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Part One:
We speak with Lev Facher, Washington correspondent for STAT, about the inside story of how lobbyists work. He gave us a view from inside the legislature when it is subjected to the “full-court press” of a horde of big-industry lobbyists. We learn about how the Maryland legislature was considering a bill to set limits on how much Big Pharma companies could charge people for medications. The industry sent in its army: two lobbyists for every one legislator! It was as if Big Brother was always just around the corner watching every move.
Nevertheless, a coalition of citizen groups pushed back, and succeeded in persuading a majority of legislators to resist the pressure and refuse to kill a policy that protected the public. The result was a study commission to assess what, if any, action the state should take to rein in high drug prices.
Part Two:
We talk to Anthony Infanti, Professor of Law at the Univ. of Pittsburgh Law School, about how U.S. tax policy discriminates against women, gays, and people of color. One example is the tax bonuses given to married couples, compared to the relatively higher taxes paid by single folks and by families where both parents work outside the home and earn a similar amount of income.
The tax code also imposes tax penalties against workers who have been illegally fired but later sue their employers and win a damage award. The worker must pay taxes on the damages s/he wins for having been discriminated against. There is unfairness even in the way the IRS chooses to enforce the tax law. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the very few provisions in the tax code that benefits low-wage working people. Yet the enforcement officers in the IRS spend a vastly disproportionate amount of their enforcement efforts going after workers who have made some type of error in filling out the daunting forms required to apply for the EITC. Hardly any enforcement effort is devoted to the very wealthy, who can hire lots of expensive lawyers to challenge any IRS enforcement efforts.
