#Tax burden 2024

[techminsolutions]

Government Focus on Tax Framework: Interim Budget 2024

The Indian government is set to make significant changes to the tax framework in the upcoming interim budget for 2024. One major area of focus is the simplification of withholding tax provisions, aimed at creating a more business-friendly environment.This strategic initiative is part of the broader plan to reduce business tax burdens, minimize disputes, and enhance overall economic efficiency in…

[venus-haze]

Power in the Blood (Father Paul Hill x Nun!Reader)

Summary: There’s power in the blood. Father Paul knows this. Soon, you will, too.

Note: Female reader who's only referred to as "Sister," but no other descriptors are used. Also, the newspaper clipping isn't on the wall in this, for obvious reasons. I’ve been working on this fic in one way or another for about a year, but watching The Devils (1971) and Immaculate (2024) earlier this year as well as encouragement from my amazing friend @zaras-really-dreamless finally gave me the push I needed to finish it. Major visual inspiration from this scene in particular. Do not interact if you're under 18, terf or radfem, or post thinspo/ED content.

Word count: 5.7k

Warnings: Major canon divergence. Angst, yearning, and unrequited feelings. Elements of Catholic mysticism. Sexually explicit content which involves dubious consent by way of religious manipulation, members of the clergy engaging in sexual acts, oral sex (f. receiving, but it's related to the stigmata and vampirism), blood play.

In retrospect, Crockett Island was the only place it could have happened. Desolation hung over the remote fishing village like fog in the early mornings, when you’d take your walks before the Monsignor awoke, and you heard the woes of the fishermen as they prepared to sail out for the day—oil spills, restrictive fishing laws, better paying jobs on the mainland but leaving everything they knew behind in exchange. Despite coming from the mainland yourself and otherwise alien to the ways of the dying village, your being a woman of the cloth on the largely Catholic (though predominantly non-practicing) island made the islanders trust you, consider you one of their own a bit more than they otherwise would have as you took on the burden of buoying their spirituality as the Monsignor’s health continued failing, and he could no longer fulfill the task himself.

You’d begged the diocese for help, hardly considered yourself equipped to care for the ailing priest and run a parish, however small, essentially on your own. But for a parish as small as St. Patrick’s, you were all the help the diocese would care to send. The letter you received in response to your detailing all of the things Crockett Island’s parishioners desperately needed boiled down to “wait until the old man kicks it.” 

You supposed it was a miracle the diocese even sent you there in the first place. Though most of the islanders took the arrival of a young nun like yourself as a breath of fresh air, Beverly Keane didn’t seem all too pleased to have her self-appointed position as number two at St. Patrick’s knocked down to number three. She seemed to settle down when it became clear you had no interest in engaging in petty politics in a church that barely counted three dozen people for regular Sunday mass attendance. 

The island’s social life, small as it was, interested you more. People were more open to receiving you as a friend than as a representative of the church, undoubtedly put off by Beverly Keane’s self-righteous fanaticism that veered into cruelty. You got to know the regular parishioners, like Erin Greene, who’d grown up on the island, left for some time, and returned pregnant yet eager to become a mother to her unborn baby. She taught at the island’s small school with Beverly, who encouraged you to take up teaching there, obviously hoping to bring a religious curriculum to the tax-payer funded public school. You declined. 

Besides Erin, and to your chagrin Beverly, who was convinced the two of you were compatriots of some kind despite how often you clashed, you found yourself spending increasing amounts of time with Sheriff Hassan. Despite dutifully filling an essential role in the community, he hardly seemed any closer to gaining acceptance despite a year on Crockett Island. 

The day he and Ali moved onto the island, you had a cold, and thus weren’t part of the unofficial welcoming committee. Your head pounded from the sinus pressure when Beverly brought the Monsignor back to the rectory afterward, and you barely heard what she said. You met Sheriff Hassan a few days later, when you were feeling well enough to shop for yourself and the Monsignor for the week. Among your expectations about Hassan Shabazz, his being handsome enough to make your breath hitch for just a moment before introducing yourself wasn’t on the list. But he was understandably weary of you, expecting the same horrendous treatment he undoubtedly received from Beverly. 

Over time, he found you were only interested in buying groceries and not in underhandedly converting him or Ali. You were both lonely outsiders to the island and found some solace in regular conversations about the mainland, or observations about the islanders, occasionally broaching the topic of religion, which had a comfortable place in the space you two shared in the general store, sometimes over a cup of coffee he’d brew for you. 

You admired him. His dedication to his son, the efficacy with which he performed his thankless job, and the unwavering faith he had in his religion, while yours had long lost its luster since you’d become Monsignor Pruitt’s live-in nurse in all but name. 

But the days became your own when the Monsignor made his trip to the Holy Land, ill-advised considering his health. When you voiced your concerns to the parish, your outsider status was paraded through the discussion by Beverly, who insisted you had no way to understand how much the trip meant to the Monsignor, and by extension, every good, practicing Catholic on the island. At the time, to your frustration, she had won. 

Besides, even if he were there, you weren’t sure a man on death’s door himself would have been able to give Mildred Gunning Last Rites. Torrential rain pounded against the rectory when you could barely hear the phone ring. 

You had picked up with a hesitant, “Hello?”

“Sister, it’s—it’s my mom. I think she’s—”

“Sarah, do you want me to come over and see her?”

“Yeah, she’d want that. Just be careful with the rain.”

“I’ll be there in ten.”

Grabbing a flashlight, you had only half pulled on your raincoat when you hurried outside, in a near sprint to the Gunning house. You almost slipped and fell on the way there, and then you wouldn’t have been any good to anybody, and the last thing Dr. Sarah Gunning needed was to tend to a broken leg while her mother was on her deathbed.

The door was unlocked when you arrived, the house quiet and dark save for a few lamps left on.

“Sarah?” you called out.

She emerged from her mother’s room, eyes red. “I thought I was ready for this a long time ago, but being face-to-face with it…”

“Are you sure this is it?”

“As sure as I can be. She hasn’t been eating. There’s only so much I can do,” Sarah said, her voice breaking in despair. “Sister, I—she’d want you to be here. Even though she didn’t know you very much, I could tell she liked you.”

“Of course,” you whispered, giving her a hug before approaching Mildred’s bedside. 

Despite her labored breathing, she managed a kind smile when you took her weathered hand in yours and prayed the Our Father with as steady of a voice as you could manage. Then, you knelt, pulled the rosary from your raincoat pocket, and prayed until your knees ached and you nearly passed out from exhaustion at staying up so late. You almost thought you had dreamed it, the way she went, as peacefully as drifting off to sleep. It was only the cry of her daughter that pierced through your haze, and you struggled to your feet as you allowed Sarah privacy and called Sheriff Hassan over to certify the death, as was necessary for the burial Mildred would have undoubtedly wanted as a Catholic.

When the Sheriff arrived, about fifteen minutes after you called, you’d become acutely aware your nightgown had soaked through in the rain, and pulled your raincoat more closely over your body, ashamed you’d even forgotten such a detail in your haste.

“I should head back now,” you said. “I’m so sorry again, Sarah. You’ll be in my prayers. I’ll contact the diocese first thing in the morning."

She nodded. "Thank you, Sister."

“Do you need a ride back to the church?” Hassan asked. “This shouldn’t take long.”

You smiled, tempted by his offer, the prospect of spending more time alone with him. Instead, you shook your head. “Thank you, Sheriff. I think I can manage.”

Crockett Island was quiet the following day, when Annie’s son Riley arrived home for the first time in over a decade, following his four year prison sentence. You could tell through his polite greeting he had no interest in speaking with you further than his mother’s introductions. Fair enough.

Monsignor Pruitt was supposed to return that evening, but you had been calling the diocese to try to get confirmation that they could send a priest over to perform the funeral mass if needed. As usual, you got answering machines or the run around of being told to call different offices, none of which could apparently help you. 

When you returned to the rectory after visiting with Sarah Gunning, you noticed the light on in the distance. Beverly had planned to meet the Monsignor at the ferry and bring him home. In all honesty, you couldn’t believe he survived the trip, both there and back.

“Monsignor, it’s me!” you called out. “How was your trip? I’d love to hear about—” You froze when you came face to face with a priest. A priest who wasn’t the Monsignor. Younger, handsome, absolutely unexpected. “Hello. I–I’m sorry, who are you? Father—”

“I’m Father Paul, Paul Hill,” he said kindly. “The diocese sent me.”

“That was quick. I thought they’d been ignoring my messages.”

“Yes, I’m afraid the Monsignor became ill on his trip, and I’m here until he recovers. I hope you don’t mind, I went ahead and brought my things into what I assumed was his room.”

“Please, make yourself at home.” You hastily made a sign of the cross. “But the Monsignor…I don’t think the islanders could take another loss. I’m so sorry, you come here and your first mass is a funeral.”

“Funeral? For who?”

“Mildred Gunning, an elderly parishioner who had been ill with dementia for a few years, I believe. She passed away two nights ago,” you said. “That’s why I’ve been calling the diocese all day. We need someone to perform the funeral mass.”

His deep, brown eyes widened with all the terror of a deer being chased through the woods. “Are–are you sure?”

“Of course I am. I was there when she passed.”

“Did she suffer?”

“No, it was like she had fallen asleep,” you said softly, watching in wonder as tears fell from his eyes. “Father?”

“I’m sorry, Sister. These things affect me deeply.”

You put your hand on his shoulder, giving it a comforting squeeze. “Can I make you coffee or tea?”

“Coffee, please,” he said, his voice empty, an almost far away sound to it.

“While that’s brewing, I’ll call Dr. Gunning, Mildred’s daughter, and let her know you’re here. I don’t think she’d want any deviation from the typical funeral rites. Her mother was quite devout.”

“Yes, I know.”

You furrowed your eyebrows. “What was that?”

“Yes, I–I figured.”

He retreated into the Monsignor’s room. When you brought the coffee to him, he requested you leave it outside the door, which you found odd. Even more strange was having to tell Beverly that she missed the Monsignor’s arrival because he wasn’t arriving in the first place, and the diocese forgot to tell you that he’d become ill on his trip and Father Paul was serving as his replacement until he recovered. You privately figured the assignment would be more permanent, as yours had unexpectedly become.

Mildred Gunning’s funeral was held in St. Patrick’s Church less than a day later. A simple, solemn affair that saw the church nearly packed for the first time outside of Christmas or Easter. Mildred had lived and died on Crockett Island, everyone knew her in one way or another. Father Paul conducted the funeral mass as if mourning the Pope himself, and you were particularly struck by his grief, the way he nearly fell apart while giving the homily.

He fared no better at the wake that followed the funeral mass, held in the community center. Father Paul was utterly disinterested in speaking with any of the parishioners who tried to introduce themselves to him or sought solace and spiritual guidance in his presence. Thus, the burden once again fell on your shoulders, and you almost thought the diocese would have been better off ignoring your calls after all.

You sighed. You couldn’t let your cynicism get the best of you. It’d be entirely inappropriate for Father Paul to treat Mildred’s wake as a social hour. Besides, people with such deep empathy for others, especially someone they’d never met, were rare, as reminded to you by Beverly, who made her way over to you with a plate of cheese and crackers and a slight sneer on her face.

“I suppose it’s nice and all, but it’s not like he knew the woman,” Beverly muttered.

“He needs time to adjust,” you said. “This isn’t the best way to start out his tenure here.”

“Yes, well, let’s just hope he gets his act together soon.”

You could swear the diocese had you on some kind of blacklist, the way your calls to them went unanswered, letters returned with vague instructions and empty assurances. Father Paul had no idea how long they intended for him to stay on Crockett Island or the condition of Monsignor Pruitt. 

Your living in the rectory made sense when you were caring for the Monsignor, but with Father Paul fully capable of taking care of himself, you wanted to know if you’d be staying on the island, and if so, if separate arrangements would be made for your own housing. The island was too small, too chatty, for you and Father Paul to be living alone for too long before it was turned into something it wasn’t.

The bitter taste of married life settled on your tongue as you took up most of the responsibilities around the rectory while Father Paul moped . The old man could hardly help with cleaning, and you didn’t want him anywhere near the kitchen, but your new roommate was an able-bodied man who could spare to pick up some slack, couldn’t he?

“I made dinner, if you’re hungry,” you said, emerging from the kitchen and into the living room where he sat on the couch. “Just spaghetti and meatballs. The jar sauce from the store isn’t too bad. I usually add—”

“Red wine and oregano to it. I know.”

“Oh,” you said, taken aback by his statement. “I guess Bev told you. Not much of a secret recipe.”

“You’re pretty young for a nun,” he said, turning to you. “What made you want to give up a normal life for this?”

“It’s my vocation. For as long as I can remember, I knew this was what God called me to do. I never wanted another life.” You sat down next to him, sparing a glance around the room. “This is it for me.”

“Crockett Island?”

You conceded a small smile. “I was hoping for somewhere a little more exciting, but I think there’s a chance for something amazing to happen here.”

He shook his head. “That time’s long passed. Look around you, Sister. People are leaving in droves, and the ones who’ve stayed…it’s just too late.”

“Please, Father, I know this island may seem like it’s dying, and presiding over a funeral as your first mass here doesn’t help that, but the people still need guidance,” you pleaded, taking his hands in yours. You couldn’t contend with the diocese sending you to rot with the rest of the island. It couldn’t be for nothing. “The Monsignor is no longer well enough to fill that need, and I couldn’t do it on my own, but together, I think we can do something great if we try. This might be the island’s last chance to have life breathed into it again.”

“Sister—”

“I agree that Crockett Island is hardly a place anymore, but it’s somewhere to start, isn’t it? We couldn’t have been sent here without a reason.”

He swallowed roughly, intertwining his fingers with yours. “You’re right, Sister. I—Thank you.”

You smiled, relief washing over you at his words, at his assurance you wouldn't have to bring revival to Crockett Island on your own. 

Following your conversation with Father Paul, his attitude completely shifted. He was friendlier with the parishioners, taking extra time to spend with Leeza, offering to hold Riley’s AA meetings in the community center to save him a trip to the mainland, and, inexplicably, he liked Beverly, who’d changed her mind about Father Paul since the wake and warmed up to him. The only time he wavered was when he visited with Sarah Gunning, still grieving the loss of her mother and considering moving her practice off of the island.

He’d return to the rectory on those evenings quiet, morose, seeking the comfort you selflessly offered him. A warm embrace in which he’d bury his face in the crook of your neck. A hand to hold and squeeze in his own, intertwining his fingers with yours. Teetering on the brink of an intimacy you’d made vows against, you weren’t quite sure how to bring it up to him, not when he needed you, and you, him, to fill the hunger in your heart for a man you knew you could never have. 

You allowed the beast to live in you. Fed it. Nurtured it. Cared for it. Guarded it with a shameful protectiveness, shielding it from your regular confessions with Father Paul, in which uttering its name would make it real, and thus ripped away from you and destroyed. 

Ash Wednesday and the first week of Lent were resigned to a haze in your memory, hardly able to think of the beginning of the holiest time of the liturgical year without feeling sick. Not after the potluck. You were sure it had been Beverly, Sheriff Hassan was, too. You knew she was cruel, but to harm an animal, something so innocent…You couldn’t stand to be in her presence for long after that, and silently resented Father Paul for keeping her so close. But you supposed everyone had their vices. 

Yours came to a head in a dream, one that felt all too real, that you could hardly remember when you awoke apart from burning hands on your skin, lips pressed to yours, you and Sheriff Hassan in throes of passion. You laid in bed with a lump in your throat and aching between your legs. You hadn’t experienced a dream like that in…you couldn’t even remember.

The entire time you sat through mass, you thought you were going to be sick. You couldn’t concentrate on the readings or the homily. Taking the Eucharist felt wrong, and your hand shook when you brought the communion wafer to your lips when Father Paul handed it to you. Finally, when mass ended, and you were sure the church was empty, you approached him with trepidation.

“Father, I have something I need to confess.”

“Would you like to go to the confessional?”

You shook your head. “I don’t want to hide behind it. I need to be transparent and held accountable.”

He nodded. The two of you sat in a pew, facing each other as you crossed yourselves. 

“How long has it been since your last confession?”

“Three days,” you answered.

“What is it, Sister?”

“I’ve been having lustful thoughts, Father, about someone incredibly close to me, who I care deeply for. Instead of asking the Lord to take these feelings from me, I’ve been indulging in them, and last night I—I had a dream about him. A sexual one that I experienced physical pleasure from.” You were in tears, guilt wracking your body as you spoke. “I’m so ashamed. I should have been stronger. I’ve been sinning against God, exploiting this man in my heart when he’s done nothing to deserve such disrespect. Sheriff Hassan is—”

“Sheriff Hassan?” Father Paul’s gaze darkened ever so slightly, and you leapt to the sheriff’s defense in his absence.

“He didn’t do anything, Father. Nothing more than friendly smiles and kind words, never anything inappropriate. It was me, letting my lustful thoughts ferment instead of nipping them in the bud right away. He committed no sin. It was me.” Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

“Why him?”

You were silent for a moment. “He’s a good man.” Better than most you’d come across. Kind, selfless, just—the virtues that were few and far between among the men of the cloth you had met. Above all else, even when it was difficult, Hassan Shabazz was good. “I love him.”

“You don’t love him, Sister. Lust after him, yes, but you don’t know him, not enough to love him the way you think you do.”

With a shaky, reluctant sigh, you nodded. “Will you help me, Father?”

He took your hand in his, giving it a gentle squeeze. “Of course, it’s the least I can do after you helped me through the trial God set out for me when I first arrived here.”

“Thank you.”

“We’ll get through this together, Sister. Let us pray.”

The following Sunday, you tried to match the enthusiasm he had for ten o’clock mass that morning. You had gotten used to it by then, the way he always seemed to know something you didn’t or was aware of details about the islanders you weren’t keen to even after living there for two years. He was easy to trust, you supposed. 

Sitting in the wooden pew, you focused on following along with mass until the homily following the reading from the Gospel. Father Paul’s homilies were always a bit odd, cryptic, even. You assumed his faith was influenced by mysticism, and sought out books by the likes of St. John of the Cross and St. Francis in an attempt to better understand him. The way he spoke that day unsettled you, a fantastical fanaticism that felt out of place on Crockett Island.

Then, when it was time to receive the Eucharist, there was a solid minute where you were sure you had never hated anyone more in your entire life than you hated him. Telling Leeza Scaroborough to walk, goading the poor girl to step out of her wheelchair in an act of cruelty you couldn’t abide by. You got up from the pew, en route to smack him across the face when she did it. Leeza stood up from her wheelchair, and with tentative steps forward and tears of disbelief and hope in her eyes, she walked up to Father Paul and received the Eucharist.

Everything that followed was a blur, but you knew you were one of the few in attendance who hadn’t broken out into frenzied celebration. Something just wasn’t right. You found yourself hesitant to make eye contact with him when you took communion, and remained quiet even as mass ended, the cacophony of elated voices almost background noise to you.

“I’m sorry, everyone, but I need to speak to our dear Sister in confidence. I’m sure you all understand,” he said, murmurs of affirmation from the congregants who had crowded around him, except for Bev, who had a puss on her face at being excluded.

Father Paul ushered you into the sacristy, closing the door behind you.

“Is something wrong, Sister?” he asked.

“How can anything be wrong? Leeza Scarborough can walk again.”

“Yes, a miracle occurred in this very parish, right before our eyes, yet you seem…hesitant.”

You chewed on your lip before murmuring, “Seeing isn’t always believing.”

“You were the one who told me this island needed life brought back to it, who said we could achieve great things together. Now I’ve done that, by the grace of God Himself, and you have cold feet?”

“It’s not that.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“You know I do,” you said, trying to ignore the lump in your throat. “Maybe my faith is still weak—I’m still weak. I’m sorry, Father.”

“You’re not weak, Sister.”

“I think I’m going to get some air,” you said.

He nodded, distressed by your continued lack of enthusiasm. “Alright.”

Leaving St. Patrick’s through the side door in the sacristy, you tried to muster up the joy and faith you were supposed to feel, but found yourself coming up disappointingly empty. You had seen it with your very own eyes, and had been standing right there when Leeza walked for the first time in years. It couldn’t have been a trick, not orchestrated or premeditated, not by her. But Father Paul seemed so certain. Was his faith that much stronger than yours? Strong enough that he could be a true miracle worker, a vessel of God Himself on Crockett Island of all places?

Even the more skeptical congregants present, like Erin and Riley, had bared witness to it. Could attest to what had happened just as everyone else had, as you could. As a nun, you were undoubtedly expected to believe, be among the most fervent of Father Paul’s advocates. Beverly wasted no time in declaring the act a miracle worthy of the Vatican’s attention. Your faith still wavered despite what should have been undeniable proof. 

You’d lost track of how long you’d been walking around the island, but the sun was beginning to set and you realized you were tired and hungry. The general store wasn’t much farther of a walk from where you ended up while mindlessly wandering, and so you made the trek into town, telling yourself you were getting a few groceries for yourself and Father Paul. Really, the only person you knew you could speak to without judgment would be in there.

When you entered, Hassan greeted you with an emotional distance you expected. He probably figured you’d be among the dozens of people eager to relay Leeza’s miracle to him, underhandedly attempting to invalidate his own faith. 

Grabbing a jar of sauce and a box of pasta, you brought them up to the counter. Your mouth was dry while he rang up the groceries, but you couldn’t help asking, “Have–um–have you seen Leeza recently?” 

He nodded, his lips pressed in a thin line. “Walked right in here and bought a Twinkie earlier.”

“Amazing, how it happened.”

“I know about what happened to Leeza. I don’t believe what happened to Leeza.”

“Neither do I.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

“It doesn’t sit right with me,” you said. “It felt more like a show was being put on than a miracle. I don’t think she had anything to do with what happened, but he had to have done something. He was so sure she would walk, and I just felt angry, betrayed that he’d make a spectacle in mass. In all honesty, Sheriff, my faith has been wavering for a while, but this didn’t make it any stronger.”

“It makes me feel a little more sane to hear you say that.”

“Well, if anyone can get to the bottom of this, I’m sure it’s you.” You smiled, taking the bags of groceries from the counter. “Have a good night, Sheriff.”

“You too, Sister.”

Walking back to the rectory, you wondered if anything would be able to make you change your mind about actually bearing witness to a miracle.

Father Paul hugged you as soon as you walked through the door. “I was about to send out a search party for you.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you, Father. I just needed time to think.”

He looked at the grocery bag in your hand. “And to see the Sheriff.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Sister, something incredible is happening here. I need to know you’re on my side,” he said, his urgency striking you like lightning. 

“I am. I want to be. Please just be patient with me. This is—it’s a lot to process.”

“I can’t do this without you,” he said softly, caressing your cheek. “I need you.” His gaze fell to your lips.

“I should start on dinner,” you whispered, pulling away from him.

“Let me, you cook enough for me already,” he said, taking the bag from you. He pulled out the jar of sauce. “Red wine and oregano, right?”

You nodded. “That’s right.”

“Make yourself comfortable out here. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”

The following half hour or so was unbearably tense, and you could hardly focus on the book sitting in your lap, The Dialogue of Divine Providence, while he cooked. The two of you ate in near silence, and you retired to your room early, falling asleep almost as soon as you changed into your nightgown and crawled into bed.

Burning pain seared your limbs when you awoke in the middle of the night, the pungent scent of iron assaulting your nose, and for a moment, you thought you were dying. You reached over to the lamp on your nightstand, your arm heavy as you moved it. With trepidation, you pulled the cord, a phantom sensation in your hand as you did so. 

Soft, white light from the bulb illuminated your beside. Lifting your hands to your face, you let out a panicked whimper at the gaping wounds in your palms, gently bleeding crimson and flowing down your arms to your nightgown. The fabric around your torso was blotched with blood, each tinge of pink becoming red with every ragged breath you took. You tried kicking at the covers, but found it excruciatingly difficult, and to your horror, discovered identical wounds to the ones in your hands through both of your feet.

Your hands shook as you screwed your eyes shut, telling yourself it was a dream, and that when you opened your eyes, the blood would be gone, the wounds healed. Except the pain was all too real, pulsing in your wounds, tears stinging your eyes as you choked out a sob. Your simple bedroom, with little more than a bookshelf, desk, chair, and crucifix on the wall, threatened to suffocate you as your panic set in.

A groan pulled from your lips as you pushed yourself out of bed, your legs nearly giving out beneath you. The strange sensation of your bare feet on the wooden floorboards made you feel dizzy, or maybe it was blood loss. Each step forward was more agonizing than the last, but you needed help. You needed someone else to see you, a witness to what was happening. 

“Father Paul!” you cried out from the doorway, your voice hoarse and low, barely carrying across the hallway. “Father, wake up!” Mustering what strength you could, you threw yourself against his bedroom door, your closed, bleeding fist erratically banging against it. “Father, please!”

“Sister, what’s going—” 

As soon as he opened the door, you collapsed into his arms, sending him stumbling backward with the sudden burden of your body on his. He looked at you, gaping at the blood that covered you—and him. 

“Father?” 

“I should call Dr. Gunning.”

You shook your head frantically. “Don’t! Not yet.” 

“What happened?”

“I woke up, and I was like this.” Your bleeding hands clenched around the hem of your nightgown, keeping it at your thighs. “I’m too afraid to look.”

“May I?” he asked, his own hands shaking as his fingers brushed the blood-drenched fabric.

Staring at him for a moment, reckoning with the further vulnerability you were about to display to him, you breathed a soft, “Yes.”

He pulled your nightgown up, the fabric sticking to your skin from the congealed blood. You stared at the ceiling as he lifted the garment over your head, too embarrassed and mortified to acknowledge your body bare before him. His fingertips brushed your torso, and you moaned. In your horror, you looked down to see deep, fresh wounds on your sides.

“Oh my God.”

“Do you know what this is, Sister?”

Tears blurred your vision as you shook your head. “It can’t be stigmata. I’m not pure enough, not devout enough. He’d never—”

“Of course He would. He saw you needed faith, a reminder of His love for you, and look at you now,” Father Paul said with hushed fervor as he took in the state of you. “You’re beautiful.” He kissed your forehead, then pressed his lips to each of your weeping palms, and then your feet. 

Desire twisted in your gut at the sight of him beneath you. He kissed your feet again, a terrifying hunger in his gaze as he brought his lips higher up your legs, his hands brushing your skin with a reverence you felt unworthy of receiving. 

You watched as he dipped his fingers into one of your side wounds and then brought the digits to his mouth, tasting your blood from them. With a ragged breath, he brought his face to your torso. His tongue plunged in the valley of your wound, lapping up the blood that gently flowed from it. A moan tore from your throat, pleasure rolling across your skin as if you truly were a vessel for the divine. Surely it was the same sensation that inspired St. Teresa of Avila’s eroticism, a mystical ecstasy that saw her driven out of villages and cloister herself in search of the purest, incorporeal love.

Except before you knelt a man of God whom you could reach out and touch, eagerly devouring your flesh as if able to find salvation in your blood. His teeth grazed your skin, eliciting a shudder that echoed through you like a worn-out hymn. Words failed you, the pleasure you received from his ravenous consumption of you overtaking the pain from your wounds. 

Holding his head against your side wound, you wanted more, the feeling of him indulging in you. Taste and eat. Everything you felt and saw was in shades of violently blossoming red, deeper and deeper with each curl of his tongue and brush of his fingertips, his unadulterated worship, his veneration for you, serving as the flowing cup of God’s grace and mercy.

Rapturous bliss hummed through you like an ecstatic prayer, pulsing in your wounds on your hands, feet, and sides. You felt like he was part of you, a mystical union between yourself and him.

But just as high as he’d taken you, you quickly came down. The gravity of the situation, of what he’d done, what you’d let him do, weighed on your conscience more heavily than any illicit feeling you’d ever harbored toward Sheriff Hassan.

Father Paul took your face in his hands, eyes glistening with a joyous faith you no longer envied. “Your own miracle, Sister. Do you see it now?”

“You did this to me?” you asked in distressed horror. “You—Who are you?”

“Not me, Sister,” he said. “Here, let me show you. You’ll understand everything. I think you’re ready.”

He held out his hand, and despite everything in you screaming otherwise, you took it.

[mapsontheweb]

Tax Burden by State in 2024

[ppumeonae-bigvibe]

seventeen's reaction to you texting them "i'm tired."

↖ navigation: seventeen masterlist || main masterlist

pairing: boyfriend! seventeen x gn! reader

a/n: merry new year to all my readers, here's my last post for this year (i moved my 1st jan post to today just so i could say this lol)

,, for those who have been supporting me through 2023, thank you all so much <3 let's step into a beautiful 2024 together !

scenario 1:

you: i'm tired. him: *missed call* him: pick up the phone him: *2 missed calls* him: where are you? i'm coming over

⤷ seungcheol, seungkwan, chan

whether you were having a tough time physically, emotionally or even mentally, these boyfies want (no, absolutely needed) to see you for themselves, to see that you were truly okay

are the types to have your texts as high priority notifications: if you didn't pick up immediately they would try and try and try until they get through you because they are so worried for you

their minds would be racing and all thoughts of rationality might just be thrown out of the window; they are scrambling to get their keys/ bus pass or whatever mode of transport they are taking and they will be at wherever you are, no matter how late

if it was physical tiredness, then you best believe they will be at your beck and call, anything to help you unwind/ relax

if it was something more mentally or emotionally taxing, they will hold you tight and whisper sweet nothings into your ears, reassuring you all while comforting you

scenario 2:

you: i'm tired. him: what happened? want to talk about it? i'm here for you, okay? i don't know what's going on but if anything please talk to me. if not...should i come over? if you don't want to text we can call too. don't be alone right now, let me share your burdens with you, let me be your strength. him: even if not today, then tomorrow, or whenever you are ready. i'll be here waiting for you.

⤷ jeonghan, joshua, wonwoo, jihoon, myungho, dokyeom

sweet loving boyfies like these would send you paragraphs after paragraphs of affirmations

respects your personal space ! but is antsy and wishes they could do something for you; definitely would be thinking about your text the entire time until you reply to them

as soon as you start texting back, they are putting down everything to reply to you, letting you talk and reading your messages carefully before texting you their hearts truest intentions

or if you call them back, same thing ! they will stop whatever they are doing so that they can listen to you, and will even switch on their video cams so that you can see them

in the case whereby you want to meet up, they will find you at their soonest availability and get you over to theirs so that you two can have a private, cozy space to talk

scenario 3:

you: i'm tired. him: let's go get something nice to eat ~

⤷ soonyoung, junhui, mingyu, vernon

these silly goofy boyfies probably mistook the text and attributed it to physical tiredness; they would probably be struggling to write a response and hence would reply a lot later ("did you mean tired or like tired tired or like..." is what is going through their heads)

surely decided to bait you to come out so they can talk to you (and to make sure you aren't alone too)

take it as a distraction ! they only want to make sure you're comfortable and they want to shower you with all their attention and love; they don't want to bring your focus to how tired you were

not good texters but good do-ers (does this make sense?) they will show to you how much they care for you through their actions

[theblueeyedfirebender]

Fanfiction Masterlist.

(Updated 9/7/24)

I started writing fiction again in March, and I now find myself the mother author of nine eleven fanfics. I figure it's time I make one of these. I'll pin this post to the top of my Tumblr and update as more works are added.

It's mostly Royai and some Zutara Trash so if you're not into that, move along.

Death and Taxes

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 5.4K

“You’re proposing we marry,” Hawkeye responds, slow and dangerous, “for tax purposes?”

Something prickles beneath Mustang's shirt collar. He resists the urge to tug at it, instilling his voice with an even coolness as he pretends to examine his cuticles. “A mutually beneficial arrangement, wouldn’t you agree?”

(marriage of convenience)

The Counteroffer

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 2.7K

On the eve of Mustang’s inauguration as Fuhrer, Riza Hawkeye submits her resignation.

My very first Royai fanfic, and my first attempt at creative writing in literal years.

(light angst with a happy ending)

Hourglass

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 1.6K

Riza Hawkeye never intended on living past age thirty-two. It wasn’t that she wanted to die. She simply did not expect to live.

Written for Royai Week 2024, Day 5: Gift

(angst with a happy ending)

The Art of Living On

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 3.9K

She has never done this. Has avoided it at all costs. Because she is unfit, she tells herself. Her hands are made for firearms and filing office paperwork, not soothing fussy babies. Her edges are too sharp, too jagged to provide comfort to anyone. She is scarred and bloodied and barely knows the love of a mother herself.

But the baby wails, pleading.

Written for Royai Week 2024, Day 2: Appreciate

(domestic fluff, light angst with a happy ending)

Uncle Zuko

Katara x Zuko

Rating: T

Word count: 2.6K

Of all the things his hands have held - from dragon eggs and ancient texts to the element of Fire itself - this is by far the most precious, the most powerful: a new generation, one born into a world without war.

Zuko is forced to hold Sokka's baby, and feelings happen. I published this story years ago on FFN under a different title. This is the updated/revised version. I haven't written much of them lately, but Zuko & Katara are, and will always remain, my otp.

(domestic fluff)

The Bookshelf - WIP

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 2.3K

“It has a ladder.” Falman remarks, impressed.

(Or: Fuhrer Mustang gifts Hawkeye a bookshelf, and the rest of the Team starts to figure things out.)

(fluff, humor)

Strong Whiskey and Slanted Light

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: G

Word count: 908

His team is alive. The Elric brothers have their bodies back. Havoc can walk again. And from her place in the driver’s seat, Riza Hawkeye - alive and breathing - glances sharply in his direction, brows raised in a rare moment of removing her attention from the road ahead. He doesn’t miss the way she winces at the sudden movement of her still-healing neck. “Sir?”

“It’s just a question, Lieutenant. I’m curious.”

Written for Royai Week 2024, Day 1: Curiosity

(light angst, mutual pining)

As You Were

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 2.4K

Maybe it’s the fact that she’s dropped his honorific.

Maybe it’s the fact that they are somehow both alive. Maybe it’s the fact that he can see her, when he’d believed with such certainty that he never would again. He can see her and she is beautiful, and for once he doesn’t understand why he ever chose to banish that thought from his mind when it is so clearly the truth.

(angst)

The Flame Alchemist's Daughter

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 6.4K

The ink is a burden. The knowledge is a curse.

Disclaimer: I wrote this before I fully understood the mechanics of Mustang's flame alchemy (I literally finished the series in March 2024; I'm new here, so my bad). I realized later that some of the implications here would not make sense in canon. That said, I still love this story. I'm proud of it and it's freaking fanfiction so who cares.

(angst)

Checkmate

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 1.6K

In the wake of his election victory, Roy Mustang makes a very important visit to Fuhrer President Grumman.

Prequel to "The Counteroffer."

(fluff, light angst)

Four

Riza Hawkeye x Roy Mustang

Rating: T

Word count: 2.2K

Each time he has laid eyes on Riza Hawkeye’s tattoo, the course of Roy Mustang’s life has been permanently altered.

(angst with a happy ending)

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

Vice President Kamala Harris has captured the support of a key coalition of progressive, youth-led and environmental justice-focused climate advocates, with the Green New Deal Network slated on Wednesday to announce its endorsement of her candidacy.

The development can cut two ways for the Democrats. On the one hand, it’s a boost for Harris from members of a voter segment that analysts agree will be key to victory in November. On the other hand, it’s fodder for former President Donald Trump’s campaign as it coalesces around a strategy of painting Harris as a radical leftist who will block U.S. oil and gas development.

Whether it helps or hurts Harris, the endorsement shows how the Democrats’ late-season candidate switch has upended the 2024 campaign among climate voters.

The Green New Deal Network never gave its endorsement to President Joe Biden, who had rankled coalition members on a wide variety of issues, from his support of Israel in its Gaza offensive to his approval of a large fossil fuel project in Alaska.

Although Biden has taken historic action on climate change, polls showed that he never regained traction with the young voters who lifted him to victory in battleground states in 2020. The Green New Deal Network said it sees Harris as bringing to the race a unique record of opposition to Big Oil and an ability to communicate forcefully on environmental justice as a woman of color.

“This has really lit a candle of hope for a lot of us that have been in the doldrums for the past year or so,” said Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network.

He said the support is not just about climate, but also represents hope for more robust U.S. policy to protect the people of Gaza and Harris’ voice as a champion of abortion rights and communities burdened by pollution. Ing himself is a Native Hawaiian who has written about the combination of historic social injustice and climate change that has threatened his home island of Maui, devastated by deadly wildfire a year ago.

“What the Green New Deal really is, is understanding that everything’s connected,” Ing said. “Making sure our tax dollars aren’t just going to kill children abroad, but to build schools and hospitals here at home. … Local control of resources, self-determination of our communities. That’s the vision Kamala Harris, given her background—being bused to schools, really being a product of a lot of our social programs—really understands.”

[posttexasstressdisorder]

If you want to see what the GOP has in store for the rest of America, visit the Old South

Thom Hartmann

June 27, 2024 5:42AM ET

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,

— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low, — Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass, — Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult, — Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people, — Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water, — Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and, — Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”

[snug-gyu]

so another year is coming to an end, and i feel like a lot has happened to me this year that i should do a little post so i can remember everything i went through and the good things that came from it. under the cut cause this will probably get long

so this year i moved back in with my parents for mental health reasons. i left behind a good job, great coworkers and a place i had just recently finally got to myself. even though i had all that, i was still feeling so bad with myself i realized i needed the support to get back to my feet.

i lost my most precious baby in the process to a horrible desease that took him from me in a matter of days, and i had to watch him suffer through it all while not being able to do anything besides make him as comfortable as i could.

with all that, i also got myself into a terrible job that was so taxing on me i feel like i deleted most of those months from my mind as a defense mechanism, to the point i broke down one day after being humiliated by my asshole boss and finally quit.

all of this happened while i changed psychiatrists and treatment at least twice, so the weeks following me quitting my job were very important to finally give my mind some rest and now i'm in a job that is a lot more considerate and less taxing on my mental health.

now on for the good things.

this year i managed to see two of my faves live, nct 127 in january and ateez in august. i haven't been to concerts in so long and now i'm completely addicted. i can't wait to see what 2024 has in store (hopefully skz?)

through all of that, some friends have been soooo important to me. you guys were there for me in my darkest hours and for the happy times as well.

@secretdiaryofanawkward my bestie, i love you. thanks for being there every day with your memes, rants and cat pics. i cherish our memories together even if it's just laying down in silence while we do our own thing. thanks for helping me while i was on my lowest and i'm pretty sure i wouldn't be where i am now mentally without your help

@hongamon , @changbeens and @cryiingemoji . you guys have been with me since last year and i know i can count on you being there to cheer me up with blorbo pics or to talk shit about people. thanks for your friendship and i hope you know i'll always be there if you need me

@ggthydrangea and @winterfloral , your words (or gifs) of reassurance mean the world to me. also @juiceofmoons and @missyedits , even though we didn't talk much i'll always have you in my heart. i know y'all been busy this year with work and uni, but i'm glad we finally managed our mb babes' call

@chanrizard my beloved wife, @decembermoonskz by sweetheart, @agibbangs my spiritual neighbor and the whole of lix jail @leenope @jinniebit @lixence @thnx4thefish @wisteriya @happysmilebtr @babebatter @haenglixie thanks for the chaos and the laughs and even if we don't talk much y'all are very special to me.

all my beloved moots, i love you guys very much and it's lovely to interact with you even if it's just through tags sometimes. you have a special place in my heart and know that if we're moots you're automatically all my friends

@hanjesungs thanks for caring the burden of modding the stayblr server since it's begging and for being the voice of reason when we need it

to all of the people on the stayblr discord server, know that i consider you all my family and going there is like coming home, so thanks for always being so warming and nice to hang around. @hongjoongpresent @brightermorepls @astraykidz @noonaracha

sorry if i forgot anyone, just know that i'm very grateful for all the friends i've made along the way. my ask box and dms are always open 💜💜 thanks and i love y'all

[todaysjewishholiday]

6 Elul 5784 (7-8 September 2024)

The fifty fourth century was a golden age for the Ashkenazim of Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As with all such golden ages for the Jewish people, it was not without dangers, and it ended in a devastating conflagration, but while it lasted it was a time of a great flowering of rabbinical study and remarkable freedom of movement for Jews across the eastern lands of Europe. More than anything else, it was this age that established the strength of Ashkenazi Judaism from which modern Jewish orthodoxy has fed. And one of the great lights of this time, whose rabbinical career carried him across the full breadth of Ashkenaz, was Gershom Shaul Lipmann ben Nathan haLevi Heller, known to his contemporaries as the Tosfot Yom Tov.

Heller was born in 5339 in Bavaria, days after his father's sudden death at the age of 18. Despite Nathan Heller's brief life, he had fathered four children. Gershom was taken under the wing of his paternal grandfather, Rabbi Moses, who began his education in Torah study. After several years of study in a yeshiva near home, the adolescent Heller traveled on his own to the beit midrash of the Maharal of Prague, a giant of both Torah and secular studies who regularly debated with the great gentile scholars of his time. Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, Heller received semicha from the Maharal and an appointment as a dayan in Prague. He remained there for 27 years, producing a number of treatises including the one whose title became his rabbinic eponym, before journeying to Moravia to take up a rabbinical post there, and being offered the position of Chief Rabbi of Vienna after barely a year in the region.

Yom Tov was of great service to Vienna's scattered Jews, receiving permission to establish a centralized community, and creating a communal constitution and various communal institutions for the good of all. However, his organized and thoughtful approach soon made him enemies among the wealthier members of the kehilla. When the Gentile authorities imposed harsh taxes on the city's Jews, Heller led the community's leaders in deciding to collect the tax progressively as a percentage of individual wealth, rather than as a simple poll tax, to lighten the burden on the community's poor. The rich, however, were not happy being asked to pay their share, and accused their chief rabbi of slandering Christianity. Heller was arrested and sentenced to death, but his allies were able to persuade the Emperor to reduce the sentence to a fine of 10,000 thalers, and a ruling that he was not to serve as a rabbi anywhere in the Emperor's realm. As soon as the fine was paid off, Heller left for the eastern border.

He was warmly welcomed into the Jewish community of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and soon appointed to the Council of the Four Lands, which functioned as a Jewish proto-legislative body and as a gathering for Jewish leaders to discuss issues for which they needed to collectively appeal Gentile authorities. Yom Tov served for three years as a rabbinical authority in Nemirov, then moved to Ludmir, and from there to Krakow, where he served as one of the Av Beis Din of Krakow's rabbinical court, and also as head of the Krakow yeshiva. It was during his two decades in Krakow that the horrors of the Chmielnicki Revolt passed through the Commonwealth. He survived the massacres, and passed away six years later on 6 Elul 5414. He was laid to rest in a humble grave in a corner of Krakow's Jewish burial ground.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

full article under the cut

June 12, 2024

By David Wallace-Wells

Opinion Writer

Here is what the indefinite pause on New York City’s congestion pricing program, if it sticks, will cost: 120,000 more cars daily clogging Lower Manhattan’s bumper-to-bumper streets, according to a New York State analysis, and perhaps $20 billion annually in additional lost productivity and fuel and operating costs, as well as health and environmental burdens and a practically unbridgeable budget shortfall for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that will straitjacket an already handicapped agency and imperil dozens of planned necessary capital improvement projects for the city’s aging subway system.

Here is what it gains Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. According to reporting, these are especially important to the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who may still be somewhat embarrassed about his state’s performance in the 2022 elections, when surprise victories for several New York Republicans kept the House of Representatives out of Democratic control. It has also handed the governor several news conferences so bungled, they have made reversing a policy unpopular with voters into a genuine political humiliation.

In her announcement, Hochul emphasized the precarious state of the city’s recovery from the Covid pandemic, but car traffic into Manhattan has returned to prepandemic levels, as has New York City employment, which is now higher than ever before; New York City tourism metrics are barely behind prepandemic records and are expected to surpass them in 2025. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt.

In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. In a follow-up news conference, she emphasized a few conversations she’d had with diner owners, who she said expressed anxiety that their business would suffer when commuters wouldn’t drive to their establishments. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Robinson Meyer, a contributing Times Opinion writer, wrote for Heatmap that delaying the plan will be “a generational setback for climate policy in the United States,” adding that “it is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory.” He called it worse than the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Willow oil project in Alaska — not just because of the direct effect on emissions, though that would be large, but what a pause means for the morale and momentum of any American movement toward a next-generation, climate-conscious urbanism.

For years, the country’s liberals have envied the transformation of London by its Ultra Low Emission Zone, which generates hundreds of millions of pounds annually and quickly cut nitrogen dioxide air pollution in central London by 44 percent from projected levels. And liberals practically salivated over the remaking of Paris by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose policies have significantly reduced the number of cars in the city center, cutting nitrogen oxide pollution by 40 percent from 2011 levels, and turned huge swaths of the urban core into a paradise for pedestrians and bikers.

Similar programs have been carried out in Stockholm and Oslo, proving remarkably popular, and while it didn’t exactly seem likely that all the world’s cities were on the verge of leaving behind the car, the fact that any American city was taking the leap looked like a sign that change was possible. There aren’t many places in the United States that could plausibly hope to take even a few steps in the direction of the 15-minute city. But the New York City metro area — which has higher public transportation ridership than the next 16 American cities combined and whose residents account for 45 percent of U.S. commutes by public transit — was the obvious place to try. At least until last week.

To enthusiastic reformers, the reversal was all the more painful because the obvious hurdles had already been cleared. Especially after the Inflation Reduction Act kicked off a frenzied real-world spending spree, progress-minded Democrats have argued about the difficulties of building things at anywhere close to the necessary speed, taking aim at a bundle of obstacles to more rapid development and build-out of green infrastructure — rampant NIMBYism, burdens of environmental review, permitting and zoning challenges, social justice litmus tests. It had taken a few decades, but congestion pricing had jumped through all the necessary hoops. The everything bagel had been slathered with cream cheese and was ready to serve. And Hochul put the kibosh on it anyway.

The cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority has spent $500 million developing the system and installing its hardware, and the inevitable shortfall now means a much less ambitious future for the agency, to trust its spokesmen, which is now probably incapable of extending the Second Avenue Subway or undertaking the Interborough Express project, which promised to revitalize huge corridors of Brooklyn and Queens and give more than 100,000 New Yorkers more viable public transit commutes. (Hochul says the pause won’t imperil those projects.) The pause may even be illegal, as State Senator Liz Krueger argued last week in The Daily News.

But for all its inscrutability, Hochul’s reversal follows a recent partisan pattern, a sort of centrist backlash among establishment Democrats and their supporters against left-wing causes and their supporters in the run-up to the November elections, partly as a matter of electoral strategy and perhaps as part of a pre-emptive blame game in anticipation of Republican victories, possibly including Donald Trump’s re-election.

The backlash is perhaps most visible in commentary from liberal pundits, who in recent weeks have tried to blame the party’s left wing for President Biden’s dicey re-election prospects, though the most obvious drags on those chances are his age and voters’ perceptions about the cost of living. At the national level it is best embodied by Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who rarely speaks at length but happily seizes opportunities to punch left, particularly toward those protesting the war in Gaza. More locally, it is embodied by Mayor Eric Adams, who won election in 2021 as a kind of centrist backlash candidate — hailed at the time as a political counterweight to progressive candidates like Maya Wiley and progressive forces like the Black Lives Matter movement and perhaps even as a future face of the Democratic Party — and whose approval ratings are now lower than any other New York City mayor in decades, even as the city has inarguably bounced back from its pandemic trough on his watch.

Hochul has been a less visible and less polarizing figure than Adams. But every time she has poked her head up and made national news lately, it has been in the same spirit, to roll her eyes at or pick fights with those to her left. In February she mocked critics of Israel’s war in Gaza by saying, “If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends, there would be no Canada the next day.” (She later apologized.) In March she suddenly deployed the state’s National Guard to patrol the subways, on the same day that Adams boasted about rapid declines in subway crime. And now on congestion pricing, just weeks after bragging she was proud to stand up to “set in their ways” drivers, she reversed course out of apparent deference to those drivers and their outsize political clout. The state government and the transit authority have hard-earned reputations for ineffectuality, and faced with an opportunity to do something big, the governor chose to retreat and do nothing instead.

“It makes me think about the fight for progress, and how any real progress in the moment seems impossible,” wrote Cooper Lund in a melancholy reflection he called “Who Gets to Be a Constituent?” Nine times as many people ride public transit into the central business district each day as take cars there. There are 11 times as many people living in Manhattan who breathe the air polluted by automobile exhaust each day as there are who drive there for work. And those who work in the greater New York area lose 113 million hours each year to traffic, at an estimated cost of nearly $800 for each commuter. “With N.Y.C.’s reputation you’d think that the Democrats would be eager to uphold the city as an example of what a liberal, multicultural society is capable of, and to foster it,” Lund went on. “But both the mayor or the governor proved that they don’t have any interest in that. Instead, the things that would improve the city are pushed away for the suburban lifestyle that both parties seem to agree represents their actual constituency.”

A generation ago, it was common for informed liberals to lament the transformation of the country’s densest and most walkable city into a traffic-snarled carscape at the hand of Robert Moses in the mid-20th century. But despite the rise of YIMBYism and a sort of conventional wisdom new urbanism, the city hasn’t become meaningfully less automobile-centric since. More cars traveled into Lower Manhattan in 1990 than in 1981, more came in 2000 than in 1990, and although the rates dropped a bit after Sept. 11, they were still slightly higher in 2010 than they were 20 years before and have remained pretty flat since. Decades into new urbanism, the country’s most walkable city has just about the same number of cars driving into its in-demand downtown.

Taxi registrations doubled from 1980 to 2010 and then grew even more rapidly through the Uber years that followed, so that there are now five times as many taxis registered in the city as there were nearly 40 years ago and two and a half times as many taxi rides. (The difference between the two figures suggests that a pretty big portion of the increase is empty cars idling or cruising without fares.) Since 2006, excess congestion has grown by 53 percent, and since 2010, the average travel speed in the central business district has fallen 22 percent, from a crawl of 9.1 miles per hour to a glacial 7.1. I can comfortably run faster.

As has been the case everywhere, the kind and size of cars in New York have changed, too. When I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s, I could look out at the streetscape and see things other than trucks and supersized sport utility vehicles — trees, storefronts, pedestrians on the opposite curb, each of them visible because the streets were much less packed with automobiles the size of small elephants. Parking spots were not walls of S.U.V.s back then but lines of sedans, nestled along the sidewalk, it seemed, almost like a string of small boats puttering by the boarding platform of a flume ride. I remember climbing down into cars then, even as a 9- or 10-year-old. As a grown-up, I’m now climbing up, into what feels more like a cockpit and an imperious claim to the street.

My parents and in-laws remember a different kind of city still, the kind where you could park right in front of restaurants, play stickball in the street with infrequent interruptions, ride bikes down the cobblestones of SoHo and see only the occasional delivery truck along the way. I never knew that world, except through photographs and the haze of secondhand nostalgia. By the time I came around, the streets were already pretty full of cars. But even so, the city as a whole didn’t seem to belong to them yet. Certainly they didn’t seem to be holding its future hostage.

[follow-up-news]

The IRS has collected $1.3 billion from high wealth tax dodgers since last fall, the agency announced Friday, crediting spending that has ramped up collection enforcement through President Joe Biden’s signature climate, health care and tax package signed into law in 2022. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel traveled to Austin, Texas, to tour an IRS campus and announce the latest milestone in tax collections as Republicans warn of big future budget cuts for the tax agency if they take over the White House and Congress. Yellen, in a planned speech in Austin, will say that in 2019, the top one percent of wealthy Americans owed more than one-fifth of all unpaid taxes, “leaving ordinary Americans to shoulder the burden. ” “To fix this, we’ve channeled IRS funding toward significant investments to combat tax evasion,” she says. In 2023 and 2024 the IRS launched a series of initiatives aimed at pursuing high-wealth individuals who have failed to pay their tax debts. The IRS says the campaign is focused on taxpayers with more than $1 million in income and more than $250,000 in recognized tax debt.

[swampgallows]

i hate covid i hate it so fucking much it keeps threatening my loved ones and nobody else gives a shit. my best friend was exposed AGAIN and im just petrified waiting to see if he managed to escape infection. also less immediate but my favorite VA whose name i will not type out because you all already know who i mean has been very cautious but was on panels at AX last week. i saw the aranet readings out of there it mustve been like the geiger counter crackling to all shit in fallout. even before covid AX has always been a disorganized cesspit from what ive heard about it since i was in like middle school. but AX is undoubtedly where the person who exposed my friend was infected and im just ssoooooo

being covid cautious in 2024 almost feels like atlas taking up the burden of everyone else's precautions they should be taking and don't. they go on their merry way and don't see the people whose lives they're affecting. "i know the risk" no, you really don't, because you're just passing it onto the people who are already at higher risk. every person who doesn't mask is another potential source of infection that renders one way masking less effective.

it's not a seatbelt. it's the headlights in your car. maybe you can see without them but you're endangering everyone around you. and when everyone else on the road has their lights off -- is mask off -- you're much more likely to have a dangerous collision with one of them.

i am so sick of this same shit rattling around in my brain for its 5th consecutive year. it's literally maddening. but what else can i do? am i supposed to just accept that i can be killed just from walking by someone? for entering a poorly ventilated room that someone two hours earlier was breathing covid into and is still hanging in the air? even if covid had a cure by tomorrow so much of my faith in humanity and sense of belonging in my community has been shattered. im supposed to go back to feeling warmth and connection to people who don't care if i die if it means they can go party? people who happily adopted eugenics because it was more comfortable and convenient for them?

i am so sick of thinking about this, having it occupy the bulk of my mind's RAM, taxing so much of my energy in being constantly hypervigilant in survival mode, having to gear up with ppe like im doing asbestos removal just to go outside.

i should be traveling. i should be doing dentistry. i should have a career and a place to live. five fucking years of my 30s spent in my childhood bedroom. but if i give way to nihilism it won't be going mask off, it'll be suicide

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

The nation’s millionaires and billionaires are evading more than $150 billion a year in taxes, adding to growing government deficits and creating a “lack of fairness” in the tax system, according to the head of the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS, with billions of dollars in new funding from Congress, has launched a sweeping crackdown on wealthy individuals, partnerships and large companies. In an exclusive interview with CNBC, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said the agency has launched several programs targeting taxpayers with the most complex returns to root out tax evasion and make sure every taxpayer contributes their fair share.

Werfel said that a lack of funding at the IRS for years starved the agency of staff, technology and resources needed to fund audits — especially of the most complicated and sophisticated returns, which require more resources. Audits of taxpayers making more than $1 million a year fell by more than 80% over the last decade, while the number of taxpayers with income of $1 million jumped 50%, according to IRS statistics.

“When I look at what we call our tax gap, which is the amount of money owed versus what is paid for, millionaires and billionaires that either don’t file or [are] underreporting their income, that’s $150 billion of our tax gap,” Werfel said. “There is plenty of work to be done.”

“For complex filings, it became increasingly difficult for us to determine what the balance due was,” he said. “So to ensure fairness, we have to make investments to make sure that whether you’re a complicated filer who can afford to hire an army of lawyers and accountants, or a more simple filer who has one income and takes the standard deduction, the IRS is equally able to determine what’s owed. And to us, that’s a fairer system.”

Some Republicans in Congress have ramped up their criticism of the IRS and its expanded enforcement efforts. They say the wave of new audits will burden small businesses with unnecessary bureaucracy and years of fruitless investigations and won’t raise the promised revenue.

The Inflation Reduction Act gave the IRS an $80 billion infusion, yet congressional Republicans won a deal last year to take $20 billion of the funding back. Now they’re pressing for further cuts.

The Treasury Department said last week it estimates greater IRS enforcement will result in an additional $561 billion in tax revenue between 2024 and 2034 — a higher projection than it had initially stated. The IRS says that for every extra dollar spent on enforcement, the agency raises about $6 in revenue.

The IRS is touting its early success with a program to collect unpaid taxes from millionaires. The agency identified 1,600 millionaire taxpayers who have failed to pay at least $250,000 each in assessed taxes. So far, the IRS has collected more than $480 million from the group ���and we are still going,” Werfel said.

On Wednesday, the agency announced a program to audit owners of private jets, who may be using their planes for personal travel and not accounting for their trips or taxes properly. Werfel said the agency has started using public databases of private-jet flights and analytics tools to better identify tax returns with the highest likelihood of evasion. It is launching dozens of audits on companies and partnerships that own jets, which could then lead to audits of wealthy individuals.

Werfel said that for some companies and owners, the tax deduction from corporate jets can amount to “tens of millions of dollars.”

Another area that is potentially rife with evasion is limited partnerships, Werfel said, adding that many wealthy individuals have been shifting their income to the business entities to avoid income taxes.

“What we started to see was that certain taxpayers were claiming limited partnerships when it wasn’t fair,” he said. “They were basically shielding their income under the guise of a limited partnership.”

The IRS has launched the Large Partnership Compliance program, examining some of the largest and most complicated partnership returns. Werfel said the IRS has already opened examinations of 76 partnerships — including hedge funds, real estate investment partnerships and large law firms.

Werfel said the agency is using artificial intelligence as part of the program and others to better identify returns most likely to contain evasion or errors. Not only does AI help find evasion, it also helps avoid audits of taxpayers who are following the rules.

“Imagine all the audits are laid out before us on a table,” he said. “What AI does is it allows us to put on night vision goggles. What those night vision goggles allow us to do is be more precise in figuring out where the high risk [of evasion] is and where the low risk is, and that benefits everyone.”

Correction: The IRS has collected $480 million from a group of millionaire taxpayers who had failed to pay. An earlier version misstated the amount collected.

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Trump Ignores the Ruinous History of Tariffs

By Steven R. Weisman; July 26, 2024 Mr. Weisman, a former correspondent and editorial writer for The New York Times, is vice president for publications at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Donald Trump’s economic panacea is to impose over-the-top tariffs on all imports, potentially generating enough revenue to eliminate the federal income tax. It is hardly an innovative idea. On the contrary, if enacted, it would return our postmodern economy to that of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, to economic policies favoring the wealthy over the poor and middle class, when tariffs were the main source of government revenue.

That tariff-dominant era ended with the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1913, which facilitated the adoption of a graduated federal income tax. The income tax, not tariffs, has been the main source of federal revenue ever since, and for good reason.

Tariffs are a tax on imports, the functional equivalent of a sales tax, imposing a proportionately bigger burden on those with modest incomes. As my colleagues at the Peterson Institute for International Economics point out, Mr. Trump’s proposal for a 10 percent tariff on all imports (which totaled $3.1 trillion last year) and a 60 percent tariff on imports from China would cost a typical middle-income household at least $1,700 in increased expenses each year.

Mr. Trump’s radical “all tariff policy” would be self-defeating. It could not possibly fund our modern national security and social welfare needs, because tariff rates would have to rise impossibly high to yield the $2 trillion generated by individual and corporate income taxes. The resulting tariff war, when countries inevitably retaliate, would shrink imports and reduce tariff revenues. And it would discard or marginalize the one tax we have that requires people to pay their fair share.

Following the Revolutionary War, the national government did indeed rely almost entirely on tariffs, as pushed by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to avoid distasteful excise taxes and encourage the new nation’s infant manufacturing sector. The Civil War quickly proved their inadequacy. To meet the resulting fiscal crisis, Abraham Lincoln persuaded Congress to pass the very first income tax in 1862, essentially a tax on only the very top earners.

That was phased out after the war, returning the United States to its reliance on tariffs and the chaos and class resentment they created. In 1889, Thomas Shearman, a prominent lawyer, wrote a widely disseminated essay titled “The Owners of the United States” that listed families including the Astors, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Morgans who presided over untaxed fortunes from railroads, factories, oil refineries, mines and banks.

Overreliance on tariffs helped foment an era of economic shocks. The Panic of 1893, at the time the worst depression in American history, was set off by business and bank failures but aggravated by foreign creditors demanding payment in gold, which only encouraged the U.S. Treasury to push for even higher tariffs to curb imports.

Out of this crisis a new star of the Democratic Party arose, William Jennings Bryan, the “Great Commoner,” who warned against America crucifying itself on a “cross of gold.” He also crusaded against protectionism by holding up clothing and kitchen utensils at his rallies and declaring that tariffs drove up their cost by 50 percent.

Bryan as the Democratic presidential nominee lost the 1896 election to William McKinley, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s (he calls McKinley “the Tariff King”). But Bryan’s ideas lived on. By 1912, a Democratic free-trader and income tax supporter, Woodrow Wilson, the reformist governor of New Jersey, had won the White House.

The income tax was enacted in 1913 in Wilson’s first year in office. Once again, it was war and the urgent need for money, rather than political ideology, that proved the impracticality of relying on tariffs. To fund the mobilization for World War I, Wilson raised the top marginal income tax rate to 77 percent. (Since then, the top rate has fluctuated up and down, rising above 90 percent in World War II and now at 37 percent.)

The Democrats’ defeat after the war brought traditional Republicans with their high-tariffs philosophy back into power and they raised tariffs throughout the 1920s. That culminated in the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which was enacted in the misplaced belief that tariffs could protect American industries and farmers after the 1929 stock market crash. Instead, they fueled a catastrophic global trade war, strangled commerce, unleashed competitive currency devaluations and intensified a worldwide depression that contributed to the rise of Nazism and worldwide war.

The advent of President Franklin Roosevelt, a free-trader who had served under Wilson as assistant secretary of the Navy, buried the outdated notion of equating tariffs with prosperity. Indeed, his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, a former Tennessee congressman, had helped enact the income tax and lower tariffs a generation earlier and went on to become an eloquent postwar champion of international trade to save the world from another global crisis.

American politics have a way of flipping the policies of parties. In the modern era, beginning with President Ronald Reagan, it was Republicans who led the way to lower trade barriers as a boon to economic growth. Reagan, the conservative, had in the 1960s demonized the progressive federal income tax as a Marxist plot. He believed its confiscatory rates in the 1940s discouraged work, recalling that in Hollywood he stopped making films halfway through the year when the top marginal rate meant he would turn nearly all his additional income over to the government.

But though Reagan negotiated “voluntary” export curbs with Japan, he never advocated higher tariffs. That opposition fell to organized labor and partly to the Democrats, most of whom have opposed trade deals ever since.

Turning away from President Reagan and his successors, Mr. Trump is the first major Republican of the modern era to enact sweeping higher tariff barriers to protect American industries and farmers. In his first term, he instituted several disparate tariffs. They failed to reduce trade deficits and instead incited Europe, Canada and China to retaliate, forcing his administration to pay $23 billion to bail out farmers when China hit back with tariffs on U.S. agriculture products.

For his potential second term, Mr. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, would bring the country back to its protectionist past at a time when large segments of the economy depend on trade and foreign investment, not to mention immigration for high-end tech jobs and low-end jobs in services and agriculture.

A case can be made for selective tariffs to protect national security and sensitive supply chains, and encourage green technologies. The Biden administration has pushed for these steps while keeping Mr. Trump’s tariffs largely in place, incurring many of the same costs. The long historical record demonstrates these are borne not by other countries, as Mr. Trump keeps insisting, but by American consumers and industries.

Tariffs may provide a marginal help to some domestic producers, but only up to a point. Steel manufacturing may gain, but manufacturers that depend on imported steel will lose. Tariffs on solar panels and electric vehicles from China, pushed also by President Biden, may help domestic interests, but they are making it more expensive to adapt to the energy transition.

Economic policies come with trade-offs, and tariffs are no exception. An across-the-board tariff policy would take us not to a prosperous future but to a reactionary past that stopped working in the 19th century, when it nearly bankrupted the government, aggravated class conflict, provoked instability and favored the wealthy over everyone else.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/opinion/trump-tariffs-biden-ev.html

[pannaginip]

“While the people are paying high out-of-pocket expenses, [the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation or] Philhealth is earning so much profit that the Department of Finance wants to get the surplus funds for other unprogrammed expenses like Maharlika investment,” [Dr. Edelina De la Paz, chairperson of Health Alliance for Democracy (HEAD)] said.

The Department of Health (DOH) earlier announced that there is P89.9 billion unused government subsidy for Philhealth, the national health insurance program of the government. They sought to transfer the unused funds for “unprogrammed appropriations” in the 2024 budget.

During the pandemic, the Duterte administration was urged to hold accountable ranking officials of Philhealth over the alleged P15 billion ($307 million) corruption. Concerned groups and individuals have been calling out the contribution premium hike for workers, adding layers of burdens amid massive price hikes and inflation, as well as unresolved issues in the Philhealth.

Dr. Jamie Dasmariñas of the Coalition for People’s Right to Health (CPRH) said that utilizing Philhealth requires health institutions to be accredited. “If you are poor and you do not have a barangay health station, and the nearest station is also not accredited by Philhealth, there is no other option for you,” she said in Filipino.

Dasmariñas stressed that Philhealth funds should be reallocated to barangay health stations and local government units because the process of Philhealth is also taxing for patients, and mostly falls under layers of red tape.

In a unity statement, CPRH called on the Marcos Jr. administration to set up health centers in every barangay with a complement of adequate health personnel, basic laboratories, supplies, and equipment in the wake of severe understaffing and subpar working conditions of healthcare workers.

2024 Jul. 19