Month: September 2017

How Everything is Racist, And You’re a Terrible Person

Via The Daily Bell

Everything you do and think is racist, you probably just don’t realize it because you’re so super privileged.

You can’t just sit back and hide in your white supremacist neighborhoods anymore. There’s no more abstaining from taking a side on this one. The sins of your ancestors have caught up to you! (Or at least the sins of the ancestors of people who look like you, considering most white Americans are descended from post-Civil War immigrants.)

You may think that standing for the national anthem is a normal thing to do. You may have even gone on standing for the national anthem, ignoring the rest of the controversy surrounding the NFL. But it turns out that behaving in a standard traditional fashion is racist.

Yep, it’s the old, “you’re either with us or against us,” philosophy. You cannot sit out this manufactured controversy. The Huffington Post says that when you stand, you stand for white supremacy. For white people, the anthem represents freedom. White Americans are full citizens, and black Americans–especially extremely successful millionaire athletes–are second class citizens.

You probably just didn’t know that because your life has been lived in a bubble of white privilege. It’s okay, you didn’t know any better. But you’re still a terrible person. You should give your house away to a black family, since “You’re bound to make that money in some other white privileged way.”

Oh, Dr. Suess is also racist, by the way.

And here’s another way we know that President Trump is racist. His wife actually sent 10 Dr. Suess books to a school in Massachusetts. Can you believe it? That’s like, ten times the racism!

Luckily, the librarian at the school knew that the books were racist, and rejected them. She wrote Mrs. Trump a letter to explain her white supremacist folly.

Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art. Grace Hwang Lynch’s School Library Journal article, “Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away from Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books,” reports on Katie Ishizuka’s work analyzing the minstrel characteristics and trope nature of Seuss’s characters. Scholar Philip Nel’s new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, further explores and shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and oppression in education and literature.

Thought those were just innocent cartoon images? Think again!

I mean it’s so obvious that Dr. Suess was a racist. He clearly thought star-bellied Sneetches were better than plain-bellied Sneetches. They were so privileged walking around with those stars on their bellies. And then, when the plain-bellied Sneetches started acting all star-bellied, the privileged star-bellied Sneetches culturally appropriated the plain-bellied Sneetches’ style!

The point of the story certainly wasn’t that a third party came into town and exploited the natural differences of the Sneetches for personal profit! Dr. Suess couldn’t have been calling attention to the fact that people will seek to exploit divisions in society for their own motives.

So nice try attempting to sit this one out! Unless you swear fealty to demolishing white privilege, then you are racist. And don’t try to end any race problems in your own way! It has to be through government intervention, and acquiescence to the demands of Black Lives Matter. If you do nothing, you are racist.

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Gold Demand Surges As Price Suffers Worst Month Since November

Amid a resurgent dollar, gold prices have tumbled in September (worst month since Nov 2016). However, as geopolitical tensions soar, with the standoff between the U.S. and North Korea probably topping the list, demand for precious metals surged with Gold ETF holdings rising most since Feb 2017.

Bullion has sunk 2.8 percent in September while holdings in gold-backed ETFs expanded 2.4 percent as of Thursday.

Plenty of investors are still seeking havens, says Barnabas Gan, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. in Singapore.

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Trump Tax Plan To Benefit “Top 1%” Most, Cost $2.4 Trillion, Middle Class To Pay More Taxes

Based on what we already know about the proposed Trump tax reform, which can be summarized as follows:

  • collapse the seven individual income tax rates to three (12, 25, and 35 percent),
  • increase the standard deduction,
  • eliminate personal exemptions,
  • increase the child tax credit,
  • eliminate most itemized deductions,
  • repeal the individual and corporate alternative minimum taxes,
  • repeal the estate tax,
  • reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 20 percent, tax pass-through business income at a top rate of 25 percent,
  • allow businesses to fully expense investment in equipment and machinery for at least five years,
  • adopt a territorial tax system that would exempt the foreign earnings of US corporations from US tax

… moments ago the Tax Policy Center released its analysis of what the practical impacts of the Trump tax plan will be on the broader population. Below we present the key findings.

The tax plan will cost $2.4 trillion over the first decade and $3.2 trillion over the second dacade, on a static basis

  • The proposal would reduce federal revenues by $2.4 trillion over the first ten years and $3.2 in the second decade. This means that absent a matched deduction in spending, US deficit and debt will increase by a similar amount. This is a problem as a Senate GOP budget resolution unveiled on Friday only allows for adding $1.5 trillion to the debt, implying a revenue shortfall of just under $1 trillion.
    • The business income tax provisions—including those affecting corporations and pass-through businesses—would reduce revenues by $2.6 trillion over the first ten years. Elimination of estate and gift taxes would lose another $240 billion. The individual income tax provisions (excluding those related to business income) would increase revenues by about $470 billion over the same period.

While many Americans will benefit, the biggest gains will go to the 1%, whose after-tax income would increase by over 8%.

  • In 2018, the average tax bill for all income groups would decline: taxpayers in the bottom 95 percent of the income distribution would see average after-tax incomes increase between 0.5 and 1.2%. However, and where the Democrats will have a field day, taxpayers in the top 1 percent (incomes above $730,000), would receive about 50 percent of the total tax benefit; their after-tax income would increase an average of 8.5 percent.
  • Between 2018 and 2027, the average tax cut as a share of after-tax income would fall for all income groups other than the top 1 percent. In 2027, taxpayers between the 80th and 95th percentiles of income (between about $150,000 and $300,000) would experience a slight tax increase on average.

The problem is that at the same time, taxes for substantial portion of taxpayers will go up:

  • In 2018, about 12% of taxpayers would face a tax increase of roughly $1,800 on average. Where it gets worse is that many of those who form the backbone of the upper-middle class, or more than a third of taxpayers making between about $150,000 and $300,000, will pay more, mainly because most itemized deductions would be repealed.

Fast forward to 2027, when the overall average tax cut would be smaller than in 2018, increasing after-tax incomes 1.7 percent. Taxpayer groups in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution—those making less than about $150,000—would receive average tax cuts of 0.5 percent or less of after-tax income. However, taxpayers making between about $150,000 and $300,000 would on average pay about $800 more in taxes than under current law. And the one item which Democrats will love: about 80% of the total benefit would accrue to taxpayers in the top 1 percent, whose after-tax income would increase 8.7 percent.

It gets worse: by 2027, taxes would rise for roughly one-quarter of taxpayers, including nearly 30 percent of those with incomes between about $50,000 and $150,000 and 60 percent of those making between about $150,000 and $300,000.

According to the Tax Policy Center, the number of taxpayers with a tax increase rises over time. This is because the plan would replace personal exemptions, which are indexed for inflation, with additional credits for children and non-child dependents that are not indexed for inflation. In addition, indexing tax brackets and other parameters to the slower-growing chained Consumer Price Index means that over time more income is subject to tax at higher rates.

Finally, there is of course, the repeal of the state and local tax deduction, a move which is expected to be widely hated by homeowners across the US, but as the chart below shows, by democrat states far more than republican states.

As BofA writes, blue states with high state and local taxes will be the most adversely impacted from the loss of this deduction. Thus, opposition in the Senate will mainly come from Democrats, while Republicans will mostly be on the same page. But, the situation should be more contentious in the House. Data from the Tax Policy Center reveals that 26 of the top 50 districts in terms of SALT deduction usage had a Republican representative. Republicans will likely face more internal pushback from these members. Ultimately, a House bill would fail if two dozen Republicans (and every Democrat) were opposed.

More in the full report below (link):

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‘Medicare Is a Bank Without Security Guards’—Media Executive David Goldhill Debates Princeton’s Paul Starr: New at Reason

On September 19 at the Soho Forum, David Goldhill, former CEO of the Game Show Network and author of the exceptional 2013 book, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—and How We Can Fix It, faced off against Princeton sociologist Paul Starr in a public debate over whether the federal government should offer a Medicare-like health insurance plan to all Americans. Star is the author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry, which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the prestigious Bancroft Prize. (Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker was scheduled to debate Goldhill, but had to drop out because of a medical issue.)

The Soho Forum runs Oxford-style debates in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event. The side that gains more ground is victorious. ​In this case, Goldhill won overwhelmingly by convincing about 30 percent of the audience to switch over to his side.

Starr, arguing for the affirmative, said that the Trump administration’s “war of attrition against Obamacare” has put “us back in the world where people with pre-existing conditions can’t get coverage.” Expanding Medicare eligibility would provide the much needed “public option” that’s missing from the Affordable Care Act, filling in for the inability of the private market to serve all citizens. And it “would not require turning health care in America upside down.”

Goldhill, arguing for the negative, made a case that Medicare takes such an expansive definition of a health care “need” that ​it leads seniors to pursue unwise treatments that put their lives at risk.

Another issue is cost. Medicare proponents say that program’s low administrative expenses are indicative of its operational efficiency. The opposite is true. “Private insurers say ‘no’ to things,” Goldhill told the audience. “They judge appropriateness…Medicare’s mandate,” on the other hand, “is to say ‘yes’ to everything.” The result is that there’s $70 billion in Medicaid fraud every year, but the government doesn’t count that as an expense.

In Goldhil’s view, Medicare​ is controlled by special interests who’ve expanded the definition of a health care “need” to drive up costs and enrich themselves. “The degree of industry capture in the way health care policy actually happens in this country is beyond anyone’s imagination,” he said. The health care industry spends half a billion annually on lobbying to maintain the status quo. The nation’s poorly run hospitals are able to operate at 65 percent capacity only because Medicare keeps them afloat.

“Medicare is a bank without security guards,” Goldhill said, and this year taxpayers will have to subsidize the program to the tune of $320 billion.

Click here for full text, links, a transcript, and downloadable versions.

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My Alma Mater Cancelled My ‘Hate Speech’ Panel

Last night I was supposed to participate in a panel at my alma mater, American University, on feminism, free speech, and Title IX. My co-panelists were to include a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the current head of a group that fights for students’ rights, and two staffers from the British website spiked—not what you might think would be a controversial lineup. But in the days leading up to the event, the AU chapter of American Association of University Women organized a campaign to “Keep Our Campus Safe,” describing the panel as “hate speech” and “violence” designed to undermine “decades of work… to make campuses safer for victims of sexual violence.”

The panel was put together by spiked as part of its “Unsafe Space” tour, which will visit several U.S. campuses and include such notable figures as Laura Kipnis and Camille Paglia (along with Reason‘s Robby Soave). The event on American’s D.C. campus was to kick off the tour, with me, spiked‘s Ella Whelan, former ACLU chief Nadine Strossen, and Foundation for Individual Rights in Education director Robert Shibley on a panel moderated by spiked Deputy Editor Tom Slater.

Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) was the student group hosting the event, and was in charge of making arrangements with the campus. An auditorium had been secured since summer, but a few days before the event AU administrators told YAL that the space was no longer available and then that the panel had to be canceled altogether.

Annamarie Rienzi, D.C. chair of YAL and one of the student organizers of last night’s event, told me that the school claimed it came down to YAL classifying the panel as a “meeting” rather than an “event.” But this is standard practice for YAL and other student groups, she says, when a talk or panel does not involve bringing paid speakers to campus or providing refreshments.

Whether the cancellation was strictly about this policy or motivated by other concerns is not something I’m interested in parsing here. The event went on, albeit in a smaller and much less collegiate location: Reason‘s D.C. office. Luckily we were able to open our space to the event at the last minute; thanks to a Learn Liberty livestream, you can watch the whole thing below.

Overall, it’s a thoroughly tame event, albeit one that fostered some good discussion with students who had trekked from AU’s campus to the Reason office. We talked about how Title IX proceedings are often assumed to only involve sexual assault, though they encompass a range of other areas that can have nothing to do with sexual activity or violence, and that can seriously jeopardize academic freedom and (often liberal) professors’ livelihoods. Whelan talked about how Title IX proceedings and the general sexual climate on campus can infantilize female students and take women’s progress a step backward.

Shibley argued that Title IX had had many positive accomplishments before it was, only recently, expanded to its current form under the Obama administration. We all stressed how rolling back some of the Obama era’s approach to Title IX won’t lessen the law’s significance as a tool against sex discrimination—and won’t stop the momentum toward reforming campus sexual assault policies—but will discourage schools and the government from weaponizing it in weird ways.

I talked about how it’s the feds, much more than any minority of illiberal students, who are forcing campuses into absurd “safe spaces.” The media spend too much time blaming “campus feminists” or leftist student groups for Title IX’s worst excesses when the real culprits are government bureaucrats and schools scared to cross them. Colleges would rather crack down on any potential liabilities—i.e., anything anyone complains about—rather than face steep fines or lose the ability to participate in federal student-loan programs.

The audience of students and non-students asked thoughtful questions. Afterward the panelists all hung around for a while and chatted with students eager to share their own thoughts. Not everyone was on the same wavelength about Title IX completely, but there were no progressive protesters or ranting men’s rights activists. It was hardly an anti-feminist space, nor a spectacle of the Milo “free speech event” type. It’s a shame that more students at American didn’t get a chance to come, judge the panel for themselves, and directly voice their perspectives and concerns.

It was especially disappointing to learn today that this may have been provoked by a women’s student group severely misrepresenting the event and then urging students to be angry about it. Here’s how the American Association of University Women (AAUW) of AU described the spiked panel:

The Unsafe Space Tour is coming to AU. What do they want to talk about? Completely revising and undoing decades of work by activists around campuses across the country to make campuses safer for victims of sexual violence.

The group did suggest that students confine their protest to Q&A time. But then, after linking to the event page, it added:

A note on First Amendment rights to free speech: AAUW at AU fully supports free speech. This does not mean we support forcing marginalized students to hate speech and other forms of violence and trauma.

In the days leading up to the panel, the AAUW of AU Facebook lobbed several misguided outrage missiles at it. “Title IX is not a threat to free speech. So why is spiked so threatened by it?” one asked.

As proof of folks being “threatened,” the group quoted a bit from spiked about the event in general (not Title IX) on how its intention in invoking “safe spaces” wasn’t to provoke aimlessly but to spark discussion and debate—”to the end of understanding what is going on, drawing out the radical, humanist case for free speech, and convincing students of why every college should be an Unsafe Space.”

After learning that AU had canceled the event, the group posted (twice):

We are STOKED to announce that the Unsafe Space Tour has been canceled at AU! In their words, they, “got word of resistance from some campus groups.” Good riddance! Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in [the “Keep Our Campus Safe” counter-event] and spoke out.

Here’s the “trauma”-inducing “hate speech” they missed out on:

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Cities Facing Fiscal Mess Plead With CalPERS as Pensions Consume Budgets: New at Reason

Local California officials visited the state pension agency to warn of a looming disaster.

Steven Greenhut writes:

If you ask the union-controlled California Public Employees’ Retirement System about the state’s looming pension crisis, you’re likely to get this answer: What pension crisis?

But the story was much different at CalPERS’ own Finance and Administration Committee meeting held Sept. 19. City officials from across California warned CalPERS board members about the dire fiscal situation their cities face because the pension debt is consuming larger portions of local budgets. The energetic discussion included 18 speakers, many of them local officials who trekked to Sacramento.

“In Hayward, 68 percent of our unfunded pension cost is retiree benefits,” said Hayward City Council member Sara Lamnin, who pointed out that “this means the promises of the past weren’t paid for, frankly.” Hayward’s future is really troubling. She said that “over the next three fiscal years, the city of Hayward’s revenue is projected to grow 1.4 percent, but our cost for PERS is going to go up 30.5 percent.” Lamnin wasn’t asking for someone to rescue Hayward. Officials just want to know how bad the damage will be. “We ask you for data,” she said.

View this article.

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Spanish Government Orders Google To Delete App Used For Catalan Independence Vote

Catalonia’s High Court on Friday ordered Google to delete an application that it said Catalan separatists were using to spread information about a disputed independence vote this Sunday, Reuters reported. The court also ordered Google to block any future applications developed by the gmail address “Onvotar1oct@gmail.com”, according to a written ruling.

The app, which was available on Google Play until just before 7 p.m. on Friday, helps people to find their polling station via their address and shows the closest polling stations on Google Maps via GPS, the name of the town or keywords. It also allows users to share links to polling station locations, according to The Spain Report.

Google told The Spain Report that: “we remove content from our platforms when we receive a court order or when it violates our terms and conditions”. The app no longer appears to be available from Spain.

The court order told Google Inc—at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 (USA)—to take down the app located at that URL and also to block or eliminate any future apps submitted by the user with e-mail address “onvotar1oct@gmail.com” or identifying as “Catalonia Voting Software”. The judge said in her ruling that the tweet with the app link is “only a continuation of the actions of the [Catalan government] to block” Constitutional Court and High Court orders “repeatedly”.

The High Court in Catalonia issued an order on September 23 allowing police to take down any referendum websites linked to by members of the Catalan government on their social media accounts. Friday’s new court order was issued because this is a referendum mobile app, for download, not a link to a referendum website or domain directly.

The “reluctant attitude” of the Catalan government to obey the previous orders about referendum websites is “clear, once again”, says the judge. “…they mean to dodge said blockades with computer applications for mobile devices, which, like the web pages, only promote and facilitate the holding of the referendum on October 1.”

The Civil Guard notified had notified the judge earlier today that a link had appeared on the Twitter profile of Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan First Minister, at 8:30 p.m. on September 27, “announcing the availability of a mobile app with information about the referendum in Catalonia, along with a link to download it”. The judge has ordered the Civil Guard to take the actions needed to enforce the order. Some 140 referendum websites and mirrors have now been taken down on court orders since the beginning of September.

As reported earlier, Madrid, which claims the authority of a constitution that declares the country to be indivisible, remained implacably opposed to Sunday’s vote. “I insist that there will be no referendum on Oct. 1,” central government spokesman Mendez de Vigo told a news conference following the weekly cabinet meeting, reiterating that the vote was illegal.

However, as also noted previously, it appears that the local population has no intetion of complying with the crackdown. In a sign that large crowds are again expected on the streets on Sunday, department store chain El Corte Ingles said it would shut three stores in central Barcelona. The central government said airspace above the city would be partly restricted, according to Reuters.

Meanwhile, lines of tractors draped in the red-and-yellow striped Catalan flag left provincial towns on Friday, planning to converge on Barcelona in a sign of support for the referendum.

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US Cities Demand Federal Help As They Brace For Influx Of 100,000s Of Puerto Ricans

As the disaster-relief effort enters its second week, air traffic is slowly resuming, which means hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans will likely flee the devastated island to stay with friends and relatives in the continental US as they wait for FEMA to rebuild roads, repair power grids and and revive the island's communications infrastructure – a process that could take months, if not longer.

While the urgency of the situation leaves many of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million population little choice, the Financial Times is reporting that the scramble to flee could worsen the population decline as some of those leaving may opt to permanently resettle. Meanwhile, cities with large Puerto Rican populations are asking for federal assistance as they prepare to absorb as many as 100,000 people fleeing the hurricane.

Mainland US cities with large Puerto Rican populations are warning that they will need federal help to cope with an anticipated influx of island residents fleeing the devastation visited on the US commonwealth by Hurricane Maria.

“If it’s as large-scale as we anticipated, it’s got to be a federal and state-co-ordinated response,” said Buddy Dyer, Orlando’s mayor. “It can’t be city by city.”

Some have said they expect to host the disaster victims for up to six months.

“We are expecting a large influx of evacuees to the state,” said Teresa Jacobs, mayor of Orange County in Florida, which includes Orlando. “We will have a major evacuation population for an extended period of time — three months, six months.”

Some city officials claimed that they’re working with state and federal officials to formulate a coordinated response.

Officials from the Orlando area said on Wednesday that co-ordination with the federal government was in the early stages.

 

“We are reaching out to federal authorities,” said Ms Jacobs. “We are planning to have a forum next Tuesday with federal authorities as well as state authorities just to get the conversation started about the co-ordination and the logistics of this effort.”

As the FT noted, the severity of the crisis was underscored on Thursday when President Donald Trump waived the Jones Act, allowing more ships to make their way to Puerto Rico. In a series of tweets, Trump lauded the disaster response, saying that navy vessels have delivered millions of dollars of supplies to the island.
 

 

 

 

 

Congress, meanwhile, has pledged to deposit another $7 billion in Puerto Rico's emergency relief account by the end of next week.

However, as WSJ reported, thousands of shipping containers holding potentially life-saving supplies have been marooned at ports in San Juan as FEMA scrambles to rebuild roads and set up a makeshift distribution system to deliver supplies to needy disaster victims across the island.

Crowley Maritime Corp., based in Jacksonville, Fla., but a major operator of cargo ships to Puerto Rico, had 4,100 containers with both relief supplies and commercial cargo waiting at San Juan’s port on Thursday. Another carrier, TOTE Maritime, said earlier this week it had more than 3,000 shipping containers stacked up at the port awaiting transport.

While Democrats have criticized the disaster response, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello said Friday that the Trump administration has been very attentive in its response to the situation in Puerto Rico, as the Washington Examiner reported.

"I have to say that the administration has responded to our petitions. FEMA, Brock Long, has been on the phone virtually all the time with me, checking out how things are going," said Rossello, leader of the New Progressive Party.

Puerto Rico is US territory, which grants its residents citizenship but not the right to vote in US elections. Over the past decade, many have left the island as its economy has deteriorated, resulting in Congress appointing a federal oversight board to oversee to manage the island’s finances while it negotiates an accord with its creditors.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Puerto Rican capital San Juan issued an angry response to acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke, who, in defending the Trump administration’s response to the disaster, described the situation in Puerto Rico as a “good news story in terms of our ability to reach people.”

“Well, maybe from where she’s standing it’s a good news story. When you’re drinking from a creek, it’s not a good news story.”

 

“Where is the good news here?”

As much as 40% of Puerto Rico doesn’t have access to potable water.

Meanwhile, in the rush to get off the island, crowds jammed the cruise ship dock in San Juan desperately hoping to board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship the Adventure of the Seas, which was sent to help evacuate people struggling to find a way off Puerto Rico following the destruction of Hurricane Maria.

According to the New York Post, more than 2,000 people sweltered in the hot sun, forming a line stretching down the shore and a pier.

Expect the exodus to the mainland to intensify as shell-shocked Puerto Ricans scramble to get off the island by any means necessary.

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US Oil Rig Count Rises Most In 3 Months

With US crude production having rebounded back to near cycle highs in its lagged response to the oil rig count, this week's rebound in the oil rig count (+6 to 750) is notably the largest addition in almost 3 months.

As Bloomberg details, explorers renewed their search for U.S. crude as oil entered a bull market and overseas demand for American supplies flourished.

Working rigs targeting crude increased by six this week, bringing the total to 750, according to Baker Hughes data reported Friday. Drillers resumed adding rigs for the first time in more than a month, a period that included Hurricane Harvey’s sweep across the Eagle Ford Shale region and coastal shipping terminals. Meanwhile, exports of domestic crude jumped 61 percent last week to an all-time high.

The rig count is seen as an indicator of near-term production growth.

Production may have a little further to go…

 

WTI has been volatile this week but remainshigher on the week… having dropped below $52 yesterday

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Order Some More Avocado Toast: What Tax Reform Means for Millennials

Depending on which definition you’re using, the generation of Americans known as “Millennials” started being born somewhere between 1977 and 1982. Suffice it to say that none of us were paying much attention to politics the last time Congress passed a comprehensive tax reform bill, in 1986.

Though there’s no way to know whether any tax bill will make it through Congress this year, Millennials have reason to be optimistic about reforms that lower rates and spur economic growth. But we should also be wary. America’s fiscal policy could rob tax reform of its benefits if left unaddressed or made worse.

First, the good.

Probably the most obvious benefit of tax reform—for Millennials and for plenty of other Americans too—is the potential for simplifying the tax code. Republicans have promised that tax reform will make it possible to file your taxes on the back of a postcard, something they say can be done by ending special tax breaks and shortening the tax code. At present, the code is more than 4 million lines long and complying with it consumes more than 6 billion hours every year, according to the IRS’ National Taxpayer Advocate.

The economic and accounting burdens of complying with the tax code fall inequitably on smaller businesses and individual taxpayers, according to research by economists Jason J. Fichtner and Jacob M. Feldman of the Mercatus Center. “An overly complex and cumbersome tax code favors businesses and individuals who can afford well-paid accountants and lawyers,” they wrote in a 2015 report.

A simpler tax code is good for almost everyone, but it stands to help Millennials more than most. A 2016 survey commissioned by NerdWallet, a San Francisco–based personal finance website, found that 80 percent of taxpayers aged 18 to 34 say they’re fearful about some aspect of preparing taxes, well above the 69 percent of people across all ages who said the same thing. Millennials might have an undeserved reputation for being easily frightened, but there’s no doubt that the current tax code induces unnecessary stress. And Millennials are the group least likely, generationally speaking, to have access to tax help.

“Millennials tend to have less experience with a deeply confusing tax code, less cash to seek professional help and less need for the more complicated returns that having children or a mortgage can bring,” says Liz Weston, a personal finance columnist at NerdWallet.

Tax reform carries other benefits for younger Americans. Done right, it means increased economic growth and more job opportunities. In the four different tax reform ideas floated last week by the Tax Foundation, projected GDP growth ranged from 2.2 percent to 7.1 percent. Wages are projected to grow too, by between 1.6 percent and 5.3 percent in the foundation’s four scenarios.

Lower corporate taxes—the GOP plan would cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent—mean potentially lower costs for all consumer products, from avocados to iPhones.

“Tax reform must be bold” for it to work, says David Barnes, policy director for the pro-market group Generation Opportunity. “It must make the tax code simpler, fairer, and more efficient by eliminating special interest tax credits and deductions.”

Still, tax reform carries plenty of risk.

If Congress passes and Trump signs a tax reform bill that doesn’t do anything to cut spending, it will only pile more debt onto younger generations. Already, each American owes about $62,000 as his or her share of the national debt—that’s roughly 8,850 orders of avocado toast (average cost: $7)—and that amount will get larger if tax rates fall and spending doesn’t.

But does Congress even care about the deficit? The outline of a tax plan introduced by Republican leaders this week suggests not. The plan would cut $5.8 trillion in taxes, offset by only $3.6 trillion in base-broadening offsets. That leaves a $2.2 trillion deficit increase over the next decade, according to an estimate by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

In the long term, the biggest drivers of the national debt are entitlements. While there’s little chance that entitlement reform will be part of the tax reform discussion, it would be unwise for Congress to ignore the subject entirely. Millennials, in particular, get the short shift when it comes to old-age programs that function as a massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old. As Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy wrote in a still-timely Reason cover story in 2012, “Social Security and Medicare, which provide retirement and health insurance benefits for senior Americans, generally without regard to need, are funded by taxes on the relatively meager wages of younger Americans who will never enjoy anything close to the same benefits.”

If Congress is serious about fixing the tax code and cutting out portions of it that only benefit special interests, older Americans must be considered one of those special interests. Tax cuts that add to the national debt and leave entitlements on their current unsustainable paths will hurt Millennials the most.

If it’s done wrong, tax reform can leave us with years of slower growth under the weight of crushing debt, the ongoing transfer of wealth from the young-and-poor to old-and-rich, and the threat of future tax increases to meet spending and debt obligations.

“Young Americans want a fairer tax code that unrigs the economy,” says Barnes, “and puts ordinary Americans ahead of special interests and the well-connected.”

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