Tax Bill Flaws; Immigration a Good Thing; and Rural Hospital Closings

Tax Bill Flaws
Average hourly wages have actually gone down, after adjusting for inflation, since the GOP tax bill went into effect. The tax bill subsidizes corporations in their outsourcing of operations and jobs offshore. Harley-Davidson announced the layoff of 800 workers at a plant in Kansas City, the opening of a new factory in Thailand, and a plan to buy back 15 million shares currently valued at $700 million. (Source: Damen Silvers, policy director and special counsel at the AFL-CEO.)

The Congressional Budget Office has recalculated the ten-year budgetary deficit increase at $1.9 to $2.3 trillion. The tax law will also raise health insurance premiums for working families and cause 3 million people to lose health coverage in the next year. There is a general consensus among tax-monitoring organizations that by 2027, 83 percent of the tax savings will go to the top 1 percent of taxpayers.

Immigration: a Good Thing
A Gallup poll published on June 21 shows 75 percent think immigration is a good thing for the U.S., up from 71 percent last year. Just 19 percent think immigration is a bad thing. A total of 84 percent said "legal" immigration is a good thing. Only 29 percent say immigration should be decreased.

 A Pew Research Center poll released on June 20 found Democrats to have a 14-point advantage over Republicans when registered voters were asked which party would better handle immigration.

A senior Customs and Border Protection official told the Washington Post that the agency would freeze criminal referrals for migrant parents with children, while Department of Justice officials were saying the the "zero tolerance" policy remained in effect. Under an order from a federal district judge in California in 1997, children must generally be moved to an approved facility for minors within 20 days.

Rural Hospital Closings
Since 2010, more than 80 rural hospitals have shuttered across the country, according to the Rural Health Program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Nationally, more than a third of rural hospitals are at risk of closure, and 41 percent are operating in the red.

According to U.S. census data from 2016, 46 percent of the country's rural population uses a form of government insurance, compared with 36 percent of the urban population. But the situation is significantly worse in the 18 states that have not joined the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, most of them largely rural. According to a recent study from the Colorado School of Public Health, hospitals in states that did not expand Medicaid are six times more likely to close than hospitals in states that did.