S. 806 -- authored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and known colloquially as the "College for All Act" -- would make four-year public universities and colleges tuition-free. (I don't have a House bill number yet, but Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, sponsors that bill.) If your right-wing friends get all ZOMG HOW WILL YOU PAYZ FOR TEH COLLEGEZ!!!!, tell them that the College for All Act would fund its aims with a financial transaction tax (or "Robin Hood tax," or "Wall Street sales tax"), one that would levy a 0.5 percent tax (not "five percent," and not "50 percent"!) on stock trades, a 0.1 percent tax on bond sales, and a 0.005 percent tax on derivative transactions. I think the bill should tax derivatives a lot harder than that, and I'm not a big fan of dedicated revenue streams either, but I approve of making public college-level education tuition-free for all Americans. So you can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page to call your Reps and Senators and tell them to support the College for All Act.
Meanwhile, S. 762, the IRS Whistleblower Improvements Act of 2017 -- an actually bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Grassley (R-IA) and Wyden (D-OR) -- would better protect whistleblowers who drop a dime on tax fraud at their workplaces. The IRS whistleblower program has recovered $3 billion in tax fraud since 2006, which doesn't sound like a lot in the context of trillions of dollars in revenues annually, but which also represents a dramatic improvement in recovered taxes since then, and really, we ought to protect the good folks who risk their lives and careers (and I'm not exaggerating when I say that!) to expose the people who are cheating us out of all the services our taxes buy. With all the hysteria from the right about the IRS over the years, it's awfully nice to see at least one Republican tune it out occasionally, and that's true even if you knew the one Republican who'd tune it out would be Charles Grassley. The National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your Reps and Senators to support courageous whistleblowers by supporting S. 762.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to reject "right-to-work" legislation -- such as H.R. 785/S. 545, the National Right to Work Act -- then Sign for Good still helps you do that. Listen to folks who support such legislation and you'll be whisked off to an alternate universe where the National Labor Relations Act somehow deprives workers of their right to negotiate terms of employment (rather than enhance their ability to exercise that right!), and where a union bargaining on your behalf is somehow a "monopoly." Seriously, if you're already very, very wealthy and successful, you can negotiate terms of employment more or less to your liking, but absent unions and strong legislation, employers could dictate terms to the rest of us, or else we wouldn't have a job. And, ah, the union as a "monopoly within the workplace"? What a profound insult to all the people hurt by real monopolies -- including the monopolies that treat their workers the worst precisely because no one can compete with them. Sometimes right-wingers are clever with words. But not so much this time.
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