Whitcomb: Train-Alignment Angst; Haitian Nurses; Deconstructing ‘Trump Accounts’
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Train-Alignment Angst; Haitian Nurses; Deconstructing ‘Trump Accounts’
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
“On the Beach at Night Alone,’’ by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet
Watch out for the recent proliferation of the colorful and stinging Lion’s Mane jellyfish on New England beaches.
“He has refused his Assent to Laws.”
“He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone.”
“Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”
“Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.”
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us.”
-- From the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s denunciation of George III. Remind you of anyone?
“The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.’’
-- Marianne Moore (1887-1972), American poet
Every season in New England has elements of other seasons. I thought of that last Tuesday night while walking our dog in a cool, almost cold, rain that made me briefly forget the heat wave and that cleaned the air. The rain and wind had torn some leaves from the trees. They lay on the glistening street, making it look like late September.
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Meanwhile, however, global warming is making blueberries ripen a week or two earlier than 50 years ago. The random picking of wild blueberries, with their tart/sweet taste, was a childhood pleasure of ours for a couple of weeks each summer. The wild ones, which favor rocky terrain, were tastier than the bigger cultivated berries we had in the front of the house; those bushes had been planted right after the 1929 stock market crash.
Berries are gifts of high summer. We’d pick them while serenaded by the cicadas we’d be hearing, louder and louder, on hot “dog-day” afternoons. (You can also eat these insects!) They can remind us that Labor Day is not that far away.
Oh, the unhealthy joy of finding piles of heart-blocking fried clams and steamed clams (deeply dunked in butter, with the juice in a bowl at the side) in what seemed to be every town on the New England coast. No more. The green-crab invasion continues to consume these soft-shell mollusks in vast quantities. The thing to do is to start eating the crabs, whose relentless spread is associated with global warming.
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Officials in the famed health-care center that is Massachusetts don’t know how to replace the Haitians (some originally illegally in the U.S., aka “undocumented”) who had been working under temporary protective status now that the Trump administration has ended TPS for Haitian nationals. Can the regime be nudged to address the swelling staffing emergency it has caused?
Immigrant workers in Massachusetts, most notably Haitians, have become crucial in filling health-care jobs, mostly ranging from maintenance to certified nursing assistants, and to registered and practical nurses, as patients and visitors in nursing homes and hospitals see every day. The absence of the Haitians, well known for their hard work and kindness, will particularly hurt institutions caring for the ever-increasing number of elderly patients needing care as the population ages. Most native-born Americans don’t want these jobs.
But AI won’t kill these positions.
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It’s a hopeful sign for the future of Providence that local real estate mogul and former Mayor Joseph Paolino has enough confidence in the city to keep buying land and buildings there. READ MORE
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Regarding Maine’s Graham Platner, forced out of his U.S. Senate campaign by sexual-abuse allegations: Do political candidates tend to have more skeletons in their closets than most people, or is it just the publicity they get? Do they have a certain aggressiveness that can get them in trouble?
But our national sexual-abuser-in-chief sits on his gilded throne.
For a Faster New Haven-Providence Route
It was good to hear that Amtrak has begun to study ways to improve the railroad’s section between New Haven and Providence. It says that it wants to “develop strategies to preserve and increase the frequency, speed, reliability and resiliency” of intercity and commuter service. But there’s a big catch: Amtrak said it would be “mindful of critical historical, environmental, and cultural resource concerns.”
It said it would “identify and evaluate new potential rail alignments alternatives and/or improvements to existing rail lines,” but “does not have a preconceived preferred alternative alignment or set of improvements.”
Translation of all this: The route could and should be made more direct, and therefore faster, but Amtrak worries that affluent and so politically powerful people along any new “alignment’’ in coastal Connecticut would fight it tooth and nail, whatever the greater good of a realigned route.
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Looking at the heat map of Providence during the torrid spell leading up to July 4, you see the most affected, as in most cities, are the parts with the poorest people. We need more public swimming pools as global warming’s effects worsen.
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The Wall Street Journal put on Page One the outstandingly arrogant Quidnessett Country Club’s (in North Kingstown) battle with the State of Rhode Island over the legally dubious and environmentally damaging seawall the club built. But then, golf is the favorite exercise (with a golf cart?) of many devoted readers of the WSJ.
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Having FIFA matches around here has provided some friendly lessons in world geography, especially useful since American schools hardly teach it anymore. Lot of countries out there!
‘Trump Accounts’
Notice how this Trump and his congressional suckups, want to imply to “low-information’’ voters that it’s somehow his generosity that would go into these new and very hyped savings accounts for children. No, it’s taxpayers’ money and will further swell the national debt, which the kids will ultimately have to address.
What’s going here – big time – includes diverting attention from the Trump regime’s massive cuts to federal programs that directly help the poor and middle class.
Anyway, this very political scheme, aimed at the mid-term elections this year and the 2028 vote, is great news for Wall Street, since the money is supposed to be invested in the stock and bond markets. There, it will contribute to asset-price inflation and intensify the financialization of the U.S. economy.
“Trump Accounts,’’ IRA-ish creatures, are more good news for the affluent, for whom most tax policy is geared to benefit, in part by favoring capital gains over earned income. The new program starts with the taxpayers offering $1,000 as one-time seed money for every American child (rich or poor) born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028. (Note precise political timing for sending this “free” money!) And $5,000 a year can be contributed yearly to the accounts. But most families can’t afford that. A rough guide is to have $2,000 on hand for emergencies.
Employers (getting tax breaks, PR boosts, and sucking up to Trump for future favors – see recent Oval Office photo ops), nonprofits, and state and local governments can all contribute to “Trump Accounts’’.
These accounts are likely to widen income inequality. But, hey, take the $1,000 and run!
Note that there’s double taxation involved in “Trump Accounts,’’ unlike with IRAs. Taxes (income and/or payroll tax) must be paid on the earned income, whence comes the money to be put into a “Trump Account,’’ and then taxes must be paid when it’s taken out. A traditional IRA lets you make pretax contributions and then taxes your withdrawals. With a Roth IRA, it’s the other way around.
Investment-account tax implications can be complicated, and most people can’t afford to pay a financial adviser. So they’ll have to study up on all these on their own with a skeptical eye. And tax rules seem to be changed about every 15 minutes, as interest groups jockey for favorable changes.
Alternatives that would probably be much better than “Trump Accounts” for most people:
UGMA/UTMA accounts let you invest in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds in a child's name. While they lack the tax deferral of “Trump Accounts,’’ investment returns are taxed on the child's lower long-term capital-gains rate, as opposed to “Trump Account’’ distributions being taxed as ordinary income. The assets are transferred directly to a child at age 18 or 21, depending on the state.
529 plans offer tax-free investment growth and tax-free withdrawals for qualified educational expenses, such as college tuitions, trade programs, and K-12 schooling.
Custodial Roth IRAs let children build tax-free wealth over decades. Funds can grow for more than 50 years. But a child must have earned income to qualify to make contributions, from, say, summer jobs.
Meanwhile, scammers are exploiting “Trump Accounts’’ by sending phishing emails and texts claiming to speed up the $1,000 government deposit or "unlock" funds. Beware. Of course, the program itself can be called a partial scam.
Again, Why We’re in NATO
The Trump regime, most notably himself and his incompetent and unhinged “War Secretary’’ Pete Hegseth, continue to whine that America has been taken to the cleaners by NATO, and so maybe it should leave, just what Putin craves. I thought of this last week while seeing the MAGA monarch churn his bizarre way through the alliance’s summit in Ankara. In fact, as I’ve said many times before, the U.S. helped create NATO in 1949, and has continued in it, because to be its leading member is in its enlightened self-interest.
In a world with aggressive, expansionist tyrannies such as the Soviet Union and its fascist successor, the Russian Federation, and increasingly totalitarian (but with a curious form of capitalism) China, membership in the alliance has provided the U.S. with much expanded power to protect its interests, including economic, around the world. Both because of that, and because of America’s wealth, it has been fair that America has paid so much to support NATO since its founding. It goes with our being a global superpower since World War II.
A strong NATO helps support the international trade and the open sea and land lanes upon which America depends.
In some ways, no nation has benefited as much from NATO as has the U.S.
And remember that NATO is a collective-defense organization. With all the misleading Trump criticism of NATO members, bear in mind that America is the only member to have invoked, after the 9/11 attacks, the alliance’s Article 5, which led to our NATO allies deploying troops and other resources to help us in Afghanistan.
The U.S., in helping to protect Europe from Russian barbarism, protects its massive market there for American goods and services, including huge quantities of defense-related goods. Europeans, looking at the increasingly unreliable transatlantic relationship, will be cutting back on those purchases, as, more broadly, Trump’s tariff wars discourage trade with America in general, hurting U.S. businesses. (Canada, for its part, is cutting back on defense-related purchases from the U.S. after Trump’s imperialist threats against it.)
Yes, some European NATO nations spend far too little on defense, though they are increasing their outlays with the eventual goal of 5 percent of GDP. (The U.S. is now at a little over 3 percent.)
The fact is that the fall of the Soviet Union lulled Europe into thinking that it could slash defense, giving it more money for social services that Americans could only dream of. And the financial crisis of 2007-2009 made things worse. Europeans didn’t want to think that a homicidal expansionist fascist tyranny like today’s Russia would eventually succeed the Soviet Empire.
There may have been some big good news from the chaotic summit: Trump, always wanting to side with a “winner,’’ said he’d let Ukraine make U.S. Patriot missile-intercepting missiles to defend itself from Russia’s relentless attacks aimed at terrorizing and murdering Ukrainian civilians. The complicated licensing and manufacturing process to actually start making these weapons in Ukraine could take more than a year, but this will give hope to brave and battered Ukraine and encourage its European allies to step up their support.
That is, if the volatile Trump doesn’t change his mind yet again on Ukraine policy, after an angry phone call from the sadistic little big man in the Kremlin who helped put our Trump in the Oval Office.
Trump’s insane war against Iran has used up more than half its supply of these interceptors, and so the U.S. is leery of immediately providing more to Ukraine. It can’t be repeated enough: Russia is a far bigger threat than Iran!
The MAGA crowd cheers on Trump’s quasi-isolationism as if America is on another planet than Earth. Consider the regime’s destruction of USAID, which for years, as a form of U.S. “soft power,” addressed such issues as disease and extreme poverty abroad. The claim was that such agencies weren’t worth it. Why spend a few billion dollars to help people suffering abroad?, ask the “Christians’’ in charge.
The answer is not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because organizations such as USAID (whose demise was led by trillionaire Elon Musk) reduce trauma and chaos abroad, pathologies whose effects can wash up on American shores as diseases and refugee flows.
USAID was an enlightened self-defense.
As the English poet John Donne famously wrote in 1624:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.