |
| 2006 | 150214(1) | 150641 | 150813 | 150881 | 151069 | 151354 | 151377 | 151716 | 151662 | 152041 | 152406 | 152732 | |
| 2007 | 153144(1) | 152983 | 153051 | 152435 | 152670 | 153041 | 153054 | 152749 | 153414 | 153183 | 153835 | 153918 | |
| 2008 | 154063(1) | 153653 | 153908 | 153769 | 154303 | 154313 | 154469 | 154641 | 154570 | 154876 | 154639 | 154655 | |
| 2009 | 154210(1) | 154538 | 154133 | 154509 | 154747 | 154716 | 154502 | 154307 | 153827 | 153784 | 153878 | 153111 | |
| 2010 | 153484(1) | 153694 | 153954 | 154622 | 154091 | 153616 | 153691 | 154086 | 153975 | 153635 | 154125 | 153650 | |
| 2011 | 153263(1) | 153214 | 153376 | 153543 | 153479 | 153346 | 153288 | 153760 | 154131 | 153961 | 154128 | 153995 | |
| 2012 | 154351(1) | 154695 | 154768 | 154557 | 154859 | 155084 | 154943 | 154753 | 155168 | 155539 | 155356 | 155597 | |
| 2013 | 155666(1) | 155313 | 155034 | 155365 | 155483 | 155753 | 155662 | 155568 | 155749 | 154694 | 155352 | 155083 | |
| 2014 | 155285(1) | 155560 | 156187 | 155376 | 155511 | 155684 | 156090 | 156080 | 156129 | 156363 | 156442 | 156142 | |
| 2015 | 157025(1) | 156878 | 156890 | 157032 | 157367 | 156984 | 157115 | 157061 | 156867 | 157096 | 157367 | 157833 | |
| 2016 | 158335(1) | 158890 | 159286 | 158924 | |||||||||
| 1 : Data affected by changes in population controls. | |||||||||||||
Employment Level
151,004,000
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 136559(1) | 136598 | 136701 | 137270 | 136630 | 136940 | 136531 | 136662 | 136893 | 137088 | 137322 | 137614 | |
| 2001 | 137778 | 137612 | 137783 | 137299 | 137092 | 136873 | 137071 | 136241 | 136846 | 136392 | 136238 | 136047 | |
| 2002 | 135701 | 136438 | 136177 | 136126 | 136539 | 136415 | 136413 | 136705 | 137302 | 137008 | 136521 | 136426 | |
| 2003 | 137417(1) | 137482 | 137434 | 137633 | 137544 | 137790 | 137474 | 137549 | 137609 | 137984 | 138424 | 138411 | |
| 2004 | 138472(1) | 138542 | 138453 | 138680 | 138852 | 139174 | 139556 | 139573 | 139487 | 139732 | 140231 | 140125 | |
| 2005 | 140245(1) | 140385 | 140654 | 141254 | 141609 | 141714 | 142026 | 142434 | 142401 | 142548 | 142499 | 142752 | |
| 2006 | 143150(1) | 143457 | 143741 | 143761 | 144089 | 144353 | 144202 | 144625 | 144815 | 145314 | 145534 | 145970 | |
| 2007 | 146028(1) | 146057 | 146320 | 145586 | 145903 | 146063 | 145905 | 145682 | 146244 | 145946 | 146595 | 146273 | |
| 2008 | 146378(1) | 146156 | 146086 | 146132 | 145908 | 145737 | 145532 | 145203 | 145076 | 144802 | 144100 | 143369 | |
| 2009 | 142152(1) | 141640 | 140707 | 140656 | 140248 | 140009 | 139901 | 139492 | 138818 | 138432 | 138659 | 138013 | |
| 2010 | 138438(1) | 138581 | 138751 | 139297 | 139241 | 139141 | 139179 | 139438 | 139396 | 139119 | 139044 | 139301 | |
| 2011 | 139250(1) | 139394 | 139639 | 139586 | 139624 | 139384 | 139524 | 139942 | 140183 | 140368 | 140826 | 140902 | |
| 2012 | 141596(1) | 141877 | 142050 | 141916 | 142204 | 142387 | 142281 | 142278 | 143028 | 143404 | 143345 | 143298 | |
| 2013 | 143249(1) | 143359 | 143352 | 143622 | 143842 | 144003 | 144300 | 144284 | 144447 | 143537 | 144555 | 144684 | |
| 2014 | 145092(1) | 145185 | 145772 | 145677 | 145792 | 146214 | 146438 | 146464 | 146834 | 147374 | 147389 | 147439 | |
| 2015 | 148104(1) | 148231 | 148333 | 148509 | 148748 | 148722 | 148866 | 149043 | 148942 | 149197 | 149444 | 149929 | |
| 2016 | 150544(1) | 151074 | 151320 | 151004 | |||||||||
| 1 : Data affected by changes in population controls. | |||||||||||||
Labor Force Participation Rate
62.8%
Series Id: LNS11300000 Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (Seas) Labor Force Participation Rate Labor force status: Civilian labor force participation rate Type of data: Percent or rate Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 67.3 | 67.3 | 67.3 | 67.3 | 67.1 | 67.1 | 66.9 | 66.9 | 66.9 | 66.8 | 66.9 | 67.0 |
| 2001 | 67.2 | 67.1 | 67.2 | 66.9 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 66.8 | 66.5 | 66.8 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 66.7 |
| 2002 | 66.5 | 66.8 | 66.6 | 66.7 | 66.7 | 66.6 | 66.5 | 66.6 | 66.7 | 66.6 | 66.4 | 66.3 |
| 2003 | 66.4 | 66.4 | 66.3 | 66.4 | 66.4 | 66.5 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 65.9 |
| 2004 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 65.9 | 66.0 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 65.8 | 65.9 | 66.0 | 65.9 |
| 2005 | 65.8 | 65.9 | 65.9 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 66.0 |
| 2006 | 66.0 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.1 | 66.2 | 66.3 | 66.4 |
| 2007 | 66.4 | 66.3 | 66.2 | 65.9 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 65.8 | 66.0 | 65.8 | 66.0 | 66.0 |
| 2008 | 66.2 | 66.0 | 66.1 | 65.9 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.1 | 66.0 | 66.0 | 65.9 | 65.8 |
| 2009 | 65.7 | 65.8 | 65.6 | 65.7 | 65.7 | 65.7 | 65.5 | 65.4 | 65.1 | 65.0 | 65.0 | 64.6 |
| 2010 | 64.8 | 64.9 | 64.9 | 65.2 | 64.9 | 64.6 | 64.6 | 64.7 | 64.6 | 64.4 | 64.6 | 64.3 |
| 2011 | 64.2 | 64.1 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.1 | 64.0 | 64.0 | 64.1 | 64.2 | 64.1 | 64.1 | 64.0 |
| 2012 | 63.7 | 63.8 | 63.8 | 63.7 | 63.7 | 63.8 | 63.7 | 63.5 | 63.7 | 63.8 | 63.6 | 63.7 |
| 2013 | 63.6 | 63.4 | 63.3 | 63.4 | 63.4 | 63.4 | 63.3 | 63.2 | 63.3 | 62.8 | 63.0 | 62.9 |
| 2014 | 62.9 | 63.0 | 63.2 | 62.8 | 62.8 | 62.8 | 62.9 | 62.9 | 62.8 | 62.9 | 62.9 | 62.7 |
| 2015 | 62.9 | 62.8 | 62.7 | 62.7 | 62.8 | 62.6 | 62.6 | 62.6 | 62.4 | 62.5 | 62.5 | 62.6 |
| 2016 | 62.7 | 62.9 | 63.0 | 62.8 |
Employment-Population Ratio
59.7%
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 64.6 | 64.6 | 64.6 | 64.7 | 64.4 | 64.5 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.2 | 64.3 | 64.4 |
| 2001 | 64.4 | 64.3 | 64.3 | 64.0 | 63.8 | 63.7 | 63.7 | 63.2 | 63.5 | 63.2 | 63.0 | 62.9 |
| 2002 | 62.7 | 63.0 | 62.8 | 62.7 | 62.9 | 62.7 | 62.7 | 62.7 | 63.0 | 62.7 | 62.5 | 62.4 |
| 2003 | 62.5 | 62.5 | 62.4 | 62.4 | 62.3 | 62.3 | 62.1 | 62.1 | 62.0 | 62.1 | 62.3 | 62.2 |
| 2004 | 62.3 | 62.3 | 62.2 | 62.3 | 62.3 | 62.4 | 62.5 | 62.4 | 62.3 | 62.3 | 62.5 | 62.4 |
| 2005 | 62.4 | 62.4 | 62.4 | 62.7 | 62.8 | 62.7 | 62.8 | 62.9 | 62.8 | 62.8 | 62.7 | 62.8 |
| 2006 | 62.9 | 63.0 | 63.1 | 63.0 | 63.1 | 63.1 | 63.0 | 63.1 | 63.1 | 63.3 | 63.3 | 63.4 |
| 2007 | 63.3 | 63.3 | 63.3 | 63.0 | 63.0 | 63.0 | 62.9 | 62.7 | 62.9 | 62.7 | 62.9 | 62.7 |
| 2008 | 62.9 | 62.8 | 62.7 | 62.7 | 62.5 | 62.4 | 62.2 | 62.0 | 61.9 | 61.7 | 61.4 | 61.0 |
| 2009 | 60.6 | 60.3 | 59.9 | 59.8 | 59.6 | 59.4 | 59.3 | 59.1 | 58.7 | 58.5 | 58.6 | 58.3 |
| 2010 | 58.5 | 58.5 | 58.5 | 58.7 | 58.6 | 58.5 | 58.5 | 58.6 | 58.5 | 58.3 | 58.2 | 58.3 |
| 2011 | 58.3 | 58.4 | 58.4 | 58.4 | 58.3 | 58.2 | 58.2 | 58.3 | 58.4 | 58.4 | 58.6 | 58.6 |
| 2012 | 58.4 | 58.5 | 58.6 | 58.5 | 58.5 | 58.6 | 58.5 | 58.4 | 58.7 | 58.8 | 58.7 | 58.6 |
| 2013 | 58.5 | 58.6 | 58.5 | 58.6 | 58.6 | 58.6 | 58.7 | 58.7 | 58.7 | 58.3 | 58.6 | 58.6 |
| 2014 | 58.8 | 58.8 | 59.0 | 58.9 | 58.9 | 59.0 | 59.0 | 59.0 | 59.1 | 59.3 | 59.2 | 59.2 |
| 2015 | 59.3 | 59.3 | 59.3 | 59.3 | 59.4 | 59.3 | 59.3 | 59.4 | 59.3 | 59.3 | 59.4 | 59.5 |
| 2016 | 59.6 | 59.8 | 59.9 | 59.7 |
Unemployment Level
7,920,000
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 5708 | 5858 | 5733 | 5481 | 5758 | 5651 | 5747 | 5853 | 5625 | 5534 | 5639 | 5634 |
| 2001 | 6023 | 6089 | 6141 | 6271 | 6226 | 6484 | 6583 | 7042 | 7142 | 7694 | 8003 | 8258 |
| 2002 | 8182 | 8215 | 8304 | 8599 | 8399 | 8393 | 8390 | 8304 | 8251 | 8307 | 8520 | 8640 |
| 2003 | 8520 | 8618 | 8588 | 8842 | 8957 | 9266 | 9011 | 8896 | 8921 | 8732 | 8576 | 8317 |
| 2004 | 8370 | 8167 | 8491 | 8170 | 8212 | 8286 | 8136 | 7990 | 7927 | 8061 | 7932 | 7934 |
| 2005 | 7784 | 7980 | 7737 | 7672 | 7651 | 7524 | 7406 | 7345 | 7553 | 7453 | 7566 | 7279 |
| 2006 | 7064 | 7184 | 7072 | 7120 | 6980 | 7001 | 7175 | 7091 | 6847 | 6727 | 6872 | 6762 |
| 2007 | 7116 | 6927 | 6731 | 6850 | 6766 | 6979 | 7149 | 7067 | 7170 | 7237 | 7240 | 7645 |
| 2008 | 7685 | 7497 | 7822 | 7637 | 8395 | 8575 | 8937 | 9438 | 9494 | 10074 | 10538 | 11286 |
| 2009 | 12058 | 12898 | 13426 | 13853 | 14499 | 14707 | 14601 | 14814 | 15009 | 15352 | 15219 | 15098 |
| 2010 | 15046 | 15113 | 15202 | 15325 | 14849 | 14474 | 14512 | 14648 | 14579 | 14516 | 15081 | 14348 |
| 2011 | 14013 | 13820 | 13737 | 13957 | 13855 | 13962 | 13763 | 13818 | 13948 | 13594 | 13302 | 13093 |
| 2012 | 12755 | 12818 | 12718 | 12641 | 12655 | 12697 | 12662 | 12475 | 12140 | 12135 | 12011 | 12299 |
| 2013 | 12417 | 11954 | 11681 | 11743 | 11641 | 11750 | 11362 | 11284 | 11302 | 11158 | 10796 | 10399 |
| 2014 | 10192 | 10375 | 10415 | 9699 | 9719 | 9470 | 9651 | 9617 | 9296 | 8989 | 9053 | 8704 |
| 2015 | 8920 | 8646 | 8557 | 8523 | 8619 | 8262 | 8249 | 8018 | 7925 | 7899 | 7924 | 7904 |
| 2016 | 7791 | 7815 | 7966 | 7920 |
U-3 Unemployment Rate
5.0%
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.0 | 3.8 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 |
| 2001 | 4.2 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.3 | 5.5 | 5.7 |
| 2002 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 6.0 |
| 2003 | 5.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 5.8 | 5.7 |
| 2004 | 5.7 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 |
| 2005 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.2 | 5.2 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 |
| 2006 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 |
| 2007 | 4.6 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 5.0 |
| 2008 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.4 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.5 | 6.8 | 7.3 |
| 2009 | 7.8 | 8.3 | 8.7 | 9.0 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.8 | 10.0 | 9.9 | 9.9 |
| 2010 | 9.8 | 9.8 | 9.9 | 9.9 | 9.6 | 9.4 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.4 | 9.8 | 9.3 |
| 2011 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 8.8 | 8.6 | 8.5 |
| 2012 | 8.3 | 8.3 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 7.8 | 7.8 | 7.7 | 7.9 |
| 2013 | 8.0 | 7.7 | 7.5 | 7.6 | 7.5 | 7.5 | 7.3 | 7.3 | 7.3 | 7.2 | 6.9 | 6.7 |
| 2014 | 6.6 | 6.7 | 6.7 | 6.2 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.2 | 6.2 | 6.0 | 5.7 | 5.8 | 5.6 |
| 2015 | 5.7 | 5.5 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.3 | 5.3 | 5.1 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
| 2016 | 4.9 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 |
U-6 Unemployment Rate
9.7%
LNS13327709 Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (seas) Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed Type of data: Percent or rate Age: 16 years and over Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 7.1 | 7.2 | 7.1 | 6.9 | 7.1 | 7.0 | 7.0 | 7.1 | 7.0 | 6.8 | 7.1 | 6.9 |
| 2001 | 7.3 | 7.4 | 7.3 | 7.4 | 7.5 | 7.9 | 7.8 | 8.1 | 8.7 | 9.3 | 9.4 | 9.6 |
| 2002 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.4 | 9.7 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.7 | 9.8 |
| 2003 | 10.0 | 10.2 | 10.0 | 10.2 | 10.1 | 10.3 | 10.3 | 10.1 | 10.4 | 10.2 | 10.0 | 9.8 |
| 2004 | 9.9 | 9.7 | 10.0 | 9.6 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.4 | 9.4 | 9.7 | 9.4 | 9.2 |
| 2005 | 9.3 | 9.3 | 9.1 | 8.9 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 8.8 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 8.7 | 8.7 | 8.6 |
| 2006 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 8.2 | 8.4 | 8.5 | 8.4 | 8.0 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 7.9 |
| 2007 | 8.4 | 8.2 | 8.0 | 8.2 | 8.2 | 8.3 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.4 | 8.8 |
| 2008 | 9.2 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.2 | 9.7 | 10.1 | 10.5 | 10.8 | 11.0 | 11.8 | 12.6 | 13.6 |
| 2009 | 14.2 | 15.2 | 15.8 | 15.9 | 16.5 | 16.5 | 16.4 | 16.7 | 16.7 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 17.1 |
| 2010 | 16.7 | 17.0 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 16.6 | 16.4 | 16.4 | 16.5 | 16.8 | 16.6 | 16.9 | 16.6 |
| 2011 | 16.2 | 16.0 | 15.9 | 16.1 | 15.8 | 16.1 | 15.9 | 16.1 | 16.4 | 15.8 | 15.5 | 15.2 |
| 2012 | 15.2 | 15.0 | 14.6 | 14.6 | 14.8 | 14.8 | 14.8 | 14.6 | 14.8 | 14.4 | 14.4 | 14.4 |
| 2013 | 14.5 | 14.3 | 13.8 | 14.0 | 13.8 | 14.2 | 13.8 | 13.6 | 13.7 | 13.7 | 13.1 | 13.1 |
| 2014 | 12.7 | 12.6 | 12.6 | 12.3 | 12.1 | 12.0 | 12.2 | 12.0 | 11.8 | 11.5 | 11.4 | 11.2 |
| 2015 | 11.3 | 11.0 | 10.9 | 10.8 | 10.7 | 10.5 | 10.4 | 10.3 | 10.0 | 9.8 | 9.9 | 9.9 |
| 2016 | 9.9 | 9.7 | 9.8 | 9.7 |
Unemployment Rate 16-19 Years Old
16.0%
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 12.7 | 13.8 | 13.3 | 12.6 | 12.8 | 12.3 | 13.4 | 14.0 | 13.0 | 12.8 | 13.0 | 13.2 |
| 2001 | 13.8 | 13.7 | 13.8 | 13.9 | 13.4 | 14.2 | 14.4 | 15.6 | 15.2 | 16.0 | 15.9 | 17.0 |
| 2002 | 16.5 | 16.0 | 16.6 | 16.7 | 16.6 | 16.7 | 16.8 | 17.0 | 16.3 | 15.1 | 17.1 | 16.9 |
| 2003 | 17.2 | 17.2 | 17.8 | 17.7 | 17.9 | 19.0 | 18.2 | 16.6 | 17.6 | 17.2 | 15.7 | 16.2 |
| 2004 | 17.0 | 16.5 | 16.8 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.0 | 17.8 | 16.7 | 16.6 | 17.4 | 16.4 | 17.6 |
| 2005 | 16.2 | 17.5 | 17.1 | 17.8 | 17.8 | 16.3 | 16.1 | 16.1 | 15.5 | 16.1 | 17.0 | 14.9 |
| 2006 | 15.1 | 15.3 | 16.1 | 14.6 | 14.0 | 15.8 | 15.9 | 16.0 | 16.3 | 15.2 | 14.8 | 14.6 |
| 2007 | 14.8 | 14.9 | 14.9 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 16.3 | 15.3 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 15.4 | 16.2 | 16.8 |
| 2008 | 17.8 | 16.6 | 16.1 | 15.9 | 19.0 | 19.2 | 20.7 | 18.6 | 19.1 | 20.0 | 20.3 | 20.5 |
| 2009 | 20.7 | 22.3 | 22.2 | 22.2 | 23.4 | 24.7 | 24.3 | 25.0 | 25.9 | 27.2 | 26.9 | 26.7 |
| 2010 | 26.1 | 25.6 | 26.2 | 25.4 | 26.5 | 25.9 | 25.9 | 25.5 | 25.8 | 27.2 | 24.8 | 25.3 |
| 2011 | 25.7 | 24.1 | 24.4 | 24.7 | 23.9 | 24.5 | 24.7 | 25.0 | 24.4 | 24.2 | 24.2 | 23.3 |
| 2012 | 23.6 | 23.8 | 25.0 | 25.0 | 24.3 | 23.2 | 23.6 | 24.3 | 23.7 | 23.9 | 24.0 | 24.1 |
| 2013 | 23.7 | 25.2 | 24.2 | 24.3 | 24.3 | 23.0 | 23.3 | 22.5 | 21.2 | 22.3 | 20.9 | 20.4 |
| 2014 | 20.7 | 21.4 | 20.9 | 19.3 | 19.3 | 20.3 | 20.2 | 19.3 | 19.9 | 18.8 | 17.5 | 16.8 |
| 2015 | 18.9 | 17.0 | 17.6 | 17.1 | 17.8 | 17.9 | 16.3 | 16.8 | 16.2 | 15.8 | 15.6 | 16.1 |
| 2016 | 16.0 | 15.6 | 15.9 | 16.0 |
Average Weeks Unemployed
27.7%
Series Id: LNS13008275 Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (Seas) Average Weeks Unemployed Labor force status: Unemployed Type of data: Number of weeks Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 13.1 | 12.6 | 12.7 | 12.4 | 12.6 | 12.3 | 13.4 | 12.9 | 12.2 | 12.7 | 12.4 | 12.5 |
| 2001 | 12.7 | 12.8 | 12.8 | 12.4 | 12.1 | 12.7 | 12.9 | 13.3 | 13.2 | 13.3 | 14.3 | 14.5 |
| 2002 | 14.7 | 15.0 | 15.4 | 16.3 | 16.8 | 16.9 | 16.9 | 16.5 | 17.6 | 17.8 | 17.6 | 18.5 |
| 2003 | 18.5 | 18.5 | 18.1 | 19.4 | 19.0 | 19.9 | 19.7 | 19.2 | 19.5 | 19.3 | 19.9 | 19.8 |
| 2004 | 19.9 | 20.1 | 19.8 | 19.6 | 19.8 | 20.5 | 18.8 | 18.8 | 19.4 | 19.5 | 19.7 | 19.4 |
| 2005 | 19.5 | 19.1 | 19.5 | 19.6 | 18.6 | 17.9 | 17.6 | 18.4 | 17.9 | 17.9 | 17.5 | 17.5 |
| 2006 | 16.9 | 17.8 | 17.1 | 16.7 | 17.1 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 17.1 | 16.3 | 16.2 | 16.1 |
| 2007 | 16.3 | 16.7 | 17.8 | 16.9 | 16.6 | 16.5 | 17.2 | 17.0 | 16.3 | 17.0 | 17.3 | 16.6 |
| 2008 | 17.5 | 16.9 | 16.5 | 16.9 | 16.6 | 17.1 | 17.0 | 17.7 | 18.6 | 19.9 | 18.9 | 19.9 |
| 2009 | 19.8 | 20.2 | 20.9 | 21.7 | 22.4 | 23.9 | 25.1 | 25.3 | 26.6 | 27.5 | 28.9 | 29.7 |
| 2010 | 30.3 | 29.8 | 31.6 | 33.3 | 34.0 | 34.5 | 33.9 | 33.7 | 33.4 | 34.0 | 33.9 | 34.7 |
| 2011 | 37.2 | 37.4 | 39.1 | 38.7 | 39.6 | 39.9 | 40.7 | 40.5 | 40.4 | 38.7 | 40.2 | 40.4 |
| 2012 | 40.2 | 39.8 | 39.3 | 39.2 | 39.6 | 40.3 | 39.3 | 39.5 | 39.8 | 39.7 | 38.9 | 37.6 |
| 2013 | 35.5 | 36.6 | 36.9 | 36.4 | 36.8 | 36.2 | 37.3 | 37.6 | 37.4 | 35.3 | 36.6 | 36.5 |
| 2014 | 35.2 | 36.7 | 35.2 | 34.6 | 34.2 | 33.6 | 32.8 | 32.1 | 32.1 | 32.7 | 32.8 | 32.5 |
| 2015 | 32.0 | 31.4 | 30.4 | 30.5 | 30.5 | 28.1 | 28.3 | 28.3 | 26.3 | 28.0 | 27.9 | 27.6 |
| 2016 | 28.9 | 29.0 | 28.4 | 27.7 |
Median Weeks Unemployed
11.4%
Series Id: LNS13008276 Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (Seas) Median Weeks Unemployed Labor force status: Unemployed Type of data: Number of weeks Age: 16 years and over
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 6.0 | 6.3 | 5.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 |
| 2001 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.6 | 5.9 | 6.3 | 6.0 | 6.8 | 6.9 | 7.2 | 7.3 | 7.7 | 8.2 |
| 2002 | 8.4 | 8.3 | 8.4 | 8.9 | 9.5 | 11.0 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.3 | 9.6 |
| 2003 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.7 | 10.2 | 9.9 | 11.5 | 10.3 | 10.1 | 10.2 | 10.4 | 10.3 | 10.4 |
| 2004 | 10.6 | 10.2 | 10.2 | 9.5 | 9.9 | 11.0 | 8.9 | 9.2 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.7 | 9.5 |
| 2005 | 9.4 | 9.2 | 9.3 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 8.8 | 9.2 | 8.4 | 8.6 | 8.5 | 8.7 |
| 2006 | 8.6 | 9.1 | 8.7 | 8.4 | 8.5 | 7.3 | 8.0 | 8.4 | 8.0 | 7.9 | 8.3 | 7.5 |
| 2007 | 8.3 | 8.5 | 9.1 | 8.6 | 8.2 | 7.7 | 8.7 | 8.8 | 8.7 | 8.4 | 8.6 | 8.4 |
| 2008 | 9.0 | 8.7 | 8.7 | 9.4 | 7.9 | 9.0 | 9.7 | 9.7 | 10.2 | 10.4 | 9.8 | 10.5 |
| 2009 | 10.7 | 11.7 | 12.3 | 13.1 | 14.2 | 17.2 | 16.0 | 16.3 | 17.8 | 18.9 | 19.8 | 20.1 |
| 2010 | 20.0 | 19.9 | 20.4 | 22.1 | 22.3 | 25.2 | 22.3 | 21.0 | 20.3 | 21.2 | 21.0 | 21.9 |
| 2011 | 21.5 | 21.1 | 21.5 | 20.9 | 21.6 | 22.4 | 22.0 | 22.4 | 22.0 | 20.6 | 20.8 | 20.5 |
| 2012 | 20.8 | 19.8 | 19.2 | 19.2 | 19.9 | 20.3 | 17.5 | 18.4 | 18.8 | 19.7 | 18.5 | 17.6 |
| 2013 | 16.0 | 17.4 | 17.7 | 17.2 | 17.1 | 16.8 | 16.3 | 16.7 | 16.5 | 16.2 | 17.0 | 17.0 |
| 2014 | 15.6 | 16.0 | 15.9 | 15.9 | 14.5 | 13.5 | 13.5 | 13.2 | 13.3 | 13.4 | 12.8 | 12.6 |
| 2015 | 13.4 | 13.0 | 12.1 | 11.6 | 11.6 | 11.4 | 11.4 | 12.1 | 11.3 | 11.1 | 10.7 | 10.5 |
| 2016 | 10.9 | 11.2 | 11.4 | 11.4 |
Not in Labor Force
1,715,000
Series Id: LNU05026642 Not Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (Unadj) Not in Labor Force, Searched For Work and Available Labor force status: Not in labor force Type of data: Number in thousands Age: 16 years and over Job desires/not in labor force: Want a job now Reasons not in labor force: Available to work now
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 1207 | 1281 | 1219 | 1216 | 1113 | 1142 | 1172 | 1097 | 1166 | 1044 | 1100 | 1125 |
| 2001 | 1295 | 1337 | 1109 | 1131 | 1157 | 1170 | 1232 | 1364 | 1335 | 1398 | 1331 | 1330 |
| 2002 | 1532 | 1423 | 1358 | 1397 | 1467 | 1380 | 1507 | 1456 | 1501 | 1416 | 1401 | 1432 |
| 2003 | 1598 | 1590 | 1577 | 1399 | 1428 | 1468 | 1566 | 1665 | 1544 | 1586 | 1473 | 1483 |
| 2004 | 1670 | 1691 | 1643 | 1526 | 1533 | 1492 | 1557 | 1587 | 1561 | 1647 | 1517 | 1463 |
| 2005 | 1804 | 1673 | 1588 | 1511 | 1428 | 1583 | 1516 | 1583 | 1438 | 1414 | 1415 | 1589 |
| 2006 | 1644 | 1471 | 1468 | 1310 | 1388 | 1584 | 1522 | 1592 | 1299 | 1478 | 1366 | 1252 |
| 2007 | 1577 | 1451 | 1385 | 1391 | 1406 | 1454 | 1376 | 1365 | 1268 | 1364 | 1363 | 1344 |
| 2008 | 1729 | 1585 | 1352 | 1414 | 1416 | 1558 | 1573 | 1640 | 1604 | 1637 | 1947 | 1908 |
| 2009 | 2130 | 2051 | 2106 | 2089 | 2210 | 2176 | 2282 | 2270 | 2219 | 2373 | 2323 | 2486 |
| 2010 | 2539 | 2527 | 2255 | 2432 | 2223 | 2591 | 2622 | 2370 | 2548 | 2602 | 2531 | 2609 |
| 2011 | 2800 | 2730 | 2434 | 2466 | 2206 | 2680 | 2785 | 2575 | 2511 | 2555 | 2591 | 2540 |
| 2012 | 2809 | 2608 | 2352 | 2363 | 2423 | 2483 | 2529 | 2561 | 2517 | 2433 | 2505 | 2614 |
| 2013 | 2443 | 2588 | 2326 | 2347 | 2164 | 2582 | 2414 | 2342 | 2302 | 2283 | 2096 | 2427 |
| 2014 | 2592 | 2303 | 2168 | 2160 | 2130 | 2028 | 2178 | 2141 | 2226 | 2192 | 2109 | 2260 |
| 2015 | 2234 | 2159 | 2055 | 2115 | 1862 | 1914 | 1927 | 1812 | 1921 | 1916 | 1717 | 1833 |
| 2016 | 2089 | 1803 | 1720 | 1715 |
Not in Labor Force, Searched For Work and Available, Discouraged Reasons For Not Currently Looking
568,000
Series Id: LNU05026645 Not Seasonally Adjusted Series title: (Unadj) Not in Labor Force, Searched For Work and Available, Discouraged Reasons For Not Currently Looking Labor force status: Not in labor force Type of data: Number in thousands Age: 16 years and over Job desires/not in labor force: Want a job now Reasons not in labor force: Discouragement over job prospects (Persons who believe no job is available.)
| Year | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 236 | 267 | 258 | 331 | 280 | 309 | 266 | 203 | 253 | 232 | 236 | 269 |
| 2001 | 301 | 287 | 349 | 349 | 328 | 294 | 310 | 337 | 285 | 331 | 328 | 348 |
| 2002 | 328 | 375 | 330 | 320 | 414 | 342 | 405 | 378 | 392 | 359 | 385 | 403 |
| 2003 | 449 | 450 | 474 | 437 | 482 | 478 | 470 | 503 | 388 | 462 | 457 | 433 |
| 2004 | 432 | 484 | 514 | 492 | 476 | 478 | 504 | 534 | 412 | 429 | 392 | 442 |
| 2005 | 515 | 485 | 480 | 393 | 392 | 476 | 499 | 384 | 362 | 392 | 404 | 451 |
| 2006 | 396 | 386 | 451 | 381 | 323 | 481 | 428 | 448 | 325 | 331 | 349 | 274 |
| 2007 | 442 | 375 | 381 | 399 | 368 | 401 | 367 | 392 | 276 | 320 | 349 | 363 |
| 2008 | 467 | 396 | 401 | 412 | 400 | 420 | 461 | 381 | 467 | 484 | 608 | 642 |
| 2009 | 734 | 731 | 685 | 740 | 792 | 793 | 796 | 758 | 706 | 808 | 861 | 929 |
| 2010 | 1065 | 1204 | 994 | 1197 | 1083 | 1207 | 1185 | 1110 | 1209 | 1219 | 1282 | 1318 |
| 2011 | 993 | 1020 | 921 | 989 | 822 | 982 | 1119 | 977 | 1037 | 967 | 1096 | 945 |
| 2012 | 1059 | 1006 | 865 | 968 | 830 | 821 | 852 | 844 | 802 | 813 | 979 | 1068 |
| 2013 | 804 | 885 | 803 | 835 | 780 | 1027 | 988 | 866 | 852 | 815 | 762 | 917 |
| 2014 | 837 | 755 | 698 | 783 | 697 | 676 | 741 | 775 | 698 | 770 | 698 | 740 |
| 2015 | 682 | 732 | 738 | 756 | 563 | 653 | 668 | 624 | 635 | 665 | 594 | 663 |
| 2016 | 623 | 599 | 585 | 568 |
Employment Situation Summary
Transmission of material in this release is embargoed until USDL-16-0882
8:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, May 6, 2016
Technical information:
Household data: (202) 691-6378 * cpsinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/cps
Establishment data: (202) 691-6555 * cesinfo@bls.gov * www.bls.gov/ces
Media contact: (202) 691-5902 * PressOffice@bls.gov
THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION -- APRIL 2016
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 160,000 in April, and the unemployment
rate was unchanged at 5.0 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported
today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, and
financial activities. Job losses continued in mining.
Household Survey Data
In April, the unemployment rate held at 5.0 percent, and the number of unemployed
persons was little changed at 7.9 million. Both measures have shown little
movement since August. (See table A-1.)
Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for Hispanics increased to
6.1 percent in April, while the rates for adult men (4.6 percent), adult women
(4.5 percent), teenagers (16.0 percent), Whites (4.3 percent), Blacks (8.8 percent),
and Asians (3.8 percent) showed little or no change. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)
The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) declined
by 150,000 to 2.1 million in April. These individuals accounted for 25.7 percent
of the unemployed. (See table A-12.)
In April, the labor force participation rate decreased to 62.8 percent, and the
employment-population ratio edged down to 59.7 percent. (See table A-1.)
The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (also referred to
as involuntary part-time workers) was about unchanged in April at 6.0 million
and has shown little movement since November. These individuals, who would have
preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had
been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.
(See table A-8.)
In April, 1.7 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, down
by 400,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These
individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work,
and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted
as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding
the survey. (See table A-16.)
Among the marginally attached, there were 568,000 discouraged workers in April,
down by 188,000 from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.)
Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they
believe no jobs are available for them. The remaining 1.1 million persons
marginally attached to the labor force in April had not searched for work for
reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-16.)
Establishment Survey Data
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 160,000 in April. Over the prior
12 months, employment growth had averaged 232,000 per month. In April,
employment gains occurred in professional and business services, health care,
and financial activities, while mining continued to lose jobs. (See table B-1.)
Professional and business services added 65,000 jobs in April. The industry
added an average of 51,000 jobs per month over the prior 12 months. In April,
job gains occurred in management and technical consulting services (+21,000)
and in computer systems design and related services (+7,000).
In April, health care employment rose by 44,000, with most of the increase
occurring in hospitals (+23,000) and ambulatory health care services (+19,000).
Over the year, health care employment has increased by 502,000.
Employment in financial activities rose by 20,000 in April, with credit
intermediation and related activities (+8,000) contributing to the gain.
Financial activities has added 160,000 jobs over the past 12 months.
Mining employment continued to decline in April (-7,000). Since reaching a
peak in September 2014, employment in mining has decreased by 191,000, with
more than three-quarters of the loss in support activities for mining.
Employment in other major industries, including construction, manufacturing,
wholesale trade, retail trade, transportation and warehousing, information,
leisure and hospitality, and government, showed little or no change over
the month.
The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls increased
by 0.1 hour to 34.5 hours in April. The manufacturing workweek and overtime
remained unchanged at 40.7 hours and 3.3 hours, respectively. The average
workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm
payrolls was up by 0.1 hour to 33.7 hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)
In April, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm
payrolls increased by 8 cents to $25.53, following an increase of 6 cents
in March. Over the year, average hourly earnings have risen by 2.5 percent.
In April, average hourly earnings of private-sector production and
nonsupervisory employees increased by 5 cents to $21.45. (See tables B-3
and B-8.)
The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for February was revised
from +245,000 to +233,000, and the change for March was revised from +215,000
to +208,000. With these revisions, employment gains in February and March
combined were 19,000 less than previously reported. Over the past 3 months,
job gains have averaged 200,000 per month.
_____________
The Employment Situation for May is scheduled to be released on Friday,
June 3, 2016, at 8:30 a.m. (EDT).
- Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
- Employment Situation Summary Table B. Establishment data, seasonally adjusted
- Employment Situation Frequently Asked Questions
- Employment Situation Technical Note
- Table A-1. Employment status of the civilian population by sex and age
- Table A-2. Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age
- Table A-3. Employment status of the Hispanic or Latino population by sex and age
- Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment
- Table A-5. Employment status of the civilian population 18 years and over by veteran status, period of service, and sex, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-6. Employment status of the civilian population by sex, age, and disability status, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-7. Employment status of the civilian population by nativity and sex, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-8. Employed persons by class of worker and part-time status
- Table A-9. Selected employment indicators
- Table A-10. Selected unemployment indicators, seasonally adjusted
- Table A-11. Unemployed persons by reason for unemployment
- Table A-12. Unemployed persons by duration of unemployment
- Table A-13. Employed and unemployed persons by occupation, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-14. Unemployed persons by industry and class of worker, not seasonally adjusted
- Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization
- Table A-16. Persons not in the labor force and multiple jobholders by sex, not seasonally adjusted
- Table B-1. Employees on nonfarm payrolls by industry sector and selected industry detail
- Table B-2. Average weekly hours and overtime of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-3. Average hourly and weekly earnings of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-4. Indexes of aggregate weekly hours and payrolls for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-5. Employment of women on nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted
- Table B-6. Employment of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Table B-7. Average weekly hours and overtime of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Table B-8. Average hourly and weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Table B-9. Indexes of aggregate weekly hours and payrolls for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls by industry sector, seasonally adjusted(1)
- Access to historical data for the “A” tables of the Employment Situation Release
- Access to historical data for the “B” tables of the Employment Situation Release
- HTML version of the entire news release
Employment Situation Summary Table A. Household data, seasonally adjusted
| Category | Apr. 2015 |
Feb. 2016 |
Mar. 2016 |
Apr. 2016 |
Change from: Mar. 2016- Apr. 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Employment status |
|||||
|
Civilian noninstitutional population |
250,266 | 252,577 | 252,768 | 252,969 | 201 |
|
Civilian labor force |
157,032 | 158,890 | 159,286 | 158,924 | -362 |
|
Participation rate |
62.7 | 62.9 | 63.0 | 62.8 | -0.2 |
|
Employed |
148,509 | 151,074 | 151,320 | 151,004 | -316 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
59.3 | 59.8 | 59.9 | 59.7 | -0.2 |
|
Unemployed |
8,523 | 7,815 | 7,966 | 7,920 | -46 |
|
Unemployment rate |
5.4 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 0.0 |
|
Not in labor force |
93,234 | 93,688 | 93,482 | 94,044 | 562 |
|
Unemployment rates |
|||||
|
Total, 16 years and over |
5.4 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 0.0 |
|
Adult men (20 years and over) |
5.0 | 4.5 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 0.1 |
|
Adult women (20 years and over) |
4.9 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.5 | -0.1 |
|
Teenagers (16 to 19 years) |
17.1 | 15.6 | 15.9 | 16.0 | 0.1 |
|
White |
4.7 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 0.0 |
|
Black or African American |
9.6 | 8.8 | 9.0 | 8.8 | -0.2 |
|
Asian |
4.4 | 3.8 | 4.0 | 3.8 | -0.2 |
|
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity |
6.9 | 5.4 | 5.6 | 6.1 | 0.5 |
|
Total, 25 years and over |
4.4 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 0.0 |
|
Less than a high school diploma |
8.5 | 7.3 | 7.4 | 7.5 | 0.1 |
|
High school graduates, no college |
5.4 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 0.0 |
|
Some college or associate degree |
4.6 | 4.2 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 0.0 |
|
Bachelor’s degree and higher |
2.7 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.4 | -0.2 |
|
Reason for unemployment |
|||||
|
Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs |
4,130 | 3,749 | 3,835 | 3,855 | 20 |
|
Job leavers |
824 | 760 | 833 | 851 | 18 |
|
Reentrants |
2,649 | 2,467 | 2,495 | 2,357 | -138 |
|
New entrants |
867 | 833 | 778 | 839 | 61 |
|
Duration of unemployment |
|||||
|
Less than 5 weeks |
2,707 | 2,297 | 2,412 | 2,545 | 133 |
|
5 to 14 weeks |
2,339 | 2,236 | 2,205 | 2,131 | -74 |
|
15 to 26 weeks |
1,162 | 1,132 | 1,178 | 1,304 | 126 |
|
27 weeks and over |
2,503 | 2,165 | 2,213 | 2,063 | -150 |
|
Employed persons at work part time |
|||||
|
Part time for economic reasons |
6,549 | 5,988 | 6,123 | 5,962 | -161 |
|
Slack work or business conditions |
3,870 | 3,579 | 3,631 | 3,709 | 78 |
|
Could only find part-time work |
2,349 | 2,104 | 2,154 | 2,009 | -145 |
|
Part time for noneconomic reasons |
20,034 | 20,615 | 20,428 | 20,469 | 41 |
|
Persons not in the labor force (not seasonally adjusted) |
|||||
|
Marginally attached to the labor force |
2,115 | 1,803 | 1,720 | 1,715 | – |
|
Discouraged workers |
756 | 599 | 585 | 568 | – |
|
– Over-the-month changes are not displayed for not seasonally adjusted data. |
|||||
Table A-2. Employment status of the civilian population by race, sex, and age
| Employment status, race, sex, and age | Not seasonally adjusted | Seasonally adjusted(1) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr. 2015 |
Mar. 2016 |
Apr. 2016 |
Apr. 2015 |
Dec. 2015 |
Jan. 2016 |
Feb. 2016 |
Mar. 2016 |
Apr. 2016 |
|
|
WHITE |
|||||||||
|
Civilian noninstitutional population |
196,574 | 197,809 | 197,906 | 196,574 | 197,471 | 197,639 | 197,718 | 197,809 | 197,906 |
|
Civilian labor force |
123,089 | 124,663 | 124,416 | 123,485 | 123,815 | 124,362 | 124,748 | 125,018 | 124,749 |
|
Participation rate |
62.6 | 63.0 | 62.9 | 62.8 | 62.7 | 62.9 | 63.1 | 63.2 | 63.0 |
|
Employed |
117,642 | 119,137 | 119,337 | 117,704 | 118,295 | 119,029 | 119,442 | 119,674 | 119,369 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
59.8 | 60.2 | 60.3 | 59.9 | 59.9 | 60.2 | 60.4 | 60.5 | 60.3 |
|
Unemployed |
5,448 | 5,526 | 5,079 | 5,780 | 5,520 | 5,333 | 5,306 | 5,345 | 5,380 |
|
Unemployment rate |
4.4 | 4.4 | 4.1 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.3 | 4.3 |
|
Not in labor force |
73,484 | 73,146 | 73,490 | 73,089 | 73,656 | 73,277 | 72,970 | 72,791 | 73,157 |
|
Men, 20 years and over |
|||||||||
|
Civilian labor force |
64,613 | 65,175 | 65,093 | 64,741 | 64,691 | 65,002 | 65,304 | 65,296 | 65,178 |
|
Participation rate |
72.0 | 72.1 | 72.0 | 72.2 | 71.7 | 72.0 | 72.3 | 72.3 | 72.1 |
|
Employed |
61,870 | 62,355 | 62,583 | 61,912 | 61,988 | 62,482 | 62,787 | 62,739 | 62,600 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
69.0 | 69.0 | 69.2 | 69.0 | 68.7 | 69.2 | 69.5 | 69.4 | 69.2 |
|
Unemployed |
2,744 | 2,820 | 2,510 | 2,829 | 2,702 | 2,520 | 2,517 | 2,557 | 2,578 |
|
Unemployment rate |
4.2 | 4.3 | 3.9 | 4.4 | 4.2 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 4.0 |
|
Women, 20 years and over |
|||||||||
|
Civilian labor force |
54,238 | 55,192 | 55,023 | 54,208 | 54,521 | 54,753 | 54,803 | 55,142 | 54,984 |
|
Participation rate |
57.4 | 58.0 | 57.8 | 57.3 | 57.4 | 57.6 | 57.6 | 58.0 | 57.8 |
|
Employed |
52,115 | 53,087 | 52,991 | 51,916 | 52,391 | 52,603 | 52,659 | 52,992 | 52,798 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
55.1 | 55.8 | 55.7 | 54.9 | 55.2 | 55.4 | 55.4 | 55.7 | 55.5 |
|
Unemployed |
2,123 | 2,105 | 2,032 | 2,292 | 2,130 | 2,150 | 2,144 | 2,149 | 2,185 |
|
Unemployment rate |
3.9 | 3.8 | 3.7 | 4.2 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 4.0 |
|
Both sexes, 16 to 19 years |
|||||||||
|
Civilian labor force |
4,239 | 4,296 | 4,300 | 4,535 | 4,603 | 4,607 | 4,641 | 4,580 | 4,587 |
|
Participation rate |
34.4 | 34.8 | 34.8 | 36.8 | 37.4 | 37.4 | 37.7 | 37.1 | 37.2 |
|
Employed |
3,657 | 3,695 | 3,763 | 3,876 | 3,916 | 3,944 | 3,995 | 3,942 | 3,970 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
29.7 | 30.0 | 30.5 | 31.4 | 31.8 | 32.0 | 32.4 | 32.0 | 32.2 |
|
Unemployed |
582 | 601 | 537 | 659 | 687 | 663 | 645 | 638 | 617 |
|
Unemployment rate |
13.7 | 14.0 | 12.5 | 14.5 | 14.9 | 14.4 | 13.9 | 13.9 | 13.4 |
|
BLACK OR AFRICAN AMERICAN |
|||||||||
|
Civilian noninstitutional population |
31,293 | 31,753 | 31,792 | 31,293 | 31,594 | 31,679 | 31,716 | 31,753 | 31,792 |
|
Civilian labor force |
19,380 | 19,421 | 19,368 | 19,405 | 19,442 | 19,536 | 19,569 | 19,513 | 19,413 |
|
Participation rate |
61.9 | 61.2 | 60.9 | 62.0 | 61.5 | 61.7 | 61.7 | 61.5 | 61.1 |
|
Employed |
17,648 | 17,670 | 17,779 | 17,540 | 17,819 | 17,821 | 17,851 | 17,759 | 17,700 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
56.4 | 55.6 | 55.9 | 56.1 | 56.4 | 56.3 | 56.3 | 55.9 | 55.7 |
|
Unemployed |
1,731 | 1,751 | 1,590 | 1,864 | 1,623 | 1,716 | 1,718 | 1,754 | 1,713 |
|
Unemployment rate |
8.9 | 9.0 | 8.2 | 9.6 | 8.3 | 8.8 | 8.8 | 9.0 | 8.8 |
|
Not in labor force |
11,913 | 12,332 | 12,423 | 11,888 | 12,152 | 12,143 | 12,147 | 12,240 | 12,379 |
|
Men, 20 years and over |
|||||||||
|
Civilian labor force |
8,868 | 8,871 | 8,964 | 8,925 | 8,780 | 8,844 | 8,910 | 8,881 | 9,013 |
|
Participation rate |
68.3 | 67.1 | 67.7 | 68.7 | 66.8 | 67.1 | 67.5 | 67.2 | 68.1 |
|
Employed |
8,095 | 8,063 | 8,157 | 8,106 | 8,017 | 8,101 | 8,146 | 8,112 | 8,155 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
62.3 | 61.0 | 61.6 | 62.4 | 61.0 | 61.5 | 61.7 | 61.4 | 61.6 |
|
Unemployed |
773 | 809 | 807 | 819 | 763 | 743 | 764 | 768 | 858 |
|
Unemployment rate |
8.7 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 9.2 | 8.7 | 8.4 | 8.6 | 8.7 | 9.5 |
|
Women, 20 years and over |
|||||||||
|
Civilian labor force |
9,868 | 9,842 | 9,712 | 9,800 | 9,928 | 9,970 | 9,938 | 9,868 | 9,667 |
|
Participation rate |
62.4 | 61.4 | 60.5 | 62.0 | 62.2 | 62.3 | 62.0 | 61.5 | 60.2 |
|
Employed |
9,067 | 9,062 | 9,090 | 8,941 | 9,241 | 9,179 | 9,152 | 9,076 | 9,003 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
57.3 | 56.5 | 56.6 | 56.5 | 57.9 | 57.4 | 57.1 | 56.6 | 56.1 |
|
Unemployed |
801 | 781 | 622 | 858 | 686 | 791 | 786 | 792 | 665 |
|
Unemployment rate |
8.1 | 7.9 | 6.4 | 8.8 | 6.9 | 7.9 | 7.9 | 8.0 | 6.9 |
|
Both sexes, 16 to 19 years |
|||||||||
|
Civilian labor force |
643 | 708 | 693 | 680 | 734 | 722 | 720 | 764 | 732 |
|
Participation rate |
25.8 | 28.3 | 27.6 | 27.3 | 29.5 | 28.9 | 28.8 | 30.5 | 29.2 |
|
Employed |
486 | 546 | 533 | 493 | 560 | 540 | 552 | 571 | 542 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
19.5 | 21.8 | 21.3 | 19.8 | 22.5 | 21.7 | 22.1 | 22.8 | 21.6 |
|
Unemployed |
157 | 162 | 160 | 187 | 174 | 182 | 168 | 193 | 190 |
|
Unemployment rate |
24.4 | 22.9 | 23.1 | 27.5 | 23.7 | 25.2 | 23.3 | 25.3 | 26.0 |
|
ASIAN |
|||||||||
|
Civilian noninstitutional population |
14,290 | 14,911 | 14,853 | 14,290 | 14,553 | 14,816 | 14,974 | 14,911 | 14,853 |
|
Civilian labor force |
9,023 | 9,478 | 9,444 | 9,038 | 9,168 | 9,192 | 9,426 | 9,411 | 9,448 |
|
Participation rate |
63.1 | 63.6 | 63.6 | 63.3 | 63.0 | 62.0 | 62.9 | 63.1 | 63.6 |
|
Employed |
8,644 | 9,112 | 9,101 | 8,645 | 8,805 | 8,856 | 9,070 | 9,038 | 9,090 |
|
Employment-population ratio |
60.5 | 61.1 | 61.3 | 60.5 | 60.5 | 59.8 | 60.6 | 60.6 | 61.2 |
|
Unemployed |
379 | 366 | 343 | 394 | 363 | 337 | 355 | 373 | 357 |
|
Unemployment rate |
4.2 | 3.9 | 3.6 | 4.4 | 4.0 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 4.0 | 3.8 |
|
Not in labor force |
5,267 | 5,433 | 5,409 | 5,251 | 5,385 | 5,623 | 5,548 | 5,500 | 5,406 |
|
Footnotes |
|||||||||
|
NOTE: Estimates for the above race groups will not sum to totals shown in table A-1 because data are not presented for all races. Updated population controls are introduced annually with the release of January data.
|
|||||||||
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The Pronk Pops Show 1156, October 16, 2019, Breaking News — Story 1: Deficit Spending Redux — Hits $779 billion for Fiscal Year 2018 — Videos — Story 2: President Trump Talked With King of Saudi Arabia — Denies Any Knowledge of Jamal Khashoggi Disappearance and Death — Trump Suggests Rogue Killers — Who Knows? — The Shadow Knows — Videos — Story 3: Trump Triumph on 60 Minutes — “I’m President and You are Not.” — Videos — Story 4: Kids, What Time Is It? It is Howdy Dowdy Time — Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring — Elizabeth Warren aka Princess Pocahontas — Killing Identity Politics — Who Cares? — Lying Lunatic Leftist Losers — Videos —
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Story 1: Deficit Spending Redux — Hits $779 billion for Fiscal Year 2018 — Videos
Fiscal 2018 budget deficit up 17% to $779 billion
In Their Own Words: Trey Hollingsworth on federal budget deficit
Greenspan Says U.S. Needs to Confront Budget Deficit
CBO Sees U.S. Budget Deficit Ballooning to $1 Trillion By 2020
Deficits & Debts: Crash Course Economics #9
US budget deficit expands to $779 billion in fiscal 2018 as spending surges
CNBC.com
The U.S. federal budget deficit rose in fiscal 2018 to the highest level in six years as spending climbed, the Trump administration said Monday.
The deficit jumped to $779 billion, $113 billion or 17 percent higher than the previous fiscal period, according to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. It was larger than any year since 2012, when it topped $1 trillion. The budget shortfall rose to 3.9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
The deficit increased by $70 billion less than anticipated in a report published in July, according to the two officials.
Federal revenue rose only slightly, by $14 billion after Republicans chopped tax rates for corporations and most individuals. Outlays climbed by $127 billion, or 3.2 percent. A spike in defense spending, as well as increases for Medicaid, Social Security and disaster relief, contributed to the increase.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have pledged their commitment to fiscal discipline, despite the fact that they passed a tax law projected to dramatically expand budget deficits last year and then authorized a boost in spending. In a statement, Mulvaney claimed that “America’s booming economy will create increased government revenues,” a point the GOP has repeatedly argued in favor of its tax plan.
“But this fiscal picture is a blunt warning to Congress of the dire consequences of irresponsible and unnecessary spending,” he added. “Going forward, President Trump and this Administration will continue to work with Congress to make the difficult choices needed to bring fiscal restraint, which, when matched with increasing revenue, will reduce our deficit.”
Several independent analyses have estimated the GOP tax plan will cause budget deficits to grow dramatically over time, even after economic growth is taken into account.
The Trump administration has proposed dramatic cuts to spending in several government agencies to reduce deficits. Even many Republicans have rejected the severity of proposed budget cuts.
The Treasury noted that receipts related to “excise, customs and other” jumped to $35 billion in September 2018, a 35 percent increase over the prior-year period. It is unclear how much of that revenue relates to Trump’s tariffs on imports from major trading partners.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/15/us-budget-deficit-expands-to-779-billion-in-fiscal-2018-as-spending-surges.html
Story 2: President Trump Talked With King of Saudi Arabia — Denies Any Knowledge of Jamal Khashoggi Disappearance and Death — Trump Suggests Rogue Killers — Who Knows? — The Shadow Knows — Videos —
The Shadow Knows
Jamal Khashoggi: Trump suggests ‘rogue killers’ to blame – BBC News
Former CIA acting director on possible punishment in Saudi missing journalist case
Trump administration takes closer look at case of Saudi Arabian journalist
Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman and the media | The Listening Post (Lead)
From Saudi royal court to exile: Why MBS wants to silence Jamal Khashoggi
#Khashoggi
The crown prince and his circle could not stomach that journalist Khashoggi was honest, spoke his mind and could not be bought
Topics:
Jamal Khashoggi is a friend of mine, so what I am about to write lacks objectivity.
In the many conversations we have had together, and for a long time after he fell out with the new regime in Riyadh under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Khashoggi actively eschewed the label “Saudi dissident”. He regarded himself as a loyalist, a son of the establishment, a journalist and foreign policy veteran who not so long ago was inside the benighted circle of the royal court. On occasions, he travelled with them.
Undying enmity
I can cite many examples of Khashoggi parting company with Western liberal critics of the kingdom. He supported – initially, at least – the Saudi-led war on Yemen. In common with many Sunni Arab analysts, he thought that Iran had overextended its reach into the Sunni Arab world and that it was time for Saudi Arabia to push back.
He defended capital punishment. He supported a crackdown on corruption – if he could be convinced that it was genuine. He supported, too, attempts to diversify and privatise an oil-dependent economy.
But Khashoggi adhered to one principle that the small circle around Mohammed bin Salman could not stomach, a quality that earned him their undying enmity. Khashoggi was honest. He could not be bought. He spoke his mind and was clear about what he was saying.
He thought that there was only one path on which the kingdom should be headed in the 21st Century – that is of a slowly opening democracy headed by a gradually retreating constitutional monarchy.
He feared the crown prince would eventually bankrupt the country as a result of his vanity projects to raise new gleaming cities in the sand – cities that would remain empty. He recognised that MBS was popular with the youth, but calculated that popularity would last up to the point where they had to open their wallets. The Saudi journalist paid heed to reports of capital flight.
The reckless crown prince
Khashoggi’s criticism of his own country was nuanced and for that reason alone I would consider him a real reformer and true democrat. That he should – by now – have been detained for over 24 hours in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul speaks volumes about the character and intentions of those running the show in Riyadh.
It dispels the well-funded PR myth that has ensnared journalists like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and Jamal’s colleague on the Washington Post, David Ignatius, who have praised Mohammed bin Salman as a reformer. Ignatius wrote that the Saudi crown prince was giving his country “shock therapy”. I did not think his paper supported the practise of lobotomy.
Mohammed bin Salman is shocking all right, but he is no therapist. He is vindictive. He bears grudges. He is supremely wilful. He has absolutely no respect for another country’s sovereignty, territory, courts or media. He is reckless. That he should have staged this stunt in Istanbul, on Turkish soil, is a measure of how reckless the Saudi crown prince and the narrow circle around him are.
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Turkey have steadily deteriorated since the coup attempt against the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan two years ago. It was clear which side the Saudi state-run media was on during the night of the coup. They ran wall-to-wall coverage, with all commentators saying either that Erdogan was dead or that he had fled the country.
That Erdogan had survived that night was truly bad news for Riyadh.
It took 16 hours for the Saudi state news service to realise that the coup had not succeeded and issue a statement expressing “the kingdom’s welcome that things are returned to normal led by his Excellency President Tayyip Erdogan and his elected government and in line with the constitutional legitimacy and the will of the Turkish people”.
A delicate time
Those memories are still raw, especially in the Turkish presidency. That Mohammed bin Salman should risk sending Saudi relations with Turkey to a new low by seizing a high-profile journalist on Erdogan’s home turf, is another indication of how unstable the next ruler of the kingdom is.
As Riyadh knows only too well, it got very little for the $300m it paid, much of it in cash, to Iraqi politicians of different confessions who were contesting the recent election. It also knows that Turkey and Iran are in high-level talks – as is the Hashd el Shabi (also known as the Popular Mobilisation Units) and Sunni groups in Iraq – about a new security accommodation in areas that are traditionally Sunni.
This is the first time in many years that Iraq’s Shia factions are genuinely divided and that a political deal that does not run so fully along sectarian lines is achievable. This is a delicate time for Saudi-Turkish relations. It is not in Riyadh’s interest to upset the apple cart as publicly and clumsily as it appears to have done at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Turkish intelligence are convinced that Khashoggi remains inside the building and have surrounded it. Saudi officials have strongly denied any involvement in his disappearance and say that he left the consulate soon after arriving.
It is essential that Turkey secures Khashoggi’s safe release for reasons that go beyond the man himself, and a threadbare bilateral relationship.
Turkey: A safe haven
Apart from being home to millions of Syrian refugees, Turkey houses thousands of political exiles from all over the Arab world.
Istanbul is home to virtually the entire gamut of the Egyptian opposition, secular and Islamist. It is where British-born militants are kept in prison. There is a lot going on in Istanbul, and more than one Western government would prefer to keep it that way.
If Turkey allowed abductions by foreign governments to take place on its soil, its own internal security would rapidly deteriorate. It would also lose the substantial leverage it has in the Middle East by providing safe haven for a number of Sunni opposition groups.
How much pressure the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is willing to apply with his counterpart, the Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir, over Khashoggi (who has residency in the US and is a Washington Post columnist) is as yet unclear. The White House is no lover of the Washington Post or press freedom.
US President Donald Trump regularly insults and humiliates King Salman of Saudi Arabia to force him to pay even more for his own security than he already has done.
The regime in Saudi Arabia swallows these insults from Trump, while going to the opposite extreme with what it considers lesser nations like Canada, because it knows it has no other option.
Khashoggi was the first to warn Saudis of the dangers of getting into bed with Trump. In fact, this was the reason he fell out with the Saudi regime in the first place, and this was long before the Arab Islamic American summit held in Riyadh last May and the announcement of lucrative arms deals. It is indeed too late for Riyadh to heed the journalist’s words, and so they have gone to desperate lengths to silence him.
For more than one reason, they should not be allowed to succeed.
– David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Photo: Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi speaks at an event hosted by Middle East Monitor in London on 29 September 2018 (Reuters)
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/son-establishment-enemy-why-mohammed-bin-salman-wants-silence-jamal-khashoggi-1430306018
What the media aren’t telling you about Jamal Khashoggi
The dissident’s fate says a lot about Saudi Arabia and the rise of the mobster state
John R. Bradley, October 11, 2018
As someone who spent three decades working closely with intelligence services in the Arab world and the West, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi knew he was taking a huge risk in entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to try to obtain a document certifying he had divorced his ex-wife.
A one-time regime insider turned critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the de facto head of the Saudi kingdom which tolerates no criticism whatsoever — Khashoggi had been living in Washington for the previous year in self-imposed exile amid a crackdown on independent voices in his homeland.
He had become the darling of western commentators on the Middle East. With almost two million Twitter followers, he was the most famous political pundit in the Arab world and a regular guest on the major TV news networks in Britain and the United States. Would the Saudis dare to cause him harm? It turns out that the answer to that question was ‘You betcha.’
Following uneventful visits to the consulate and, earlier, the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khashoggi was lured into a murderous plan so brazen, so barbaric, that it would seem far-fetched as a subplot in a John le Carré novel. He went inside the Istanbul consulate, but failed to emerge. Turkish police and intelligence officials claimed that a team of 15 hitmen carrying Saudi diplomatic passports arrived the same morning on two private jets. Their convoy of limousines arrived at the consulate building shortly before Khashoggi did.
Their not-so-secret mission? To torture, then execute, Khashoggi, and videotape the ghastly act for whoever had given the order for his merciless dispatch. Khashoggi’s body, Turkish officials say, was dismembered and packed into boxes before being whisked away in a black van with darkened windows. The assassins fled the country.
Saudi denials were swift. The ambassador to Washington said reports that Saudi authorities had killed Khashoggi were ‘absolutely false’. But under the circumstances — with his fiancée waiting for him, and no security cameras finding any trace of his leaving the embassy — the world is left wondering if bin Salman directed this murder. When another Saudi official chimed in that ‘with no body, there is no crime’, it was unclear whether he was being ironic. Is this great reforming prince, with aims the West applauds, using brutal methods to dispose of his enemies? What we have learned so far is far from encouraging. A Turkish newspaper close to the government this week published the photographs and names of the alleged Saudi hitmen, and claims to have identified three of them as members of bin Salman’s personal protection team.
There are also reports in the American media that all surveillance footage was removed from the consulate building, and that all local Turkish employees there were suddenly given the day off. According to the New York Times, among the assassination team was the kingdom’s top forensic expert, who brought a bone saw to dismember Khashoggi’s body. None of this has yet been independently verified, but a very dark narrative is emerging.
In many respects, bin Salman’s regime has been revolutionary: he has let women drive, sided with Israel against Iran and curtailed the religious police. When Boris Johnson was foreign secretary, he said that bin Salman was the best thing to happen to the region in at least a decade, that the style of government of this 33-year-old prince was utterly different. But the cruelty and the bloodletting have not stopped. Saudi Arabia still carries out many public beheadings and other draconian corporal punishments. It continues to wage a war in Yemen which has killed at least 10,000 civilians.
Princes and businessmen caught up in a corruption crackdown are reported to have been tortured; Shia demonstrators have been mowed down in the streets and had their villages reduced to rubble; social media activists have been sentenced to thousands of lashes; families of overseas-based activists have been arbitrarily arrested. In an attempt to justify this, bin Salman said this week he was ‘trying to get rid of extremism and terrorism without civil war, without stopping the country from growing, with continuous progress in all elements,’ adding: ‘So if there is a small price in that area, it’s better than paying a big debt to do that move.’
The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power. This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.
In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.
He had been a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, but then became more of a player than a spectator. Before working with a succession of Saudi princes, he edited Saudi newspapers. The exclusive remit a Saudi government–appointed newspaper editor has is to ensure nothing remotely resembling honest journalism makes it into the pages. Khashoggi put the money in the bank — making a handsome living was always his top priority. Actions, anyway, speak louder than words.
It was Yasin Aktay — a former MP for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) — whom Khashoggi told his fiancée to call if he did not emerge from the consulate. The AKP is, in effect, the Turkish branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. His most trusted friend, then, was an adviser to President Erdogan, who is fast becoming known as the most vicious persecutor of journalists on earth. Khashoggi never meaningfully criticised Erdogan. So we ought not to see this as the assassination of a liberal reformer.
Khashoggi had this undeserved status in the West because of the publicity surrounding his sacking as editor of the Saudi daily Al Watan back in 2003. (I broke the news of his removal for Reuters. I’d worked alongside Khashoggi at the Saudi daily Arab News during the preceding years.) He was dismissed because he allowed a columnist to criticise an Islamist thinker considered to be the founding father of Wahhabism. Thus, overnight, Khashoggi became known as a liberal progressive.
The Muslim Brotherhood, though, has always been at odds with the Wahhabi movement. Khashoggi and his fellow travellers believe in imposing Islamic rule by engaging in the democratic process. The Wahhabis loathe democracy as a western invention. Instead, they choose to live life as it supposedly existed during the time of the Muslim prophet. In the final analysis, though, they are different means to achieving the same goal: Islamist theocracy. This matters because, although bin Salman has rejected Wahhabism — to the delight of the West — he continues to view the Muslim Brotherhood as the main threat most likely to derail his vision for a new Saudi Arabia. Most of the Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia who have been imprisoned over the past two years — Khashoggi’s friends — have historic ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Khashoggi had therefore emerged as a de facto leader of the Saudi branch. Due to his profile and influence, he was the biggest political threat to bin Salman’s rule outside of the royal family.
Worse, from the royals’ point of view, was that Khashoggi had dirt on Saudi links to al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. He had befriended Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan and Sudan while championing his jihad against the Soviets in dispatches. At that same time, he was employed by the Saudi intelligence services to try to persuade bin Laden to make peace with the Saudi royal family. The result? Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi who had the beef on the royals’ intimate dealing with al Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. That would have been crucial if he had escalated his campaign to undermine the crown prince.
Like the Saudi royals, Khashoggi dissociated himself from bin Laden after 9/11 (which Khashoggi and I watched unfold together in the Arab News office in Jeddah). But he then teamed up as an adviser to the Saudi ambassador to London and then Washington, Prince Turki Al Faisal. The latter had been Saudi intelligence chief from 1977 until just ten days before the 9/11 attacks, when he inexplicably resigned. Once again, by working alongside Prince Turki during the latter’s ambassadorial stints, as he had while reporting on bin Laden, Khashoggi mixed with British, US and Saudi intelligence officials. In short, he was uniquely able to acquire invaluable inside information.
The Saudis, too, may have worried that Khashoggi had become a US asset. In Washington in 2005, a senior Pentagon official told me of a ridiculous plan they had to take ‘the Saudi out of Arabia’ (as was the rage post-9/11). It involved establishing a council of selected Saudi figures in Mecca to govern the country under US auspices after the US took control of the oil. He named three Saudis the Pentagon team were in regular contact with regarding the project. One of them was Khashoggi. A fantasy, certainly, but it shows how highly he was regarded by those imagining a different Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps it was for this and other reasons — and working according to the dictum of keeping your enemies closer — that a few weeks ago, according to a friend of Khashoggi, bin Salman had made a traditional tribal offer of reconciliation — offering him a place as an adviser if he returned to the kingdom. Khashoggi had declined because of ‘moral and religious’ principles. And that may have been the fatal snub, not least because Khashoggi had earlier this year established a new political party in the US called Democracy for the Arab World Now, which would support Islamist gains in democratic elections throughout the region. Bin Salman’s nightmare of a Khashoggi-led Islamist political opposition was about to become a reality.
The West has been fawning over bin Salman. But how now to overlook what seems to be a brazen Mafia-style murder? ‘I don’t like hearing about it,’ Donald Trump said. ‘Nobody knows anything about it, but there’s some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it.’ Well, there are plenty more stories where that came from, stories about a ruthless prince whose opponents have a habit of disappearing. The fate of Khashoggi is the latest sign of what’s really happening inside Saudi Arabia. For how much longer will our leaders look the other way?
This article was originally published in The Spectator magazine.
https://spectator.us/2018/10/jamal-khashoggi/
FEATURED: Jamal Khashoggi- A Global Muslim Brotherhood Operative Writing For The Washington Post?
Global media has been widely reporting on the alleged disappearance of Saudi national and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, often describing him in terms such as “a dissident-journalist critical of the oil-rich kingdom.” As the BBC recently reported:
Generally but not always overlooked in the media coverage are Khashoggi’s ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood
1. What is the Global Muslim Brotherhood?
Most observers are familiar with the pan-Islamic organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Founded in 1928 by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan El-Banna, the Egyptian Brotherhood has been a wellspring of Islamism and political Islam since it(…)
“>Global Muslim Brotherhood. For example, British author and journalist John R. Bradley reports that Khashoggi joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970’s:
Washington Post writer David Ignatius, who says he knew Khashoggi for 15 years, also reports that Khashoggi joined the Muslim Brotherhood at some unspecified time, likely while in the US for his education:
Interesting is Khashoggi’s attendance at Indiana State University confirmed in a local media report which says he was an undergraduate student at Indiana State from 1977-1982, and was awarded a degree in business administration on May 7, 1983. According to a report by the GMBDW author, at the same time Khashoggi was attending university in Indiana, the state was the hub of the newly developing complex of organizations that would become the US Muslim Brotherhood. For example, the report notes a key meeting held in early 1977 described as follows:
“>Muslim Student Association (MSA) reached its mid-teens it began preparing for an expanded role in the service of Islam. It called an historic meeting of a cross-section of Islamic workers, in Plainfield, Indiana, in early 1397/1977. This meeting set up a task force to recommend a new organizational structure to respond to the increasing challenges and responsibilities emerging in the growing North American Muslim communities. The task force concluded that the new environment would be best served by establishing a broader umbrella organization called “ISNA.”
ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America, emerged out of the early US Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure and documents discovered in the course of the the terrorism trial of the Holy Land Foundation
“>Holy Land Foundation
confirmed that the organization was part of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood. ISNA was named as a Holy Land unindicted co-conspirator as a result of what the US Justice Department called the organization’s “intimate relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Palestine Committee, and the defendants in this case.” Although not confirmed, it would seem more than possible that a Muslim student active in Indiana would have been interacting with the complex of US Brotherhood organizations rapidly developing at that time. Khashoggi is also known to have close relations with Saudi businessman Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal who appointed him to run the ill-fated Al Arab television station in Bahrain in 2015. As frequently reported by the GMBDW, Prince Talal is known to have made donations to both the ISNA and to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), also part of the US Muslim Brotherhood.
Not all reporting characterizes Khashoggi as a Muslim Brotherhood “member” although it should be remembered that membership is a nebulous concept when discussing the Global Muslim Brotherhood. The independent Turkish news portal Ahval claims that while Khashoggi was not a Brotherhood member he was “someone close to their ideas”:
As for Khashoggi himself, Islamist media reported in 2017 that he denied that being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood although he characterized Brotherhood thought as “noble”:
However at the same time, and in another interview, Khashoggi gave a somewhat disingenuous denial of Brotherhood membership, stating that he was not “officially a member” but did not mind being referred to as such:
Consistent with ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood is Khashoggi’s friendship with Azzam Tamimi, a UK activist for Hamas and a leader in the UK Muslim Brotherhood. According to an Associated Press report, the two hd been involved in setting up “pro-democracy” projects since 1992:
Although described as a “democracy advocacy group” it should be noted that in reality, as described in an ABC News report, DAWN was in fact a stalking horse for the inclusion of “Sunni Political Islam” in Middle Eastern governments, presumably including Saudi Arabia. Another self-described Islamic Democracy group is the US-based Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
“>Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
(CSID) where Khashoggi gave the keynote address in April 2018 and were he reportedly:
Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) was founded in 1998 in what appears to have been a cooperative effort among the US Muslim Brotherhood, the US State Department and Georgetown University academic Dr. John Esposito who served during the 1990’s as a State Department “foreign affairs analyst” and who has at least a dozen past or present affiliations with global Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas
“>Hamas
organizations. From its inception, CSID has argued that the U.S. government should support Islamist movements in foreign countries and has received financial support from the U.S. State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy and the United States Institute of Peace.
It should also be noted that the British journalist John R. Bradley, has reported that Khashoggi instructed his fiancée to contact former Turkish MP and AK Party leader Yasin Aktay in case he failed to come out of the consulate. Aktay is known to be a close advisor to Muslim Brotherhood supporter and Turkish President Erdogan and the AK Party is an Islamist party close to the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
The evidence offered above strongly suggests that Jamal Khashoggi was not only a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood and close to the Global Muslim Brotherhood but was, in fact, actively supporting Brotherhood-related projects as recently as April of this year as evidenced by his key note address on behalf of the CSID. The GMBDW wished to state in the clearest terms that none of the above should be taken as support for any violence that may or may not have been committed against Mr. Khashoggi by any party. The evidence does however raise serious questions about how such an individual came to be associated with the Washington Post and why he is generally fêted as a “pro-democracy reformer” by so much of the global media. Perhaps much of that media is not aware that the Muslim Brotherhood is often categorized by academics as a “reformist movement.”
While it would seem unlikely and/or unusual that such a prominent journalist would be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the GMBDW has long reported on the example of Waddah Khanfar, the former General Manager of Al Jazeera who is tied to both the Global Muslim Brotherhood and to Hamas as well as currently serving as a trustee of the US-based International Crisis Group.
We should also add that this is by no means the only example of the Washington Post showing astonishingly bad judgment with respect to the Global Muslim Brotherhood. In February 2017, we reported on the Post’s shoddy work with respect to an article purporting to fact check recent series of claims about long-time Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin. As we wrote at that time:
It would seem our hopes are to be dashed once again.
https://www.globalmbwatch.com/2018/10/14/jamal-khashoggi-a-global-muslim-brotherhood-operative-writing-for-the-washington-post/
BREAKING: CNN Reports Saudis Preparing to Admit Jamal Khashoggi Was Killed in ‘Interrogation Gone Wrong’
by Aidan McLaughlin | Oct 15th, 2018, 3:17 pm
CNN reported on Monday that Saudi Arabia is preparing a report in which they will admit that Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Postcolumnist who went missing earlier this month, was killed in an “interrogation gone wrong.”
Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi dissident, went missing after walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Turkish officials said they have proof he was murdered and dismembered by a team of Saudi agents, a charge the Saudi government vehemently denied.
Per two sources who spoke to CNN, however, the Saudis are preparing a report admitting that they intended to abduct and bring Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia, but that he was inadvertently killed in the process. The report is intended, per CNN, to absolve the Saudi government of responsibility for the murder by claiming the operation was not cleared.
Damon added that the Saudis’ report is still being prepared, and could change.
Earlier on Monday, President Donald Trump said he spoke with Saudi King Salman, who “firmly denied any knowledge” of the murder of Khashoggi. Trump also said Salman suggested those responsible for his death could be “rogue killers.”
The Saudis had previously insisted that Khashoggi left the consulate soon after arriving.
This story is developing…
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/breaking-cnn-reports-saudis-preparing-to-admit-missing-journalist-was-killed-in-interrogation-gone-wrong/
Story 3: Trump Triumph on 60 Minutes — Videos
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The President talked over Lesley Stahl in a relentless blast of rhetoric that seemed more rally than interview
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First, Stahl seemed to want to conduct a definitive interview with Trump summarizing his presidency so far. In so doing, she skittered across the map of global and domestic issues, seeming to touch on every topic under the sun, from the ultra-current — the fate of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi — to the more long-range. Questions about, say, North Korea, tariffs on China, climate change, and NATO were met with long bursts of Trumpian verbiage, spilling out so fast they seemed barely able to be edited. What fell away in editing, or what was barely allowed to happen in the time allotted, were many follow-ups.
And when follow-up questions did happen, they seemed to fall into the interview’s second trap: Trying to crack the code of Donald Trump, human being. “I wish you could go to Greenland,” Stahl mused in the brief portion of the interview dealing with climate change, “watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels.” Trump shouted her down, predictably unmoved by Stahl’s evident passion about a story imbued with dread. He won every segment of the interview because he was utterly unable to brook doubt — and, at this point, a broadcast dealing with a president who cannot face facts must be armed with real facts of their own. Stahl asked Trump about “the scientists who say [the effects of climate change are] worse than ever,” but was unprepared to cite one; knowing, now, that the human factor will not work on Trump, a broadcaster should be prepared to cite hard facts in a face-off with the President.
Not, of course, that those facts will change his mind or even elicit an unexpected answer from the Commander-in-Chief. But it felt like a missed opportunity that both so many ardent Trump fans and so many in the hazy middle tuned into an interview with the President and found so much of what was put to him phrased in loose, conversational terms. If he won’t deal with the realities of climate change (presented in this interview only in anecdotal terms of ice and hurricanes and in data, never explained, from “NOAA and NASA,” and not the recent, catastrophic United Nations report) or of abandoning NATO, the broadcaster should rush in to fill the gap. Instead, facts like these ones seemed to be assumed on the part of the viewership at home, and the silences were filled by Trump, who explained away why orthodoxies were wrong while Stahl struggled to break into his monologues. The one moment Stahl meaningfully challenged Trump was on his alliance with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un — presenting the President with a “resume” of his conversation partner’s misdeeds in his own country — but even then, the format demanded she move forward after Trump said the pair shared “a good energy.” Her next question was, verbatim, “China.” And Trump free-associated there, too.
By pushing through questions and by capitalizing on an interview approach seeking to synthesize his entire presidency into two segments of television, Trump effectively converted “60 Minutes” into a short rally. There are those who will see his rants as worthy, and those who will loathe them; whatever unity can be made to exist by the President exists only within those camps. That “60 Minutes” went looking for something greater is more proof than viewers needed that their approach to the President left them outmatched.
Lesley Stahl
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December 16, 1941(age 76)
Lynn, Massachusetts,
U.S.
Lesley Rene Stahl[1] (born December 16, 1941) is an American television journalist.
She has spent most of her career with CBS News, having been affiliated with that network since 1972; since 1991, she has reported for CBS’ 60 Minutes.
Contents
Personal life
Stahl was born to a wealthy Jewish family[2] in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was raised in Swampscott, Massachusetts. She is the daughter of Dorothy J. (née Tishler), and Louis E. Stahl, a food company executive.[1][2][3] In 1977, Stahl married author Aaron Latham. They have one child, Taylor Stahl Latham. The couple currently lives in New York City.
Career
Stahl and her family with PresidentRonald Reagan in 1986
An honors graduate of Wheaton College who majored in history,[4] Stahl began her television broadcasting career at Boston’s original Channel 5, WHDH-TV, as a producer and on-air reporter.[5] She joined CBS News in 1972, and became a correspondent in 1974. “I was born on my 30th birthday,” Stahl would later write about the experience. “Everything up till then was prenatal.”[6] Stahl credits her CBS News hire to the Federal Communication Commission‘s 1972 inclusion of women in its affirmative action mandate: “the television networks were scouring the country for women and blacks with any news experience at all. A friend in New York had called to tell me about a memo floating around CBS News mandating that ‘the next reporter we hire will be a woman.'”[7] According to Stahl, Connie Chung and Bernard Shaw were “the two other ‘affirmative action babies’ in what became known as the Class of ’72.”[8] Stahl reflected in an interview on her early days at CBS how, on the night of the ’72 Nixon-McGovern election returns, she found her on-air studio chair marked with masking tape, not with her name as with her colleagues, but with “Female.” Stahl was the mentor of CBS news producer Susan Zirinsky.[9]
Stahl’s prominence grew after she covered Watergate. “I found an apartment in the Watergate complex, moved all my stuff from Boston, and didn’t miss a day of work. … June 1972. Most of the reporters in our bureau were on the road, covering the presidential campaign. Thus, I was sent out to cover the arrest of some men who had broken into one of the buildings in the Watergate complex. That CBS let me, the newest hire, hold on to Watergate as an assignment was a measure of how unimportant the story seemed: … I was the only television reporter covering the early court appearances. When the five Watergate burglars asked for a bail reduction, I got my first scoop. Unlike my competitors, I was able to identify them. The next time the cameraman listened when I said, ‘Roll! That’s them!’ And so CBS was the only network to get pictures of the burglars. I was a hero at the bureau.” [10]
She went on to become White House correspondent during the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. At the Republican Convention of 1980, she broke the news on CBS that Reagan’s negotiations with ex-President Gerald Ford had broken down and the answer to the question of who would be vice-presidential nominee was: “It’s Bush! Yes, it’s Bush!” George H. W. Bush had been standing perhaps not far away, largely off by himself, looking discouraged because he was sure he wasn’t going to be chosen.
Stahl was the moderator of Face the Nation between September 1983 and May 1991. In addition, she hosted 48 Hours Investigates from 2002 to 2004. In 2002, Stahl made headlines when Al Gore appeared on 60 Minutes and revealed for the first time that he would not run for president again in 2004. When Katie Couric was hired, CBS News asked Stahl to reduce her salary by $500,000 to accommodate Couric’s salary, bringing her salary down to $1.8 million.[11][12] In October 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France, stood up and walked away from an interview with Stahl because she asked him about his relationship with his soon-to-be estranged wife, Cécilia.
In 1998, she appeared on the NBC sitcom Frasier, playing herself in the episode “Desperately Seeking Closure”. In 2014, she served as a correspondent for Years of Living Dangerously, a documentary show about climate change.[13]
Stahl has written two books, the first of which, Reporting Live, was published in 1999:
Her second book, Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting, which chronicles her own experiences with her grandchildren, was published in 2016.
Lesley Stahl hosting the 67th Annual Peabody Awards
She received a Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa from Colgate University in 2008[15] and a Doctorate of Humane Letters honoris causa from Loyola College in Maryland in 2008.
Lesley Stahl was a founding member in 2008, along with Liz Smith, Mary Wells Lawrence, and Joni Evans, of wowOwow.com, a website for “women over 40” to talk about culture, politics, and gossip.[16] By the end of 2010 it had merged into PureWow, a Web site aimed at younger women.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[17]
Stahl is on the Board of Selectors of Jefferson Awards for Public Service.[18]
Career timeline
Bibliography
See also
References …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_Stahl
Story 4: Kids, What Time Is It? It is Howdy Dowdy Time — Princess Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring — Tone Deaf Elizabeth Warren aka Princess Pocahontas is 99.999% White — Killing Identity Politics — Who Cares? — Lying Lunatic Leftist Losers — Videos —
Trump reacts to Elizabeth Warren releasing DNA test results
Elizabeth Warren releases DNA test results
[youtube3=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Ao3M3wlZE]
Elizabeth Warren’s family story
Howdy Doody -Yell Howdy Doody -Judy Tyler
Howdy Doody Time with Princesss Summer-Fall-Winter-Spring
Scott Adams – Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test, Khashoggi, and Climate Change
Liawatha Fauxcahontas Elizabeth Warren: 0.0976% Native American and 100% Pure Bovine Egesta
Couldn’t Be More Tone Deaf’: Tomi Takes on Hillary’s Latest Attack on ‘Deplorables’
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[ARCHIVES] ANDY KAUFMAN INTERVIEWING HOWDY DOODY
Warren releases results of DNA test
Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president.
Warren, whose claims to Native American blood have been mocked by President Trump and other Republicans, provided the test results to the Globe on Sunday in an effort to defuse questions about her ancestry that have persisted for years. She planned an elaborate rollout Monday of the results as she aimed for widespread attention.
The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.
He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
RELATED: Ethnicity not a factor in Elizabeth Warren’s rise in law
Smith was born in the late 1700s. She identified as white in historical documents, though at the time Indians faced discrimination, and Smith would have had strong incentives to call herself white if possible.
The inherent imprecision of the six-page DNA analysis could provide fodder for Warren’s critics. If O.C. Sarah Smith were fully Native American, that would make Warren up to 1/32nd native. But the generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. The report notes there could be missed ancestors.
Undergoing the test and releasing the results reveal how seriously Warren is taking the attacks from Trump, who has been able to effectively caricature and diminish his national foes via nicknames and conspiracy theories. Trump pushed then President Barack Obama into releasing the long form of his birth certificate to prove what most knew was already true: He was born in America.
Warren is seeking reelection in Massachusetts and is expected to easily win a second term. She has said that she will take a “hard look” at running for the Democratic nomination for president once the midterm elections are over. She’s already released 10 years worth of her tax returns and made her personnel files available to The Boston Globe, showing that ethnicity was not a factor in her rise in law.
By taking a DNA test, Warren is showing that if she runs for president, she plans to be a very different candidate than Hillary Clinton was. The 2016 Democratic nominee for president chafed at releasing personal information and was dogged throughout her campaign by her use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
RELATED: Elizabeth Warren’s Native American problem goes beyond politics
Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides. The data from that test was sent to Bustamante and his team for analysis. Warren received the report last week.
Warren didn’t use a commercial service, but Bustamante is on the scientific advisory board for Ancestry, which provides commercial DNA tests. He’s also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.
Warren said she was committed to releasing the report regardless of the results. However, Warren’s aides would not say whether she or any of her three siblings had previously done a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance about Bustamante’s analysis.
There were five parts of Warren’s DNA that signaled she had a Native American ancestor, according to the report. The largest piece of Native American DNA was found on her 10th chromosome, according to the report. Each human has 23 pairs of chromosomes.
“It really stood out,” said Bustamante in an interview. “We found five segments, and that long segment was pretty significant. It tells us about one ancestor, and we can’t rule out more ancestors.”
He added: “We are confident it is not an error.”
Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.
“The tribes have felt they have been exploited,” explained Lawrence Brody, a senior investigator with the Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The amount of genetic data that is available from Native Americans is sparse.”
To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That’s because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago and settled in what’s now America but also migrated further south. His report explained that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed “for maximal accuracy.”
RELATED: Warren defends heritage claims
Bustamante said he can tease out the markers that these South Americans would have in common with Native Americans on the North American continent.
Bustamante also compared Warren’s DNA to white populations in Utah and Great Britain to determine if the amounts of Native American markers in Warren’s sample were significant or just background noise.
Warren has 12 times more Native American blood than a white person from Great Britain and 10 times more than a white person from Utah, the report found.
Warren has come under blistering attacks from Trump for making claims of Native American heritage. His taunts of her as “Pocahontas” have become part of his standard rally monologue.
Earlier this month at rally in Iowa, Trump said he hoped Warren would run for president because it would allow him to find out “whether or not she has Indian blood.”
In July, during a rally in Montana, Trump imagined debating Warren during the 2020 presidential election and said that he’d try to make her take a DNA test by throwing it at her onstage. “We have to do it gently, because we’re in the #MeToo generation, so we have to be very gentle,” Trump said.
He also offered to provide $1 million to her charity of choice if she takes the test.
Warren’s Senate campaign has used clips from Trump and his spokeswoman Sarah Sanders attacking her for making the Native American claims in a slickly produced video it planned to distribute Monday morning. It includes a scene of Warren and her three older brothers discussing the issue.
There’s even footage of Warren calling Bustamante to get the results of her DNA test.
“The president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say?” asks Warren, sitting at a desk by behind a Macintosh laptop.
“The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree,” replies Bustamante, who was also captured on film by Warren’s team.
Bustamante is considered one of the leading DNA analysts in the world. When several DNA experts were asked by the Globe, earlier this year, how they’d recommend Warren go about taking a DNA test, his name came up repeatedly.
He has never donated to Warren’s campaigns. (A different California professor with the same name donated $200 to Obama in 2008, federal records show.)
Questions over Warren’s ethnicity have dogged her since her 2012 Senate campaign. That’s when GOP operatives found archival stories in the Harvard Crimson of a Harvard Law School spokesman referring to her as a Native American as a way to show the school had a diverse faculty.
During her academic career as a law professor, she had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995. (She was a visiting professor at Harvard during the 1992-1993 academic year.)
In an interview with the Globe published last month, Warren explained that she identified herself as Native American in the late 1980s and early 1990s as many of the matriarchs of her family were dying and she began to feel that her family stories and history were becoming lost.
Ivy League universities, like the ones where Warren taught, were under great pressure to show they had diverse staffs.
The University of Pennsylvania filled out a document explaining why it hired a white woman over minority candidates — clear evidence it didn’t view her as a Native American addition. And the Globe interviewed 31 Harvard Law School faculty members who voted on her appointment there, and all said her heritage was not a factor.
Correction: Due to a math error, a story about Elizabeth Warren misstated the ancestry percentage of a potential 6th to 10th generation relative. The generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.
Annie Linskey can be reached at annie.linskey@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @annielinskey.
Characters
Puppet characters[
Besides Howdy Doody, the other characters in this show are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howdy_Doody#Characters_and_story
Did Elizabeth Warren Just Kill Identity Politics?
If the Massachusetts senator is now a person of color then the term has no meaning.
By James Freeman
“Elizabeth Warren’s Native American Heritage” is the title of a new campaign video promoting the senior senator from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren, a former Harvard law professor, is claiming vindication after presenting the results of a genetic test which appears to show she likely has more of a claim to Native American heritage—but perhaps less of a claim—than the average white person in the United States.
The likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has been trying to find some way to respond to questions about her longtime claim of Native American heritage given that her family doesn’t belong to a tribe.
“Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides,” says a report today by Annie Linskey in the Boston Globe. But the senator sought a judgment on the results from Carlos Bustamante, a professor of biomedical data science at Stanford. Writes Ms. Linskey:
This column doesn’t find it odd that the senator didn’t want to rely on analysis performed by a commercial firm given her hostility to commerce generally. In any case here’s Professor Bustamante’s conclusion after studying the Warren test results:
This suggests that the senator is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American. A 2014 news account seems to provide useful context. “In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people,” reported Carl Zimmer in the New York Times. Mr. Zimmer added:
At least according to the report from Professor Bustamante, it’s possible that Sen. Warren has far less than one percent Native American ancestry, and that her genetic makeup is perhaps similar to that of the average white person in the U.S. Could this create a problem for the senator both among those who have never claimed minority status and those who believe they clearly deserve it? Ms. Warren’s Senate re-election campaign is now rolling out testimonials from academic colleagues who say she never benefited from her identification as a Native American. The Boston Globe’s Ms. Linskey has previously reported on Ms. Warren’s various racial claims:
Given the Bustamante analysis, Ms. Warren might have chosen to acknowledge that her claims of minority status were a stretch. But she’s instead decided to present it as vindication, even demanding on Twitter that the President donate $1 million to something called the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
At a speech in July, Mr. Trump discussed the possibility of debating Sen. Warren in the 2020 campaign. Mr. Trump said that “in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims she’s of Indian heritage“ he would toss a DNA testing kit her way and say, “I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.”
One could argue that the President didn’t actually make the offer but instead described a hypothetical scenario. Yet by demanding a Trump payment Sen. Warren clearly seems to be asserting that she is “an Indian.”
Before facing President Trump in a 2020 debate, Sen. Warren will first need to win over the Democrats who vote in presidential primaries. If these voters accept her as a Native American then logically it suggests that most if not all Americans can also claim to be members of groups that have historically suffered discrimination. We’re all minorities now?
This column thinks it would be wonderful if politicians decided to stop separating Americans by race but doubts Ms. Warren can sell this to Democratic party activists.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/did-elizabeth-warren-just-kill-identity-politics-1539633575
Pocahontas
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c. 1596[1]
Werowocomoco, present-day Gloucester County, Virginia
Gravesend, Kent, Kingdom of England
Pocahontas (born Matoaka, known as Amonute, c. 1596 – March 1617) was a Native American[2][3][4] woman notable for her association with the colonial settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the paramount chief[2] of a network of tributary tribal nations in the Tsenacommacah, encompassing the Tidewater region of Virginia. In a well-known historical anecdote, she saved the life of a captive of the Native Americans, the Englishman John Smith, in 1607 by placing her head upon his own when her father raised his war club to execute him. Many historians doubt the veracity of this story.[5][6]
Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom by the English during Anglo-Indian hostilities in 1613. During her captivity, she converted to Christianity and took the name Rebecca. When the opportunity arose for her to return to her people, she chose to remain with the English. In April 1614, at the age of 17, she married tobacco planter John Rolfe, and in January 1615, she bore their son, Thomas Rolfe.[1]
In 1616, the Rolfes travelled to London. Pocahontas was presented to English society as an example of the “civilized savage” in hopes of stimulating investment in the Jamestown settlement. She became something of a celebrity, was elegantly fêted, and attended a masque at Whitehall Palace. In 1617, the Rolfes set sail for Virginia, but Pocahontas died at Gravesend of unknown causes, aged 20 or 21. She was buried in St George’s Church, Gravesend in England, but her grave’s exact location is unknown, as the church has been rebuilt.[1]
Numerous places, landmarks, and products in the United States have been named after Pocahontas. Her story has been romanticized over the years, and she is a subject of art, literature, and film. Many famous people have claimed to be among her descendants through her son, including members of the First Families of Virginia, First Lady Edith Wilson, American Western actor Glenn Strange, Las Vegas performer Wayne Newton, and astronomer Percival Lowell.[7]
Early life
Pocahontas’s birth year is unknown, but some historians estimate it to have been around 1596.[1] In A True Relation of Virginia (1608), Smith described the Pocahontas he met in the spring of 1608 as “a child of ten years old”.[8] In a 1616 letter, he again described her as she was in 1608, but this time as “a child of twelve or thirteen years of age”.[9]
Pocahontas was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, paramount chief of Tsenacommacah, an alliance of about 30 Algonquian-speaking groups and petty chiefdoms in Tidewater, Virginia.[10] Her mother’s name and origins are unknown but she was probably of lowly status. The colonist Henry Spelman, who had lived among the Powhatan as an interpreter, noted that when one of the paramount chief’s many wives gave birth to a child, the mother was returned to her place of origin, to be supported there by the paramount chief until she found another husband.[11] In the traditional histories of the Powhatan, Pocahontas’s mother died in childbirth.[12][13] An oral history of the Mattaponi Reservation Peoples, who are descendants of the Powhatan, claims that Pocahontas’s mother was first wife of Powhatan, and that Pocahontas was named after her.[14]
Pocahontas’s childhood was probably little different from that of most girls who lived in Tsenacommacah. She would have learned how to perform what was considered women’s work: foraging for food and firewood, farming, and searching for the plant materials used in building thatched houses.[15] As she grew older, she would have helped other members of Powhatan’s household with preparations for large feasts.[13] Serving feasts, such as the one presented to John Smith after his capture, was a regular obligation of the Mamanatowick, or paramount chief.[16]
Names
At the time Pocahontas was born, it was common for Powhatan Native Americans to be given several personal names, have more than one name at the same time, have secret names that only a select few knew, and to change their names on important occasions. Bestowed at different times, the names carried different meanings and might be used in different contexts.[17] Pocahontas was no different. Early in her life, she was given a secret name, Matoaka, but later she was also known as Amonute. Matoaka means “Bright Stream Between the Hills”; Amonute has not been translated.[18][19]
According to the colonist William Strachey, “Pocahontas” was a childhood nickname that probably referred to her frolicsome nature; it meant “little wanton”;[20] some interpret the meaning as “playful one”.[16] The 18th-century historian William Stith claimed that “her real name, it seems, was originally Matoax, which the Indians carefully concealed from the English and changed it to Pocahontas, out of a superstitious fear, lest they, by the knowledge of her true name, should be enabled to do her some hurt.”[21] According to the anthropologist Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas “revealed [her secret name] to the English only after she had taken another religious—baptismal—name, Rebecca”.[22]
Pocahontas’s Christian name, Rebecca, may have been a symbolic gesture to Rebecca of the Book of Genesis who, as the mother of Jacob and Esau, was the mother of two “nations”, or distinct peoples. Pocahontas, as a Powhatan marrying an Englishman, may have been seen by herself and her contemporaries as also potentially a matriarchal figure of two distinct peoples.[23]
Title and status
Pocahontas has been considered in popular culture a princess. In 1841, William Watson Waldron of Trinity College, Dublin, in Ireland, published Pocahontas, American Princess: and Other Poems, calling her “the beloved and only surviving daughter of the king”.[24]Pocahontas was her father’s “delight and darling”, according to the colonist Captain Ralph Hamor[25] but she was not in line to inherit a position as a weroance, subchief, or mamanatowick (paramount chief). Instead, Powhatan’s brothers, sisters, and his sisters’ children all stood in line to succeed him.[26] In his A Map of Virginia John Smith explained how matrilineal inheritance worked among the Powhatan:
Interactions with the English
John Smith
In this chromolithograph credited to the New England Chromo. Lith. Company, around 1870, Pocahontas saves the life of John Smith. The scene is idealized and relies on stereotypes of Native Americans rather than reliable information about the particulars of this historical moment. There are no mountains in Tidewater Virginia, for example, and the Powhatans lived not in tipis but in thatched houses. And the scene that Smith famously described in his Generall Historie (1624) did not take place outdoors but in a longhouse.
Pocahontas is most famously linked to the English colonist Captain John Smith, who arrived in Virginia with a hundred other settlers in April 1607, at the behest of the London Company. After building a fort on a marshy peninsula poking out into the James River, the Englishmen had numerous encounters over the next several months with the people of Tsenacommacah, some of them friendly, some hostile. Then, in December 1607, while exploring on the Chickahominy River, Smith was captured by a hunting party led by Powhatan’s younger brother (or close relative) Opechancanough and brought to Powhatan’s capital at Werowocomoco. In his 1608 account, Smith describes a great feast followed by a long talk with Powhatan. He does not mention Pocahontas in relation to his capture, and claims that they first met some months later.[27] [28] Huber understands the meeting of Smith and Powhatan as the latter’s attempt to bring Smith, and so the English, into his chiefdom: Powhatan offered Smith rule of the town of Capahosic, which was close to Powhatan’s capital at Werowocomoco. The paramount chief thus hoped to keep Smith and his men “nearby and better under control”.[29]
In 1616, Smith wrote a letter to Queen Anne in anticipation of Pocahontas’s visit to England. In this new account, his capture included the threat of his own death: “at the minute of my execution”, he wrote, “she [Pocahontas] hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that but so prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.”[9] In his 1624 Generall Historie, published long after the death of Pocahontas, Smith expanded the story. Writing about himself in the third person, he explained that after he was captured and taken to the paramount chief, “two great stones were brought before Powhatan: then as many as could layd hands on him [Smith], dragged him to them, and thereon laid his head, and being ready with their clubs, to beate out his braines, Pocahontas the Kings dearest daughter, when no intreaty could prevaile, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death …”[30]
In a later publication, True Travels (1630), Smith claimed a similar rescue by another young girl in 1602, following his capture by Turks in Hungary; the story resembles a popular contemporary type of moral tale, in which a Christian hero maintains his faith despite threats and intimidation. Karen Ordahl Kupperman suggests that Smith used such details to embroider his first account, thus producing a more dramatic, second account of his encounter with Pocahontas as a heroine worthy of reception by Queen Anne. Its later revision and publication was probably an attempt to raise his own stock and reputation; he had long since fallen from favor with the London Company, which had funded the Jamestown enterprise.[31] Anthropologist Frederic W. Gleach, drawing on substantial ethnohistory, suggests that Smith’s second account, while substantially accurate, represents his misunderstanding of a three-stage ritual intended to adopt Smith, as representative of the English colony, into the confederacy;[32][33] but not all writers are convinced, some suggesting the absence of certain corroborating evidence.[34]
Early histories did establish that Pocahontas befriended Smith and the Jamestown colony. Pocahontas often went to the settlement and played games with the boys there.[35] When the colonists were starving, “every once in four or five days, Pocahontas with her attendants brought him [Smith] so much provision that saved many of their lives that else for all this had starved with hunger”.[36] As the colonists expanded their settlement further, the Powhatan felt their lands were threatened, and conflicts arose again.
In late 1609, an injury from a gunpowder explosion forced Smith to return to England for medical care. The English told the Powhatans that Smith was dead. Pocahontas believed that account and hence stopped visiting Jamestown. Much later, she learned that he was living in England when she traveled there with her husband, John Rolfe.[37]
Capture
In his engraving The abduction of Pocahontas (1619), Johann Theodor de Bry depicts a full narrative. Starting in the lower left, Pocahontas (centre) is deceived by the weroance Iopassus, who holds as bait a copper kettle, and his wife, who pretends to cry. At centre right, Pocahontas is put on the boat and feasted. In the background, the action moves from the Potomac to the York River, where negotiations for a hostage trade fail and the English attack and burn a Native American village.[38]
Pocahontas’s capture occurred in the context of the First Anglo-Powhatan War, a conflict between the Jamestown settlers and the Native Americans that began late in the summer of 1609.[39] In the first years of war, the English took control of the James River, both at its mouth and at the falls. Captain Samuel Argall, in the meantime, pursued contacts with Native American groups in the northern portion of Powhatan’s paramount chiefdom. The Patawomecks, who lived on the Potomac River, were not always loyal to Powhatan, and living with them was a young English interpreter named Henry Spelman. In March 1613, Argall learned that Pocahontas was visiting the Patawomeck village of Passapatanzy and living under the protection of the Weroance Iopassus (also known as Japazaws).[40]
With Spelman’s help translating, Argall pressured Iopassus to assist in Pocahontas’s capture by promising an alliance with the English against the Powhatans.[40] They tricked Pocahontas into boarding Argall’s ship and held her for ransom, demanding the release of English prisoners held by her father, along with various stolen weapons and tools.[41] Powhatan returned the prisoners but failed to satisfy the colonists with the number of weapons and tools he returned. A long standoff ensued, during which the English kept Pocahontas captive.
During the yearlong wait, she was held at Henricus, in modern-day Chesterfield County, Virginia. Little is known about her life there, although colonist Ralph Hamor wrote that she received “extraordinary courteous usage”.[42]Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow, in a 2007 book, refers to an oral tradition that during this time, Pocahontas was raped; according to Helen Rountree, “Other historians have disputed that such oral tradition survived and instead argue that any mistreatment of Pocahontas would have gone against the interests of the English in their negotiations with Powhatan. A truce had been called, the Indians still far outnumbered the English, and the colonists feared retaliation.”[43]
At this time, the minister at Henricus, Alexander Whitaker, taught Pocahontas about Christianity and helped her improve her English. Upon her baptism, Pocahontas took the Christian name “Rebecca”.[44]
In March 1614, the standoff built up to a violent confrontation between hundreds of English and Powhatan men on the Pamunkey River. At Powhatan’s capital of Matchcot, the English encountered a group of senior Native American leaders. The English allowed Pocahontas to talk to her countrymen. When Powhatan arrived, Pocahontas reportedly rebuked him for valuing her “less than old swords, pieces, or axes”, and said that she preferred to live with the English, “who loved her”.[45]
Possible first marriage
Current Mattaponi tradition holds that Pocahontas’s first husband was Kocoum, brother of the Patawomeck weroance Japazaws, and that Kocoum was killed by the English after his wife’s capture in 1613.[46] Today’s Patawomecks believe that Pocahontas and Kocoum had a daughter, Ka-Okee, who was raised by the Patawomecks after her father’s death and her mother’s abduction.[47]
Kocoum’s actual identity, location, and even existence have been widely debated among scholars for centuries, with several historians[who?] arguing that the only mention of a “Kocoum” in any English document is taken from a brief statement written about 1616 by William Strachey in England that Pocahontas had been living married to a “private captaine called Kocoum” for two years.[48] Since 1614 is certainly when she married John Rolfe, and no other records even hint at any previous husband, it has accordingly been suggested that when Strachey wrote of the “private captaine called Kocoum” he was mistakenly referring to Rolfe himself, with the reference being later misunderstood as one of Powhatan’s officers.[49] There was a Powhatan military rank called kokoraws, sometimes translated “captain”, and scholars have suggested[attribution needed] that Strachey could have meant this as one of his famously divergent spellings, as a gloss to “Captayne”. In addition, the date of Strachey’s original statement has been widely disputed by numerous authors attempting either to argue or refute that Pocahontas had been previously married. If there was such a marriage and Kocoum was not murdered, it likely ended, according to Powhatan custom, when Pocahontas was captured.[50]
Marriage to John Rolfe
John Gadsby Chapman, The Baptism of Pocahontas (1840). A copy is on display in the Rotunda of the US Capitol.
During her stay in Henricus, Pocahontas met John Rolfe. Rolfe’s English-born wife, Sarah Hacker, and child, Bermuda Rolfe, had died on the way to Virginia after the wreck of the ship “Sea Venture” on the Summer Isles, also known as Bermuda. Rolfe established a Virginia plantation, Varina Farms, where he successfully cultivated a new strain of tobacco. He was a pious man and agonized over the potential moral repercussions of marrying a heathen, though in fact Pocahontas had by this time accepted the Anglican faith and taken the baptismal name Rebecca. In a long letter to the governor requesting permission to wed her, he expressed his love for Pocahontas and his belief that he would be saving her soul. He wrote that he was
Pocahontas’s feelings for Rolfe are unknown. They were married on April 5, 1614, by chaplain Richard Buck, probably at Jamestown. For two years they lived at Varina Farms, across the James River from Henricus. Their son, Thomas, was born on January 30, 1615.[52]
Their marriage created a climate of peace between the Jamestown colonists and Powhatan’s tribes; it endured for eight years as the “Peace of Pocahontas.”[53] In 1615, Ralph Hamor wrote, “Since the wedding we have had friendly commerce and trade not only with Powhatan but also with his subjects round about us.”[54]
England
The Sedgeford Hall Portrait, once thought to represent Pocahontas and Thomas Rolfe, is now believed to actually depict the wife (Pe-o-ka) and son of Osceola, Seminole Indian Chief.[55]
The Virginia Company of London had long seen one of its primary goals as the conversion of Native Americans to Christianity. With the conversion of Pocahontas and her marriage to an Englishman – all of which helped bring an end to the First Anglo-Powhatan War – the company saw an opportunity to promote investment. The company decided to bring Pocahontas to England as a symbol of the tamed New World “savage” and the success of the Virginia colony.[56] In 1616, the Rolfes travelled to England, arriving at the port of Plymouth on June 12.[57] They journeyed to London by coach, accompanied by a group of about eleven other Powhatans, including a holy man named Tomocomo.[58] John Smith was living in London at the time and while Pocahontas was in Plymouth, she learned he was still alive.[59] Smith did not meet Pocahontas, but wrote to Queen Anne, the wife of King James, urging that Pocahontas be treated with respect as a royal visitor. He suggested that if she were treated badly, her “present love to us and Christianity might turn to … scorn and fury”, and England might lose the chance to “rightly have a Kingdom by her means”.[9]
Pocahontas was entertained at various social gatherings. On January 5, 1617, she and Tomocomo were brought before the king at the old Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall at a performance of Ben Jonson‘s masque The Vision of Delight. According to Smith, King James was so unprepossessing that neither Pocahontas nor Tomocomo realized whom they had met until it was explained to them afterward.[59]
Although Pocahontas was not a princess in Powhatan culture, the Virginia Company nevertheless presented her as one to the English public. The inscription on a 1616 engraving of Pocahontas, made for the company, reads: “MATOAKA ALS REBECCA FILIA POTENTISS : PRINC : POWHATANI IMP:VIRGINIÆ”, which means: “Matoaka, alias Rebecca, daughter of the most powerful prince of the Powhatan Empire of Virginia”. Many English at this time recognized Powhatan as the ruler of an empire, and presumably accorded to his daughter what they considered appropriate status. Smith’s letter to Queen Anne refers to “Powhatan their chief King”.[9] Cleric and travel writer Samuel Purchas recalled meeting Pocahontas in London, noting that she impressed those she met because she “carried her selfe as the daughter of a king”.[60] When he met her again in London, Smith referred to Pocahontas deferentially as a “Kings daughter”.[61]
Pocahontas was apparently treated well in London. At the masque, her seats were described as “well placed”,[62] and, according to Purchas, John King, Bishop of London, “entertained her with festival state and pomp beyond what I have seen in his greate hospitalitie afforded to other ladies”.[63]
Not all the English were so impressed. According to Helen C. Rountree, “there is no contemporary evidence to suggest … that Pocahontas was regarded [in England] as anything like royalty”. Rather, she was considered to be something of a curiosity and, according to one observer, she was merely “the Virginian woman”.[26]
Pocahontas and Rolfe lived in the suburb of Brentford, Middlesex, for some time, as well as at Rolfe’s family home at Heacham Hall, Heacham, Norfolk. In early 1617, Smith met the couple at a social gathering and later wrote that when Pocahontas saw him, “without any words, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented”, and was left alone for two or three hours. Later, they spoke more; Smith’s record of what she said to him is fragmentary and enigmatic. She reminded him of the “courtesies she had done”, saying, “you did promise Powhatan what was yours would be his, and he the like to you”. She then discomfited him by calling him “father”, explaining Smith had called Powhatan “father” when a stranger in Virginia, “and by the same reason so must I do you”. Smith did not accept this form of address because, he wrote, Pocahontas outranked him as “a King’s daughter”. Pocahontas then, “with a well-set countenance”, said:
Finally, Pocahontas told Smith that she and her fellow Native Americans had thought him dead, but her father had told Tomocomo to seek him “because your countrymen will lie much”.[59]
Death
Statue of Pocahontas in Saint George’s church, Gravesend, Kent
In March 1617, Rolfe and Pocahontas boarded a ship to return to Virginia; the ship had sailed only as far as Gravesend on the river Thames when Pocahontas became gravely ill.[64] She was taken ashore and died at the approximate age of 21. It is not known what caused her death, but theories range from pneumonia, smallpox, and tuberculosis to her having been poisoned.[65] According to Rolfe, she died saying, “all must die, but tis enough that her child liveth”.[66]
Pocahontas’s funeral took place on March 21, 1617, in the parish of Saint George’s, Gravesend.[67] Her grave is thought to be underneath the church’s chancel, though since that church was destroyed in a fire in 1727, its exact site is unknown.[68] Her memory is honored with a life-size bronze statue at St. George’s Church by William Ordway Partridge.[69]
Descendants and legacy
Pocahontas and her husband, John Rolfe, had one child, Thomas Rolfe, who was born in January 1615. The following year, Thomas’ parents travelled to London.
Pocahontas and her father, Chief Powhatan, have many notable descendants, including Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, Woodrow Wilson‘s wife; American Western actor Glenn Strange, Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton[70] as well as members of the First Families of Virginia, including George Wythe Randolph, Admiral Richard E. Byrd, and Virginia Governor Harry F. Byrd.
In 1907, Pocahontas became the first Native American to be honored on a US stamp.[71] She was a member of the inaugural class of Virginia Women in History in 2000.[72]
In July 2015, the Pamunkey Indian Tribe, descendants of the Powhatan chiefdom, of which Pocahontas was a member, became the first federally recognized tribe in the state of Virginia.[73]
First Lady Edith Wilson, a descendant of Pocahontas.
Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a descendant of Pocahontas[74]
Cultural representations
A 19th-century depiction
After her death, increasingly fanciful and romanticized representations of Pocahontas were produced, in which Pocahontas and Smith were romantically involved. Contemporary sources substantiate claims of their friendship, not romance.[53] The first claim of their romantic involvement was in John Davis’ Travels in the United States of America (1803)[75]
On stage
In dramatizations
Commemorations
In films
Films about Pocahontas include:
In games
In literature
In music
A woman (Pocahontas) standing half draped in fur skin tunic holding a cross in right hand, leash in left hand and a reclining fawn.
In visual art
Namesakes
Animals
Companies
Places
Schools
Summer Camps
Transport
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocahontas
Story 4: Deficit Spending Redux — Hits $779 billion for Fiscal Year 2018 — Videos
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US budget deficit expands to $779 billion in fiscal 2018 as spending surges
CNBC.com
The U.S. federal budget deficit rose in fiscal 2018 to the highest level in six years as spending climbed, the Trump administration said Monday.
The deficit jumped to $779 billion, $113 billion or 17 percent higher than the previous fiscal period, according to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. It was larger than any year since 2012, when it topped $1 trillion. The budget shortfall rose to 3.9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
The deficit increased by $70 billion less than anticipated in a report published in July, according to the two officials.
Federal revenue rose only slightly, by $14 billion after Republicans chopped tax rates for corporations and most individuals. Outlays climbed by $127 billion, or 3.2 percent. A spike in defense spending, as well as increases for Medicaid, Social Security and disaster relief, contributed to the increase.
The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have pledged their commitment to fiscal discipline, despite the fact that they passed a tax law projected to dramatically expand budget deficits last year and then authorized a boost in spending. In a statement, Mulvaney claimed that “America’s booming economy will create increased government revenues,” a point the GOP has repeatedly argued in favor of its tax plan.
“But this fiscal picture is a blunt warning to Congress of the dire consequences of irresponsible and unnecessary spending,” he added. “Going forward, President Trump and this Administration will continue to work with Congress to make the difficult choices needed to bring fiscal restraint, which, when matched with increasing revenue, will reduce our deficit.”
Several independent analyses have estimated the GOP tax plan will cause budget deficits to grow dramatically over time, even after economic growth is taken into account.
The Trump administration has proposed dramatic cuts to spending in several government agencies to reduce deficits. Even many Republicans have rejected the severity of proposed budget cuts.
The Treasury noted that receipts related to “excise, customs and other” jumped to $35 billion in September 2018, a 35 percent increase over the prior-year period. It is unclear how much of that revenue relates to Trump’s tariffs on imports from major trading partners.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/15/us-budget-deficit-expands-to-779-billion-in-fiscal-2018-as-spending-surges.html
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