I think Ivanka Trump's job title is Senior Adviser to the President, something like that, but what she actually does is a mystery, unless you count the occasional interview with a friendly news outlet in which she nevertheless manages to exhibit her vacantness. The most recent example is her interview a few days ago with "Fox and Friends," in which she breathlessly looked forward to traveling the country this April, when people are completing their tax forms and realizing how great the new law is for them. I guess she doesn't realize that this April people are settling up with the feds for the 2017 tax year, which is governed by the old law. You'd think that someone in the Trump Administration could explain to her that, while some people may be able to detect a different withholding rate in their paychecks early next year, the tax filing due in April isn't affected by the new law at all. The benighted mainstream media, speaking through one of its principal propaganda organs, the Washington Post, explains:
[The new] law has no real bearing on the 2017 tax returns Americans will be filling out in April. It will apparently take effect when it comes to their personal tax withholding as early as February 2018, but the tax returns in April involve only taxes paid through December 2017.
Ivanka elaborated by indicating that people will in April be particularly grateful because the "vast majority" of them will be able to do their filing on a postcard-sized form. Uh, no. That's wrong for April 2018 for the aforementioned reason, and it's wrong for April 2019 because the new law does not deliver on the promise to simplify the tax code (which is not the only promise it doesn't deliver on). Again, the Post explains:
[T]he postcard thing was a Republican goal for this process that never came to fruition. In fact, as FiveThirtyEight notes, this bill doesn't really even simplify the tax code. There may be an increase in the number of people who take the standard deduction, which has doubled, and taxes for businesses will in some cases get simpler. But other aspects, such as the expanded child tax credit and new rules for pass-through income, will create more complexities. In addition, people will still want to calculate their itemized deductions before deciding whether the standard deduction is the better option for them.
Oh, Ivanka! You're confirming my suspicions about pretty girls who post to social media selfies of themselves lounging by the pool at a Mar-a-Lago Christmas.
Meanwhile, her dad's administration is having trouble filling a lot of positions in the federal bureaucracy, including secretary of defense for health affairs. In his confirmation hearing, conducted on the morning after the mass shooting at the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Dr Dean Winslow, professor of medicine at Stanford University, let drop that he thought it was "insane" that a civilian can buy a semiautomatic weapon like the AR-15. His nomination was subsequently tabled and he has now withdrawn from consideration. He appears to be a smart and qualified guy, which distinguishes him from many Trump nominees, but, alas, his generally conservative outlook does not extend to Second Amendment absolutism. We are told that the Constitution is not a suicide pact but it does stop anyone seeking to curb gun violence in America, a serious public health issue. Dr Winslow wrote about his experience on the editorial page of the same propaganda organ that corrected Ivanka.
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