Legislative Report
November 11, 2018
Federal Items:
Democrats will control the House – beginning in January. November and December promise a dangerous lame duck session. Among the items Congress must consider…
► A budget deal to avoid a government shutdown on Pearl Harbor Day;
► A renewal of the Farm Bill (which is mostly food stamps);
► Making permanent last year’s tax cuts; and,
► Several issues related to defense spending, including targeting funds for border enforcement.
Also on the radar: a deal to allow the federal debt to climb by better than one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000.00) over the next few months. Remember, a core tenet of the “Freedom Caucus”/Tea Party for the past eight years has been a demand that the debt not be increased and that Congress only pass a “balanced budget.”
It is rumored that Trump’s allies will try to push through a middle class tax cut – essentially a 10% tax rate decrease for those making less than $200,000 a year – before Democrats control the House.
The Trump administration and Congress are creating a disaster in the education funding system. Graduates who took jobs with the promise of getting loan forgiveness for their work are discovering that they must now pay back all of what they borrowed. Bureaucrats are working to minimize the role of non-profit lenders (such as MOHELA in Chesterfield), forcing more students to for-profit banks and brokers.
The best guess is that total for all student loans is above $1.5 trillion. The average payback time is 19 years.
State Items:
Members of the House and Senate may begin pre-filing bills on December 1st.
In the days after the election conservative legislators promised to file bills to overturn Missouri’s new minimum wage schedule.
It is expected that lawmakers won’t bring back Right To Work in 2019 – they may push for it late in the 2020 session. This would limit the time which opponents would have to gather signatures to force a vote.
Despite a strong economy, Missouri general revenue remains weak. At the end of October (four months into the fiscal year), general revenue receipts were 3.9% below last year’s anemic yield. The culprit is weak income tax yield – due in part to faulty tax with holding tables issued by the Department of Revenue after the federal tax cut: new tables were issued in October.
Remember when George W. Bush tasked Dick Cheney to find him a vice president candidate – and Cheney picked Cheney? Well, after a “national search,” accidental Governor Mike Parson picked outgoing Speaker of the House Todd Richardson to be the new head of Missouri Medicaid. The job pays $225,000 a year and oversees $10 billion in annual spending. Medicaid cares for a million Missourians.
At the announcement of his selection, Richardson promised that he would not expand Medicaid.
Glenn Koenen