Thieves in the Temple.

Action: concerning health care, Social Security, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, make Social Security better, and pass the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the Comstock Act, which literally prohibits our Postal Service from mailing anything abortion-related. As you might expect, it’s a very old law, one so old that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals essentially neutered it in 1936 (ruling that if a doctor orders any abortion-related material, then our Postal Service can’t simply refuse to send it). Think today’s Supreme Court will adhere to that 88-year-old precedent? I kid, of course. Hence we tell our Congressfolk to repeal the law – and work to remove them if they don’t.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Congressfolk to “scrap the cap” (preventing income over $168,600 from being taxes into the system) and expand Social Security benefits. People say blogs are useless, but they’re dead wrong, not just because blogs were the only media outlets that would air dissent about the Iraq War back in 2002 and 2003, but because the push to expand Social Security started on Duncan “Atrios” Black’s famous blog, Eschaton, about 10 years ago. And if we worked for it, paid for it, fought for it, and deserve to enjoy it when we get old, then why can’t it be better?

Finally, Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act, which would not only impose a wealth tax on folks worth more than $50 million, but would give our IRS more funds to go after those who try to avoid the tax. The tax itself wouldn’t be very big – a 2% tax on wealth more than $50 million but less than $1 billion, and 3% on wealth above that – but that kind of money could fund all kinds of good services that our government could provide. It wouldn’t even put these rich folks out! And believe me, I’d put them out a lot more if it were only up to me. But I don’t let the perfect murder the good, and the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act is good.

Action: concerning taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to raise taxes on the rich and reject any tax policy that hurts good Americans so Congress won’t raise taxes on the rich. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would assess a 2%, 4%, or 6% tax on wealth exceeding median household wealth by between 1,000 and 1,000,000 times. Look at those three numbers again and understand this would not be a 100% TAX!!!!!! on wealth, as Donald Trump has said. If all these wealth tax bills have spun your head around a bit, know that telling your Congressfolk we want to tax the rich a lot harder than we do now always benefits us, regardless of what banner that desire might be flying at a particular moment.

In a similar vein, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any regressive tax policy that only makes already-rich folks richer – like cutting services any of us might need one day to avoid raising taxes on the rich, or cutting IRS funding so that rich folks can get away with more tax evasion. Or keeping the corporate tax rate so low! Americans for Tax Fairness’s tool helps you tell your Congressfolk to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to “at least 28%,” but why stop there? In the ‘50s, it was 55%, and it helped create the greatest middle class in history, so maybe say that instead!

Action: concerning Social Security, taxing the rich, and workers’ rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to strengthen Social Security, start taxing wealth, and better protect workers’ right to organize. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. They pretend they can go “behind closed doors” to create their Death Panels to secretly cut Social Security benefits, but expanding Social Security benefits is something they actually can do, by raising the cap on income taxed into the Social Security system, as Civic Shout helps you tell them to do. Currently income over $168,600 doesn’t get taxed into Social Security at all, meaning Elon Musk would be done paying his annual Social Security taxes literally four minutes into the year. So let’s do something about that.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Oppose Limitless Inequality Growth and Reverse Community Harms (or OLIGARCH) Act, which would at long last start taxing wealth in America. The OLIGARCH Act would create four tax brackets for wealth, the highest of which would assess an 8% tax on wealth over 1,000,000 times the median household wealth. Rich folks will act like it’s a 100% tax on everything they have – Donald Trump said as much in 2019, with little correction from our “liberal” media – but don’t believe their hype. This tax will do nothing but good.

Finally, Cedar Key Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the PRO Act. You’ve heard about Starbucks workers joining unions – but you haven’t heard about any contracts they’ve signed. Why might that be? Why, it might well be because Starbucks simply won’t talk to these workers, because our laws don’t punish corporations when they do that. The PRO Act would start to fix that problem, plus it would outlaw state-level right-to-work-for-less laws and coercive anti-union propaganda meetings. These would be good works, and we should encourage our Congressfolk to do them. But they won’t, unless we speak up.

Action: concerning health care, taxes, and executive pay.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, the OLIGARCH Act, and the RECOUP Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Public Citizen helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which would give our government the power to manufacture generic drugs wherever name-brand drugs are too expensive for good Americans to afford. Specifically, the bill would create an Office of Drug Manufacturing within our Department of Health and Human Services, and would keep drug corporation lobbyists or senior executives of such corporations that’ve broken our laws out of that department; the Office would be able to manufacture any drugs for which patents have expired, if big pharma corporations can’t produce enough of them (like what happened with Ozempic last year!) or if big pharma corporations are simply charging too much for them. This would make health care cheaper, and anyone who cries SOSHULIZMZ!!!! should really stop driving our roads if they don’t want to be hypocrites.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the OLIGARCH Act, which would establish tax rates on wealth based on median household wealth in America ($121,700 as of 2019, per our Federal Reserve), ranging from two percent on household wealth 1,000 to 10,000 times median household wealth to eight percent on household wealth 1,000,000 times median household wealth. At present, this tax would only affect folks worth over $121.7 million, and two percent of that figure would still leave those folks with a lot of money, so don’t believe the hype that it’d actually be much worse. Certainly don’t believe any slippery-slope BS that it’d eventually be 100% (a cursory examination of our history will tell you how hard it is to raise taxes on the rich). People with no arguments will say anything, but they shouldn’t win.

Finally, Take On Wall Street helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the RECOUP Act, which would literally recoup the sales of stocks and other assets that bankster executives make right before their banks crash. This just happened with both the Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank failures, so it’s not a solution in search of a problem. And don’t think of this as a punishment for things CEOs might have done; think of it as a punishment for being a bad boss. Really, you don’t have to prove that they maliciously drove their bank off the edge and cashed out before everyone else knew what was happening. I mean, that would be the way to bet! But this is a bill that would punish incompetence. Folks don’t argue they have a “right” to be incompetent if it hurts other people, do they? I guess they do. But they shouldn’t, and they certainly shouldn’t get all the say about everything.

Action: concerning Medicare, Social Security, education, the Estate Tax, and the Biden budget.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject any Medicare or Social Security benefit cuts, reject any education funding cuts, reject Estate Tax repeal, and pass the Biden budget already. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Courage for America helps you tell the Republican House majority to “back off” our earned Medicare and Social Security benefits. They’ve said they won’t cut these benefits, but you know the minute we take our eye off the ball the reaper’s scythe will start slashing, and anyway they don’t need 218 votes to cut benefits – they only need five, as in the number of Republican House Reps who can deprive Mr. McCarthy of a working majority on any bill. I’d bet Our Glorious Elites are counting on that, in fact! Someday there’ll be a price to pay for defying the popular will again and again – but not if we don’t speak our will.

The Coalition on Human Needs helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to cut education funding. They’ll be coming for that as a “deficit-fighting” tool, as well, particularly since right-wingers have done a lot of work seizing that issue back from liberals. They’ve been doing it by whining about having to wear masks and banning books and threatening their fellow citizens at school board meetings, but gosh, what energy! And they probably think that gives them the momentum to cut federal education funding! Well, we cut funding that actually helps good Americans enough. It’s about time we stop hurting each other just to make these alleged philosophical stands.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to repeal the Estate Tax, since Republicans have reintroduced an Estate Tax repeal bill and are still telling the same tall tales about folks losing their family farms over it. Why “tall tales”? Not just because the stories you hear (cough Kristi Noem cough) have, shall we say, holes in them, and not just because even the anti-Estate Tax crowd has never found even one family farm killed by the Estate Tax, but also because big ag monopolies have been killing family farms for 50 years! Blaming the Estate Tax for the death of the family farm is like blaming a mosquito bite for the death of a shooting victim.

Finally, the Coalition on Human Needs also helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Biden budget already. The Biden budget, as you know, would raise taxes on the rich and on corporations, institute a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, raise the stock buyback tax, establish 12 weeks of paid family/medical leave, and re-expand the Child Tax Credit, among many other good works; no use calling it an “aspirational” document when all our Congressfolk have to do is pass it. Is it a perfect budget? No. Will Republicans come up with anything better? Also no. And would it be better than what we’ve got? Absolutely! But not if we don’t speak out.

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, any extension of the Trump tax-cuts-for-the-rich, and any attempt to repeal the additional IRS funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, and tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Mininum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any attempt to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace our income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single 30% sales tax, which would be like immediate 30% inflation. And given all our talk about Social Security lately, we should note that, in addition to the 893 other reasons we should reject the “FAIR” Tax, it’ll eventually cause Social Security to fail. You remember the “FAIR” Tax would replace the payroll tax, which funds Social Security, and with ITEP telling us the rate would have to be more like 60% to raise the same money, well, you see where that’s going. Kill this beast before it kills us.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. The “FAIR” Tax, in addition to all its other evils, would represent a massive tax cut for the rich, and so do the Trump tax cuts, where that 2.6-point cut at the top end represents hundreds of thousands of dollars for many, many undeserving rich. But I have good news for you: the Trump tax cuts didn’t keep Democrats from taking our House back in 2018, so don’t get spooked by any “they’re coming for your tax cuts” BS. Did you even notice you got a tax cut? It’s entirely possible you didn’t. You sure didn’t get a couple hundred grand like some folks did!

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject any efforts to repeal the additional IRS funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. No, our IRS isn’t coming for your money! At least, not more than it was when it was underfunded and understaffed and only went after the folks who filled out their Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit wrong. Now our IRS has the money to go after rich folks, and I have more good news for you: Republicans’ fearmongering over IRS funding didn’t exactly deliver the sturm und drang electoral showing they were counting on in 2022. So don’t believe their hype here, either.

Finally, Americans for Tax Fairness also helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, one that’ll actually get at the massive amounts of wealth billionaires hoard and never pay taxes on because they don’t actually sell off those assets. Don’t believe anyone who tells you billionaires deserve to keep what they got! These clowns trip over their own penis in public every day! And not for nothing, but even if our Supreme Court eventually strikes it down – and since it’s something that’d actually help people, they’re no doubt masturbating over that opportunity as we speak – that’ll be just another nail in the coffin of their reputation.

Action: concerning voting rights, taxes, and paid family/medical leave.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, reject the “FAIR” Tax, pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, and pass legislation creating a paid family/medical leave system. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Civic Shout helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. This bill would let our government stop states and localities with a history of vote suppression from changing their laws so they can suppress votes even more – which, you may recall, our government could do until our Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. Our Court said it unfairly targeted Southern states, but the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would explicitly state that our Justice Department could scrutinize any state or locality that suppresses votes. Nobody should vote against this bill, but we still need to get in our Congressfolks’ grills about it.

Both Moms Rising and Daily Kos help tell your Congressfolk to reject any effort to pass the so-called “FAIR” Tax, which would replace all income, corporate, payroll, and Estate taxes with a single, 30% sales tax. That would be like 30% inflation on everything you buy! Care to imagine how big your rent or mortgage would be? And when you remember that payroll taxes fund Social Security and Medicare, you might think paying 30% more for a gallon of milk would be a bad way to fund that. We need to get back to taxing the rich and corporations, not least so they can’t control us anymore, but the “FAIR” Tax only takes us in the opposite direction, toward more misery and chaos. If we speak out, we can kill it in its crib.

Speaking of taxing the rich, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax, which would ensure that the richest Americans pay at least 20% of their wealth every year, and if that seems like a lot, remember that they’re billionaires and they’ll still have a lot left over. You’ve gotten by on a lot less than a billionaire, I guarantee you that, but while the pandemic might have cost you your job, billionaires somehow only got richer! As I’ve said, we need to limit the amount of damage billionaires do to our civilization, and the Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax will help us start to do that again. But not if we don’t fight for it.

Finally, Care2 helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation granting paid family/medical leave for all Americans. Because only six other countries on Earth don’t have it! Those other countries, by the way, are the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea – yes, even Russia offers paid family/medical leave! We could get this done through budget reconciliation, but we won’t have a chance at that unless we communicate our will to our Reps and Senators in numbers they can’t deny. Don’t let folks tell you it would “cost too much.” You know what costs too much? Workers coming in sick or worried about their sick loved ones because they can’t get a day off!

Action: concerning taxes.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax, pass the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, institute a windfall tax on big corporations, and pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to reject the so-called “FAIR” Tax. Having trouble imagining the damage a 30% sales tax would do to your bank account? How about adding 30% not just to your grocery bill, but to your rent or your mortgage, too? And if you’re thinking maybe Republicans will smarten up and nominate someone sane to be our next President, recall that Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Tim Scott have all supported the FAIR Tax. Indeed, Donald Trump has supported it rather more tepidly than any of these! Supporting 30% inflation should seriously end all their campaigns, but it won’t, unless we speak out in numbers no one can deny.

The Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy has written about the No Tax Breaks for Outsourcing Act, which would prevent big corporations from reporting profits amounting to ten times the entire economic output of a nation (as they’ve done with the Cayman Islands). The Trump tax “reform” lets corporations pay a lower rate on offshore profits – which means corporations pretend they make money elsewhere so they can pay less taxes on it! If they paid more of their fair share, we’d have better roads and bridges, and we’d also have better public services, like Medicare and paid family/medical leave. So you may want to call your Congressfolk and tell them to pass this bill.

The Juggernaut Project helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a windfall profits tax on big corporations. Again: when you see high inflation and record profits at the same time, you don’t need an economics degree to know you’re getting screwed. Actually, an economics degree might be a positive impediment to knowing you’re getting screwed, but I digress. We need to let big corporations know that their greed has consequences; our government has done a pretty crap job of that for the last 40 years, but certainly not for lack of effort on our part. And the fact is, we’re right and they’re wrong, and just as being wrong should have consequences, being right should have rewards.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act and the Stock Buyback Accountability Act. The former bill would tax a billionaire’s actual wealth and not just the small part they realize from selling their assets every so often, while the latter bill would increase the tax on stock buybacks from one percent to four percent, so that big corporations do less buying back of their own stock and more investing in the actual work they do. Both would start us back on the path to actual fair taxation in America, so we should get in our Congressfolk’s grills about them.

Action: concerning monopolies, corruption, and taxing the rich.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly, investigate Justice Thomas’s alleged conflicts of interest, and pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate the Live Nation/Ticketmaster monopoly. Yes, Live Nation (which assimilated Ticketmaster in 2010) is a monopoly, given that they control 70% of the live event market, and last month’s Taylor Swift presale tickets scandal doesn’t begin to tell the full story of how badly they serve that market – Ticketmaster also keeps a good chunk of those notorious fees they’re not supposed to keep, plus their lax security lets scalpers buy up tickets in bulk and charge concert-goers even more money. So it turns out MTV didn’t kill the live show – ticket monopolies did. Good Americans deserve better, so our Congressfolk should do better.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to investigate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s alleged conflicts of interest. You know, like his wife openly colluding to overthrow our government on January 6! Naturally he’s ruled the wrong way on January 6-related matters that have come before the court since then, and though he might be able to argue that his rulings are entirely consistent with the philosophy he’s expressed on our Court for 30 years, c’mon, we’re not schmucks. I long to live in an America where people are shamed out of their status for being corrupt! But if we want that world, we have to demand it, and work for it.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire’s Minimum Income Tax before they go home for the holidays. It’s hard to get such things through Congress, but the more we demand it the harder we make it for Congress to ignore us. And one more time: nobody “earns” a billion dollars. Billionaires get where they are not through “talent” or “hard work” but because they leverage their privilege and their wealth to hurt other people. And if we want to be a sane, moral, and decent civilization again, we need to tax billionaires a lot harder.

Action: concerning endless war, taxing the rich, and workers' rights.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to repeal Iraq War authorization, tax billionaires a lot harder, and pass the PRO Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Both Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation help you tell your Congressfolk to repeal the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF). Yes, it’s still on the books, though the Iraq War has been over for more than a decade and both Presidents Obama and Trump have abused it to launch more unwise and unconstitutional military adventures. No one calls them “wars,” of course, since wars kinda have a bad name now. Why do wars have a bad name now? Why, mainly because of the Iraq War, which the 2002 AUMF authorized, a profoundly evil war George W. Bush and his votaries used to tar all their political opponents as traitors. If you want to stop that from ever happening again, then raise hell about the 2002 AUMF.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire Minimum Income Tax. Billionaires made out a lot better than the rest of us during this pandemic, not because they’re “better people” or because they “worked harder” or because they “contributed more to society,” but because when you start out with billions of dollars, it’s much easier to make billions more, particularly when our civilization acts like “letting the rich do what they want” is not only a good idea but the only idea. A half-century ago we had only one billionaire, and (not coincidentally!) a much fairer America, and the Billionaires Minimum Tax will help us get that America back.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842/S. 420, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. The PRO Act would outlaw state-level “right to work” laws, which we might better describe as “right to work for less money, fewer benefits, and fewer protections from bosses’ whims” laws, even though I suppose that's not as snappy "Right to work” laws allow workers to work in union shops without paying union dues, but no one who joins a union simply doesn’t know that dues fund the many services a union provides, and not for nothing, but the higher salary workers make when they're in unions tends to outstrip dues. Certainly that's been my experience for a few decades now.

Action: concerning taxes and war.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion and make it permanent and pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and tell your Senators to repeal the 2002 Iraq War AUMF. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to bring back the Child Tax Credit expansion (from the American Rescue Plan Act) and make it permanent. That CTC expansion put $250 and $300 checks (per child!) in good Americans’ bank accounts every month in 2021, which sure did help when inflation shot upward, but Congress let it lapse at the end of 2021 – or rather, 50 Senate Republicans and Joe Manchin let it lapse at the end of 2021. Working families sure could have used it last year, and they sure could use it now, too. And frankly bringing it back should be a no-brainer – even for a Congress that all too frequently demonstrates it hasn’t a brain in the building.

Patriotic Millionaires helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on the ultra-rich, and with a quickness. A recent Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) report told us what we all kinda knew already, that the richest one percent of Americans have increased their wealth by almost $30 trillion over the last 30 years; meanwhile the rest of us worry about getting slammed with surprise medical bills and wonder how much of the rent we can get away with not paying this month. So yeah, we’ve gotta change that, and it sure ain’t like taxing the rich harder polls badly! I guess all that’s left is for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D?-AZ) to intone for the 211th time that she won’t raise taxes on the rich because working families small businesses tough times Arizona I’m a maverick.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to repeal the notorious 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (or AUMF) in Iraq, which the last four Presidents have all used to justify all manner of military misadventures that have spilled our blood and treasure for the greater glory of American defense corporations. Sorry, in the absence of a strategy at least somewhat moored in reality, I must assume that’s why it still happens, and if we take away this AUMF, there’ll be less of it. And not to pile on, but that’s five words they’re using to say “wage war.” Why don’t they just say “wage war”? Couldn’t be a profound lack of courage, could it?

Action: concerning taxing the rich, prescription drug prices, and marriage equality.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to . Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to start taxing billionaire wealth already. Yeah, it sure looks like Congress has already done all they’re going to do about the tax code this year, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still speak out! Especially when billionaires seem to step in it every day! Just a week and a half ago ProPublica reported that a single Chicago businessman somehow funneled $1.6 billion over two years to a right-wing dark money group run by the Federalist Society’s co-chair, all to create even more right-wing judges than Mitch McConnell already has. So yeah, billionaires have too much power, and it’s crippling our civilization.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to do more to lower prescription drug prices for all Americans. Again, Congress may have done all it’s prepared to do about this matter, but again, that doesn’t mean we can’t tell them to do more! Folks on Medicare will pay no more than $35/month for insulin starting in January, and that’s a good thing, but we want insulin prices for everyone to go down. You may recall that most Republicans voted against that plank in the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s perfectly OK to tell all your friends that they want you and your family to pay more for drugs.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 8404/S. 4556, the Respect for Marriage Act, which would protect gay marriage and interracial marriage from any attempt our Supreme Court might make to overturn previous rulings protecting these rights. Justice Thomas flat-out said our Court ought to reverse those rulings protecting those rights, so our Senators have to act. Brook no absurd claims that those rights aren’t in danger! Republicans said the right to abortion wasn’t in danger, until it was gone; it’s almost like they were trying to lull us into a false sense of security! Hopefully most Americans know better than to trust these people by now.

Action: concerning Social Security, billionaire taxes, labor, Title X, and Native communities.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass the Social Security 2100 Act, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, and the PRO Act, increase funding for Title X services, and pass the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5723, the Social Security 2100 Act, which would actually expand Social Security benefits and tax higher incomes into the system to help pay for those benefits. Social Security keeps a lot of folks out of poverty, but why shouldn't it keep us out of poverty at a higher level? After all, we worked for it, we paid into it, we fought for it, and we deserve to enjoy it in our old age. And in a sick, immoral, and decadent society where Rick Scott feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose sunsetting Social Security within five years, and where Mitt Romney feels secure enough in his evil that he can actually propose fast-tracking Social Security benefits without debate or input from the American people, it's long past time for us to play offense.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7502, the Babies Over Billionaires Act, which would tax unrealized (i.e., unsold) gains of folks worth over $100 million at 30 percent and then use that money to establish a Family Investment Trust Fund, which would disburse that money to the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services "for programs relating to supporting family well-being and the development of children." Hence, Babies Over Billionaires. The bill leaves establishing such programs a bit up in the air for my taste, but we could hash that out in amendments; I certainly wouldn't pass up an opportunity to get at all that money rich folks will never spend, but will instead use as collateral for the low-interest loans that really subsidize their lifestyle.

Social Security Works helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 842, the Protecting the Right to Organize (or PRO) Act. We watch corporations do a lot of shady stuff to evade our labor laws, like calling their employees "contractors," forcing them to sit in anti-union propaganda meetings, and intimidating and firing workers who try to organize. The PRO Act would put a stop to all of that! And then working folks' victories over employers like Starbucks, Verizon, and Amazon could multiply all across the land. We know Republicans will filibuster this bill in the Senate, but let's at least have a vote and force them to stand against the 60% of Americans who'd like to be in a union and the 12% of Americans who are already in one. Seriously, it's well past time for Democrats to stop playing not to lose and start playing to win. We do it, so why can't they?

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to increase funding for Title X family planning services, not merely restore funding to pre-Trump levels. Title X helps working families afford things like birth control, cervical cancer screenings, breast cancer screenings, and HIV testing. Of course you know Donald Trump spent the last four years crippling Title X services, mainly by prohibiting Title X funds from going to clinics that shared information about getting abortion care; this wound up impacting about half the good Americans who used Title X services during the Trump years. Because what is government for, if not for punishing people randomly to make a point? That's what bad government is for, of course, but good Americans deserve much better than bad government.

Finally, the Daily Kos Liberation League helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 7577/S. 3968, the CDC Tribal Public Health Security and Preparedness Act, which would allow CDC Public Health Emergency Preparedness funding to reach Native American communities. Native Americans suffered just as much or more from the COVID pandemic as anyone else, and they also suffer high rates of both chronic health care issues (such as heart disease and diabetes) and chronic infrastructure issues (like lack of electricity and running water). There's no moral reason to exclude Native Americans from this funding, but extending assistance to Native communities also means diseases like COVID won't keep rising back up and biting all of us in the ass.

Action: concerning drug prices, billionaire taxes, labor, forced arbitration, free tax filing, and pollution in public lands.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to lower prescription drug prices, pass a Billionaire's Income Tax, allow Congressional staffers to organize, pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, let working families file with the IRS for free, and pass the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Senators to lower prescription drug prices using the reconciliation process. Since Republicans aren't going to help! Republicans think they're a lock for getting our House and Senate back, so they're just going to prevent anything good from happening, like that doesn't hurt people! You know who else needs to hear this message, though? Democratic Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Bob Menendez of New Jersey, that's who! They're not going to listen to anyone but their own constituents -- or, if they can get away with it, just their big donors! -- but if enough of their colleagues hear it, that might help light a fire under their asses. People like that don't do the right thing until they have to.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Billionaire's Income Tax and start taxing wealth the way we tax regular income. Republicans (and Joe Manchin!) will leap forward to tell you that we've never taxed that way, but of course there is a little thing called the Estate Tax, and anyway we need to start taxing these people that way, because they run roughshod over the rest of us. And these billionaires don't ever have to sell the property that makes them wealthy because banks will give them cheap loans to live on! Nice work if you can get it! Now, don't brook any nonsense from House Reps that "it's not worth doing because it won't pass the Senate." Even if it doesn't, it's still worth it to put our Senators on the spot.

More Perfect Union helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass legislation allowing Congressional staffers to organize for better pay and working conditions, specifically by repealing Congress's exemption from our labor laws. Congressional staffers get paid $30,000 to $40,000 annually in one of America's most expensive cities to work 60 to 80-hour weeks -- plus many of them have second jobs! -- and this means that most of the folks who work as staffers are folks who come from wealthy families, and don't we have enough wealth being slung around in Congress? If Congressional staffers can organize for higher pay and shorter work weeks, then more folks from all walks of life will be able to work there, and that would do us a lot better than having Congressional staffers who don't really understand how hard most Americans have it.

Public Justice helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 963/S. 505, the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act. Public Justice's email missive puts the whole case pretty succinctly: "(f)orced arbitration is rigged...it basically allows big companies to avoid accountability when they do something wrong. And you have no say! If you make a claim, you can’t go to court. You can’t get a fair hearing. And 9 times out of 10, you will lose. And there is nothing you can do about it." Unless you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, that is! Don't believe the hype that "the average arbitration award is x thousand dollars," because if you lose (and you very likely will), your "average award" will be zero dollars. Plus the corporation can sue you back and win! And that's no way to get justice in America.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to make tax preparation easy and free for all Americans with relatively simple tax needs. If you work for a living, our government should send you a pre-filled tax form (since they know, from employer-provided W-2 and 1099 forms, how much you make), and indeed our government has the legal authority to do that! So why don't they? Bet you can't guess -- because big tax-filing corporations don't want them to! And as you know from the news, the "deal" they made with our government "mandates" that these corporations provide free tax filing to low-income earners, but good luck finding it, not least because these corporations do their damnedest to steer you away from it! If you don't have investments so complex they look like corruption, you should be able to file your taxes for free.

Finally, Penn PIRG helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 5533/S. 2960, the Reducing Waste in National Parks Act. Keeping single-use plastics out of our national parks? You mean, we don't do that already? Indeed, we do not. And thus our National Park Service must deal with some 70 million pounds of trash every year, and you can bet that plastic bags and plastic wrap and plastic water bottles make up a sizable chunk of that; a review of Yellowstone National Park nearly a decade ago found that plastic bottles comprised half that park's waste stream. And we didn't know this when we embraced the shatterproof bottle, but plastics have become so ubiquitous that we now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic some way or other every single week. Talk about unintended consequences!

Action: concerning Iran, drug prices, climate change, taxing the rich, our Supreme Court, and our Postal Service.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to allow us to restart the Iran nuclear deal, cap insulin costs at $35/month, pass more and better climate change legislation, tax the rich and corporations more, expand our Supreme Court, and pass the Postal Service Reform Act. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

Win Without War helps you tell your Congressfolk not to obstruct our President's efforts to restart the Iran nuclear deal, a major achievement of the Obama Administration. You'll recall how right-wing Senators actively obstructed the deal in 2015 by telling the Iranian government a future Republican Administration would probably scuttle it. Which Mr. Trump did, and for no good reason! The deal was keeping Iran from developing nukes, and its absence has permitted them to develop nuclear weapons technology much further than they had before. Don't brook any stupidity about how you can't "trust" Iran, because the deal required verification of Iran's compliance, not trust. Jesus, right-wingers can be so stupid. Anyway, we can restart the deal -- if we get in our Congressfolks' grills about it.

Both More Perfect Union and Daily Kos help you tell your Congressfolk to cap insulin costs at $35/month, for which President Biden asked in his recent State of the Union address Daily Kos wants us to tell them to do it via budget reconciliation, but I'd honestly prefer they force Republicans to filibuster the insulin cap. Not because that legislation might not make it through reconciliation (the Senate parliamentarian killed the $15/hour minimum wage hike, you recall). It's more that I want to get Republicans on record as being objectively pro-death for diabetic children. People all over America are risking death by rationing their insulin because they can't afford it, so I expect they'll be even less receptive to Republican yammering about price controls than I am.

Daily Kos also helps you tell your Congressfolk to step up their climate change game, given the possibility that our super right-wing Supreme Court may soon hamstring our EPA's ability to even regulate climate change. If that happens -- and it'd be a hell of a reversal of precedent, since our Court ruled as recently as 2014 that our EPA could regulate carbon emissions under existing law -- Congress will have to write more specific laws, which they're loathe to do, but which they'll have to do if we want a planet to live on in 30 years. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently found that climate change is outrunning us, so we'd better pick up the pace -- without right-wing rubbish about how "this isn't the government's job."

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a 15% minimum tax on corporate profits, both domestic and offshore, while Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax on billionaires. Neither of these actions does everything I want them to do, but they'll make our tax code a good deal better -- a 15% minimum corporate tax will, with one swoop, end a lot of corporate welfare in America, and the wealth tax will begin to address the problem of runaway billionaires in America. If the nation's billionaires can add trillions of dollars to their net worth while the rest of us are struggling under the yoke of a pandemic, something's very wrong. And we, as Americans, have a duty to make it right. Corporations and rich folks need to pay more taxes, end of story.

Demand Progress also helps you tell your Congressfolk to expand our Supreme Court. Yes, we should do it because six of the nine Justices are far right-wingers, and we should do it because a President rejected by 54% of the electorate in 2016 appointed the last three of those. But there's another good reason: we have 13 federal Appeals Courts in America, so having one Supreme Court Justice to manage each District Court will make all those courts work better. These reasons are all better reasons than ones Congress used the last seven times they changed the number of Supreme Court Justices. And if Republicans think it's unfair to expand our Supreme Court under a Democratic President, well, they should have won the 2020 election. I won't lie: I say that at least partly because I know it'll piss 'em off.

Finally, Americans for Financial Reform helps you tell your Senators to pass H.R. 3076, the Postal Service Reform Act. Ignore fake "concerns" about Medicare from certain right-wing Senators (which even Sen. Portman of Ohio have said are bunkum). The bill would allow our Postal Service to offer services like fishing licenses which will increase revenue -- a consistent issue with our Postal Service, since taxpayers haven't funded it for decades -- and would, more importantly, shed our Postal Service of the mandate to prepay retiree benefits decades in advance, a mandate required of no other public or private entity and a mandate that, frankly, feels like a Bush Mobb effort to destroy our Postal Service. With the Postal Service Reform Act, our Postal Service would get much-needed breathing room.

Action: another exciting edition of "all jobs, all day."

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to pass better tax policy, better climate change policy, better clean water policy, better broadband policy, and better care economy policy, all so we can get good jobs legislation. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers and/or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy assures us that Joe Biden's tax proposals would do us all a lot of good, and I agree that they would -- particularly getting rid of the lower tax rate for capital gains and dividends, one of the most grievous injuries inflicted on the American people by the Bush Administration and that's saying something. So go ahead and call your Congressfolk and tell them you want capital gains and dividends taxed like income, since, you know, they are income. It couldn't hurt to remind them that the resulting revenue would help pay for jobs legislation. Don't brook any silliness from your right-wing Congressfolk about "dangerous tax increases." They act like all tax increases are dangerous. Tax increases on the rich aren't -- they help us restrain the rich from running roughshod over the rest of us.

You'll also want to remind your Congressfolk of the other ways we could fund jobs legislation. Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax on millionaire and billionaire estates, Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact a "millionaire's surtax," and the Sierra Club helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the End Polluter Welfare Act. Also, too, Drug Prices Are Too High helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass the Lower Drug Prices Now Act, since that would give Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices, which would save upwards of $80 billion annually, which could also very easily fund jobs legislation. If you want to tell them to bring back the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income -- you know, instead of telling them to institute the "millionaire's surtax" -- then go right ahead! If we all demand the 91% tax bracket, we may not get it -- but we'll certainly be more likely to get the millionaire's surtax.

Both Progress America and the League of Conservation Voters help you tell your Congressfolk that they must include better climate change policy in jobs bills. And what do you know? Better climate change policy not only fights pollution, but creates jobs. And prioritizing renewable energy over fossil fuels not only means fewer droughts and wildfires and hurricanes and heatwaves but less filth in our air and water. And we're going to need people to help us build a better way. No, "liberal" media pundits, we're not going to build a better way with robots! Too many people think robots are really far along in development, which is to laugh. But I'm one of those who think people are considerably more advanced than we used to be. Laugh if you like; we will move past you, and your cynicism will be cold comfort in your lonely old age.

The League of Conservation Voters helps you tell your Congressfolk to include funding for getting rid of lead pipes in any upcoming jobs legislation. You'd think Republicans would consider replacing poisonous lead pipes in our sewer systems "real" infrastructure spending, but they don't seem to care very much about that, even though lead poisoning equals brain damage in any child whose drinking water comes from a lead pipe. Maybe they don't care about it because That Only Happens to Those People, but clean water is actually fairly popular among Americans of all races and creeds, and dooming folks to poisoned drinking water should be electoral suicide. It'll only be so if we fight to get the lead out of our drinking water, and Democrats actually follow our lead.

Moms Rising and Social Security Works help you demand paid family/medical leave and better care economy funding, respectively, from upcoming jobs legislation. The United States is approximately last in the world in mandating paid family/medical leave for good Americans, and the care economy will be our future to a large degree, so we might as well ensure that jobs in the care economy are good jobs. Many Americans (and perhaps many more American politicians) still think taking care of the sick and infirm isn't "real work," when it's about the realest work you can imagine, and yes we deserve an America that rewards real work. You know, versus rewarding money machinations that just redistribute worker wealth upward to hedge fund managers. But we won't get that America unless we fight for it.

Free Press helps you tell your Congressfolk to fund expanded broadband in upcoming jobs legislation. We all saw how much we need high-speed broadband during this pandemic -- not just to keep working, but also to keep our children learning. Clearly it ain't just for streaming movies and TV shows anymore, and our government needs to start approaching it that way. And we're probably going to need high-speed broadband for work and school again, as roughly half the country continues to throw a tantrum about getting vaccinated. Nearly 70,000 new cases on Friday! Just like it was precisely one year ago, when they were throwing a tantrum about wearing masks. I'd prefer not to have a resurgent pandemic prove to our politicians how badly we need expanded broadband. But we should at least tell them, or they'll continue pretending they don't already know.

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about how I think the Biden Administration might really want this to play out -- not to demoralize you, but to prepare you. I think the Biden Administration split the jobs bill in two to split us in two, much as the Obama Administration held out the public health care option in 2009 in order to forestall any talk of expanding Medicare to include everyone. And just like they yanked the public option back when it came time to pass the Affordable Care Act, I also think the Biden Administration really wants the far more desirable reconciliation bill to fail, which also means they really want to lose both houses of Congress in 2022 so they can keep this interminable (but very lucrative, for some people) drama going between insane Republicans and spineless Democrats. You'd think Democrats would take a different lesson from recent events -- like, that Republicans are far too dangerous to ever have any kind of power again, anywhere. But if they won't, we have to make them learn that lesson, and we'll only do that if we speak out. We are the only people standing between America and oblivion. And we always have been. So let's step up and be heroes, today and every day.

Action: concerning jobs, taxes, paid leave, and D.C. statehood.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk to keep privatization out of the American Jobs Plan, pass a Wealth Tax, make the Child Tax Credit expansion permanent, enact paid family/medical leave, and make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs.

On the occasion of David Dayen at The American Prospect informing us that a central feature of the "bipartisan" infrastructure bill is the selling off of public services to private corporations in order to build new public services, this would be a good time to call your Congressfolk and tell them no privatization in the American Jobs Plan. When you sell off public works, you get money one time; when you hold on to public works, you get money, in the form of taxes, for as long as you can shepherd them properly. And nobody's still clinging to the notion that the private sector can do public works better, right? I mean, the opposite happens, like, all the time (as Mr. Dayen documents in his article). And once something's private, the people don't own it anymore.

In a related note, Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a Wealth Tax. We all just witnessed the ProPublica report detailing how little the very richest Americans pay in taxes -- and the Republican response was to say whoever leaked that information to reporters ought to go to jail! That sure is burying the lede! Most of us work a job and get a paycheck, but the very richest individuals don't have to work very hard -- they just let the money they already have do the "work"! But if they have absurd amounts of money, they can buy laws and politicians at will -- and they have! This is why we need to enact a Wealth Tax, and the Wealth Taxes proposed so far raise a lot of money without destroying any estates. Hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously propose selling off public assets to fund new public assets instead of taxing the rich.

In yet another related note, both Americans for Tax Fairness and the Coalition on Human Needs help you tell your Congressfolk to make that Child Tax Credit (or CTC) expansion permanent. Lots of good American working families will be getting the first of their monthly $250 or $300 checks on July 15, and they're going to like it, even if Republicans don't. Even if Congress (foolishly!) let those expanded checks be annual after that, as they're supposed to be in 2022, good Americans with children will continue to reap the benefits of having more breathing space -- when you can meet the bills, you can be better parents. And, you know, it's hard to believe, Harry, that anyone would seriously consider ending these expanded benefits instead of taxing the rich.

Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to enact paid family/medical leave for all Americans. We're about the only civilized nation that doesn't have it as a matter of course, and a mere 21% of American workers get paid family/medical leave via their employers, so we've got to fix that. Just so happens that President Biden's American Families Plan would include paid/family medical leave, but we'd do well for ourselves to tell Congress we want paid family/medical leave in advance. You hear how many Republicans talk about how their constituents are talking to them about the 2020 election? Wouldn't it be nice if they'd talk about how their constituents are talking to them about paid family/medical leave? Yes, it would. And we should help them do that.

Finally, People for the American Way helps you tell your Senators to pass S. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which would make Washington, D.C. our 51st state. Because they deserve it! They have more residents than either Vermont or Wyoming and almost as many residents as Alaska and North Dakota, but nobody claims that those four states shouldn't be states. But at present, D.C. has one non-voting member of the U.S. House, and must submit to rule by our federal government -- and can I say that didn't help them very much on January 6? If D.C. had their own National Guard, for example, they could have responded to that uprising a lot more quickly than Donald Trump did. I mean, we do still value self-reliance and self-determination, right? Or do we only do that with areas that aren't majority-Black? I mean, I'd rather think better of my opponents, but they make it so hard.

Action: concerning the American Jobs Plan and how to pay for it.

Long story short: tell your Congressfolk, once again, to listen to us as they consider jobs legislation, and fund it with higher taxes on the wealthy. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to find your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition tools in the following paragraphs. And good hunting!

You've heard that a group of 10 Senators (only five of whom are Republicans, when you'd need 10 to overcome a filibuster) have come to an "agreement" about a $1.2 trillion (really only $569 billion in new spending) infrastructure bill? One that doesn't raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy, doesn't promise to fund renewable energy infrastructure, and doesn't fund the care economy we're all going to be a part of as we get older? Well, we've got action alerts for you today, then! Daily Kos still helps you demand a "big, bold, and green" jobs plan. Hey, why should we care what 10 Senators agreed to? None of them seem to think it's all that important to agree with us. Which is why we keep telling them, as often as we need to.

Both the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Moms Rising help you demand that your Congressfolk help build a care economy infrastructure. Think about it: child care costs an arm and a leg, elder care costs an arm and a leg, and workers in these fields get paid in dung pellets; keep leaving it up to the "free" market and we'll have a nation of debt slaves with a few CEOs at the top who gild the plumbing in their 19th vacation homes. Spend our taxpayer money insuring that care workers get good pay for good work and we'll start to build something we can be proud of. And it'd be nice if Republicans would stop pretending that it's not "infrastructure" if you can't drive on it. A civilization needs an infrastructure of hard-working, dedicated citizens more than it needs roads.

Americans for Tax Fairness helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 3805/S. 2028 and thus enact a "millionaire's surtax." I think millionaire income should be taxed at 91% just like the good old days and the bill's "millionaire's surtax" would raise the 37% rate on millionaire income only to 47%, but I try not to let the perfect murder the good, and we should take every opportunity we can to send our Congressfolk the message that the rich don't pay enough in taxes, a matter about which we got a painful reminder this week from ProPublica. Afraid it's not "biparatisan" enough? Over half of Republicans support it, per a Hart Research poll, so enough of that.

Inequality.org helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1979/S. 794, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act. This bill would actually raise corporate taxes if a corporation's highest-paid employee makes more than 50 times as much as its median-salaried employee; that tax rate would go up a half-percentage point in that case, and the rate would scale upward, such that a corporation with a 500-to-1 pay ratio would wind up paying five percentage points more. Again, I'd raise it all the way up to 55% for corporate profits over $1 million (and I would expect to lower the ratio that way, too), but let's communicate to our Congressfolk the fact that we think some people make too much money while the rest of us are scraping along, and that they should do something about it.

Finally, Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. This bill would enact a "wealth tax" that would finally start to get at the trillions of dollars the ultra-rich sit on -- you know, that money right-wingers always say will "trickle down" to the rest of us? Well, it doesn't, but the wealth tax would impose an annual tax of 2% of assets between $50 million and $1 billion and 3% on assets above $1 billion. It'd raise a lot of money, and the super-rich would still be super-rich -- sure sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? Then all the whining right-wingers will do about might leave you scratching your head.

Action: concerning taxing the rich, clean water, demilitarizing our police, paycheck fairness, corporate taxes, and whistleblower rewards.

Long story short: Tell your House Reps to pass the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, the WATER Act, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, and the Paycheck Fairness Act; also tell your Congressfolk to close big corporate tax loopholes and strengthen whistleblower rewards. Use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or, if you're viewing it on a cellphone, the bottom of this page) to get your Congressfolk's phone numbers, or use the email/petition links provided below.

H.R. 1459/S. 510, the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act, would assess a tax on wealth over $50 million for the first time in America -- households and trusts worth more than $50 million would pay 2% on all their assets over $50 million (meaning the tax would leave their first $50 million alone -- but you know they'll whine about it nonetheless!) and then 3% on assets over $1 billion. Sen. Warren (D-MA) says it'll raise $300 billion annually, and given that billionaires alone have amassed another $1.3 trillion in wealth over this last pandemic year, really, this wealth tax ain't too much to ask of people who should be paying 91% of their income to Uncle Sam. The Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund provides a petition.

H.R. 1352/S. 916, the WATER Act, would start rebuilding our water infrastructure, which would represent a solid investment in one of our most important natural resources, clean water, without which, it's safe to say, we'd have no decent health care in America at all. You can't wash or bathe or disinfect or sterilize with polluted water, after all! Not to mention getting the lead out of all our water pipes will create a lot of jobs for people! I guess Republicans will retort TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!!, but they didn't give one rat's hind quarter about when they were cutting taxes for the rich and for corporations, and whiners always have excuses to avoid doing the right thing. Food and Water Watch provides an email contact tool.

H.R. 1694, the Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act, would limit transfer of military equipment from our Department of Defense to local police departments. I've said this many times: you don't need a drone or a grenade launcher to find murderers and drug dealers -- but you do "need" these things, apparently, to put down protests about your own brutality. Particularly if you're Donald Trump and you want to do a photo-op in front of a church with a Bible in your hand! Seriously, the fact that that moment didn't make 75 million Americans turn against him is our shame as Americans, although admittedly it's more their shame as Trump votaries. And just as we shouldn't try to turn police officers into social workers, we shouldn't turn them into soldiers, either. Restore the Fourth provides the email tool.

H.R. 7, the Paycheck Fairness Act, now awaits a full House vote; the bill would, like its previous iterations, give women more tools to fight paycheck discrimination, which (despite the Equal Pay Act of 1965) still runs rampant in America, such that women make about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, when it really should be a dollar for a dollar. The Paycheck Fairness Act would, among other things, prevent employers from disciplining workers for discussing their pay, since that's usually the only way employees find out they're getting shafted. I bet Republicans defend the "free speech" right of bosses to tell their employees what they can't talk about, but do we really want employers to be able to make their employees accomplices in their wage theft? Daily Kos provides the petition.

Did you know that big corporations can pay large amounts of money in class action settlements when they hurt people -- and then turn around and deduct those settlements from their taxes? Yes, this really happens, and it sure hampers us from being a law-and-order nation now, doesn't it? We generally regard punishments as more effective if they hurt, and don't think it's OK because the injured parties are still getting their money, because when corporations get to use their wrongdoing as an excuse to skimp on what they owe on their taxes, we all become injured parties, because that's money that ain't paying cops and ain't keeping the libraries running. So that $26 billion big pharmaceuticals are planning to pay for keeping good Americans addicted to opioids will wind up being yet another windfall -- for them. Penn PIRG provides the email tool, if you don't call your Congressfolk.

Finally, the National Whistleblower Center helps you tell your House Reps to strengthen the whistleblower protections in the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement (or FIRREA) Act. Currently the law caps whistleblower rewards, which means more whistleblowers won't come forward, and the CARES Act just gave away a couple trillion bucks of our hard-earned taxpayer money -- quite a lot of "small business" money went to national restaurant chains! -- so we've got a more immediate incentive to root out corruption. Don't let your Tea Party uncle describe whistleblowing as a "way for scammers to make money," because whistleblowers go through absolute hell for years while the courts evaluate their complaint -- they usually never work in the same field again, and more than a few don't work at all. They deserve our support.

Action: concerning a wealth tax, student loan debt, birth control, and the minimum wage.

Demand Progress helps you tell your Congressfolk to pass a wealth tax. Sen. Warren (D-MA) has proposed a tax on wealth -- a two percent tax on wealth over $50 million, which would escalate to three percent on wealth over $1 billion. Two percent, three percent -- doesn't sound very onerous, does it? But it would raise a lot of money -- $275 billion annually, so says research out of UCal-Berkeley -- and you may have noticed that our billionaire class has done quite well during this pandemic, particularly those billionaires who run Amazon. You'll recall that Donald Trump's objection to the Warren wealth tax during the campaign was that it would be 100%! That's the kind of absurd rubbish we can count on hearing from Republicans this time, too. But, for real, don't listen to their objections, because they're the party that can't win without suppressing the vote or staging a coup. And for too long we've claimed to be a healthy just because one person can make enough money to build a giant atomic clock in a cave as a comment on the nature of time, but I hope, one day, we claim we're a healthy civilization because we take care of everyone.

Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard that President Biden only wants to forgive around $10,000 in student loan debt per person, even though he can by law forgive up to $50,000. Why so parsimonious? Possibly because Mr. Biden is unusually attuned to the kinds of things even mostly-decent people say about it! "Why should they get all the breaks?" they say. Well, there's a good reason they should get "all the breaks": college costs a lot more than it used to -- we of a certain age and older (cough President Biden cough) can hardly comprehend six-figure student loan debt, let alone some $1.6 trillion in student loan debt held by over 40 million Americans (that's roughly one out of every five American 18 and older). But I'm happy to bestow upon the less-fortunate a boon I never had, not least because it's a boon I didn't need! So Daily Kos helps you tell President Biden to stretch his mind a bit and forgive $50,000 of student debt per borrower. Not for nothing, but that'll free up a lot of cash to stimulate the economy. Some folks might even buy homes one day.

In other news, the EACH Woman Act (no bill number at Congress.gov at this writing) would ensure that folks on Medicaid have access to legal abortions, which means it would repeal the 44-year-old Hyde Amendment which prevents federal funding for abortions. Perhaps that seemed like a reasonable compromise to some folks once, but not now -- used to be when abortions were illegal that folks of means could get them and poor folks couldn't, but under the regime established by the Hyde Amendment it's totally different: now folks of means can get them and poor folks can't. Just like everyone else I shudder at the idea of a fetus being aborted, but the alternative to legal abortions is making women second-class citizens again, and I certainly won't do that. The bill would also prevent our government from interfering with private health insurers that cover abortion, which is what conservatives want, right? Our government out of what's between doctor and patient? Barry Goldwater would've said so. Hence Daily Kos helps you tell your Congressfolk to support women's health care rights by passing the EACH Woman Act.

Finally, just because Senate Democrats won't fight for the $15/hour minimum wage in the COVID relief bill anymore doesn't mean we won't, so go ahead and call your Senators and tell them to pass one anyway. It doesn't matter that they won't; they need to know where we stand, because, apparently, telling them a hundred times doesn't get it through their thick skulls. So let's consider, for a moment, that polling finds 63% of West Virginians support a $15/hour minimum wage. Hey, that's Joe Manchin's state, a state so allegedly full of "conservatives" that he just can't support the $15/hour minimum wage. Even though they're telling him to support it! And given that other polling finds clear majorities of Republicans favor the $15/hour minimum wage, I bet the polling would be no less embarrassing for Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona. It's a shame I still have to say this to my fellow liberals, but your job isn't to coddle people like Messrs. Manchin and Sinema, it's to tell them to listen to their own constituents! Right-wingers say we coddle people too much, so let's maybe stop coddling "moderates" who contort themselves into absurd arguments when their constituents' will is plain.

Oh, and before I go, don't forget to catch One True Real and Awesome Great American President Donald Trump's Totally True and Real Second Inauguration today. I hear it'll be quite the drama, and I'm sure FNC, Newsmax, and OANN will carry it live. I kid, of course.