H.R. 1902, the Social Security 2100 Act, would expand Social Security benefits by taxing income over $400,000. As you know, we currently tax only the first $127,200 of income into Social Security, and that means that H.R. 1902 would essentially create a "donut hole" of income (between $127,200 and $400,000) that wouldn't get taxed into Social Security, but that's better than simply letting all income over $127,200 be untaxed. H.R. 1902 would also use the CPI-E, or the Consumer Price Index for Elderly Consumers, to compute cost-of-living adjustments, since the CPI-E would (as its name suggests!) more closely approximate seniors' costs than the system we're currently using (and certainly better than "Chained CPI," which the Obama Administration consistently offered as a cost-cutting measure back in the day). All of this will not only make Social Security run better, but will make it more solvent into the coming decades and centuries; our opponents pretend that cutting benefits is the only way to make Social Security run better, but they're wrong, as usual. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the Social Security 2100 Act.
Meanwhile, H.R. 1180, the so-called Working Families Flexibility Act, would allow employers to offer compensatory time-off instead of overtime pay -- such that the only "flexibility" in the bill is a flexibility required of working families, not for them. I understand perfectly well that H.R. 1180 would offer workers 1 1/2 hours of compensatory time for every overtime hour worked, and that workers would eventually cash in on unused time at the end of every calendar year. But that's "flexibility" for employers, not workers, who would be able to delay paying overtime for up to an entire calendar year if they so choose. Also, the whole point of overtime isn't so much to pay workers for extra time worked, though that's not a bad thing: the whole point of overtime is to give employers an incentive to hire more workers by making them lose money when they overwork the workers they already have. In other words, overtime is an actual job creation scheme, and H.R. 1180 isn't. So this is another matter that could well require a phone call to your Reps and Senators.
Finally, Philadelphia residents, take note: Color of Change and the No215Jail Coalition help you tell Philadelphia's Mayor, City Council, and District Attorney to end cash bail within city limits. The Justice Department said in an August court filing that using the cash bail system to detain suspects is unconstitutional when based entirely on a suspect's ability to pay, and though that was Mr. Obama's Justice Department, and you can expect Mr. Trump's Justice Department to feel rather differently about it, the August statement is sound -- we're only supposed to detain suspects when we can clearly demonstrate that not detaining them would be a risk to themselves or others, not when suspects happen not to have a certain amount of cash at the ready; otherwise the state essentially winds up jailing suspects before they're convicted of a crime, which is not what our Founders intended. Cash bail thus winds up being a system that oppresses the poor -- and thus also a system that oppresses mostly black and brown folks -- as they languish in jail for months at a time. At considerable cost to the taxpayer, I feel compelled to add -- which means cash bail isn't even a cash cow.
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