Episode 22: So-Called Tax Reform

GOP leaders are setting their sights on tax reform, Trump is still trying to sabotage Obamacare markets, and an Iranian-American comedian shares her experience using comedy to combat bigotry. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

After efforts to repeal Obamacare were dealt a deathblow (we hope), GOP leaders in Congress are turning their attention to so-called tax reform. CAP budget guru, Harry Stein, joins us to lay out the fight ahead: In a time of crushing income inequality, Americans want tax reform that ensures everyone is paying their fair share but the Republican Party wants a wealth grab for the highest earners in the country. Later in the show, Maura Calsyn, CAP’s Managing Director of Health Policy, talks with us about Trump’s continued efforts to sabotage Obamacare markets. A self-described feminist Muslim, Iranian-American comedian, Zahra Noorbaksh, shares how she uses comedy to break through bigotry in America. And Rebecca closes the show with some thoughts on efforts by Trump’s Department of Education to make colleges campuses safer… for students who commit sexual assault.

This week’s guests:

• Harry Stein, Center for American Progress
• Maura Calsyn, Center for American Progress
• Zahra Noorbaksh, Iranian-American Comedian

For more on this week’s topics:

• Learn more about the fight to stop the GOP wealth grab at NotOnePenny.org
• Share your story about how budget cuts would impact your life at HandsOff.org
• Check out CAP Action’s tracker on how Trump’s sabotaging the ACA
• Follow Zahra’s work at www.ZahraComedy.com
• For more about Title IX protections for survivors of campus sexual assault, check out Know Your IX

This program aired on August 4, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. After GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act were dealt a death blow we hope in the Senate last week, congressional leaders have begun to pivot towards the next fight. They’re calling tax reform, and many in the media have gone along with that label. But let’s call a spade a spade; what they’re really after is no different from what we saw in the healthcare debate. Giving tax cuts to millionaires and in this case corporations. And just like we saw in the health care debate they’re concealing their motives because of one reason — they know how deeply unpopular their agenda is with the American people. Take an NPR poll from earlier this year. When NPR asked Americans what they wanted to see in terms of changes to the tax code, the vast majority, 75% said they want to see taxes increased for people making a million dollars or more. Meanwhile in that same poll, large majorities of Americans across party lines, include 71% of Republicans want to see higher taxes on wealth than on income. Currently the top rate that the highest income Americans will pay on most capital gains, so they’re called, is 20%, around half the top marginal rate for ordinary income. But as Paul Ryan and his colleagues in congress reiterated last week in their sparse but telling quote, “principes,” laying out where they plan to go with so-called tax reform, their millionaire tax cut agenda is wildly out of step with even what their own voters are asking for.

And equally unpopular is how they want to pay for it by slashing Social Security and Medicare, programs that help families afford adequate nutrition like Meals on Wheels and school meals, making it harder to pay for college, decimating critical safeguards that keep our air and water clean and on and on. And yes, ending Medicaid as we know it since they failed so far at gutting that program as part of repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Later in the show I’ll talk with Maura Calsyn, managing director of health policy at the Center for American Progress about how Trump and Republicans in congress have turned to sabotaging the Affordable Care Act without legislation. And I’ll speak with Zahra Noorbaksh, a feminist Muslim comic who’s using comedy as a tool against Islamophobia in Trump’s America. But first I think it’s important to bring back CAP’s budget and tax guru Harry Stein, the one the only, to get us up to speed on the tax fight that is shaping up and how we fight back. Harry, thanks so much for coming back on the show.

HARRY STEIN: Good to be on, let’s talk taxes.

VALLAS: Let’s talk taxes, indeed. So, I talked about a lot of things there, right, I mean Republicans are at it again trying to ram through an agenda without a single Democratic vote that people in this country by and large didn’t ask for and don’t want. How are they going to try to do it?

STEIN: It’s going to be an almost identical redux of the health care fight. So if you’ll recall back to January, this was actually before the Trump inauguration, congress passed a budget resolution for the 2017 fiscal year which we were already, we are in the middle of. And the whole purpose of doing that was to create a vehicle to pass a repeal of the Affordable Care Act without a single Democratic vote. Those are called reconciliation instructions. You pass a budget with a reconciliation instruction and then that lets you pass a subsequent bill that they tried to do, that’s what failed in the Senate so far to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Here’s what I mean when I say it’s an identical copy of what we just saw.

VALLAS: Deja vu all over again for Yogi Berra fans.

STEIN: They’re going to do another budget resolution, that’s the expectation with new reconciliation instructions, only this time the purpose of those instructions won’t just be able repealing the Affordable Care Act, it’s going to be like with the Affordable Care Act, cutting all sorts of taxes for the wealthy and also like the Affordable Care Act they’re probably going to come after health care programs again but also everything else. Things like nutrition assistance, disability benefits and of course also Medicare and Medicaid. The only bit of good news, by the way with reconciliation is that they certainly what to come after Social Security, fortunately you cannot cut Social Security in reconciliation. But we can expect to see attacks on nutrition assistance, attacks on healthcare, attacks on other disability benefits. And all of this will be designed to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest people and the biggest corporations.

VALLAS: So what should we be watching in the weeks ahead for them to do this? They came out with tax principles which we laughed about on last week’s show because they were again sort of bullets, similar to what we had seen from President Trump earlier this year where he said, “Oh my God, I have a tax plan.” And then he had bullet points. This was very similar in that it was hardly detailed, it left a lot to be done. But it did make clear where they were headed which is in that millionaire and corporation tax cuts direction. But now that they’ve done those principles, like what do we actually need to be looking for?

STEIN: Well they’re going to I think stay as vague as possible as long as possible. So what we want to look for is in the budget resolution, does that give them a tool through reconciliation that they could use to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and also cut programs like Medicare and Medicaid nutrition assistance. We’ll have to look for those tools. Now remember, that will be quite vague. So the budget resolution may say a lot of things that give us a sense of what their agenda is and certainly the House Budget Committee, their budget’s given us a very good sense like we’ve seen before in Ryan budgets, they want to privatize Medicare, they want to make huge cuts to Medicaid, nutrition assistance. So they’ve said all these things and we know that that’s their plan but the actual budget resolution, the parts that really matter are going to be quite vague. This is the reconciliation instruction and what they’ll say, they’re going to tell us, “No, no, no, no, no, this is middle class tax cuts, we are all about the middle class now.” It’s a lie, don’t buy it. We’ve seen their tax plans, we know that under the Ryan tax plan 99.6% of the benefit went to the top 1%.

VALLAS: I always feel the need when we say that piece to sort of pause and let people absorb, yes you heard Harry say, “99.6% of the tax cuts in Paul Ryan’s plan go to top 1%.”

STEIN: It’s like a cartoon —

VALLAS: It is.

STEIN: — Of a Republican tax plan. I think that’s right. You do kind of have to say that twice and I promise I’m not making this up. This comes from the best neutral tax analysts in town, the Tax Policy Center. So that’s what we can expect to see and what we’ve got to do is stop the budget resolution in its tracks. We’ve got to make sure that that doesn’t give them a vehicle to ram through tax cuts without any Democratic votes. Or then if they’re able to pass a budget resolution like they were able to pass the budget resolution to give them a vehicle to repeal the Affordable Care Act but they couldn’t then follow through so far. At least not in the Senate, they did in House, we’re going to have to then turn around and stop those tax cuts and that’s when we’re going to see legislation and really see you know the kinds of huge cuts in the rates that the wealthiest people and the biggest corporations and then that’s what we’ll need to be watching for.

VALLAS: Now something I think it’s helpful to unpack and few people can explain this in English better than you can, although it’s a low bar Harry so don’t let your head get too big from me complimenting you in this way, is there’s a lot of jargon that gets used in the reconciliation context. Things like, “deficit neutral reserve fund,” lots of stuff, right. And actually a lot of it matters a lot when it comes to what people need to know to be informed to know what to look for. So would love a little bit of your patented primer on what people need to understand and some of those key terms and why they matter in reconciliation, especially in this tax and budget fight.

STEIN: Right so, a big thing to understand with reconciliation is that all that they generally give you is a minimum for how much to cut. So they might say something that sounds really innocuous, like they might tell a committee, “Hey, reduce the deficit by at least a dollar.” And you might say, “Well, how bad can that be.” Remember, they could go above that. So they could cut spending by $4 trillion and that’s what their budget resolution advocates.

VALLAS: It’s a floor, not a ceiling.

STEIN: It’s a floor. Now the other that’s really important here is they’ve talked about doing decifit neutral, what they call tax reform. Deficit neutral, as opposed to revenue neutral.

VALLAS: What’s the difference there?

STEIN: The difference is that revenue neutral means if you’re going to cut taxes somewhere, you’ve got to close loopholes, close up some deductions and raise revenues somewhere else so that the tax code is still bringing in the same amount of revenue to pay for things like Medicare, Medicaid, infrastructure, environment and so forth. Deficit neutral could mean that but it probably doesn’t. What it really means is we’re going to cut all the taxes for the wealthy and corporations and we’re going to pay for that by cutting spending programs like Medicare, Medicaid and so forth. And so that’s really what to watch for and that’s what the House budget resolution would let them do. The House budget resolution tells the tax writing committee, reduce the deficit by at least $52 billion. So OK, they could just cut spending by $52 billion. Or they could cut spending by $1 trillion and $52 billion, and then give the wealthy a trillion dollars of tax cuts and that’s what I would expect them to try to do.

VALLAS: So I want to go back for a second to what I said up at the top about how calling what Republicans are trying to do here tax reform is completely dishonest and frankly a label that I would call on those in the media to stop using, just full stop. Help me break down why tax reform isn’t fair in terms of a characterization of what they’re trying to do. What are the elements apart from massive tax cuts for millionaires that they’re including in their agenda?

STEIN: So when we think about tax reform what that tends to mean to people is we’re going to close loopholes, broaden the tax base and then maybe also, and maybe we can use some of that revenue to lower rates. But that would be, and I think tax reform ought to raise revenue and support the kinds of programs that we need to maintain basic living standards.

VALLAS: And apparently 75% of the American people agree with you because they want to see millionaires paying more in taxes.

STEIN: What they’re really talking about isn’t that. They’re just talking about tax cuts and in fact it’s interesting, the one bit of specifics that we got in the principles was them ditching this border adjustment tax that putting aside the merits of the policy, purported to raise a substantial amount of revenue so that would look more like at least on it’s face something that might be in a tax reform. That’s the one bit of specifics is that they said forget it. So we’re just going to tax cuts.

VALLAS: So just to reiterate one of the things that we would have hoped to have seen if they were actually doing tax reform is one of the only things they said we’re for sure not doing that.

STEIN: They’ve basically made clear, you know, and frankly again this is where it’s similar to health care, their health care effort fell apart in my opinion because they just refuse to confront tradeoffs. The tradeoff between, look, this is a bill that all of their bills cut taxes for the wealthy and took away health insurance from people and the tradeoff of the ACA was raising taxes on the wealthy and giving people health insurance. Their bills refused to acknowledges those, like the tradeoffs that are just inherent in tax policy and health policy and you’re going to see the same thing on taxes. They’re not going to be ready to confront the tradeoffs that you would need for a genuine tax reform. Where, you know the thing about tax reform is there is winners and losers. One person’s loophole is another person’s very important tax provision. And they’re not ready to confront that, I think they’re going to move towards just saying forget about it, let’s just cut taxes. They’re still going to call it tax reform. But you’re right, it’s not tax reform and right, the people in the media calling it tax reform is just using their talking points. It’s not reporting on this honestly.

VALLAS: So we’re going to see people fight back I would guess like we’ve seen with health care and in fact in my opinion and we’ve talked a lot about this on this show, people can focus a ton on say the moderate votes in the Senate and say it all came down to John McCain and maybe when it comes to a deciding vote, yes that is technically true but I would argue that the Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land today and Medicaid remains in tact and actually a promise to the American people as opposed to ending that guarantee when people qualify for its services because of people taking to the streets. People calling their members of congress. People relentlessly showing up to town halls, sharing with their members how they feel, what they want from the people who are running their country and who they get to decide with their vote, whether they come back in 2018 and in 2020. What are we going to see from people when they start to find out what is actually in this so-called tax reform but really millionaire tax cut agenda?

STEIN: Well you know when you ask people and you said at the top the poll that people wanted to see the wealthy and corporations paying more taxes, when you ask people what is their number one concern about the tax system, the Pew Research Center asked this in a poll, and they asked it several times. What’s their number one concern about the tax system, some corporations don’t pay their fair share. That’s their top concern. What’s their number two concern? That some wealthy people aren’t paying their fair share. I would’ve honestly guessed before having seen this that the concern would be that people feel like they’re paying too much in taxes themselves, but that’s not, that’s not.

VALLAS: And I’ll be honest, that would always have been my guess as well.

STEIN: Right, and it’s not that that’s a concern that people have but that’s not what the top or second largest concern that people have. So when people hear tax reform that’s what they expect to see and how are we going to make sure that finally these guys start paying their fair share? That is the opposite of what this is going to be. This is going to make the tax system even worse, even more loopholes for the wealthy, even more loopholes for the biggest corporations, lower, they’re showering them with huge tax cuts. And you know, given that those are the top two concerns that people have I would expect to see and I hope we’ll see a large public outcry against that because let’s be clear, this is what they want to do. They’ve made that clear in the Trump tax plan that he campaigned on and the ‘Better Way’ tax plan that the House of Representatives campaigned on. They’ve made this clear time and time again and this is what they want to do. Just like they voted 60 times or whatever it was to try repealing the Affordable Care Act while President Obama was president, this is what they want to do. The only way that they’re not going to do it is if the public outcry is deafening.

VALLAS: And possibly even louder than what we saw with the Affordable Care Act. So what is it that you would have to wager, right now, in terms of, I’m going to make you look into your crystal ball, I know you hate doing this and it’s unfair of me but you know it’s my show, I’m going to do it anyway. So get that crystal ball out here Harry, so Trump and Republicans in congress have yet again similar to their promises about how they were going to speedily repeal the Affordable Care Act and in the course of it, end Medicaid as we knew it, as we know it still, they said in the beginning of the year, oh we can do this in like a matter of weeks, they were actually making promises that were that ambitious and I think you knew and I knew at the time it was going to be a lot harder to do that than they realized and then Trump famously was quoted talking to governors saying you know it turns out health care is kinda complicated, right. Well guess what else is complicated? The tax code, and guess what else is going to be really hard I would wager, actually moving forward something that they’re calling tax reform and that’s before you even calculate opposition by their constituents in their districts and also here in Washington. What if you had to wager is actually going to happen here? Are they going to be able to get something through their caucus?

STEIN: Well, I’m looking into my crystal ball and I see the same Ouija board that they seem to be using to write health legislation. [LAUGHTER] And here is what I mean by that. They’re writing, there’s the bill that’s moving in the House and then especially in the Senate and different members are seeing different things in it. They’re looking at the same bill and saying it does two different things and we’re just going to keep the process moving along and doing everything they can to avoid taking responsibility for the results. So it’s as if all of their hands on the Ouija board it’s like, no, no, you’re moving it, you’re the one that’s, I don’t know what the bill even is. I think we’ll see a similar thing on taxes. They’ll be a lot of focus in their caucus on just let’s just move the process along. Let’s just move the process along to avoid accountability for those details, especially for the cuts that they might be making to pay for some of these tax cuts but also just for these tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that are so unpopular. I would expect to see a very messy process where the message from leadership to rank and file members is just come on guys, let’s just move the process along don’t worry about what’s in there. We’ll fix, first the House will pay it, they’ll say the Senate will fix it. The senate will pass it, they’ll say the House will fix it.

I mean but nobody really taking responsibility for the details because as you say, when they get into the details and when they get into the tradeoffs that gets very messy for them and you know, if they’re not able to do, to do the kinds of things to actually, they could either raise taxes somewhere else, they could either do a genuine tax reform. That requires tradeoffs. I think they’ll move away from that. They could try to cut spending to pay for tax cuts. I’m sure they’ll try to do that, I think that there will be a lot of opposition to that and I hope that they’re not able to. The third option that they have is to just cut taxes, shrug their shoulders about the deficits but here’s the thing. They’re not really shrugging their shoulders because they’re going to come back next year and say my god look at these deficits, we have to do something about Medicare now. And then they’ll come and voucherize Medicare next year. But the deficits are probably the easiest way for them to avoid tradeoffs and I think that’s where we’re going. We’ll watch for that in the budget resolution because they’ll have to acknowledge in the budget resolution that yeah, we’re really probably just going to increase deficits with our tax cuts. But remember, they’re going to come back next year and come for everything else.

VALLAS: So it’s, we’re in August recess, there’s a lot of folks who are in their districts watching their members of congress come home and probably hide in the bushes or avoid town halls because oh my God, they all voted to take away everyone’s health care except for a handful who didn’t. And as part of that there are a lot of people who are wondering right now how can I communicate what I want and what I don’t want when it comes to this tax and budget fight? I know that there’s a new campaign that is just getting off the ground as we speak called “Not One Penny.” Would love to hear you talk a little bit about that, and how people can get involved there.

STEIN: Sure, so Not One Penny has, I’m really excited about this campaign and like you say, it’s launching right now, people should keep an eye out for it when it launches. And the basic premise here is tax reform is complicated and the Koch Brothers and the big corporations that stand to profit from this, they profit from that complication. This was remember George Bush in 2000, “fuzzy math.” They want to hide who’s really benefitting here. What Not One Penny is saying is look, we’re going to, people will analyze the tax plan that gets produced and it will say well who is benefitting and who is not. Not One Penny is saying there should be not one penny of benefit to the wealthy and to corporations. Not you know, hey if the rich are going to get a tax cut then I should get a tax cut too, no no no, because look, the rich are always going to get the biggest tax cut anyway and they’re coming for the programs. Not one penny of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, they ought to be paying more. The other thing that you can do is you know keep in mind that all of this is being done on the backs of the programs for working families, the other campaign that we’re working on here is Hands Off. So people can go to HandsOff.org, share your story about how those programs affect you because as we saw in the health care fight, you know, personal stories go a long way in these debates.

VALLAS: Much further than pie charts.

STEIN: Right, and when this stuff is about numbers on a page, that’s when we lose. When it’s about people and how the budget actually matters in people’s lives, that’s when we win. That’s how we won health care, that’s how we’ll win this.

VALLAS: HandsOff.org, which Harry just mentioned of course is where you can find out more about the Hands Off campaign which CAP is part of along with a whole number of different partners, trying to help educate people about the budget process, what’s at stake and give folks ways to get involved but Not One Penny, also has it’s own website, NotOnePenny.org. I’m looking at it right now as it has just launched and it gives you all kinds of facts about who would win from Trump’s tax plan, Republican’s tax plans in congress and how to get involved especially in events that are where you live. Harry Stein is the tax and budget and many other things guru at the Center for American Progress and a frequent guest on this show whom I always love having back. Harry, thank you as always for helping translate things into english.

STEIN: Well it’s good to be here and speak some english!

VALLAS: And I will talk to you very soon and often with what we have ahead.

STEIN: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act through legislation maybe on ice for now but that isn’t stopping President Trump from trying to sabotage the ACA in other ways. Here to unpack what he’s up to and what it means for Americans if has his way is Maura Calsyn, she’s the managing director of health policy at the Center for American Progress and a generally awesome human. Maura thank you for joining the show again.

MAURA CALSYN: Thank you for having me again.

VALLAS: So I said what I said, which is that Trump is, he’s not seeing the failure on the part of congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act as a stop sign. Maybe more of a speed bump in his efforts to bring down the law. But also this isn’t really anything new.

CALSYN: No it’s not, it’s the latest in a years and years, almost, I mean 8 year, almost drive to completely, well if you can’t get rid of the ACA through, you know, Supreme Court or through legislation, they’ll try to make it seem as bad as possible. So I think that the thing is that that I think is important for people to realize is it’s not just the policy stuff but like literally every single tweet he sends out that bashes the Affordable Care Act is a way that he’s sabotaging the law and driving up costs so there’s a lot to talk about in terms of even just his tweets and what they are doing. And then there’s this latest thing that people might start hearing about in the news called cost sharing reductions, CSRs.

VALLAS: CSRs, gotta have the acronym, right?

CALSYN: Of course, it’s DC.

VALLAS: It’s Washington, we’ve got to have acronyms; CSRs, seeing that everywhere. I want to get into that in just a second but I feel like it’s important to acknowledge that Trump has said, I don’t even know how many times at this point, I’m sure someone’s counting, maybe CAP’s war room is counting, probably. In fact if they’re listening let us know and we can know so we can tweet it out when the show goes to air. But it’s almost uncountable at this point how many times Trump has said that “Obamacare is imploding or it’s going to implode!” And we’ve heard the same from Paul Ryan and others. What he’s actually doing is trying to make sure that that’s a self fulfilling prophecy, right?

CALSYN: Absolutely and I think just stepping back a little bit. Just really top line primer on insurance, I mean insurance works because you have people pay in premiums and that gets you a pool of money and then insurers have to pay that out to help you pay for your health care costs. So in order to make insurance work you need more people to be enrolled and especially you need healthier people to be enrolled. So there’s a lot of things in the ACA that kind of encourage more people to join and then there’s also provisions in it that are very, very techincal that basically help mitigate some of the risk that insurers face in the new ACA marketplaces because before the ACA, insurers got to choose their consumers based on how risky they were and now they don’t really have any choice. So I think the most important thing for everybody to know is just insurers hate risk, and by encouraging this kind of sense of like will he or won’t he do X, Y, or Z in terms of really undermining the market, the insurers are going nuts and they just have no way to price their policies for next year.

VALLAS: So nothing new here in terms of attempts to sabotage, but the CSR piece which is what I really want to get into in the meat of this discussion, this is the latest shoe to drop in Trump’s efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act. So take us to the CSR piece of this. What do we need to know and what is he trying to do?

CALSYN: So the ACA helps lower and moderate income Americans afford their health insurance when they have to buy it directly from the insurer, when they don’t get it through say Medicare or Medicaid or through their employers and you probably have heard about the tax credits. So basically the ACA allows people to access advanced tax credits to afford their premiums. But you know that just buys you the insurance, once you have the insurance you might have deductibles and other out of pocket costs, you might have co-pays, co-insurance. So for lower income consumers there’s also these things called cost sharing reductions and it’s really just a fancy way of talking about the help people get to lower their deductibles and other out of pocket costs. So what happens is the insurers have to give certain people with incomes under a certain level much more robust policies so they don’t have to pay the same deductibles, they don’t have to pay the same amount of co-pays for example because they simply can’t afford it. And how it works is basically the federal government pays for that portion of the, of your insurance. So the payments go directly to the insurer but it’s really helping you afford your insurance if you qualify for these, for that help.

VALLAS: So what is Trump doing to muck around with these CSRs?

CALSYN: Well it started back, he’s just kind of taking over from the House of Representatives. And the House of Representatives, it’s really technical but they basically filed a lawsuit to stop payment of these subsidies because the idea is it basically if you don’t have these payments, insurers are going to make up the difference somewhere else so they’re going to inflate premiums. So the House of Representatives started this thing and then now it’s very much up in the air and Trump is basically playing a soap opera and each day, each month he’s saying oh maybe I’ll stop these payments, maybe I won’t.

VALLAS: So it really is actually playing a game of chicken with what ultimately will be massive increase in out of pocket costs for Americans’ health insurance.

CALSYN: Yeah I mean there are two different, a lot of insurers are basically filing two different sets of premium rates. And it’s Trumpcare rates and Obamacare rates and if the CSRs are not paid and he just decides to be really cruel it’s going to increase premiums by about 20%. I mean he’s basically throwing a massive temper tantrum because he’s really mad that the, that congress didn’t act before leaving for August recess.

VALLAS: But it’s a temper tantrum that’s already having consequences.

CALSYN: Oh yeah.

VALLAS: So explain how we’re seeing this impact the insurance market.

CALSYN: So for example, well, A, the rates that have been filed are up to about 20% more. But I think that you see, even like his tweets and the uncertainty, Anthem which is a big insurer exited a lot of the ACA marketplaces earlier this year even before this all became an issue, citing all the uncertainty all the administration was going to, all the uncertainty that the administration, not just Trump but also Secretary Price and the other official who administers like the marketplaces and everything, and they’ve done their best to just completely keep everybody in the dark about what they’re planning on doing.

VALLAS: So where do things go from here? With that being what’s at risk and the consequences that we’re already seeing, how is this all going to a head?

CALSYN: I think that there is now consensus, at least for some Republicans on the hill at least that these payments are really necessary. So Senator Alexander from Tennessee has basically said that if they don’t make these payments people are going to be harmed. So those of us working in this world are really hoping that once the, once congress comes back from their August recess that they will actually pass legislation that will require the president to make these payments.

VALLAS: So effectively legislation that would stabilize the insurance market.

CALSYN: Yeah I mean the CSR piece is one part of it and there’s a few other kind of little wonky things that they can do but you know, it’s time now to move on to those bipartisan fixes to really shore up a market that was working quite well until Donald Trump arrived at the White House.

VALLAS: Maura Calsyn is the managing director of health policy at the Center for American Progress and someone who understands acronyms like CSR a heck of a lot better than I do and most people in this country. Maura, thank you so much for coming back on the show and as is so helpful, translating those acronyms into kitchen table terms.

CALSYN: Anytime, thanks.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Islamophobia is hardly a new phenomenon in the U.S. but in 2017 with President Trump in the White House it’s on steroids. Can comedy be a tool for busting myths and fear inducing misperceptions about Islam? And maybe even for pushing back on xenophobia fueled attacks on Muslims in America? Zahra Noorbaksh, she is a feminist Muslim, an Iranian American comedian and co-host of “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” a podcast whose provocative work calls that very question. I met her at the Sundance Creative Change retreat earlier this summer and got to see her workshop her new one woman show, “On Behalf of All Muslims” which is set to tour this year. And Zahra, I’m so thrilled to say welcome to the show.

: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So I asked a question there that I know you have views on but I don’t want to let you speak to those yet because before I do I want to ask, how did you get into doing comedy of all things?

NOORBAKSH: I, well there’s the dorky question and then the technically true correct question. Which order should I give them in?

VALLAS: I think you should pick.

NOORBAKSH: Alright so technically I got into comedy when a friend of mine who was running this talent show for the Iranian Cultural Center at Berkeley was like I want you to do your set at this talent show with like 500 parents with all these stories about your dad and just like string them together in one routine. And I did it and it was amazing. And I was like I want to do this. And I started going to all these Iranian benefits where they would always say like oh let’s have some comedy from Zahra Noorbaksh, and you know it was really exciting. They paid me, I was like I already, like two years into comedy, like I skipped. But then they would tell me come back do more stuff, just don’t do anything political and nothing about religion and definitely don’t talk about sex and don’t mention your atheist boyfriend. Do you have any new material? And I was like nope, no, I don’t that’s about, that covers the gambit. Like all I have is stories about my dad. So I ventured out into the mainstream comedy club scene, this place called The Brainwash. Where you like are performing in front of maybe 10 to 20 people who were trapped there because they’re doing their laundry. And they can’t leave and it’s a laundromat/cafe. So it’s a great place to just sort of like, everyone is stuck and it’s a great spot to do comedy.

And I totally bombed. And it was a miserable set but I really wanted to do it again and that’s when I knew I wanted be a comedian. But the dorky answer is when I was 10 and we were drawing X-Men cards my guy friends because I was a huge tomboy were like what’s your X-Men’s power and I said my X-Men’s power is the ability to make anyone laugh. And I was like, huh, I probably want to be a comedian because that’s the dorkiest superhero power of all time.

VALLAS: Dorky but also enviable as someone who tries to be funny and often fails I will say. So now to the sort of second part question which is you don’t just do comedy, you do comedy about a whole bunch of topics that as you just laid out people have told you to stay away from because they’re not kosher to do comedy about. So how did you get into doing comedy about being a feminist Muslim?

NOORBAKSH: So I started out just trying to do jokes about my family and sort of coming of age stories and not really touching on anything political. But then I would get off the stage and inevitably an audience member would come by and say, “How come you didn’t talk about being Mexican? Oh you’re not Mexican, oh are you Sicilian? How come you didn’t talk about being Sicilian?” And it was just like, and then it was Greek and then I would say oh no I’m Iranian. “Oh how come you don’t say Persian, my friend says Persian, how come you don’t talk about that?” And I would just notice that while all these other white male comics would go up and do their set about like dating or whatever, my audience was always distracted. You know, they wanted to know where is your family from, what are you doing here, your name is different.

Like my name was always the first give away, right, because people would say, “Now coming to the stage Zahra Noorbaksh.” Like, where is that name from? So because they were distracted with all these question they weren’t laughing with me, they were distracted. And so I just decided to declare all of my [INAUDIBLE] at the top and then see what happened. And the more I did it, the more interesting it was to me that like, this sort of reverse effect happened where you know, there is all this talk about how we need to create relatable humor, and relatable and humanize our experience. But when you enter into it was the expectation of relating, then you get the opposite effect because audiences are smart, they want to solve puzzles. If you present to them a charlatan, they’re curious about their humanity. And if you present to them your humanity, then they want to know well what makes us different actually though. And so then I was having the reverse experience, right. Where I would put out up top, here are all the ways that I’m not at all like you. And then my audience would do the work of searching for the ways of where we’re the same rather than me having to enforce that.

VALLAS: Do people ever come up to you and say that they were offended or they thought that you were joking about something that’s actually a serious subject?

NOORBAKSH: I think my favorite response was a friend of mine who was like, cause I’ll say up top, “My name is Zahra, I’m a feminist Muslim Iranian American comedian. I also identify as a pork eating, drinking, pre-marital sexing having, bisexual marriage and atheist now kind of Muslim.” And then from there I went into this rant about men and one of my friends said I’m so busy being offended by what you said about men that I forgot that you were Muslim. And I love that, I love that because I think not because, not that I want to erase my Muslim identity but because right now Islam is on such a siloed spotlight. There’s this way that we’re like always examining it, with careful tools or not so careful tools. But it’s being examined and I love that because I sort of put it all up top then in the comments afterwards I’m being asked about everything else, you know? People aren’t asking me about like how Muslim I am or how I practice or how I observe. I’m getting questions about my relationship dynamics which is what I want.

VALLAS: So sort of getting people, without telling them to get there but getting people to this stuff that is actually past the labels where they were distracted when you weren’t bringing it up.

NOORBAKSH: Exactly.

VALLAS: So how is your comedy received by people who are Muslim?

NOORBAKSH: All over the place because who are Muslim are all over the place. You know, there’s sort of this experience of I call it, I call it ‘Kindergarten Islam’. I think there is this way that we all have to go to Kindergarten of Islam school as Muslims and non-Muslims. Where you know, as Muslims we sort of grow up thinking like, OK well my family is a traditional Muslim family and I learned really soon that that doesn’t make any sense. My first sort of venturing into this career and the work that I do began as a memoirist in 2011 I was in the book, “Love InshAllah: The Secret Love Live of American Muslim Women” and one of the great things about being a part of that anthology was you were in a book of 25 stories all by Muslim women and all these stories contradicted each other. I remember was first writing it and I would say the traditional Muslim, I had a traditional Muslim family. I would get red lined everytime and they were red lining everyone who wrote that. And they said listen, the editors, Ayesha Mattu, and Nura Maznavi said you and all 25 of these other women are writing traditional Muslim family. So what is that?

So I get, some Muslims who come to the show who are like whoa I don’t do that, I don’t practice that way, you know and of course there’s the common understanding that Muslims don’t eat pork but then I, in my show, that’s not, I don’t leave it at that. That’s the start of a conversation about how well you know, my husband, he’s atheist, he doesn’t eat pork because politically he believes that it’s wrong, that pigs are closer to human beings than even primates and that they’re a smart creature and they shouldn’t be killed and slaughtered and so he won’t eat pork. So I don’t eat pork anymore but not because of my Muslim-ness but because of his politics. Does that make him more Muslim than me? You know, what are all these traditions about and why are we essentializing Islam to these really basic rules and labels? And so, you know, Muslims who haven’t had the experience of sort of questioning their practice or observance or even their experience of Islam outside of the general knowledge of like well, there’s Sunni and Shi’a, that’s it, then have all kinds of new questions realizing that there’s 70 sects of Islam, that it runs the gambit in terms of practice and that a lot of what we think is traditional practice is really just what our parents passed down to us. And on the non-Muslim side you know, then it opens up for, a lot of what I hear actually and see is that people have this sort of like oh this is a very universal story question mark, like surprising themselves that they’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid in terms of like, what you talked about earlier, Islamophobia and xenophobia and thinking that there were so many differences when really actually it’s as complex as people are complex.

VALLAS: And that’s part of what your comedy actually takes on head on. I’m thinking about one joke that I heard you make in particular as part of the show that you were workshopping this summer at Sundance. You told a joke that was very much rooted in the story of how you got your family to be ok with you being with an atheist white guy. Tell that story, and it very much has to do with what the definition of a Muslim is.

NOORBAKSH: So I told my dad, I tried to explain to him that my boyfriend now husband, but at the time boyfriend was atheist. And in Farsi there is no word for atheist, there’s just seven slurs. “He who denies God, then saw God, then denied God,” “jerk,” and it just goes down from there. And I told him, “well you know he’s not really,” sort of waffling and my dad says, “What is atheist, some kind of Christian? It’s OK, it’s OK, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist, it’s all the same damn thing. We all believe in God, we surrender to that God,” I was like, “Uh, he doesn’t really believe in God so much as he believes in science.” And my dad was like, “That Tom Cruise stuff?” And I was like oh, God, this just got worse now. And then my mom jumped in and my mom was like, “Is he Jewish? Because if he’s Jewish then he’s circumcised and he has to get circumcised and no man will do that for you. Is he Jewish?” And I said, “I don’t know.”

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Which is the only acceptable answer right?

NOORBAKSH: I don’t know, yeah, Mom coming in with a trick question. Is he circumcised? Of course I don’t know Mom, I don’t know the answer to that. [LAUGHTER] And my dad said, “Listen, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, the word Muslim just means one who surrenders to a force greater than himself, that’s it.” And I said “He’s not spiritual, he believes that we have religion due to the lack of a real economic infrastructure. He doesn’t believe in God, no God, not any God.” And my dad took that in, and he thought for a minute, and then he came back with, “Well, does he believe in gravity? Gravity is a force greater than him, if he surrenders to that force, cannot change it, he surrenders to that force, he’s a Muslim.” And so that was it, gravity makes you Muslim.

VALLAS: It’s brilliant right. So it’s sort of this creative definition that gets out of all of the kind of essentialisizing as you said, and I love that story so much and I want to ask is it true? And maybe if it’s not lie to me and tell me it is.

[LAUGHTER]

NOORBAKSH: Yeah. Yes, the story is true, that’s how my dad came to it and one part of a one hour show that I have called “All Atheists are Muslim” which is about sort of the process of revealing to my parents that like, hey guess what I have a boyfriend, guess what he’s atheist, guess what this is what that means. And it also came at a time when I was 25 years old and thought of myself as this really independent young feminist woman who never needed her father’s approval but all of a sudden I was like you know, a total mess and seeking dad’s approval and being like hey, I really, it’s really important to me that you approve, I don’t know why, I shouldn’t care but please be ok with this. And he sort of brought us together.

VALLAS: So you’ve written about, and I’m sort of getting back to the question that I ceeded in the opening which is a huge part of why I’m so excited to talk with you for this show. You’ve written about how following the election lots of people have looked at you and said oh my God, a feminist Muslim comedian, this is exactly what this country needs right now, referring to of course living in, I hate calling it this but Trump’s America with Islamophobia being sort of what we’re hearing handed down literally from the White House and embedded in that question is sort of this hope that through comedy, someone like you might be able to show people that you know Muslims are just like the rest of us. But you’ve actually come to reject this as a theory of change and I would love to hear you talk a little bit about that progression and why you’ve landed there.

NOORBAKSH: Well one of the things that I notice was happening with the show “All Atheists are Muslim” was that it did do a lot in terms of getting people who were trying to understand Islam, trying to understand Islam, trying to understand Islam to sort of like open out and realize that it’s not about understanding this religion, it’s about realizing that you’re sort of, you’ve essentialized a whole group of human beings and locked their identity into being about their religion. And you’ve forgotten all of these other questions about family, about love, that we are used to ask when actually we see plays and we see shows. When we go to a play, we don’t go to a play to see you know, and understand one aspect of a person’s identity, we go to see an entire story about, that’s rich with conflict, not a story that’s there to make you connect with somebody.

And it’s always really like, it’s interesting because in doing “All Atheists are Muslim” around the country, it did have that effect where it sort of like, allowed people to realize what they’d been doing in terms of what they’ve been expecting of Muslim artists, writers, comedians, to explain explain, educate, educate, sort of them broke them of that self. But the other thing that I noticed happening was that I would get people in the audience who were actually anti-Muslim and that’s why they came. Because they thought that I was making some commentary about Muslims as atheists, which was really interesting. And actually part of what I loved about the title, I loved that you couldn’t tell what side I was on. And so it brought all these different people to the crowd. But what they walked away with was they would say well your family is one of the good ones. And then they would compartmentalize it that way and leave with that. And this polarization of you know, this idea, this notion that we have to catch the bad ones and we can catch the bad ones by essentially forcing all of the quote, unquote good ones to confess their story, confess their relatability is a huge problem. A big symptom of xenophobia and a very scary stepping stone when we start talking about internment.

VALLAS: And that seems sort of embedded in also the title, the name of your podcast, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.”

NOORBAKSH: Yeah and that’s actually why co-host Tanzila Ahmed, that’s why we started the podcast was that we were both noticing this phenomenon where in her audiences and readership she also discovered that the things that make her a good Muslim to non-Muslim folks are the same things that make her a bad Muslim to Muslim folks and vice versa. There was just no winning you know, like and I noticed this as well that when I saw I eat pork and drink and am married to this atheist guy then some non-Muslim audiences will see that as ways that I am less Muslim and therefore more American. And on the other end of it, the flip would always be true to that like because my husband is a doctor and I’m married and that’s very traditional and that’s making me more Muslim. And therefore less American. And it was like this is kind of gross and sort of a problem and kind of a really difficult space to do any kind of art from when you’re being pinned as either on this end or that end and neither end really wins. What is this polarization about? Where does it stem from and what can we do to sort of have an impact and shift it. And so we decided to create a podcast, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” and it’s basically, it’s a girlfriend podcast where also a part of our being girlfriends is that we talk about the news all the time, we’re both politically minded, we both seek to have impact and create culture shift and it’s been really rewarding doing that show.

VALLAS: So in the last minute or so that I have with you and frankly I wish I had all day because there’s a lot more that I want to hear you talk about. So if your goal in your work is not reliability, it’s not hey I’m going to show people that there’s a good Muslim out there and therefore it’s going to help them see that oh my God, Muslims are people too like me. What is your goal with your work and what is your theory of change?

NOORBAKSH: My goal and my theory of change is to tell my story. I think that I’m certainly not saying that people shouldn’t tell their story, I’m saying that don’t fall for the trap, the xenophobic trap of having to explain yourself because that is just exposition and every good writer is taught that you don’t just throw exposition out there. It’s bad writing and it’s a double edged sword because, actually I don’t even know if I’m using that idiom right. But American idioms often don’t make any sense to me. But it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work in a lot of ways. When we’re trying to reach people by saying like we’re the same, we’re the same, we’re the same, then we as an audience, as a smart audience are trained to be skeptical of that. And the guidance that we have to navigate this is as old as all the tools of good writing have always been which is talk about what makes you different. Talk about the conflicts in your life, everyone else will do the work of figuring out you know, how they connect to you.

VALLAS: Zahra Noorbaksh is a feminist Muslim Iranian American comedian. Her one woman show “All Atheists are Muslim” was directed by W. Kamau Bell and dubbed a highlight of the international New York city fringe theater festival by the New Yorker magazine. I had a great time getting to know her a little bit at the Sundance Creative Change festival and her tour, her one woman show “On Behalf of all Muslims” is set to tour this year. Zahra, where can people find out more about you?

NOORBAKSH: Come check me out at Zahracomedy.com, and I will tell you where to find me.

VALLAS: Zahra, you’re awesome, thank you for doing what you do and really a pleasure to have you on the show.

NOORBAKSH: Thank you, this was a great conversation.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

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You’re listening to Off Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. While all eyes have been on health care, immigration and now tax, the Department of Education is quietly looking at its policies on campus sexual assault. What it’s considering doing may make college campuses safer for student who commit sexual assault. As we speak under what’s known as Title IX, the federal civil rights law that applies to educational institutions, there’s a provision that requires colleges and universities that receive public funds to use a standard of proof known as a preponderance of evidence when it comes to complaints of sexual assault. To put that in English, if the evidence shows that the reported sexual assault more likely than not occurred, the student accused of sexual assault will be punished pursuant to the school’s code of conduct. This standard of proof, preponderance of the evidence, has been in place for decades. But school enforcement was lax, leaving sexual assault to run rampant on many campuses with little recourse for those who experienced it.

Responding to the concerns of sexual assault survivors and advocates in 2011, the Obama administration took action to remind school administrators of their legal duties under Title IX to respond to sexual assault allegations promptly and fairly. They also issued guidance on specific steps that schools need to take to fulfill their duties under Title IX. One of these was an explicit reiteration that schools must use the preponderance standard rather than some higher burden of proof. This guidance and the Obama White House’s vocal support for survivors of sexual assault more broadly drew criticism from some at the time. But now Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary is taking it head on. Specifically, she is considering undoing the preponderance standard which she has the authority to do in a single pen stroke.

To do so would be dangerous and misguided. Women between the ages of 18 and 24 are more likely to experience sexual assault than any other group. Many are college students and some 1 in 4 female college students according to some estimates experience sexual assault during their time on campus. I myself am one of them. Meanwhile there’s already a bevy of obstacles to reporting sexual assault when it happens, including stigma, fear of reprisal by your attacker but importantly as the fear of not being believed when you make the report. To raise the burden of proof would add further red tape and disincentives to survivors of sexual assault, just a tiny fraction of whom ever come forward at all. Isn’t this for the criminal justice system to handle asks some critics of the current preponderance policy. Well ask anyone who’s ever gone through the painstaking process of reporting sexual assault on campus and you’ll quickly understand why that just doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason the criminal justice system used a higher burden of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt. And that’s because people’s liberty is at stake in the criminal justice system. But what’s at stake in the college campus context is disciplinary action up to expulsion, a categorically different type of punishment. School administrators must continue to have the tools they need to keep their campuses safe for students without needing to wait what could be years for the criminal justice system to run its course.

Sexual assault on campus has reached epidemic levels in recent years with not just a growing literature to back that up with numbers but a spate of recent scandals at school such as Stanford, Florida State and scores of others making that abundantly clear. Thanks to Title IX and the Obama administration’s guidance, schools are finally starting to get safer but if Betsy DeVos rolls back those protections, we’ll be headed back to a place where being raped is just part of the college experience.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.