Cabinet picks

Marketplace has a great overview of the business ties Trump’s nominated cabinet has.

Reading through the list shows that while some of the cabinet members may have very close ties to various businesses, others may only share ties based on previous donors to their campaigns.

I have a feeling that could be said about any previous cabinet.

So I’m curious, is there any good resource for comparing the cabinet members of previous presidents like this in an easy to digest format?

I feel like I’m hearing so much more about cabinet picks this time around. I don’t know if there’s simply more attention being given because it’s Trump, because his picks are unusual, because he promised to “drain the swamp” or something else.

What do you think?

2nd Amendment Do’s and Don’ts

In case you weren’t sure about the manners associated with the 2nd Amendment and Open Carry Laws, The Daily Show offers some good Do’s and Don’ts…

Tony Campolo on abortion

I think it is a pressing political issue. And I am very concerned that we have allowed the Republican party alone to define the pro-life position.
The Democrats have not understood where evangelicals are coming from. They would be able to get a great deal of support from the evangelicals if they would propagate what they know to be true: 72% of all abortions in America are driven by economic forces. That is to say, it is young women who are pregnant, working at a minimum wage, with no health insurance or possibility for daycare, with no pre-natal or post-natal help, and who knows that if she has the baby it’s going to cost her thousands of dollars for hospital care.
So we have to begin to ask, “What’s this woman going to do?” Seventy-two percent of the people who’ve had abortions were driven by economic forces and when asked by the Guttmacher Institute, which is a pro-choice organization, “Would you have an abortion if it wasn’t for these economic choices?” would say, “No, we wouldn’t have had the abortion.”
My question is: how can we as evangelicals call ourselves pro-life if all we are anxious to do is to make abortion illegal? If we are not dealing with the economic forces that are driving people to have abortions?

Read more.

How to stop the world’s biggest companies from avoiding taxes

From the Washington Post:

Today, the Treasury estimates, as much as 70 percent of net business income escapes the corporate tax.

What this means is that there are companies of the same size with the same profits, in some cases competitors in the same industry, that are paying significantly lower tax rates — on average, 6 percentage points lower — just because they operate under a different legal charter…

These days, the business lobby never misses an opportunity to point out that the 35 percent corporate tax rate is the highest in the industrialized world. With state taxes, it’s about 39 percent. For other industrialized countries, the statutory rate averages about 30 percent.

What really matters to business, of course, is not the statutory rate but the effective tax rate — the percent of profits paid in taxes once all the deductions, credits and other complex provisions of the tax code are taken into account. What you don’t hear from the business lobby is that, in terms of the effective rate, the United States is slightly below the average of the big industrial countries, at about 26 percent. According to Sullivan, the claim that our corporate tax rate is crippling the competitiveness of American business is “vastly overstated.”